"Rite of Passage" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

4

Lacking anything else to do, I left the Common Room and went back to Geo Quad. I may have seemed outwardly calm — I think I did — but inside I was frantic. Once, when I was about ten, I had been on an outing on the Third Level and gotten into a patch of nettles. I didn’t discover what they were until I was well into them, and I had no choice but to continue pushing my way through. By the time I came out on the other side my legs and arms were itching furiously and I was dancing up and down, driven almost into a frenzy by the fiery prickling, wishing for anything that would make it stop. What I was feeling mentally now was something very similar. I had an itch I couldn’t stop and couldn’t locate, I was jumpy and unhappy, and very depressed.

I wanted to get away. I wanted someplace dark to hide. I wanted something to do to occupy my mind. When I got back to our apartment — a place that held the furniture but not the feel of home — I hunted up a piece of chalk and one of those small lights that dorm mothers use to count heads with, after lights-out. Then I went out again. It was about two o’clock in the afternoon then, and though I hadn’t eaten for hours I was far too agitated to think of food.

I didn’t just piqk the nearest grate to our apartment and pop into it. I wandered a little until I found a quiet bywater of a hail not too far away. I was in no mood at all to try to explain myself to some uncomprehending adult, so I did some looking around before I decided on a particular grate to use as my entrance into the Fifth Level collecting chutes.

I knelt down by the grate and began to take it off. It was hung by clips on both sides and they hadn’t been worked for such a long time that they were stiff and unmoving. Once I started to use them regularly they wouldn’t be any problem, but right now they refused to yield to my prying fingers. I worked at it in a very slow-paced way, not feeling up to much more, and it was fully five minutes before my judicious wiggling of the left-hand clip unfroze it. I was about to start on the other when a voice asked, “What are you doing?”

I had my face in my hand at the moment, and I jumped guiltily at the sudden sound. I composed myself as best I could before I looked around. It was Zena Andrus standing there.

I said, “What are you doing?”

She said, “I live back there,” pointing to a door not so far down the way. “What are you doing?”

I pointed through the grate at the collecting chute. “I’m going down in there.”

“You mean down in the ducts?”

“Yes,” I said. “Why not? Does the idea scare you?”

She bristled. “I’m not scared. I can do anything you can.

With deliberate malice, I said, “In that case, come on along with me.”

She swallowed a little bit hard, then knelt down beside me and looked through the grate, feeling the indraft and becoming conscious of the distant sound of fans. “It’s awfully dark down there.”

“I have a light,” I said. “We won’t need it much, though. It’s more fun running along in the dark.”

“Running?”

“Well, walking.”

Uncertainly, she looked back at the grate again. They say that misery loves company, and I was bound to make someone else miserable.

“Oh, well,” I said. “If you’re afraid to come along…”

Zena stood up. “I am not.”

“All right,” I said. “If you’re coming, stand aside and let me get the grate off.”

In a minute I had the other clip pulled to the side. I set the grate on the floor and pointed to the black hole. “After you.”

“You’re not going to shut me up in there?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’ll be right behind you. Co through feet first.”

Since she was a butterball, it was a tight fit for her, but after she did some earnest wriggling, she popped through. I handed the chalk and the light down to her and then I slid through myself. When I was standing on the floor of the duct, I took the chalk and light back.

“Put the grate on,” I said, and while she was doing that I made an X-mark and put a neat circle around it, the chalk squeaking lightly on the metal.

“That’s the mark for home,” I said. The ducts corresponding to arteries have pushing fans, the ducts corresponding to veins have sucking fans. Between the chalk marks I make and the direction and feel of the wind, I always have a good enough idea where I am, even in a strange place like this one, to at least find my way home again. There was certainly more similarity here to the ducts at home than there was in the layouts of Alfing and Geo Quads proper. I didn’t think it would take me long to get my bearings.

When Zena had the grate in place, we set off.

I walked first down the metal corridor. Zena followed uncertainly behind me, tripping once and skidding, though there was nothing there to trip on except her feet. The duct itself, fully six feet wide and six feet high, was made of smooth metal. The darkness was complete except for the occasional grille of light cast into the dust at a grate opening, and the beam cast by my little light. As we passed them, I numbered the grates and the cross-corridors to give me a ready idea of how far from home I was.

As we passed the grates, occasionally noises penetrated from the outside world, but it was clearly another world than the one that we were in. The sounds of our world were the metallic echoes of our whispers, the sound of our sandals padding dully, and the constant sound of the fans.

I had read more than one novel set in the American West two hundred years before Earth was destroyed, where conditions were almost as primitive as on one of the colony planets. I remembered reading of the scouts who even in strange territory had the feel of the country, and I felt much the same way myself. The feel of the air, the sounds, all meant something to me. To Zena they meant nothing and she was scared. She didn’t like the dark at alL

At those points where the corridors joined there were sometimes fans to be ducked. The corridors also sloped at the junctions so that there were no straight corners, and this was disconcerting when the corridor you were meeting ran up-and-down, even when it was the equivalent of a capillary and could be gotten over with one good jump.

Zena balked at the first of these that we encountered and had to be prodded before she would cross it.

“I don’t want to,” she said. “I can’t jump that far.”

“All right,” I said. “But if you don’t come along, you’ll just be left here all alone in the dark.”

That made her mind up for her and she found that she could jump it, and with very little effort, either.

But I’ll have to admit that old-collecting-chute-hand or not, I wasn’t prepared for what we found next. In the darkness, there was no floor in front of us. Above us, no ceiling. My light showed our own corridor resuming on the far side of the gap, fully six feet away. The floor sloped sharply down and the air rushed strongly along. I had never encountered an up-anddown duct of this size before.

“Well, what is it?” Zena asked.

There were handholds at the side on which to cross the gap, and holding onto one of these, I leaned over and dropped a piece of broken chalk in a futile attempt to gauge the depth of the cross-duct. I listened, but I never heard a sound.

“It must connect one level with the next,” I said. “A main line. I bet it goes straight down to the First LeveL”

“Well, don’t you know?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I’ve never been here before.”

I wasn’t about to jump that distance, so I examined the hand- and footholds carefully. If you slipped and fell, and it was as far down as I suspected, all that would be left of you would be jam. I shone my light up and down, and the beam only managed to nibble at the blackness. The holds went up-and-down, too, as well as across, a ladder that went much farther than I could see.

“Maybe it connects with the Fourth Level down there,” Zena said, “but where does it go to up there?” She pointed straight up the duct.

I didn’t know. The Fifth Level was the very last, the outside, but this duct went beyond the Fifth. Air chutes don’t lead into blind corners and air doesn’t come from nowhere.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But as long as we’re here, why don’t we see where it goes?”

I reached over and put my toe in the inset in the wall. Then I grabbed the first handhold I could reach and swung out. They were good finn holds and while the distance straight down bothered me a little, as long as I couldn’t see how far down it was I wasn’t really scared. I once had the experience of walking along a board three inches wide while it was set on the ground — I went the whole length and probably could have walked on for a mile and never fallen off. Then the board was raised into the air and I was challenged to try again. When it was set on posts ten feet high, I wouldn’t even try it because I knew I couldn’t make it. This was something of a similar situation, and as long as I couldn’t see I knew I wouldn’t worry.

I grabbed the next hold and started up. Before I could get anywhere, Zena leaned over and held me by the foot. “Hey, wait up,” she said, and gave my foot a tug.

“Watch it!” I said sharply. “You’ll make me fall.” I tried to jerk my foot loose, but she wouldn’t let go.

“Come on back down,” Zena pleaded.

Reluctantly I came down. I said, “What is it?”

“You can’t go and just leave me.”

“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “Just follow me and you can’t be left behind.”

“But I’m scared,” she said.

That was really the time for her to finally admit it. We had both known that from the beginning, but she had refused to admit it until things were getting interesting.

“It’s not going to hurt you,” I said. “All we have to do is climb until we find out what’s up there.” I could see she was wavering, caught between the fear of climbing the ladder and the fear of being left behind. “Come on,” I said. “You first.” I wanted her to go first. That way she couldn’t grab me again.

After a moment, I edged her down the beginning of the slope to the first handhold. I got her onto the ladder and actually moving again. I followed her. I had the light clipped at my waist, pointing upward and giving both of us some’ idea of what and where to grab as we continued to climb.

I could hear Zena whimpering as she climbed, making scared noises in her throat. To get her mind off her troubles, I said, “Can you see anything up there?”

She was clinging tightly to the ladder as we went up, and now she stopped, flipped her head up for just the shortest instant and then brought it down again.

“No,” she said. “Nothing.”

I should have known better, I told myself as we continued to climb. You don’t bring somebody who has a habit of choking up into a situation like this.

Suddenly, without any warning, Zena stopped moving. Before I could help myself, my head rammed so hard into her foot that a shock of pain ran through my neck. If I’d had my head up, I would have seen that she’d stopped, but you can’t climb indefinitely with your head thrown back without getting a crick in your neck. I stopped immediately and went down one step.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I just can’t go any farther. I can’t.”

I lifted my head and peered upward. I couldn’t see anything beyond Zena that would hold her up. She was just clinging to the ladder, her face pressed close to the metal. I could hear her breath rasp in her throat.

“Did you run into something?”

“No. I just can’t go any farther,” she said tearfully. “I’m scared.”

I reached up and put my hand on her leg. It was rock-hard and trembling. I said, “Move ahead, Zena,” in a firm but gentle tone — I didn’t want to frighten her — and pushed at the calf of her leg, but she didn’t move.

I could see that it had been a mistake to be in the lower position on the ladder. If Zena let go and fell, I would be swept along no matter how hard I tried to hold on. That would save me trying to explain what had happened — and it might be difficult to explain if I came back by myself without Zena: “Oh, she fell down one of the air chutes” — but that wasn’t anything to be happy about. I was genuinely frightened. My heart was beginning to speed up and I could feel a trickle of sweat running down my back.

“Don’t let go, Zena,” I said carefully.

“I won’t,” she said. “I won’t move.”

I unclipped the light at my belt and then I leaned back as far as I could until I could see beyond her. It would take twenty minutes to go down the ladder — in her state, probably longer — and even if I could start her moving, I doubted she could hold on that long. I held the light up at arm’s length over my head. About forty or fifty feet above us I could see something black at the side of the duct. A cross-corridor, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. All I could do was hope that it was.

“I want to go down,” Zena said.

We couldn’t go down. We certainly couldn’t stay where we were. I didn’t know what was ahead of us, but it was the only direction in which we could go.

“You’re going to have to climb a little more,” I said.

“But I’m scared,” Zena said. “I’m going to fall.”

I could feel sweat on my forehead now. A runnelet ran down and caught in my eyebrow. I wiped my brow.

“No, you’re not going to fall,” I said confidently. “I just looked up above, Zena, and there’s a cross-corridor just thirty feet or so over your head. That’s all you have to climb. You can do that.”

Zena just screwed her face in against the metal even harder. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. I’ll help you. Keep your eyes closed. That’s right. Now, move your foot up one step. Just one step.” I pushed at her leg. “That’s right. One step. All right, now reach your hand up — no, keep your eyes closed. Now move your other foot.”

One foot, one hand at a time, I got her moving again. For the first time since I could remember, the darkness seemed oppressive, a place where anything could happen. It was the way it must have seemed to Zena all along.

In a minute, I said, “It’s not more than twenty feet or so now,” but Zena was blocking my view and I couldn’t do anything but hope I was right. “You’re doing fine. It’s only a little bit farther.”

I continued to urge her on, and she went up slowly, a rung at a time. It was more than twenty feet, but not too much more than that, when Zena gave a little cry and was suddenly no longer above me. I looked up, and in the beam of the light clipped at my waist I could see the cross-corridor just over my head.

All I could do, sitting on its floor, was try to catch my breath and calm my heart. My heart was thumping away, sweat was continuing to drip from my forehead, and now that I was safe my mind was thinking of all that could have happened in full detail. Beside me, Zena was sobbing soundlessly.

After a minute, in a voice filled with wonder, Zena said, “I did make it.”

I breathed through my open mouth, trying not to pant. Then I said, “I told you that you would, didn’t I? Now all we have to do is get you back down again.”

Zena said, in a determined tone that surprised me, “I can make it back down again.”

I said, “Well, as long as we’re here, we may as well have a look around.”

In a minute or two, we walked down the corridor until we came to the first grate opening. The opening was there, but not the grate, and there was no light shining into the duct from outside as there would have been in Geo Quad or Alfing. I snaked through the hole and then gave a hand up to Zena. And we were standing in a hall on the Sixth Level, the level that shouldn’t have been there.

I shone my light around and all was silent, and dark, and deserted. The corridor was bare. All the fixtures were gone. Anything that could be removed was gone, only the holes remaining after. There was a doorway showing in the beam of my light.

“Let’s go look at that,” I said.

There was no door — that was gone, too. Nothing had been yanked ruthlessly or broken off. Everything had simply been removed.

The room into which the doorway led was bare, too. It was a very long room, longer than anything else I had seen in any quad, short of a quad yard. Its closest resemblance was to a dormitory, but it was as though somebody had taken all the rooms in a dormitory and torn out all the walls in order to make one long room. There were holes bored in the walls at regular intervals, columns of holes. But the room was bare.

“What is it?” Zena asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

We went back into the hall. It was long and straight, without any of the dead ends, stairs, or sudden turns that you ordinarily expect to see in any normal hallway. It was straight as a string. That was strange and different, too.

I noticed the numbers 44-2 painted neatly on the wall by the door of the room. There was a red line that started at the doorway, moved to the center of the hall and made a sharp right turn to run beside green, yellow, blue, orange and purple lines that continued past, running down the center of the hall.

“Let’s see where the lines go,” I said, and set off down the corridor.

It was late, past dinner time, when we got back to Geo Quad. We came out of the ducts from our original opening just down the hall from Zena’s home. My stomach was starting to notice how long it had been since I had eaten and I had a healthy appetite.

Zena hesitated for a minute outside her door, and then she said, “You’re much nicer than I thought you were at first.” And then, rapidly, as though to cover that statement up, she said, “Good night,” and went quickly into her apartment.

When I walked in, Daddy was just getting ready to go out for the evening. He and some of his friends used to get together regularly and build scale models and talk. Models of machines, animals (bones and all), almost anything imaginable. This group had met on Sunday nights for as long as I had lived with Daddy, and he had a whole collection of the models he had made, though they hadn’t yet been unpacked since we had moved here from Alfing.

Actually, I had no fault to pick with his models. Daddy used to say that everybody needs to have at least one mindless hobby to occupy himself with, and I had several.

Daddy asked, “Where have you been?”

“Up on the Sixth Level,” I said. “What do we have on hand to eat?”

“There’s some Ham-IV in the kitchen, if you want that,” Daddy said.

“That sounds good,” I said.

I liked Ham-IV very much. It comes from one of the two or three best meat vats in the Ship, though some people find it too strong for their taste. Gamey, I think they say. Still they have to put up with it, because it’s one of the best producing meat cultures on the Ship. It doesn’t hurt to like the inevitable.

I started for the kitchen and Daddy followed.

“Isn’t the Sixth Level completely shut up?” he asked. “I didn’t know you could still get up there.”

“It’s not that hard,” I said, and started getting food out. “Just why did they tear everything out the way they did?”

“Nobody has ever told you why they closed it down?”

I said, “Before today, I didn’t even know that there was a Sixth Level.”

“Oh,” Daddy said. “Well, it’s simple enough. At the time they converted the Ship it was pretty Spartan living here. We had more space than we needed with all the colonists gone, but not enough of everything else. They stripped the Third and Sixth Levels and used the materials to fix up the rest of the Ship more comfortably. They changed the Third to as near an approximation of Earth as they could, and closed the Sixth down as unnecessary.”

“Oh,” I said. That seemed to make sense out of the tomb that we had seen.

Daddy said, “I guess I’d forgotten how barren the Sixth Level is. If you want to find out more about it, I can tell you where to look it up. Right now, though, I have to be on my way or I’ll be late.”

Before he got out of the kitchen, I said, “Daddy?”

He turned around.

I said, “I changed my mind today. I think I’d like to go with you next weekend after all.”

Daddy smiled. “I was hoping you’d change your mind if I gave you a little time. You make your share of mistakes, but most of the time you show good sense. I think you did this time.”

Daddy is nice, so he wouldn’t say, “I told you so,” but I was certain that he thought that it was seeing the Sixth Level and not getting stricken dead for it that had changed my mind. It wasn’t, though. I think I changed my mind on the ladder — there are times when you have to go forward whether you like it or not, and if Zena Andrus could do it, as scared as she was, so could I. That’s all.

I smiled and said, “Do I get unfrozen?” I was at least half-serious. For some reason, getting Daddy to say so was important to me.

Daddy nodded. “I guess you do. I guess you do.”

I was still smiling as I sat down to eat. It was just about time I started to do a little growing. It was then that the thought struck me that if I did start to grow, in not very long at all I wouldn’t be able to squeeze my way into the ducts.

Well, you can’t have everything.