“All right,” said Thorburn crisply. “All in. We’ll have to go to the far edge of the quarry. Keep closed up.”
Julia flashed him a glance. Thorburn nodded his head at her. “I know, my dear, I know.”
The two Forager groups, standing by the hole their engineers had cut into the food quarry beyond, shadowed and dimly illumined by a faint seeping light, turned all as one as Rogers’ point man called back sharply.
“Yobs! Action front! Yobs!”
Everyone, including Stead, who had been trained in this, flung furiously to the ground, diving for cover, flattening out, snouting up their splutter-guns. Even so, one of Rogers’ group farthest out, was slow. He screamed, staggering back, off balance. A long arrow protruded from his shoulder, artfully penetrating between the junction of arm and shoulder leathers. Before he was snatched down by a raking friendly arm four other arrows feathed into his armor.
Eyes slitted, Stead peered carefully out into the dusty crawling darkness behind the wall of the world. His heart thudded painfully against the ground. His gun felt suddenly cold to his fingers.
“See ’em, Cardon?” rumbled Thorbum.
“Not yet. If there are more than a dozen they’ll rush us in a second or two.”
“I hope they do.” Julia’s tones lashed the dark viciously. All their headlamps had been turned off. “You can pick a Yob off then.” She glanced at Stead. “Don’t let one get to close quarters, Stead.”
Stead gulped. “So I believe,” he said in his Controller’s voice that had long since ceased to amuse his Forager comrades. He peered down the sights of his gun and willed the tremble in his fingers out of existence.
“Here they come!” someone yelled.
Fire and explosions rippled from the prostrate line of men. Bullets ripped and tore into the charging mass ahead. Firing with the others, Stead tasted the acrid stink of burnt powder, felt the sweat rilling down his face, heard the insane hammer and clatter and the weird alien screams, saw the darting arrows striking down all about.
Then it was all over. Through the roaring in his ears and the streaking retinal after-images in his eyes, Stead understood that another peril of outside had been met and conquered. With the others, shakily, he stood up.
He walked across and looked down on a Yob.
The beast was more than a beast. Nine feet long, it propelled itself on six of its legs, the front pair of this world’s usual multiple-limbs being elevated like a man’s, the front portion of the Yob lifting up into a grotesque parody of a man’s chest. The head was flat and puffed and round, like a tureen, with four hom-hooded eyes, a wide mouth, nostril slits and a cockscomb of flesh, bright ochreous yellow, rising above. Furless was a Yob, like a man. The forelimbs were clumsily manipulative, almost like a man’s, the thumb not quite fully opposed. And, like a man, a Yob clad itself in skins and furs, wore a wide leather belt from which depended a knife, carried an ugly cudgel and a bow and a quiver of long, wickedly barbed arrows.
Intelligent, after their fashion, were Yobs.
“Now you’ve made the acquaintance of the highest level of intelligent animal in the world,” said Thorburn. “And now I know why the Demons set those traps.” He kicked the sprawled, riddled body of the Yob contemptuously. “They are savages; they live by no Regulations. They quarry and forage without check, leaving traces, telling the Demons everything. No wonder the traps appeared.”
“I lost a man,” said Rogers. “Wilkins will be pleased.”
“Take him back all the Yob equipment. You deserve it.”
Stead was not surprised at Rogers’ reaction of thanks. Yob artifacts fetched a great price in service and resources among the Controllers. They were curios, objects of an alien and strange culture, if culture it could be called.
“Right!” Thorburn grated the words deliberately. “All in.”
Old Chronic cackled. “Bring along the least damaged Yob. Usual drill.” Chuckling with a Forager’s amazing resilience, cheerful seconds after hideous danger, Sims and Wallas obeyed. The Yob was dragged through the exit hole, bundled inside through the mountains of food.
“There’s a trap,” nodded Julia.
Quickly the men draped the dead Yob artistically in the trap, grappled his naked left hind foot, pulled. The trap swished horribly down. They undid their grapnel.
“Now the Demons might be placated a little.”
Stead saw the wisdom of that. Working with the others, right over on the edge of the quarry, hard up against a painted metal wall that reared upwards for thirty feet, until the floor above created the ceiling to this shelf, he stuffed his sack with round white eggs, each over half his own size. He worked with a will, anxious to be off.
The damp moss packing he rammed down between the eggs finished, and still the sack was not full. He walked a few paces towards the metal wall, where one of the mixed-up bread and fruit mountains lay, cut open and crumbling. His axe sliced out neat wedges which he rammed gently down on top of the eggs. Absorbed in his task he heard the click and whoosh of air as though from a distance. He did not look up.
A vivid bar of light crashed down across the floor.
“Stead! Run, man, run!”
Thorburn’s frantic yell brought Stead up, all blinking, his eyes closing against that ferocious white light. He had seen no light so powerful, so actinic, so devastatingly blinding.
Fumbling, he dropped his sack, reeled, tried to run, crashed into the food mountain. Panting, he clung on, feeling it as the only solid refuge in a world of merciless light.
Then… horror.
Through streaming eyes that he forced agonizingly to open he saw the floor drop away. He felt his body rising, felt the movement as though his antigrav had been switched on under full power, and had gone wrong.
Swaying, sickeningly swooping, the section of food mountain soared into the air, out into that blazing whiteness of light.
The floor passed beneath his feet. Below that, incredibly far below that, dwindling it seemed in impossible perspective, another floor appeared, so far below him that blueness edged its outlines. He clung onto the food with all his strength. Something white and shiny appeared below. His feet struck it jarringly. The food fragment tilted and, blessedly, its shadow dropped over him. Now he could see.
Now he could see.
How long he crouched there, dumb, numb, sick, filled with a horror that engulfed his entire being, he did not know. It seemed to him like hours.
The ground beneath his feet was hard and white and shiny, like china. It encircled his vision. Beyond it stretched a great plain of brightly colored material. Distantly, he made out two upright columns of wood and two cross bars joining them. He was staring at these in wonder, in a maelstrom of fear and panic and bowel-loosening terror, crouched down, unable to move, when the final horror burst upon him.
Something appeared from the side. Something so huge and vast it dwarfed his being. He did not, dared not,- look up. He knew within his soul that there must be a roof up I here, but suppose there wasn’t? And now, as he watched this something move slowly, so slowly, across in front of the wooden structure, his whole being and body screamed silently and his brain curdled in his skull.
The thing was vast. Impossibly vast. It towered. And it moved. Slowly it moved, until it stopped in front of the wood. Then, slowly, it sank down.
Stead stared up… up… at a vast, a world-filling, an earth-shaking, snorting, breathing, moving Yob.
A Yob so huge that it blotted out all vision, so de-vastatingly monstrous that his overstrained mind could no longer accept the evidence of his senses.