Rite of Passage

by Alexei Panshin

  “Oh, you know that isn’t so, Venie,” I said sweetly. “You haven’t moved there yet. By the way, why don’t you? We’ve got a place on our third-string soccer team waiting for you.”

  “I may not be very good,” Venie said, stung, “but I can outplay you any day of the week with both eyes closed.”

  “Mary,” I said, “how has your family been?”

  “All right, I guess,” she said unhappily.

  “At least my parents didn’t dump me in a dormitory to get rid of me while they were still married,” Venie said.

  Without turning to look at her, I said, “Venie, if you want another punch in the nose, keep saying those things. Mary, why don’t we go over to your place? Then we won’t have any interruptions.”

  “Oh, don’t leave on my account,” Venie said. “I’m going myself. The air is getting a little close in here. You kids coming with me?”

  She pushed back her chair and the other three girls got up and started after her as she eased her way out between the red, yellow, green, and blue topped tables.

  I said, “Shall we go over to your place, Mary?”

  Unhappily, she said, “Gee, Mia, I can’t. We were just about to go over and play soccer.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said and stood up. “Let’s go play.”

  Mary said, “I don’t think Venie would like that.”

  I asked, “What’s the matter with you? Since when did it ever matter what Venie thinks?”

  Mary stood there looking at me, and finally she said, “Mia, I love you dearly, but you just don’t live here anymore. I do. Can you understand that? I’ve got to go now. Will you call me up sometime?”

  “Yes,” I said, and watched her hurry out after Venie Morlock. “I will,” I said softly, but I knew I wouldn’t. I knew, too, that one more finger had just been pried loose.

  Chapter 4

  LACKING ANYTHING ELSE TO DO, I left the Common Room and went back to Geo Quad. I may have seemed outwardly calm—I think I did—but inside I was frantic. Once, when I was about ten, I had been on an outing on the Third Level and gotten into a patch of nettles. I didn’t discover what they were until I was well into them, and I had no choice but to continue pushing my way through. By the time I came out on the other side my legs and arms were itching furiously and I was dancing up and down, driven almost into a frenzy by the fiery prickling, wishing for anything that would make it stop. What I was feeling mentally now was something very similar. I had an itch I couldn’t stop and couldn’t locate, I was jumpy and unhappy, and very depressed.

  I wanted to get away. I wanted someplace dark to hide. I wanted something to do to occupy my mind. When I got back to our apartment—a place that held the furniture but not the feel of home—I hunted up a piece of chalk and one of those small lights that dorm mothers use to count heads with after lights-out. Then I went out again. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon then, and though I hadn’t eaten for hours I was far too agitated to think of food.

  I didn’t just pick the nearest grate to our apartment and pop into it. I wandered a little until I found a quiet bywater of a hall not too far away. I was in no mood at all to try to explain myself to some uncomprehending adult, so I did some looking around before I decided on a particular grate to use as my entrance into the Fifth Level collecting chutes.

  I knelt down by the grate and began to take it off. It was hung by clips on both sides and they hadn’t been worked for such a long time that they were stiff and unmoving. Once I started to use them regularly they wouldn’t be any problem, but right now they refused to yield to my prying fingers. I worked at it in a very slow-paced way, not feeling up to much more, and it was fully five minutes before my judicious wiggling of the left-hand clip unfroze it. I was about to start on the other when a voice asked, “What are you doing?”

  I had my face in my hand at the moment, and I jumped guiltily at the sudden sound. I composed myself as best I could before I looked around. It was Zena Andrus standing there.

  I said, “What are you doing?”

  She said, “I live back there,” pointing to a door not so far down the way. “What are you doing?”

  I pointed through the grate at the collecting chute. “I’m going down in there.”

  “You mean down in the ducts?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Why not? Does the idea scare you?”

  She bristled. “I’m not scared. I can do anything you can.”

  With deliberate malice, I said, “In that case, come on along with me.”

  She swallowed a little bit hard, then knelt down beside me and looked through the grate, feeling the indraft and becoming conscious of the distant sound of fans. “It’s awfully dark down there.”

  “I have a light,” I said. “We won’t need it much, though. It’s more fun running along in the dark.”

  “Running?”

  “Well, walking.”

  Uncertainly, she looked back at the grate again. They say that misery loves company, and I was bound to make someone else miserable.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “If you’re afraid to come along . . .”

  Zena stood up. “I am not.”

  “All right,” I said. “If you’re coming, stand aside and let me get the grate off.”

  In a minute I had the other clip pulled to the side. I set the grate on the floor and pointed to the black hole. “After you.”

  “You’re not going to shut me up in there?”

  “No,” I said. “No, I’ll be right behind you. Go through feet first.”

  Since she was a butterball, it was a tight fit for her, but after she did some earnest wriggling, she popped through. I handed the chalk and the light down to her and then I slid through myself. When I was standing on the floor of the duct, I took the chalk and light back.

  “Put the grate on,” I said, and while she was doing that I made an X-mark and put a neat circle around it, the chalk squeaking lightly on the metal.

  “That’s the mark for home,” I said. The ducts corresponding to arteries have pushing fans, the ducts corresponding to veins have sucking fans. Between the chalk marks I make and the direction and feel of the wind, I always have a good enough idea where I am, even in a strange place like this one, to at least find my way home again. There was certainly more similarity here to the ducts at home than there was in the layouts of Alfing and Geo Quads proper. I didn’t think it would take me long to get my bearings.

  When Zena had the grate in place, we set off.

  I walked first down the metal corridor. Zena followed uncertainly behind me, tripping once and skidding, though there was nothing there to trip on except her feet. The duct itself, fully six feet wide and six feet high, was made of smooth metal. The darkness was complete, except for the occasional grille of light cast into the dust at a grate opening, and the beam cast by my little light. As we passed them, I numbered the grates and the cross-corridors to give me a ready idea of how far from home I was.

  As we passed the grates, occasionally noises penetrated from the outside world, but it was clearly another world than the one that we were in. The sounds of our world were the metallic echoes of our whispers, the sound of our sandals padding dully, and the constant sound of the fans.

  I had read more than one novel set in the American West two hundred years before Earth was destroyed, where conditions were almost as primitive as on one of the colony planets. I remembered reading of the scouts who even in strange territory had the feel of the country, and I felt much the same way myself. The feel of the air, the sounds, all meant something to me. To Zena they meant nothing and she was scared. She didn’t like the dark at all.

  At those points where the corridors joined there were sometimes fans to be ducked. The corridors also sloped at the junctions so that there were no straight corners, and this was disconcerting when the corridor you were meeting ran up-and-down, even when it was the equivalent of a capillary and could be gotten over with one good jump.

  Zena balked at
the first of these that we encountered and had to be prodded before she would cross it.

  “I don’t want to,” she said. “I can’t jump that far.”

  “All right,” I said. “But if you don’t come along, you’ll just be left here all alone in the dark.”

  That made her mind up for her and she found that she could jump it, and with very little effort, either.

  But I’ll have to admit that old-collecting-chute-hand or not, I wasn’t prepared for what we found next. In the darkness, there was no floor in front of us. Above us, no ceiling. My light showed our own corridor resuming in the far side of the gap, fully six feet away. The floor sloped sharply down and the air rushed strongly along. I had never encountered an up-and-down duct of this size before.

  “Well, what is it?” Zena asked.

  There were handholds at the side on which to cross the gap, and holding onto one of these, I leaned over and dropped a piece of broken chalk in a futile attempt to gauge the depth of the cross-duct. I listened, but never heard a sound.

  “It must connect one level with the next,” I said. “A main line. I bet it goes straight down to the First Level.”

  “Well, don’t you know?”

  “No. I don’t,” I said. “I’ve never been here before.”

  I wasn’t about to jump that distance, so I examined the hand- and footholds carefully. If you slipped and fell, and it was as far down as I suspected, all that would be left of you would be jam. I shone my light up and down, and the beam only managed to nibble at the blackness. The holds went up-and-down, too, as well across, a ladder that went much farther than I could see.

  “Maybe it connects with the Fourth Level down there,” Zena said, “but where does it go to up there?” She pointed straight up the duct.

  I didn’t know. The Fifth Level was the very last, the outside, but this duct went beyond the Fifth. Air chutes don’t lead into blind corners and air doesn’t come from nowhere.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But as long as we’re here, why don’t we see where it goes?”

  I reached over and put my toe in the inset in the wall. Then I grabbed the first handhold I could reach and swung out. They were good firm holds and while the distance straight down bothered me a little, as long I couldn’t see how far down it was I wasn’t really scared. I once had the experience of walking along a board three inches wide while it was set on the ground—I went the whole length and probably could have walked on for a mile and never fallen off. Then the board was raised into the air and I was challenged to try again. When it was set on posts ten feet high, I wouldn’t even try it because I knew I couldn’t make it. This was something of a similar situation, and as long as I couldn’t see I knew I wouldn’t worry.

  I grabbed the next hold and started up. Before I could get anywhere, Zena leaned over and held me by the foot. “Hey, wait up,” she said and gave my foot a tug.

  “Watch it!” I said sharply. “You’ll make me fall.” I tried to jerk my foot loose, but she wouldn’t let go.

  “Come on back down,” Zena pleaded.

  Reluctantly I came down. I said, “What is it?”

  “You can’t go and just leave me.”

  “I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Just follow me and you can’t be left behind.”

  “But I’m scared,” she said.

  That was really the time for her to finally admit it. We had both known that from the beginning, but she had refused to admit it until things were getting interesting.

  “It’s not going to hurt you,” I said. “All we have to do is climb until we find out what’s up there.” I could see she was wavering, caught between the fear of climbing the ladder and the fear of being left behind. “Come on,” I said. “You first.” I wanted her to go first. That way she couldn’t grab me again.

  After a moment, I edged her down the beginning of the slope to the first handhold. I got her onto the ladder and actually moving again. I followed her. I had the light clipped at my waist, pointing upward and giving both of us some idea of what and where to grab as we continued to climb.

  I could hear Zena whimpering as she climbed, making scared noises in her throat. To get her mind off her troubles, I said, “Can you see anything up there?”

  She was clinging tightly to the ladder as we went up, and now she stopped, flipped her head up for just the shortest instant, and then brought it down again.

  “No” she said. “Nothing.”

  I should have known better, I told myself as we continued to climb. You don’t bring somebody who has a habit of choking up into a situation like this.

  Suddenly, without any warning, Zena stopped moving. Before I could help myself, my head rammed so hard into her foot that a shock of pain ran through my neck. If I’d had my head up, I would have seen that she’d stopped, but you can’t climb indefinitely with your head thrown back without getting a crick in your neck. I stopped immediately and went down one step.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “I just can’t go any farther. I can’t.”

  I lifted my head and peered upward. I couldn’t see anything beyond Zena that would hold her up. She was just clinging to the ladder, her face pressed close to the metal. I could hear her breath rasp in her throat.

  “Did you run into something?”

  “No. I just can’t go any farther,” she said tearfully. “I’m scared.”

  I reached up and put my hand on her leg. It was rock-hard and trembling. I said, “Move ahead, Zena,” in a firm but gentle tone—I didn’t want to frighten her—and pushed at the calf of her leg, but she didn’t move.

  I could see that it had been a mistake to be in the lower position on the ladder. If Zena let go and fell, I would be swept along no matter how hard I tried to hold on. That would save me trying to explain what had happened—and it might be difficult to explain if I came back by myself without Zena: “Oh, she fell down one of the air chutes”—but that wasn’t anything to be happy about. I was genuinely frightened. My heart was beginning to speed up and I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back.

  “Don’t let go, Zena,” I said carefully.

  “I won’t,” she said. “I won’t move.”

  I unclipped the light at my belt and then I leaned back as far as I could until I could see beyond her. It would take twenty minutes to go down the ladder—in her state, probably longer—and even if I could start her moving, I doubted she could hold on that long. I held the light up at arm’s length over my head. About forty or fifty feet above us I could see something black at the side of the duct. A cross-corridor, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. All I could do was hope that it was.

  “I want to go down,” Zena said.

  We couldn’t go down. We certainly couldn’t stay where we were. I didn’t know what was ahead of us, but it was the only direction in which we could go.

  “You’re going to have to climb a little more,” I said.

  “But I’m scared,” Zena said. “I’m going to fall.”

  I could feel sweat on my forehead now. A runnelet ran down and caught in my eyebrow. I wiped my brow.

  “No, you’re not going to fall,” I said confidently. “I just looked up above, Zena, and there’s a cross-corridor thirty feet or so over your head. That’s all you have to climb. You can do that.”

  Zena just screwed her face in against the metal even harder. “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. I’ll help you. Keep your eyes closed. Now, move your foot up one step. Just one step.” I pushed at her leg. “That’s right. One step. All right, now reach your hand up—no, keep your eyes closed. Now move your other foot.”

  One foot, one hand at a time, I got her moving again. For the first time since I could remember, the darkness seemed oppressive, a place where anything could happen. It was the way it must have seemed to Zena all along.

  In a minute, I said, “It’s not more than twenty feet or so now,” but Zena was blocking my view and I couldn’t do anything but
hope I was right. “You’re doing fine. It’s only a little bit farther.”

  I continued to urge her on, and she went up slowly, a rung at a time. It was more than twenty feet, but not much more than that, when Zena gave a little cry and was suddenly no longer above me. I looked up, and in the beam of the light clipped at my waist I could see the cross-corridor just over my head.

  All I could do, sitting on its floor, was try to catch my breath and calm my heart. My heart was thumping away, sweat was continuing to drip from my forehead, and now that I was safe my mind was thinking of all that could have happened in full detail. Beside me, Zena was sobbing soundlessly.

  After a minute, in a voice filled with wonder, Zena said, “I did make it.”

  I breathed through my open mouth, trying not to pant. Then I said, “I told you that you would, didn’t I? Now all we have to do is get you back down again.”

  Zena said, in a determined tone that surprised me, “I can make it back down again.”

  I said, “Well, as long as we’re here, we may as well have a look around.”

  In a minute or two, we walked down the corridor until we came to the first grate opening. The opening was there, but not the grate, and there was no light shining into the duct from outside as there would have been in Geo Quad or Alfing. I snaked through the hole and then gave a hand up to Zena. And we were standing in a hall on the Sixth Level, the level that shouldn’t have been there.

  I shone my light around and all was silent, and dark, and deserted. The corridor was bare. All the fixtures were gone. Anything that could be removed was gone, only the holes remaining after. There was a doorway showing in the beam of my light.

  “Lets go look at that,” I said.

  There was no door—that was gone, too. Nothing had been yanked ruthlessly or broken off. Everything had simply been removed.

  The room into which the doorway led was bare, too. It was a very long room, longer than anything else I had seen in any quad, short of a quad yard. Its closest resemblance was to a dormitory, but it was as though somebody had taken all the rooms in a dormitory and torn out all the walls in order to make one long room. There were holes bored in the walls at regular intervals, columns of holes. But the room was bare.