Daybreak—2250 A.D.

9. INTO THE BLOW-UP LAND

Fors hunched over the table, leaning on his elbows, hardly daring to breathe lest the precious cloth-backed squares he was studying crumble into powdery dust. Maps—such a wealth of maps he had never dreamed of. He could put finger tip to the point of blue which was the edge of the great lake—and from that he could travel across—straight to the A-T-L-A-N-T-I-C Ocean. Why, that was the fabulous seat He looked up impatiently as Arskane came into this treasure room.

“We are here—right here!”

“And here we are like to stay forever if we do not bestir ourselves—”

Fors straightened up. “What—?”

“I have but come from the tower at the end of this building. Something alive moves at the far end of the field of machines. It is a shadow but it slides with too much purpose to be overlooked by a cautious—”

“A deer,” began Fors, knowing that it was not.

Arskane gave a short bark of humor-lacking laughter. “Does a deer creep upon its belly and spy around corners, brother? No, I think that our friends from the city have found us out at last. And I do not like being caught in this place—no, I do not like that at all!”

Fors left the maps regretfully. How Jarl would have delighted in them. But to attempt to move them would be to destroy them and they would have to remain—as they had through the countless years. He picked up his quiver and checked the remaining arrows. Only ten left. And when they were gone he would have only short sword and hunting knife—

Arskane must have picked that thought right out of his companion’s mind for now he was nodding. “Come.” He went back to the flight of stairs which led them in a spiral up and up until they stood in a place that had once been completely walled with glass. “See there—and what do you make of that?”

The southerner stabbed a finger southeast. Fors picked out a queer scar in the vegetation there, a wide wedge -of land where nothing grew. Under the sun the soil had a strange metallic gleam. He had seen the raw rocks of mountain gorges and the cleared land where the Old Ones had once had concrete surfaces, but this was differ-ent. In a land where trees and grass had reclaimed their own nothing green encroached upon the wedge.

“Desert—” was all he could suggest doubtfully. But there should be no deserts in this section of the country.

“That it is not! Remember, I am desert born and that is no natural wasteland such as I have ever known. It is something the like of which I have not stumbled upon in all my journeying!”

“Hush!” Fors’ head snapped around. He was sure of that sound, the distant scrape of metal against metal. His eyes ran along the lines of the silent machines. And there was a flicker of movement halfway down the second line!

He screened his eyes against the sun, crowding up to the frame of the vanished glass. Under the shadow of the spreading wing of a plane squatted a gray-black blot. And it was sniffing the ground!

His whisper hardly rose above the rasp of Arskane’s quick breathing. “Only one—”

“No. Look within the curve of that bush—to the right—”

Yes, the southerner was right. Against the green, one could see the bestial head. The Beast Things almost always hunted as a pack. It was too much to hope that this time they did not. Fors’ hand dropped to his sword hilt.

“We must go!”

Arskane’s sandals already thudded on the stairs. But before he left the tower Fors saw that gray thing dart forward from under the plane. And two more such lumps detached themselves from the covering of trees along the ruined runway, taking cover among the machines. The pack was closing in.

“We must keep to the open,” Arskane warned. “If we can stay ahead and not allow them to corner us we shall have a fair chance.”

There was another door out of the building, one which gave upon the other half of the field. Here was a maze of tangled wreckage. Shell holes pocked the runways; machines and defense guns had been blasted too. They swung around the sky-pointing muzzle of an anti-aircraft gun. And in the same instant the air was rent with a horrible screech, answered by Lura’s snarl of rage. A thrashing tangle of fighting cat and her prey rolled out almost under their feet.

Arskane swung his club with a sort of detached science. He struck down, hard. Thin, bone-gray arms went wide and limp and Lura was clawing a dead body. A missile from the wreckage grazed Fors’ head sending him spinning against the gun. He stumbled over the body from which came a filthy stench. Then Arskane jerked him to his feet and pulled him under the up-ended nose of a plane.

Still shaking his ringing head Fors allowed his companion to guide him as they turned and dodged. Once he heard the ring of metal as Beast Thing dart struck. Arskane pushed him to the left, the momentum of the southerner’s shove carrying both of them into cover.

“Driving us—” Arskane panted. “They herd us like deer—”

Fors tried to struggle free of the other’s prisoning hand.

“Lura—ahead—” In spite of the blow which had rocked him he caught the cat’s message. “There the way lies clear—”

Arskane did not seem disposed to leave cover but Fors tore free and wriggled through an opening in the churned earth and broken machines. It seemed to last hours, that crawling, twisting race with death. But in the end they came out on the edge of that queer scar in the earth which they had sighted from the tower. And there Lura crouched, her lips lifted in a snarl, her tail sweeping steadily to signify her rage.

“Down that gully—quick—” Arskane was into the notch before he had finished speaking.

The strange earth crunched under Fors’ boots. He took the only way left to freedom. And Lura, still giving low voice to her dismay, swept by him.

Here there was not even moss and the rocky outcrops had a glassy glaze. Fors shrank from touching anything with his bare flesh. The sounds of pursuit were gone though. It was too quiet here. He realized suddenly that what his ears missed was the ever-present sound of insects which had been with them in the vegetation of the healthy world.

This country they had entered blindly was alien, with no familiar green and brown to meet the eye, no homely sounds for the reassurance of the ear. Arskane had paused and as Fors caught up he asked the question which was on his tongue tip.

“What is this place?”

But the southerner countered with a question of his own. “What have you been told of the Blow-Up Lands?”

“Blow-Up Lands?” Fors tried to remember the few scanty references to such in the records of the Eyrie. Blow-Up Lands—where atom bombs had struck to bite into the earth’s crust, where death had entered so deeply that generations must pass before man could go that way again—

His mouth opened and then shut quickly. He did not have to ask his question again. He knew—and the chill horror of that knowing was worse than a Beast Thing dart striking into his flesh. No wonder there had been no pursuit. Even the mutant Beast Things knew better than to venture here!

“We must go back—” he half whispered, already knowing that they could not.

“Go back to certain death? No, brother, and already it is too late. If the old tales be true we are even now walking dead men with the seeds of the burning sickness in us. Instead—if we go on—there is a chance of getting through—”

“Perhaps more than a chance.” Fors’ first horror faded as he recalled an old argument long ago worn to rags by the men of the Eyrie. “Tell me, Arskane, in the early years after the Blow-Up did the people of your tribe suffer from the radiation sickness?”

The big man’s straight brows drew together. “Yes. There was a death year. All but fen of the clan died within three months. And the rest sickened and were ever weakly. It was not until a generation later that we grew strong again.”

“So was it also with those of the Eyrie. Men of my clan who have studied the ancient books say that because of this sickness we are now different from the Old Ones who gave us birth. And perhaps because of that difference we may venture unharmed where death would have struck them down.”

“But this reasoning has not yet been put to the proof?”

Fors shrugged. “Now it is. And we shall see if it is correct. I know that I am mutant.”

“While I am like the others of my tribe. But that is not saying that they are the same as the Old Ones. Well, whether it be what we hope or nqt, we are set on this path. And there is truly death, and an unpleasant one, behind us. In the meantime—that is a storm coming. We had best find shelter, this is no land to blunder across in the dark!”

It was hard to keep one’s footing on the greasy surface and Fors guessed that if it were wet it would be worse than sand to plow through. They held to the sides of the narrow valleys which laced the country, looking for a cave or overhang which would afford the slightest hint of shelter.

The dark clouds made a sullen gray mass and a premature twilight. A bad night to go without a fire—in the open of the contaminated land under a dripping sky.

A jagged flash of purple lightning cracked across the heavens and both of them shielded their eyes as it struck not far from where they stood. The rumble of the thunder which followed almost split their ear drums. Then the rain came in a heavy smothering curtain to close them in. They huddled together, miserable, the three of them against the side of a narrow valley, cowering as the lightning struck again and again and the water rose in a stream down the center of the gully, washing the soil from the glassy rocks. Only once did Fors move. He unhooked his canteen and pulled at Arskane’s belt flask until the big man gave it to him. These he set out in the steady downpour. The water which ran by his feet was contaminated but the rain which had not yet touched soil or rock might be drinkable later.

Lura, Fors decided, must be the most unhappy of the three. The rain ran from their smooth skin and was not much held by their rags of clothing. But her fur was matted by it and it would take hours of licking with her tongue before it was in order again. However, she did not voice her disapproval of life as she usually did. Since they had crossed into the atom-blasted land she had not given tongue at all. On impulse Fors tried now to catch her thoughts. He had been able to do that in the past—just enough times to be sure that she could communicate when she wished. But now he met only a blank. Lura’s wet fur pressed against him now, but Lura herself had gone.

And then he realized with a start that she was listening, listening so intently that her body was now only one big organ for the trapping of sound. Why?

He rested his forehead on his arms where he had crossed them on his hunched knees. Deliberately he set about shutting out the sounds around him—the drum of the rain, Arskane’s breathing, the gurgle of the water threading by just beyond their toes. Luckily the thunder had stopped. He was conscious of the pounding of his own blood in his ears, of the hiss of his own breath. He shut them out, slowly, as thoroughly as he could. This was a trick he had tried before but never with such compulsion on him. It was very necessary now that he hear— and that warning might have come either from Lura or some depth within him. He concentrated to shut out even the drive of that urgency—for it too was a danger.

There was a faint plopping sound. His mind considered it briefly and rejected it for what it was—the toppling of earth undercut by the storm-born stream. He pushed the boundaries of his hearing farther away. Then, even as a strange dizziness began to close in, he heard it—a sound which was not born of the wind and the rain. Lura moved, rising to her feet. Now she turned and looked at him as he raised his head to meet her eyes.

“What—?” Arskane stirred uneasily, staring from one to the other.

Fors almost laughed at the blank bewilderment in the big man’s eyes.

The dizziness which had come from his concentration was receding fast. His eyes adjusted to the night and the shadows. He got to his feet and put aside bow and quiver, keeping only the belt with his sword and knife. Arskane put out a protesting hand which he eluded.

“There is something back there. It is important that I see it. Wait here—”

But Arskane was struggling up too. Fors saw his mouth twist with pain as he inadvertently put weight upon his left arm. The rain must have got to the healing wound. And seeing that, the mountaineer shook his head.

“Listen—I am mutant—you have never asked in what manner I differ. But it is this, I can see in the dark—even this night is little different from the twilight for me. And my ears are close to Lura’s in keenness. Now is the hour when my difference will serve us. Lura!” He swung around and looked for a second time deep into those startlingly blue eyes. “Here will you stay—with our brother. Him will you guard—as you would me!”

She shifted her weight from one front paw to another, standing up against his will in the recesses of her devious mind, refusing him. But he persisted. He knew her stubborn freedom and the will for it which was born into her kind. They called no man master and they went their own way always. But Lura had chosen him, and because he had no friends among his own breed they had been very close, perhaps closer than any of the Eyrie had been with the furred hunters before. Fors did not know how much she would yield to his will but this was a time when he must set himself against her. To leave Arskane here alone, handicapped by his wound and his lack of night sight, would be worse than folly. And the big man could not go with him. And the sound—that must be investigated!

Lura’s head came up. Fors reached down his hand and felt the wetness of her fur as she rubbed her jaw along his fist in her most intimate caress. He had a moment of pure happiness at her acceptance of his wish. His fingers scratched behind her ears lovingly.

“Stay here,” he told them both. “I shall return as quickly as I may. But we must know what lies there—”

Before he finished that sentence he was off, not giving either of them time to protest again, knowing that the rain and the darkness would hide him from Arskane within a few feet and that Lura would be on guard until his return.

Fors slipped and stumbled, splashing through small pools, following the route he had memorized as they came. The rain was slacking, it stopped entirely as he .reached the top of a pinnacle of rock and looked out again over the old airport. He could distinguish the bombed section and the building where they had found the maps. But he was more interested in what was directly below.

There was no fire—although his mind kept insisting that there should be one, for it was plain that he was spying upon a council. The circle of hunched figures bore an uncanny and, to him, unwholesome resemblance to the meetings of the elders in the Eyrie. The Things were squatting so that their bodies were only blotches—for that he was glad. Somehow he had no desire to see them more clearly. But one pranced and droned in the center of that circle, and the sounds it uttered were what had drawn Fors there.

He could distinguish gutturals which must be words, but they had no meaning for him. Arskane’s tongue and his own had once had a common base and it had not been difficult to learn each other’s speech? But this growling did not sound as if it were shaped by either lips or brain which were human.

What the leader urged he could not know, but what they might do as a result of that urging was important. The Beast Things were growing bolder with the years. At first they had never ventured beyond the edges of the cities. But now they would follow a trail beyond the ruins and perhaps they were sending scouts into the open country. They were a menace to the remaining humans—

The leader ended his or its speech abruptly. Now its too thin body turned and it pointed to the wasteland where Fors crouched, almost as if it had sighted the hidden watcher. The gesture was answered by a growl from its companions. One or two got to their feet and padded to the edge of the Blow-Up ground where their heads sank as they sniffer warily at the polluted soil. But it did not take them long to make up their minds. For they were gathering up their bundles of darts and forming into a sort of crude marching line.

Fors stayed just long enough to be sure that they were indeed coming, that whatever taboo had help them back no longer operated. Then he fled, skimming lightly at his sure woods’ pace, back to where he had left Lura and Arskane. The Beast Things did not seem too cheerful about their venture and their starting pace was slow. They walked as if they expected to find traps under their feet. There was hope that the pursued could keep ahead of them.

The mountaineer found Arskane impatient, Lura crouched on an outcrop, her eyes glowing in the dark. Fors grabbed up the equipment he had discarded as he gasped out his news.

“I have been thinking,” Arskane’s slower but deeper voice cut through his report. “We do not understand the weapons of the Old Ones, those which could make a desert such as this. Was there only one bomb which fell here, or were there more? But the heart of such a place would be more dangerous than its lip. If we head straight across we may be going to that death tradition promises for those who invade the ’blue places. But if we circle we may—”

“There is the matter of time. I tell you trackers run on our heels now.”

“Yes, and they track by scent. There is at hand an answer to that.”

Arskane’s moccasins plowed through a pool, sending up spray. Fors understood. The threat of stream might be their salvation after all. But, since the rain had ceased, the water was shrinking rapidly in volume, almost as if the rocky soil over which it ran was a sponge to suck it up.

Fors started ahead, his night sight picking out the pit-fals and bad footing for both of them. Sometimes it was only his hand which kept Arskane on his feet. The big man stumbled stubbornly on, his breath torn out of him in harsh gasps. Fors knew from the grip of cramp in his own leg muscles what tormented the other. But they must gain ground—gain it while the pursuers, still suspicious of the Blow-Up Land, traveled slowly.

Then, long after, Arskane fell and, although Fors allowed them both a rest, he could not get to his feet again. His head slumped forward on his chest and Fors saw that he was either unconscious or asleep, his mouth twisted with pain. But what was worse were the seeping stains on the bandage which still bound the wounded shoulder.

Fors pressed the palms of his hands against his burning eyes. He tried to think back—was it only last night they had slept in the city tower? It seemed a week behind them. They could not keep on at this rate, that was certain. Now that he relaxed against a sandy bank he was afraid he could not make the effort to get up again. He must keep. And there was the matter of food also. How large was this Blow-Up desert? What if they must go on and on across it—maybe for days?

But they would be dead before days passed. Would it be better to choose a likely place now and make a last stand against the Beast Things? He dug his eyes again. He dared not sleep now. Then he remembered Lura.

She lay flat on a ridge a little above them, licking one paw, pausing now and then to prick her ears and listen. Lura would nap too, but in her own fashion, and nothing could come to attack while she watched. His head fell back against Arskane’s limp arm and he slept.