Logan's Run

Table of Contents

Logan’s Run

Chapter 10
Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Chapter 7
Chapter 6
Chapter 5
Chapter 4
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Chapter 1
Chapter 0

Logan’s Run

TO ALL THE WILD FRIENDS
WE GREW UP WITH-
and who were with us when we wrote this book:

To Frankenstein and Mickey Mouse
To Jack, Doc and Reggie and The Temple of the Vampires
To Fu Manchu, Long John Silver, Tom Mix and Buck Jones
To The Iliad and The Odyssey, Superman and The Green Hornet
To Jack Armstrong, the Ail-American Boy, and The Hunchback of
     Notre Dame
To Gunga Din, King Kong and The Land of Oz
To Mr. Hyde and The Phantom of the Opera
To The Sea Wolf, Captain Nemo and The Great White Whale
To Batman and Robin, Black Country, Ted Sturgeon and The Ears
     of Johnny Bear
To Rhett Butler and Jiminy Cricket
To Matthew Arnold, Robert Frost and The Demolished Man
To What Mad Universe
To Dante, Dr. Lao and Dick Tracy
To Punch, the Immortal Liar, and The Girls in Their Summer Dresses
To The Man in the Iron Mask
To Marco Polo and The Martian Chronicles
To Bogie and The Maltese Falcon
To Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant, Krazy Kat and The Dance of
     The Dead
To Thomas Wolfe
To The Unicorn in the Garden
To Hammett and Chandler and You Play the Black and the Red Comes Up
To Papa Hemingway, Mickey Spillane and Popeye the Sailor Man
To Fancies and Goodnights
To a Diamond as Big as the Ritz and a Blood Wedding in Chicago
To Beauty and the Beast
To The Daredevil Dogs of the Air, The Dawn Patrol and The Long, Loud Silence
To Doug Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and The Keystone Kops
To Tarzan and The Land That Time Forgot
To Tom Swift, Huck Finn and Oliver Twist
To Citizen Kane, Sinbad and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
To Ali Baba, The Marx Brothers and Dangerous Dan McGrew

To The Beanstalk

To The Lone Ranger, Little Orphan Annie and The Space Merchants
To The Day The Earth Stood Still
To The Highwayman

To Kazan, The Time Machine and Don’t Cry for Me
To Captain Midnight and Lights Out

To Shackleton, Terry and the Pirates, Richard the Lionheart and

     The Rats in the Walls
To The Most Dangerous Game
To Lil’ Abner, S. J. Perelman and Smoky Stover
To The Seven Dwarfs and Mandrake the Magician
To Billy the Kid, Geronimo, Stephen Vincent Benet and The House

     of Usher

To The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Ship of Ishtar
To Robin Hood, Scarface and Tommy Udo

To Frederick Schiller Faust who was Max Brand who was Evan Evans

     who was George Challis who was…
To Astounding, Amazing, Fantastic, Startling, Unknown, Galaxy,

     Weird Tales, Planet Stories, Black Mask and The Magazine of

     Fantasy and Science Fiction
To Rhysling, Blind Singer of the Spaceways

     AND, WITH LOVE
To The Green Hills of Earth

The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength.

By the early 1970s over 75 per cent of the people living on earth were under twenty-one years of age. 

The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage.

In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 per cent.

In the 1990s, 82.4 per cent.

In the year 2000—critical mass.

Her hair was matted, her face streaked and swollen. One knee oozed slow blood; she’s cut it on a steel abutment.

A stitching pain lived in her side. She ran.

There was a high lovers’ moon and the night was full of shapes. Shadows slid on shadows.

When had she crossed the river? Was it last night or the night before? Where was she now? She didn’t know.

Off to her right she could see an unending length of metalmesh beyond a stretch of dead asphalt. Far out on the pavement sea was a cluster of teeter-swings. An industrial nursery; it had to be Stoneham or Sunrise.

Perhaps her baby was there!

She veered to the left, away from the mesh, into the deep night-black between buildings. Abruptly she found her passage blocked by a high board barrier. She turned. Maybe she could double back over the river.

If she could only rest.

Wait! She froze, remained motionless. There was someone in the shadows ahead. A silent scream ripped at her throat.

Sandman!

Panic drove her heart against her chest in shuddering strokes. She spun about, clawed at the blistered boards, her fingernails breaking as she sought a grip on the coarse wood. The fence was too high.

For an instant (a century?) she clung there, trying to will her muscles to lift her oh-so-heavy body, but all the energy was gone. Something tore inside her, and she crumpled at the base of the wood.

Huddled into herself, she studied the char-black flower crystal centered in the palm of her right hand. A few days ago it had been a warm blood-red—just as seven years before it had been electric-blue, and seven years earlier, sun-yellow. A color for each seven years of her life. Now she was twenty-one and her flower was dull black. Sleep black. Death black.

The figure moved calmly toward her, across the moon-pavement. She didn’t look up. She stared at her palm, because her future and her past were written there. All of her days and her nights and her fears and her hopes.

Why had she believed in Sanctuary? Insane. Impossible. Why hadn’t she been like all the others who had accepted Sleep?

Now the dark figure, in black, stood over her, but she did not look up. She didn’t beg because begging was useless.

Instead she remade the world.

She was not here, outlawed and condemned, shamed and terrified; she was in Sanctuary—on a wide, wind-lazy meadow beside a cool stream of silver—a world in which time did not exist.

Then why was her hand scrabbling under her torn clothing for the vibroknife she’d hidden there? Why the urgency to plunge the buzzing steel through breast and rib into her heart? Why?

She saw the Gun come up.

The homer!

She saw the moonlight dazzle off the dark-blue barrel. The homer!

She saw the pale, tight-set face of the Sandman, and saw his eyes above the Gun, as his fingers whitened on the trigger.

The homer!

There was a soft explosion. That was the last thing she heard.

And the last thing she felt was raw, blinding agony, as the homer struck, burned, ripped and unraveled her.

Logan was tired, but the little man kept talking.

“You know how it is, citizen.” he said “Nobody feels like he’s done it all. All the traveling, all the girls, all the living. I’m no different from anybody else. I’d like to live to be twenty-five, thirty.. .but it just isn’t going to happen. And I can accept that. I’ve got no regrets. None to linger on, I mean. I’ve lived a good life. I’ve had my share and nobody can say that Sawyer is a whiner.”

He was talking compulsively. As long as he talked he didn’t have to think. Logan had seen a lot of them on Lastday, talking away the final hours.

“You know what I’m going to do?” asked the man, whose palm-flower was blinking red, then black, then red. He didn’t wait for a reply. He went on in a rapid voice, telling Logan exactly what he was going to do.

Logan had changed to grays back in DS Headquarters, and he wondered if the man would be talking to him if he were in his black tunic. No doubt he would Sawyer was obviously the type who went through life unworried about Deep Sleep men and Guns. Which was proper. He was a good citizen, and good citizens made a stable world.

“—and then I’m going over to the Castlemont Glasshouse and get myself three of the youngest, prettiest girls in the stagroom. One will be blond. You know, with deep-blue eyes and blue-white hair. Then I’ll get one with short black hair and one with golden-brown skin. Three beauties. I hear they’ll do anything for you when you’re on Lastday.”

The man looked at his palm. The flower bloomed red, then black, then red. “Did you ever wonder if the Thinker makes mistakes, the same as people do? Because it doesn’t seem like I’ve turned twenty-one. It really doesn’t. It seems I turned fourteen maybe five years ago. That would make me just nineteen.” He said this without conviction. “I remember the day, when my flower changed and I was fourteen. I was in Japan, and it was the first time I’d visited Fujiyama. Wonderful mountain! Inspiring! Ever see it?”

Logan nodded. He’d seen it.

“I sure remember the day. Couldn’t have been more than five years ago—maybe six. Do you think the machine could make that kind of mistake?”

Logan didn’t want to remember how many years had passed since he’d been fourteen. Of late he had tried not to think about this. His flower was still a steady red, but.

“No,” said Sawyer, answering his own question. “The machine wouldn’t make that kind of a mistake.” He was silent for a long moment; then, in a quiet voice, he said, “I suppose I’m scared.” His flower blinked red, black, red, black.

“Most people are,” said Logan.

“But not
this
scared,” said the man. He swallowed, raised a hand. “Don’t get me wrong, citizen. I’m no coward. I’m not going to run. I have my pride. The system is right, I know that. World can only support so much life. Got to be a way to keep the population down.I’ve been loyal and I won’t change now.”

The two sat quietly as the rumbling belt carried them up through the threemile complex.

At last the man spoke again: “Do you really believe that a homer is—is as
terrible
as they say it is?

“Yes,” said Logan. “I believe it.”

“What gets me is the way it
finds
a runner. Once it’s fired at him, I mean. The way it homes in on the body heat. They say it burns out your whole nervous system. Every nerve in your body.”

Logan didn’t answer.

The little man’s face was gray. A muscle leaped in his cheek. He swallowed. “God,” he said.

Sawyer drew in a deep breath. A spot of color returned to his face. “Of course it’s necessary. Without the DS men and homers there’d be a lot more runners. We couldn’t have that. Runner deserves what he gets, if you ask me. I mean, he doesn’t
have
to run. A Sleepshop isn’t so bad, is it? We toured one when I was twelve, me and a friend of mine. In Paris. Clean and nice. It isn’t so bad”

Logan thought of the Sleepshops with their gaily painted interiors, the attendants in soft pastel robes, the electronically augmented angel choirs, the skin spray of Hallucinogen, which wiped away a confused look of suffering and replaced it with a fixed and joyful smile. He thought of the quiet, dim-lit grave room lined with aluminum shelving, and of the neat rows of steelfoil canisters marked with the names and numbers of men.

“No,” said Logan. “It isn’t so bad.”

Sawyer was talking again. “Sometimes, though, I wonder about those DS men. I could never do it, what they have to do. Not that I’m defending runners. Not scum. I don’t defend scum. But I just wonder how a man can fire a homer into—”

“I get off here,” said Logan.

He left the belt.

Logan was annoyed at his action. He didn’t live in this part of the complex. His unit was almost a mile beyond, but the man’s constant chatter had frayed his patience. He knew this section, of course. A year ago he’d hunted a man here. Runner named Nathan. He closed off the memory.

Idly he began walking the covered thoroughfare.

Ahead was the Jewel Building. Logan paused to survey the vast mural which gave the structure its name—a climbing mosaic composed of tiny bits of fireglass brilliantly arranged to commemorate the Burning of Washington. Orange, purple and raw red flames jeweled halfway up the facade; bodies flamed; buildings smoked and tumbled. Yet the awesome masterwork was flawed, incomplete. Stark, gaping areas broke the pattern. Only the famed muralist Roebler 7 could handle the corrosive fireglass, and when he had accepted Sleep his secret died with him. The project would never be finished.