The Walls Have Eyes (6 page)

“No, sir,” the security bot said. “He wasn't another bot of my class. He was me. Another . . . no, not another . . . a me. My partner was me, because I work alone.”

A puzzled silence followed. Martin turned to Chip. “Did that make any sense to you?” he whispered.

“Pardon me, but if you're satisfied now, I need to leave,” the bot said. “I have a security matter to attend to. A human is in the yard.”

“Yes,” Abel said sarcastically. “Two humans. Us!”

“No, sir. Someone else is in the yard.”

Uh-oh! thought Martin.

Zebulon spoke. “A human, out here? Really?”

Martin sat up and banged his head against the bottom of the hulk.

Chip pulled himself into a crouch. He didn't vibrate, not exactly, but Martin's hearing on Chip's side went funny.

“Oh, never mind,” the security bot said. “My partner has it.”

Another silence followed. Then Zebulon's voice said gently, “Your partner. Who is you. Although you work alone.”

“Yes, sir.” The bot sounded relieved. “I think you've got it now.”

“Abel, shove that pile of junk out the door, and let's be on our way. If I was the packet chief around here, I'd write out an order to replace it!”

The security bot landed with a clatter on the gravel railbed. Then the door slammed shut. The maroon packet's engine sputtered to life, and the steel wheels started to turn. Martin lay flat and listened to it chug away into the distance.

“So it's you,” the monstrous bot said, gazing at them with reproach in its big blue eyes. “If I'd known it was you, I could have brought you in to talk to them, and maybe then they would have believed me.”

“They were just being mean,” Martin said as he stood up. “I thought you made all kinds of sense.”

The bot gave him a smile and rolled away.

Martin and Chip ran to the mouth of the tunnel. Chip galloped inside while Martin dragged the bottles and knapsack off the rails. A couple of minutes later, Mom and Dad came rolling down the line, looking pale and overwrought.

“Why did you leave us so long?” Mom cried. “I was worried!”

She slid off her makeshift ride and ran to him. Chip had to screech to a stop and stumble sideways to avoid colliding with her, and Dad fell flat on his back on the rails.

“Tris, for crying out loud!” he said.

“I was worried about you,” Mom said again as she enveloped
Martin in a hug. Then she looked through the tunnel mouth. “Oh, goodness!”

Martin extricated himself and followed her line of sight: pale sky, a couple of plump white clouds, some dried weeds, little outbuildings, and rusted piles of junk, all bounded by the high cinder-block fence.

“I hate to tell you, Mom, but that's pretty ugly. Save yourself for the good stuff.”

He marshaled them along to the outer gate. Mom shaded her eyes as she squinted up at the sky and tripped over rails, rocks, pebbles—everything. Dad maintained a distracted commentary on the pieces of equipment they passed. “See that? That moves earth; you can tell. They must have moved a lot of it to make that access space you showed us.”

Then Chip rolled them through the outer gate, and even Dad was speechless.

Martin stood at the top of the hill that fell away for miles into the distance, and joy swelled in his heart. Without the blockade of buildings and fence, the strong wind pushed and shoved at him, and he opened his arms to let it flow past. Ahead, a flock of birds swooped and turned like a single entity, and Mom put her hands over her mouth and started to cry.

“Now, this looks better,” Martin told her. “See those? They're blackbirds. And this crazy bot named Hertz told me that the bushes over there with the silver leaves are sagebush. No, sagebrush. Anyway, same thing.”

He reached for the water bottles to load Chip up again, but the German shepherd barked happily at him and tore off at a dead run, then came swinging back around like a boomerang.
Martin grabbed for him as he whirled past, and took off running in his wake. “Chip, you moron! Get back here!” he yelled. But it felt good to yell, and good to run, while his parents put their arms around each other and looked at the world in amazement.

Dad cleared his throat and picked up his canvas satchel. “Where did those agents go?” he asked gruffly. “How far do we have to go to get away from them?”

“We can go wherever we want,” Martin decided, and the realization made him almost burst with excitement. “Anyplace we wanna go, that's where we're going. All this out here is ours.”

Dad looked around. “Where's the fishpond?”

“Okay, fish,” Martin said. “We'll go this way, to the mountains. There's a lake there, and I've seen rivers. They've got fish in them.”

They started off. Dad kept wiping his eyes.

“I know, Walt,” Mom said. “I never imagined a place could be so beautiful.”

“It's not that,” Dad said, looking embarrassed. “It's just that it's so
bright
.”

“Oh, hey,” Martin said. “We gotta get you guys covered up! And me, too, even though I'm used to it. Pull out your sheets. Dad, did you bring a sheet or just a blanket? No, not the blanket. Get your sheet.”

They helped one another drape the sheets over their heads and shoulders. Martin couldn't help laughing when they were done. Dad was enveloped in brown-and-green plaid, and Mom in pale lilac with blue flowers.

“You look like a ghost, Mom,” he said. “A ghost with no fashion sense.”

“Well, you look like a laundry pile,” she countered. “And now I can't see the view.”

They shambled on their way again, hampered by their protective layer. After a while, Dad stopped wiping his eyes, but by then, he was puffing loudly enough to be heard over the wind hissing through the wildflowers.

“Need . . . to stop,” he panted. “Pack and tackle . . . too heavy. We can just . . . stay here.”

Martin turned around. The dome still loomed behind them, a gigantic steel bubble gleaming fiercely in the midday sun, and he could still make out the line of track that the maroon packet car would travel once the agents' interrogation of Fred was complete.

“We haven't gone very far,” he pointed out. “We gotta keep going. We need to get out of sight.”

Dad dropped his fishing gear and turned to look back at the dome. Then he mopped the sweat from his face with the corner of his sheet. “You're right,” he panted. “Too close.”

“Walt, I'm sorry,” Mom said, “but I've told you for years you need to get daily exercise. It's very important to lose abdominal fat. All the morning shows say so.”

Across their line of march grew a shabby thicket of scrub oak trees with thick, waxy, ugly leaves. They entered the thicket and could no longer walk straight ahead, but had to weave in and out among the rough trunks. Birds swooped across their path or sat on the spindly branches and sang.

“This is good,” Martin said. “It'll be harder to find us in here. That should make you happy, Dad.”

There was no answer.

Martin turned around and pushed back his sheet so he could see better. “Hey, Dad?” he called. “Mom, we've lost Dad!”

They hurried back the way they had come and soon found Dad. He had sagged down onto a low outcrop of rock. His mouth was open. “Tried to . . . call,” he gasped. “Had to . . . sit down.”

“Walt!” Mom said. “Walt, goodness! You're so red, you're purple!”

Martin disconnected a water bottle. Dad drank some and made a face. “Already warm,” he groaned.

“Look, we need to get going,” Martin said, picking up Dad's pack. “I'll carry this if you can get the fishing stuff.”

After that, they made good time. Dad sauntered along while Martin struggled with the heavy pack. Martin's temper began to wear thin, but he refused to slow down. He was determined to show Dad up.

By early evening, they came to the bank of a lazy stream about half a foot deep and fifteen feet wide. It flowed over pebbles and orange dirt, cutting tiny channels for itself and leaving narrow sandbars high and dry. Long, curvy patterns in the wet sand seemed to trap the tracks of waves. Tall cottonwoods shaded the little stream, and many delicate bird tracks stippled the shore.

“Let's stay here tonight,” Martin said, dropping Dad's pack and rubbing his sore arms. “It looks like a fun place to explore.”

“It does,” Mom agreed.

Dad unwound himself from his plaid sheet and looked around in vague confusion. “But . . . ,” he began.

Martin was easing his own pack from his shoulders. The minor movements this exercise required of his strained limbs felt like the cartilage-popping contortions of a circus athlete.

“But what?” he asked crossly.

“I don't know.” Dad lifted his hands. “It's just that there's nothing here.”

“We've got water,” Mom pointed out. She was folding her stained sheet into a tidy rectangle. “Martin, can we drink it?”

“I've got a filter for it,” Martin said.

“But—no house,” Dad said, turning to gesture at their surroundings. “No chairs, no beds, no fridge, no cooker, no table, no plates, no nothing. No television, and tonight's the last night of
Chef's Got Game
.”

“Are you serious?” Martin cried. “You've got a million great things to check out here, and all you can think about is the stupid television?”

Mom silenced him with a look, and he stomped off. Then she stepped up to Dad and put her arms around his waist. “It's an adventure,” she said. “Our first real adventure, Walt. We don't need an easy chair.”

“Maybe you don't,” Dad said. But he kissed her.

Martin pulled the pairs of bottles off Chip. More than a few were already empty. He took the filter from his pack, found a spot near the bank where the river was deeper than a couple of inches, pushed the hose down into the water, and started to pump. His sore arms immediately protested. The pump took a lot of force. Hertz had made it seem so easy.

Martin wondered for a few uneasy seconds about Hertz. The rugged outdoorsman had seemed normal at first, as if
he belonged in the great outdoors. He had known everything about how to survive out here, and yet he was a bot. Where was he now? Were there other bots like him, wandering the hills? Martin pushed the thought away.

Dad came over to see what he was doing. “I'll take a turn, son,” he said, reaching for the pump, and Martin's resentment toward him eased.

While they pumped, the heat of the day backed off. Then the birdsong died down. Martin glanced up to find that the glade around them had turned golden, and at that same moment, Mom let out a shriek.

“It's red!” she cried. “It's cherry red! You have to come see this!”

They followed her up a little rise. The sun was setting. Sedately, it gathered its colors in the peaceful western sky. Gold blended into rose, which blended into vermilion, then finally coalesced into the sun's broad crimson ball. The sun withdrew with tremendous dignity before the coming night.

Dad was speechless, and Mom cried.

The clear sky changed almost imperceptibly in the aftermath of the sunset as it faded into twilight. A cool wind flowed over them, the first breath of the chilly night breeze. “You gotta watch for the stars,” Martin advised. “One minute, you won't see any, and the next minute, you'll see five or six.”

“I think I see one,” Mom said.

Dad smacked his own arm. “Hey! Look at that!” The meager light revealed what seemed to be a small black tangle of sewing thread next to a dark smear. “I saw it!” Dad said. “It stuck me with a needle. It took a sample of blood!”

“Oh yeah,” Martin said. “It's not a big deal. It's just this weird kind of bug.”

“It's a tracking bug,” Dad said. “Tracking us. For the agents!”

Mom plucked the delicate tangle from his arm and tried to examine it in the failing light. The stars came out, but she wasn't looking at them anymore.

Martin shook his head. “No, Dad. I've gotten stuck by those lots of times. They just whine around. And those A and Z twins don't even know we're gone yet.”

“Not twins,” Dad said. “They're clones. All the agents are clones of the same person. I've worked with agents three times, and they look the same, just a little older or younger. ‘You know how we took over the Agency?' one of them said to me once. ‘We weren't smarter or stronger than the other agents. It's just that we never give up.' They never give up. And now they're tracking us.”

Martin started to scoff, but then he didn't. The ice blue stare of Hertz intruded uncomfortably on his thoughts. Hertz, with his built-in killing device. With the radio link back to his masters.

I lost someone very important to me
, Hertz had said. But later, he'd told Martin he'd never seen another human being. Had Hertz been placed in the wilderness to track somebody down? Someone he had been programmed to find?

“I can't believe I let you talk us into coming out here,” Dad said. He stalked to his backpack, jerked his sheet off the ground, and muffled up in it. “The bugs in the suburb listened to us and watched us, but we didn't have bugs with needles!”

When Martin awoke in the morning, the sun was already up and birds were starting to flit among the branches. A trail of tiny black ants was taking a shortcut along a fold of his sheet. He sat up to find a thin wild dog the color of gray dust drinking from the bank across the river. It stopped when he moved and stared at him through amber eyes. Then it trotted away.

Mom was working on a watercolor of the tall cottonwoods against the morning sky. “It's amazing how different the colors are out here,” she said. “I'm mixing colors I've never used before.”

Dad had his pants rolled up, and he was splashing around in the river. Martin thought he was having fun, but Dad waded back to shore with a frown.