Logan's Run by William F. & Johnson Nolan Read Free Book Online Page B

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 hundred compartments in one insane instant. Molly screamed. Steel tore like paper. Fourteen thousand men, women and children mixed their atoms with the sea in the first chaotic shock.
    Molly absorbed the blow. Pressures equalized; bulkheads strained, tore, accepted the load, howled as the ocean tide-tons bent them inward. Automatic valves closed; hatches slammed. In twelve seconds she was a jumbled conglomerate of corpses, of flooded compartments and corridors, of machinery, jackstraw-heaped. But she held.
    Some of her compartments retained air—and against these watertight chambers the sea gnawed with a patient gnawing that would never stop until Molly was completely dead.
    She had begun her long war with the sea.
    The mazecar slotted into Molly. The seats unlocked.
    "Exit, please."
    Jessica didn't resist as Logan guided her through the hatch.
    The platform, buried in greenback fathoms, creaked and shifted, shifted and creaked beneath them. The great surging skin of the Pacific pressured in against the bubbleglass. The air held an odor of iron and age, a smell of medicated wounds. A dull booming, far off. Echoes. Silence.
    Why here, under the sea? wondered Logan. Who was the next contact?
    The girl looked vacant, dead. Hatred burned in Jessica, deeply, but the will to resist had left her.
    "All right," said Logan. "So I've got a DS Gun. And, back in my unit, I've got a black tunic to match it. But now I'm a runner. Just as you are."
    "Sandmen don't run," she said flatly.
    "And Sandmen don't eat. And Sandmen don't breathe. And Sandmen don't get tired. Well, I'm tired. I'm tired and I'm hungry and I'm sick of being jumped and kicked at and hated."
    She looked at him coldly. "You're a monster. You've chased