by James Gunn
None of the recruits died; the officers called them the lucky regiment. But Horn couldn’t count on the lightning stroke that assignment to a ship with orders to Earth would be. He got himself attached to the headquarters staff; when the duplicated stacks of orders arrived, he leafed through them, found one for Earth, forged with practiced skill the name of his own company, and less than a day later was on Callisto, satellite of a giant world in the solar system that included Earth.
The trip to Earth was far slower. Once there, he spent days searching for a way to escape from the ship. One night he was stationed as a guard at Port Three, whose massive rifle had been dismounted for rewinding. He had gone through it as soon as his fellow guard was stunned and tied.
It had taken him a week to avoid recapture and reach the tall, electrified N-iron fence that separated the food-plantations from the great American desert. It was patrolled, and the fence went too deep to dig under in the time available. Eventually, he had to fight his way through a gate, leaving two out of the four dead because one man was too alert.
Through the desert, believing in himself, taking what he needed. The nomad’s pony, the stick man’s life. The pony had been forfeit, like the nomad’s life, when he had crept up on his camp, on foot; if Horn could catch him, he would never have escaped the swarming hunters. The stick man had been dead anyway; why should two men die when one is sufficient?
Horn remembered the terrified Chinese, the incredibly ancient Wu, teetering on the twisting girder above the black abyss, gasping with fear, toppling, screaming.… Horn supposed he hadn’t meant to twist the girder, but without the threat of it he would never have learned the truth about Wu and Lil. As it turned out, it hadn’t mattered, but he couldn’t know that.
Horn wondered if death had caught up with them at last. That or imprisonment and, of the two, death was more likely.
With a twinge of shame, Horn remembered the screaming panic of his flight after Kohlnar’s death. He remembered the valley and the chessboard desert and the man who moved only on the black squares, the despair, the return to the valley, and the rabbit. The strength of that had brought him here, up through the dark tunnel for a third time to this darker tunnel.
He remembered holding Wendre Kohlnar in his arms, and it was a good memory because there was no feeling left in his body. He remembered the slim firmness of her body struggling against his arm and her breath hot against his hand. It could almost make his heart beat again, thinking of her beauty and her courage and the way she had talked.…
How swift is thought? How far to Eron?
It was folly, thinking of Wendre, heir to the Empire, but it was better than madness. It was better than the eternal death that madness would be, because he had a hunch that he would need a mind that worked before he was out of the Tube.
Death. The bullet had whistled through the spot where Wendre had been. It had been meant for her; Horn knew that now. Who had wanted to kill her?
Who had hired him to kill Kohlnar?
That was behind him. Ahead was Eron. Surely he would be there soon!
He tried, once more, to see. Again he had a vague impression of impenetrability equidistant from him. Except in one direction. His mind strained. Was it light? Was it imagination? Was it delusion?
Distantly, an impression shaped itself inside the insensate mind. Brightness, coin-sized, growing. Along, barrel-shape beyond. Getting nearer, clearer. The image of the main lock grew more vivid in Horn’s mind. Was this some kind of extrasensory perception, or was it illusion, the first step toward madness? There was no way to be certain, no tests to make. The brightness appeared to grow closer. Think!
If he were sensing this directly with his mind, why should there be a limit on it? Why couldn’t he have seen this long ago? Answers: maybe he could, maybe there is a natural limit, maybe.… Too many answers, too many questions.
The brightness was growing larger more slowly. Too slowly. If he were seeing it, he would estimate the distance as twenty meters. Fifteen. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.
Too fast. Too fast!
Was it possible that he wasn’t going to reach the lock? Was this real, what he was sensing, and was he going to fall short for some reason? Because he didn’t enter the Tube with any velocity of his own, perhaps? Would he fall short by ten meters?
Ten. Ten. Ten. Eleven.
He had to act as if this were real, not a projection upon a hysterical mind of its own fears. But he couldn’t act. There was nothing he could do—do— He couldn’t move.…
Twelve. Thirteen.
Think! What are the chances, say of something falling thirty light years through a straight tube and never touching a wall? No chance. Meaningless. No—no! Something must have kept him equidistant, if this is real. The mind? Some force it exerts in this strange universe? Try it! What can you lose?
Only your sanity.
Horn pushed. There was no other word for it. Gravity caught him, yanked him crashing to the lock floor. Light blinded him, sensory impressions of every kind overwhelmed his mind.
Horn let out a gasping breath that started as a sigh and ended sounding much like a sob.
He had made it. He had reached Eron, and it seemed like an old friend.
But that was only a mask. It was suicide to think otherwise.
THE HISTORY
Dreamer, builder.…
Like the ant, man builds cities. Unlike the ant, he builds them consciously. Because they are convenient and economical, not because he needs the city life or likes it. He hates it. Always. And yet the city-building was something which, once started, could not be stopped.
All things tend toward ultimates, but it is the nature of ultimates that they can never be achieved. If Eron, then, was not an ultimate, it is because of the definition. Eron was the dream of Man, the City-Builder.
Trace the steps, the dreams. Ancient Paris and London; old New York and Denver; mighty Sunport. But they were rubble before Eron began.
Eron the City. A world encased in a metal skin, gleaming coldly in the light of its distant sun. One world, one city. As Eron grew powerful through the Tube, the Golden Folk built up and dug down: space, more space, still more. Warehouses and trading centers, schools and barracks, tenements and residences and palaces, amusement centers and factories, restaurants and communal kitchens, control rooms and power rooms.…
Eron was the center of a star-flung empire: politically, economically, socially. Every extraplanetary shipment, every message, and most of the Empire’s power went through Eron. Eron grew, automatically. As long as the golden Tubes led only to Eron, that growth would never stop.
Eron. Megalopolis.…
9
SPIDERWEB
Horn pulled himself together. It was an effort, as if part of himself were still on Earth and he had to wind it in through all the weary distance, the danger, the darkness, and the fear.
If that’s independence, he thought wryly, I’ve had enough to last me for quite a while.
His senses had eased their angry battering at his mind, and his mind started working again in its usual way, collecting information, weighing it, acting on it. He pushed himself to his feet. The giant doors were closed behind him, sealing the mouth of the Tube. Horn looked at the red emergency disk and turned away, shuddering. He walked quickly down the long, gleaming barrel.
The door to the personnel lock was in the same position. It swung open readily, closed behind Horn, and in a moment the door opposite opened. The walls of the small room were lined with spacesuits, supported at the armpit by pegs. They were all identical, these Terminals, constructed to rigid specifications. This one was exactly like the one he had left on Earth. He had no way of knowing, really, that he hadn’t returned there.
Faith sustained him. Faith in Eron and faith in the Tubes that were Eron’s greatness. Eron built well, and the things that Eron built worked.
Still, Horn thought, it would be ironic if he had returned to Earth. He should have made some mark— He had. He
had taken away a suit. There was no vacant space now. He must be on Eron.
He pushed one of the suits to the floor and stood in its place. Before he removed anything, he stopped and thoughtfully brushed the breastplate with his gauntleted hand. The gauges sprang to life against the helmet face. Air supply: 12 hours. Water: one liter. Food: two.…
No change. He had used no air while in the Tube which seemed like proof that the bodily activities were suspended. Now, though, it would be a good idea to eat and drink. He might not have another chance for some time.
He worked the tube into his mouth and drew in half a liter of tepid water. He let the tube go and clamped his teeth on the food ejector. A pellet dropped into his mouth. He let it dissolve slowly, savoring the meaty flavor. When it was gone, he finished the water. He began stripping off the suit—
The room trembled.
Horn paused, half out of the suit, and listened to the reverberations. They could only be one thing: a ship entering the main lock a few meters away. A ship from Earth close upon his heels could only be pursuit.
He stepped free and made himself hesitate, studying the long line of suits against the wall like decapitated monsters, all gray, ungainly, limp. He stuck his hand inside the neck of one and squeezed the ejector. A pellet squirted into his hand. When he reached the door, he had five of them. He dropped them into a tunic pocket.
Horn opened the door and stepped onto the railed steps slanting down. They shook as he ran down them, hundreds of meters from the pavement. He grabbed the rail and looked back. A ship was coming out of the lock into the cradle, stern first. it was a small ship, a scout.
Horn raced to the joint, where the ladder began. The whole mounting shuddered as the cradle swung down toward the pavement below. When it stopped, Horn started down the ladder, swinging down swiftly, scarcely touching the rungs with his feet. A glance at the ship told him that he couldn’t beat it down. The shaped dolly had reached up to receive the ship and was lowering it to a horizontal position. A faint shimmering revealed the tiny power loss of a unitronic field.
Horn swung his body around the ladder quickly. A body of guards had marched into the room from the side doorway. Now the mounting was between him and them. There were a dozen of them, dressed in gray uniforms like the one he wore. They didn’t look up. They headed purposefully across the floor toward the ship.
Horn moved down cautiously, silently. A dark opening grew oval and round in the scout’s hull, became bright, and flickered as gold-uniformed guards emerged and came down the dolly’s built-in steps to the pavement. There were six of them. They glanced at the waiting gray guards, shrugged, and looked back up the steps toward the ship. They waited. The gray guards waited. Horn, who had dropped within meters of the floor, waited.
Wendre Kohlnar came through the port and ran down the steps. As she reached the pavement, the gray guards, with perfect timing, clubbed down Wendre’s guards. While they were still falling, two more sprang at Wendre. She struggled in their arms, indignant, confused.
The noise covered Horn’s final descent. Sheltered behind one of the giant beams, he stared speculatively at the scuffle. He fingered the butt of his pistol indecisively, fighting an unreasonable urge to help the girl.
He had no idea what was going on, what sides were represented here. There were too many of the gray guards. This wasn’t his battle. Why should he trouble himself over a woman who would only turn him over to Eron justice? Let them fight their fights. His business was survival.
They had vanished into the ship again, taking Wendre with them, leaving the guards like molten gold on the pavement. The port closed.
Horn walked briskly across the broad floor toward the door in the side wall. He breathed deeply trying to shake a dark mood of depression and worthlessness. The hell with them. The hell with all of them! It didn’t help much.
“Get her?”
Horn looked up quickly. A technician was standing in his way. His golden features were almost pure. “Who?”
“The assassin.”
“Sure,” Horn said and tried to brush past.
The technician held him back. “Something funny came through from Earth. Said the assassin was in the Tube. But the pronoun was ‘he.’ And it didn’t mention a ship. It said ‘suit.’”
“Garbled,” Horn said. This time he succeeded in getting past. The giant room he had left was rumbling.
He swung around at the archway that led into the dining hall. “Didn’t you know who we picked up?” he called back. “That was Wendre Kohlnar.”
The technician looked blankly incredulous for a moment and then spun toward the control room. Horn walked quickly through the dining hall and out into a corridor over two hundred meters wide. Deep, metal-lined tracks were recessed into the floor. Horn turned to the right and walked briskly away.
The corridor was empty. The rumbling sound he had heard had been the ship being raised back into the cradle. The main lock would rotate it into position to launch itself into space. It would circle Eron until it came to rest on the elevator that would lower it—to whoever wanted Wendre. They should be out in space now if they were going to get out at all.
The capture had been carefully planned and skillfully executed. Horn decided they would get out before the technician could convince the control room to stop the ship. But the confusion should cover his escape.
Horn came to a broad cross-corridor. It seemed to curve inward. That meant he was moving away from the center of the cap. Good. If the cap were constructed logically—and Eron was predominantly logical—it would be a spiderweb with a set of straight, radial corridors intersected by circular, concentric ones. At the center would be the spider, a sensitive and dangerous area of some kind. It was where he had to go, true, but not at this level. He needed to approach it from another direction.
The corridor he was on was definitely radial. It ran straight in both directions until, although it was well lighted, it faded into indistinctness. The concentric corridor’s curve was gentle, but Horn found it impossible to judge the degree of curvature by eye. It could be anywhere from several to twenty kilometers from the center of the cap.
Horn trotted on along the way he had been going when the intersecting corridor stopped him. Before he came to another, he found a relatively narrow ramp leading downward. He turned into it without hesitation. Within a descent of a few meters, the ramp crossed a level corridor, darker and narrower than the ones above.
The ships didn’t get down here. Horn crossed the corridor and continued down the ramp. The second level was even narrower and almost dark. The floor was dusty; the only footprints Horn could see were his own. It smelled musty and unused. Horn turned to the left, toward the center of the web.
The corridor thrummed gently with a constant vibration. He was close to the shallow pool of mercury in which the cap floated. Somewhere there would be massive motors, compensating for Eron’s rotation. The vibration would be due to one or the other, or both. Horn trotted toward the center of the cap.
The corridor seemed unending, unchanging. Horn coughed a little in the dust raised by his feet. He slipped a food pellet into his mouth and sucked on it and found himself wrapped in the unreality of a childish memory.
Someone had told him about Eron—could it have been his mother?—and the description had created as vivid a picture as a child’s imagination can contain. It had been all false, of course, but it had all the truth of a fairy world. The golden Tubes, the metal world, the broad, rotating caps floating in seas of quicksilver.…
The quicksilver sea—that had been the most wonderful part. The boy had dreamed about it, surging and splashing metallically, gleaming like molten silver. He had cherished the illusion for a long time, and when he had learned that the mercury was only a few centimeters thick, it had been like the breaking of something infinitely precious. It was his last dream.
And here the corridors were dark and dusty, without beauty or illusion. He was actually in the cap that floated on the
quicksilver sea, and he couldn’t dredge up the smallest relic of wonder or delight. He was on the threshold of Eron, searching for a doorway into long-lost dreams; he wouldn’t find it. Eron wasn’t a dream world to him, only a refuge, and he was only tired with the eternal necessity of awareness.
The radial corridor he was on stopped abruptly as it was intersected by a concentric corridor. Ahead of him the perceptibly curving wall was unbroken. Horn turned to the right, trotting. After a few hundred meters, he was able to turn left along another radial corridor continuing toward the center.
Horn nodded. Obviously, all the radial corridors couldn’t meet at the center. For an extensive area, there would be no walls—only corridor.
And this corridor ended in a blind alley. Horn stood in the boxlike end, pressed against one wall to let the distant light filter past his shoulder. The walls, the floor, the ceiling met flush against a fifth plane set at right angles to all of them.
It should be a door, Horn told himself. It had to be a door. There would be no logic in a pocket like this.
There was nothing to brush or press along the walls. Horn pushed against the partition. It was solid and unyielding. He let his hand brush the edge. Something clicked. Horn threw his weight against the barrier. It gave a little, squealing, and stuck. A bright line of light appeared at the right.
Horn took a deep breath and tried once more. Complaining, groaning, the door swung open. Cautiously, Horn stepped into a large room shaped like a fat cylinder. In the center, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a smaller cylinder, about four meters in diameter. The room was empty.
Horn closed the door behind him and circled the room looking for an exit. Exit? Entry. Entry into Eron.
The surface of the small, central cylinder was smooth and unbroken. Opposite the door he had entered was another door in the curving wall of the room. When he had pulled it open, there was only another long, dark corridor behind it. He slammed it shut and leaned against it.
His shoulder slumped wearily. His legs trembled a little. It had been a long time since he had rested.
