American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (31 page)

“No one, eh? Including your friend in Gouffre Martel you’re so eager to rescue? By God, you almost swindled me, Foyle. Tell Captain Y’ang-Yeovil I congratulate him. He’s got a better staff than I thought.”

“I never heard of any Y’ang-Yeovil.”

“You and your colleague are going to rot here. It’s no deal. You’ll fester here. I’ll have you moved to the worst cell in the hospital. I’ll sink you to the bottom of Gouffre Martel. I’ll— Guard, here! G—”

Foyle grasped Dagenham’s throat, dragged him down to the floor and hammered his head on the flagstones. Dagenham squirmed once and then was still. Foyle ripped the goggles off his face and put them on. Sight returned in soft red and rose lights and shadows.

He was in a small reception room with a table and two chairs. Foyle stripped Dagenham’s jacket off and put it on with two quick jerks that split the shoulders. Dagenham’s cocked highwayman’s hat lay on the table. Foyle clapped it over his head and pulled the brim down before his face.

On opposite walls were two doors. Foyle opened one a crack. It led out to the north corridor. He closed it, leaped across the room and tried the other. It opened onto a jaunte-proof maze. Foyle slipped through the door and entered the maze. Without a guide to lead him through the labyrinth, he was immediately lost. He began to run around the twists and turns and found himself back at the reception room. Dagenham was struggling to his knees.

Foyle turned back into the maze again. He ran. He came to a closed door and thrust it open. It revealed a large workshop illuminated by normal light. Two technicians working at a machine bench looked up in surprise.

Foyle snatched up a sledge hammer, leaped on them like a caveman, and felled them. Behind him he heard Dagenham shouting in the distance. He looked around wildly, dreading the discovery that he was trapped in a cul-de-sac. The workshop was L-shaped. Foyle tore around the corner, burst through the entrance of another jaunte-proof maze and was lost again. The Gouffre Martel alarm system began clattering. Foyle battered at the walls of the labyrinth with the sledge, shattered the thin plastic masking, and found himself in the infrared-lit south corridor of the women’s quadrant.

Two women guards came up the corridor, running hard. Foyle swung the sledge and dropped them. He was near the head of the corridor. Before him stretched a long perspective of cell doors, each bearing a glowing red number. Overhead the corridor was lit by glowing red globes. Foyle stood on tiptoe and clubbed the globe above him. He hammered through the socket and smashed the current cable. The entire corridor went dark . . . even to goggles.

“Evens us up; all in the dark now,” Foyle gasped and tore down the corridor feeling the wall as he ran and counting cell doors. Jisbella had given him an accurate word picture of the South Quadrant. He was counting his way toward South-900. He blundered into a figure, another guard. Foyle hacked at her once with his sledge. She shrieked and fell. The women patients began shrieking. Foyle lost count, ran on, stopped.

“Jiz!” he bellowed.

He heard her voice. He encountered another guard, disposed of her, ran, located Jisbella’s cell.

“Gully, for God’s sake . . .” Her voice was muffled.

“Get back, girl. Back.” He hammered thrice against the door with his sledge and it burst inward. He staggered in and fell against a figure.

“Jiz?” he gasped. “Excuse me . . . Was passing by. Thought I’d drop in.”

“Gully, in the name of—”

“Yeah. Hell of a way to meet, eh? Come on. Out, girl. Out!” He dragged her out of the cell. “We can’t try a break through the offices. They don’t like me back there. Which way to your Sanitation pens?”

“Gully, you’re crazy.”

“Whole quadrant’s dark. I smashed the power cable. We’ve got half a chance. Go, girl. Go.”

He gave her a powerful thrust and she led him down the passages to the automatic stalls of the women’s Sanitation pens. While mechanical hands removed their uniforms, soaped, soaked, sprayed and disinfected them, Foyle felt for the glass pane of the medical observation window. He found it, swung the sledge and smashed it.

“Get in, Jiz.”

He hurled her through the window and followed. They were both stripped, greasy with soap, slashed and bleeding. Foyle slipped and crashed through the blackness searching for the door through which the medical officers entered.

“Can’t find the door, Jiz. Door from the clinic. I—”

“Shh!”

“But—”

“Be quiet, Gully.”

A soapy hand found his mouth and clamped over it. She gripped his shoulder so hard that her fingernails pierced his skin. Through the bedlam in the caverns sounded the clatter of steps close at hand. Guards were running blindly through the Sanitation stalls. The infrared lights had not yet been repaired.

“They may not notice the window,” Jisbella hissed. “Be quiet.”

They crouched on the floor. Steps trampled through the pens in bewildering succession. Then they were gone.

“All clear, now,” Jisbella whispered. “But they’ll have searchlights any minute. Come on, Gully. Out.”

“But the door to the clinic, Jiz. I thought—”

“There is no door. They use spiral stairs and they pull them up. They’ve thought of this escape too. We’ll have to try the laundry lift. God knows what good it’ll do us. Oh Gully, you fool! You utter fool!”

They climbed through the observation window back into the pens. They searched through the darkness for the lifts by which soiled uniforms were removed and fresh uniforms issued. And in the darkness the automatic hands again soaped, sprayed and disinfected them. They could find nothing.

The caterwauling of a siren suddenly echoed through the caverns, silencing all other sound. There came a hush as suffocating as the darkness.

“They’re using the G-phone to track us, Gully.”

“The what?”

“Geophone. It can trace a whisper through half a mile of solid rock. That’s why they’ve sirened for silence.”

“The laundry lift?”

“Can’t find it.”

“Then come on.”

“Where?”

“We’re running.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not getting caught flat-footed. Come on. The exercise’ll do you good.”

Again he thrust Jisbella before him and they ran, gasping and stumbling, through the blackness, down into the deepest reaches of South Quadrant. Jisbella fell twice, blundering against turns in the passages. Foyle took the lead and ran, holding the twenty-pound sledge in his hand, the handle extended before him as an antenna. Then they crashed into a blank wall and realized they had reached the dead end of the corridor. They were boxed, trapped.

“What now?”

“Don’t know. Looks like the dead end of my ideas, too. We can’t go back for sure. I clobbered Dagenham in the offices. Hate that man. Looks like a poison label. You got a flash, girl?”

“Oh Gully . . . Gully . . .” Jisbella sobbed.

“Was counting on you for ideas. ‘No more bombs,’ you said. Wish I had one now. Could— Wait a minute.” He touched the oozing wall against which they were leaning. He felt the checkerboard indentations of mortar seams. “Bulletin from G. Foyle. This isn’t a natural cave wall. It’s made. Brick and stone. Feel.”

Jisbella felt the wall. “So?”

“Means this passage don’t end here. Goes on. They blocked it off. Out of the way.”

He shoved Jisbella up the passage, ground his hands into the floor to grit his soapy palms, and began swinging the sledge against the wall. He swung in steady rhythm, grunting and gasping. The steel sledge struck the wall with the blunt concussion of stones struck under water.

“They’re coming,” Jiz said. “I hear them.”

The blunt blows took on a crumbling, crushing overtone. There was a whisper, then a steady pebble-fall of loose mortar. Foyle redoubled his efforts. Suddenly there was a crash and a gush of icy air blew in their faces.

“Through,” Foyle muttered.

He attacked the edges of the hole pierced through the wall with ferocity. Bricks, stones, and old mortar flew. Foyle stopped and called Jisbella.

“Try it.”

He dropped the sledge, seized her, and held her up to the chest-high opening. She cried out in pain as she tried to wriggle past the sharp edges. Foyle pressed her relentlessly until she got her shoulders and then her hips through. He let go of her legs and heard her fall on the other side.

Foyle pulled himself up and tore himself through the jagged breach in the wall. He felt Jisbella’s hands trying to break his fall as he crashed down in a mass of loose brick and mortar. They were both through into the icy blackness of the unoccupied caverns of Gouffre Martel . . . miles of unexplored grottos and caves.

“By God, we’ll make it yet,” Foyle mumbled.

“I don’t know if there’s a way out, Gully.” Jisbella was shaking with cold. “Maybe this is all cul-de-sac, walled off from the hospital.”

“There has to be a way out.”

“I don’t know if we can find it.”

“We’ve got to find it. Let’s go, girl.”

They blundered forward in the darkness. Foyle tore the useless set of goggles from his eyes. They crashed against ledges, corners, low ceilings; they fell down slopes and steep steps. They climbed over a razor-back ridge to a level plain and their feet shot from under them. Both fell heavily to a glassy floor. Foyle felt it and touched it with his tongue.

“Ice,” he muttered. “Good sign. We’re in an ice cavern, Jiz. Underground glacier.”

They arose shakily, straddling their legs and worked their way across the ice that had been forming in the Gouffre Martel abyss for millennia. They climbed into a forest of stone saplings that were stalagmites and stalactites thrusting up from the jagged floor and down from the ceilings. The vibrations of every step loosened the huge stalactites; ponderous stone spears thundered down from overhead. At the edge of the forest, Foyle stopped, reached out and tugged. There was a clear metallic ring. He took Jisbella’s hand and placed the long tapering cone of a stalagmite in it.

“Cane,” he grunted. “Use it like a blind man.”

He broke off another and they went tapping, feeling, stumbling through the darkness. There was no sound but the gallop of panic . . . their gasping breath and racing hearts, the taps of their stone canes, the multitudinous drip of water, the distant rushing of the underground river beneath Gouffre Martel.

“Not that way, girl.” Foyle nudged her shoulder. “More to the left.”

“Have you the faintest notion where we’re headed, Gully?”

“Down, Jiz. Follow any slope that leads down.”

“You’ve got an idea?”

“Yeah. Surprise, surprise! Brains instead of bombs.”

“Brains instead of—” Jisbella shrieked with hysterical laughter. “You exploded into South Quadrant w-with a sledge hammer and th-that’s your idea of b-brains instead of b-b-b—” She brayed and hooted beyond all control until Foyle grasped her and shook her.

“Shut up, Jiz. If they’re tracking us by G-phone they could hear you from Mars.”

“S-sorry, Gully. Sorry. I . . .” She took a breath. “Why down?”

“The river, the one we hear all the time. It must be near. It probably melts off the glacier back there.”

“The river?”

“The only sure way out. It must break out of the mountain somewhere. We’ll swim.”

“Gully, you’re insane!”

“What’s a matter, you? You can’t swim?”

“I can swim, but—”

“Then we’ve got to try. Got to, Jiz. Come on.”

The rush of the river grew louder as their strength began to fail. Jisbella pulled to a halt at last, gasping.

“Gully, I’ve got to rest.”

“Too cold. Keep moving.”

“I can’t.”

“Keep moving.” He felt for her arm.

“Get your hands off me,” she cried furiously. In an instant she was all spitfire. He released her in amazement.

“What’s the matter with you? Keep your head, Jiz. I’m depending on you.”

“For what? I told you we had to plan . . . work out an escape . . . and now you’ve trapped us into this.”

“I was trapped myself. Dagenham was going to change my cell. No more Whisper Line for us. I had to, Jiz . . . and we’re out, aren’t we?”

“Out where? Lost in Gouffre Martel. Looking for a damned river to drown in. You’re a fool, Gully, and I’m an idiot for letting you trap me into this. Damn you! Damn you! You pull everything down to your imbecile level and you’ve pulled me down too. Run. Fight. Punch. That’s all you know. Beat. Break. Blast. Destroy— Gully!”

Jisbella screamed. There was a clatter of loose stone in the darkness, and her scream faded down and away to a heavy splash. Foyle heard the thrash of her body in water. He leaped forward, shouted: “Jiz!” and staggered over the edge of a precipice.

He fell and struck the water flat with a stunning impact. The icy river enclosed him, and he could not tell where the surface was. He struggled, suffocated, felt the swift current drag him against the chill slime of rocks, and then was borne bubbling to the surface. He coughed and shouted. He heard Jisbella answer, her voice faint and muffled by the roaring torrent. He swam with the current, trying to overtake her.

He shouted and heard her answering voice growing fainter and fainter. The roaring grew louder, and abruptly he was shot down the hissing sheet of a waterfall. He plunged to the bottom of a deep pool and struggled once more to the surface. The whirling current entangled him with a cold body bracing itself against a smooth rock wall.

“Jiz!”

“Gully! Thank God!”

They clung together for a moment while the water tore at them.

“Gully . . .” Jisbella coughed. “It goes through here.”

“The river?”

“Yes.”

He squirmed past her, bracing himself against the wall, and felt the mouth of an underwater tunnel. The current was sucking them into it.

“Hold on,” Foyle gasped. He explored to the left and the right. The walls of the pool were smooth, without handhold.

“We can’t climb out. Have to go through.”

“There’s no air, Gully. No surface.”

“Couldn’t be forever. We’ll hold our breath.”

“It could be longer than we can hold our breath.” “Have to gamble.”

“I can’t do it.”

“You must. No other way. Pump your lungs. Hold on to me.”