Logan Trilogy (14 page)

Logan returned to the surface. Had Jess understood the location of the maze? He should have given her explicit instructions. He'd have to wait and hope she could find the place. Better to wait than chance missing her. If she were still alive—and free. If.

He settled under a sheltering overhang of trees from which he could keep the entrance under observation. A bird scolded. A squirrel frisked into the open and advanced with little flirts of its tail.

The squirrel frisked closer, button eyes alert and questioning. Logan killed it with a neck snap, skinned and gutted the animal and skewered it on a green stick. Hunger was a pressure in his belly; saliva filled his mouth as he thought of the cooked meat.

He removed the four remaining shells from his Gun: needier, vapor, tangler and homer. He triggered the Gun and the resultant flash from its power pack ignited a small mound of leaves and dead branches. Feeding the smokeless fire a twig at a time, Logan roasted the squirrel and ate it.

A crunching of gravel.

He smothered the blaze and took cover. The sound of breaking twigs, of running feet in brush…

Jess emerged from the woods.

He met her at the entrance.

"Hurry," she sobbed. "Someone's after me."

"DS?"

"No—" A crash of footsteps. "Two boys. They saw my hand."

"Into the maze," he said. Logan hurried her down the stairway.

"The battle…I was separated from you…thought I'd lost you…was afraid I couldn't get here—"

"Never mind," he told her. "You're here."

The platform was still deserted.

"Washington, D.C.," said Logan to the car which arrived at their summons.

Chapter 2

He is playing them now, circling them watching them.

He knows their destination and is not concerned.

The Follower is beamed in, tracking them. As they move, the light dot moves with them. The black flower in the girl's hand sends out its message.she's here, here, here.

It will lead him to them.

He is no longer angry or frustrated.

He is sure of his moves, utterly calm.

The mice are in the trap.

EARLY EVENING…

"Barrier, fifty miles ahead," the car warned, slowing itself.

"Barrier, twenty-five miles ahead," it said.

"Barrier, five miles ahead."

"Barrier reached. Instructions, please."

Logan and Jess sent the car back down a tunnel.

"We walk from here," he told her.

Ahead of them the maze was blocked by a cavedin section of rock. Part of the tunnel ceiling had collapsed, choking the area with mud and rubble. They managed to skirt the obstruction by using a narrow walkway, which led them eventually to an abandoned platform.

STANTON SQUARE

The air was moist and cloying and smelled of rot. Thick vines looped themselves across the stairway which led up to the street. At the bottom of the root clogged landing Logan stopped short, drew in a

quick breath. Bootprints. One set. Leading up.,

Francis must have arrived here ahead of them.

He must be waiting up there for us, thought Logan, the Gun gripped tightly in his hand.

Waiting to kill us.

The first engagement in the Little War took place at Fifteenth and K street in front of the Sheraton Bar and Grill in the heart of Washington. For over a month young people had been pouring into the city, massing for a huge demonstration to protest the Thirty-ninth Amendment to the Constitution. Like other prohibitions before it, this Compulsory Birth Control Act was impossible to enforce, and youth had taken the stand that it was a direct infringement of their rights. Bitter resentment was directed against the two arms of Governmental enforcement, the National Council of Eugenics and the Federal Birth Study Commission. Washington had no business regulating the number of children a citizen could have. Bitterness turned to talk of rebellion.

Several test cases of the new law before the Supreme Court had failed to advance the cause of the youthful rebels. Anger swept the ranks of the nation's young. In his State of the Union address President Curtain had stressed the severity of the food shortage, as world population spiraled toward six billion. He called upon the young to exercise self-control in this crisis. But the sight of the fat, overfed President standing in living units across the country, talking of duty and restraint, had a negative effect on his audience. And the well known fact that Curtain had fathered nine children made a showdown inevitable.

At 9:30 P.M. Common Standard Time, on Tuesday, March 3, in the year 2000, a seventeen-year-old from Charleston, Missouri, named Tommy Lee Cong don, was holding forth outside the Sheraton Bar.

With firebrand intensity he called upon his youthful listeners to follow him in a march on the White House.

"If you wanta march, why don't you damn fool kids march home to bed?" demanded a paunchy, middle-aged heckler whose name is unrecorded.

It was the wrong place, the wrong time and the wrong mode of expression. Words and blows were heatedly exchanged.

The Little War had begun.

By morning, half of Washington was in flames. Senators and congressmen were dragged in terror from their homes and hanged like criminals from trees and lampposts. The police and National Guard units were swept away in the first major wave of rioting. Buildings were set afire and explosives used.

During the confusion an attendant at the Washington Zoo released the animals to save them from flames. The beasts were never recaptured.

The Army was called in and tanks were deployed on the streets radiating from the Capitol, but there were only a few older troops left to man them. The majority of the nation's armed forces were under the age of twenty-one, and their sympathies lay with the rebels. There were massive defections from all the services; abandoned uniforms were strewn along the length of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The movement swept the states. But aside from the fighting in Washington the revolution was remarkably bloodless. Angry young people took over state capitals, county seats and city halls from coast to coast. Fearful for their lives, mayors and governors and city councilmen by the score deserted their posts, never to recover them again.

Within two weeks the reins of government lay firmly in the hands of youth. The Little War had ended.

During the rioting, Brigadier General Matthew Pope authorized the use of one vest-pocket tactical atomic bomb. It was the last act of his life, and no other nuclear weapon was used in the Little War.

Ground zero for the bomb was the site of the Smithsonian Institution—and the resultant crater was thereafter known as Pope's Hole. It was a remarkably dirty bomb, and for two weeks Washington was virtually uninhabitable—until the Geiger count fell low enough for observers to re-enter the city and test the atmosphere. Already the zoo animals had begun to breed.

The next year marked the beginning of the great debates on how best to solve the population crisis.

Chaney Moon had an answer. He was sixteen and blessed with a ragged, powerful voice, glittering, hypnotic eyes and a sense of personal destiny. A crowd pleaser, with the talent to make the commonplace sound novel and the preposterous seem reasonable. As proposal followed proposal his voice rose above the others in a compelling thunder. His views found solid support. In London, at Piccadilly Circus, he addressed a chanting mob of 400,000 youngsters. In Paris, speaking flawless French, he mesmerized twice that number on the west bank of the Seine. In Berlin they embraced him;

Moon was the world's savior, the new Messiah. Within six months the followers of the Chaney Moon Plan numbered in the millions. It was noted by detractors that most of his people were under fifteen, but what they lacked in maturity they made up for in fanaticism.

Five years later the Moon Plan was inaugurated and Chaney Moon, now twenty-one, proved his dedication by becoming the first to publicly embrace Sleep.

Young America accepted this bold new method of self-control, and the Thinker was programmed to enforce it. Eventually all remaining older citizens were executed and the first of the giant Sleepshops went into full-time operation in Chicago. One thing the young were sure of; they would never again place their fate in the hands of an older generation.

The age of government by computer began. The maximum age limit was imposed with the new system, and the original DS units were formed.

By 2072 all the world was young.

Logan squinted up the dark stairway. He did not delude himself; he was no match for Francis. The man was brilliant and unbeatable, an enemy to fear and respect. And he was somewhere up there ahead of them, his black tunic blending into the shadows.

Angerman was filled with fury…homer in the Gun!

Looking at Jess, Logan felt sorrow. Behind the mask of fatigue, her face was beautiful. And she seemed so young. She'd lived a full life, yet she seemed so vulnerable and young.

He waved Jess back into the tunnel gloom. She tried to protest. He hushed her lips. Then, smoke-silent, he began ascending the stairs. At the landing he slid stomach-first against the stair riser, trying to make himself small. No sound above. He didn't expect any. Francis was a hunter; he'd wait until Logan was in his sights for a clean shot. Cautiously Logan raised his head. Still nothing.

He inched up the remaining flight of stairs, taking cover at the side of the entrance. He carefully eye-combed every inch of terrain.

A swarm of gnats descended on him, but he did nothing about them. He did not move until he was

positive that each leaf was a leaf, that each tree was, in fact, a tree, that each rock was made of stone instead of flesh. Then he moved.

Logan plunged through the opening into a tangle of pulped vine, rolled several feet to come up behind the bulk of a rotting log. Again he examined each feature of the surrounding area for an oddness, a stillness too still, a movement where none should be.

Old Washington.

Jungle and jungle sounds. A monkey chattered. A macaw screamed. Somewhere in the deep brush a lion rumbled.

Logan quartered the area surrounding the maze entrance; it was a choking riot of tropical growth.

Giant banyans had shot out their root systems as they rose to make a foundation for other vines, ferns, creepers. Exotic plants and flowers grew from the ripe loam-mulch next to spikethorn trees. Sword grass made it impossible to see into the jungle. It was a lush confusion of dark-green, sick-green, yellow-green. Underfoot the ground bled rivulets of water—and pond lilies broke through the scum where dragonflies hovered and darted.

He walked the area slowly. Frogs and snakes plopped and slid away at his approach. Mosquitoes swarmed angrily, biting his arms and face. He was instantly mantled in sweat, and his shirt hung in hothouse damp upon his shoulders, clinging to chest and back. His trousers were wet to the knees before he had finished reconnoitering the area.

Francis was not here.

Logan returned to the tunnel's mouth. "Jess!" he called softly. The girl came up to join him. She looked about in wonder at the jungle.

Heat from the nuclear explosion stored in tidal salts beneath the earth was still leaching out after all these years. The furnace heat, combined with the high humidity, had created a tropical rain forest.

Winter ceased to exist in Washington. The site had once been a swamp, and to swamp it had returned.

Above the trees they saw the sun-tinted dome of the Capitol Building—and it seemed, to Logan, a logical place to head for in seeking Ballard. They moved off across the square into the thick of jungle.

Insects plagued them: buffalo flies and sweat bees, legions of gnats and mites, spiders and ants. Spine

trees slashed at their clothing; needles from fishtail palms lanced their skin. Twining poison vines entangled them—and the voice of the jungle was the voice of rhesus and chimp, of brush pig and plumed bird and razorback.

Then—another voice. Rattling, belching, hollow, infinitely evil: the growl of a Bengal. The jungle stilled. "Cat," breathed Logan. "Big one."

The hair rose along the back of his neck. He probed the deep scar on his left arm as he remembered the black leopard…

He'd been stalking lesser kudu at Bokov's in Nairobi. At Bokov's, the most famous of the great hunting restaurants, a man could escape the pallid food of the vending slots. He could hunt his own game with the knowledge that an expert chef stood ready to prepare a gourmet's meal from the fresh-killed animal. It wasn't easy. Bokov had prided himself on the number of predators kept on the preserve; anyone who wanted fresh game must run a proper risk to obtain it. He catered to the brave, and it was a mark of prowess to say "I dined at Bokov's."

Logan had paid his fee, checked out a brace of weighted hunting knives and entered the bush. He was careless, overconfident. The leopard had taken him by surprise. He remembered the black speed of it, the black savagery of it. He had almost died that afternoon…

Logan and Jess did not stir. He held the Gun, set at needler. A line of black ants marched steadily down his body from neck to elbow, making a trail of his right arm. Their home, a giant ant tree, brushed Logan's shoulder. But he did not move. Any sound at this moment and the Bengal tiger, largest of his breed, might be upon them.

The growl was closer.

"I think he's got our scent," Logan told the girl. "Stay behind me if he charges."

A striped flame of yellow-and-black erupted from the high grasses. Logan fired. The needle slug buried itself in the Bengal's chest. He fired again—and a vapor cloud closed over the beast.

The big cat twisted, stunned, growling murderously. The gas drove it back into the high brush.

The growl faded behind them.

When they reached the steps of the Capitol Building Jess was staggering. Her blouse was torn in a dozen places and blood stained the cloth. Reddening welts discolored the girl's face. Logan helped her mount the crumbling steps, avoiding the heavy tap roots which had split the stone. The mosquito drone followed them inside.