“If they elude us, Nourse, it could -”
“You’ve flagtapped the appropriate enzyme prescriptions?”
“Yes, Nourse.”
“Then they cannot run far… or long.”
“As you say, Nourse.”
“You may go,” Nourse said.
He watched the screen long after it had turned blank. Destroy the van? That would be an ending. He felt then that he did not want this game to end—ever. A curious feeling of elation crept through him.
The globe’s entrance segment swung open below him. Calapine entered followed by Schruille. They rode the climbing beam to their seats on the triangular dais. Neither spoke. They appeared withdrawn, oddly calm. Nourse thought of a controlled storm as he looked at them—the lightning and the thunder contained, that it might not harm their fellows.
“Is it not time?” Calapine asked.
A sigh escaped Nourse.
Schruille activated the sensor contact with the scanners in the mountains. There was moonlight suddenly in the receiving screens, the sounds of nightbirds, a rustling of dry leaves. Far off across moon-frosted hills lay lines and patches of lights tracing the coast and harbors of the megalopolis and the multi-level skyway networks.
Calapine stared at the scene, thinking of jewels and casual baubles, the playthings of idleness. She’d not had the inclination in several centuries to indulge in such toys. Why should I think of them now? she wondered. These are not toys, these lights.
Nourse examined the binary pyramids, the action analogues showing the course of Folk activity within the megalopolis.
“All is normal… and in readiness,” he said.
“Normal!” Schruille said,
“Which of us?” Calapine whispered.
“I have seen the necessity longest,” Schruille said. “I will do it.” He rolled a looping ring in the arm of his throne and as he moved it was appalled by the simplicity of the action. This ring and the powers it controlled had been at hand for eons, an insensitive linkage of machinery. All it took was a simple turning motion, a hand and the will behind the hand.
Calapine watched the scene in her screens—moonlight on hills, the megalopolis beyond, an animated toy subject to her whims. The last cadre of special personnel had departed, she knew. Irreplaceable objects that might be damaged had been removed. All was ready and doomed.
Winking flares began to appear through the necklaces of light—golden yellow flares. The Tuyere’s screens blurred as sonics vibrated the distant scanners. Lights began going out. Across the entire region, the lights went out—in groups and one by one. A low green fog rolled across the scene, filling in the valleys, overrunning the hills.
Presently, no lights were visible. Only the green fog remained. It continued to creep out beneath the impersonal moon, moving out and across and through until it remained and nothing more.
Schruille watched the stacked numerical analogues, the unemotional reporters which merely counted, submitted deductions of sortings, remainders… zeroes. Nothing showed Folk dying in the tubes and warrens, in the streets… at their labors… at their play. Nourse sat weeping.
They are dead, all dead, he thought. Dead. The word felt peculiar in his mind, devoid of personal meaning. It was a term that could be applied to bacteria perhaps… or to weeds. One sterilized an area before bringing in lovely flowers. Why do I weep? He tried to remember if he’d ever wept before. Perhaps there was a time when I wept, he thought But it was so long ago. Ago… ago… ago… time… time… wept… wept. They were words suddenly without meaning. That’s the trouble with endless life, he thought. With too much repetition, everything loses meaning.
Schruille studied the green fog in his screens. A few repairs, and we’ll be able to send in new Folk, he thought. We’ll repopulate with Folk of a safer cut. He wondered then where they’d find the safer Folk. The globe’s analysis boards revealed that the Seatac problem was only one of many such pockets. Symptoms were everywhere the same. He could see the flaw. It centered on the isolation of one generation from another. Lack of traditions and continuity became an obsession with the Folk… because they seemed to communicate no matter what repressions were tried. Folk sayings would crop up to reveal the deep current beneath.
Schruille quoted to himself: “When God first created a dissatisfied man, He put that man outside Central.”
But we created these Folk, Schruille thought. How did we create dissatisfied men?
He turned then and saw that Calapine and Nourse were weeping.
“Why do you weep?” Schruille demanded.
But they remained silent.
15.
Where the last skyway ended, the van took the turn away from the undermountain tube, and held to the wide surface track on the Lester by-way. It led upward through old tunnels to the wilderness reserve and breeder-leave resorts along an almost deserted air-blasted roadbed. There were no slavelights up here, only the moon and the stabbing cyclops beam of the van’s headlight.
An occasional omnibus passed them on the down-track, the passenger seats occupied by silent, moody couples, their breeder-leave ended, heading back to the megalopolis. If any of them focused on the van, it was dismissed as a supply carrier for the resorts.
On a banked curve below the Homish Resort Complex, the Cyborg driver made a series of adjustments to his lift controls. Venturis narrowed. Softness went out of the ride. Turbines whined upward to a near destructive keening. The van turned off the roadbed.
Within the narrow box that concealed them, Harvey Durant clutched the bench with one hand and Lizbeth with the other as the van lurched and bounced across the eroded mounds of an ancient railroad right of way, crashed through a screen of alders and turned onto a game track that followed the right of way upward through buck brush and rhododendrons.
“What’s happening?” Lizbeth wailed.
The driver’s voice rasped through the speaker, “We have left the road. There is nothing to fear.”
Nothing to fear, Harvey thought. The idea appeared so ludicrous he had to suppress a chuckle which he realized might be near hysteria.
The driver had turned off all exterior lights and was relying now on the moon and his infrared vision.
The Cyborg-boosted vision revealed the trail as a snail track through the brush. The van gulped this track for two kilometers, leaving a dusty, leaf-whirling wake to a point where the game trail intersected a forest patrol road—a cleared track matted with dead sallow and bracken from the passage of the patrol vehicles. Here, it turned right like a great hissing prehistoric monster, labored up a hill, roared down the other side and to the top of another hill where it stopped.
Turbines whined down to silence and the van settled onto its skids. The driver emerged, a blocky stub-legged figure with glittering prosthetic arms attached for its present needs. A side panel was ripped off and the Cyborg began unloading cargo, tossing it indiscriminately down through a stand of hemlock into a deep gully.
Within their compartment, Igan lurched to his feet, put his mouth near the speaker-phone, hissed, “Where are we?”
Silence.
“That was stupid,” Harvey said. “How do you know why he’s stopped?”
Igan ignored the insult. It came after all from a semi-educated dolt. “You can hear him shifting cargo,” Igan said. He leaned across Harvey, pounded a palm against the compartment’s side. “What’s going on out there?”