V
“Stuck-up—” Conrad drew and scattered the fire from under his largest vat.
“Conceited—” He tilted the vat on its foundation of round stones, using a wooden bar as a lever, so that the contents poured down the channels to the setting-pans.
“
Blockhead
!” he finished bitterly, and picked up the sack in which he was going to carry back a load of the unusually fine white soap he had boiled up yesterday. With his knife he divided the hard slabs into convenient handful-sized chunks and threw them in the sack as they were cut. He was on the point of turning away when something on the ground caught his eye. Why, it was the carving he had been making when the strangers appeared.
Some grains of dirt had got embedded in it, but he could remedy that easily enough. He put down the sack, drew his knife again, and did so. Then he turned it over in his hands.
There was something distinctly odd about it. It would pass for an attempted likeness of Idris, certainly, even though her cheeks were plumper than that and her lips not so fine. Yet, as he raised the knife to widen the lips a little, he found himself hesitating.
In some unaccountable fashion, it was correct as it was. Not because it looked like Idris, but because it looked like—
He was suddenly shivering, as though a cold gale of recognition had blown out of memory. This carving looked like one of the people who inhabited his mysterious visions of another and happier world.
With determination he poised the knife afresh. It wasn’t
meant
to depict anyone out of a dream. It was meant to depict Idris, who was kind to him, and it was about time he stopped giving in to his impulses to drift off into a fantasy existence. No matter how hard and dull his life was, it was his life, and if he took refuge in imagination every time it got him down he would never be able to tell the Waygans of Lagwich what they could do with their horn—
Horn!
He had been so completely absorbed in his musing that he had paid no attention to the thunderous bellow of the sunset horn from the town’s gate when it sounded a few minutes ago. He hadn’t noticed how late it was getting; why, here it was practically full dark!
He stuffed the carving inside his shirt and fled for the protection of the town, his sack of soap bumping on his back.
He was just in time. He came panting out of the dusk as Waygan finished sounding the second and final blast, and dashed across the bridge as the hornman also was crossing. He felt the swinging sack bump Waygan on the arm.
“You!” Waygan said. “Might I not have known?”
Conrad didn’t answer. He lowered his sack while recovering his breath. In the shadows men tugged on ropes, and the drawbridge rose creaking to the vertical. On its underside it bore foot-long spikes of wood sheathed with copper, which faced any oncoming
thing
with a virtually unclimbable obstacle.
“Did you fall asleep over your soap-cooking, stewboy?” Waygan went on. “You look as though you’d have done well to use some of your produce on yourself.”
“If you’re so clever,” Conrad retorted, “let me see you work all day with grease and wood-ash and come home spotless!”
“Hah!” Waygan slapped his horn, making it give out a hollow boom. “So you’re ‘working all day’ now, are you? What news! We’ll have to take care that Lagwich isn’t buried under a mountain of soap, shan’t we? No, wait—wait! Don’t be in such a hurry to leave me. While I see you before me, let me tell you not to go and plague the foreigners while they’re here, is that understood? It was bad enough that they should have met you first, instead of someone who could give them a favourable impression of the town. Don’t show your dirty face near them again!”
Conrad jerked his sack on his shoulder again and trudged up the narrow alley away from the gate. He was fuming with rage. He was too used to being disappointed to have thought much about it during the afternoon, but it would have been pleasant to gain some reflected glory from guiding the strangers into the town and taking them to the wise men. And Waygan had done him out of even that meagre reward.
What was going to become of him? Almost everyone mocked him, and he didn’t see it was his own fault. Possibly it was because his father was as he was, but to shift blame on to a sick man seemed unfair …
He was getting near home when there was a clatter of running footsteps ahead. By reflex he drew into a shadowed doorway; that sounded like a gang of youths, and sometimes he had been set upon. The youths halted in front of a nearby house and shouted for a friend to come down to them.
“Come and see the foreigners!” they cried. “Up at Malling’s house! Come and look!”
Immediately shutters flew open on all sides, and not only the friend they were calling for but many other people poured into the street, pulling coats about them. Conrad hesitated. That Yanderman—he’d seemed pleasant enough, and polite to Conrad despite his appearance. Perhaps even now there might be the chance of a word of thanks for his help, to make the townsfolk think twice before mocking him again.
He made up his mind, and followed the crowd at a discreet distance.
Malling was the oldest of the wise men, and his house was one of the five reserved for holders of the office and sited within the stone wall of the fort at the top of the town. The great courtyard was thick with people struggling to get near the house-door where the watchman Gelbay stood with his staff, belabouring the over-eager and ordering them to stand clear.
Conrad was about to try and work his way through the press when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder and he turned, heart sinking, to look into a gap-toothed face.
“Why, it’s my useless son, may the
things
take him to the barrenland!” said his father in a rasping voice. “What d’you think you’re doing here? Get home, you lazy rascal!”
“Why should I?” Conrad said, jerking free. “Wasn’t I the one who showed the strangers the way to the town?”
“Oh, hark at the proud cockerel!” his father sneered. “I tell you to go, and that’s reason enough.”
“When did they let you out of the pillory?” Conrad said, astonished at his own boldness. “Your breath is rank as a privy with the stink of sour beer.”
His father’s face twisted with wild anger. Then he swung his boot at Conrad’s shin. He usually kicked, rather than hitting out, for one of his hands was wasted with a childhood sickness, and much practice had made the kicks deadly.
Conrad felt a dazzling stab of pain below his kneecap, and his leg gave way. He went sprawling on the ground.
“Crawl, then!” said his father triumphantly, and jerked Conrad’s head back on his shoulders by hooking a toe beneath his chin. That hurt, too, though not so badly. “Are you still minded to argue with me?”
Conrad pulled himself up on his good knee. He saw that a dozen or so youths of his own age, despairing of getting close to the house, had turned to watch the new distraction. Conrad’s father was always good for some amusement, whether it was taunting him in the pillory or egging him on to another fight. One of the youths called out, “Why, it’s Idle Conrad! Did you go to sleep on your feet and fall down there, useless one?”
“Why not use your soap on yourself?” another put in, and they all squealed with foolish laughter.
Conrad braced his sound leg under him and launched himself arrow-wise on an upward slant. His head sank in his father’s belly and hurled him back against the crowd beyond. Many people turned, complaining angrily at being pushed.
“Wish me to the barrenland, would you?” Conrad said between his teeth. Somehow years of frustration had boiled up inside him and turned to pure, clear-headed rage, as the mix in one of his vats would turn to soap of a clean whiteness. “You a father who couldn’t support his family, who begs scraps of bread from his son and barters them for beer so he may wallow in a hog’s stupor till he’s dragged to the pillory! I’ll go to the barrenland if that’s your wish—then you can weep in the streets and no one will pity you!”
His father made to rush at him, but someone had called for the watchman Gelbay, who came now from his post by the door, brandishing his staff. Conrad waited passively, favouring his hurt leg, for Gelbay was a drinking-crony of his father’s and he could look for no sympathy there.
“You—fighting with your father!” Gelbay barked. “Disgusting! You’re not too young for the pillory, you wastrel, and that’s where I’ve a mind to have you put!”
“Do it!” Conrad said defiantly. “I’m tired of slaving for my drunken father.”
“Pillory! Yes, the pillory!” cried some of the eager youths, but a cautious look came over his father’s face.
“Perhaps not,” he said, plucking at Gelbay’s sleeve. “For it would ill serve the town to lack for soap next washday!”
Oh, the beer-sodden hypocrite
! Conrad snapped, “What you mean is that you’d lose the money that keeps you liquored!”
“Enough of that!” Gelbay brought his staff down stingingly on Conrad’s shoulder. “Get gone—and be thankful that your father pleads for you after what you did!”
The jeers of the crowd were still ringing in his head as he let himself into the dirty upper room where he and his father eked out their existence. As he’d expected, the loaves that had been in the cupboard this morning had gone; one of them had been eaten, as crumbs on the floor testified, but the others would have been traded for mugs of beer.
He let fall his sack of soap in the corner and sat down on his blanket with his head in his hands. What point was there in living like this any more?
Something hard pressed against his chest, inside his shirt. With a start he remembered the soap-carving he had been making. He took it out, his hands trembling. By a miracle it was undamaged, except that a lock of the hair had broken off.
He hadn’t seen Idris outside Malling’s house, where most other people were, and since unchaperoned girls were seldom allowed out at night in Lagwich, she might well be at home.
Carrying the carving, he crept down the rickety outside stairs and went to the back door of the next house but one on the same street. He listened for a while in the darkness to make sure he wasn’t going to run into Idris’s mother, who disapproved of her daughter even talking to someone as generally disliked as Conrad. There was a line of yellow light around the door, and someone was moving around. A clear voice started to hum a tune: Idris’s voice. Cautiously he tapped the door.
“Who is it?” Idris called.
“Conrad. Are you by yourself?”
Quick footsteps came to the door and the bolt scraped back. “Yes—everyone has gone to Malling’s house to gape at the foreigners. Come in. I daren’t let you stay, but—Conrad, you’re limping dreadfully!”
He rubbed his injured knee and explained what had happened. Idris’s round, pretty face set in an angry expression.
“I think it’s shameful!” she said. “You’re not lazy—you work as hard as anyone, and no one else in Lagwich can make such good soap, and your horrible father squanders your earnings and on top of
that
Watchman Gelbay says you have to put up with it. It’s a scandal, really. What’s that in your hand?”
“Something I made for you,” Conrad said shyly. He held it out. “It’s only soap, and it got a bit broken when I was knocked down, but I hope you like it.”
Her fingers brushed his as she took the carving from him, and he drew away, hoping she wouldn’t notice. He had once held her hand, on harvest-day last summer; indeed, then she had let him kiss her cheek. But it was only at times like harvest-day, sowing-day or New Year’s that he had a chance to cleanse himself of his permanent layer of congealed ash and grease, and he had never felt it right to ask her to touch him when he was in his usual grimy state. So now he drew back, as usual.
“Conrad, you are clever!” she exclaimed with sparkling eyes. Looking at her, Conrad decided it was just as well he hadn’t tried to improve the likeness of the carving. It would take a master to catch the
alive
quality of her face, especially now as she flushed at the compliment she had been paid. Probably it would be easier to make a likeness of the whole of her; the buxom curves under her working gown would shape pleasingly to the hand. In fact—
Conrad checked his line of thought and reprimanded himself.
“Did you see the foreigners?” Idris asked, turning to put the carving on a shelf behind her.
“Yes,” Conrad told her bitterly, and recounted his story. Listening, Idris stamped her foot at the injustice of it.
“I sometimes wonder,” Conrad said at length, “whether I wouldn’t be better off if I just left here. Walked to another town—there’s bound to be work somewhere for a good soapmaker. Or just went to the barrenland where father wished me.”
“You mustn’t talk like that!” the girl said in alarm.
“Wouldn’t I be better off in another town, though? I’m not quite serious about the barrenland.”
“Maybe … Only I’d miss you, I think. I really would, if you went away.”
There was a noise outside, of the front door of the house being opened. Idris drew her breath in quickly and hissed at him. “You’ll have to go! Here, take this—it isn’t much, but it’s all I can spare.” She snatched handfuls of bread, cheese, onions and salad-greens from the table, and thrust an apple at him as well. “Quick now! Thanks for the carving—and we’ll have lots of ash for you tomorrow because we’ve been baking, so I’ll see you then.”
She rushed to open the back door for him, and as quickly as he could he limped out of the kitchen. Only just in time, for a moment after the bolt was slid home again he heard the sharp voice of Idris’s mother calling her.
He ate almost all the food, leaving a little to stop his father complaining when he came back later, and then lay down on the blanket which was the only bed he had. He stared into the darkness for a long time before he fell asleep; when he did doze off, he dreamed that he was riding a horse and waving a long black and red banner on a pole because he had finished carving a life-size statue of Idris without any clothes on and wanted everyone to admire it.
VI
“Nestamay! Nestamay!”
The girl rolled under her blanket and fought against the intrusion of the world.
“Nestamay, time for your watch!” Grandfather rasped, and prodded her in the side. She jerked and came awake with a sigh to the squalid narrowness of the hovel which was her home, to the smell of fresh food and the howling of baby Dan, alarmed by Grandfather’s harsh shouting. She had slept since noon, but would willingly have slept on till the next one.
However, there was no chance of that. Wrapping her blanket about her, she made her way to the lean-to shed over the stream and attended to necessities. When she came back, her face was shiny-wet and her cheeks were a little flushed with the coldness of the water. There was a bowl of porridge waiting, some sun-dried fruits and a hunk of bread. In silence she gulped them down.
“Hurry up, Nestamay!” Grandfather rapped. “You’re going to be late!”
She stifled the impulse to make a sullen answer in some such terms as, “What does it matter?” It
did
matter that every night someone should keep watch even though the automatic alarm had never failed; precisely why it mattered, Nestamay didn’t know, but it had been dinned into her since she was old enough to talk, and she no longer had the emotional equipment to contest the statement.
Sometimes she thought Grandfather must know why it was important to keep the watch, and sometimes she wondered if even he did. But not very hard.
Finishing her food, she reached towards the rack on which the handlights were kept. There was only one in its place, not the one she generally used. Her heart sank. Of course. It had grown dim, and she had set it out in the sun this morning to recharge itself.
Hoping Grandfather might not notice, she made to take the one which was in place.
“Nestamay!” the old man barked, and she snatched her hand away guiltily. “To each his own—remember? If you were too lazy to bring your own light back before you lay down to sleep, you can just go and fetch it now. And
hurry
!”
Nestamay thought of objecting. But she decided after a moment she would rather face the silent threat of the darkness outside than Grandfather in a towering rage. She nodded, put on her sweater and pants—but not her sandals; it was better to go barefoot in the dark, and cling with her toes if she had to—and slipped through the door.
The darkness wasn’t so bad once she had dived into it. It was clear overhead, and the stars twinkled reassuringly. From adjacent huts—there were some twenty-five all told—came familiar noises—children-noises, mostly, and more crying than laughter. For a long painful second she found herself wishing she was still a child, not forced into this demanding status of adulthood. Then she suppressed the foolish idea and headed, cat-silent, towards the bare ground.
She reached the place where she had left the handlight in a few minutes. It was still there; when she flicked the switch the beam came on bright and comforting. But she only flicked it on and off. The storage cells were weakening, and there was no telling how much of the accumulated sunlight she might need before morning.
For a few seconds she stood to let the clean dry desert-scented air sweep the last traces of drowsiness from her system, and then headed back, past the grouped hovels, towards the main body of the Station. It loomed up in the night like the back of a sleeping
thing,
pregnant with a menace of its own which a lifetime of familiarity had never dispelled. It could, and much too often did, hatch out horrors.
Something moved on her right, emerging from shadow. With a gasp she threw herself backwards, snapping on the handlight with one hand and grabbing her hatchet with the other. It wasn’t much of a weapon to use against a lurking
thing,
but then—what was? Some would even stand and face a heatbeam.
Then a flood of relief and anger filled her. “Jasper!” she cried. “Jasper, that’s a stupid trick to play on someone!”
In the beam of the handlight a tall, rather fleshy youth parted his broad lips in a grin. “You wouldn’t take your hatchet to me, Nestamay, would you now?” he purred.
“No. No. I suppose not,” Nestamay said with a sigh.
“Come on, give me a kiss,” Jasper suggested, moving closer. “I haven’t seen you all day.”
Somewhat reluctantly, Nestamay complied. It had been made clear to her that sooner or later she was going to have to set up a home with Jasper—there was no one else of her age-group who didn’t trespass on her genetic line too badly—and, she reasoned, she’d better get used to his attentions. But she didn’t like the prospect very much.
When his hands crept under her sweater, she protested and pushed him away.
“I’ve got to get up to my watch!” she said sharply.
Jasper laughed. “Why?” he murmured. “Nobody’s going to know if you come away with me for a while instead. I’ve found a place around the other side of the Station where—”
“Stop it!” Nestamay exclaimed, deeply shocked. “Jasper, that’s a dreadful thing to say! Skip my watch—why, that’d be unforgivable!”
“I’d forgive you,” Jasper grinned. “And nobody else would have to know.”
“I’ll tell my grandfather!”
“Him!”Jasper curled his lip. “He’s a pig-headed fool, and you ought to know by this time. Driving everyone to waste time ‘on watch’, as he calls it—slaving over foolishnesses in the Station all day instead of something constructive like making more food or pulling bits out of the Station and improving the huts.”
“But it has to be done!” Nestamay objected.
“Does it? Who says so? Your grandfather and a few other addlepated old folk! I don’t think he believes these stories he feeds us—I think he just uses them to maintain his position over the rest of the people. If he really believes what he says about walking to other and better worlds, why doesn’t he try it himself—on solid ground instead of through some hole in the Station full of horrible
things?
”
White-lipped, Nestamay forced words between her teeth. “My father did try, Jasper! You know perfectly well!”
“And was never heard of again,” Jasper said. “So much for your grandfather and his tales.”
Almost blinded by rage, Nestamay might have taken the hatchet to him in the next few seconds, but that the night was riven apart by a rising wail from the Station. Jasper whirled.
“Now look what’s happened because you held me up!” Nestamay shrieked, and fled towards the source of the noise. Behind her, the doors of the huts opened and men and able-bodied young women came running out, bearing handlights and weapons. Some of them had been resting after their daytime stint of work in the Station, and hadn’t bothered to put on their clothes.
Once it would have been possible to head straight into the Station and reach the room—Grandfather called it the “watch office”—where someone always waited during the night for the automatic alarms to indicate the arrival of a
thing.
Long ago, however, the direct passageways had become choked with vegetation, and some had caved in, while others held poisonous thorns and grasping plant-tentacles. Nestamay had to use a roundabout route, up twisted stairways and along rickety catwalks, to arrive at her destination.
Panting, she flung open the office door. There was no one here; day watches were kept by members of the working parties, and they would have knocked off no later than sunset, half an hour ago. She almost fell into the chair, frantically scanning the detector dials. Half of them were cracked and useless, but some were functioning.
And, by a miracle which would conceal her lateness, those dials provided her with the information she needed.
“Nestamay!” her grandfather’s acid voice thundered from a speaker high on the wall. “We’re waiting for you to tell us where it is—we can’t move until you do!”
“Sorry,” Nestamay mumbled. “I was just—uh—making a double check. This is a big one, Grandfather, probably too big to kill. Mass about two hundred kilos. It hatched in Sector 2-A and started moving immediately. It’s somewhere in Sector 4 by now, but there’s a dial broken—just a moment, a signal’s coming up!”
She leaned forward and rubbed dust from the glass over a dial.
“Yes, it’s in 4-C now and still moving. You may be able to hear it!”
A voice in the background behind Grandfather said something affirmative, and, straining her ears, Nestamay caught a faint crash that reached her almost simultaneously via the speaker and directly from the heart of the Station around her.
“Right!” Grandfather snapped, and went on to his companions. “Margin for error in a two-hundred-kilo body is too great—we might not hit a vital organ. Try and flush it into Channel Nine and drive it clear of the Station. Light first, noise next, and only then anything which might enrage it without doing serious harm. Quickly, now!”
There was a pause. Nestamay saw from the dials that the
thing
had stopped moving; more crashes from the direction of Sector 4-C suggested the creature had found something to interest it for a while.
“Nestamay!”
It was Grandfather again. She called an answer.
“Nestamay, it’s a bad one—wild! It charged the handlights and someone’s been hurt. No time for half-measures! I want power fed to the Channel Nine electrofence, and the storage cells for the heatbeams topped up.”
Nestamay’s heart lurched. On this watch of all watches, when a dangerous killer came through, Jasper had to delay her on her way to the office! She was going to give Jasper a piece of her mind when she next saw him—a going-over with a heatbeam would be even better, but hard to organise …
“Full power!” she reported, having tripped the necessary switches.
“Full power!” Grandfather told his companions. “Move!”
Nestamay jumped from her chair and ran to the window overlooking that side of the Station known as Sector 4. She stared into the gloom under the cracked and sagging roof.
At first she saw nothing. Then glimmering handlights appeared, masked by vegetation and rubble. Caught in their beam for a second, something glistening reared up. A howl at a teeth-rasping frequency split the air, followed by a vast crash and a completely human scream. Nestamay found she was biting her fingertips in agony.
Then the heatbeams came on. Like dull red pokers, they stabbed through the murk, striking swirls of smoke from anything they touched. Behind Nestamay, there were clicks as the power-level readings dropped with frightening rapidity.
The
thing
howled again and made a couple of stupid rushes at its tormentors, but the heat increased inversely with the square root of the intervening distance, and provided the beams remained steady it was impossible for the
thing
to come closer than some fifteen feet. It realised this at last, turned—howling more than ever—and blundered into Channel Nine, which would lead it to the bare ground beyond the Station.
“Electrofence!” Grandfather ordered. Nestamay dived for the power-switch.
The electrofence wasn’t precisely a fence, but a tubular mesh of wire completely enclosing each channel. Its original function might have been connected with the transportation of goods; currently, it served as their best weapon against the
things.
It induced microwave frequencies in sufficient quantity to half-cook anything inside it.
With a howl far louder than any preceding, the
thing
felt the first effects, and panic took over. Nestamay hadn’t seen whether it had legs or not, but it must have done; nothing else but good, muscular legs could have carried its substantial mass out of the channel so fast. Off into the surrounding desert it fled, trumpeting its intolerable pain to the stars.
It might come back—if it was stupid enough. Men with heatbeams would have to watch for it for the next few days, which meant taking people away from the regular working parties. Not all the
things
were as bad as that—some were huge and harmless, some were little and harmless … and some were little and deadly, and they were the worst of all. But it had been a long time since anything in a swarm, which was particularly frightening, had hatched out in the Station.
Nestamay wiped her face; it was running with sweat. Now she had to trace the original point of emergence of the
thing,
so that it could be blanked off for ever.
Was there never to be an end to this existence? Would they never find the last hole through which
things
leaked from—wherever they originated?
Those were questions she knew she couldn’t answer. She drove them from her mind and went about her work.