In his turn, tremblingly but firmly, Stead squeezed through the hole into the Outside.
At once he looked up. But the dimness precluded any sight of the ceiling; the whole vast space before lay shrouded in shadow. He felt the first faint prickings of relief. At least, rooflessness had not attacked him.
Vance stayed closed up to Stead.
The line of men stepped forward across a coarse tufty surface of knee-high stems. They marched through bands of different colored stems and with each change, however dimly perceived in the faint ghostly lighting, their camouflage capes changed to conform.
Thorbum beckoned, a single swift overarm that, in the drilled and rehearsed sign-language of Foragers, meant, “Close up. Flankers out.”
They clustered at the foot of a square wooden tower that soared into the dimness above them. Thorburn checked batteries. Then the antigravs were switched on and the men rose into the air. Up and up they ascended with the smooth wooden tower flowing downward past them. Boris, who had taken over the lead, halted them with a single wrist-flick. Jan and Moke had vanished before the ascent had begun, going off with their poison sacks.
The silence, the dimness, the rustling furtiveness of every movement, came home to Stead in a strange and chilling miasma of fear and shame-bolstered courage.
This was a Special Forage, with a vengeance.
Then they had scrambled over the edge of a vast wooden plateau that stretched away before them into the dimness. Walking across it was a strange experience; the wood had been covered with some tacky substance only partially rubbed smooth. Boris halted, pointed upwards. Stead craned his head back and stared.
So that was a tree.
There had been a Tree in the garden that had brought the Captain and his Crew to Earth, he recalled, and wondered if that Old Tree had looked like this. It grew up out of a solid glass-like object fully eighteen feet high, soaring up and away and spreading gnarled branches out above them, its top lost in the dimness. Brown were those branches and each branch was covered with pallid yellow and green leaves each the size of a dining room table cloth. But they did not take Stead’s attention. He looked up and he saw myriad shining scarlet berries, round and juicy and glistening, hanging in great clusters from every nodule of those branches.
Setting to work with the others, climbing up on antigrav and plucking the berries, carefully, as he had been told, putting them with caution into his sack, he was struck by the plump juiciness of the berry, the feel of sweet goodness within. He wondered what they tasted like.
As each consignment of full sacks was stacked below, a transport party formed up and carried them back to the hole in the wooden wall. Soon Stead found himself transferred to this duty. He made six trips. On the seventh, with a returning group of Jan and Moke, their poison sacks laid aside for full sacks, and Honey and Vance, he was halfway from the tree to the drop when Julia’s voice shrilled, faint and attenuated by distance from the hole. “Alarm!”
He heard no more. The ground beneath his feet trembled. A breath of air blasted across the surface, dragging at hiS camouflage cape. Honey gasped a single short cry, chopped off by rigorous Forager training.
Every ear strained, every sense jumped alert. A monstrous creaking noise blasted at them from the far distance away from the hole.
“Dark glasses ready!” snapped Vance, taking over the lead at this moment of crisis. “There will be light soon. Now, run!”
Shambling, they ran for the edge of the wooden plateau and the drop beyond.
The light, when it came, crashed with actinic violence across his eyes. He fumbled his dark glasses on in haste, nearly dropping them, blinded by sweat and shaking with fear.
When he could see again Jan and Moke were about to drop over the edge some hundred yards away. Vance was tugging at him and Honey had slung her own sack onto her back and had grabbed his.
“Come on, man. Run!” Vance looked back and up.
Stead could not do so, but he ran. He knew at what Vance looked back… and up.
Through the air above his head whistled and roared a frightful force, a blast of air, a sensation of wind buffeting around him. The wooden plateau shook under his feet. And ahead… ahead— A great white roll swooped down out of the air, lay full length in a crushing blow across Jan and Moke, caught them and bent them and flung them to the floor.
The long roll rose slowly into the air, hovered above their heads. He saw with the numbness of complete fear that the end of the roll was grasped in the hand of a Demon. The arm reached back out of his vision and he could not swing his head to look.
“Up!” gasped Vance. “Up! It’s our only chance!”
Stead remembered the chilling swish of that knife wielded by a blood-crazed Demon thirsting for his life, and he triggered his antigrav and rose between Vance and Honey, shaking.
The blasphemous roll of white blasted through the air, flattened in rolling waves of sound against the wooden plateau. Torrents of displaced air shook him, whirled him over and over, broke Vance’s grip on his arm. Honey tumbled headlong away and still she gripped her full sack. The noise rolled around his head like the sound of splutter-guns fired in a constricting cavern—booming, hideous.
“Honey!” he called despairingly.
She checked herself somehow, twisted her legs, began again to rise on antigrav. He couldn’t see Vance. Then he, too, was rising with Honey and the white roll went swish! crack! past below.
“There must be a roof we can shelter against up there!” he shouted to Honey, forgetting the sibilant Forager whisper in the terror of the moment.
The roof swooped down on them, white and flaky, with wide areas loose and ready to fall in powder. He bumped against it thankfully, regaining his breath, feeling his limbs once more coming under his control. Honey pressed close to him, her eyes behind the dark glasses wide and fearful. He took a deep breath and wiped the sweat away from his forehead. That first Demon he had seen had been unable to reach him flattened out against the ceiling. That gave him hope.
He remembered that he was a Man. He looked about him; he looked about, and he saw.
The Demon was very like a Yob, but for its size and its four uplifted front limbs and four limbs for locomotion. It was dressed in shapeless glittery clothes, much slit and pouched for pockets, the material straining now with the violence of the Demon’s movements. He could see the Demon’s uplifted crest, erect and fleshy, a dark glistening green, saw the streaky colors around the face, colors that could well be cosmetics. The thing’s flat tureen-like head sat squatly on its thick neck around which brilliant jewels flamed in a string of splendor. The four eyes were not symmetrical; two were opaque and atrophied, horn-covered, not used. And all the time the Demon snorted and gasped, breathing with a heavy rasping hiss and bubbling like a giant pot of stew.
Stead saw. He saw that the Demon was a real live being, a beast living in this room, in which he could now understand that the wooden plateau across which they had run was a table, that there were chairs in the room, and sideboards, carpets on the’floor, windows to the room, curtained now and dark, a room not unlike the rooms he had seen in the warrens. And he was an insignificant figure bumping against the ceiling like a fly.
The Demon slowly climbed from chair to table and that creaking sounded hollow and ghostly to Stead. The Demon lifted a long wooden pole, tipped with what Stead could now perceive to be a broomhead. The bristles, twelve feet long, scraped across the ceiling, dislodging much white plaster, creating a cloud, rustling and clacking past them.