The Missing Man (v4.1) (3 page)

Carl Hodges went around the room, inspecting it
and thinking coldly of escaping. He had to get out and straighten up the mess
the city was in after the collapse of Brooklyn Dome. He had to get out and have
the kids arrested before they sabotaged anything else. According to his best
logic, there was no way to get out. He was stuck, and deserved it. He pushed
his mind, thinking harder, fighting back a return of weakness and tears. He
reached for a happy pill, then took the bottle of white pills and poured its
contents down a hole in the floor.

The two Rescue Squad men shifted their chairs
through acceleration bands to the inner fast slots and passed the other chairs,
each leaning forward on the safety rail of his chair as if urging it on. The
people they passed were holding portable TV screens like magazines, watching in
the same way that people used to read.

The voice of the announcer murmured from a
screen, grew louder as they passed, and then again fell to a murmur. “Brooklyn
Dome. Fifteen pounds atmosphere pressure to sixty-five pounds per square inch.
Exploded upward. Implosion first, then explosion.” The voice grew louder
again as they approached another sliding chair in the slower lane. Another
person listened, propping the screen up on the safety rail to stare into it,
with the sound shouting. “Debris is floating for two square miles around
the center from which the explosion came. Coast Guard rescue ships, submarines
and scuba divers are converged into the area, searching for survivors.”

They neared and passed a TV screen which showed
a distant picture of an explosion like an umbrella rising and opening on the
horizon. “This is the way the explosion looked from the deck of a
freighter, the Mary Lou, five miles south at the moment it occurred.”

George settled himself in his seat and shut his
eyes to concentrate. He had to stop that explosion from happening again to the
other undersea dome. Whoever had done it would be laughing as he watched on TV
the explosion unfold and settle. Whoever had done it would be eager for
destruction, delighting in the death and blood of a small city.

The peculiarly wide range of perceptions that
was George Sanford groped out across the city.

“The police department is still
investigating the cause of the explosion,” said the murmur, growing louder
as they passed another TV watcher in the slow lane. Someone handed the
announcer another note. “Ah, here we have some new information. Bell
Telephone has opened up to the investigators eight recordings taken from public
phones in Brooklyn Dome. These phone calls were being made at the moment
Brooklyn Dome was destroyed.”

A face appeared on a screen behind the
announcer, a giant face of a woman telephoning. After an instant of mental
adjusting of viewpoint the woman’s face became normal in the viewer eye, the
announcer shrank to ant size and was forgotten as the woman spoke rapidly into
the phone. “I can’t stand this place another minute. I would have left
already, but I can’t leave. The train station is jammed and there are lines in
front of the ticket booth. I’ve never seen such lines. Jerry is getting
tickets. I wish he’d hurry.” The anxious woman’s face glanced sideways
either way out of the booth. “I hear the funniest noise, like thunder.
Like a waterfall.”

The woman screamed and the background tilted as
the screaming face and the booth went over sideways. A hand groped past the
lens, blackness entered in sheets, and the picture broke into static sparks and
splashes. The screen went blank, the antlike announcer sitting in front of it
spoke soothingly and the camera rushed forward to him until he was normal size
again. He showed a diagram.

George opened his eyes and sat up. Around him on
the moving chairs people were watching their TV screens show the pictures he
had just seen in his mind’s eye. It showed a diagram of the location of the
phone booths at Brooklyn Dome, and then another recording of someone innocently
calling from a videophone booth, about to die, and not knowing what was about
to happen, an innocent middle-aged face.

Expressionlessly, the people in the traveling
subway seats watched, hands bracing the sides of the TV screen, grip tightening
as they waited for the ceilings to fall. Audience anticipation; love of power,
greatness, crash … total force and completeness … admiring triumph of
completeness in such destruction. Great show. Hope for more horror.

All over the city people looked at the innocent
fool mouthing words and they waited, watching, urging the doom on as it
approached. This time be bigger, blacker, more frightening, more crushing.

George shut his eyes and waited through the
hoarse screams and then opened his eyes and looked at the back of the neck of
the TV watcher they were passing, then turned around and looked at her face
after they passed. She did not notice him; she was watching the TV intently,
without outward expression.

Did that woman admit the delight she felt? Did
she know she was urging the thundering waterfall on, striking the death blow
downward with the descending ocean? She was not different from the others.
Typical television viewer, lover of extremes. It was to her credit that when TV
showed young lovers she urged them to love more intensely, and rejoiced in
their kisses. Lovers of life are also lovers of death.

George slid down further in his seat and closed
his eyes, and rode the tidal waves of mass emotion as the millions of watchers,
emotions synchronized by watching, enjoyed their mass participation in the
death rites of a small city. Over and over, expectancy, anticipation, panic,
defeat, death, satisfaction.

The secretly worshiped god of death rode high.

In twenty minutes, after transfers on platforms
that held air-lock doors to pass through into denser air, they arrived, carried
by underseas tube train, at the small undersea city of Jersey Dome. Population:
ten thousand; residents: civil service administrators and their families.

The city manager’s office building was built of
large colored blocks of lightweight translucent foam plastic, like children’s
large building blocks. There was no wind to blow it away. Inside, the colors of
the light tinted the city man’s desk. He was a small man sitting behind a large
desk with one phone held to his ear and another blinking a red light at him,
untouched. “I know traffic is piling up. We have all the trains in service
that city services can give up. Everyone wants to leave, that’s all. No. There
isn’t any panic. There’s no reason for panic.” He hung up, and glared at
the other phone’s blinking light.

“That phone,” he snarled, pointing,
“is an outside line full of idiot reporters asking me how domes are built
and how Brooklyn Dome could have blown up, or collapsed. It’s all idiocy. Well.
What do you want?”

Ahmed opened his wallet to his credentials and
handed it over. “We’re from Metropolitan Rescue Squad. We’re specialists in
locating people by predicting behavior. We were sent over to .locate a possible
lunatic who might have sabotaged Brooklyn Dome or blown it up, and might be
here planning to blow up Jersey Dome.”

“He just might,” replied the manager
of Jersey Dome with a high-pitched trembling earnestness in his voice.
“And you might be the only dangerous lunatics around here. Lunatics who
talk about Jersey Dome breaking. It can’t break. You understand. The only thing
we have to fear is panic. You understand.”

“Of course,” Ahmed said soothingly.
“But we won’t talk about it breaking. It’s our job to look for a saboteur.
Probably it’s just a routine preventive checkup.”

The manager pulled a pistol out of a desk drawer
and pointed it at them, with a trembling hand. “You’re still talking about
it. This is an emergency. I am the city manager. I could call my police and
have you taken to a mental hospital, gagged.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Ahmed said
soothingly, picking his wallet back off the desk and pocketing it. “We’re
only here to admire the design and the machinery. Can we have a map?”

The manager lowered the pistol and laid it on
the desk. “If you cooperate, the girl in the front office will give you
all the maps of the design and structure that you’ll need. You will find a lot
of technicians already in the works, inspecting wires and checking up. They’re
here to design improvements. You understand.” His voice was still
high-pitched and nervous, but steady.

“We understand,” Ahmed assured him.
“Everything is perfectly safe. We’ll go admire their designs and
improvements. Come on, George.” He turned and went out, stopped at the
receptionist’s desk to get a map, consulted it and led the way across the
trimmed lawn of the park.

Out on the curved walk under the innocent
blue-green glow of the dome, Ahmed glanced back. “But I’m not sure he’s
perfectly safe himself. Is he cracking up, George?”

“Not yet, but near it.” George glanced
up apprehensively at the blue green glow, imagining he saw a rift, but the dark
streak was only a catwalk, near the dome surface.

“What will he do when he cracks?”
asked Ahmed.

“Run around screaming,‘The sky is falling!’
like Chicken Little.” muttered George. “What else?” He cocked an
apprehensive glance upward at the green glow of the dome. Was it sagging in the
middle? No, that was just an effect of perspective. Was there a crack appearing
near the air shaft? No, just another catwalk, like a spiderweb on a ceiling.

Making an effort, he pulled his eyes away from
the dome and saw Ahmed at a small building ahead labeled “Power Substation
10002.” It looked like a child’s building block ten feet high, pleasantly
screened by bushes, matching the park. Ahmed was looking in the open door. He
signaled to George and George hurried to reach him, feeling as if the pressurized
thickened air resisted, like water.

He looked inside and saw a man tinkering with
the heavy power cables that provided light and power for the undersea dome.
Panels were off, and the connections were exposed.

The actions and mood of the man were those of a
workman, serious and careful. He set a meter dial and carefully read it, reset
it and made notes, then read it again. George watched him. There was a strange
kind of fear in the man, something worse than the boxed-in feeling of being
underwater. George felt a similar apprehension. It had been growing in him. He
looked at Ahmed, doubtfully.

Ahmed had been lounging against the open door
watching George and the man. He took a deep sighing breath and went in with
weight evenly balanced on his feet, ready for fast action. “Okay, how are
the improvements coming?” he asked the workman.

The man grinned over his shoulder. He was
slightly bald in front. “Not a single improvement, not even a small
bomb.”

“Let’s check your ID. We’re looking for the
saboteur.” Ahmed held out his hand.

Obligingly the man unpinned a plastic ID card
from under his lapel, and put a thumbprint over the photographed thumbprint so
that it could be seen that the two prints matched. He seemed unafraid of them,
and friendly.

“Okay.” Ahmed passed his badge back.

The engineer pinned it on again. “Have fun,
detectives. I hope you nail a mad bomber so we can stop checking for defects
and go home. I can’t stand this air down here. Crazy perfume. I don’t like
it.”

“Me too,” George said. A thick
perfumed pressure was in the air. He felt the weight of water hanging as a dome
far above the city pressing the air down. “Bad air.”

“It has helium in it,” Ahmed remarked.
He checked the map of the small city and looked in the direction of a
glittering glass elevator shaft. A metal mesh elevator rose slowly in the
shaft, shining in the semidark, like a giant birdcage full of people hanging
above a giant living room.

George tried to take another deep breath and
felt that whatever he was breathing was not air. “It smells strange, like
fake air.”

“It doesn’t matter how it smells,”
Ahmed said, leading the way’ “It’s to keep people from getting the bends
from internal pressure when they leave here. Why didn’t you okay the man, George?
His ID checked out.”

“He was scared.”

“What of?” Ahmed asked him.

“Not of us. I don’t know.”

“Then it doesn’t matter. He’s not up to any
bad business.”

The two walked across the small green park,
through the thick air, toward the glittering glass shaft that went up from the
ground into the distant green dome that was the roof of the city. Inside the
huge glass tube a brightly lit elevator rose slowly, carrying a crowd of people
looking out over the city as a canary would look out above a giant room.

“Next we check the air-pump controls,”
Ahmed said. “They’re near the elevator.” People went by, looking
formal and overdressed, pale and quiet, stiff and neat. Not his kind of people.
Civil servants, government administration people, accountants.

George followed, trying to breathe. The air
seemed to be not air, but some inferior substitute. Glittering small buildings
rose on either side of the park in rows, like teeth, and he felt inside a tiger
mouth. The air smelled like lilies in a funeral parlor. The people he passed
gave out vibes of a trapped hopeless defeat that made his depression worse.
They passed a crowd of quiet miserable people waiting to get on the elevator,
carrying fishing poles and swimming equipment.