by Dan Donoghue
The tunnel door was now dangerous. Wolf took the radio, and ran through the city to the other side, and out onto the great rock. Again Courteau answered the radio almost at once. “You got it on?” the thin voice asked anxiously.
“Yes. Do you feel anything?”
“Not a thing. Some say they can, but I think they're imagining it. There's planes out looking for us, and now that we've had to draw the men back, they'll be along the track we left. How soon will that thing work?”
“Very soon. How is Margaret?”
“Cort says she's resting all right. The move was hard on her. Hang on, Bader is reporting in. He's the one with your cap.”
There was a pause that lasted almost two minutes, then Courteau come through again. “Bader says there's something going on in the city. Things are confused, and the search seems to be concentrating in the north. It seems like it might be working. Can you handle it there when they start arriving?”
“I can handle it, Governor, by the time they get here, they'll be as good as dead—worse than dead.”
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Chapter 18
Now was a time of waiting. An uncomfortable time of thought, and knowing, that did not sit easily on Wolf's mind. The anger he had felt at the knowledge of Margaret's suffering, and the horror of Pa'Lar's germ bombs, had given way to dull sadness. He walked down through the morning beauty of the little plain to the lake, and stood on the mirrored shore, and everything was so fresh, and pure, and beautiful that he felt like a maggot slowly turning an apple rotten.
With a sigh, he set to work to wash the accumulated perspiration and dirt of three hard days from his body and clothes. Then, after he had eaten, he managed to run down one of the lizard-like flying reptiles before it could become airborne. He carried it into the city, and launched it over the balcony. It spread its skin wings, and swooped towards the building. It lasted little more than a second before a bolt of fire flashed it into fine ash.
Wolf had need of sleep, but, as before, the many dead daunted him, and he could not sleep in the city. Yet he needed to be close to the machine. He remembered a great peak of stone that stood high above the hills over his head. It was as though a great rock was being slowly uncovered by erosion. Such a thing would take much energy to build. It seemed hardly likely that it would serve no purpose, and its most likely purpose would be a lookout tower.
He was forced to go outside, and locate its direction before he could find it. In searching for it, he began to realise for the first time the magnitude of the city. Not only did it stretch beneath the artificial hills, it was sunken under the real hills also, and the pale radiance that emanated from the stone itself gave an eerie light there. Drawn by curiosity, he followed one street which became a lane, and then a tunnel. Eventually he stopped, and stared into the distance. There was no end. The glow just went on and on until the sides, and the roof, and the floor, merged into one soft central point. Wolf turned back. What was at the end of it? A mine? Another hidden city? Death Island?
Three times he passed the building that reached to the peak before he realised what it was. It was close to the centre of city, and was some sort of administrative building. It had a resident robot, similar to the one in the building he had first entered, who clicked alive, and presented him with its little clawed plate. He ignored it, and hurried past. As its duplicate in the other building had done, it trundled over to a box against the wall, plugged itself in, and, no doubt, reported him. He hoped the result would be as negative. If the guard robots turned against him, his chances of escaping were about as good as those of a soap bubble in space, and he would have created another Death Island.
Beyond the reception hall was a number of doorways, many open, some showing rooms inhabited only by skeletons in various postures of violent death, some holding weapons, others clustered in groups as though they had been herded in and destroyed in bunches. One room was littered with the tiny bones of what must have been very young children. Many bodies had been cut completely in halves, some tiny bone fingers still clutched metallic toys.
All the rooms had chairs and consoles, but no robots. It appeared that it was from this building that the city might have been run by the officials of the bird people. It was most probably to here that Wolf had been reported, and, since there was no officials to order action, none had been taken.
Then he found stairs spiralling upwards, and that put an end to his exploration. Floor after floor, he passed, before the walls suddenly became almost transparent, and he climbed in sunlight to the top, where a hatch-like door swung easily down, and the steps were made to look like natural crevices in the side of the rock to carry him up to an almost flat surface.
There was no shade, and the heat of the sun was building up quickly. He was forced to return to the top floor of the building to look for something with which to build a shelter. There seemed to be nothing that would move. All the rooms seemed to be offices of some kind. It seemed that much more than just the administration of the city was carried out from the building. In the end Wolf blasted a door from its hinges with the laser, and carried it up. He propped it against a slightly higher part of the rock, set the radio up to wake him with its buzz, and crawled under the door to sleep. So long had he been without proper rest, that, despite the hardness of his couch, he dropped into a deep sleep almost immediately.
A great crash woke him to billowing smoke, and the roar of flames. Some sort of artillery? He thrust the door aside, and sprang down the steps in one fear injected surge of motion. Then he threw his mind outwards in an attempt to sweep the area. It would not pierce the rock, and he was forced to creep cautiously up once more. Something was scattered and burning over a wide section of the hills. No piece was recognisable, but there seemed to be too much debris to be artillery shells, only that much he noticed, before his eyes were drawn to the mouth of the tunnel, and he stared in amazement and horror.
About the area where the tunnel opened into its valley, like great, grotesque moths circling a bright light, were hundreds of soldiers in jump-jets, going round and round, spiralling down, and down, dropping out of sight, but never lessening in numbers, for others were streaming in across the plain, and joining the senseless dance.
Then, across the plain, grew a flight of aircraft, twelve—straight as an arrow—swifter than sound—they swelled into the valley, and crashed against the hill above the tunnel, wiping the air clear of jump-jets in one great gout of flame and flying metal. But the oncoming jump-jets did not falter. They came in over the wreckage, and spiralled down into the burning mass as though it was not there, and their fuel tanks made little popping sounds in the roar of the flames, and sparked like sudden stars in the smoke.
Wolf dropped back through the doorways and clattered down the stairs as fast as he could take them. On the top floor a couple of robots were fitting another door where the blasted wall had been repaired. Wolf wondered if he had been reported again, but the robots ignored him, and in a moment he had dropped down out of sight, if sight the things had.
He ran at top speed to the machine, but, as he reached the street, the questions in his mind were answered. One of the trayed robots came trundling towards him loaded with tightly bundled uniforms with the proud USNCA insignia showing through the grime and blood. Near the door of the tunnel, a crowd of workers were chuckling over a pile of jump-jets, and already some were in pieces as they went about examining, repairing, and cleaning them. Wolf stopped to watch. If the bird people had used any sort of jump-jets, they would have to be very different in design, yet the robots were working on them as though they had been programmed to do so. They were a very different creation to the robots of Earth. Somehow these had been designed with an imagination, and the ability to learn, even if they couldn't tell the difference between a living master and a pile of bones.
Wolf went in and looked through the lens down along the tunnel. The mouth was floored with charred bodies and smouldering wreck
age, but men were already coming through, their clothes burning, struggling unheedingly to maintain their balance on top of the squashing bodies of their comrades, staggering under the weight of their jets, eyes staring, fixed, or burnt out, their hands held out like infants reaching out to loved ones. Some fell. Others walked over them until they reached the roller floor, and dropped out of sight. Those behind did not hesitate, but came on, pushing and shoving in a mindless determination to reach their doom.
Wolf turned away sickened. He dared not watch. In his imagination he saw the pile of hides building, the cans of meat stacking, the offal filling the barrels. He dare not think of what lay beyond the walls, the gristly work going on there.
As in a daze, he stumbled back through the city, and the bones now appeared to be his doing. He had recoiled from the evidence of such hatred. Now he had created such death himself, and had lost the prop of hatred, and so must know the full horror of his deed. He wept as he walked.
His unheeded path took him back to the lookout rock. The radio was buzzing insistently. He picked it up, glanced across at the jump-jets, shivered, and pushed the receive button. “Come in Carthar!” it demanded urgently.
“Carthar,” he whispered.
“There you are! You all right?”
“I'm all right, Governor.”
“Good! You had us damned worried. Can you turn the power down a bit. The thing worked like a charm. Cort is out there with the cap now. He reports the city is clear, but some of our people are still locked up there, and they're going mad. They're mostly the wounded you couldn't get out before, and a few kids who were kept in the old lock-up for some reason. Cort can't do anything with them. He says they're trying to claw the walls down.”
Wolf raced back towards the machine. Now there was something to do that did not have the taint of murder on it. He brought the power levers down to just below their old positions, and raced back to the radio. Again it was buzzing. “Turn it back up!” Courteau shouted. “They're dying!”
Fast Wolf ran then, bounding down the steps in great leaps, scattering robots that scuttled out of his way as the urgency in his mind triggered some reaction in their brains. He swung the levers up a little, and raced back. Twice he made the mad dash, and the levers were almost back to full power, before Courteau told him that the prisoners had stopped dying, and had returned to trying to get out of the cells.
“Is there any way we can help them?” Courteau pleaded, and his agony of mind reached across the air to Wolf.
“I don't know,” Wolf told him, “but I got a good dose from close up, and it's a kind of pain that kills. If you can drug them with pain-killers for twelve hours or so, they might be all right. I survived it, but I wasn't wounded.”
“We haven't painkillers left here, and, the supplies in the city have been destroyed or taken.”
“What about the ships?”
“Cort's been there. It looks like they're deserted, but military discipline must have held out long enough for them to seal the ships, and set automatic weapons. Cort thinks we could shoot our way in, but it would need a number of men and it would take time, and, if you turned the thing off, the kids would be all dead before we got there and back.”
Wolf thought for a few moments. Always the jump-jets circled like moths. “Listen!” he said suddenly, “Have you got jump-jets?”
“Yes.”
“Fully fuelled?”
“We could make one or two.”
“Tell Cort to get one and lift to here. He can't miss it. All he has to do is fly north, north-cast on a dead reckoning, and he'll pick up the soldiers coming in. Tell him, when he sees them circling, to head for a tall rock in the hills just past them. I'll be waiting with all the caps he can carry, and a couple of these lasers. On top setting I think they'll take out anything the ships have.”
“Right.”
It was almost three hours later, and most of the jump-jets were gone, and great tracked ground vehicles had begun to arrive, before a jet came streaming in, higher than the others had. It wavered a little over the tunnel mouth, then turned to the rock, and sped in. Wolf's mind had identified Cort before he got the thing down. It was an awkward landing, and he almost spilled off the rock, but he regained his balance before Wolf reached him.
“Space me! But I don't like this thing.” Cort greeted him, struggling to sit the machine more comfortably on his shoulders. “What's going on down there? Where are all the bastards heading?”
“Into a tunnel to a slaughter house,” Wolf said.
“Slaughter house!”
“That's right! They're being slaughtered, butchered, and canned.”
“You serious?”
“Yes.”
“I'd like to see that, Christ! Look at them coming! How far is this slaughter house?”
“I don't think you could make it.”
“Make it? Why?”
“The people who built this place were sensitives, I think. There's a sort of guard robot that seems to destroy anything that isn't a sensitive. A patrol chased me in last night. They lasted about a minute, or less, and they were commandos.”
“Commandos, eh? Well I reckon I'm well out of it, but I would dearly like to see a few of those bastards get theirs for what they did to my people.” Cort fingered the bundle of caps and lasers reluctantly, and glared at the distant troops.
Wolf sighed. The High Americans would see little horror in the death of an army. Cort obviously did not see those struggling creatures as men, but animals from an alien planet. Perhaps it would be better to set blast bombs in the city.
After the vehicles had stopped coming, there was a long stillness. Wolf waited, suffering the heat of the lookout, unable to return to the horror below. Night fell. The lens showed a great crush of army vehicles of every sort blocking the mouth of the tunnel with men still crawling blindly through them. The robots had gone out, and were busily working on them, pushing them apart, parking them in neat rows, cleaning, repairing, and studying them. It had been a great day for the robots.
Morning. The radio remained silent. Wolf waited. The long hours passed. The rock became unbearably hot. Midday, and the men on foot began to straggle onto the plain. Men in the last stages of exhaustion, their minds all but destroyed, blind to the suffering of their bodies, blind even to the thirst that choked their throats, so that they staggered across creeks, and did not stay to drink, drawn onwards, ever onwards, by the evil caress in their heads, and the total negation of their wills. Amongst them ran the kerries, urging them, guiding them, dragging them, blind themselves to all but the overwhelming need to bring anything that moved to the source of the thing that strummed in their heads.
Three hours past midday, and the heat was like a living thing upon the plain. No longer, could the distant hills be seen. They were lost beyond a shimmering infinity of heated air turned to the colour of boiling water. In it, the men walked, legless, headless, or crawling on the mirage waters high above the plain.
From the peak, Wolf watched. His own body was forgotten in the knowledge of their suffering. These things who had been men, now brought lower than cattle, lower than the animals he used to hunt. Always, he had been forced to pit his skill against the acuteness of their senses and the speed of their escape. Here there was no escape. Death had already won, and the plain was filling up.
Few of the soldiers reached the tunnel. Most fell upon the centre of the plain, too weak to continue in the pitiless heat of that hottest of days. As evening fell, Wolf went below, and turned off the machine. The heat waves had shimmered away. The land was all too clearly defined. All over it men died in agony. Wolf climbed once more the stairs to the lookout, and stared down across the plain.
He saw bodies stilled, and those that yet writhed, or crawled blindly, seeking the thing that had left their minds, and opened them to the agony of their bodies. With a terrible fascination, as though he was gripped in the toils of a nightmare from which he could not wake, Wolf could not help but open his mind, a
nd sweep across the plain, and he shared their last agony, and he watched the life flicker from the tortured minds.
It was a compulsion against which his will, sickened under an overwhelming sense of self-loathing, could not give battle. He watched until every one of the thousands of men had died, and the plain had become still except for the moaning kerries, and the accusing whisper of the faint night wind.
He was left in the country of the dead, the ancient dead below him, the newly dead beyond, and for all, he felt an overwhelming guilt.
It had been sensitives like himself who had built the city, and the machine. That he could not doubt. The bird people, too, had known their sensitives, and their nonsensitives, and the sensitive had left their home planet, and come here, and built these hidden cities under the ground—cities to manufacture and store metals and food—for what? So many warehouses, so very large, it could only be to supply an army. In that they may have been justified. Their people, too, may have been burned at the stake, or something equally as evil, but they had committed a worse evil. They had brought non-sensitives with them, or they had turned out the less gifted of their own offspring, and they had set the guard robots to destroy any who might enter the city, and they had built the machine, and had used it horribly.
But the common people had made the caps, and negated the machines, and they had come in their vengeance, and they had killed, killed all through the cities, exterminated the sensitives like vermin, but they had made a terrible mistake.
In their fury, they had smashed the machines they hated. They should have merely turned them off, for they had missed some of the robots, probably those hidden deep in the mines, and the robots had rebuilt their fellows, then the cities, and the machines, and they would have set them as they had been before, set, as the sensitives would have set them at the start of the attack, set to lure, and destroy their enemies.