“But they would take me? I mean, if we ever made it back to them?”
“They would, darling. They’d have to. I have too much knowledge and training for my people to lose. And they wouldn’t get me again without you. ‘You take my Eric,’ I’d tell them, ‘you take my Eric and make him feel nice and welcome and loved or I’ll get so unhappy that I’ll forget everything I ever knew.’ That’s what I’d say, and there wouldn’t be anything at all to worry about. Especially these days, with their plans about the Monsters and my very specialized and useful set of facts.”
“These plans, Racheclass="underline" can’t you give me some idea what they are? Hitting back at the Monsters in a new and different way—it’s so exciting, but every time I try to figure out what they could be—”
She rolled away abruptly and sat up facing him. “Eric,” she said, “I can’t, and by now you know better than you ever did before that I can’t. Don’t keep asking me. It’s a secret that has to do with the future of my people. I’ve been entrusted with it, and I can’t discuss it with anyone who isn’t a member of my people. When you are, you’ll know—and you’ll also be a part of the Plan.”
Eric held up his hand in the gesture of peace. “All right,” he begged, smiling. “Sorry and never again.” He waited for her to come back to his arms, but she continued to sit a distance away, in thought.
“You were talking about making it back to my people,” Rachel said at last, still looking off in the white distance, through the transparent walls of the cage. “Have you thought of how we might do it?”
“Escape, you mean?”
“I mean escape. From this cage.”
“No, but I have a couple of ideas. One that I think might be good. It needs a lot of working out.”
Her eyes swung back and met his. “Work it out then, darling,” she said in a low, steady voice. “Work it out soon. We’re liable to be pressed for time.”
They sat and stared at each other. Then Rachel rose and Eric did too. She came into his arms.
“I haven’t wanted to say anything—I thought—I wasn’t certain. I am certain now.”
“You’re pregnant!”
She nodded, placed her hands on either side of his face and kissed him slowly, softly. “Listen, darling,” she whispered, her cheek against his. “Any method of escape is bound to involve a certain amount of gymnastics. And at some time in the not too distant future, little Rachel is going to be a lot less limber than she is now. She’s going to be very clumsy about climbing from one place to another—and she’s going to be awfully slow if any running has to be done. If we make a move, it has to be well before that.”
Eric held her tight against him. “Those damned Monsters!” he swore. “Their damned laboratory! Their damned experiments! They are not going to get my child.”
“It could be children,” Rachel reminded him. “You may be a singleton, but a real litter is still a definite possibility.”
“There’d be no escape, then,” he said soberly. “You’re right: we’ve got to get out of here before you give birth. The sooner the better.”
Rachel pushed herself away from him and turned aside. “Yes,” she whispered, mostly to herself. “It was one thing to save our necks by giving the Monsters what they wanted: a breeding pair. But to give them the results of the breeding—”
“Stop it, Rachel! We’re not at that point yet.” And Eric moved off to make yet another circuit of the cage, yet another examination of Monster territory as it was visible through the transparent walls and floor. He had to be a warrior again, watching for an advantage, looking for a soft spot at which to aim an attack.
All of the plans for escape he had discussed with Jonathan Danielson and Walter the Weapon-Seeker had been inadequate; but here there was a new factor, something that had been nibbling at his mind for weeks. So far it had been only a nibble, not a bite. He concentrated on it demandingly, impatiently, both outer and inner eyes wide open.
There were no more lessons, at least none where the studies were guided wholly by the girl. Now he sat at her feet and asked her questions, pulling her back and forth in the areas of knowledge that corresponded to the places where he felt the nibbling sensation in his mind.
“Rachel, I must know about every single item in the pockets of your cloak. That small, pointed thing, for example—”
“You told me once what your people think this entire Monster dwelling looks like. Could’ you draw a picture of it for me—”
“Can you cut up a few small sections of the cloak? Can they be sewn together? You said you had some kind of adhesive, didn’t you—”
“Rachel, darling, can you tell me in simple, noncomplicated language what you know of the principles behind the various vehicles our ancestors used? Automobiles,boats, airplanes, spacecraft. Whatever you know about them, whatever you can explain—”
Sometimes he amused her. Sometimes he almost terrified her. Always he ended by exhausting her. “There is a difference between men and women,” she would mutter as she fell back finally, locking her arms behind her head and closing her eyes. “And now I know what it is. Women have to rest. Men don’t.”
Truly, Eric seemed to have no need of rest. He would prowl up and down the cage in long, springy, nervous strides, shaking a single fist over and over again, as if he were trying to hammer an idea open in mid-air. Or he would sit in a corner, staring down at a Monster going by—but while he sat and stared, his whole body would vibrate, faster, faster, faster. Or he would get involved in experiments: experiments with the properties of some piece of equipment in the cloak, experiments that could be conducted only when food was being dropped in, or only when the cage was being flooded and washed, or only when one of their immense captors had, come by to look them over.
In the beginning, Rachel worked with him and tried to help him—that is, when she could find out what it was that he was investigating: frequently he had no idea of the goal himself. But more and more she tended to leave him to his own researches. She would answer the questions he suddenly snapped at her, giving him relevant data or her carefully considered opinions. Otherwise, she was content to lie and watch him work, smiling at him fondly whenever he turned a look murky with concentration in her direction. And more and more, she spent her time stretched out at full length, dozing.
He understood, even though it was infuriating not to have the full, alert services of her well-stocked mind. First, he was her man: she had put herself and their mutual problem in his hands—and she trusted him. But more important, something was at work that he had seen many times before among the females of Mankind: pregnancy usually created a certain placid euphoria in a woman; it was as if her thoughts were pledged exclusively to the helpless thing growing slowly within her body. With Rachel it was starting early.
Eric understood, but the understanding only made him more frenzied, more restless, more probing and determined. It was up to him and him alone whether his family were ever to wander in the burrows as free creatures—-or whether they were to be forever caged and at the mercy of the Monsters’ agony-filled investigations. He would escape, he told himself, beginning yet another new line of experimentation. He would. He would.
One day there was an interruption. A Monster came by and dropped Roy the Runner into their cage.
At first, Eric had scrambled for a spear as the strange human, released from the green rope, had struggled to his feet near where Rachel sat, both hands over her mouth and her eyes wide with fear. Then he recognized Roy and called out his name. All three of them relaxed and exhaled prodigiously. They grinned weakly at each other.
The Monster, satisfied after a period of watching that no mayhem was to be committed, rumbled its tremendous bulk away on other business.