Stead didn’t mind that. Not now. His values had been brutally altered since he’d joined the ranks of the Foragers and Hunters.
He felt their pride. A twisted force of… circumstances, pride, maybe. But it uplifted them and gave them courage in the bright places of the Outside.
He gladly shared in it. He was a comrade, now.
The extent of that comradeship, its real meaning, was highlighted for him in a few gruff words from Cardon.
Vance had lounged across in the Hunters’ anteroom, grim and seamed, the essence of toughness, the veteran Forager, and bent down to Cardon. Stead caught the swift, low words.
“That bald-headed pal of yours never knew how near he was to his come-uppance. Lucky for him you stopped him killing Stead.”
“You saw?”
“My job, inside as well as out. The womanising angle doesn’t concern me, only his life. His two watchdogs look after that.”
“I see.” Cardon’s black eyebrows drew together as he glanced covertly at Stead. Stead’s face, with its assumed air of negligence, apparently satisfied him. “Stead’s a Forager comrade and in my own group. That bald-headed fellow is a fine man, born organizer, marvelous orator, but he’s a worker. I couldn’t let Stead be killed, could I?”
Should he let Cardon know he knew what had happened? The problem bothered Stead as they sat there waiting for the orders that would send them Outside to face the horrors lurking there, the Scunners and the Yobs, the Rangs… and the Demons.
Cardon settled the problem.
Vance leaned back and Cardon said across the gap, low and yet in that Forager’s penetrating whisper that would carry in the reaches of Outside without disturbing the life that festered there, “Stead, forget it all, understand? You’ll be all right.”
So Stead could only say, as a Forager must, “Thank you Cardon. I assure you I followed you because I thought you were going back to the group. You’re—”
“Just forget it, Stead. That’s all.”
Sitting back on the hard seat Stead felt the resentment coursing through his mind again. Forget it. Why, sure, that must be easy for him. He was a man without a memory. He was just a child, learning in a man’s world; what difference could he make to the great designs these men plotted in their nooks and crannies? He wanted to learn, to know, to understand. Simon and Delia had helped and taught him, but their teaching he found every day fell short of what his eyes and brain told him was true. Was all of life then a fraud? Were there always truths behind truths, one opening out of the next? Did men say one thing and do another, and was that expected of them?
Just when Honey came in and sat beside him he wasn’t sure; but slowly he turned his head to look at her, the cloud in his eyes a sure sign to her that his thoughts were lar away from what now mattered to her, increasingly and with more poignant force every day. Stead, for his part, knew obscurely that Honey looked more troubled and sad each day, but what the trouble was he didn’t know. And, naturally, no one would tell him.
They talked desultorily as they waited for Thorbum.
“More and more wavelength changes,” said Honey, steadfastly adhering to her radio-talk. “Something’s really messing up the air.”
“You should worry,” Julia chipped in, her blonde hair glinting, her fresh face flushed. “Lorna—she’s Rogers’ ra-darop—says that they met a nine-inch beam last trip. Nine inches above the ground! Think of it!”
“You’d never squeeze through that,” Old Chronic cackled. “Not with your figure.”
“Keep quiet, you old Scunner-bait!” snapped Julia. But Stead saw that she put both hands to her waist and pressed them down and in, smoothing. “I’ll be sliding through beam gaps when they feed you to the river.”
“River?” said Stead, politely.
“That’s where they drop corpses,” Cardon said, and jerked his thumb down. “Plunk ’em through the burial gaps into the river. Read a nice service over ’em and pipe an eyeful and then, forget them.”
“Lethe,” said Honey, with a little shiver. “That’s what the river’s called.”
Stead was about to ask where it went when Thorbum and the other leaders reappeared. At once the casualness went out of the talk; the atmosphere in the room grew taut with the knowledge that at last they would know where they were going on this trip. It might all too easily end in a death far away from the cleansing waters of the Lethe.
“A big one,” Thorburn told his group as they gathered around him at one of the briefing tables. Old Chronic shuffled his maps out, sniffing and clicking his dentures. Vance sat relaxed, lounging, but his fierce eyes glittered on Thorbum with a vigilance that chilled. Sims and Wallas sat together, erect, watching Thorburn’s face, taking all they wanted from there. Cardon crouched a little in his seat, his hand fingering the worn handle of his machete, his brows a black bar tufting over his eyes. Julia and Honey spread out their logs ready to record wave-lengths and radarop notices of beam positions. Their slender hands moved surely and with purpose, yet they contrasted strongly with the square brown hands of the men.
They were a team, this group. Vance and Stead were now full members, and each individual fitted in like the sliding mechanism of a clock, each party devoted to its task and all depending on the efficiency of each single member.
It was, Stead decided, listening to Thorburn, a good feeling.
Thorburn spoke crisply and yet matter-of-factly, not overly stressing any one particular aspect of the Forage, yet at every word that good feeling leached out of Stead as though his strength of purpose had become a sponge to absorb and let go at the slightest pressure. Appalled, he looked forward to a return to the nightmare world of Outside. His fear uncoiled in him with a physical pain in the pit of his stomach, soggy, dull, shaming. In the level words of Thorbum, the leader, the man who would take them out again from the warrens into the outer runnels, Stead could find no comfort but only the final sentence of a death he could not face.
Out there were Scunners. Out there were Yobs. Out there were Rangs and all the human enemies of the Empire of Archon.
And… there were Demons.
No. He couldn’t go out again. He couldn’t. That was all there was to it.
He made his mind up in a single chaotic moment of confusion and fear and pain. He put a trembling hand down onto the seat of his chair to press himself up. He would rise and tell them he wasn’t going out again… not again. Not any more.
He’d get Simon and Delia to intervene. They’d understand. They’d fix it. He must have done his full tour as a Forager now; he must have done. His arm straightened to push himself up, and—
And Honey lightly tapped the inside of his elbow, his arm bent, and he remained sitting down, feeling foolish, casting a sideways glance at her, his face burning, a roaring in his ears and the shakes flowing all across his thighs. Honey put her small cool hand on his knees. She pressed hard; she dug her fingernails in. She dug as though her shapely hand had become on a sudden the rending fangs of a Scunner.
Her face, raised to his from her wave-length logs, held a long, aloof look of complete understanding and compassion, and of absolute withdrawnness and disinterest. Stead met that look; he matched it. He drew in a dragging lungful of air, coughed, wiped his mouth with a hand that did not quite tremble, and then put his own hand on Honey’s fingers clamping into his knee.
“Thanks, Honey.”
“It happens to all of us,” she said, softly, allowing the intimacy between them to flower as a precious bloom apart I mm thfe others of the group. “I know. Thorburn knows, too. We all do.” She lifted her hand from his knee and, for a queer split-second instant her hand trembled against his. Then, with ii quick pat, she had withdrawn, was turning back to her logs. “You’ll be all right, now, Stead.”