New Folks' Home: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 6) (18 page)

There was a way—there had to be a way—to stop it. There must be a way in which the Dream guild could be saved. And if there were a way, he must be the one to find it; of them all, Blaine was the only one who knew the imminence of dishonor.

The first step was to get hold of Harriet, to talk with her, to make her see the right and wrong.

The goons were hunting for him, but they would be on their own; they could not enlist the help of any other union. It should be safe to phone.

Far up the street, he saw a phone booth sign and he headed there, hurrying along, his footsteps ringing sharply in the morning chill.

He dialed the number of Harriet’s office.

No, the voice said, she wasn’t there. No, he had no idea. Should he have her call back if she happened to come in.

“Never mind,” said Blaine.

He called another number.

“We’re closed,” a voice told him; “there’s no one here at all.”

He called another and there was no answer.

Another. “There ain’t no one here, mister. We closed up hours ago. It’s almost morning now.”

She wasn’t at her office; she wasn’t at her favorite night spots.

Home, perhaps?

He hesitated for a moment, then decided it wasn’t safe to call her there. The goons, in defiance of all Communications regulations, would have her home line tapped, and his home line as well.

There was that little place out by the lake where they’d gone one afternoon.
Just a chance,
he told himself.

He looked up the number, dialed it. “Sure she’s here,” said the man who answered.

He waited.

“Hello, Norm,” she said, and he could sense the panic in her voice, the little quick catch in her breath.

“I have to talk with you.”

“No,” she said. “No. What do you mean by calling? You can’t talk with me. The goons are hunting you …”

“I’ve got to talk to you; that story …”

“I’ve got the story, Norm.”

“But you have to listen to me. The story’s wrong. It’s not the way you have it; that’s not the way it was at all. “

“You better get away, Norm. The goons are everywhere …”

“Damn the goons,” he said.

“Goodbye, Norm,” she said; “I hope you get away.”

The line was dead.

He sat stunned, staring at the phone.

I hope you get away. Goodbye, Norm. I hope you get away.

She had been frightened when he’d called. She wouldn’t listen; she was sorry, now, that she had ever known him—a man disgraced, a killer, hunted by the goons.

She had the story, she had told him; and that was all that mattered. A story wormed out of the whispered word, out of a gin and tonic or a Scotch and soda. The old, wise story garnered from many confidences, from knowing the right people, from having many pipelines.

“Ugly,” he said.

So she had the story and would write it soon and it would be splashed in garish lettering for the world to read.

There must be a way to stop it—there had to be a way to stop it.

There was a way to stop it!

He shut his eyes and shivered, suddenly cold with the horror. “No, no,” he said.

But it was the only answer. Blaine got up, groped his way out of the booth, and stood in the loneliness of the empty sidewalk, with the splashes of light thrown across the concrete from the many shop fronts with the first dawn wind stirring in the sky above the roofs.

A car came creeping down the street, with its lights off, and he did not see it until it was almost opposite him. The driver stuck out his head. “Ride, mister?”

He jumped, startled by the car and the voice. His muscles bunched but there was no place to go, no place to duck, nowhere to hide. They had him cold, he knew. He wondered why they didn’t shoot.

The back door popped open. “Get in here,” said Lucinda Silone. “Don’t stand and argue. Get in, you crazy fool.”

He moved swiftly, leaped into the car and slammed the door.

“I couldn’t leave you out there naked,” said the girl. “The way you are, the goons would have you before the sun was up.”

“I have to go to Center,” Blaine told her. “Can you take me there?”

“Of all the places …”

“I have to go,” he said; “if you won’t take me …”

“We can take you.”

“We can’t take him and you know it,” said the driver.

“Joe, the man wants to go to Center.”

“It’s a stupid business,” said Joe. “What does he want to go to Center for? We can hide him out. We …”

“They won’t be looking for me there,” said Blaine. “That’s the last place in the world they’d expect to find me.”

“You can’t get in …”

“I can get him in,” Lucinda said.

XIII

They came around a curve and were confronted by the road block. There was no time to stop, no room to turn around and flee. “Get down!” yelled Joe.

The motor howled in sudden fury at an accelerator jammed tight against the boards. Blaine reached out an arm and pulled Lucinda to him, hurling both of them off the seat and to the floor.

Metal screamed and grated as the car slammed into the block. Out of the corner of his eye, Norman Blaine saw timber go hurtling past the window. Something else smashed into a window and they were sprayed with glass.

The car bucked and slewed, then was through. One tire was flat, thumping and pounding on the pavement.

Blaine reached up a hand and grasped the back of the seat. He hauled himself up, pulling Lucinda with him.

The hood of the machine, sprung loose, canted upward, blocking out the driver’s vision of the road. The metal of the hood was twisted and battered, flapping in the wind. “Can’t hold it long,” Joe grunted, fighting the wheel.

He turned his head, a swift glance back at them, then swung it back again. Half of Joe’s face, Blaine saw, was covered with blood from a cut across the temple.

A shell exploded off to one side of them. Flying, jagged metal slammed into the careening car.

Hand mortars—and the next one would be closer!

“Jump!” yelled Joe.

Blaine hesitated, and a swift thought flashed in his mind. He couldn’t jump; he couldn’t leave this man alone—this Buttonholer by the name of Joe. He had to stick with him. After all, this was his fight much more than it was Joe’s.

Lucinda’s fingers bit into his arm. “The door!”

“But Joe …”

“The door!” she screamed at him.

Another shell exploded, in front of the car and slightly to one side. Blaine’s hand found the button of the door and pressed. The door snapped open, retracting back into the body. He hurled himself at the opening.

His shoulder slammed into concrete and he skidded along it; then the concrete ended, and he fell into nothingness. He landed in water and thick mud and fought his way up out of it, sputtering and coughing, dripping slime and muck.

His head buzzed madly and there was a dull ache in his neck. One shoulder, where he’d hit and skidded on the concrete, seemed to be on fire. He smelled the acrid odor of the muck, the mustiness of decaying vegetation, and the wind that blew down the roadside ditch was so cold it made him shiver.

Far up the road, another shell exploded, and in the flash of light he saw metallic objects flying out into the dark. Then a column of flame flared up and burned, like a lighted torch.

There went the car, he thought.

And there went Joe as well—the little man who’d waylaid him in the parking lot that morning, a little Buttonholer for whom he’d felt anger and disgust. But a man who’d died, who had been willing to die, for something that was bigger than himself.

Blaine floundered up the ditch, stooping low to keep in the cover of the reeds that grew along its edges. “Lucinda!”

There was a floundering in the water ahead. He wondered briefly at the thankfulness of relief that welled up inside of him.

She had made it, then; she was safe, here in the ditch—although to be in the ditch was only temporary safety. They might have been seen by the watching goons. They had to get away, as swiftly as they could.

The flare of the burning car was dying down and the ditch was darker now. He floundered ahead, trying to be as quiet as possible.

She was waiting for him, crouched against the bank. “All right?” he whispered and she nodded at him, her face making the quick motion in the darkness.

She lifted an arm and pointed; there, seen through the tightgrowing reeds of the marsh beyond the ditch, was Center, a great building that towered against the first light of morning in the eastern sky. “We’re almost there,” she told him softly.

She led the way slowly along the ditch and off into the marsh, following a watery runway that ran through the thick cover of sedges and rushes. “You know where you are going?”

“Just follow me,” she told him.

He wondered vaguely how many others might have followed this hidden path across the marsh—how many times she herself might have followed it. Although it was hard to think of her as she was now, dirty with muck and slime, wading through the water. Behind them they still could hear the shouts of the squad of goons that had been stationed at the block.

The goons had gone all out, he thought, setting up a block on a public highway. Someone could get into a lot of trouble for a stunt like that.

He’d told Lucinda that the goons would never dream of his going back to Center. But he had been wrong; apparently they had expected he’d try to make it back to Center. And they’d been set and waiting for him. Why?

Lucinda had halted in front of the mouth of a three-foot drain pipe, emerging from the bank just above the waterway. A tiny trickle of water ran out of it and dripped into the swamp. “How are you at crawling?”

“I can do anything,” he told her.

“It’s a long ways.”

He glanced up at the massive Center which, from where he stood, seemed to rise out of the marsh. “All the way?”

“All the way,” she said.

She lifted a muddy hand and brushed back a strand of hair, leaving a streak of mud across her face. He grinned at the sight of her—sodden and bedraggled, no longer the cool, unruffled creature who had sat across the desk from him. “If you laugh out loud,” she said, “I swear I’ll smack you one.”

She braced her elbows on the lip of the pipe and hauled herself upward, wriggling into the pipe. She gained the pipe and went forward on hands and knees.

Blaine followed. “You know your way around,” he whispered, the pipe catching up the whisper and magnifying it, bouncing it back and forth in an eerie echo.

“We had to, we fought a vicious enemy.”

They crawled and crept in silence, then, for what seemed half of eternity. “Here,” said Lucinda. “Careful.”

She reached back a hand and guided him forward in the darkness. A glow of feeble light came from a break in the side of the pipe, where a chunk of the tile had been broken or had fallen out. “Tight squeeze,” she told him.

He watched her wriggle through and drop from sight.

Blaine followed cautiously. A broken spear of the tile bit into his back and ripped his shirt, but he forced his body through and dropped.

They stood in a dim-lit corridor. The air smelled foul and old; the stones dripped with dampness. They came to stairs and climbed them, went along another corridor for a ways, then climbed again.

Then, suddenly, there were no dripping stones and dankness, but a familiar hall of marble, with the first-floor murals shining on the walls above the gleaming bronze of elevator doors.

There were robots in the hall; suddenly, the robots all were looking at them and starting to walk toward them.

Lucinda backed against the wall.

Blaine grabbed at her wrist.

“Quick,” he said. “Back the way …”

“Blaine,” said one of the advancing robots. “Wait a minute, Blaine.”

He swung around and waited. All the robots stopped. “We’ve been waiting for you,” said the robot spokesman. “We were sure you’d make it.”

Blaine jerked at Lucinda’s wrist. “Wait,” she whispered. “There’s something going on here.”

“Roemer said you would come back,” the robot said. “He said that you would try.”

“Roemer? What has Roemer got to do with it?”

“We are with you,” said the robot. “We threw out all the goons. Please allow me, sir.”

The doors of the nearest elevator were slowly sliding back.

“Let’s go along,” Lucinda said. “It sounds all right to me.”

They stepped into the elevator, with the robot spokesman following.

The car shot up and stopped. The door opened and they stepped out, between two solid lines of robots, flanking their path from the elevator to the door marked Records.

A man stood in the door, a great foursquare, dark-haired man whom Norman Blaine had seen before on a few occasions. A man who had written:
If you should want to see me later, I am at your service
.

“I heard about it, Blaine,” said Roemer. “I hoped you’d try to make it back; I figured you were that kind of man.”

Blaine stared back at him haggardly. “I’m glad you think so, Roemer. Five minutes from now …”

“It had to be someone,” said Roemer. “Don’t think about it too much. It simply had to come.”

Blaine walked on leaden feet between the file of robots, brushed past Roemer at the door.

The phone was on the desk and Norman Blaine lowered himself into the chair before it. Slowly he reached out his hand.

No! No! There must be another way. There must be another, better way to beat them—Harriet with her story; and the goons who were hunting him; and the plot with its roots reaching back through seven hundred years. Now he could make it stick—with Roemer and the robots he could make it stick. When he’d first thought of it, he had not been sure he could. His only thought then, he remembered, had been to get back to Center somehow, to get into this office and try to hold the place long enough, so he could not be stopped from doing what he meant to do.

He had expected to die here, behind some desk or chair, with a goon bullet in his body, and a shattered door through which the goons had finally burst their way.

There had to be another way—but there was no other way. There was only one way—the bitter fruit of seven hundred years of sitting quietly in the corner, with hands folded in one’s lap, and poison in one’s brain. He lifted the receiver out of the cradle and held it there, looking across the desk at Roemer.