Stead had been calculating. “That means the bright light is on the wane Outside?”
“Yes. That accounts for our day or two’s breather. But now we’re off again.” He glanced back.
Following the seven Forager trucks rolled another ten filled with soldiers. Up ahead as point rode two more. Ar-chon meant to protect the wealth her Foragers would bring in. And that had dropped another piece into place for Stead. There were two sorts of outside, he had soon realized. The outside of tunnels and corridors and crannies behind walls that lay outside the warrens. This was the outside in which soldiers from rival Empires and Federations fought over women and wealth. This was the outside the Controllers talked about so grandly. But there existed another outside, outside the first—The Outside—the world of the Foragers and Hunters, a world that the Controllers talked of again, but not so grandly. And there, Stead knew with a sick feeling dread, was the land of rooflessness, of Rangs and… of Demons?
He became aware that Honey was looking at him, and he smiled. She turned her face away at once, fiddled with her radio set, sat stiff and unyielding to the bumpy ride. Stead felt the usual mystification strike him and shrugged it off. Honey was a woman. That explained that. A shy, timid little soul, she aroused in him a feeling he found difficult to define—a different and yet allied feeling to his attitude towards Delia and, yes, of his chaotic impressions of Belle.
Julia now, well Julia could as well have been a man for all the difference it made to Stead. Thorbum seemed to be interested in her, though. Stead had found an unyielding wall of rectitude between him and his comrades whenever he had carefully, casually, artfully, brought up the subject of men and women and why they were different.
More than once an odd expression had escaped one of them, usually Sims or Wallas, and Thorburn had shut them up. Stead had gradually become voicelessly convinced that Simon and Delia had given instructions to his comrades not to discuss the question with him. That rankled at first, but then he thought of Delia and her dedicated fire, and smiled and waited until the time came for her to explain. Somehow, he wanted Delia to explain it all, not these Foragers, however strong the ties of friendship now binding them.
For he felt now very much a Forager. The Hunter nom-clature, although still used, was an archaism, from the days when Foragers and Hunters had been different classes. The Foragers foraged and quarried; the Hunters hunted live game. Now a Forager hunted what came to hand.
The journey this trip was longer, a good twenty miles. At a halt the Commander—a Controller officer stiff and grim in his armor—walked down the line of trucks. With him strode his Bosun, squat, tough, craggy, merciless. The Foragers didn’t think much of hun.
Cardon said fiercely, “Class traitor!”
The Commander reminded them all that they were now driving near the border with the Empire of Trychos. Alertness. Anticipation. Ready weapons. On the ball.
“We know,” said Cardon blackly to the group when the soldier had stalked on. “A Forager will spot an enemy, human or animal, miles before a soldier!”
The depths of class distinctions and hatreds within the single body politic continued to astound Stead. If men faced the hazards he knew they faced outside, surely, common sense said, they should stick together. Somehow, they didn’t. And, again somehow, the machinery of the state creaked on.
B. G. Wills had said that it would not creak for very much longer.
The convoy reached a narrow crack between two runnels made by a large, earth-boring animal whose runs were frequently used by men. Driving through with whining electrics, they came out onto a flat, low but wide expanse. A solid concrete wall faced them. Down this ran a pipe some six feet in diameter, loud with splashing water. Further along, cables looped down as though sagging through rotten wood—the men had to fight and rout a small army of twelve-legged animals two feet long, and clear away their nests and cocooned young—each cable about eighteen inches thick, alive with electricity.
“The immortal one provides us with light, heat and water,” commented Thorburn as the camp arose under the men’s capable hands. “If only he’d made it all a little easier!”
The Commander told off pickets, guard details, duty rotas. On this important trip Forager Manager Purvis had come along to supervise his men on the spot. Forage parties went out on schedule, returned with bulging sacks. The pattern of life developed its own rhythms in the advance depot.
Thorbum’s group had been allotted a sleeping area against the earth wall built at right angles to the concrete wall of the world. They had their own electric light and heater. Their sleeping bags lay neatly in two rows. Julia slept next to Thorburn. Honey, for some odd reason uncompre-hended by Stead, slept a little apart from the rest.
They carried out three trips, very short, going through runnels well marked and signposted, carrying back full sacks.
The quarry they had mined staggered Stead in the proportions of its bounty. Food lay heaped in quantities limitless to the eye. Regulations would wait long before they called a halt to this gathering.
Four more trips were completed, and now they marched the runnels as along familiar streets in the warrens. The signposts became unnecessary. On their eighth trip and halfway out, Honey called Thorbum. They stood beneath a signpost which said: Quarry Nine and displayed an arrow, pointing onwards.
“Signal, Thorbum,” said Honey, looking up uneasily. At once their easiness, their casualness, evaporated.
“It’s Rogers, up ahead. Some of the signposts have been torn down since he went in. They’ve run across traps.”
“Well, this was too good to last,” said Thorburn grimly. And then he said something that, at first, unutterably shocked Stead. Only as the words rang in his mind did he see how they fitted in with Simon’s theories, only with stunning force.
“The Demons,” Thorbum said. “They’re trying to stop us again.”
“But… but—” protested Stead incoherently. “The Demons can’t do anything to a man with a rational mind! They are figments of the imagination, controllers of the spirit to order our consciences. It is the immortal being who provides us with food and who also sets the traps.”
“Now what sort of immortal one would that be,” demanded Julia scornfully, “who’d deliberately trap a man and mangle his body?”
“I see,” said Stead unsteadily. “The traps and the Rangs are facts of life, but it is not the immortal one—who cannot be seen—who puts them there, but the Demons— who cannot be seen—”
It all fitted.
Well, he was learning.
“Relay the signal back to depot, Honey,” said Thorbum. “Purvis will have to know.”
“There’s an awful lot of clutter on the air.” Honey’s silky black hair bent closer in automatic reflex as her slender hands played with her dials delicately. “All right, I’m reaching him.”
The secondary runnel seemed clear. No traps. But up ahead Sims and Wallas walked with immense caution, and Cardon, rear marker, swung his head as though it pivoted on a universal joint. They reached their exit hole without further trouble. Rogers and his group marched past with full sacks, cheerily.
“The Demons are on to us, Thorburn,” said Rogers. “But no Rangs. Is Purvis sending out any more parties?”
“Couldn’t say. We came in by the secondary route. I’d advise you to try that.”
“Thanks. We tripped all the traps we could find. But you’ll have to go in some way. Regulations have been reached close to the exit hole.”
Thorburn’s party groaned at this. It was a groan of affectation, mock dismal; Stead found an amazement that they could joke in such gruesome ways when their every move might bring their deaths.