The man stared, then pointed. “Take a right and you’ll find a flight of stairs. Up one flight, take a right, then a left, and watch for the sign. It’s a big door with an alarm light; you can’t miss it.”
“Thanks.” Matt turned toward the stairs. His stomach hurt, and there was a shivering in his hands. He wished he could drop where he was, but he had to keep going.
Something stung his arm.
Matt turned and raised his arm in the same instant. Already the sting was gone; his arm was as numb as a haunch of meat. Half a dozen tiny red drops bedewed his wrist.
The big, soft man regarded Matt with a puzzled frown. His gun was in his hand.
The galaxy spun madly, receding.
Corporal Halley Fox watched the colonist fall, then bolstered his gun. What was the world coming to? First the ridiculous secrecy about the ramrobot. Then, two hundred prisoners swept up in one night, and the whole Hospital going crazy trying to cope. And now! A colonist wandering the Hospital corridors, actually asking for the vivarium!
Well, he’d get it. Halley Fox lifted the man and slung him over his shoulder, grunting with the effort. Only his face was soft. Report it and forget it. He shifted his burden and staggered toward the stairs.
The Vivarium
VIAt dawn the graded peak of Mount Lookitthat swam beneath a sea of fog. For those few who were already abroad, the sky merely turned from black to gray. This was not the poison mist below the void edge but a continuous cloud of water vapor, thick enough to let a blind man win a shooting match. Crew and colonists, one and all, as they stepped outside their homes, their homes vanished behind them. They walked and worked in a universe ten yards in diameter.
At seven o’clock Implementation police moved into the trapped forest, a squad at each end. Yellow fog lights swept the tongue of forest from the nearest sections of wall. The light barely reached the trees. Since the men who had been on watch that night had gone home, the searchers had no idea what animal they were searching for. Some thought it must be colonists.
At nine they met in the middle, shrugged it each other and left. Nothing human or animal lived in the trapped woods, nothing bigger than a big insect. Four aircars nevertheless rose into the fog and sprayed the wood from end to end.
At nine-thirty…
Jesus Pietro cut the grapefruit in half and held one half upside down. The grapefruit meat dropped in sections into his bowl. He asked, “Did they ever find that rabbit?”
Major Jansen stopped with his first sip of coffee halfway to his lips. “No, sir, but they did find a prisoner.”
“In the woods?”
“No, sir. He was pounding on the gate with a rock. The gate man took him inside the Hospital, but from there it becomes a little unclear—”
“Jansen, it’s already unclear. What was this man doing pounding on the gate?” A horrible thought struck him. “Was he a crew?”
“No, sir. He was Matthew Keller. Positive identification.”
Grapefruit juice spilled on the breakfast rack. “Keller?”
“The same.”
“Then who was in the car?”
“I doubt we’ll ever know, sir. Shall I ask for volunteers to examine the body?”
Jesus Pietro laughed long and loud. Jansen was pure colonist, though he and his ancestors had been in service so long that their accents and manners were almost pure crew. It would never do for him to joke with his superiors in public. But in private he could be amusing—and he had the sense to know the difference.
“I’ve been trying to think of a way to shake up Implementation,” said Jesus Pietro. “That might do it. Well. Keller came up to the gate and began pounding on it with a rock?”
“Yes, sir. The gateman took him in charge after calling Watts. Watts waited half an hour before he called the gatehouse again. The gateman couldn’t remember what happened after he and the prisoner reached the Hospital. He was back on duty, and he couldn’t explain that either. He should have reported to Watts, of course. Watts put him under arrest.”
“Watts shouldn’t have waited half an hour. Where was Keller all this time?”
“A Corporal Fox found him outside the door to the organ banks, shot him, and carted him off to the vivarium.”
“Then he and the gateman are both waiting for us. Good. I’ll never sleep again until I get this straightened out.” Jesus Pietro finished his breakfast in a remarkable hurry.
Then it occurred to him that the mystery was deeper than that. How had Keller reached Alpha Plateau at all? The guards wouldn’t have let him past the bridge.
By car? But the only car involved…
Hobart was scared. He was as frightened as any suspect Jesus Pietro had seen, and he took no interest in hiding it. “I don’t know! I took him through the door, the big door. I made him walk ahead so he couldn’t jump me—”
“And did he?”
“I can’t remember anything like that.”
“A bump on the head might have given you amnesia. Sit still.” Jesus Pietro walked around the chair to examine Hobart’s scalp. His impersonal gentleness was frightening in itself. “No bumps, no bruises. Does your head hurt?”
“I feel fine.”
“Now, you walked in the door. Were you talking to him?”
The man bobbed his graying head. “Uh huh. I wanted to know what he was doing banging on the gate. He wouldn’t say.”
“And then?”
“All of a sudden I—” Hobart stopped, swallowed convulsively.
Jesus Pietro put an edge in his voice. “Go on.”
Hobart started to cry.
“Stop that. You started to say something. What was it?”
“All of a sudden I—gulp—remembered I was s’posed t’be at the gate—”
“But what about Keller?”
“Who?”
“What about your prisoner?”
“I can’t remember!”
“Oh, get out of here.” Jesus Pietro thumbed a button. “Take him back to the vivarium. Get me Keller.”
Up a flight of stairs, take a right then a left…
VIVARIUM. Behind the big door were rows of contour couches, skimpily padded. All but two couches had occupants. There were ninety-eight prisoners here, of all ages from fifteen to fifty-eight, and all were asleep. Each was wearing, a headset. They slept quietly, more quietly than the usual sleeper, breathing shallowly, their peaceful expressions untroubled by bad dreams. It was a strangely restful place. They slept in rows of ten, some snoring gently, the rest silent.
Even the guard looked sleepy. He sat in a more conventional chair to one side of the door, with his double chin drooping on his chest, his arms folded in his lap.
More than four centuries ago, at some time near the middle of the nineteen hundreds, a group of Russian scientists came up with a gadget that might have made sleep obsolete. In some places it did. By the twenty-fourth century it was a rare corner of the known universe that did not know of the sleepmaker.
Take three electrodes, light electrodes. Now pick a guinea pig, human, and get him to lie down with his eyes closed. Put two electrodes on his eyelids, and tape the third to the nape of his neck. Run a gentle, rhythmic electric current from eyelids to nape, through the brain. Your guinea pig will drop off immediately. Turn the current off in a couple of hours, and he will have had the equivalent of eight hours’ sleep.
You’d rather not turn off the current? Fine. It won’t hurt him. He’ll just go on sleeping. He’ll sleep through a hurricane. You’ll have to wake him occasionally to eat, drink, evacuate, exercise. If you don’t plan to keep him long, you can skip the exercise.
Suspects weren’t kept long in the vivarium.
Heavy footsteps sounded outside the door. The vivarium guard jerked alert. When the door opened, he was at attention.
“Sit down there,” said one of Hobart’s escorts. Hobart sat. Tears had streaked his sunken cheeks. He donned his own headset, dropped his head back, and was asleep. Peace spread across his fa
ce. The bigger guard asked, “Which one is Keller?”
The vivarium guard consulted a chart. “Ninety-eight.”
“Okay.” Instead of taking off Keller’s headset, the man moved to a panel of one hundred buttons. He pushed number ninety-eight. As Keller began to stir, they both moved in to attach handcuffs. Then they lifted the headset.
Matt Keller’s eyes opened.
His new escorts lifted him to his feet with a practiced motion. “On our way,” one said cheerfully. Bewildered, Matt followed the pull on his arms. In a moment they were in the hall. Matt snatched one look behind him before the door closed.
“Wait a minute,” he protested, predictably jerking back against the handcuffs.
“Man wants to ask you a few questions. Look, I’d rather carry you than do this. You want to walk?”
The threat usually quieted them down—as it did now. Matt stopped pulling. He’d expected to wake up dead; these moments of consciousness were a free bonus. Someone must have gotten curious.
“Who wants to see me?”
“A gentleman named Castro,” the bigger guard tossed off. The dialogue was following its usual pattern. If Keller was an average suspect, the Head’s dread name would paralyze his brain. If he kept his wits, he’d still choose to use this time in preparation for his interview, rather than risk a sonic now. Both guards had been doing this for so long that they’d come to see prisoners as faceless, interchangeable.
Castro. The name echoed between Matt’s ears.
What did you think you were doing, Keller? You came in here like you had an engraved invitation. Thought you had a secret weapon, did you, Keller? What did you think you were doing, Keller? WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU—
One instant the suspect was walking between them, lost in his own fears. The next, he had jerked back like a fish hooked on two lines. The guards instantly pulled apart to string him between them, then regarded him in sheer disgust. One said, “Stupid!” The other pulled out his gun.
They stood there, one with a sonic loose in his hand, looking about them in apparent bewilderment. Matt jerked again, and the smaller guard looked in shocked surprise at his own wrist. He fumbled in his belt, got out a key, and unlocked the handcuff.
Matt threw all his weight on the other steel chain. The bigger guard yelled in anger and pulled back. Matt flew into him, inadvertently butting him in the stomach. The guard hit him across the jaw with a backhand swing of his arm. Momentarily unable to move, Matt watched the guard take a key from his pocket and unlock the remaining handcuff from his own wrist. The guard’s eyes were strange.
Matt backed away with two sets of handcuffs dangling from his arms. The guards looked after him, not at him but in his general direction. Something was very wrong with their eyes. Fruitlessly, Matt tried to remember where he’d seen that look before. The gateman last night?
The guards turned and sauntered away.
Matt shook his head, more baffled than relieved, and turned back the way he had come. There was the vivarium door. He’d had only one backward glimpse, but he was sure he’d seen Harry Kane in there.
The door was locked.
Mist Demons, here we go again. Matt raised his hand, changed his mind, changed it again, and slapped the palm three times against the door. It opened at once. A round, expressionless face looked through and suddenly acquired an expression. The door started to close. Matt pulled it open and went in.
The round guard with the round face genuinely didn’t know what to do. At least he hadn’t forgotten that Matt was here. Matt was grateful. He swung joyfully at the guard’s double chin. When the guard didn’t fold, Matt hit him again. The man finally reached for his gun, and Matt took a firm grip on the appropriate wrist, holding the gun in its holster, and swung once more. The guard slid to the floor.
Matt took the guard’s sonic and put it in his pants pocket. His hand hurt. He rubbed it against his cheek, which also hurt, and ran his eyes down the row of sleepers. There was Laney! Laney, her face pale, with one thin scratch from temple to chin, her auburn hair concealing the three-pronged headset, her deep breasts hardly moving as she slept. And there was Hood, looking like a sleeping child. Something began to unwind inside Matt Keller, a warmth uncoiling to spread through his limbs. For hours he had been all alone with death. There was the tall man who’d spelled him for bartender that night. Night before last! There was Harry Kane, a cube of a man, strong even in sleep.
Polly wasn’t there.
He looked again, carefully, and she still wasn’t there.
Where was she? Instantly the aquarium tanks of the organ bank flashed into his mind’s eye. One tank had held skins, whole human skins with barely room between them for the clear conducting nutrient fluid. The scalps had some hair, short and long, blond and black and red, hair that waved in a cold fluid breeze. Rejection classes C, 2, nr, 34. He couldn’t remember seeing the space-blackness of Polly’s hair. It might or might not have been waving in the aquarium tank. He hadn’t been looking for it.
Convulsively he made himself look about him. That bank of buttons? He pushed one. It popped out at the touch of a finger. Nothing else happened.
Oh, well, what the hell…He started pushing them all, letting his forefinger run down a row of ten, down the next row, and the next. He had released sixty when he heard motion.
The sleepers were waking.
He released the rest of the buttons. The murmur of awakening grew louder: yawning, confused voices, clatterings, gasps of dismayed shock when prisoners suddenly realized where they were. A clear voice calling, “Matt? Matt!”
“Here, Laney!”
She wove her way toward him through people climbing groggily out of their contour couches. Then she was in his arms, and they clung to each other as if a tornado were trying to pluck them apart and whirl them away. Matt felt suddenly weak, as if he could afford weakness now. “So you didn’t make it,” he said.
“Matt, where are we? I tried to get to the void edge—”
Somebody bellowed, “We are in the Hospital vivarium!” The voice cut like an ax through the rising pandemonium. Harry Kane, Leader, assumed his proper role.
“That’s right,” Matt said gently.
Her eyes were two inches from his, dead level. “Oh. Then you didn’t make it either.”
“Yes I did. I had to get here on my own.”
“What—how?”
“Good question. I don’t know exactly—”
Laney began to chuckle.
Shouting from the back of the room. Somebody had noticed an Implementation uniform on one of the newly awakened. A scream of pure terror changed to a yell of agony and died abruptly. Matt saw jerking heads, heard sounds he tried to ignore. Laney wasn’t laughing anymore. The disturbance subsided.
Harry Kane had mounted a chair, He cupped his hands and bellowed, “Shut up, all of you! Everyone who knows the map of the Hospital, get over here! Gather round me!” There was a shifting in the mass. Laney and Matt still clung to each other, but not desperately now. Their heads turned to watch Harry, acknowledging his leadership. “Take a look, the rest of you!” Harry shouted. “These are the people who can lead you out of here. In a minute we’re going to have to make our break. Keep your eyes on…” He named eight names. Hood’s was one. “Some of us are going to get shot. As long as one of these eight is still moving, follow him! Or her. If all eight are down, and I am too”—he paused for emphasis—“scatter! Make as much trouble as you can! Sometimes the only sensible thing to do is panic!
“Now, who got us out of this? Who woke us up? Anyone?”
“Me,” said Matt.
A last buzz of noise died. Suddenly everyone was looking at him. Harry said, “How?”
“I’m not sure how I got in here. I’d like to talk to Hood about it.”
“Okay, stick with Jay. Keller, isn’t it? We’re grateful, Keller. What do those buttons do? I saw you fooling with them.”
“They turn off whatever it is that makes you go to sleep.” r />
“Is anyone still in his couch? If so, get out of it now. Now, somebody push those buttons back in so it’ll look like there was a power failure. Was that it, Keller? Did you just accidentally wake up?”
“No.”
Harry Kane looked puzzled, but when Matt didn’t elaborate, he shrugged. “Watson, Chek, start pushing those buttons in. Jay, make sure you stick with Keller. The rest of you, are you ready to move?”
There was a shout of assent. As it died, a lone voice asked, “Where to?”
“Good point. If you get free, make for the coral houses around the south void and Alpha-Beta cliffs. Anything else?”
Nobody spoke, including Matt. Why ask questions to which nobody knew the answers? Matt was unutterably relieved to let someone else make the decisions for a while. They might be just as wrong, but ninety-eight rebels could be a mighty force, even moving in the wrong direction. And Harry Kane was a born leader.
Laney moved out of his arms but kept a grip on one hand. Matt became conscious of the handcuffs dangling from his wrists. They might hamper him. Jay Hood moved up beside him, looking rumpled. He shook hands, grinning, but the grin didn’t match the fear in his eyes, and he seemed reluctant to let go. Was there one person in this room who wasn’t terrified? If there was, it wasn’t Matt. He pulled the sonic loose from his pants pocket.
“All out,” said Harry Kane, and butted the door open with a wide shoulder. They streamed into the hall.
“I’ll take only a minute of your time, Watts.” Jesus Pietro relaxed indolently in his chair. He loved mysteries and proposed to enjoy this one. “I want you to describe in detail what happened last night, starting with the call from Hobart.”
“But there aren’t any details, sir.” Master Sergeant Watts was tired of repeating himself. His voice was turning querulous. “Five minutes after your call, Hobart called and said he had a prisoner. I told him to bring him to my office. He never came. Finally I called the gate. He was there, all right, without his prisoner, and he couldn’t explain what had happened. I had to put him under arrest.”