Free Logan Trilogy by William F Nolan, George Clayton Johnson Page A

did precisely as Box had instructed. Leading Jess, he was threading the force field labyrinth.
    Wind chopped and cut at them on the open plain.
    To Logan the spot seemed identical with the storm-swept terrain that surrounded it. Ice flurries whipped about them as they moved: two steps forward, a step to the right…It was hopeless; Box had lied.
    They took three paces in a weaving pattern Angled right, then left. Three more steps forward, one back.
    Magic!
    They were out—standing on the warm platform.
    Hell was gone.
    They discarded the filthy pelts.
    "Can you get a mazecar?" asked Jess.
    "The Gun first," said Logan. He recovered it from a niche in the side of the platform, checked it. Five charges left: tangler, vapor, ripper, needler and homer.
    Logan pried open the back of the callbox and began to shift the terminals.
    A car came humming.
    "Where now?" the girl asked him.
    "To the Black Hills of the Dakotas," he said. "Ballard knows how to control the maze. He directs these cars as he needs them. If we want to find him we go to the source. We go to the Thinker."
     
    Chapter 6
     
    He is a violence, contained.
    He sits in front of the board.
    He has not eaten.
    He has not slept.
    Technicians avoid him, say nothing to him.
    His eyes suddenly flash to the board. Brightness there. One of the scanners has registered the presence of a runner.
    Location: South Dakota, the Black Hills.
    He feels elation.
    The hunt resumes.
    EARLY MORNING…
    When Crazy Horse Mountain was dedicated, the great mass of granite became the site of a monumental project which was to consume half a century. An Indian warrior, 563 feet high and 641
    feet long, would ride the land, carved from six million tons of Dakota stone. A mountain would become a man, towering above black-forest wilderness, dwarfing the giant heads of Rushmore.
    The sculptor was Korczak Ziolkowski, and under his direction 150,000 tons of rock would be ripped away each year to form his dream. After a decade, more than a million tons of living granite lay in rubble at the foot of the looming mountain—and the feather of the great War Chief of the Ogallala Sioux began to emerge. Obsessed by his vision, Ziolkowski ranged the continents, prying money from the pockets of the rich, the vain, the titled—which he spent on blasting powder, dynamite, cordite, tools, winches and rope.
    The work went on. Gradually the mountain sheared away. Nations threw their combined resources behind it, fired by the dramatic image of a great fighting chieftain on a wild-maned stallion.
     
    Thousands of laborers and artists toiled on the flanks of the plunging horse. Diamond drill bits and jackhammers tore at the granite heart of the mountain.
    And, with infinite slowness, the mammoth figure took its place against the Dakota sky: Tashunca-uitco. Crazy Horse. The ruthless Indian genius who directed the annihilation of Custer's Seventh on the Little Big Horn.
    The world marveled.
    On an April afternoon, three years before the project's completion, a thick-waisted laborer named Balder "Big Ed" Thag was clearing brush on the east flank of Crazy Horse. He was attracted to a cleft in the rocks by a strange, ululating sound; a wind was issuing from the interior of the mountain.
    Thag stepped to the wide opening and peered within. The wind slammed him with such force that he had to brace his legs to keep from being pushed off the slope.
    Unfortunately for Thag, it was exactly 4:27 o'clock. The banshee wind whistle abruptly stopped. There was a moment of absolute stillness. Then the wind resumed, but this time it was not blowing outward.
    The wind sucked in with irresistible force. It was Thag's misfortune that he was braced in the wrong direction. He lost his footing and toppled into the hole and fell as a stone falls down a well.
    The mountain was breathing, but Thag was not.
    Many years passed before the Crazy Horse Caverns were discovered again.
    Etched by moving water through eons of time from the limestone