Logan's Run (9 page)

"If we pose, do we get food?" asked Logan.

"I have no food."

"Then why should we do it?"

"
Why?
Do you know how long this temple will last? Not twenty-one years, or twenty-one thousand years—but twenty-one thousand thousand years! And you'll be a part of it, the crown jewel in my collection. Ages will roll. Milleniums. And you'll be here—the two of you—eternally frozen in a lovers' embrace."

Logan turned away.

Box became apprehensive; his voice took on a wheedling tone. "What can I give you?"

"Nothing," said Logan. "We need two things, food and a way out. You have no food, and there's no way out."

"Ah, but there is," tempted Box.

"Then why are you still here? Why don't you escape?"

"And leave my white wonderland, leave the singing winds and the silence, the purity, the flowing skies . . . For what? For your squabble and smoke, your jamming and rushing? No. But I could. I
could
leave if I wished to do so."

"How?" asked Logan.

"How indeed," silked Box. "First you pose, then I tell you."

"First you tell us, then we pose."

Box hesitated. Gears seemed to click in him. He moved his metal hand in a gesture of surrender. "I suppose I must trust you," he said.

Will he do it? Logan wondered.
Can
he do it? Can he really provide an escape route?

Box put his hand to the metal of his head and closed his human eye. He spoke of visions: "I am a humming in blackness. Far away. I am ten billion, billion neurons in a mighty brain. A brain of steel . . . I am the force that rules the maze."

The Thinker!
It tied in; being half machine, Box was, in a very real sense, part of the great machine brain.

"Above me—a great warrior astride the world. A sweep of black mountain below, great birds on my granite shoulders, a vastness beneath me. I am part of Tashunca-uitco."

Crazy Horse!

"I am brother to the Thinker," went on Box. "I know its circuits and its ways. I share its great wisdom. I can thread the force field labyrinth. I can leave Hell . . ."

And he told them the way.

Box opened his eye, advanced. "Now, you shall keep your bargain."

"How do you want us?" asked Logan.

"Nude," said the Box.

"Take off your clothes," Logan told Jess, beginning to strip off his own.

The girl looked at him.

"It'll be all right," he assured her.

Jess pushed back the cowl of her parka and began to unknot the leather ties. She dropped the rank fur at her feet. Averting her eyes from Logan, she touched the magnetic closure on her blouse. It opened under her fingers and she removed the blouse, then quickly peeled away the clear cosmetic supports from her full breasts. Her skirt was added to the clothing on the fur-rich floor. She unzipped her shoes and stepped out of them.

"Enchanting," said Box.

He waved them to a dais covered with deep white polar furs. "Up there," he said.

"Shall we—just
stand
?" asked Jess. "Or should we . . ."

"Take her in your arms," Box said.

Logan looked at Jessica. Lamplight played along the creamed curves and valleys of her body. Her skin was glowing ivory in the light of the flame.

"Stop wasting my time," Box said. He stood poised at a tall monolith of sparkling ice.

Logan took the girl clumsily into his arms.

"No, no, no," complained Box. "With emotion. With feeling. She is your love, your life." To the girl, he said, "Mold yourself to his strong body. Look into his eyes."

Jess looked into Logan's eyes.

He felt the sweet warmth of her, the nearness of her. Breasts pressing him, legs touching him, arms holding him. He felt a slow surge of passion, but more than passion: a rapture, a tenderness, and a wild, sweet sadness he'd never known.

"Superb!" said Box.

His metal hand began to buzz. He brought it forward to shiver the ice into blue patterns. He worked furiously, with incredible speed. In a shower of tinkling shards and ice splinters, the two figures began to emerge from the block. Magically, forming, shaping . . .

Logan held Jess. This, too, was a house of glass—but how different from the frantic, empty pursuit of sensation in the houses of the city. There was a reality here, a meaning. Forget everything else; forget the twisted man-thing carving the ice; forget the Hell-huddle of convicts; forget Francis and Ballard and the maze and Sanctuary. But let this moment last.
Jess . . . Jess . . .

"Done!" piped Box. "Behold!" He stepped back.

Logan reluctantly released the girl.

They faced
themselves
.

In stunningly wrought ice figures, shimmering with life, the artist had captured the form, the mood, the emotion of his models. The endless moment was there. Love. Passion. Beauty. All there.

Logan forced the image from his mind. They had to move, to dress, to make their escape. No time for love. Or passion. Or beauty. No time.

He turned to reach for his clothing.

And did not anticipate the ripping blow that snuffed out the world.

The world was reborn in a voice that said, "Torture is also a fine art and I am its master. Your death; my lady, shall be exquisite."

Logan swam up through fog and froth to full awakening.

He was in an ice cage, behind ice bars. Directly in front of the cage Jess was spread-eagled and helpless, pinned, naked, to a tilted slab. Her body was trembling with chill. Facing her was a steeply inclined slideway. Balanced delicately on the high lip of the slide was a massive ten-ton ice block. An oil flame ate steadily at one end of the great block. Water dripped into white fur.

With each passing second, as more of the ice melted, the end of the block lightened, tipping the remainder. Already the mass was inching over in a continuous grinding crunch, pulled by the slow force of gravity. When enough of it had turned to water the huge block would tip into the slideway and begin its ponderous rush toward Jess. It would bear down with all of its tonnage, like a giant sledge, and the vulnerable body of the girl would be caught between the ice faces as they smashed together.

On the polar-covered dais Box sat, his chromed legs folded beneath him. "Beg me," he crooned "I can still save your life."

Jess remained silent, her eyes glazed with fright.

Logan threw himself at the bars. They held. Embedded in one of them, midway up, he saw the curved darkness of a small fish, frozen there.

His glance swept the cell. His shirt had been thrown in one corner. Hurriedly he scooped it up and wound it three times around his right hand.

Box was still urging the girl to beg for her life.

The block tipped further.

Logan faced the imperfection in the cell bar, stiffening his fingers into a slight curve, bunching the pad of muscle in the heel of his hand. He assumed the Omnite stance.

Now.

He summoned tension into his body, feeling it gather along the backs of his legs; he felt his spine arch as the muscles pumped full of blood. He concentrated on the hand. He was
only
a hand. He took several deep breaths, let his attention widen to include a spot in space three inches beyond the bar. He would hit
that
spot.

He blanked out the cell bar that was between the spot and his hand. It didn't exist; there
was
no cell bar. He tensed. Energy sang into the arm that slashed the rigid hand at the spot in the air.

A splintering crack. The bar exploded. Logan squeezed through the opening.

He scooped up one of Jessica's shoes and leaped onto the slideway. Ignoring the poised juggernaut at his back, he attacked the ice shackles that held the girl's wrists and feet. Four quick hammer blows and she was free.

Jess screamed. A great rumble at the tip of the slide. The block was loosed. Logan pushed her ahead of him, diving from the slideway just as the awesome masses mated in demolition. Ice dust powdered the air.

An angry buzz of metal. Logan swung around to see Box coming at him.

"Grab your clothes and get out!" he yelled to Jess—and she obeyed him.

Box hurtled in, his half-face contorted with rage and frustration. Logan ducked under the sweep of his cutting hand, which ripped into the room's central pillar. The buzzing metal cut deeply into the column before Box could free it.

Logan fell back, calculating. The love statue: he and Jess in a perfect world, forever locked in sweet embrace. He would have to destroy it, destroy
himself
. Logan wedged his shoulder against his ice thigh and pushed. The statue tilted, rocked, and toppled into the weakened pillar.

A crack fissured the vault.

Logan ran.

Birds showered from a crystal sky. Otters squealed and splintered. The walrus reared. Box died with one maniacal metal cry.

In that single cataclysmic death, the ice creatures cracked and clattered, mirror-smashed in a fractured tumble of shelves and ledges and crystal lace, disintegrated in shimmering waves as the great palace pulled itself down in a blue ruin.

Logan did precisely as Box had instructed. Leading Jess, he was threading the force field labyrinth. Wind chopped and cut at them on the open plain.

To Logan the spot seemed identical with the storm-swept terrain that surrounded it. Ice flurries whipped about them as they moved: two steps forward, a step to the right . . . It was hopeless; Box had lied.

They took three paces in a weaving pattern. Angled right, then left. Three more steps forward, one back.

Magic!

They were out—standing on the warm platform.

Hell was gone.

They discarded the filthy pelts.

"Can you get a mazecar?" asked Jess.

"The Gun first," said Logan. He recovered it from a niche in the side of the platform, checked it. Five charges left: tangler, vapor, ripper, needler and homer.

Logan pried open the back of the callbox and began to shift the terminals.

A car came humming.

"Where now?" the girl asked him.

"To the Black Hills of the Dakotas," he said. "Ballard knows how to control the maze. He directs these cars as he needs them. If we want to find him we go to the source. We go to the Thinker."

He is a violence, contained.

He sits in front of the board.

He has not eaten.

He has not slept.

Technicians avoid him, say nothing to him.

His eyes suddenly flash to the board. Brightness there. One of the scanners has registered the presence of a runner.

Location: South Dakota, the Black Hills.

He feels elation.

The hunt resumes.

EARLY MORNING . . .

When Crazy Horse Mountain was dedicated, the great mass of granite became the site of a monumental project which was to consume half a century. An Indian warrior, 563 feet high and 641 feet long, would ride the land, carved from six million tons of Dakota stone. A mountain would become a man, towering above black-forest wilderness, dwarfing the giant heads of Rushmore.

The sculptor was Korczak Ziolkowski, and under his direction 150,000 tons of rock would be ripped away each year to form his dream. After a decade, more than a million tons of living granite lay in rubble at the foot of the looming mountain—and the feather of the great War Chief of the Ogallala Sioux began to emerge. Obsessed by his vision, Ziolkowski ranged the continents, prying money from the pockets of the rich, the vain, the titled—which he spent on blasting powder, dynamite, cordite, tools, winches and rope.

The work went on. Gradually the mountain sheared away. Nations threw their combined resources behind it, fired by the dramatic image of a great fighting chieftain on a wild-maned stallion. Thousands of laborers and artists toiled on the flanks of the plunging horse. Diamond drill bits and jackhammers tore at the granite heart of the mountain.

And, with infinite slowness, the mammoth figure took its place against the Dakota sky: Tashunca-uitco. Crazy Horse. The ruthless Indian genius who directed the annihilation of Custer's Seventh on the Little Big Horn.

The world marveled.

On an April afternoon, three years before the project's completion, a thick-waisted laborer named Balder "Big Ed" Thag was clearing brush on the east flank of Crazy Horse. He was attracted to a cleft in the rocks by a strange, ululating sound; a wind was issuing from the interior of the mountain.

Thag stepped to the wide opening and peered within. The wind slammed him with such force that he had to brace his legs to keep from being pushed off the slope.

Unfortunately for Thag, it was exactly 4:27 o'clock. The banshee wind whistle abruptly stopped. There was a moment of absolute stillness. Then the wind resumed, but this time it was not blowing outward. The wind sucked
in
with irresistible force. It was Thag's misfortune that he was braced in the wrong direction. He lost his footing and toppled into the hole and fell as a stone falls down a well.

The mountain was breathing, but Thag was not.

Many years passed before the Crazy Horse Caverns were discovered again.