Chapter III

He couldn't have been anyone else but the spy. The gun, in the first place. The fact that he looked harried and upset and terribly nervous, in the second place. And, of course, the fact that he came from the elevator shaft.

Looking back, I think he must have been just as startled as I when we came face to face like that. We formed a brief tableau, both of us open-mouthed and wide-eyed.

Unfortunately, he recovered first.

He closed the emergency door behind him, quickly but quietly. His gun stopped waving around and instead pointed directly at my middle. "Don't move!" he whispered harshly. "Don't make a sound!"

I did exactly as I was told. I didn't move and I didn't make a sound. Which left me quite free to study him.

He was rather short, perhaps three inches shorter than me, with a bony high-cheekboned face featuring deepset eyes and a thin-lipped mouth. He wore gray slacks and shirt, with brown slippers on his feet. He looked exactly like a spy ... which is to say that he _didn't_ look like a spy, he looked overpoweringly ordinary. More than anything else, he reminded me of a rather taciturn milkman who used to make deliveries to my parents' apartment.

His gaze darted this way and that. Then he motioned with his free hand at the descending stairs and whispered, "Where do they go?"

I had to clear my throat before I could speak. "All the way down," I said.

"Good," he said--just as we both heard a sudden raucous squealing from perhaps four flights down, a squealing which could be nothing but the opening of a hall door. It was followed by the heavy thud of ascending boots. The Army!

But if I had any visions of imminent rescue, the spy dashed them. He said, "Where do you live?"

"One fifty-three," I said. This was a desperate and dangerous man. I knew my only slim chance of safety lay in answering his questions promptly, cooperating with him until and unless I saw a chance to either escape or capture him.

"All right," he whispered. "Go on." He prodded me with the gun.

And so we went back up the stairs to one fifty-three, and stopped at the door. He stood close behind me, the gun pressed against my back, and grated in my ear, "I'll have this gun in my pocket. If you make one false move I'll kill you. Now, we're going to your apartment. We're friends, just strolling along together. You got that?"

I nodded.

"All right. Let's go."

We went. I have never in my life seen that long hall quite so empty as it was right then. No one came out of any of the apartments, no one emerged from any of the branch halls. We walked to my apartment. I thumbed the door open and we went inside.

Once the door was closed behind us, he visibly relaxed, sagging against the door, his gun hand hanging limp at his side, a nervous smile playing across his lips.

I looked at him, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could leap at him before he could bring the gun up again. But he must have read my intentions on my face. He straightened, shaking his head. He said, "Don't try it. I don't want to kill you. I don't want to kill anybody, but I will if I have to. We'll just wait here together until the hue and cry passes us. Then I'll tie you up, so you won't be able to sic your Army on me too soon, and I'll leave. If you don't try any silly heroics, nothing will happen to you."

"You'll never get away," I told him. "The whole Project is alerted."

"You let me worry about that," he said. He licked his lips. "You got any chico coffee?"

"Yes."

"Make me a cup. And don't get any bright ideas about dousing me with boiling water."

"I only have my day's allotment," I protested. "Just enough for two cups, lunch and dinner."

"Two cups is fine," he said. "One for each of us."

* * * * *

And now I had yet another grudge against this blasted spy. Which reminded me again of Linda. From the looks of things, I wasn't _ever_ going to get to her place. By now she was probably in mourning for me and might even have the Sanitation Staff searching for my remains.

As I made the chico, he asked me questions. My name first, and then, "What do you do for a living?"

I thought fast. "I'm an ore-sled dispatcher," I said. That was a lie, of course, but I'd heard enough about ore-sled dispatching from Linda to be able to maintain the fiction should he question me further about it.

Actually, I was a gymnast instructor. The subjects I taught included wrestling, judo and karati--talents I would prefer to disclose to him in my own fashion, when the time came.

He was quiet for a moment. "What about radiation level on the ore-sleds?"

I had no idea what he was talking about, and admitted as much.

"When they come back," he said. "How much radiation do they pick up? Don't you people ever test them?"

"Of course not," I told him. I was on secure ground now, with Linda's information to guide me. "All radiation is cleared from the sleds and their cargo before they're brought into the building."

"I know that," he said impatiently. "But don't you ever check them before de-radiating them?"

"No. Why should we?"

"To find out how far the radiation level outside has dropped."

"For what? Who cares about that?"

He frowned bitterly. "The same answer," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "The same answer every time. You people have crawled into your caves and you're ready to stay in them forever."

I looked around at my apartment. "Rather a well-appointed cave," I told him.

"But a cave nevertheless." He leaned toward me, his eyes gleaming with a fanatical flame. "Don't you ever wish to get Outside?"

Incredible! I nearly poured boiling water all over myself. "Outside? Of course not!"

"The same thing," he grumbled, "over and over again. Always the same stupidity. Listen, you! Do you realize how long it took man to get out of the caves? The long slow painful creep of progress, for millennia, before he ever made that first step from the cave?"

"I have no idea," I told him.

"I'll tell you this," he said belligerently. "A lot longer than it took for him to turn around and go right back into the cave again." He started pacing the floor, waving the gun around in an agitated fashion as he talked. "Is this the _natural_ life of man? It is not. Is this even a _desirable_ life for man? It is _definitely_ not." He spun back to face me, pointing the gun at me again, but this time he pointed it as though it were a finger, not a gun. "Listen, you," he snapped. "Man was progressing. For all his stupidities and excesses, he was growing up. His dreams were getting bigger and grander and better all the time. He was planning to tackle _space_! The moon first, and then the planets, and finally the stars. The whole universe was out there, waiting to be plucked like an apple from a tank. And Man was reaching out for it." He glared as though daring me to doubt it.

* * * * *

I decided that this man was doubly dangerous. Not only was he a spy, he was also a lunatic. So I had two reasons for humoring him. I nodded politely.

"So what happened?" he demanded, and immediately answered himself. "I'll tell you what happened! Just as he was about to make that first giant step, Man got a hotfoot. That's all it was, just a little hotfoot. So what did Man do? I'll tell you what he did. He turned around and he ran all the way back to the cave he started from, his tail between his legs. _That's_ what he did!"

To say that all of this was incomprehensible would be an extreme understatement. I fulfilled my obligation to this insane dialogue by saying, "Here's your coffee."

"Put it on the table," he said, switching instantly from raving maniac to watchful spy.

I put it on the table. He drank deep, then carried the cup across the room and sat down in my favorite chair. He studied me narrowly, and suddenly said, "What did they tell you I was? A spy?"

"Of course," I said.

He grinned bitterly, with one side of his mouth. "Of course. The damn fools! Spy! What do you suppose I'm going to spy on?"

He asked the question so violently and urgently that I knew I had to answer quickly and well, or the maniac would return. "I--I wouldn't know, exactly," I stammered. "Military equipment, I suppose."

"Military equipment? _What_ military equipment? Your Army is supplied with uniforms, whistles and hand guns, and that's about it."

"The defenses--" I started.

"The defenses," he interrupted me, "are non-existent. If you mean the rocket launchers on the roof, they're rusted through with age. And what other defenses are there? None."

"If you say so," I replied stiffly. The Army claimed that we had adequate defense equipment. I chose to believe the Army over an enemy spy.

"Your people send out spies, too, don't they?" he demanded.

"Well, of course."

"And what are _they_ supposed to spy on?"

"Well--" It was such a pointless question, it seemed silly to even answer it. "They're supposed to look for indications of an attack by one of the other projects."

"And do they find any indications, ever?"

"I'm sure I don't know," I told him frostily. "That would be classified information."

"You bet it would," he said, with malicious glee. "All right, if that's what _your_ spies are doing, and if _I'm_ a spy, then it follows that I'm doing the same thing, right?"

"I don't follow you," I admitted.

"If I'm a spy," he said impatiently, "then I'm supposed to look for indications of an attack by you people on my Project."

I shrugged. "If that's your job," I said, "then that's your job."

He got suddenly red-faced, and jumped to his feet. "That's _not_ my job, you blatant idiot!" he shouted. "I'm not a spy! If I _were_ a spy, _then_ that would be my job!"

* * * * *

The maniac had returned, in full force. "All right," I said hastily. "All right, whatever you say."

He glowered at me a moment longer, then shouted, "Bah!" and dropped back into the chair.

He breathed rather heavily for a while, glaring at the floor, then looked at me again. "All right, listen. What if I were to tell you that I _had_ found indications that you people were planning to attack my Project?"

I stared at him. "That's impossible!" I cried. "We aren't planning to attack anybody! We just want to be left in peace!"

"How do I know that?" he demanded.

"It's the truth! What would we want to attack anybody for?"

"Ah hah!" He sat forward, tensed, pointing the gun at me like a finger again. "Now, then," he said. "If you know it doesn't make any sense for this Project to attack any other project, then why in the world should you think _they_ might see some advantage in attacking _you_?"

I shook my head, dumbfounded. "I can't answer a question like that," I said. "How do I know what they're thinking?"

"They're human beings, aren't they?" he cried. "Like you? Like me? Like all the other people in this mausoleum?"

"Now, wait a minute--"

"No!" he shouted. "You wait a minute! I want to tell you something. You think I'm a spy. That blundering Army of yours thinks I'm a spy. That fathead who turned me in thinks I'm a spy. But I'm _not_ a spy, and I'm going to tell you what I am."

I waited, looking as attentive as possible.

"I come," he said, "from a Project about eighty miles north of here. I came here by foot, without any sort of radiation shield at all to protect me."

The maniac was back. I didn't say a word. I didn't want to set off the violence that was so obviously in this lunatic.

"The radiation level," he went on, "is way down. It's practically as low as it was before the Atom War. I don't know how long it's been that low, but I would guess about ten years, at the very least." He leaned forward again, urgent and serious. "The world is safe out there now. Man can come back out of the cave again. He can start building the dreams again. And this time he can build better, because he has the horrible example of the recent past to guide him away from the pitfalls. There's no need any longer for the Projects."

And that was like saying there's no need any longer for stomachs, but I didn't say so. I didn't say anything at all.

"I'm a trained atomic engineer," he went on. "In my project, I worked on the reactor. Theoretically, I believed that there was a chance the radiation Outside was lessening by now, though we had no idea exactly how much radiation had been released by the Atom War. But I wanted to test the theory, and the Commission wouldn't let me. They claimed public safety, but I knew better. If the Outside were safe and the Projects were no longer needed, then the Commission was out of a job, and they knew it.

* * * * *

"Well, I went ahead with the test anyway, and I was caught at it. For my punishment, I was banned from the Project. They kicked me out, telling me if I thought it was safe Outside I could live Outside. And if it really was safe, I could come back and tell them. Except that they also made it clear that I would be shot if I tried to get back in, because I would be carrying deadly radiation."

He smiled bitterly. "They had it all their own way," he said. "But it _is_ safe out there, I'm living proof of it. I lived Outside for five months. And gradually I realized I had to tell others. I had to spread the word that Man could have his world back. I didn't dare try to get back into my own Project; I would have been recognized and shot before I could say a word. So I came here."

He paused to finish the cup of chico that I should have had with lunch. "I knew better," he continued, "than to simply walk into the building and announce that I came from Outside. Man has an instinctive distrust for strangers anyway; the Projects only intensify it. Once again, I would have been shot. So I've been working in a more devious way. I snuck into the Project--not a difficult thing for a man with no metal on his person, no radiation shield cocooning him--and for the last two months I've been wandering around the building talking with people. I strike up a conversation. I try to plant a few seeds of doubt about the deadliness of Outside, and I hope that at least a few of the people I talk to will begin to wonder, as I once did."

Two months! This spy, by his own admission, had been in the Project two months before being detected. I'd never heard of such a thing, and I hoped I'd never hear of such a thing again.

"Things worked out pretty well," he said, "until today. I said something wrong--I'm still not sure what--and the man I was talking to hollered for Army, shouted I was a spy." He pounded the chair arm. "But I'm not a spy! And it's the truth, Outside is safe!" He glared suddenly at the window. "Why've you got that drape up there?"

"The window broke down," I explained. "It's stuck at transparent."

"Transparent? Fine!" He got up from the chair, strode across the room, and ripped the drape down from the window.

I cowered away from the sun-glare, turning my back to the window.

"Come over here!" he shouted. When I didn't move, he snarled, "Get up and come over here, or I swear I'll shoot!"

And he would have, it was plain in his voice. I got to my feet, hesitant, and walked trembling to the window, squinting against the glare.

"Look out there," he ordered. "Look!"

I looked.