Physics of the Crowbar

Sewer

The compactor drain pipe was almost too narrow for him to fit. The ribs in the pipe jostled his shoulders, rubbing painfully against the burns. It dropped him out in a shallow cesspit surrounded by natural rock; the sun was creeping up, and above him the cliff glowed pink.

He sat on the cool sand and watched the sun rise, relishing a moment when nothing was trying to kill him. Knowing he'd been left for dead, knowing the soldiers thought they'd succeeded, left him with an odd feeling of detachment. He'd failed, been caught, hauled out and thrown bodily from Black Mesa.

He could walk away.

Well, creep and crawl away, until the burns festered and killed him, or until he ran into a military perimeter.

Suicide wasn't an option. Survival required reentering the mountain, continuing the experiment, seeing it through.

There was no bad data, only bad design. If you set up the experiment correctly, you couldn't complain about what it gave you. You just kept going. Alter parameters. Change the variable. Try again. And again. And again. Graph your results. Make your prediction. Revise the setup and start again.

It'd been his life since sophomore year of undergrad, twelve years ago, when he'd discovered a physics professor who didn't care how young he was or that he didn't talk, just that he did his homework, excelled in experimentation and theory, and could keep a proper notebook.

Start again, Freeman. He got up. He walked. He killed parasites with the crowbar and inched his way painfully up a ladder, climbing with his right arm to spare the broken ribs. He crawled through rust-red ducts and dropped a painful ten feet to the cement floor of an interior space.

Inside again.

He took a hand gun off a dead guard; the guard had been scattered into a collection of bone and blue cloth, the offal of a ceiling barnacle.

The stench of acetone and benzene burned his nose. Liquid sloshed through the immense settling vats, turned by debris combs clogged with foam, disposable gloves and discarded plastic pipettes. The halls were narrow, too tall and too dark, their corrugated metal walls chipped back to show three layers of paint under a slime of condensation. Meant to shield the porous native stone should something catastrophic occur, but decades out of repair.

He worked his way gingerly around the facility and found every door securely locked. Some form of lockdown existed in this forgotten bowel, probably meant to keep prying safety officers and health inspectors out, not aliens in. But it walled him off like a medieval baffle, forcing him again into tunnels not meant for human occupants. He was crawling up the outflow tubes, a piece of reverse debris worming its way back in.

Then he reached a ledge, where liquid waste was redirected from solid waste, and saw his only way forward.

He glared at the murky brown water. At least it was tepid and not icy cold like the silo water, but it stank far worse. He did not want to get in it. The suit was compromised, he had open burns and puncture wounds, and the tank was the business end of a wastewater system serving a town-sized compound of mad scientists.

Freeman was not obsessive-compulsive but he knew people thought he was. He just had a healthy respect for laboratory safety procedures. He'd seen what got tracked around by gloved hands and had watched a colleague's sandwich crumbs ruin four months' mass spec work. And he had a pretty good idea of what went down the drains. The treatment plant was cold-war era and Black Mesa paid a lot of money to make sure environmental groups never got near it. It was the biological equivalent of the nuclear cesspit he'd already seen.