Tom stood staring at it, scratching the back of his neck. Rivera got off the machine and stood beside him. For a long time they said nothing.
The stone was roughly rectangular, shaped like a brick with one end cut at about a thirty-degree angle. And on the angled face was a square-cut ridge, like the tongue on a piece of milled lumber. The stone was about 3 × 2 × 2 feet, and must have weighed six or seven hundred pounds.
“Now that,” said Tom, bug-eyed, “didn’t grow here, and if it did it never grew that way.”
“Una piedra de una casa,” said Rivera softly. “Tom, there was a building here, no?”
Tom turned suddenly to look at the knoll.
“There is a building here — or what’s left of it. Lord on’y knows how old—”
They stood there in the slowly dwindling light, staring at the knoll; and there came upon them a feeling of oppression, as if there were no wind and no sound anywhere. And yet there was wind, and behind them Daisy Etta whacked away with her muttering idle, and nothing had changed and — was that it? That nothing had changed? That nothing would change, or could, here?
Tom opened his mouth twice to speak, and couldn’t, or didn’t want to — he didn’t know which. Rivera slumped suddenly on his hunkers, back erect, and his eyes wide.
It grew very cold. “It’s cold,” Tom said, and his voice sounded harsh to him. And the wind blew warm on them, the earth was warm under Rivera’s knees. The cold was not a lack of heat, but a lack of something else — warmth, but the specific warmth of life-force, perhaps. The feeling of oppression grew as if their recognition of the strangeness of the place had started it, and their increasing sensitivity to it made it grow.
Rivera said something, quietly, in Spanish.
“What are you looking at?” asked Tom.
Rivera started violently, threw up an arm, as if to ward off the crash of Tom’s voice.
“I… there is nothin’ to see, Tom. I feel this way wance before. I dunno—” He shook his head, his eyes wide and blank. “An’ after, there was being wan hell of a thunder-storm—” His voice petered out.
Tom took his shoulder and hauled him roughly to his feet. “Goony! You slap-happy?”
The boy smiled, almost gently. The down on his upper lip held little spheres of sweat. “I ain’t nothin’, Tom. I’m jus’ scare like hell.”
“You scare yourself right back up there on that cat and git to work,” Tom roared. More quietly then, he said, “I know there’s something — wrong — here, Goony, but that ain’t goin’ to get us a runway built. Anyhow, I know what to do about a dawg ’at gits gunshy. Ought to be able to do as much fer you. Git along to th’ mound now and see if it ain’t a cache o’ big stone for us. We got a swamp down there to fill.”
Rivera hesitated, started to speak, swallowed and then walked slowly over to the Seven. Tom stood watching him, closing his mind to the impalpable pressure of something, somewhere near, making his guts cold.
The bulldozer nosed over to the mound, grunting, reminding Tom suddenly that the machine’s Spanish slang name was puerco — pig, boar. Rivera angled into the edge of the mound with the cutting corner of the blade. Dirt and brush curled up, fell away from the mound and loaded from the bank side, out along the mouldboard. The boy finished his pass along the mound, carried the load past it and wasted it out on the flat, turned around and started back again.
Ten minutes later Rivera struck stone, the manganese steel screaming along it, a puff of grey dust spouting from the cutting corner. Tom knelt and examined it after the machine had passed. It was the same kind of stone they had found out on the flat — and shaped the same way. But here it was a wall, the angled faces of the block ends obviously tongued and grooved together.
Cold, cold as—
Tom took one deep breath and wiped sweat out of his eyes.
“I don’t care,” he whispered, “I got to have that stone. I got to fill me a swamp.” He stood back and motioned to Rivera to blade into a chipped crevice in the buried wall.
The Seven swung into the wall and stopped while Rivera shifted into first, throttled down and lowered his blade. Tom looked up into his face. The boy’s lips were white. He eased in the master clutch, the blade dipped and the corner swung neatly into the crevice.
The dozer blatted protestingly and began to crab sideways, pivoting on the end of the blade. Tom jumped out of the way, ran around behind the machine, which was almost parallel with the wall now, and stood in the clear, one hand raised ready to signal, his eyes on the straining blade. And then everything happened at once.
With a toothy snap the block started and came free, pivoting outward from its square end, bringing with it its neighbour. The block above them dropped, and the whole mound seemed to settle. And something whooshed out of the black hole where the rocks had been. Something like a fog, but not a fog that could be seen, something huge that could not be measured. With it came a gust of that cold which was not cold, and the smell of ozone, and the prickling crackle of a mighty static discharge.
Tom was fifty feet from the wall before he knew he had moved. He stopped and saw the Seven suddenly buck like a wild stallion, once, and Rivera turning over twice in the air. Tom shouted some meaningless syllable and tore over to the boy, where he sprawled on the rough grass, lifted him in his arms, and ran. Only then did he realize that he was running from the machine.
It was like a mad thing. Its mouldboard rose and fell. It curved away from the mound, howling governor gone wild, controls flailing. The blade dug repeatedly into the earth, gouging it up in great dips through which the tractor plunged, clanking and bellowing furiously. It raced away in a great irregular arc, turned and came snorting back to the mound, where it beat at the buried wall, slewed and scraped and roared.
Tom reached the edge of the plateau sobbing for breath, and kneeling, laid the boy gently down on the grass.
“Goony, boy… hey—”
The long silken eyelashes fluttered, lifted. Something wrenched in Tom as he saw the eyes, rolled right back so that only the whites showed. Rivera drew a long quivering breath which caught suddenly. He coughed twice, threw his head from side to side so violently that Tom took it between his hands and steadied it.
“Ay… Maria madre… que me pasado, Tom — w’at has happen to me?”
“Fell off the Seven, stupid. You… how you feel?”
Rivera scrabbled at the ground, got his elbows half under him, then sank back weakly. “Feel O.K. Headache like hell. W-w’at happen to my feets?”
“Feet? They hurt?”
“No hurt—” The young face went grey, the lips tightened with effort. “No nothin’, Tom.”
“You can’t move ’em?”
Rivera shook his head, still trying. Tom stood up. “You take it easy. I’ll go get Kelly. Be right back.”
He walked away quickly and when Rivera called to him he did not turn around. Tom had seen a man with a broken back before.
At the edge of the little plateau Tom stopped, listening. In the deepening twilight he could see the bulldozer standing by the mound. The motor was running; she had not stalled herself. But what stopped Tom was that she wasn’t idling, but revving up and down as if an impatient hand were on the throttle — hroom hroooom, running up and up far faster than even a broken governor should permit, then coasting down to near silence, broken by the explosive punctuation of sharp and irregular firing. Then it would run up and up again, almost screaming, sustaining a r.p.m. that threatened every moving part, shaking the great machine like some deadly ague.