Star Bridge (12 page)

Eron the City. A world encased in a metal skin, gleaming coldly in the light of its distant sun. One world, one city. As Eron grew powerful through the Tube, the Golden Folk built up and dug down: space, more space, still more. Warehouses and trading centers, schools and barracks, tenements and residences and palaces, amusement centers and factories, restaurants and communal kitchens, control rooms and power rooms.…

Eron was the center of a star-flung empire: politically, economically, socially. Every extraplanetary shipment, every message, and most of the Empire's power went through Eron. Eron grew, automatically. As long as the golden Tubes led only to Eron, that growth would never stop.

Eron. Megalopolis.…

 

 

9

SPIDERWEB

Horn pulled himself together. It was an effort, as if part of himself were still on Earth and he had to wind it in through all the weary distance, the danger, the darkness, and the fear.

If that's independence
, he thought wryly,
I've had enough to last me for quite a while.

His senses had eased their angry battering at his mind, and his mind started working again in its usual way, collecting information, weighing it, acting on it. He pushed himself to his feet. The giant doors were closed behind him, sealing the mouth of the Tube. Horn looked at the red emergency disk and turned away, shuddering. He walked quickly down the long, gleaming barrel.

The door to the personnel lock was in the same position. It swung open readily, closed behind Horn, and in a moment the door opposite opened. The walls of the small room were lined with spacesuits, supported at the armpit by pegs. They were all identical, these Terminals, constructed to rigid specifications. This one was exactly like the one he had left on Earth. He had no way of knowing, really, that he hadn't returned there.

Faith sustained him. Faith in Eron and faith in the Tubes that were Eron's greatness. Eron built well, and the things that Eron built worked.

Still, Horn thought, it would be ironic if he had returned to Earth. He should have made some mark— He had. He had taken away a suit. There was no vacant space now. He must be on Eron.

He pushed one of the suits to the floor and stood in its place. Before he removed anything, he stopped and thoughtfully brushed the breastplate with his gauntleted hand. The gauges sprang to life against the helmet face. Air supply: 12 hours. Water: one liter. Food: two.…

No change. He had used no air while in the Tube which seemed like proof that the bodily activities were suspended. Now, though, it would be a good idea to eat and drink. He might not have another chance for some time.

He worked the tube into his mouth and drew in half a liter of tepid water. He let the tube go and clamped his teeth on the food ejector. A pellet dropped into his mouth. He let it dissolve slowly, savoring the meaty flavor. When it was gone, he finished the water. He began stripping off the suit—

The room trembled.

Horn paused, half out of the suit, and listened to the reverberations. They could only be one thing: a ship entering the main lock a few meters away. A ship from Earth close upon his heels could only be pursuit.

He stepped free and made himself hesitate, studying the long line of suits against the wall like decapitated monsters, all gray, ungainly, limp. He stuck his hand inside the neck of one and squeezed the ejector. A pellet squirted into his hand. When he reached the door, he had five of them. He dropped them into a tunic pocket.

Horn opened the door and stepped onto the railed steps slanting down. They shook as he ran down them, hundreds of meters from the pavement. He grabbed the rail and looked back. A ship was coming out of the lock into the cradle, stern first. it was a small ship, a scout.

Horn raced to the joint, where the ladder began. The whole mounting shuddered as the cradle swung down toward the pavement below. When it stopped, Horn started down the ladder, swinging down swiftly, scarcely touching the rungs with his feet. A glance at the ship told him that he couldn't beat it down. The shaped dolly had reached up to receive the ship and was lowering it to a horizontal position. A faint shimmering revealed the tiny power loss of a unitronic field.

Horn swung his body around the ladder quickly. A body of guards had marched into the room from the side doorway. Now the mounting was between him and them. There were a dozen of them, dressed in gray uniforms like the one he wore. They didn't look up. They headed purposefully across the floor toward the ship.

Horn moved down cautiously, silently. A dark opening grew oval and round in the scout's hull, became bright, and flickered as gold-uniformed guards emerged and came down the dolly's built-in steps to the pavement. There were six of them. They glanced at the waiting gray guards, shrugged, and looked back up the steps toward the ship. They waited. The gray guards waited. Horn, who had dropped within meters of the floor, waited.

Wendre Kohlnar came through the port and ran down the steps. As she reached the pavement, the gray guards, with perfect timing, clubbed down Wendre's guards. While they were still falling, two more sprang at Wendre. She struggled in their arms, indignant, confused.

The noise covered Horn's final descent. Sheltered behind one of the giant beams, he stared speculatively at the scuffle. He fingered the butt of his pistol indecisively, fighting an unreasonable urge to help the girl.

He had no idea what was going on, what sides were represented here. There were too many of the gray guards. This wasn't his battle. Why should he trouble himself over a woman who would only turn him over to Eron justice? Let them fight their fights. His business was survival.

They had vanished into the ship again, taking Wendre with them, leaving the guards like molten gold on the pavement. The port closed.

Horn walked briskly across the broad floor toward the door in the side wall. He breathed deeply trying to shake a dark mood of depression and worthlessness. The hell with them. The hell with all of them! It didn't help much.

“Get her?”

Horn looked up quickly. A technician was standing in his way. His golden features were almost pure. “Who?”

“The assassin.”

“Sure,” Horn said and tried to brush past.

The technician held him back. “Something funny came through from Earth. Said the assassin was in the Tube. But the pronoun was ‘he.' And it didn't mention a ship. It said ‘suit.'”

“Garbled,” Horn said. This time he succeeded in getting past. The giant room he had left was rumbling.

He swung around at the archway that led into the dining hall. “Didn't you know who we picked up?” he called back. “That was Wendre Kohlnar.”

The technician looked blankly incredulous for a moment and then spun toward the control room. Horn walked quickly through the dining hall and out into a corridor over two hundred meters wide. Deep, metal-lined tracks were recessed into the floor. Horn turned to the right and walked briskly away.

The corridor was empty. The rumbling sound he had heard had been the ship being raised back into the cradle. The main lock would rotate it into position to launch itself into space. It would circle Eron until it came to rest on the elevator that would lower it—to whoever wanted Wendre. They should be out in space now if they were going to get out at all.

The capture had been carefully planned and skillfully executed. Horn decided they would get out before the technician could convince the control room to stop the ship. But the confusion should cover his escape.

Horn came to a broad cross-corridor. It seemed to curve inward. That meant he was moving away from the center of the cap. Good. If the cap were constructed logically—and Eron was predominantly logical—it would be a spiderweb with a set of straight, radial corridors intersected by circular, concentric ones. At the center would be the spider, a sensitive and dangerous area of some kind. It was where he had to go, true, but not at this level. He needed to approach it from another direction.

The corridor he was on was definitely radial. It ran straight in both directions until, although it was well lighted, it faded into indistinctness. The concentric corridor's curve was gentle, but Horn found it impossible to judge the degree of curvature by eye. It could be anywhere from several to twenty kilometers from the center of the cap.

Horn trotted on along the way he had been going when the intersecting corridor stopped him. Before he came to another, he found a relatively narrow ramp leading downward. He turned into it without hesitation. Within a descent of a few meters, the ramp crossed a level corridor, darker and narrower than the ones above.

The ships didn't get down here. Horn crossed the corridor and continued down the ramp. The second level was even narrower and almost dark. The floor was dusty; the only footprints Horn could see were his own. It smelled musty and unused. Horn turned to the left, toward the center of the web.

The corridor thrummed gently with a constant vibration. He was close to the shallow pool of mercury in which the cap floated. Somewhere there would be massive motors, compensating for Eron's rotation. The vibration would be due to one or the other, or both. Horn trotted toward the center of the cap.

The corridor seemed unending, unchanging. Horn coughed a little in the dust raised by his feet. He slipped a food pellet into his mouth and sucked on it and found himself wrapped in the unreality of a childish memory.

Someone had told him about Eron—could it have been his mother?—and the description had created as vivid a picture as a child's imagination can contain. It had been all false, of course, but it had all the truth of a fairy world. The golden Tubes, the metal world, the broad, rotating caps floating in seas of quicksilver.…

The quicksilver sea—that had been the most wonderful part. The boy had dreamed about it, surging and splashing metallically, gleaming like molten silver. He had cherished the illusion for a long time, and when he had learned that the mercury was only a few centimeters thick, it had been like the breaking of something infinitely precious. It was his last dream.

And here the corridors were dark and dusty, without beauty or illusion. He was actually in the cap that floated on the quicksilver sea, and he couldn't dredge up the smallest relic of wonder or delight. He was on the threshold of Eron, searching for a doorway into long-lost dreams; he wouldn't find it. Eron wasn't a dream world to him, only a refuge, and he was only tired with the eternal necessity of awareness.

The radial corridor he was on stopped abruptly as it was intersected by a concentric corridor. Ahead of him the perceptibly curving wall was unbroken. Horn turned to the right, trotting. After a few hundred meters, he was able to turn left along another radial corridor continuing toward the center.

Horn nodded. Obviously, all the radial corridors couldn't meet at the center. For an extensive area, there would be no walls—only corridor.

And this corridor ended in a blind alley. Horn stood in the boxlike end, pressed against one wall to let the distant light filter past his shoulder. The walls, the floor, the ceiling met flush against a fifth plane set at right angles to all of them.

It should be a door, Horn told himself. It had to be a door. There would be no logic in a pocket like this.

There was nothing to brush or press along the walls. Horn pushed against the partition. It was solid and unyielding. He let his hand brush the edge. Something clicked. Horn threw his weight against the barrier. It gave a little, squealing, and stuck. A bright line of light appeared at the right.

Horn took a deep breath and tried once more. Complaining, groaning, the door swung open. Cautiously, Horn stepped into a large room shaped like a fat cylinder. In the center, reaching from floor to ceiling, was a smaller cylinder, about four meters in diameter. The room was empty.

Horn closed the door behind him and circled the room looking for an exit. Exit? Entry. Entry into Eron.

The surface of the small, central cylinder was smooth and unbroken. Opposite the door he had entered was another door in the curving wall of the room. When he had pulled it open, there was only another long, dark corridor behind it. He slammed it shut and leaned against it.

His shoulder slumped wearily. His legs trembled a little. It had been a long time since he had rested.

He leaned his head back against the cool metal and closed his eyes. He forced them open quickly. If he let them stay closed, he would fall asleep, and he couldn't afford to sleep. The silent desertion of the lower levels of the cap was deluding. There could be no peace for him, just as there could be no sleep. The hunt went on, somewhere, and if he stayed too long in one spot, the hunters would catch up with him.

He saw the wheel against the ceiling.

It was below the ceiling a few centimeters, connected to it by a thick, threaded bar. Beside it, against the wall, was a ladder. It started three meters from the floor.

Horn jumped, caught the bottom rung, and pulled himself up hand over hand. When his head was close to the ceiling, he wrapped one leg around a rung and leaned back to grab the wheel. Above the wheel was an opening in the ceiling about a meter in diameter; it was covered from above by a metal plate.

From his position, Horn couldn't exert much leverage, and the wheel was stubborn. Horn gripped it firmly and pushed with his legs and back. It began to turn. He sweated with it, his back muscles starting to cramp, until it was almost flat against the plate in the ceiling.

He rested for a moment and wiped his face on his sleeve, braced himself again, and shoved upward. The wheel lifted, taking the plate with it, and toppled to one side. Horn grabbed the edges of the circular hole and lifted himself into the room above, realizing that caution was useless after the noise he had made.

The room was almost identical with the one below. The differences: it was cleaner, better lighted, and the central cylinder was cut off a few feet from the ceiling. This room was empty, too.