Bells and sirens went off all over the place. Riggs recovered quickly and ran out the door, Moosic at his heels. They made it through a screaming mass to the central area. There were bodies all over the place, and the smell of gas, but the bodies were all office and Marine personnel. Areas of the ceiling were bubbling, smoking masses occasionally dripping ooze onto the floor as they smoldered and gave off foul smells.

“Somebody’s going for the chamber!” Riggs shouted, drawing his pistol and moving off down a corridor that should have blocked their entrance. No passes were necessary now, though—the computer terminal was another smoldering mass of fused metal and plastic.

Moosic recognized it as the corridor he’d come from only a few minutes earlier, the one that led to Silverberg’s offices and the time chamber.

A bunch of uniformed and plainclothes security officers were near the elevator. They saw Riggs and rushed up to him, all talking at once. With a mighty roar of “Quiet!” he got them settled, then picked one to tell him the story.

“Four of ’em,” said Conkling, the middle-aged uniformed man picked as the spokesman. “They knew the exact locations of everything, Joe! Everything! They had the password, knew the right names, and when the door slid open for the one who came into the entrance, the other three blew open the outer door. By that time, that first one had set off a mess of gas bombs from someplace. None of ’em had any masks I could see, but one whiff and you died while they walked through it cool as can be. They had some kind of gun that worked like a bazooka one minute and shot gas the next.”

“What about the gas in the reception area?”

“Didn’t bother ’em. They shot everybody up, then fried all the ceiling weapons with some type of laser gun. I tell you, Joe, I never saw weapons like that before from any country! Never! Right outa Buck Rogers.”