The Visible Man and Other Stories Read online

  “That’s perfectly all right, missy,” Rowan said politely, and started to tap his way along again. There was no interference, no alarm.

  Goddamn, it was going to work after all, wasn’t it!

  A few yards further on, he found one of the main stairways, and followed it up. He was suddenly claustrophobic, the whole subterranean complex pressing down on him with miles of corridors and stairs, steel, concrete, rock, plastic, dead black earth. God, to get out—

  Sunlight struck him in the face.

  It was still the same day, Rowan realized bemusedly, staring at the sky. Just a little while ago he had been on his way to Boston for the execution of his sentence. That had been years ago, it seemed. Decades ago. A lifetime. But the position of the sun showed that it had been barely four hours. Time enough, Rowan thought. Surely an active hunt for him was underway by now.

  Rowan had come out onto a landscaped mall, pyramidal buildings rearing high all around, windows flashing like hydra eyes in the sun. Hundreds of people were moving invisibly all around him; he could sense their presence as a nearly subliminal susurrus composed primarily of footsteps and voices. This type of shopping complex was potentially obsolete—the existence of house-to-store pneumatic networks should have killed them as dead as the dinosaurs. But this was an underpopulated region, where most of the homes still didn’t have computer terminals; so far, downtown Boston was the closest area to have been completely converted to the system. It took time for advanced technology to disseminate across a society. And herd instinct was also a factor. With the commercial heart eaten out of the smaller towns, people gathered at the shopping plazas as earlier peoples had gathered at wells or watering-holes or drive-in restaurants, and for the same reasons: to gossip, to court, to meet friends, or just to have someplace to go at night. On a sunny day like this, there could easily be ten thousand people circulating through the complex, and somehow Rowan would have to get by them all.

  He launched himself away from the shelter of a building, like a swimmer kicking off for a race, was jostled repeatedly, and realized that he was trying to buck a stream of pedestrian traffic going in the opposite direction. Obediently, Rowan turned around and let the pressure of that stream sweep him along, trusting that people would make allowances for a blind man and not crowd him too closely. The stream hurried him through the mall and into a covered walkway between buildings. Here, suddenly confined, the murmur of crowd-noises swelled into a roar. Clacking footsteps echoed and re-echoed from the low ceiling, voices reverberated hollowly—all sound became fuzzy and directionless, as though he were in a cave under the sea. Again the air seemed full of invisible wings. He could almost feel them beating around his ears, hemming him in, wrapping him in gossamer.

  Suddenly dizzy, Rowan sat down on a bench. He found that his heart was beating fast with irrational terror. His nerves were giving under the strain, he told himself as he fought down another attack of claustrophobia. He couldn’t take much more. Slowly, he calmed himself. At least his disguise seemed to be working.

  Someone touched his arm. “You’re an escaped convict, aren’t you?”

  Rowan gasped. He would have jumped up and bolted instantly, but now the hand was on his wrist, holding him down. He half-turned, shifting his grip on the cane so that he could use it as a club.

  “Hold it!” the unseen someone said in a low, urgent voice. “Don’t run. Calm down, son—I’m on your side.”

  Rowan hesitated. “This is some kind of mistake—”

  “No it’s not,” the other man said dryly. “You’re pretending to be blind, aren’t you? That’s a good one, it hasn’t been used much the last few years. You might get away with it. But don’t just tap right in front of your feet, the way you’ve been doing. That’s a dead giveaway. Keep your cane swinging steadily from side to side as you tap. Remember, you’re supposed to be feeling your way along with it, like a bug does with his antennas, right? And don’t walk so fast. Be a little more uncertain about it, son, listen more, as if you’re trying for auditory clues. And for God’s sake, stop staring at things. And tracking them! It’s obvious you can see through those damn glasses. You won’t last an hour that way.”

  Rowan opened his mouth, closed it again. “Who are you?” he said.

  “It’s a real stroke of luck, me being able to spot you,” the other man said, ignoring him. “I hoped you’d show up in this area, and I’ve been cruising around for an hour trying to pick you up. Logical, in a way, prisoners making for a place like this, cops don’t seem to think that way though. Luckily for you. Still, we’re going to have to jump to get you out of here. But don’t you worry—you just listen to me, now, and you’ll be all right. I’m on your side, son.”

  “I wasn’t aware that I had a side,” Rowan said wearily.

  “You do now, son, you do now. Whether you like it or not. The enemy of my enemy, right?” As the man was saying this, Rowan had a sudden vivid mental picture of how he must look: a small, intense man of middle years with a foxy, florid face and hair like wire brush. “Listen, now,” the man said, “we haven’t got much time. You know Quincy Park in Beverly? Just down the coast a ways from Dane Street Beach?”

  Rowan realized, to his own surprise, that he did know Quincy Park. He could mistily visualize it, the trees, the long grassy slope down to the seawall, the rocky beach, the ocean—he must have passed through there at one time, long ago. “Yeah, I know it,” he said.

  “Well, you just get there before dark. Get there somehow, whatever you do, if you want to keep on living. It’s a station on the Underground Railroad, one we haven’t used in a long while. They won’t be watching it. I’ll call up ahead and arrange it, and there’ll be a sailboat waiting for you just offshore at Quincy Park. You get on her, they’ll take you up the coast, you’ll be safe in Canada by morning. Right? But listen—you’ve got to make the connection the first time. The boat’ll only wait until dark, and we won’t send it back there two evenings in a row. You understand? But if you make it to the boat, why, you’ll be all right then. You’ll be fine.”

  “I—”

  “No, listen now, boy, I mean really OK. We’ll get you down to Bolivia. The insurrectionists have got equipment at La Paz as good as anything they’ve got in Boston. They’ll break the injunction and you’ll be normal again. They’ve done it a hundred times—you don’t think you’re the only political prisoner ever to escape, do you? And they’ve got plenty of use for good men down there. So you just concentrate on getting to Beverly, and you’ll be OK. Keep up the blind man act, it’s your best bet.”

  “Wait a minute—why can’t you just drive me over there now?”

  “Too risky. They’ll be checking private cars before long, but they might not stop public transportation. Besides, I’ve got to lead them away from here before they close the ring on you. Now look—you wait around a minute, then head out of here, east. I’m going to intercept one of the patrol sweeps and tell them that I saw you bicycling west, heading for North Reading or Middleton, maybe. They know you stole a bicycle, but they don’t know yet that you ditched it. They’ll bite. And that’ll give you a better chance to make it out of here. Good luck, son.”

  “But what if—” Rowan found himself talking to empty air; the man was gone. Rowan sat and puzzled at it for a while, then shrugged. What other choice did he have? He got up and tapped his way through the invisible crowds, surreptitiously following painted arrows to the tubetrain stop, trying to comply with the behavioral pointers his benefactor had given him. He did feel more in character that way, he discovered, and more secure.

  While he was waiting for the tubetrain, he again heard the wild keening of sirens in the sky, very loud and terrible, swelling until it seemed they must be directly overhead. Rowan didn’t look around. Doggedly, he leaned on his cane and waited. The sound of the sirens faded away into distance, was gone. Rowan realized that his legs were trembling. He leaned more heavily on the cane.

  The tubetrain arrived. He let it swallow him
, shoved his commuter ticket into the computer, and tapped his way to a seat, hoping he wouldn’t pick one that was already occupied. He did, but the occupant immediately muttered an apology and moved to another seat. Deference to the blind. It was wonderful. Rowan sat down.

  It was odd to ride in an apparently empty tubetrain, and yet at the same time hear all around you a hundred little noises—rustling papers, coughing, footsteps, voices—that proved you were not alone at all. Rowan kept staring out the window at the bland green countryside, then remembering that he was supposed to be blind and looking self-consciously away. He was thinking about what the man at the shopping plaza had said, replaying his words like a tape, analyzing them, sniffing at every nuance of meaning. Only now, after the fact, was he beginning to believe that there might be some truth to what he had been told—that there really was an Underground Railroad, that there would be a boat waiting for him, that somewhere he could be given a chance to start a whole new life. He wouldn’t quite let himself hope, but he was thawing to it.

  The train pulled into Salem.

  After Salem, the tubeline swung south and then east again to Marblehead, and then on south to Lynn and Boston. But Beverly was about four miles north of Salem, on the far side of the estuary. Rowan supposed that there was some kind of public transportation between the two towns, but he didn’t know what, and couldn’t have afforded to utilize it anyway; the commuter-ticket was dead. He was going to have to walk. Maybe it was better that way.

  Up Essex Street, fumbling and tapping in the dusty sunlight.

  Everything went well for perhaps a mile. Then Rowan discovered, to his dismay, that practically the entire eastern half of town had been razed since the last time he’d been through, and was being made over into a vast industrial complex of some sort. On this side of Essex Street, there were still houses and trees, but on the far side, across a flat expanse of asphalt, he was confronted with a chaotic expanse of factories, trainyards, excavations, construction sites and storage areas. Some of the factories were already in operation, others were still going up. The whole region was crisscrossed with deep gullies and pits, and some areas seemed to have been terraced and stairstepped in a manner reminiscent of strip-mining. Construction was taking place on many different levels among the terraces, and a gray haze of smoke hung over everything. East, toward the ocean, a herd of snaky black machines were busily eating the last of a row of old wooden houses.

  He had hoped to keep to the side streets, but it seemed that there weren’t any side streets here anymore. Unless he circled back to the west, he’d have to keep on following the major thoroughfare north, and that was more risky than he liked.

  Rowan decided that he’d have to take the chance of following Essex Street. He had just started to tap his way forward again when wood-pulp geysered from a tree alongside him, leaving a ragged new hole in the bark.

  Sound slapped his ears a heartbeat later, but by then he was already moving. By the time he consciously realized that someone was shooting at him, he had covered half the distance to the nearest cluster of factory buildings, running faster than he had ever run in his life, dodging and swerving like a madman. Suddenly there was a railing in front of him, with a drop of unknown depth beyond it. He vaulted up and over it without breaking stride. A bullet made the railing ring like a gong a second after he had cleared it.

  He dropped about ten feet down onto hard pavement, took ukemi as well as he could, and was up and dodging instantly in spite of a painfully wrenched ankle. As he ran, he was acutely aware of how hot it was under the glaring sun. The only thought in his head was an incongruous wish for a glass of water. Another shot splintered concrete at his heels, and then he was slamming through a door and into a building. It was some kind of huge assembly plant with a cavernous ceiling, full of cold echoes and bitter blue lights. He bullied his way through it, followed by a spreading wave of alarm as he collided with people and knocked work-benches over, staggering, falling down and scrambling up again. As he dodged out a door on the far side of the plant, he heard another gunshot behind him. Then he was tearing through a narrow alleyway between factories. There were rainbow puddles of oil and spilled chemicals on the ground here, and he splashed through them deliberately, hoping that the bitter reek of them would throw his pursuers off if they were tracking him by scent. Someone shouted excitedly at his heels. He ducked into another factory building.

  It became phantasmagoria, a nightmare of pursuit—Rowan running endlessly through vast rooms full of shapes and stinks and lights and alien noises, while invisible things snatched at him and tried to pull him down. Everything was fragmentary and disjointed now for Rowan, as though he existed only in discontinuous slices of time. In one such slice, he was hitching a ride on a flat-car that was rumbling through a trainyard between varicolored mountains of chemical waste, listening to sirens and shouts behind him and wondering when he should jump off and run. In another, he was dodging through a multi-leveled forest of oddly jointed pipes, like a child swarming through a jungle gym. Another, and he was climbing slowly and tenaciously up a cyclone fence. Another, and he was running through a vacant lot, a construction site that had been temporarily abandoned and which had been grown over everywhere by man-high expanses of scrub grass and wild wheat.

  Rowan tripped over a discarded tool, fell flat on his face, stayed down. That saved him. A scythe of heat swept across the field at hip level, and suddenly all the grass was burning. This time, they were using lasers. He rolled frantically through the blazing grass in an instinctive attempt to put out the little fires that were starting on his clothes and in his hair, and accidentally tumbled down into a steep, clay-sided gulley. There was a sluggish, foot-deep trickle of muddy water at the bottom of the gulley, and he crawled through it on his belly while everything burned above him, choking, blinded by smoke and baked by heat that blistered his back, an inchworm on a griddle in Hell.

  Then he was kneeling in a tree-shaded backyard while someone washed his face with a wet, scented towel. He retched helplessly, and firm hands held his head. He had something very important to say, some vitally important thing that he had almost remembered, but when he tried to speak all he could coax from his cracked lips and swollen tongue was an ugly jangling croak. “Shut up, goddamn you,” said an anxious voice. A woman’s voice. He rested in her arms, and stared up at her in awe. She was radiantly beautiful, as cool and clear as the water she used to sponge him, and she smiled like the sun as she wiped the blood and slime and singed hair from his face. He woke up enough then to realize that he had been slipping in and out of delirium, that he really couldn’t see her at all. She was invisible. That seemed very sad and unreasonable. He discussed it with her while she bathed his face, carrying out a long, intricate conversation with her, not even trying to use his voice this time, it was such a poor instrument for communication, and his didn’t work anyway. Then she was forcing something into his mouth—a capsule—and holding water to his lips.

  Drinking was so painful that it shocked him almost fully awake, and then the antifever capsule hit his system, and that helped too. He realized that she was trying to wrestle him into something. A caftan. “What are you doing?” he asked, quite clearly and reasonably. “Keep quiet!” she snarled. “Raise your arms a little.” Dutifully, he helped her get the caftan onto him. The world faded for a moment, and when it came back she was wrapping a scarf around his head. “Cover the singed hair, anyway,” she said. “I’d shave your head if I had time. Goddamn you, don’t go to sleep! You’ve got to get out of here, right now.”

  With an effort, Rowan pulled himself to clarity. He sat up and took his head in his hands. “Come on, come on,” the woman was saying nervously, “get up.” Her hands took him under the arms and tugged, he scrambled and flailed, pushing with legs that didn’t want to work. There was a moment of extraordinary nausea and pain, and then he was on his feet, trembling, half-supported by the woman. “Just stay on your feet now,” she said. “You’ll be OK. That’s right.” S
he took her hands away, and somehow he managed to stay upright, swaying, feeling as if his bones had melted. By this time, Rowan had figured out what was happening, and he clumsily started to thank the woman for helping him, but she cut him off irritably. “Just get out of here, you goddamned fool. I can’t do anything more for you. Done more than I should already, I got a family to think of. You just go on and get out of here now. Road’s out that way”—not knowing that he couldn’t see which way she was pointing—“don’t guess you’d want to go back out over the fence the way you came in, too suspicious.” She hesitated, as though afraid to wish him well. “Go on, now,” she said at last, and he could almost imagine her making shooing motions at him. Her voice was unsteady. “Please go. I have to think of my family. I can’t let them catch you here.” He sensed then that she had gone abruptly away. A moment later the back door of the house opened and closed. He wondered if she was still watching him through the glass half of the door. Somehow he hoped that she was.

  Rowan made his way around to the front of the house, and discovered that he was on Bridge Street, a mile or more from the factory area, although he had no clear recollection of how he had gotten there. That made it a fairly straightforward problem. He had to follow Bridge Street north another mile, cross the bridge over the estuary, and he would be there. He could hardly feel his body anymore, but that was probably a blessing. It allowed him to sit somewhere far removed from pain and drive his body like a car, coax it along like a beaten-up old heap being driven to a second-hand dealer’s lot, the owner swearing bitterly all the way and hoping he can get the thing there before it falls apart. He set out for Beverly.

  The world began to turn to mush again as he walked. After a few blocks he started to hallucinate, seeing brief vivid flashes of things that couldn’t be there, having long talks with people who didn’t exist. He would come back to himself as from a great distance, and find that he was talking to himself in a very loud voice and swinging his arms wildly, or else making hoarse grunting noises, huhn, huhn, like an exhausted bear harried closely by hounds. He no longer cared if he attracted attention or even if he bumped into people. He was no longer worried about pursuit; in fact, he had forgotten that anybody was after him. He only knew that he had to get to Beverly. Reaching that goal had become an end in itself; he didn’t remember what he was supposed to do when he got there, and he didn’t care. All his will was taken up by the task of keeping his body clumping leadenly along, while the world flowed by like porridge.