STONEHAM

Each major city area had its secondary nurseries, its Stoneham and Sunrise units; Logan had terminated a female runner once, near Stoneham, in the Angeles Complex. (“Please don’t hurt me, Sandman! I want to live. I’m only twenty-one…that isn’t really old…can’t you…”) And the homer leaving the Gun. And the girl scrabbling along the high fence, the horror in her eyes. And the homer—

Stop it!

Logan shut down the memory.

The primary nurseries were much larger, and handled most of the city infants; these outside units were designed to take up the overflow, but were complete in themselves. There was more than a good chance he’d find Sterozine at a secondary unit.

Adults had no use for the drug. It would fetch nothing on the Market, and would be a useless item to outland looters.

A good chance…

Had his mission been less critical Logan would have enjoyed the flight to Stoneham. The sky was a serene blue, the green land rich and rolling beneath him—and the paravane was sound and responsive, thanks to his work on it over the past seven days since he and Jess had found the machine, abandoned outside the city-ruins. It had been damaged in the city’s fall, had fluttered down, brokenbladed, to kill its pilot. Logan’s mechanical skills, honed in his years on Argos, had quickly restored it to perfect working order.

Fuel wasn’t a problem, since the craft’s solar-charged unit would provide unlimited range, and Logan was fully confident that he would encounter no malfunction in flight.

But thoughts of Jaq kept darkening his mind, canceling out the natural joys of soaring above the land…

Then he sighted the heavy mass of bulked gray stone rising from a hill to his left. Stoneham.

Logan cut primepower on the aft blade, swinging the paravane at a sharp arc downward and to the left, clearing the nursery’s microwire fence. He gentled the craft to a smooth touchdown in the central court area, killed the blades, slid free of the controls.

Incredible silence. His landing had set off no alarm systems; no automated guards rushed toward him; no robotic defense devices were activated. He remembered running with Jess from just such a nursery as this in the Dakotas—through a chaos of sirens and bells—fighting his way free of machines and closing gates and menacing robots.

This time, nothing. He was free to walk inside.

Yet Logan felt uneasy, prowling the long, dust-silent corridors, searching for the Medroom. He’d hated growing up in this sterile environment, denied all outside human contact for the first seven years of his life. His talk puppet had been his only real friend (“I’ll never forget you, Loge…never forget you!”) and his dream of becoming a Sandman had sustained him. The pride he’d felt in the word in those days! Sandman! The psyc machines had brainwashed him thoroughly from birth. If it had not been for Jess…

Suddenly an old memory clicked into place for him: Playroom…Delivery-room…Cribroom…

Medroom. That was the way Autogoverness had taken him whenever he got sick, rolling along the hall with him, clucking at him in her soulless metal voice, telling him he’d soon feel fine, just fine.

Logan found the Playroom, entered—and instantly fell into a defensive crouch. Something was alive inside the room, flickering at him, away from him, at him again.

Logan smiled. In entering, he’d simply dislodged one of the vibroballs, and it was dancing its selfenergized puzzle pattern from ceiling to floor. He reached out, caught and boxed it, moved quickly on.

The Deliveryroom. Logan stared with fresh awe at the large Hourglass dominating the chamber; it had always fascinated him. Inside: the glittering time crystals ready for implant in the palm of each new infant brought to Nursery. Logan closed his right fist around his own dead crystal, remembering the sick shock which had run through his body when his timeflower had begun to blink red-black… red-black…red-black…telling him he had just twenty-four hours before Last-day.

Damn the Thinker and the horrors it had inflicted!

He turned to enter the Cribroom.

Logan was used to death; he’d dispatched it to others, had seen his friends die in Sleepshops, had faced massed death on Argos—but what he found here, in this dank, silent room, stunned him. In each of the small, bullet-shaped cribs lining the four walls lay a tiny skeleton. Here were the delicate bones of a hundred babies who had died when the Thinker died, oxygen cut off, vital fluids denied them. Their small white skulls mocked Logan with dark, eyeless sockets as he moved past them toward the med supplies.

He found another corpse in the Medroom. An Autogoverness lay on her side, her dozen jointed arms frozen, rust already gathering in thin, red lines along her seams. In her metal fingers she grasped vials and bottles. Apparently she’d gone for the medicine in a vain effort to revive the dying infants, unaware of the fact that nothing she could do would save them. Logan stepped over her, tense and nervous.

Would he find Sterozine here?

Hurriedly, he ripped open panels, pored over shelved items, discarding, sifting, searching…At least the Medroom had not been stripped. If a secondary nursery carried Sterozine a supply should be here.

Teromitcone…Hydrafane…Ritlan-C…Eztem-F…

But no Sterozine.

Only a primary nursery carried the drug Jaq needed.

Logan knew he had no choice now.

He would face the Scavengers.