It wasn’t Sunny who walked through the hatch. It was Franklin. He looked at me and smiled. “I bet you were expecting your plaything,” he said. “Sorry to disappoint you. She won’t be returning.”
His eyes were so intent on mine that he didn’t even notice the water on the floor. A moment passed before he spotted my bloody leg, and his expression went serious. If they couldn’t risk a hypodermic needle penetrating my skin, the inch-wide hole I had carved in my thigh might be a deal-breaker.
Franklin looked around the cell. The bastard stared at the
geyser coming from the toilet. He grinned, and said, “You’ve been busy.”
This is it. This is the moment,
I thought. I focused my thoughts on the hormone flooding my veins and the pain in my thigh, and I launched myself at him. I wanted to leap from the cot, crack him across his skull, and drown him; but the most I could manage was to step into the water and stand on my sagging legs with the pipe hidden behind my back.
The dumb speck still had not pieced it all together. He looked at me, brushed back his hair, and said, “Able to stand up, are you?” He wore the same movie-star smile he’d had when he’d posed me on the toilet.
Franklin’s smile vanished a moment before I stabbed the bloody end of the pipe into his forehead.
He shrieked and fell into the water, as I stumbled out of the cell.
Had I been more sure of my strength, I would have drowned the bastard or bashed his head with the pipe. There was nothing I wanted more than to kill him; but weakened as I was, I wasn’t sure I could win a fight with a three-year-old. Lifting the pipe wore me out. I didn’t have strength enough to keep swinging, so I ran, not knowing whom I could turn to if I managed to escape.
I had no allies in Mars Spaceport. Colonel Riley was a traitor, possibly brainwashed the same way they’d been trying to brainwash me. Gordon Hughes might help me; but I thought he would be too weak an ally. Like me, he was just another inmate on death row.
In her own way, Sunny was worse than Franklin.
I found a control panel with buttons and levers and cameras outside my cell. Its workings were labeled, but in an unreadable language. I recognized the letters but not the words.
Inside the cell, Franklin lay on his back on the wet floor. If I went in…If I turned him on his stomach…if I forced his face into the water…I could place my hands on the back of his head and press all of my weight down on them.
The bastard stirred and moaned. One of his legs rolled.
I needed to make a choice. If that bastard caught me, he
would kill me. I could try to drown him. I could try to hide. He lifted an arm and rubbed a hand against his damaged face.
I stumbled away as fast as I could.
As I headed down the hall, I heard sloshing behind me. It did not sound like he had made it to his feet yet. He yelled, “Come back here, you specking son of a bitch!”
There was a silent pause. A moment later he screamed, “Speck! You speck! You cut me! You specking bastard, you cut me!”
The hall was dim…damn near dark. I ran a few steps, walked a few steps, and staggered on. My brain felt like it was twisting inside my head. Needing to rest, I promised myself I would sleep for two days straight when I made it out of here.
If I made it out.
I would not need to run far. If I was right, and this was the spaceport, there would be people. There were people everywhere. I did not have the strength to run very far, but I would not need to. If I made it out of this holding area, I would find crowded halls and hide among the picnickers and rest. What other choice did I have?
I held on to the pipe as I stumbled past the row of dark, empty cells that neighbored mine. All the while, Franklin continued screaming, yelling for me to come back, swearing that he would murder me. I should have stayed at the control panel and tried to seal him in. Maybe I should have rolled the dice and tried to drown him. It was too late to go back.
The cell doors all hung open, the rooms inside as dark as night until I reached the final door. Light shone from that final cell. As I approached it, I raised the pipe above my head in case someone waited inside for me. Then I saw her body.
Sunny lay on the floor exactly as I had imagined her so many times. Her face had turned purple. Her lips had turned blue and formed a circle around her swollen tongue. Her vacant eyes stared up at me.
“Where are you?” Franklin screamed from the cell.
Franklin had ripped Sunny’s clothes, torn her dress and lab coat to shreds that hung from her shoulders.
I wanted to kill him. I wanted to return to the cell and beat the son of a bitch’s head in.
Sunny was psychotic, and she would have destroyed me,
but she had saved me as well. I felt something for her, maybe even sympathy; and I realized that I would have saved her if I could have. Had there been time, I might have kissed her dead forehead just as I had fantasized so many times.
In the fantasies, I had crushed her throat and killed her. Now that I actually saw her dead, I felt sorry for her.
I heard splashing and knew Franklin had finally climbed to his feet. He was hurt, though, hopefully badly hurt. The way I had stabbed that pipe into his forehead should have messed up his balance. He would be stronger than me but not much faster. I had probably bought myself time. After one last glance at the girl who had helped me and tortured me, I shuffled into the darkness.
“Where are you, you specking son of a bitch!”
If Franklin caught me, gurneys and gases would be the least of my worries; and that was fine with me. I’d fought enough wars. I was going to die sometime; that was something I accepted. Having my brain gutted and becoming a puppet, that was far worse.
“Harrisssss!” He began shrieking like a wild animal, like an injured animal. There was not a shred of control in the voice that came from the cell.
I rounded a familiar corner and saw the sick bay that Sunny had wheeled me through those many times. It was almost empty and dark, lit only by the soft green glow from an instrument panel. Looking through the window, I saw a pile of corpses, maybe twenty of them, stacked roughly one on top of the other.
I moved like the walking wounded, leaning on walls, hunched over, my right hand still clutching that foot-long pipe, my left arm supporting my weight when I passed walls or rails. I took short steps and fought for balance. My breathing was fine, nothing wrong with my lungs. There was nothing wrong with my heart, either, except that the adrenaline in my blood had it pumping so damn fast.
The air was cold. My breath turned to steam. The bottoms of my bare feet began to stick to the iron floor as I padded on. I could not afford to stay in one place.
I kept expecting to run into other people. I expected to turn a corner and find halls packed with picnickers.
But I continued to move through one dark hall that emptied into another, then another. The place was abandoned. As I stuttered forward, I wondered where they had found so much space in the spaceport. The only explanation I had was that I was wrong about the jail itself. Maybe this was a brig, and I was still on Mars Air Force Base.
Even as I considered the possibility, I knew this had to be the spaceport. This was a civilian facility. The curved doorways, the windows along the hall, the chrome pipes in the cells…this place was built for natural-borns.
“Harris, where are you? Where are you?” Franklin’s voice still had that insane tone.
KLANK! KLANK! KLANK!
Metal hitting metal. He struck the metal walls with a pipe or a hammer to get my attention.
The world started to spin as I pushed forward. I was tired and cold and dizzy from fighting against chemicals meant to paralyze me. I had no idea how they impacted my sensory perceptions. The floor seemed to rise and lower every time I lifted my feet. The walls seemed to bend and close in around me. My breath turned to steam.
I limped ahead.
“I’m coming for you, Harris. Better run. Better run!” Franklin sounded farther away, not closer. Maybe he had taken a wrong turn.
I tried to orient myself.
This had to be an area of the spaceport that was not open to the public.
There have to be people. There are people here…seventeen million. Where are they?
I thought.
I found a hall that was wide and dark, and I followed it. Here and there I saw signs on the walls; but the dark lighting and the drugs played tricks on my perception. I recognized the letters, but the words made no sense.
I had a trace of a memory, something I had dreamed or possibly something I heard while drugged. I remembered a conversation with Don Cutter. His name entered my head, and a wave of hate rolled over me. I tried to resist the feeling. It was all part of the brainwashing. They had trained me to hate my friend.
Have to keep moving,
I told myself. If I could buy myself more time, my strength would return.
The sign over the door said:
PISCINE LUNE
. Was it a hallucination?
I stopped for just a moment and I stared at it. The drugs had addled my brain. I’d never been dyslexic, not until that moment; but the letters I knew, the words I did not.
My head throbbed. The walls around me seemed to bulge and shrink as if inhaling and exhaling. The floor seemed to roll under my feet. I could hear Franklin behind me, far behind me.
I pushed through the door.
There was something in the air; I breathed it in, and it made me dizzy. The room I had entered could not exist, not on a spaceship and certainly not on Mars. It was a chamber as large as any auditorium I had ever seen, bigger than the ones back in the orphanage.
The metal walls formed a dome, and in the center of that dome sat a pool the size of a football field.
The pool was nearly as flat and smooth as a mirror. The only light in the room was the yellow glow rising out of the pool. Powerful lights shone under that water.
I closed the door behind me and stole over for a closer look. The water was brutally cold but not frozen. A metal catwalk spanned the width of the surface. Placed a mere five feet above the water, it was slick and the iron was cold and some kind of gritty white canker had formed on it.
The moon pool,
I reminded myself. Sunny had said “moon pool” and I had not put two and two together. I had heard the term in school and filed it away as trivial. Boats and submarines and underwater buildings had moon pools, open areas that faced down into the water. The water didn’t come in because the air pressure balanced it out.
As I stepped onto that catwalk, I looked up and saw series of cranes hanging above my head.
If I hid in this chamber I would slowly freeze to death. With my body still weak, I could not swim. If Franklin threw me in the water, I would drown. The entire room, with its watery floor and mystic lighting, made me nervous. I peered down into the pool and saw that beneath its lit mouth, it was as dark and mysterious as death, as vast and heartless as outer space.
I backed away from the pool and out the door. If I ran into
Franklin at that moment, I might have welcomed a swift end. He did not scare me as much as the chilly and dark depths of that pool. Franklin was in a rage and had lost control. If he caught me, he would kill me, and everything would end, but that was something I could understand. Those dark waters represented the unknown. Somewhere in my subconscious, the moon pool and reprogramming were almost equivalent, unfathomable depths, unknowable mysteries, the end of existence.
“Harrissss!” the voice was far off, but moving closer. It had a frantic quality.
Some of my strength had returned, and I found I could walk better. I could support my own weight.
I followed the corridor that circled the outside of the enormous domed chamber. The way would have been completely dark except for little lights built into the wall at knee level. I traveled from one light to the next, keeping my steps as silent as possible.
I came to a door, eased it open, and stopped breathing.
There in front of me, spread wide and dark and endless, was an entire abandoned city complete with streets and buildings. This wasn’t Mars Spaceport. This place was large enough to hold a dozen Mars Spaceports.
I knew where I was now. I was no longer on Mars, or even in space at all. I was in one of the abandoned Cousteau deep-sea colonies.
Four hundred years ago, when the Unified Authority had just started exploring the galaxy, a nation called France began an undersea colonization initiative called the Cousteau Oceanic Exploration Program. The ocean, according to the French, was closer than outer space, more safely traveled than outer space, and brimming with life. To prove their point, they constructed three underwater domes in which they nested enormous cities, each of them large enough to house a population of three million people.
Four hundred years had passed, and this fossil still stood. The French abandoned the Cousteau program in 2115. Over the last few centuries, mankind established and lost colonies in the six galactic arms. Man had conquered space and been chased back to Earth, where France’s underwater cities still stood.
Somewhere along the line, I had dismissed them as no more real than Cibola or Mount Olympus. Now mythology had caught up with me.
The top of the dome might have been four hundred feet above me. A halo of pale light shone down from its curvature, artificial light; sunlight could not possibly penetrate this deep in the ocean. That much I knew. The French built their underwater cities near thermal vents, in waters several miles deep.
I looked for anything I could use to seal the door behind me, but I was in an empty street in a vacant city that had never been populated. This place had streets but no cars, apartment buildings without beds, offices without desks or workers. It was the opposite of Mars Spaceport. One hosted millions of people with nowhere to house them; the other had housing for millions and no occupants.
I walked to the nearest building, a four-story framework that had never seen walls. Looking for hiding places on its
naked concrete floor, I passed through its unfinished frame. The building was all girders and framework with no place for concealment.