Gods of Riverworld by Philip José Farmer

“You think that perhaps Nur might have tracked the machine to its lair?”
    “We won’t know until later.”
    Burton turned to Frigate.
    “I assume, since you’ve reported nothing, you saw nothing.”
    “Right.”
    “The machine could have gone in any direction in this maze. We’ll wait until Nur gets here.”
    “If the Snark didn’t catch him,” Frigate said.
    “You’re so optimistic,” Aphra said.
    “I just like to consider every possibility,” Frigate said somewhat heatedly. “It’s not my fault that negative possibilities always outnumber the positive.”
    “They don’t. You just see the dark chances easier than you see the bright ones.”
    Burton looked at his wristwatch. Five minutes had passed since the machine had broken through. He would wait a total of thirty. If Nur did not show by then, they would go back to their apartments. There they might have to wait for a while until Turpin, Alice, and Li Po returned from searching for them. If, that is, they had indeed gone out to look for them. Logic might tell them to stay together in one apartment for defense.
    A voice startled them. It was Nur’s, speaking from just outside the nearest brick wall.
    “Don’t shoot. It’s I. Nur. I have good news.”
    “Come in,” Burton said.
    The little man entered. He stripped off some plastic material from his face and removed his gloves and jacket.
    “Hot.”
    Burton stepped outside the doorway. Nur’s chair, equipped with an enclosure like Frigate’s, was parked by the wall. Burton went inside. Nur was smiling, as well he might.
    “I caught the Snark outside her secret room. I came speeding out of the dark part of the corridor and yelled at her to surrender. She refused; she started to take her beamer from her holster. So I shot her.”
    “Her?” Burton said.
    “Yes. We knew that the unknown could be of either sex, but we spoke of her as him so much that we’d fallen into the habit of thinking that she must be a he. The rest of you did, anyway. I did not.”
    Nur said it would be best if he took them to the scene of the discovery and then explained what had happened. They followed him in their chairs through the breach in the wall, went down one corridor, turned, and stopped a hundred feet from the corner. The unknown lay on her back, eyes and mouth open, a thin cauterized wound on her throat showing where Nur’s beam had pierced it from front to back. She was short and slim and clothed in scarlet shirt, sky-blue slacks, and yellow sandals. A beamer lay near one open hand on the floor.
    “She’s Mongolian,” Nur said. That he would point out the obvious showed that he was not as calm as he seemed. “I don’t know if she’s Chinese, Japanese, or of some other Mongolian nationality. Li Po might be able to tell us. But it’s irrelevant.”
    There was a large circular opening in the wall, the doorwheel having rolled within the wall recess. Beyond would be her apartment, where she had hidden while keeping herself well informed of the movements of the eight. Wall-screens showed all the rooms in their apartments. The beds of Alice, Tom Turpin, and Li Po were empty; another screen displayed them at a table, playing cards in Turpin’s apartment. If they were alarmed, they did not show it. Apparently, they had decided that their colleagues had disappeared because Burton was carrying out one of his secret plans, or they had stayed together for safety. As it turned out, they had elected to hole up for both reasons.
    Burton would, however, have to endure their reproaches when he returned to the apartment. He could bear them easily because he came with victory in his pocket.
    The night before, Peter Frigate and Nur el-Musafir had gone to their bedrooms. They had hoped that the Snark would be sleeping and that the Computer would awaken the Snark only if it detected someone leaving the suite to enter the corridor. The only detectors on, they hoped, would be the heat devices. They were praying that no video