He stopped and glanced apprehensively overhead. They were between buildings, under a tiny square of open sky. He grabbed Forrester and dragged him swiftly back into the cellar where the joymaker-maker had kept his shop.
“Watch out!” he whispered fiercely. “They’s a reporter up there!”
The word meant nothing to Forrester, but the tone carries the message. He ran one way, Whitlow the other. The joymaker-maker’s shop had been in a sort of vermiform appendix to the plumbing of an apartment complex, in an area where some installation had been designed into the plans, then was outmoded and removed, and the space left vacant. The little man who sold the joymakers occupied a sort of triplex apartment—three rooms on three levels—and out of it and around it ran, for some reason, a net of empty, four-foot-wide tunnels. Down one of them Whitlow fled. Down another ran Forrester.
It was dark. The footing was uneven. But Forrester hurried down it, stooped over to avoid banging his head, until the blackness was total and he fell to the rough floor, gasping.
He still did not know what he had been running from, but Whitlow’s fear was contagious. And it reawakened a hundred old pains; until this moment he had almost forgotten the beating he had taken the first day out of the freezer, but the exertion made every dwindling ache start up again. His sides pounded, his head throbbed.
He had now been a Forgotten Man for exactly two hours.
Time passed, and the silence was as total as the darkness. Whatever it was that Whitlow had feared it did not seem to be pursuing here. It would take a human stoat to pursue a human rabbit in this warren, he thought; and in the darkness maybe even the rabbit would develop claws. It had been bad enough when all he had to fear was the crazy Martian. Now. . . .
He sighed, and turned over on the rough, cast-stone floor.
He wondered wistfully what had become of all the furnishings and gadgets he had bought so recklessly for the apartment he no longer owned. Shouldn’t there be some sort of trade-in allowance?
But if there was, he did not have the skill to claim it. Nor did he own a working joymaker to help him with instructions. He wondered if Hara would help him out at this last juncture and resolved to go looking for the doctor. After all, it was in a way Hara’s responsibility that he was in this predicament. . . .
“No,” said Forrester in the darkness, aloud and very clearly.
It wasn’t Hara’s responsibility at all. It was his own.
If there was one thing that he had learned in his two hours as a Forgotten Man, it was that there were no responsibilities any more that were not his own. This was not a world where a protective state provided for its people. It was a world of the individual; he was the captain of his fate, the master of his soul—
And the prisoner of his failings.
By the time he heard Whitlow cautiously calling his name, Forrester had come to terms with the fact that he was all alone in a cold and uncaring world.
Cautiously they tiptoed out of the pipes, across a hoverway, and under a huge building that was supported on a thousand elliptical pillars, set in beds of grass. What light kept the grass growing came from concealed fixtures in the ten acres of roof over their heads.
Whitlow, regaining the appearance of confidence, led the way to one particular pillar that held a door, marked in glittering red letters EMERGENCY EXIT. He pushed it open, shoved Forrester inside, and closed it behind them.
“Whew,” he said cheerfully. “That was close, but we’re all raht now. You beginning to get hungry?”
Forrester had been about to ask questions, but that totally diverted his attention. “Yes!”
Whitlow grinned. “Figured,” he said. “Well, Ah’ve got just the thing for you, prob’ly. Ah’ve got a steady clah’nt in this building, fellow who used to work with me at the labs, back before. He’s on diet programming now, see, and he always manages to slip me something out of the expurimental allowance. So let’s see—”
He rummaged in a cupboard and emerged with a pair of thermal-covered hot dishes. They opened at a touch and displayed a steaming, fragrant dinner for two. “Damn, he done better than ever! Looks lahk smoked oysters Milanese! Sink your teeth in this, Chuck: Ah guarantee you won’t do better at the Senate of the Twelve Apostles!”
While he wolfed down the food, Forrester glanced about him to discover what sort of place he was in. It seemed to be an air-raid access to the underground park from the building above, no longer used because, since the beginning of the Sirian threat, complete new facilities had been excavated at the five-hundred-foot subterranean level. But this little forgotten vestige of a completely stocked shelter remained, and, as no one else had any use for it, Whitlow had taken it for his own. It was temperature controlled; it had lights and plumbing; and, as Forrester had already seen, it was provided with food storage facilities. All Whitlow had to do was furnish the food. Forrester leaned back, relaxed; trying to summon up the energy to eat a chocolate mousse and half listening to Whitlow’s stream of talk. “. . . So then when Ah got out of M. Ah. T. they weren’t vurry many jobs open for coal-mahning engineers, of course. So Ah went back and took mah master’s in solid-state electronics. Then Bell Labs sent they recruiter up to scout out prospects and he made me this offer, and Ah went into the labs at nahn thousand to start. Sweat, man, things looked good. Murry was puttin’ on weight, and the kids were fahn. But Ah’d had this little cough for some tahm, and—”
“Whit,” said Forrester, “hold off on that a minute, will you? I want to ask you something. Why did we hide from that reporter?”
Whitlow looked startled. “Ah’m sorry,” he apologized after a minute. “Ah keep forgetting what a greenhorn you are. You don’t know about these reporters.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, all you have to know is seeing one of them’s poison. Whah, that lahk a vulture hovering over a hill. You just know they’s going to be a corpse down below. See, they’ve got this Freedom of the Press thing, so when anybody takes out a killing lahcense he got to tell the reporters raht away. And he’s got to fahl a complete plan of action, see, so the reporters can be raht there when the blood starts flahing, because they tape it all and they put it on the view-walls. Specially if the killer’s in one of the tournaments. Fella from the National Open was here last week and, God, they was reporters hanging out of every cloud.”
“I think I understand,” said Forrester. “You mean if you can keep out of the way of the reporters, you can probably keep out of the way of the assassins, too.”
“Stands to reason, don’t it?”
“I don’t know what stands to reason,” Forrester said humbly. He was beginning to wish he had not been so quick to follow the advice of Adne’s children, so reluctant to wait and expose himself to more of Adne’s gentle scorn. He felt a quick surge of anger. How dare this world treat his life so lightly!
But if it had not been for this world he would not have a life at all; would have stayed dead with a lungful of smoke and fire, centuries before, his body now no more than a soft place in the ground. He leaned back and let himself be lulled by Whitlow’s continuing story of his own adventures.
“So then Ah went to the comp’ny doctor and he told me Ah had it, all rhat. The Big C. Well! Scared? But we had this comp’ny freezer plan at the labs, and Ah reported in to the medics. ‘Sheeoot,’ they said. ‘Lung cancer, hey? Well, you lay raht down here and we’ll freeze your bones—’ ”
Relaxing, half listening, Forrester found himself getting drowsy. It had been a very strange day, he thought; but then he stopped thinking and fell asleep.
In order to live successfully as a panhandler, you had to exercise special care in picking your “clients,” Whitlow said. The worst thing you could do was guess wrong. There was always the chance that you might sidle up to somebody and hit him for a touch—and then find out that he was some jet-set happy-boy looking for an economical murder to commit, one that might get him out of the problem of paying for the victim’s repairs, and one with double thrills, since there was always the chance that the victim would stay dead.
To avoid that, you had to study each prospective mark carefully. No one came down here on business. The best ones were the rubberneck tourists. They usually came in pairs; and, of any two, the one who was being shown around could safely be figured for a greenhorn—himself too fresh out of the freezers, or back from the starways, to be eager for murder as yet. The problem there was to make an accurate assessment of the one who was doing the showing. “That’s whah Ah picked you, Chuck. Ah wasn’t worried about the little boy. Though you can be vurry surprised sometahms.”