Дэймон Найт - Orbit 12

“Look at this man’s head, Mr. Ardrey.” He had forgotten his resentment of my skeptical attitude toward Miss Longhope’s memorabilia. “Look at his head, Mr. Ardrey. Where did this man come from?”

“A makeup room, Newlyn. It’s just an actor pretending to be a member of a humanoid species that never existed. A nonexistent friendly alien.”

He continued to look at the actor’s picture. “Can I have this?”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t mine to give you. What do you want with it, anyway?” I took it out of his hands, gently.

He shrugged and looked at the other items on the desk. He feigned an interest in the ledger containing the old woman’s “log entries,” but I could tell that the writing there bored him.

I sorted the papers and photographs and put them back into the dingy manila envelopes. There was nothing in the old woman’s possessions of any conceivable value to the city. We had innumerable collections of such maudlin remnants of the pre-Evacuation days, should anyone actually wish to see such things. Museums. Chronos galleries. Pedestrian corridors lined with glass cases and curioboards. No one was denied information about the past. And if Almira Longhope had anything at all worth saving, I supposed it to be the blue ledger. However miserable and cramped, at least it was a document of human suffering and therefore of some small value to the urban archives.

But as I had mentally predicted he would, Newlyn had grown weary of this document. He had left the sleeping cubicle and gone back to the command pit of the Sojourner II. I finished putting away the old woman’s possessions, the inconsequential leftovers of a lifetime misspent and horrifyingly sad.

Everything but the ledger.

That I carried with me, out to where Newlyn prowled among the winking lights and the ghostly crewmen who rode their drifting derelict through the ruinous voids of that lifetime.

Newlyn said: “What do we have to do now?”

“Find a telecom unit. The old bitch must have tried to make it an integral part of the equipment on this ‘vessel.’ Why don’t you see if you can find it?”

This request pleased Yates’ son; it gave him an excuse to finger the dials and levers, to examine the intricacy of the total construct. Meanwhile, the old woman surveyed us regally from the command chair. I realized that she was attired after the fashion of some anonymous producer’s concept of a Rigelian priestess; a sort of scepter, or abbreviated staff, lay across her thin thighs. How magnificently, how pettily, she had met her death. In the cubicle’s cold air her face seemed to be carved of ice. I had just looked away from her twisted lower lip when Newlyn called, “Here it is, Mr. Ardrey. In this box over here. Where it says ‘Communications.’“

“Where it says ‘Communications,’“ I echoed. “Very apt.”

I mounted the catwalk, sat down, and made three brief calls. One to the main control room. One to the office of the administrative head of the glissadors on Level 8. One to the city agency of Flame-Decontamination and Refurbishing.

Newlyn said: “You’re going to have them burn out the old woman’s cubicle? You’re going to let them set fire to all this stuff she’s made?”

“She’s done with these things, Newlyn. Somebody else should have access to what she can’t use anymore. Even though this is Level 8, there are people waiting to live here. People from the level beneath us.”

“Maybe they’d like it the way she has it now.”

“Grow up,” I said.

He wouldn’t talk to me through the waiting that followed. He wouldn’t talk to me when the glissadors came with their silent cart to carry Miss Almira Longhope’s corpse through the murky corridors to the pneumatic scaffolding that would drop her to the waste converters on Level 9. He remained silent through the waiting that followed the glissadors’ departure.

And when the men from F-D&R came into the cubicle with their canisters of bactericidal combustgens, and their flame-suits, and their unbelieving goggled-over eyes, Newlyn cut his own eyes in reprimand and stalked out. He went into the corridor-went with blatant contempt for my colloquy with these men— and waited outside in the smoky halflight that drifted there. I explained the situation to the men from F-D&R. I gave directions. They nodded their insectlike heads. My explanation done, I went into the silent corridor and, with considerable difficulty, found Newlyn leaning in a crimson shadow against the opposite wall. I said something, but he wouldn’t talk to me.

“All right,” I said. “I’m going up. You can do what you like.”

The tap-tap-tap of my footfalls was overwhelmed, just then, by the carnivorous whooshing of the F-D&R handtorches. The corridor filled with this noise, and the tightly closed panel of cubicle 502 gave me the momentary illusion that the panel itself was glowing with unnatural heat, unnatural light. I hesitated briefly. Then I resumed walking. Seconds later, it became apparent that another series of footfalls was echoing my own, albeit in a reluctant and irregular way: taptap tap taptaptap.

In the domed cities (not simply in Atlanta, but in all the Urban Nuclei) there exist among the affluent surfacesiders, particularly among the adolescent boys of the wealthy and/or enfranchised, a significant few who have more leisure and more adrenalin than they can intelligently deal with. These few release their energy and defile their time in inutile pursuits that frequently terrorize the innocent, the unprepared, the preoccupied. They do not pick pockets. They do not engage in vandalism. They do not kill.

Instead, they practice the grotesque art of instilling a wholly meaningless terror in all those whom they assault with mad gestures and mad nylon-distorted faces. These boys—and, sadly, these few perverse adult males—go by the name of hoisterjacks, primarily because of their inclination to leap out of the darkness of the catacombs, to cling reasonlessly to the crystalline face of a lift-tube, arms full out, fingers gripping the maintenance handles on either side of the lift-tube door, and to scream like ravening hyenas as they press their already misaligned features against the glass.

One can in no way make adequate psychological preparation for the coming of a hoisterjack—even if one sees him beforehand.

I had entered the central concourse on Level 8, the concourse leading to the lift-station from which we had earlier disembarked, when I became aware of an echo on the tiles. An echo in addition to Newlyn’s tentative taptaptaptapping . The echo was coming to me from the direction in which I moved, not from behind me. I looked down the ill-lit corridor, through the haze of red light. I saw the deeper glimmering of the lift-station and the translucent outline of the waiting lift-tube itself. I thought the cylinders presence a fine piece of luck; we would not have to wait for transportation—and I would not have to make inane conversation to cover the depressing childishness of Newlyn’s funk.

Then I saw, or believed I saw, two wraithlike figures cross the glimmering backdrop of the lift-station and disappear into an auxiliary hallway. I could not be sure. I paid little heed.

When I reached the lift-tube, I entered and held my thumb on the thin silver operating panel so that the door would not close. From out of the fog of halflight Newlyn came. He entered the cylinder and stood to one side, away from me. I did not remove my thumb from the operating panel.

“Let go of it,” Newlyn said. “Send us up.”

“What do you mean, ‘Let go of it’? Who are you talking to?” Newlyn didn’t answer. I repeated my self-defeating straightline: “Who are you talking to, Newlyn?’