by William F.
"I can't recall just when. I'd heard the stories, of course."
"Of Ballard?"
"Yes. And the rest of it."
"About the Sanctuary line. Oh, how I wanted to believe those stories when I first heard them as a little girl." Her eyes grew hard again. "Do you ever wonder what your mother was like, who she was, what she felt, how she looked? Do you think she'd be ashamed of what you've become?"
"She may have been a runner, too," said Logan evasively. "I'll never know what she was."
Jess frowned angrily. "I think you should. I think children should know their mothers and be loved by them. Little Mary-Mary should have a mother to love her. A machine can never love you . . . only people can love people."
"Where did you work before you ran?" he asked her.
"I was a fashion tech at Lifeleather trim. Three hours a day, three days a week. I hated it."
"Then why did you stay there?"
"Because it was a job. What can anyone really work at? You can paint or write poetry or go on pairup. You can glassdance or firewalk in the Arcades." Her voice was scornful. "You can breed roses or collect stones or compose for the Tri-Dims. But there's no meaning to any of it. I just—"
A scream from the tunnels.
"That was Mary-Mary!" Jess lunged forward, but Logan restrained her.
"Wait," he said. "Here she comes."
The child ran out of the darkness into Jessica's arms. "The bad people! Bad, bad, bad!"
A howling group of cubscouts burst from the tunnel mouth to surround them. A strutting, feral-faced thirteen-year-old headed the pack. From the waist up he was dressed in the bloodstained uniform of a DS man. Below the ripped black tunic he wore sweat-darkened skintights. "Here now and look what Charmin' Billy led you to." He smirked. "The little rat-trapper and two stinkin' runners."
Mary-Mary stomped her foot. "You go on away!" she demanded. "This is my place. Go back upstairs!"
Charming Billy ignored her. "Going to have us a time, we are!"
Logan measured the pack with his eyes. He could summon the car in another five minutes. How do you buy five minutes? He'd take out the blocky cub to his right first and then go for Charming Billy if nothing else worked. He eased Jess and the child behind him.
Logan looked at Billy. "I feel sorry for you, boy."
Confusion. The pack watched their leader.
"For me? Better feel sorry for yourself, Runner!"
"No—for you, Billy. How old are you?"
Billy's eyes slitted. He didn't reply.
"Twelve? Thirteen? Now me, I'm as old as you can get." Logan slowly exposed his blinking timeflower. "And you—your days are running out. How long can you last, Billy?"
One minute gone.
"Two years? A year? Six months?" he pointed to the blue flower glowing in Billy's palm. "What happens when you go to red?"
"Got me a Sandman once, I did! They said I'd never get him, but I cut him up good, I did. Make the rules as I go. Cubs do what I say. Always have. Always will. I got Cathedral and I'll never let go!"
"No cubs at fourteen, Billy. Ever heard of a cub with a red flower? You'll leave Cathedral then, Billy, when you're on red, because they won't let an adult stay here. The young ones. They'll gut-rip you if you stay, so you'll cross the river. And then, almost before you know it, Billy, you're twenty-one and your hand is blinking. And you'll die like a sheep."
Two minutes gone.
"Not me, I won't!" Billy shouted. "I'll—"
"—run!" snapped Logan. "Isn't that just what you'll do? Run as I'm running. As she's running."
"Shut up! Shut up your damn mouth! I ain't no stinkin' runner!"
"We're the same kind, Billy. You're just like us. Help us, Billy. Don't fight us."
The blocky cub cut in. "Let him suck Muscle. That'll shut his mouth. Let's us watch him shake himself to death!"
The anger and frustration drained from Charming Billy's face. He smiled.
Logan tensed. The talking was done.
Three minutes gone.
Drugpads materialized. The cubs squeezed the pads, inhaled the Muscle. They shimmered into kaleidoscopic blurs, into weaving color patterns. Here. There. They were everywhere.
Logan fell back into a fighting crouch, but before he could strike a blow he was caught, dragged and slammed against the wall.
Screaming, Mary-Mary broke from Jessica and ran off down the tunnels.
A staccato burst of words; the blocky cub's voice, "GivehimsomeMuscle!"
"Shakehimtodeath!"
"Killhim!"
A drugpad danced the air in front of Logan's face.
Four minutes gone.
Logan held his breath. The fumes enveloped him; if he breathed . . . He felt the Gun pressing into his thigh. The Gun.
Despite revealing himself to Jess, he'd have to use the Gun.
He wrenched his arms loose, dropped to the floor, rolled free of the weaving shapes, drew and fired.
The nitro charge exploded into the pack. Fragmented bodies littered the platform.
Five minutes!
Logan quickly pocketed a drugpad and key-punched the callbox.
Jess stared at him with revulsion. "Sandman! You're a Sandman!"
A mazecar swooped out of the depths.
"In!"
Jessica hesitated. Logan pushed the girl inside, leaped after her. Before the hatch could engage a black shimmer filled the space.
The shimmer solidified into Charming Billy.
He was headless.
The hatch shut.
The mazecar slammed into night.
A light flares.
He smiles. Logan's Gun has been fired.
He notes the coordinates. They pinpoint a spot beneath the dead area of Cathedral.
He goes there.
He examines the bodies on the platform.
He picks up a used Muscle pad, flings it away.
He examines the callbox, probes at the terminals.
Logan has taken a mazecar.
He frowns darkly.
He hears a faint child's voice singing, "Sandman, Sandman, leave my door . . ."
The voice fades.
He follows the sound down the tunnel.
NIGHT . . .
At the end of the Twentieth Century, before the Little War, when men spawned like microbes on a culture dish, the great problem was food. The fourth horseman rode the land and his name was Famine.
Man reached for the planets and found them puddled gas and frozen stone. He reached for the stars and was driven back by E = mc²—and he abandoned space.
There was the sea. Six-sevenths of the world. A wave rises in a ripple and marches in growing kinetic motion for thousands of wet miles to smash on continental shores. That is the surface of the sea. Beneath the surface: the Depths. Light filters slowly down into murky dimness for the first hundred feet. Lower still, and light is dead. Only darkness remains. Pressures and swift currents and yeasty life mix in savage broth.
And far below, where reinforced steel acts like balsa, and nightmare creatures carry their own light, is Molly, once queen city of the teeming sea.
She took an age to build. She covered a hundred undersea miles. She provided living quarters and work space for twenty thousand technicians and their families—and she gave sustenance to a quarter of the world. She was a vast food-processing center sunk under a plasteel dome, and through her locks came subs and tenders, skimmers and harvesters.
Protein is protein whether it is obtained from a steer or a squid. With the proper mixture of carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, the protein molecule can be made into any foodstuff, and the protein molecule lives in a million forms in the sea.
Molly showed the way. After her they built the Zuther-Notion, the Proteus and Manta City. But Molly was the queen.
Until 6:03 P.M. Common Standard Time, March 6, 2033. At that moment intolerable pressures in the Challenger Deep, acting through uncounted centuries, caused a tenth of an inch slippage along two,
fault planes crossing the Marianas Trench—and a hairline crack appeared in Molly's plasteel dome. A solid bar of water knife-sliced through seven levels, destroying a hundred compartments in one insane instant. Molly screamed. Steel tore like paper. Fourteen thousand men, women and children mixed their atoms with the sea in the first chaotic shock.
Molly absorbed the blow. Pressures equalized; bulkheads strained, tore, accepted the load, howled as the ocean tide-tons bent them inward. Automatic valves closed; hatches slammed. In twelve seconds she was a jumbled conglomerate of corpses, of flooded compartments and corridors, of machinery, jackstraw-heaped. But she held.
Some of her compartments retained air—and against these watertight chambers the sea gnawed with a patient gnawing that would never stop until Molly was completely dead.
She had begun her long war with the sea.
The mazecar slotted into Molly. The seats unlocked.
"Exit, please."
Jessica didn't resist as Logan guided her through the hatch.
The platform, buried in greenback fathoms, creaked and shifted, shifted and creaked beneath them. The great surging skin of the Pacific pressured in against the bubbleglass. The air held an odor of iron and age, a smell of medicated wounds. A dull booming, far off. Echoes. Silence.
Why here, under the sea? wondered Logan. Who was the next contact?
The girl looked vacant, dead. Hatred burned in Jessica, deeply, but the will to resist had left her.
"All right," said Logan. "So I've got a DS Gun. And, back in my unit, I've got a black tunic to match it. But now I'm a runner. Just as you are."
"Sandmen don't run," she said flatly.
"And Sandmen don't eat. And Sandmen don't breathe. And Sandmen don't get tired. Well, I'm tired. I'm tired and I'm hungry and I'm sick of being jumped and kicked at and hated."
She looked at him coldly. "You're a monster. You've chased and killed people like my brother, whose only sin was wanting to live another day."
"I didn't kill your brother."
"Maybe not, but you would have. You'd have put a homer in him and been proud of yourself for doing it."
He had no answer.
Jess drew in a ragged breath. "Damn you!" she flared. "You DS live by pain, by hurting and wounding and killing. You destroy in the name of mass survival and you never think about the sick wrongness of it, the horror of it . . . You enjoy using the Gun and you burn with it and you terrorize with it! Damn your kind and damn your system! You're a foul, rotten—"
Logan slapped her hard across the cheek to stop the words which cut him like stones.
She put up a shaking hand to the drop of blood at the corner of her mouth.
Her flower was charcoal.
"It's changed," said Logan. "You're on black." His hand automatically drifted toward the warm pearl handle of the Gun.
The girl looked at him in horror.
Logan hesitated.
He had taken on the shape and coloration and mental attitudes of a runner, and it was impossible for him to know where the dividing line really was.
In that suspended moment, Jessica wheeled off down the long platform.
"Jess!"
The girl ran.
She ran as a deer in panic runs, heedlessly, blindly, driven forward by the desire to put distance between herself and the hunter. A spiral of metal steps carried her upward; her feet rattled against metal cleats, leaving an echo path for Logan to follow.
She pounded along a narrow culture corridor lined with flashing sea life. Squid and porpoise and eel, shark and barracuda and the trunkback turtle marked her passage. Ahead of her the corridor dead-ended at a tall durasteel door controlled by a bar of chilled iron. Jess threw herself at the bar, tugging, dragging her body's weight against it.
The bar moved slightly.
A dry-grass hiss, a rush of heat and, just one inch from Jessica's head, an armored steg harpoon buried itself in the steel door.
"Wait up there, girl! Open that hatch, and the sea will take us both."
Standing wide-legged, holding a primed steglauncher in two bloated hands, was an incredible figure. Hormones had gone wild in him; a rampaging thyroid had built a giant. His bristled head brushed the corridor ceiling. An oiled slicker the color of midnight draped his swollen frame. His face was a moon.
His name was Whale.
"Look out!" Jess pointed down the corridor at Logan.
Whale billowed about. Seeing the Gun in Logan's belt, his eyes vanished in moonflesh. The steglauncher fixed its metal eye on Logan's stomach. "What's this? Told to wait for two runners, and what do I get? Runner don't chase a runner."
"He's with DS," snapped Jess.
Whale considered this placidly. A sudden thudding in the depths of the bubble city; another collapsing bulkhead. Whale flinched, his great mass rippling.
"I'm a runner," said Logan. "I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't believe me."
"So why should I?" asked Whale quietly. He held up a thick hand, opened sausage fingers. A charcoal flower was lost in folded flesh. The steglauncher did not waver.
Anger and frustration clouded Logan's mind. Anything he said could kill him.
"Just you ease out that Gun and put it on the deck, my lad," rumbled Whale.
With the deliberate control of a glassdancer, Logan placed the Gun on the floor, eyes never leaving the cold bore of the steglauncher which moved to cover him.
He straightened.
"Now," said Whale, "let's us all take a little march through Molly."
He herded them back down the corridor.
"You drylanders don't know about Molly. She's a real fighter, she is. She's like me. She don't die easy."
Up the slanting wall of a slimed compartment, along a twisting catwalk suspended over blackness, through a beamed jungle of ripped and bent conveyors acrid with the smell of spilled oil and brine. Crab creatures scuttled at their approach; phosphor fish darted in shallow bilgewater as the three figures corkscrewed down through the dying bubble city.
The water climbed their legs until it took them at thigh level. Whale undogged a final beaded bulkhatch and pushed Logan through ahead of him. Wet tonnages drummed the chamber. In this small coffin space the ocean was a living presence; the sledging boom of iced undersea tides quaked the walls, and dust powdered down in damp brown showers.
Without the Gun, and under the implacable eye of the weapon in Whale's hand, Logan felt powerless.
"She's sick down here." said Whale. "Fightin' hard, she is." Shifting the launcher, he placed a gentle hand against the pitted metal of the wall. "Hold on, Molly girl," he crooned. "Ya showed 'em what ya got. I know you're hurt. You've taken all the sea can give. Hold! I've brought ya help."
He fixed Logan with his eyes. "If you wanta live, mate, you'll help Molly fight her battle. Just put your weight to that wall."
The mountain of man squeezed back, out of the chamber.
"When the bulkhead goes, you go with it."
"Wait," cried Jess. She blocked the hatch. "You're not leaving him here?"
Whale rumbled. "Where else? Molly needs him."
"But then you're no better than he is. A killer."
"A man kills to save himself." He brushed her aside, slammed the hatch and dogged it.
Outside, he handed her a key. "Use this at ten forty for the next car. And you'd better step. You know where the landing is."
Jess looked at him, white-faced.
A dull reverberation trembled the floorplates.
"Molly's callin' and I got work to do. Tell Ballard we're still holdin."
And, with amazing agility, he weaved through a thicket of spars and stanchions to disappear into Molly's vitals.
In the sweating dark, Logan felt despair. His last hope was gone. He was dead and he knew it. Now he felt as a runner feels, feared as a runner fears.
He traced the sweep of flexing coffin with searching fingers. No openings. Nothing to use on the hatch. Why hadn't he taken his chances against the harpoo
n? It ripped your gut out, but at least it was quick. Not like this. A place like this could break a man's courage, stretch his nerve, unman him.
Well, I'm getting what I asked for, he thought. And maybe I deserve it for what I've done. God, maybe I do. So let the damn sea have me.
Logan fought a sudden urge to smash at the walls.
The Pacific leaned its weight against the chamber; water dripped continually, increasing in volume. Logan was chest deep in the cold tide. It rose toward his chin; he clamped his mouth shut. The chamber groaned under immense pressures.
Then abruptly the hatch opened. The water receded. Jess was there.
"Quick," she said. "There's not much time."
In subsector 8, section T, level zero, now completely submerged, a tiny crustacean burrowed a hundredth of an inch further into a conduit, since it was the creature's nature to burrow. The tiny crawler blazed into blue-white heat.
In callbox 192978-E a micro terminal rose seven and a half degrees, shorting out a relay. A wire-cluster fused, and a new circuit was born.
"Sanctuary," they had said to the mazecar.
But it did not take them to Sanctuary.
Instead, it took them to Hell.
He examines the data.
Fact: Doyle 10 had a sister, Jessica 6.
Fact: His interrogation of the little girl, Mary-Mary 2, has revealed that Logan is with Jessica.
He watches the board. It is silent, dark. No lights glow. No needles quiver.
The maze scanners are silent, dark.
The Gun tracer is silent, dark.
The Follower is silent, dark.
Impossible.
His quarry has vanished.
LATE NIGHT . . .
Hell: named after the ancient religious concept of eternal punishment. Over a thousand miles of dead glare-ice wilderness between Baffin Bay and the Bering Sea. A sharded tumble of floes and bergs and nightmare crevasses, of daggered ice cliffs and howling glacial frost winds. A crippling, killing, freezing, forsaken world of white on white on white.
Hell: fourteen burrows in an irregular semicircle on the lee side of a storm-carved berg. Each cramped ice cell clawed from the iron surface by dying, lonely men and women working in subzero cold. Near the entrance to one hide-hole was a rich red stain on the ice glass, where an unknown convict had lung-hemorrhaged under the refrigerated glare of the midnight sun.
