by Jerry
Patricia spoke to Nona, invisible to Johnny as she spoke even though she sat only two feet away from him.
“Is it dark for you, too, Nona?”
“No,” Nona answered from the blackness in front of them. “It’s only like a cloudy day would be for—others. I can lead us all the way, all through the night.”
“Freedomist,” Home’s grim voice came through the darkness. “The rescue party will consist of armed guards. I gave the following order over the transmitter: they will shoot you and the girl on sight in the morning if Felder and I are not with you. Remember that.”
His tone changed to the impersonally commanding one he used with Nona. “We will go in single file. You will lead us, avoiding as many obstacles as possible. There will be no attempt to lead us astray or into danger. At the first suspicion of such you will be deactivated.”
“I only want to lead us out of danger,” she said.
“That is a desire it would be very wise for you to retain. Now, lead the way. You other two—in line!”
Hours had gone by when they reached a low summit from which Nona could see the country behind them for the first time. Home was breathing very heavily by then.
“I can see the Diggers, a whole band of them,” she said. “They’re following our trail even in the rain.”
And then, in a queer tone, “Something gray is following just behind us!”
“What did it look like?” Johnny asked. Her answer sent a little chill up his back. “I think it was a fog weasel.”
“What is a fog weasel?” the voice of Felder demanded.
“They’re like an Earth weasel,” Lancer answered, “but they’re seven feet long and outweigh a man. They attack in the dark and tear your throat open so they can drink the blood.”
“What”—there was the sound of Felder swallowing—“what is the best defense against them?”
“A light to see them by,” he said, and found a little amusement in the way Felder’s pencil light immediately sent its feeble beam into the sea of darkness behind them.
“Lead us on,” Home said to Nona, although he was still breathing heavily. “Be certain to keep careful watch behind us.”
They walked steadily for another hour. Home could be heard stumbling more and more frequently over the unseen stones and uneven patches of ground, his breath coming harder. When they came to the second low summit he ordered, in a voice made almost unrecognizable by panting:
“We’ll have to stop and rest.”
Nona climbed a little higher and reported:
“The Diggers are still coming. They’re gaining all the time.”
Felder spoke suspiciously. “Then why do we never hear them?”
Johnny answered his question. “They don’t want to alarm us until they sight us. Then you’ll hear them scream again.” He turned toward Nona. “Have you seen the fog weasel again?”
“Yes. It’s still following us, coming along behind us among the brush and trees.”
Home had not yet spoken; the only sound from him was the slow diminishing of his labored breathing. It was apparent that he could not much longer keep up the pace necessary to outdistance the Diggers and the fact would already be grimly obvious to him.
“Nona?”
It was Home who spoke, and Johnny jerked up his head in surprise. It was the first time Home had ever addressed her by name, as he would a human being, and the first time he had ever spoken to her with friendliness in his tone.
“Yes?” she asked.
“How long until the Diggers reached us if we should remain stopped, Nona?”
“They would be here in about half an hour.”
“Is there any place we might hide from them until daylight?”
“There is nothing but rolling hills here.”
“Farther on?” It was like a hopeful question. “A ledge for us to climb upon, perhaps, where they couldn’t reach us.”
“We’ll soon have to go up a canyon. Maybe there will be something there.”
“Watch for it,” he said. “You must find it for us, Nona.”
It was a little less than an hour later that Home called another halt for rest. That time his breathing was such a frantic gasping that Johnny knew he had forced himself to the limit. Felder’s light, grown very weak, swung in a circle that showed them to be in a narrow clearing among high and thickly growing brush.
“We’ve stopped in a death trap,” Felder said to Home. “That thing could be in there now, no more than ten feet away.”
“I—know.” Home’s answer came jerkily between his frantic gasping for breath. “Can’t—go farther—now.”
Felder seated himself as far as possible from the brush on either side and turned out his light. Home’s panting slowed as the minutes went by until, at last, he could speak again.
When he did so it was a single word, spoken questioningly, pleadingly, into the darkness:
“Nona?”
“Yes?” her voice answered.
“My heart. I must rest awhile before I go on, Nona. The weasel could attack so quickly. I—we must trust you to see for us and guard us from it.”
“They psycho-probed me at the hospital and you know I never willingly let harm come to anyone in my life,” she answered.
“Tonight our lives are in your hands as your life was in our hands that night, Nona. We did more than not let you die that night. We gave you near-immortality. You remember what we did for you, don’t you, Nona?”
Patricia twisted beside Johnny, words hot and choking in her throat, but Nona’s voice came soft and gentle:
“I remember. I’ll never forget what you did for me.”
Johnny tried to find the brassy undertone he had heard in the hospital but it was not there. It made him wonder again if he knew her, if he could ever really know her.
“You will be rewarded for what you do tonight,” Home said. “Anything you may want will be yours, Nona, when we get back to Venus City. And your husband and sister will be with us. There will be no execution in the morning if I am there.”
Patricia twisted in Lancer’s grip again, unable any longer to restrain herself.
“He lies, Nona! He’s scared, he’s afraid you’ll leave him behind. He’s scared, and all his promises are lies he won’t keep!”
But Nona’s reply was to Home, comforting and reassuring.
“Rest now, and trust me to watch over you. Then we can go on again before it’s too late.”
Silence inclosed them but for the steady drumming of the rain and Johnny thought of the change in Home, his sudden and frantic fear of death. Home was not the cowardly type. It was something much greater, infinitely more precious, than the last declining years of his life that he was about to lose. He was a member of the Technorder ruling cabinet and would be entitled to a brain transfer, as Marmon had been. A thousand more years of life would be his if he lived to read the pass. Near-immortality that only Nona could give him. “There—there!”
It was Nona’s cry, urgent in warning. She ran past Johnny, toward Felder and Home, crying again, “There it goes!”
Felder’s light flicked on, catching her pointing arm, and he fired three times in the wildness of panic as he jumped to his feet. The bullets screamed from distant rocks, then Felder stiffened into immobility as his swinging light revealed Home.
Home was lying sprawled on the ground, his dead-white face staring up at Felder, his head set crookedly on a broken neck and his throat ripped open.
Johnny went to them, Patricia beside him, as Nona said in a tone of anguish:
“I warned him! It jumped out and killed him before I could do more than that.”
“Where is it now?” Felder demanded. He swung the light and pistol aimlessly, his hands shaking. “Where is it now?”
“It ran back into the brush,” Nona answered. “Shall I walk in there and try to—”
“No!” Felder interrupted hoarsely. “Don’t leave us!”
He swung to face Johnny, “We’re
getting out of here. My gun will be in your back all the way in case either of you try anything.”
“Wait!” Nona spoke quickly. “The deactivator button. If the Diggers should bite into it and deactivate me—”
Felder jerked the strap from Home’s limp arm and shoved it in a pocket.
“All right,” he said, turning again. “In line, all of you. And you,” his tone indicated Nona, “will lead us straight and fast to the pass. Move!”
Twenty minutes later they heard the outbreak of hooting and roaring behind them, loud and exultant. Felder jabbed the pistol against Johnny’s back in quick question.
“What does that mean?” he demanded.
“It means they’ve found Home,” he answered.
“On!” Felder ordered. “Faster!”
An hour later, as suddenly as it had begun, the rain stopped. “They’ll pick up our full scent at this point,” Johnny said. “From here on they’ll come in a dead run.”
“Faster!” Felder ordered again, the sound of panting in his voice. “We’ll stop for nothing.”
They had climbed far up the mountain slope that led to the pass when the grayness of dawn lightened the sky. It was then that the Diggers screamed for the third time, sounding loud and very near in the still air, a shrieking, exultant chorus.
“They’ve found our trail,” Johnny said.
The light in the east brightened rapidly as they hurried on, to become full daylight within a minute. It was the rare phenomenon called the Miracle Dawn, a quick, full daylight caused by a deep rift opening suddenly in the cloud layers as the sun came up.
The fog had withdrawn to lower elevations and the light revealed a featureless slope around them, with no place to make a stand against the Diggers short of the pass that was just ahead of them. It revealed Nona as shining steel again, taking away the illusion of the night when she had been a warm human voice guiding them on. It revealed Patricia, scratched and muddy, stumbling with weariness. It revealed Felder, wild-eyed and sweating, slobbering a little as he panted.
And it revealed the valley below them and the tossing, surging gleam of armor as the Diggers pounded toward them.
They went into the pass, an upward-sloping rocky floor between tall walls of black lava. The sounds of the Digger herd grew louder behind them. They came to a curve, followed it to the final climb of the floor, and stood suddenly on the floor’s summit.
Ahead of them the floor dropped gently for a quarter of a mile, then ended abruptly on the sheer wall-to-wall brink of the Dry Falls. To the left of the falls a thin, narrow ledge ran around a high red cliff and there, on the other side of the cliff, lay the green bowl that was the upper end of Silent Valley.
“That’s the ledge, the one the Diggers can’t follow us around?” Felder asked, his eyes darting from it back to the curve behind them.
Johnny listened to the swelling rumble of the Digger herd and said, “We would never make it. You’d better get these chains off my wrists in a hurry.”
Felder did so in quick haste and Johnny knelt with the blaster pointing back down the pass. Felder moved into position some distance behind him, his pistol in his hand, and ordered Patricia to stand directly in front of him. Nona stood where she had stopped, silently watching them. There was nothing she could say or do. She had led them as near to safety as she could and the rest was out of her hands.
Johnny fitted his fingers to the complex firing controls and centered the sight on the curve in the canyon where the Diggers would appear. The rumbling of their coming grew louder, then bloomed into sudden thunder as they swept around the curve.
They came like a roaring tide of gray armored tanks, pounding, ripping claws, green-glowing eyes and gaping, shrieking mouths. When the front rank was one hundred and fifty feet away he pressed the firing studs.
The blaster jerked in his arms and snarled like a living thing, sending its pale blue beam into the leaders. The beam hissed and smashed its way across them and they went down at one hundred feet, sprawling and sliding from their momentum. The second rank leaped over their bodies and the beam swept back, the snarling of the blaster higher in pitch. The second rank went down at fifty feet and the last rank was a gray wall plunging at him; a wall that shrieked and roared in triumph. The blaster’s snarl was a scream then, rising high and wild above the triumph of the Diggers, and the beam was a blinding blue fire.
The charge faltered against it, broke, and shattered. The armored bodies crashed to the ground, the last one sliding to a stop eight feet in front of him. Its open mouth snapped shut in a dying reflex and crushed a lava boulder like sand.
The last echo faded away and it was over, the blaster hot in his hands and the charge indicator showing that it had a two-second burst of fire left in it.
And Felder was waiting with Patricia a living shield in front of him, his thick hand gripping her shoulder and her own hands still bound with the chains.
Felder listened for a moment, staring back down the pass, then he nodded in satisfaction. His former panic was gone as though it had never existed.
“No more Diggers are coming,” he said. He raised the pistol, almost smiling. “There’s no reason to wait any longer, is there?”
Patricia’s eyes were wide and dark with the knowledge of Felder’s intention. She looked at Nona in quick, mute appeal, into the silent steel face, then back to Johnny. Her face was pale with frightened resolve.
“Johnny, believe what I say.” The words came quick and desperate. “I’d rather die fighting here than die alone in a prison camp!”
Then she twisted against Felder’s grip with all her strength, crying, “Shoot, Johnny, shoot!”
But he could not fire without killing her. Felder struck her across the jaw with the barrel of his pistol and she was still his living shield, even though unconscious, as he whipped the pistol around to Johnny again.
“Now!” he said, no longer smiling.
Nona moved, so suddenly and quickly that she was a metallic flashing behind Felder. Her right hand caught the pistol, jerking it aside as it fired, while at the same time her left hand tore at the strap of the deactivator button. It snapped like a paper band and she flung it aside as Felder released Patricia with a startled, incredulous sound.
Patricia slid to the ground as they fought for the pistol. Felder’s face was red with the intensity of his efforts to resist the power of the slim steel arms, horror dawning on it as the muzzle of the pistol was forced back toward him.
It was a struggle that ended before Johnny could run five steps toward them. Felder’s thick arms were no match for steel. The muzzle of the pistol touched his chest and he had time for only one word, pleading, as Home had pleaded the night before:
“Nona.”
The pistol fired three times, methodically, muffled. Felder jerked from each bullet, as Nona had jerked the night the guards shot her, the horror stark and wild on his face. Then the strength went out of his struggling arms and he slid to the ground as she stepped away from him.
He clutched at his chest and stared at the red welling of blood. He looked at Johnny and beyond him, seeming to see something too late with a sudden and terrible understanding.
“We thought it wouldn’t harm us. We thought it was still human!”
He choked, shuddered, and died.
Nona was standing with the pistol in her hand, blood and gray lead streaks on her bosom where the bullets had glanced off after going through Felder.
“You will kill me now,” she said in a voice of hard, flat metal. In his first amazement he thought it was a question, then he realized it was not.
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“Kill me,” she said again. “I want to die. I have a right to die.” He thought he saw for certain then what he had been afraid of all the time and had not dared admit to himself. Slowly, reluctantly, he asked: “You’re not really Nona, are you?” The metal voice in the metal face answered:
“I’m not Nona, not the Nona you knew. I�
��m only a part of her. They killed the rest.”
The implications of her words were like the turning of a knife in him. He was dimly aware of Patricia sitting up as he said, “The day I first saw you—”
“I had to pretend to be the same. If they had known I wanted to die, they would have put me in a brain case and made me live a thousand year while they studied me.”
“And last night you were the fog weasel?” he asked.
“Yes. I knew I could never handle the blaster controls to kill myself. Only you would ever understand why I must die and do it for me, and they were going to kill you. But Felder was too alert for me to kill him, too.’
“Were you the one who destroyed the Vanguard?”
“It was my first chance to die. I tore my guard’s throat out with my fingers and went to the control room. I killed the officer who saw me and shot the captain with the officer’s pistol. I used the voice they gave me to imitate the captain’s voice and order full drive. Then I pulled the big red lever that would put the ship into the warp and make it explode.
“But it didn’t kill me and I had to wait for some other way, for this, for you to kill me now.”
He looked from the hard, beautiful face to the scarred blaster in his hands and back again.
“Once you were Nona,” he said, “You’re the only Nona left to me, no matter how much you’ve changed. I can’t kill you, Nona.”
She hesitated, like one trying to find words for some infinitely difficult description. When the words came all the metal was forced out and it was the gentle voice of Nona that spoke to him.
“I was dying that night so Patricia could live and I was trying so hard to see you just once again and say goodby to you, and then I was in the hospital and everything was a clear memory. But it was like something that had happened to someone else, like a drawing on paper. Everything was empty. I didn’t care. I saw and heard and thought and remembered but none of it mattered to me. I only wanted to shut out the sight and sound and memories and cease existing because existence was a meaningless torture.
“They questioned me and I knew that I had to pretend to be unchanged or they would deactivate my body and let my mind suffer for a thousand years while they studied it. They deactivated me once. For a hundred years I was deaf and blind and helpless and screaming without a voice in a sea of nothing. Then they reactivated me and it had been only two hours.