Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Nine

“Next time, of course, we’ll have to kill you.”

Johnny Considine paced the floor of the stockade as he spoke. In the reddish evening light his sharply defined muscles, with their clearly visible insertions, reminded Stirling more than ever of a crab’s body plates. The voice box shone at his throat like a medallion.

“You mean, you’re giving me a chance. I’m grateful.” Stirling tried to sound calm and relaxed, but his mind was seething with disappointment and shock. The villagers had ridden the great robot, controlling it like a horse or camel. How?

“I didn’t ask you to come here, Victor. Don’t forget that. You’re alive at this minute only because of your relationship to me.”

Stirling laughed bitterly. “I notice that all your loyal subjects call you “Jaycee,” Johnny. Do I detect a religious connotation there? After all, this is Heaven.”

“You must have thought I was pretty stupid,” Johnny said impassively. “Didn’t you think it was odd for a new member, still on probation, to be put on scavenging patrol?”

“We are always in the forge, or on the anvil,” Stirling quoted. “By trials God is shaping us for …”

“Cut that stuff!”

“All right, Johnny. I guess I didn’t give you enough credit for brains, but can’t you give me credit for not being malicious? I left word with Pete Biquard that I would never talk about what I’ve seen here, and I meant it. I don’t want to pull your little world out from under your feet.”

“It’s no use, Victor. You don’t seem to understand that you’ve come among people who can’t even breathe down below. I mean it. There were nights when my heart felt like a pillow filling my whole chest. I used to lie inside that box and do nothing but try to get air inside me, and I never got enough.

“Most of the villagers were worse than I was. To them, going back down would be the exact equivalent of dying: that’s why they’ll never let you go. It’s two hundred lives against your one, Victor.”

“But you’re the boss man here,” Stirling said reasonably. “Surely…”

“It’s my life, too.” Johnny’s voice was a discordant shriek from the prosthetic. “From now on, you and I are not brothers, Victor. Look out for yourself.”

Johnny went out, and someone lashed the door shut from the outside. Stirling stared after him for a moment, then walked around his new home. The stockade was a thirty-foot-square space under one of the smaller storage tanks. Its metal underside formed a seven-foot-high ceiling, and the walls were of scavenged plastic wired to the tank’s stanchions and diagonal bracing. Not an escape-proof prison by any means; but a constant watch would be kept; and, if he did get out, there would be the same twenty-mile slog to the transit area. With ragged warriors hounding him down, from the backs of their metal dinosaurs.

In a corner of the stockade someone had left Stirling’s foam-insulated sleeping bag in an untidy bundle. He zipped himself into it and lay staring at the streaked metal plates over his head.

First, he thought, first catch your dinosaur….

He wakened in the morning to the sound of the door being opened. Stirling sat up, rubbed his eyes, and saw Melissa Latham come in carrying a tray. Strips of sunlight from the cracks in the walls snaked across her body as she stooped to set the tray on the floor.

“Thank you. I’m ready for that—I guess I didn’t get much to eat yesterday.” Stirling kept his voice polite and neutral, waiting for clues which would let him assess the situation. Here was one person who would know even more than Johnny about the villagers, including the technique of controlling the big robots. She would have to be courted with all the delicacy and insight of which he was capable, and he hoped he could muster more of both qualities than he had shown in his dealings with Johnny.

Melissa nodded watchfully, without speaking, and made no move to leave. Stirling tried to unzip his sleeping bag; but avenues of pain opened up right across his back. His ribs and shoulders had stiffened into near-immobility during the night—somebody had worked him over, hard, after his capture. He thought he could guess who.

“I don’t know what status enemies of the state have up here, Miss Latham,” he said as he made a second and more cautious attempt to open the bag, “but may I ask you one question?”

“What is it?”

“Was that slightly simian gentleman known as Dix one of the party who brought me back here yesterday?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“No. I was … dozing at the time.”

“Yes, Dix was there. Why do you ask?”

“I’m a very conscientious person,” Stirling said, deciding he could use Dix as a means of testing Melissa’s attitude to several aspects of life on the He. “When somebody gives me something, I like to make sure he gets it back—and Dix is building up quite an account for himself.”

Melissa almost smiled. Reaction satisfactory, Stirling thought, but why is she hanging around here, listening to me? Any animal magnetism I might have had wouldn’t have survived the degaussing of the last few days. He finished struggling out of the bag, lifted the tray, and began to eat.

“Are you really his brother?”

“Half-brother.” Stirling looked up at Melissa. So that was it. She was interested in him because of his connection with Johnny. He felt an irrational flicker of disappointment.

“He never mentioned you.”

“‘I didn’t talk much about him either. It’s all slightly pathetic. Are you really his girl friend?” Too far and too fast, he thought immediately; but she shrugged casually and leaned against the wall. Stirling got his first good look at her face and approved of what he saw. Flawless, brown skin stretched in economical planes, dark eyes with almost phosphorescent whites, lips which would be sensitive or sensual depending on how a man looked at her, or how she looked at him.

“My father wants to see you,” she said.

“Why?”

“He sees every new member.”

“Oh, yes. The traditional interview with the village elder. I thought Johnny had done away with all that.”

“He would like to, but a lot of people remember my father lifted this village out of the Stone Age when he came here. He won’t be cast aside so easily, no matter what you or your brother think.”

“Hold on a minute! I don’t want to cast him aside. All I want is to get off the He—that’s why I’m in here, remember.”

“That’s an even more futile ambition than your brother’s. Nobody goes back.”

Stirling nodded disbelievingly. “When do I see your father?”

“He would like you to come along to our hut during your lunch break today.”

“You mean I’m allowed to go outside?”

“Of course. If prisoners did no work, we’d have a queue waiting to get into the stockade. No work, no food.”

“Is that the lex non scripta?”

“My father will write the law out for you, if necessary,” Melissa said curtly, demonstrating that she had understood the Latin tag. As if to further emphasize the point, she lifted the tray from Stirling’s lap before he had quite finished, and went out with it. Her massive battle-plume of black hair was momentarily limned with bronze by the morning light, then the door closed ‘behind her. Stirling got up and folded away his sleeping bag, uneasily aware that Melissa’s after-image was persisting an unusually long time.

He spent the morning emptying bird traps from plastic sacks, checking and repairing the mechanisms, and coating them with goose grease. The traps were treacherous devices made from metal scraps over a period of many years by men with different ideas and varying standards of professionalism. In the comparatively moist, oxygen-rich atmosphere of the lie, the rate of oxidization of unprotected ferrous metals was high and added to the unreliability of the traps. Stirling found it necessary to give the work all his attention in the interests of retaining a complete set of fingers; and the time passed quickly.

A constant stream of villagers, thin, brown individuals who showed an amiable curiosity about Stirling’s personal background, came by the storage hut beside which he was working. Although there was no marriage or giving in marriage in Heaven, a good proportion of them were paired off in apparent monogamy, and he saw—at last— several children. They seemed to have no ambition in life but to eat, sleep, and gather food. The sinless, blameless life of a primitive tribe seemed to suit them perfectly: they were super-hoboes riding a celestial freight car on a journey to nowhere. Stirling tried without success to see things from their point of view. The Compression was bad—but not all that bad.

Late in the morning Pete Biquard came by, carrying a load of the thin black plastic used so much by the villagers. This plastic, Stirling had learned, was the standard weather-proofing for robot replacement units. He spoke briefly, completely without animosity; but Stirling got the impression Biquard realized he had been chosen as the guinea pig for Johnny’s trial of his brother’s trustworthiness, and was not happy about it. Stirling filed the fact away for possible future use.

At lunchtime the middle-aged woman who had served him the previous morning brought a tray of food, much of it uncooked lettuce and cabbage dressed with green-flecked vegetable oil. Stirling suspected his new diet was deficient in protein; but he was feeling better than ever before in his life and already had detected a certain roominess in the waistband of his trousers. The gray uniform supplied by Bennett less than a week earlier was dirty, torn, and stained with blood and goose fat, but Stirling preferred it to the black plastic. He cleaned up his tray and tentatively began walking in the direction in which he believed the Lathams’ hut to lie.

Apart from the man whom he vaguely remembered— from his first night—as a Council member and who had directed him to his work on the traps, Stirling had seen no evidence that he was under guard. His leaving the vicinity of the storage hut would give an indication of how much prison life on the He differed from its counterpart three miles below. Stirling had once visited Newburyport’s main penitentiary, but had locked the memory away in a place where it would not easily be stumbled upon.

Immediately after he began to walk, a small, blackened stick of a man, who had been sleeping against a storage bin, got to his feet and moved after him. Stirling gave the little man a contented wave—this amount of surveillance he could stand—and concentrated on finding the Lathams’ hut. The villagers had made a good job of protecting their dwellings from inquisitive eyes or satellite-borne cameras. The surface of the lie outside the area occupied by the soil beds was covered by a brown lightweight composition; but it had been silted over with the dust of many summers, and insouciant grasses had taken hold. In the half-mile length of the village most of the elevated tank structures had been adapted as living quarters, and the individual foxholes constructed in the open were roofed with matted straw and leaves. Even at close range, a casual observer glancing along the eastern margin was likely to see nothing but complex rail systems and an occasional agricultural robot satisfying its appetites at the grass-blurred tanks.

Stirling found the Latham place in about ten minutes, with some assistance from passers-by. It was constructed on the same lines as the stockade and was considerably larger than most of the villagers’ private dwellings. He knocked at the low entrance and a thin but hoarse voice told him to enter. Inside he found the hut was divided into several rooms by woven grass screens. In the room to his right he found an old man lying on a low bed which was covered in genuine fabrics. The man raised himself on one arm.

“Are you Victor Stirling?”

“That’s right.”

“What’s right? I didn’t make any statement—I only asked you a question, so how could anything be ‘right’?” Judge Latham’s blurry, gray eyes fixed themselves ferociously on Stirling’s face for a few seconds; then he gave a triumphant smile. “You journalists! Biggest butchers of the language I’ve ever seen. You get your money for nothing. You know that, don’t you?”

“My editor often said that too, Judge,” Stirling replied, grinning. “I never appreciated his viewpoint.”

“You probably gave him ulcers. Well, don’t stand there blocking the light. Pull up a heap of dust and sit down.”

Stirling found a stool and tested his weight on it carefully. Judge Latham sounded like a man he was going to like. He looked around the interior of the hut. He noted color sketches on the walls and a gray box which looked as though it could contain a micro-library.

“Melissa isn’t here,” Latham said abruptly. “Jaycee sent for her.”

Stirling felt a pang of regret, then saw the older man was staring at him appraisingly. The pupils of the judge’s eyes seemed almost to have dissolved into the whites; but his gaze went deep, and Stirling shifted uneasily. It was too soon for anyone to start thinking what the judge seemed to be thinking.

“She said you wanted to see me, Judge.”

“Never mind the title, Victor. Call me Ford. My real name is Clifford, but it doesn’t sound like a real name. Well, what do you think of my little place?” Latham stared at him eagerly from behind a nose which acne had turned into an enormous strawberry. “It’s the first home I’ve seen on the He,” Stirling said. Latham relaxed slightly. “What brought you up here, son?”

“I thought I was doing something for my brother. Now … What are you doing here?” “Dying, mostly. Under the fourth sign of the zodiac.”

“Cancer?” Stirling found the word difficult to say in the circumstances, but Latham seemed to have a detached interest in his own condition.

“You know your astrology, boy. It started over ten years ago; so I suppose I’ve been more fortunate ‘than most.”

“That’s when you came up here?”

“That’s when I came up here. It cost me a fortune in bribes.”

“And you brought Melissa.”

“She wanted to come. At the time I thought it would be only for a matter of months—a vacation in the sky—but things turned out differently. We both were lucky.”

“Melissa too?”

“I said both of us were lucky.” Latham leaned forward in the bed, and pain dragged his mouth out of shape. “My daughter is a real person. Did you meet any others down there?”

Stirling shook his head slowly and waited until the judge’s breathing became easier. “I ask too many questions —it’s an occupational disease.”

“That’s all right, son. This isn’t one of my official interviews. I’m too old and sick now to play any real part in the village life; but I keep up the pretense just to annoy that so-called Council.”

“That’s a good enough reason, Ford.” Stirling hesitated, judging his ground. “You know, it would really annoy them if I got away from here.”

Latham let the words hang in the air for a few seconds before he shook his head. “You can put that idea right out of your head. This is a squalid, pointless little community in many ways, but I wouldn’t betray it. Nobody goes back.”

“Those words are beginning to stick in my throat,” Stirling said tiredly. Then his interest revived. “You knew what I was going to ask you?”

Latham pushed his nose around delicately, as though molding putty, and his eyes narrowed significantly. “I had an idea you might be developing an interest in the automatic cultivators.”

“Well, they are fascinating machines.”

“Have they any feature which particularly catches your interest?”

Stirling rubbed the heavy stubble on his chin, aware he was about to gamble. “I’m puzzled by the fact that machines designed for fully automatic operation on the lies seem to have some kind of override circuit, making it possible for a human operator to give them arbitrary directions. Even from a distance.”

“Now there’s a thought.” Latham toyed with the watch strapped to his narrow wrist. “If that were the case, you’d have five hundred getaway cars standing out there. All in a row. Believe me, son, there are no provisions on the robots for manual overriding; and if there were, I wouldn’t tell you. Nobody …”

“… goes back,” Stirling completed the phrase and stood up. “Talking about going back, I think I should get to work. Have to make a good impression on the first day, you know.”

Latham nodded wearily, but he held up one hand. “I like you, Victor. Possibly it’s an indictment of our community that the only new member I have liked in ten years is the one who got here by mistake, but that’s by the way … This is the only talk we’ll ever have; yet there are so many things I’m not free to say. Melissa can’t make her mind up about your brother. I have tried to help her come to a decision, but there are too many contradictions on both sides. It will take time … and that’s something I’m running out of. … You must forgive my incoherency, but the circumstances. … I would put Melissa before Heaven itself. …”

“You must rest, Judge.”

“My name is Ford.”

“Yes, but ‘Judge’ suits you better. You’ve got to rest.”

“How right. . . you are.”

“I’ll come and see you tomorrow, Judge.” Stirling was uneasily aware that the old man had been trying to say something without putting it into words.

“No!” Latham’s voice became stronger “I’m receiving no more visitors. You journalists … money for nothing. Victor, take that thing with you. I’ve finished reading.” Latham pointed to the gray box in the corner, then turned his face to the wall.

“Yes, sir.” Stirling lifted the box and carried it out into the sunlight. It was a micro-library and, judging by its weight, a well-stocked one. He began walking back to the storage hut where the bird traps were kept, and at once the stick-like man stepped out of the shade to follow him.

The idea came so suddenly that it almost jolted Stirling into looking at the library’s index panel in full view of his shadow. He waited, instead, until he was back at the heaps of traps and was squatting in the dust—ostensibly giving his full attention to the archaic mechanisms. While leaning over to scoop another handful of the evil-smelling goose grease, Stirling ran his eye down the printed plastic strips of the index.

One of them bore the words, American Encyclopedia, Stirling nodded in satisfaction. Had he been carrying out a routine research job back in the Record’s office, that was the book he would have chosen to give him information about the International Land Extensions and the design of their robots.

With his concentration on the traps broken, ‘the hot hours of the afternoon dragged by like geological ages; and he received several rust-stained grazes on his fingers before someone came to let him know he had earned his food for the day. It was the man he knew as Paddy.

“You’ve been to the judge’s place,” he said, as Stirling stood up. “Yes. Is it out of bounds?”

“Nope. Not out of bounds, but Jaycee won’t like it much.”

“Does it matter?” Stirling recalled his original walk to the village and how Paddy had been objecting to Johnny’s new regime.

Paddy shrugged. “What have you got there?”

“The Judge gave me his library. I presume I’ll be permitted to read?”

“I used to be quite a reader myself,” Paddy said reflectively. “Read a lot in the old days.”

“I’m glad to hear it. It’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow booklover.”

Paddy gripped Stirling’s arm, sinking his lean fingers into the muscle. “Keep the library, Stirling,” he whispered, “but don’t look down your nose at me. You and that brother of yours—you’re great ones for using people.”

Stirling watched the black figure stalking away through the village, somehow managing to look dignified in its flapping plastic wrappings; and then he realized he had been guilty of forgetting that the villagers were still members of the human race. He called out his thanks and took the micro-library into the stockade. The model was an unfamiliar one; and it took him several minutes to fit the reading glasses, connect up the flexible light-guides, and master the volume selection system. When he had the instrument working properly, he called up the encyclopedia. Perfect images of its microfilmed pages were carried through the corded light-guides from the enclosed projection system. Stirling adjusted the focus and worked through the index until he had the access coordinates for an article entitled: International Land Extensions, automatic cultivation, engineering considerations.

He punched in the article’s coordinates and waited for the designated pages to appear. Instead of the expected closely printed page of text, an oblong of white brilliance sprang into view. In the center of the field of light—looking crude and misshapen because of the magnifications concerned—somebody had printed three letters by hand. They were: “N.G.B.”

After a moment’s thought, Stirling decided they could stand for only one phrase. Nobody goes back.