Another tremor began, shook the room like a Rang shaking a Yob, receded. The radio said, “… everyone to help. Shoring parties to repair and buttress roofs. Parties to clear rubble. Electric lines to be repaired. Everyone must help. The Captain has complete confidence. The immortal being is sending us a test. We must measure up to that.”
The radio babbled on, telling of rock falls, cave-ins, the hideous long-drawn-out rumble of a rock slide, the most terrible sound an underground dweller can hear.
Delia clung to Stead and the roof fell in on them.
Through the smoke and dust, the choking blindness, Stead realized he was lying athwart Delia, the divan crushed beneath them. She lay there, breathing still, her eyes wide open, her mouth in a blasphemous parody of a smile. The buttons had ripped away from her lab smock and it had been twisted aside. He saw black lace, narrow straps, white flesh, flushed rosy now and all powdered with the acrid dust from the fallen plaster.
“This isn’t how I’d planned it,” she whispered. “But—”
Her arms tightened on his neck. All the fear had fled from her eyes. He had a moment’s shocked remembrance of Belle, and how she had said, “This!” And then his lips touched Delia’s, clung, moved, parted. Her tongue touched his. Something was happening to him. Great world-shaking rumblings ravaged the room, the divan, but they could have been bursting out from within him as much as the Demons digging down to kill him.
He drew his head back, gaping for air. Delia lay, limp and yielding, but vibrant now with the key to that mystery that had mocked and eluded him for so long. Without understanding why he did it, he reached out, pulled away that black lace, snapped the narrow straps.
“Oh, Stead!” Delia sobbed. Her arms pressed him down with a ferocious strength that filled with a joy he still did not comprehend.
The dusty white lab smock lay discarded. His armor rang and the buckles squealed. The radio babbled on: “Heavy falls all over the warrens. Boiling water is pouring in everywhere. Poison gas on a scale never known before. The immortal one aid us! The boiling water is… it’s coming in! It’s steaming, boiling, scalding. It’s—”
Stead didn’t hear. His spirit fused with Delia’s and blinding lights pulsated in his eyes, glorious music cascaded into his ears. A moment of absolute truth would be reached in which he could forget everything save the miracle his body wrought, at any second. Now… now—
A beam, dislodged from the cracked roof, fell shrewdly across the back of his head.
There came no climax, only a deep drifting blackness that took him away into nothingness.
Chapter Fifteen
“Steady, now… Steady.”
Captain Winslow Tait of the Terran Survey Corps opened his eyes and stared about him.
Everything seemed very dark and dusty; his head ached; an abominable noise tortured his eardrums; he felt like hell. That damned generator would have to cut out just as he’d been trying to impress the Samians with Terran efficiency. The Samians were a big people, though not as big as some Tait had discovered in the Galaxy, and it looked now as though he’d begun with a very bad impression. He’d crashed his single-seater scout, all right.
But how in the name of a blue-tailed baboon had he got here?
He stared about, then recoiled as though he’d touched a red-hot venturi.
He was lying beside a naked woman.
Clumsily, he stood up, to discover that his regulation green coveralls were missing and the he wore a few scraps of underclothes foreign to him. He shook his head.
What the hell?
A cloak-like garment clung narrowly to his back.
The ground shook heavily. Something pattered down from the roof like rain. A light speared from a single electric bulb, wan and pitiful. A wall of this odd room collapsed and water, steaming, boiling water, spewed out. A few drops stung his naked flesh.
Well, the woman couldn’t be left there, whoever she was. Tait flung a white smock thing about her, lifted her over one shoulder, and sprinted madly for the door opposite the swirling flood of boiling water.
Any man of the Terran Survey Corps was trained to react to the needs of the moment; Tait doubted whether any of them had met this little lot before.
Through the door he plunged, to be engulfed chaotically in a crazed, screaming, fighting bedlam of people. The cloak was about him now, covering both him and the girl.
He didn’t remember tightening it. A man shouted into his face.
“It’s no good! We’re too late! Nothing matters now! This is the end!”
Captain Winslow Tait had served a goodly time in the Terran Survey Corps, moving from one globe of space to another, discovering everything he could about them, using his flagship Cochrane as the only base and home thousands of people would know for a decade or more. The Galaxy was a stupendously wonderful place and always there extended worlds upon worlds, worlds never-ending. Homo sapiens in reaching out from the Solar System encountered many strange aliens: friendly, hostile, disinterested. When the scouter had reported the Samians, Tait had gone down personally, on the invitation of the Samian prime minister.
He now found himself engulfed in a screaming hysterical mob of human beings, in a corridor that shook itself to pieces, with the stink of fear in his nostrils and the awful stench of scalding flesh and the bubbling sound of tons of boiling water assailing him from every direction.
He wasn’t mad. That, he could never believe.
So there had to be a logical answer, that a human being from Solterra could find and understand in the alien inhumanity of the galaxy. Vague and nebulous thoughts washed through his mind. The people jostled him. He was pushed gradually along the corridor—once he narrowly missed a rock fall—going with the living tide.
The girl in his arms stirred. He looked down, then pushed his way into a shadowed alcove, his back pressed against the dirt wall.
The cloak thing moved. It writhed away from contact with the wall, adjusted itself, hung neatly at his side.
Winslow Tait’s mind crawled. His body erupted into a rash of goosepimples.
The cloak—alive!
Then the girl opened her eyes and stared up at him. Deep violet were those eyes. He looked down on her and he knew that he knew her, but he could not remember.
His first, irrational thought had been: A luscious wench. Now he saw the firmness of purpose in that beautiful face, the shadow of tragedy marking its pallor. Her short red curls were matted with sweat.
She opened her lips, soft and supple; they parted on a breath.
“Stead,” she said. “Oh, Stead!”
And Captain Winslow Tait of the Terran Survey Crops remembered. “Delia!”
Two divergent, colliding, opposing streams of thought clashed in his mind. They were like oil and water, coiling around each other in the case of his skull, refusing to mingle. First one, then the other boiled uppermost.
Now he saw the thick star-clusters of space as Cochrane drove steadily across the light years; then he saw the evilly slavering fangs of a Rang. Now he was standing in the control room of his flagship, conning his scouters down onto a new and unknown planet; then he was creeping with Thor-burn and the Foragers along dusty, Flang-skin scattered crannies behind the skirting boards of the Demons’ houses.
Demons?
Demons!
No—not Demons—Samians.
Ordinary people, living in a relatively low stage of culture, admittedly with four legs and four arms and two ordinary eyes and two atrophied eyes, but intelligent, ordinary, simple people. The Samians had welcomed the advent of alien life upon their planet. Every overture they made had been friendly. They had only recently invented wireless and the first weak signals spluttering into space had homed in Cochrane.