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СКАЧАТЬ to be: a somewhat distracted metach occupying the time after his shift by taking a spin. His activity was uncommon, but also not remarkable, viewed mostly as a harmless whim.

      No one seemed to realize he was a traitor.

      In the distance, Venron spotted a young woman on a bicycle, her upper body bent well forward in order to offer less resistance as she rode.

      Immediately yanking the handlebars to the left, he shot down between rows of bushes. Sliding off the seat, he crouched down so that he could see the path without being seen, and didn't move until the woman had passed.

      It was Denetree. She had tied her hair into a knot as she usually did when she made her rounds. Her legs rose and fell in a swift rhythm. She rode in a high gear not only to develop her muscles but to be able to increase her speed at a moment's notice.

      Venron waited for almost half an hour before he dared come out of the bushes. He couldn't have faced his sister. She would have guessed his plan, read it from his face, from his body language. And would have insisted on going with him ...

      But that was impossible. Venron had no idea what awaited him. He would look for Denetree later and apologize to her for not saying good-bye.

      I've done what I could for her, he tried to console himself. He would leave, but would leave a trace of himself behind. He had planned for that.

      Venron continued on his way, finally stopping at a remote shelter. The simple plastic construction, a roof supported by four slender poles about the height of a man, would be torn away by even a mild storm—but there were no storms. The shelter sufficed to protect against the artificial rain.

      Venron leaned the bicycle against one of the poles, switched it to FREE so the next person to find it could use it, and knelt on the ground. A thin layer of moldering grass and plant stems covered the floor of the shelter. Venron brushed it to one side to uncover the bare metal surface. Near the middle of the cleared space he found what he was looking for: a scratched display screen. Even though it was now fully dark, the screen glowed enough to be readable.

      He spread the thumbs and index fingers of both hands, then pressed them simultaneously against all four corners of the display. A keyboard appeared on the screen and Venron entered a random series of numbers.

      He didn't need a code: The input was only necessary so that the mechanism wasn't activated by accident. This mechanism opened the hatch to the pressurized air chambers below the surface that would ensure their survival in an emergency. As far as Venron knew, such an emergency had never occurred—and he strongly doubted that the chambers would be of much use if an emergency came to pass. One could survive for a day or a week in them—but then what?

      Venron heard a clicking. A square section of the floor lifted creakingly to stand on one edge over a man-sized hole. The Net had released the hatch. Good. The Net had also been informed that there had been a request to open a hatch. Not so good. Everything now depended on how the Net interpreted the action. Playing children opened the hatches on a regular basis. The Net expected it. Testing the limits of their world and what was allowed was part of children's normal development. To a point.

      If it was Venron's bad luck that children had been using this entrance a little too often recently, the Net would confine him in the chamber below until the Tenoy came. It would be very difficult to explain what he was doing in the underground chambers: He was an adult who ought to know better than to stick his nose into things that didn't concern him.

      Venron climbed down a narrow metal ladder into the dark. Each time he rested his weight on a new rung, the ladder squeaked and sagged. Above him, the hatch closed automatically. Faint light came on, making the outlines of objects visible. Venron looked at the ceiling. Only every third light was illuminated.

      Our resources are limited.

      Venron had not been down in the pressurized chambers since his childhood. He was surprised by how small and cramped it felt. He was in a long, narrow corridor with a low ceiling, lined on both sides with benches. Baggy pressure suits hung in wall niches, looking like sacks with helmets attached. They would fit anyone of any size or build, and even untrained persons could slip them on in seconds. But they condemned their wearers to immobility. It would be impossible to move through the narrow corridor wearing the pressure suits, especially if the corridor was jammed full of people.

      Venron didn't want to imagine it. He already felt oppressed by the confined space.

      He started walking, counting the pressure suits as he went. When he reached sixty-three, an opening yawned in the apparently endless row. There was a narrow passageway in the wall where another pressure suit should have hung. Venron squeezed himself inside. After a few meters, the passageway opened onto another corridor lined with pressure suits. Venron turned left and counted the suits again. At ninety-six, he found a new gap and squeezed his way into it.

      The throat-constricting feeling that he was caught in a trap gradually subsided. The conditions he had found so far matched the description he had read, which encouraged him to hope that all of it would be accurate. As yet he had not heard the heavy footsteps of the Tenoy racing through the corridors to seize him, nor any warnings from the Net.

      Again Venron counted. He stopped at thirty-three. This time, there was no gap. He was looking at a pressure suit that was exactly the same as the hundreds he had already passed. He grasped the suit by the neck ring, lifted it up, and set it down on the opposite side. The suit was surprisingly light. Once, as a child, he had put on a suit just to be daring, and without understanding what he was playing at. The other children had teased him for weeks afterwards because the suit had been such a tight fit. "You're so fat!" they had called over and over again. "Fat! Fat! Fat!" Only Denetree hadn't laughed at him. She simply took him into her arms without a word and held him until he had calmed down.

      Venron still remembered how hard it had been to lift the helmet over his head at that age. But he had grown up slim and strong.

      Moving the suit revealed bare metal. Venron leaned close, narrowed his eyes and felt the wall. It seemed massive. Doesn't matter, he assured himself.

      He ran his fingers over the surface, searching for any unevenness. Not an easy task: Dust had settled on the wall over the centuries and hardened, so much so that it had withstood the efforts of the maintenance and cleaning crews that still serviced these chambers at regular intervals. Twice he thought he had found what he was looking for, twice he was disappointed. Then he found the hidden switch, and to his right a concealed display screen slid out of the wall.

      An input field lit up in front of Venron.

      He mentally repeated the password that he had stumbled across a few weeks earlier when he was looking for new star pictures to show the Seekers. He had succeeded in temporarily isolating a memory unit from the Net without being noticed, a success that could only last a few minutes. A dummy virtual unit wouldn't fool the Net any longer than that. To his disappointment, he hadn't found any new star pictures, only boring construction plans. Without giving it much thought, he copied some of them to his portable memory unit, reversed his manipulation of the system and slipped away.

      When he examined his plundered data later, he found—hidden in a dry mass of construction plans and circuit diagrams—a door to the stars.

      Would he be able to open it?

      He entered the password, and a section of the wall slid back. The hatch was not completely open when Venron dove into the darkness beyond.

      From this point forward, he had very little time.

      The СКАЧАТЬ