“Come with me.” said the hellkin. “There is better ground.”
Huldi, seeing the cat emerge from the cloud of mist and flies which obscured the area beyond the dendrite, had crouched with her knife, ready to fight. But when the hellkin spoke she relaxed immediately.
Iorga came forward, shouldering his bow. “I’ll help you with the boy,” he said.
Nita, meanwhile, was recovering her knife.
CHAPTER 18
Randal Harkanter came back from a short walk in the wilderness with his gun slung over his shoulder and a big sweat-stained scowl behind his face-mask.
His select company had set up camp less than a hundred yards away from the door set in the metal wall, through which Carl Magner had come to his death. They had not found his body, although a request had filtered down from somewhere in the hierarchy of authority that they should locate and recover it, if possible. They had found what appeared to be an unmarked grave, but there was no one among them willing to take it upon himself to investigate by digging. No one wanted to get his hands dirty. The Overworld was a clean world, and its citizens had clean habits. With the possible exception of Harkanter, who had, over the years, cultivated an uncaring obliviousness to his remarkable propensity for copious sweating, the delegated representatives of the Euchronian spirit of scientific adventure were anxious to be as tentative as possible in their dealings with the Underworld. An inquiring mind was one thing—a filthy body was another. The Euchronian scientists tended to believe in mens sana in—and only in—corpore sano.
Harkanter alone had been prepared to undertake a march into the wilderness, and he had been overruled by the prudent majority. Investigation was a slow process—one did not rush headlong into it. It was not an attitude that Harkanter had much sympathy with, but he was well-known for attitudes at odds with the spirit of the Euchronian Movement.
As Harkanter unstrapped his gun there were a few faintly polite murmurs of interest with regard to his observations.
“Filth,” he said, fixing his stare on the most convenient listener, who happened to be Felipe Rath. “Filthy, disease-ridden, vermin-haunted swamp. What did you expect?”
“Filthy, disease-ridden, vermin-haunted swamp,” said Rath calmly. “What else?” Rath was squatting on an extensive groundsheet, surrounded by a multitude of boxes, trying to assemble equipment. His progress was slow and unhurried.
“Quite so,” said Harkanter. “I always believed the Underworld to be a worldwide sewer. Now that we’re here we find it to be a worldwide sewer. Very good. So what?”
“It would be rather ambitious,” Rath pointed out, “to decide on the whole nature of the Underworld on the basis of what we see from here. No doubt what we see is representative, in some way, but a world is a big place. It can include a wide range of environments. Our world above, remember, has been shaped and Planned. This one hasn’t. We mustn’t expect anything like the same level of comparability between geographically separated regions. On the platform there are no deserts, and even the forests don’t run wild. Here it’s all wild. The old world you know about never really existed even then. The slick myth always outlives any semblance of the reality. You thought of this trip in terms of a safari. You’re the big black hunter and we’re the white bearers. But that won’t work here—not even as a portable fantasy. You can act out your daydreams up above—the world is geared for it. But down here it’s still real.”
Harkanter turned away from the patiently working scientist. Rath had delivered his speech more or less absent-mindedly, with the bulk of his attention fixed on what he was doing. He was unaware of the poisonous expression on Harkanter’s face, although the mask did not hide it.
“I was asked to lead this party,” said Harkanter, half-turning in order to direct his comments back to Rath. “I was asked to come down here and find the people.”
“We’ll find them,” said Rath. “We’ll find them with this, if they’re here to be found.” He lifted up the assembly on which he was working. It looked like a toy, and in a sense it was—it would have been nonfunctional in the upper world except as an amusement. It was a robot bird armed with a camera. The idea was to send it out to map the region photographically. Its basic scheme of operation would be by remote control, but it carried enough electronic gear and programming capacity to allow it to fly around obstructions and avoid other flying creatures.
Harkanter retired to his tent to breathe some sterilized air and drink some water. When he came back out, some time later, Rath was still sitting in the same place, still working on the same device.
“Why don’t you do that inside?” Harkanter growled.
“No room,” said Rath. “Full up.” His head gestured very slightly toward the cluster of hemispherical plastic tents, wherein other members of the expedition prepared their various endeavors. Rath was by no means the only one to have been forced to do his work in the open, but most of the others were working with rather more extensive apparatus.
“You could catch fever, sitting here in the open,” said Harkanter, with dour relish. “You’re not wearing gloves.”
“I’ve heard of picking up diseases,” said Rath, “but I don’t think one does it in quite that way.”
Harkanter gathered the moisture in his mouth, but remembered in time that he could not spit without lifting his mask. Privately, he looked forward to the wholly imaginary moment when Rath would be ravaged by all manner of Hell-born ailments because of exposing his bare flesh to the air, but he said nothing. There was no point—not now.
“You’re taking your time with that,” he commented.
“Time has to be taken,” answered Rath philosophically. “If you get into the habit of saving it, you get out of the habit of spending it. It needs the time. What’s worrying you?”
Rath knew perfectly well what was worrying Harkanter. Of all the people in the encampment, he was the only one with nothing to do. For the moment, he was the spare man. In time, he would come into his own—his willingness and determination to act, and his ability to make and force decisions would be needed soon. The scientists would be only too ready to collect trivial data till the sky fell, if Harkanter were not there to make them follow up their initial findings with some action.
When Harkanter didn’t answer the rhetorical question, Rath continued. “Why don’t you take Vicente out into the bush? He’s got no intricate equipment to fiddle with. He probably wants to get busy collecting. Better take him out now, before the enthusiasm wears off.”
“Nobody’s stopping him,” said Harkanter.
“He won’t go out alone.”
“I’m not his nursemaid.”
Rath shrugged.
“It’ll never get off the ground,” said Harkanter, meaning Rath’s electronic bird.
Rath felt it better to ignore him. One of the others—Gregor Zuvara—observed that Harkanter was inconveniencing Rath, and came over to tap the tall Negro on the shoulder.
“I’ve been looking at the grave,” he said.
“You’re not going to dig him up!”
“It’s not important,” said Zuvara. “It might be Magner. It probably is. That’s not what I wanted to point out. Never mind the identity of the corpse—what we ought to be wondering is the identity of the one who buried him.”
The suggestion had the desired effect. It obviously had not occurred to Harkanter that it takes two to make a funeral.
“The grave is fresh,” said Zuvara. “Whoever dug it can’t be far away. Unless they’ve gone for good, they must know we’re here. We haven’t been very discreet. What do you think?”
“We’d better mount a guard,” said Harkanter.
“That’s your province,” said the other man. “But take it easy. Don’t start handing out hours of duty arbitrarily. Try to fit in with our work schedule, if you can.”
Harkanter nodded. Satisfied that the big man now had something to occupy his time and his talents, Zuvara left him. Rath looked up and gave a brief nod of recognitio
n. He only hoped that the mysterious gravediggers were themselves discreet. In a pitched battle, the Overworlders would win without much effort, and probably without loss, but it would be messy and unpleasant.
Rath preferred things neat and tidy.
CHAPTER 19
Later in the day—or what would have been the day had Harkanter’s expedition been in the Overworld—Vicente Soron did manage to extend his hunt for specimens beyond the bounds of the encampment. Harkanter, now convinced of the need for vigilance, and his sour mood behind him, agreed to accompany him. Soron was determined to clutter himself up with an embarrassment of equipment and containers, but at Harkanter’s insistence he also managed to accommodate a gun somewhere about his person. This, too, was not without its purpose in terms of collecting equipment, however, as it was a small compressed-air device which fired anesthetic needles. Soron considered it only reasonable that anything which attacked them should thereby qualify for the specimen collection.
Harkanter led the way into the Waste, with a confident stride that seemed likely to scatter all the wildlife from his path before Soron even got a glimpse of it, but in the meantime the collector was content to stick to the obvious, leaving the fugitive for more subtle methods at another time. Nor did he try to make Harkanter slow down or pause—it would be less burdensome to do the collecting on the way back, and it was always sensible to use the eyes well before beginning to use the hands.
Harkanter was a man of direct personality, and he had no prejudice against getting his clothing wet. He therefore strode forward purposefully, ignoring the lie of the land, and stepping knee-deep in swamp water as often as not. None of the water could seep through to his skin—he was well-protected. Soron was much shorter, and the water came up proportionally higher so far as he was concerned. In addition, it was not simply his skin that he had to worry about—his pockets were full and there were specimen bottles decked around his waist in a wide belt. Thus he was forced to pay rather more attention to precisely where he put his feet, and sometimes he walked around areas that Harkanter plunged straight into. Though he covered a greater distance, he was not noticeably slower and did not get particularly tired, precisely because he avoided the circumstances which would slow him down and sap his strength.
As time went by, Soron began to feel a certain impatience, considering that he had come quite far enough for his purposes. Harkanter, however, was unwilling to listen to his mild hints. It was not that the big man was particularly keen to make a meal of the walk in the wilderness, nor that he had anything in particular against Soron, but he could not quite help himself overdoing things, simply to make the little man suffer a little for his inconveniences.
When Soron’s complaints became rather more insistent, however, Harkanter stopped for a rest, sitting down and resting his rifle in the cleft of a dendrite. He then showed no inclination to move for some length of time while Soron methodically sorted out whole plants and pieces of plants, marking the bottles and making notes in cryptic ultrashorthand on his sleeves.
“It’s easier than notebooks,” he explained, “and more convenient than voice records.”
“Sure,” said Harkanter. “If you run out of space you can use the back of my tunic.”
Soron consented to smile, without making any remark of his own to cap the comment. He might find it convenient to take the big man at his word, but there was no need to say so.
“Can you bring down some of the animals when we get nearer to the camp?” Soron asked him. “Birds and bats? They won’t be much use as specimens but I’d like to have a look at them quickly.”
Harkanter hefted the rifle in one hand. “Wouldn’t be much left of anything I hit with this,” he said.
“What about the handgun?”
“You want me to hit birds with a pistol? In the dark?”
Soron smiled again. “I thought you could do it,” he said. “I don’t know anything about guns.”
“I’ll try,” Harkanter promised, sounding less than confident.
“Thanks,” said Soron.
Harkanter watched the little man working away, with infinite patience and complete confidence. A typical Euchronian, he thought. All method and endurance. Like a machine. All action under complete control. He did not think of his own manner and methods as at all mechanical, but in his way, he was as much a Euchronian as the scientist. Their differences showed up clearly, but what they had in common was not so obvious to either of them. It was because they had so much in common and taken for granted that they were so aware of the differences. But method and patience were the Euchronian attributes—not because of Euchronian philosophy but because of eleven thousand years of the Euchronian Plan. What Harkanter thought of as his qualities of imagination and creativity were really only his uneasiness and dissatisfaction with the quality of his life. He did not feel at home in himself or in the world, but he embroidered the vague and incoherent feeling into a network of ideas and assumptions which made what was simply inconvenient into something very complex and enigmatic. The explanations which he invented to account for himself were involved and detailed, but not really relevant. His was a common enough problem, although it manifested itself in different ways in different people.
By the time that Soron was ready to make his way back to camp, Harkanter was also keen to get back. But Soron did not want to return at the same pace—this time he wanted to collect as he went. Thus, when Harkanter fell, as a matter of course, into his long, loping stride, he quickly outdistanced his companion, and had to stop to wait for him. Every time the scientist caught up, the same thing happened again within minutes. It did not take long for Harkanter’s patience to wear thin. Instead of stopping to wait for his campanion he began to circle back on himself every time he got far enough ahead. His path therefore became a series of loops running alongside Soron’s more or less straight line. The more impatient Harkanter got, the bigger the loops became and the more purposeful his stride.
Inevitably, he took one careless stride too many.
He sank waist-deep in a patch of glistening mud onto which he had walked without considering its implications. It was smooth and dead flat, flecked with algal growths but not covered. It looked like a semiliquid, if Harkanter had only paused to look. But he had not, and now he was in it, stuck firm. As he struggled, he sank further. It took him a few seconds to realize that he was in real trouble. He had placed altogether too much confidence in his protective clothing.
“Vicente!” he howled.
Soron was out of sight, but when he heard the cry he came running. Not too fast, however. When he saw what had happened to the big man he stopped running and became very careful indeed about the placement of his feet.
“Come on,” said Harkanter. “Help me out.”
“I’ll help you out,” said Soron, in a poor imitation of a soothing tone, “but let’s make sure that you don’t help me in.”
He advanced with exaggerated caution.
“I’m sinking,” said Harkanter. His voice was quite even, neither loud nor anxious. In fact, he felt somewhat at a loss. He just did not know how to react. He had had no practice.
Soron came as close as he dared. When he extended a toe to test the ground before him it gave slightly, and he lost confidence in it completely. Harkanter considered that he was being too conservative, but he realized fully enough that if they both got stuck there was no one else to come running.
The big man twisted his body, and reached out toward the nearest clump of vegetation, hoping to get a handhold. He could touch the soft green tissues of the fronds, but could not grip anything solid. Virtually all the plant life in the Waste was only facultatively photosynthetic, deriving most of its energy from alternative processes, and the highly specialized structural modifications associated with leaf-bearing were simply not basic to the Underworld way of life. Tough stems and branches existed, but they were by no means everywhere to hand. Soron also looked around for something long and tough, but there was nothing imme
diately apparent in the vicinity.
“Hold out the gun,” said the scientist. “I’ll try to pull you back this way.”
“It’s no use,” said Harkanter, comparing his size with that of the little man. But he extended the barrel of the rifle nevertheless. Soron gripped the gunsight at the extremity of the barrel, and began to pull. It surprised neither man that he made very little impression.
“You’re too heavy,” complained Soron.
Harkanter perceived at this point that he had stopped sinking. The mudpool had a bottom. The problem was simply to make some progress toward extricating himself.
“I can’t come backwards,” said the big man. “Come around the other side of the patch and I’ll try to come out forwards.”
Soron picked his way carefully round the glistening spot of colored mud, and then began shedding some of the load which was inconveniencing his movements. He seemed—to Harkanter—to take a long time about it. Then Harkanter extended the rifle again, and began to haul his legs forward through the sticky fluid. Soron helped as much as he could by pulling. Harkanter flopped forward, scraping for a handhold to draw himself out more directly.
Slowly, they began to make progress. As Harkanter became more aware of the fact that he was able to move, he became more confident of the fact that he could get out, and this helped him to make more progress. The mud made tiny sucking noises, like smacking lips, but slowly it yielded its glutinous clutch.
Then Soron let go of the gun, and tumbled backwards, leaving Harkanter completely off balance and floundering. The big man cursed volubly, but as he splashed in the mud and twisted to save himself from falling horizontally, he saw what Soron had seen, behind him.
Something had emerged from a clump of high-stemmed growths a few yards away, and it stood looking at him with large pink eyes.
Harkanter fought to bring the gun to bear, but it was no use. It had flopped into the mud when Soron had released it, and the barrel was oozing the stuff. Even if the gun would fire, it was more likely to blow Harkanter’s head off than kill the creature.
A Vision of Hell: The Realms of Tartarus, Book Two Page 7