by Bob Shaw
“Don’t argue,” Hasson ordered, completing the electrical connections and bringing the vital pea-sized dome of radiance into being at Theo’s waist.
“We could try it together,” Theo said. “I’ve heard about people going piggyback.”
“Kids.” Hasson pushed him into the rectangular aperture. “Not grown men like us, Theo. Together we’d be way outside basic modular mass. And anybody’s who’s as keen on flying as you are ought to know all about BMM and field collapse.” “But…”
“Outside! I’ve set you at what ought to be just under height maintenance power for your weight, so when you get out there just let yourself float away and sink. Now …gol” Hasson shoved Theo as hard as he could, sending the boy tumbling into the cool black sanctuary of the night sky. Theo, feeling himself topple, added the impulsion of his own legs, turning his exit into a kind of sprawling dive which carried him well beyond the field interference radius, out above the jewelled geometries of the city. He swam in a soft sea of air.
Hasson watched him curve away out of sight, then became aware that the floor slab under his feet had begun to shudder and stir like something possessed of life. He moved off it towards the stairs, feeling curious rather than immediately threatened, and in that instant the slab exploded into fragments. Some pieces fell to the floor below, others were carried upwards in a roaring gout of fire which made the landing as bright as day and seared the moisture from Hasson’s eyes. He threw himself on to the staircase and ran for the upper floors, expecting at any second to find himself treading empty space. Other ominous rumbles coupled with an increase in the general brightness told him that the structure of the hotel was beginning to succumb to the onslaught on an increasing scale.
He tried to increase his speed, forcing his thighs to reach high with every stride, and his breath began to come in raucous, throat-tearing gasps. When he had been running for what felt like a very long time a new fear began to manifest itself, a fear that he might unwittingly have passed the level on which Lutze’s body lay. Or, or, supposing that Lutze had managed to survive a second apparently mortal wound, even for a short time, and was no longer on the landing? Looking upwards, Hasson saw that he was reaching the point where the metal banister ceased to skirt the edge of the stair and he was able to establish his position. He stiff-armed himself away from the wall on to the next expanse of floor and experienced a moment of profound relief when he picked out the inert form of Lutze lying exactly where he had last seen it.
Crossing to the body, he dropped on to his knees and cast about him, expecting to locate the oblong mass of Theo’s power pack either in Lutze’s clothing or on the floor nearby. He was unable to find it. He raised his head and extended the scope of his search, only to discover that in the fitful and uncertain light every piece of litter and builder’s rubble promised to be a power pack and almost immediately revealed itself to be something else. A bomb exploded on one of the floors he had passed seconds earlier, producing the now familiar upsurges of flame and horizontal billowings of dust and smoke. Accompanying the blizzard of paper and plastic scraps there came a heaving of the floor, an uneasy sense of loosening.
Hasson realized that even in the period of dire extremity he had been indulging one part of his nature, claiming the luxury of fastidiousness. He rolled Lutze’s body on to its side, exposing the black-lipped obscenity of the fatal wound, and unclipped the power pack from the dead man’s harness. The unit itself and the electrical connectors were slimed with dark blood. Hasson stood up, clutching the unit to his chest, and loped wearily towards the stairs.
His upward progress was now complicated by the absence of a banister. The prolonged and punishing exertion was robbing his legs of both strength and control. There was an increasing tendency for his knees to buckle and for his feet to come down some distance from their point of aim — but with no balustrade at his side the slightest stumble could have resulted in a one-way trip to the inferno of the first floor. Into the bargain, he was now in a section of the hotel which, for all he knew, had not been traversed since Morlacher had planted his over-powered booby traps, which meant there was a new risk of being swatted into oblivion by an unseen hand. The remnants of his powers of thought told him it was a hazard that would have to be accepted — to get out of the hotel he would have to go all the way to the roof and find the exit used by Barry Lutze and the other aerial trespassers. It was a dismal and dangerous prospect, but the only one open to him.
Having managed to project his thoughts a short distance into the future, Hasson — above the agonised pumping of his thighs and the bellows-sound of his breathing — began to speculate about whether the stair he was climbing would terminate in a doorway to the roof. There had been plans for roof gardens and swimming pools, so it was likely that there would be provision for public access by stair as well as by the elevator service. Spurred on by the hope of perhaps suddenly and easily finding himself outside in the clean starry air, Hasson turned his gaze upward, wondering if he would be able to identify the top landing when it came into view.
In the event there was no difficulty. The entire top storey of the hotel was filled with an impenetrable, rolling layer of smoke and fumes which extended almost from floor level up to the invisible ceiling.
Hasson sank down, winded, on the flight of steps which slanted on to the uppermost floor, feeling like a man under siege as he took stock of his surroundings. The underside of the metres- thick blanket of smoke was defined with surprising sharpness. It shifted and heaved and puckered like the surface of a slow-boiling soup which was being seen through an inverting lens, and there was a thin stratum of clear air between it and the floor. Peering horizontally through the translucent sandwich, Hasson was able to discern the beginnings of yet another flight of steps at the opposite side of the landing. The treads were narrower than those upon which he sat, and the conviction grew in him that they led directly to a door which opened on to the hotel roof.
He forced himself to remain at rest for the space of a few more breaths, gathering oxygen into his system, then he stood up, locked his chest muscles, and ran for the ascending stairway. His feet found the steps seemingly without his guidance, and he hurled himself blindly upwards, going as fast as he could, aware that even one inhalation of the reeking blackness surrounding him could result in calamity. Almost at once a new thought occurred — how could he be sure that the stairs he was now on followed the same layout as those below? How did he know he was not about to plunge over an unguarded edge? Fending the thought off he kept running, trailing a hand along a roughcast wall, until he reached a small landing and a metal door. The door was bolted, padlocked, immovable.
Almost grateful that the door, because of its patent solidity, had not tempted him to waste time in trying to force it, Hasson turned and ran back the way he had come. He reached his starting point just as his lungs were giving out and hunkered down on the steps. Tatters of acrid smoke clinging about him flayed his nostrils and throat, triggering a bout of coughing. He clung to the steps until the convulsions ended, a part of his mind disdaining involvement, using the moments of astral detachment to analyse the situation.
From the moment he had entered the Chinook Hotel his life had depended on interplays of forces. Some of the factors he had contended with had been human, others had been purely physical — and not all of them had worked entirely to his disadvantage. The design and topography of the building, for example, had conspired to give him some respite, some time to manoeuvre. A fire was like a primeval jet engine, needing air intakes and an efficient exhaust before it could attain its full deadly splendour. The fact that the roof of the hotel remained unvented and intact — as evidenced by the trapped pall of smoke — had denied the fire the upward exhaust it craved, slowing its progress, cramping its natural style. Had the layer of smoke and fumes not been able to form, he, Rob Hasson, would no longer be alive, having been engulfed and incinerated at a much earlier stage. It was unfortunate-though no indication of malice on the par
t of the physical world — that the same toxic cloud was now making it impossible for him to search for the only escape route to the outside universe…
Far below Hasson a cataclysm overtook part of the edifice of sloping stair beams upon which he was poised. There was a gargantuan shuddering and thundering which suggested that whole flights of stairs were breaking free of their supports and dropping like carelessly released playing cards. Currents of hot gas geysered up through the central well beside him, churning the overhanging canopy of smoke.
Hasson uttered an involuntary moan as the staircase on which he was perched gave a tentative lurch. He crawled forward on to the floor proper, pressing himself downwards to stay within the wafer of lucid air, holding his breath each time a disturbance enveloped him in the smothering lower reaches of the cloud. Even at floor level the air was now so polluted as to abrade the tissue of his lungs, and he began a slow steady coughing. A lurid redness began to pulse in his vision.
Hasson blinked his eyes, squinting ahead through his two-dimensional continuum, making the belated discovery that the shifting red light was not a subjective phenomenon, but something that had its origins in the external world. Driven by impulses beyond his understanding, he squirmed forward, towards the source of the intermittent radiance. Eventually, an incalculable time later, he found himself lying on the shore of a circular lake.
He shook his head, trying to restore a sense of scale, the ability to relate to his environment.
What he was seeing was not a lake, not a pond, not a pool. It was… an elevator shaft.
Hasson looked down into the shaft — narrowing his eyes into slits to combat a hot upward draught — into its dwindling, receding telescopic sections, the alternating concentric rings of darkness and orange fire which had at their distant hub a small, black, unwinking eye.
The eye hypnotised him, beguiled him, seduced him.
Hasson broke free of it with an effort and turned his attention to the massy oblong block of the power pack still clutched in his left hand. He rolled on to his side and, working with the languid precision of a man in a trance, fitted the unit into the vacant retaining clips, noting as he did so that the metal case had a heat scar which meant it could have been grazed by the thermal cutter which had ended Barry Lutze’s life. He wiped a dark and tacky residue off the two electrical connectors and locked them into the adjoining counter-gravity generator on his belt. Nothing remained for him to do now but to rotate the master control, thus energising the flight system, and step into the waiting elevator shaft and fall to safety. Hasson mused briefly, making himself ready.
It was, of course, an unorthodox means of taking to the air — one not recommended by any of the numerous manuals on techniques of personal flight. The CG field would be disrupted and unable to take effect within the confines of the elevator shaft, which meant he would fall fourteen storeys and more, passing well clear of the underside of the hotel, before any lift would be generated. The total free drop would be something like sixty metres, a distance he would cover in approximately four seconds, making a small allowance for air resistance. It was, granted, an unpleasant and uncomfortable way to embark on a flight, the sort of thing which might upset a nervous person or a raw beginner, but it was nothing, nothing at all, to an experienced air cop who in the course of an arrest had once plunged three thousand metres…
Hasson rotated the master control on his belt panel — and smiled a tremulous, disbelieving smile when he saw that the function light had not begun to glow. The message, if he accepted it, was that his counter-gravity harness was inoperative, that he had no chance of escape.
I’ll tell you three things this might mean, he said to himself, dulling his reactions with textbook pedantry. Then I’ll tell you the one thing it DOES mean.
It might mean you’re getting no power, but that isn’t definite. Current could be coming through, but the microprocessor in the monitor circuits may have decided that the power pack is not in the peak of condition. The microprocessor doesn’t seem to know what an emergency is — it treats every take-off as the beginning of an eight- hour demonstration flight.
It might mean that you damaged the CG generator when you hit that window frame down on the second floor, but that isn’t too likely — those units are built to withstand a fair amount of abuse.
It might mean that the function light itself is broken — that’s been known to happen, though not very often.
There was a louder, more immediate and more threatening rumble not far away, in the direction of the staircase he had recently vacated, and the ceiling of smoke became agitated, pushing down on him like a diaphragm. Still lying on his side, he drew his knees up and closed his eyes.
And the one thing it DOES mean — Rob, Mr Hasson, sir — is that you would stay up here and suffocate rather than take that drop. Who could blame you? Who in his right mind would choose to fall fourteen stories through a blazing building… and came out of it into thin air higher than the Empire State Building … with all that distance still below him, still to drop… without knowing whether his CG harness was going to work or not? It’s impossible. Beyond reason. And yet… And yet . .
Hasson stirred, moved closer to the grinning edge, and looked down into the descending and receding fiery circlets of the shaft. He looked into the black central disk — at the far side of which the world lay waiting — and understood that it was not an eye at all, that his father was not watching him, that nobody was watching him. He was alone. It was entirely up to him whether he chose to die, or to be born again.
He made the decision by relaxing his muscles, allowing himself to fall forward, giving himself up to a lazy dream-like tumble into the unknown, Four seconds.
Measured by normal human time scales, four seconds is a very brief interval — but Hasson was receiving incomparably vivid sense impressions at a cinematic rate, and for him all clocks stopped and the heavens ceased to spin. He had ample time in which to glimpse the flaming battlefields of successive floors, to feel himself breast the battering sound waves of their passing, to endure the growing emptiness in his stomach which told him he was gathering speed in response to the earth’s silent and deadly summons, to experience the alternation of light and shade, heat and comparative coolness, to think, to scheme, to dream, to scream…
And when, finally, in the murmurous, wind-rushing darkness — with the hotel receding above him like a black sun — he felt the counter-gravity harness begin to gather lift, to bring order into . howling chaos, he truly had been born again.
eleven
Al Werry and Henry Corzyn were buried in neighbouring graves on the sunlit, south-facing slope of a cemetery close to Tripletree.
Hasson, native of an island where cremation had long been compulsory, had never witnessed a traditional interment. The burial ceremonies he had seen portrayed in televised holoplays had prepared him for a surfeit of sombre emotion, but the actuality was strangely tranquil. There was a sense of rightness about the return to the earth which left him, if not comforted, in some measure reconciled to the facts of life and death.
Throughout the ceremony he remained apart from the main body of mourners, not wishing to make any statement about his relationship with Werry by joining any particular group. Sybil Werry, who had flown in from Vancouver, stood close to her son. She was a small dark woman, whose slightness of build made the fourteen year old beside her appear tall and unexpectedly mature. Theo Werry kept his head erect, making no attempt to hide his tears, following with slight movements of his sensor cane the final lowering of his father’s coffin. Looking at the boy, Hasson could see clearly on his face the imprinted features of the man he was to become.
May Carpenter and her mother, discreetly veiled, formed part of a separate element containing Dr Drew Collins and others who were strangers to Hasson. May and Ginny had moved out of the house a few hours before Sybil Werry’s arrival and were staying in another part of Tripletree. Not far away from them stood the disparate figures of Victor Quigg
and Oliver Fan, both scarcely recognisable when attired in formal black. Behind the knots of individuals, placing them in a common frame of reference, the city sparkled cleanly and uncaringly in the distance beneath the pastel traceries of its aerial highways. Hasson saw everything with an intensely detailed clarity which told him it was a scene he would revisit many times in memory.
As soon as he got back to the house he went to his room, which the sun on the drawn blinds had filled with parchment-coloured radiance. He laid out his belongings and, working with calm concentration, began packing them into a new set of flight panniers. There was insufficient room for everything that had been in his cases, but he had no hesitation in selecting the items he required and placing the others in a sprawling heap on the bed. He had been busy for about five minutes when he heard footsteps on the landing and Theo Werry entered the room. The boy stood for a moment, turning and tilting his sensor cane, then moved closer to Hasson.
“Are you really going, Rob?” he said, his face alert. “I mean now, this afternoon.”
Hasson continued packing. “If I go now I can be on the west coast before dark.”
“What about the trial? Aren’t you supposed to wait around for that?”
“I’ve lost interest in trials,” Hasson said. “I’m supposed to attend another one in England, and I’ve lost interest in that as well.” .’They’ll go looking for you.”
“The world’s a big place, Theo, and I’m going to gallop off in all directions.” Hasson paused to make a proper acknowledgement of the boy’s presence. “That’s another line from Stephen Leacock.”
Theo nodded and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’ll get around to reading him some day.”
“Sure you will.” A sudden renewal of sympathy made Hasson wonder if he was being too self-centred. “Are you positive about not having those cataracts removed? Nobody would stop you having the operation done on one eye, anyway.”