Caliban

THERE was no more point in further static practice. Either the thing would work or it would not. Either he could pilot it or he could not. Caliban sat in the pilot’s seat of the open cockpit aircar. He gripped the controls firmly, adjusted his feet over the pedals, and engaged what he thought was the lift control. The car lifted slowly off the ground. Yes, good. It worked.

He had been more worried over whether the car wouldwork than whether he had figured out the controls properly. After all, it seemed likely that the car had been sitting, forgotten, in Periphery Skyport Six since the underground Skyport went out of service, sometime in the last century. Working by his internal infrared light source, Caliban brought the decrepit old craft up to a reasonably steady hover at about ten meters over the floor of the cavernous room. He performed a circuit of the room with about as much grace and agility as one of the more elderly citizens he had seen tottering about the city his first day out on the street.

Yes, throttle, lift, directional controls-he had divined them all properly. Aircar operation was yet another area where his datastore was frustratingly silent. He had been forced to work it all out for himself, and he was acutely aware that there was a great deal he did not know about how the aircar would handle in anything besides low speeds and still air.

But now, assuming the aircar held together, there was little purpose in further delay. It was time to set out. Caliban eased the car gently into the wide egress tunnel and guided it at a sedate ten kilometers an hour, moving in illumination provided by his infrared system, following the gentle upward grade of the tunnel as it moved toward the surface. The moldering walls of the tunnel drifted past in silence. Even after all his explorations of the underground world, this wide, broad tunnel into the darkness, the whole Skyport complex, was still cloaked in strangeness.

The place had a feeling of age, of years passing while it sat here in silence-and yet there was also the sense that this place had never been used. Everything was old, but nothing looked even slightly worn. It was all new under the dust.

It took a minute or two to reach the long-sealed exterior door. He had walked up the tunnel and examined the mechanism earlier. He was reasonably confident that he could open it, but that was nothing he could count on. Even getting it opened would not solve all his problems. It seemed at least possible that the Sheriff’s Department would be watching the tunnel entrances around the periphery of the city. That was why he had not opened it before now: no sense advertising his location until he was ready to leave.

Assuming he did get the door open, he would have to move fast once he was through. That was the reason for choosing an aircar rather than attempting to get out on foot.

And he would have to leave soon. In another day or so, his power supply would reach dangerously low levels. He dared not search for a recharging station inside the city. The deputies were everywhere in the tunnels, and he had had several narrow escapes already. He did not wish to be forced to stay in one place for the hour or so a recharge would take. Besides, it would be the height of madness to so much as approach a recharging station. He had to assume Sheriff Kresh would have the sense to post guards over all the recharge stations. No. He had to get out of the city and find a power source out there. Somehow.

There was the end of the tunnel. Caliban landed the aircar with a bit more of a bump than he intended and got out. He walked over to the door controls and flipped the switches for the manual control.

With a thump and a hum and thechuff of the overlying dirt and dust dropping into the tunnel, the door opened.

Before the door was even fully retracted, Caliban was back in the pilot’ s seat. He threaded the ancient aircar through the entrance and then cranked the lift control and forward thrust to maximum, seeking to put as much sky and distance as possible between himself and the city of Hades.

BY now, Alvar Kresh was thoroughly used to having his sleep interrupted. This time when Donald touched him on the arm, he came fully awake at once, with no intermediate stage of confusion. He sat up, swung his feet around onto the floor, and stood. He crossed to the chair where he had laid out his clothes upon going to bed. If he was going to dress himself, he had no intention of losing any more valuable time fumbling for clothes.

“What’s the report?” he asked.

“It could be nothing, sir, but it seems at least possible that it is Caliban. The robots working the city status monitors were instructed to report anything unusual. They are a rather conservative design and they reported all sorts of routine events, making it difficult for their human supervisors to distinguish the truly unusual-”

“Damn it, Donald, get to it!”