Norstrilia

THE HIGH SKY FLYING

Rod walked to the edge of the little park. This was utterly unlike any ship he had ever seen or heard about in Norstrilia. There was no noise, no cramping, no sign of weapons — just a pretty little cabin which housed the controls, the Go-Captain, the Pinlighters, and the Stop-Captain, and then a stretch of incredible green grass. He had walked on this grass from the dusty ground of Mars. There was a purr and a whisper. A false blue sky, very beautiful, covered him like a canopy.

He felt strange. He had whiskers like a cat, forty centimeters long, growing out of his upper lip, about twelve whiskers to each side. The doctor had colored his eyes with bright green irises. His ears reached up to a point. He looked like a cat-man and he wore the professional clothing of an acrobat; C’mell did too.

He had not gotten over C’mell.

She made every woman in Old North Australia look like a sack of lard. She was lean, limber, smooth, menancing and beautiful; she was soft to the touch, hard in her motions, quick, alert, and cuddlesome. Her red hair blazed with the silkiness of animal fire. She spoke with a soprano which tinkled like wild bells. Her ancestors and ancestresses had been bred to produce the most seductive girl on Earth. The task had succeeded. Even in repose, she was voluptuous. Her wide hips and sharp eyes invited the masculine passions. Her catlike dangerousness challenged every man whom she met. The true men who looked at her knew that she was a cat, and still could not keep their eyes off her. Human women treated her as though she were something disgraceful. She traveled as an acrobat, but she had already told Rod McBan confidentially that she was by profession a “girlygirl,” a female animal, shaped and trained like a person to serve as hostess to offworld visitors, required by law and custom to invite their love, while promised the penalty of death if she accepted it.

Rod liked her, though he had been painfully shy with her at first. There was no side to her, no posh, no swank. Once she got down to business, her incredible body faded partway into the background, though with the sides of his eyes he could never quite forget it. It was her mind, her intelligence, her humor and good humor, which carried them across the hours and days they spent together. He found himself trying to impress her that he was a grown man, only to discover that in the spontaneous, sincere affections of her quick cat heart she did not care in the least what his status was. He was simply her partner and they had work to do together. It was his job to stay alive and it was her job to keep him alive.

Doctor Vomact had told him not to speak to the other passengers, not to say anything to each other, and to call for silence if any of them spoke.

There were ten other passengers who stared at one another in uncomfortable amazement.

Ten in number, they were.

All ten of them were Rod McBan.

Ten identified Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBans to the one hundred and fifty-first, all exactly alike. Apart from C’mell herself and the little monkey-doctor, A’gentur, the only person on the ship who was not Rod McBan was Rod McBan himself. He had become the cat-man. The others seemed, each by himself, to be persuaded that he alone was Rod McBan and that the other nine were parodies. They watched each other with a mixture of gloom and suspicion mixed with amusement, just as the real Rod McBan would have done, had he been in their place.

“One of them,” said Doctor Vomact in parting, “is your companion Eleanor from Norstrilia. The other nine are mouse-powered robots. They’re all copied from you. Good, eh?” He could not conceal his professional satisfaction.

And now they were all about to see Earth together.

C’mell took Rod to the edge of the little world and said gently, “I want to sing ‘The Tower Song’ to you just before we shut down on the top of Earthport.” And in her wonderful voice she sang the strange little old song,

Rod felt a little funny, standing there, looking at nothing, but he also felt pleasant with the girl’s head against his shoulder and his arm enfolding her. She seemed not only to need him, but to trust him very deeply. She did not feel adult — not self-important and full of unexplained business. She was merely a girl, and for the time his girl. It was pleasant and it gave him a strange foretaste of the future.

The day might come when he would have a permanent girl of his own, facing not a day, but life, not a danger, but destiny. He hoped that he could be as relaxed and fond with that future girl as he was with C’mell.

C’mell squeezed his hand, as though in warning.

He turned to look at her but she stared ahead and nodded with her chin,

“Keep watching,” she said, “straight ahead. Earth.”

He looked back at the blank artificial sky of the ship’s force-field. It was a monotous but pleasant blue, covering depths which were not really there.

The change was so fast that he wondered whether he had really seen it.

In one moment the clear flat blue.

Then the false sky splashed apart as though it had literally been slashed into enormous ribbons, ribbons in their turn becoming blue spots and disappearing.

Another blue sky was there — Earth’s.

Manhome.

Rod breathed deeply. It was hard to believe. The sky itself was not so different from the false sky which had surrounded the ship on its trip from Mars, but there was an aliveness and wetness to it, unlike any other sky he had ever heard about.

It was not the sight of the Earth which surprised him — it was the smell. He suddenly realized that Old North Australia must smell dull, flat, dusty to Earth-men. This Earth air smelled alive. There were the odors of plants, of water, of things which he could not even guess. The air was coded with a million years of memory. In this air his people had swum to manhood, before they conquered the stars. The wetness was not the cherished damp of one of his covered canals. It was wild free moisture which came laden with the indications of things living, dying, sprawling, squirming, loving with an abundance of Earth had always seemed fierce and exaggerated! What was stroon that men would pay water for it — water, the giver and carrier of life. This was his home, no matter how many generations his people had lived in the twisted hells of Paradise VII or the dry treasures of Old North Australia. He took a deep breath, feeling the plasma of Earth pour into him, the quick effluvium which had made man. He smelled Earth again — it would take a long lifetime, even with stroon, before a man could understand all these odors which came all the way up to the ship, which hovered, as planoforming ships usually did not, twenty-odd kilometers above the surface of the planet.

There was something strange in this air, something sweet-clear to the nostrils, refreshing to the spirit. One great beautiful odor overrode all the others. What could it be? He sniffed and then said, very clearly, to himself,

“Salt!”

C’mell reminded him that he was beside her,

“Do you like it, C’rod?”

“Yes, yes, it’s better than—” Words failed him. He looked at her. Her eager, pretty, comradely smile made him feel that she was sharing every milligram of his delight. “But why,” he asked, “do you waste salt on the air? What good does it do?”

“Salt?”

“Yes — in the air. So rich, so wet, so salty. Is it to clean the ship some way that I do not understand?”

“Ship? We’re not on the ship, C’rod. This is the landing roof of Earthport.”

He gasped.

No ship? There was not a mountain on Old North Australia more than six kilometers above MGL — mean ground level — and those mountains were all smooth, worn, old, folded by immense eons of wind into a gentle blanketing that covered his whole home world.

He looked around.

The platform was about two hundred meters long by one hundred wide.

The ten “Rod McBans” were talking to some men in uniform. Far at the other side a steeple rose into eye-catching height — perhaps a whole half-kilometer. He looked down.

There it was — Old Old Earth.

The treasure of water reached before his very eyes — water by the millions of tons, enough to feed a galaxy of sheep, to wash an infinity of men. The water was broken by a few islands on the far horizon to the right.

“Hesperides,” said’C’mell, following the direction of his gaze. “They came up from the sea when the Daimoni built this for us. For people, I mean. I shouldn’t say ‘us’.”

He did not notice the correction. He stared at the sea. Little specks were moving in it, very slowly. He pointed at one of them with his finger and asked C’mell,

“Are those wethouses?”

“What did you call them?”

“House which are wet. Houses which sit on water. Are those some of them?”

“Ships,” she said, not spoiling his fun with a direct contradiction. “Yes, those are ships.”

“Ships?” he cried. “You’d never get one of those into space. Why call them ships then?”

Very gently C’mell explained, “People had ships for water before they had ships for space. I think the Old Common Tongue takes the word for space vessel from the things you are looking at.”

“I want to see a city,” said Rod, “Show me a city.”

“It won’t look like much from here. We’re too high up. Nothing looks like much from the top of Earthport. But I can show you, anyhow. Come over here, dear.”

When they walked away from the edge, Rod realized that the little monkey was still with them. “What are you doing here with us?” asked Rod, not unkindly.

The monkey’s preposterous little face wrinkled into a knowing smile. The face was the same as it had been before, but the expression was different — more assured, more clear, more purposive than ever before. There was even humor and cordiality in the monkey’s voice.

“We animals are waiting for the people to finish their entrance.”

We animals? thought Rod. He remembered his furry head, his pointed ears, his cat-whiskers. No wonder he felt at ease with this girl and she with him.

The ten Rod McBans were walking down a ramp, so that the floor seemed to be swallowing them slowly from the feet up. They were walking in single file, so that the head of the leading one seemed to sit bodiless on the floor, while the last one in line had lost nothing more than his feet. It was odd indeed.

Rod looked at C’mell and A’gentur and asked them frankly, “When people have such a wide, wet, beautiful world, all full of life, why should they kill me?”

A’gentur shook his monkey head sadly, as though he knew full well, but found the telling of it inexpressibly wearisome and sad.

C’mell answered, “You are who you are. You hold immense power. Do you know that this tower is yours?”

“Mine!” he cried.

“You’ve bought it, or somebody bought it for you. Most of that water is yours, too. When you have things that big, people ask you for things. Or they take them from you. Earth is a beautiful place but I think it is a dangerous place, too, for offworlders like you who are used to just one way of life. You have not caused all the crime and meanness in the world, but it’s been sleeping and now wakes up for you.”

“Why for me?”

“Because,” said A’gentur, “you’re the richest person who has ever touched this planet. You own most of it already. Millions of human lives depend on your thoughts and your decisions.”

They had reached the opposite side of the top platform. Here, on the land side, the rivers were all leaking badly. Most of the land was covered with steam-clouds, such as they saw on Norstrilia when a covered canal burst out of its covering. These clouds represented incalculable treasures of rain. He saw that they parted at the foot of the tower.

“Weather machines,” said C’mell. “The cities are all covered with weather machines. Don’t you have weather machines in Old North Australia?”

“Of course we do,” said Rod, “but we don’t waste water by letting it float around in the open air like that. It’s pretty, though. I guess the extravagance of it makes me feel critical. Don’t you Earth people have anything better to do with your water than to leave it lying on the ground or having it float over open land?”

“We’re not Earth people,” said C’mell. “We’re underpeople. I’m a cat-person and he’s made from apes. Don’t call us people. It’s not decent.”

“Fudgel” said Rod. “I was just asking a question about Earth, not pestering your feelings when—”

He stopped short.

They all three spun around.

Out of the ramp there came something like a mowing machine. A human voice, a man’s voice screamed from within it, expressing rage and fear.

Rod started to move forward.

C’mell started to move forward.

C’mell held his arm, dragging back with all her weight.

“No! Rod, no! No!”

A’gentur slowed him down better by jumping into his face, so that Rod suddenly saw nothing but a universe of brown belly-fur and felt tiny hands gripping his hair and pulling it. He stopped and reached for the monkey. A’gentur anticipated him and dropped to the ground before Rod could hit him.

The machine was racing up the outside of the steeple and almost disappearing into the sky above. The voice had become thin.

Rod looked at C’mell, “All right. What was it? What’s happening?”

“That’s a spider, a giant spider. It’s kidnapping or killing Rod McBan.”

“Me?” keened Rod. “It’d better not touch me. I’ll tear it apart.”

“Sh-h-hl” said C’mell.

“Quiet!” said the monkey.

“Don’t ‘sh-sh-sh’ me and don’t ‘quiet’ me,” said Rod. “I’m not going to let that poor blighter suffer on my account. Tell that thing to come down. What is it, anyhow, this spider? A robot?”

“No,” said C’mell, “an insect.”

Rod was narrowing his eyes, watching the mowing machine which hung on the outside of the tower. He could barely see the man within its grip. When C’mell said “insect,” it triggered something in his mind. Hate. Revulsion. Resistance to dirt. Insects on Old North Australia were small, serially numbered and licensed. Even at that, he felt them to be his hereditary enemies. (Somebody had told him that Earth insects had done terrible things to the Norstrilians when they lived on Paradise VII.) Rod yelled at the spider, making his voice as loud as possible,

“You — come — down!”

The filthy thing on the tower quivered with sheer smugness and seemed to bring its machine-like legs closer together, settling down to be comfortable.

Rod forgot he was supposed to be a cat.

He gasped for air. Earth air was wet but thin. He closed his eyes for a moment or two. He thought hate, hate, hate for the insect. Then he shrieked telepathically, louder than he had ever shrieked at home:

hate-spit-spit-vomit!

dirt, dirt, dirt,

explode!

crush:

ruin:

stink, collapse, putrefy, disappear!

hate-hate-hate!

The fierce red roar of his inarticulate spieking hurt even him. He saw the little monkey fall to the ground in a dead faint. C’mell was pale and looked as though she might throw up her food.

He looked away from them and up at the “spider.” Had he reached it?

He had.

Slowly, slowly, the long legs moved out in spasms, releasing the man, whose body flashed downward. Rod’s eyes followed the movement of “Rod McBan” and he cringed when a wet crunch let him know that the duplicate of his own body had been splashed all over the hard deck of the tower, a hundred meters away. He glanced back up at the “spider.” It scrabbled for purchase of the tower and then cartwheeled downward. It too hit the deck hard and lay there dying, its legs twitching as its personality slipped into its private, everlasting night.

Rod gasped. “Eleanor. Oh, maybe that’s Eleanor!” His voice wailed. He started to run to the facsimile of his human body, forgetting that he was a cat-man.

C’mell’s voice was as sharp as a howl, though low in tone. “Shut up! Shut up! Stand still! Close your mind! Shut up! We’re dead if you don’t shut up!”

He stopped, stared at her stupidly. Then he saw she was in mortal earnest. He complied. He stopped moving. He did not try to talk. He capped his mind, closing himself against telepathy until his brainbox began to ache. The little monkey, A’gentur, was crawling up off the floor, looking shaken and sick. C’mell was still pale.

Men came running up the ramp, saw them and headed toward them.

There was the beat of wings in the air.

An enormous bird — no, it was an ornithopter — landed with its claws scratching the deck. A uniformed man jumped out and cried,

“Where is he?”

“He jumped over!” C’mell shouted.

The man started to follow the direction of her gesture and then cut sharply back to her.

“Fool!” he said. “People can’t jump off here. The barrier would hold ships in place. What did you see?”

C’mell was a good actress. She pretended to be getting over shock and gasping for words. The uniformed man looked at her haughtily,

“Cats,” he said, “and a monkey. What are you doing here? Who are you?”

“Name C’mell, profession, girlygirl, Earthport staff, commanded by Commissioner Teadrinker. This — boyfriend, no status, name C’roderick, cashier in night bank down below. Him?” She nodded at A’gentur. “I don’t know much about him.”

“Name A’gentur. Profession, supplementary surgeon. Status, animal. I’m not an underperson. Just an animal. I came in on the ship from Mars with the dead man there and some other true men who looked like him, and they went down first—”

“Shut up,” said the uniformed man. He turned to the approaching men and said, “Honored subchief, Sergeant 387 reporting. The user of the telepathic weapon has disappeared. The only things here are these two cat people, not very bright, and a small monkey. They can talk. The girl says she saw somebody get off the tower.”

The subchief was a tall redhead with a uniform even handsomer than the sergeant’s. He snapped at C’mell, “How did he do it?”

Rod knew C’mell well enough by now to recognize the artfulness of her becoming confused, feminine and incoherent — in appearance. Actually, she was in full control of the situation. Said she, babbling:

“He jumped, I think. I don’t know how.”

“That’s impossible,” said the subchief. “Did you see where he went?” he barked at Rod McBan.

Rod gasped at the suddenness of the question: besides, C’mell had told him to keep quiet. Between these two peremptories, he said, “Er — ah — oh — you see—”

The little monkey-surgeon interrupted drily, “Sir and Master Subchief, that cat-man is not very bright. I do not think you will get much out of him. Handsome but stupid. Strictly breeding stock—”

Rod gagged and turned a little red at these remarks, but he could tell from the hooded quick glare which C’mell shot him that she wanted him to go on being quiet.

She cut in. “I did notice one thing, Master. It might matter.”

“By the Bell and Bank, animal! Tell me,” cried the subchief. “Stop deciding what I ought to know!”

“The strange man’s skin was lightly tinged with blue.”

The subchief took a step back. His soldiers and the sergeant stared at him. In a serious, direct way he said to C’mell, “Are you sure?”

“No, my Master. I just thought so.”

“You saw just one?” barked the subchief.

Rod, overacting the stupidity, held up four fingers.

“That idiot,” cried the subchief, “thinks he saw four of them. Can he count?” he asked C’mell.

C’mell looked at Rod as though he were a handsome beast with not a brain in his head. Rod looked back at her, deliberately letting himself feel stupid. This was something which he did very well, since by neither hiering nor spieking at home, he had had to sit through interminable hours of other people’s conversation when he was little, never getting the faintest idea of what it was all about. He had discovered very early that if he sat still and looked stupid, people did not bother him by trying to bring him into the conversation, turning their voices on and braying at him as though he were deaf. He tried to simulate the familiar old posture and was rather pleased that he could make such a good showing with C’mell watching him. Even when she was seriously fighting for their freedom and playing girl all at once, her corona of blazing hair made her shine forth like the sun of Earth itself; among all these people on the platform, her beauty and her intelligence made her stand out, cat though she was. Rod was not at all surprised that he was overlooked, with such a vivid personality next to him; he just wished that he could be overlooked a little more, so that he could wander over idly and see whether the body was Eleanor’s or one of the robots’. If Eleanor had already died for him, in her first few minutes of the big treat of seeing Earth, he felt that he would never forgive himself as long as he lived.

The talk about the blue men amused him deeply. They existed in Norstrilian folklore, as a race of faraway magicians who, through science or hypnotism, could render themselves invisible to other men whenever they wished. Rod had never talked with an Old North Australian security officer about the problem of guarding the stroon treasure from attacks by invisible men, but he gathered, from the way people told stories of blue men, that they had either failed to show up in Norstrilia or that the Norstrilian authorities did not take them very seriously. He was amazed that the Earth people did not bring in a couple of first-class telepaths and have them sweep the deck of the tower for every living thing, but to judge by the chatter of voices that was going on, and the peering with eyes which occurred, Earth people had fairly weak senses and did not get things done promptly and efficiently.

The question about Eleanor was answered for him.

One of the soldiers joined the group, waited after saluting, and was finally allowed to interrupt C’mell’s and A’gentur’s endless guessing as to how many blue men there might have been on the tower, if there had been any at all.

The subchief nodded at the soldier, who said,

“Beg to report, Sir and Subchief, the body is not a body. It is just a robot which looks like a person.”

The day brightened immeasurably within Rod’s heart. Eleanor was safe, somewhere further down in this immense tower.

The comment seemed to decide the young officer. “Get a sweeping machine and a looking dog,” he commanded the sergeant, “and see to it that this whole area is swept and looked down to the last square millimeter.”

“It is done,” said the soldier.

Rod thought this an odd remark, because nothing at all had been done yet.

The subchief issued another command: “Turn on the kill-spotters before we go down the ramp. Any identity which is not perfectly clear must be killed automatically by the scanning device. Including us,” he added to his men. “We don’t want any blue men walking right down into the tower among us.”

C’mell suddenly and rather boldly stepped up to the officer and whispered in his ear. His eyes rolled as he listened, he blushed a little, and then changed his orders: “Cancel the kill-spotters. I want this whole squad to stand body-to-body. I’m sorry, men, but you’re going to have to touch these underpeople for several minutes. I want them to stand so close to us that we can be sure there is nobody extra sneaking into our group.”

(C’mell later told Rod that she had confessed to the young officer that she might be a mixed type, part human and part animal, and that she was the special girlygirl of two off-Earth magnates of the Instrumentality. She said she thought that she had a definite identity but was not sure, and that the kill-spotters might destroy her if she did not yield a correct image as she went past them. They would, she told Rod later, have caught any underman passing as a man, or any man passing as an underman, and would have killed the victim by intensifying the magnetic layout of his own organic body. These machines were dangerous things to pass, since they occasionally killed normal, legitimate people and underpeople who merely failed to provide a clear focus.)

The officer took the left forward corner of the living rectangle of people and underpeople. They formed tight ranks. Rod felt the two soldiers next to him shudder as they came into contact with his “cat” body. They kept their faces averted from him as though he smelled bad for them. Rod said nothing; he just looked forward and kept his expression pleasantly stupid.

What followed next was surprising. The men walked in a strange way, all of them moving their left legs in unison, and then their right legs. A’gentur could not possibly do this, so with a nod of the sergeant’s approval, C’mell picked him up and carried him close to her bosom. Suddenly, weapons flared.

These, thought Rod, must be cousins of the weapons which the Lord Redlady carried a few weeks ago, when he landed his ship on my property. (He remembered Hopper, his knife quivering like the head of a snake, threatening the life of the Lord Redlady; and he remembered the sudden silent burst, the black oily smoke, and the gloomy Bill looking at the chair where his pal had existed a moment before.)

These weapons showed a little light, just a little, but their force was betrayed by the buzzing of the floor and the agitation of the dust.

“Close in, men! Right up to your own feet! Don’t let a blue man through!” shouted the subchief. The men complied.

The air began to smell funny and burned.

The ramp was clear of life except for their own. When the ramp swung around a corner, Rod gasped.

This was the most enormous room he had ever seen. It covered the entire top of Earthport. He could not even begin to guess how many hectares it was, but a small farm could have been accommodated on it. There were few people there. The men broke ranks at a command of the subchief. The officer glared at the cat-man Rod, the cat-girl C’mell and the ape A’gentur:

“You stand right where you are till I come back!” They stood, saying nothing. C’mell and A’gentur took the place for granted. Rod started as though he would drink up the world with his eyes. In this one enormous room, there was more antiquity and wealth than all Old North Australia possessed. Curtains of an incredibly rich material shimmered down from the thirty-meter ceiling; some of them seemed to be dirty and in bad repair, but any one of them, after paying the twenty million percent import duty, would cost more than any Old North Australian could afford to pay. There were chairs and tables here and there, some of them good enough to deserve a place in the Musuem of Man on New Mars. Here they were merely used. The people did not seem any the happier for having all this wealth around them. For the first time, Rod got a glimpse of what the spartan self-imposed poverty had done to make life worthwhile at home. His people did not have much, when they could have chartered endless argosies of treasure, inbound from all worlds to their own planet, in exchange for the life-prolonging stroon. But if they had been heaped with treasure they would have appreciated nothing and would have ended up possessing nothing. He thought of his own little collection of hidden antiquities. Here on Earth it would not have filled a dustbin, but in the Station of Doom it would afford .him connoisseurship as long as he lived.

The thought of his home made him wonder what Old Hot and Simple, the Hon. Sec., might be doing with his adversary on Earth. “It’s a long, long way to reach here!” he thought to himself.

C’mell drew his attention by plucking at his arm. “Hold me,” commanded she, “because I am afraid I might fall down and E’ikasus is not strong enough to hold me.”

Rod wondered who Yeekasoose might be, when only the little monkey A’gentur was with them; he also wondered why C’mell should need to be held. Norstrilian discipline had taught him not to question orders in an emergency. He held her.

She suddenly slumped as though she had fainted or had gone to sleep. He held her with one arm and with his free hand he tipped her head against his shoulder so that she would look as though she were weary and affectionate, not unconscious. It was pleasant to hold her little female body, which felt fragile and delicate beyond belief. Her hair, disarrayed and windblown, still carried the smell of the salty sea air which had so surprised him an hour ago. She herself, he thought, was the greatest treasure of Earth which he had yet seen. But suppose he did have her? What could he do with her in Old North Australia? Under-people were completely forbidden, except for military uses under the exclusive control of the Commonwealth government. He could not imagine C’mell directing a mowing machine as she walked across a giant sheep, shearing it. The idea of her sitting up all night with a lonely or frightened sheep-monster was itself ridiculous. She was a playgirl, an ornament in human form; for such as her, there was no place under the comfortable grey skies of home. Her beauty would fade in the dry air; her intricate mind would turn sour with the weary endlessness of a farm culture: property, responsibility, defense, self-reliance, sobriety. New Melbourne would look like a collection of rude shacks to her.

He realized that his feet were getting cold. Up on the deck they had had sunlight to keep them warm, even though the chill salty wet air of Earth’s marvelous “seas” was blowing against them. Here, inside, it was merely high and cold, while still wet; he had never encountered wet cold before, and it was a strangely uncomfortable experience.

C’mell came to and shook herself to wakefulness just as they saw the officer walking toward them from the other end of the immense room.

Later, she told Rod what she had experienced when she lapsed into unconsciousness.

First, she had had a call which she could not explain. This had made her warn Rod. “Yeekasoose” was, of course E’ikasus, the real name of the “monkey” which he called A’gentur.

Then, as she felt herself swimming away into half-sleep with Rod’s strong arm around her, she had heard trumpets playing, just two or three of them, playing different parts to the same intricate, lovely piece of music, sometimes in solos, sometimes together. If a human or robot telepath had peeped her mind while she listened to the music, the impression would have been that of a perceptive c’girl who had linked herself with one of the many telepathic entertainment channels which filled the space of Earth itself.

Last, there came the messages. They were not encoded in the music in any way whatever. The music caused the images to form in her mind because she was C’mell, herself, unique, individual. Particular fugues or even individual notes reached into her memory and emotions, causing her mind to bring up old, half-forgotten associations. First she thought of “High birds flying…” as in the song which she had sung to Rod. Then she saw eyes, piercing eyes which blazed with knowledge while they stayed moist with humility. Then she smelled the strange odors of Downdeep-downdeep, the work-city where the under-people maintained the civilization on the surface and where some illegal underpeople lurked, overlooked by the authority of Man. Finally she saw Rod himself, striding off the deck with his loping Norstrilian walk. It added up simply. She was to bring Rod to the forgotten, forlorn, forbidden chambers of the Nameless One, and to do so promptly. The music in her head stopped, and she woke up.

The officer arrived.

He looked at them inquisitively and angrily. “This whole business is funny. The Acting Commissioner does not believe that there are any blue men. We’ve all heard of them. And yet we know somebody set off a telepathic emotion-bomb. That rage! Half the people in this room fell down when it went off. Those weapons are completely prohibited for use inside the Earth’s atmosphere.”

He cocked his head at them.

C’mell remained prudently silent, Rod practiced looking thoroughly stupid, and A’gentur looked like a bright, helpless little monkey.

“Funnier still,” said the officer. “The Acting Commissioner got orders to let you go. He got them while he was chewing me out. How does anybody know that you underpeople are here? Who are you, anyhow?”

He looked at them with curiosity for a minute, but then the curiosity faded with the pressure of his lifelong habits.

He snapped, “Who cares? Get along. Get out. You’re underpeople and you’re not allowed to stand in this room, anyhow.”

He turned his back on them and walked away.

“Where are we going?” whispered Rod, hoping C’mell would say that he could go down to the surface and see Old Earth itself.

“Down to the bottom of the world, and then—” she bit her lip “…and then, much further down. I have instructions.”

“Can’t I take an hour and look at Earth?” asked Rod. “You stay with me, of course.”

“When death is jumping around us like wild sparks? Of course not. Come along, Rod. You’ll get your freedom some time soon, if somebody doesn’t kill you first. Yeekasoose, you lead the way!”

They walked toward a dropshaft.

When Rod looked down it, the sight made him dizzy. Only the sight of people floating up and down in it made him realize that this was some Earth device which his people did not have in Old North Australia.

“Take a belt,” said C’mell quietly. “Do it as though you were used to it.”

He looked around. Only after she had taken a canvas belt, about fifteen centimeters wide, and was cinching it to her waist, did he see what she meant. He took one too and put it on. They waited while A’gentur ran up and down the racks of belts, looking for one small enough to fit him. C’mell finally helped him by taking one of normal size and looping it around his waist twice before she hooked it.

“Magnetic,” she murmured. “For the dropshafts.”

They did not take the main dropshaft.

“That’s for people only,” said C’mell.

The underpeople dropshaft was the same, except that it did not have the bright lights, the pumping of fresh air, the labelling of the levels, and the entertaining pictures to divert the passengers as they went up and down. This dropshaft, moreover, seemed to have more cargo than people in it. Huge boxes, bales, bits of machines, furniture and inexplicable bundles, each tied with magnetic belts and each guided by an under-person, floated up and down in the mysterious ever busy traffic of Old Earth.