“Damn you!” she said again, “Go on, laugh at me. Laugh at me because I do want him, me!” She gave a queer, choked laugh herself. “And what’s the use? Oh, God, what’s the use? If he weren’t in love with you, what good would I be to him—like this?”
She clenched her hands to her face and stood for a moment, shaking all over, then she turned and flung herself on the brushwood bed.
We stared into the shadowy comer. One moccasin had fallen off. I could see the brown, grubby sole of her foot, and the line of six toes. I turned to Rosalind. Her eyes met mine, contrite and appalled. Instinctively she made to get up. I shook my head, and, hesitantly she sank back.
The only sounds in the cave were the hopeless, abandoned sobbing, and plop-plop-plop of the drips.
Petra looked at us, then at the figure on the bed, then at us again, expectantly. When neither of us moved she appeared to decide that the initiative lay with her. She crossed to the bedside and knelt down concernedly beside it. Tentatively she put a hand on the dark hair.
“Don’t,” she said. “Please don’t.”
There was a startled catch in the sobbing. A pause, then a brown arm reached out around Petra’s shoulders. The sound became a little less desolate . . . it no longer tore at one’s heart; but it left it bruised and aching . . .
I awoke reluctantly, stiff and cold from lying on the hard rock floor. Almost immediately there was Michael:
“Did you mean to sleep all day?”
I looked up and saw a chink of daylight beneath the skin curtain.
“What’s the time?” I asked him.
“About eight, I’d guess. It’s been light for three hours, and we’ve fought a battle already.”
“What happened?” I inquired.
“We got wind of an ambush, so we sent an outflanking party. It clashed with the reserve force that was waiting to follow up the ambush. Apparently they thought it was our main body; anyway, the result was a rout, at a cost of two or three wounded, to us.”
“So now you’re coming on?”
“Yes. I suppose they’ll rally somewhere, but they’ve melted away now. No opposition at all.”
That was by no means as one could have wished. I explained our position, and that we certainly could not hope to emerge from the cave in daylight, unseen. On the other hand, if we stayed, and the place were to be captured, it would undoubtedly be searched, and we should be found.
“What about Petra’s Zealand friends?” Michael asked. “Can you really count on them, do you think?”
Petra’s friend, herself, came in on that, somewhat coolly.
“You can count on us.”
“Your estimated time is the same? You’ve not been delayed?” Michael asked.
“Just the same,” she assured us. “Approximately eight and a half hours from now.” Then the slightly huffy note dropped, a tinge almost of awe colored her thoughts.
“This is a dreadful country indeed. We have seen Badlands before, but none of us has even imagined anything quite so terrible as this. There are stretches of miles across where it looks as if all the ground has been fused into black glass; there is nothing else, nothing but the glass like a frozen ocean of ink . . . then belts of Badlands . . . then another wilderness of black glass. It goes on and on . . . What did they do here? What can they have done to create such a frightful place? No wonder none of us ever came this way before. It’s like going over the rim of the world, into the outskirts of hell. It must be utterly beyond hope, barred to any kind of life for ever and ever . . . but why?—why?—why? There was the power of gods in the hands of children we know; but were they mad children, all of them quite mad? . . . The mountains are cinders and the plains are black glass—still, after centuries! It is so dreary, dreary. A monstrous madness . . . It is frightening to think that a whole race could go insane. If we did not know that you are on the other side of it we should have tamed back and fled—”
Petra cut her off, abruptly blotting everything with distress. We had not known she was awake. I don’t know what she had made of most of it, but she had clearly caught that thought of turning back. I went across to soothe her down, so that presently the Zealand woman was able to get through again and reassure her. The alarm subsided, and Petra recovered herself.
Michael came in asking, “David, what about Deborah?”
I remembered his anxiety the previous night.
“Petra, darling,” I said, “we’ve got too far away now for any of us to reach Deborah. Will you ask her something?” Petra nodded.
“We want to know if she has heard anything of Mark since she talked to Michael.”
Petra put the question. She shook her head.
“No,” she said, “She hasn’t heard anything. She’s very miserable, I think. She wants to know if Michael is all right.”
“Tell her he’s quite all right—we all are. Tell her we love her, we’re terribly sorry she’s all alone, but she must be brave—and careful. She must try not to let anyone see she’s worried.”
“She understands. She says she’ll try,” Petra reported. She remained thoughtful for a moment. Then she said to me, in words, “Deborah’s afraid. She’s crying inside. She wants Michael.”
“Did she tell you that?” I asked.
Petra shook her head. “No. It was a sort of behind-think, but I saw it.”
“We’d better not say anything about it,” I decided. “It’s not our business. A person’s behind-thinks aren’t really meant for other people, so we must just pretend not to have noticed them.”
“All right,” Petra agreed, equably.
I hoped it was all right. When I thought it over I wasn’t at all sure that I cared much for this business of detecting “behind-thinks.” It left one a trifle uneasy, and retrospective . . .
Sophie woke up a few minutes later. She seemed calm, competent again, as though the last night’s storm had blown itself out. She sent us to the back of the cave and unhooked the curtain to let the daylight in. Presently she had a fire going in the hollow. The greater part of the smoke from it went out of the entrance; the rest did at least have the compensation that it helped to obscure the interior of the cave from any outside observation. She ladled measures from two or three bags into an iron pot, added some water, and put the pot on the fire.
“Watch it,” she instructed Rosalind, and then disappeared down the outside ladder.
Some twenty minutes later her head reappeared. She threw a couple of disks of hard bread over the sill and climbed in after them. She went to the pot, stirred it, and sniffed at the contents.
“No trouble?” I asked her.
“Not about that,” she said. “They found him. They think you did it. There was a search—of a sort—early this morning. It wasn’t as much of a search as it would have been with more men. But now they’ve got other things to worry about.
The men who went to the fighting are coming back in twos and threes. What happened, do you know?”
I told of the ambush that had failed, and the resulting disappearance of resistance.
“How far have they come now?” she wanted to know.
I inquired of Michael.
“We’re just clear of forest for the first time, and into rough country,” he told me.
I handed it on to Sophie. She nodded. “Three hours, or a bit less, perhaps, to the riverbank,” she said.
She ladled the species of porridge out of the pot into bowls. It tasted better than it looked. The bread was less palatable. She broke a disk of it with a stone, and it had to be dipped in water before one could eat it. Petra grumbled that it was not proper food like we had at home. That reminded her of something. Without any warning she launched a question:
“Michael is my father there?”
It took him off guard. I caught his “yes” forming before he could suppress it.
I looked at Petra, hoping the implications were lost on her. Mercifully, they were. Rosalind lowered her bowl and stared into it silently.
&
nbsp; Suspicion insulated one curiously little against the shock of knowledge. I could recall my father’s voice, doctrinaire, relentless. I knew the expression his face would be wearing, as if I had seen him when he spoke.
“A baby—a baby which would grow to breed, and, breeding, spread pollution until all around us there would be Mutants and Abominations. That has happened in places where the will and faith were weak, but here it shall never happen.”
And then my Aunt Harriet, “I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world.”
Poor Aunt Harriet, with her prayers as futile as her hopes.
A world in which a man could come upon such a hunt, himself! What kind of a man?
Rosalind rested her hand on my arm. Sophie looked up. When she saw my face her expression changed.
“What is it?” she asked.
Rosalind told her. Her eyes widened with horror. She looked from me to Petra, then slowly, bemusedly back to me again. She opened her mouth to speak, but lowered her eyes, leaving the thought unsaid. I looked at Petra, too, then at Sophie, at the rags she wore, and the cave we were in.
“Purity,” I said. “The will of the Lord. Honor thy father . . . Am I supposed to forgive him? Or to try to kill him?”
The answer startled me. I was not aware that I had sent out the thought at large.
“Let him be,” came the severe, clear pattern from the Zealand woman. “Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled, they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature.
“The living form defies evolution at its peril, if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The Old People brought down Tribulation, and were broken into fragments by it. Your father and his kind are a part of those fragments. They are determined still that there is a final form to defend. Soon they will attain the stability they strive for, in the only form it is granted—a place among the fossils.
“Whether harsh intolerance and bitter rectitude are the armor worn over fear and disappointment, or whether they are the festival-dress of the sadist, they cover an enemy of the life-force. The difference in kind can be bridged only by self-sacrifice—his self-sacrifice, for yours would bridge nothing. So, there is the severance. We have a new world to conquer, they have only a lost cause to lose.”
She ceased, leaving me somewhat bemused. Rosalind, too, looked as if she were still catching up on it. Petra seemed bored.
Sophie regarded us curiously. She said, “You give an outsider an uncomfortable feeling. Is it something I could know?”
“Well—” I began, and paused, wondering how to put it.
“She said we’re not to bother about my father because he doesn’t understand, I think,” observed Petra. It seemed a pretty fair summary.
“She . . .?” Sophie inquired.
I remembered that she knew nothing of the Zealand people.
“Oh, a friend of Petra’s,” I told her, vaguely.
Sophie was sitting close to the entrance, the rest of us farther back, out of sight from the ground. Presently she looked out and down.
“There are quite a lot of the men back now—most of them, I should think. Some of them are collected around Gordon’s tent, most of the others are drifting that way. He must be back too.”
She went on regarding the scene while she finished the contents of her bowl. Then she put it down beside her. “I’ll see what I can find out,” she said, and disappeared down the ladder.
She was gone fully an hour. I risked a quick look out once or twice, and could see the spider-man in front of his tent. He seemed to be dividing his men up into parties and instructing them by drawing diagrams in the bare earth.
“What’s happening?” I asked Sophie, as she returned. “What’s the plan?”
She hesitated, looking doubtful.
“For goodness’ sake,” I told her, “we want your people to win, don’t we? But we don’t want Michael to get hurt if it can be helped.”
“We’re going to ambush them this side of the river,” she said.
“Let them get across?”
“There’s nowhere to make a stand on the other side,” she explained.
I suggested to Michael that he should hang back at the riverside, or, if he could not do that, he might fall off during the crossing and get carried away downstream. He said he’d bear the proposal in mind, but try to think of a less uncomfortable means of delay.
A few minutes later a voice called Sophie’s name from below. She whispered:
“Keep back. It’s him,” and sped across and down the ladder. After that nothing happened for more than a hour, when the Zealand woman came through again:
“Reply to me, please. We need a sharper reading on you now. Just keep on sending numbers.”
Petra responded energetically, as if she had been feeling left out of things lately.
“Enough,” the Zealand woman told her. “Wait a moment.”
Presently she added: “Better than we hoped. We can cut that estimate by an hour.”
Another half-hour went by. I sneaked a few quick glimpses outside. The encampment looked all but deserted now. There was no one to be seen among the shacks but a few older women.
“In sight of the river,” Michael reported.
Fifteen or twenty minutes passed. Then Michael again: “They’ve muffed it, the fools. We’ve spotted a couple of them moving on the top of the cliffs. Not that it makes a lot of difference, anyway—that cleft’s much too obvious a trap. Council of war now.”
The council was evidently brief. In less than ten minutes he was through again:
“Plan. We retreat to cover immediately opposite the cleft. There, at a gap in the cover, we leave half a dozen men occasionally passing and repassing in view to give the impression of more, and light fires to suggest that we are held up. Rest of the force is splitting to make detours and two crossings, one upstream, and one down. We then pincer-in behind the cleft. Better inform, if you can.”
The encampment was no great distance behind the river cliffs. It looked likely that we might be caught within the pincers. I very much wished Sophie would return. An hour passed, then: “We’re across the river downstream from you. No opposition,” Michael told us.
We went on waiting.
Suddenly a gun went off somewhere in the woods, on the left. Three or four more shots followed, then silence, then another two.
A few minutes later a crowd of ragged men with quite a number of women among them came pouring out of the woods, leaving the scene of their intended ambush and making toward the firing. They were a woebegone, miserable lot, a few of them visibly deviants, but most of them looking simply the wrecks of normal human beings. I could not see more than three or four guns in all. The rest had bows, and a number had short spears scabbarded at their backs, as well. The spider-man stood out among them, taller than the rest, and close beside him I could see Sophie, with a bow in her hand. Whatever degree of organization there may have been had clearly disintegrated.
“What’s happening?” I asked Michael. “Was that your lot shooting?”
“No. That was the other party. They’re trying to draw the Fringes men across their way so that we can come in from the opposite side and take them in the rear.”
“They’re succeeding,” I told him.
The sound of more firing came from the same direction as before. A clamor and shouting broke out. A few spent arrows dropped into the left-hand end of the clearing. Some men came running back out of the trees.
Suddenly there was a strong, clear question:
“You’re still safe?”
We were all three lying on the floor in the front part of the cave now. We had a view of what was going on, and there was little enough chance of anyone noticing our heads, or bothering about us if he did. The way things were going was plain even to Petra. She loosed an urgent, excited flash.
�
�Steady, child, steady! We’re coming,” admonished the Zealand woman.
More arrows fell into the left-hand end of the clearing, and more ragged figures appeared in rapid retreat. They ran back, dodging as they came, and took cover among the tents and hovels. Still more followed, with arrows spitting out of the woods after them. The Fringes men crouched behind their bits of cover, bobbing up now and then to take quick shots at figures scarcely visible between the trees.
Unexpectedly a shower of arrows flew in from the other end of the clearing. The tattered men and women discovered themselves to be between two fires, and started to panic. Most of them jumped to their feet and ran for the shelter of the caves. I got ready to push the ladder away if any of them should try to climb into ours.
Half a dozen horsemen appeared, riding out of the trees on the right. I noticed the spider-man. He was standing by his tent, bow in hand, watching the riders. Sophie, beside him, was tugging at his ragged jacket, urging him to run toward the caves. He brushed her back with his long right arm, never taking his eyes from the emerging horsemen His right hand went back to the string, and held the bow half-drawn. His eyes kept on searching among the horsemen.
Suddenly he stiffened. His bow came up like a flash, bent to its full. He loosed. The shaft took my father in the left of his chest. He jerked, and fell back on Sheba’s hindquarters. Then he slithered off sideways and dropped to the ground, his right foot still caught in the stirrup.
The spider-man threw down his bow, and turned. With a scoop of his long arms he snatched up Sophie, and began to run. His spindly legs had not made more than three prodigious strides when a couple of arrows took him simultaneously in the back and side, and he fell.
Sophie struggled to her feet and began to run on by herself. An arrow pierced right through her upper arm, but she held on, with it lodged there. Then another took her in the back of the neck, She dropped in mid-stride, and her body slid along in the dust.
A Treasury of Great Science Fiction 1 Page 19