A pale, washed out, all pervasive light splayed down out there. The dawn of the Demon’s day must be only a few moments away, that electric flickering in the air their long-prolonged multi-second vibration of their lighting. The one second flickering of the electric light that served to demarcate time periods in mankind’s world would be too small for Demons—too small… too small.
Slowly, reluctantly, with agony and despair, Stead’s eyes focused on the illimitable distances through the window. Outlines showed hazy and indistinct, but he saw monstrous square blocked shapes, miles away: cliffs that hung peppered with the random scattering of lighted windows, yellow oblongs glowing against the pallid radiance and the blackness of mighty buildings.
Those buildings out there, structures created by the immortal one for mankind to inhabit, were all of a size with the Demons. Mankind had shrunk in Stead’s understanding. Mankind had shrunk and he thought he understood and he did not want to understand.
With a wide spinning movement that swung the room about him, he felt the Demon turning, leaving the window, walking with a ponderous undulation for the door. And for the first time the thrill of fear contained an inward-directed core: how long could he perch here before the Demon became aware of him?
Through the door he was carried, down in a series of steeply precipitous lunges, shuddering shocks as each tread halted, followed by a further dizzying descent, down step after step as they went down the stairs.
A number of conflicting emotions kept him where he was. Fear predominated. But also a slow, stubborn will-to-knowledge possessed him, a teeth-grinding will that he knew would sustain him now through whatever might befall. There remained little in that dogged conviction of his earlier eager, naive rushing after knowledge for the sake of it; now he wanted to know so that he could alter and change both himself and the truths of men.
The Demon entered a room where on a wooden table stood a glass vase containing a flowering shrub. All down one side of the shrub the scarlet berries had been picked away, scarlet drops like sprinkles of blood lay trailed haphazardly across the table.
A Demon with a broom was brushing up a couple of mangled bodies—bodies of men, men caught stealing the red berries. Jan and Moke would never return to the safe world of the warrens.
From Stead’s Demon volumes of noise poured out in crashing and stunning waves of sound; a great vein in the Demon’s squat throat vibrated; Stead could clearly hear the blood rushing through those distended veins.
A shining drop of cloudy liquid oozed through the flesh just before him; the smell of sweat stank in his nostrils.
Were the Demons, then, frightened of men?
The broom wielding Demon, the Demon who had struck so savagely with that monstrous rolled up paper at them on the table, turned to face the newcomer, moving with an undulating grace abruptly disconcerting to Stead, crouched, shivering and hating, in the shadows atop a Demon’s shoulder. He knew what he must do, but the messages shrilling from his brain to his muscles met impenetrable blocks of fear; his muscles locked. He had to leave this Demon’s shoulder. He must plunge out and up on antigrav—he must! But he couldn’t.
The callous broom disposed of Jan and Moke, swept them away, broken and bloody, into a dustpan. The Demon turned that massive flattened head; the two good eyes focused on its companion; the Demon screamed.
A hand like the hand of doom swept down on Stead’s Demon’s shoulder. Broad and curved, cupped for a stunning buffet, that hand slashed down to knock the puny human being from the blue robe, send it dashing to destruction on the floor so far below.
The hand flashed down, and Stead was shooting up on antigrav, spinning, numbed, shaken with the violence of his reactions, purged of fear as his brain forced its messages savagely past the blocks locking his muscles.
He cavorted in the air, trying to regain his balance, trying to evade the enormous lethal swipes of broom and paper.
A larder door stood open by the wall. On the topmost shelf a shadow moved, metal glinted. Stead looked down.
Down there, peering around the open door on the top shelf, glistening whitely, a row of tiny faces—men’s and women’s faces. His comrades!
Honey was there. She waved at him, a gesture so brave and so defiant that it stung him. Her voice lifted, a squeak in the vastness of the Demon’s room.
“I got back all right, Stead. We had a run-in with a gang of Yobs. Drop down here with us. But hurry! Hurry!”
That strange and inexplicable feeling for Honey seized him now with the desire to ensure that she, of all people, should never again have to face the fear and terror of the Demon myth. He wanted to break the barrier of lies surrounding his comrades. The Foragers—mere rats stealing food from this Demon’s larder.
Now Stead wanted more than ever to live and return to the world, and tell the people what he had discovered, what he knew.
As he lifted his splutter-gun he wondered if anyone else had made this discovery before, if anyone else had gone through the blasting of pride and honor in race, had discovered that brave humanity was but a parasite scuttling behind the walls in the darkness of the earth behind this great Demon-created world.
He thought of the Regulations. And he denied them. He aimed the splutter gun very carefully at the Demon’s looming monstrous eye.
The gun made a loud sound. But to the Demon it must have made a very tiny, very pitiable spitting.
Even so, a full clip blinded the beast.
The Demon’s roars were now so great and reverberating that great billows of sound made Stead clap his hands over his ears. A door opened. Another Demon walked in with that slow graceful movement imposed by their size.
But Stead had dropped on antigrav to the shelf of the larder and had scuttled in among his friends.
He remembered the choking fear he had felt, that all Foragers must feel, as they set off for Outside. That inhibited exploration. Had anyone ever reached the same conclusions as he had been forced to this day? Surely they must have done!
Someone grabbed his arms, ran them up his back. Someone else snatched away his splutter-gun.
Thorburn said, “We won’t kill you now, Stead. You’ll go back to H.Q. where you will stand trial. We’re not barbarians any more. You have violated the Regulations.”
“Of course!” Stead’s brain seethed now with his vision. “I did it to save my own life, but I found out—”
’Take him along!” said Old Chronic with a new and frighteningly savage voice.
These people who had been his comrades had changed. He was met with only hostile stares, vicious eyes glaring at him; he was a pariah, an outcast.
“But—” he said, pleadingly, not believing. “But I believe in Demons, and I know what they are!”
“We believe in them too. And the Regulations expressly forbid a man to shoot at them.” Thorbum hurried the party along, through the food quarry, out the exit hole, along the dark way littered with dead Yobs. “You’ve committed the worst crime a man can commit, Stead. You’ll see! At your trial not one voice will be raised to defend you; you’ll die, Stead, because you broke the Regulations.”
“All I did was save my life.”
“Your life! Your life! Don’t you see, you imbecile, the Demons will hunt us down mercilessly now. We’ll have no peace for generations to come.”
That shocked and sobered Stead. He hadn’t thought of that.
The fiery importance of his discovery chilled suddenly.
Grimly, silently, the Forager group marched on. The need for hurry possessed them all, Stead no less than the others. An overhanging doom seemed pressing in on them, stultifying thought, making them cast apprehensive glances over their shoulders far more frequently than they covered the way ahead. Cardon scowled and closed up and his face was as black as the nether depths. Cardon, this time, didn’t relish his rear marker position.