Only Forward Read online

  None of them, however, have ever laughed with the guttural, lewd good humour of the sound I could hear echoing down the tunnel. It wasn’t a pretty laugh, but it was a genuine one.

  The conclusion was obvious, but so unexpected that I took a while to look at it from every side. Men who are on their way to kill someone do not laugh like that. At least one of the guards was laughing like that. Therefore they weren’t coming to get me. They didn’t know I was here.

  That may sound like thin reasoning to you, but it’s the kind that has kept me alive over the years, and I’ve learnt to trust it. I realised I was still in with a chance, in the short term at least. The guy who’d been shooting at me wasn’t a guard. He couldn’t be, because otherwise he’d have contacted the others and they wouldn’t be laughing like that. So who was he?

  He had to be a member of the gang which had stolen Alkland. There was no reason for anyone else to try to kill an intruder. The clever bastards had posted someone outside on the off-chance.

  This was both good and bad news, of course. It meant I was on the right track, which was good. It also meant the gang were even more together than I’d thought, which was not so good. But as it meant I wasn’t necessarily going to die in the next two minutes, I decided that on balance it qualified as good news, absolutely top quality news, news out of the top fucking drawer.

  I dissuaded myself with difficulty from throwing a street party, and settled for re-evaluating my position. It was, I realised, just as if everything was going according to plan. That wasn’t as good as all that, but it was okay. The gang was a problem I was going to have to deal with anyway when the time came. What I had to do now was just carry on as I’d intended. I knew my intrusion plan was only so good, but I felt so relieved that anything seemed possible, and I started to creep quietly up the pipe. I carefully made my way round the first bend, and saw that there was at least one more to go. A faint glow was coming down the widening tunnel, and the sound of more laughter. I reached the final bend and flowed round it like an oiled shadow or something similarly quiet.

  About twenty yards ahead of me was a desk, bulky and big-boned in dark wood. A guard was sitting at it, with his back to me, and another was lolling on a chair on the other side.

  There were only two guards. Not only that, but they were paying no attention to the outward end of the tunnel, but drinking out of plastic cups and swapping tales of unlikely sexual prowess.

  These were not crack troops, wired up and itching for action. They were just a couple of cops, bored but content with their lot, sipping coffee and cheerfully telling each other fibs which both knew the other wouldn’t believe. The guns on the desk weren’t machine guns, but just a pair of old-fashioned revolvers. Maybe Snedd had been the last outsider to make an intrusion, and after eight years security had become a little lax.

  What I couldn’t do was risk the chance of the sound of shots echoing up the tunnel, and so I had something else in mind. I crept forward inch by inch until I was little more than ten yards away, and then stopped. The tunnel was becoming too light, and I didn’t dare go any further forward. I felt in my jacket pocket for the device, steeled myself, and then snapped forward at a sprint.

  I got to within a couple of yards before either noticed me, and that was far enough. By the time they were rising to their feet I was vaulting onto the desk, judging my landing so that one foot kicked the guns off onto the floor. I spun round and kicked the lamp very firmly into the wall. It smashed, plunging the tunnel into utter darkness. Then I leapt off the desk and after a few yards hurled the device back in their general direction. It hit the desk and detonated with a barely audible crump, and the two guards immediately started sneezing, coughing and sniffing.

  Then I ran like hell. As I sprinted soundlessly up the tunnel I kept a listen out for sounds of pursuit, but they soon faded into the distance. A hacking cough reached me every now and then, but that was all.

  The device I threw was a Flu Bomb. Anyone within a two-yard range when it detonates instantaneously goes down with a really dismal dose of flu. Runny nose, headache, chesty cough, aching muscles, the whole works. Not in the least fatal, but all you want to do is go home, wrap up warm and watch old films while drinking gallons of hot lemon and honey. The absolute last thing you feel like doing is pelting down a dark tunnel after some lunatic and possibly being shot in the process. It just doesn’t appeal.

  I knew they’d be back there somewhere, dutifully trudging up the pipe and miserably complaining to each other about the aches in their backs, but as far as catching me went, they were out of the frame.

  After a few hundred yards the tunnel opened into a dimly-lit room, and as I sped through I noticed an elevator in one corner. That was obviously the way the guards got down here, but as it doubtless opened in a police station it was no use to me. After the room the tunnel returned to its previous size and I raced up it, knowing I didn’t have much time.

  After another quarter mile I came to a junction. Following Snedd’s route I pelted up the left fork. The gradual upward slope of the pipe was levelling out, and I guessed that I was now only about a few yards below street level. I ignored the first ladder I passed, and the second, but when I came to the third I leapt up at it and shinned quietly to the top. Above me was a manhole, and I paused for the briefest of moments, forgetting about the Centre, about Red, about Sound and Natsci, and just thinking Stable, Stable, Stable.

  The world is very small, I thought, and I like it that way. I’m very lucky and content to be here, because outside the wall is a lethal wasteland. I know, because I’ve seen it, heard about it, learnt about it in school. We tried expansion, tried to go further than we should, and look what happened. The whole thing was a complete disaster. No, I’m really very happy where I am. Oh look, it’s eleven o’clock: think I’ll go to bed.

  Then I shoved the manhole up, moved it to the side and popped out onto the street.

  5

  ‘And finally, the main points again. The rate of inflation has fallen for the third month running, to 4.5 per cent.

  ‘Colette Willis, gold medallist in the Stable Games, has broken the 100 metres breaststroke record for the fourth time.

  ‘Scientists from the Principle Institute agree that estimates on levels of external toxicity may have to be revised upwards again. It now appears that the level of radiation outside Stable will remain at fatal levels for at least another two hundred years.

  ‘The weather: tomorrow will be a bright day, with light rain between 9.00 and 10.05 a.m.

  ‘That’s it from us: we’ll leave you with more footage of Gerald the talking duck. Goodnight.’

  Half an hour later I was sitting nonchalantly in a café about a mile away, drinking a rather nice cup of coffee, smoking a relaxed cigarette and reading the paper. Stable scientists had run yet more tests, I read, and were now sadly confident that it would be at least three hundred years before it was safe to go out. That story was on page six. Good news about the economy was on the cover, sports on pages two and three, and some duck that could talk took up most of four. Sooner or later I was going to have to get on with the job, but for the time being I felt I deserved a coffee. It was now twelve o’clock, after all, and I hadn’t had one since leaving the apartment. I was in, I was alive, and everything was going according to plan.

  Okay, I admit I was kind of lucky in the tunnel. Three guys with machine guns would have been more of a handful. The plan, if you’re interested, was to throw the Flu Bomb so that it broke the light as it detonated, and then run and jump.

  Would have been a bit touch and go, I admit, but there you are. What can I say? I had a lucky break for once: do you begrudge me that? Well, shut up then.

  There were only three people in the backstreet into which I emerged from the tunnel, an old man with a dog and a young housewife pushing a baby in a pram. At first they did look mildly surprised to see me, but I had a plan.

  ‘Well,’ I said, dusting off my hands, ‘you don’t need to worry a
bout that any more!’

  They had no idea what I was talking about, of course, but it sounded reassuring so they forgot about the whole thing and went about their business. I strode confidently up the street, head held high, quietly content that everything was so nice in here when there was only a radioactive wasteland outside. I turned the corner into a busy shopping street and slowed my pace to an apparent dawdle, looking in the windows and taking in the scenery. I say ‘apparent’ because though I took care to look like just one of the strolling masses out on a Saturday afternoon, I was actually making sure that I got some distance between the wall and myself.

  Stable was actually rather nice, I decided. The ceiling of the Neighbourhood was so high that there was enough atmosphere and haze to partially obscure the fact that it was there at all. The wide streets had trees dotted along either side, and every now and then there was a little park. No one was using a portable phone or trying to one-up other people on their knowledge of staff motivation theory; they weren’t using a prostitute or casually disposing of a body. They were just lolling about on the grass or walking their dogs.

  The goods in the shop windows were all very old-fashioned, but nicely designed: the whole place was like a time capsule, a living museum of life. There are older places in The City, but none where life is still lived the way it was. You can see fragments, but not the whole picture, and it made me feel very nostalgic. Zany five-wheeled cars pulled slowly through the crowded streets, and the phone kiosks clearly weren’t built to allow you to see who you were talking to.

  I hadn’t realised how weird being in Stable would actually feel. This was all they knew. As far as they were concerned, this is how things were. They still had neighbourhoods with a small n, and little houses with driveways and gardens; they still had two-dimensional televisions; they still lived together as families and knew where their grandparents lived. These people didn’t know about the planets, and they didn’t know about the stars: they knew about their jobs, their friends, their lives.

  It wasn’t perfect, as two men arguing over a parking space showed, but as neither of them had a gun, it could have been a lot worse. The streets weren’t artificially pristine, as they were in Colour, or knee-deep in everything from rubbish to corpses the way they were in Red: they were just streets. There were no alternatives here, no wildly different ways of being. Everything was just the way it was, and that was the only way it could be. This was their home.

  No one gave me a second glance, which was as expected but still reassuring. The police obviously couldn’t announce that they were looking for an intruder from the outside, but they could splatter my face across the televisions and newspapers by claiming me guilty of some heinous crime designed to stir the blood of the Stablents.

  To do that, however, they would have to know who I was. The only people on the outside who knew I might be in here were the Centre, and Ji and Snedd. The Stablent Authorities would be unaware of the existence of the latter, and the former would deny knowledge of my existence to the death if they were ever asked. The guards in the tunnel would have seen nothing more than that I was a man, possibly wearing a suit. The only other people who could possibly blow the whistle on me were the gang inside Stable who were holding Alkland: but as they were intruders too, their options were limited even if they had known who I was. All in all, things were looking pretty tight.

  So far.

  Accepting a refill from the smiling waitress, I ran over my as yet embryonic plans for the next bit. Clearly the first priority was finding out where they were holding Alkland. Then I had to stake out the gang, and decide how the hell I was going to get him away from them with us both still in one piece. Then, I had to somehow find a way of getting us out of the Neighbourhood, again, still in one piece.

  Christ.

  I decided to concentrate initially on the first problem, because until I’d solved it I couldn’t deal with the other even more depressingly difficult problems.

  That’s the way I work, you see. Doing what I do, there’s no point trying to come up with some kind of unified, start to finish, A-Z plan before you begin. It isn’t possible because you don’t have the information, because you don’t have the time, and in my case, because I simply can’t be bothered.

  I pulled out the map of the Neighbourhood I’d bought earlier, and opened it over the table. This was all I was going to know until I found Alkland, and seeing the interlocking grid of streets and neighbourhoods laid out in front of me helped to concentrate my mind a little. I had no contacts, no angle, and my vidiphone was turned off because I couldn’t risk its transmissions being detected: there was only me and these streets, streets which I didn’t know. And somewhere in there, Alkland.

  There were two main lines of thought I could follow. A gang of outsiders were not going to be able to just melt into the background. They wouldn’t have the history, the jobs, the houses. Therefore they were going to have to be holed up somewhere: in a run-down area where people came and went, or in a hotel, somewhere where itinerants were to be expected. The alternative was to assume that the gang were actually from Stable itself, which a) struck me as extremely unlikely, and b) would take me back to square one, because they could be hiding out anywhere. The first task in front of me was therefore actually relatively simple, and one I’d done countless times before, albeit in easier circumstances. It was working out where you’d hide in a Neighbourhood.

  Within a couple of minutes I’d narrowed it down to only two areas, which cheered me up a bit. I wasn’t going to have to slog my way through every street in the Neighbourhood. Given that Stable was closed to the outside world, they didn’t have quite the call for hotels that parts of other Neighbourhoods did: what hotels there were seemed to be concentrated in one area on the North side, called Play. I got the impression from the blurb on the map that, in the absence of there being anywhere else to go, they’d turned a quarter of a square mile into a sort of low-key resort, the place to stay when you had a holiday. It didn’t look very spectacular from the photos: a stretch of artificial beach by a river, mainly, but I guess that if there was no alternative, then it was the best there was. The other area that looked promising was a small enclave in the centre of the Neighbourhood, a few blocks either side of the railway line. Something about its position, the way it backed onto warehouses and railway depots, told me that if there was anywhere in Stable where derelicts went to do their thing, this was where it would be.

  Quickly finishing up my coffee, I set off in the afternoon sun. It was artificial, of course, but still rather nice. It took me about half an hour to walk to the run-down area of the Neighbourhood, and as soon as I realised that I’d found it, I began to strongly suspect that this wasn’t where they’d be.

  It was too anaemic, somehow, too thin. I’m a bit of a connoisseur of disaster areas in Neighbourhoods, and I can tell what they’re like immediately. This was not a place where you’d stash guns or run a drug-peddling concern. It was too clean, too flat. I can’t describe exactly what was missing, a sense of fear, or possibility, or something. There were a few derelicts around, sure, and it wouldn’t be my first choice of a place to hang out, but it was a nothing. It had no atmosphere, no sense of inwardness or community. Somewhere had to be not quite as nice as everywhere else, and this happened to be it. That was all.

  Of course to a really clever gang, that might be just what they were looking for, a nowhere land that no one really cared about. Not nice enough to want to live in, but not bad enough to keep bugging the council about. I dutifully trudged through a couple of hours’ worth of abandoned buildings, and asked questions of a few tramps, but each one just confirmed my suspicions.

  There were no gangs here. According to the derelicts, there were no gangs at all. The derelicts were like derelicts everywhere, but quieter. They were the logical extension of something I’d begun to notice about Stablents in general: they seemed to be a pretty placid people. It took me quite a while to get them to understand what I was talking ab
out: organised crime clearly wasn’t a problem in Stable. They all pulled together.

  By five I’d had enough. They weren’t here. I hadn’t checked every building, and of course it was possible that they’d keep on the move in the day, but I knew in my bones that this was not the right place. That left about five hotels on the other side of town. Finding Alkland was going to be easier than I’d thought.

  If there’s anything I really hate, it’s things going better than expected. It’s a sure sign that something really very unpleasant is slouching over the horizon in my direction.

  That’s not pessimism. That’s the way it works. Things turning out well fills me with nameless dread, and I was beginning to hope I’d run into a few problems sooner rather than later.

  Dressing for dinner consisted of standing in a dark corner of a park on the outskirts of Play and waving the CloazValet™ over myself. Poking about in disused buildings had rendered my suit and coat a little dusty for civilised company, and if you’re effectively on the run it never does any harm to change your look every so often. The CloazValet™ was evidently in minimalist mood: it changed everything I had on to jet black, with the exception of two small squares, one on each kneecap, which it coloured magenta.

  The plan was straightforward. Go to each of the five hotels in turn, and hang out. I’d seen enough of Stablents during the day to get a sense of what they were like, and thought I could probably spot an outsider like myself fairly quickly. It was unlikely they’d be marching up and down the place, waving Crunt Launchers around and staring uncomprehendingly at menus, and it was more unlikely still that Alkland himself would be out and about. But if I had no luck with the laid-back approach, all I had to do was case the hotels a little harder. Believe me, this is a walk compared with some searches I’ve done. I once had to find a particular rat (the rodent) in Red Neighbourhood. Not only did I find him, but I got him and his lover (also a rodent) on a thru-mono back to Sniff Neighbourhood in under twenty-four hours. First class seats, smoking section. All true, apart from the last bit.