by Chad Oliver
He tossed a glance back over his shoulder, and his heart sank at what he saw. The guards had stopped, and were using a wall phone to call ahead.
Sam slowed his pace, fighting for breath. There was just one question he had to answer: could he reach that cutoff tunnel before the Crewmen from town got there from the other end? He wanted to think that he could, but he had to admit that the odds were against it. He still had too far to go. And even if he did, the others were not fools. They would know about that cutoff, would be waiting at the other end.
No, that was out.
There was only one thing to do, and he did it.
The next door he came to, he stopped. He fumbled open the catch, swung the door open, and slipped inside. At first, he was blind; there was no light at all. He switched on his tubelight, closed the door, and bolted it shut.
He made himself take the time to put on his shoes. His lungs ached in his chest, and the air in the passage was stale and dead. He held the light in front of him, and tried to run. He soon slowed to a fast walk.
He listened carefully, but heard no sounds of pursuit.
The corridor was different from the others. It seemed older somehow, and he had the eerie feeling that no man had walked these floors for centuries. There were oil slicks on the walls, and the floor was gritty.
Sam kept going.
He came to another door that sealed off the passage. There was a sign on it, but it was streaked and dirty; he couldn’t read it. He fumbled the catch open, shoved on the door.
It didn’t open.
Sam bit his lip. He backed off, took a deep breath, and threw his shoulder into the door. It gave a little. He hit it again, and yet again. It swung open with a rasping screech. He squeezed through and shut it again behind him. The bolt stuck and he couldn’t throw it.
He flashed the light around. The corridor was smaller now; his head almost scraped the ceiling. The air was so flat he could hardly breathe it. There was a layer of fine, white dust on the floor. When he took a step, the stuff puffed up in a cloud, stinging his eyes and his nostrils.
Sam hesitated, doubting himself. He could still go back. It would be rough, but they probably wouldn’t kill him. A little conditioning in the surgery, that was all, and he would be the most placid man on the Ship. He shuddered.
There was a chance, just a chance, that this tunnel might eventually take him back to the town, back to some forgotten entrance. He still had perhaps five hours before morning, and he would not be missed until then.
He smiled sourly. He had only intended to do a little exploring this first night; he had fully expected to be back at work tomorrow. Now he was trapped, cut off, and he would probably never be able to go back to the life he had known.
Well, it was a small loss.
Sam took a bar of food out of his pocket and wolfed it down. He felt a little better, but he was desperately thirsty. If there were ever a next time, he would bring water and forget about the food.
Of course, there wasn’t going to be any next time.
Not for him.
He steadied himself and flashed the light around again. There was nothing to see. The black cave stretched away as far as the light could penetrate. The fine dust on the floor was white, like the snow he had seen in pictures.
There was just one way to go.
Sam moved forward at a fast walk, the dust puffing up around him until he could hardly see. He moved on, his mind frozen hard against the terror that seeped in around him, walking down a silent tunnel to nowhere.
He kept it up for two hours, and then he couldn’t take it any longer. The clouds of dust hung in the stale air like smoke, and his throat was raw and burning.
He had seen nothing.
He had heard nothing, save for the pad-pad-pad of his own feet.
The tunnel had twisted and curved until he didn’t have the faintest idea where he was. There had been other corridors branching off from the one he was in, but he had been afraid to try them. This way, he could at least retrace his steps if he had to. He had a childish, irrational fear of getting lost, even though he now had no home to go back to.
But he had to get out of the dust.
He came to a door in the wall and forced it open. He went through and closed it quickly behind him. He stood very still, trying not to stir up the dust.
He flashed the light around him.
For one awful moment, he thought all the stories he had heard about things that lived in the forbidden caves were true. He was in a room, not a tunnel, and the walls were lined with grotesque figures—big bulging caricatures of men, with glassy faces and swollen arms and legs.
But the things were not alive.
They had never been alive.
Gingerly, Sam stepped over and touched one. It was made of some kind of smooth stuff that reminded him of pottery, and it glistened dully in the light.
How long had it been since this lost chamber had seen a light? A hundred years? Two hundred? Three?
He tapped the thing with his fingernail. It gave off only a faint click, although he knew that it was hollow. He looked around him, estimating rapidly. There must have been at least fifty of the weird figures in the chamber with him.
He knew what they were, and it came as something of a shock when he realized that he had never actually seen one of them before.
Spacesuits.
He was in a storeroom full of spacesuits.
Strange, half-formed thoughts began to well up in his mind. He hardly knew what to make of them, and for a moment he feared he might be going mad. Funny I’ve never seen a spacesuit before. Funny none of us were given training in their use. Funny no one has ever had to go Outside for repairs.
Or were they a carefully guarded secret, one of the privileges of the Crew?
But what was all this secrecy for, anyhow?
The puzzle of the midnight guards at the Control Room door came back to plague him. Sure, it wouldn’t do to have women and kids and questionable characters like himself swarming over the place, getting in the way. But guards in the middle of the night seemed a bit excessive.
What were they hiding in the Control Room?
What was there they did not dare let anyone see until they knew they could trust him absolutely?
In fact, now that he thought about it, there was one question that might be asked about a lot of things on the Ship.
It was a deadly question, a question that had toppled empires.
Why?
The unvoiced word vibrated against his brain, and there was no answer to it.
He looked more closely at the spacesuit in front of him. The thing had a thin film of dust on it. He heaved on it, turned it around. There were two oxygen tanks clamped to its back. He found the switch that activated the air supply and threw it.
Nothing happened.
He picked up the heavy helmet, pressed it to his ear. He heard nothing. He sniffed at it, and the air was as dead as ever. There was no oxygen coming through.
Surely, in a ship in space, it would only be common sense to keep the spacesuits ready for action. He shook his head. Of course, there must be others somewhere, but still—
He replaced the helmet and chewed on another food bar. He hated to go back into the dust-laden corridor, but he couldn’t stay here. He only had a few hours left before the working day began.
A plan?
He had no plan. He thought vaguely that there might be a lifeboat of some sort on the Ship, but it would be a pure accident if he found it. Even if he did locate it, it would do him no good. He had had no training in operating a ship in space, and he knew enough about spaceships to be certain that he couldn’t just pile into one and go blasting merrily on his way.
In any event, where could he go?
One notion did occur to him. Unless there were no rhyme or reason at all to the plan to the Ship, there must have been a purpose in locating the storeroom where it was.
And there was just one such purpose that he could think of.
He opened the door again, coughing as the dust hit him. He listened carefully, but the corridor was utterly silent. It stretched on before him, a dead and lifeless thing, heavy with the weight of centuries.
Sam moved on, trying not to give way to despair.
Pad-pad-pad.
The fine white dust swirled and eddied in the old, stale air.
The pencil of light stabbed through the gloom, becoming a solid bar of silver radiance as it knifed through the glittering clouds of dust.
His throat was so dry he could no longer swallow, and he thought of the clean, fresh air of the hydroponics room with hopeless longing.
Pad-pad-pad.
His shoes kicked something on the floor, and he looked down. There was a heap of something there, white as the dust that covered it.
Bones.
Bones, and a shrunken skin as dry as old paper. A human skull gaped at him with something that had once been eyes. He knelt and touched the thing. The skin crumbled at the slightest pressure.
Sam looked at the pitiful remnants that had long ago walked and breathed and loved. He felt no horror, only an odd surge of sympathy and relief. He was not the first, after all! He was not the only man who had gotten out of line.
How many others had there been?
He waved a friendly greeting at the pile of bones.
I wish I could have known you, he thought. We might have done something, together. I might have had someone to talk to. We could have been friends, you and I.
He stepped over the bones, being careful not to disturb them, and walked on.
Within half an hour, he came to the end of the tunnel.
A door sealed the passage before him, but this was no ordinary door. This was a massive metal thing set into the very side of the Ship itself.
A faded sign read: DANGER. LOCK FOUR. DANGER
Sam stared at the gleaming metal. Involuntarily, he backed away. He had come to the end of his world. Beyond that door, he knew, was the chamber of an airlock. And on the other side of the airlock—
Outside.
Deep space.
The End.
Sam sat down in the dust, his head in his hands. He didn’t try to kid himself. He was through. This was all there was. He had no choice now. He could only retrace his steps along that dead tunnel, go back and give himself up.
And then?
He shivered, and the blood ran cold in his veins.
No, no. I won’t give up. I can’t. Not yet.
He got to his feet, trembling.
He forced himself to walk up to the airlock door. He reached out and touched it. It felt icy, or was that just his imagination?
He wasn’t thinking; he was beyond that. He only knew that the Ship and everything in it had become horrible to him, unbearable. Maybe there was a workable spacesuit inside the lock, maybe he could go Outside and drift forever among the stars….
It would be a cleaner death than the thing that waited for him at the other end of the tunnel.
He reached out and gripped the wheel in the middle of the lock.
He wrenched it, hard.
It stuck at first, then began to turn.
Instantly, the corridor exploded into sound.
A siren screamed, rising and falling, screeching through the Ship.
The noise deafened him after the hours of silence. He covered his ears and the siren wailed in his brain.
Oh God, they’ve got it wired. They know where I am. They’ll come after me, kill me—
Sam didn’t want to die. Opening the inner door of the airlock had been a gesture, nothing more. Faced with the reality of death, he had only one instinctive thought:
Hide!
Get away!
He ran back into the tunnel.
He all blindly, bruising himself against the walls, a mindless body fleeing through a nightmare cave of arid white clouds and the insistent fury of the siren’s scream.
With numbing abruptness, Sam Kingsley heard a human voice.
Human?
It was screeching so that he could hardly tell, screeching a single mad high-pitched note over and over again. How could he hear it over the wail of the siren? He shook his head wildly, like an animal.
The siren had stopped.
He stuffed his big fist into his own mouth, biting down on the knuckles. The screaming voice that might have been human turned into a strangled gurgle.
It was his own voice.
He sobbed, and the sound was shatteringly loud in the sudden silence. His ears were ringing, his body was wet with sweat. The dust in his lungs made him cough, but he didn’t have enough air to cough….
He stumbled over the skeleton in the corridor, scattering the bones. He tried to keep running, but he was staggering now.
Hide!
Get away!
If he could just reach that storeroom, get in there with the spacesuits, there might be a chance, a prayer—
No.
It was too late.
He heard voices ahead of him in the corridor, brushing noises, the tread of feet.
“Kingsley!” The shout was strangely muffled. “Kingsley! We know you’re in there! Stay where you are. Don’t try to fight. We won’t hurt you. Kingsley! Can you hear me?”
Sam collapsed on the floor, his face in the dust, gasping for breath. He didn’t answer, he couldn’t answer. He stayed there in a huddle, unable to think, beyond even despair, the blood roaring in his ears.
The lights in the ancient tunnel came on, blinding him, searing whitely into his brain.
The footsteps came closer, closer….
There. He saw a shoe, right in front of his eyes.
Voices. “Is he dead?” “No such luck.” “He’s too tough to kill.”
A foot nudged his battered shoulder, none too gently.
“Come on, Sam boy. Get up.”
It was like awakening after a too-long sleep. He had to swim back toward awareness, pulling his way through dense layers of stifling fog. Every bone in his body hurt. He rolled over very slowly.
He struggled to his knees.
The foot hit him again. It wasn’t a hard kick, but it didn’t have to be. Sam went down, his mouth in the dust.
“Come on, Sam boy. Stop playing around.”
“That’s enough of that, Ralph. Let him alone.”
Sam tried it again. He got to his knees, waited. Nothing happened. He pulled himself erect. His vision cleared.
There were three of them in the corridor with him. They were all Crewmen, and they all had face masks on to protect them from the dust. He recognized Ralph Holbrook by his voice. The men all had canteens clipped to their belts.
“Water,” he said. His voice was a dry croak.
The men were ghostly in the white light. One of them shook his head. “No water, Kingsley. Not until we get you back where you belong. After that, you can have all the water you want.”
“Water,” he said again. His throat was on fire.
“Sorry, Sam boy.”
Holbrook moved a little. Sam could hear the water gurgling in his canteen.
“Let’s go, Kingsley,” said the man who had spoken before. He sounded almost bored. “It’s a long walk back.”
Sam stared at the canteen on Holbrook’s belt with raw, red eyes. He stood absolutely motionless, and then something snapped inside him. It was like a dam bursting, a dam he had held in check all his life. His eyes brightened, and a terrible icy strength flowed into his exhausted body.
He stood up straight, his head almost touching the roof of the tunnel. His huge frame seemed to swell until he filled the corridor. His hair was white with dust, but his eyes were black coals in the light. He clenched his bleeding fists and his lips drew back from his teeth.
Suddenly, he was very calm, very sure.
He stood there like a rock.
He was through running.
And then, for the first time in his life, Sam Kingsley really got mad.
He took one quick
step forward and caught Holbrook’s tunic in his fist. Holbrook’s eyes widened and a curious noise came out of his mouth. Sam yanked, and the fabric ripped.
Off balance, Holbrook started to fall on his face.
Sam brought his beefy right fist up from his knees and sent it crunching into Holbrook’s jaw. Something broke; the jaw went flabby. Quite coldly, Sam drove a piston left into Holbrook’s stomach, and then caught him with another right to the side of the head as the man crumpled at his feet.
Silently, he went after the others.
The corridor was so narrow that the two Crewmen got in each other’s way. With icy deliberation, Sam held them off with a jabbing left hand, throwing his right with merciless precision.
The first man kicked at him frantically. Sam caught the foot, twisted it with a wrenching jolt. The man screamed. Sam picked him up by the feet and smacked his head against the tunnel wall.
The last Crewman turned to run.
Sam reached out his long left arm, caught his shoulder, spun him around. The man slashed out with something that glittered and Sam felt a hot wetness in his chest. He narrowed his black eyes, slammed his right into the man’s face with all his strength. He followed it up relentlessly, slugging the man back down the corridor. The man fell, staggered to his feet again.
Sam let him have it.
It was all over.
Sam felt a small warm glow of satisfaction deep within himself, and that was all. He stood quietly for a moment, gasping for breath in the dust-choked air, and then he reached down and unhooked the man’s canteen. He lifted it to his lips and poured cold water down his throat.
That was a mistake.
When he was through being sick, he got Holbrook’s canteen and forced himself to sip the water slowly, letting it trickle down until nausea made him stop. Then he found one of the face masks that was still relatively intact and pulled it over his face.
Air!
Clean, filtered air!
He breathed deeply, luxuriating in the stuff. He filled his lungs with it, tasting it, loving it. His chest worked like a bellows until the oxygen made him dizzy and he had to slow down.
He examined his chest. It was slippery with blood, blood furred now with sticky dust, but it was not a deep cut. In any event, he wasn’t worried about it. There was no time left for worry.