No one had been in this room for ages. The thick dust was undisturbed. Not even the tiny footprints of rats or other animals. Linc nodded, satisfied that it was safe. He shut the door, turned off the lights, and stretched out on the grimy floor. He was asleep almost instantly, in spite of the choking smell of dust in his nostrils.
A dream awakened him.
Linc sat bolt upright, sweating and trembling. He had been screaming in his nightmare, and his mouth was open now, but nothing came out except a strangled cough. The dream fled from his memory; the harder he tried to recall, the smaller and smaller it dwindled inside his mind until, within a few moments, it was lost altogether. All he could remember was the terror. Something had been after him and nearly got him.
Still coughing from the dust, Linc got to his feet and left the room. Within a few minutes he was back in the tube-tunnel, shuddering slightly from the coldness of it. He touched the curving metal wall; it was so cold that it hurt his fingertips.
Upward, ever upward. Spiraling around and around until he grew dizzy and had to stop and sit on the steps and catch his breath. Then the cold would seep through his thin coveralls and he’d be forced to his feet again. Exercise warmed him. But his belly growled complainingly. It had been empty too long.
Once when he stopped, he heard scrabbling sounds. Clawed feet scratching across metal. Lots of them. In the echoes of the tunnel he couldn’t tell if the noise was coming from below him or above.
Linc pulled the length of pipe from his belt loop and hefted it firmly in his hand. But his hand shook, and not merely from the cold.
He climbed more slowly now, and paused often to listen. The sounds were always there, and seemed to be drawing nearer. He pounded the pipe against the steps, and the clanging frightened even himself. But within a few heartbeats, the scrabblings of the rats returned.
Linc had suffered an electric shock when he had fixed a faulty wire in the distribution center. He still remembered the feeling.
It was mild compared to the shock he felt when he saw Peta’s body.
The boy was lying in a tumbled heap at one of the platforms in front of a hatch. H is clothes were badly chewed up and caked with blood. Linc sank to his knees and stared at the dead body. There was a huge red gash across his forehead. His eyes were open, staring sightlessly at nothingness.
Linc lost track of how long he knelt there, not knowing what to do. Did Jerlet do this? No, it couldn’t be. This isn’t the weightless domain. Jerlet’s not here.
That meant that something, or someone, had killed Peta.
Monet’s guards? Did they track him all this way and kill him? Linc shook his head. Impossible. Why would they? And even Monel’s guards couldn’t deliberately kill somebody.
As he knelt there, a tiny tick-tick-ticking sound scurried across the platform. Linc looked down to Peta’s bare feet. A pair of rats were sniffing there, their red eyes glittering in the darkness.
Linc swung his pipe at them but they scampered away unharmed and disappeared. The pipe clattered across the metal floor plates.
Can’t leave Peta here!
Linc retrieved the pipe, then hoisted Peta’s cold body to his shoulder. He worked the hatch open and stepped into the passageway on the other side…
For the first time he realized how little weight there was here. His own weight had been diminishing steadily, but he had been too sleepy and hungry, and too tired, to notice it. Peta felt as light as a bunk mattress, and Linc was almost tempted to try gliding down the passageway.
There’s got to be a deadlock here someplace. Linc told himself as he tiptoed down the passageway. Got to put Peta safely away into the outer darkness.
The passageway seemed strange. The ceiling was lower than any Linc had ever seen before. There were doors only on one side of the corridor. And the floor curved sharply upward. It looked as if Linc were walking uphill, but it felt to his tired legs as if he was on a perfectly flat floor.
The deadlock was at the end of the passageway, blocking it completely, a huge, heavy metal hatch with the strange symbols that the ancients had put there.
Linc studied it for a long while, to make certain it was exactly the same as the deadlock in the Living Wheel. It seemed the same; as if it had been made by someone who couldn’t possibly make two things differently.
He didn’t like the idea of staying there any longer than he had to, but Linc worked the deadlock very carefully. He went exactly by the ritual Jerlet had taught them so long ago, for he knew that to deviate from the ritual would mean instant death.
Carefully he touched the buttons set into the wall alongside the hatch in the proper order and watched the lights inside each button turn on, just as they were supposed to. When the correct ritual had been performed, the inner hatch slid open, and Linc peered into the glittery metal chamber of the deadlock itself.
Strangely, he found that his eyes misted over and he was nearly crying as he gently laid Peta’s body in the cold metal chamber. He looked so little, so helpless.
“Soon you will be outside,” Linc whispered the words of the ritual, “with all the others who have ever lived. You will become a star, Peta, and you will never feel cold or alone again.”
Linc went back to the keyboard to finish the ritual. The hatch closed and the red light over it flashed on. Linc could hear a faint hum and whoosh of the outer hatch opening and Peta’s body taking flight for the stars. Then the humming stopped and the red light turned off.
It was done. Peta was launched into the outer world, as was proper. Yet Linc felt no happiness about it. He had done the correct thing, but it made him sad and somehow lonelier than he had ever felt before in his life.
Grimly, he made his way back along the passageway to the hatch that opened onto the tube-tunnel. Hunger and cold were his only companions now.
Except for the rats.
8
The tunnel was endless.
Linc pushed on, up the eternally-spiraling steps, eyes burning from lack of sleep, hands shaking from the cold. It was dark in the tunnel, the only light came from an occasional window. The starlight carried no warmth with it. Somehow the light from the yellow star never reached these windows; its warmth never touched the metal chill of the tunnel.
At his back Linc could hear the rats. At first they had been faint, distant. But now their scrabbling claws scratched clearly on the metal steps. Their screeching chatter came echoing off the curved tunnel walls.
Linc pushed on. His weight was getting lighter and lighter, but his strength was ebbing away fast, too, leached from his body by the cold and hunger.
Can’t stop, he told himself. If you stop you’ll fall asleep. And the rats will get to you --
He stumbled. He fell. He picked himself up. He spread out his arms and soared effortlessly. The tunnel was no longer spiraling up over his head. It was flat and open and there was no up or down. He laughed aloud, and heard a strange crackling harsh voice echoing off the metal walls of the tunnel.
He floated almost weightlessly. Floating, floating… Everything was dark around him. Impenetrable black. He was alone in the darkness, without even a star to watch over him. Nothing… no one… alone… Something deep inside Linc’s mind was telling him to stay awake, but the voice was far, far away.
Alone… all alone… and cold… It didn’t make any difference if his eyes were open or shut. There was nothing to see. The darkness was complete.