After that, I turned on the television and was instantly glad I had taken so many precautions getting here. I had driven to the airport, abandoned my hovercar, and had brought my luggage back here on a bus. If I had not been so quick and careful, I might now be jailed, for I was a television star it seemed, my face a portrait on the wideangle tube.
On the news, they showed coppers at my house, looking busy as they attended complex machinery. They found signs of traitorous activities-signs which they had planted since my escape. They had uncovered a "secret room" and such nefarious things as a photo-printer and stacks of antiAlliance, anti-military booklets I was alleged to have written with-they pointed out-the aid of Melinda Thauser, who had already been taken into custody. There were even weapons caches and a small bomb assembly bench. I was wanted on a warrant for sedition. Very neat indeed.
But there was another warrant as well.
The second one was for murder.
They exhibited, in ludicrous detail, the demolished howler at the foot of the cliff, the charred corpses of the men who had been riding in the back of it. They had fished the detached cab from the sea, and the drivers were laid side by side, horribly mutilated by the broken windscreen and the crumpled roof of their vehicle. According to the news, I had run the howler off the narrow cliff road. I had charged it directly, and when it was obvious I was going to hit them, the drivers of the mammoth rig had swerved off the road to avoid killing me. Quite gallant of them.
I waited for the reporter to say how I had managed to make my escape with still another cop car ahead of me, but he talked around it without letting the home audience in on the way I had dived over the cliff myself.
KELLY KILLER, COPS SAY! That was the headline the papers would carry, surely. Those boys always went for alliteration.
I spent most of the evening working over a plan in my head. Just remaining on the loose did not seem enough, any longer, not while Melinda was in the women's quarters of the Tombs, down there in dark, cold stones without me.
Somewhere around nine in the evening, my thinking was interrupted by the whine of sirens and the sinister rattle of gunfire.
I stood, listening intently, wondering if they were now surrounding the building, now getting wise to my sudden disappearance. But they would hardly be firing out in the streets. And there would be no need for sirens. Indeed, sirens would warn me, and such a building as this provided a great many hiding places.
Turning to the broad picture window, I looked down into the street eight floors below. Three howlers curbed in front of the building across the street, and uniformed coppers poured out of them like insects from a broken hive. From the fourth floor of that building, a number of men opened fire with small arms, pitifully insufficient against such organized and deadly police.
What followed was a bloody, desperate battle which carried no reason nor purpose to it, so far as I could see.
Obviously, the people on the fourth floor were considered enemies of the state, for there was also an army car down there, with what appeared to be high brass directing the operation. But why tear gas was not used, why bullets were chosen instead, I could not understand.
I watched, terrified and fascinated.
In the end, as those on the fourth floor surrendered, tossing guns and ammunition down to the street, the most chilling scene of all occurred. Searchlights now illuminated the rooms beyond the shattered fourth-floor windows, showed the men and women there, dejected and defeated.
Almost simultaneously, the inside doors to the building's corridors burst open, and uniformed coppers stepped into the rooms. They carried what appeared to be machine pistols, and they used them expertly, slaughtering the thirty or so human beings who had already surrendered. A tall, willowy blonde twirled gracefully and fell across the windowsill. Her long fingers scrabbled at the wooden frame, while her mouth went slack and her face contorted hideously with the knowledge of impending death. Another eruption of gunfire behind her sent her lunging through the window, tearing her arms on projections of broken glass. She tumbled sixty feet to the street, turning lazily, her waist-long yellow hair sprayed around her like a halo
At last I turned away from the window.
What I had just seen was a sample of that "community camaraderie" the real estate agents spoke of. The neighbors of those dead men and women had turned them in, surely, in righteous indignation that a cell of revolutionaries should exist in their building.
The consensus had killed them as surely as the bullets.
The consensus, I would have to soon learn, was a living, breathing creature that could attack in vicious rage.
And the molders of the consensus had Melinda in a cell where they could get to her at any moment.
VI
At a quarter to three in the morning, after a short nap and a quick snack of cheese and crackers, I dressed and slipped both loaded pistols into the pockets of the heavy coat I was wearing. Through a series of pedways, escalators, and elevators, I reached the ground level of the west wall of the apartment complex and went outside. For a moment, I savored the cool air, then turned right and walked briskly toward the center of the city. I held my chin high and made my step firm but not rushed. I tried to look as little like a fugitive as possible. In ten minutes, I passed a dozen other pedestrians without getting a second glance from any of them, and I thought the ruse was working.
Twenty-five minutes from her apartment complex, the squat, round surface portion of the Tombs hove into sight.
This was the administrative wing, containing offices and files. Light burned in some of the long, narrow window slits. Below this modest and attractive nubbins, bored for dozens of levels into the earth, were the cells and the interrogation chambers. The place had been designed, originally, as a modern progressive prison. But slowly, through the years since the cold war had been renewed, it was converted into something quite less than progressive by those reactionaries who branded change as part of any enemy plot, labeled disagreement as subversion. The ideal of rehabilitation was abandoned by those who thought punishment was better than converting to usefulness. Frustration and boredom and rage were the companions of those locked within these walls.
And Melinda was there now.
There were three howlers parked along the curb, all of them empty and locked. At the four corners of the intersection, there were piles of snow which had not yet been removed. Streetlights threw long shadows against the circular structure. There was no other person in sight, and the scene was almost like still-life painting into which I had walked through some unknown magic.
I had both guns shoved into my overcoat pockets, though I prayed to an insane and unheeding God that I would not have to use them. Indeed, I didn't think I could use them if the occasion arose. But, clutched in my hands, they gave me a sense of determination, as the dying Catholic must feel when his fingers grip his crucifix and he doesn't feel so bad about meeting the end.
Stepping from the curb, I crossed the icy street toward the main entrance of the building.
The doors opened and two coppers came out, walked to the last of the three howlers, and got in.
I kept moving. Up on the other curb, across the sidewalk, up the long flight of gray steps, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. I pushed through the double doors into the well-lighted lobby of the place, took it all in as I walked across it, went down the main corridor to the elevator, which I took down to the cell levels. The doors opened on a guard sitting at a desk, and I received my first challenge.