Steel Beach (71 page)

I knew it had to do with the big story Cricket mentioned. Impossible visions flitted through my head, from a city-wide blowout to thousands upon thousands of soldiers like the ones I’d seen laying waste to the whole planet.

But I had to keep trying. So I went back down into the maze and sought out my favorite airing hole. And two big guys in suits were camped out there, weapons ready.

I’d had ten minutes of air when I first backed into the pile of chrome pipes to hide from the soldiers. That had been seven minutes earlier.

The first thing I’d done was cut back the oxygen dissemination rate in my artificial lung to a level just short of unconsciousness. Ditto the cooling rate. I figured that would stretch the ten minutes into fifteen if I didn’t have to move around too much. So far I hadn’t moved at all. The blinking red light I was watching was telling me my blood oxygen level was low. Another gauge, normally dormant, had lit up as well, and this one assured me my body temperature stood at 39.1 degrees and was rising slowly. I knew I couldn’t take much more without becoming delirious; anything over forty was dangerous territory.

I’m a miserable tactician, I’ll admit it, at least in a situation like that. I could see the elements of the problem, but all I could do was stew about it. Those guys topside, for instance. Could they communicate my position to the gorillas guarding the air tank? They were no more than thirty meters above me; if they had any kind of generalship at all a message would soon be arriving to the guards to be on the lookout for a roly-poly, out-of-breath football trophy, known to associate with lengths of chrome-plated pipe.

If so, what could I do about it? There was no hope of making my way through the maze to the next air station—which might well be guarded, anyway. So if these guys didn’t find somewhere else to go in the next eight minutes, it was going to be a dead heat (
terrible
choice of words there) as to whether I died of suffocation or boiled in my own sweat. I didn’t really have a preference in the matter; it’s something only a coroner could care about.

Brenda Starr, comic-strip reporter, would surely have thought up some clever ruse, some diversion, something to lure those freaking soldiers away from the air tank long enough for her to re-fuel. Hildy Johnson, scared-shitless schoolteacher and former inkster, didn’t have the first notion of how to go about it without drawing attention to herself.

There was one bit of good news in the mix. My tongue had continued its independent ways as I crouched in hiding, and soon I was startled by the sound of a busy signal in my ear. I didn’t even know who I’d called, much less how the signal got out. I eventually surmised (and later found out it was true) that something in the junk pile was acting as an antenna, relaying my calls to the surface, and thence to a satellite.

So I tried Brenda again (still no answer), and the
Nipple
(still nothing), and then I dialed Liz.

“Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty speaking,” came a slurred voice.

“Liz, Liz, this is Hildy. I’m in big trouble.”

There was a long, somehow boozy silence. I wondered if she’d fallen asleep. Then there was a sob.

“Liz? Are you still there?”

“Hildy. Hildy. Oh, god, I didn’t want to do it.”

“Didn’t want to do what? Liz, I don’t have time for—”

“I’m a drunk, Hildy. A goddamn drunk.”

This was neither news, nor a well-kept secret. I didn’t say anything, but listened to the sound of wracking sobs and watched the seconds tick off on my personal clock and waited for her to talk.

“They said they could put me away for a long time, Hildy. A long,
long
time. I was scared, and I felt really awful. I was shaking and I was throwing up, only nothing came up, and they wouldn’t let me have a drink.”

“What are you talking about? Who’s ‘they?’ ”

“They,
they
, dammit! The CC.”

By then I had more or less figured it out. She stammered disconnected parts to me then, and I learned the complete story later, and it went something like this:

Even before the Bicentennial celebration Liz had been firmly in the employ of the CC. At some point she had been arrested, taken in, and charged with many counts of weapons violations. (So were a lot of others; the invasion of Heinlein Town had been armed with weapons confiscated during a huge crackdown—an event that never made the news.)

“They said I could go to jail for eighty years, Hildy. And then they left me alone, and the CC spoke to me and told me if I did a few little things for him, here and there, the charges might be dropped.”

“What happened, Liz? Did you get careless?”

“What? Oh, I don’t
know
, Hildy. They never showed me the evidence they had against me. They said it would all come out in the trial. I don’t know if it was obtained illegally or not. But when the CC started talking I figured out pretty quick that it didn’t
matter
. We talked about that; you know that, if he ever wanted to, he could frame every person on Luna for something or other. All I could see was when we got to court, it’d be an airtight case. I was afraid to let it get that far.”

“So you sold me out.”

There was silence for a long time. A few more minutes had gone by. The guards hadn’t moved. There wasn’t anything else to do but listen.

“Tell me the rest of it,” I said.

It seemed there was this group of people out around Delambre that the CC wanted to know more about. He suggested Liz get me out there and see what happened. I should have been flattered. The CC’s estimate of my bloodhound instincts must have been pretty high. I suppose if I hadn’t seen anything during that first trip, something else would have been arranged, until I was on the scent. After that, I could be relied on to bring the story to ground.

“He was real interested when you brought in that tape of the little girl. I…  by that time I was a wholly-owned subsidiary, Hildy. I told him I could find some way of getting you to tell me what was going on. I’d have done about anything by then.”

“The hostage syndrome,” I said. The guards were still there.

“What? Oh. Yeah, probably. Or sheer lack of character. Anyway, he told me to hold back or you’d get suspicious. So I did, and you finally invited me in.”

And on that first visit she’d stolen a null-field generator. She didn’t say how, but it probably wasn’t too hard. They’re not dangerous unless you try to open them up.

I could put the rest of it together myself. During the next week the CC had learned enough null-field technology to make something to get his troops through the barriers, if not to equip them with null-suits or fields of their own.

“And that’s pretty much it,” she said, and sighed. “So I guess he arrested you, and probably all those other folks, too, right? Where have they got you? Have they set bail yet?”

“Are you serious?”

“Hell, Hildy, I don’t think he could have anything serious on you.”

“Liz…  what’s going on out there?”

“What do you mean?”

“Cricket said all hell was breaking loose, somehow or other.”

“You got me, Hildy. I was just…  ah, sleeping, until you called. I’m here in my apartment. Come to think of it, the lights are flickering. But that could be just my head.”

She was in the dark as much as I was. A lot of people were. If you didn’t leave your apartment and you didn’t live in one of the sectors where the oxygen service was interrupted, the chances of your having missed the early stages of the Big Glitch were excellent. Liz had been in an alcoholic stupor, with her phone set to take calls only from me.

“Liz. Why?”

There was a long pause. Then, “Hildy, I’m a
drunk
. Don’t ever trust a drunk. If it comes to a choice between you and the next drink…  it’s not really a choice.”

“Ever thought of taking the cure?”

“Babe, I
like
drinking. It’s the only thing I
do
like. That, and Winston.”

Maybe I would have hit her right in the belly at that point; I don’t know. I know I was filled with rage at her. Telling her the dog was fried and vac-dried wouldn’t have begun to get back at her for what she’d done to me.

But just then I suddenly got real, real hot. I’d already been too warm, you understand; now, in an instant, my skin was so hot I wanted to peel it off and there was a burning ache on the left side of my chest.

The null-suit did what it could. I watched in growing alarm as the indicator that had been telling me how many minutes I had to live took a nose dive. I thought it wasn’t going to stop. Hell, it was almost worth it. With the falling gauge came a cooling blast of air all over my body. At least I wasn’t going to fry.

I’d finally put together what was happening, though. For almost a minute I’d been feeling short, sharp shocks through the metal pipes I leaned against and the metal brace I had my feet on. Then I saw a bullet hit a pipe. That’s the only thing it could have been, I reasoned. It left a dent, a dull place on the metal. Somebody was standing on top of the junk pile and shooting down into it at random. It had to be blind shooting, because I couldn’t see the shooter. But the bullets were ricocheting and one had finally struck me. I couldn’t afford another hit.

So I grabbed a length of pipe and started toward the corridor. I didn’t think I could do much good against the tough pressure suits, but if I swung for the faceplates I might get one of them, and at least I’d go down fighting. I owed it to Winston, if to no one else, to do that much.

Getting to the corridor was like reaching for that top step that isn’t there. I stepped out, pipe cocked like the clean-up batter coming to the plate. And nobody was there.

I saw their retreating backs outlined by the light of their helmet lamps. They were jogging toward the exit.

I’ll never know for sure, but it seems likely they’d been summoned to the top to help in the search for me. How were they to know the guys on top of the pile were only a few meters directly above them? Anyway, if they’d stayed in place, I’d have been dead in ninety seconds, tops. So I gave them ten seconds to get beyond the point where they could possible see me, and I reached for the ALU adapter hose.

It wasn’t there.

It made me mad. I couldn’t think of anything more foolish than getting this close to salvation and then suffocating with about a ton of compressed oxygen at my fingertips. I slammed my hand against the tank, then got my flashlight and cast about on the ground. I was sure they’d taken it with them. It’s what I would have done, in their place.

But they hadn’t. It was lying right there on the ALU’s baseplate, probably knocked off when one of the guards decided to rest his fat ass on the tank. I fumbled it in place between the tank and my chest valve, and turned the release valve
hard
.

I make my living with words. I respect them. I always want to use the proper one, so I searched a long time for the right one to describe how that first rush of cooling air felt, and I concluded nobody’s made up a word for that yet. Think of the greatest pleasure you ever experienced, and use whatever word you’d use to describe that. An orgasm was a pale thing beside it.

Why hadn’t they taken the connector hose? The answer, when I eventually learned it, was simple, and typical of the Big Glitch. They hadn’t known I needed it.

The cops and soldiers who had invaded Heinlein Town hadn’t been told much about anything. They hadn’t been led to expect armed resistance. They knew next to nothing about the nature of or limitations to null-suit technology. They
surely
hadn’t been told there were two groups, working at cross purposes to the extent that one group would ensure the destruction of the other. All this affected their tactics terribly. A lot of people lived because of this confusion, and I was one of them. I’d like to take credit for my own survival—and not
everything
I did was stupid—but the fact is that I had Winston, and I had a lot of luck, and the luck was mostly generated by their ignorance and poor generalship.

I had vaguely realized some of this by the time I made my way from the ALU and to a branching corridor I thought would take me to a different surface exit. I didn’t know what good it would do me, but it was worthwhile to keep it in mind.

Once on the surface again, I called the
Nipple
and again got a busy signal, all the time keeping my eyes open for more of the bad guys. I was hoping they were all up atop the junk, possibly stumbling around and breaking legs, heads, and other important body parts. I wished Callie were there; she’d have put a hex on them.

Callie? Well, what the hell. I had to dredge the number up from the further reaches of my memory, and it did no good at all. Not even a busy signal. Nothing but dead air.

Then I remembered the top code. Why did it take me so long? I think it was because Walter really had impressed it on me that the code was not to be used at all, that it existed as an unachievable level of dire perfection. A story justifying the use of the top code would need headlines that would made 72-point type seem like fine print. The other reason is that I had never thought of what was happening to me as a story.

I didn’t really expect much from it, to tell the truth. I’d been using my normal access code to the
Nipple
, and that should have gotten through any conceivable log-jam of calls and directly into Walter’s office. So far it had yielded only busy signals. But I punched in the code anyway, and Walter said:

“Don’t tell me where you are, Hildy. Hang up and move as far from your present position as you dare, and then call me back.”

“
Walter
!” I screamed. But the line was already dead.

It would be nice to report that I immediately did as he said, that I wasted no time, that I continued to show the courageous resolve that had been my trademark since the first shots were fired. By that I mean that I hadn’t cried to that point. I did now. I wept helplessly, like a baby.

Don’t try this in your null-suit, when you get one. You don’t breathe, so your lungs just sort of spasm. It’s enough to make your ears pop. Crying also throws the regulator mechanism out of whack, so that I wasted ten minutes’ oxygen in three minutes of hysterics. Trust Mister V. M. Smith not to have reckoned with emotional outbursts when he laid out the parameters.