A number of men and women had been whisked away to probable death when Phizwhiz had suddenly started the sidewalk rolling at top speed, but the remaining troops had managed to pry up a large piece of the sidewalk. Underneath they'd found a coaxial cable some two feet across, and the rest of the day had been devoted to cutting through it with lasers. Periodically machines had come hurtling down the walktube towards them, but, in the end, the cable had been fully severed.
The problem now was going to be to keep Phizwhiz's robots from repairing the cable break. A barrier and a large group of armed men and women had been left there to prevent this. For now, though, Phizwhiz no longer controlled the Eastside.
This meant that it would be safe to enter the waterworks, the sewage plant, the hydroponic farm, the cloning center—and try to get them running again. There would, of course, be the microwave-controlled repair robots to contend with, but the threat they posed was limited in comparison to that of a whole factory. Also, several detachments of men were planning to knock out Phizwhiz's microwave antennae the next day.
Taking and holding the Eastside was important not only because of the utilities, but because the robot factories were there . . . and they'd been running around the clock. The speculation was that Phizwhiz was designing and building specially designed killer machines which would be less vulnerable and more deadly than the taxis and the repair robots. But now the production of killer robots had been halted by the cutting of the control cable.
The mood in Waxy's was one of elation over the day's success and Vernor's return. Toast after toast was drunk, smoked, injected, and snorted. Soon, the room seemed like a solid hypercube of four-dimensional spacetime, so distinctly did Vernor see the trails of moving objects.
Mick was standing in front of him with a pornographically sexy girl. "This is Ramona," Mick said. "Who saw you up in the sky."
Sky? With A—put that away. "How'd I look," said Vernor.
"Astral," she answered, nudging him with her breast.
"I'm strictly gross material plane, darling," Vernor answered, squeezing her bottom, whose cheeks were exposed by a cut-out in her tight pants. "Oh, you feel so lush and ripe."
Ramona smiled and kissed him, pushing her tongue lazily against his. With a gentle, knowing hand, she felt his crotch. "Last time I saw this thing, it looked like Florida."
Vernor and Ramona had a good time with each other in Vernor's room above the barroom at Waxy's. When he awoke, she was gone, and he could hear voices downstairs.
He went down to find Mick and Oily Allie. "You smell
good
, Vernor," Mick said leaning close and sniffing him. "I hope you didn't make Ramona do nothing she never done before."
"That might be hard," said Oily Allie. She was wearing ragged jeans and a stained black T-shirt showing off her muscular arms.
"Is there any food?" asked Vernor. The Dreamfood taps still worked, but the food which came out was poisoned, natch.
Mick reached into a crate behind the bar. "We've got some vintage tubes. Green?"
"Green." Vernor squeezed down the paste. "So, are we going to find the Professor today?"
"Today's the day," Oily Allie responded, picking up her laser and patting it. "Not many folks can handle this baby," she said proudly. Indeed the laser must have weighed seventy pounds. Allie had stolen it from a taxi factory where she worked before the War. It had been used to cut thick sheets of plastic in the factory, but the ingenious Allie had turned it into a highly effective weapon.
"Right," Mick said. "You and me and Oily Allie are going into the Eastside to the Professor's warehouse."
"What about all the vans and robots?" Vernor asked. "Maybe it would be wise to wait until the microwave towers are down."
Mick looked unconcerned. "Ah, we'll just keep off the streets. Stay high, ya dig?"
"You're the General," Vernor answered.
Allie gave Vernor a backpack which she said would be helpful, and then they set off for the Eastside.
Vernor felt a little dazed from all the drugs he had taken the night before. He was still having his looping dreams . . . where a thought would seem to travel around some internal Circular Scale loop of his all night . . . now shrinking down out of his consciousness, now slowly gathering itself in his mind from every direction. It was not necessarily unpleasant to loop something all night. Last night, for instance, it had been the taste of Ramona's two-tone kisses.
The trip around Circular Scale had definitely altered his mind. Not only were there these strange looping dreams, there were unexpected thoughts which would arise full-blown. Where, for instance, had the idea of vaulting above the taxis' point of impact come from? He hadn't known he was planning to do that until it was over. It was not just that he was having more thoughts, some of his thoughts seemed to have no logical connection with his usual thoughts.
They were approaching the region where Dreamtown shaded into the Eastside. There were fewer and fewer people to be seen, and after Oily Allie had blasted two robots and a taxi they knew they'd entered Phizwhiz's turf.
"How far do you figure it is from here, Vernor?" Mick asked.
"Twenty blocks at least."
Oily Allie made a brief mental calculation. "We better hit the sky. If we stay down here it's going to take about three blasts a block to handle the robots." She patted her laser. "The charge on this laser's only good for thirty blasts."
There were still some apartment buildings on this street. They entered one and climbed the stairs to the flat roof. Most of the buildings in this part of the Eastside were about the same height, and it wouldn't have been too difficult to simply walk the twenty blocks by moving from roof to roof—that is if there had not been streets and alleys separating the buildings. As it was, they were able to walk about fifty yards until they came to a gap of some thirty feet between roofs.
Vernor leaned over and looked down. They were seven stories up. There was a small street down there with a few idling robots.
"Well, gang," he said. "Maybe Mick can jump that, but think of poor Allie here with that heavy laser, and me with my backpack . . . " Mick and Allie didn't seem to be listening.
Vernor was alarmed. "Are you two nuts? Jump thirty feet? Are we going to leave all our stuff here? And even if we do, I really don't..."
Mick glanced over. "Come on, Vernor, cut the shit. Get the gear out of your pack. Oily Allie's built us three flying machines."
Oily Allie, a mad Marie Curie of the times, had been fond of building various unsafe gadgets out of odds and ends which she stole from her factory in the pre-War days. Vernor remembered now that Allie had built some sort of personal rocket which she tested in the park at night—but surely not under such stringent conditions as jumping thirty feet between two seven-story buildings.
Vernor opened his pack. It contained a number of tubes, some of which seemed to be hissing. Oily Allie quickly snapped the tubes together until she had three T's. One for each of them. On each T, the upright was a tube about four feet long and three inches in diameter; it had small vents on the sides, an adjustable diaphragm closing one end, and a solid cross-bar attached to the other end.
"Not a very hefty rocket," ventured Vernor.
"Doesn't have to be," Oily Allie beamed. "And rocket ain't really the right word. It's an anti-rocket. It sucks. Show him, Mick."
Mick stuck the upright of the T out between his legs, with the cross-bar behind him. He was sitting on the cross-bar and the diaphragm end of the vented tube was sticking up at the sky. He reached up and moved a lever to open a tiny hole in the diaphragm closing off the top end of the tube.
The tube jerked up to a vertical position and slowly lifted Mick upwards. When he was some twenty feet above them he pushed forward on the big tube with his hands and back on the cross-bar with his thighs so that the power tube was no longer vertical. It continued drawing him up, but now at an angle. Soon Turner was over the roof on the other side of the street. He let the power tube return to the vertical, adjusted the diaphragm to a pinhole opening, and floated down to the roof on the other side of the street. Grinning, he looked across at Vernor and gave him the finger.
"Get it?" Oily Allie asked. "This lever opens and closes the hole at the top. The air gets sucked in there and the sucking lifts you. That's all there is to it." Allie paused to mount her anti-rocket. "Would you believe those wimps at the factory were using these things to run a fucking ventilation system?"
"How does it work?" Vernor asked, fascinated. "What does the sucking?"
"I've got a tiny black hole mounted in there," Allie explained. "Matter just disappears into it. This little piggie could soak up the whole atmosphere in a couple thousand years."
Vernor wanted to ask more questions, but some roofing robots were approaching them. He mounted his cross-bar. "Easy on that control," Allie shouted, but too late.
In his unfamiliarity with the lever's sensitivity, Vernor had opened the aperture in the top end of the power-tube much too far. He shot upwards to a height of a hundred yards above the roof tops before he managed to stop the aperture down.
Mick was a tiny figure on the roof across the street, and Allie was at the top of a practiced parabola which would land her next to Turner in seconds. Vernor, however, was falling like a stone towards the robot on the roof below him.
He tried to ease the tube's hole open just a little, but again he overdid it, blasting up to a position much higher than his original position. This time, instead of completely closing the opening he managed to leave a hole just large enough to balance his weight.
He was sitting there on his T-bar, hugging the power tube, many hundreds of yards above street-level. Mick and Allie appeared to be doubled over with laughter, though it was hard to tell from so great a distance. Fuck 'em.
His tense muscles relaxed a little and he was able to look around. He had a great view in all directions. Ahead lay the Eastside, factories and warehouses of various shapes jammed together like the tubes in an antique radio. The urban residential districts lay behind him . . . on the left Dreamtown with its high-rises; and on the right the Waterfront district where the factory workers lived.
By craning hard he could make out the ribbon of the river through the buildings of the Waterfront; and beyond the river rose the towers of the business district. There was nothing but air between him and the EM building, some five miles away.
He could make out the bands and patches of tract homes ringed around these urban districts. They stretched on mile after mile . . . a suburban sea dotted here and there with other urban centers. The City.
It was so
big
. Sure they might be able to organize the Dreamtown of one center . . . but the rest? Let it be, a voice in Vernor's mind seemed to say, you don't
have
to organize other people's lives.
But what if they're assholes
? he asked. And what if
you
are, the voice answered.
A slight breeze had carried him to a position over the block of roofs where Mick and Allie were. Cautiously, Vernor closed the tube opening a little more, and he drifted down.
Vernor's handling of his anti-rocket . . . actually Oily Allie called it a sky-sucker . . . grew smoother, and soon the three of them were hopping several blocks at a time together.
"What's the highest you've gone?" Vernor asked Allie during one such hop. The sky-suckers operated soundlessly, except for the rushing of the air into the tube, so it was easy to talk.
"Up past the clouds a couple of times," Allie answered. "Gets cold up there, though. Windy, too. One time I got all screwed up inside a cloud and came out headed straight down at top speed." Oily Allie chuckled, "The G's snapped the T-bar off when I pulled back up . . . I was hugging the power tube for what they call dear life. My hands were slipping and I couldn't reach the control—"
Vernor had suddenly lost interest in this conversation, and he began scanning the buildings ahead. "There's the plastics factory, Mick," he shouted.
"Yeah. Let's land there and get our bearings."
They landed on the barrel-vaulted roof of the factory. They could hear robots moving about inside. "There's the street the loach coach was driving us on after our scale trip," said Mick, pointing.
Vernor nodded, and they began hopping along the roofs of the buildings lining the street in question. Soon they were above the spot where Kurtowski's bomb had scarred the street's surface. And there was the alley where they'd crawled through the little hole.
One last hop with the sky-suckers and they were on top of the warehouse containing the Professor's hide-out. "Should we blast in through the front door?" suggested Vernor.
"Better not," Mick answered. "He might want to keep using that door. Let's go in through the roof. Allie?"
Oily Allie hefted her laser doubtfully. "It'll take a lot of power. I'll have to run it continuous for a couple of minutes to cut a hole big enough for us."
"Shit, man, we're not going to have to blast any more robots," Mick responded. "Anything hassles us we just turn on the sky-suckers and we're gone."
"O.K." Allie said, switching on the heavy industrial laser. At full power, it was able to cut a circle through the roof's material in a matter of minutes, although the beam seemed noticeably weaker by the time the cut-out disk of roof crashed down into the warehouse.
They peered in. It was indeed the right place.
"Hey, Professor," Vernor yelled, but only echoes answered him.
"His room's soundproofed," Mick pointed out.
"Oh, yeah," Vernor answered. "Well, let's float down on the sky-suckers."
Moments later the three of them were in the aisles of the gloomy warehouse, lit only by the sun streaming in through the hole in the roof sixty feet above them. The fifty foot mounds of crates surrounded them as before.