Then Blood blew. “Well, maybe we should, you simple dumb putz!”
“What's a putz, you little turd ... is that something bad ... yeah, it must be ... you watch your fucking mouth, son of a bitch; or I'll kick your ass!”
We sat there and didn't talk for fifteen minutes. Neither one of us knew which way to go.
Finally, I backed off a little. I talked soft and I talked slow. I was about up to here with him, but told him I was going to do right by him, like I always had, and he threatened me, saying I'd damned well better because there were a couple of very hip solos making it around the city, and they'd be delighted to have a sharp tail-scent like him. I told him I didn't like being threatened, and he'd better watch his fucking step or I'd break his leg. He got furious and stalked off. I said screw you and went back to the boiler to take it out on that Quilla June again.
But when I stuck my head inside the boiler, she was waiting, with a pistol one of the dead rovers had supplied. She hit me good and solid over the right eye with it, and I fell straight forward across the hatch, and was out cold.
VI
“I told you she was no good.” He watched me as I swabbed out the cut with disinfectant from my kit, and painted the gash with iodine. He smirked when I flinched.
I put away the stuff, and rummaged around in the boiler, gathering up all the spare ammo I could carry, and ditching the Browning in favor of the heavier .30-06. Then I found something that must've slipped out of her clothes.
It was a little metal plate, about three inches long and an inch-and-a-half high. It had a whole string of numbers on it, and there were holes in it, in random patterns. “What's this?” I asked Blood.
He looked at it, sniffed it.
“Must be an identity card of some kind. Maybe it's what she used to get out of the downunder.”
That made my mind up.
I jammed it in a pocket and started out. Toward the access dropshaft.
“Where the hell are you going?” Blood yelled after me.
“Come on back, you'll get killed out there!
“I'm hungry, dammit! I'm wounded!
“Albert, you sonofabitch! Come back here!”
I kept right on walking. I was gonna find that bitch and brain her. Even if I had to go downunder to find her.
It took me an hour to walk to the access dropshaft leading down to Topeka. I thought I saw Blood following, but hanging back a ways. I didn't give a damn. I was mad.
Then, there it was. A tall, straight, featureless pillar of shining black metal. It was maybe twenty feet in diameter, perfectly flat on top, disappearing straight into the ground. It was a cap, that was all. I walked straight up to it, and fished around in my pocket for that metal card. Then something was tugging at my right pants leg.
“Listen, you moron, you can't go down there!”
I kicked him off, but he came right back.
“Listen to me!”
I turned around and stared at him.
Blood sat down; the powder puffed up around him. “Albert...”
“My name is Vic, you little eggsucker.”
“Okay, okay, no fooling around. Vic.” His tone softened. “Vic. Come on, man.” He was trying to get through to me. I was really boiling, but he was trying to make sense. I shrugged, and crouched down beside him.
“Listen, man,” Blood said, “this chick has bent you way out of shape. You know you can't go down there. It's all square and settled, and they know everyone; they hate solos. Enough roverpaks have raided downunder, and raped their women, and stolen their food, they'll have defenses set up. They'll kill you, Vic!”
“What the hell do you care? You're always saying you'd be better off without me.” He sagged at that.
“Vic, we've been together almost three years. Good and bad. But this can be the worst. I'm scared, man. Scared you won't come back. And I'm hungry, and I'll have to go find some dude who'll take me on ... and you know most solos are in paks now, I'll be low mutt. I'm not that young any more. And I'm hurt pretty bad.”
I could dig it. He was talking sense. But all I could think of was how that bitch, that Quilla June, had rapped me. And then there were images of her soft tits, and the way she made little sounds when I was in her, and I shook my head, and knew I had to go get even.
“I got to do it, Blood. I got to.”
He breathed deep and sagged a little more. He knew it was useless. “You don't even see what she's done to you, Vic. That metal card, it's too easy, as if she wanted you to follow.”
I got up. “I'll try to get back quick. Will you wait...?”
He was silent a long while, and I waited. Finally, he said, “For a while. Maybe I'll be here, maybe not.”
I understood. I turned around and started walking around the pillar of black metal. Finally I found a slot in the pillar, and slipped the metal card into it. There was a soft humming sound, then a section of the pillar dilated. I hadn't even seen the lines of the sections. A circle opened and I took a step through. I turned and there was Blood, watching me. We looked at each other, all the while that pillar was humming.
“So long, Vic.”
“Take care of yourself, Blood.”
“Hurry back.”
“Do my best.”
“Yeah. Right.”
Then I turned around and stepped inside. The access portal irised closed behind me.
VII
I should have known. I should have suspected. Sure, every once in a while a chick came up to see what it was like on the surface, what had happened to the cities; sure, it happened. Why, I'd believed her when she'd told me, cuddled up beside me in that steaming boiler, that she'd wanted to see what it was like when a girl did it with a guy, that all the flicks she'd seen in Topeka were sweet and solid and dull, and the girls in her school'd talked about beaver flicks, and one of them had a little eight-page comic book and she'd read it with wide eyes ... sure, I'd believed her. It was logical. I should have suspected something when she left that metal I.D. plate behind. It was too easy. Blood'd tried to tell me. Dumb? Yeah!
The second that access iris swirled closed behind me, the humming got louder, and some cool light grew in the walls. Wall. It was a circular compartment with only two sides to the wall: inside and outside. The wall pulsed up light and the humming got louder, and the deckplate I was standing on dilated just the way the outside port had done. But I was standing there, like a mouse in a cartoon, and as long as I didn't look down I was cool, I wouldn't fall.
Then I started settling. Dropped through the floor, the iris closed overhead, I was dropping down the tube, picking up speed but not too much, just dropping steadily. Now I knew what a dropshaft was.
Down and down I went and every once in a while I'd see something like 10 LEV or ANTIPOLL 55 or BREEDER-CON or PUMP SE 6 on the wall; faintly I could make out the sectioning of an iris ... but I never stopped dropping.
Finally, I dropped all the way to the bottom, and there was TOPEKA CITY LIMITS POP. 22,860 on the wall, and I settled down without any strain, bending a little from the knees to cushion the impact, but even that wasn't much.
I used the metal plate again, and the iris—a much bigger one this time—swirled open, and I got my first look at a downunder.
It stretched away in front of me, twenty miles to the dim shining horizon of tin can metal where the wall behind me curved and curved and curved till it made one smooth, encircling circuit and came back around around around to where I stood, staring at it. I was down at the bottom of a big metal tube that stretched up to a ceiling an eighth of a mile overhead, twenty miles across. And in the bottom of that tin can, someone had built a town that looked for all the world like a photo out of one of the water-logged books in the library on the surface. I'd seen a town like this in the books. Just like this. Neat little houses, and curvy little streets, and trimmed lawns, and a business section and everything else that a Topeka would have.
Except a sun, except birds, except clouds, except rain, except snow, e
xcept cold, except wind, except ants, except dirt, except mountains, except oceans, except big fields of grain, except stars, except the moon, except forests, except animals running wild, except...
Except freedom.
They were canned down here, like dead fish. Canned.
I felt my throat tighten up. I wanted to get out. Out! I started to tremble, my hands were cold and there was sweat on my forehead. This had been insane, coming down here. I had to get out. Out!
I turned around to get back in the dropshaft, and then it grabbed me. That bitch Quilla June! I shoulda suspected!
The thing was low, and green, and boxlike, and had cables with mittens on the ends instead of arms, and it rolled on tracks, and it grabbed me.
It hoisted me up on its square flat top, holding me with them mittens on the cables, and I couldn't move, except to try kicking at the big glass eye in the front, but it didn't do any good. It didn't bust. The thing was only about four feet high, and my sneakers almost reached the ground, but not quite, and it started moving off into Topeka, hauling me along with it.
People were all over the place. Sitting in rockers on their front porches, raking their lawns, hanging around the gas station, sticking pennies in gumball machines, painting a white stripe down the middle of the road, selling newspapers on a corner, listening to an oompah band in a shell in a park, playing hopscotch and pussy-in-the-corner, polishing a fire engine, sitting on benches reading, washing windows, pruning bushes, tipping hats to ladies, collecting milk bottles in wire carrying-racks, grooming horses, throwing a stick for a dog to retrieve, diving into a communal swimming pool, chalking vegetable prices on a slate outside a grocery, walking hand-in-hand with a girl, all of them watching me go past on that metal motherfucker.
I could hear Blood speaking, saying just what he'd said before I'd entered the dropshaft: It's all square and settled and they know everyone; they hate solos. Enough roverpaks have raided downunders, and raped their women and stolen their food, they'll have defenses set up. They'll kill you, Vic!
Thanks, mutt.
Goodbye.
VIII
The green box tracked through the business section and turned in at a shopfront with the words BETTER BUSINESS BUREAU on the window. It rolled right inside the open door, and there were half a dozen men and old men and very old men in there, waiting for me. Also a couple of women. The green box stopped.
One of them came over and took the metal plate out of my hand. He looked at it, then turned around and gave it to the oldest of the old men, a withered toad wearing baggy pants and a green eyeshade and garters that held up the sleeves of his striped shirt. “Quilla June, Lew,” the guy said to the old man. Lew took the metal plate and put it in the top left drawer of a rolltop desk. “Better take his guns, Aaron,” the old coot said. And the guy who'd taken the plate cleaned me.
“Let him loose, Aaron,” Lew said.
Aaron stepped around the back of the green box and something clicked, and the cable-mittens sucked back inside the box, and I got down off the thing. My arms were numb where the box had held me. I rubbed one, then the other, and I glared at them.
“Now, boy...” Lew started.
“Suck wind, asshole!”
The women blanched. The men tightened their faces.
“I told you it wouldn't work,” another of the old men said to Lew.
“Bad business, this,” said one of the younger ones.
Lew leaned forward in his straight-back chair and pointed a crumbled finger at me. “Boy, you better be nice.”
“I hope all your fuckin’ children are hare-lipped!”
“This is no good, Lew!” another man said.
“Guttersnipe,” a woman with a beak snapped.
Lew stared at me. His mouth was a nasty little black line. I knew the sonofabitch didn't have a tooth in his crummy head that wasn't rotten and smelly. He stared at me with vicious little eyes. God, he was ugly, like a toad ready to snaffle a fly off the wall with his tongue. He was getting set to say something I wouldn't like. “Aaron, maybe you'd better put the sentry back on him.” Aaron moved to the green box.
“Okay, hold it,” I said, holding up my hand.
Aaron stopped, looked at Lew, who nodded. Then Lew leaned real far forward again, and aimed that bird-claw at me. “You ready to behave yourself, son?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“You'd better be dang sure.”
“Okay. I'm dang sure. Also fuckin’ sure!”
“And you'll watch your mouth.”
I didn't reply. Old coot.
“You're a bit of an experiment for us, boy. We tried to get one of you down here other ways. Sent up some good folks to capture one of you little scuts, but they never came back. Figgered it was best to lure you down to us.”
I sneered. That Quilla June. I'd take care of her!
One of the women, a little younger than Bird-Beak, came forward and looked into my face. “Lew, you'll never get this one to kowtow. He's a filthy little killer. Look at those eyes.”
“How'd you like the barrel of a rifle jammed up your ass, bitch?” She jumped back. Lew was angry again. “Sorry,” I said real quickly, “I don't like bein’ called names. Macho, y'know?”
He settled back and snapped at the woman. “Mez, leave him alone. I'm tryin’ to talk a bit of sense here. You're only making it worse.”
Mez went back and sat with the others. Some Better Business Bureau these creeps were!
“As I was saying, boy: you're an experiment for us. We've been down here in Topeka close to thirty years. It's nice down here. Quiet, orderly, nice people who respect each other, no crime, respect for the elders, and just all around a good place to live. We're growin’ and we're prosperin'.”
I waited.
“But, well, we find now that some of our folks can't have no more babies, and the women that do, they have mostly girls. We need some men. Certain special kind of men.”
I started laughing. This was too good to be true. They wanted me for stud service. I couldn't stop laughing.
“Crude!” one of the women said, scowling.
“This's awkward enough for us, boy, don't make it no harder.” Lew was embarrassed.
Here I'd spent most of Blood's and my time aboveground hunting up tail, and down here they wanted me to service the local ladyfolk. I sat down on the floor and laughed till tears ran down my cheeks.
Finally, I got up and said, “Sure. Okay. But if I do, there's a couple of things I want.”
Lew looked at me close.
“The first thing I want is that Quilla June. I'm gonna fuck her blind, and then I'm gonna bang her on the head the way she did me!”
They huddled for a while, then came out and Lew said, “We can't tolerate any violence down here, but I s'pose Quilla June's as good a place to start as any. She's capable, isn't she, Ira?”
A skinny, yellow-skinned man nodded. He didn't look happy about it. Quilla June's old man, I bet.
“Well, let's get started,” I said. “Line ‘em up.” I started to unzip my jeans.
The women screamed, the men grabbed me, and they hustled me off to a boarding house where they gave me a room, and they said I should get to know Topeka a little bit before I went to work because it was, uh, er, well, awkward, and they had to get the folks in town to accept what was going to have to be done ... on the assumption, I suppose, that if I worked out okay they'd import a few more young bulls from aboveground and turn us loose.
So I spent some time in Topeka, getting to know the folks, seeing what they did, how they lived.
It was nice, real nice.
They rocked in rockers on the front porches, they raked their lawns, they hung around the gas station, they stuck pennies in gumball machines, they painted white stripes down the middle of the road, they sold newspapers on the corners, they listened to oompah bands in a shell in the park, they played hopscotch and pussy-in-the-corner, they polished fire engines, they sat on benches reading, they washed windows and
pruned bushes, they tipped their hats to ladies, they collected milk bottles in wire carrying-racks, they groomed horses and threw sticks for their dogs to retrieve, they dove into the communal swimming pool, they chalked vegetable prices on a slate outside the grocery, they walked hand-in-hand with some of the ugliest chicks I've ever seen, and they bored the ass offa me.
Inside a week I was ready to scream.
I could feel that tin can closing in on me.
I could feel the weight of the earth over me.
They ate artificial shit: artificial peas and fake meat and make-believe chicken and ersatz corn and bogus bread, and it all tasted like chalk and dust to me.
Polite? Christ, you could puke from the lying, hypocritical crap they called civility. Hello Mr. This and Hello Mrs. That. And how are you? And how is little Janie? And how is business? Are you going to the sodality meeting Thursday? And I started gibbering in my room at the boarding house.
The clean, sweet, neat, lovely way they lived was enough to kill a guy. No wonder the men couldn't get it up and make babies that had balls instead of slots.
The first few days, everyone watched me like I was about to explode and cover their nice white-washed fences with shit. But after a while, they got used to seeing me. Lew took me over to the Mercantile, and got me fitted out with a pair of bib overalls and a shirt that any solo could've spotted a mile away. That Mez, that dippy bitch who'd called me a killer, she started hanging around, finally said she wanted to cut my hair, make me look civilized. But I was hip to where she was at. Wasn't a bit of the mother in her.
“What'sa'matter, cunt,” I pinned her. “Your old man isn't taking care of you?”
She tried to stick her fist in her mouth, and I laughed like a loon. “Go chop off his balls, baby. My hair stays the way it is.” She cut and run. Gone like she had a diesel tail-pipe.
It went on like that for a while. Me just walking around, them coming and feeding me, keeping all their young meat out of my way till they got the town stacked-away for what was coming with me.
Jugged like that, my mind wasn't right for a while. I got all claustrophobed, clutched, went and sat under the porch in the dark at the rooming house. Then that passed, and I got piss-mean, snapped at them, then surly, then quiet, then just mud dull. Quiet.