The corridor's parents never minded Elmore. He kept the kids out of their hair, and, very grateful, they all chipped in to card Elmore some kind of present every Founder's Day. If any of them knew most of Elmore's stories were anti-Company, they never said anything. Nor would they have cared.
The end was inevitable. Some kid talked around the wrong person. Like the Counselor.
One off-shift, Elmore didn't return. Everyone wondered what had happened. But the topic became boring, and everyone forgot.
Not Sten. He saw Elmore again, on The Row. The man was a shambling hulk, stumbling behind a streetcleaning machine. He paused beside Sten and looked down at the boy.
Elmore's mouth opened, and he tried to speak. But his tongue lolled helplessly, and his speech was guttural moans. The machine whistled, and Elmore obediently turned and stumbled away after it. The word crawled out of Sten's mind: brainburn.
He told his father about what he'd seen. Amos grimaced. "That's the secret you gotta learn, boy. You got to zig when they zag."
"What'd I tell you about zigging, son?"
"I couldn't, pa. There were four of them, and they was all bigger than me."
"Too bad, boy. But there's gonna be a lot of things bigger than you come along. How you gonna handle this one?"
Sten thought for a minute.
"They won't look nigh as big from the back, would they, dad?"
"That's a terrible thought, Karl. Terrible. Especially since it's true."
Sten got up.
"Where you headed?"
"I'm…gonna go play."
"Naw. First you're gonna let that black eye go away. And let people forget."
Two weeks later, one of the four boys was shinnying up a rope in exercise period when it broke and dropped him twenty feet to the steel deck.
Three days after that, two more of the group were exploring an unfinished corridor. It was probably just their bad luck to be standing under a wallslab when the fasteners broke. After the boys were released from the hospital, the Counselor reprimanded their parents.
The leader of Sten's attackers was just as unfortunate. Out after curfew, he was jumped from behind and battered into unconsciousness. After an investigation, the Counselor said it had probably been a Delinq—a member of one of the wild gangs that roamed the abandoned sectors of Vulcan, one step ahead of brainburn.
Despite the explanations, Sten was left pretty much alone after that.
"Karclass="underline" Gotta have a word with you."
"Uh…yeah, dad?"
"Me and the other folks been to a meeting with the Counselor."
"Oh."
"You wonderin' what he wanted?"
"Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sure I am."
"Don't have any idea, do you?"
"Nossir."
"Didn't think you did. Seems that some Mig's kid went and invented something. Some kinda spray. You don't know anything about that, do you, boy?"
"Nossir."
"Uh-huh. This spray smells just like…well, like when the sewage recycler blew up down on Corridor Eighteen-forty-flve. Remember that?"
"Yessir."
"Kinda quiet tonight, aren't we? Anyway. So somebody went and sprayed this on the Counselor and four of those aides he's got. Sprayed on their pants where they sit down. Is that a laugh you're hidin'?"
"Nossir."
"Didn't think so. The Counselor wanted all of us parents to find out who's got themselves a antisocial kid and turn him in."
"What're you gonna do, dad?"
"Already done it. Dropped by the microfiles. Your ma talked to the librarian, while I sort of looked at who's been reading books on chemistry."
"Oh."
"Yeah. Oh. Unfortunately, I went and forgot to give them records back."
Sten didn't say anything.
"My pa told me once—before you go setting a man's foot on fire, you best make sure there's at least six other people with torches in their tool kits. You follow what I mean?"
"Yessir."
"Thought you might."
One of the best times was what Sten always thought of as the Off-shift Xypaca.
Xypacas were incredibly nasty little carnivores that had been discovered on some hellworld by the Company's probeships. Nobody knew why the crew had brought back specimens of the psychopathic little reptiles. But they did.
Measuring barely twenty centimeters in height, the Xypaca had a willingness to use its claws and teeth on anything up to a hundred times its own height. One of Sten's teachers, originally from Prime World, said Xypacas looked like minityrannosaurs, whatever they were.
If the Xypaca hated almost everything equally, it had a special hard place in what passed for its heart for its own species. Except during the brief breeding cycle, the Xypaca loved nothing more than tearing its fellow Xypaca apart. Which made them ideal pit-fighting animals.
Amos had just been rewarded by the Company for figuring out his mill would run an extra thousand hours between servicing if the clearing exhaust didn't exit just above the computer's cooling intake. With great ceremony, they knocked a full year off of Amos' contract.
Amos, always one for the grand parlay, used that year's credit to buy a Xypaca.
Sten hated the reptile from the first moment, when a lightninglike snap of its jaws almost took off his little finger.
So Amos explained it to him. "I ain't real fond of that critter either. I don't like the way it looks, the way it smells or the way it eats. But it's gonna be our ticket off of Vulcan."
His spiel was convincing. Amos planned to fight his Xypaca in small-time preliminary fights only, betting light. "We win small—a month off the contract here, a week there. But sooner or later it'll be our ticket out of here." Even Sten's mother was convinced there was something to this latest of Amos' dreams.
And Sten, by fifteen, wanted off Vulcan more than anything else he could imagine. So he fed the Xypaca cheerfully, lived with its rank smell, and tried not to yell too loudly when he was a little slow in getting his hand out of its cage after feeding.
And it seemed, for a while, as if Amos' big plan was going to work. Until the night the Counselor showed up at the fights, held in an unused corridor a few rows away.
Sten was carrying the Xypaca's cage into the arena, following Amos.
From across the ring, the Counselor spotted them and hurried around. "Well, Amos," he said heartily, "didn't know you were a Xy-man."
Amos nodded warily.
The Counselor inspected the hissing brute under Sten's arm. "Looks like a fine animal you've got there, Amos. What say we pitch it against mine in the first match?"
Sten looked across the ring and saw the obese, oversized Xypaca one of the Counselor's toadies was handling. "Dad," he said. "We can't. It'll—"
The Counselor frowned at Sten.
"You letting your boy decide what you do now, Amos?"
Amos shook his head.
"Well then. We'll show them we're the best sportsmen of all. Show the other corridors that we're so bored with the lizards they've got that we'd rather fight our own, right?"
He waited. Amos took several deep breaths. "I guess you haven't decided about the transfers over to the wire mill yet, have you, sir?" he finally asked.
The Counselor smiled. "Exactly."
Even Sten knew that handling the mile-long coils of white-hot metal was the deadliest job on Amos' shift.
"We—me and my boy—we'd be proud to fight your Xy, Mister Counselor."
"Fine, fine," the Counselor said. "Let's give them a real good show."
He hurried back around the makeshift ring.
"Dad," Sten managed, "his Xy—it's twice the size of ours. We don't stand a chance."