Logan's Search (9 page)

It ended.

The last shiverings of rock spatted against the ledge; the snowdust settled. Full cycle: rumble to roar to snow-velvet silence. Again, the mountain slept.

“One thing’s for sure,” said Logan. “We won’t be going back down.”

They turned toward the faint illumination at the cave’s end, walking slowly, allowing the furor to ease inside them. Kilimanjaro had shown its might, and they were stunned and shaken by the display.

“Are you frightened?” asked Logan.

“No,” said Jess. “Maybe I should be—but somehow I believe what Nyoka told you. About the leopard’s eye. It will show us a way out of the mountain.”

“If there
is
a leopard,” said Logan.

“We wouldn’t be here unless he knew,” said Jessica. “He programmed the ant to take us here.”

“And the ant’s gone,” said Logan. “Maybe we were meant to ride it back down to the plain. Nyoka didn’t count on an avalanche.”

They reached the source of illumination, rounded a bend in the cave, looked up.

The leopard was above them, on a carved shelf of rock, poised to leap, frozen there in a timeless moment of attack, the ridged muscles along his sleek flank etched in perfect simulation, tail caught in mid-lash, ears twitched back, flattened into the graceful head. A ton of white ivory shaped to the likeness of a crouching beast. In the exact center of its lowered head, a matchless, square-cut green-glowing emerald eye, the size of a man’s fist.

“He’s beautiful,” said Jess in a hushed tone. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful…so
alive!
”

“Well, if he’s alive he’s not telling us anything,” said Logan.

“Perhaps he will,” said Jess. “This is a shrine, Logan. How about some faith?”

“I don’t believe in building shrines to anything—not even white leopards. And the only faith I have is in
me
.”

“Spoken like a true Sandman.”

“I was one. I’m not anymore.”

“Well, you
sound
like one. Arrogant, and so sure of your rightness!”

“This kind of talk won’t get us out of here,” said Logan. “I’m climbing up to have a go at that eye.”

He scrambled up to the rock shelf, reached the head of the carved beast, and began prodding and pulling at the emerald.

“Is it loose?” asked Jess. “Does it move?”

Logan shook his head. He stepped back, considering alternatives. “If I had a knife I could pry it loose. Should have brought along one of Nyoka’s spears.”

“You think there’s something behind it.a map, directions of some kind?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.” Logan nodded. He picked up a sharp-edged rock fragment and began digging at the large green emerald. After several minutes he pulled back, sighing. “No good. Can’t even scratch it.”

The green stone was not meant to be removed, so his guess had been wrong. He was deeply discouraged. A sense of panic was edging into his mind. What good would a map do them, even if they found one, trapped here inside the damned mountain? The ant was gone and, with it, all their food and water. The cave entrance was completely blocked, so there was no way to reach the path leading down. And even if they got down onto the plain again, how long could they last?

To Logan, at this moment, Nyoka’s words of escape were hollow and meaningless. What if the clever Masai had never really intended for them to escape? What if sending them here to this empty shrine to die was his way of avenging the son Logan had slain on the Serengeti? The avalanche had simply aided and abetted the process. A bonus for old Nyoka.

Jessica’s excited voice broke into his dark thoughts. She was calling him.

“Logan, down here!”

He slid quickly from the shelf to join her where she knelt at the opposite wall of the cave. “What have you found?”

“Nothing…yet,” she told him. “But I think I know what Nyoka meant when he said, ‘The leopard’s eye will guide you.’ “

“Well?” he urged.

“If you sight along the trajectory—the line of his sight, given his position on the ledge—you arrive here. He’s looking at this section of wall.”

They were both running their hands over the smooth stone. It seemed to hold no secrets. 

“Here,” said Jess. “I’ve found something!”

At cave-floor level, a small metal knob ran flush with the wall, almost invisible in the glowing green darkness. Jess poked at it, tried to twist it, but the knob did not move.

Logan studied it. “I’d say it’s a control lever,” he declared. “Could be operated by foot pressure. Let’s find out.”

And he stood, placing his right shoe over the knob and pressing his weight against it. The knob moved!

And, in a steady, grinding motion, the section of wall slid back to reveal a descending flight of crude-cut stone steps. Muted daylight from a distant rock fissure barely illuminated the passageway as they hurried downward.

At the bottom, the passage opened abruptly into a rust-red, alum-braced tunnel, dead-ending at the steps. Logan ran a finger along the dirt-grimed curve of metal.

“Mazeway!” he said. “A spur track through the mountain. Never completed.”

Jessica’s excitement dimmed as she examined the tunnel floor. “But there’s no grid,” she told Logan. “A mazecar can’t run without one.”

“Not here, on the spur,” he said. “But if we follow this tunnel far enough…”

“Then Nyoka was telling you the truth,” said Jessica, her face bright again. “A way out of Serengeti— out of Africa!”

They looked at each other, exchanging foolish, dazed smiles.

The trek down the tunnel was silent. They knew they were not free, and their initial exuberance had given way to darker introspection. Once they managed to locate a mazecar, they had no safe destination to seek. They were condemned fugitives and would be executed on sight if they attempted to return to Angeles Complex. And without valid citystate ID, no Complex anywhere on Earth was safe for them.

“Where do we go, Logan?”

He walked the gloomed tunnel in silent thought. Then he stopped, turned to her. “We’ve got one possible chance.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a man the aliens told me about—a man they said I could contact in case of emergency. Named Kirov. Works for Central Control in Moscow. If we can reach him there before we’re caught, he just might have an answer for us, a way for us to survive.”

“Survive,” said Jessica softly. She smiled. “Right now, that’s the most beautiful word on Earth!”

The spur tunnel ended two miles beyond Kilimanjaro, at an abandoned maze-intersect grid.

“Are you sure we can get a car?” asked Jessica as they mounted the brush-covered platform.

Logan moved to a rusted callbox, pulling creeper roots and vines free of its face. “If this box is still connected to the main grid, I can rig it for a car,” he said.

He finished clearing the box, prying loose a side control plate, reaching inside to examine the wiring pattern. An orange spark sizzled against his hand, and Logan grinned. He carefully reconnected two multicolored wire clusters, using his metal beltclasp as a makeshift tool.

Within seconds, in a humming rush, a mazecar slotted into the platform.

“This is an unauthorized area,” the car told them as they stripped their thermosuits and climbed inside. “It is not permitted to transport citizens in this area without central clearance. Please identify for clearance.”

And the car waited, unmoving, on the grid.

Logan leaned forward, and smashed the machine’s auto-destination device. The car-voice sputtered: “Not…is…citizens…this…proceed…not for…”

The voice rattled and died.

“You killed it!” exclaimed Jess. “Now we can’t move!”

“I’ll take us in on manual,” he told her, activating the emergency control panel inside the car. “Won’t they stop us?”

“They won’t know. This will go on the board at CenComp as a routine vehicle malfunction. By the time they’ve triangulated the problem and sent a repair team we’ll be in Moscow.”

“You’ve done this kind of thing before, “haven’t you?”

“In my world I was a runner, Jess—just like your brother.”

She looked at him, her eyes probing his face. “There’s so much more I’d like to know about you,” she said as the car left the platform and began skimming along the grid.

“You know too much already,” said Logan. “The aliens warned me not to contact you. If I’d listened to them, you wouldn’t be here now, involved in all this. It’s not your problem.”

“The system
is
my problem,” she said levelly. “And maybe the aliens were right…Knowing you has given me hope. Maybe you can destroy this system.”

“Right now I’m a long way from doing: it,” he said.

The silver mazecar, at full acceleration, jetted them through the gleaming tunnel under the African night.

Away from Kilimanjaro. Away from the Serengeti. 

They had escaped the killing ground.

Kirov 2 was a small, pale man of bland personality and rigid habit. The bed in his modest lifeunit (in the village of Leninskiye, thirty-five kilometers from central Moscow) faced east. At dawn each morning, as the sun’s fingers touched Kirov’s thin eyelids, he would wake instantly, cleanse himself, put on his freshly-pressed state uniform, dial a frugal breakfast from the vending slots (the fried-eggs-on-wheat-no-butter-with-orange-juice menu never varied), and take a local mazecar into Moscow.

Emerging on the busy platform beneath Red Square, he would take a riser up, walk briskly across the wide cobbled Square, past Lenin’s red-granite tomb alongside the high Kremlin wall, to enter the Kremlin itself through the gate of Spasskaya Tower.

As a Class A computer tech in the Georgievsky Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace, Kirov was always the first to arrive for work each day. He would solemnly begin his duties at a CenControl data feedback unit board under one of the six huge bronze chandeliers (no longer operational) lining the vast, gold-painted ceiling.

Kirov 2 was neither liked nor disliked by his fellow workers; they ignored him completely as he ignored them. He performed his job with quiet efficiency. If asked a question, he would answer it in a calm, evenly controlled tone of voice. Otherwise, he said nothing.

His future was in perfect order. On red, Kirov had already chosen a Sleepshop in Revolution Square, off the Bolshoi Arcade, which he would enter on his twenty-first birthday. Deep Sleep, for him, would be calmly accepted as part of his duty to the system that supported him. He would make his personal contribution to global birth control without fear or regret.

Kirov had no memory whatever of being taken, one night, aboard a great silver ship—nor of the mental indoctrination he had received there. All knowledge of this encounter with the aliens had been erased from his conscious mind.

Thus, Kirov 2, who considered himself a very ordinary citizen, was actually very special: he was Logan’s only contact between two worlds.

The gridline from Kilimanjaro to Moscow took them directly north, through Kenya and Ethiopia, under the Red Sea and beneath the tip of Saudi Arabia, on beneath Syria and Turkey and the Black Sea, into Russia. And, finally, under the Moskva River, to Red Square.

Logan slotted the mazecar into a side repair-platform and quickly exited with Jess. They took an expressbelt up to the Square.

He’d been given no instructions on how to contact Kirov, but Logan knew that the man worked inside the Kremlin, once the seat of Soviet government and now headquarters for CenControl. Upon questioning a guard there, he learned that Kirov was on dayshift and would leave, with the other day workers, through Spasskaya Gate within the hour.

The weather was mild and clear; a soft breeze from the Moskva carried the sharp scent of fir trees into the Square as Logan waited with Jess in the shadow of St. Basil’s, under the huge fire-colored onion domes.

He had asked the guard for a description of Kirov and had been told not to worry. “Can’t miss him,” the guard had declared. “Always the last out. Every day the same, you can depend on it. First in, last out. No way to miss Kirov.”

It had been an uneventful day, as were all days to Kirov 2. Upon completing his stint at the board, he had left with his fellow workers, but, as was his custom, he had returned after punchout to examine the historical tapestry, threaded in gold, which ran the entire 200-foot length of the hall. Kirov did this each day after boardtime, carefully savoring a small segment of the tapestry during each visit. It took him exactly two months of working days to progress from the first section of this masterwork to its end. And after completing this inspection he would begin the next afternoon to slowly repeat the process. It was one of the few pleasant activities Kirov enjoyed in his dull, self-limited existence.

As predicted, he was last through the gate under the long-silent clock chimes of the Spasskaya Tower.

Looking neither right nor left, he walked briskly across the Square to the maze entry. Logan and Jess followed.

At the platform, Kirov settled into the rear of a local mazecar. As the car moved out along the tunnel, Kirov was startled to feel a hand at his shoulder.

“Kirov 2?”

He blinked. “I am that person.”

“I’m Logan 3. I’ve come to you for help.”

He started to protest that he had never heard the name, and could not be of help to strangers, when something deep in his mind responded. Kirov nodded. “We will talk in my unit,” he said quietly.

And they rode in silence to Leninskiye.

Kirov’s lifeunit was as colorless and pale as the little man himself. The interior was painted a drab gray; there were no decorations of any kind to brighten the walls; heavy drapes obscured the view, and the furniture was starkly functional. The unit was, however, scrubbed and spotless. Not a mote of dust was allowed to settle there, since Kirov was an obsessively clean man.

Inside, before speaking, he prepared a pot of rather bitter yellow tea for his guests, bade them sit down, and then asked, sipping his sugarless brew, how he might help.

“We need to establish new identities,” Logan told him. “As Logan 3 and Jessica 6, we’re fugitives. If we’re taken by the Federal Police we’ll be executed. We need new IDs.”