Floating Worlds (53 page)

Some while later their building was raided. She and Bunker, Willie and An Chu sat for hours in the tunnel. It was freezing cold. She laid her cheek against Bunker’s shoulder and closed her eyes. Once they heard Jennie Morrison screaming. Finally, just before dawn, they crept down into the secret room again.

Jennie was gone. The apartment was wrecked. The desk had been smashed and the cupboards and counter pulled off the kitchen wall. The wall between this and the next apartment had been broken out. The man who lived there was gone too.

An Chu leaned on Willie’s shoulder and cried. Paula took her jacket off. The healing bullet wound ached in her backside. She and Bunker went out to the hall.

All up and down the hall the doors to the apartments were broken inward. She went along the hall, looking into the rooms. In some of them even the mat flooring had been ripped up and the floors cracked open. No one was there. Paula wiped her hands on her sleeves. So they had done it, rounded everybody up and taken them away. Bunker went ahead of her toward the stairs. She turned back to Jennie’s room.

Willie paced up and down the room, his arms swinging. “This proves it. We have to get out of here.”

“Where?” Paula said. Bunker returned, and her shoulders sank an inch with relief.

“The people hidden under the floor in 73 are still here,” he said. “And the two women who live in the broom closet. I guess the police just didn’t bother to look in there.”

Willie walked past them, his strides quick as a soldier’s. “I’ll kill them. I’ll smash hell out of them, if I can just get my hands on them.” He brandished his fists.

An Chu came in from the secret room with a cup of water. “What are we going to do about Jennie?”

“We have to get out of here,” Willie said.

“We can’t leave,” Bunker said to Willie. “Not right away. They’ll be watching to see if anybody bolts.” He slid under the sink to open the secret door.

Paula and An Chu followed Bunker into the narrow room. The smell of mildew grew strong just inside the door. An Chu dropped down onto the cot she and Willie shared, her face tipped up to Paula’s.

“We have to find out where they’ve taken Jennie.”

At the end of the room, Bunker turned around. “No. There’s nothing we can do for Jennie now.”

“When we find her we can decide what to do,” Paula said. Her left buttock throbbed deep in the wound. Willie Luhan was stalking down the room, his fists still clenched tight.

“You know, I think you’re a coward,” he said to Bunker.

“I think you’re an idiot,” Bunker said. He went head-first out of the room into the ruined building.

An Chu straightened, her hand on Paula’s arm. “They took dozens of people. It won’t be that hard to find them.”

“I’ll help you,” Willie said. “I know where I can get a gun.”

Paula’s hand pressed against her bad hip. She went to the bucket for a drink of water. It was nearly morning. They would have to wait until night to look for Jennie. The pain in her hip nagged her. She was going nowhere with Willie and his gun. Of all the people she knew, the only one she needed was Bunker. He would not help her, and he was right. She hunched her shoulders.

At a lope she crossed the close-cropped lawn to the next building, An Chu behind her, and sat down in the lee of the wall. An Chu raced up beside her. Paula wiped her hand over her face.

“This is impossible.”

An Chu muttered something. There were four buildings in this complex, all above ground, rising six or eight stories above the trim lawns. Down the hill, Paula could see a section of the wire fence that separated the buildings and grass from the wasteland. A light came on in the building she was sitting against.

“We aren’t doing this right.” She got up. Her hip had stiffened and when she put her weight on it she nearly fell. She led An Chu the length of the building to the door. It was locked. She pressed her nose to the window. Inside was a hall, and along the wall a row of vending machines.

“We need an hourly.”

An Chu pushed her out of the way to look. “They won’t say where they took them in an hourly.” She rattled the door, Paula turned, casting around the lawn for loose paper.

“Listen.” An Chu clutched her arm. “Is that about us?”

Somewhere nearby a siren moaned up toward a whistling shriek. Paula moved away from the building, toward the dark. Another siren joined the first, and another, and another, and suddenly one on the roof before her, so loud she jumped a foot.

“Come on.” Limping, she started down the hill toward the fence. The grass was even as pavement under her feet.

The sirens screeched up to a high note and stuck there. An Chu beside her broke into a trot. She glanced back.

“Watch out!”

Paula wheeled. A searchlight snapped on near the building they had just left. An Chu whispered, “Run!”

“No.” Paula grabbed the other woman’s arm and held her. She faced the searchlight’s blinding eye. The sirens’ high scream needled her ears. Two indistinct figures ran down the gentle slope toward her.

“Stay where you are. Put your hands up.”

Paula raised her hands. She called, “What’s going on? We’re trying to get home.”

Two Martian soldiers reached them. One carried a heavy automatic pistol. The other slapped his hands down Paula’s sides.

“All right. Where’s home? You know you’re half an hour past curfew.”

Paula gave the address on her identification. She took the white job-card out of the collar pocket on her jacket to show the soldier. The searchlight went off; the round eye of the lamp faded slowly through yellow to brown to black. An Chu stood rigid while the soldier groped her up and down. Suddenly the sirens too were turned off. The silence rang like the aftertone of a bell. The soldier with the pistol looked up over his head at the dark dome.

“False alarm?”

The other man was reading Paula’s card, luminous in the dark. “What are you doing all the way—” He raised his head. High overhead there was a boom.

“Come with us. Run.” He grabbed Paula’s arm and dragged her across the lawn at a dead run toward the nearest building. The other man and An Chu raced after them.

Another boom sounded, nearer, like a crash of thunder. The echo rolled off around them. The sound hurt Paula’s ears. The soldier opened a sloping basement door and pushed her toward a flight of steps leading down into the underground floor. She looked back. Far down the dome, beyond the fence, there was a sudden great spark, blue-white, like a giant star, gone in an instant. The soldier thrust her down into the basement.

“Attention,” a wall speaker said. “Your attention please.”

The dark basement was crowded with people, packed together body to body. The man behind Paula directed her through the room. His hand torch flashed a narrow light ahead of her. She stepped over legs and bodies sprawled over the floor. Two people squeezed apart to make room for her.

“Paula—”

She caught An Chu’s hand and pulled her after her. There was room for only one of them to sit, and they stood, An Chu in front of Paula. The soldiers were gone.

“Attention. We are experiencing a meteorite barrage. There is no need for alarm. Please remain quiet and obey your building commandos.”

“Meteorites,” An Chu said. “What do they—”

“Sssh.” Paula slid one arm around An Chu’s waist. Her hip hurt and she shifted her balance to the other leg. In the wasteland they hardly noticed the air raids. The door was behind them, ten yards away: twenty people away. Wait. Under her feet the floor vibrated. The people around her talked in low voices. The soldier who had brought them still had her job-card. He might be checking it. The sirens began to howl again.

“Attention. Your attention please. The all-clear is sounding—”

The crowd got to their feet in a sudden relieved roar of voices, their feet loud, reaching for coats and children. Paula shoved An Chu forward.

“Hurry.”

They worked their way through the shifting mob toward the door. The ceiling lights came on, dazzling bright, drawing a gasp from most of the people in the room. Between Paula and the door a man helped another into a coat. He had been sitting on an hourly, which clung to his backside. In passing, Paula removed it. She bundled it in her fist and followed An Chu to the door. They slid out to the cool night air and ran down the gentle slope toward the fence.

RAIDS BREAK SABOTAGE RING

Government Police have arrested over a thousand anarchist terrorists in raids that broke the back of a dome-wide subversive organization.

“Over a thousand,” Paula said. Even allowing for official exaggeration, that meant hundreds of prisoners. There were very few places in New York large enough to keep hundreds of people. Even after the immigrations of the past months, the Martians did not have enough men here to guard hundreds of prisoners in small groups: they all had to be together. Paula swept a look around them. They were walking along the side of a hill, outside the fences of the Martians. Dawn was coming.

“How’s your butt?” An Chu stuffed her hands in her jacket pockets.

“It’s all right.”

“They don’t expect anybody to believe that was meteorites,” An Chu said.

“They do have meteor storms on Mars,” Paula said. “The air’s that thin.” She folded the hourly. A dry ridge of hillside rose up ahead of them, beyond a forest of tree stumps four feet high. She swung around the foot of the hill.

Climbing the gentler slope beyond, she smelled smoke, and when she reached the crest of the hill saw a ruin, still burning, on the level ground beyond. She stopped. An Chu caught up with her.

“What’s the matter?”

Paula was staring at the ruin. It had been bombed out long before; the old walls had sagged almost to the ground. Someone had bombed it again last night. An Chu said, “That must have happened during the raid. Then it’s the Styths, isn’t it?”

Paula went on without answering. With masers, they could bomb inside the dome, and they obviously had some way of finding buildings, although without distinguishing inhabited places from ruins. She thought nervously of Bunker in the building near the lake and went faster down the hillside.

The wound in her cheek itched. She hoped that meant it was healing. Limping after An Chu across the barren wasteland, she thought wryly of what Tanuojin had said; she wished for him now, with his doctor’s hands. An Chu ran off over the crest of a hill, out of sight.

The night was much warmer than the one before had been. The dust made her nose itch. They had spent an hour talking over the whole dome and the places where the Martians could house hundreds of prisoners. There was only one: the entry port on the northwest wall. She rounded the hillside and a dry wind brushed her face. An Chu dashed up to her.

“Look what I found.”

She had half an overripe melon, lightly peppered with coffee grounds. They ate it while they walked. The sweet juice ran down Paula’s chin and she caught it on her fingers and licked it off. They crossed a stretch of low ground that had been bulldozed flat, as if for a new building. Paula looked south. The dome stretched off below her, spotted with islands of lights. The sirens began.

“Again?” An Chu put her head back to look up.

“Come on,” Paula said. “This will make it easier—they’ll all be indoors.”

They went on side by side toward the west wall of the dome. The sirens’ hound-voices rose and fell, reached their high note, and stayed there. The first crash boomed in the peak of the dome. The thunder radiated out like a wave. Paula found herself walking at top speed in spite of her bad hip.

Another, louder bang sounded. Suddenly, just ahead of her and a hundred feet off the ground, there was a silent explosion of light, blue-white, brilliant as a sun. It was gone at once. She stopped, her breath caught in her lungs, An Chu beside her. They were near the top of a hill; to the north was another complex of buildings. The booming in the dome grew louder and the reports closer together. Another star burst at ground level between the two women and the buildings. For an instant the buildings, the land, the dead stumps of the trees were printed on Paula’s eyes like a photographic negative. The blackness that fell afterward was like being blind. Another boom echoed through the dome and a few seconds later another light shone, and one of the buildings to the north exploded into a stalk of flames.

Paula turned and ran down the hillside. Her ears rang. The thunder rolls of the attack came so fast they blended into one long crash. The light-bombs burst with every stride she took. An Chu ran beside her. The grass broke under Paula’s feet and a sharp dry stalk jabbed her in the leg. Dazzled by the bombs, her head throbbing from the racket, she ran straight into a heavy wire-mesh fence.

The attack ended. The sirens of the all-clear began to moan. Paula and An Chu climbed the fence and dropped down onto the smooth clipped grass of a Martian lawn. Limping, Paula jogged toward the dome wall, just ahead of them beyond a building. Voices sounded, and people began to spill out of the below-ground floors onto the grass. The lights in the building came on. Paula and An Chu went unnoticed in the crowd; they sneaked down into a basement to hide for the day.

An Chu found them a banquet in the garbage: soggy bread and apple cores and four containers with beans and vegetables still clinging to the bottoms. They drank from a public fountain and spent most of the day in the basement of the building, in behind the cleaning machines. After dark they started along the wall of the dome, going north, to find the entry port, the most secure place in the dome.

It bulged out of the side of the dome, taller than any building, about fifteen minutes’ walk from where they had spent the day. The wire fence surrounding it was strung on rubberized posts. Five feet inside this fence was another fence, higher, also insulated.

Paula sat down. Her backside hurt more than yesterday and she knew it was infected. “That must be where those prisoners are.”

“Is it electric?” An Chu put her hand out.

“Touch it and find out.”

“Why are you in a mood?”