The house was extravagantly designed. The roof was a convex triangle, almost horizontal, with the base against the hill itself. Below the roof were two walls of glass, or of something stronger. The house's single room was exposed to this single voyeur, who perched precariously on the slope and clutched at a boulder with thick gloves. It was, he thought, a hell of a place to build a house.

He pressed his faceplate against the (presumed) glass.

The floor was not level. Either the hill itself had settled, or architectural styles had changed more than Corbell was willing to believe.

He was looking into a living-room-sized area with what had to be a bed in the middle. But the bed was two or three times bigger than king size, and it had the asymmetrical shape of a '50s-style Hollywood pool. The curved headboard was a control panel fitted with screens and toggles and tall grills like hi-fl sound boxes, and a couple of slots big enough to deliver drinks or sandwiches. In the darkness above the bed hovered a big wire sculpture or mobile or possibly some kind of antenna, he couldn't tell which.

Two pinpricks of yellow light lived in the control panel.

"This is your power source, all right," Corbell reported. "I'm going to find the door."

Twenty minutes later he reported, "There's no door."

"A house must have an opening. Look for an opening that doesn't look like a door. From your description, there must be more to the house than you can see: a toilet at least, perhaps an office, or a food dispensary."

"They'd have to be under the hill. Mmm... all right, I'll keep looking."

He found no trace of a trapdoor in the roof. Could the whole roof lift up in one piece, on signal? Corbell couldn't guess whether the architect would have been that wasteful of power.

If there was an entrance in the road itself, then hard dirt covered it. Corbell was getting annoyed. The house couldn't have been used in a hundred years; possibly a thousand; conceivably ten thousand. Likewise the door, wherever it might be. Maybe the house had a second, lower story, now buried in the hill, door and all.

"I'll have to break in," he said.

"Wait. Might the house be equipped with a burglar alarm? I'm not familiar with the design concepts that govern private dwellings. The State built arcologies."

"What if it does have a burglar alarm? I'm wearing a helmet. It'll block most of the sound."

"There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser."

"Will it-?" Will it reach? Stupid, it was designed to reach across tens of light-years. "Go ahead."

"I have the house in view. Firing."

Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam from the sky; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red-hot. A patch of earth below the house stirred uneasily; rested; stirred again. Then a ton or so of hillside rose up and spilled away, and a rusted metal object floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell's arm pierced the clouds.

"Peerssa, you're being attacked. Can you handle it?"

"It can't hurt me. It could hurt you. I'd better destroy it."

The metal object began to glow. It didn't like that. It fled away in a jerky randomized path, while the red beam remained fixed on one point in the sky. Its upper body glowed bright red verging on orange. It was screaming; its frantic warbling voice sang through Corbel's helmet. Suddenly it tilted and arced away down the hill. It struck the plain hard, turned over and over, and lay quiet.

There was a hole in the roof now. Corbell said, "You think there are more of those?"

"Insufficient data."

Corbell climbed down to the roof and looked through. Molten concrete, or whatever, had set the bed afire. Corbell jumped down onto the flaming bedclothes, prepared to get off fast. Wrong again: It was a water bed, and his feet went right through it. He waded out, then pushed the burning bedclothes into the puddle in the middle with his clumsy gloved hands. The fire went out, but the room filled with steam.

"I'm in the house," he reported. Peerssa didn't bother to answer.

Corbell the architect looked about him.

This room, the visible part of the house, was a triangle. The bed in the center had the pleasing asymmetry of a puddle of water-and it was pleasing. An arc of sofa occupied one corner, facing the bed. In front of the sofa was a slab of black slate or a good imitation, arced like the sofa, but broken in the middle. Corbell bent and lifted one end of the slab. Something on the underside: solid circuitry. At a guess, this had been a floating coffee table until whatever was holding it up burned out.

From inside the room he still couldn't see any doors.

There was only one opaque wall to inspect. He moved along it, rapping. It sounded hollow.

Door controls on the headboard? Nuts. You'd have to walk clear around to the other side-wait, there was something on the back side. Three thumb-sized circular depressions of chrome yellow against black headboard. Corbell pushed them.

The back wall slid up in three unequal sections.

The biggest one was a closet. Corbell found half a dozen garments in it, all one-piece long-sleeved garments with lots of pockets. Some had hoods. A layer of dust at the bottom of the closet was two to three inches thick.

The second section was smaller, no bigger than a telephone booth, with a free-form chair in it. Corbell stepped in. He found another chrome-yellow depression on the wall, and touched it. The door shot up behind him.

A chair. Funny. Now he saw the great hole in the seat of the chair. A toilet? But there was no water in the bowl, and no toilet paper...nothing but a glitteringly clean metal sponge attached to the chair by a wire.

He left the cubicle. By any terms, it was pretty basic for a house with this complexity of design. The owner should have been able to afford something better.

He turned to the clothing still hanging on shaped hangers. Funny, he couldn't tell if they were made for a man or a woman. He tugged at the fabric. It was amazingly resilient-and very dusty. He tugged harder, then tried in earnest to tear the cloth. It stood his full strength.

This clothing seemed new.

But the dust?

Say there were temporary clothes, meant to be thrown out when styles changed, and clothes meant to last longer. How long? If that layer of dust was the temporary clothes.

He still hadn't found a door.

The third cubicle looked promising. There was nothing in it at all except for one unmarked switch like the yellow circle in the bathroom, and a panel of four white-glowing touch points.

"I think I've found an elevator," he said. "I'm going to try it." He used the yellow touch point. The door came up; he turned on his helmet lamp.

Peerssa said, "Dangerous. What if the elevator takes you down and then breaks down?"

"Then you beam me another manhole to climb out of." Corbell pushed the top button. Nothing happened.

He'd expected that. He must be at the top. He pushed number two.

Peerssa's voice came unnecessarily loud. "Corbell. Answer if you can."

"Yeah?" There had been no sense of motion, yet something had changed. There were eight more white-glowing touch points: two additional vertical rows beside the first, set closer together, and each of these was marked with a black squiggle.

Corbell jabbed at the door button.

Peerssa said, "You have changed position by four point one miles southwest and two hundred feet loss of altitude. I place you in One City."

"Yeah." Corbell looked out into a different room. He was beginning to feel like a wandering ghost. Everything was spooky, unreal.