The Missing Man (v4.1) Read Online Free PDF

should go up
there,” he said, hoping Ahmed would misunderstand and think George was
being called by a hunch.
    “What do you feel?” Ahmed looked at
him keenly. The doors shut and the elevator rose rapidly, leaving them behind
on the ground.
    “What I feel is, we shouldn’t have let that
elevator go without us. We’ve had it, old buddy. It’s been nice knowing you. I
didn’t expect to die young.”
    “Snap out of it.” Ahmed clicked his
fingers under George’s nose. “You’re talking for somebody else. Hold that
feeling separate from your thinking. It’s not your kind of feeling. George
Sanford isn’t afraid, ever. You don’t think like that.”
    “Yes I do,” George said sadly. He
heard the elevator doors rumble open far overhead. Somewhere above people had
escaped to the top of the ocean instead of the bottom. A dock? An island?
Somewhere fresh winds were blowing across ocean waves.
    “Locate that feeling of doom,” Ahmed
said. “Maybe our mad bomber is a suicider and plans to go down with the
ship. Shut your eyes. Where are you in your head?”
    “On top, on an island in the
daylight,” George said sadly, looking at his imagination of sand and
seagulls. “It’s too late, Ahmed. We’re dead.” A few new people
arrived and lined up behind him waiting for the elevator. The sound of its
descent began far above. People approached through the park from the direction
of the railway station, and George remembered that there had been fenced-in
crowds waiting for trains, waiting to get out. Maybe some people had grown
impatient and wanted to get to fresh air. The crowd behind him grew denser and
began to push. The elevator doors opened in front of George.
    “Get in, George,” said Ahmed, and
pushed his elbow. “We’re going to the top.”
    “Thanks.” George got on. They were
pushed to the back of the cage and the doors shut. The elevator rose with
knee-pressing speed. Over the heads of the people before him George saw a
widening vision of the undersea city, small buildings circling a central park,
dimly and artistically lit by green and blue spotlights on trees and vines,
with a rippling effect in the light like seaweed and underwater waves. Paths
and roads were lit with bead chains of golden sodium lights. On the other side
of the park the railroad station, squares of soft yellow light, fenced in by
lacework metal walls. Many people around it. Too many. Dense crowds. The paths
across the park were moving with people approaching the elevator shaft.
    The elevator reached the top of the dome and
went through into a tube of darkness. For a few moments they rose through the
darkness and then they felt the elevator slow and stop. The doors rumbled open
and the people pressed out, hurried through a glass door and down a staircase,
and were gone from the top floor.
    George looked around. There was the sky and
ocean spaces he had dreamed of, but the sky was cloudy, the ocean was gray, and
he was looking at them through thick glass. The island viewing platform was
arranged in a series of giant glass steps, and the elevator had opened and let
them into the top step, a glass room that looked out in all directions through
thick glass, giving a clear view of the-horizon, the glass rooms below, and the
little motorboats that circled the docks of an artificial island.
    “How’s your hunch? What do you feel’?”
Ahmed snapped out, looking around alertly, weight on the balls of his feet,
ready to spring at some mad bomber that he expected George to locate.
    “The air is faked. I can’t breathe
it,” George said, breathing noisily through his mouth. He felt like
crying. This was not the escape he had dreamed of. The feeling of doom
persisted and grew worse.
    “It’s the same air and the same pressure as
down undersea in the dome,” Ahmed said impatiently. “They keep the
pressure high so people can come here from under without going through air
locks. They can look, take pictures and go back down. It smells