by John Brunner
Conrad dodged out of sight again, heart thumping. That was a killer! The nearest he had ever come before to one of the things in life was when the whole town was called out to reinforce the guard—and now here he was, alone. What was he to do? The sensible thing was to return to the fields and call up an armed party to deal with it. But it would be just his luck if the thing awoke while he was gone and made off without a trace.
With his bow, he might have risked shooting into that bulging white eye—at ten feet he could hardly miss. But to stab it with an arrow … He dismissed the idea.
And then he thought of the sacks of ashes.
He was surprising himself all the time now, he reflected as he stole back up among the rocks with the soft sack on his shoulder. It couldn’t be bravery. It must be sheer desperation driving him.
He poised the sack on the rock overhanging the creature. A tug on the drawstring would open its neck and let down a cascade of blinding dust. The next part would be more difficult—it involved getting one of the pottery vats up here too.
He managed it somehow, though his knee hurt abominably, and several times he almost lost his footing. Each time he waited in horror for the noise to wake the thing and bring it over the rim of the rock, yowling and ready to kill.
He got the vat on the rock, sideways so it would roll, and steadied it with one hand. He closed his eyes and wished, opened them again, sighted, and let go.
The barrel-like vat struck fair on the domed head, making a soft revolting noise like a fist going into mud. The thing came awake instantly, shooting its limbs out in all directions, and the vat smashed to fragments as a convulsion tossed it aside like a pebble. The strength it had! Conrad suddenly felt he had been insane to attempt this. Mouth dry, he opened the sack of ash.
Then he fled.
At the foot of the slope he snatched up the wooden bar he used to tilt the full soap-vats. Brandishing it grimly, he waited to confront the maddened beast. It was fully ten minutes before he plucked up courage to go back and look.
He found the thing had lived only a few moments after the vat fell on its skull; it lay half-buried in the pile of ash, and its sucker-like mouth was choking-full of grey dust as he had intended. Runnels of brownish ichor mingled with splinters of black bone in the ruins of its head.
Conrad felt he wanted to sing. But more than that, he wanted people to know what he had done. He scrambled down to the beast’s level and tried to drag it away by its tail, but it was much too heavy for him with his bad leg.
Well … there was no chance of it waking up and going away now. It was bound to be there when he brought someone back to look at it. And even if he had to whip them here, he was going to bring the townsfolk to admire his action. He was sick of their sneers. Then afterwards he could have the hide tanned and give it to Idris, and her mother might be a little less grumpy …
His thoughts running blithely ahead of him, Conrad started back towards the town.
A cry rang out from the leading man of the party, and Stadham’s mind snapped back from consideration of this area as a possible site for their long-time camp to more immediate matters.
“What is it, Berrow?” he shouted.
“Don’t know!” the soldier called back. “My horse shied at something—and there’s a foul stink around somewhere!”
“Close in on Berrow!” Stadham ordered his other companions. “Take it slow and keep alert!”
The soldiers nodded grimly and set their guns on their saddle-bows as they urged their steeds up the rocky slope in front. They were all nervy, as Stadham knew. They’d located two or three possible camp-sites—all with drawbacks—and Stadham had decided to work through the area at least until noon before settling for one or other of them. In the men’s view, nowhere could be a good camp-site this close to the barrenland, and they didn’t see there was much to choose between the possibilities.
Berrow was trying to calm his horse as it attempted to back down-slope; he could coax it no further. When Stadham found his own mount balking in the same way, he swung to the ground and threw his reins to his nearest companion. Gun ready, he strode up the rise past Berrow, and came in a few moments to a place where shadow fell between two rocks.
He started and gave an oath, slapping his gun to his shoulder. But before he fired, he realised it was pointless. He gestured to Berrow to approach him.
“Here’s what scared your horse—a dead thing!”
The men moved closer, two or three of them dismounting because their horses also shied, and stood soberly regarding the carcase. “They breed ’em out there, don’t they?” one of them remarked in a solemn tone.
“But this one’s dead, like the one that attacked Ampier!” Stadham reminded them sharply. They exchanged glances; it was clear they didn’t like the beast much better for all that.
Stadham came to a decision. “You two!” he snapped, addressing the men whose horses had come closest without taking fright. “Get this thing on one of your mounts! I want to show it off when the army gets here and prove that the things from the barrenland aren’t invulnerable.”
The soldiers hesitated. One of them muttered something, and Stadham rounded on him.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, lieutenant.” The man’s face was pasty-pale. He got down from his horse, but looked at the carcass for a long time before bringing himself to lift it with his comrades’ help and set it on his saddle.
Thus burdened, they moved away.
And, half an hour later, Conrad stood sick and bewildered before a group of impatient, hostile meant-to-be-witnesses, wondering if the universe was conspiring against him. Because if the ground hadn’t opened and swallowed the thing, what else could possibly have happened to the proof of his single-handed triumph?
IX
Night-long, the people of the Station had waited anxiously in the dark and the cold, flashing their handlights occasionally to make sure a lurking shadow was simply that—a shadow.
The dawn washed, shell-pink, over the underside of morning clouds, and they stretched cramped limbs, wiped eyes stinging with sleeplessness and the dust that blew off the apparently infinite barrenness around them, and went to count the cost.
Still not fully recovered from the narrowness of the chance that had prevented anyone else knowing she had been overdue at her post—except Jasper, and he wasn’t likely to boast about that—Nestamay picked a path for herself through the eternal twilight of the main Station dome, bearing a big canister of hot broth and a bag half-filled with chunks of dry bread.
She had already called on three or four of the working groups busy assessing the damage. It hadn’t taken their reactions, but only the evidence of her own eyes, to tell her the bitter truth. Last night’s misadventure had set them back months of painstaking, backbreaking work.
She rounded the side of some large, inexplicable complex of ancient machinery dented in now by a blind charge of the intruding thing, and came on another working party in the centre of which her grandfather was standing. She stopped, knowing he would be angry if she tried to interrupt what he was saying for anything as trivial as food and drink.
Resting the heavy canister, still more than a one-arm burden, on a convenient support, she stared at the time-worn face of the grizzled old man, heard his harsh words echo away under the deformed curve of the roof.
“Now I’ve had reports already from Clagny,” Grandfather stated. “He went on directly after dawn, and lost the thing’s trail a couple of miles out, among the East Brokes. It might be lairing up there to lick its wounds. If it is, the chances are against it returning to the same side of the Station, but in favour of it coming back sooner or later—the current count for returns runs about six to four runaways. If we’re lucky, it may pick up the Eastigo Creek and work its way downstream, in which case we’ve seen the last of it. Nestamay!”
The girl gave a start. “Y-yes, Grandfather?” she said in a thin voice.
“How do I know it probably won’t foll
ow the creek?”
Nestamay gulped. Grandfather was forever playing this kind of trick on her—shooting unexpected questions in public and demanding an answer that would shame the hearers. He was obsessively proud of the fact that his family was the only one in living memory to add significantly to the traditional stock of Station lore. Sometimes Nestamay wondered if it had been as a by-product of that well-founded pride that her father, whom she barely remembered, had been persuaded to undertake his foolhardy journey away from the Station and off into the vast unknown—the journey from which he had never returned.
For a long moment she stood confused. Then a stir of memory came to her aid. Something acrid about a scent which she had detected drifting into the air of the office late last night, when the thing had been driven away …
“The smell!” she said, suddenly positive she was correct. “When the heatbeams seared it, the smell it gave off didn’t resemble the smell of a water-seeking creature!”
Grandfather looked surprised for an instant. “Very good,” he said. “Anybody else spot that?” His fierce, bloodshot eyes swept the members of the working party. “No? Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves? Here’s my granddaughter, only a few weeks past adulthood, knows it as well as I do, and you lot with all your combined years of experience have to be told! She’s perfectly right—the stink that comes off when a heatbeam hits a water-seeker is heavier, damper, a little sweetish at the back of the throat. The smell we got last night was acrid, dry, and eye-watering.”
He paused. Nestamay, relying on the momentary favour she was enjoying, caught his attention and indicated the refreshments she was bringing; a curt nod gave her permission to distribute them, and she proceeded to do so while he resumed his diatribe.
One or two of the men, dipping their hands in the bag of bread, looked dismayed as they felt its hard stale texture, and shot accusing glances at Nestamay as though to blame her for its condition. A little resentfully, she glared at them.
“Any idea how much power we used last night? There wasn’t anything left for the ovens this morning!”
That didn’t make them any more pleased, of course. Glancing skyward through the rents in the Station dome, they could see the cloudy sky which meant the recharging of the power storage cells would proceed extremely slowly today. Everything at the Station was so interlocked, Nestamay reflected; when a dangerous thing hatched, power had to be set aside for heatbeams or activating electrofences, which meant food became short, or had to be eaten cold rather than hot, clothing due for recycling had to wait no matter how dirty and torn it had become, and at night the people had to huddle together against the chill …
She served the last of the working party with his cup of broth and hunk of bread, and prepared to move on. Once again Grandfather interrupted her.
“Nestamay, don’t forget I’ll want to see you this morning. You’re due for a test on last week’s instruction!”
Nestamay nodded. She’d hoped Grandfather might be too preoccupied with the emergency to remember, for she was very tired now. Nevertheless, it was no use railing against events. This was the course the world had taken, and she knew of no way to change things for the better.
That was her last call on this side of the Station. From here to the other side, she would have to go circuitously. Only cautious, fully-instructed working parties dared venture into the central area under the monster dome, because it was there that the—the trouble, the problem, the danger, whatever one chose to call it—the central mystery, perhaps, was located.
On her way past, Nestamay checked and stared at the enigmatic bulk of the inaccessible zone. It was changed, and yet unchanged. It had been part of her life since she was born, and still it retained its aura of alienness.
Twisted now and sagging, the arch of the dome spanned a good three miles of ground. Huge gashes, five or six times a man’s height, gave limited access to its interior. In the north was the least inhospitable section—some thousands of square yards were safe even for children, and it was there that the machinery on which the precarious life of the people depended was situated. There was food—ovens for bread, cauldrons for broth, vast hydroponic trays yielding fruit and vegetables from which spores of alien plants had to be scrupulously excluded. The north, too, was the side from which it was relatively safe to pillage scrap, to build or repair the miserable one-room shacks which served as their homes. Every now and again a working party managed to push back the limits of the safe area, either permanently—which was rare—or long enough at any rate to salvage some useful odds and ends.
Just what was hidden in the rank heart of the dome, no one could do more than guess.
Over the rusting structure creepers swarmed, bearing black sticky fruits that, if left to themselves, burst after a few months and sowed spores over everything—clinging spores, able to use anything organic as food. Nestamay had heard from Grandfather about unwary people who were struck by the spores in the old days, and who could not even be buried but had to be cremated with heatbeams lest another plant spring from the grave.
Pullulating fungi, a sickly orange in colour, grew on the branches of the creeper. Flowers, some of them of incredible beauty—and incredibly deadly, because the scent they gave off dulled the senses and laid one open to attack by swinging plant-tentacles—shone out here and there. Great toothed pseudo-leaves sprawled over the ground below, ready to close like a shroud on any trespasser …
Nestamay’s heart turned over, for at this very moment one of those pseudo-leaves opened in sight of her, with a grunting, scratching sound, exposing to view a disgustingly slimy object which at first she thought might be human remains.
A second look reassured her. It was only a thing which the plant had found indigestible after much trying. Now it was a shapeless jellied mass which the pseudo-leaf was attempting to displace over its edge, by humping up and forcing it to roll. The spectacle nauseated her. She went quickly on her way.
Every so often, the idea came from a hothead like jasper that what was needed was to march straight into the central area under the dome, heatbeams blazing, and clear out the entire fetid jungle. Every time, Grandfather or someone else vetoed the idea instantly.
In some incomprehensible way, their existence depended on leaving that central area alone—driving back the vegetation, killing any things that emerged from it, but otherwise enduring its hateful presence. Something was inside there, behind the sporulating fruits, the fungi and the pseudo-leaves, from which they derived their food, clothing, warmth and other basic necessities. Nestamay had pestered Grandfather over and over when she was a child with questions about this strange hidden master of their fate, and the answers had been confusing.
It wasn’t a person, but it could think. It wasn’t a machine, but it was out of order. It was practically everlasting, but a single touch from a heatbeam might destroy it. It provided their food, but it also hatched out things to plague them in the night. To Nestamay as a little girl it had seemed rather like Grandfather on a vaster scale—capricious, often bad-tempered for no discernible reason, but a kind of rock in the turmoil of their lives, to which one must turn for support because there was nothing else available.
Now she was nominally an adult, she recognised that Grandfather must one day die, and when that happened it would be up to her and others of her age-group to apply the knowledge Grandfather had passed on from his father and his father’s father. And that knowledge was designed to overcome the arbitrary power of the not-a-person thinking there in the stinking green swelter under the dome.
There was no stability in this life, except the bareness of the desert ringing the Station. That didn’t change. It was disturbed occasionally, by footprints. But the wind wiped them in the night, and the next day the desert was the same as before.
For that reason, when Nestamay turned from contemplating the hideous tangle of the miniature jungle beneath the dome, she looked long at the unalterable desert—just as inhospitable, but not actively hostile. It was
there, and it was a fact, and it was.
Oddly comforted, she hurried to complete her rounds with the canister of broth and the bag of bread.
It was at the next call but one that she found Jasper, cursing and sweating over the removal of a large pile of scrap metal which the terrified thing had overset last night as it howled away from the torture of the electrofence. Tightening her lips, Nestamay left him till last of the party to receive his rations. He noticed the fact; he was meant to.
“Not looking very cheerful this morning, Nestamay!” he taunted. “Grandfather been scolding you—hey?”
“No,” Nestamay contradicted with a toss of her head. “As a matter of fact, he’s been praising me for a change. No thanks to you, you—!”
“Ho-o-o-o!” Jasper raised his eyebrows. “I suppose it’s my fault now, is it? I’m responsible for hatching out things, and I do it during your watch to make trouble for you!”
“You do your best to make trouble for me, and you can’t deny it!” Nestamay retorted. “Suppose I’d been taken in by your wheedling last night, and skipped my watch—what would have happened then?”
Jasper laughed. It wasn’t a friendly sound. He said, “You were the one supposed to be on watch, my dear, not me. I didn’t know. After all, you didn’t tell me that was where you were going!”
The barefaced audacity of the lie shocked Nestamay into paleness. Stamping her foot, she snapped, “Jasper, you make me sick to my guts!”
“Too bad,” Jasper said with a shrug, turning away. “A time will come when I make you literally sick for a much better reason—because my kid’s kicking you in the belly. And you don’t have much choice in the matter, do you? Not even if you go weeping to your precious grandfather. He doesn’t think tears are constructive.”
Unconstructive tears blurred Nestamay’s sight as she moved away. For, like it or not, what Jasper said was undeniable.