This Fortress World (22 page)

Laurie! Laurie
!

I found a piece of wrapping paper in the trash and scribbled on it with the burnt head of a match.

I haven't any money to pay you. Sabatini took that. I thought I had found something much more valuable, but somebody took that away, too. I'm sorry I was so stupid. Maybe this will make up for it.

I wrapped the pebble in it and put it on the table and went out the door and down the steps.

I felt the walls close around me.

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There are many patterns for survival, but basically they boil down to three: attack, defense, and concealment.

Attack depends on skill, agility, and weapons. Defense is the fortress system. There are two kinds of concealment: a man can camouflage himself by fading into his surroundings, or he can hide, like the mole.

In the days that followed, I used all of these to stay alive, although why I wanted to stay alive was a question I couldn't answer. At first I went about the business numbly, automatically; later it became a game that was played for the sake of the game.

Camouflage came first. I was already dressed as a ragged freedman. I was part of the city, like the tenements and the warehouses and the dingy stores. But it wasn't good enough. I had no money. I couldn't eat, therefore, without begging, and to beg would be to discard the camouflage. The disguise, moreover, was imperfect; I was known to be dressed as a freedman. Although there were many like me, it wasn't wise to have the field narrowed so small.

I needed money first. There was only one place to get it; I couldn't take it from those who needed it worse than I did. I hunted the hunters. I hunted them with my bare hands, because I didn't want to hold a gun again. I was sick of killing. I waited patiently near the entertainment district for the hunters to appear. I waited in an alley, unseen, watching, and perhaps I waited also for a glimpse of Laurie, so that I might see her with new eyes and know her for what she was, but she didn't appear. But the hunters came. I saw them coming down the street, the Agents, two of them because they did not go out alone. They were determinedly inconspicuous in their black suits. I didn't know them, but it didn't matter. They were a breed, all guilty, hunters all.

They came by the alley, and I turned and scuffled back through the dark. But when I stopped, I was only a little ways from them, pulled back into a doorway. They hesitated at the mouth of the alley, looking into it, and then, in unison, guns appeared in their hands, and they ran after me.

I stuck out my foot as the one on the left passed me. He tripped. As he fell I clubbed him on the back of the neck. He hit the ground and lay still. A few yards past, the other one stopped, turned, peered blindly into the darkness.

"Sam?" he said. "Sam?"

Silence answered him. Cautiously he came back, his gun probing into the night. When he was close enough, I grabbed his wrist with one hand and hit him in the belly with the other. He doubled up, gasping. As his head came down, my knee came up savagely. It caught him in the face. He flew backward until his head bounced off the wall and collapsed in a huddled heap.

Quickly and efficiently, I stripped them of their clothing. I emptied their money belts into my waist pouch, estimating that I had gained about five hundred chronors. I also pocketed two identity cards which I wanted to inspect later.

I bundled their guns inside their clothes and walked out of the alley, leaving them whitely naked. Two blocks away I dropped the bundle into a trash can.

The bolt of the door yielded to a steady pressure. It squealed once as the screws pulled out of the frame, and then the squalid shop was as silent as it was dark. I listened for a moment. The noise had disturbed no one, or else the owner was afraid to investigate. I walked into the shop.

The light that fought its way through the dirty front window was little more than a slightly grayer shadow, but it was enough for eyes that lived in the night. I pawed through the heaps of used clothing until I found what I wanted. I had already decided on my next disguise.

I pulled a pair of clean, patched pants out of the pile and a shirt to match. On the shirt was the red craft badge of the mechanic. One of the two identity cards had been red. I found a pile of caps and tried them on until I found one that fit.

I picked up the clothes, left ten chronors on the shabby counter to pay for the clothes and the damage to the door, and I went out into the night and closed the door gently behind me.

Abandoned warehouses are friendly places, if you don't mind the company of the things that scurry and the things that crawl. I didn't. The warehouse I found was in a little better shape than the one I had hidden in before. There was no danger, at least, of falling through the floor. I built a nest of boxes in one corner, with a hidden mole-tunnel to crawl through, rolled up my discarded freedman's clothes for a pillow, and slept. My sleep was uneasy and troubled, but it was sleep, and I was thankful for that.

I ate in the small cheap restaurants for the laborers. I ate thin soup and stale bread and almost-rotten fish and paid for them with small coins, grudgingly handed over. But I never ate in the same place twice, and sometimes I would buy bread and cheese and take them back to my hiding place. What the rats didn't eat during the night, I finished for breakfast.

It wasn't much of a life, the mole-life, but it was life. And the game went on.

To be a mole, you have to know the tunnels and diggings of your territory. I learned the city, its main thoroughfares driven through marketplace and slum, straight and wide; its crooked, winding bystreets, wandering where chance and whim had located them; its dark, unexpected alleys, filthy, haphazard, unpredictable. Day after day, night after night, I walked the city, unsuspected, unwatched, until I had it all in my head. I could unroll it like a map.

I would happen upon an Agent, and I would follow him, casually, and he wouldn't know I was there. Sometimes I would learn something vaguely interesting, but mostly it was only exercise and experience. I followed a few of them to a side door of the great palace. Others disappeared into mean houses or lingered in alleys until someone met them. From one of these last encounters I learned that people were still looking for me. I stopped around the corner from the alley and knelt to fasten my shoe and listened.

"What luck?"

"No luck."

"Siller?"

"Dead. Stinking."

"The fool."

"We let him in."

"Are you questioning the Congress?"

"No."

"We can't be too particular. But to let the answer slip away when he had it in his hands!"

"The answer turned out to be rather deadly."

"It usually does. But this fellow Dane is somewhere. Find him. Bring him in."

"Ha!"

"All right. Do your best."

I crept away. The Citizens were still at work.

One day I saw the little, dark Agent with the glittering eyes, Sabatini's man. He didn't recognize me, although I followed him for blocks. He slipped into an alley; as I passed by, he looked around and then went through a narrow door. I made a mental note of the location of the place. One day I might have use for that information.

I trailed one agent beyond the edge of the city. I knelt in the brush while he waited there, looking off occasionally toward the horizon. At last he stood up, shading his eyes, and then I saw it too. It was a black dot in the sky that slowly drew close, its top misty, and became a helicopter and dropped in the clearing. Out of it climbed the little, middleaged man with the bald, shining head, my friend, the Peddler from the port.

I snaked silently through the brush to the other side of the helicopter. The first word I heard was of murder.

"Kill him?" It wasn't the Peddler.

"Yes," the Peddler chirped. "Once he might have been useful to us, but no more. He has been loose too long. He knows too much. It is better for him to die than to help any of the others."

"First he must be found. That is, if one of the others doesn't have him already."

"They had him. First one and then another. They couldn't hold him, not one of them. I don't think he will be captured again. He must die before he decides to use it himself."

"Use what?"

I felt the little man shrugging.

"Someone has been watching me," the Agent said uneasily.

"Who?"

"I don't know. That's the funny part. I would have known if it had been any of the others."

"It must have been Dane." The Peddler's tone was decisive. "He has learned to be more clever than the others. If you get this feeling again, stop and watch everybody who passes, even the ones you would never suspect, most of all the ones you would never suspect. You will recognize him by his face. It has a light band across the eyes."

I shivered. The Peddler was too shrewd. I must be very careful in leaving this place.

They were whispering now, so low that I couldn't hear, but somehow I knew that they were laying a trap. Was it for now or later? I couldn't take a chance.

Noiselessly I crawled into the back of the helicopter, crouching low to keep below the sides. I waited. The ominous whispering went on and on.

"All right," the Peddler said loudly. "Don't get in touch with me unless you have the news I want to hear."

The brush rustled. The little man climbed into the front seat of the helicopter and waited. Minutes passed. They passed for me in an agony of suspense.

"Nothing," someone called from outside.

I saw the Peddler shrug. "It was a guess. You have your orders."

The rotors started spinning overhead. Slowly the airship climbed. I waited until it was several hundred feet above the ground.

"Don't look around," I said. He knew my face, but I'd rather not be put to the trouble of changing my disguise.

His head jerked. His shiny scalp got white.

"I can kill you very easily," I said. "But I won't unless I have to. Why do you want to kill me?"

"If you were there, you heard," he said, looking straight ahead. "You're dangerous."

"Do you always kill what is dangerous? Perhaps I could be useful to you."

"You're an unknown quantity. We can't take a chance."

"Who?"

He was silent. "I won't answer any questions," he said after a moment. "You can't fly this ship."

It was a statement, but I answered it anyway. "No."

"If you keep asking me questions, if you threaten me, I'll crash the ship."

I chuckled. "Go ahead."

The ship flew steadily.

"Turn toward the city," I told him.

He sighed and turned the ship. "What do you want?" I asked him. He knew what I wanted to know. "A galaxy in which we can trade freely."

"A free galaxy?"

"Not necessarily. There's a difference. A free galaxy would be fine if it were possible. It isn't. A balance of power is possible. We must make certain that the power stays balanced."

"And I am the possible unbalancing factor," I said. "And yet you gave me to Sabatini."

"I didn't know who you were. If I had, I would have helped you get away. I still can."

I chuckled again. "No thanks." And quickly, "Don't look back."

His head jerked back to the front.

"Land there, next to the outskirts of the city," I told him.

The ship began to descend.

"Who is 'we'?" I asked. "The Peddlers?"

"Yes."

"You're organized, then."

He was silent. The ship sighed to the ground.

"Put your hands behind you," I said. He thrust them behind the seat. With a piece of rope that was coiled in the seat beside me, I tied his hands together, tightly enough to hold him, loose enough for him to escape within a few minutes. And I was thinking that it would be a great relief to have someone like him on my side, but it was impossible. I ripped a piece of fabric loose from the inside of the ship, folded it, and tied it over his eyes.

I started to get out of the ship and stopped. "I'll tell you something," I said. "Forget about the pebble. I haven't got it, and I don't know where it is. Even if you had it, you couldn't read it. Even if you could read it, it wouldn't help you. In practical value, it's worthless."

He was silent. With his eyes concealed, his face was unreadable. "I believe you," he said. He was telling the truth. I got out of the ship and stood on the ground opposite.

"A word of advice," he said. "Don't overlook the obvious."

I walked away from the ship quickly and disappeared into the city, puzzling over his final statement, wondering what that bit of wisdom had meant. I had decided some time ago that one force in this internecine world had been hiding its hand; I had felt it subtly, now and then, but I couldn't identify it. Something had happened, somewhere, that should have given me a clue, but I couldn't remember what it was. "Don't overlook the obvious," the Peddler had said.

I thought about it all the way across the city and reached no conclusion. And even though my mind was busy, my senses were watchful. They recognized, finally, a familiar neighborhood. I looked up. In front of me was a flight of rickety wooden steps ascending the side of a building. They led to Laurie's apartment.

Something turned over inside me, something I thought had died a long time ago. But it was still alive. It fluttered hopefully in my stomach.

I had wanted the Peddler on my side, but I had realized it was impossible. Now I understood why. Ever since Frieda came into the Cathedral I had been seeking help; I had looked for it everywhere, and I hadn't found it. The reason for that was simple: there wasn't any help. From the beginning I'd been all alone, and the only help I could expect was the kind that came from inside. It was a hard lesson to learn, but I had learned it.

The implications of the thought were interesting. If you're alone, it doesn't matter if you swallow your pride. It doesn't matter to anyone else how you feel, and if there are two hurts and you choose the lesser one, it doesn't matter to anybody but you.