REALIZATION came, explosively. He saw those enigmatic shapes, not as they appeared now, half blotted out by the street lamps’ glare, but as he had seen them from the window above. Cylinders, T-shapes, cubes—and a wide-angled, tapering V.
The blades of a copter!
In Glenbrook, no one was allowed to land a copter on a rooftop—no one except the Guard.
And if the Guard had had time to put a copter there, then there would be Guardsmen concealed on the street as well… .
The whole chain of reasoning occupied a fraction of a second; to Bass, there was no interval between the first step and the last. He whirled and leaped back toward the shelter of the doorway.
In the middle of that leap, Bass heard a shout: “Get it!”
As his foot struck the pavement, bedlam fountained behind him. The sharp, slapping echoes blended one explosion into the next to make one single marrow-shaking roar. Something slapped the pavement viciously to Bass’s left; something else chewed a fan-shaped wad of splinters from the frame of the entranceway ahead. A round tiny hole, radiating hairline cracks, appeared low in the display window to the right.
Bass did not strictly speaking leap again; his momentum carried him forward over his leg’s leverage. When he came down the second time, he was eight feet away from the recessed door.
And the door vanished behind a roiling cloud of gray-white gas that filled the entranceway brim-full. Tendrils of it curled off around the frame-edge, whipped by the wind—too slowly.
Bass rocked violently to a stop … stood hesitating for a moment during which something struck his right shoe a wrenching blow … and dived head-first through the cracked glass of the display window.
Footsteps echoed behind him down the lightless corridor.
Winded, staggering, the pain in his side stabbing him fiercely at every movement, Bass emerged from the bookshop doorway and hurled himself into the crowd again. Twice, in the first ten yards, he caught a glimpse of a scarlet uniform and. had to angle off in a new direction. When he slowed down and let himself be carried along by the crowd’s eddying movement, it was only because his overtaxed muscles refused to carry him any farther at a faster pace.
The character of the crowd had changed somehow, he realized vaguely; its blended shriek and roar were as raucous as ever, but under them was a muted, persistent humming. And here and there, isolated in the restless flow, were motionless clots of people with their heads bent together. He passed close to several of these groupings, and caught meaningless scraps of conversation that penetrated the uproar: “… pushed ‘em with ‘is …” “Told ‘em I got to find my daughter…”’ “…call to be feared unless …”
The clots broke up and reformed, but always, it seemed to Bass, they grew larger and more frequent. He edged his way into one as it grew into being around a large, self-important-looking man in a sky-blue cape. He heard:
“‘S matter up there, man? What’s happenin’?”
“Don’t know n’more than you, friends. They’re stoppin’ ever’body at the corner —won’t let nobody through.”
“Other corner, too!”. cried a gnomelike little man. “Told ‘em I had to find my daughter, but they wouldn’ …”
Bass turned back into the current, shaken. Either the Guard had acted more swiftly and efficiently after his escape than he would have believed possible, or his period of blankness had lasted just long enough to give them the time they needed. At any rate they had effectively trapped him, with a cordon at each end of the block, and—undoubtedly—men posted on each of the adjoining streets.
He saw another red uniform, and dodged deeper into the crowd. Their only problem now, he thought feverishly, was to dip the one fish they wanted out of the pool. They might bring up a hundred men, or two hundred, but only—how many? Four cars, with perhaps as many as six men in each. Only twenty-four Guardsmen, at most, had actually seen him, not counting the ones who had fired at him, a few minutes ago, across the full width of the street ….
He stumbled, and, looking downward, saw that a long, curling strip of plastic had been ploughed up from the sole of his right shoe. He stooped painfully and tore it loose, knowing at the same instant that the action was futile. He could steal a complete set of new clothing, put on spectacles, somehow contrive a false mustache, alter his appearance completely … and still they would only have to look for a man with a gunshot wound.
Bass put his fingers tentatively to the warm stickiness at his side. Incredible that he had been shot … most of the red stain wiped off against his overshirt, but a little remained, buried in the grooves between the tiny ridges of his fingertips… .
They still wanted him alive. That must be the reason they had done nothing until he had turned to run back into the building: they had wanted him to get far enough out into the street so that they could cut him off and capture him. And then, when they had fired, they had aimed low, at his legs. Another paradox: believing him to be a fiendishly powerful monster, the Guard treated him as if he were made of ordinary mortal flesh.
That, he thought dizzily, could be resolved by thinking of the Guard in two parts—the lower ranks, who were bound by superstition, and the high officials, who weren’t—but it led immediately to still another: His knowledge made him dangerous, clearly, but it couldn’t be of any interest in itself to the Guard or any other organ of the state. Unless—
Unless the two co-existing mercantile states were in competition, as one licensed craftsman might compete with another, and sometimes sent spies or troublemakers into each other’s territory?
The notion of the Glenbrook Store competing with anyone made Bass’s head swim, and yet he sensed dimly that it might explain a great many things—things that he had never before thought needed any explanation. The insistence on a high birth-rate, and the consequent overcrowding. The very structure of society itself, the Wall, the false stories of iron-fleshed demons… .
NOW he had to get out, he thought, with sudden, desperate clarity. If they recaptured him and took him to Guard headquarters, there would be no question of simply interrogating him and then killing him. They would want information about Glenbrook’s espionage system, and they could not afford to believe that he didn’t have it. They would keep him alive, and in pain, as long as they could.
“Commoners of Stamford, attention!” an enormous voice blared suddenly. Bass stopped, quivering. Around him he saw heads turn toward the invisible loudspeaker; the roar of the crowd began to diminish. “Among you is a man who by accident has exceeded his capacity for alcohol. This man is temporarily beyond the control of his angel and is not responsible for his actions. I repeat, his condition is temporary. This man is not possessed, but he is dangerous to himself and others.”
A hum of interested, curious or dismayed voices arose, to subside as the loudspeaker bellowed: “All persons in this block, between Dine and Kusko Streets, will move in an orderly manner toward the sound of my voice. You will each be examined individually by the Guard, after which you will be free to continue the celebration.”
The clamor of the mob burst forth again, more deafening than before; but the huge, packed mass slowly began to move down the street. Bass hung back until wide patches of confetti-strewn pavement began to appear behind him; then the crowd forced him to move.
His mind was spinning frantically, finding a grip nowhere. The fishermen were emptying their net; it would be a slow process, but infallible. There was no way he could escape it. In a few minutes, half an hour at most—