"Fine," Harl said. "I'll have my screen checked over." He moved toward the door. "I'll go back up to the third level. I'll be expecting your signal. I'll have my equipment ready."
up to the third level. I'll be expecting your signal. I'll have my equipment ready."
The two men watched the door slide shut after the youth.
"Quite a boy," Turner muttered.
"Turning out to be something, after all," Ed Boynton murmured. "He'll go a long way." He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "But I wonder how he'll act up on the surface during the raid."
Harl met with his group leader on the third level, an hour after he left his father's office.
"Then it's all settled?" Fashold asked, looking up from his report spools.
"All settled. They're going to signal me as soon as the ship is ready."
"By the way." Fashold put down the spools, pushing the scanner back. "I've learned something about the saps. As a YL leader I have access to the Directorate files. I've learned something virtually no one else knows."
"What is it?" asked Harl.
"Harl, the saps are related to us. They're a different species, but they're very closely related to us."
"Go on," Harl urged.
"At one time there was only the one species -- the saps. Their full name is homo sapiens. We grew out of them, developed from them. We're biogenetic mutants. The change occurred during the Third World War, two and a half centuries ago. Up to that time there had never been any technos."
"Technos?"
Fashold smiled. That's what they called us at first. When they thought of us only as a separate class, and not as a distinct race. Technos. That was their name for us. That was how they always referred to us."
"But why? It's a strange name. Why technos, Fashold?"
"Because the first mutants appeared among the technocratic classes and gradually spread throughout all other educated classes. They appeared among scientists, scholars, field workers, trained groups, all the various specialized classes."
"And the saps didn't realize --"
"They thought of us only as a class, as I've just told you. That was during the Third World War and after. It was during the Final War that we fully emerged as recognizably and profoundly different. It became evident that we weren't just another specialized offshoot of homo sapiens. Not just another class of men more educated than the rest, with higher intellectual capacities."
Fashold gazed off into the distance. "During the Final War we emerged and showed ourselves for what we really were -- a superior species supplanting homo sapiens in the same way that homo sapiens had supplanted Neanderthal man."
Harl considered what Fashold had said. "I didn't realize we were so closely related to them. I had no idea we had emerged so lately."
Fashold nodded. "It was only two centuries ago, during the war that ravaged the surface of the planet. Most of us were working down in the big underground laboratories and factories under the different mountain ranges -- the Urals, the Alps, and the Rockies. We were down underground, under miles of rock and dirt and clay. And on the surface homo sapiens slugged it out with the weapons we designed."
"I'm beginning to understand. We designed the weapons for them to fight the war. They used our weapons without realizing --"
"We designed them and the saps used them to destroy themselves," Fashold interjected. "It was Nature's crucible, the elimination of one species and the emergence of another. We gave them the weapons and they destroyed themselves. When the war ended the surface was fused, and nothing but ash and hydroglass and radioactive clouds remained.
"We sent out scouting parties from our underground labs and found nothing but a silent, barren waste. It had been accomplished. They were gone, wiped out. And we had come to take their place."
"Not all of them could have been wiped out," Harl pointed out. "There are still a lot of them up there on the surface."
there on the surface."
"So nothing exists now but males and females without homes."
"There are a few villages here and there -- wherever they've managed to clear the surface. But they've descended to utter savagery, and live like animals, wearing skins and hunting with rocks and spears. They've become almost bestial remnants who offer no organized resistance when we go up to raid a few of their villages for our factories."
"Then we --" Harl broke off abruptly as a faint bell sounded. He turned in startled apprehension, snapping on the vidphone.
His father's face formed on the screen, hard and stern. "Okay, Harl," he said. "We're ready."
"So soon? But --"
"We set the time ahead. Come down to my office." The image on the screen dimmed and vanished.
Harl did not move.
"They must have got worried," Fashold said, grinning. "They were apparently afraid you'd pass the information along."
"I'm all ready," Harl said. He picked up his blast gun from the table. "How do I look?"
In his silver communications uniform Harl looked splendid and impressive. He had put on heavy military boots and gloves. In one hand he gripped his blast gun. Around his waist was his screen control-belt.
"What's that?" Fashold asked, as Harl lowered black goggles over his eyes.
"These? Oh, they're for the sun."
"Of course -- the sun. I forgot."
Harl cradled his gun, balancing it expertly. "The sun would blind me. The goggles protect my eyes. I'll be safe up there, with my screen and gun, and these goggles."
"I hope so." Still grinning, Fashold thumped him on the back as he moved toward the door. "Bring back a lot of saps. Do a good job -- and don't forget to include a female!"
The mother ship moved slowly from the warehouse, and out onto the lift stage, a rotund black teardrop emerging from storage. Its port locks slid back, and ramps climbed to meet the locks. Immediately supplies and equipment were on their way up, rising into the bowels of the ship.
"Almost ready," Turner said, his face twitching with nervousness as he gazed through the observation windows at the loading ramps outside. "I hope nothing goes wrong. If the Directorate should find out --"
"Quit worrying!" Ed Boynton ordered. "You picked the wrong time to let your thalamic impulses take over control."
"Sorry." Turner tightened his lips and moved away from the windows. The lift stage was ready to rise.
"Let's get started," Boynton urged. "Have you men from the department at each level?"
"Nobody but department members will be near the stage," Turner replied.
"Where is the balance of the crew?" Boynton demanded.
"At the first level. I sent them up during the day."
"Very well." Boynton gave the signal, and the stage under the ship began slowly to rise, lifting them steadily toward the level above.
Harl peered out the observation windows, watching the fifth level drop below and the fourth level, the vast commercial center of the under-surface system, come into view.
"Won't be long," Ed Boynton said, as the fourth level glided past. "So far so good."
"Where will we finally emerge?" Harl asked.
"In the latter stages of the war our various underground structures were connected by tunnels. That original network formed the basis of our present system. We'll emerge at one of the original entrances, located in the mountain range called 'The Alps'."
"In the latter stages of the war our various underground structures were connected by tunnels. That original network formed the basis of our present system. We'll emerge at one of the original entrances, located in the mountain range called 'The Alps'."
"Yes, in Europe. We have maps of the surface, showing locations of sap villages in that region. A whole cluster of villages lie to the North and North East in what used to be Denmark and Germany. We've never raided there before. The saps have managed to clear the slag away from several thousand acres in that region, and seem gradually to be reclaiming most of Europe."