Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  The strip of park by the river’s edge was an island, in the city but not of it, like the river itself, which a dozen yards away glinted with ripples and chuckled faintly against the stones of its margin. Here he could rest for a few minutes, try to think of a way out.

  He didn’t know just what time it was, but he knew it was late. Not too late yet, however. There was still time . . .

  Time to make his way-out to a safe distance—barring accidents. But he no longer believed in accidents.

  Instead—he knew. What had been a prescient fear was truth. He cowered, seeing the city around him, whole, immense, living—the true Leviathan.

  For 300 years the city had been growing. Growth—the elemental law of life. Like a cancer budding from a few wild cells, lodged half by chance at the meeting of river and sea, proliferating, thrusting tentacles far up the valley and for miles along the hollows of the hills, eating deeper and deeper into the earth on which it rested.

  As it grew, it drew nourishment from a hundred, a thousand miles of hinterland; for it the land yielded up its fatness and the forests were mown like grain, and men and animals bred also to feed its ever-increasing hunger. The long fingers of its piers thrust out into the ocean to snare the ships from all the continents.

  And as it fed, it voided its wastes into the sea, and breathed its poisons into the air, and grew fouler as it grew more mighty.

  It developed by degrees a central nervous system of strung wires and buried cables, a circulatory system with pumps and reservoirs, an excretory system. It evolved from an invertebrate enormity of wild growth to a higher creature having the tangible attributes that go with the subjective concepts of will and purpose and consciousness. . . .

  Its consciousness he could not imagine; its ultimate purposes he could not guess. But he felt the pain of flesh bruised against the city’s stones, and realized shivering how the city must hate him. No longer with the lordly impersonal contempt which he, like so many, had received as his birthright. It could no longer be indifferent to the vermin who were its victims. Now, for the first time in its 300 years, it was threatened in its life.

  And vengefully it had sought his life. He had not escaped. The city was very powerful and very cunning. It still surrounded him, waiting; it knew he couldn’t stay here. Whichever way he looked, the lights stared and winked at him.

  His thoughts raced. There was still time . . .

  Time to surrender, to go back. He could hasten back to the locked room (but he had thrown away the key and he would have to get help to break down the door), he could reach it in time to stop the process going on there, as only he in all the city knew how. If he did that, he was sure, there would be no more accidents. The things that had happened had been designed to break his spirit, to drive him back.

  Suddenly he sat bolt upright, dazzled by insight. Then he laughed—not mirthfully, but hysterically, viciously, turning his head slowly to survey the lights around him.

  “But you don’t dare kill me!” he said aloud. “I’m the only one that could still save you. You can try to scare me into going back—but you can’t kill me, because if I die your last hope is gone!”

  He got to his feet unsteadily, bracing himself against the tree-trunk. But he felt strength flowing back into him, the strength of his hate.

  “Try and-stop me!” he said between his teeth. “Try!”

  He forged straight ahead, walking and dog-trotting by turns. He no longer glanced up or down. Crossing a broad avenue against the lights, he laughed wildly when the fender of a swerving truck missed him by inches. He knew that it had to miss.

  He laughed again when the bars of a railroad crossing descended in his face, and jogged chuckling across the tracks under the glaring eye of the locomotive—confident that, if he were not in time to escape it otherwise, the train would be derailed before it hit him.

  A sign ahead said DANGER, and he laughed loudly and did not turn aside.

  Along this suburban street were floodlights, and men working under them—a rush job, obviously, and a job whose supreme irony only he could appreciate. They were wrecking a row of ugly old houses, preparing ground for some new construction that would never be built. At this distance from Point Zero downtown, they were out of the radius of total destruction, but even here very few dwellings would remain standing after the blast and the fires. . . . He hurried past, ignoring the lights and the workmen, and broke into a trot again when someone shouted, “Hey!”

  Then a rumbling roar began, and he looked up stunned to see a wall of masonry leaning above him, breaking apart as it fell. It seemed to fall with torturing slowness, but there was no time to avoid it.

  Consciousness hadn’t left him, but he was unable to move, and aware of much pain. There seemed to be no bones broken, but a ton of stone prisoned his legs, and another mass lay wedged across his chest, not bearing fully on him, but bowing his body backward across a heavy wooden beam.

  Voices, faces, lights floated in chaos around him. Hands plucked futilely at the wood and stone.

  “Christ, he didn’t pay no attention—”

  “Don’t stand there, get a jack!”

  “Watch it, if that was to shift a little—”

  He hung there in the glare of the floodlights, pinioned as if by the fingers of a gigantic hand. Those fingers needed only to twitch, the mass of stone above to move only an inch or two, and his spine would snap.

  When they tried to free him with pry bars, he screamed, and they drew back.

  “Wait.”

  “Who put in the call to the emergency squad?”

  A siren “moaned to a stop. More lights. Another siren approaching. Dizzily he glimpsed uniforms, the insignia of men who served the city.

  He fought for breath, and shrieked, “Fools! You’re corpuscles! That’s all you are—corpuscles!”

  “Poor guy’s delirious.”

  “Stand back, now, stand back.”

  He shrieked again, “I know, I know what it wants, but I won’t—”

  “Take it easy, fellow, we’ll—”

  “I won’t—” The stone above moved by a fraction of an inch and his voice snapped like a string. His eyes stared past the faces and the lights, and he groaned, “No, no. I’ll tell. I’ll tell!”

  “Take it easy now—”

  “Fools!” he gasped. And in short choking sentences, breath rattling between, he told them. Everything; what was in the locked basement room, and how to find it, and how to dismantle it without exploding it.

  There was still barely time.

  With dazed looks they heard. “May be out of his head, all right. . . . But you can’t take a chance with something like that. Got the address? Got all of it?”

  Nearby a voice spoke crisply, rapidly, answered startled questions from a radio speaker. Far off, in the city’s threatened heart, sirens sprang to life one by one and raced crying through the night.

  “Come on, we’ve still got a job here. Bring that jack—”

  But there was a grating sound, the ponderous mass of masonry began to shift downward. One inch, two inches, three—Those around threw their strength against the stone, but uselessly. The trapped man screamed in a terrible high voice and was silent.

  The men looked helplessly into one another’s white faces.

  The city was merciless.

  WORLD OF THE DRONE

  Dworn knew that if his machine failed him in battle he would die. For men fought each other viciously, with no bond of brotherhood, in this—

  THE beetle woke from a dreamless sleep, yawned, stretched cramped limbs and smiled to himself. In the west the sunset’s last glow faded. Stars sprang out in the clear desert sky, dimmed only by the white moon that rose full and brilliant above the eastern horizon.

  Methodically, suppressing impatience, he went through every evening’s ritual of waking. He checked his instruments, scanned the mirrors which gave him a broad view of moonlit desert to his left. To the right he could see nothing, for his little armored
machine lay half-buried, burrowed deep into the sheltering flank of a great dune; all day long it had escaped the notice of prowling diurnal machines of prey. He listened, too, for any sound of danger which his amplifiers might pick up from near or far.

  The motor, idling as it had all day while its master slept, responded to testing with a smooth, almost noiseless surge of power. The instruments were in order; there was plenty of water in the condenser, and though his food supply was low that shouldn’t matter—before tonight was done he would be once more among his people.

  Only the fuel gauge brought an impatient frown to his face. It was menacingly near the empty mark—which meant he would have to spend time foraging before he could continue his journey. Well . . . no help for it. He opened the throttle.

  The beetle’s name was Dworn, and he was twenty-one years old. The flesh and blood of him, that is. The rest, the steel-armored shell, the wheels and engine and hydraulic power-system, the electric sensory equipment—all of which was to his mind as much part of his identity as his own skin, muscles, eyes and ears—was only five years old.

  Dworn’s face, under his sleep-tousled thatch of blond hair, was boyish. But there were hard lines of decision there, which the last months had left. . . . Tonight by the reckoning of his people, he was still a youth; but when tomorrow dawned, the testing of his wanderyear would be behind him, and he would be adult, a warrior of the beetle horde.

  Sand spilled from the beetle’s dull-black carapace as it surged from its hiding-place. It drifted, its motor only a murmur, along the shoulder of the dune. Dworn eyed his offending fuel gauge darkly; he would very much have liked to be on his way at top speed, toward the year’s-end rendezvous of the horde under the shadow of the Barrier.

  He began cruising slowly, at random, across the rolling moonlit waste of wind-built dunes, watching for spoor.

  He spied, and swerved automatically to avoid, the cunningly concealed pit of a sand devil, strategically placed in a hollow of the ground. Cautiously Dworn circled back for a second look. The conical pit was partly fallen in, unrepaired; the devil was obviously gone.

  The burrowing machine would, Dworn knew, have had fuel and other supplies somewhere in its deep lair, buried beneath the drifted sand where it spent its life breathing through a tube to the surface and waiting for unwary passers-by to skid into its trap. But Dworn regretfully concluded that it would not be worth while digging on the chance that whatever had done away with the devil had not rifled its stores. . . . He swung the beetle’s nose about and accelerated again.

  On the next rise, he paused to inspect the track of a pill-bug; but to his practiced eye it was quickly evident that the trail was too old, blowing sand had already blurred the mark of heels, and the bug probably was many miles away by now.

  A mile farther on, luck smiled on him at last. He crossed the fresh and well-marked trail of a caterpillar—deeply indented tread-marks, meandering across the dunes.

  HE began following the spoor, still slowly, so as not to lose it or to run upon its maker unawares. A caterpillar was a lumbering monster of which he had no fear, but it was much bigger than a beetle, and could be dangerous when cornered. Dworn had no wish to corner it; the caterpillar itself was not the object of his stalking, but one of its supply caches which according to caterpillar custom it would have hidden at various places within its range.

  The trail led him uphill, into a region cut by washes—dry now, since the rainy season was past—and by ridges that rose like naked vertebrae from the sea of sand that engulfed the valley floor.

  Several times Dworn saw places where the caterpillar had halted, backed and filled, shoved piles of earth and rocks together or scraped patches of ground clear with its great shovel. But the beetle knew his prey’s habits of old, and he passed by these spots without a second glance, aware that this conspicuous activity was no more than a ruse to deceive predators like himself. If Dworn hadn’t known that trick, and many others used by the various non-predatory machine species which manufactured food and fuel by photosynthesis, he would have been unfit to be a beetle—and he would never have lived through the wanderyear which weeded out the unfit according to the beetle people’s stern immemorial custom.

  At last he came to a stop on a rocky hillside, where the tracks were faint and indistinct. Carefully scanning the ground downslope, he saw that his instinct had not misled him—the caterpillar had turned aside at this place and had afterward returned to its original trail, backing and dragging its digging-blade to obliterate the traces of its side excursion.

  Dworn grinned, feeling the stirring of the hunter’s excitement that never failed to move him, even on such a prosaic foraging expedition as this. He sent the beetle bumping down the slope.

  The blurred trail led into the sandy bed of a wash at the foot of the hill, and along that easily-traveled way for a quarter mile. Then the stream made a sharp bend, undercutting a promontory on the left and creating a high bank of earth and soft white rock. Dworn saw that a section of the bank had collapsed and slid into the gully. That was no accident; the mark where a great blade had sheared into the overhang was plain to read, even if it had not been for the scuffed over vestiges of caterpillar tracks round about.

  Dworn halted and listened intently, his amplifier turned all the way up. No sound broke the stillness, and the black moon-shadows within range of his vision did not stir.

  He nosed the beetle carefully up to the heap. He had no equipment for moving those tons of soil and rock, but that was no matter. He twisted a knob on the control panel, a shutter in the beetle’s forward cowling snapped open and a telescoping drill thrust from its housing, chattered briefly and took hold, while the engine’s pulse strengthened to take up the load.

  Twice Dworn abandoned fruitless borings and tried a different spot. On the third try, at almost full extension the drill-point screeched suddenly on metal and then as suddenly met no more resistance. Dworn switched on the pump, and quickly turned it off again; he swung the overhead hatch open, and—pausing to listen warily once more—clambered out onto the cowling, in the cold night air, to open the sample tap at the base of the drill and sniff the colorless fluid that trickled from it.

  It gave off the potent odor of good fuel, and Dworn nodded to himself, not regretting his caution though in this case it had not been needed. But—clever caterpillars had been known to bury canisters of water in their caches, poison for the unsuspecting.

  THE pump throbbed again; there was the satisfying gurgle of fuel flowing into almost-empty tanks. Dworn leaned back, seizing the opportunity to relax for a moment in preparation for the strenuous journey still before him.

  But he didn’t fail to snap alert when just as the gauge trembled near the full mark, he heard pebbles rattling on the hillside above. Immediately thereupon he became aware of the grind of steel on stone and the rumbling of an imperfectly muffled engine.

  In one smooth rapid motion Dworn switched off the pump, and spun the drill control. As the mechanism telescoped back into place, he gunned his engine, and the beetle shot backward and spun round to face the oncoming noise.

  A squarish black silhouette loomed high on the slope above the overhanging bank, which rose so steeply that a stone loosened by turning treads bounded with a clang off the beetle’s armor in the wash below. The caterpillar halted momentarily, engine grumbling to take in the scene.

  Dworn didn’t linger to learn its reaction at spying a looter. A snap shot from his turret gun exploded directly in front of the other machine, throwing up a cloud of dust and—he hoped—confusing its crew. And the beetle was fleeing around the bend in the stream bed, keeping close to the high bank.

  A score of yards past the turning, intuition of danger made Dworn swerve sharply. An instant later, the ground blew up almost in his face—the bend had brought him into view, under the guns of the enemy above.

  He wrenched the beetle around in a skidding turn and raced back for the bend where the overhang afforded shelter. Another shell an
d another crashed into places he had just left, and then he was safe—for the moment.

  But it was an uncomfortable spot. The caterpillar rumbling wrathfully on the slope above him, couldn’t see him as long as he hugged the bank, undercut by the water that flowed here in the rainy season; but, by the same token, he couldn’t make a dash for safety without running the gauntlet of a murderous fire in the all-too-narrow way the stream bed offered. In open country, he would not have hesitated to count on his ability to outmaneuver and outshoot the caterpillar . . . but here he was neatly trapped.

  And it was nerve-racking to be unable to see what the enemy was about. It seemed to have halted, judging the situation just as he had been doing. Now, though, he heard its engine speed up again, and the grinding of its treads came unmistakably closer. His ears strained to gauge its advance as it came lurching down the slope, till it sounded only a few feet away and Dworn braced himself to shoot fast and straight if it started coming down over the bank. Then it paused again, and sat idling, hoping no doubt that he would panic and show himself.

  He didn’t. The caterpillar’s engine raced up once more and began to labor under a heavy load. There was an increasing clatter of falling stones. Then Dworn remembered the great digging-blade it carried, and realized what it was going to try.

  Ten feet to his right the bank began giving way. Tons of rubble thundered into the gully. Dworn winced and moved away as far as he dared. He heard the caterpillar back and turn, then it snarled with effort once more and another section of the overhang caved in with a grinding roar.

  Inside minutes at this rate, it would either have driven him from his refuge or buried him alive. Now it came rumbling forward for the third time; rocks showered from the rim directly above his head, and he saw the bank begin to tremble.

  DWORN braced himself. Even as the wall of earth and rock began leaning outward above him, he gave his engine full throttle. The wheels spun for one sickening instant, then the little machine lunged forward from beneath the fresh landslide and was climbing, bucking and slewing, up the slope of loose soil created by the ones before.