— Stop, stop it! He remembered why he had sought the drink's temporary oblivion. It was the fear of abandonment, the fear of huge distances, of a helicopter attempting that vast, hostile airspace. But he was indispensable, wasn't he? Indispensable.
Helicopters? One helicopter? Ridiculous!
Had they ever said helicopters? Had they? Well? Fool, fool, can't you remember? He pressed his hands against his temples, but he could not still the debate, could not squeeze certainty back into his head. Isolation, the sense of abandonment, welled up in him. Fool, fool — did they ever even mention helicopters? Isn't that what you supposed? Tears leaked from his squeezed-shut eyes. He slumped back against the cold wall, his hands loosely lifting and letting fall the material of the gray army blanket on which he sat. Then he let his head loll to one side, his cheek and ear and temple against the concrete, his posture magnifying his sobs. He could hear them, the great slobbering groans of a child sent to bed early. It had only been his dream, the helicopter; he had no authority for the idea whatsoever. It was Tuesday morning, and they would not come, not now. Cars, trucks, trains, would be too slow now… the moment was past when they would come.
He wailed loudly. He heard the noise magnified against the wall, almost through the concrete. They would not come. How could he ever have believed it?
He heard the noise he was making. Sobbing again now.
Heard—
The corridor on the other side of the wall was like a whispering gallery.
Heard—
— whispers, shuffles, clicks; movement and conversation of small animals — rats talking and scrabbling. He lifted his feet from the floor. He swallowed a sob. What did it matter now?
Whisper, shuffle, click…?
Heard—
— them.
Feverishly wiping his wet mouth with his hand, he pressed his ear more firmly against the wall. Shuffle, click, whisper, shuffle-click, whisper, slam, click-click-click, whisper, whistle—?
He was shivering with terror, unable to believe that the sounds were as distant as they appeared. He looked wildly around for a glass — remembering something from a detective story — and saw where a tumbler had rolled away from his drunken grasp under the bunk opposite; snatched it up, his hands shivering as they clasped it. He put it against the concrete, then rubbed his ear to comfort against it. His blood pounded, magnified, and his breath rushed. He had to hold the hand that held the glass, to still its tremor.
Click, click, click, whisper-whisper-whisper, shuffle, shuffle— little rat noises out there in the dark corridors — where? How far? Slightly louder now, coming closer…? He listened, until it became irrefutable that the noises were gradually becoming louder moving in his direction. A search — of every room!
His desperation doubled him up with stomach cramps. He wanted to retch. He dropped the glass on the bunk. His mouth hung open, but the nausea was like repeated soft blows to the back of his head, clubbing him gently down into the rough gray blanket.
He did not understand how he moved to the door, not even that he had done so. He pressed his ear against it, switched off the room lights, then moved the heavy, stiff handle and turned it. He opened the door with exaggerated caution even as the blows continued to bang in his neck and head. His breathing seemed wild, uncontrolled as he looked out. He heard the whisper moving down the corridor but discerned nothing in the gloom. Then heard and distinguished footsteps clicking, some distance away, funneled indirectly to him. They were still in another corridor, beyond the T-junction. But this corridor was a dead end. If he moved, it had to be back toward the noises he could hear, toward the crackling exchanges over walkie-talkies, thin tinny voices without recognizable words. The opening and slamming of steel doors. How far down the corridor beyond the T-junction were they?
His head had cleared. The blows of his pulse had receded. He ducked back into the room, and in the darkness that did not seem to delay him, he scrabbled up his haversack, checked that the precious transponder was inside, then scraped and bundled his possessions into it. Half-wrapped sandwiches smeared margarine on the heavy boots he would need in the marshes; he felt its stickiness…
He returned to the door.
He could not hide the fact of his presence. They might be at the end of the corridor already… no, no, the noises were still too quiet — but he had to head back toward the noises! The idea stunned him into immobility in the doorway. The row of lights along the corridor's roof could be switched on at any moment, exposing him. He shuddered, then moved stiffly, like a paraplegic at painful exercise. Walking as softly as he could, moving slowly, limbs unfreezing….
Yet, however cautiously he moved, it still seemed as if he were rushing toward the noises that slid and whispered along the concrete walls. Rushing into the narrow neck of a bottle — to become an exhibit, a preserved specimen. There were patches of silence in the search when he, too, stopped, then further crackles, whispers, slams. Occasionally, the calls seemed to be louder, on the edge of comprehension, and those were the most frightening. Closer, closer — he was converging on them. The noises of boot heels sounded like pebbles dropped down a deep well.
He touched off each door, each yard of wall, hardly breathing. He felt light-headed with panic, but there was a clarity to it. The panic hurried him on, but with caution, with alert senses; his ears began to measure the weight and distance of the noises made by the search. Even as his mind whirled with terrors.
Corner. The T-junction. Which way were the noises, which way the nearest runged ladder to the surface?
Footsteps, voices — left… ladder? Ladder? Come on, come on, which way, which…? Right, right! Thank God. Relief tumbled into his mind.
He felt the skin across his shoulder blades stretch and become sensitive as he turned down the right-hand tunnel. The furry touch of asbestos against his fingertips. His hand closed convulsively on the pipes, his right foot reached out and tapped against the railway in the middle of the tunnel and withdrew swiftly, as if its motions were signaling like a telegraph key along the rail. The skin on his back and buttocks was so thin. If they heard or sensed him now, they might just open fire.
He moved, counting each footstep. The tunnel, lower and narrower than the corridor from which he had come, magnified the noises behind him. He could almost hear each time the walkie-talkies were switched from Transmit to Receive. Slamming doors were loud. Bootsteps were distinct.
Hesitantly, he looked back. — gleam. A flash like a weak, distant glimpse of lightning or the twitching aside of a curtain. Flashlights. He felt his hand hurrying beside him along the top of the asbestos-lagged pipe. He began to hear his own footsteps as loudly as the first whispers of theirs. Tiptoe, but that was foolish because the drink returned to surge in his head before being kept at bay by fear and the instinct to escape.
A shout that might have been the raising of the alarm stunned him, thrust him in the back to make him go faster, rid him of all thought except the certainty of capture if he did not reach the ladder to the surface. There was no time for any other idea. His heart pattered in his chest like a small, terrified animal.
He looked back three more times. On the third occasion he saw a flashlight's beam wash the tunnel wail before turning off, down the main silo corridor from which he had come. Toward the room where he had hidden. Where the evidence of his recent occupation waited to be discovered. Lights flickered on, then the glow came seeping out of the long corridor, illuminating two soldiers, little more than silhouettes. His foot splashed in a puddle; something skittered away from him with a squeak; nausea filled his throat — don't be sick now, not here. He blundered on for a few steps, one hand over his mouth, until the nausea subsided. Ahead of him, a barely discernible light seemed to drip from the roof of the tunnel.