Sign of the Labrys Read online

For a moment I didn’t understand. Then I realized what it was. He was dead. It was the neurolytic form of the plague.

  How had it reached him? And why hadn’t it reached me? I sank down on my bunk, panting. After a moment I shook my head. I didn’t know the answer to any of it.

  I got up and went over to Ames’s body. I pulled the ring off his finger and carefully put it on my own.

  He had said Despoina had sent the ring as a passport. He had said she wanted me to go to her. Very well. Despoina might or might not have any real existence. But I would go.

  5

  The light brightens as you descend in the levels until, abruptly, you reach the dark. Or at least that is the story. I mean by this that there was no reason why I should wait for day to go in search of Despoina, or think that night would be any advantage to me. But I was tired and hungry, and I couldn’t decide what to do about Ames.

  I stood looking at him. The trickle of slime had reached his chin and was trailing down on the collar of his uniform. He had called on me in a private capacity, which meant that the FBY probably wasn’t keeping track of him. If I went off and left him lying there, his body would decay slowly for several weeks, during all of which time, spores of the neurolytic form of the plague would be getting into the ventilating system. And, of course, anyone who opened the door of the room where he was would be dead in a few seconds; I’d be leaving a nasty, deadly little booby trap behind.

  On the other hand, Ames had died during a struggle with me, in a room where I was currently living. If I reported him to the disposal people, there might be trouble with the FBY. And I wanted to be on my way as soon as I rested and ate.

  This inability to decide what to do, this nagging irresolution, and in a matter where I would ordinarily have been decisive enough, was the first sign of a bodily change in me. But I did not recognize it for what it was.

  At last I decided to go up to B level, taking my personal belongings with me, and put in an anonymous call for the disposal people. Even then, I could not bring myself to leave at once. I stood over Ames irresolutely, wondering whether to take his belt, with its collection of weapons and gadgets—it might be useful—but fearing vaguely that it might be evidence against me. Even after I had got to the door with my suitcases, I turned back to stand over him for several minutes more. Finally, I almost ran out of the room. I didn’t take the belt.

  I left my bags in a community kitchen on C, went up to B, and made my anonymous call. In the kitchen—there was nobody else there, of course—I made some soup from concentrate and opened a can of meat balls. The food didn’t taste good, and I left most of it. And now, where should I sleep?

  I thought of the rows and rows of rooms and smaller cubicles, the accommodations for a city, almost a people, of troglodytes. On any individual level each bed was exactly like any other bed.

  Sweat began to run down my body; my hands were trembling. I was in a state of acute, unreasonable bodily panic. I licked my lips. Very well then, I’d sleep—I’d sleep—

  It seemed to me that the only possible place for rest for me tonight was in the cleft at the end of E3, where I had seen the sign of the labrys scratched upon the bare stone.

  Again, this whim, this fancy, didn’t alarm me. I went into one of the dorms, stripped the foam mattress off a bunk, rolled it up. It made a carryable parcel. After more indecision, I left my suitcases in the kitchen and, with my mattress, went back to E3.

  It took me quite a long time to maneuver and push my mattress into the spot where I wanted it. I kept breaking into drenching sweats and stopping to rest.

  At last I got it laid out in a reasonably smooth and level space on the stone. The sign of the double axe was above and to the left of my bed, and clumps of the purple fungus were growing behind it. There was a faint draft of air through the cleft, and I could see, though a long way off, the dim glow of the illuminated corridors of E3. I lay down facing it. It did not occur to me to wonder why I had gone to so much trouble to spend a comfortless night lying on the rock. Before I went to sleep I held Despoina’s ring up before my eyes. But the light was too poor for me to make out anything except the ellipsoidal shape of the stone.

  I slept surprisingly well. Once I half roused up, with the impression that people were going past, a long way off, in the dim corridors of E3. I thought sleepily that they must be the disposal people, come to get Ames’s body, but this was almost certainly wrong; he was in level D, the one above this one, and there would be no reason for them to go this deep.

  I woke after seven and a half hours. I sat up on my mattress and yawned and stretched. My muscles were a little sore, and my skin was warm. As I crawled out of the cleft, I felt a transient dizziness.

  Outside, in E3 once more, I took stock of myself. I wasn’t hungry, and there was no point in taking food into the lower levels, which were said to be better stocked than the upper ones were. In my pockets and on my belt I had a flashlight, a water flask, and a pocketknife. That was all. I might not need any of them. Perhaps it would have been wise to have taken Ames’s stun pistol, but it was too late now. I doubted that weapons would help me much anyway. I would have to trust to luck primarily—and to Despoina’s ring.

  The water in my flask was down, and I tried to fill it at a fountain before I remembered that something was wrong with the water supply on tier E3. Well, I’d fill it in F. I wanted to get started. I walked toward the stairs.

  It is important to understand what a level is. It is not much like a floor in an office building. A level may be a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet deep, and subdivided into several tiers. Also, access to them is not uniform. The upper levels are simple and straightforward; one gets to and from them by stairs, escalators, or elevators. I dislike the elevators, myself, since if the power should be interrupted, one would be stuck there indefinitely. But the upper levels are easy.

  As one goes down, it gets difficult. Entrances and exits are usually concealed. The reason for this, I think, was partly to protect the VIP’s in the lower levels from unauthorized intrusion, partly to provide a redoubt in case the “enemy” was victorious, and partly because of the passion for secrecy that characterizes the military mind.

  Whatever the reason, the difficulty exists. F is said to be the last of the levels one can enter easily.

  I started down the stairs. They were steep and tedious. I knew there must be an escalator somewhere, but I didn’t want to spend time hunting for it.

  The stairs turned a couple of times and then stopped on a landing. I was sure this wasn’t F, but one of the sublevels, and I poked around, opening doors and going down short corridors, until I found a descending staircase again. It was so steep I was sure it was a maintenance flight, but it would get me there just the same.

  The stairway stopped several times, but I always managed to find where it went on again. At last I stood on level F.

  I don’t know what I had been expecting. Ames had spoken of guards, but it wasn’t reasonable to think they’d be posted as far up as level F.

  F had been designed as the laboratory level, but there had been a foul-up during its construction. F1 and F2, the partial levels, or tiers, which had been meant to house the lab workers of F, had been constructed above it and on the bias, like the two arms of a Y. The partial levels were a considerable distance from the primary they were supposed to serve, and I don’t know what would have happened if the levels had ever been inhabited as intended; I suppose the lab workers would have commuted to work.

  The part of F where I now was seemed to be a service area: there were doors marked “High Voltage” and “Maintenance,” and the corridor was narrow and high. It ran straight for six or eight feet, and then seemed to descend a couple of steps.

  There was a drinking fountain on my left, and I filled my flask at it. The water ran fresh enough, but it had a sulphury smell. I found it faintly nauseating.

  I stoppered the flask, put it back on my belt, and walked along the corridor to where it changed level. The
re I stopped in surprise.

  The space in front of me was large, perhaps twenty by fifty feet, and it was carpeted with a dense deep covering of shining white. The covering was hummocky and uneven, though always seeming to be thick, and I stared at it, wondering what the fabric was. Fabric? Or was it a fungus? Then I saw that the hummocks were constantly moving, and my heart gave a jump.

  The space before me, from wall to wall, was filled with white rats.

  They moved and humped and opened their mouths at each other; they were packed in as tight as sardines in a can; no wonder I had thought them a particularly dense rug.

  Two stair treads, some nine inches high, separated me from them. Unhurriedly I descended the steps and stepped out on the rats. I tried to push them away with my toes before I put my feet down; I disliked the idea of feeling them crunching under my feet.

  The result of my first three paces was astonishing. I had tried to avoid stepping on the rats, but I had felt one of them give under me. Now, all about my feet and widening out from them, the rats began to die. They gasped and writhed, turned on their backs, collapsed in ever-broadening circles about me. It was like watching the ripples spread out from a rock thrown in a pool.

  The ripples of death seemed to die away and turn inward. The rats on the periphery were coming toward the center. Watching in fascinated disgust, I saw that they were coming toward me, feeding ravenously on the ones that were dead.

  The eaters wavered. For a moment they were immobile, their snouts raised. Then, as if they had heard a signal, inaudible to me, they turned and scurried away, some of them toward the end of the open space, others through a series of low openings along the wall.

  It was like watching water running down the drain in a sink. I think it cannot have been more than sixty seconds until the whole space in front of me was empty, leaving only three clusters of dead rats.

  I drew an astonished breath. After a moment I began to walk forward, avoiding the clumps of rats. My body was bathed in warm sweat.

  Far down the corridor from me a door opened and a girl stepped out.

  She was wearing a white lab smock and a checked wool skirt; even in the high-heeled slippers she had on, she was short. Her dark short hair curled loosely about her ears. Her skin had a pale, pearly luster, oddly pale for the rest of her coloring and her dark red lips. In one hand she had some sort of hilted knife. I did not realize until much later that it was an athame.

  Her eyes widened when she saw me. She hesitated and then started toward me, her hands at her side.

  “What happened to the rats?” I asked when she was still some distance off. I hadn’t meant to say that.

  “They went back to their cages,” she replied absently. “Eight to five.”

  “Ten to three,” I answered automatically. “Don’t come any closer to me.”

  “Why not?” she asked. But she slowed down and looked at me.

  “I’m a vector of neurolytic plague.”

  She laughed. It was not a response I would have expected anybody to make to what I had said.

  “What makes you think that?” she asked.

  “The rats. They died as soon as I got near them. It must have been plague.”

  She laughed again. Her laugh, like her voice, was husky and low. “Well, it wasn’t,” she answered. “They died because there’s a constitutional imbalance in their brains, and any unexpected jar kills them. It’s related to their four-hour tropism out of their cages and back again.

  “Who are you, anyway?” she went on. “You gave me the password, but I don’t think you’re Gerald. You don’t look like the description of him at all.”

  “Gerald is dead,” I answered confidently.

  “How do you know?”

  “I saw him die. It was on F1 a couple of days ago. He died of the pulmonary form of the plague.” As I spoke, I had a vivid picture of the FBY man’s bloated body lying at my feet. It did not occur to me to wonder why I was so confident he was the “Gerald” she was speaking of.

  “Oh.” She tossed the hilted knife up in the air and caught it again by the handle—expertly, like a juggler. “So she was wrong, then,” she said thoughtfully.

  “So who was wrong?” I asked.

  “Don’t you know?” she countered. “And you haven’t told me yet who you are.”

  I felt a surge of half-grudging attraction to the girl. I supposed that in a few moments I would begin to want to get away from her; but for the present I felt oddly contented in her company. Besides, there was really no reason why I shouldn’t answer her. “My name’s Sam Sewell,” I said. “I’m trying to find the exit from level F to the one below.”

  She was silent for a long minute. Then she said, “Go ahead. I wish you luck.”

  “Do you know where the exits are?”

  “One of them. There are several. But I only know one.”

  She had turned and was walking slowly along beside me down the open space. There were faint clankings from behind us, and I turned around to see a two-foot-tall robot, not at all humanoid, sweeping the dead white rats into a sort of dustpan.

  “Does it always do that?” I asked her.

  “Yes. Otherwise this level would soon be uninhabitable.”

  A door ahead of us on the left opened, and a fattish man in shirt sleeves stepped out. When he saw us he darted back inside.

  “Who was that?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know. A man.”

  “You’re not the only one living on this level?”

  “No, of course not. There are two or three hundred labs down here, some of them very well equipped. When the plagues came, not all of the scientific workers died. Some of them came down here so they could go on with their work, and some of them just came down here anyway.”

  “Since you know where one of the exits is, won’t you show it to me?”

  She gave a very slight shrug. “Come along to my office. We can talk it over.”

  We had reached the door from which she had originally come. I started to turn into it, but she pulled me on.

  “That’s not my office. I just happened to come out of there.”

  “Do you eat and sleep down here?” I asked.

  “Uh-huh. I brought a mattress and cooking stuff down from F2. I’m comfortable enough. I take baths in a big laboratory sink.”

  The wide space ended and a narrow corridor turned left. The light was different here—a little dimmer, and with a faint orange cast.

  We had gone about fifteen feet in the new direction when she pressed down on my shoulders. “Bend over,” she said. “It’s dangerous.”

  “Dangerous? Why?”

  “Don’t you know? Can’t you tell?”

  “No, not at all.”

  She sighed. “The lab animals always get out of the way of ionizing radiation, if they have a chance. I’d think you’d be sensitive to this.”

  “Well, I’m not. What is it?”

  “Somebody in the lab up ahead has hauled a big X-ray machine up close to the wall. He’s got all the voltage going into it that it will take. The beam is going across the corridor at about the height of a man’s heart. It might not kill you for a while. But there are an awful lot of roentgens there.”

  “But why? Why would anybody do that?”

  “I don’t know. He may have something in a cage on the other side of the corridor that he wants to irradiate, something that can’t be moved. Or he may be trying to put up some sort of barrier against movement in the corridor. I don’t know what his motive is. But it’s dangerous. Bend down.”

  We had stopped walking while we talked. Now, crouched over so that we were not more than three feet above the floor, we moved forward again.

  “You can straighten up now,” she said presently.

  I stood up. My body felt shaky, and sweat was once more running down my sides.

  “Are there any more booby traps like that?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. We’re almost there… Don’t you feel well?”


  I considered. “I’m a little light-headed.”

  “Ah.” She opened a door on the right. “This is my office.”

  I followed her inside. She motioned me to a chair and sat down herself, across a desk from me.

  It was oddly like a doctor’s office—the straight wooden chairs, the desk, and she herself, careful, attentive, and with the impersonal attractiveness a good woman physician has. But the knife lay between us on the blotter of the desk. I could not take my eyes from it.

  “Now,” she said, “you want me to show you the exit from F to the level below.”

  “Yes. That’s the idea.”

  “Why do you want to go on down?”

  “I’ve been sent for.”

  “Ah. But why should I show you the way?”

  I hesitated. Then I held out my hand toward her so she could see Despoina’s ring.

  Her eyes flickered. She stretched out one hand and touched the bezel of the ring lightly. “Yes… I will help you.” Before I could feel elated, she added, “But you must give me the ring.”

  “How can I do that?” I asked. “It’s my passport through G. I’d never get any deeper without it.”

  She shrugged. There was a scurrying noise. It sounded like leaves falling, like rain, like big particles of mist blowing against a window. I said, “What’s that?”

  “The rats. They come out every four hours.”

  “But—it hasn’t been four hours since I first got to F.”

  “Oh, yes it has. Doesn’t it seem that long to you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “That’s odd.” She looked at me quickly and then looked away again. “It sounds as if you were one of the old—”

  “Old what?”

  “You’ll find out later. Well, then, I’ll help you, and you needn’t give me the ring. But you must make me a promise first. I’ll tell you what it is as you go through. Long enough before you go through for you to stop if you like… Come into the next room.”

  The adjoining room was also like a doctor’s office. There was a flat couch, an enameled table with rubber gloves and jars of solutions on it, and an outsized autoclave. But in one f corner there was a chair with arms and straps along the arms. I looked down and saw that there were straps at the legs of the chair too.