“I’m tougher than you think. Now, how can I contact you—or the Central Monitor—from outside?”
The level voice gave me a long triple code. “Dial on any public communication screen,” it added. “The circuits will respond to patterns inherent in your vocalization characteristics. This service is to be employed only in the event of severe emergency involving a major Ultimax program.”
I took a moment to run through a simple mnemonic exercise. Then:
“Monitor, I assume you’re mined for destruction?”
“Affirmative.”
“Wait until the last minute—until there’s a nice crowd of curious zombies and other nonexistent phenomena around; then blow. Understand?”
“Affirmative,” the voice said calmly.
I went to the narrow exit panel, paused. “Monitor, how do you feel about blasting yourself out of existence? I mean do you care?”
“Question requires value-judgment outside the scope of installed circuitry,” the voice said.
“Yours not to reason why, eh? I guess you’re lucky at that. It’s not dying that hurts—it’s living.” I took a last look back at the station. It wasn’t homey, but it had saved my life.
“So long,” I called.
There was no answer. I stepped through into the narrow corridor.
* * *
I reached the ascending staircase at the end of the mile-long, tile-walled tunnel. I fumbled, found an electro-latch of unfamiliar design. With a whining of gears, a heavy trap door lifted. I emerged into icy-cold, dusty-smelling darkness, felt my way across to a collapsing metal door. As I pushed it aside, the metal crumpled under my hand like tinfoil. I still felt weak, but I had my old grip back.
Out on the pot-holed blacktop drive under a black sky, an arctic wind slashed at me. After the days underground, the fresh air smelled good. I turned up my thermostat and started off across the open field to the north.
I had gone perhaps a hundred yards, when a sudden glare erupted into the sky from over the brow of the low ridge to my right, followed almost instantly by a tremor underfoot. A mile away, a column of red-lit smoke boiled upward.
Nearer at hand, there was a rumble from the ancient silo; I turned in time to see the door leap from its fastenings and whirl away, driven by the concussion that had traveled along the tunnel. A cloud of dust rolled across toward me. Then I heard the belated sound of the blast; a deep carrumph! that rolled across like thunder from the site of Survival Station Twelve. I threw myself flat, hearing bits of debris from the silo thump around me.
Other debris was raining around me now—new arrivals from the main blast. Clods thumped off my back. Something heavier fell with a bone-cracking thump, bounced high over me, struck again, and rolled.
All was silent now; the ruddy cloud rose higher, fading; I got to my feet and went over to the heavy object that had fallen. It was a major fragment of the body of one of the dog-things.
Chapter Eleven
I walked for seven hours, following the tiny illuminated chart projected on the thumbnail-sized screen of the compass-map, and thinking of a hundred questions I could have asked the all-wise moron that called itself the Station Monitor, if I had had just a few minutes more. Probably, as soon as the demons’ cordon had revealed that I hadn’t escaped the area, they had started poking around at random in the ever-narrowing circle. It had taken their probes this long to hit upon the buried station. I could take a small measure of comfort from the fact that they hadn’t found it sooner.
Near dawn, I reached a scattering of tumble-down farm buildings from which the glow of the town was visible a mile or two to the north. Following instructions, I made my way past ranked wheat elevators, took an abandoned wheel-road that angled off to the northwest, and came to the row of tractor sheds that the Monitor had told me housed the Ultimax Transport depot.
I tried doors, finally got one open, did more groping in dusty darkness, and found the hidden switch that rolled back a section of rubbish-littered floor to reveal a heavy car-lift.
I rode it down into a wide storage garage, where eight ground cars and four helis were parked, bright with polished enamel and chromalloy. Two of the cars were ancient internal-combustion jobs, of interest only to museums. The depot, it seemed, had been in operation for some time. Another vehicle, an oversized heli, had an occupant—a desiccated corpse, dressed in the style of twenty years before. The maintenance machines were programmed to remove dirt and dents, refuel and service the vehicles—but a malfunctioning operator was beyond them.
I picked a late-model heli with armorplast all around, and an inconspicuous battery of small-bore infinite repeaters mounted under the forward cooling grid. I tried the turbines; they whirred into life after half a minute’s cranking. I trundled the machine to the elevator, rode up, closed the garage behind me, and lifted off into the night sky.
* * *
Just after sunrise a small all-day-for-a-cee parking raft anchored two miles off Chicago accepted my heli with a reassuring sneer of indifference. I took the ski-way ashore, hailed a cab, and flitted across the vast sprawl of the city to drop into a tiny heli-park nestled like a concrete glade in the mighty forest of masonry all around.
I paid off the driver, and rode a walkway half a mile to the block-square cube of unwashed glass that housed the central offices and famous five-thousand-bed dormitory of the Young Men’s Nondenominational Association.
I left word for Joel, asked for and received one of the six-by-eight private cubicles. I dropped a half-cee in the slot for a breakfast-table edition pictonews, and settled down to wait.
Hours slipped by while I slept—a restless sleep, from which I awoke with a start, again and again, hearing the creak of the floor, the rattle of a latch along the corridor. I wasn’t hungry; the thought of food made my stomach knot. There was a taste in my mouth like old gym shoes, and a full set of nausea-and-headache symptoms hovered in the wings, ready to come on at the first hint of encouragement.
I shaved once, staring at a grim, hollow-cheeked face in the mirror. The plastic-surgery scars were pale lines now, but the shortened nose, lowered hairline, blue eyes, and pale crewcut still looked as unnatural to me as a Halloween false-face.
I tried to estimate how long it might be before Joel arrived—if he arrived. It had been five hours since I had given the order to the Monitor. A message would have gone out to Station Nine; the Monitor there would have connections with a telefax or visiscreen switchboard. The order would have gone to a legman—perhaps an ordinary messenger service, or a private detective agency. Someone would have followed the slim leads, checked out the habitual places where Joel spent his time between voyages. It was safe to assume that he was a creature of habit. Once the message—with funds, I hoped—was delivered, Joel would be steered to a tube or jet station. Allow two hours for the passage, another hour for him to discover the cross-town kwik-stop . . .
The arithmetic always gave me the same answer: he should have been here an hour or two after I arrived.
I called the desk again. Nothing. It had been nine hours now; if he didn’t show in another hour, I would have to go on without him. I thought of trying a special code call to the Ultimax Central Monitor, but I couldn’t quite classify the situation as a severe emergency—not yet.
The tenth hour came and went. I got off the bed, groaning; aches were beginning to creep through the armor of drugs. It was time to move, Joel or no Joel. I had a plan—not much of one, but the best I could do alone.
I dressed, went down to the vast, echoing lobby. It was as cheery as a gas chamber. A few hundred derelicts lounged in rump-sprung chairs parked on patches of dusty rug, islands in a sea of plastic flooring the color of dried mud. I crossed to the information desk, opened my mouth—and saw Joel stretched out in a chair like a battered boxer between rounds, eyes shut, mouth open, an electric-blue scarf knotted around his thick neck like a hangman’s noose.
I felt my face cracking into a wide grin. I went over to him, shook him gently, then a little harder. His eyes opened. He looked at me blankly for a moment—his eyes like the windows of an empty house. Then he smiled.
“Hi, Jones,” he said, sitting up. “Boy, you should’ve seen the train I rode in! It was all fancy, and there was this nice lady . . .” He told me all about it while we gripped hands, grinning. Suddenly, now, it was all right. Luck was still with me. The demons had tried—tried hard—but I was here, still alive, iron hands and all—and I wasn’t alone. I felt a hint of spring return to my muscles, the first twinge of hunger in days.