The doors slid apart easily at his touch and he was careful to close them behind him. A flashlight led him to Candlewaif s office. He wasn’t surprised to find her cabinetry locked, though protected by far simpler devices than the fiberoptic system that guarded the entrance:
Quicksearch brought the file he wanted to life on the single terminal screen. He ran through active clients before locating the inactive file, soon found Lisa Tambor’s name. There was a Manhattan address, which he entered into his wrist terminal. Then he cleaned up, shut down the terminal, and rose to depart. It had taken less than half an hour from the time he’d entered the tower lobby. All one needed was a plan of action, a few modest skills, and a little luck.
Consequently it was a terrible shock to see the two uniforms quietly waiting for him in the reception area. One held a stun pistol loosely in his right hand while the other rested in the same chair where Eric had so recently thumbed through glossy magazines.
“Didn’t sound like you were doing any damage,” the woman in the chair said, “so we figured we’d wait for you.”
“Look, I can explain.”
“Everyone who breaks in can explain.” The man gestured with the pistol. “Let’s go downstairs. You’d be wasting your breath explaining to us.”
A stunned Eric stood motionless while the woman frisked him quickly and professionally. She hesitated a moment, eyeing his tools admiringly, but leaving them in his coat. She didn’t want to disturb the evidence.
As they left, Eric tried to penetrate the secret of the doors, wondering what he could have overlooked. He was positive he’d deactivated the alarm.
The woman behind him noticed his gaze, smiled thinly. “Oh, you doused the doors all right. A slick piece of work, that. What you missed was the carpet.” Eric looked over his shoulder but saw no bulges beneath the shag.
“Pressure-sensitive,” she went on, “which is why I don’t mind mentioning it. You can’t avoid it even if you know it’s there. Step inside and the alarm goes off down-stairs. To bypass it you’d have to remove the whole carpet, because the wires don’t run underneath. They’re part of the weave.”
Sure enough, a last backward glance revealed the occasional silver thread wending its way among the green and blue.
“Carpet plugs into the walls,” the guard explained, evidently enjoying his discomfort. “All the Harlem Towers use it. What I can’t figure out is what you expected to steal in there.”
“Never mind,” said her partner, ’Let the psych cops work that one out.”
Now that the initial shock of his capture had wom off, Eric felt the first stirrings of panic. His excuse for breaking and entering wouldn’t sway the judge’s sentence. Discovery of his altered credit/identity card would be enough to ruin his career and buy him a long jail term.
They were heading for the elevators. Over the center lift a lightbar glowed brightly. Its companions were dark. With only seconds remaining in which to save himself he reacted more from instinct than thought.
His wild swing took the guard in front of him completely by surprise. Eric didn’t look very threatening, and his cowed attitude was genuine enough. The stun pistol went flying. A shove sent the woman on her backside even as she was raising her own weapon to fire.
Then he was in the elevator cab, jabbing frantically at the buttons. There was no response.
The woman sounded tired as she called to him. “You’re wasting your time, sleek. Did you think we’d leave the lift free for you to use? We’re the only ones who can get you down.”
Frantically he thumbed the CLOSE DOOR button. The opposing panels promptly slid shut. He held the switch down while he poked dozens of floor numbers.
There was an insistent knocking from outside, hands slapping metal. Faint voices reached him. They were angry now, not exasperated.
“Open up, sleek. You’re only wasting our time, and yours.”
He pressed 80 and was rewarded with a whirr as the elevator started to rise. The block only extended to floors below the elevator, and why not? There was no escape in the other direction.
He could hear the voices of his pursuers fading beneath the cab. “Come down, sleek! It’s going to go harder on you!”
He ignored them. He could get out on any floor between seventy-one and eighty, but he couldn’t go down. Surely they’d post a guard on every stairwell, now that it was known there was an intruder loose in the tower. The same would go for every elevator, including the service lifts.
Doors parted to admit him to the top floor, then closed. The lift whined as the cab was called downward. Soon the floor would be swarming with security personnel as the alert was passed through the complex.
He still had his tools. He could break into another office, maybe one without a pressure-sensitive carpet, but that would only delay his capture. A quick search revealed a fire and service stairwell. He went up instead of down. There was a very simple lock at the top of the double flight of stairs.
The night air was shockingly cool. Off to the south he could see the office towers of Hoboken, to the east the dark strip that was Long Island Sound. Powerful heating and cooling equipment throbbed behind him. Close by was the dark shaft of Harlem Tower Six and further off, Harlem Tower Two. He stood there trying to recover his wind and wits until he heard voices from the stairway below.
“He’s got to be up here somewhere … we’ve checked the whole damn floor … everything’s tight …”
More than two of them now. That was to be expected.
“Don’t take any chances with this guy … might be unbalanced … watch yourselves …”
This time they’d stun first and carry him down. He started searching his aerie, not knowing what else to do, postponing the inevitable end. The end of everything. His career, his future, his chance to see Lisa Tambor. Everything.
A faint voice shouted, “There he is!” A crackling sound, a tingle in his right shoulder that felt like his foot going to sleep, and then he was running around the outer serviceway.
Two figures suddenly appeared out of the darkness in front of him. Both knelt, holding up hands and pistols.
“Hold it right there, mister. Game-time’s over.”
He darted between two massive cooling units. Footsteps and voices sounded on the far side, moving to cut him off. He moved sideways between the machinery, the steady hum a pounding inside his head.
He couldn’t let them catch him. Not now, not when he was so close, so near to his goal. Lisa Tambor’s face hung in front of his eyes, not a quick glimpse now but a hundred different poses urging him on, the vision enhanced and multiplied by the holos Candlewaif had shown him in her office. He would meet her. Tambor, he would, and nothing and nobody was going to stop him.
“He’s up this way!” Two stun beams hummed behind him, missing. Then a voice, surprised, screaming, “Don’t do it!”
The barrier rimming the top of the tower was less than six feet high. Running as fast as he was able he jumped. His right foot landed on the top of the barrier and his leg muscles spasmed as he kicked off. Several screams reached him dimly together with an equal number of loud gasps.
Space. He was floating through space, hands flailing, legs kicking. Eighty stories, a thousand feet below, was the garden that swirled around the Harlem Complex.
Then he was falling, falling toward the ground, his body arcing over until he could see the trees and lights far below.
