Dumping their full sacks with the Quartermaster’s assistants, giving them a helpful shove up onto the stacks aboard the trucks, Thorbum’s group could at last seek their own cubby and strip off their armor, lay down their weapons, wash themselves and walk along to the mess for food.
But Stead could not forget his first sight of the Demon.
He never would; he felt that an experience like that would remain with him through any memory-erasing experience such as he had already gone through. He just knew he’d never seen a Demon before. If he had, he knew he’d never forget it.
“You’ll soon forget it, Stead.”
He turned sharply, surprised, imagining for a weird instant that the voice had echoed in his mind. Honey smiled demurely up at him. They were entering the marked off cubicle used as a mess and her face looked cleaned and scrubbed and fresh, her eyes friendly, her red mouth soft.
“Forget it?” He laughed harshly. “I doubt it.”
She sat down and, after a momentary hesitation, he sat beside her.
Awkwardly, he said, “Honey, I want to thank you. You risked your life. If you hadn’t— Anyway, thank you. I’m not worth much to anyone, but thank you very sincerely.”
“You’re worth a great deal!” she flashed. Then she picked up her knife and fork and set to with a resoluteness that stifled any further conversation.
A bright color burned in her face.
Women! Stead told himself with a sour little chuckle. He might take the Demons for granted as a fact of life—all the other Foragers did and he meant to be as good a Forager as any one of them—but women! Women—no. But no!
All the same, life couldn’t be the same now he knew that Demons did exist and were not an immaterial shadow working in opposition to the immortal being.
Only then, sitting thinking in the mess with his comrades about him, did Stead remember Simon and Delia. What would they say? He remembered the long discussions and arguments, with Delia tossing her red curls and Simon stroking his shrunken cheeks, as they thrashed out the meaning behind the imagination-conjured Demons.
Well. He’d be able to inject some common-sense into any similar discussions in the future.
If there were any, that was.
A signals orderly came in, shouting over cutlery noise and talk and laughter, silencing them.
“We’re pulling out. Manager Purvis and the Commander have decided that with the Yobs’ betrayal of our routes and mining areas, and the sighting of one of us by a Demon, this lode is worked out. We return to the warrens at once. Everyone to load.”
In a welter of relief and excitement, the forward depot was packed up and in a long column of vehicles the men pulled out, headed back for the warrens.
Chapter Ten
The warrens seemed unreal to Stead.
Manager Purvis called him into the office and took no pleasure in ripping him to pieces.
“You didn’t have to explain to a supercilious Controller Commander that one of your men had seen a Demon, and been seen in return. Thorburn reported the incident in as lie was bound to do.” Purvis pushed back in his chair and glowered up at Stead standing unhappily before him.
“Thorburn knew that once the Demons sight us they go on a determined all-out effort to kill us all. But you try telling that to a Controller!”
“They don’t believe in Demons.”
“Of course they don’t. They can’t. How could they, stuck in the warrens or the outside immediately surrounding the warrens? The Commander pulled out because we had been betrayed by the Yobs.” Purvis thumped the table. “That’s one of the few times in my life I’ve been glad to see Yobs!”
“But can’t we persuade the Controllers that there are Demons? Can’t we—”
“We can’t. And it isn’t our job to try. Our job is to go out and Forage and return with full sacks. That and nothing more. Controller Wilkins accepted the Yob report; I doubt that the Commander bothered to repeat the story of the’ Demon. Y’know, Stead, you’ve been extremely lucky.”
Stead supposed that he had.
“The Controllers consider themselves a superior form of life, Stead. Oh, I know you’ve been in the inner warrens with them and you speak like a Controller. But you’re a Forager. From the reports I’ve had on you so far, an extremely able one. Until this last fiasco. You’ve got to remember that you are a Forager. You’ll live longer that way.”
Stead nodded slowly, reluctantly. He had to agree with old Purvis, at least in part, but he could never renounce his affinities with the Controllers. They had taught him and they had taught him well, and he must not neglect the fact he tended now more often to overlook—that he was out with the Foragers only for one tour of duty. After that he’d go back to Simon’s laboratory and Delia would enter the final stages of bringing back the memory of his past. He still wanted that to happen, but without the consuming passion the revelation of those hidden days had once held for him.
How she was going to do it he hadn’t the slightest idea. He knew only that she could, and would.
“Right, Stead. Be off with you. You’ve caused me enough trouble with your special guards and surveillance that… ah hmm! Well? What are you waiting for? Rang’s dinner? Be off!”
Stead went.
Special guards? Surveillance?
Well, there was Vance. Was that what Purvis meant? It must be; it had to be.
In the days that followed Stead developed his Forager’s eternal head-swinging habit into something that remained with him even inside the most secure burrow. Everyone he saw wore to his sensitive perceptions the sinister aspect of a spy, someone sent to watch over him and to prevent him from learning.
For that, surely, could be the only reason the Controllers had set watchdogs on him. They might just as well have set watch-Rangs; after a week or so Stead had picked out the men he suspected.
His suspicions crystallized the night of the Forager bac-chanalia.
Ostensibly the celebrations were in honor of the anniversary of the landing on Earth of the immortal being’s garden. Farther in among the Controllers’ warrens, elaborate rituals were being gone through; down in the Captain’s cabin impressive processions wound through the lighted streets, chanting hosts and singing choirs celebrating the auspicious day. Astromen came into their own this day.
Huge replicas of that instrument that hung at Astroman Nav’s waist and had so puzzled Stead would be borne in stately procession, illuminated by spotlights, scented by sweet-burning aromatic woods. An instrument of potent power, it was, said to have guided the garden to its resting place on Earth.
After the solemn rituals would follow the parties.
Sorry as he was to miss all that splendor and color, that pageantry and tradition, Stead did not regret it for an instant. Instead of that, he had the Foragers’ Bacchanalia.
Ostensibly the Foragers and Hunters, too, celebrated the anniversary of the garden’s landing on Earth; in fact, the day had become through long usage and custom in the wilder sections of the warrens a day of license and jollity, when inhibitions were flung aside and wine and laughter and carelessness ruled.
Caught up in the excitement of preparation and then in the fever of participation, Stead allowed himself to be borne along in the center of Thorburn’s group. Even on such a day, a group of Foragers tended to stick together.
Everywhere the electrics burned. Everywhere flushed faces and laughing mouths and bright eyes brought laughter and jollity to the warrens. Many people wore fancy dress. The heaters burned at full power, reckless of the drain on the cables looped through into the world from the world of buildings by the designing hand of the immortal being. This day no one recked the cost.