A For Anything

17

Dick awoke to a thunder of running footsteps in the corridor; screams, the crash of glass. He sat up, heart pounding. He blinked as lights flared on in the outer rooms. A door slammed.

"Who's that?" he called. "What is it?"

Alex came running into view, his thin face scared and paper-white. "Oh, misser, misser, they are killing people in the corridors!"

There was a distant explosion that jarred the floor. Then more screams, farther away. Dick got out of bed, thinking furiously. Turnover Day had been put off again and again, in spite of Melker's good intentions; the last Dick had heard, it was set for three days in the future.

Either they had started it prematurely, without warning him, or else there had been a slip-up and the turnover was betrayed.

The valet, shaking but still correct, was holding out his trousers. If only he knew more! "Tell me what you saw, Alex. No, not those -- the dress uniform."

"Misser, it was terrible. I was in the Long Corridor, on my way to the Gismo Room for the morning quota. I heard explosions, like it was gunshots. I turned around, all the people was staring, they couldn't believe their eyes. There was running a man, and then just by the little gold fountain, there was another gunshots, and he fell down. It was like a terrible, terrible dream. And the blood, you have no idea ... "

"Who shot him?"

"I didn't see. I ran. But in our corridor, Misser Jones, it came gunshots again, and then I saw a whole lot of men running, with guns in their hands. And behind them, the red ones, shooting."

"Household Guards?"

"Yes. Shooting, shooting, shooting -- I thought they would kill me. Two they did kill, they are lying there in the corridor. I saw also the black ones, Gismo Guards; but then I came in before they could shoot me. Misser Jones, what is going to happen?"

"Hell!" said Dick, jerking at the elbow-chain attached to his belt. It wouldn't give, and then it did. He pulled the chain through the sleeve, then did the same for the other side. Wherever he was going, he might need his arms free.

He knew one thing, at any rate: if the Guards were chasing conspirators, it was all up; one way or another, the attempt had failed. The only question was, how much did they know? If they had all the names, it was just a matter of time before they picked him up. The best thing he could do would be to try to get out of Eagles as fast as possible.

But if they didn't have his name, and he ran, it would be an admission of guilt; whereas if he brazened it out, he might have a chance.

In the corridor were two dead bodies, both huddled against the blood-spattered wall. Dick recognized one of them; it was Thor Swenson, with whom he had been drinking beer only the night before last. The funny thing was, he hadn't known Thor was in the conspiracy.

Up in the Long Corridor there were more bodies, both sexes, slobs as well as people.

An incongruous memory came into his mind, for no reason that he could see: the dead mongrel, back at Buckhill on his last day, with the little slob boy kneeling in tears over it.

He listened. There was no more firing, nothing to be heard except a faint, cadenced marching and a rumble of wheels that grew slowly louder. He heard a voice shouting orders. Out of a cross corridor suddenly appeared a squad of Household Guards with two field artillery pieces. Dick saw the officer in charge glance sharply in his direction, and felt a cold sweat break out on his forehead. It occurred to him for the first time that an Army uniform might be no protection at all; the Army had been deeply infiltrated, and it was ten to one that some of the conspirators had been in uniform when the fighting broke out.

He didn't hesitate. He strode toward the officer, bringing his heels down hard. The guards were wrestling the two field pieces around back to back, to sweep the corridor in both directions. The officer raised his pistol. "Halt. Identify yourself."

"Lieutenant," said Dick firmly but respectfully, "there's some mistake here. General Myer is about to set up an artillery post in that same spot -- he went off to see about requisitions not fifteen minutes ago. I'm his adjutant, Lieutenant Jones."

"I take my orders from Home Guard H.Q.," said the other, lowering his pistol. "Where's your sidearm?"

"We haven't been issued any yet. Look, Lieutenant, you haven't got enough men for this operation anyhow. You could be enfiladed from that cross corridor."

"We hold that, clear back to the Arcades," said the Guard officer, but his tone sounded a little less surly. "You Army puffs have got lead in your scuts, like always. Hell, it's all over -we're just here in case. You tell your General Myer -- "

He was interrupted by a stentorian voice that shouted, "Your attention! Your attention! There has been an attempt on the life and property of the Boss. All of the ringleaders have been killed or captured by the alertness of the Household Guard. However, some minor members of the gang are still at large. Stay in your present locations until a room to room search can be completed." By craning his neck, Dick could see the source of the voice, a public telescreen in the plaza just ahead. Even from this angle, the picture was clear though distorted. The camera was panning over the heaped bodies of men sprawled in the Armory Courtyard; the bronze Fountain of Commemoration was visible in the background. Dick saw Melker's gnomish face, with all the meaning gone out of it. Blood was matted in his forked beard.

The camera panned up, and he saw a group of people standing near the wall, with their hands tied behind them. One of them was Clay; he glanced at the camera without expression, and looked away.

The camera moved on. Twirling slowly in the air, trussed up by the legs like a fowl from the balcony railing, was another body. With difficulty, Dick recognized the upsidedown face.

It was Oliver.

The voice boomed out again: "One of the missing gang members is a woman, age about twenty, hair blonde, complexion fair, eyes gray-green. Any person found harboring this woman will be shot. Any person delivering this woman alive or furnishing information where she may be found, will be rewarded according to status, with quota advancement or high office. Any servant delivering this woman or providing such information, will be rewarded with, free status."

The Guard lieutenant whistled under his breath. His loutish face was suddenly drawn and intent. Behind him, all the other guards were looking up with the same expression. They were all slaves, of course; a special kind of slave, with the privilege of bearing arms in Eagles, which made them in some ways superior to any free man; but you could see that any of them would give an arm or a leg to be a person. It almost never happened; it was a measure of the woman's importance to the Boss, that he should offer it.

The woman was Elaine. There was no doubt of that, from the description. It was natural for the Boss to want her accounted for -- any idiot who had her might think himself qualified to lead another revolt. But if that were all, would he take the risk of manumitting slaves?

There was another possible explanation. When Melker's group had obtained a dupe of Elaine, they might have destroyed or hidden the prote at the same time. Misfiling it would have been enough: it would take forever to find one misfiled prote among the billions.

If that were so, then even if Dick's name was on the blacklist -- when things settled down, if he returned with the Boss-wife, that might be enough to buy his immunity. It was something: it was a chance.

Feeling the Guards' eyes on him, he glanced at his watch. "I suppose the plans have been changed again," he said. "I'd better go and check."

The Guard lieutenant nodded gloomily. Dick turned and walked away.

Which way? He had to decide quickly: but the girl might have taken any of dozens of exits from the sector of Melker's suite. There were uncountable nooks and crannies; he had less than a chance in a thousand of guessing the right one.

But when he stopped wondering where the girl might be, and thought of his own danger, he had only one instinct: down.

So much the better. To track a deer, you had to be a deer. Dick boarded the down escalator at the next plaza, thinking, I'm frightened. I've got to hide -- get out of sight, or they'll kill me. Down. Down deep. Make myself small and pull the covers over my head.

Now he was on the lowest residential level. The corridors were beginning to fill up here; he passed a roving squad of Guards, and remembered just in time to straighten his back and let his footsteps fall hard. They looked at him sharply, but let him go: he was a man in uniform, moving as if he had a legitimate errand.

Looking for a way down, he saw a door he must have passed a hundred times without seeing it: two swinging panels, with the green stencilled design that meant: SLOB COUNTRY.

He pushed the door open and was in another world. Dim lights shone on the grime of the high ceilings; the walls were of unfinished cement, and the floors were bare except for catwalks of rubber mats laid end to end. A hum of voices and movement greeted him, together with a breath of stale air, freighted with sour, old smells. For an instant, it was like being back in the holy man's cave, and Dick had a curious sense of double vision -- the dusty fluorescents overhead, and a flickering, oil-soaked wick below; grime and soot intermingling. Then it passed, and he was moving down the main corridor. Half-dressed slobs looked up sleepily from their bunks as he passed an open doorway. From another came the clangor of tinware and a steamy smell with soap and rotten cloth in it. An old fellow in yellow denims came by, pushing a wheeled rack full of kitchenware. Dick stopped him roughly:

"Where's the exit to the lower level?"

"Misser," said the fellow, looking frightened, "there isn't one, excuse me, except the one that has the seal on it. Nobody goes here to below, it's forbidden. It's the Boss's own seal, I will show you."

He scurried ahead, abandoning the cart, and Dick followed into the next corridor and down a half-flight of stairs. The door was grimy with disuse. It was fastened with a hasp and a padlock; the padlock had an embossed design which Dick could feel with his thumb: a "C" with a finicky shape above it, probably an eagle.

"Get me some tools," he said. "A cold chisel and a hammer. I want that door open in less than five minutes."

"Misser, we have no requisition -- "

"Get "em!" shouted Dick. The old fellow ducked away with a gesture of despair.

In a few minutes he was back, in the center of a little knot of other servants. One of them, inevitably, was Frankie. The gargoyle was carrying a toolbox. He looked unhappy. "Misser Jones, you know we not suppose to open that door without the word from the Boss heself. If you got the word -- "

"There wasn't time for that," said Dick. "This is an emergency. Here -- " He felt in his pockets, found a scrap of paper. "Give me a pencil, I'll sign for it."

Frankie handed over the stub of a carpenter's pencil, looking dubious. Dick scrawled, "I take responsibility for opening door in servant quarters," and signed it. The slobs looked at it with varying degrees of incomprehension; probably few of them could read or write. Frankie looked unhappier than ever, but carefully folded the paper away, and took a chisel and sledge out of his toolbox. Three powerful strokes sheared through one arm of the staple that held the padlock. Frankie worked the lock free and stood back, holding it in his palm"

Dick opened the door, saw a glimmer of light at the end of a short passage. "Lock this up again behind me," he said, and stepped through.

At the end of the passage, he found himself in a wide, empty hall. The dim lights in the ceiling were not even fluorescents, but old-fashioned incandescent bulbs; they cast a sickly orange glow that left the place almost in darkness. The air was heavy and still. Silence closed in. Dick felt alone and a little foolish. Suppose the girl hadn't come here at all? Through that door, at least, nobody had come for years. But there were hundreds of possible entrances; if he had stopped to test his hunch by checking each one, it would have taken him forever. Now, at least, he was here; if she had come this way, it ought to be an easy matter to pick up her trail on this side.

He stooped: in the thick carpet of dust there were footprints, but none looked recent. At one side of the room stood several abandoned hand trucks; there were loading bays in the far wall, closed now by metal doors. To right and left were open doorways; nothing was visible through either except darkness, picked out faintly at intervals by more dim yellowish lights.

Dick followed the left-hand corridor past still other doorways, some closed and locked, some open. Through the open doorways, in the dim light, he glimpsed piled, enigmatic masses: once he reached inside and felt the curved smoothness of a table leg. These evidently, were disused storerooms, full of articles once prized but now forgotten. A disturbing echo of memory awakened: Ruell, saying, "He collects collections ... This whole mountain, in fact ... " How deep did these subterranean storerooms go?

Guided by some obscure compulsion, he took the first stairway down.

He found himself in a clutter of objects piled helter-skelter: tables, sofas, chairs thrusting their legs at him; books sliding and squirming under foot as he moved, lamp shades shaking down clouds of dust.

In the distance, someone sneezed.

The sound echoed and re-echoed under the vaulted ceilings. Dick held his breath, listening, and after a moment heard a faraway, sliding clatter. Someone ... someone ... Who else could it be?

He moved forward cautiously, trying to avoid making any noise, but it was useless. A tilted chair slid out from under him, and his foot went through a fragile table-top with a crunching, rending sound.

Instantly, somewhere in the distance, there was a crash and a scurrying noise. Dick swore, wrenched the table-top loose, and clambered in pursuit. His heart was racing; he vaulted a fallen bookcase, danced precariously in a nest of chairs, climbed an up-ended divan. He stopped to listen.

Faintly, in the distance: clatter, crash.

For what seemed like hours, the chase went on. Dick fought his way a few yards at a tune through the tangle of furniture and crates; stopped to listen; plunged forward again. Soaked with sweat, gasping like a fish in the stagnant air, he paused with one leg up over the ridge of a mountainous sideboard. There was no sound. He gulped air, held his breath for a moment: still nothing but the pounding of blood in his own ears.

He stared from side to side. In all the vast sea of tablelegs, headboards, mirrors, there was no movement under the dim lights. Impossible that she could have escaped from the vault: the nearest doors were almost invisible in the distance. She had gone to ground: she might be anywhere in that hardwood jungle -- crouching under a table, or inside a buried wardrobe; lying still trying not to let him hear her breathing, like a rabbit in a hedge.

He waited, in hopes she would lose her nerve and bolt again, until he had his breath back. Then he began to move slowly and carefully, trying to make as little noise as possible. He quartered the ground patiently, pausing frequently to listen. On the third cast, a tiny sound broke the silence -- the faint creak of wood. Probably she had shifted her position.

Not everybody could stand lying still on a hard surface for long.

There was an open crate full of glass-shaded lamps nearby. He took a chance: he lifted one out, a dusty dumb-bell-shaped thing, and lobbed it in the direction he thought the sound had come from. It burst with a startling crash. Shards tinkled all around.

Sharp-eyed, Dick saw a convulsive movement in the forest of chair-legs. He vaulted an Empire sofa, zigzagged precariously across stacks of nested tables, and found himself looking down into a hollow under a big desk. Curled in the hollow, looking up at him with frightened eyes, was the girl.

"All right, come out," he said.

She rose slowly, dusty and tousled in the dim light. There was something curiously pathetic about her thinness, and the smudge of dirt on one cheek. She had ripped half the skirt off her antique dress, he saw: it was not the costume for scrambling around in the storage cellars.

Her frightened expression changed, doubtfully. "Oh, aren't you -- "

"Dick Jones. That's right." They had met once, at the last briefing, but only for a minute.

She was trying to laugh. "Well, then, why didn't you say so? I mean, all this -- " She gestured helplessly.

"Would you have believed me if I'd told you who I was?" he asked smoothly. "Come on, let's get out of here."

She put her hand in his; her palm was cool and soft. "Where are we going?" she asked as he helped her up. She brushed her long hair back from her forehead. "Can we go back up now? Golly, I must look like an awful mess."

Dick improvised lies about the turnover, which she seemed to accept without question. How young she was! His mind kept coming back to that, newly astonished by the gawky slenderness of her body, or the innocence that showed itself in every word she spoke. Had he ever been that dumb, even back at Buckhill? It seemed unlikely.

He tried to steer a course for the door he had come in by, but when they reached it, it was the wrong one. There was a short stair going down, none going up. A stronger glow of light came from the landing.

The way might be clearer one level down: heaven knew, they could waste days fighting their way through that tangle of furniture. "Come on," he said, taking her arm.

Downstairs there was another vault, illimitable, misty under the bluish ceiling lights. Crates and stacks of all sizes stood at random, but at least there was some space to move between them. Also, there were tracks in the dust that looked recent.

Dick frowned over this. He did not like the idea of meeting anyone before he could get back to the authorities with his prisoner: some officious nobody was likely to take him for the girl's accomplice instead of her captor. However, it was worth the risk to get out of here that much faster. Somewhere on this vast floor there must be an elevator or a stair going up.

Still, the aisle grew narrower and more erratic the farther they went, and the things in the crates began to get very queer, too. Here was a box taller than their heads, through whose dusty, plastic sides they could see, as if frozen in a dirty block of ice, a heap of stuffed animals -- rumpled velvet pelts, button eyes staring, threadbare paws. There were teddy bears, elephants, tigers, lions, monkeys ... all used-looking, not collector's items by any stretch of the imagination, but just junk.

Here was a long case full of books in individual plastic envelopes. Some of the bindings were good, some were even elaborately tooled, but others were scuffed, cracked and torn. Dick paused to read a few of the titles: Treasure Island; Ozma of Oz; Pepper and Salt. Then there was a row of narrow volumes with nothing on the spines but a monogram, "TC." One was rat-gnawed; Dick took it down, pulled the envelope off, and opened it in the middle. Under an exercise in square roots, in a boyish hand, was a riddle:

"What has 22 legs and flies? Ans.: A dead football team."

Under that, a drawing of a knife, the pencil lines deeply scored. Dick shut the book and put it back.

"What is all this?" the girl asked. "Do you know?"

"It looks as if he never threw anything away," said Dick. He glanced at her curiously. Her face was unconcerned; she looked back at him with a tremulous smile -- more aware of him than of anything so remote as the Boss's boyhood.

Curious to think that she had given birth to that boy, who was now the gray toad who ruled Eagles. In fact, if Thaddeus II had been nine or so when that journal was written, then she must have been dead for about four years ... It made him a little dizzy to think about it. All that, so deep now in the past, was nothing but an unrealized future to her: she was twenty again, and looked about eighteen; the best thing that could happen to her, he supposed, was to go through it all over again. A good thing for her that she didn't know.

The floor seemed endless. The sounds of their footsteps were muffled; there was a gray musty smell in the air -- a smell of papers turning dusty and brittle, packed away out of the light. Everywhere stood the plastic-sided boxes and bundles, some still whole, some not. Then the character of the place began to change. They were passing a row of little buildings, standing isolated like so many crates, some faced with stone or brick on one side, bare wood and plaster on the rest. One had a sign over it, "STRIPPEL'S DRUGS"; the door had been carefully sealed, but the glass was broken out of it.

"Can't we sit down and rest for a minute?" the girl asked. "I'm so tired, I could just die."

Against the dimness inside, he could see the outlines of a table and chairs. "Careful." With a hand on her elbow, he helped her through the broken door, bits of glass snapping underfoot. The chairs were of flimsy wood, cheap twentieth century stuff, but they seemed sound, and there was not even very much dust. Probably the interior had been sealed and filled with inert gas until recently.

They sat down, surrounded on all sides by racks, display cases, pigeonholes: candy here, greeting cards, boxes of film over there, yellowing magazines and paperbacked books. The counters were crowded with cardboard displays; some had fallen to the floor. Dick idly picked one up; there were a few tiny bags of peanuts clipped to the front of it. On the back he read: "Say! Mr. Retailer! Here's a colorful counter display box that has been designed expressly to help you make MORE SALES and MORE PROFITS ... " A reconstruction, probably; hardly anything of this kind had survived through the Turnover years.

He was surprised to see the girl's eyes glistening with tears. "What's the matter?"

"I don't know," she said thickly. She leaned her head on one hand, rubbing the heel into her eye. The posture made her neck and shoulders look absurdly fragile; he had an-impulse to put his arm around her. Her pale lashes were quite thick and long; he saw; they didn't show when she was looking up. "Don't mind me, I'm just being silly." Her lips were swollen, her cheeks softly flushed.

The chair legs skreeked on the floor. He did put his arm around her. She was soft and slender; her fine hair tickled his chin.. After a few moments, she gently pushed him away. "Have you got a kleenex -- I mean a tish?"

He handed her one; she blew her nose, dabbed at her eyes.

She tried to smile at him. "Don't look, I must look so awful." It was true -- her face was swollen and pink, her eyes swim-my, lips puffed -- and yet something ached yearningly in his chest. I'm falling in love, he thought incredulously.

He recognized the symptoms, although it had never happened to him before. Her features, which had seemed perfectly ordinary half an hour ago, were now unique. He saw that some of them were not particularly beautiful -- her ears, for instance -- but this simply gave him a feeling of pleasure and pride. Anybody could appreciate her obvious points; he loved everything about her.

Part of him was dismayed by these thoughts -- there was no sense nor reason in them -but the rest of him was happily conjuring up new ones, the more irrational, the better. Would he perform menial services for her? -- tend her when she was sick, bathe her, feed her, dress her? Yes, gladly. Would he give his life for her? He boggled at that one, but then a fresh wave of feeling took him: maybe he would. His next reaction was one of horror: love was a horrible thing if it could make you destroy yourself. But somehow the horror only added to his pleasure.

She said apologetically, "I haven't even thought about drugstores for years. It was just so unexpected." She looked around, biting her lip. "Carter's Little Liver Pills. Oh, my. And there's the fountain. I don't suppose it really works."

She was looking at the dingy marble counter with the stools in front and the mirror behind. "Works?" said Dick.

"I mean, we couldn't make an ice cream soda, or anything. But maybe there would be some water? I'm awfully thirsty."

"I'll see," Dick said, and got up quickly. There were two taps over a slotted metal plate, and he tried them both, but nothing came out. "No, it's dry." Behind the counter he saw a bottle in a half-open compartment, and picked it up. "Here's some ginger ale, though."

"Oh, that would be lovely."

He opened the bottle and used part of the contents to rinse out two glasses. Then he filled them and brought them to the table.

She made a little face. "It's flat, isn't it? But nice," she added quickly, and drank some more. She set the glass down. "I'm glad you found me. I recognized you right away -- and did I feel relieved!"

"You did?"

"Oh, yes. You have a very distinctive face. I always remember faces. Yours is so square and serious looking. And you have those bushy eyebrows that go up" -- she twirled a forefinger -- "at the corners." She was smiling at him, but her eyes were still hazy with tears. "I used to know a boy who had eyebrows like that"! His name was Jimmy Bowen. You remind me of him quite a bit."

Dick felt a curious glow of pleasure, and a stab of suspicion. "Where was that?"

"Back at Dunrovin -- Mr. Krasnow's estate. My father was the head of the greenhouse there. I don't suppose you ever heard of it; they say it isn't there any more." She looked melancholy again. "Jimmy and I wanted to get married, but Daddy thought he wasn't good enough for me. Then Mr. Sinescu came and saw me, and brought me back here. Of course, all this wasn't built then. There was just the one big building on top of the mountain." She shuddered delicately. "Mr. Crawford was going to marry me, they told me afterward; I think I must have guessed it, and that was what made me fall into my deep sleep."

"Sleep?" said Dick curiously. It was enough just to listen to her, but that word had jogged his attention.

"Why, didn't you know? It's the craziest thing -- I slept over seventy years! I don't believe it ever happened to a human before, but they say frogs do it. I didn't wake up till just, let's see, about three weeks ago. I couldn't believe it, till they showed me all this -- " She waved her hands; her eyes glittered with excitement, and her teeth gleamed white. "It was just like a dream."

"Then you mean they didn't dupe you?" Dick asked incredulously.

"Oh, no. They were going to, but I fell asleep first, and then they couldn't, you see. That was lucky; I wouldn't want to be duped, would you?"

Dick shook his head miserably. He saw it now: she thought she was the original Elaine; she refused to believe she was a dupe, and so she had invented this deep-sleep story and managed to convince herself it was true. There was something pathetic about it; it reminded him of what he had been trying to forget. This was the fourth Elaine. She was twenty years old, and the other three had all died at twenty-five.

This time it would be different, he told himself fiercely. The thing was, he didn't know what the others had died of: it might have been something to do with childbirth. Or it might be something she had now, without knowing -- something that could be cured, now, if anyone took the trouble.

At any rate, the chain was broken -- she was never going to marry Oliver. He would have to Improvise as he went along -- get her out of here somehow without running into the Guards, smuggle her out of Eagles ... and, he realized suddenly, probably off the continent. It wouldn't be safe to bring her home to buckhill, except perhaps years later ... He had a brief formless vision of his mother and father: But who are her people? Do you mean to say she is a dupe? A slave?

He shrugged the thought aside irritably. He couldn't stop to worry about that now, he had too much else on his mind. If only this damned irrational thing hadn't happened to him ... He had a mental glimpse of how it might have been -- his delivering the girl to the Household officials, being congratulated for discretion, perhaps by the Boss in person; preferment, honors, steps up the ladder -- planks in the wall that held Buckhill strong and safe.

Almost, he wavered. But he saw Elaine looking at him with her level green eyes; strange, strange, how there was always more meaning in her eyes than hi what she said; and he put all that behind him.

There was a scuffling noise at the door. He turned, heart jumping with alarm, but it was only the gargoyle, Frankie -- two of him, dressed in gray jumpers and carrying satchels.

He relaxed almost immediately. The Frankies were unarmed -- of course -- and no guards were coming into view behind them. They must have been sent into the vaults on some routine errand, perhaps to unearth some particular specimen for the Boss's display collections. Still, it seemed odd somehow, to meet anyone in this untenanted maze ... It was curious, too, how slowly they seemed to be coming forward, like figures under water. Their solemn expressions did not change, but bloomed toward him with a sort of incandescent meaning. Eyes, noses, mouths were as if lit from behind; Dick, forgetting who and where they were, could only stare at them in hopes of deciphering the riddle.

The last thing he heard was a sound that vaguely alarmed him, one that he had been half-noticing for some time; the steady hissing of escaping air.