Star Bridge Part 9

"The a.s.sa.s.sin."

"Sure," Horn said and tried to brush past.

The technician held him back. "Something funny came through from Earth. Said the a.s.sa.s.sin was in the Tube. But the p.r.o.noun was 'he.' And it didn't mention a ship. It said 'suit.'"

"Garbled," Horn said. This time he succeeded in getting past. The giant room he had left was rumbling.

He swung around at the archway that led into the dining hall. "Didn't you know who we picked up?" he called back. "That was Wendre Kohlnar."

The technician looked blankly incredulous for a moment and then spun toward the control room. Horn walked quickly through the dining hall and out into a corridor over two hundred meters wide. Deep, metal-lined tracks were recessed into the floor. Horn turned to the right and walked briskly away.

The corridor was empty. The rumbling sound he had heard had been the ship being raised back into the cradle. The main lock would rotate it into position to launch itself into s.p.a.ce. It would circle Eron until it came to rest on the elevator that would lower it-to whoever wanted Wendre. They should be out in s.p.a.ce now if they were going to get out at all.

The capture had been carefully planned and skillfully executed. Horn decided they would get out before the technician could convince the control room to stop the ship. But the confusion should cover his escape.

Horn came to a broad cross-corridor. It seemed to curve inward. That meant he was moving away from the center of the cap. Good. If the cap were constructed logically-and Eron was predominantly logical-it would be a spiderweb with a set of straight, radial corridors intersected by circular, concentric ones. At the center would be the spider, a sensitive and dangerous area of some kind. It was where he had to go, true, but not at this level. He needed to approach it from another direction.

The corridor he was on was definitely radial. It ran straight in both directions until, although it was well lighted, it faded into indistinctness. The concentric corridor's curve was gentle, but Horn found it impossible to judge the degree of curvature by eye. It could be anywhere from several to twenty kilometers from the center of the cap.

Horn trotted on along the way he had been going when the intersecting corridor stopped him. Before he came to another, he found a relatively narrow ramp leading downward. He turned into it without hesitation. Within a descent of a few meters, the ramp crossed a level corridor, darker and narrower than the ones above.

The ships didn't get down here. Horn crossed the corridor and continued down the ramp. The second level was even narrower and almost dark. The floor was dusty; the only footprints Horn could see were his own. It smelled musty and unused. Horn turned to the left, toward the center of the web.

The corridor thrummed gently with a constant vibration. He was close to the shallow pool of mercury in which the cap floated. Somewhere there would be ma.s.sive motors, compensating for Eron's rotation. The vibration would be due to one or the other, or both. Horn trotted toward the center of the cap.

The corridor seemed unending, unchanging. Horn coughed a little in the dust raised by his feet. He slipped a food pellet into his mouth and sucked on it and found himself wrapped in the unreality of a childish memory.

Someone had told him about Eron-could it have been his mother?-and the description had created as vivid a picture as a child's imagination can contain. It had been all false, of course, but it had all the truth of a fairy world. The golden Tubes, the metal world, the broad, rotating caps floating in seas of quicksilver....

The quicksilver sea-that had been the most wonderful part. The boy had dreamed about it, surging and splashing metallically, gleaming like molten silver. He had cherished the illusion for a long time, and when he had learned that the mercury was only a few centimeters thick, it had been like the breaking of something infinitely precious. It was his last dream.

And here the corridors were dark and dusty, without beauty or illusion. He was actually in the cap that floated on the quicksilver sea, and he couldn't dredge up the smallest relic of wonder or delight. He was on the threshold of Eron, searching for a doorway into long-lost dreams; he wouldn't find it. Eron wasn't a dream world to him, only a refuge, and he was only tired with the eternal necessity of awareness.

The radial corridor he was on stopped abruptly as it was intersected by a concentric corridor. Ahead of him the perceptibly curving wall was unbroken. Horn turned to the right, trotting. After a few hundred meters, he was able to turn left along another radial corridor continuing toward the center.

Horn nodded. Obviously, all the radial corridors couldn't meet at the center. For an extensive area, there would be no walls-only corridor.

And this corridor ended in a blind alley. Horn stood in the boxlike end, pressed against one wall to let the distant light filter past his shoulder. The walls, the floor, the ceiling met flush against a fifth plane set at right angles to all of them.

It should be a door, Horn told himself. It had to be a door. There would be no logic in a pocket like this.

There was nothing to brush or press along the walls. Horn pushed against the part.i.tion. It was solid and unyielding. He let his hand brush the edge. Something clicked. Horn threw his weight against the barrier. It gave a little, squealing, and stuck. A bright line of light appeared at the right.

Horn took a deep breath and tried once more. Complaining, groaning, the door swung open. Cautiously, Horn stepped into a large room shaped like a fat cylinder. In the center, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a smaller cylinder, about four meters in diameter. The room was empty.

Horn closed the door behind him and circled the room looking for an exit. Exit? Entry. Entry into Eron.

The surface of the small, central cylinder was smooth and unbroken. Opposite the door he had entered was another door in the curving wall of the room. When he had pulled it open, there was only another long, dark corridor behind it. He slammed it shut and leaned against it.

His shoulder slumped wearily. His legs trembled a little. It had been a long time since he had rested.

He leaned his head back against the cool metal and closed his eyes. He forced them open quickly. If he let them stay closed, he would fall asleep, and he couldn't afford to sleep. The silent desertion of the lower levels of the cap was deluding. There could be no peace for him, just as there could be no sleep. The hunt went on, somewhere, and if he stayed too long in one spot, the hunters would catch up with him.

He saw the wheel against the ceiling.

It was below the ceiling a few centimeters, connected to it by a thick, threaded bar. Beside it, against the wall, was a ladder. It started three meters from the floor.

Horn jumped, caught the bottom rung, and pulled himself up hand over hand. When his head was close to the ceiling, he wrapped one leg around a rung and leaned back to grab the wheel. Above the wheel was an opening in the ceiling about a meter in diameter; it was covered from above by a metal plate.

From his position, Horn couldn't exert much leverage, and the wheel was stubborn. Horn gripped it firmly and pushed with his legs and back. It began to turn. He sweated with it, his back muscles starting to cramp, until it was almost flat against the plate in the ceiling.

He rested for a moment and wiped his face on his sleeve, braced himself again, and shoved upward. The wheel lifted, taking the plate with it, and toppled to one side. Horn grabbed the edges of the circular hole and lifted himself into the room above, realizing that caution was useless after the noise he had made.

The room was almost identical with the one below. The differences: it was cleaner, better lighted, and the central cylinder was cut off a few feet from the ceiling. This room was empty, too.

Horn was interested in the central tube. It led down. From here. It ended here.

He circled it. The first thing he noticed was the disk just below eye level. Then he saw the hairline crack beside it. He palmed the disk and waited. Nothing happened for a moment.

He felt a slight jar under his hand. The crack widened. A door swung open toward him. Behind it was a little, circular room, just big enough for one person.

Horn waited until his heartbeat slowed and stepped into the room. It had to be a way into Eron, an elevator or a tube car. He sank gratefully into the single, room-filling pneumatic chair. He stared at the curved, softly golden wall. It was a pleasing color, but featureless.

No controls. No way of knowing where the car went or how to stop when it got there. It had to be automatic, then. With no choice, there was only one possible destination. That, logically, would be the other Terminal cap. If he went straight through Eron and out at the other pole, he would be no better off than if he stayed here.

Horn frowned. That meant there was no way directly from the caps to Eron. It didn't seem reasonable.

He reached out for the handle of the cylinder door and brought it gently toward him. Before he closed it completely, he hesitated and then, defiantly, slammed it shut. The lights went out. In the darkness, something nudged Horn's arm into the car and slid shut. Horn wondered why he felt no movement, no sense of falling.

Eight glowing disks floated in the darkness in front of him. Six of them were in the middle. To the left of these, separated a little, and a trifle more than half a diameter beneath the straight line that pa.s.sed through the center of the others was a white disk. The six in the middle were colored: silver, gold, orange, green, blue, black. The last one was barely discernible against the deeper darkness. And, separated by a s.p.a.ce to the right, there was a red disk.

Controls! They had to be. He could pick a destination inside Eron. All he had to do was figure out the meaning of the disks and pick one-the right one.

The white one at the left was easy. It should be for the south Terminal cap. If he had been at the south cap, that disk would be out and there would be one lit above it. At one of the other destinations, both of them would be lit, and a pa.s.senger could choose between them.

The colored disks-he could only think of one meaning. They could stand for the directorships. If he covered one of those, the car should take him to the residence of one of the Directors. It was a sobering discovery.

He had blundered into the Directors' private transportation system. It seemed to be the only route direct from Eron to the caps. It would take him into Eron, sure, but right into the hands of those most anxious to find him. Like the Tube that had brought him from Earth to Eron, this only postponed the imminence of capture in favor of greater inevitability.

But there wasn't any choice. A quarry has only one function: to run. When he stops, he is finished; the game is over. Horn sat in the near darkness staring at eight floating choices and reflected how inevitability had channeled his actions since he had left the Cl.u.s.ter. Since he had accepted the money from the voice in the darkness, there had been only one step to take, and he had taken it; one path to follow, and he had followed it. Beyond, it had seemed, there would be choice; never now.

So it had led him on, step by step, comforted by the self-nurtured illusion of free will, guided subtly, unyieldingly, by the iron tube of determinism. Once started, he never had a chance to turn back. There was only one thing that could have prevented his appointed meeting with Kohlnar-death. And death is almost always the greater of evils.

"I go where I wish," Horn had said, there at the base of the cliff.

And the ancient Mr. Wu had replied, "So we think, so we think. In the middle of things we see no pattern. But as we look back and view the picture whole, we realize how men are moved about by forces they do not suspect. The pieces fall into place. The pattern is clear."

In other words, when somebody moves, something has pushed.

Choice. Where had there been choice? Having deserted, he would have been insane to stay in the occupied lands. In the desert, the hunting parties had forced him toward the mesa. Backed against the cliff, he had only one way to go: through them.

Wait. Twice there had been choice: at the beginning and at the end. He could have turned down the job. Could he? Given his condition, his experience, his background, his environment, had he chosen freely? Or had the choice been determined for him?

With the crosshairs on Kohlnar, he could have refused to pull the trigger. Couldn't he? Perhaps he couldn't. Perhaps that, too, had been determined by the built-in set of a lifetime.

And then, after the a.s.sa.s.sination, even the illusion of choice had vanished. Driven, guided, pushed. Down the dark tunnel to find the desert closed. Back to the mesa to find only one way open: the Tube. And through the Terminal cap to this spot.

Was it true that a man's only real choice was to live or die? Even then the dice are loaded. Roll them as often as he likes, the dice will come up: live! It is better to suffer than to feel nothing. The conscious mind may rebel; it may even, in a brief moment of sanity, win a surprising and final victory. But it is infrequent, and who can say whether that, too, is not determined.

"I won't die," Horn had said.

"So we think, so we all think," the fat, yellow man had answered. "And yet we do."

And now another choice, a choice of colors: silver, gold, orange, green, blue, black. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Not free. Not now or ever. Because the coin is life.

The other Directors might well be back by now. Only two would not be home: Kohlnar, who was dead, and his daughter, who was captured. Silver or gold? In any case, there would be guards, and they would be watchful and on edge. What choice? A choice of staying here, where he would certainly be caught, or postponing his capture for the duration of the trip through this private tubeway.

Horn's lips curled wryly. The quarry has no choice. He must run until he can run no more.

Silver was probably the better choice; the General Manager's household would be confused, disordered, headless. But Horn had a curious reluctance to go there.

His hand stretched out toward the disks, hesitated, and dropped over gold. He had chosen Wendre. Or had something pushed?

The thought was cut off as the chair dropped out from under him. The glowing disks vanished. Blackness was a blow, and he remembered nothing.

He opened his eyes to darkness and the unpleasant disorientation of free fall. For a moment he thought he was back in the Tube, but sensation was still with him. Behind him was smoothness. He gave himself a gentle push and floated through the darkness, his hands groping ahead. In a moment he had pulled himself into the chair and strapped around his legs the belt he hadn't noticed before.

He rubbed the back of his head gingerly. The colored disks were dark; it hadn't been all unconsciousness. Only the red disk on the far right was still glowing. As he watched, it blinked.

He knew then what it was. He slapped his hand over it, hoping he was not too late.

Then the panel was completely dark. The car began to slow.

THE HISTORY.

Hope....

It springs from the hopeless. It is all they have.

True religion comes from the slaves. It is a survival factor; for them, the major one.

The Entropy Cult, with its visionary hope, was born among the endless, numbered slaves of Eron. Its symbol was the bisected circle; its promise was a rebirth of matter and spirit when the eternal circle swung back to rest upon its other foot.

The day of regeneration. The poor, the hopeless, the oppressed waited for the promised reversal, when those that were low would rise high and those that were high, fall low.

Out of the darkness it was born. In the darkness of the deepest warrens and catacombs, it grew. Poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d-child of science and despair.

Officially, the Cult was banned. Unofficially, the Golden Folk considered it something which, if it had not existed, they would have invented. It kept the slaves docile.

But oppression and despair can breed other things. And a symbol can cover a mult.i.tude of meanings....

10.

THE HOLLOW WORLD.

Horn was pressed hard into the yielding chair for a moment, and then his body was straining against the belt around his legs. The car or an inner sh.e.l.l had flipped over. Suddenly the pull ceased; normal gravity took over. The car was at rest.

At rest where?

Horn looked at the disks which were floating once more in the darkness. All of them were on, even the two white ones, one above the other at the left, even the red one. He was nowhere. For Horn, it was better than somewhere.

Horn unfastened the belt and fumbled with the panel of the car before he found the b.u.t.ton that pulled it back. Beyond it, a door swung aside. Light flooded into the car. It was blue.

The red disk had been an emergency stop. This was an unlisted exit into the hollow world. There might be dozens of them. There had to be more than one; otherwise the red disk would have gone out.

Horn stepped out of the car into the blue room. It was empty. He turned and studied the tube door. He suspected that when it was closed the thin line of its juncture with the wall would be completely concealed by the living mural on the luxion facing.

The blue world. Around the walls and across the ceiling the mural flowed, constantly changing. The sky was the blue of midnight; the foliage was blue-veined white fernery tossing gently in a breeze he couldn't feel. Horn had an uneasy feeling that blue-furred animals moved silently behind them, peering out with strange, cautious eyes.

The floor was carpeted with blue gra.s.s. In one corner the floor rose to a wide, mossy mound. Horn suspected that one would sink down deep into it. He shivered. Beyond the bed a brook sprang musically from the wall and streamed across the floor in a narrow channel.

The tube door was similar to the other walls except that there was a small, blue sun toward one edge. It was a little too blue to be realistic; it should have been blue-white and hot. Instead it chilled the room. Horn shivered again. He didn't like this room. The night sky was brilliant in the Cl.u.s.ter, rivaling the day. Nights on Earth had been bad enough. This gave him a shuddering, choking feeling.

He put his hand over the blue sun and felt something click. That was the lock and the signal for the tube car. He hesitated and then slowly shut the door. This was better than he could reasonably expect to find at another tube car destination. But the click-click had an ugly sound of finality. He thought about the car falling through the metal tube to wherever its depot was, for it wouldn't stay outside the blue room, blocking the tube.

Half an hour in the blue world was twenty-five minutes too long. Horn fought a desperate despondency as he searched for a way out of the room. But half an hour was the length of time it took him to find it. He had knelt on the blue gra.s.s, reluctantly, and sipped the blue water. It had been cold and sweet and vaguely effervescent. He had opened a closet filled with diaphanous blue and white clothing; there were also some stained things that could have been nothing but whips. At last Horn found the door.

He stepped into the yellow hall with a heavy sigh. The change in his att.i.tude was remarkable. He felt invigorated, potent, powerful. He fought that, too, and moved cautiously down the hall. The doors he pa.s.sed were marked with colored disks. When he pa.s.sed too close to some of them, he heard high-pitched laughter and screams and low moans and animal-like grunts. If he had had any doubts about the nature of this place before, they were dispelled. After that he stayed in the middle of the hall. He wasn't squeamish; it was merely that some pastimes were not to his taste.

He met no one along the straight corridor that stopped, eventually, against an immovable door. Horn stared at it blankly. There was no disk to palm, nothing to press, nothing to turn; the only clue was a slot a few centimeters long and about a quarter of that wide.

Horn frowned. It was a simple door, at the end of the hall, obviously meant to be used. It would be irony to be turned back now. The slot was obviously meant for something.

Horn pinched coins from the money belt and fed one into the slot. It clucked contentedly, but it didn't open. Horn kept count. When the total reached five hundred kellons, the door swung out.

Horn grimaced. It had been an expensive exit; it had eaten a sizable hole in the price of Kohlnar's death. Escape and the exotic came high on Eron. He shrugged as the door closed behind him and another opened in front. He had never kept accounts.

He stepped warily into what seemed to be a roofed alley. It was dimly lit, a perfect spot for thugs and thieves. But perhaps the area was patrolled. The alley was deserted.

The alley opened into a broad, colorful roadway. Horn had seen slideways before but never so many and so swift. The ceiling overhead was a neutral color, reflecting without glare the light that streamed against it from hidden sources. The slideways were crowded; the golden-skinned people on them were dressed fantastically. The women wore very little, and Horn realized that the air was warm, a little too warm. Brief skirts or shorts revealed long, shapely legs often ornamented with brilliants. Blouses were even more revealing; they were transparent, low-cut, only a half, or slashed strategically to give tantalizing glimpses of golden flesh.

What clothing the women had removed, the men had put on. They were overdressed in synsilks, furs, and jewels. Their bosoms were padded into grotesque imitation of their mates, and their legs, elevated on stilt-heel shoes, had a feminine symmetry. These were the Golden Folk, at home, and Horn wondered how he could pa.s.s among them without being stopped.