Дэймон Найт - Orbit 10

Brens concentrated on one of the few tasks not yet automated: at Cityend, and on the train’s emergence from the tunnel, his real duty would begin. Three times in the past month skyers had sought to breach City defenses through the tunnel itself.

“Hey! You didn’t check defense systems,” Karras said.

“Thanks,” Brens muttered through clenched teeth. “But they’re okay.” Then, because he knew Karras was right, he flipped the arming switch for the roof-mounted fifties and checked diverted-power availability for the nose lasers. The dials read in the green, as always.

Only Karras, who now sat hunched forward in anticipation, would have noticed the omission. Because Karras was sick. The man actually seemed to look forward to his turn in the window seat, not only for the sights all the other commuters in the Co-op tried to avoid, but also for the possible opportunity of turning loose the train’s newly installed firepower.

“One of these days they’re going to make a big try. They’d all give an arm to break into City, just to camp in the corridors. Now, if it was me out there, I’d be figuring a way to get out into Suburbs. But them? All they know is destroy. Besides, you think they’ll take it lying down that we raised the O-tax? Forget it! They’re out there waiting, and we both know it. That’s why you ought to check all the gear we’ve got. Never know when . . .”

“Later, Karras! There it is.” Brens felt his chest tighten as the distant circle of light swept toward them—tunnel exit, Cityend. His forearms tensed and he glared at the instruments, waiting for the possibility that he might have to override the controls and slam the train to a stop. But a green light flashed; ahead, the circle of sky brightened as the approaching train tripped the switch that cut off the spray of mist at the tunnel exist. And with that mist fading, the barrier of twenty thousand volts which ordinarily crackled between the exit uprights faded also. For the next few moments, while the train snaked its way into Opensky, City was potentially vulnerable.

Brens stared even harder at the opening, but saw nothing. The car flashed out into gray twilight, and he relaxed. But instinct, or a random impulse, drew his eyes to the train’s exterior mirrors. And then he saw them: a shapeless huddle of bodies pouring into the tunnel back toward City. He hit a series of studs on the con­sole and braced himself for the jolt.

There it was.

A murmur swept the crowded car behind him, but he ignored it and stared straight ahead.

“What the hell was it?” Karras asked. “I didn’t see a thing.”

“Skyers. They were waiting, I guess till the first car passed. They must have figured no one would see them that way.”

“I don’t mean who. I mean, what did you use? I didn’t hear the fifties.”

“For a man who’s taking the run tomorrow, you don’t keep up very well. Nothing fancy, none of the noise and flash some people get their kicks from. I just popped speedbreaks on the last three cars.”

“In the tunnel? My God! Must have wiped them all the way out the tunnel walls, like a squeegee. Who figured that one?”

“This morning’s Co-op bulletin suggested it, remember?”

Karras sulked. “I’ve got better things to do than pay attention to every word those guys put out. They must spend all day dic­tating memos. We got a real bunch of clods running things this quarter.”

“Why don’t you volunteer?”

“I give them my four days’ pay a month. Who needs that mishmash?”

Brens silently agreed. No one enjoyed keeping the Co-op alive. No one really knew how. And that was one of the major problems associated with having amateurs in charge: it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. But the only way, since the line itself had declared bankruptcy, and both city and state governments refused to take over. If it hadn’t been for the Co-op, City would have died, a festering ulcer in the midst of the cancer of Opensky.

Opensky whirled past them now. Along the embankment on both sides, legs dangled a decorative fringe. People sat atop the pilings and hurled debris at the speeding stainless steel cars. Their accuracy had always amazed Brens. Even as he willed himself rigid, he flinched at the eggs, rocks, bottles, and assorted garbage that clattered and smeared across the window.

“Look at those sonsabitches throw, would you? You ever try and figure what kind of lead time you need to hit something moving as fast as we are?”

Brens shook his head. “I guess they’re used to it.”

“Why not? What else they got to do but practice?”

Behind them, gunfire crackled and bullets pattered along the boiler plate. Many of the commuters ducked at the opening burst.

“Look at them back there.” Karras pointed down the aisle. “Scared blue, every one of them. I know this psychologist who’s got a way to calm things down, he says. He had this idea to paint bull’s-eyes on the sides of the cars, below the window. Did I tell you about it? He figures it’ll work two or three ways. One, if the snipers hit the bull’s-eyes, there’s less chance of somebody getting tagged through a crack in the boiler plate. Two, maybe they’ll quit firing at all, when they see we don’t give a suck of sky about it. Or three, he says, even if they keep it up, it gives them some­thing to do, sort of channels their aggression. If they take it out on the trains, maybe they’ll ease up on City. What do you think?”

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to put up shooting galleries in all the playgrounds? Or figure a way to get new cars for the trains? We can’t keep patching and jury-rigging these old crates forever. The last thing we need right now is to make us more of a target than we already are.”

“Okay. Have it your way. Only, I was thinking. . .”

Brens tuned him out and squinted at the last molten sliver of setting sun. Its rays smeared rainbows through the streaked eggs washing slowly across the window in the slipstream. The mess coagulated and darkened as airblown particles of ash settled in it and crusted over. When he could stand it no longer, Brens flipped on the wipers and watched the clotted slime smear across the glass, as he had known it would. But some of it scrubbed loose to flip back alongside the speeding train.

The people were still out there. If he looked carefully straight ahead, their presence became a mere shadow at the edges of the channel through which he watched the trainpad reeling toward him. Though he doubted any eye would catch his long enough to matter, he avoided the faces. There was always the slight chance that he might recognize one of them. Twenty years wasn’t so long a time. Twenty years ago he had watched the trains from an embankment like these.

Now the train swooped upward to ride its cushion of air along the raised pad, level with second-story windows on each side. Blurred faces stared from those windows, here disembodied, there resting on a cupped hand and arm propped on a window ledge.

The exterior mirrors showed him faces ducking away from the gust of wind fanning out behind the train and from the debris lifted whirling in the grimy evening air. He tried to picture the pattern left by the train’s passage—dust settling out of the whirl­wind like the lines of polarization around a magnet tip. A few of the faces wore respirators or simple, and relatively useless, cotton masks. Many didn’t bother to draw back but hung exposed to the breeze that the train was stirring up. And now, as on each of his previous rare turns at the window seat, Brens had the impulse to slow the train, to let the wind die down and diminish behind them, out of what he himself considered misplaced and maudlin sympathy for the skyers, who seemed to enjoy the excitement of the train’s glistening passage. It tempered the boredom of their day.