“The source was simply the center of the galaxy. There were other intelligent forms of life between man and that center, forms that also suffered variants of the illness, and it was rapidly understood that investigation was useless. The larger band of the chill impulse was twenty thousand light-years deep, and the source had been demolished long ago by a species now defunct. Yes, the chill was of artificial origin; no more was known.
“Meanwhile the waves were locally charted and schedules set up. The rich saved themselves by vacationing elsewhere during the critical month, while the majority simply waited and ferried the stricken out of range, if they found them in time. Great numbers were discovered too late.
“And Earth,” Hastings finished, “populous Earth, with far too many billions to transport, could do nothing but wait for the first of the waves to strike. This is the time: the year §400. I’m glad I’m not there.”
The crowd drifted off. Hastings had made light of the threat, but the chill was frightening, deep inside, to all of them. For no prisoner knew where Chthon was located.
The chill could strike tomorrow.
8
“Hey Fiver, pal—know what Garnet just done to me?” Framy was bursting with news.
“I can guess.” Aton halted his chipping and sat down.
Framy rushed right on. “She gimme a whole chow for free. I held out my garnet and she never took it. Just handed over my meal and went away, sort of dreamy. She ain’t never been so careless before.”
Aton reclined against the wall, rubbing grit off his forearms as Framy ate. “It wasn’t carelessness.”
Framy spoke around a mouthful. “But she never took the—you mean she done it on purpose?”
Aton nodded.
“She’d be crazy to do a thing Eke that. She hates me ’most as much as she hates you.”
“Does she?” said Aton. Hate is such an interesting thing. I hate the minionette…
Garnet appeared, interrupting their discussion. “Got your stone?” she gruffly asked Aton. Wordlessly he held it out. She took it and dropped the package on the floor.
Framy stared after her until she was gone. “God of the Pit! I never seen it before. She soft on you, Five.”
Aton opened his package.
But the little man was still puzzled. “That ain’t no cause for her to be doing me no favors. I ain’t no woman’s idol. Why don’t she give you no chow for free?”
Aton explained carefully so that the other would understand. Framy was incredulous. “You mean she don’t want to show how she’s soft on you, so she takes it out on me? ’Cause I’m your pal and don’t know nothing anyway?”
“Close enough.”
“It just don’t make no sense. No sense at all.”
They brought the half-eaten corpse in for everyone to see. A man had wandered too far out alone, downwind. He might have been searching for superior garnets, or perhaps for an exit from the lower caverns. The chimera had come. Help had come ten minutes after his agonized scream—but he had been dead ten minutes. Stomach and intestines had been ripped open and eaten; eyes and tongue were gone. Long dark streaks showed on the cavern floor, they said, where he had been found, where the blood had flowed and been licked up.
“Remind me never to go on the Hard Trek,” Hastings said sickly. “I’m too tender a morsel to be exposed to that.”
The black-haired beauty gave him a sidelong glance. “I hear there’s worse ’n that downwind on the Hard Trek,” she said. “Ain’t no one ever made it out. You can hear the howls of the beast-men that once were people like us, before they got caught.”
“They live?” Hastings asked, obligingly setting up her punch line.
“Naw—but they howl.”
There was general laughter. It was an old joke, and not without a suspicion of accuracy.
This is my opportunity, Aton thought. Now—while it seems natural. Feign uncertainty, but get it out.
“I’m not sure, but it seems to me I heard about someone getting through,” he said.
Framy took him up immediately. “Somebody got out? Somebody made the Hard Trek?”
“There must be a way out,” Hastings said. “If we could only find it. The chimera had to get in somewhere.”
“Maybe them animals never did get in,” the black-haired woman said. Aton had never picked up her name. She had been subtly interested in him since that first discussion, but refused to make an overt play. Possibly she was afraid of Garnet or just smarter. She certainly interested him more; she was able to fling her hair about in a kind of dress that hinted at the sensuality of clothing. Nothing, he had discovered here, is quite so sexless as complete nudity. “Maybe there ain’t no animals,” she continued. “We never see none.”
“I seen a salamander—” Framy began, then cut himself off.
“Salamanders, yes,” Hastings said. “But that’s about the only one a man can see and survive. That’s why we speak of the ‘chimera’—that’s what the word means. Imaginary monster. But we sure as Chthon didn’t imagine that.” His eyes flicked toward the corpse.
“It was a doctor,” Aton said judiciously. “He was quite mad—but free.”
Heads turned in his direction. Conversation stopped.
“A doctor?” Hastings breathed.
Aton held out his hand for a garnet, and everyone laughed. “About five years ago, I think. They never found out how he managed to escape. They had to put him in a mental hospital.”
“Bedside!” someone cried.
“He swore he’d get out.”
“That means there is a trail.”
“You sure about that?” Hastings asked Aton. “You remember the name?”
Do I remember the name I pried so carefully from the prison librarian, knowing that this was the word that might free me? “It wasn’t Bedside,” he said. “Something like Charles Bedecker, M.D. Of course he lost his license when they sent him down.”
“Yeah,” Framy agreed. “They defrocked him.”
“I knew him,” Hastings said. “I had almost forgotten. We never called him by his real name, of course. He stayed about a month; then he set out with hardly more than his doctor’s bag. He said he’d make a trail for the rest of us, if we had guts enough to follow. But he was such a small, mild character. We knew he’d never get far.”
“How come you let him go?” the woman asked. “Him a doctor—”
“No sickness down here,” Hastings pointed out. “We’re sterilized—by the heat, perhaps. And death is usually too sudden. And he was a bad man to offend. Small, but what he could do—”
“That’s not surprising,” Aton said. “Didn’t you know what he got sent down for?”
Hastings put him off. “You remember a lot, all of a sudden. We never ask that question here. That’s none of our business.”
“But there’s a trail,” Framy said, savoring it.
“A trail to madness,” Hastings pointed out. “That’s as bad as death.”
“But a trail…”
The magic word was out. Aton knew that it would spread like the hot wind through the caverns. Proof—proof of a way out. They could never be fully satisfied now, until they found it.