Logan Trilogy by William F Nolan, George Clayton Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

and frustration drained from Charming Billy's face. He smiled.
     
    Logan tensed. The talking was done.
    Three minutes gone.
    Drugpads materialized. The cubs squeezed the pads, inhaled the Muscle. They shimmered into kaleidoscopic blurs, into weaving color patterns. Here. There. They were everywhere.
    Logan fell back into a fighting crouch, but before he could strike a blow he was caught, dragged and slammed against the wall.
    Screaming, Mary-Mary broke from Jessica and ran off down the tunnels.
    A staccato burst of words; the blocky cub's voice, "GivehimsomeMuscle!"
    "Shakehimtodeath!"
    "Killhim!"
    A drugpad danced the air in front of Logan's face. Four minutes gone.
    Logan held his breath. The fumes enveloped him; if he breathed…He felt the Gun pressing into his thigh. The Gun.
    Despite revealing himself to Jess, he'd have to use the Gun.
    He wrenched his arms loose, dropped to the floor, rolled free of the weaving shapes, drew and fired.
    The nitro charge exploded into the pack. Fragmented bodies littered the, platform.
    Five minutest
    Logan quickly pocketed a drugpad and key-punched the callbox.
    Jess stared at him with revulsion. "Sandman! You're a Sandman!"
    A mazecar swooped out of the depths.
    "In!"
    Jessica hesitated. Logan pushed the girl inside, leaped after her. Before the hatch could engage a black shimmer filled the space.
    The shimmer solidified into Charming Billy.
     
    He was headless.
    The hatch shut.
    The mazecar slammed into night.
     
    Chapter 8
     
    A light flares.
    He smiles. Logan's Gun has been fired..
    He notes the coordinates. They pinpoint a spot beneath the dead area of Cathedral.
    He goes there.
    He examines the bodies on the platform.
    He picks up a used Muscle pad, flings it away.
    He examines the callbox, probes at the terminals.
    Logan has taken a mazecar.
    He frowns darkly.
    He hears a faint child's voice singing, "Sandman, Sandman, leave my door…"
    The voice fades.
    He follows the sound down the tunnel.
    NIGHT…
    At the end of the Twentieth Century, before the Little War, when men spawned like microbes on a culture dish, the great problem was food. The fourth horseman rode the land and his name was Famine.
    Man reached for the planets and found them puddled gas and frozen stone. He reached for the stars and was driven back by E = mc2—and he abandoned space.
    There was the sea. Six-sevenths of the world. A wave rises in a ripple and marches in growing kinetic motion for thousands of wet miles to smash on continental shores. That is the surface of the sea.
    Beneath the surface: the Depths. Light filters slowly down into murky dimness for the first hundred feet. Lower still, and light is dead. Only darkness remains. Pressures and swift currents and yeasty life mix in savage broth.
     
    And far below, where reinforced steel acts like balsa, and nightmare creatures carry their own light, is Molly, once queen city of the teeming sea.
    She took an age to build. She covered a hundred undersea miles. She provided living quarters and work space for twenty thousand technicians and their families—and she gave sustenance to a quarter of the world. She was a vast food-processing center sunk under a plasteel dome, and through her locks came subs and tenders, skimmers and harvesters.
    Protein is protein whether it is obtained from a steer or a squid. With the proper mixture of carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, the protein molecule can be made into any foodstuff, and the protein molecule lives in a million forms in the sea.
    Molly showed the way. After her they built the Zuther-Notion, the Proteus and Manta City. But Molly was the queen.
    Until 6:03 P.M. Common Standard Time, March 6, 2033. At that moment intolerable pressures in the Challenger Deep, acting through uncounted centuries, caused a tenth of an inch slippage along two, fault planes crossing the Marianas Trench—and a hairline crack appeared in Molly's plasteel dome. A solid bar of water knife-sliced through seven levels, destroying a