"I know it!" she cried. "That's the trouble! I have no mate, no child!"
"Every man is your mate. You described the policy of Helicon yourself. Sharing."
She laughed bitterly. "I'm an old woman. Men don't share with me."
Neq saw that she had more than one grudge against the underworld. Had he been doing his own job properly, he would have been aware of this problem long since. He had to do something now, or admit he was less a leader than Bob had been. Yet it was impossible to restore to her the sexual attraction she had had a generation ago.
Deprived of both sexuality and motherhood in a situation where both were doubly important--no wonder Sola was miserable! "We need you in Helicon," he said. "I shall not let you go. There is no life for you outside."
"Sosa can do my job; talk to her."
"No! Sosa has a different temperament. She--" Then he had it. "She can't bear children!"
"Do you think _I_ can?" Sola snapped. "I'm thirty-three years old!"
"You bore Vara! Then you lived with a castrate, and then a sterile man. When you tried with Var, he was sterile too. They could not make life; you could. And you can still! And Helicon must have that life! Children are our most important--"
"Childbirth would kill me at this age. I'm almost a grandmother." Yet he knew by her tone that she wanted to be convinced.
"Not with Dick the Surgeon attending. He made the Weaponless what he was--"
"Sterile!" she put in.
"That was an accident! Look what he did for these hands of mine! No one else could have restored me like that, and he didn't make me sterile! He can save life; he can save yours no matter how many babies you might bear, no matter how old. And if--it won't happen, but if-- if you do die--what difference does it make? You'll die anyway in the wilderness!"
That bit of cruelty brought a perverse glimmer of hope to her face, but it passed. "No man will touch me," she said sullenly.
"Every man will touch you!" he cried. "This is Helicon, and I am master! I'll send--" he broke off, realizing this was the wrong approach. He was saying in effect that men had to be forced, and she would never go along with that.
"You see? You don't travel; you know what I mean." He did know. Now he saw his duty. "When I first saw you, you were sixteen. You were beautiful--more lovely than any. I used to dream about you--lewd dreams." "Did you?" She seemed genuinely flattered. "You're older now--but so am I. You're bitter--and so am I. Yet we can do anything the youngsters can. I will give you your baby--one no one can take away from you."
"You've done your duty already by my daughter," she said, the hint of a chuckle in her voice.
"That's over. The baby will not bear my name. I had to give her what I had taken from her. She will share hereafter--as will I. And you. You have beauty yet."
"Do I?" It was a little-girl query, plaintive.
There on the tracks he took her. And in the dark he found that he had spoken truly, and there was a lot of Vara in her, and it was better than he had expected.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was just a faint whiff, but it brought a rash of strange feelings. Neq followed his nose.
There was a tiny crack in the wall he hadn't noticed before. From a distance it looked like an imperfection in the finish, but now he discovered that it was deep. Had
Bob had a secret compartment in his office, along with all the rest?
He inserted the corner of a sheet of paper into it and probed. The paper disappeared--and now he had lost his weapons-production statistics for the past month! There was space in there, all right--and the odor was jetting out, a very small current of air.
He fetched a dagger and maneuvered it into the crack with his pincers. He pried. Something snapped, and a section of the wall swung in. There was a passage here--
one he had missed, and might never have found, except for the little smell.
He peered in. It was dark, of course, and there was a warm draft. The odor was much stronger.
It was a man-hewn tunnel into the unexplored subterranean wilderness of Mt. Helicon. Anything at all could lie within, and the chances were more than even that it was deadly. This called for an armed party.
Neq shrugged and entered, alone. The stimulating breath of fragrance washed down along the corridor, lightening his step, and the stone and metal walls seemed to widen. This was Bob's escape route--and he had been right, a man needed such an exit from the tedium of leadership.
Vara had borne a fine boy and named him Vari. She had spent a reasonable period recovering and tending the baby, then begun sharing. Sosa spent considerable time with the baby also, and already it seemed as though Vari were hers. Three months after the first birth, Vara was pregnant again, and not by Neq.
Sola, too, conceived, and her joy transformed her. The two women became closer, not as mother and daughter but as sister-expectants, comparing notes and talking about plans for the Helicon nursery facilities and schooling of children. They were fine examples for the others, and the problems of the sharing system were diminishing.
Neq walked on, in a daze of memory despite the danger of exploring the unknown alone. He had a flashlight, for he never could anticipate when he might need light in Helicon, and he used it to pick out his path through the expanding passage. Now there was no metal, and the rock bore mosslike growths and was convoluted into treelike formations.
Jim the Gun had completed his initial renovation of the equipment and instituted a training program for operation and maintenance so that the work could carry on without him. "I'm not leaving," he said. "I like it here. Machines are my thing, and these are wondrous! But accidents happen, and I am aging."
As the machinery of Helicon moved toward capacity production--the capacity of the human attendants, not the machines--the exports to the crazies increased. The old trucks were renovated, for Helicon produced motors and tires and gasoline and gears, and the six trucks the crazies had been able to maintain became twenty, then fifty. Nomads had to be recruited as drivers and guards, being paid in food and good weapons and medicine. The trucks always traveled in convoys: one for the payload, another filled with warriors armed and spoiling for battle, the third carrying gasoline and replacement parts and food and similar staples. A new tribe formed: the trucker tribe, dedicated to this service. The existence and function of Helicon w,as no longer secret, of course, but the conditions of admittance remained stringent. The Truckers felt they had the best of it: Helicon provisions, a rambling nomad life. Many died in the actions against greedy outlaws, but this was the nomad way. Heroism.
The trail wandered between the overhanging trees, tunnel-like. Neq walked faster, eager to get where he was going.
He had wanted to have a crew lay down a telephone cable from Helicon to the main crazy outpost. But the expenditure in manpower would have been prohibitive, since they would have had either to raise the wire out of the casual reach of the outlaws, or bury it where it could not be found. There were mountains and rivers and badlands along the route. He had to settle for continuous radio contact, which would soon become television contact.
Dick the Surgeon started a hospital where nomads could receive medical attention and such drugs as required. But this posed another problem: either he had to leave Helicon, or nomads had to be admitted on a temporary basis. The old guidelines were inadequate. Neq dispensed with them. A portion of the underworld was blocked off from the rest, and a separate entrance opened. Dick began training those nomads who were interested in the potentials of medicine, though most of these were illiterate and ignorant. He had to devise simplified picture-codes for prescriptions: a circle with a jagged arrow through it representing a headache for aspirin; the outline of a tooth for novocaine; a squiggle representing a germ for antibiotics. He made sure no dangerous drugs were available without his supervision, and the system worked well enough. The nomad trainees were not stupid; they merely had to leam.