“I see the hand of Olga in this.”
“Oh, be serious,” scoffed Val. “They are just a bunch of crippled misfits being pushed Outside to die. Look at the dazed expressions—the canes and crutches. They are hundreds of miles from the nearest undomed gardens, and there will be hunters waiting for them there. Nothing good can come of it.”
“But Eppendorff was our Pipe,” said Walter. “Like Tinker, he came from our shaft city. Remember the trouble we had tracking Tinker? The three decoy corpses—the renegade meck? Something was protecting him. Now Pipe just waves his staff and our Huntercraft and communicators go haywire.”
“Well, it is no miracle,” sneered Val. “Solar flares are upsetting the EM’s. Venus is moving into the sun sign—Gemini—the buckeye shamen can predict solar wind. That’s all. After the EM disturbance passes, the hunters will wipe them out.”
“But those are patients,” objected Walter. “A thousand years ago they were loyal citizens. They earned suspension.”
“They have five toes,” shrugged Val, fingering an arrow. “And now they are Outside. That spells buckeye to me.”
Val’s callous remarks shocked old Walter.
“You wouldn’t hunt them—would you?”
“No need,” smiled Val. “They are over three thousand miles away. Look at their stumbling gait. They’ll never live to see the borders of Evergreen.”
Walter turned sadly to his ESbook. If Olga returns, why couldn’t everyone welcome her? Why the confusion? The doubt?
“Sentimentality irritated Val. He stomped off to HC Garage and took Bird Dog IV out under manual control. Sensors fumbled with the aurora, producing a meaningless kaleidoscopic jumble of colors on the viewscreen. Val checked the crops visually—noticing nothing unusual among the dense vine-covered trees and the deep fields of triple-crop. His tension subsided after several hours of cruising. Bird Dog took him home.
The patients filed southward through the frozen mists. White-haired and bald they came. Young and middle-aged they came. Some limped. Others had raw sores where ugly skin tumors had disappeared. They formed a living, drifting mass a mile wide and four miles long—contracting at night for warmth and expanding during the day to forage on the frozen ground. A glacier of five-toeds.
Hugh Konte picked his way through the herd into the younger, more vigorous crowd that was walking point. Hugh sought a leader. A lean ectomorph sprinted out into the lead, hesitated, and faded back. A burly male spoke loudly until he realized he was acquiring a following. Hugh looked into a thousand faces and saw nothing but uncertainty. The burly male fell silent. The ectomorph scurried about exploring. No one led. Footsteps followed footprints—south.
Moses and Willie carried a map—Court’s safe passage was marked—a corridor freshly harvested—cropless. Small caches of protein bars—the 250,000 patients who died—were spaced along the route. The map ended where Court’s jurisdiction ended—at 50:00.
Moses climbed a shaft cap at night and took credit for curing them. He shouted his orders to stay together, using for his authority the aurora borealis. Toothpick sparked magically. The predictions of protein caches won the skeptics.
During the day Moses and several others sifted soil as they trekked, searching for possible fragments of food overlooked by Harvesters. They found only bits of lignin and cellulose left as a mulch. Some pieces were moist and chewable, containing a few drops of some plant juice, but most were musty and invaded by soil microflora. These inedibles, garnered during the day, were fed into smoldering campfires at dusk. These little fires, started by Toothpick’s arc, marked the social units into which the human mass was fragmenting.
Moses sat in the circle of dusty faces around a pile of glowing pink coals—bright corneas reflected. Stars blinked overhead.
“Need more combustibles?” asked Hugh Konte, walking out of the darkness.
He handed Moses a fist-sized moldy tangle of roots.
“Find a soft spot and sit down.”
He put the clump of roots on the coals and they watched bright white sparks play over it as dry mycelia flared up. Soon the woody roots were burning with a steady yellow flame. Moses preached on the harsh realities of life on the Outside.
“I’m grateful to be alive, of course,” said Hugh, “but don’t you think we should break up into smaller groups? Forage a wider area?”
“Court said no,” said Moses. “The protein caches will see us to 50:00. If we stray out of the corridor Agrifoam will be used on us. We won’t be able to sleep dry, and the protein caches will be stopped. We don’t want to offend Court.”
Hugh stood up and studied the horizon. They were surrounded by endless rows of shaft caps. To the north the multitude slept around dying campfires. To the south, darkness.
“We’ll have to split up eventually. Your description of the Eyepeople isn’t too inviting—stone tools, fleeing from hunters, and eating who-knows-what; but its a big improvement over suspension. Odd—but when I went into suspension I was the head of a fairly large industrial complex—my own empire. Now?” He thrust his hands deep into empty pockets. “Things certainly do change in a thousand years.”
He nested in the dirt around cooling coals and slept.
Agromecks cultivated ground on both sides of their exodus corridor. The sight of all the forbidden fruit activated gastric juices. Temptations lured scattered fugitives off into the gardens. Moses repeated Court’s warnings, but word passed slowly in the human glacier. Huntercraft appeared.
Rumors of food below the 50:00 border stimulated a brisker pace. Moses and Hugh stood on the right flank and watched the mass flow by. Stragglers in the rear extended back as far as they could see. Canes and crutches were numerous. Limps were aggravated by the loose soil and the relentless pace. At dusk the main body camped, ate and fell asleep while the stragglers caught up.
“A lot of these aren’t going to make it,” said Moses softly. “I saw some swollen ankles that I’m certain won’t be able to cover tomorrow’s thirty miles—and we have almost a month of this pace to reach the border on time.”
Hugh nodded. In the distance were little groups of cripples who had given up. They huddled together in the darkness, miles behind. Having lost family and friendship ties while in suspension, they were unable to form new ties during the hurried exodus. Now they were arbitrarily grouped with the infirm of similar disabilities—each unable to help the other.
“I know the Big ES doesn’t want to accept the burden of feeding all of us—but surely the stragglers won’t be allowed to just die of starvation.”
Moses, who had been on the Outside long enough to know, nodded in agreement.
“No one starves to death any more.”
Hugh did not like the ominous tone in Moses’ voice.
Before dawn the main body of travelers was awakened by distant screams. Thousands of heads popped up from their earthen pillows. Frightened eyes strained back through the darkness of the trail covered the day before. Hoarded fuel was hastily added to small fires. Silence fell. Then, new screams rose from a different spot in the darkness. These continued—approaching slowly—moans and sobs.
A large hulk of a man limped out of the darkness, carrying a spindly old man in his arms. The sounds came from the small, frail form. The big man collapsed with his burden near a campfire. Wetness glistened in the firelight—blood.
“Some deviate shot an arrow into Ed,” lamented the huge acromegalic.
Moses bent down. The arrow passed through the left thigh. He ripped open the trouser leg and tried to stop the bleeding while the giant related his story over and over.
“—and while Ed was screaming this—deviate—came out of the darkness carrying a bow. He took out this little knife and tried to cut off— With Ed screaming, and all the blood—I guess I lost my head and killed him. Pushed his damned face right down into the dirt—and kept pushing—and pushing—”