Dayworld Breakup Read online

  Snick, standing in the doorway of the hall entrance to the office, shot a woman in the leg before she could get to the door. The woman screamed and fell, tried to get up but could not make it.

  Duncan pressed once on the CN MAN FIRE button. The beam pierced the window and bored a hole through the wall just above a doorway jammed with struggling and shouting operators.

  That beam had been shot only to increase the fright of the office people, and it certainly succeeded.

  Snick ran into the office to pounce on the wounded woman.

  By now, orange words: EMERGENCY, UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY were flashing on the walls. The alarms were still screaming.

  He rotated the airboat until it faced the direction from which it had come. After putting the controls on HOLD, he climbed swiftly out of the craft and ran into the office.

  3

  Each wallscreen indicated the current time. It was exactly 12:31. He and Snick should be out of here in five minutes, which he hoped was enough for them to get out before ganks from other towers got here. The local ganks would have to be catch-as-catch-can.

  Snick was dragging the still-screaming woman toward a workdesk and shouting, “Shut up! I won’t kill you if you do what I tell you to do!”

  The woman began whimpering, her face pale, her eyes wide and rolling. Duncan helped Snick to carry the woman to the chair and sit her in it. Her right leg had been pierced through the back of the thigh and out the front. But the beam had cauterized both wounds.

  “Turn off the alarms!” he roared.

  The woman, gasping, spoke a code word into the screen before her, and the sirens and flashing warnings stopped.

  A man’s head stuck out from one of the exit doorways.

  Duncan shot a beam at it; the side of the doorway puffed smoke. The head withdrew. Duncan ran to the doorway to make sure that the man had gone. Behind him, Snick was yelling more orders, and the woman was shrilling, “I can’t do that! They’ll punish me!”

  “No, they won’t!” Snick said. “You’re being forced! Anyway, I’ll kill you if you don’t! Take your choice!”

  Duncan stopped just short of the door and crouched down and peered around the side of the doorway. No one was in the long hall, but the man could have gone into any of the open doorways along it. Never mind.

  By the time he had returned to the desk, the operator had issued the command Snick had demanded.

  The wallscreens now flashed with the codes the operator had so reluctantly—but quickly—inputted. And, for the first time in the history of the New Era, everybody in a city had been destoned at the same time.

  Except for the Baldwin Hills power-distribution tower, every one of the twenty-one towers contained a million living people on any one day and six million in the stoners.

  The codes had caused a simultaneous input of electrical power to all the cylinders holding the gorgonized citizens. The destoned would think that this morning was their scheduled day to live. The Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday citizens would be thoroughly confused when they found that the other days were also awake.

  He could imagine the shock and the chaos now in every one of the twenty-one towers. Over one hundred and forty million would be jammed into a space which could comfortably fit only twenty million on any day.

  That would be only the first shock. The second would be when they saw Duncan’s messages on the wallscreens.

  Snick set her gun to MED STUN, and it spat a violet beam against the back of the woman operator’s head. She slumped forward onto the desktop.

  Ten seconds later, Duncan and Snick were in the airboat, and it was accelerating down the corridor. It slowed at the first intersection and turned right. Its nose and stem missed the walls by a few inches. Then it shot down a long hall until it came to an unusually large doorway. It stopped and rotated ninety degrees, facing the doorway.

  Beyond was an enormous circular well-lit room, two hundred and fifty feet in diameter, soaring to a hundred feet, and ringed with galleries. In the center was a shimmering light-purple cylinder half the diameter of the room and rising seventy-five feet. Below its floor, Duncan knew, was a cable forty-five feet thick entering the cylinder base. It was connected to a smaller cylinder inside the larger, and from the sides of this cylinder twenty-one cables, each ten feet thick, sprouted downward and into the base along the wall of the outside covering. The large cable carried the power transmitted from the gigantic complex in the Mojave Desert. The center of that complex was the shaft that had been burned by proton accelerators down to the distance needed to feed off the heat from the metal core of Earth. A thermionic converter changed the heat to electricity, and part of this was sent to the Baldwin Hills plant in the state of Los Angeles.

  All monitor screens in this tower had also been cut off. The tenants, including the local ganks, did not know where the airboat was.

  He set the cannon for full-power continuous firing.

  The bulbous nose of the cannon spat a violet beam, four inches thick, against the purplish cylinder. For a few seconds, the purple spot against which the beam was ravening was unchanged except for a darkening. Then the wall opened, and the beam struck through the hole to the inner cylinder. For another few seconds, there was only the silence of a thousand megawatts concentrated in a six-inch-thick beam and the eye-watering and nose-burning ozone-heavy air.

  Snick had gotten out of the airboat and was crouching by the doorway, two proton handguns ready. Duncan kept glancing to both sides of him, alert if anyone should appear at either end of the hallway. He held a handgun, and another lay on the seat by his side.

  Suddenly, Snick shouted, “Ganks on the galleries!”—he could not see them, they must be on the higher ones—and flame and smoke and white-hot sparks and a roaring as of a hundred Niagara Falls shot out of the hole in the side of the cylinder. Duncan was deafened, and he was quickly surrounded by a blinding stinking cloud that scraped his eyes raw and seemed to burn his nostril hairs and squeezed his lungs with fiery fingers. He coughed and coughed, and he heard Snick’s deep tearing sounds while she climbed into the seat behind his.

  She could not talk, but she tapped his right shoulder in a signal to get going.

  He turned the boat around. So thick was the smoke, it hid the brilliant violet beam of the cannon. Then he shot the boat forward and also pressed the OFF button of the cannon. Suddenly the cloud was behind them, though still rolling down the hall, and the air was sweet and pure. But the hallway was no longer illuminated, and he knew by that that the power distribution cables were a torn-up and melted mess. At any other time, he would have shouted with joy. But he could only cough violently. The boat scraped along the sides of the wall, bounced off, and dragged its other side against the opposite wall. Then it was shot out of the archway and over the Los Angeles basin waters like a spat-out seed, and he was trying to see with eyes buried in tears and pain.

  There were no lights from the rooftops and the bridges connecting some towers. The glow cast back by the low-lying clouds was gone. Only the firefly glowworm twinkles of the running lights of a few surface craft and airboats showed that this great city-state existed here.

  Then, as his eyes ceased watering and became somewhat less painful, he could make out the pale sheen on the underside of the clouds above the Burbank Tower beyond the Hollywood Hills.

  Still coughing, he brought the canopy up out of the hull.

  There were at least a dozen gank craft, searchlights on, heading for the tower he had just left. Their occupants must be very puzzled and disturbed. They would be radioing their headquarters, asking what had caused this complete blackout.

  His boat, now in the water, almost completely submerged, moved slowly toward the northwest.

  Between spasms of coughing, Duncan hoarsely told Snick what he planned to do next. He ended, “O.K. with you?”

  “It’s more insane than what we just did. But I like it.”

  He took the airboat, its lights now on, up the s
ide of the University Tower, his first stop. Any ganks seeing it would assume that it was one of theirs. When they found out different, they would be too late to do anything about it.

  He found a huge arched opening on the tenth level and landed in it. There were two boats there and no one in sight. Further in, he knew, there would be at least one gank on duty, unable to leave his post because his orders would demand that he stay there. He should have a mobile emergency lantern to light his office.

  After a fit of coughing—it was less violent now—he and Snick went down the hallway leading from the port and walked into the room where a lone woman, a sergeant second-class, sat at a desk. The lantern, klieg-bright, hung on a hook from the center of the ceiling. She stood up, smiling, though somewhat strainedly, and said, “Good to see you. I’m lonely. How’s the situation out there? Found out anything?”

  Snick took her gun from its holster, pointed it at the woman, and said, “Hands up.”

  The woman turned pale, her mouth open, but she obeyed. Her voice shaking, she said, “What is this?”

  “Anyone else around?” Duncan said.

  She shook her head. “You won’t…” And she closed her mouth.

  “…get away with this?” Snick said.

  The woman did not reply.

  “Are you expecting anyone soon?” Duncan said. He coughed mildly.

  Again, she shook her head.

  Snick came around behind her, relieved her of her gun, and stuck it in her own belt. Then Snick went to a cabinet mounted to the wall and opened it. After looking its contents over, she took two cans of TM and four powerpaks for proton handguns. These she jammed into her jacket pockets. She went to a fountain in a corner and drank deeply. After she was done, she held her gun on the woman while Duncan drank.

  “We want food,” he said. “Show us where it’s stored.”

  Still with her hands above her head, the woman conducted them down the hall to the precinct HQ kitchen. Duncan held the heavy lantern with one hand while they walked there. They returned a moment later with a box full of cans and two codekey can openers. He would have liked to have brought some delicacies, but these were stoned.

  Snick handcuffed the woman to a deskleg, and they walked out with the lantern and her gun, powerpaks, and two flashlights while she protested about being left in the dark. Before they had left the office, she was cursing and threatening them.

  When they got to the port, they checked out the two organic airboats there. The three-seater was not only faster but had fully charged powerpaks for both the motor and the cannon, which was a very powerful Class V. After storing the food, extra guns, and lantern in the rear section, they climbed into the cockpits. He called up a display of the map of the basin and of the contiguous areas which he needed. The boat, without running lights and close to the surface of the water, flew to the great reservoir in the northeast corner of the basin. Here the craft rose along the concrete dam, shot across the big lake, and then followed the course of the Los Angeles River. When it got to a large body of water called Lake Pang, once named Lake Hughes, Duncan turned the boat to the right and followed a three-laned plastic road to Boron. This was a small village and fuel station for the surface vehicles traveling between the Mojave Thermionic Power Complex and Los Angeles. Duncan turned off the lights well before reaching it, detoured into the desert for ten miles, then returned to the road.

  Rain began to fall heavily, and lightning and thunder raised hell westward behind the boat.

  As they whizzed above the highway, heading for the complex sixty miles distant, Duncan envisioned the babel and bedlam of Los Angeles. By now, the ganks must have figured out who had caused it. They would, however, have to try to restore order before they could spare many personnel to track him and Snick. Not until the wrecked power distributor was replaced would they be able to begin bringing order out of chaos. Nor would they know where the fugitives were.

  It was good for him and Snick that the area was cloud-covered. The stationary satellites monitoring this area could not see through the clouds. Their infrared equipment would be operating, but his boat was not emitting enough of that kind of energy to be detectible. The Gernhardt-drive motor in the boat caused an electromagnetic disturbance which the satellites could sense. But the approaching electrical storm would soon interfere with that capability.

  He grinned savagely. What he and Snick had done at Los Angeles was small potatoes compared to what they would do at the Mojave power site. If things worked out the way he planned, that is.

  Then the storm caught up with them and netted them with rain, thunder and lightning. Duncan turned on the ultraviolet headlights to help him on the terrain. The lightning streaks were, however, frequent enough and close enough for him to make his way from point to point. Fifteen minutes later, the boat was on the edge of a hole. And humankind’s mightiest work lay below them.

  One of them, anyway. There were fifty of them on the five continents, and all were of equal size.

  The boat rested on the lip of a circular depression twenty miles across and one thousand feet below sea level. This had been dug out of the rock two obmillenia ago. The lights radiating from its buildings and ground shone so brightly through the driving rain that Duncan and Snick could discern the white cylindrical tower in its center and the structures arranged in a circle around it. The tower was two miles wide and five hundred feet high. Its walls were made of twenty-inch-thick cardboard subjected to stoning power and, thus, invulnerable to any heat except perhaps that at the center of a star.

  The tower covered the half-mile wide shaft that plunged 1700 miles into the earth. The walls of the shaft were lined with stoned cardboard. The end of the pipe in its center was near the border of the Earth’s mantle and liquid outer core. The heat conducted up it was passed out of the tower through dozens of pipes that passed horizontally to other huge cylinders stationed around the central tower. These contained thermionic converters, tremendous devices that changed heat to electricity.

  From these, electrical conduits fifty feet thick went to the structures arranged in a third circle. These were transformers, and from them underground conduits relayed the power to transformers and then to power-distribution centers in ten western departments, also called states.

  Duncan’s target was the building housing the Number 6 transformer. This was on the western side of the outer circle, and it was made of steel. Hence, its walls could not resist the proton-accelerator Class V cannon in the nose of the boat.

  Dimly, the lights from the residential buildings at the base of the Brobdingnagian hole wavered through the rain. There were no vehicle lights on the roads connecting the inner structures and the personnel housing.

  “In and out,” Duncan said loudly. “Like Finnegan. If their radar doesn’t pick us up at once, we can do it. It’s not likely in this rain, and we’ll keep close to the surface.”

  He was sure that radar towers were placed along the edge of the hole and at its bottom. So far, he had seen none. It was also possible that they were not operating. No one in the history of the New Era had ever tried to assault a thermionic-generator complex. Security could be rather lax, especially on such a storm-ridden and pluvial night.

  He slipped the boat over the edge. When the sky was clear and the sun had poured heat into the deep well, it would have caused an updraft day or night. But the rain had cooled off the air, and this was winter. Now the boat was caught in the downdraft of the strong western wind behind it, and hurled along the face of the cliff toward the bottom. He applied lifting energy to counteract somewhat the down-pushing air and descended at thirty miles an hour. Nearing the bottom, he slowed the vessel and then sent it in a curve which straightened out a few feet above the ground. The boat accelerated, reaching a hundred miles an hour velocity until it was two miles from the target.

  He slowed the craft then because, at this rate, its momentum was not easily stopped within a short space.

  A few minutes later, he brought the boat to a stan
dstill. It was fifty feet above the ground, its nose pointed at the shell around the great converter.

  So far, no alarms had sounded or flashed.

  The cannon spat its violet. Smoke poured out of the shell, but the rain kept it from spreading far.

  A minute passed. Two minutes.

  The cannon charge-indicator on the instrument panel showed that two-thirds of the powerpak’s energy was gone.

  He cut the cannon off. Sirens began wailing and orange lights began flashing on the shell and on the fronts of the far off buildings. Squares of light suddenly blazed along the base of the hole. Garage and hangar doors were opening to loose surface cars and airboats.

  Duncan took the boat up and away, accelerating it until it shot over the edge of the hole at two hundred miles an hour. He had the boat’s radar on then but if a radar tower was just ahead of him, the scope did not show it.

  After leveling off at a hundred feet above the surface of the Mojave Desert, the boat sped at its maximum velocity, three hundred miles an hour. He slowed it to a hundred mph as he brought it slanting down through the rain and the white-hot bolts. At the same time, he had the headlights and blacklight scopes on. He leveled out at five feet above the surface of the desert. Snick gasped when a monolithic rock formation loomed before them. He twisted the wheel savagely and slowed the craft down simultaneously. The side of the fuselage nearly scraped against the rock. Past it, he kept on slowing until he was moving at fifty miles an hour.

  Far behind them, shining dimly at different altitudes, wavery in the heavy rain, were the searchlights of a dozen gank aircraft.

  4

  Extract from a tape made by Wednesday’s World Councillor, Ji Nefzawi Ibson, and sent via secret couriers to the other World Councillors.

  USE DESCRAMBLER CODE #1489C.

  ERASE THIS COMMUNICATION AFTER ASSIMILATION.

  Re: the enemies of the Commonwealth of Earth, Jefferson Cervantes Caird alias William St. George Duncan et alia (see Index) and Panthea Pao Snick, alias Jenny Ko Chandler et alia (see Index).