Book Three of the Travelers (11 page)

T
he vast majority of what was once New York City was now underground. There were remnants of the ancient city left—the lions outside the New York Public Library, the silver-clad Empire State Building, other monuments and buildings. But the city was mostly a maze of tunnels and underground chambers that extended hundreds of feet deep and contained thousands of miles of corridors.

For the most part the underground was as bright and cheerfully lit as the outdoors. Beautiful iridescent murals covered the walls, and the nearly unlimited power sources available to society meant that being underground never meant feeling as if you were in a cave.

Well…
almost
never.

For about an hour Patrick had been tracking the signal from the cat collar he'd stuffed into the spine of
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
. And during that time the thief had been winding deeper and deeper into the tunnels that composed the city. And now he was
beginning to find himself in parts of the city that were, well, pretty cavelike.

They had passed through the sections where most people lived and worked, then into the deeper, darker Maintenance Sector. M-Sector, as it was known, was an old shadow world whose roots went back thousands of years. Back when working underground wasn't easy or cheap the way it was today. Down here was where the pumps and air ducts and water systems, as well as the geothermal power units that supplied much of the city's power were located.

Huge metal bracing held up the ceilings of the chambers he passed through, many of which were lit by ancient bulbs whose flickering light threw dark shadows into the corners of every room.

Some of the people Patrick passed in M-Sector clearly worked on the huge machinery that supported the city. But many other people seemed furtive or listless, their clothes dirty and unfashionable, their eyes clouded with fear or anger or mistrust. Patrick was not used to seeing people like that. It made him nervous. Some of the people he passed eyed him as though they were considering attacking him.

As Patrick entered one of the vast, dim, echoing chambers, he spotted the thief again for the first time. The thief was hurrying along, head down, not looking backward. Patrick still couldn't make out who it was. The thief was no longer wearing the night-vision mask, but instead, one of the large, floppy hats that were currently in fashion, still hiding his or her face and the color and length of hair.

“Hey!” Patrick yelled.

Without looking back, the thief ducked through a small door on the side of the large chamber.

Patrick had noticed that here in M-Section the tracer signal was starting to break up, sometimes disappearing from the screen on his comm. Something to do with the large amounts of electromagnetic energy produced by the generators down here, he supposed.

Patrick broke into a run. The chamber was at least two hundred meters long. By the time he'd covered a hundred meters, the little red circle on his comm screen had flashed a few times and then disappeared.

He was out of breath when he reached the door. It was made of heavy steel, surrounded by thumb-size rivets and covered in chipped greenish paint.

 

VALVE CHAMBER 7

 

DANGER!

 

AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

NYC DEPT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

 

The sign on the door was so scarred and worn that it was barely readable. From the looks of it, this part of the tunnel system was almost certainly thousands of years old.

Patrick twisted the massive steel handle and pushed the door open with a deep groan. What he found on the other side amazed him.

Darkness. It was the first time he'd ever seen real
darkness in the city. It wasn't that there was no light at all, but the light was so dim and flickering that for a moment he almost couldn't see anything. Then he realized what the source of the light was. Fire! Scattered here and there throughout the tunnel were tiny fires.

The chamber he had entered was a long tunnel, maybe ten meters high, carved from solid rock. The floor was wet, the walls oozing and dripping. A thick acrid haze of smoke filled the tunnel.

The thief was nowhere to be seen. Not that Patrick could have seen much of anybody in this smoky gloom.

For a moment Patrick hesitated. But then a voice inside his head said, “You have to find the book!” Patrick couldn't ignore it. He stepped forward a few feet, trying to see better.

Behind him, the door slammed shut with a great groaning
booooooooom
.

“Hey!” Patrick called. The sound echoed loudly, repeating and repeating before finally dying away.

As his eyes adjusted, Patrick suddenly realized, to his shock, that he was not alone. Scattered here and there were small clusters of people. They were sitting around the tiny fires. Some of them seemed to be cooking things over the flames.

Patrick felt a sick sensation run through him. Who
were
these people? There were legends, of course, about people who lived in the deeper reaches of the tunnels. They were called “roaches.” The stories were crazy and unbelievable. People said that roaches stole, fought, killed—that they even
ate
one another! Patrick had always believed that these were just stories told to scare
kids. But now, looking around at the huddled figures in the chamber, he wasn't so sure.

“Hey!” Patrick called again, his voice cracking a little.

Hundreds of pairs of eyes turned toward him, glinting in the firelight. Every single pair of eyes seemed to be appraising him, as though trying to figure out what they could take from him.

“Don't you look pretty and clean, Master,” a soft voice said.

Patrick whirled. A dark shape rose from the shadows five or ten meters away. It was a man, his face barely visible in the dark. The man moved toward Patrick with a slow, limping gait.

A limp! It turned Patrick's stomach. He'd never seen a real person with a limp. It had been thousands of years since medicine had been perfected to such a degree that broken limbs could be fixed in a matter of hours.

The man came out of the shadows. Other than the limp, it was clear he was large and powerfully built. There was something about the way he moved that frightened Patrick, something predatory, like a hyena or a wolf edging toward its prey.

Suddenly a shaft of light revealed the man's face. It was a horrible mass of scars, like a pile of red worms. He only had one eye.

“Help a sick man, would you, Master?” the man said.

Without intending to, Patrick gasped.

The man extended a large, gnarled hand toward Patrick. A terrible odor accompanied him, like the scent
of a rotting deer Patrick had once smelled when he went on a camping trip out West.

“I'm sorry, I—” Patrick stumbled backward, hitting the ground with an impact that shot through his entire body like a lightning bolt. “I must have made a mistake.”

“I think you did, Master,” the man said. His smile, a horrible twisted leer, split his face.

Patrick struggled to his feet. Every eye in the tunnel was on him. Laughter spread through the chamber, echoing eerily.

Patrick staggered backward, feeling for the handle of the huge iron door through which he'd just entered.

“Oh, you don't like us roaches, do you, Master?” the man said. “Well, maybe we don't like you so much either, hmm?”

Patrick's hand closed around the steel door handle. He wrenched it open and stumbled through the door. The big man dove toward him.

The last thing he saw before the big steel door slammed shut was a single bloodshot eye staring at him.

 

When Patrick stopped running, his chest felt as if it were encircled by bands of red-hot iron. He put his hands on his knees and tried to catch his breath. He felt light-headed, and his legs were trembling so hard he wasn't sure he was going to be able to remain standing.

“Hey,” a voice said.

Patrick straightened up, his heart banging in his chest.

“You okay, friend?” A smiling man in a green jumpsuit was looking at him inquiringly. Inscribed on his
chest was a small sign that read
MAINTENANCE
—
WE MAKE IT HAPPEN
!

“I'm—fine,” Patrick gasped.

“You sure?”

Patrick nodded.

“You're a little off the beaten path, aren't you?” the man said.

Patrick smiled weakly. “Thanks for your concern. I'm fine. Really.”

“Okay,” the man said dubiously.

After the man was gone, Patrick sat down and put his head between his knees.
I'm just not up to this
, he thought.
I've made a big mistake thinking that I had any business getting involved in a thing like this.

W
hen Patrick got home, he slumped down in the chair in his living room and stared at the wall for a while.
Failure! Total failure!

Everything had been working until he entered that tunnel. The prediction of which book would get stolen next. The tracking device. Following the thief. It was all perfect. Until he'd lost his nerve.

The man with the scarred face hadn't threatened him directly. He'd been a little rude. But that was all.
What it comes down to?
Patrick thought.
When the crunch came, I lost my nerve.

Patrick wasn't even sure what he'd been afraid of. The dirt. The scars. The limp. The fires. The smoke. The strangeness of it all. He still couldn't believe that in this day and age people lived like that. Why? What were they doing down there? Cooking food with actual
fires
? It was bizarre.

Patrick sat for a long time, trying to think what he should do next. No one else would know that he had failed. In fact, everybody else seemed perfectly content to
leave the matter to the detective from Unit 9. There were millions of books down there in the stacks underneath the public library. At this rate the thief could steal a book every day for the next thousand years and barely make a dent in the collection.

But it wasn't right! Once those books disappeared, they were gone forever. Sure, there were copies of them lurking someplace in the memory of a computer somewhere. But it wasn't the same as a real, physical book. The book that had been stolen was a signed first edition. It had actually been touched by L. Frank Baum over three thousand years ago.

Idly Patrick turned toward the far wall of his apartment. Right now it had an iridescent pattern moving around on it.

“Bring up my file of pictures from the ski trip I took to Colorado,” he said.

Instantly the iridescent pattern disappeared, and the first of the security tapes appeared showing the cartoon character the thief used to mask his or her image during the first theft.

“Capture the image of the cartoon,” he said. “Identify.”

“The image mask is three-D model based on a hand-drawn cartoon,” the voice of his computer said. “Based on color application and style, the original cartoon is probably twentieth century. Most likely before 1980.”

“Can you do any better than that?”

There was a brief pause. “There is a ninety-seven percent likelihood that it is based on the work of Dr. Seuss.”

“Who's he?”

“A children's book author and illustrator. Real name, Theodor Seuss Geisel, born March second, 1904, in Springfield, Massachusetts. Died—”

“Okay, okay,” Patrick said. “Can you identify the specific character?”

There was a long pause. “Ninety-one percent likelihood the image is based on the Key-Slapping Slizzard of Solla Sollew.”

“The
what
?”

By way of answer, the computer brought up the image of a book, along with a paragraph of information on the book and author. The title was
I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew
. Apparently this book was one of the lesser-known publications of the author known as Dr. Seuss. Patrick scanned the list of Dr. Seuss's most popular books. There was one book called
Green Eggs and Ham
. That sounded like an interesting one to read! Another time, perhaps. For now, Patrick scrolled through the text of
Solla Sollew
. It was about a furry creature who lived in an unpleasant place where he got stung and hit in the head. Tired of his life there, he decided to go to a perfect place called “Solla Sollew,” a magical city where people didn't have problems. Unfortunately, when he got to Solla Sollew, there was a big wall around the town, and only one door in. And hiding in the lock of that door was a tiny mischievous critter that kept slapping away the keys of everyone who tried to enter. As a result, the furry creature had to go back where he came from. He went through all manner of crazy and difficult adventures. When he finally got home he realized that he didn't mind the place that much after all. The point
of the story seemed to be that no matter where you go, there will always be problems.

“Huh,” Patrick said, examining the illustration. “It's definitely the same character. Can you tell me anything else about it?”

“A little over a thousand years ago, when wars and crime were finally being stamped out by humanity, there was a movement that said humanity would always have problems. They took the Key-Slapping Slizzard as their symbol or mascot. They claimed that making a perfect society was a mistake, that humanity would be more vulnerable to bad things if everyone got out of the habit of struggling with evil and poverty and oppression.”

“What happened to that movement?”

“They went underground. Literally. The people referred to as ‘roaches' are their descendants.”

“You mean they actually
chose
to be down there?”

“It was a long time ago.”

“Speculate for me as to why somebody would have chosen this image to mask what they were doing.”

“I'm not good at guessing, Patrick.”

“Try it anyway.”

“Possibly they are attempting to indicate their belief that our current way of life could all fall apart.”

“That's kind of what I was thinking too.”

“The Slizzard movement claimed that every society had the potential to hit a tipping point that would send it into a death spiral from which it couldn't easily recover.”

“Like what?”

“It could be anything. A war between competing groups or nations. A failure of some kind of basic technology. Climate change. Crop failures. An energy source that disappeared.”

“And they thought that could even happen to
us
?”

“Yes.”

He stared at the hologram. The image of the Slizzard, two meters high, rotated slowly in front of him. It seemed to be watching him with its crazy-looking eyes.

If somebody had told him yesterday that the world could ever fall apart, he would have laughed at them. But there was something about those people down there in that tunnel that spooked him. There was no reason for them to live there. Food and shelter were free today. For whatever reason, the roaches
chose
to live down there. Dirty, hungry, sick, vulnerable to violence. It made no sense at all. And yet…there they were.

And if somebody could choose that…Well, what other terrible things could they choose?

“But why steal books? Why burn them? What's the connection? And why children's books?”

“I don't know, Patrick.”

“Guess.”

“I'm sorry. I cannot.”

“What use are you then?”

“Actually, I am very good at—”

“Rhetorical question,” Patrick interrupted.

“Oh.”

How many thousands of years had they had computers? And they still couldn't give them a sense of humor.

After a moment a bell dinged, and the wall turned red.

“Your cat is missing,” the computer said.

“No, it's not,” Patrick said.

“Your cat is missing. Alert detected. Your cat is missing. Alert detected.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” Patrick said. “Where?”

A map appeared on the wall. It read
PINE HAVEN WILDERNESS SITE
.

“Here,” the computer said.

“What is that?”

“It's a wilderness preserve one hundred and twelve kilometers north of your current location. It contains over forty miles of trails and a variety of wildlife, including thirty-four species of birds, three species of bats, elks, white-tailed deer, bison, cougars, wolves, red foxes, lynx, bobcats, coyotes—”

“Okay, okay, okay. But where's my…uh…cat?”

“Your cat has been detected in a cave six kilometers from the entrance to the park.”

“Call an air taxi. I want to go there immediately.”

“I'm sorry, Patrick. That's not possible.”

“What do you mean it's not possible!”

“It's a restricted area.”

“Restricted to what?”

“Tourism is not allowed. Due to its status as a wilderness preserve, it can only be accessed for educational purposes.”

“Educational purposes?”

“Yes, Patrick.”

Patrick thought for a long time. “You know what I think?” he said finally.

“No, Patrick.”

“Time for a field trip!”