Richard E. Peck

 

GANTLET

 

 

JACK BRENS thumbed the ID sensor and waited for the sealed car doors to open. He had stayed too long in his office, hoping to avoid any conversation with the other commuters, and had been forced to trot through the fetid station. The doors split open; he put his head in and sucked gratefully at the cool air inside, then scrubbed his moist palms along his thighs and stepped quickly into the car. Rivulets of sweat ran down the small of his back. He stretched his lips into the parody of a confident smile.

 

Most of the passengers sat strapped in, a few feigning sleep, others trying to concentrate on the stiff-dried facsheets which rat­tled in their hands. Lances of light fell diagonally through the gloom; some of the boiler plate welded over the windows had apparently cracked under the twice-daily barrage.

 

Brens bit the tip of his tongue to remind himself to call Co-op Maintenance when he got home. Today the train was his responsi­bility—one day out of one hundred; one day out of twenty work weeks. If he didn’t correct the flaws he noticed, he might suffer because of them tomorrow, though the responsibility would by then have shifted to someone else. To whom? Karras. Tomorrow Karras had window seat.

 

Brens nodded to several of the gray-haired passengers who greeted him.

 

“Hey, Brens. How’s it going?”

 

“Hello, Mr. Brens.”

 

“Go get ‘em, Jack.”

 

He strode down the aisle through the aura of acrid fear rising from the ninety-odd men huddled in their seats. A few of the commuters had already pulled their individual smoking bells down from the overhead rack. Although the rules forbade smok­ing till the train got underway, Brens understood their feelings too well to make a point of it.

 

Only Karras sat at the front. The seats beside and behind him were empty.

 

“Thought you weren’t coming and I might have to take her out myself,” Karras said. “But my turn tomorrow.”

 

Brens nodded and slipped into the engineer’s seat. While he familiarized himself with the instrument console, he felt Karras peering avidly past him at the window. Lights in the station tunnel faded and the darkness outside made the window a temporary mirror. Brens glanced at it once to see the split image of Karras reflected in the inner and outer layers of the bulletproof glass: four bulging eyes, a pair of glistening bald scalps wobbling in and out of focus.

 

The start buzzer sounded.

 

He checked the interior mirror. Only two empty seats, at the front of course. He’d heard of no resignations from the Co-op and therefore assumed that the men who should have occupied those seats were ill; it took something serious to make a man miss his scheduled car and incur the fine of a full day’s salary.

 

The train thrummed to life. Lights flared, the fans whined to­ward full thrust, and the car danced unsteadily forward as it climbed onto its cushion of air. Brens concentrated on keeping his hovering hands near the throttle override.

 

“You really sweat this thing, don’t you?” Karras said. “Relax. You’ve got nothing to do but enjoy the view, unless you think you’re really playing engineer.”

 

Brens tried to ignore him. It was true that the train was almost totally automatic. Yet the man who drew window seat did have certain responsibilities, functions to perform, and no time to waste. No time until the train was safely beyond the third circle—past Cityend, past Opensky, past Workring. And after that, an easy thirty miles home.

 

Brens pictured the city above them as the train bored its way through the subterranean darkness, pushing it back with a fan of brilliant light. City stretched for thirty blocks from center in this direction and then met the wall of defenses separating it from Opensky. The whole area of City was unified now, finally—build­ings joined and sealed against the filth of the air outside that massive, nearly self-sufficient hive. Escalators up and down, beltways back and forth, interior temperature and pollution kept at an acceptable level—it was all rather pleasant.

 

It was heaven, compared to Opensky. Surrounding and con­tinually threatening City lay the ring of Opensky and its in­credible masses of people. Brens hadn’t been there for years, not since driving through on his way to work had become impossibly time-consuming and dangerous. Twenty years ago he had been one of the last lucky ones, picked out by Welfare Control as “salvageable”; these days, no one left Opensky. For that matter, no one with any common sense entered.

 

He could vaguely recall seeing single-family dwellings there, whether his wife, Hazel, believed that claim or not, and more vividly the single-family room he had shared with his parents and grandfather. He could even remember the first O-peddlers to appear on Sheridan Street. Huge, brawny men with green O-tanks strapped to their backs, they joked with the clamoring children who tugged at their sleeves and tried to beg a lungful of straight O for the high it was rumored to induce. But the peddlers dealt at first only with asthmatics and early-stage emphysemics who gathered on muggy afternoons to suck their metered dollar’s worth from the grimy rubber face mask looped over the peddler’s arm. All that was before each family had a private bubble hooked di­rectly to the City metering system.

 

He had no idea what life in Opensky was like now, except what he could gather from the statistics that crossed his desk in Welfare Control. Those figures meant little enough: so many schools to maintain, dole centers to keep stocked and guarded, restraint aides needed for various playgrounds—he merely con­verted City budget figures to percentages corresponding to the requests of fieldmen in Opensky. And he hadn’t spoken to a fieldman in nearly a year. But he assumed it couldn’t be pleasant there. Welfare Control had recently disbanded and reassigned to wall duty all Riot Suppression teams; the object now was not to sup­press, but to contain. What went on in Opensky was the skyers’ own business, so long as they didn’t try to enter City.

 

So. Six miles through Opensky to Workring, three miles of Workring itself, where the skyers kept the furnaces bellowing and City industry alive. But that part of the trip wouldn’t be too bad. Only responsible skyers were allowed to enter Workring, and most stuck to their jobs for fear of having their thumbprints erased from the sensors at each Opensky exit gate. Such strict con­trol had seemed harsh, at first, but Brens now knew it to be nec­essary. Rampant sabotage in Workring had made it so. The skyers who chose to work had nearly free access to and from Workring. And those who chose not to work—well, that was their choice. They could occupy themselves somehow. Each year Welfare Con­trol authorized more and more playgrounds in Opensky, and the public schools were open to anyone under fifty with no worse than a moderate arrest record.

 

Beyond Workring lay the commuter residential area. A few miles of high-rise suburbs, for secretaries and apprentice managerial staff, merging suddenly with the sprawling redevelop­ment apartment blocks, and then real country. To Brens the com­muter line seemed a barometer of social responsibility: the greater one’s worth to City, the farther away he could afford to live. Brens and his wife had moved for the last time only a year ago, to the end of the trainpad, thirty miles out. They had a small square of yellowed grass and two dwarf apple trees that would not bear. It was . . .

 

He shook off his daydreaming and tried to focus on the dark­ness rushing toward them. As their speed increased, he para­doxically lost the sense of motion conveyed by the lurching start and lumbering underground passage. Greater speed increased the amount of compression below as air entered the train’s howling scoops and whooshed through the ducts down the car sides. Cityend lay moments ahead.

 

Brens concentrated on one of the few tasks not yet automated: at Cityend, and on the train’s emergence from the tunnel, his real duty would begin. Three times in the past month skyers had sought to breach City defenses through the tunnel itself.

 

“Hey! You didn’t check defense systems,” Karras said.

 

“Thanks,” Brens muttered through clenched teeth. “But they’re okay.” Then, because he knew Karras was right, he flipped the arming switch for the roof-mounted fifties and checked diverted- power availability for the nose lasers. The dials read in the green, as always.

 

Only Karras, who now sat hunched forward in anticipation, would have noticed the omission. Because Karras was sick. The man actually seemed to look forward to his turn in the window seat, not only for the sights all the other commuters in the Co-op tried to avoid, but also for the possible opportunity of turning loose the train’s newly installed firepower.

 

“One of these days they’re going to make a big try. They’d all give an arm to break into City, just to camp in the corridors. Now, if it was me out there, I’d be figuring a way to get out into Suburbs. But them? All they know is destroy. Besides, you think they’ll take it lying down that we raised the O-tax? Forget it! They’re out there waiting, and we both know it. That’s why you ought to check all the gear we’ve got. Never know when . . .”

 

“Later, Karras! There it is.” Brens felt his chest tighten as the distant circle of light swept toward them—tunnel exit, Cityend. His forearms tensed and he glared at the instruments, waiting for the possibility that he might have to override the controls and slam the train to a stop. But a green light flashed; ahead, the circle of sky brightened as the approaching train tripped the switch that cut off the spray of mist at the tunnel exist. And with that mist fading, the barrier of twenty thousand volts which ordinarily crackled between the exit uprights faded also. For the next few moments, while the train snaked its way into Opensky, City was potentially vulnerable.

 

Brens stared even harder at the opening, but saw nothing. The car flashed out into gray twilight, and he relaxed. But instinct, or a random impulse, drew his eyes to the train’s exterior mirrors. And then he saw them: a shapeless huddle of bodies pouring into the tunnel back toward City. He hit a series of studs on the con­sole and braced himself for the jolt.

 

There it was.

 

A murmur swept the crowded car behind him, but he ignored it and stared straight ahead.

 

“What the hell was it?” Karras asked. “I didn’t see a thing.”

 

“Skyers. They were waiting, I guess till the first car passed. They must have figured no one would see them that way.”

 

“I don’t mean who. I mean, what did you use? I didn’t hear the fifties.”

 

“For a man who’s taking the run tomorrow, you don’t keep up very well. Nothing fancy, none of the noise and flash some people get their kicks from. I just popped speedbreaks on the last three cars.”

 

“In the tunnel? My God! Must have wiped them all the way out the tunnel walls, like a squeegee. Who figured that one?”

 

“This morning’s Co-op bulletin suggested it, remember?”

 

Karras sulked. “I’ve got better things to do than pay attention to every word those guys put out. They must spend all day dic­tating memos. We got a real bunch of clods running things this quarter.”

 

“Why don’t you volunteer?”

 

“I give them my four days’ pay a month. Who needs that mishmash?”

 

Brens silently agreed. No one enjoyed keeping the Co-op alive. No one really knew how. And that was one of the major problems associated with having amateurs in charge: it’s a hell of a way to run a railroad. But the only way, since the line itself had declared bankruptcy, and both city and state governments refused to take over. If it hadn’t been for the Co-op, City would have died, a festering ulcer in the midst of the cancer of Opensky.

 

Opensky whirled past them now. Along the embankment on both sides, legs dangled a decorative fringe. People sat atop the pilings and hurled debris at the speeding stainless steel cars. Their accuracy had always amazed Brens. Even as he willed himself rigid, he flinched at the eggs, rocks, bottles, and assorted garbage that clattered and smeared across the window.

 

“Look at those sonsabitches throw, would you? You ever try and figure what kind of lead time you need to hit something moving as fast as we are?”

 

Brens shook his head. “I guess they’re used to it.”

 

“Why not? What else they got to do but practice?”

 

Behind them, gunfire crackled and bullets pattered along the boiler plate. Many of the commuters ducked at the opening burst.

 

“Look at them back there.” Karras pointed down the aisle. “Scared blue, every one of them. I know this psychologist who’s got a way to calm things down, he says. He had this idea to paint bull’s-eyes on the sides of the cars, below the window. Did I tell you about it? He figures it’ll work two or three ways. One, if the snipers hit the bull’s-eyes, there’s less chance of somebody getting tagged through a crack in the boiler plate. Two, maybe they’ll quit firing at all, when they see we don’t give a suck of sky about it. Or three, he says, even if they keep it up, it gives them some­thing to do, sort of channels their aggression. If they take it out on the trains, maybe they’ll ease up on City. What do you think?”

 

“Wouldn’t it make more sense to put up shooting galleries in all the playgrounds? Or figure a way to get new cars for the trains? We can’t keep patching and jury-rigging these old crates forever. The last thing we need right now is to make us more of a target than we already are.”

 

“Okay. Have it your way. Only, I was thinking. . .”

 

Brens tuned him out and squinted at the last molten sliver of setting sun. Its rays smeared rainbows through the streaked eggs washing slowly across the window in the slipstream. The mess coagulated and darkened as airblown particles of ash settled in it and crusted over. When he could stand it no longer, Brens flipped on the wipers and watched the clotted slime smear across the glass, as he had known it would. But some of it scrubbed loose to flip back alongside the speeding train.

 

The people were still out there. If he looked carefully straight ahead, their presence became a mere shadow at the edges of the channel through which he watched the trainpad reeling toward him. Though he doubted any eye would catch his long enough to matter, he avoided the faces. There was always the slight chance that he might recognize one of them. Twenty years wasn’t so long a time. Twenty years ago he had watched the trains from an embankment like these.

 

Now the train swooped upward to ride its cushion of air along the raised pad, level with second-story windows on each side. Blurred faces stared from those windows, here disembodied, there resting on a cupped hand and arm propped on a window ledge.

 

The exterior mirrors showed him faces ducking away from the gust of wind fanning out behind the train and from the debris lifted whirling in the grimy evening air. He tried to picture the pattern left by the train’s passage—dust settling out of the whirl­wind like the lines of polarization around a magnet tip. A few of the faces wore respirators or simple, and relatively useless, cotton masks. Many didn’t bother to draw back but hung exposed to the breeze that the train was stirring up. And now, as on each of his previous rare turns at the window seat, Brens had the impulse to slow the train, to let the wind die down and diminish behind them, out of what he himself considered misplaced and maudlin sympathy for the skyers, who seemed to enjoy the excitement of the train’s glistening passage. It tempered the boredom of their day.

 

“. . . right about here the six-thirty had the explosion. Five months ago. Remember?”

 

“What?”

 

“Explosion. Some kids must have got hold of detonator caps and strung them on wires swinging from a tree. When the train hit them, they cracked the window all to hell. Nearly hurt some­body. But the crews came out and burned down all the trees along the right of way. Little bastards won’t pull that one again.”

 

Brens nodded. There was one of the armored repair vans ahead, on a siding under the protective stone lip of the embankment.

 

The train rose even higher to cross the river which marked the Opensky-Workring boundary. They were riding securely in the concave shell of the bridge. On the river below, a cat, or dog - it was hard to tell at this distance—picked its cautious way across the crusted algae which nearly covered the stream. The center of the turgid river steamed a molten beige; and upriver a short way, brilliant patches of green marked the mouth of the main Workring spillway.

 

At the far end of the bridge, a group of children scrambled out of the trough of the trainbed to hang over the side.

 

“Hey! Hit the lasers. Singe their butts for them.” Karras bounced in his seat.

 

“Shut up for a minute, can’t you? They’re out of the way.”

 

“Now what’s that for? Can’t you take a joke? Besides, you know they’re sneaking into Workring to steal something. You saying we ought to let them get away with it?”

 

“I’m just telling you to shut up. I’m tired, that’s all. Leave it at that.”

 

“Sure. Big deal. Tired! But tomorrow the window seat’s mine. So don’t come sucking around for a look then, understand?”

 

“It’s a promise.”

 

Sulfurous clouds hung in the air, and Brens checked the car’s interior pollution level. It was a safe 18, as he might have guessed. But the sight of buildings tarnished green, of bricks flaking and molting on every factory wall, always depressed him. The ride home was worse than the trip into City. Permissive hours ran from five to eight, when pollution controls were lifted. He knew the theory: evening air was more susceptible to condensation be­cause of the temperature drop, and dumping pollutants into the night sky might actually bring on a cleansing rain. He also knew the practical considerations involved: twenty-four-hour control would almost certainly drive industry away. Compromise was essential, if City was to survive.

 

It would be good to get home.

 

The train swung into its gently curving descent toward Workring exit, and Brens instinctively clasped the seat arms as the seat pivoted on its gimbals. At the foot of the curve he saw the barri­cade. Something piled on the pad.

 

Not for an instant did he doubt what he saw. He lunged at the power override, but stopped himself in time. Dropping to the pad now, in mid-curve, might tip the train or let it slide off the pad onto the potholed and eroded right of way where the uneven terrain offered no stable lift base for getting underway again.

 

“Ahead of you! On the tracks!” Karras reached for the con­trols, but Brens caught him with a straight-arm and slammed him to the floor. He concentrated on the roadbed flashing toward them. At the last instant, as the curve modified and tilted toward level, he popped all speedbreaks and snatched the main circuit breaker loose.

 

From the sides of the cars vertical panels hissed out on their hydraulic pushrods to form baffles against the slipstream, and the train slammed to the pad. Tractor gear whined in protest, the shriek nearly drowning out the dying whirr of compressor fans, and the train shuddered to a stop.

 

Inside, lights dimmed and flickered. Voices rose in the darkness amid the noise of men struggling to their feet.

 

Brens depressed the circuit breaker and hit the emergency call switch overhead. “Hold it!” he shouted. “Quiet down, please! There’s something on the pad, and I had to stop. Just keep calm. I’ve signaled for the work crews, and they’ll be here any minute.”

 

Then he ignored the passengers and focused his attention on the window. The barricade lay no more than twenty feet ahead, rusted castings and discarded mold shells heaped on the roadbed. The jumbled pile seemed ablaze in the flickering red light from the emergency beacons rotating atop the train cars. Behind the barricade and along the right of way, faceless huddled forms rose erect in the demonic light and stood motionless, simply staring at the train. The stroboscopic light sweeping over them made each face a swarm of moving, melting shadows. Brens fired a prelimi­nary burst from the fifties atop the first car, then quickly switched them to automatic, but the watching forms stood like statues.

 

“They must know,” Karras said. He stood beside Brens and massaged his bruised shoulder. “Look. None of them moving.”

 

Then one of the watchers broke and charged toward the car, waving a club. He managed two strides before the fifties homed on his movement and opened up. A quick chatter from overhead and the man collapsed. He hurled the club as he dropped and the fifties efficiently followed its arc through the air with homed fire that made it dance in a shower of flashing sparks. It splintered to shreds before it hit the ground.

 

The other watchers stood motionless.

 

Brens stared at them a long moment before he could define what puzzled him about their appearance: none of them wore respirators. Were they trying to commit suicide? And why this useless attack? His eyes had grown accustomed to the flickering light and he scanned the mob. Young faces and old, mostly men but a few women scattered among them, all shades of color, united in appearance only by their clothing. Workring skyers in leather aprons, thick-soled shoes, probably escapees from a nearby fac­tory. He flinched as one of them nodded slightly—surely they couldn’t see him through the window. The nod grew more violent, and then he realized that the man was coughing. Paroxysms seized the man as he threw his hands to his mouth and bent forward helplessly. It was enough. The fifties chattered once more, and he fell.

 

“But what do they get out of it?” He turned his bewilderment to Karras.

 

“Who can tell? They’re nuts, all of them. Malcontents, or anar­chists. Mainly stupid, I’d say. Like the way they try and break into City. Even if they threw us out, they wouldn’t know what to do next. Picture one of them sitting in your office. At your desk.”

 

“I don’t mean that. If they stop us from getting through, who takes care of them? I mean, we feed them, run their schools, bury them. I don’t understand what they think all this will accomplish.”

 

“Listen! The crew’s coming. They’ll take care of them.”

 

A siren keened its rise and fall from the dimming twilight ahead, but still the watchers stood frozen. When the siren changed to a blatting klaxon, Brens switched the fifties back on manual to safeguard the approaching repair car. The mob melted away at the same signal. They were there, and then they were gone. They dropped from sight along the pad edge and blended into the shadows.

 

The work crew’s crane hoisted the castings off the pad and dropped them on the right of way. In a few minutes they had finished. Green lights flashed at Brens, and the repair van sped away again.

 

Passing the Workring exit guards, Brens made a mental note to warn the Co-op. If the skyers were growing bold enough to show open rebellion within the security of Workring, the exit guards had better be augmented. Even Suburbs might not be safe any longer. At thirty miles distance, he wasn’t really concerned for his own home, but some of the commuters lived dangerously close to Workring.

 

He watched in the exterior mirror. The rear car detached itself and swung out onto a siding where it dropped to a halt while the body of the train went on. Every two miles, the scene repeated itself. Cars dropped off singly to await morning reassembly. Brens had often felt a strange sort of envy for the commuters who lived closer in: they never had the lead window seat on the way out of City. Responsibility for the whole train devolved on them only for short stretches, only on the way in.

 

But that was fair, he reminded himself. He lived the farthest out. With privilege go obligations. And he was through, for an­other twenty weeks, his obligations met.

 

At the station, he telexed his report to the Co-op office and trotted outside to meet Hazel. The other wives had driven away. Only his carryall sat idling at the platform edge. He knew he ought to look forward to relaxing at home, but the trip itself still preyed on his mind unaccountably. He felt irritation at his inability to put the skyers out of his thoughts. His whole day was spent working for their benefit; his evenings ought to be his own.

 

He looked back toward City, but saw nothing in the smog-covered bowl at the foot of the hills that stretched away to the east. If it rained tonight, it might clear the air.

 

Hazel smiled and waved.

 

He grinned in answer. He could predict her reaction when she heard what he’d been through: a touch of wifely fear and concern for him, and that always made her more affectionate. Almost a hero’s welcome. After all, he had acquitted himself rather well. A safe arrival, only a few minutes late, no injuries or major prob­lems. And he wouldn’t draw window seat for another several months. It was good to be home.