Ryan leaned back in his desk chair, seemed to consider it. Then he shook his head. “No. If I did that, we’d be no better than the Reds. No, we’ll get evidence. But first I want to know what this plasmid thing is all about. My instinct tells me it’s something that could change Rapture’s marketplace.”
Sullivan nodded, ran a hand through his hair, licking his lips as if he were thinking of bringing up another issue. Then he shrugged. “I’m on it, sir.”
He headed out the door, a man on a mission.
“How are those leakage problems I’ve been hearing about, Bill?” Ryan asked, though the glazed look in his eyes suggested his thoughts were roving elsewhere.
“Constant maintenance, guv. The bloody sea doesn’t just sit quiet out there—we push it out of our way, and it pushes right back. Always throwin’ its weight around—sheer water pressure, currents, changing temperature, ice formation, sea creatures a-scrapin’ and squeezin’. Barnacles and starfish and seaworms. Had to send scraping crews out twice the last month.”
“Yes. Some of the men spend so much time in deep-sea diving suits they’re beginning to feel like part of them.” Ryan smiled to himself.
Bill remembered the experimental subject he’d seen in the labs. Not something he wanted to think about.
Ryan tossed the pencil on the desk, tented his fingers, and scowled broodingly. “Fontaine is shaping up to be my great rival here. He can only sharpen me. It is like fuel for the fire of my talent. But I cannot let him come to
It was right depressing, visiting the old maintenance workers’ colony. Bill McDonagh didn’t like coming here. It made him feel obscurely guilty as he walked along from the Metro passage to the back of the pawnshop at the corner, picking his way past moraines of trash. Bill felt responsible for Rapture—he sure hadn’t planned on any slums.
Someone had written “Welcome to Pauper’s Drop” in red across one wall in dripping paint. Below it, a long, tatty row of sullen indigents squatted against the metal bulkhead, shivering, some of them in carapaces of cardboard. The heating duct for this area was blocked, and the few merchants down here were reluctant to pay the Ryan Industries service fee for getting them unblocked. Bill had come down to do it in his spare time. Not that he would tell Ryan that. If Ryan knew he was doing charity work…
Bill had gotten Roland Wallace to help—each swearing the other to secrecy—and Wallace promised he’d bring an electrician along. But neither Wallace nor his wire jockey was here now.
Bill was beginning to feel nervous about being here alone. The surly unemployed along the wall watched his every step. He heard them muttering as he went along. One of them said, “She’s watching him too…”
He was relieved to see Roland Wallace at the corner. With Wallace was a bearded man in overalls, carrying a toolbox—a tall, gaunt man with an aquiline profile.
“Oi!” Bill called, his breath steaming in the chill. “Wallace!” Wallace saw him and waved. Bill hurried to him. “I’m bloody well glad to see you, mate,” Bill said, keeping his voice low. “These ragamuffins over ’ere’ve been giving me the gimlet eye. Half-expecting a knock in the head.”
Wallace nodded, looking past him at the ill-kempt men and women along the wall, many with bottles in hand. “Drinking too, a lot of them. No rules against making your own in Rapture—someone’s been selling cheap absinthe to this bunch, I hear. Three people died from bad hooch, and two went blind.” He cleared his throat. “Well, come on—the best way into the duct is in the back of the pawnshop. Glad to get the heat working here—it’s damn cold…”
The electrician said nothing, though it seemed to Bill that the man was muttering to himself under his breath, his hawkish, deep-set eyes darting this way and that. Bill noticed thick red blotches on the man’s forehead.
They stepped over small piles of trash and went around a quite large one to get to the back of the pawnshop. “There’s no trash pickup here either?” Bill asked.
“We can’t afford it.”
“You live down here too?”
“Why you think I’m doing this job free?” the electrician said, clipping the words. His tone dripped venom. “Need the heat. Can’t get into the ducts without you Ryan Industries types along. Not if I don’t want the constables after me.”
Bill nodded and thumped on the back door of the pawnshop.
“Who is it?” called a gruff voice from inside.
“Bill McDonagh! Looking for Arno Deukmajian! You got my Jet Postal?”
“Yeah, yeah, come on in.” The man who opened the brass-sheathed door looked as gruff as his voice sounded. He was a squat-faced man in a rumpled suit with a scar through his lower lip. His arms were too long for his suit jacket. His hair was bristly short. “Yeah, I’m Arno Deukmajian. This here’s my shop. Come in, come in… if you have to.”
The three men entered the dusty, dimly lit back room where there was barely room to move about. Piled floor to ceiling were appliances, radios, lady’s shoes, gowns, boxes of guns, boxes of watches, silver picture frames, anything that could be hocked. “I’ve cleared off the trapdoor,” Deukmajian said. “This place was built right over it.”
Building over the trapdoor might’ve been a violation of some building regulation up on the surface, Bill figured, but in Rapture there were almost no building regulations.
Wallace had the key. He knelt on the metal floor and opened the trapdoor, as the electrician held an electric torch for him. The light slanted down to reveal a grimy iron shaft and a rusty ladder.
A sickening smell rose up from the shaft. “Must be something dead down there,” Bill said. He climbed down as the electrician held the light. It got a little colder each step he descended. The other two joined him at the bottom, and they ducked to enter a tunnel, the electrician going first to light the way. The reek of death was growing stronger. They had to move along hunched over—the tunnel was about eight inches too low to stand up in. “If they’re going to make it big enough for a short man, why can’t they make it big enough for a tall man,” the electrician grumbled. “It ain’t that much more.”
Just thirty echoing steps in, where the tunnel narrowed to a large pipe, they found the source of the smell—and the cause of the obstruction. A body was jammed in the heating duct. It appeared to be the partly mummified body of a boy—perhaps twelve or thirteen—lying facedown in the vent pipe. He wore ragged clothing, and his black hair was matted with old dried blood. A large fan blade, pitted with rust, had sliced partway through his neck…
“Oh Jesus fookin’ Christ,” Bill muttered. “Poor little blighter.”
Wallace was gagging. It took him a few moments to get his composure. Bill had seen enough death in the war—and in the building of Rapture—and he was almost inured to it. Almost. Still, he felt a deep queasiness looking at the shriveled hands of the child, clutching at the tunnel wall—as if frozen in a last attempt at reaching out to life.
“I reckon,” Bill said, his voice a bit hoarse, “the kid was exploring… and the fan’s not on all the time. It was off, and he tried to crawl past—and that’s when it came on.”
The electrician nodded. “Yeah. But he wasn’t exploring. Didn’t have any place to live. One of the orphans. Nobody took him in, so… he came down into the tunnels to sleep, where he’d be safe. Maybe got lost.”
“The orphans?” Bill asked. “Quite a few, are there?”
“There’s some, hereabout. People come here, work, then they finish a project and the bosses lay ’em off. No more work. But they’re not allowed to leave Rapture either. So they start to fighting over food and such—kill one another. And now with these plasmids… some people don’t know how to handle ’em. Got to know how. Surely do. If you don’t—you might get a little carried away. Leaves some orphans…”
