Logan's Run

by William F.

  He turned to reach for his clothing.

  And did not anticipate the ripping blow that snuffed out the world.

  The world was reborn in a voice that said, "Torture is also a fine art and I am its master. Your death; my lady, shall be exquisite."

  Logan swam up through fog and froth to full awakening.

  He was in an ice cage, behind ice bars. Directly in front of the cage Jess was spread-eagled and helpless, pinned, naked, to a tilted slab. Her body was trembling with chill. Facing her was a steeply inclined slideway. Balanced delicately on the high lip of the slide was a massive ten-ton ice block. An oil flame ate steadily at one end of the great block. Water dripped into white fur.

  With each passing second, as more of the ice melted, the end of the block lightened, tipping the remainder. Already the mass was inching over in a continuous grinding crunch, pulled by the slow force of gravity. When enough of it had turned to water the huge block would tip into the slideway and begin its ponderous rush toward Jess. It would bear down with all of its tonnage, like a giant sledge, and the vulnerable body of the girl would be caught between the ice faces as they smashed together.

  On the polar-covered dais Box sat, his chromed legs folded beneath him. "Beg me," he crooned "I can still save your life."

  Jess remained silent, her eyes glazed with fright.

  Logan threw himself at the bars. They held. Embedded in one of them, midway up, he saw the curved darkness of a small fish, frozen there.

  His glance swept the cell. His shirt had been thrown in one corner. Hurriedly he scooped it up and wound it three times around his right hand.

  Box was still urging the girl to beg for her life.

  The block tipped further.

  Logan faced the imperfection in the cell bar, stiffening his fingers into a slight curve, bunching the pad of muscle in the heel of his hand. He assumed the Omnite stance.

  Now.

  He summoned tension into his body, feeling it gather along the backs of his legs; he felt his spine arch as the muscles pumped full of blood. He concentrated on the hand. He was only a hand. He took several deep breaths, let his attention widen to include a spot in space three inches beyond the bar. He would hit that spot.

  He blanked out the cell bar that was between the spot and his hand. It didn't exist; there was no cell bar. He tensed. Energy sang into the arm that slashed the rigid hand at the spot in the air.

  A splintering crack. The bar exploded. Logan squeezed through the opening.

  He scooped up one of Jessica's shoes and leaped onto the slideway. Ignoring the poised juggernaut at his back, he attacked the ice shackles that held the girl's wrists and feet. Four quick hammer blows and she was free.

  Jess screamed. A great rumble at the tip of the slide. The block was loosed. Logan pushed her ahead of him, diving from the slideway just as the awesome masses mated in demolition. Ice dust powdered the air.

  An angry buzz of metal. Logan swung around to see Box coming at him.

  "Grab your clothes and get out!" he yelled to Jess—and she obeyed him.

  Box hurtled in, his half-face contorted with rage and frustration. Logan ducked under the sweep of his cutting hand, which ripped into the room's central pillar. The buzzing metal cut deeply into the column before Box could free it.

  Logan fell back, calculating. The love statue: he and Jess in a perfect world, forever locked in sweet embrace. He would have to destroy it, destroy himself. Logan wedged his shoulder against his ice thigh and pushed. The statue tilted, rocked, and toppled into the weakened pillar.

  A crack fissured the vault.

  Logan ran.

  Birds showered from a crystal sky. Otters squealed and splintered. The walrus reared. Box died with one maniacal metal cry.

  In that single cataclysmic death, the ice creatures cracked and clattered, mirror-smashed in a fractured tumble of shelves and ledges and crystal lace, disintegrated in shimmering waves as the great palace pulled itself down in a blue ruin.

  Logan did precisely as Box had instructed. Leading Jess, he was threading the force field labyrinth. Wind chopped and cut at them on the open plain.

  To Logan the spot seemed identical with the storm-swept terrain that surrounded it. Ice flurries whipped about them as they moved: two steps forward, a step to the right . . . It was hopeless; Box had lied.

  They took three paces in a weaving pattern. Angled right, then left. Three more steps forward, one back.

  Magic!

  They were out—standing on the warm platform.

  Hell was gone.

  They discarded the filthy pelts.

  "Can you get a mazecar?" asked Jess.

  "The Gun first," said Logan. He recovered it from a niche in the side of the platform, checked it. Five charges left: tangler, vapor, ripper, needler and homer.

  Logan pried open the back of the callbox and began to shift the terminals.

  A car came humming.

  "Where now?" the girl asked him.

  "To the Black Hills of the Dakotas," he said. "Ballard knows how to control the maze. He directs these cars as he needs them. If we want to find him we go to the source. We go to the Thinker."

  He is a violence, contained.

  He sits in front of the board.

  He has not eaten.

  He has not slept.

  Technicians avoid him, say nothing to him.

  His eyes suddenly flash to the board. Brightness there. One of the scanners has registered the presence of a runner.

  Location: South Dakota, the Black Hills.

  He feels elation.

  The hunt resumes.

  EARLY MORNING . . .

  When Crazy Horse Mountain was dedicated, the great mass of granite became the site of a monumental project which was to consume half a century. An Indian warrior, 563 feet high and 641 feet long, would ride the land, carved from six million tons of Dakota stone. A mountain would become a man, towering above black-forest wilderness, dwarfing the giant heads of Rushmore.

  The sculptor was Korczak Ziolkowski, and under his direction 150,000 tons of rock would be ripped away each year to form his dream. After a decade, more than a million tons of living granite lay in rubble at the foot of the looming mountain—and the feather of the great War Chief of the Ogallala Sioux began to emerge. Obsessed by his vision, Ziolkowski ranged the continents, prying money from the pockets of the rich, the vain, the titled—which he spent on blasting powder, dynamite, cordite, tools, winches and rope.

  The work went on. Gradually the mountain sheared away. Nations threw their combined resources behind it, fired by the dramatic image of a great fighting chieftain on a wild-maned stallion. Thousands of laborers and artists toiled on the flanks of the plunging horse. Diamond drill bits and jackhammers tore at the granite heart of the mountain.

  And, with infinite slowness, the mammoth figure took its place against the Dakota sky: Tashunca-uitco. Crazy Horse. The ruthless Indian genius who directed the annihilation of Custer's Seventh on the Little Big Horn.

  The world marveled.

  On an April afternoon, three years before the project's completion, a thick-waisted laborer named Balder "Big Ed" Thag was clearing brush on the east flank of Crazy Horse. He was attracted to a cleft in the rocks by a strange, ululating sound; a wind was issuing from the interior of the mountain.

  Thag stepped to the wide opening and peered within. The wind slammed him with such force that he had to brace his legs to keep from being pushed off the slope.

  Unfortunately for Thag, it was exactly 4:27 o'clock. The banshee wind whistle abruptly stopped. There was a moment of absolute stillness. Then the wind resumed, but this time it was not blowing outward. The wind sucked in with irresistible force. It was Thag's misfortune that he was braced in the wrong direction. He lost his footing and toppled into the hole and fell as a stone falls down a well.

  The mountain was breathing, but Thag was not.

  Many years passed before the Crazy Horse Caverns were discovered
again.

  Etched by moving water through eons of time from the limestone basement of the mountain chain, they proved to be the most extensive network of cave formations in the world. Beside them, Carlsbad was a worm crawl.

  In Custer, South Dakota, the car told Logan and Jess, "You are entering restricted territory. I am not permitted to proceed farther."

  At dawn they left the maze and began to trek overland.

  In a deep ravine flanking Crazy Horse Mountain was a white metal post. On it a stamped sign.

  ABSOLUTELY NO TRESPASSING BEYOND

  THIS POINT

  DEATH!

  KEEP OUT!

  U.S. GOVERNMENT

  Hidden in the scrub growth: a stubby bark-colored pedestal. And on the side, another. And another after that. Linking this progression was a beam of invisible light.

  A dappled fawn moved from cover and, with delicate steps, advanced up the ravine. Its nose tested the morning air for danger and found none.

  It breasted the beam.

  On the high granite shoulders of Crazy Horse, bronze feathers stirred. Circuits clicked.

  The questing fawn lowered its sun-warmed head to lap softly at clear water in a natural stone basin. It did not see the two shadows which hushed over evergreen country. It did not see the two gold shapes which came out of the sun.

  Hooded jewel eyes. Razored talons. A cruel hook of steel beak. Assassins.

  The mech eagles struck.

  A blood rag of fur lay on the forest floor.

  Logan looked up at the sign. "We're almost there."

  "It says 'Death.' " Jessica hesitated.

  "Keep moving," he told her. The Gun was in his hand.

  In cloud fastness the mech eagles drifted down the sloped sky, their twenty-foot wings spread against the cushioning air. Currents buoyed the metal bodies in their glide and circle; photo-electric eyes locked on the toiling ant figures far below.

  A copper command in skullcase metal: Kill!

  They dived.

  In that last instant Logan saw them coming. He smashed Jess to the ground, rolling over her. And took the blow. Blinding pain raked his back. Three deep furrows from shoulder to hip welled blood and torn cloth. Through a pain mist he fumbled in the brush for the fallen Gun.

  Sun blazed on climbing gold. The birds wheeled and came back. Kill!

  Logan's enemy fingers clawed at the Gun, in the tangle of root grass. He could not get hold of it. He dug and scrabbled at it. Blinking back waves of pain, he gripped the barrel. He juggled it around awkwardly, and his two hands closed on the pearl handle. He had it now. He bent one leg, dug in a heel, twisted and flopped over on his back. Pain!

  The two shapes carne at him, blacking the sky, as Logan screamed at his fingers and the Gun fired and a ripper sliced in a smoking scorch across the black bodies and the two birds exploded and rained down in a bronze wreckage.

  The brook was silver and cool softness over round rocks. On the shadowed moss bank, Jess dipped a cloth into the stream and carefully blotted the mangled flesh of Logan's back. He slept fitfully. Jess put aside the cloth and sat regarding him. She reached down to touch at his matted hair. His lips moved; he moaned. "Jess . . ." He tried to sit up, but she restrained him with gentle fingers.

  "Lie still," she told him. She could see the raw hurt in the wax of his skin, the fever of his eyes. For a moment he looked at her without recognition.

  "Rest," she said soothingly. "You need rest."

  The tension began to leave him as he listened to her voice. Above him the tree boughs moved soft fans of shifting green shadow. The quiet worked on him as the last of the tension drained away. His breath evened. The pulse in his neck slowed and steadied.

  "Got to keep moving," he said. "Ballard. Got to—"

  "Hush," she told him.

  Now they were moving again, with Crazy Horse towering above them, impossibly huge. The warrior's feather was lost in cloud.

  They had found the old trail, overgrown with years, leading into the base of the mountain. At its end was the main cavern entrance. Logan and Jess stepped into arched darkness. Their eyes gradually adjusted to the light change.

  The floor was layered thickly with rock dust, undisturbed by footprints. Their feet echoed as they descended.

  "Are you all right?" asked Jess.

  "I can make it."

  The tunnel widened. They rounded an abrupt elbow turn and stopped.

  The Thinker lay before them.

  Here was a constellation of winking fireflies stretching to infinity. Here was an immense electronic silence. In the endless, glowing dark was Tangier and London, Macao and Capri and Beirut, El Quederef and Chateau-Chinon and Wounded Knee. From these caverns leapt the motive force of a dispensary in Chemnitz, a glasshouse in Shropshire, a callbox in Billings, Montana . . . This vast mountain brain sent its signals along Earth's nervous system—to the distant places, the villages, towns and cities, bringing order out of disorder, calmness out of confusion.

  They beheld the world.

  The final realization of the computer age. A direct extension of the electronic brains at Columbia and Cal Tech in the 1960s, it was a massive breakthrough in solid-state technology. Computer was linked with computer in ever widening complexity.

  President Curtain was the first to suggest that the Thinker be moved from Niagara to the Crazy Horse Caverns, and with the death of the Republican Party in 1988 the Crazy Horse bill was passed without opposition. Estimated final cost: twenty-five billion dollars.

  The old had built it; the young would use it.

  "It's almost . . . frightening," said Jess.

  They moved downward along the spiral of tunnel. Spaced at irregular intervals along the glowing plain below were bars of darkness. Logan was perplexed. What did these dark areas represent? He would find out.

  They stepped onto the polished flooring beside the first dark area. Set into the smooth computer metal facing them was an embossed plaque.

  CATHEDRAL—JCV 6° 49883

  West Complex. Los Angeles, California

  Western America

  A siren wail stabbed the silence. From deep within the hive of linking corridors something was coming in a sulfurous rush.

  Logan snatched Jessica's hand and ran.

  The sound intensified.

  The thing was closing. It came with a howl and a shriek.

  It was upon them.

  They plunged into tunnel blackness. The siren ceased abruptly.

  Tableau: Logan, braced against dead metal, the Gun a pointing finger; Jess, crouched behind him; and a looming presence at the mouth of the passage.

  In the solenoid night the Watchman waited, motionless except for the faint gear-flicker behind the glass plate which was its face. A half-ton of destruction; armor plate bristling with weaponry. Waiting.

  Doomed, thought Logan. Against this thing even a DS Gun was useless. What's holding him back? Why doesn't he go for us? Logan's throat moved. He looked up. Another plaque.

  MULTI-OPERATIONAL LOWER LIFE UNIT—

  VJK 8° 1704

  Pacific Ocean

  Western Hemisphere

  "M.O.L.L.U.," breathed Logan. "Molly!"

  Of course, that was why the thing didn't attack them. That was why it couldn't move. This was a dead area. For the robot it didn't exist. Logan's thoughts raced. Cathedral. Molly. Both dead, untended stages on the Sanctuary line. Which meant the next dead area would be stage three. But how to get to it?

  Logan backed Jess along the corridor. The Watchman didn't move. At the other end they faced brightness. The machine could not follow them down the dead passage; it would be forced to go around. But would they have enough time?

  "Come on!" urged Logan.

  They ran.

  The Watchman burned into blinding motion.

  They ran as the fox runs from the hounds. The darkness of another dead area was ahead. The Watchman erupted into the corridor, cannoned down upon them.

  Into darkness!


  The Watchman dead-stopped outside the tunnel.

  Stage three;

  WASHINGTON-LLI 7° 5644

  District of Columbia

  Eastern America

  "That's where the car out of Molly should have taken us," said Logan. "Ballard must be there, in Washington."

  "But how can we—That thing won't let us out," said Jess.

  Logan swept the area. "I think there's another way," he said.

  Winding and zigzagging dizzily up above the mammoth electronic glow, a narrow series of steps had been chiseled into the tough interior rock of the mountain. To reach the steps, however, they would have to cover a full quarter-mile of live corridors.

  Logan jammed the Gun into his belt and removed his shoes. He checked the Watchman. No movement. A silence.

  Sucking in a lungful of air, Logan drew back his arm and lobbed one of the shoes far out across the top of the computer plain.

  The shoe fell.

  As it touched the metal floor the Watchman whirled and shrieked off down the hive.

  "Go!"

  The girl was terrified. "We'll never make it. We'll—"

  "Run, damn you, run!"

  They sprinted for the steps.

  The Watchman reached Logan's shoe, hummed for a split second; a muzzle glided in the robot's chest. It blitzed the shoe into flaked ash. The machine then reversed course, crashing back toward Logan and Jess.

  The girl slipped to her knees on the polished floor. Logan pulled her up. They ran.

  The watchman's siren filled the world.

  Running.

  The glitter and flash of insect corridors.

  Logan heaved the other shoe. It angled out and down, buying them another few seconds.

  Running. The Watchman blurring in.

  The steps!

  Logan and Jess threw themselves onto the cut granite and scrambled upward—just as the Watchman slammed to a halt at the bottom.

  "Will it follow us?"

  "Can't," Logan said, climbing. "The steps aren't energized."