Someone pounded at the door. "Security," someone called from outside.
"Hang Tommy," Dan said.
They were unlocking the door. "Help me up," he begged of them; and they did, held him on his feet, wrapped one of the towels about him. The door opened, and security was there, with drawn guns.
"Got an accident," Dan said. "Team went out, lines fouled, wind broke them. We got two in; one live, one dead; the others dropped."
"Call the meds," the officer in charge said. Johnny shook his head, panicked; the hospital—corporation-financed. He did not want to put himself in their hands.
"I'm not going," he said, while the call went out. "Going to the Bottom. Get myself a drink. That's what I want. That's all I want."
The officer pulled out a recorder. "You up to making a statement, Mr.—"
"Tallfeather. Johnny." His voice broke, abused by the cold, by fright. He leaned against the men holding him up. "I'll make your statement. We were out on the 90s, going down. My sister Sarah.
. . her line broke. The others tried to spider me down, to come back, and the lines fouled. Hours out there. Lines broke, or maybe one suicided. The wind—"
"Man would," Dan said. "You ever been Outside, officer?"
"Names. ID's."
Dan handed his over. Another searched Johnny's out of his coveralls, turned everyone's over, dead and living. The officer read them off into the recorder. Returned them, to the living. "Dead man here?"
"Team boss," Johnny said, moistening his lips. "Jino Brown. The others dropped." The officer looked at Dan Hardesty and his team. "Your part in this?"
"Friends. They didn't show and we came checking. Boy named Tommy Pratt in the Pillar, he put us onto it. Let the man go, Mister. He's had enough."
The officer bent down and checked Jino's corpse, touched the skin, flexed the fingers.
"Frosted," Dan said. "Pulled his mask off, you understand? No mask out there, you die quick. Painless, for those afraid of falling."
"Thought liners weren't afraid of falling."
"Lot of us are," Dan said levelly. "Come on, officer, this man's sisterdied out there."
"Think he'd be more upset about it, wouldn't you?"
Johnny swung; they stopped him, and the officer stepped back a pace.
"All right," the officer said carefully. "All right, all right. Easy." Johnny sucked air, leaned there, glaring at the officer, cooled his mind slowly, thinking of what he wanted—to be out, down, away from them—alive.
The officer thumbed his mike. "Got an accident here," he said. "Liners fouled, one survivor, Tallfeather, John Ames, city employee."
Noise came back. The officer touched the plug in his ear and his eyes flickered, looking at them. The door opened, the rest of the security officers showing two meds in. "Get him out," the officer said with a gesture at Jino's body. "The other one says he's walking." The meds ignored the body, turned on him. Johnny shook them off, shook his head while one of them told him about massive contusions and blood clots and his brain. "Get me my clothes," he told the liners. One did.
"Somebody," Dan was saying, "needs to go out there and get those bodies in off the Bottom." He heard. Maybe he should protest, give way to grief, insist to be one to go even if there was no chance of his walking that far. He had no interest in finding Sarah's body, or Poll's, or Sam's. He had only one interest, and that was to get his clothes on, to get out of here. He managed it, wincing, while the meds conferred with the police and wondered if there were not some way to arrest him to get him to the hospital.
"Get out of here," Dan warned them. There was sullen silence.
"Mr. Tallfeather," one of the medics appealed to him.
He shook his head. It hurt. He stared hatefully at them, and they devoted their attention to Jino, who was beyond protest.
"Free to go?" Dan asked the police.
"We've got your numbers," the officer said.
Dan said nothing. Johnny walked for the door between two of them, trying not to let his knees give under him.
They got him to the service lift, got a better grip on him once inside, because he gave way when the car dropped, and he came near to fainting. They went down, down as far as they would go, got out in the passages, walked the way to the Worm.
He fainted. He woke up in a bed with no recollection of how he had gotten there; and then he did remember, and lay staring at the ceiling. An old woman waited on him, fed him; labored over him. Others came in to look at him, liners and Builders both. When he was conscious and could get his legs under him he tottered out into the Worm itself and sat down and had the drink he had promised himself, remembering Sarah, who had sat with him—over there. And the word whispered through the Worm that there was a strike on, that none of the liners were going out; that there was a Builder slowdown, and the name of Manley and ATELCORP was mentioned. There was a quiet about the place, that day, the next. There were police, who came and took photographs inside the Worm and read a court order in dead silence, ordering the Builders back to work. But the silence hung there, and the police were very quiet and left, because no one wanted to go Outside but liners and the whole City would die if the Builders shut things down. Up in the towers they knew their computers. A lot was automated; a lot was not. The computers were all their knowledge.
There was talk of an investigation. The Mayor came on vid and appealed for calm; said there was an investigation proceeding about gang activity, about bribes; about corruption in certain echelons far down the corporation lists. There was a lot of talk. It all moved very quickly.
"We'll get something," Dan Hardesty told him. "We got the one that went by Manley. Fellow named George Bettin. ATELCORP'S man. Flunky; but we got him."
"They'll hang him out," he said quietly, hollowly. "So much for Manley. Yes. We got him." And that day the Bettin trial started he rode the lift up to the hundredth, and walked to one of the observation windows, but when he got close to it, with the far blue distance and the Newark spire rising in his view, he stopped.
It was a long tune before a passerby happened to see him there, against the wall; before a woman took him by the arm and coaxed him away from the wall, down the corridor. They called the meds; and they offered him sedatives.
He took them. Rode the lift down. That itself was terror. He had had dreams at night; wakened with the world hanging under him and the sky above and screamed until the Worm echoed with it.
The drugs stopped that. But he stayed below, refused to go near the windows. Three, four days, while the Manley/Bettin trial dragged on. They never called him to testify; never called any of the liners.
But a message came to the Worm, signed with big names in ATELCORP; and that failed to surprise him. He went, up the far, far distance to the nineties.
He walked in, looked about him, flinched from the windows, a mere turning of his head. They wanted him to go into an office with windows. Paul Mason, the door said, President.
"Mr. Tallfeather," someone said, trying to coax him. He turned his back to the windows.
"He comes out here," he said, staring at the blank wall in front of him, the fancy wallpaper, the civic contribution citations. "He comes out to me."
He stood there. Eventually someone came, and a hand rested on his shoulder. "The windows. I understand, Mr. Tallfeather. I'm terribly sorry. Paul Mason. I called you here. You want to walk back this way, please?"
He walked, trembling, until they were in the hallway, in the safe, stone-veneer hall, and Mason drew him into a small windowless office, a desk, a few bookshelves, some chairs, immaculate, expensive. "Sit down," Mason urged him. "Sit down, Mr. Tallfeather." He did so, sank into a chair. A secretary scurried in with an offer of hot tea.