The rail under his left foot began to vibrate. Stirling frowned as he tried to quicken his pace. The robot which had passed him was corning back, still moving at top-speed. There was no denying that this was an unusual amount of activity for one of the big machines; but, perhaps, his presence was upsetting some receptor network. He kept glancing back over his shoulder until the familiar yellow angularities appeared, flaring in the brilliant light; then he rolled into the soil bed on his right and lay still. A green, private universe. It would be so pleasant to rest here among the cool stalks and sleep. The vibrations coming up through the soil reached their climax, and his green cave darkened momentarily as the robot’s superstructure blotted out the light.
“There he is!” The voice seemed to come from the sky.
Stirling barely had time to glimpse the black, tattered, flying silhouettes against the sky’s blue canopy. Something hard and heavy smashed down on him with irresistible force. His face was driven down into the dark soil, in which he had once found a human skull.
Chapter Nine
“Next time, of course, we’ll have to kill you.”
Johnny Considine paced the floor of the stockade as he spoke. In the reddish evening light his sharply defined muscles, with their clearly visible insertions, reminded Stirling more than ever of a crab’s body plates. The voice box shone at his throat like a medallion.
“You mean, you’re giving me a chance. I’m grateful.” Stirling tried to sound calm and relaxed, but his mind was seething with disappointment and shock. The villagers had ridden the great robot, controlling it like a horse or camel. How?
“I didn’t ask you to come here, Victor. Don’t forget that. You’re alive at this minute only because of your relationship to me.”
Stirling laughed bitterly. “I notice that all your loyal subjects call you “Jaycee,” Johnny. Do I detect a religious connotation there? After all, this is Heaven.”
“You must have thought I was pretty stupid,” Johnny said impassively. “Didn’t you think it was odd for a new member, still on probation, to be put on scavenging patrol?”
“We are always in the forge, or on the anvil,” Stirling quoted. “By trials God is shaping us for …”
“Cut that stuff!”
“All right, Johnny. I guess I didn’t give you enough credit for brains, but can’t you give me credit for not being malicious? I left word with Pete Biquard that I would never talk about what I’ve seen here, and I meant it. I don’t want to pull your little world out from under your feet.”
“It’s no use, Victor. You don’t seem to understand that you’ve come among people who can’t even breathe down below. I mean it. There were nights when my heart felt like a pillow filling my whole chest. I used to lie inside that box and do nothing but try to get air inside me, and I never got enough.
“Most of the villagers were worse than I was. To them, going back down would be the exact equivalent of dying: that’s why they’ll never let you go. It’s two hundred lives against your one, Victor.”
“But you’re the boss man here,” Stirling said reasonably. “Surely…”
“It’s my life, too.” Johnny’s voice was a discordant shriek from the prosthetic. “From now on, you and I are not brothers, Victor. Look out for yourself.”
Johnny went out, and someone lashed the door shut from the outside. Stirling stared after him for a moment, then walked around his new home. The stockade was a thirty-foot-square space under one of the smaller storage tanks. Its metal underside formed a seven-foot-high ceiling, and the walls were of scavenged plastic wired to the tank’s stanchions and diagonal bracing. Not an escape-proof prison by any means; but a constant watch would be kept; and, if he did get out, there would be the same twenty-mile slog to the transit area. With ragged warriors hounding him down, from the backs of their metal dinosaurs.
In a corner of the stockade someone had left Stirling’s foam-insulated sleeping bag in an untidy bundle. He zipped himself into it and lay staring at the streaked metal plates over his head.
First, he thought, first catch your dinosaur….
He wakened in the morning to the sound of the door being opened. Stirling sat up, rubbed his eyes, and saw Melissa Latham come in carrying a tray. Strips of sunlight from the cracks in the walls snaked across her body as she stooped to set the tray on the floor.
“Thank you. I’m ready for that—I guess I didn’t get much to eat yesterday.” Stirling kept his voice polite and neutral, waiting for clues which would let him assess the situation. Here was one person who would know even more than Johnny about the villagers, including the technique of controlling the big robots. She would have to be courted with all the delicacy and insight of which he was capable, and he hoped he could muster more of both qualities than he had shown in his dealings with Johnny.
Melissa nodded watchfully, without speaking, and made no move to leave. Stirling tried to unzip his sleeping bag; but avenues of pain opened up right across his back. His ribs and shoulders had stiffened into near-immobility during the night—somebody had worked him over, hard, after his capture. He thought he could guess who.
“I don’t know what status enemies of the state have up here, Miss Latham,” he said as he made a second and more cautious attempt to open the bag, “but may I ask you one question?”
“What is it?”
“Was that slightly simian gentleman known as Dix one of the party who brought me back here yesterday?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“No. I was … dozing at the time.”
“Yes, Dix was there. Why do you ask?”
“I’m a very conscientious person,” Stirling said, deciding he could use Dix as a means of testing Melissa’s attitude to several aspects of life on the He. “When somebody gives me something, I like to make sure he gets it back—and Dix is building up quite an account for himself.”
Melissa almost smiled. Reaction satisfactory, Stirling thought, but why is she hanging around here, listening to me? Any animal magnetism I might have had wouldn’t have survived the degaussing of the last few days. He finished struggling out of the bag, lifted the tray, and began to eat.
“Are you really his brother?”
“Half-brother.” Stirling looked up at Melissa. So that was it. She was interested in him because of his connection with Johnny. He felt an irrational flicker of disappointment.
“He never mentioned you.”
“‘I didn’t talk much about him either. It’s all slightly pathetic. Are you really his girl friend?” Too far and too fast, he thought immediately; but she shrugged casually and leaned against the wall. Stirling got his first good look at her face and approved of what he saw. Flawless, brown skin stretched in economical planes, dark eyes with almost phosphorescent whites, lips which would be sensitive or sensual depending on how a man looked at her, or how she looked at him.
“My father wants to see you,” she said.
“Why?”
“He sees every new member.”