Читать книгу Only Forward - Michael Marshall Smith - Страница 12

On the way back to my apartment I did what I could to come up with a plan of attack. For reasons of my own I was actually pretty excited at the idea of seeing the inside of Stable, but like everybody else, I knew next to nothing about it. What little I did, including the only possible method of entry, I knew from Snedd. I had the notes I’d got him to make after being released from there with numbers on his forehead, but they were very patchy. He didn’t understand why I was so interested in the inside of a Neighbourhood I could never go into, and he wasn’t in the best of moods at the time.

There was no point going back into Red to talk to him now: after eight years, many of them spent out of his head, there was little chance he was going to remember anything new. All I could do was memorise what I had, and try to replicate his entry.

I remembered him being very insistent on one thing: if you’re going to try to break in, do it during the day. Most of the Neighbourhoods are geared for twenty-four-hour living, though activity does thin out a lot at night. It’s only places like Red that go full on all the time. But Stable, Snedd had said, shuts tight at 11.00 p.m. That had been his mistake. He’d broken in at night, because that’s what you generally do, to find himself the only moving person.

Apart from the Stable police, that is. That’s why he’d been caught, and that’s why he was a living time-bomb. He’d been lucky, too. By chance he’d been caught in a built-up area: had it been possible, the police would simply have shot him on sight.

By the time I was near my mono stop the walls of the carriage looked like an explosion in a paint factory as they strove to meet the challenge of evoking my mood. In most Neighbourhoods I have a contact, I have an angle, I have some way of protecting myself, of keeping this just a dangerous game. In the Centre I have Zenda. In Red I have Ji. In Natsci I have a guy called Brian Diode IV, who can break the security code of just about any computer in The City, given the time and enough pizza. In Brandfield I know a girl called Shelby who has a two-person heliporter, which has saved my life more than once.

And so on, and so on. In Stable I had nothing. Blending in was not going to be easy, always assuming I could gain entry in the first place, and if I didn’t, I was going to die.

Also, what the hell was going on in the Centre? I’ve known Zenda a long time, and I’d never seen her looking the way she had tonight. A little paranoia was natural in a Neighbourhood where absolutely everybody was trying to clamber over the top of everybody else, but she hadn’t been looking paranoid. She’d looked like something was worrying her, but she wasn’t sure what it was. I found that very worrying.

Also, who the hell were we dealing with? Any gang who could not only steal an important Actioneer but then sneak him into a forbidden Neighbourhood and keep him there undetected was a group of serious over-achievers. If they found out I was looking for them then the Stable police were going to be the least of my problems, and I wouldn’t have Ji or even Snedd around to help.

How do I get myself into these positions? Why do I do this job? Why do I still need this safety net, this thing to be? Isn’t it time to say goodbye now?

There was a quiet pinging sound, and I looked up to see that the walls were fading to a uniform black. I’d broken the carriage’s mood detector.

Bugger this, I thought. I had to wait till tomorrow anyway. I was going to take a break. I was going to find my cat.

I stayed on the mono to the far side of Colour, and then got off at the transfer portal. I had to go through another Neighbourhood to get where I was going, which meant buying another ticket. An attendant inspected me at the gate, checked that I was wearing quiet shoes, and nodded. I went over to the ticket office and pointed on the map at where I wanted to go. The man behind the counter nodded, and held up three fingers. I handed him three credits as quietly as I could, and he passed me a ticket. Then I tiptoed over to the platform and waited.

The next Neighbourhood along from Colour is Sound, so named because they don’t allow any. When the mono arrived it pulled up with barely a whisper, and the doors opened silently. I stepped into the carriage and sat carefully down on the padded seat. My journey wasn’t going to take that long: Sound isn’t very big, thank Christ. It gives me the creeps.

The carriage was empty. The Sounders have one hour every evening where they’re allowed to go into a small room and shout their heads off, and I was bang in the middle of that hour. I still couldn’t make any noise though, as the carriages have microphones all over the place. If you make any noise a silent alarm goes off somewhere and they come and throw you silently off the mono, and you have to walk silently down the silent streets instead, which is even worse.

So I sat and thought, trying to calm my mood and also to remember as much as possible of what Snedd had told me about Stable.

There wasn’t much. The Neighbourhood had been forbidden right from the start. When The City reorganisation had started to take place, Stable had simply built a wall all around itself, shut out the sky, severed all connections with the outside world and pretended it didn’t exist. The first generation knew it did, of course, but they were forbidden to tell their children. They were happy not to: the first generation stayed in Stable because they liked it that way.

They were all long dead now, and the sixth and seventh generations had no idea the outside world existed. As far as they knew, the whole planet apart from the area they lived in had been destroyed in a nuclear war. They could walk up to the walls and see through windows and sure enough, outside was just a barren red plain blown with radioactive sand. The windows were in fact vidiscreens maintained by the authorities whose job it was to keep things going on the way they were.

The very last thing those authorities want is for anyone to make it in from the outside: it would blow the whole thing and trash hundreds of years of desired deception. Desired, because I’m not talking about repression here. The Stablents aren’t kept in ignorance against their will. It’s all they know, and it’s all they want to know.

A couple got on the mono and tried to engage me in conversation, but as my signing isn’t too hot it was a rather stilted dose of social interaction. They’d clearly been shouting, and looked flushed and excited, obviously keen to get home and make mad, passionate, silent love. After a while they left me to my own silent devices, though they did both keep pointing at my shirt, giving me the thumbs up and smiling broadly. I couldn’t work out what they meant.

At the portal exit I stood still for a moment, gearing myself up, flexing my weirdness-resilience muscles. Sound is a weird Neighbourhood, but where I was going now was far weirder. I was going into the Cat Neighbourhood.

A long time ago, some eccentric who’d gained control of a largely disused Neighbourhood decided to leave it to the cats. The place was a complete mess, falling down and strewn with rubbish and debris. He forced the few remaining people out, built a wall round it and then died, making it irrevocably clear in his will that no one was to live there henceforth except cats.

Ho ho, thought everyone, what a nut. We’ll leave it a couple of years, and then move in. A cat Neighbourhood, ha ha.

And then the cats started to arrive. From all over The City, one by one at first, and then in their droves, the cats appeared. Cats who didn’t have owners, or had cruel ones, cats who weren’t properly looked after, or just wanted a change, cats in their hundreds, and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands, moved into the Neighbourhood.

Interesting, everybody thought.

After a while a few people decided to visit the Neighbourhood, and they discovered two things. Firstly, if you don’t love cats, they won’t let you in. They simply will not let you in. Secondly, that there was something very weird going on. The rubbish and debris had disappeared. The buildings had been cleaned. The grass in the parks was cut. The whole Neighbourhood was absolutely and immaculately clean.

Interesting, everybody thought, slightly uneasily.

The lights work. The plumbing works. People who go into the Neighbourhood to visit their cats sleep in rooms that are as clean as if room service has just that minute left. Each block has a small store on one corner, and there is food in that store, and it’s always fresh. A cat sits on the counter and watches you. You go in, choose what you need, and leave.

Nobody knows how they do this. There are no humans living in the Neighbourhood, absolutely none. I know, I’ve looked. There are just a hell of a lot of cats. Some live there all year round, some just for a few months. They chase things, roll around in the sun, sleep on top of things and underneath things and generally have a fantastic time. And the lights work, and the plumbing works, and the place is immaculately clean.

I walked down the steps from the mono portal and towards the main gate. A huge iron affair, it opens eerily as you approach, and then shuts silently after you. On the other side lies the Path, a wide cobbled street that leads into the heart of the Neighbourhood. The Path has streetlights all along it, old-fashioned lantern types that spread pools of yellow light along the way.

Cat Neighbourhood is a perfectly peaceful place, particularly at night, and I was in no hurry as I walked slowly between the tall old buildings. All around everything was quiet, everything was calm, like a living snapshot from a time long past. For a while the street was deserted, and then in the distance I saw a pale cat walking casually towards me. We drew closer and closer, and when we were a few yards apart the cat sat down, and then rolled over to have his stomach rubbed.

‘Hello, Spangle,’ I said, sitting down to give him a serious tickling. ‘How did you know? How do you guys always know?’

Next morning I was on the mono at 7.00 a.m., hotwired on coffee and feeling tired but alert. I was carrying my gun, a few tricks of the trade and nothing else.

We’d got back to the apartment around midnight, and Spangle had a brilliant time poking around the upturned furniture and bits and pieces while I sorted through my messages. Most were from the contacts I’d phoned that morning, all saying they hadn’t heard anything. There was also a photo of most of someone’s brain, transfaxed by Ji and Snedd, doubtless stoned out of their minds. Then with the aid of a lot of coffee I’d worked through the notes I had on Stable, trying not so much to memorise it as assimilate it, make it a part of me. I got to bed about three o’clock.

I made it to the far side of Red at nine-thirty, and clambered gratefully off the mono. There’d been six fatalities during the Red section of the journey, and the prostitutes had been doing heavy trade in a variety of far from straightforward positions. One of their pimps started to give me a pretty hard time for no very good reason, but I showed him my gun, which has Ji’s mark on it. That did the trick, so much so that he offered me a freebie instead. Which I declined, I’ll have you know.

The far portal in Red is always deserted: the next Neighbourhood is empty, and there’s no reason for anyone to get off there. I ran a quick mental check, making sure there was nothing I’d forgotten, and then climbed over the barricade.

When I poked my head out the other side, I saw that the sun was shining steadily and that the day was going to be rather nice. Not that the Stablents would ever know that, of course: all they’d ever see was the everlasting swirl of fake radioactive dust. I stepped out onto the metal balcony and stared across the Neighbourhood at the wall I was going to have to get past.

The wall round Stable is very, very high. Between it and me was a network of metal walkways and bridges which interconnected clusters of metal buildings. The whole of the bottom of this narrow Neighbourhood is filled with water, and today it was sluggishly stirring in the light breeze. A long time ago Royle Neighbourhood was very popular, a rather bijou town-on-water affair. Unfortunately Red, Stable and Fnaph Neighbourhoods all started pumping their waste into the water via pipes in their Neighbourhood walls, and it wasn’t long before the area was uninhabitable and abandoned. One thing I was going to be very careful to do in the next hour was to not fall in the water.

Like Hu, the abandoned buildings in Royle are empty husks, and I walked carefully to avoid making a clang which would echo round the town. If you step too heavily in Royle it sets off a vibration which travels all the way round the Neighbourhood, getting more and more amplified till by the time it gets back it can plang you forty feet into the air. As I negotiated my way across the rusting walkways, heading for the Main Square, I peered at the white wall in the distance, gearing myself up, trying hard to think like a Stablent.

By the time I reached the Square, which is the biggest open area in the Neighbourhood, I was mentally exhausted and beginning to think I’d find it easier passing myself off as an Fnaphette. They believe that each man has a soul shaped like a frisbee and spend their whole lives trying to throw themselves as high as possible, trying to get to heaven. I stopped for a cigarette.

It must have been quite a feat of engineering for its time, Royle: the Square, which is about a quarter of a mile to a side, is made entirely out of one sheet of steel. I’d been there once before, a few years ago, just to see what it was like. It hadn’t changed much, and was better preserved than the bridges and walkways.

What I like to do in empty Neighbourhoods is half close my eyes and try to imagine what they were like when they were still alive. As I sat I tried to re-enter a time when thousands of people walked across the Square every day, when the wealthy and cultured had flocked to the metal opera house down the other end, when the metal cafeés and shops along the sides had thronged with chattering life, when the Neighbourhood had been one taut sculpture of gleaming steel poised above clear water. It must have been pretty flash, I think, and now it was just a rather strange and alien scrapyard teetering above a sewage tank.

As I sat there on the warm metal, two of my senses suddenly sent up messages at once. My hand registered the faintest of vibrations, and my eyes discerned some minute movement down the far end of the Square. I couldn’t make out more than that through the gleam of the sun off steel, but the message was clear: someone else was sightseeing this morning. I stood up and peered that way again, shielding my eyes, but was still unable to see anything. It could just have been some vagrant from Red: Royle is occasionally used as a hide-out by those who’ve run foul of someone like Ji. That was the most probable explanation. There was no reason for me to feel a little odd, as if some nerve had been touched. Probably just a vagrant. Either way it was time to be going.

Within another fifteen minutes I was about two hundred yards away from the massive wall that penned in the half-million inhabitants of Stable, and began to choose my route amongst the interconnecting bridges more carefully, heading towards the area Snedd had told me about eight years ago. After a few moments I spotted the distinctive building he had mentioned and headed for it, taking a few risks on shaky walkways but eventually getting there in one piece.

The building was unmistakable from Snedd’s description. It looked as though a borderline insane architect had bloodymindedly set out to create the most alarming building of all time out of gleaming metal, and had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Strange little towers and extrusions stuck out of it at disturbing angles, all of them different. Either the architect had lost his protractor before starting the job, or he’d deliberately broken it and stuck it back together wrongly.

Round the other side was a peculiar balcony and, first testing it with my hand, I braced myself carefully and leant over to peer at the base of the wall just above where it went down into the water. Still about fifty yards away, the area was rather confused, covered in many generations of bracing struts and twisted metal, and it took a while before I found what I was looking for.

Then I saw it: a small hole, about three feet above the waterline. Using it as a marker, I left the balcony and headed down the walkways that led in the right direction towards the wall.

One of the reasons that Ji and Snedd make such a terrifying couple is that they are not exactly the same. They’re both primarily extremely dangerous psychopaths, to be sure, but within that there are shades of difference that make them a complementary pair. Ji favours a head-on approach to everything, whereas Snedd will often think a little longer, and sometimes finds a way of slipping round the side. Ji will simply destroy anything that’s in his way, but Snedd might try asking it to move first. Snedd also has an ability to Find Things Out which is frankly extremely impressive even to me, and I spend my life doing it. The fact that he is still alive after eight years of one-year countdowns is testament to that: to the best of my knowledge no one else has ever managed to find a way round DNA expiration. Snedd had managed to get into Stable as a result of one of those little pieces of information, and I was relying on it still being true.

What he’d discovered was that, over the years, the level of the water in Royle had dropped. Not by much, it was still hundreds of feet deep, but enough to reveal the earliest external wastepipe Stable had built over two centuries ago. It had been replaced by a whole system of outlets which were below the present water level, but the pipe had never been blocked up. It was used by Stable police to gain access to the outside of the wall for maintenance work, and in the old days to eject intruders once they’d had their biological time-bomb set. The pipe was guarded by a unit of three men armed with machine guns, but to the likes of Snedd that was as good as rolling a red carpet down it and stringing up a neon sign saying ‘Welcome’. He’d crept in the hole that night eight years ago, annihilated the guards and gone running out into the Neighbourhood looking for fun, unfortunately not having found out about the eleven o’clock shutdown.

As I got closer to the wall the pipe entrance began to look bigger, but it was still going to be a bastard to get to. Twenty yards away I stepped to the edge of the walkway, sat on the edge, and then swung myself under it. The outer wall of Stable is unbreachable by anything short of nuclear weapons. It hadn’t used to be, and Snedd had gained most of his information from a survivor of the last time a group had got in through the wall. Now it was impassable, so I didn’t expect Stable police to be wasting their time keeping too strict a watch on the surrounding walkways. But you never know, so I made my way to the end of the walkway by swinging along underneath.

A few yards before it reached the wall the walkway stopped, destroyed a long time ago by Stable authorities. Just visible in the weathered rock ahead of me was the dim outline of where a large portal had once been. It was filled in tightly, and gave me a bit of an eerie feeling, as if I was about to try to break into a huge mausoleum, a tomb which had been bricked up with people still alive inside it.

The next bit, I realised as I swung gently underneath the walkway, was going to be a bit of a challenge. The next bit was going to be pretty damned intrepid. With nothing to push against, I had to generate the forward swing to carry me over almost two yards of water, with enough momentum left to spare to give me time to grab hold of something the other side. As I tensed and relaxed my muscles, limbering up, I scanned the area below the hole, trying to spot something that looked like a handhold rather than a means of killing myself.

I couldn’t see anything. Underneath the pipe entrance was a largish sheet of rusting metal, the remnants of some ancient brace or strut or other construction-related thing. The sheet had peeled away at the top to become a dangerous-looking lip of jagged metal. If I tried to grab that I would simply lose my fingers before falling the ten feet into the water, from which there was no hope of getting back up again. The pipe itself was only about a yard across. I estimated my chances of swinging myself neatly into it in a crouched position, as the lunatic Snedd had done, at just less than nil.

Bollocks, I thought, my arms beginning to hurt. Bollocks.

I might have hung there all day, or as long as my arms held out, had I not suddenly been given a massive incentive to move. There was a rush of air in front of my stomach, and a fraction of a second later I heard the soft phip of an energy rifle shot. As I looked round wildly, the same thing happened again.

Some bastard was shooting at me.

Intensely concerned at this development, I started to swing back and forwards as hard as I could, simultaneously craning my neck round to see where the shot was coming from. I couldn’t see anything, but a whining ricochet off the top of the walkway thirty seconds later removed the minimal chance that it had been an accident.

Somebody was actually shooting at me. They really were. I couldn’t get over it. Give me a break, I thought. Surely I have enough grief on my plate as it is?

The Stable police must have posted someone to guard the hole from the outside. That’s who I’d seen in the Square. I stopped craning and sheltered my head behind one of my arms, now swinging back and forth at quite some speed. As I swung back another energy bullet slashed though the air where my stomach had been the moment before, and I decided that I had to get the hell out of this position.

Another shot spun behind me as I swung forward, and I realised that I was going to have to go for it soon: the bullets were getting closer and closer. As I swung back I braced my wrists and tensed my arms: when I reached the highest point I was going to I whipped my arms as hard as I could, waited till I was speeding forwards, and let go.

I came closer than I can say to screwing it up. I’d been so intent on flinging myself off as hard as possible that my feet went too far ahead of me, and for a terrible moment it looked as though I was going to end up smacking into the wall back first, smashing my skull in the process. I jacked my legs down and thrust forward with my arms, achieving semi-upright flight just in time to slam painfully into the wall just to the side of the pipe. As I fell I scrabbled out with my hands and the right one caught the lip of the outlet. I whipped the left over to it and for a moment my fingers slipped down the old masonry, but then they held.

A bullet smacked into the rock a foot from my head. Christ on a bike, I thought irritably, why not blindfold me and set my clothes on fire too? Desperately, but carefully so I didn’t slip, I hauled myself up towards the lip of the pipe. My right arm was in far enough to get a minimal grip on a groove in there when another bullet cracked into the wall, this one much closer.

Sod it, I thought, and just heaved. I was up over the lip and into the pipe in one surprisingly fluid movement, in time to see a large chunk of rock disappear out of the wall at the level where my lungs had been seconds before. I scooted up the tunnel a couple of yards, until I was safe, and then sat down heavily, chest heaving. Things, I realised, had gone from crap to really, traumatically crap. There was no further sound of gunfire, but the guard outside would surely be radioing to the ones inside that an intrusion through the pipe was in progress.

I’m pretty tough, actually, by most people’s standards, but I’m not Snedd: if they knew I was coming, then three machine-gun-toting guards were going to be more than I could handle. Unfortunately, there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t go back, because the guard would be standing there, sight steady on the entrance to the pipe. Even if I sped down he’d be able to get me as soon as I hit the water, and I didn’t want to die by being shot full of holes in a lake of turd soup. It struck me as undignified.

There was no point in rushing up the tunnel firing my gun: a blanket fire of energy would cut me in half and quarters and eighths before I got anywhere near them. There was a bend in the pipe about five yards ahead, and that seemed to be my only potential hope. If I waited, and they eventually crept down to do me in, there was a tiny, minimal, infinitesimal chance that I might be able to get one or more of them first. My position would still be absolutely terrible, but I wouldn’t be dead. Soon afterwards, perhaps, but when all you have is a few minutes, each one of them seems fairly precious, each couple of seconds worth having. I crouched down and waited, gun ready.

On impulse I fumbled the portable vidiphone out of my jacket and called my apartment. I told the fridge to make sure that Spangle was fed regularly, and to alert the store if it ran out of cat food. I think it sensed I was in a serious jam, and it dispensed with the usual backchat and wished me luck. There was still no sound from the pipe up ahead, so I quickly called Zenda’s office and got Royn on the screen.

‘Oh hi, Stark. Hey, you’re in a tunnel.’

‘Yeah. Is Zenda available?’

‘Christ, no way, Stark, I’m afraid. She’s in meetings for the next seventy-two hours solid. Any message?’

I thought for a moment. Nothing came, nothing big enough.

‘Just say I called. No, say this: say I said to remember the waterfall.’

‘Sure thing. Remember the waterfall. You got it.’

‘Thanks, Royn.’

I heard a sound up ahead and cut the transmission, hugging the wall as tight as I could. Each shot was going to be critical, and so I braced my arm and held my torso as steady as I could, waiting, I knew, for death.

After everything I’d done, everything I’d seen, the distance I’d travelled, it was going to end in being gunned down in an ancient sewage pipe on an unimportant job. And I found I cared, strangely. A few years ago I wouldn’t have done. Something had been changing in me recently, stirring and flexing beneath the surface. I’d started to feel worse, but to care more. Something was happening, but I didn’t know what. Now it looked like I’d never find out.

Then the sound came again, and my arm wavered slightly. It was very faint, but I thought I recognised the kind of sound it was. I opened my mouth slightly to let the noise get to my eardrums through the Eustachian tubes as well as my ears, and strained every nerve to hear. It happened again, and my mouth dropped open wider of its own accord.

It was laughter. The sound was definitely laughter.

I’ve had a lot of experience of macho people. In the last nine years I’ve worked for, with and against a wide spectrum of soldiers, policemen, lunatics, hit men and gang members, and I’ve met a lot of ‘if-it-moves-shoot-it, -and-if-it-doesn’t-shoot-it-until-it-does’ kind of guys. When that kind of person is on the hunt, when he’s got a quarry in his sights and he’s moving in to blow it to little bloody pieces, some of them will laugh. A few laugh with nervousness, with a last-minute realisation of the enormity of what they’re about to do. Some will laugh heartily, desperately proud and strong, and some will laugh the thin giggle of the completely and utterly deranged as the twisted devil inside them peeks out to do its work.

None of them, however, have ever laughed with the guttural, lewd good humour of the sound I could hear echoing down the tunnel. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, but it was a genuine one.

The conclusion was obvious, but so unexpected that I took a while to look at it from every side. Men who are on their way to kill someone do not laugh like that. At least one of the guards was laughing like that. Therefore they weren’t coming to get me. They didn’t know I was here.

That may sound like thin reasoning to you, but it’s the kind that has kept me alive over the years, and I’ve learnt to trust it. I realised I was still in with a chance, in the short term at least. The guy who’d been shooting at me wasn’t a guard. He couldn’t be, because otherwise he’d have contacted the others and they wouldn’t be laughing like that. So who was he?

He had to be a member of the gang which had stolen Alkland. There was no reason for anyone else to try to kill an intruder. The clever bastards had posted someone outside on the off-chance.

This was both good and bad news, of course. It meant I was on the right track, which was good. It also meant the gang were even more together than I’d thought, which was not so good. But as it meant I wasn’t necessarily going to die in the next two minutes, I decided that on balance it qualified as good news, absolutely top quality news, news out of the top fucking drawer.

I dissuaded myself with difficulty from throwing a street party, and settled for re-evaluating my position. It was, I realised, just as if everything was going according to plan. That wasn’t as good as all that, but it was okay. The gang was a problem I was going to have to deal with anyway when the time came. What I had to do now was just carry on as I’d intended. I knew my intrusion plan was only so good, but I felt so relieved that anything seemed possible, and I started to creep quietly up the pipe. I carefully made my way round the first bend, and saw that there was at least one more to go. A faint glow was coming down the widening tunnel, and the sound of more laughter. I reached the final bend and flowed round it like an oiled shadow or something similarly quiet.

About twenty yards ahead of me was a desk, bulky and bigboned in dark wood. A guard was sitting at it, with his back to me, and another was lolling on a chair on the other side.

There were only two guards. Not only that, but they were paying no attention to the outward end of the tunnel, but drinking out of plastic cups and swapping tales of unlikely sexual prowess.

These were not crack troops, wired up and itching for action. They were just a couple of cops, bored but content with their lot, sipping coffee and cheerfully telling each other fibs which both knew the other wouldn’t believe. The guns on the desk weren’t machine guns, but just a pair of old-fashioned revolvers. Maybe Snedd had been the last outsider to make an intrusion, and after eight years security had become a little lax.

What I couldn’t do was risk the chance of the sound of shots echoing up the tunnel, and so I had something else in mind. I crept forward inch by inch until I was little more than ten yards away, and then stopped. The tunnel was becoming too light, and I didn’t dare go any further forward. I felt in my jacket pocket for the device, steeled myself, and then snapped forward at a sprint.

I got to within a couple of yards before either noticed me, and that was far enough. By the time they were rising to their feet I was vaulting onto the desk, judging my landing so that one foot kicked the guns off onto the floor. I spun round and kicked the lamp very firmly into the wall. It smashed, plunging the tunnel into utter darkness. Then I leapt off the desk and after a few yards hurled the device back in their general direction. It hit the desk and detonated with a barely audible crump, and the two guards immediately started sneezing, coughing and sniffing.

Then I ran like hell. As I sprinted soundlessly up the tunnel I kept a listen out for sounds of pursuit, but they soon faded into the distance. A hacking cough reached me every now and then, but that was all.

The device I threw was a Flu Bomb. Anyone within a two-yard range when it detonates instantaneously goes down with a really dismal dose of flu. Runny nose, headache, chesty cough, aching muscles, the whole works. Not in the least fatal, but all you want to do is go home, wrap up warm and watch old films while drinking gallons of hot lemon and honey. The absolute last thing you feel like doing is pelting down a dark tunnel after some lunatic and possibly being shot in the process. It just doesn’t appeal.

I knew they’d be back there somewhere, dutifully trudging up the pipe and miserably complaining to each other about the aches in their backs, but as far as catching me went, they were out of the frame.

After a few hundred yards the tunnel opened into a dimly-lit room, and as I sped through I noticed an elevator in one corner. That was obviously the way the guards got down here, but as it doubtless opened in a police station it was no use to me. After the room the tunnel returned to its previous size and I raced up it, knowing I didn’t have much time.

After another quarter mile I came to a junction. Following Snedd’s route I pelted up the left fork. The gradual upward slope of the pipe was levelling out, and I guessed that I was now only about a few yards below street level. I ignored the first ladder I passed, and the second, but when I came to the third I leapt up at it and shinned quietly to the top. Above me was a manhole, and I paused for the briefest of moments, forgetting about the Centre, about Red, about Sound and Natsci, and just thinking Stable, Stable, Stable.

The world is very small, I thought, and I like it that way. I’m very lucky and content to be here, because outside the wall is a lethal wasteland. I know, because I’ve seen it, heard about it, learnt about it in school. We tried expansion, tried to go further than we should, and look what happened. The whole thing was a complete disaster. No, I’m really very happy where I am. Oh look, it’s eleven o’clock: think I’ll go to bed.

Then I shoved the manhole up, moved it to the side and popped out onto the street.