Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Seventeen

Feeling grateful that somebody had been thoughtful enough to deactivate the robotic scarecrows, Stirling picked his way across the ice-covered transit area.

He hesitated at the edge of the raised platform and pondered a leap down into the crawling darkness which—for all’ the reassurance he got from his eyes—might represent a hole cut in the He’s floor. Borges had fallen silently to an unpleasant death, Stirling thought. Air resistance prevents a man’s body from reaching any higher speed than a hundred and twenty miles an hour, which meant Borges would have had a full minute and a half to think things over on the way down.

The silhouette of a partially completed building further along the platform reminded Stirling that the F.T.A. team must have provided some means of getting down to the soil bed level. He walked along the tracks, found a ramp, and walked down it. The intense darkness was accentuated by radial sprays of light on the horizon far ahead, where government aircraft had ringed the power station with per-ma-flares. Stirling was certain Johnny was not one of the garrison; and he did not want to get close to the station anyway, in case somebody opened up on him with a rifle. He kept moving south for the better part of an hour, jumping the sunken tracks which separated each fertile strip before turning east in the direction of the village.

Once his eyes had adjusted to seeing by starlight, he found it relatively easy to keep in the center of a strip. He had been striding over the crisply furrowed soil for some time before realizing his chest no longer felt constricted, that his lungs were satisfying themselves easily and gratefully on the glacier-fresh night air. Johnny was right about me, he thought. More right than I was about him.

By taking bearings from the garishly illuminated power station, Stirling estimated he had covered about seven miles when the radio in his pocket began to bleep. He took it out and spoke his name into the grill.

“Victor,” a crisp voice said, “this is Mason Third. I’ve just had clearance from Raddall. He isn’t happy, but the Air Force is going to hold off until noon tomorrow—today, that is. You’ll need to have everything going your way by that time.”

“Don’t worry.” Stirling dropped the radio into his pocket and began to walk faster, looking around him for the familiar hulk of an agricultural robot. The villagers had too much in common with frontiersmen for him to try sneaking up on them. The only way to enter the village in safety would be on the back of a yellow dinosaur.

An hour later he found one of the big machines quietly at work turning over the black soil, unhindered and unperturbed by the darkness that sifted away to the horizons. Stirling climbed up on the moisture-beaded flanks, crossed the beam, and positioned himself on the flat upper surface of the faintly thrumming turret. When dawn began to overpaint the dimmer stars he stripped the cover from the alarm relay panel. It came away easily in his hands and was evidence that this particular robot had been ridden in the not too distant past. He closed the relay designating the eastern end of the strip; the turret pulled its spider legs clear of the soil; and the steel mammoth obediently moved off with gathering speed. Stirling kept his face turned into the wind and sucked it in greedily while he had the chance.

The robot took ten minutes to reach the edge of the village. As soon as it had rolled to a halt, Stirling leaped onto the soil bed and from there down into the margin.

Knowing his arrival would have been watched by dozens of eyes, he walked casually towards the center of the village and waited for someone to make contact. He did not have long to wait. A man and woman ran towards him from the shade of a grass-blurred tank, the woman carrying a layered bundle which must have been a baby. Her face was voodoo-patterned with tear streaks.

“Can you help us?” Her voice was brittle with fear. “Can you get us out of here? My baby …”

The man did not speak; but his eyes scanned Stirling’s face, and he kept touching the woman’s shoulder uncertainly, almost apologetically.

“Everybody can leave,” Stirling said. “The raids have been suspended till noon to give you a chance to get clear of the village. Spread the word around. Everybody is free to go.”

The man hesitated.

“What are you waiting for? I tell you it’s all over.”

“Jaycee says nobody is to leave.” The man glanced guiltily at the woman beside him. “He’s sitting on a tank down at the south end. He has that rad-rifle up there with him—and he says nobody is to leave.”

Stirling felt something heave icily in his stomach. “I’ll fix it with Jaycee. Just start spreading the word around.”

He walked on towards the south end, noting the effects of the air raids. The grass’ underfoot was matted and soggy in places where storage tanks had been ripped open by cannon fire and had spilled their contents, which was sometimes water, sometimes evil-smelling liquids. In several places he saw ragged three-foot holes in the decking, through which it was possible to glimpse sunlit oceans seemingly frozen in their westward march by sheer distance. Several times he saw brown faces watching him from the lee of heavier structural members. Each time, he waved confidently and shouted to them to get ready to leave; but they seemed afraid to move—and he had an idea they were not worrying about aircraft. He wondered if Johnny had burned anybody with the big rifle, just to show them that the king was not prepared to let his subjects walk out on him. Stirling hoped it had not come to that. Somehow, someday it could all be worked out and made right again—provided Johnny had not taken human life.

At the indistinct line which only a native could recognize as marking the southern end of the village, Stirling halted and looked around. Some of the tracks in the area were twisted into the air like sculpted lines of agony; and the bomb holes were giving off a low moaning sound as air bled through them from the higher pressure zone inside the He’s shell field. Stirling was reminded of photographs taken in European cities at the end of World War II. He was cupping his hands around his mouth to call Johnny’s name when he saw Melissa. She was slumped tiredly against the patchwork wall of a large hut. Her face was whiter than he had ever seen it, and her hands were streaked with red. It dawned coldly on him that she had been watching his approach for some time, but had not bothered to signal her presence.

“Melissa!” He ran towards her. “Are you all right?”

“I’m alive,” she said dully. “Why have they stopped? Where are the planes?” Her eyes were unfocused, vacant with shock and exhaustion.

“There won’t be any more planes. All we have to do is get out of here in a hurry.”

“Get out?” Melissa raised one hand to her forehead, and he saw it was covered with blood. “Get out? I can’t leave.” There was a movement in the hut behind her, and his eyes suddenly picked out the horizontal figures of men, or women, lying in the dimness. Somebody began to groan; the sound came as regularly as breathing. He went to the door, looked in, and turned away quickly.

“Don’t go in there again, Melissa,” he said quietly. He took her arm and led her away from the hut. “You aren’t even entitled to accept that sort of responsibility. I’ll see that military medics are brought in as soon as possible.”

She looked up at him, smiled uneasily, and became heavy in his arms. Stirling lifted Melissa and carried her limp body back to the last place where he had seen other villagers.

“Get out of here,” he shouted, as he laid Melissa on the grass. “What are you waiting for?” There was no response, and he began to feel afraid that noon would come and find them all frozen in the same tableau. “I tell you the raids have been stopped until noon. You can all leave.”

“Give it up, Victor,” a reedy voice said from above. “You haven’t got the touch.”

Stirling looked up and saw Johnny standing on the upper surface of a storage tank. He had spoken without moving his lips—the boyhood convention for menace— and the muscles around his mouth were slack and heavy. The bulky tubularity of the rad-rifle was cradled in his arms with its tripod still attached. Slanting across his bared chest was the strap of a pack containing a spherical object; and—Stirling felt a pang of fear—on his feet were the ancient, crinkled, leather flying boots left behind by his father. Suddenly Stirling saw his own father against that fabled background of misty dream-fields: the familiar-alien face taut with anger, his eyes accusing.

“Go away, Victor,” Johnny squeaked. “You don’t belong here.”

I’m older than you, Stirling thought in a gust of inexplicable fury. I was first! I BELONG! He felt himself begin to run, heard his feet hammer on the thinly covered decking, and saw his limbs go hand-over-hand up the clustered feed pipes leading to the top of the tank. Halfway across the tank’s upper surface he saw the look of hard speculation in Johnny’s eyes, and his censor clamped down violently forcing him to slow to a walk. The understanding, which had been close at hand for a few seconds, receded, and left in its wake a sense of loss mingled with a vast relief.

“It’s been agreed that the raids will be suspended until noon, Johnny.” Stirling concentrated on keeping his voice under control. ‘That gives the people here plenty of time to get away.”

Johnny shook his head. “You’ll never understand. There are people who can’t live down there. They don’t want to leave.”

“Some of them do, and the rest would probably go if you told them.”

“That’s what Raddall would like—to split us up. If he can get the weaklings to leave of their own accord, he’ll switch over to gas; and then it’ll be all over.”

“But it’s all over right now. For God’s sake, Johnny, be reasonable. Raddall has no choice other than to bring you down, one way or another. How long do you think any country could tolerate what amounts to a petty dictatorship within its own borders?”

Johnny smiled indulgently. “Within its own borders? You know, Victor, you have accidentally come close to the point of the whole operation. I do believe that if you were given a week or two to sit down and think about it, you would get there by yourself.”

“This is …” Stirling began to speak impatiently, unthinkingly; then an idea was born. “You haven’t the engineering know-how Johnny.” He spoke urgently.

“Not personally,” Johnny said. “But the Council has it —and we’re all one.”

“But …” Stirling’s mind was swamped with the new concept. “Even if you did master the negative-gravity units, and introduce a horizontal component, how fast would the He move? Five knots? Ten? No matter which way you go, they’ll stay with you. It won’t …”

He stopped speaking. Johnny was pointing straight up into the sky. Meaningfully.