I lay perfectly still.
Sound of soft footsteps. A pause; and then the footsteps retreating.
There was another faint click as the door closed again—and darkness.
Someone had come into the room, looked at me, gone away again.
What did it mean? I could not guess. All I could imagine was that it meant someone wanted to know if I were conscious or not; I hoped I had deceived them.
I went back to my rubbing, but for only a few moments. Then the door opened again; but the footsteps were not soft.
There were several men behind me. They were talking to each other as they came in; there was no attempt at concealment, no sense of trying to disguise their voices, no seeming awareness that I was alive. That could mean only one thing:
As far as they were concerned, the time in which I would remain alive was very short.
“Sure he’s awake,” said one of the men belligerently. “Go on, Jack—give him a kick and see.”
Jack did. His foot connected with my right shoulder blade. Somehow no bones were broken; but I have never been hit harder in my life. The impact spun me around, lying on the floor as I was; I came to rest on my other side, facing the men.
The man who had kicked me was a hulking, stubby toad of a man; I had never seen him before. One of the others was equally strange. But the third I recognized.
Kelly was his name. He had tried to pick a fight with me, back on the Ninth Level.
I said, through a haze of pain, “What’s all this about? What do you—-”
“Shut up,” said Kelly contemptuously. “If he opens his mouth again, Jack, kick his teeth in. Come on, give me a hand.”
Kelly stood back, staring expressionlessly, as Jack and the other man picked me up, head and foot. They carried me out of the room, down a short, dimly-lit corridor.
The man at my feet grunted, “Kelly, I don’t like this. Suppose the sea-cops wander by?”
“Suppose the moon falls on us?” Kelly said sardonically. “You’re not paid to think. Jack scouted for the cops; he said there wasn’t a patrol-jeep on the whole level. Right?”
Jack growled, “Right.” A man of few words, this Jack, I thought. I opened my mouth to say something, but the sudden gleam of interest in his eyes stopped me. We bumped along for a few yards, then my bearers dropped me.
“Okay,” growled Kelly. “Take off, boys. I won’t need you any more.”
The other two left—hurriedly. Kelly came closer, and bent down beside me. He fumbled with something on the floor, out of my range of vision: I heard a heavy clanking sound.
“So long,” he said, grinning at me. A sudden seepage of cold wet air came up alongside me; as Kelly raised his foot to thrust at me, I realized what he had done. He had opened a trap—beneath lay the drainage tunnels of Thetis!
As his foot came down I made a desperate lunge, and felt the cord that bound my left wrist part. But it was too late, far too late; his foot caught me in the side and thrust me over a metallic lip. I scrambled and half-caught myself; but one numbed hand was not enough.
I plunged into icy, quick-flowing water. The shock of striking it paralyzed me for a moment; I sank far down before I somehow, with one hand, began struggling upward again.
Somehow, somehow—I reached the surface. Somehow I kept myself afloat, coughing and strangling, gasping cold, dank air into my lungs, surging along through a giant metal conduit at a rate of knots, as helpless as a jellyfish in a tidal bore.
Almost I gave up; but something would not let me give up. Perhaps it was the voice of my instructors at the Academy: Panic is the enemy. Perhaps it was a Voice more authoritative still—but something kept me kicking and struggling, though the best I could hope for was to stay alive until I reached the vent pumps…
And, in the fiercely driven pistons of the pumps, foreing the waste seepage out against a pressure of many atmospheres, the struggle would surely end.
But I kept on struggling.
And—I saw a light.
Only a dim glow, but it was a light. I saw it, far off, through a mist of salt water. I blinked and looked again, and it was closer; a dim flicker on a sort of shelf beside the surging flow.
It was a portable Troyon light. And beside it a man stood, staring at the water.
I tried to call to him, but only a splutter came out. Perhaps he heard me; perhaps it was only fortune that made him look at where I struggled. But I heard his wordless shout, and I found breath to cough a reply.
He acted like the lightning itself. Almost as soon as he had seen me I was driven to the ledge where he stood; in a moment I would have been irrecoverably gone. But just as I slid beneath him he lunged at me with what looked like a long pole.
Something sharp and painful caught my shoulder. I felt the skin break and tear as the boathook slid along my upper arm and back.
The cloth of my tunic ripped, held, ripped again—
And held.
He dragged me, feebly spluttering, to his ledge and helped me up.
I slumped breathlessly against the wall. He grinned at me.
“Man,” he said, “you must have wanted to go swimming awful bad!”
13
The Hermit of Kelly’s Kingdom
“Thanks,” I said, for saving my life, for risking his own—if he had slipped into that raging water, we both would have died—all I could say was “thanks.”
“Sure,” my rescuer said off-handedly. He studied me while I caught my breath, and I returned the compliment. He was a tall, husky Negro, dark as any Gullah, with a clear, friendly eye. He shook his head as he saw the ropes on me. “Um,” he said. “Maybe you weren’t swimming for fun after all.” He thrust a hand far down into a trouser pocket, and drew out a clasp knife.
The pain in my fingers and toes as he cut the ropes and the blood surged back was worse than anything that had gone before. I never thought I would welcome pain! But at last I began to believe in my luck—I was alive!
“Thanks,” I said inadequately again. “You saved my life; I hope I can pay back the favor.”
He chuckled. “Why, I certainly hope you can’t, friend,” he said. “I don’t exactly want to need that kind of favor. Come on, let me give you a hand.” Leaning on him, I limped a few yards along the ledge to where the Troyon light lay. It was a small tube, flickering and feeble as though its luminous gas were nearly exhausted. But it was welcome light to me. By it I looked around.
There was a niche in the ledge. In the niche, barely head high and wide enough for a man to lie down, were a few tattered blankets, a rough platform of boards that appeared to serve as a bed, a few packing crates. “Welcome to my home,” said the man. “My name’s Park, Gideon Park. It isn’t a very fancy establishment, but you’re welcome to make use of it.”
I said earnestly, “Mr. Park, I never saw a place I liked better.”
He grinned. “I imagine so,” he said. “Call me Gideon, if you don’t mind; it’s a name I’m partial to. That’s why I made it up. My folks christened me Walter, but I guess they kind of ran out of good names after eleven of us… Unless you’d like to forget the whole thing, you might satisfy an old man’s curiosity. Who put the ropes on you?”
I shook my head. “I wish I knew, Mr.—Gideon, I mean. Somebody named Kelly and somebody else he called Jack. That’s all I know about them. They took everything out of my pockets, so I guess that’s all they wanted. Why they picked me, though—I’ll never know, I guess.”
Gideon frowned. “Lots of Kellys around,” he said somberly. “This one wouldn’t be a tall, skinny fellow with a nasty disposition, would he?”