by Jerry
“Mark,” Piscetti said unemotionally, and his light went out. Overhead, the great pipeline gave a premonitory groan. Jothen yanked the power jack out of the slave board, resettled the honeycomb helmet and ran for cover, hoping that the master computer had eavesdropped and understood his timing instructions.
It took him four minutes plus to make the main gallery overlooking the pump hall. Fronted with polarized, laminated glastic, the gallery was theoretically immune to heat shock, and to most mechanical insults. If it wasn’t, Jothen would be allowed only a few seconds of life to regret it; he had to stay here until the accident arrived, since the gallery held the only gang board he could have hoped to have reached beforehand.
Pulling down his gas mask, he checked the timing: yes—the computer was clocking both deadlines. The hot line from Kansas City was producing a silent red scream. He snapped it open.
“Gitler, are you aware that a capsule of molten gallium—”
“Yes,” Jothen said grimly. “Why didn’t you stop it, KC?”
“It had crash priority. What’s the matter, can’t you handle it?”
“No—but now we’ve got to try. Get off the line, we’ve got troubles enough.”
“Very well, Gitler. However, please record that we’re shunting the river around you as of now.”
“What!” Jothen shouted. “Listen, get me a senior monitor up there—this is no time for computer handling. We can’t do without the river—”
“This is monitor control.”
“But . . . how do we drain off this mess you sent us, then?”
“You’ll have to store it,” KC said primly.
“Store it in what?”
“Your problem, Gitler. We can’t allow you to contaminate the water table downstream. Good luck. Out.”
“Out upon you, you—”
The KC line went dead. “Piscetti—Piscetti! . . . Oh, damn . . . Master computer! Give me a radio-active storage deadhead!”
“Radio storage tanks are sealed,” Gitler’s computer said.
“Open them, and reroute all drainage channels for receipt of sewage.”
“No access,” the computer said. “Radio storage is under UNOC seal except for emergency dumping of nuclear wastes.”
Jothen shut the mike off for a moment and swore. Obviously he could not dump the city’s two working power piles; that would leave the whole of Gitler without electricity. But on the other hand, what choice did he have? He had to get rid of the incoming garbage somehow, and the river was closed to him.
“Dump the technie village pile in—let me see—twelve minutes after the mark. Dump the city’s stand-by pile three minutes thereafter, barring a countermanding order from me and nobody else. At eighteen minutes, shunt all city effluent into the radio storage tanks. And give me a rate-of-fill estimate for the tanks, keyed to radiation hazard for personnel in the subbasements.”
“Minirads for personnel will be reached in fourteen minutes after the mark,” the computer said, with perfect indifference. “Radio storage capacity will fill and reseal at two hours aught two minutes. Subbasements will be uninhabitable for personnel thereafter for approximately twenty-eight thousand, five hundred and thirty-nine years, give or take four years.”
“That’s no good. Advise Kansas City River Control that we will overflow hot onto the water table after one hour unless they let us spill into the river instead and give them a complete rundown on what isotopes to expect, half lives and all. Don’t tell me, tell them. Also, tell Radio-Census Washingtongrad we’re going to have a long-term hot spot underground here, same data. Mark and move on all orders when I switch out.”
“Ready to mark,” the computer said, almost as disinterestedly as Piscetti.
“All right. Out.”
Another call light lit. It was Piscetti back again.
“Hello, Jothen, glad I located you. I’ve been picking up your program. But I’ve got something else, too. I think we’ve identified the murderer.”
Jothen was astonished to discover that he had forgotten all about the death of Guivrec. “Who is it?”
“A Madagascan technie named Fongavaro Jones. He tried to join our maintenance staff a day or so after he got here, but Tananarive—that’s his home town—wouldn’t release him. Then he disappeared, and there have been unexplained small drains on the Rest Spots in the murder area ever since.”
“Sounds convincing.”
“There’s more. The news leaked out somehow, and the rest of the Joneses have been blowing up the rumors in the usual way. The last version I heard was that a homicidal maniac is on the loose with a laser metal-cutter. They say he’s already killed and dismembered fifteen people.”
“I’m not surprised,” Jothen said grimly.
“No, but it’s still feeding back. Fongavaro evidently has been listening in from one Rest Stop or another, because he now seems to have the idea he can frighten everybody away—maintenance staff included—and have the city all to himself. He just tried to broadcast a general warning, something very grisly about the Stalker Who Strikes Unseen—wonder what he’s been reading lately? Anyhow, the computer intercepted it, compared the voice with the one recorded on the transfer application, and there we were. It’s Fongavaro, all right.”
“And psychotic for sure. Put a squad after him, but don’t risk them unnecessarily—that area’s due to be flooded. I’d rather have him just kept below than captured if there’s no other alternative.”
“Will do. Be sure you get out yourself.”
“Right. Out.”
A sharp hiss from the shunt room made him jump, but it was only the discharge lock, splitting lengthwise to emit a capsule whose green cocarde said it contained pine-nut flour. It lay quiescent on its receiving truck for a moment like a fat, white worm, its flexible sides still glistening with the water that had pushed it into Gitler. Then the truck hummed away with it along the tracks toward the community kitchens.
The groan he had heard earlier must have been in response to the arrival of that load; evidently the crystallized spot in the main line was in even worse shape than he had feared. The discharge lock had already closed, and at the moment the usual torrent of water was rushing along the line in its usual silence—but that wouldn’t last.
He glanced at the clocks: only three minutes to go! It seemed impossible that so much time had already passed; yet now that he was watching the tumblers and sweep-hands, they seemed to freeze into immobility. The last sixty seconds were the longest in his life. Was it never going to happen—
The line groaned once more. Then, with a crack like the snapping of a treebole, the main line split. Water jetted out of it. Under the intense pressure behind it, the jet was as smooth and hard as a sheet of glass; and it shattered like glass when it hit the baffle over the drain. The air in the hall became one solid, terrible shriek. Were it not for the glastic barriers, the sound alone would have killed him.
He looked quickly over his shoulder to make sure that the one-man lift to the flyport control tower was still standing open and ready. At that instant, the noise stopped. In the aching, intolerable silence, the crack in the main lengthened, and something white came swelling out of it like an obscene balloon—the gallium capsule or a pseudopod of it.
Jothen did not wait for the sequel. He was into the little drum-shaped lift and shooting skyward in six seconds flat.
Beneath him, the computer stolidly continued to watch, filming a miscalculation it could have prevented, had anybody had time to ask it esoteric and unlikely questions about rare-earth chemistry. As the hot spray of silvery metal hit the moist air of the shunt room, most of the trivalent stuff converted to the sesquioxide. The air seethed. Spitting like dragon’s poison, the oxide flakes struck the baffle, which was magnesium only slightly alloyed to prevent burning. As it splashed over the baffle, the dragon’s spittle reduced to metallic gallium again, promptly and violently.
The explosion shook the top levels of Gitler like a temblor. Jothen’s car, the c
ompressed air on which it was riding snatched out from under it, slammed to a stop halfway to the flyport control tower. Trembling and swearing, Jothen began to climb the rest of the way.
Anyhow, he thought so much for Fongavaro Jones,
He had never before had so prompt an answer. From somewhere behind him, a shot pierced his temporary deafness and ricocheted, squealing away from the riser three inches from his left foot, leaving a bright weal in the metal.
III
It had been easy enough for Fongavaro to come by the gun. Except for the very small and inexperienced police squad—half of which was already hunting for him—nobody in Gitler went armed, of course; but here, as in Tananarive and in every other city, there was a small cache of sidearms in every fifth Rest Stop, stored there for the technics’ use against the possibility of a really major riot. Though he had never fired a gun and expected to continue to prefer strangulation, Fongavaro had appropriated a pistol early on, just in case.
It would probably have been rather more difficult for him to say exactly when he had come to believe that Jothen Kent was the principal agent of all his troubles. In one sense, the realization had swept over him, when he had listened in on the Gitler official’s directions for hunting him down or allowing him to drown. At least, it was then that he had realized that killing Jothen Kent would now be only self-defense.
But in another sense, it seemed to him that he had always known it. After all, it must have been Kent who had turned down his original petition to be transferred to Gitler’s working crew; surely no computer would have been entrusted with an application so important. It was on Kent’s order that the Joneses were being evacuated, obviously a transparent maneuver to ship Fongavaro home by force under cover of a fake emergency—what sane man would believe that story about a giant meteor?—no matter how many other people’s civil rights were violated in the process. And surely it must have been Kent who had cunningly alerted the computer to any possible further message from the fugitive. Fongavaro knew something about computers and had carefully and cleverly worded his warning to get it past any mechanical intelligence that lacked the guidance of a human enemy. But for Kent, it couldn’t have failed.
In any event, it was now perfectly clear that Fongavaro could not hope to have Gitler to himself while Jothen Kent was alive. Without Kent the evacuation of the Joneses would fall apart—this McGee, with whom Kent was trying to confuse him, was obviously only some sort of minor politician or other flunky—and the milling hordes would then be easy to panic. In addition, the hounding of Fongavaro himself would stop, deprived of the leadership of the one man who was really out to get him. It all made perfect sense.
Avoiding the patrols and getting out of the subbasements was simple. After all, he could hear every order that Kent issued, even those that didn’t seem to bear directly on hunting him down. For the same reason, finding where Kent was working and was planning to go next had been equally easy. Fongavaro worked his way cautiously up the utility stack, stalking the stalker.
The explosion threw him and enraged him. He had not expected Kent to be ready to destroy a part of the city to get him. He was almost as surprised to see his prey erupt from the lift-shaft in mid-air, so to speak, and go on up toward the flyport on foot. But he was determined to let nothing that Kent could do rattle him—nothing!
Regaining his footing, he pointed the gun.
Of course, he missed and nearly lost hold of the little automatic, to boot. But it did not look like he had missed by much. He took aim again, this time using both hands.
“Fongavaro!”
That was Kent’s voice, echoing down the stack. It was bound to be a trick.
“Fongavaro! Cut it out, man! Don’t you want to get out of this alive?”
“I’m not getting out,” Fongavaro said—to his own surprise, for he had not meant to answer at all. “You can’t scare me away—”
“Then you’re being a damn fool. The main feeder line’s broken, and the city’s flooding. Throw away the gun and come on aloft with me. I’ll help you if I can. There are planes up there, waiting to take you all home.”
At the word “planes,” the whole of the stack washed out into a red blur, and Fongavaro’s ears roared with the pulsing of his own blood. Through the pounding confusion, he heard the gun go off . . . but when he could see again, Jothen Kent had vanished.
The providential emergency exit debouched Jothen into a section of the city with which he was unfamiliar—and worse, it was empty. It appeared to be a residential area, perhaps the topmost one under the technie village. The air of the street was full of settling dust, which confused him further, since he had never seen such a thing before. He could only guess that it was some aftermath of the explosion and was glad his gas mask was in place.
There was of course no way to lock the emergency exit, and he wasted no time seeking ways to jam or block it. His only impulse was to run. He did not like being shot at.
But run to where? In the distance, he heard a compound rumble of many voices, some of them shouting. That might just be the sound of a column of Joneses, being led up motor-stairs toward the roof. If so, there might be one or two of his own men there who would be armed; or at worst, he ought to be able to lose himself in the crowd. Panting, he took off.
There was a blurred yell, hardly human, behind him and then another shot. How many rounds did that gun have in it, anyhow? He remembered, not too certainly, that the standard automatic was a high-velocity weapon that bit tiny splinters of lead azide off the end of a roll of plastic-fill tape; if Fongavaro had one of those, it was good for a least a hundred tries at Jothen before even a dub at guns would have to try to reload it or throw it away. Jothen promptly tried to run faster, but short of free flight he was already making better time than he would have thought possible before.
He careened around a circle of silently watching coupon shops, all as empty of merchandise as they were of people, and slowed down at the main entrance to another utility stack. It was sealed—by his own order. But the crowd noise now seemed quite close. Cutting down a deserted avenue, he found himself charging now into an exchange plaza.
His heart gave a bound of hope. The plaza was full of pushing, flushed, scared figures in torn costumes—some carrying or tugging at quarreling or squalling children, others dragging baggage they had never had to tote before, still others finding it difficult to shuffle their own two feet. From the midst of the mob, two broad spiral escalators, twined around each other like twinned genes, wound upward through the remote roof, packet with restive Joneses.
He tried to work his way through them and was indignantly shoved back at, until the people around him took second looks at him and saw the honeycomb helmet. Then they gave way, but slowly and sullenly. The Gitler crew was not, it was painfully clear, very popular around here at the moment.
Slow though his progress was, Jothen should have been pleased with it, for he was surely quite buried in this mass of flesh now. But instead he felt stifled, he himself on the verge of panic. Sweating, he went on shouldering his way forward, trying to pull through the gas mask thick, wet air that had no odor but completely refused to move into his lungs.
The helmet jolted suddenly on his head and shoulders as he jammed himself onto the nearest escalator: somebody had tried to punch him where it usually counted. Then he was on the stairs and being swung up and up, around and around, and the plaza was fading into a lake of bent heads and angry upturned faces. Breathing a long sigh of relief, he looked back at the boulevard by which he had come galloping into this press.
Fongavaro was standing there, the street empty behind him, his monkey body and ragged filth marking him off from the other costumes almost as readily as the neat, vicious little gun in his hand. Jothen felt an impulse to thumb his nose; but at the same moment, the foreshortened Madagascar raised the pistol at the end of both long arms and fired it squarely at Jothen’s head. How could he tell which of all these stair-riders—
The helmet! Eve
n among all these unintelligibly costumed people, there could be no mistaking that bulging, functional carapace; it said Gitler to all the Joneses, and Jothen to Fongavaro, like a scarlet tattoo. And Jothen did not dare take it off, even if the spiral swath of bodies around him had left any cranny in which to hide it; it was now his only contact with Piscetti, with McGee, with the crew, with the world-at-large.
Where the hell was the armed squad? How long was this damned go-around motor-stair ride going to take? How far up—
Splat!
The sound of the automatic was only a stitch in the fabric of the crowd’s noise, but Jothen—and probably Jothen alone—could hear it all too well. He flinched helplessly inside the honeycomb, feeling as though the whole front of his helmeted head was one enormous target.
But Fongavaro, amazingly, did not seem to think he was getting anywhere at all. Jamming the still-potent gun somewhere inside his rags, he scuttled almost on his knuckles along the fringes of the mob until he came upon a fat and fussy old Jones in a Pierrot suit who seemed to be trying to load his life’s possessions into a battered but still floating autocrutch. Dumping the oldster and the luggage with a single brutal sweep of his forearms, Fongavaro straddled the machine and scooted in a long, wabbly parabola toward the top of the motor-stair tree.
The hole in the ceiling swallowed Jothen, before he saw the end of that crazy ride. He was just as glad, but he knew better now than to draw any deep breaths; he was still on the run.
The next level was the floor of the technie village, quiet and bucolic and familiar ordinarily. Now it was a shambles. The overflow Joneses—out of sight and hence out of mind of Gitler’s few and tentative police—were making up for the loss of their totems and baggage by looting the technie’s homes. There was nobody around to prevent them or even to herd them back toward the roof; they were spreading out all through the level, giggling, singing and throwing bottles at each other. Fuming with indignation, Jothen threw a leg over the stairs to get back down to the floor; somebody had to break up this orgy—