Gording was having less trouble keeping up. If the chance came, the old man would be able to run... but running wouldn't do it. The Boys were faster. Corbell wanted transportation.
"Phone booths" didn't send far enough. Useful for hiding in a city, but not for reaching safety; not unless he could get into the emergency-transport network Skatholtz had diagrammed for him. A car would be better. Or... what did the Boys use to lower a dozen bedrooms onto the roof of Dikta City? A giant helicopter? Some big flying thing, anyway.
He wouldn't find any of those things outside a city. Maybe they existed in Sarash-Zillish alone. He would reach Sarash-Zillish too late; Gording's hair would be showing black by then.
Past noon on the fifth day. Far across the corn they watched a loner hunting. Sprint, walk a bit, sprint, walk: The loner must be tired. But the kangaroo was exhausted. Hop and waddle, hop and waddle, look back at the closing loner, hop hop hop! Until at last it waited for the loner to walk up and kill it.
Krayhayft's tribe veered to give the loner room, but the loner had other plans. He did a fast butchering job on the kangaroo, slung the meat over his shoulder and loped to join the tribe at an angle.
He was dirty. He bled where the kangaroo had snapped at his forearm. He had lost his loincloth somewhere. But he grinned, white flashing through the dirt, and he talked at electric-typewriter speed. Corbell caught some of it. He'd been out a year and a half, since the end of long night the previous year... had gone places, done things, seen wonders... had studied the kchint herds from hiding, knew more of them than any Boy... his rapid speech ran down as his eyes locked on Corbell.
Corbell tried to listen to what the Boys were telling the loner about him. Unfamiliar words, and the sudden drumming of the afternoon rain, made understanding impossible. But the wanderer derived much amusement from what he was hearing.
When the afternoon rain ended, the clearing sky disclosed reaching towers whose tops sketched a dome shape.
They camped a mere hour's distance from what seemed an intact city. The loner had cleaned the mud out of his hair, revealing it as brown streaked with white, and had found a loincloth. He did all the talking that night. Was that why Boys turned loner? Nothing to talk about anymore?
Corbell slept badly. The towers made a broken arc against the stars. If he could break loose, to reach the city alone... But every time he looked around him someone was watching him. As if they could read his mind.
V
Parhalding was bigger than Sarash-Zillish. Moth and rust had done their work... and invading soil and grass and trees and vines. The buildings still stood, most of them. Their flat roofs sprouted green heads. Grapevines and blackberry vines swathed their waists. Corn and wheat grew mixed where soil was shallow. Where soil and water could pool, there were gnarled old trees bearing varied fruit and walnuts.
Corbell picked what looked like a puffy lemon. (The limbs of the tree were thick and low-its green head touched vines swarming to the second story of a building with empty windows-but Boys climbed like monkeys, and they were too close, and watching.) The fruit tasted like lemonade, like lemon with sugar.
Parhalding was what an abandoned city looked like. In Sarash-Zillish he had taken the state of preservation for granted. Foolish. He should have been looking for caretakers.
The vines bulged oddly near the corner, and something glinted within the bulge. Light shifted as he walked... and Corbell became certain that there was a bubble-car under the bulge. How badly damaged? Corbell caught Gording's fraction-of-a-second glance. Had anyone else caught it? The Boys couldn't know everything...
But the tribe had clumped inward as they walked. He might have thought they were afraid of ancient ghosts. They converged to a corn-New file pact mass with Corbell in the middle, and it was Corbell who was afraid.
That building ahead: no vines, no green top. Someone had maintained it. Corbell knew it by its shape: a hospital.
The hospital's big double doors opened for them. Now the dozen Boys around Corbell were close enough to trip over one another, though they didn't. Indirect lighting came alive slowly, showing an admissions desk, a shattered picture window with a few curved transparent teeth still in it, cloud-rug and sofas cleaned of slivers; and a wall covered by twin polar-projection maps with the polar ice caps prominent.
A panicky choking sound pulled his eyes around. Corbell saw yesterday's loner fall to his knees in the doorway. His head was gone. His neck jetted bright blood.
Gording was at bay. The albino stood bent-legged and snarling between Gording and the double doors. As the young albino came at him, Gording threw a rock, sidearm, to miss. Corbell tried to make sense of what he was seeing. The rock passed behind the albino's neck, turned sharply and circled his throat. Gording jerked hard on the other rock still in his hand.
Then it made sense. The albino screamed without sound and clawed at the air between them. His neck parted cleanly. The doors opened for the headless corpse as it stumbled backward. Gording brushed past it and was gone.
Corbell became aware that two Boys were holding his arms. And the rest were charging after Gording.
Corbell's military training was far in the past, but he remembered. Stamp down along the shin; the enemy doubles up, you twist and bring your elbow up- His captors faded like ghosts from his blows, and a swinging arm caught him precisely across the eyes. He was dizzy and half blind as they led him up flights of stairs.
"They'll have him soon," he heard Skatholtz say.
"He's got thread. We'll have to test every doorway," said Krayhayft. "Thread is too near invisible, and if it caught a Boy across the throat-come, Corbell."
They had climbed four flights of stairs and gone down a corridor. Corbell looked into an operating room. Four tables, and spidery metal arms above them.
"Nooo!" Corbell thrashed. Your pain will be instructive to you and to us. They were going to dissect him! They pulled him to an operating table and fastened him spread-eagled, face up.
"You can't be sure you know everything I know," he called to Krayhayft's receding back. Nuts, he was gone. But Skatholtz hoisted himself to sitting position on another table.
"Skatholtz, if you destroy my brain, you lose the only viewpoint that isn't just like your own! Now think about that!"
"We're not going to ruin your brain. At least I think we're not. There is that risk."
"What are you going to do?"
"We're going to entertain each other."
Then Krayhayft came jogging back with a flask of... blood plasma? Clear fluid, anyway. He reached over Corbell's head and nested it somehow among the tool-tipped steel arms.
Corbell thought, Tell them about the car! He swallowed the idea. If his sympathy lay with anyone besides himself, it was with the dikta. Let Gording escape if he could.
A spidery steel arm descended. Its hypodermic tip hesitated above him, then dipped into his neck. Krayhayft's strong hands held his head immobile for an endless time. Then the hypo withdrew and the arm retracted into its nest.
Corbell waited. Would the stuff put him to sleep? Or only paralyze him?
But Skatholtz was releasing his arms and ankles and pulling him to his feet. Corbell swayed. The stuff was doing something to him.
They took him up three more flights of stairs and down a corridor and into a small theater. They dropped him into a cloud-rug chair. Dust puffed up around him. He sneezed and tried to get up, but he was too dizzy. Something was happening to his mind.
Krayhayft was at work behind him somewhere.
The theater went dark.
Lights glowed in the dark, infinitely far away. Stars: the black sky of interstellar space. Corbell found familiar constellations, distorted and then something told him where he was.