Johannes Cabal the Detective

CHAPTER 6 in which death occurs and curiosities are noted

Cabal slept lightly. This was as much a learned behaviour as a natural aspect; far too many people and other entities had trod lightly towards him as he slept with less kindly intentions than tucking him in and kissing his brow. He skimmed through the dreaming edges of deep sleep like a man on ice skates, standing rigid, arms crossed, and wearing a disapproving expression, as his subconscious mind threw phantasms, childhood memories, and random elements of his recent past in his path with more optimism than expectation. He slid through them all with the humourless gravitas of an Old Testament prophet challenged to a magical duel by Uncle Mungo the children’s conjuror. When he did finally reach the places of the mind too dark and motionless for dreams, he paused, barely over the tree line, and waited for his body and his mind to recuperate, all the time listening to the distant call of his senses, singing like the wind over telegraph wires. If they suddenly cried with pattern and purpose, he could be up and out of the well of sleep faster than a rabbit from a trebuchet.

Tonight, he had taken almost an hour to drift into even a light slumber, and was just in the act of strapping on his figurative skates when something roused him back to full wakefulness. He did not sit bolt upright — there’s nothing like visibly declaring oneself awake to precipitate an attack. Instead, he lay, his eyes opening only slightly as he took in his surroundings, and listened carefully. The steady thrum of the levitators he had grown accustomed to, and this he ignored. There was something else, however. A dull battering sound running through the outer hull, as if somebody was kicking the wall. After a moment more it ended, and there were only the sounds of the ship’s running.

Cabal rolled onto his back and gazed at the ceiling as he wondered what had made the noises. It was, he knew, largely an exercise to bore himself back to sleep; he had no inkling of the workings of a vessel like the Hortense. For all he knew, the sound might be a common occurrence, made by some necessary component doing its job. There had been something about it, though, something organic rather than mechanical. He had heard dying men drum a similar tattoo on the floorboards with their heels, and this thought shooed sleep away.

Five minutes later there was a new sound, and at this Cabal did sit bolt upright. It was a dull roar that grew, in a rapid crescendo, to a climax that coincided with a sharp metallic thud. Cabal had heard a sound very similar to it earlier in the evening when the sliding windows in the salon were drawn back. But then they had been flying lower and slower. The window in one of the nearby cabins had been drawn back, he was sure of it, and this raised two objections in his mind. First, that the cabin would now be bitterly cold as the wind blew harshly around it. Second, that when he had been looking from his own window earlier in the evening, he noted in passing that the sliding frame was locked shut by a bolt that would require a specialist tool to release. These two factors seemed to indicate that whoever had opened the window had not done so purely for a breath of fresh air.

Cabal sat in the darkness, his hands clasped, his index fingers extended and tapping rapidly together as he fought his curiosity. It was an anomalous sound, and — as a scientist — anomalies intrigued him. Warring with his curiosity, however, was his instinct for self-preservation. If something was awry, and he was strongly inclined to think so, then wandering the ship’s corridors might provoke suspicion, and this was something to be vigorously avoided. Then again, if he didn’t investigate something that should have induced him to wander about in Meissner’s unforgivably gaudy Chinese dressing gown, wouldn’t that also be cause for questions?

“Why didn’t you go out to discover the source of this strange sound, Herr Meissner, as any trueborn son of Mirkarvia would?” he imagined the captain asking him.

“Because I slept through it,” he imagined himself replying and, pleased with this simple but effective excuse, he settled back down to sleep.

Whereupon there was a commotion in the corridor, talking for a minute, and the sound of one of the neighbouring doors being knocked upon, apparently without effect. A few moments later, it was joined by a light but insistent knock at his own door. Cabal was wondering whether he could reasonably say that he’d slept through this, too, when it was repeated with more vigour, and he knew he was going to have to show his face.

“Good grief,” said Leonie Barrow when he answered the door. “Where on earth did you get that dressing gown?” She herself was wearing a red-and-blue tartan gown over a white winceyette nightdress. In purely aesthetic terms, her nighttime apparel made Cabal wonder how the English ever managed to find sufficient motivation to breed.

“How may I help you, Fräulein?” he said, ignoring her question.

“Didn’t you hear anything?”

He drew breath to say he had slept through it, but changed his mind. “I heard something.” He looked out into the corridor and saw Colonel Konstantin, the Roborovskis, and — inevitably — Cacon milling around outside DeGarre’s door. “What’s happening?”

“I heard some sort of commotion coming from M. DeGarre’s cabin. Well, we all did.” She waved at the other passengers. “Now it sounds like he’s got his window open somehow.”

“Has anybody called for the officer of the watch?” He was answered by the arrival of Captain Schten himself, still buttoning his uniform collar.

“Ladies. Gentlemen. Kindly step back. I am sure there is nothing amiss.”

He made to knock on the door, but Cacon said, “You’re wasting your time there, Captain. I’ve been knocking until my knuckles are red raw.” Cabal noted that they plainly were not. “There’s no answer. Just the wind — whoooooo. Y’know what? I bet ’e’s done ’imself in.” He crossed his arms and looked both pleased and expectant, as if he anticipated that everybody would applaud his deduction and go back to bed, mystery solved.

The captain gave him a look that verged on hostility, and knocked sharply on the door. “M. DeGarre? This is the captain. Are you all right, sir?”

“You won’t get an answer, Capitano,” said Cacon. Irritatingly, he was right. Captain Schten listened for a moment, but all any of them could hear was the moaning wind beyond the door. Schten grasped the door handle and tried it, but it did not yield. He took a master key from his jacket pocket, unlocked the door, turned the handle, and started to open it while beginning an apology for the intrusion. Both the opening and the apology came up short as the door stopped abruptly in its travel.

“’is body’s probably in the way,” said Cacon, apparently knowledgeable in such things.

“Herr Cacon,” began Schten, his temper almost visibly fraying. Whatever he was about to say was thankfully lost when Colonel Konstantin interrupted.

“Herr Cacon,” the colonel said evenly. “Please return to your cabin. You are not helping affairs.”

“Eh?” The possibility of being less than vital in unfolding events seemed not to have occurred to Cacon. “Eh? Me? You can’t order me about, matey! I’m not in the army, y’know!”

“Sir,” said Schten, his temper reined back in the respite Konstantin had bought him. “As the captain of this vessel, you are under my authority. Please return to your cabin.”

“Oi, oi, oi!” Cacon was outraged by this attack on his dignity. “I ’ave as much right to be ’ere as anyone!”

“No,” said Captain Schten. “You don’t.” He summoned over the purser and a steward who had arrived and were standing uncertainly at the back of the group. “Take Herr Cacon back to his cabin, Steward. Make sure he stays there.”

Cacon was escorted away, still complaining. “This is a blinkin’ outrage! I’ll write a letter!”

“As you wish,” said the captain wearily. He waited until Cacon was gone before trying the door again. There was a distinct clunk against the handle after the first inch or so, and he could open the door no further. He regarded it grimly. “There’s a chair under the handle. M. DeGarre,” he called through the gap. “If you can hear me, please move away from the door.” He moved back to give himself space and kicked the door hard with the flat of his boot, just under the handle. They heard the chair bounce across the cabin floor, Schten already moving in to follow it.

Cabal was slightly surprised to find himself in the doorway a moment after Schten. His curiosity had, not for the first time, overridden his sense of self-preservation. Still, now he was there, it would be more suspicious for him to suddenly become all backwards about coming forward. So he stood just inside the door and looked around officiously, as if inspecting mysteriously empty aeroship cabins in which a chill wind whipped around his naked knees were all part of a Mirkarvian civil servant’s duties. Schten was already by the window, which was slid back along its track as far as it would go. He looked out into the darkness.

“He’s gone,” he said, his words almost lost in the howling wind. He shook his head. “Stupid, stupid man.” He slid the window shut with an angry slam. The sudden silence was almost shocking.

“How,” said Cabal, wondering how far he could let the uncomfortable persona of Herr Meissner slip in safety. Every degree was a relief. “How did he open the window? If it’s like mine, it’s fixed with a screw.”

The thought hadn’t occurred to Schten. He looked at the window again and seemed nonplussed. He cast his gaze around the room. “I don’t know, Herr Meissner. The windows can be opened when we are at anchor and in low-level flight, but my crew would have made the rounds of all the cabins and secured the windows when we began to climb.”

On the bed, he found the answer to this small mystery. A tool wallet lay open, its elasticated straps holding in place the sort of small spanners, screwdrivers, and other devices that a man with an interest in the mechancal might well carry in his luggage. One screwdriver was out of place, lying across its fellows. Beside it was the missing window screw. Schten picked it up and showed it to Cabal. “It was never foreseen that a passenger would have both the desire to open a cabin window at high altitude and the means by which to do it.” He sighed as he looked at the window. “A tragedy.”

“Why did he do it?” Konstantin had walked past Cabal to stand in the rapidly cluttering cabin. “He seemed in perfect equilibrium at dinner. Why would he return here with every appearance of good humour and then coldly and methodically put an end to himself?”

Schten shrugged. “Dinner was several hours ago. Perhaps he spent that time brooding over something. The man who undid that window may have been of very different composure to the man to whom we bid good night.”

Konstantin was unimpressed. “Brooding over what?”

“The boy was right. I have dedicated my life to science, and all it has brought is death. The victims of my machines cry out for justice. I shall give it to them.”

Konstantin and Schten turned to Cabal in astonishment. They found him leaning over a portable typewriter on the small writing desk. He was reading from a sheet still in place between platen and paper bail.

Cabal turned and looked at the two men. “He typed his suicide note. How very modern of him.”

Schten glared at him. “For God’s sake, Meissner! A man’s dead.” He made to remove the sheet from the typewriter. Before he could reach it, however, Cabal tapped a lever on the typewriter’s carriage twice smartly and then tapped a key. He pulled the sheet from the machine himself and regarded it sharply for a moment before handing it over.

“The inevitable investigation into M. DeGarre’s death will no doubt wish you to preserve this as evidence, Captain,” he said.

Schten was coming to the conclusion that he really didn’t like the meddlesome Herr Meissner. “What was the point of that, sir?”

“To give the police a comparison. I have repeated the last m of the message, as you can see. We are all witnesses that I typed it on this machine and, even to the naked eye, the two letters seem identical. Believe me, Captain, a thorough investigation would leave no stone unturned and no hypothesis unconsidered, including the possibility that this note was typed on another machine and left here to divert suspicion.”

“What? What? Are you serious, man? The door was locked and barred from the inside. Are you suggesting that the poor man was murdered and the murderer threw the body out of the window and then himself to follow?”

“I am suggesting it, yes, but not as a serious theory, only as a possibility. There are such things as parachutes, after all.”

“Parachutes? This is a civil vessel, sir; it has no need of parachutes. And before you suggest that this remarkable murderer of yours brought his own aboard, you should understand that we are travelling in near-total darkness over wooded mountains. No one but a lunatic would attempt such a jump.”

“There are such things as lunatics, Captain.” Cabal held up his hands to forestall Schten’s increasing wrath. “Peace, sir. I do not believe for a second that this is the case. While there are certain religious and political groups that encourage a degree of fanaticism in some of their members, that they may be used as expendable assassins, they are rarely subtle. I see no reason that any such organisation should want to kill M. DeGarre and then disguise it as suicide. Miss Barrow — ” He turned to Leonie, as did Schten and Konstantin, both in some surprise that a woman would want to hang around the scene of a death. She, in her turn, demonstrated some discomfort that her silence had not rendered her entirely invisible. “I understand from our conversation earlier that you have some interest in psychology. What do you make of all this? The apparent equanimity of M. DeGarre this evening? The abrupt nature of this note?”

That Cabal did not mention that her “interest” in such matters was formal and criminological was not lost on her, and so she spoke as an unthreatening dilettante.

“Well,” she started uncertainly, “from what I’ve read on cases like” — she gestured vaguely at the cabin and its window — “this, there is no standard form. Sometimes there are notes, but … well, there’s no rule that says there has to be. And when there is a note it can be anything from pages and pages long to less than you’d leave in a note for the milkman. I understand Herr Meissner’s wishing to be thorough, but there is nothing here to say this is anything but what it appears to be. And that is very regretful. I liked M. DeGarre.”

“As did I, my dear,” said Konstantin. “I think we all did. This isn’t the place for a young lady. Please, may I accompany you —?”

“That won’t be necessary, Colonel,” interrupted Cabal. “I have said my piece and perhaps demonstrated my incompetence for such an investigation. I shall leave this in the hands of the captain, who will surely do a better job of it than I. Good night, gentlemen. I am, of course, at your service if you should need me for a statement or suchlike.” He nodded curtly, to which the colonel clicked his heels, while the captain distractedly bid them farewell.

On the way to Leonie Barrow’s cabin, Cabal stared at the carpet the whole way, his hands behind his back, thinking. She looked at him, mildly amused. “If anybody saw you like that, they’d forget all about us being the ship’s lovebirds. You’re taking me, unchaperoned, to my cabin, but you look like a man with acute dyspepsia.”

Cabal was not in the mood for verbal fencing. “DeGarre, missing and, in all reasonable probability, dead.”

“Yes?”

“A suicide note. Typed.”

“Yes.”

“Brooding over a few featherlight jibes from some boy who’s barely started shaving, he types a note, removes a securing bolt from his window, and throws himself into the void.”

“Yes.”

Cabal walked in silence for another few paces. “Do you believe a word of it?”

“No. No, I don’t. That business with the typewriter — what were you up to?”

“I told the captain. A letter from that typewriter for comparison.”

“That’s something else I didn’t believe a word of. You should be careful; I don’t think the captain believed you, either.”

Cabal stopped and looked at her. “What’s this?” he said, a bitter mockery evident in his tone. “Concerned for my safety?”

“I’ve explained that once.” She kept walking, and after a moment Cabal admitted defeat in this small conflict and followed. “All I’m saying is that you should keep your head down. If you want to keep it at all. So, the typewriter.”

“The typewriter. I backspaced twice and typed the last letter in DeGarre’s note, the m in them.”

“What use is that for comparison? It would have come down in the same place as the original.”

“No. It should have come down in the same place as the original.”

“But it didn’t?”

“No. About half a millimetre to the right and a little more upward.”

“Which means what, exactly? That the note was typed, removed, and then replaced? Why would DeGarre do that?”

“If DeGarre did it at all. And, even if he did not, why would this hypothetical expendable assassin do it?”

They had reached Leonie’s cabin and paused by the door, speaking in hushed tones. “We believe he was murdered, then?” she whispered. “I don’t believe in hypothetical expendable assassins, with or without parachutes. Unless we can come up with a reasonable explanation of how a murderer got out of a locked and barricaded room, we’re just going to have to accept that it was suicide, no matter how wrong that seems.”

There was something of the caged animal about Cabal, she thought, as she waited for a reply. He was angry and frustrated that he had been presented with a problem that intrigued him, but that engaging that problem might lead to his exposure, arrest, and execution. She could almost feel sorry for him. But this was Johannes Cabal, a man she knew from bitter experience was more than capable of monstrous acts of violence and cruelty when necessary. Then again, he was also the man who had sent her a letter and document of such astonishing and liberating power that it had made her father — a man of great imperturbability — sit down and repeat, “Well, I’ll be buggered” for the better part of a minute.

Whatever was going on inside Cabal’s mind currently, he did not seem in the mood to share. “Good night, Miss Barrow,” he said finally, and walked away, drawing his ridiculous Oriental dressing gown tight. Leonie watched him through narrowed eyes, shook her head, and retired for what was left of the night.

Cabal got back to his cabin, closed the door heavily, dumped the horrendous dressing gown on the floor, and threw himself into his bed with a muttered expression of irritation with the world. He just wanted to go back to sleep. He did not want to become any more involved in the curious case of the defenestrated DeGarre than he already was. Indeed, if he could avoid any further entanglements he would be a happy man. A happier man, at least. He was determined to roll over, make himself comfortable, forget all about the night’s events, and go to sleep.

He managed exactly half of this list. After rolling over and making himself comfortable, he discovered that he was just comfortable enough to consider the night’s events in detail, and in so doing drove away any hope of sleep. He was in that awkward place where rationality and logic don’t quite match up, and the horrible squealing of misaligned mental cogs was driving him to distraction. Pure brute logic said the door was locked and barricaded, the window was open, and the cabin offered no hiding places, therefore the occupant of the cabin had gone out of the window. Pure brute logic overruled any silly murder shenanigans by pointing out the suicide note and the locked room, and then proceeded to wave Ockham’s razor around in a threatening manner.

Rationality, however, is a slightly different beast, or, at least, Cabal’s was. It considered the curious facts of DeGarre’s good humour at dinner, the curiosity of the misaligned suicide note, and … damn it! The chair! Cabal sat up in bed, thinking hard. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door at all? The door was already locked. Even if opening the window turned out to be a noisy operation, by the time a member of the crew bearing a master key arrived to open the door he would long since have completed his unsuccessful impersonation of Peter Pan and become an untidy mess in the Mirkarvian wilderness. To protect against or at least slow any attempt to kick the door down. Schten had dislodged the chair with a single well-placed kick, but the captain was a big man. Anybody else would have taken longer to get through, and that was what DeGarre had planned upon. There, it was satisfactorily explained. No, it wasn’t. It was overplanned. Once the window was open, it was the work of a moment to climb out into eternity. Unless he ended up dithering before the jump? No, that wouldn’t do, either. That meant he had planned for time spent dithering, which meant he expected to be unsure or at least anticipated the possibility of being unsure, in which case he was unsure of committing suicide, in which case — Cabal growled with irritation. In which case, why had he committed suicide? People don’t set out to kill themselves and then make contingency plans lest they change their minds. It was a stupid, stupid circular argument. So he returned to the point of departure. Why had DeGarre barricaded his door? Cabal looked around for a new path to follow, one that didn’t curve so alarmingly, but was to be disappointed.

He slumped back down and tried to sleep. At first, his slowing conscious mind was naïve enough to believe that his subconscious was helping him to drift off. It presented him with a vision of a limitless plane of tiles beneath a sterile white sky. The tiles were marked on each edge with a letter — a, b, c, d — to indicate orientation, and some mathematical symbols were scrawled across the centre. He halfheartedly attempted to read one, but the notations squirmed beneath his gaze and it seemed too much work to force them to stay still. He was fairly sure they were something to do with topology, and that was enough for him. Topology was not one of his favourite branches of mathematics. Instead, he went for a walk, feeling the reassuring touch of pure, warm shag pile scientific logic beneath his bare feet. There was little to look at except for the tiles, so he watched them pass beneath and by him as he strolled, enjoying the swirling patterns of notation on their surfaces, enjoying the regularity, and the —

Something stabbed his foot. He hopped sideways, swearing with surprise. One of the tiles was not flush with the others, and had gashed his foot. The tiles didn’t feel warm and woolly anymore but cold and hostile. His blood was scattered in scarlet drops across the offending tile, shining like rubies. As he watched, the notation joined with his blood and formed new shapes. Belatedly, he realised that the writing was not entirely topographical. It was too late now, though. All around him tiles were rising to reveal that they were in fact the top faces of cubes. All but the one that had cut him; that one grew and expanded, and he could see extra dimensionality within it, a tesseract. He tried to name its four dimensions — he felt he had to — but they came out wrong. This cube had the dimensions of height, length, width, and significance. It grew and grew until he was in its skeletal shadow, the white sky warped in its core.

Cabal awoke suddenly from a light slumber, sweating, angry, and with a phantom pain in his foot. He was angry at himself for looking and not seeing, angry at his unconscious mind’s infuriating habit of telling him things in the most obscure way possible, and angry at circumstances for putting him in this wretched situation. He could investigate the potential clue he had just perceived, but he knew that he shouldn’t.

He managed to resist his curiosity for the best part of four minutes.

It was now over two hours since the discovery of DeGarre’s disappearance and probable death. The corridors were quiet again, and the muttered conferences from his fellow passengers speculating about the night’s events had long since died away. Cabal wrapped the dressing gown around himself again and, his phantasmically injured foot still fresh in his memory, put on Meissner’s slippers.

He looked up and down the corridor, but it was silent and empty. Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he turned his attention downwards, and started walking towards DeGarre’s cabin.

The dark red carpet marked with a black pattern was not made up of a single roll at all. Instead, the ingenious Mirkarvians had used individual squares of carpet. The practicality of being able to easily replace damaged or stained sections without the necessity of recarpeting great lengths of corridor was not lost on Cabal. Nor, now, was the significance of his dream. Tesseract sounds a great deal like tessellate, at least to an overactive unconscious mind. There are seventeen groups of tessellation with translational symmetry in two dimensions; the pattern woven into the identical carpet squares used group pmg, which reflects in only one direction. Therefore, if a tile is placed incorrectly it breaks the pattern. The pattern was a complex one, wrought in one dark colour upon another, if one regards black as a colour. In the normal run of things, it might have been months before an error was noticed, if it ever was.

Between Cabal’s eye for order and the analytical qualities of his unusual mind, it had been discovered within a few hours. A few hours, because Cabal was positive the carpeting had been perfect before. Yet now — he stopped and knelt just around the corner from DeGarre’s cabin — one square had been lifted and replaced incorrectly. Why was that? It was obvious that the pattern had been disrupted, if only one took a few moments to examine it properly. The unmistakeable conclusion was that it had been replaced in a hurry, and there had been no time to check.

The square was well tamped down, and Cabal was frustrated to find that he couldn’t lift it. A brief trip back to his cabin and he returned with his switchblade. It was the work of seconds to insert the tip of the knife beneath the square’s edge and lift it out.

Beneath was a bed of underlay. Unlike the carpet, this seemed to be continuous. Yet he could make out a neat cut running through it close to the edge of the exposed area. Cabal lifted more carpet squares and revealed that a square section of underlay, perhaps seventy centimetres along an edge, had been cut. It didn’t look to be a hurried job and, when he lifted the loose square of underlay, he saw that it had probably been done when the flooring was originally laid. A maintenance hatch lay in the area he had cleared, a ring in its surface ingeniously flush, with only a small space to insert a fingertip and flip the ring up so the hatch could be lifted. Without a second thought, Cabal did so.

He disliked extemporised activities, not least because going without preparation usually meant being unprepared. As he lowered himself into the darkness of the ducting that lay beneath the open hatch, he reflected that there were better ways to explore a mysterious dark place than without a torch and naked but for a Chinese dressing gown and a pair of slippers. Giving himself the assurance that he would not go far, he shuffled along on all fours.

The duct almost immediately reached a T-junction. He gauged that turning left would take him beneath the corridor on which DeGarre’s cabin lay, so that was the way he went. The light filtering down through the open hatch behind him dimmed sharply as he took the corner, and for the next two or three metres he crawled forwards in deep gloom. Thus, he felt, rather than saw, something unusual in the duct. The slightly flexible sheet metal became suddenly rigid and, feeling around, he realised that he had discovered yet another hatch, locked shut at its four corners by rotating catches connected to small handles. He gripped one of the handles, gave it an experimental turn, and felt a catch disengage. He did the same to one of its neighbours, and felt that side of the hatch drop slightly until it came to rest on something. He guessed that the hatch would have a lip running around its edge to prevent it simply falling through once all four catches were opened, because — unless he was very much mistaken — he had a very good idea what was on the other side of it, and dropping the hatch would be inconvenient at the very least.

He released the last catch, lifted the far edge of the hatch, and pushed it away from him so that it lay on the duct floor on the far side of the opening. Then he crawled back a little and gingerly pushed the near edge of the hatch away from him to reveal what lay beneath.

It was Mirkarvia, some four thousand feet below him, and barely visible in the early-morning darkness. A cold wind blew up through the hatch and made him shiver, suddenly very aware of how ridiculously unprepared he was. Extemporisation! Pah! He spat, mentally, on the concept. Here he was, woefully underequipped to carry out any sort of detailed investigation, without light or notebook. And cold. Very, very cold. Still, he was here now, so he should make the most of it, although he had little idea what he hoped to find. The duct didn’t run beneath DeGarre’s cabin, with a convenient hatch to give the hypothetical assassin an escape route. He felt around for anything suspicious, but there was nothing; the duct’s main function seemed to be to carry assorted cables and pipes around the ship, with ventilation possibly a secondary task. There were a couple of sturdy metal handles mounted on either side of the opening, although they struck him as more likely to be used as mounting for ladders during maintenance than as rungs to hold when engineers climbed through here.

He reached down and felt around on the outer skin of the Princess Hortense but found very little to excite his attention. Well, it had seemed an interesting avenue of enquiry when it was all dreamscapes and hypercubes, but now that it had been reduced to freezing in a tin tunnel Cabal felt it had lost some of its allure. He pulled his arm back inside and backed up a little to allow himself room to pull the hatch into position. Except that he couldn’t back up a little; something was in the way, and by the time he realised that “something” was actually “somebody” it was much too late.

His knees squealing against the steel floor of the duct, he was bodily shoved forward. He tried to scramble across to the other side of the open hatchway, but a hand came down in the small of his back and pushed him forcefully down. As he fumbled, looking for some way to pull himself clear, one knee dropped over the edge of the gap, and Johannes Cabal fell out of the hatch.