When at last they marched into the temporary depot, consternation greeted them. Honey, having already passed on news of Stead’s deed over the radio, had not been able to meet his eye since. Her pert face was now as downcast as a rock slide.
The Commander’s men and Purvis’s men had been formed up and rows of sullen, hostile, frightened faces glowered on Stead. The parade watched him in frigid silence. Then everyone boarded the trucks and the convoy pulled out.
Stead, his hands tied together, rode in the back of Purvis’s truck, two Forager guards with ready guns eyeing him halefully all the ride.
But that ride was dramatically interrupted.
The first volley riddled the point truck. Men screamed and toppled. Splutter-guns crashed from the slot of darkness up which the convoy had been rolling, headlights cutting a path of radiance ahead. A soldier swung a searchlight and it was shot out at once, exploding in a screech of glass and a shower of fragments.
The two Forager guards grabbed Stead, and in a rolling, tangled bundle, they dropped over the tailboard. Two of the electric trucks had collided. All along the line bullets pocked the dirt. Fire stabbed pitilessly from the blackness.
“Enemy all around!”
Stead heard the orders ringing out, the forming of lines, defense posts, first-aid for the wounded, the trucks’ electric motors whining as gallant volunteers tried to drive them into a defensive ring. The noise cracked down in the dark slot beneath the ground.
Beneath the houses of a race of people so giant that mankind was a mere pest to them, Stead still clung to that knowledge as the battle raged and roared about him.
One of the Forager guards yipped abruptly, turned over and lay still. Stead saw the blood seeping, bright in the fire glow from a burning truck. He crawled off a little, inching along with his bound hands. The second Forager guard followed. He, too, was reluctant to be caught under a truck that might explode at any minute.
A dark form, camouflage cape glittering against the fire at its back, glided up to Stead.
“Hold steady.”
A knife slashed his bonds.
“What’s going on?” The guard moved across, his face wild, gun up.
“We need everyone in the fight,” snapped Thorburn, sheathing the releasing knife. “Get into the line.” He turned to Stead, gripped his arm. “You, too.”
Intermittently caught in the quickly stabbing bursts of Archon searchlights, hooded on the instant, men’s figures flitted out there, enemies closing in for the kill. Fleetingly, Stead glimpsed the insignia of Trychos. He lined up his sights quite automatically, the gun thrust still warm into his hands by Thorburn, grim-faced, smoke-grimed, dusty.
Where yesterday Stead would have seen in those soldiers of Trychos only enemies to be shot and disposed of, now a reluctance held his trigger finger in a stasis his conscious efforts could not break. They were men; why kill a fellow human being when there were so many ravening monsters in this underworld inimical to everything human?
Through the darkness lurid bolts of light leaped and crossed. Men screamed and died, the shriek bubbling from lips already doomed, limp bodies falling all atangle across the lights. The livid beams circled and swept the battlefield, silhouetting maniacal figures in antic motion, marionette of death. The lights threw distorted shadows, picked out the sudden lethal gleam of steel, threw drifting war smoke into silvery beautiful streamers, writhing like gossamer veils. The stench of battle beat up palpably. The feel of it scraped his nerves raw.
Thorbum paused and sagged back, reaching for a fresh clip, smacking the rounds in savagely. His powder-streaked face turned to Stead, all crouched and immobile.
“Why aren’t you fighting? There are a lot of ’em. They caught us flat-footed. Sims is already wounded.” The breath caught in Thorburn’s throat. “We’ve got to fight, man, if we’re to come out of this.”
His teeth and eyes gleamed ferally.
“They’re men,” Stead said, foolishly, as though that was answer enough.
“You mean you’ve nothing to live for, when we get back. That’s understandable. But think of Honey—she’s in here, fighting.”
Stead shook his head, helplessly, like a dumb animal.
“I thought,” Thorburn said, sighting and firing in a winking beam of light, dropping back to earth, “I expected—we all did—that you’d see the way Honey felt about you even if you’re not supposed to be talked to about… about—” He lifted his shoulder, hunched, fired again, flopped back. “They’re getting closer.”
“About what?”
“Never mind now. You shot at a Demon. Oh, sure, I understand why you did. He’d have swatted you like you swat a ily if you hadn’t. But the Regulations were made to protect all men, not just one Forager stupid enough to be caught in the open in the light.”
“You talk… as though you do… might… understand.”
“I’ve seen what you’ve seen, Stead. More, probably. I know the position of men in the world of buildings. A number of us do. But what is there to be said, let alone done about it?” He hunched up, fired, cursed, fired again, dropped back with the return fire crackling past his ear.
“You see? You made me forget how to fight—one shot a time, son—otherwise they’ll take your head off.”
The bedlam of noise hammered on. Smoke reeked in their nostrils, racked their throats. Stead’s eyes were streaming again, as they had done when the Demon’s light struck them. He coughed, bitterly.
“You mean you know? And yet you go on?”
“You forget. We’re Foragers. The high and blasted mighty Controllers don’t even believe Demons exist. If they thought that man was just a parasite, living on the scraps from a giant’s table—no, Stead. It just couldn’t get through to them.”
“But we ought to try! We’ve got to show them.”
“What for?” Thorburn’s tones were brutal. “What good would it do? Racial inferiority? No, son, no. Mankind has got to believe in himself in some things. Just the stupid, down-trodden Foragers have to bear the load.”
“Wilkins—he’s a Controller.”
“Half a Controller, the others call him. And he doesn’t know. Even if he did, what could he do?”
“What I must do, Thorburn!” A blazing conviction rang now in Stead’s words. He felt uplifted, shorn of fear, dedicated. “I must go into the world and preach the truth! Men must know, and then, then, Thorburn,” I will instigate a great crusade against the Demons!”
“You’ll what?” Sheer surprise at the audacity of Stead’s words brought Thorburn down in a rush from his slow aiming. “You’ll do what?”
“Tell the world, the world of men! Then we can come up out of our runnels, take over the greater world outside, the world of Demons, and make it rightfully our own!”
Chapter Thirteen
The soldiers’ Commander was down. He lay prostrate, pumping out his life blood, prone there on the dirt of a runnel beneath the world of buildings.
Was that, Stead wondered sickly, any way for a man to die?
Lights blazed confusedly before him. Like an apparition from the nether depths he saw Rogers all silhouetted against a burning truck, striking about him with his sword, smashing back a would-be victorious onslaught. Vance, too, and Car-don, leaped to stand with Rogers, sweeping away the soldiers of Trychos, then dropping flat into concealing darkness. Then the orange flicker of their guns took a further murderous toll.
“We’ll do it, boys, we’ll do it!” Old Purvis’s yell knifed clearly through the hubbub. Already the detonations of enemy explosives crashed less frequently; the bright winking of their guns faded to blackness in ever-growing patches. The men of Archon once again were routing the men of Trychos.