Logan Trilogy (17 page)

"Took you long enough. Now, do exactly what I tell you. There's less than seven minutes left and no time for talk. We're on the edge of the minefield. A wrong step will take your legs off. Understood?"

Logan nodded dully.

"Then follow me," said the man.

Logan's legs were weighted. They were unyielding things which did not wish to obey him. As he followed the guide he kept losing his balance, righting himself, then almost falling again. If he fell he would be blown to pieces. Walking was impossibly difficult, one of the hardest feats he had ever been called upon to perform. Jess, too, was staggering with exhaustion.

Finally they were clear of the mined area.

They entered a long storage building, passed between high, crated objects.

Logan tried to focus his eyes on the objects. Silvery. Silvery shapes in shimmering white webbing—no, fiber packing. Numerals and letters on the sides: TITAN…STARSCRAPER…FALCONER…

He knew what they were. Missiles. Crated and stacked and abandoned.

Again into the open.

Logan narrowed his eyes. Across an unbroken stretch of tarmac: a tall gantry, supporting a massive gleaming needle.

A passenger rocket!

Logan tried to weave a logical fabric from threads of confused thought. Cape Steinbeck, the space storage center at the tip of the Keys. A dead section. Like Cathedral. Like Molly. Like Washington. All stages on the Sanctuary line. Steinbeck, where the rockets and the missiles were mothballed when space flight was abandoned. Yet they were using a rocket which meant that Sanctuary must be in space. But how? Where? The planets in this solar system would not support life. The stars had never been reached. How?

"Keep moving," said the guide.

They started toward the waiting rocket. Steam wisped from its lower stage. Frost condensed and evaporated from liquid oxygen and hyrodgen stored inside, ready to be converted into raw power.

Logan felt a darkness sifting down. A darkness within himself; a darkness from the heavy sky above him; and a darkness from a man who wore it. Wore the darkness. Wore black. A tall man, coming. A hunter in the tunic of night. Angerman, the judge and jury…

At last, as Logan knew it had to be. At last—Francis.

A sense of doom and despair settled around him; the feeling was crashing, unsupportable. He had never experienced anything like it.

Jess saw the DS man, choked out a small cry.

Logan pushed her toward the guide. "Take her. Get her aboard. I'll try to stop him."

The hard-faced man did not hesitate. He gripped Jessica's arm, propelled her toward the racket. She fought to free herself. "No, Logan! No!"

He ignored the fright and the urgency and the entreaty and the pain in her voice and he screamed silently, Hear me, Francis. Hear me. I want to TALK to you. There's so much I have to say to you.

A shudder rippled his body; the ground was sponge rubber; he kept sinking into it, tottering, pushing himself. He slipped to one knee, dragged his body up with clogging slowness. Dark was swimming in at him. He blinked it back.

The DS man was close now. Face set in rigid lines. Eyes cold, flat.

There was so much to say to Francis. That the world was coming apart, that it was dying, this system, this culture. That the Thinker was no longer able to hold it together. A new world would be formed.

Living is better than dying, Francis. Dying young is a waste and a shame and a perversion. The young don't build. They use. The wonders of Man were achieved by the mature, the wise, who lived in this world before we did. There was an Old Lincoln after the young one…

Exhaustion hacked at Logan. His breath rattled in his throat.

Francis filled the sky. The Gun was in his hand.

Can I speak? Can I tell him? Will he listen?

Words. Sound. Logan spoke. Brokenly. In patches.

"World…dying…can't last…I saw…the dead places…heart of the system is…rotten…There'll be more…runners…more of them…You can't stop them…can't…We…We were wrong, Francis…death no answer…we must…build, not destroy…tired of killing…wrong…tired…I—I.. "

A roaring. A great humming roar in Logan's head. The rocket leaving without him? Let it go, then. Let it find Sanctuary. The roaring pulsed, intensified. And with it, black. A wave of ruining black that took him, filled his mouth and eyes. Black sound. And Francis, black in black. And the Gun…

Someone was speaking. Someone was commanding him to open his eyes.

Francis stood above him. The DS man leaned over, pulled Logan up. The Gun was in its holster, the homer unfired.

Francis began to change. What was this? Am I really conscious? The skin, the very bones of Francis began to change; the face was being stripped away. The nose was altered, the jaw, the line of cheekbone. Francis was…

Francis was Ballard!

"I couldn't tell you back in Washington," the tall man said. "I didn't trust you then. Even when you failed to use the Gun I didn't trust you. Now I do."

The logic was suddenly there for Logan. Ballard would need to disguise himself among the young in

order to move about in the world. Every few years he'd need a new face, a new disguise. And what better disguise than that of a Sandman?

"I haven't been able to help too many of you," Ballard was saying, "because the only runners I can help are those I can reach. My organization is still a small one."

"But Doyle…back in Cathedral?"

"I gave him a key, told him to go for Sanctuary, but you were too quick for us, and the cubs got him."

"Then—it was you, on the steps at Crazy Horse."

Ballard nodded. "I wanted to stop you then."

"But how…how do you…" Logan tried to frame questions, but his tongue would not function.

"I have only limited access to the Thinker. I control parts of the maze, the dark parts, but I'm learning more each day. The system is dying. The Thinker is dying. Someday you and Jess and the others will be able to come back—to a changed world. A good, strong one. I'm working for that, widening the cracks in the system, doing what I can. There are few I can trust. Mainly I have to work alone."

"And—Sanctuary?"

Ballard was helping Logan toward the rocket. "Argos," he said. "The abandoned space station near Mars. It's a small colony now, still crude, cold, hard to live on. But it's ours, Logan. Yours now. The jump for Argos is Darkside—on the Moon."

He drew Logan, stumbling, to the boarding ladder. Jess was there., waiting, tears in her eyes.

Jess…Jess, I love you!

Hands reached for him, gentled him aboard, fastened him into the launch seat. A crisp crackle of voices beginning the countdown. And in the final second, as the port closed, Logan saw Ballard giving last-minute instructions to the hard-faced guide who had led them through the minefield.

The port sealed itself.

A great shuddering noise possessed the rocket. Logan felt himself danced by energies and tremors; Jess was smiling at him; a weight pushed him down. He closed his eyes.

Ballard watched the tide of orange envelop the lower stage of the rocket. The needlecraft poised, rose ponderously, gaining speed as it left Earth. Faster now. A thunder—as it began its long run down the Atlantic Range, safe from the eyes of men.

Ballard turned, a tall, lonely figure blending with the night, and walked back over the cold ground.

Chapter 0

The rocket was climbing on a golden flame, bound out and away for Darkside.

And 
SANCTUARY
.

Book 2 Logan's World

ARGOS

Argos died twice.

Beyond the 21st century, when the angry young had taken control of Earth, and space travel had been aborted, she was left to die in orbit, dwarfed by a silent Mars, her mute sun mirrors capturing energy without purpose, her womb-hub empty of life—an immense, spoked wheel turning in endless black.

Until the runners found her.

The man called Ballard knew about Argos, knew that she could provide shelter to those who fled the Sandmen and sought Sanctuary. He helped organize the lifeships that fired up from Cape Steinbeck carrying the vital stuffs of existence—hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon—to feed the arteries of the great wheel in the sterile frontier darkness beyond Earth. And, with each silver ship, eager runners arrived on Argos, free from the Sandman's Gun, to spawn fresh life in this new sea of space.

Children were born who would never know Earth. A hospital was built; fields of wheat, corn and rice were cultivated; a school was established—and fruit trees bloomed under a ribbed-glass sky.

At staggered intervals, as Ballard perfected his Sanctuary Line, more ships arrived, swelling the colony's population to more than three thousand men, women and children.

Then the lifeships stopped coming.

As a full year passed without supplies, fear began to permeate the colony. Argos was not self-sufficient; she could not survive without the stuffs of Earth.

Two years without ships.

Three. Then four.

Medical supplies were exhausted. Plague and death ran the wheel. The colony dwindled—to a thousand…to five hundred…to a hundred…to a handful of steel-tough runners and their families.

Logan and Jessica were among them, ten-year veterans of Argos—the legendary ex-Sandman and the woman who'd shared his desperate run for Sanctuary. They had a son now: Jaq, born on the wheel eight years ago, with the strength of his father in his pale green eyes, his mother's grace in movement, a boy who thrived on Earth history, who listened, entranced, to Logan's dark tales of a computerized world. To Jaq, the man named Ballard was a god…

Six years without ships.

Crisis time. The fields sere and withered. Water at a minimum. Food running out.

And one small lifeship to take them back.

Only a dozen could undertake the voyage. Lots were drawn, the final twelve chosen, the ship prepared. On board with nine others: Logan, Jessica and Jaq.

Fireup! Away…away.

Away.

Behind them, in the cool depths of uncaring space, Argos began her second death.

In Old Washington, Logan discovered why the ships had stopped coming. Sandmen had penetrated and smashed the Sanctuary Line at Cape Steinbeck. Just one step ahead of them, Ballard escaped to Crazy Horse Mountain in the Dakotas, to the Thinker. There, in a final gesture of rebellion against the system, he had sacrificed himself to destroy the vast computer-complex—bringing the cities down with it. Mazecars froze on their tracks; beltways were stilled; the time crystals in the hand of each citizen no longer ticked away human life.

The power of the Sandman was broken.

Citizens poured out of the tumbled, lifeless cities into the sudden reality of a raw world. The City People, young, pampered, given every luxury by their computerized life-system, had now become the Wilderness People, bewildered and cast adrift in a harsh new environment.

For them, the illusion of freedom had turned to the reality of nightmare.

RUN!

Logan was running.

No longer the hunter, he was the hunted. Black on black: his charcoal-dark uniform blending into night, feet stabbing the earth as he ran, dry-mouthed, for life.

The men of Deep Sleep were close behind him, relentless, kill-trained State assassins who terminated runners with the cold dispatch of the Thinker itself. Sandmen who hated him for what he'd done to them. "A Sandman doesn't run, Logan! He accepts Sleep proudly. You've betrayed the system, made fools of us all—and we'll homer you down for it, Logan!"

Homer! It could follow him anywhere, that singing charge of pain and death, seeking the heat of his body as a bee seeks pollen, leaping and twisting as he leaped and twisted through the night spaces of the city.

Yet, they had not fired. They were savoring the hunt, tasting it like a fine wine, moving in tireless oiled motion behind him, knowing he could not outrun them or the glowing death they carried at their belts.

Why is the runner always weak, exhausted, fighting to stay afoot—while his hunters are calm, easy-breathing, unruffled? Is it fear which quakes his bones, triphammers his heart; the fear of impossible odds, fear of the homer's ultimate pain?

Logan feared. He was brave, resolute, superbly-conditioned, and had faced the possibility of death in many forms, but now he feared. When a homer leaves the barrel of a Sandman's Gun there is no way to deflect it from its deadly course. It finds you, hits you, rips and unravels you in a wash of searing, nerve-tortured pain. Any man would fear such a death…

Logan circled up through the mile-high complex, a frenzied insect caught in a maze of steel-and-metal.

He was weaponless; the Gun had been lost to him a million years ago somewhere in the vastness of the city. A million-year run! His mouth gaped in pained laughter. Had he really been running that long? No wonder, then, that exhaustion burned fire-hot in his chest, that the world rippled in and out of focus, that his legs were loose and stupid under him, betraying his body, refusing to obey the hard command: run…run…run!

Run!

Logan fell.

"You all right?" Voice, filtering down to him. Hand, reaching for him. "Up you come now, Sandman.

Easy does it."

Logan swayed, holding fast to the shoulder of a reed-thin citizen, blinked at him, held out his right palm.

"Your flower's blacked, has it? Then you're a runner!" The voice turned icy. "A stinking runner!"

A fist smashed into Logan's face. He lurched back, blood threading his mouth.

"Here he is! Here!" The man was shouting, telling the Sandmen where to find Logan. He swung dizzily away, into a snake-twist of corridor darkness.

Another lift up. A riser to the next quad level. Then, in a stagger of steps, and a cool rush of night air, through an irised exit onto the roof of the mile-high complex.