This time Greg didn't laugh. He was interested enough to let her go on.
And as I waited, rather chilled by the water in which I was partly
immersed. I felt for a stone or a stick.
Whether Miranda was on my side or not, I couldn't be on Greg's side. It
couldn't be a mistake to take Greg if I could.
"People who haven't the Gift," Miranda said, "have to learn to
coexist. When they're babies they know instinctively that they have to
get and keep their parents on their side. As children they know that
other children may sometimes be rivals, but they have to be allies
too. So what you never learned was -- "
Greg bellowed again. "Is that all? I thought for a moment you had
something to say. Now listen to me. First, take off that suit."
"I can't, I have to go back and -- "
"You're not going back, darling. Not to the stasis. Not across the
bridge. Not anywhere."
I might have moved then, but with a silent suddenness which startled me
so much I almost cried out, the bridge above me winked out.
It just wasn't there. It didn't burn or fade or shimmer or flash. It
simply ceased to exist.
Although probably both Greg and Miranda noticed this out of the corner
of their eyes, neither bothered to look -- which was just as well,
because I might have been slow in ducking out of sight.
Miranda took a step back and turned as if to run. Greg reached out
casually with his long arm and tumbled her to the ground.
Standing over her, he said: "But before I kill you, darling, I want to
tell you that things couldn't have been arranged better if you'd let
me plan them all myself. The stasis goes just before dawn, right? Just
before dawn you've got to get those two out and get back in yourself,
right? They're left alive, here, and you're safe back home, right?"
"Yes," said Miranda.
"There are two spare suits in the stasis so that you can get those two
out, right?"
"Yes."
"Wrong. They're gone."
Miranda sat up quickly. "I watched you all the time -- "
He laughed. "I know you did. So I got Wesley to shift them. He wasn't
keen, but he didn't want to die. So he . . . (?) for me."
"He'll know . . . " Miranda began, and stopped.
"He won't know anything. He has no idea what the suits are for. But
that's not all. Suppose I just kill you here and now, swim across and
tell everybody you went back by yourself . . . "
I didn't fully understand all this, but from her startled gasp it was
obvious that Miranda did. It was as if she had allowed herself to be
locked in a dungeon of death, as part of a plan, and then felt in her
pocket and discovered she didn't have the key.
Greg couldn't let it go -- he had to savor his cleverness to the
full. "They'll believe me. They'll have to. You know that anything I
say is the truth -- always has been the truth. All I've ever had to do
is go into any . . . (?) office and make a statement. Whatever I say,
it has to be the truth. Otherwise -- "
She leaped from under him and ran like a deer. Greg lunged after her. My
hand forced, I scrambled up the bank and went after them. In my right hand
I held a heavy stone.
They could both run much faster than I could. I'd have lost them in the
strange mist that hid the bridge . . . but only a hundred yards away,
it ceased to exist. And I came on Greg and Miranda, only six feet from
the river, with Greg again standing over Miranda.
I let fly with my stone. It caught Greg full on the back of the head,
and he staggered. His legs collapsed under him. He pitched right over
Miranda and landed on the other side of her.
We could have escaped if we'd been quick enough. But Miranda stared up
at me in surprise, astonished to see anyone at all, more astonished to
see me. And I coughed as a cloud of smoke swirled round me -- out of
the giants' protective mist, I had forgotten to be careful how I breathed.
Greg was up. He lashed out at my head, and although I escaped the full
force of the blow, I went down heavily. The next second Greg had Miranda
in his grasp. Holding her, he made a quick pass at me, and something
stung my eyes.
I couldn't move. I could see and hear, I could move my eyes and, with
an effort, my head. But that was all.
"What went wrong, Miranda?" Greg asked, looking down at me. "Why is
he here?"
"I don't know. I left the . . . (?) in the house, below the bottom shelf
in a cupboard. It was set slow-to-limit, short of death. Anybody in the
house should have got sleepy very gradually, and then -- "
"So it didn't work. Or he went out too soon. It doesn't matter. Take
off your suit, Miranda."
"No."
"Take it off. I'm going to take him into Shuteley, in your suit. Then
I'll open it."
I didn't shudder, because I couldn't.
Picturing what was going to happen to me (walking through an inferno,
unharmed, and then a wrench as the plastic suit was torn, then . . . )
I must have missed something. A moment later Greg was saying:
"I want you, darling."
"Don't try to be funny."
"I'm very serious. There's nothing more important in the world to me.
I want you, here and now."
Incredibly, Miranda, who had been standing up to him, opposing him,
arguing with him, was as weak and pliable as if under hypnosis.
Well, was that it? Hypnosis?
"I thought . . . " she said, visibly struggling.
"You thought after that one time, when you resisted, and I let it go,
that you could stand against me. That I didn't want you. That you still
had some authority over me. That for some reason, any reason, I was
never going to claim you."
He laughed. It was a forced laugh. There was no mirth in it. And I
realized now that Greg's laugh was always forced, completely lacking in
real enjoyment.
At once, as if he had never laughed, he went on fiercely, malevolently:
"I set you up, darling. For when I wanted you. And the time is now."
There was a brief pause. Then, slowly, reluctantly Miranda touched her
plastic suit at several points, at the throat, at her waist, at her knees.
It split and fell off her, and the box at the back came with it. So did
the boots, which were part of the suit. So did the dark goggles.
Like an automaton she stepped closer to Greg.
And he hit her.
I'd never seen such a blow. At the very least he was twice her weight. He
hit her as a very large man could have hit a rather small child, but
perhaps never had in human history; surely even a human beast would find
it impossible to hit someone so much smaller so hard.
Her feet left the ground. She would have been thrown several yards
anyway. As it was, she sailed far out over the river, unconscious before
she touched the water, and was swept away.
She was possibly dead before she landed. In the river, unconscious,
she would drown.
Greg was satisfied. He scarcely glanced at the river. Instead, he bent
to pick up her suit.
Straightening, he looked down at me. Greg must be used to looking down
on people. Yet he still seemed to enjoy it immensely.
"I'm a little sorry for you, Val," he said, in ordinary English. "You
didn't know what you were up against -- despite knowing Jota. Miranda
knew. Wesley and all the others knew -- especially the girls, of
course. You didn't, you poor fool. If you'd stayed quietly at home
tonight, you'd at least have lived. Miranda left a sleep cylinder in
the house to make quite sure, because of what we had to do here."
He shrugged. "You needn't worry -- I won't open your suit until we're
right in the middle. You'll scarcely feel a thing. It'll be over in
a second."
Chapter Eight
I don't think Greg hit me again.
I had been drinking at the roadhouse, not enough to show, but enough to
know I'd been drinking. What had happened since would have made me stone
cold sober if I'd had ten times as much, yet the residual alcohol in my
system was one thing. The shock of what had happened was another. Then,
the constant blast of heat from the blaze across the river must have done
something to all of us, though since it was constant we soon ignored it. I
had fallen into the river, hit my head and got water in my lungs. Greg
had hit me and thrown a paralyzer of some kind at me.
It could have been all that which had suddenly caught up with me. In
any case, the next I knew I was being led through the fire. Dazed,
I hardly knew whether I was dreaming or not. Certainly only in dreams
could I ever have experienced anything remotely like this before.
In spite of the goggles over my eyes, the flames were still blinding
until the eyes adjusted. Greg, at my left side, grasped my arm tightly,
half leading me, half carrying me. And we moved through a vast furnace.
The suits were totally efficient. They completely screened all heat,
and the air I breathed was pure. No smoke stung my eyes or throat.
Yet it was an ordeal of terror.
There was nothing to be seen but living flame and smoke. Frequently the
ground writhed with liquid fire -- blazing oil, tar or anything which
liquified in extreme heat. The confidence I soon acquired in my suit
and boots -- which fitted surprisingly well -- did very little to still
terror of the unknown.
I was lucky, I suppose, that I was too dazed to think properly. I had
that "this can't be real" feeling that makes people capable of things
otherwise utterly beyond them.
It also prevented me from having to fight or at least resist Greg. He
had just murdered Miranda and had every intention of murdering me at
any moment in a particularly horrible way. I should have done something,
though Greg could kill me quite easily simply by abandoning me.
But the feeling that this wasn't really happening made it possible to
play along with it. At the moment Greg was helping me.
The vagueness did not prevent me from remembering afterwards the horror
of a fire that consumed not a building but a whole town.
I saw only some of what the fire had done, and I was glad of it.
One single impression summed it up.
The damage to property was nothing. Houses could be built again. Cars in
the street had melted into red puddles. That was unimportant. But too
often, no longer in the cars, because the cars no longer possessed any
"in," there were relics of human beings, who had not, even in presumably
efficient vehicles, been able to escape what was happening round them.
In a way it was all clean and antiseptic. Fires are clean. A fire like
this was cleanest of all fires. There was no blood to be seen, no skin,
no guts, nothing unpleasantly animal like that. The fire had taken care
of all such things. There would be no plague after the Great Fire of
Shuteley. The fire had been too efficient for that. Anything organic
within the inner area had perished forever.
The crowning horror was the mound of blackened bones.
I wouldn't have seen it if it hadn't been in an area (where in the town
I hadn't the slightest idea, for nothing was recognizable) which must
have burned early and was therefore totally consumed. Around it the
fire still raged, but here there was near blackness. Even the tar in
the streets had been burned, and the stone merely glowed darkly.
And in the wreckage of a collapsed building was a vast mound of skeletons.
There seemed to be thousands of them, but there were probably only
hundreds.
For one wild moment I wondered if the giants had collected all the victims
they could find and dumped them all together in one refuse heap of human
remains. I almost hoped this was so. But it couldn't be. These were the
victims of a single disastrous incident in the general horror. This was
not the total toll, only a single part of it.
A large number of people must have been together somewhere in the town
when the fire caught them. They must have died quite quickly, or the
pile of bones would not have been so neat and compact.
Only the impression, the picture, registered at the time -- but it
registered for life. It was something I'd never forget.
It was only then that I started to hate the giants. What kind of beings
could have known this was going to happen, and not tried to avert it?
Awareness came back gradually, but rapidly, and it was to some extent
retrospective.
I knew I had reached a haven of peace and coolness in the heart of the
fire, which was still blazing all around me, but as if behind glass.
But what was I doing in a haven?
Greg had brought me through the fire: I knew that. He had meant to tear
my fire-suit at a spot where the temperature was instantly lethal: I knew
that too. Yet I had come through the fire, with Greg.
I became aware, with some surprise, that I wore only my underpants. The
fire-suit I had been wearing had been removed. It lay on the ground
beside me. I now understood why the giants wore little or nothing under
the suits. The suits, light and not elaborate, could be effective only
if they were utterly impervious to heat, a complete barrier to it. If
they let any heat through at all, they'd be useless in such a fire.
It was beyond even the giants to construct a suit which would stop heat
coming in and let body heat out. So you stewed in your own juice.
Greg was with me, he was talking to me, but the sense didn't register
yet. Apparently realizing this, he stopped.
He had thrown a gas capsule at me, or something which had a similar effect.
Apart from that moment when my eyes smarted, there were no painful effects.
But although I could move, although my mind could register some things,
it couldn't sort them out.
I glanced around.
We were in a huge hemisphere of no-fire, entirely surrounded by fire, in
an area in the town which I couldn't place. It was flat, and the ground
was plain, scorched earth, with few stones and no debris. In the center
was a dome, a curious obiect. It was a plain hemisphere 15 feet high, as
smooth as ice but of no material I knew. The faint silveriness suggested
metal, the translucency glass, the milky opaqueness plastic. One thing
was clear: since it stood in the exact center of the cleared space,
and since the dome of no-fire was exactly the same shape, one followed
from the other.
The air was cool and fresh, with no smell of burning. A faint breeze
from the center of the stasis -- there was no doubt that this was the
mysterious stasis I'd heard about -- confirmed that the machine there
was air-conditioning the sanctuary.