"Krysty's right, Ryan," Finnegan whispered. "Sooner we get out of this fucking ville the better."
"Yeah, Finn. With you there. Best get us some food and then mebbe hoist a wag and head on north."
They walked on in the thickening crowd. The calm of earlier had been replaced by a tenseness, an air of muted excitement. More and more eyes turned to look at the strangers, and again and again they heard the word "outworlder" repeated, plus the expression "first stone," or something that sounded like that.
The buildings were in excellent repair far better than any ville Ryan, J.B. and Finn had ever seen. There were several stores, mostly selling plain clothes or food. Also for sale was a newspaper, the Ginnsburg Falls Regulator, whose proprietor, named on a trim board, was Isaac Sissy. That name was obviously quite popular. There was also the Sissy Temperance Hotel and the Rachel Sissy Second Pentecostal Baptist Church of His Last Coming.
"This Sissy family sure has the ville sewn up tight," J.B. said.
"Don't like the feel at all," Ryan replied, keeping his voice quiet so that none of the men and boys surging around them would catch what was said.
"Me, neither," Jak said. "Dumb creepy mutie bastards, all of 'em. Why not go, Ryan?"
"Tomorrow," Ryan said.
There were lights coming on all around the township, with lamps on street corners glowing into golden life. Doc Tanner looked around in delight. "I swear that I have not encountered such a degree of civilization in... in many long years."
"Where's the power plant?" Ryan asked the sec guard, who still walked stolidly along beside them, the heels of his boots ringing on the stone sidewalk.
"West. On Salvation Avenue. Big generators."
"You got radio?"
"Yes. Just for us. No vids. Mayor says one day. Gotta get spares. Folks up north could help. So my father said to me. Said his father 'fore him heard the same."
"That must..." Finnegan began, stopping suddenly when Ryan surreptitiously angled a foot out to trip him. The stout gunman stumbled and nearly fell over. He looked at Ryan in sudden anger, then saw the warning shake of the head and calmed himself. Ryan didn't want the sec men of Ginnsburg Falls to know anything about the faint radio message they'd heard, and Finn nodded his understanding.
"Got vids or teevee?" Jak Lauren asked.
"Said not."
"Said no vids. How's 'bout teevee?"
"No." The word was flat and final.
Ryan was surprised they hadn't been ordered to remove their blasters and leave them with the sec men. All of them had chosen not to carry their heavier guns, relying on side arms. Most of the adult males of the ville wore pistols, many of which looked like remakes.
On some of the side streets small domestic wags were parked, and just beyond the Harold Sissy Memorial High School, close by the lake, there was a big old Kenworth rig with chromed exhaust.
They followed the throng off the main drag and up the narrow slope of Quarry Road.
Several of the older men were smoking pipes, and Ryan wrinkled his nostrils at the familiar smell. He looked sideways at J.B., seeing that the Armorer had also recognized the scent.
"Maryjane, huh?" he whispered.
"How's that sit with that temperance hotel back there?" J.B. wondered. "From the Mayor Sissy Cannabis Plant?"
"Watch the tongue, friend," Ryan warned.
"Fireblast!" exclaimed Ryan Cawdor when they arrived at the quarry. It was possible that more people had gathered here than he'd ever seen in one place. He did a quick count in the gathering gloom, estimating there were something like seven thousand men and boys present.
That meant there was something wrong. Something, somewhere, that was terribly wrong.
"Doc," he said, noting the villefolk had left a circle around the five outworlders as though they were suspected of being plaguies.
"What?"
"You're the man of science."
"Was, my dear boy, was."
"What did that sign say when we came into the ville? The population?"
"Eight thousand four hundred and... and seven. Real big town for these days."
"Do me a rough count on how many's here."
The old man was silent, lips moving as he let his eyes run around the natural arena, ticking off the figures on the different ledges in the quarry. Away to their left there was some sort of disturbance in the crowd, with a phalanx of sec men pushing through.
"Something between seventy-three hundred and seventy-four hundred. Difficult to count a shifting mob of chapped-hand yokels in poor light. I counted legs and divided by two."
Finnegan was listening to the exchange. "Wait a fucking minute," he began. "If there's a total..."
"Keep your voice down," J.B. snapped. "We get the picture, Ryan. Total population eight and a half thou. Man seven and a half thou. Take off some male babies. Can't leave more'n a few hundred women in the whole ville."
All four of them pondered that. The chatter around them had subsided, and the great granite bowl was silent, with only the whistling of the wind to break the stillness. As on the previous evening, it had become bitingly cold, and a chem-storm was raging away to the north, the crimson clouds torn apart with golden curtains-of forked lightning.
There was a ramp that led to a raised podium near the middle of the quarry. The sec men were climbing it, with someone or something at their center. Jak Lauren had the keenest eyes.
"Cripple. They're wheeling."
Ryan saw him then: a tiny, frail man with a head, fringed with silvery hair, that looked too large for his body and a skin almost as pale as Jak's. They were only about fifty yards off, and Ryan could see the little hands, soft and pink, decorated with chunky rings and a golden bracelet. The legs trailed, wasted, in neat, highly polished shoes of black leather. The man wore a tailored suit of light cream cloth. As he was wheeled up to the platform, his head jiggled and rolled on his shoulders.
"Silence for Mayor Theodore Sissy," one of the sec men bellowed unnecessarily, since the crowd had fallen quiet the moment the leader of Ginnsburg Falls had appeared.
There was a microphone at the front of the stage, already adjusted to the height at which Mayor Sissy could speak into it comfortably from his chair. His voice was soft and trembling, like a nervous child.
"Bring them before us."
The stillness was broken by a murmur of sound that slithered around the quarry like some great rustling reptile.
A half-dozen sec men, including the leader of the patrol in the jeep, moved into the center of the quarry with two people in their midst.
"Let there be light," the cripple on the platform breathed. There was the sharp sound of a lever being thrown, and the whole place was flooded by arc lamps that stood on pylons circling the stone arena.
The stark glare made Jak's white hair stand out like spun magnesium. All round them the men and boys backed farther off, muttering and pointing. Fortunately they were distracted by the events at the middle of the quarry.
"Here stand Jolyon Manscomb and the whore. Taken in the act of adulterous lust. It is admitted that the whore lured him, as Eve lured Adam, with her cunt filled with honey. But both pay the price."
The woman was slightly built, with dull brown hair cropped raggedly at shoulder level. She was dressed in a short robe, like a shift, of some coarse material that looked as if it had been used as sacking. It was dyed a vivid, sickly yellow. The man, whose head was bowed and balding, was wearing a similar robe, colored flat ocher. Both of them were barefoot and both had their hands tied in front of them with a thick rope.
Ryan had noticed that he stood on uneven ground. It was covered with a thick layer of stones, ranging in size from pebbles to jagged chunks of granite as large as a man's fist. There were similar piles of stones all about the floor of the quarry, the nearest only a dozen paces from where he waited with J.B., Jak, Finn and Doc Tanner. He licked his lips, finding them suddenly dry as he realized what the stones were for.