Another cloud.
Then things happened so fast that the telling of them takes longer than the event.
Something dark rushed at me from up ahead. A violent blow hit me in the chest. Only much later did I realize that this was Macht's arm trying to grab me before we went over the edge. Then we went into another cloud. Before I could even speak to Virginia a second blow struck me. The pain was terrible. I had never felt anything like that in all my life. For some reason, Virginia had fallen over me and beyond me. She was pulling at my hands.
I tried to tell her to stop pulling me, because it hurt, but I had no breath. Rather than argue, I tried to do what she wanted. I struggled toward her. Only then did I realize that there was nothing below my feet—no bridge, no jetway, nothing.
I was on the edge of the boulevard, the broken edge of the upper side. There was nothing below me except for some looped cables, and, far underneath them, a tiny ribbon which was either a river or a road.
We had jumped blindly across the great gap and I had fallen just far enough to catch the upper edge of the roadway on my chest.
It did not matter, the pain.
In a moment the doctor-robot would be there to repair me.
A look at Virginia's face reminded me there was no doctor-robot, no world, no Instrumentality, nothing but wind and pain. She was crying. It took a moment for me to hear what she was saying.
"I did it, I did it, darling, are you dead?"
Neither one of us was sure what "dead" meant, because people always went away at their appointed time, but we knew that it meant a cessation of life. I tried to tell her that I was living, but she fluttered over me and kept dragging me farther from the edge of the drop.
I used my hands to push myself into a sitting position.
She knelt beside me and covered my face with kisses.
At last I was able to gasp, "Where's Macht?"
She looked back. "I don't see him."
I tried to look too. Rather than have me struggle, she said, "You stay quiet. I'll look again."
Bravely she walked to the edge of the sheared-off boulevard. She looked over toward the lower side of the gap, peering through the clouds which drifted past us as rapidly as smoke sucked by a ventilator. Then she cried out:
"I see him. He looks so funny. Like an insect in the museum. He is crawling across on the cables."
Struggling to my hands and knees, I neared her and looked too. There he was, a dot moving along a thread, with the birds soaring by beneath him. It looked very unsafe. Perhaps he was getting all the "fear" that he needed to keep himself happy. I did not want that "fear," whatever it was. I wanted food, water, and a doctor-robot.
None of these were here.
I struggled to my feet. Virginia tried to help me but I was standing before she could do more than touch my sleeve.
"Let's go on."
"On?" she said.
"On to the Abba-dingo. There may be friendly machines up there. Here there is nothing but cold and wind, and the lights have not yet gone on."
She frowned. "But Macht . . . ?"
"It will be hours before he gets here. We can come back."
She obeyed.
Once again we went to the left of the boulevard. I told her to squeeze my waist while I struck the pillars, one by one. Surely there must have been a reactivating device for the passengers on the road.
The fourth time, it worked.
Once again the wind whipped our clothing as we raced upward on Alpha Ralpha Boulevard.
We almost fell as the road veered to the left. I caught my balance, only to have it veer the other way.
And then we stopped.
This was the Abba-dingo.
A walkway littered with white objects—knobs and rods and imperfectly formed balls about the size of my head.
Virginia stood beside me, silent.
About the size of my head? I kicked one of the objects aside and then knew, knew for sure, what it was. It was people. The inside parts. I had never seen such things before. And that, that on the ground, must once have been a hand. There were hundreds of such things along the wall.
"Come, Virginia," said I, keeping my voice even, and my thoughts hidden.
She followed without saying a word. She was curious about the things on the ground, but she did not seem to recognize them.
For my part. I was watching the wall.
At last I found them—the little doors of Abba-dingo.
One said meteorological. It was not Old Common Tongue, nor was it French, but it was so close that I knew it had something to do with the behavior of air. I put my hand against the panel of the door. The panel became translucent and ancient writing showed through. There were numbers which meant nothing, words which meant nothing, and then:
Typhoon coming.
My French had not taught me what a "coming" was, but "typhoon" was plainly typhon, a major air disturbance. Thought I, let the weather machines take care of the matter. It had nothing to do with us.
"That's no help," said I.
"What does it mean?" she said.
"The air will be disturbed."
"Oh," said she. "That couldn't matter to us, could it?"
"Of course not."
I tried the next panel, which said FOOD. When my hand touched the little door, there was an aching creak inside the wall, as though the whole tower retched. The door opened a little bit and a horrible odor came out of it. Then the door closed again.
The third door said HELP and when I touched it nothing happened. Perhaps it was some kind of tax-collecting device from the ancient days. It yielded nothing to my touch. The fourth door was larger and already partly open at the bottom. At the top, the name of the door was PREDICTIONS. Plain enough, that one was, to anyone who knew Old French. The name at the bottom was more mysterious: PUT PAPER HERE it said, and I could not guess what it meant.
I tried telepathy. Nothing happened. The wind whistled past us. Some of the calcium balls and knobs rolled on the pavement. I tried again, trying my utmost for the imprint of long-departed thoughts. A scream entered my mind, a thin long scream which did not sound much like people. That was all.
Perhaps it did upset me. I did not feel "fear," but I was worried about Virginia.
She was staring at the ground.
"Paul," she said, "isn't that a man's coat on the ground among those funny things?"
Once I had seen an ancient X-ray in the museum, so I knew that the coat still surrounded the material which had provided the inner structure of the man. There was no ball there, so that I was quite sure he was dead. How could that have happened in the old days? Why did the Instrumentality let it happen? But then, the Instrumentality had always forbidden this side of the tower. Perhaps the violators had met their own punishment in some way I could not fathom.
"Look, Paul," said Virginia. "I can put my hand in."
Before I could stop her, she had thrust her hand into the flat open slot which said PUT PAPER HERE.
She screamed.
Her hand was caught.
I tried to pull at her arm, but it did not move. She began gasping with pain. Suddenly her hand came free.
Clear words were cut into the living skin. I tore my cloak off and wrapped her hand.
As she sobbed beside me I unbandaged her hand. As I did so she saw the words on her skin.
The words said, in clear French: You will love Paul all your life.
Virginia let me bandage her hand with my cloak and then she lifted her face to be kissed. "It was worth it," she said; "it was worth all the trouble, Paul. Let's see if we can get down. Now I know."
I kissed her again and said, reassuringly, "You do know, don't you?"
"Of course," she smiled through her tears. "The Instrumentality could not have contrived this. What a clever old machine! Is it a god or a devil, Paul?"
I had not studied those words at that time, so I patted her instead of answering. We turned to leave.
At the last minute
I realized that I had not tried PREDICTIONS myself.
"Just a moment, darling. Let me tear a little piece off the bandage."
She waited patiently. I tore a piece the size of my hand, and then I picked up one of the ex-person units on the ground. It may have been the front of an arm. I returned to push the cloth into the slot, but when I turned to the door, an enormous bird was sitting there.
I used my hand to push the bird aside, and he cawed at me. He even seemed to threaten me with his cries and his sharp beak. I could not dislodge him.
Then I tried telepathy. I am a true man. Go away!
The bird's dim mind flashed back at me nothing but no-no-no-no-no!
With that I struck him so hard with my fist that he fluttered to the ground. He righted himself amid the white litter on the pavement and then, opening his wings, he let the wind carry him away.
I pushed in the scrap of cloth, counted to twenty in my mind, and pulled the scrap out.
The words were plain, but they meant nothing: You will love Virginia twenty-one more minutes.
Her happy voice, reassured by the prediction but still unsteady from the pain in her written-on hand, came to me as though it were far away. "What does it say, darling?"
Accidentally on purpose, I let the wind take the scrap. It fluttered away like a bird. Virginia saw it go.
"Oh," she cried disappointedly. "We've lost it! What did it say?"
"Just what yours did."
"But what words, Paul? How did it say it?"
With love and heartbreak and perhaps a little "fear," I lied to her and whispered gently,
"It said, 'Paul will always love Virginia.'"
She smiled at me radiantly. Her stocky, full figure stood firmly and happily against the wind. Once again she was the chubby, pretty Menerima whom I had noticed in our block when we both were children. And she was more than that. She was my new-found love in our new-found world. She was my mademoiselle from Martinique. The message was foolish. We had seen from the food-slot that the machine was broken.
"There's no food or water here," said I. Actually, there was a puddle of water near the railing, but it had been blown over the human structural elements on the ground, and I had no heart to drink it.
Virginia was so happy that, despite her wounded hand, her lack of water, and her lack of food, she walked vigorously and cheerfully.
Thought I to myself, Twenty-one minutes. About six hours have passed. If we stay here we face unknown dangers.
Vigorously we walked downward, down Alpha Ralpha Boulevard. We had met the Abba-dingo and were still "alive." I did not think that I was "dead," but the words had been meaningless so long that it was hard to think them.
The ramp was so steep going down that we pranced like horses. The wind blew into our faces with incredible force. That's what it was, wind, but I looked up the word vent only after it was all over.
We never did see the whole tower—just the wall at which the ancient jetway had deposited us. The rest of the tower was hidden by clouds which fluttered like torn rags as they raced past the heavy material.
The sky was red on one side and a dirty yellow on the other.
Big drops of water began to strike at us.
"The weather machines are broken," I shouted to Virginia.
She tried to shout back to me but the wind carried her words away. I repeated what I had said about the weather machines. She nodded happily and warmly, though the wind was by now whipping her hair past her face and the pieces of water which fell from up above were spotting her flame-golden gown. It did not matter. She clung to my arm. Her happy face smiled at me as we stamped downward, bracing ourselves against the decline in the ramp. Her brown eyes were full of confidence and life. She saw me looking at her and she kissed me on the upper arm without losing step. She was my own girl forever, and she knew it.
The water-from-above, which I later knew was actual "rain," came in increasing volume. Suddenly it included birds. A large bird flapped his way vigorously against the whistling air and managed to stand still in front of my face, though his air speed was many leagues per hour. He cawed in my face and then was carried away by the wind. No sooner had that one gone than another bird struck me in the body. I looked down at it but it too was carried away by the racing current of air. All I got was a telepathic echo from its bright blank mind: no-no-no-no!
Now what? thought I. A bird's advice is not much to go upon.
Virginia grabbed my arm and stopped.
I too stopped.
The broken edge of Alpha Ralpha Boulevard was just ahead. Ugly yellow clouds swam through the break like poisonous fish hastening on an inexplicable errand.
Virginia was shouting.
I could not hear her, so I leaned down. That way her mouth could almost touch my ear.
"Where is Macht?" she shouted.
Carefully I took her to the left side of the road, where the railing gave us some protection against the heavy racing air, and against the water commingled with it. By now neither of us could see very far. I made her drop to her knees. I got down beside her. The falling water pelted our backs. The light around us had turned to a dark dirty yellow.
We could still see, but we could not see much.
I was willing to sit in the shelter of the railing, but she nudged me. She wanted us to do something about Macht. What anyone could do, that was beyond me. If he had found shelter, he was safe, but if he was out on those cables, the wild pushing air would soon carry him off and then there would be no more Maximilien Macht. He would be "dead" and his interior parts would bleach somewhere on the open ground.
Virginia insisted.
We crept to the edge.
A bird swept in, true as a bullet, aiming for my face. I flinched. A wing touched me. It stung against my cheek like fire. I did not know that feathers were so tough. The birds must all have damaged mental mechanisms, thought I, if they hit people on Alpha Ralpha. That is not the right way to behave toward true people.
At last we reached the edge, crawling on our bellies. I tried to dig the fingernails of my left hand into the stone like material of the railing, but it was flat, and there was nothing much to hold to, save for the ornamental fluting. My right arm was around Virginia. It hurt me badly to crawl forward that way, because my body was still damaged from the blow against the edge of the road, on the way coming up. When I hesitated, Virginia thrust herself forward.
We saw nothing.
The gloom was around us.
The wind and the water beat at us like fists.
Her gown pulled at her like a dog worrying its master. I wanted to get her back into the shelter of the railing, where we could wait for the air disturbance to end.
Abruptly, the light shone all around us. It was wild electricity, which the ancients called lightning. Later I found that it occurs quite frequently in the areas beyond the reach of the weather machines.
The bright quick light showed us a white face staring at us. He hung on the cables below us. His mouth was open, so he must have been shouting. I shall never know whether the expression on his face showed "fear" or great happiness. It was full of excitement. The bright light went out and I thought that I heard the echo of a call. I reached for his mind telepathically and there was nothing there. Just some dim obstinate bird thinking at me, no-no-no-no-no!
Virginia tightened in my arms. She squirmed around. I shouted at her in French. She could not hear.
Then I called with my mind.
Someone else was there.
Virginia's mind blazed at me, full of revulsion, The cat girl. She is going to touch me!
She twisted. My right arm was suddenly empty. I saw the gleam of a golden gown flash over the edge, even in the dim light. I reached with my mind, and I caught her cry:
"Paul, Paul, I love you. Paul . . . help me!"
The thoughts faded as her body dropped.
The someone else was C'mell, whom we had first met in the corridor.
I came to get you bo
th, she thought at me, not that the birds cared about her.
What have the birds got to do with it?
You saved them. You saved their young, when the red-topped man was killing them all. All of us have been worried about what you true people would do to us when you were free. We found out. Some of you are bad and kill other kinds of life. Others of you are good and protect life.
We the Underpeople Page 22