Forty feet long if it was an inch. Twelve feet wide, maybe fifteen feet high. Brutish. Ugly. It would have been right at home in the age of the dinosaurs. Lower in the back than in front. Five-foot-high treads rather than shuttle blade. Cruised along the ground, not over it. Weapons systems. Curious gun barrels without bores in them. Twin rocket launchers, a slim missile locked in each. Steel plating. Solid. He nodded approvingly; it should get them through anything.
He didn't know why he was so sure that he needed a tank for the world which lay beyond the pyramid. It was a gut feeling, and he hadn't a shred of evidence to back it up. But he knew that if he ignored it, if he walked out of here without protection, he would be committing suidice.
Nevertheless, as dangerous as it might be, he had to leave. Henry Galing gave him no choice.
A sharp whistling noise sliced through the garage, and the public address system hissed to life. “Joel… Joel, wherever you are, please stop and listen to me.”
It was Henry Galing.
“Go to hell,” Joel said.
He got into the cab with Allison and pulled the heavy door shut, locked it. Galing's voice was now an indecipherable murmur. Joel got Allison into a sitting position, strapped her in place, then hooked into his own safety harness.
As he studied the complex banks of controls in front of him, he decided she would be better off asleep, and he hoped she remained unconscious longer than Galing had done. He had been driven to the wall and was acting precipitously; he had no way of knowing what he was getting them into. Trouble. Definitely trouble of some sort. But he couldn't say of
Galing's voice continued to drone senselessly beyond the walls of the tank.
With surprisingly little trial and error, he started the big tank's engines, which were powered by a miniature fusion plant. The controls were quite familiar. In some other age, back beyond the life support pod, he had operated this machine or one very much like it.
He put it in gear.
The tread clanked on the concrete floor.
“Here we go,” he said aloud, to himself.
The concrete pillars which supported the roof of the garage were marked by phosphorescent red arrows that pointed toward the exit. He drove the tank out of its niche and into the main aisle, turned left and followed the arrows.
At first he handled the tank clumsily. Taking a corner in the aisle, he misjudged his distances and crushed a small fan shuttle parked at the end of one row. The giant tread ground inexorably over the vehicle, tore it to pieces, mashed it flat, and kicked it out behind. After that, he was more careful.
The roar of the huge engines thundered from wall to wall, came back from the concrete ceiling like a wave from the beach.
A the back of the garage he located and boarded a stone ramp that led gradually upwards. Thirty yards along the ramp, the walls closed in and the ceiling lowered. The corners disappeared, and he was in a smooth steel tube, a tunnel.
When he glanced at the view-screen which brought a closed-circuit picture of the road behind, he saw that a sphincter door had cycled out of the walls back there. He was sealed off from the garage.
A trap?
He brought the tank to a full stop and thought about it. In a confined space like this, unable to turn and maneuver, his great big war machine wasn't much good to him. Galing and his crew — if they were the ones who had sealed him off, could enter the tube at their leisure, climb onto the tank, and eventually cut him out of it. If he used his missiles or other artillery at such close range, he would surely kill them — but, bottled in the tunnel as he was, he might also kill himself and Allison. Then he realized that, if he used the tank as a battering ram, he could probably buckle that door enough to get back into the garage. He wasn't imprisoned after all.
What then? If not a trap, it must be a precaution. He recalled the pressure hatch that led to the observation room and that thick gray window… Yes, this was most likely a precaution. The tunnel was like an anti- contamination chamber in a laboratory, separating experimental quarters from public rooms.
But what was outside that might contaminate the pyramid?
He supposed the only way to find out was to go on, and he put the tank in gear again. He followed the rising corridor until, at last, he came to a second sphincter door. His fingers darting swiftly over the solid-state light controls on the drive panel, he brought the tank to a full stop once more.
A computer display screen lighted above the exit:
WATT FOR REPETITIVE SERIES
CHECK ON REAR DOORS.
He waited, though impatiently.
FIRST SERIES COMPLETE.
WAITING…
SECOND SERIES COMPLETE.
WAITING…
Two minutes later, twenty checks had been run on the lock and seal of the door behind him. Only then was the computer satisfied.
PROCEED.
The sphincter door raised, let him through, and whirled shut again. He brought the tank to a halt just outside the tunnel mouth and, stunned, looked at the world he had been so long in reaching.
XXIII
The sky looked like the bottom of a spittoon. Ugly gray-brown masses of roiling vapors and darker, heavier clouds like clots of mucous scudded down the throat of the world. He could see no blue sky at all. Not a single bird graced the heavens; and no sun shone. It was, he thought, the vault of hell.
He did not faint.
He simply sat and stared, too numbed to feel the full emotional jolt of it.
The land was also gray and dead. It contained no trees. No grass or flowers. The only growing things were towering fungoid forms that reached from the ground like the rotting fingers of dead giants who were determined to push out of their graves. The earth was all dressed in rags of fungus and moss that resembled — though this was a much more virulent form of it — that wriggling monstrosity which he had encountered in the storm drains during his escape from the dungeon. Soupy brown fog drifted between these towers of fungus, like an intelligent entity seeking something unspeakable. There was no other movement than the fog. No animals scampered through the vegetation; no breeze stirred a leaf, for there was neither breeze nor leaf. There were no cities, no houses, no people. Just these endless vistas of death…
He had known that he must come out here. He had known there was something he must see, something into which he must plunge in the manner of a child leaping blindly into a pool in order to sink or swim. The scene was too devastating, the truth behind it too horrible for him to absorb it a piece at a time; absorbing one bit, he would have backed quickly away from the rest of the knowledge, a reluctant Adam with a rotten apple. He'd needed to face it all at once or not at all. And now, weeping softly, he saw it, and he remembered…
This was the pitiful world which man had inherited when the planet's ecological systems began to break down in the late 1990s and on into the Twenty-first Century. In those Last Days, the government had constructed the inverted pyramid deep beneath the flatlands of Utah, a last bastion of mankind where more than two thousand
