“Eh? How so?”
“We’re told that was tried long ago. It only choked off the circulation and ran the heat up into the sweltering range.”
“Least we could do,” Haverty persisted, “is close it up some.”
“Ought to be bigger as it is.”
Jared eased up to the grotto entrance, but stood to one side so he wouldn’t block any of the direct sounds from the caster. That would betray his presence even to the most insensitive ears.
The Prime Survivor was absently tapping the meeting slab with his fingernail, producing unobtrusive echoes.
“However,” he said, “there is something we can do.”
“Eh? What’s that?” Survivor Haverty asked.
“We couldn’t do it by ourselves. It’s too big a project. But we might undertake it as a joint enterprise with the Upper Level.”
“We never had any joint enterprises with them before.” It was Elder Maxwell’s voice that entered the discussion.
“No, but they know we’re going to have to pool our resources.”
“What’s the pitch?” asked Haverty.
“There’s one passageway we might seal off. It wouldn’t disturb the circulation in either the Upper or Lower Level. But, still, it would block us off from the Zivver World, as far as we know.”
“The Main Passage,” Maxwell guessed.
“Right. It’d be quite a job. But with both Levels working at it, we could do it in maybe half a pregnancy period.”
“What about the Zivvers?” Haverty wanted to know. “Won’t they have anything to say about that?”
Jared heard the Prime Survivor shrug his shoulders before continuing: “The two Levels far outnumber the Zivvers. We could keep adding material to this side of the barricade faster than they could haul it away from the other side. Eventually they’d give up.”
Silence around the slab.
“Sounds good,” Maxwell said. “Now all we got to do is sell the Upper Level on the idea.”
“I think we can do that.” The Prime Survivor cleared his throat. “Jared, come on in. We’ve been waiting for you.”
The Prime Survivor might be getting old, Jared conceded, entering. But his ears and nose hadn’t aged any. From the uninterrupted fingernail tapping, Jared received a composite impression of all the faces at the slab turned in his direction. There was a figure standing behind the Prime Survivor, he sensed.
The man moved into the clear and Jared picked up his features — short and somewhat stooped despite the comparative youthfulness his breathing suggested; hair flowing down past his forehead and around the sides of his face, with irregular openings to accommodate his ears and nose-mouth region. The fullest fuzzy-face in the Lower Level — Romel Fenton-Spur, his brother.
After the amenity of Reasonable Time for Recognition and Reflection had been observed, the Prime Survivor cleared his throat. “Jared, it’s about time to apply for your Survivorship, don’t you think?”
Jared’s impulse was to brush aside the prosaic matter and launch into his revelation of the menace lurking in the Original World. But his presentation would have to be rational, so he decided to put it off a while. “I suppose so.”
“Ever think of Unification?”
“Radiation no!” Then he pinched his tongue. “No, I haven’t given it any thought.”
“You realize, of course, that every man must become a Survivor and that the principal obligation of a Survivor is to survive.”
“That’s what I’ve been told.”
“And surviving doesn’t mean merely preserving your own life, but also passing it down through the generations.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“And you’ve found no one with whom you’d like to Unify?”
There was Zelda; but she was a fuzzy-face. There was Luise, who was both open-eyed and bare-faced to the clickstones. But she was always tittering. “No, Your Survivorship.”
Romel snickered in anticipation of something or other and reproachful gestures were audible around the slab. For Jared, the sardonic giggle was reminiscent of earlier days when Romel’s malicious pranks usually took the form of a swish-rope that would lash out from behind a boulder, twine around his ankles and snatch him off his feet. The fraternal antagonism was still there. Only, now it managed to find other adult — well, almost adult — forms of expression.
“Good!” the Prime Survivor enthused, rising. “I think we’ve found a Unification partner for you.”
Jared sputtered a moment, then shed his respect with an oath. “Not for me you haven’t!”
How could he tell them he had no time for Unification? That he had to be free to continue what he had started out to do long pregnancy periods ago? That he doubted their religious beliefs? That he wanted to spend his life proving Light was something physical, attainable in this existence — not something restricted to the afterlife?
Romel laughed and said, “That’s for the Elders to decide.”
“You’re no Elder!”
“Neither are you. And, Jared, you’re forgetting the Eminence of Seniority Code.”
“To Radiation with the code!”
“That’ll be enough,” interrupted the Prime Survivor. “As Romel suggests, your Unification is for us to decide. Elders?”
Maxwell proposed, “Let’s hear more about this arrangement first.”
“Very well,” the Prime Survivor went on. “Nieither I nor the Wheel have let this get out yet, but we’re both sold on the idea of joining hands between the two worlds. The Wheel thinks that end can be helped along by Unification between Jared and his niece.”
“I won’t do it!” Jared vowed. “The Wheel’s just trying to pass off some spook of a relative!”
“Have you ever heard her?” the Prime Survivor asked.
“No! Have you?”
“No, but the Wheel says—”
“I don’t care what the Wheel says!”
Jared drew back and listened. The Elders were rumbling impatiently. They weren’t too happy over his stubbornness. If he didn’t do something — anything — soon, they’d have him hooked!
“There’s a monster in the Original World?” he blurted. “I was out chasing a soubat and—”
“The Original World?” asked Elder Maxwell incredulously.
“Yes! And this thing — it reeked like Radiation and—”
“Do you realize what you’ve done?” the Prime Survivor demanded severely. “Crossing the Barrier is the worst possible offense, besides Murder and Misplacement of Bulky Objects!”
“But this creature! I’m trying to tell you I heard something evil!”
The Prime Survivor’s voice drowned out even the central caster’s clacks. “What in the name of Light Almighty did you expect to find in the Original World? Why do you think we have laws, the Barrier?”
“This calls for severe punishment,” Romel suggested.
“You keep out of it!” snapped the Prime Survivor.
“The Punishment Pit?” Maxwell prompted.
“Eh? What?” clipped Haverty. “I imagine not. Not with a Unification arrangement pending.”
Jared tried again. “This thing — it—”
“How about Seven Activity Periods of Detachment and Servility?” Haverty went on. “If he does it again — two gestations in the Pit.”
“Lenient enough,” Maxwell agreed. But he left unexpressed the general knowledge that only one prisoner had ever spent more than ten activity periods in the Pit and that he had had to be tied down for a whole gestation before he became harmless.
The Prime Survivor spoke up. “We’ll make Jared’s token punishment contingent on his accepting Unification.”
The Elders eagerly smote the slab in approval.
“While serving your sentence,” the Prime Survivor told Jared, “you can condition yourself for a visit to the Upper Level for the Five Periods Preparatory to Declaration of Unification Intentions.”