Demons' World

Chapter One

They found him sprawled on the edge of a projecting aerial platform, white, lax, unconscious and as helpless as a baby.

“Push him over the edge,” counseled Old Chronic, the veteran Forager. His pouchy eyes moved restlessly in the unceasing survey of all Foragers, his leathery neck creasing and uncreasing like an animated concertina.

“We-el,” said Thorburn, hesitantly. This was his first trip as lead Forager and the onus of responsibility had fallen on him with unwelcome surprise. Now he shook his massive head, trying to think and plan, conscious of the six others and contriving not to show the uncertainty he felt was a personal weakness. Tentatively he reached out for assurance from the others, and all the time his eyes moved up and down, left and right, around the back, searching, watching, apprehensive. A Forager out on a trip scarcely ever looked at his companions.

Old Chronic cackled, clicking his dentures, his eyes bright with gleeful malice. “What frightens you, Thorburn? He won’t step on you.”

The five others—three men and two girls—nodded and laughed at the sally. There was truth in that. Old Chronic might be past leading a foraging group, but he had lived a long time in a trade where men and women died frequently and they saw the wisdom of his words. All the time their eyes were moving, moving, moving.

Without looking at it, Thorburn jerked a horny thumb at the strange shining machine, lying mute and dumb beside the equally quiescent figure on the cold marble.

“And what about that?”

Julia, the blonde with the big body and agile, slender limbs, glanced down over the edge of the platform, her camouflage cape rustling in the breeze. She turned lithely, looked back at the others, raised a quizzical eyebrow at Old Chronic.

“Go on,” he said, wheezing a little in the fresh air.

Thorburn said, “Hold on, now—” and stopped. His eyes, in their ceaseless roaming, had glanced up at the Outer Sky, all a dazzling white-blue glare, far away and infinitely remote. A mile or so away across the concrete plain other buildings rose, black-outlined, colored cliffs of metal and stone and plastic. Every shape lay clearly before him in the brilliant light; yet every outline was encrusted in a blue mist of distance, a soft haze that subdued color and detail, lent the usual blurring to visual inspection. “I don’t know—”

The marble aerial platform trembled suddenly, a gentle, skin-felt vibration, a sensation of bodily swinging movement.

At once the Foragers reacted.

The four men and two women flung their camouflage capes more securely about them and dashed with scuttling speed for the shadow behind the doorway towering into dizzy perspective two hundred feet above.

Thorburn hesitated. The tight knot of puzzlement chaining these people had been dissipated and unraveled by that gentle vibration. His way, it seemed to him, had been marked out for him. Effortlessly, he picked up the man lying still and twisted by his strange machine, slung him over his shoulder, raced after his comrades with the long sure stride of an athlete in perfect training.

He reached the concealing shadows of the architrave as the Demon stepped out onto the balcony.

The stranger wore no camouflage cape and the odd material of his one piece coverall that had so puzzled the Foragers gave no clue to his origin, but its color, a drab greeny-gray, blended well enough with the shadows to give concealment from the enormous but erratic eyes of the Demon.

Holding himself perfectly still a few yards from his rigid companions, Thorburn watched the Demon stride out into the sunshine.

Displaced wind buffeted him as one gigantic leg swished by. He was thankful to see that Julia’s cape now clipped tightly to her without any betraying flutter. The noise of a monstrous foot descending sent shock waves through the feet-thick solid marble; a rushing wall of bright crimson going past, seemingly unending, slithering and scraping across the floor, drew excruciating pangs from his eardrums. The very air shivered as the Demon passed.

Thorburn did not look up now, did not move, stood graven, huddled, holding in the screaming panic within him, fighting the ages-old fear of the Demons that had haunted Mankind from the Beginning.

Thud, thud, thud, crashed the Demon’s feet. At each gigantic blow, sound blasted at Thorburn’s eardrums. Then that rippling avalanche of glowing crimson passed and he could flicker his eyes furtively within the shelter of his cape, and stare at Honey’s white, tensed, panic-drawn face; the rigidity of her pose told eloquently of deep primordial fear rather than an ordered and controlled stillness.

He shivered a little. Honey was young, on her second Forage; he should have stayed at her side. But this stranger who now so laxly hung over his arm had claimed his first attention. Why, he didn’t know. Rules of conduct were arbitrary enough for no one to misunderstand and a Forager’s first duty was to his comrades. If once a Demon caught sight of a man or a woman, the story might be different.

On the thought Thorburn swiveled an eye at the Demon.

Enormous, crushingly huge, the Demon stepped out onto the aerial platform, and leaned on the balustrade that lofted eighty feet. Something bright glinted up from a corner; a subdued splintering crash sounded.

Slowly a black shadowed foot lifted, rising like the black belly of a thundercloud swept down in ponderous might. The stranger’s queerly shining machine vanished over the edge of the platform. Before it shattered into meaningless fragments on the ground beneath, it must have fallen through three thousand feet of nothingness.

An explosive, blustering snort exploded from the Demon, a rolling, rushing tornado of sound that dwarfed anything that had gone before. Thorbum clenched his teeth and waited through the paroxysm. Staring in that swift, fleeting, camera-efficient, comprehensive glance of all Foragers, Thorburn checked that the Demon was not looking their way, flicked the retire signal to his companions and, on the instant, sprang from the architrave shadow to the shadow of the wall within.

The others joined him, six explosively moving and then stone-still people, in a line, sheltering in the shadows beneath the fifteen-foot-high skirting board.

At their leader’s imperious gesture Sims and Wallas, both young and agile, quick-witted, fleet-limbed, moved out ahead along the floor paralleling the crack where wooden skirting board and tiled floor untidily met. As well as an eye for the Demons, roaring and striding ponderously in the upper air, a Forager must spare an eye for every dark crack and cranny, every crevice and corner of his own world.

Bringing up the rear of the group, Cardon, a little older than Sims and Wallas, a little younger than Thorburn, a fierce, dark-eyed black-browed man with a notoriously filthy temper marched, it seemed, with a permanent crook in his neck, his head tilted back, his eyes forever searching the way they had come. The group depended on the rear marker.

Now that the Daemon had been left behind Honey had regained some color; her dark eyes flashed no less swiftly and intelligently as she, like everyone else, maintained a constant vigil. She pushed a hand beneath her cape, touched the warm metal of the walkie-talkie strapped to her back. The touch reassured her. Her job this trip as radioman gave her an importance, at least in her own eyes, and a task to which she could devote her attention and try, albeit with indifferent success, to shut out those screaming primordial fears that would not be denied in the actual physical, dreaded presence of a Demon.

Julia said, “Hold it. That’s the entrance; we came through flattened out. There’s a beam full-width a foot above the floor. Everybody down.”

“You first, Sims, Wallas,” ordered Thorburn to make no mistake about who was running this party. Julia, as radarop, tended to get above herself. “When you give the all clear we’ll follow. Julia, you and Old Chronic give me a hand with the stranger.” Thorburn laid the limp form out flat on the floor a foot from the beam, watched as Julia re-checked her meters. He quizzed her with a glance.

“Still the same.” Julia phrased the query beginning to dominate all men’s minds. “They aren’t any better yet—the beam’s still too high—but when are they? Our grandparents didn’t have detector beams to worry about—”

“But we have,” Thorburn said, cutting her off. “Come on, there’s the signal from Sims.”

Julia flashed him a glance which said eloquently, Go get trodden on! And then obediently flattened out—with her figure it was no easy task—and squashed through. Pushing and pulling, the three eased the stranger under the detector beam.

Why was he bothering with this man? Thorburn didn’t know the full answer to that, but he saw clearly that some of the answers were bound up in that quick glance from Julia.

Apprehensively but quite firmly, Honey squeezed through, her lissome figure finding the task simple, and then Cardon, with a last long look back, followed.

Outside the door they skirted the tiled landing, and saw their goal, the banister-flanked head of the stairs, remote and yawning, three hundred feet away. They took time negotiating the shadow-fringed skirting board, checking each point and then clearing it in a controlled rush that ended in frozen immobility.

“This is a small house,” Thorburn said irritably. “And poor. I’m surprised the Demons have a detector beam here at all. And,” he finished with the age-old sarcasm of the Forager for his commanders, “H.Q. briefed us entirely incorrectly. Not a scrap of steel in the whole place.”

Sims and Walls, being young, automatically patted their empty sacks. “Steel weighs heavy,” Sims said. “Make an easier touchdown without it,” said Wallas.

Both smiled as though they had said something profound.

Old Chronic cackled at them, clicking his dentures. “We live in a poor empire, my lads. Every scrap of whatever it may be is useful. Don’t be gleeful over empty sacks.”

Only half repentant, Sims and Wallas led out to the head of the stairs. Here Thorburn, as regulations demanded, checked batteries. This time it was a mere formality; he knew that they’d only used their antigravs once on the incoming trip to ascend the stairs down which they must now drop. “All right,” he said, grasping the stranger more firmly over a shoulder. “Honey, you’re the lightest. Give me a hand with him.”

Help in dropping down with a burden on antigrav was not really necessary—they could drop under adequate control with a three hundred pound sack—but he felt the need to give orders. This trip had not resulted in any way as he had expected. And Old Chronic, almost in abandon from what a proper Forager should do, kept watching him, cackling and mumbling to himself. Let the old fool get stepped on!

The seven Foragers and the inert passenger dropped, plummetting past the floor levels, even this long plunge unable to give them a comprehensive outline of what this place was like. It was far too big to be understood as a single unit. This house—they knew it to be that from careful architectural drawings by their leading geographers—appeared to them as a\ vast number of individual places—a dark comer, a beamed doorway, a landing, a long plunge downwards on antigrav, a convenient hole, a whole succession of convenient holes—into which they could dart the moment the snorting and blowing and ground vibration of a Demon warned them.

You could not grasp the entire scene. Only if you stood off—preferably in a high vantage nook—and surveyed a distant prospect, could you understand that the world was a succession of buildings. Not many people ever had that opportunity and fewer of those really understood, as Thor-burn had only recently understood, just what the world really was.

A man labored his life away at his task down below; only the Foragers and the Hunters were ever likely to see a Demon and many a man and woman was bom, lived and died without once hearing or seeing a Demon. Thorburn knew that he was glad he was not one of those, but the price came high.

The group landed in the shadow of the lowest stair, checked, froze, then sprinted hard for the slot beneath the five hundred foot tall front door. Vague and misty that doorway towered up, the glow of Outer Sky shining through vast areas of colored glass. All seemed quiet. They tumbled through the slot where wood and tile failed to meet with precision, stumbled down in faint reflected light. A man could see in almost pitch-darkness just so long as there was light enough to strike back from corners and projections. Now Thorburn ordered their lamps switched on, alternately, each two men stepping along in the radiance from one headlamp. He wanted to get this limp stranger home. The responsibility so rashly undertaken now weighed him down, to add to the loss he felt at the failure of the trip. H.Q. was bound to have nasty things to say about that.

The light of Outer Sky had not been bright today and the Foragers had not worn their dark glasses as, usually, they were forced to do. Even so, it was a relief to return from the stark nakedness of outside to the safe runnels of the familiar human world.

“Keep closed up,” Thorburn said. The order was unnecessary; still that compulsion lay on him. He had been chosen leader and as leader he had taken the decision to bring this stranger in. He wanted the others to know and keep on knowing that he was leader.

So far there had been no real time to examine the stranger. He lay, white and breathing shallowly, a limp weight on Thorburn’s shoulder. Old Chronic voiced the doubt preying in Thorbum’s mind.

“He’s not one of us,” Old Chronic said, sucking a tooth so that his dentures palpitated clickingly. “He’s an enemy, sure as sure. What you going to do when he wakes up, Thorburn?”

Thorburn hadn’t really thought. Fumblingly, he groped for an answer.

“He may be an enemy,” he said slowly as they marched through the dark runnels. “Or he may… may not be. But he’s a man. I couldn’t leave him for the Demons to step on and kick over the edge.”

“You’re a fool, Thorburn,” said old Chronic with the liberty of age.

Surprisingly, Julia turned on the old man.

“You keep a civil tongue, Old Chronic. Thorbum’s the leader. Remember that.”

Thorburn, studiously, did not look at Julia. He felt a strange warmth in him, and, failing at first to recognize it for what it was, denied it for weakness.

“Checkpoint coming up,” Wallas called back.

The dim blue light welcomed them. They marched in with a swagger, the swagger and panache that all Foragers cultivated at home, their eyes still roving, roving, roving. The steel-helmeted guard lowered his gun. He saluted Thorburn. Behind him a sergeant pulled the switch and the barrier rose.

“Hullo,” said the sergeant, a brass-voiced, barrel-bodied man, huge in his armor. “What have you got there?”

“A stranger.” Thorburn was short with the soldier. “We’re taking him to Forager H.Q.”

That was quite enough to silence the loquacious sergeant.

Very soon Thorburn was able to lower his burden onto a sofa in the Forager anteroom. He had not felt the strain of carrying the man, but a weight lifted from him as the stranger flopped back, a weight that was not physical. Wil-kins walked up and stood pensively looking down.

“Tell me,” said Wilkins in his soft voice.

Thorbum swallowed. Wilkins, whilst a Forager, was a Controller. And Controllers ran all of life, everything, when they felt impelled to do so. Controllers did not speak like the lower classes, did not think like them; Controllers represented an achievement in humanity bewildering and yet perfectly accepted by men in Thorbum’s position. Thorbum told Wilkins, watching furtively the Controller’s ascetic face and slender hands, watching the faint frown gathering between those aristocratic eyes, watching the full mouth pucker.

“I see. Well, we’d better make a report. When he comes around I’ll talk to him.” Wilkins had seen the empty sacks, of course, the moment the party marched in. “Empty, Thorbum? If you can’t do better than that we will have to think again about your leadership.”

“But, sir—”

“Enough of that. Dictate your report to a scribe.”

Wilkins turned away. A little cry from Honey brought his head around, ominously, a frown of annoyance beginning to cloud that aristocratic face.

“Look!” said Honey, quite forgetting herself. “The stranger! He’s coming to!”

Thorbum bent above the green clad figure. Blue lips moved feebly; the eyelids fluttered like curtains in a draft. The mouth opened, the throat jerked; words, a word, struggled garglingly to be born.

“Stead,” said the stranger and, again, with an agonized energy, a frightful toll of energy pouring out into the single, meaningless word. “Stead…”

They stood looking down on him as he lay, white, lax, no longer unconscious, but staring up with the utter helplessness of a baby.