Sea Legs by Frank Quattrocchi (ebook reader with highlighter .TXT) 📖

for those who were not permitted elsewhere. Those who would not fit, could not be "rehabilitated," could neither be jailed nor permitted complete freedom.

Controllers of one kind or another patrolled such streets, keeping them in a kind of check—or, more accurately, in a kind of containment. But no amount of control would ever completely stamp out the likes of Nave, the bootlegger.

Perhaps here, on this street, Craig could be "lost." Here he might find security for a time in anonymity, security and time to find a way ... to what? He did not know.

"Mister! Mister!" cried a thin, high voice from somewhere to his left. "Here, quick!"

It was a young boy of perhaps nine or ten. Craig caught sight of him as he motioned urgently. He wore a shabby, torn version of what appeared to be a space service uniform.

"I'm not buying anything, son," Craig said, pausing briefly.

"Come here, quick!" insisted the boy, his eyes large in a dirty face. "You already bought too much."

The boy was motioning him to follow. He had stepped between two buildings. Craig approached him with suspicion.

"What did you say?"

"Slip in here quick! You bought from Nave the peddler. You bought poly, didn't ya?"

"How did you...." Craig began.

"Tell you later. Slip through here quick or they'll send you to Hardy!"

The genuine fear of the youngster conveyed itself to Craig. With effort he forced his body through the space between the old buildings. At first he did not intend to follow the boy, but only to stop him for an explanation. The boy, however, continued down the tight corridor formed by the buildings.

"There's a window soon," he said from ahead of Craig. "Hurry. You lost time with that peddler."

Lost time? Cursing himself for becoming involved again in something he did not understand, Craig nevertheless followed as best he could. It was a tight squeeze and he found himself becoming breathless.

"Dive down!" shouted the boy, looking back with terror in his eyes.

Instinctively Craig did so. The rough walls tore at his suit.

"Stop!" shouted a voice from behind Craig. "Stop or we fire!"

Craig suddenly felt the sill of a window which opened into the building to his left. He quickly pulled himself into it. There was a sickening whine and a part of the window disintegrated in a cloud of splinters and plaster.

"Through here," said the boy from the semi-darkness. "They'll blast their way inside in a minute!"

Craig found himself in another empty building. He followed the boy through a doorway and felt his way as he half ran along the dark hall.

"Who are they?" he panted.

"Controllers."

"Civil Control?"

"Sure. You must be pretty important. I didn't get it all. But they say the controllers checked up on you after.... I'll explain later."

The hall ended in a dim room piled high with plasmolite packing boxes in great disarray. The boy chose a box and lifted a lid.

"Follow me. It's a passage."

"Where to?"

"No time now. Down here."

The passage, which seemed to be constructed of plasmolite boxes, seemed somehow lit by daylight, although Craig could not actually see the source of the light.

The tunnel ended in broad afternoon daylight. As he climbed out he saw a large clearing surrounded by ruins.

"We're just inside the old city," the boy said. "We're safe now—unless those controllers are willing to take more chances than I think."

"Wait a minute, son. You said 'old city.' You mean that this is a part of pre-war Los Angeles?"

"Well, sure."

"But that's supposed to be...."

"Radioactive? Most of it, anyway. Good thing, too. Otherwise we'd have no place to go."

"Look, kid, you better explain," said Craig. "You were right about somebody being after me, but I don't get the 'we' business. Or how you knew all about this."

"All right, mister, but let's get away from here. Those guys won't come through to here, even if they find a way—I don't think. But they're gettin' smarter and you're pretty hot right now."

The boy led the way to what appeared to be a completely demolished building.

"Used to be the old library," he said.

They circled the heap of plaster, brick, and twisted steel. On the other side Craig saw what appeared to be a window. The boy let himself down through it.

Craig was amazed to find a large, relatively clear area inside, probably part of an old room that had been spared by some freak of the blast.

"You live here?" Craig asked the youngster incredulously.

"Part of the time." The boy brought up an old crate and offered it to Craig as a chair. "Listen, mister, I don't know who you are. You're an ex-spaceman and that's enough for me." There was a slightly amusing attempt at adult hardness about him. "You shouldn't have wasted time with Nave. You should have got out of there."

"Why?"

"I don't know. What you done, anyway?"

"I don't remember. Passed out at a bar...."

The boy showed disgust. He glanced at the pocket which contained the polyester.

Craig smiled. "I don't use this stuff. At least not enough to deserve what you're thinking." He tossed the remaining cubes on the littered floor of the room.

The boy maintained his look of scorn for a time, but then softened. "I was afraid you got kicked out of the service for that."

"How did you know I was ever in it?"

"Easy. You don't know how to walk on a planet yet. Anybody can tell."

"I didn't get kicked out," Craig said. "I came here to take a civil service job."

"It'd almost be better if you had been."

"I didn't know about Terra. None of us had any idea."

"I know," said the boy sadly. "My father quit, too. He quit to marry my mother. That was before it was ... so bad."

"Where—" Craig began, then bit off the question.

"Oh, gee, mister, Terra's in an awful bad shape! They took ... my parents. They hunt us down. They...."

Craig approached the boy and put a hand on his shoulder. "What's your name, son?"

"Phil."

"Phil what?"

"I don't know exactly. My father had to use so many names toward the ... end. He once had only one name, but I guess even he forgot what it was."

They prepared to spend the night in the old library room, but first Phil left it and made his way into the wilderness of rubble. He returned dragging a packing box of plastic insulating material, out of which they fashioned a crude bed. Despite the thousands of questions that paraded across Craig's mind, he waited each time for the boy to speak.

"I can't take you any further until...."

"Until you know more about me?"

"In a way. They'll let me know."

Craig would have risked much to identify the "they" Phil referred to, but he did not ask the question. As he watched the boy preparing the dimly lit room for the night, he felt sure Phil could be trusted. He was almost frighteningly mature for his age.

The room was well hidden, for the once great library lay in a powdered ruin about it on all sides but a part of one. Only by accident or knowledge would a stranger recognize it in what was literally a world of rubble. During the moments of silence between the boy's volunteered statements, Craig tried to visualize the awful catastrophe that had befallen the old city. Piles of powdered masonry restricted his view greatly under the gathering night. He could see a scant city block through the window, but he knew the wreckage around them must extend for miles.

"You don't have to worry, mister...."

"Craig."

"Mr. Craig. They don't come in here at night."

"Radioactivity?"

"Yes. Not right here, but all around, everywhere."

"What?"

"It's all around us. You go through it to get here, but you can't stay anywhere but a few places like this."

"How do you know all of these things, Phil?"

"Oh, we know, all right. We had to find out."

"You must have ion counters," he said in what he hoped was a casual tone.

"We have lots of things."

Craig was thoughtful for a minute. The boy was obviously on his guard now.

"Those empty buildings?" Craig asked tentatively.

"They built them too close," said the boy. It seemed to be a safe subject. "They built them up as close as they thought was safe. Space is very valuable here. But they built them too close."

"Yet the 'we' you speak of live even closer?"

The boy bit his lip and eyed him suspiciously in silence.

"Look, kid," Craig said very deliberately, "I'm not a controller and I'm not interested in a bunch of petty thieves."

The effect was just what he had intended. "We're not thieves! And we're not traitors, either! We're...."

The boy was almost in tears. Craig waited a moment, then continued in a soft voice. "Phil, I'm just beginning to realize what a rotten place Terra is. From just what I've seen—it isn't very much—I can imagine such a system producing a great many 'we' groups like yours. I don't know who you are or what you are, but you can't be any worse than what I've already seen of Terran officials. Tell me, kid, what's it all about? And is there any way out of here? I mean—way out!"

"You may tell him, Philip," said a quiet voice from the window entrance. "Like us, Philip, Mr. Craig is an enemy of tyranny, though he doesn't realize it yet."

Craig instinctively jumped back to get out of range of the window, meanwhile feeling around for something that could be used as a weapon. But the boy ran to the silhouetted figure in the window.

"Mr. Sam!" he cried eagerly.

Craig relaxed his hold on a strip of heavy metal. When the man had entered, the boy pulled a ragged black cloth across the window once more. He then ignited a small oil burning lamp in a carved-out nook in the wall.

"It's all right, Philip, nobody is following me," the newcomer said.

Craig studied his face. It was an old face covered by a stained gray beard. With a shock Craig recognized the man as a tramp he had seen earlier on the street, napping, sprawled in a doorway. Now for the first time he saw the eyes. Sharp and clear, they caught up the yellow light of the oil lamp and glowed warmly as they turned to Craig.

"I am 'Mr. Sam,' Mr. Craig. You might know me by the full name, Samuel Cocteau, but I doubt it. Even the names of the infamous do not penetrate space."

"I guess not," Craig agreed. "But you said something about my being an enemy of tyranny."

"Whether you like it at once or not, you are temporarily one of us—one of the 'we' Philip has been speaking of. But all of that in due time. Right now it is necessary for us to leave here."

"They're going to try to find us tonight?" asked Phil, startled.

"Yes, a tribute to Mr. Craig," said the old man. "A Geiger team is being readied at the station."

Craig started to protest as the boy began hurriedly to pick up his few possessions in the room.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Craig," the man said. "I must ask you to decide now whether to trust us and our judgment. There is grave danger for you if you are caught by the Civil Control. The report I have received is that you are largely unaware of the 'crimes against the state' you have committed. The Civil Control hoped to capture you before you find them out. But that, of course, is my word only. There is no time to give you proof, even if I had it."

Craig's mind whirled under the sudden onslaught of new facts. He had followed a peddler without knowing why he did it. He had bought polyester he had no use for. He had followed a boy who beckoned to him. Now—how much longer was he to move haphazardly through Terra like a cork on a wind-blown sea? Who were these strange fugitives who said he was one of them and who lived in the heart of a radioactive city?

"Well, Mr. Craig?" asked Cocteau quietly.

Craig glanced at the boy. The child's eyes were wide and pleading in the dim light of the oil lamp.

"Let's go," Craig said.

Darkness was swiftly falling on the wilderness of heaping ruin. The three made their way toward what Craig at first thought was an unbroken wall of rubble. The near-horizontal rays of the sun tipped the white mass of broken stone with brilliance, and gave the entire scene an unearthly quality. Below the towering rubble mountains, long black shadows were reaching toward what Craig knew to be the living city.

Cocteau took the lead and set a fast pace for a man of his age. He took a highly devious path through the "mountain," or what began to seem to Craig needlessly difficult and that outlined them against the bright western sky. At one point Craig