camaraderie” the real estate agents spoke of. The neigh-
bors of those dead men and women had turned them in,
surely, in righteous indignation that a cell of revolutionaries
should exist in their building.
The consensus had killed them as surely as the bullets.
The consensus, I would have to soon learn, was a living,
breathing creature that could attack in vicious rage.
And the molders of the consensus had Melinda in a cell
where they could get to her at any moment….
VI
At a quarter to three in the morning, after a short nap
and a quick snack of cheese and crackers, I dressed and
slipped both loaded pistols into the pockets of the heavy
coat I was wearing. Through a series of pedways, escala-
tors, and elevators, I reached the ground level of the west
wall of the apartment complex and went outside. For a
moment, I savored the cool air, then turned right and
walked briskly toward the center of the city. I held my
chin high and made my step firm but not rushed. I tried to
look as little like a fugitive as possible. In ten minutes, I
passed a dozen other pedestrians without getting a second
glance from any of them, and I thought the ruse was
working.
Twenty-five minutes from her apartment complex, the
squat, round surface portion of the Tombs hove into sight.
This was the administrative wing, containing offices and
files. Light burned in some of the long, narrow window
slits. Below this modest and attractive nubbins, bored for
dozens of levels into the earth, were the cells and the
interrogation chambers. The place had been designed,
originally, as a modern progressive prison. But slowly,
through the years since the cold war had been renewed, it
was converted into something quite less than progressive by
those reactionaries who branded change as part of any
enemy plot, labeled disagreement as subversion. The ideal
of rehabilitation was abandoned by those who thought
punishment was better than converting to usefulness. Frus-
tration and boredom and rage were the companions of
those locked within these walls.
And Melinda was there now.
There were three howlers parked along the curb, all of
them empty and locked. At the four corners of the inter-
section, there were piles of snow which had not yet been
removed. Streetlights threw long shadows against the cir-
cular structure. There was no other person in sight, and the
scene was almost like still-life painting into which I had
walked through some unknown magic.
I had both guns shoved into my overcoat pockets,
though I prayed to an insane and unheeding God that I
would not have to use them. Indeed, I didn’t think I could
use them if the occasion arose. But, clutched in my hands,
they gave me a sense of determination, as the dying
Catholic must feel when his fingers grip his crucifix and he
doesn’t feel so bad about meeting the end.
Stepping from the curb, I crossed the icy street toward
the main entrance of the building.
The doors opened and two coppers came out, walked to
the last of the three howlers, and got in.
I kept moving. Up on the other curb, across the side-
walk, up the long flight of gray steps, my heart pounding
and my mouth dry. I pushed through the double doors
into the well-lighted lobby of the place, took it all in as I
walked across it, went down the main corridor to the
elevator, which I took down to the cell levels. The doors
opened on a guard sitting at a desk, and I received my
first challenge.
“Yeah?” he asked, looking up from the magazine of
undressed girls and overdressed fiction.
I probed out, struck into the center of his mind, fishing
through the currents of thoughts there, seeking the frag-
ments of scenery from his past and from the future he
imagined for himself. I had not done this thing since I had
been a child in the AC complex and they had made me do
it in experiments. It was distasteful and painful, to me as
well as to my victim. But I found the worst of his