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pain stinging sharp; so I wriggled and squeezed to roll the other way, facing
the Bumbler instead of having it at my back. Having a Bumbler jammed against
my stomach wasn't comfortable either, but I could stand it for a while. With
less than two minutes of air in the rebreather, I had worse troubles.
The whale-shark's mouth began to close. I tried to hold it open, tried to
grab its jaw and pull myself free; but the hold on my ankle was as strong as
iron, chaining me in place.
Better to stop fighting. My air would last longer that way.
Concentrate,I told myself.Slow breaths. Wait.
I had no idea what I was waiting for; but no one builds a river-shark just
for the hell of it not one with tentacles for grabbing passersby. This machine
was designed to capture people... and I hoped it took them alive.
Yes. Of course it must want me alive. If its purpose was to eliminate
intruders, it would have killed me by now. It could have zipped out a knife to
slit my throat the second I was immobilized.
Unless it wanted my skin intact. Unless the machine's job was to supply the
Skin-Faces with fresh Explorer pelts.
Concentrate!I growled mentally.Slow, slow breaths.
Somewhere inside the shark, machinery started grinding. It was an unhealthy,
damaged sound the stunner had shattered some part of the glass mechanism.
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Slowly though, slowly, the water around me gurgled away. The shark was pumping
water out, and (I hoped) pumping breathable air in.
Taking a chance, I raised my head into the clear space and inhaled shallowly
through my nose. So far so good. I completely filled my lungs and waited.
No dizziness, no sudden rush of blackness. The shark wasn't even doping the
air with knockout gas.
What a wimp-ass planet.
Pumps Clanking
The water level dropped till half the interior was filled with air. I
expected the water to continue receding; it didn't.
Why did that bother me?
The whale-shark contained no light source, but it swam close enough to the
surface that weak daylight filtered through the machine's glass hull. The dim
illumination showed why the water level wasn't dropping anymore: as fast as
the pumps sucked water away, more water seeped through the cracks where the
shark had hit the log. It looked like the glass bent slightly inward up near
the snout as if the water pressure outside had enough strength to buckle the
hull, now that the inside was half air.
"Okay," I said aloud, "I am now officially worried."
Minutes passed. The grinding noise in the tail section got worse, punctuated
occasionally by soft electric crackling. If that was the sound of the pumps,
they wouldn't last long.
I held the rebreather in front of my face. The gauge was hard to read in the
dimness, but the little tank still held sixty seconds of air. Careful
breathing could stretch that out, but not forever.
Lifting my head into the air space, I filled my lungs as deeply as I could.
By the time I finished, there was no doubt possible: the water level was back
on the rise.
Arrival
In an entertainment bubble broadcast, I'd be saved at the last second just as
the chamber was completely full, just as my rebreather gasped out its last
molecule of oxygen. Life doesn't match that standard: you do not find a job
just as you run out of money, a couple's orgasms seldom arrive simultaneously,
and salvation may not sweep to the rescue at the point of peak drama. For me,
salvation arrived with some minutes to spare better than mistiming its cue in
the other direction.
To make a long story short, the whale-shark's gullet still held a few fingers
of air at the end of the machine's journey.
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My first hint we were close to our goal was a sharp dive: I couldn't tell if
we were going down intentionally or some new breakdown was sinking us at
speed. The dim and distant daylight from the river's surface faded to
darkness. After half a minute, I asked myself how deep the river could be. We
hadn't traveled far enough to reach the ocean. Perhaps we had come to a lake
whose bottom was lower than the river feeding into it.
Down and down and down. I was glad the water level had risen now it helped
balance the fearsome pressure pushing on the shark's broken nose. Even so, the
damaged area creaked in protest... and perhaps itwas in the nick of time that
the machine passed through an airlock into bluish-silver light.
The shark's mouth opened, spilling water onto a concrete jetty.
The tentacled grip on my ankle eased. Stiffly, I pulled myself past the
Bumbler (still pressed against my stomach), and crawled out of the shark's
mouth. Thirty seconds later, I was on my feet, the Bumbler strapped to my
back, and my stunner in hand.
Silence.
No one rushed to attack me. The entry chamber was small and empty, with blank
concrete walls. At the far end was a metal door with a red pushbutton beside
it.
Enter freely and of your own will,I thought to myself.
The Colored Town
There was no way to go back the way I came. Even if I could start the
whale-shark again, I'd drown on the return journey. That left two choices: sit
where I was, or move forward. Staying put just avoided the future. Better to
head out now, and find cover before anyone came for me.
I walked straight to the door and pressed the button. With a rusty whine, the
hatch opened toward me. I stepped through.
Glass towers. Glass homes. Glass blockhouses.
It was larger than Oar's village, but built on the same model. A black
hemispherical dome loomed overhead, no doubt holding back a million tons of
water. The buildings on the perimeter were low-built, while the ones in the
middle reached high into the air, stretching more than halfway to the roof.
Like Oar's home, the place had an abandoned air: quiet and unpeopled.
But it had color.
Red plastic streamers lay in the street, like the unswept remains of a Mardi
Gras. Purple and orange banners had been fastened above many glass
doorways banners now fuzzed with dust, and corners dangling dog-eared where
the glue had lost its stick. The tallest spire in town sported a droopy yellow
flag with a smudged black crest in the middle; and other towers had flags of
their own, bile green, dark blue, stripes of brown and fuchsia.
It all looked so sad. Dirt-specked attempts to brighten the place up.
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Deliberately garish yet futile. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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