He got up and went for the fourth kit by the elevators. A sound in the hallway spun him around—he had left the gun by the bombs—but the doorway was empty-dark and the sound (whisper of silk?) was no more. If it had been at all. His own sound, it might have been, reflected back at him.
Watching the doorway, he backed to the kit, caught up its strap, and brought it quickly to the other kits; kneeled again and brought the gun close to his side. He opened the kit, pulled out straw, and lifted out three bombs and fitted them in with the others. Three rows of six. He covered them and pressed the kit closed, then put his arm through the strap and lodged it on his shoulder. He raised the kit carefully against his hip. The bombs in it shifted heavily.
The gun with the kits was an L-beam too, newer-looking than the one he had. He picked it up and opened it. A stone was in the generator’s place. He put the gun down, took one of the knives—black-handled, pre-U, its blade worn thin but sharp—and slipped it into his right-hand pocket. Taking the working gun and holding the kit with his fingers under its bottom, he got up from his knees, stepped over an empty kit, and went quietly to the doorway.
Darkness and silence were outside it. He waited till he could see more clearly, then walked to the left. A giant telecomp clung to the display wall (it had been broken, hadn’t it, when he had been there before?); he passed it and stopped. Someone lay near the wall ahead, motionless.
But no, it was a stretcher, two stretchers, with pillows and blankets. The blankets Papa Jan and he had wrapped around them. The very same two, conceivably.
He stood for a moment, remembering.
Then he went on. To the door. The door that Papa Jan had pushed him through. And the scanner beside it, the first he had ever passed without touching. How frightened he had been!
This time you don’t have to push me, Papa Jan, he thought.
He opened the door a bit, looked in at the landing—brightly lit, empty—and went in.
And down the stairs into coolness. Quickly now, thinking of the boy and the woman upstairs, who might soon be coming to, crying an alarm.
He passed the door to the first level of memory banks.
And the second.
And came to the end of the stairs, the bottom-level door.
He put his right shoulder against it, held the gun ready, and turned the knob with his left hand.
He eased the door slowly open. Red lights gleamed in dimness, one of the walls of transmitting-receiving equipment. The low ceiling glowed faintly. He opened the door wider. A railed refrigerator pit lay ahead of him, blue arms upreaching; beyond it, a pillar, a pit, a pillar, a pit. The reactors were at the other end of the room, red domes doubled in the glass of the dimly lit programming room. Not a member in sight, closed doors, silence—except for a whining sound, low and steady. He opened the door wider, stepping into the room with it, and saw the second wall of equipment sparked with red lights.
He went farther into the room, caught the door edge behind him and let it pull itself away toward closing. He lowered the gun, thumbed the strap up off his shoulder, and let the kit down gently to the floor. His throat was clamped, his head torn back. A green-silk elbow was under his jaw, the arm crushing his neck, choking him. His gun-wrist was locked in a powerful hand and “You liar, liar,” Wei whispered in his ear, “what a pleasure to kill you.”
He pulled at the arm, punched it with his free left hand; it was marble, a statue’s arm in silk. He tried to back his feet into a stance for throwing Wei off him, but Wei moved backward too, keeping him arched and helpless, dragging him beneath the turning glowing ceiling; and his hand was bent around and smashed, smashed, smashed against hard railing, and the gun was gone, clanging in the pit. He reached back and grabbed Wei’s head, found his ear and wrenched at it. His throat was crushed tighter by the hard-muscled arm and the ceiling was pink and pulsing. He thrust his hand down into Wei’s collar, squeezed his fingers under a band of cloth. He wound his hand in it, driving his knuckles as hard as he could into tough ridged flesh. His right hand was freed, his left seized and pulled at. With his right he caught the wrist at his neck, pulled the arm open. He gasped air down his throat.
He was flung away, thrown flat against red-lit equipment, the torn band wound around his hand. He grabbed two handles and pulled out a panel, turned and flung it at Wei coming at him. Wei struck it aside with an arm and kept coming, both hands raised to chop. Chip crouched, his left arm up. (“Keep low, Green-eye!” Captain Gold shouted.) Blows hit his arm; he punched at Wei’s heart. Wei backed off, kicking at him. He got away from the wall, circled outward, stuffed his numbed hand down into his pocket and found the knife handle. Wei rushed at him and chopped at his neck and shoulders. With his left arm raised, he cut the knife up out of his pocket and stuck it into Wei’s middle—partway in, then hard, all the way, hilt into silk. Blows kept hitting him. He pulled the knife out and backed away.
Wei stayed where he was. He looked at Chip, at the knife in his hand, looked down at himself. He touched his waist and looked at his fingers. He looked at Chip.
Chip circled, watching him, holding the knife.
Wei lunged. Chip knifed, slashed Wei’s sleeve, but Wei caught his arm in both hands and drove him back against railing, kneeing at him. Chip caught Wei’s neck and squeezed, squeezed as hard as he could inside the torn green-and-gold collar. He forced Wei off him, turned from the railing, and squeezed, kept squeezing while Wei held his knife-arm. He forced Wei back around the pit. Wei struck with one hand at his wrist, knocked it downward; he pulled his arm free and knifed at Wei’s side. Wei dodged and spilled over the railing, fell into the pit and fell flat on his back on a cylindrical steel housing. He slid off it and sat leaning against blue pipe, looking up at Chip with his mouth open, gasping, a black-red stain in his lap.
Chip ran to the kit. He picked it up and walked back quickly down the side of the room, holding the kit on his arm. He put the knife in his pocket—it fell through but he let it—ripped the kit open and tucked its cover back under it. He turned and walked backward toward the end of the equipment wall, stopped and stood facing the pits and the pillars between them.
He backhanded sweat from his mouth and forehead, saw blood on his hand and wiped it on his side.
He took one of the bombs from the kit, held it back behind his shoulder, aimed, and threw it. It arched into the center pit. He put his hand on another bomb. A thunk sounded from the pit, but no explosion came. He took out the second bomb and threw it harder into the pit.
The sound it made was flatter and softer than the first bomb’s.
The railed pit stayed as it was, blue arms reaching up from it.
Chip looked at it, and looked at the rows of white straw-stuck bombs in the kit.
He took out another one and hurled it as hard as he could into the nearer pit.
A thunk again.
He waited, and went cautiously toward the pit; went closer, and saw the bomb on the cylindrical steel housing, a blob of white, a white clay breast.
A high-pitched gasping sound came sifting from the farthest pit. Wei. He was laughing.
These three were her bombs, the shepherd’s, Chip thought. Maybe she did something to them. He went to the middle of the equipment wall and stood squarely facing the center pit. He hurled a bomb. It hit a blue arm and stuck to it, round and white.
Wei laughed and gasped. Scrapings, sounds of movement, came from the pit he was in.
Chip hurled more bombs. One of them may work, one of them will work! (“Throw and boom,” she had said. “Glad to get them into the can.” She wouldn’t have lied to him. What had gone wrong with them?) He hurled bombs at the blue arms and the pillars, plastered the square steel pillars with flat white overlapping discs. He hurled all the “bombs,” hurled the last one clean across the room; it splattered wide on the opposite equipment wall.
He stood with the empty kit in his hand.
Wei laughed loud.
He was sitting astride pit railing, holding th
e gun in both hands, pointing it at Chip. Black-red smears ran down his clinging coverall legs; red leaked over his sandal straps. He laughed more. “What do you think?” he asked. “Too cold? Too damp? Too dry? Too old? Too what?” He took one hand from the gun, reached back behind him, and eased down off the railing. Lifting his leg over it, he winced and drew in breath hissingly. “Ooh Jesus Christ,” he said, “you really hurt this body. Ssss! You really did it damage.” He stood and held the gun with both hands again, facing Chip. He smiled. “Idea,” he said. “You give me yours, right? You hurt a body, you give me another one. Fair? And—neat, economical! What we have to do now is shoot you in the head, very carefully, and then between us we’ll give the doctors a long night’s work.” He smiled more broadly. “I promise to keep you ‘in condition,’ Chip,” he said, and walked forward with slow stiff steps, his elbows tight to his sides, the gun clasped before him chest-high, aimed at Chip’s face.
Chip backed to the wall.
“I’ll have to change my speech to newcomers,” Wei said. “ ‘From here down I’m Chip, a programmer who almost fooled me with his talk and his new eye and his smiles in the mirror.’ I don’t think we’ll have any more newcomers though; the risk has begun to outweigh the amusement.”
Chip threw the kit at him and lunged, leaped at Wei and threw him backward to the floor. Wei cried out, and Chip, lying on him, wrestled for the gun in his hand. Red beams shot from it. Chip forced the gun to the floor. An explosion roared. He tore the gun from Wei’s hand and got off him, got up to his feet and backed away and turned and looked.
Across the room, a cave, crumbling and smoking, hollowed the middle of the wall of equipment—where the bomb he had thrown had been splattered. Dust shimmered in the air and a wide arc of black fragments lay on the floor.
Chip looked at the gun and at Wei. Wei, on an elbow, looked across the room and up at Chip.
Chip backed away, toward the end of the room, toward its corner, looking at the white-plastered pillars, the white-hung blue arms over the center pit. He raised the gun.
“Chip!” Wei cried. “It’s yours! It’ll be yours some day! We both can live! Chip, listen to me,” he said, leaning forward, “there’s joy in having it, in controlling, in being the only one. That’s the absolute truth, Chip. You’ll see for yourself. There’s joy in having it.”
Chip fired the gun at the farther pillar. A red thread hit above the white discs; another hit directly on one. An explosion flashed and roared, thundered and smoked. It subsided and the pillar was bent slightly toward the other side of the room.
Wei moaned grievingly. A door beside Chip started to open; he pushed it closed and stood back against it. He fired the gun at the bombs on the blue arms. Explosion roared, flame erupted, and a louder explosion blasted from the pit, mashing him against the door, breaking glass, flinging Wei to the swaying wall of equipment, slamming doors that had opened at the other side of the room. Flame filled the pit, a huge shuddering cylinder of yellow-orange, railed around and drumming at the ceiling. Chip raised his arm against the heat of it.
Wei climbed to all fours and onto his feet. He swayed and started stumblingly forward. Chip shot a red thread to his chest, and another, and he turned away and stumbled toward the pit. Flames feathered his coveralls, and he dropped to his knees, fell forward on the floor. His hair caught fire, his coveralls burned.
Blows shook the door and cries came from behind it. The other doors opened and members came in. “Stay back!” Chip shouted, and aimed the gun at the nearer pillar and fired. Explosion roared, and the pillar was bent.
The fire in the pit lowered, and the bent pillars slowly turned, screeching.
Members came into the room. “Get back!” Chip shouted, and they retreated to the doors. He moved into the corner, watching the pillars, the ceiling. The door beside him opened. “Stay back!” he shouted, pressing against it.
The steel of the pillars split and rolled open; a chunk of concrete slid from the nearer one.
The blackened ceiling cracked, groaned, sagged, dropped fragments.
The pillars broke and the ceiling fell. Memory banks crashed into the pits; mammoth steel blocks smashed down on one another and slid thunderously, butted into the walls of equipment. Explosions roared in the nearest and farthest pits, lifting blocks and cushioning them in flames.
Chip raised his arm against the heat. He looked where Wei had been. A block was there, its edge above the cracked floor.
More groaning and cracking sounded—from the blackness above, framed by the ceiling’s broken fire-lit borders. And more banks fell, pounded down on the ones below, crushing and bursting them. Memory banks filled the opening, sliding, rumbling.
And the room, despite the fires, cooled.
Chip lowered his arm and looked—at the dark shapes of fire-gleaming steel blocks piled through the broken border of ceiling. He looked and kept looking, and then he moved around the door and pushed his way out through the members staring in.
He walked with the gun at his side through members and programmers running toward him down white-tiled corridors, and through more programmers running down carpeted corridors hung with paintings. “What is it?” Karl shouted, stopping and grabbing his arm.
Chip looked at him and said, “Go see.”
Karl let go of him, glanced at the gun and at his face, and turned and ran.
Chip turned and kept walking.
6
HE WASHED, sprayed the bruises on his hand and some cuts on his face, and put on paplon coveralls. Closing them, he looked around at the room. He had planned to take the bedcover, for Lilac to use for dressmaking, and a small painting or something for Julia; now, though, he didn’t want to. He put cigarettes and the gun in his pockets. The door opened and he pulled the gun out again. Deirdre stared at him, looking frantic.
He put the gun back in his pocket.
She came in and closed the door behind her. “It was you,” she said.
He nodded.
“Do you realize what you’ve done?”
“What you didn’t do,” he said. “What you came here to do and talked yourself out of.”
“I came here to stop it so it could be reprogrammed,” she said, “not to destroy it completely!”
“It was being reprogrammed, remember?” he said. “And if I’d stopped it and forced a real reprogramming—I don’t know how, but if I had—it would still have wound up the same way sooner or later. The same Wei. Or a new one—me. ‘There’s joy in having it’: those were his last words. Everything else was rationalization. And self-deception.”
She looked away, angrily, and back at him. “The whole place is going to cave in,” she said.
“I don’t feel any tremors,” he said.
“Well everyone’s going. The ventilation may stop. There’s danger of radiation.”
“I wasn’t planning to stay,” he said.
She opened the door and looked at him and went out.
He went out after her. Programmers hurried along the corridor in both directions, carrying paintings, pillowcase bundles, dictypes, lamps. (“Wei was in it! He’s dead!” “Stay away from the kitchen, it’s a madhouse!”) He walked among them. The walls were bare except for large frames hanging empty. (“Sirri says it was Chip, not the new ones!” “—twenty-five years ago, “Unify the islands, we’ve got enough programmers,’ but he gave me a quote about selfishness.”)
The escalators were working. He rode up to the top level and went around through the steel door, half open, to the bathroom where the boy and the woman were. They were gone.
He went down one level. Programmers and members holding paintings and bundles were pushing into the room that led to the tunnel. He went into the merging crowd. The door ahead was down but must have been partway up because everyone kept moving forward slowly. (“Quickly!” “Move, will you?” “Oh Christ and Wei!”)
His arm was grabbed and Madhir glared at him, hugging a filled tablecloth to his chest. “Was it you?” he
asked.
“Yes,” Chip said.
Madhir glared, trembled, flushed. “Madman!” he shouted. “Maniac! Maniac!”
Chip pulled his arm free and turned and moved forward.
“Here he is!” Madhir shouted. “Chip! He’s the one! He’s the one who did it! Here he is! Here! He’s the one who did it”
Chip moved forward with the crowd, looking at the steel door ahead, holding the gun in his pocket. (“You brother-fighter, are you crazy?” “He’s mad, he’s mad!”)
They walked up the tunnel, quickly at first, then slowly, an endless straggle of dark laden figures. Lamps shone here and there along the line, each lamp drawing with it a section of shining plastic roundness.
Chip saw Deirdre sitting at the side of the runnel. She looked at him stonily. He kept walking, the gun at his side.
Outside the tunnel they sat and lay in the clearing, smoked and ate and talked in huddles, rummaged in their bundles, traded forks for cigarettes.
Chip saw stretchers on the ground, four or five of them, a member holding a lamp beside them, other members kneeling.
He put the gun in his pocket and went over. The boy and the woman lay on two of the stretchers, their heads bandaged, their eyes closed, their sheeted chests moving. Members were on two other stretchers, and Barlow, the head of the Nutritional Council, was on another, dead-looking, his eyes closed. Rosen kneeled beside him, taping something to his chest through cut-open coveralls.
“Are they all right?” Chip asked.
“The others are,” Rosen said. “Barlow’s had a heart attack.” He looked up at Chip. “They’re saying that Wei was in there,” he said.
“He was,” Chip said.
“You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Chip said. “He’s dead.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Rosen said. He shook his head and took a small something from a member’s hand and screwed it onto what he had taped to Barlow’s chest.
Chip watched for a moment, then went over to the entrance of the clearing and sat down against stone and lit a cigarette. He toed his sandals off and smoked, watching members and programmers come out of the tunnel and walk around and find places to sit. Karl came out with a painting and a bundle.