CHAPTER FIVE

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Stanacre precinct was opening its doors as they backtracked through the dormitory area to pick up the boulevard that would take them on to Brimstage. From there, one of the avenues ran direct to the outer ring of Woodslee precinct.

Shesha Haddon said, "Living to the full is surely great; but how long can you do it without food?"

"A well-built girl like you can live for a week on her fat." Reckoning that familiarity was working against the claims of courtesy, she walked an arm's length away for a good two hundred meters. But since Holt did not seem to have noticed, curiosity drove her back.

"What are you thinking about?"

"I don't understand why it's so quiet."

"It's early. Nobody travels any distance before nine hundred. They're all busy having breakfast. What do you think they eat on Horizon Alpha? Peacocks' tongues and that?"

"Why are there no androids about?"

"They could hardly be on the line for the soup kitchen. Unless they top up energy cells. Perhaps they've been called off."

"You just could be right. They know where we're going and they can wait until we get there." They had come to an intersection, with avenues curving away left and right. Shesha read off the legend, putting her bundle on the plinth of the indicator board like Dick Whittington. "Thornton left, Raby right." A clutter of construction gear was grouped around the entrance of the nearest building. The labor gang would be about due. It was a small casino. One of the outlying units of the Raby precinct entertainment belt. They were remodeling the interior as part of the five-year refurbishing cycle. Among the machines was a small, fuel-cell-powered forklift. Holt wondered why it had not occurred to him before. All this shanks' pony business was long out of date. Transport should be for people. He backed it off the apron and ran it over to a stack of oblong cladding sheets. He picked four from the top, backed clear, heaved them upright, and anchored them in place with a flexible grab.

From Shesha Haddon's viewpoint, a disembodied grinning head, over a gray screen, was bearing down on her as she waited patiently for the laboring man to finish his stint. It looked so pleased with itself that she hardly liked to ask, but evolutionary forces were strong.

"What's this then?"

"An armored car. Put your trousseau in the rumble and hang on to your tiara." It was a solid, unsprung job, strictly for site work. On full thrust, it rumbled over the micro-grooved roadway at the speed of a jog trot. The psychological gain was out of all proportion. After the long years of standing on the sidelines, they felt that they were making a positive use of the environment, taking a hand in their own future.

Holt held a course down the center of the Brimstage boulevard with the power pack in an urgent howl and the flexible sheets whipping like a stage thunder machine.

Eager-beaver workers, filtering out onto this main artery, leaped for the inset porches of buildings flanking the route.

With no such subtle sense of self-preservation, a guard android, on a routine patrol duty, stood four square in the center and held out both arms in a signal to stop.

Judging distance to a centimeter, Holt ran it down, without slackening speed. The leading edge of the pick-up platform, knife-sharp to feel its way under a load, sliced through the metallic legs at mid-calf height and left the feet standing, when the truck had passed over, as though the tin man had been plucked out of his boots.

The dome, hitting first, shattered against the cladding screen and spilled a shower of small debris onto the footplate. The trunk held up for a count of three and slewed sideways into the road. Less involved in the mechanics of it, Shesha Haddon saw both sides of the equation. Even in the short time she had known him, violence was changing Holt. He was getting a taste for it. His hair was not actually standing on end, but there was a berserk ambience about him that made it likely any minute. The face that turned to check out whether she was still in the boat had no element of friendship in it. She was just part of the scene, a piece of equipment on his own faction. She knew he would have run the gendarme down if it had been a human being.

On the sidelines, faces were registering shock, horror, and simple fear. Mouths were open in screams that were lost in the din thrown up by the laboring machine and in the general hubbub. As in Barnston's refectory, they were far from being popular idols, bucking the system in the public interest. The crowd saw only a rogue elephant loose on the highway.

A new note added a strident, overall theme, like a demented piccolo entry. Some trusty had found a riot-call box, broken the seal, and pulled the plug. Over a kilometer radius, repeaters were belting out a wobbling siren alarm.

Holt, driving with one hand, was loosening thumb catches to take the cowling off the motor. She had to yell close to his ear to get attention.

"What are you doing?"

"There's a governor on this pack. I can get more speed."

"Did you have to hit that guard? It's stirred the whole place up."

"What?"

"Never mind."

"Of course I don't mind. What's an android here or there?"

She gave it up and edged gingerly to the half-hoop tubular frame that made a reredos for the small, hurrying platform. Wedged against it, she unwrapped her carbine and held it in the crook of her arm. Altogether it looked like a terminal situation, a headlong charge in the traditions of bone-headed chivalry. But the sheer excitement of it swamped out criticism. When the car bucked forward, as though kicked up the rudder, and accelerated away at double speed, she was beating on the bar with her free hand, hair flying back in a dark pennant, and yelling, "You did it! You did it!" Holding course was a full-time chore. The unwieldy trolley was doing its best to slew away from the direct air pressure that shoved back at its plate screen.

Holt had a confused impression of crowds melting away on either side. For five minutes he concentrated on keeping it going flat out, through a tunnel of noise and spreading panic. Then for fifty meters, before the boulevard ran through Brimstage's main square, there was a clear run. Word had finally gotten ahead. A crew of androids were wheeling out crowd-control barriers to close the road. In the center a tripod-mounted riot gun had been set up and an android was kneeling behind it, looking woodenly up the track with the firing toggle in his hand.

Noise from the flapping shield reached a crescendo, and Holt felt the speed check, as they absorbed the impact of a continuous burst. Then the barrel was being rammed through the android's chest. They swept across the piazza and made a locked-wheel skid stop under the canopy of the executive tower block.

"What have you stopped for?"

She was still speaking up, to beat a certain numbness in her own ears, and the question had a wider public than she intended.

A small burly man who had made an inspired two-meter standing jump to beat his fate, yelled back,

"That's right. What do you want here? We've heard about you on the newscast. Get the hell out of it. We want no troublemakers here."

An android commissionaire patrolling the lobby pushed through the plate-glass doors to bring a decent regard for law and order, and stopped dead when Holt reached his level. No fool, it knew who was disturbing the peace; but a built-in safeguard stopped it from challenging a special human type.

Holt spent ten seconds converting it to work on an external brief and left it in the porch with a clear instruction to prevent any moving object from crossing into the lobby. Her unanswered question still hanging about in his ear, in spite of the agile politician's reply, Holt said,

"We can't make it by road. Next time they'll have trestles we can't shift. Let's have the diagram again." He spread it out on the horse-shoe reception desk, and a clerical android said, "State your business and fill out a request blank. State your business and fill out a request blank." Functionally tailored for its niche in the system, it was a truncated job on a plinth, and Holt spared a minute to tip it off into the well. Its voice went on in a petulant mutter, until Shesha Haddon dropped a small filing cabinet on its head.

For her, it was the final snapping of all links with the past. A deed of blood to qualify for a place in the team.

Holt said approvingly, "Good thinking," and found what he wanted on the chart.

"Look. These towers are all the same. They're the key structural members in the city. Every last one, slap astride the power grid. It comes up here in a main trunk and fans out all over the precinct. There has to be a way down for maintenance. There's direct access from each Horizon. All we have to do is cross over and find the pipe for Alpha. But we'll do that from Woodslee. There's no problem crossing over there."

"But if it was as easy as that, wouldn't it have been done before?"

"We don't know that it hasn't. But you've heard the people. Either they're content or they don't want to know. Usage is all. They've accepted the system and they don't look for anything different."

"Maybe we wouldn't, if we hadn't been different. And that was an accident not of our own choosing. We can't take any credit. You can't blame them."

"I'm not blaming them. I'm stating a fact."

Holt looked around the set. Outside, a crowd had formed up in a semicircle outside the range of the android Horatius. Some of them would be workers in the headquarter building. The few who had been in the lobby were prudently grouped around the walls to make it plain that they were not fellow travelers. Holt said, "As I recall, the Executive block has its own canteen. Look it up on the indicator board. Go and pick up our peasant's portion of black bread, while I sort out the way below." When she had gone, he made a rapid tour of the lobby. Public Health Department, Registrar, Education—with an obsolescent android that had an impediment in its speaker: "Er No interviews Er with the Superintendent Er can be given Er until eleven-thirty Er."

Every suite was self-contained, with no visible route to the cellar. The elevators, in a group beside the kiosk, all showed this floor as bottom level. He was beginning to think he had been all wrong. The diagrams were drawing-board plans, which in fact had never been carried through; or early versions, which had been superseded at the time of building.

Clamor from the porch was notching up. In the end it would be a matter of numbers. The single android would be overrun.

Holt was back at the kiosk. On the face of it, this should be the nodal point, communications-wise, for the tower structure. He vaulted over the counter and began a systematic check of the consoles. There was a switchboard for the internal intercom, video circuits, and outgoing lines to all precincts; a computer link for profile data on all registered citizens of the borough; a schematic diagram with glowing asterisks to show the position of every android on the strength, with a direct channel to each metallic ear. That was interesting in itself.

Currently the whole force was moving in towards the headquarters building. Every android carried a numeral call sign. He identified the one crossing the porch, to try its luck with the apostate, as GD/B/37

and called it up on the link. "Attention, GD/B/37, Emergency. Proceed at once to the rear of the male dormitory area where there is a disturbance. Acknowledge."

A rapid metallic stammer came from the desk and a ticker tape writhed out under his hand. He read off

"Message received and understood" and saw the asterisk move briskly off. When Shesha Haddon reappeared, with a tray of mixed cereals and four beakers of coffee, he was sending a detachment of his Keystone Cops at a jog trot to find a four-leaf clover in Thortonheath Park. She said bitterly, "It's very nice for some. While you play little jokey games, I had a terrible time in that canteen."

"Put on a determined front and the androids will fall over their big feet to satisfy your every whim."

"It wasn't the androids. It was quite busy, and people objected to my jumping the line for service. I had to threaten to shoot off this obscene gun."

"Never mind. When we get up top, you can throw it away. You did well. As a reward, you can choose where to send this last rude mechanical."

"It can go to hell."

"There you have a difficulty. A metaphysical locale is outside its span. The best I can do is have it dismantle itself and throw the pieces to left and to right like a feather plucker." She said patiently, "Do whatever you think best. But shouldn't we be moving on? You're very sure about Alpha. How do you know we'll be accepted there?"

Holt responded to the seriousness in her tone and left the board, with asterisks slowly migrating to its rim.

"I don't. But we're on our way. We can't stay here for a sure thing." He worked on around the horseshoe. There was a lot of instrumentation that he could have spent time with. But Shesha sounded the alarm.

She had gravitated over to the porch and was checking out the piazza. "Gunnar. They've caught up. Specials coming into the square."

Usage breeding confidence, there was also a move from the flesh and blood heirs of the system. People were moving out from the walls and edging forward. They would be found, full of zeal, on the side of law and order.

Holt was at the end of the command island, when the plate-glass doors of the reception hall shattered in flying shards.

The narrowing cordon of citizens broke up in disorder in a frantic scramble for cover, except for half a dozen who stayed where they fell and a girl, still motivated to move, but confused direction-wise, who began to crawl toward Shesha Haddon leaving a snail-trail of fresh blood. Then he found it. A small panel with a pictograph of the elevator cages and a special key for number four. It overrode the operating panel for that item and gave it an extension for six levels down. Shesha was sitting crosslegged on the deck with the girl's head pillowed on her lap and made no move when he called. "Come on. We're in business."

He had the grille open and went back for her as a special android came through the shattered porch. The face she turned to him was all reproach and shiny with tears. She sobbed, "Look what we've done now. We're murderers. There's no excuse. We should give ourselves up." It was logic of the heart and not open to argument. Holt fired over her head and stopped the leading android in its tracks. Then he gently lifted the body clear and hauled Shesha to her feet. She made no protest until she was in the cage. Then it seemed to dawn on her that she was being shanghaied. She tried to get out as the grille was closing, and Holt grabbed her and pinned her into a corner.

It was a full-time chore, and the cage had dropped two levels before she had to concede that there was no future in it. Arms clamped to her sides, knees pinning her legs, superior weight shoving her against the bulkhead, she could only spit like a cat, which she did.

Holt gingerly redeployed one hand and gripped her around the mouth and chin. Then he banged her head back against the wall to emphasize what he was saying.

"Listen, you emotional nut. That girl on the floor could have been you. The word has gone out to destroy us. And they don't care who else suffers. Not for anything we've done, but for what we are. I'm just as sorry for the innocent victims as you are. Except that I can't in honesty say that I'd sooner it was you or me. The system's rotten through. We can't begin to make it over, so we have to leave it right?" He felt some of the muscular tension go out of her body, and he warily released his grip. She stayed still, with her hands straight down by her sides, and would not look at him.

"Right?"

"I suppose so."

"Can you imagine fifty or sixty more years, wandering about, knowing you didn't fit in, ending up like Sutton? That's supposing you had been left alone."

Shesha sounded infinitely tired.

"I suppose you're right. Most of the time I agree with you. It comes down to the ends and means bit. There is a point where any end does not justify the means."

"We haven't reached that yet."

"If you say so."

"I do say so. Don't lumber yourself with a load of guilt. Keep saying to yourself, 'Every day things will get better. Man'—or in your case—'Woman cannot live without the possibility of shaping her own future.'

That's the key item. Horizon Delta has atrophied. It's a fossil." The cage had already grounded and the grille rolled back. Opposite, across a small square landing, was an equipment rack. Holt picked out a cadmium steel lever and jammed it in the grille. That would prevent the cage being taken up.

They were in a section of conduit, arched by precast concrete hoops and closed off two meters either way by olive-drab bulkheads, with circular manholes for access. A coil filament in a ceiling port was glowing red-orange and gave a mininium light to see by. On the wall, beside the punched-strip shelving, was a schematic diagram of the system.

Shesha Haddon, recovered enough to be curious, found a locker beside the elevator shaft, and her startled "Eek" had Holt grabbing for his carbine.

She had slammed the door again on the instinctive precept of out of sight, out of mind and was across the cave in two leaps.

"What is it?"

"Androids, I think."

"Maintenance units waiting to be switched on."

"They don't switch me on one bit."

"Take a carbine. Cover me. If there's a movement, shoot off a clip."

"Suppose I shoot you."

"Then you'll have a tough time with that delicate conscience." Holt edged sideways along the wall, got his fingers to the locker door, and whipped it back. In the marginal light, the recess appeared to be full of gray people. Snouted and with shining circular eyes. As though they had been waiting for years for a signal to march out from the tomb. But there was no movement. Holt gingerly touched the nearest and it swayed away like an empty shroud. There was time to shout "Hold it," and only a single shot fanned past his ear. To Shesha Haddon's excited eye, it looked as though she had exorcised a whole raft of poltergeists. The plain back of the alcove was bare to see, with a raw, shiny scar where the bullet had struck. Holt was rummaging on the floor and straightened up with a treasure trove that came near to settling his pilgrimage. Tardily, he recognized the danger and called from behind. "Easy. Put that cannon down. It's a protective suit."

There were eight in the closet. Complete outfits with elasticated wrists and ankles. Corrugated breathing tubes led back to lightweight recalculating gear carried like a hump on the back. A rattle from the elevator cage underlined the fact that this was only a whistle stop. Shesha Haddon asked two questions and could hardly evaluate which concerned her most "Will it hold? What are they, for Pete's sake?"

"Under one, I guess so. Long enough. Under two, protective clothing and breathing apparatus."

"You're not going to put one on! They give me the green creeps."

"This is a fitting-out bay for maintenance crews. Bad air might collect in the tunnels. Look at these shoulder panels—indicator gauges. Amber for caution, red for unfit to breathe. Pick one to suit your fancy and well get on."

"You look like an android. Keep talking."

"Put one on. Then you'll be in the club. Like the old rhyme—I'd rather be than see one.'"

"I'm not so sure that's right. It's just as nasty to be one of those." While she was sealing up, he checked out the tool chest. There was a comprehensive range, from simple steel-working gear, to repair fabric, to sophisticated electronic replacements for the power line itself. He picked out a thermic lance kit and tried it on the cage. It sliced through the metal like a cleaver through dough.

"What are you doing?"

"Cutting out the bottom of the cage. If they get it up, it won't be any use to them."

"Why not just partly cut it out so that they'll try to use it and fall through?" Her voice was muffled by the stiff cowl.

Holt took time off to walk over to her and tap on the dome.

"Is that you in there?"

She looked around. There was nobody else about. "Yes, I think so."

"What's all this savagery, then? A good idea. But unexpected."

"Androids have no feelings."

There would have been material there for a debate, but time pressed. He cut a hairline around the frame of the cage, leaving a centimeter uncut in the center of each side. Four androids would be a dead weight topping four hundred pounds. Enough to drop the bottom out.

He finished the cut from the door and had hardly switched off the lance when the cage began to move. Somebody had done the sum and used an emergency circuit to trip the fail-safe mechanism of the jammed grille.

Shesha Haddon had done some rummaging on the stall and was holding out a circular headlamp to slot into a fitting on his face piece. She had already fixed one herself and had a shining Cyclops eye. She said, "Does this mean that there won't be any light in the trunk?"

"Not necessarily. But if they were working on a power failure, every circuit would be out."

"That won't be so good."

"With a lamp on your head, it'll be light wherever you look. How do you know it isn't always dark where you're not looking?"

He had the clips off the right-hand hatch cover and swung it open like a porthole. A long, dimly lit tunnel stretched away into indefinite distance. Slap down the center, resting on lateral cradles that held it clear of the deck, was a meter-thick, dead black cable—the nerve fibre of the complex. Shesha had emptied out a heavy-duty tool grip. "Is there anything else we should take?" A click from the elevator shaft made a period. The cage had reached ground level in Delta. Holt found a spare charge for the lance, two fuel cells apiece for the head lamps, a Sat pack of emergency rations. The spare clips and the carbines filled up the grip. He dumped it through the hatch and helped the girl after it. Ground level was lower than the landing, and she found inset footholds to take her down. He would have liked to refit the plate and give somebody a problem of choice, but there was no way of doing it from inside.

He was halfway through the hole, when the bottom of the elevator cage ended its free fall with a percussive smack that shook the floor. A special android, having gathered a full due of urge in its spring-loaded legs, took off in angled flight and whipped out of the elevator like a zany jack-in-the-box. It scored a bull's eye on the ceiling light, and blue fire momentarily outlined its limbs. Then the landing was pitch black.

With remorseless female logic, Shesha Haddon said, "What have you done? All the lights have gone out." Shesha said, "What time do you have?"

"Fourteen hundred."

"That's right. I thought my disk had stopped."

It was the first hint of complaint, and a mild one at that. Holt said, "It isn't far. Not more than half a kilometer. But we could take a spell."

She was sitting with her back to the tunnel wall before the echo had stopped vibrating around the set. They could have been anywhere that they had seen in the last hours. The tunnel had a uniformity that bludgeoned the mind. That and the lateral support cradles made every kilometer a major hazard to sanity. Holt said, "Androids will have a tough time crossing these things."

"Not only androids."

"It'll keep you lissome. Switch out your light."

"Come here first. So that I know where you are."

Hand on her arm, they switched out together. At first, darkness was absolute. Looking back was like looking at a black wall. Ahead, Holt could not be sure.

Shesha said uncertainly, "Is it imagination, or is there the very faintest light up there?" Holt switched on his lamp and it swamped out whatever eteliolated glow there was. He said, "That figures, we're coming out of this section. The Woodslee lights will not have fused."

"Couldn't we just find the way into the Alpha system?"

"Where's your scientific spirit?"

"About a kilometer and a half back down that tunnel."

"Hand out the ration pack and see what we have."

The heavy plastic cover had a zip toggle, and there was the hiss of a breached vacuum when he pulled it open. Inside, there was a dozen flat packs, also sealed. They took one each and Shesha said it reminded her of her name day—the only personal festival left for the trogs in Horizon Delta. She even delayed the moment of truth by a civil inquiry. "What do you have?"

"A block labeled chocolate. A cereal-and-fruit bar. Two tablets to make up a drink. Vitamin-reinforced sugar cubes and five self-lighting cigarettes."

"Check. What are you going to eat first?"

"The cereal bar."

"You've thought it through?"

"Of course."

"You could be right."

Shesha Haddon had tipped back the visor of her protective suit and had the detachable lamp on the floor between her knees, giving footlight illumination that made her eyes brilliant. As her teeth sank into the soft-nougat texture of the bar, all the lights went on as though she had thrown a switch.

Reaction had her convulsively swallowing the plug, and Holt had to beat her back before she could draw a tortured breath.

Eyes streaming, she managed to say, "What's in this, for Pete's sake?" Holt held up the wrapper. "Bircher Muesli—the Wonder Bar."

There was no move from the way they had come; but there was no doubt that they had left an easy trail in the dust. Now there was light, the posse could follow up.

He said, "The picnic will have to wait until we find a patch of grass." The supporting saddles were twenty meters apart, and they crossed ten before Holt halted the column. Shesha stood still, leaning on the wall, waiting for the next thing. He put his ear on the cable and listened.

"What are you doing?"

"Quiet."

"I only asked."

Holt straightened up. "It's like an ear trumpet, that cable. Probably a hollow core with a vacuum. You can hear their big feet pounding along."

"Specials?"

"It wouldn't take long to shove a jury floor in the cage. We'll take a quick look at Woodslee and then get out. In any case, the next crossover area is there. We have to work from that." At fifteen hundred, she stopped astride a cradle and flipped back her hood. "That's the longest half-kilometer on record."

"Nearer one and a half."

"Now you tell me."

"We passed the precinct boundary a long way back. Didn't you notice the numbers on the cradles?

Decreasing, Numbered out from each tower."

"Where?"

"You're sitting on it."

"Fifty."

"Right Forty-nine to the jackpot."

"At ten meters each, four-ninety. Back to that half-kilometer you talked about. Can't we take a rest?" Holt tried his sounding tube again. The rhythmic knock was a lot clearer. He looked down the tunnel to the hazy point where perspective lines gathered into a dot. There was movement. It was incredible, but the specials were beating their time.

Then he knew why the noise was so positive. They were walking on the cable. Gyro stabilizers would keep them in balance. They could walk a tightrope. At the same rate, they would catch up inside the distance to Woodslee's control point.

He said, "We'll take a leaf out of their book and balance walk along the top. Up you get." There was no answer. He whipped around to see what she was doing and for a disordered second believed that the whole sequence had been a trick of the imagination. The tunnel was empty. Then he was vaulting over the cradle and lifting her from the floor. Both shoulder panels were glowing red.

He slipped on the cowl and sealed it and saw that the valve was moving as she breathed. He picked her up, draped her over his shoulder in a fireman's lift, took their carpet bag in his free hand, and got himself on the cable. The roof was only centimeters over the dome of his helmet. For the first ten meters, he reckoned it was no go. He would have to go down and sweat it out over the saddles. Then he got the rhythm of it and realized he was making better time than they had made so far, despite the extra load. He concentrated all his mind on the shiny black bar that stretched ahead. He told himself it was Sat and wide and as easy as a walkway. He talked himself along and was still muttering when a gray bulkhead appeared slap in front of his face and he could swing her down and lean her against the last saddle, while he set up the thermic lance to cut a way through the hatch. When it was done, he knocked it through, saw that they had arrived at a junction point full of switchgear and metering consoles, and went back to pick her up.

Gunnar Holt was working like an android, set to endure without thought, following a program that he had set himself. The Woodslee Center was the goal. He had reached it. Once inside, he could stop and plot out the next move. He lifted Shesha and posted her through the hole feet first. As he let go, he felt muscular tension coming into the slack body. He gathered up the tools, thinking that it would be interesting to hear what she had to say when she found herself out of the tunnel and alone in a new place. God, that was stupid, she might think he had left her. He recognized that it was the first time in his life that another human being's mental comfort had been a factor to reckon with. That must mean something. He dropped the grip through and followed it, fetching up on his hands and knees on a tiled floor, dust-free as though the place was in regular use.

He was getting multiple vision. A fatigue syndrome. Shesha appeared as a semicircle of seven. Then he saw she was only slowly getting to her feet beside him and the seven were still there. Guy Taubman, center of the group, said, "You can stand up. Take off your visors. But do nothing quickly. Just go flat against the wall and put your hands on your shoulders."