Demons' World

Chapter Seven

The electric car moved smoothly, running on eight small rubber-tired wheels, its truck body swaying gently. The Foragers sat around the truck on bench seats, their equipment, strapped to them, part of their beings now. Following the car, another truck filled with Forager Engineers kept pace with them. Overhead lights flashed past, to dwindle and die. The driver switched on his headlights.

“What’s the drill, then, leader?” asked Vance formally.

“We’re going through a new hole. Beams have been appearing regularly across our major exits.”

“Yes. It’s been getting tough over on the other side.”

“Foraging is getting more difficult every day,” growled Cardon, his dark face savage. “Wilkins doesn’t seem to understand, but then, he’s only a Controller. The last time he went Outside must have been twenty years ago.”

Stead sat silent, listening avidly, conscious of the strangeness of this conversation. These people didn’t seem to appreciate the position of Controllers, didn’t seem to understand how fortunate the Empire of Archon was in its ruling class.

But he did not say anything.

Thorburn pulled out his leader’s map, angled it so they all could see. “I’m changing the route on my own initiative. Didn’t want old Purvis to know; he’s a good man but—”

The others nodded understandingly.

“Last trip we opened up a new route straight into a fresh food store. Relatively simple to fill our sacks and lug them back. However, although I want to get back into that store again and that’s the way we were routed, I figure that the route will be beamed. There were traps there, all over.”

“Traps,” said Vance contemptuously.

“One of ’em had caught a Scunner,” said Cardon, and Vance raised one bushy eyebrow. “Nasty, then,” he said in a low voice.

The corridor debouched into an uneven, narrow space with raw earth on one side and a flowing wall of concrete on the other. The truck’s headlights speared into the darkness ahead. The sound of running water kept pace with their progress; the air smelt damp.

When, at last, the truck slowed and stopped, they had covered at least five miles. The driver looked up.

“End of the ride. All out.”

The engineers’ truck pulled up behind. The engineers, Foragers with specialized aptitudes, pulled their equipment out, strapped down to antigrav sleds. They yoked themselves up and began hauling the sleds up a rubble-strewn ascending passage that curved and jinked and gave them some trouble.

The driver and his four guards, Foragers detailed for soldier duties, conversed with the second driver and guards. Then the driver turned to Thorburn. “Blane took his group out this way yesterday.”

“Yes. I don’t expect we’ll meet him, though.” Thorbum was checking the engineers’ progress. “He was routed to return through that hole over on the cable way.”

“I was going to say he dropped a hint he might come out this way. If you see him, pass the word we’ll wait for him, too. His own transport can be picked up later.”

“Right.” Thorbum looked over his group. “Come on.”

These men, decided Stead, following obediently, seemed to take a lot for granted. And they made up their own minds, overriding the definite orders of their superiors.

That puzzled him, knowing what he did of the hierarchy of Archon.

Up ahead the lights from the engineers bobbed and winked. In the illumination of every other man’s headlamp, Thorburn’s party began the ascent.

The world for Stead had always consisted of narrow passages and slots, and cubicles cut from earth or concrete or brick, except for that one frightening experience when he had gone down to the Captain’s Quarters. As the party toiled on along slits between earth and rock, negotiating thick cables and wires, brushing through falls of dirt and leaping splits in the ground, he found the surroundings familiar if more cramped. These alleyways through the foundations of the world of buildings were little different from those immediately surrounding the warrens. He began to breath with an easier rhythm.

Thorbum had them use their antigravs sparingly, checking, as Regulations demanded, each time they were operated. The batteries gave only a certain operating time; they must not go past the halfway mark before they had reached their destination.

Presently, after a long upward drift with the antigravs pulling them up a narrow slot that extended sideways out of reach of their probing lights, they reached a ledge, dusty and filled with the discarded husks of sixteen legged animals, as large as dogs, shining and brittle.

“Flangs,” explained Thorbum. “As they grow they have to shed their skins. Stupid creatures. Don’t waste a shell on them. Wave a light in their eyes and they’ll fracture their legs trying to get away.”

He looked up at the top of the ledge, ten feet above. “Lights out!”

As the headlamps died to orange glows and then blackness, the Foragers’ eyes slowly adjusted. The engineers were quietly unstrapping their equipment and setting it up, working by touch and feel. Presently Stead felt, rather than saw, a dim illumination seeping over the top of the ledge, a pale washed-out radiance that obscurely depressed him. It felt cold.

“All ready,” called the engineer leader. “Cutting.”

Muffled drills bit. An electric saw whined and then, at the swift curse of the leader, hurtled down the cliff. Something banged, loud and shockingly.

“Whoever built this ought to be stepped on!” said the engineer leader. “It shattered on the metal. Dark glasses, everyone. We’ll have to bum.”

“Sims and Wallas,” ordered Thorbum. “Left flank. Vance and Stead, right. Move!”

Stepping carefully after Vance into the darkness, feeling the flangs’ discarded skins cracking beneath his feet, Stead felt the awful engulfing fear of the dark swamping in on him. Yet mankind knew the darkness as a friendly cloak. Why should it bother him?

Before he removed his dark glasses he stared back. A fierce, ravening, man-made flame bumed viciously against the metal of the wall, cutting and melting. That gave him heart, and he turned to his guard duty with a feeling of stronger purpose. Nothing happened until Thorburn called, “Check in. We’re through.”

The engineers were already packing their equipment when Stead returned.

“Wait until I’ve been through,” said Thorbum. “If I’m right, we should be able to pick up food at once. You can take some back.”

The engineers didn’t argue. They were Foragers, and to a Forager full sacks meant a way of life.

“Stead!” Thorburn motioned. “Stand right behind me. Look over my shoulder. Learn.”

Quivering with the excitement of the moment, Stead did as he was bidden. Thorburn climbed purposefully through the hole, his cape not recoiling from the bumed edges where the engineer’s cooling liquid had brought the temperature of the metal down. All Stead could see in the pale illumination was a shining metal wall, rounded, going up out of sight. To one side of that Thorbum crouched, staring about, his splutter-gun up. After a few moments Thorbum pointed. Stead looked.

The trap must have sprung on the animal just as it had seized the scrap of food in its jaws. It wasn’t a Scunner, but it had sixteen legs, sprawled now and lax, and its body had been nearly cut in two by a great shining blade.

“He must have got in by a different route,” said Old Chronic’s voice in Stead’s ear. “Have to remember that.”

“You mean—”

“Before you forage anything, Stead, have a good look around. These infernal traps are clever.” Stead felt sick.

Thorbum waved. With Stead pushed back into the ranks, they all squeezed through the hole.

At first, Stead had no real notion of where he was. He stood on a surface of wood, partially covered by a thick and clumsy paper, surrounded by tall, shining, rounded, metal walls, and great humped masses covered in more thick and clumsy paper. The smell of food was overpowering.

“Fill up,” called Thorbum. “And be quick, about it. We could get in two trips.”

Watching the others swing their axes and machetes, Stead followed their example, and began to hack huge odiferous hunks from the enormous masses of food. He worked on a mountain of meat, slicing foot-thick strips away and stuffing them into his sack, feeling the material bulge with the meat. They passed their first loaded sacks through the hole and the engineers took them with little grunts and piled them on the equipment sleds.

Stead, busily chopping away at his meat mountain, became aware that Thorbum was looking about keenly, obviously coming to a decision. At his side Sims ceased carving, screwed his three-quarter-filled sack up tightly; on the other side Wallas took a last chunk of cheese from his food mountain.

“We’ve gone far enough here,” said Thorbum. “Wipe traces, everyone.”

Stead felt bemused. He looked at his half filled sack and from it to Thorburn’s massive head, outlined against the glow coming from the distant side of this food quarry. Tentatively, Stead approached, aware of the bustle of efficiency all about him, and said, “But my sack isn’t full yet, Thorburn. Full sacks—I thought.”

“Regulations, Stead. Full sacks, yes. But not too much from any one place. We’ve taken our quota; now we move on.”

“Regulations. I see,” said Stead. But he didn’t.

They congregated by the hole, dragging their sacks, scarcely exchanging a word and that in a furtive whisper.

Julia said, “I found another trap around the back.”

Thorburn glanced at his watch. “Days and nights are different in the Outside world from our real world, Stead,” he said thoughtfully. “We’ve a little time yet. Come and learn something.”

With Thorburn in the lead, the sacks lying at the hole, they all went toward Julia’s trap. Massive it was, towering, gleaming and dark with menace. On the floor a man-sized chunk of cheese rested like an accidental crumb fallen from the main mountain. Thorburn unhitched his rope and grapnel, swung it, let fly, sank it into the cheese. He looked around. Then he pulled.

The trap hissed. From the ceiling a glittering knife blade descended with the violence of death, sliced across the cheese as the grapnel pulled it loose. Below where the cheese had been, two springs, now touching, were revealed.

“By the immortal one!” said Stead, shaken. The slashing crash of the descending blade half numbed him. He felt the blood beating painfully through his fingers, as though his hands had constricted all unaware.

“Pretty little things,” Vance said, kicking the still vibrating blade. “Same sort we have over on the other side.” He was quite casual about it. “Do you have those beastly trapdoor things over here?”

Sims nodded. “Yes, they’re really tricky.”

Vance said with a casualness that Stead could not fault, “Took me three hours to cut my way out of one once. Never again.”

The others looked at him with a new respect. If he’d done that, he really was a Forager. Thorburn retrieved his grapnel. The trapknife had sheered off one prong. Wrapping the rope up, Thorburn said, “Just another lesson, Stead. Check everything first; there are no second chances Outside.”

And that, reasoned Stead, ran counter to what Vance had just told them about the trapdoor trap. Deliberately?

Out of the hole the darkness crowded in more thickly than before. The engineers had gone. The party moved sideways along the dusty, flang-shell littered ledge, lights pooling ahead, thrusting back the dark.

“Should be lighter soon,” Thorburn said after another time check. “We can mine in here now and be clear before the Outside day begins.”

They had reached a place where the cold faint illumination welled up from a two-foot-high slit running along the floor. Above them, plaster walling towered into dizzy heights, dark and creepy with the unknown.

“This is House Five-Eight-Nine-Stroke-Charley,” said Old Chronic, hands creasing his maps. “Ground. Let me see, now… h’mm. Well, Thorburn, you took a Regulation load from here—do you intend to go into the open?”

“Must do to fill sacks.” Thorbum treated the question with tolerance. Old Chronic worried over trivialities at times and passed matters of grave importance. “I’ll go and take Stead.”

“That means me, too,” said Vance.

“Sims and Wallas. Rest of you, stay here.”

The five men slipped under the two foot high slot, stood up. Automatically, without conscious thought, horrified, stricken with a panic he had never known he could experience, Stead grasped with one hand for Thorbum, with the other covered his eyes.

“No! no!” he said, his voice a gargling whisper of pain.

Thorbum wrenched the hand covering his eyes away. He took his head between his hands—Sims and Wallas and even Vance were there, holding him, forcing his head back, pricking his eyes open with something sharp—making him look up.

Look up!

But… there was nothing up there!

Nothingness—a vast white glaring expanse of emptiness, sucking the blood from his body, drawing out the soul from his breast, tearing him, calling him, entreating him to rise up and up and up.

“No!” screamed Stead into the homy palm that clamped across his mouth. His eyes bulged. He felt every inch of his body open and inflamed, excoriated by the awful lack of substance above his head. “Don’t… Stop… No! I can’t go out there!”

“Half a minute, Stead, that’s all.” Vance spoke gratingly.

Thorbum said, “Feel your feet, Stead.”

Someone trod on his foot.

He yelped with the abrupt little pain, and felt the ground beneath his feet. But still they held his head back, his face up, still they pricked his eyes open, forcing him to look up to… to what? Was there something there? What horror really dwelt up there, wherever up there was?

“Yes, Stead.” Thorbum’s rich voice burred in Stead’s ears. “There is something up there. But it’s a long way off and it’s painted white and it isn’t easy to see. But it’s there, Stead, it’s there. It’s a ceiling, Stead, a roof. Only it’s a long way off. D’you understand?”

Understand? Dimly in the cold and pallid illumination, Stead saw the white wide sweep of roof, felt again the breath of rationality swing back as he realized that of course, there must be something above. How could there not be?

“I’ll be all right. Sorry. Silly of me. For a half minute there I thought the roof had fallen off the world—stupid. That couldn’t be.”

No one argued that. But Thorbum had to say, “We’ll see you right, Stead. We’ll be going Outside one of these days.” An uncomfortable silence. Then Honey poked her head through the slot, stared up.

“Haven’t you gone yet? Well, that’s good. Signal from Blane. He’s somewhere near here; he got twisted around somehow.”

“He never did have a good navigator,” came Old Chronic’s sardonic whisper from the slot.

“Well, Honey?” Thorbum slowly let his grip on Stead slacken. Stead took two great lungsful of air.

“Blane reports a Rang loose in this House.”

At once the electric stir of tension, of alarm, of an apprehension approaching panic that shot through them was completely understandable to Stead.

Rangs meant sudden death, or, maybe, a death not so sudden but just as sure.

“Step on the beastly thing!” exclaimed Thorbum, as much enraged as frightened. “This was a smooth operation up until now. This really fouls it up.”

Inevitably, it had to be Old Chronic who said, not without a tang of meaning, “Orders, Thorbum?”

“I’m not going back without full sacks.” The stubborn set to Thorburn’s mouth chilled the watchers. “I went back with empty sacks that day we found you, Stead, and since then I’ve never gone back without every sack being full. Right. Cardon, you and Old Chronic stand by the slot here. We’ll go in. You may have to cover us on our way out.”

Vance ostentatiously unlimbered his gun and checked the magazine.

“Make sure your cape’s tight,” said Thorbum, sharply. “That’ll be of more use than a gun now.” He turned to Stead. “You’re an encumbrance I can’t risk. Stay here.”

“But—”

Vance slung his gun. “I stay with him too.”

For another moment of meaning no one said anything. Then Old Chronic smothered a snigger and spread himself out under the slot. “Come and join me, big Hunter,” he said, and the tone shot a stiff jolt into Vance’s sullen face.

Thorbum looked at Sims and Wallas. Then the three Foragers moved out into that pallidly eerie illumination. Their figures dwindled with distance. Then they vanished behind a tall cubical tower of wood that towered above, topped by a wide and flat expanse like… like what? Stead thought he knew, but he couldn’t bring it into his mind.

With a fierce thrill of longing he wished he had gone with the three out into that great unknown.

Honey crouched down with earphones clamped over one ear. Her face was twisted with concentration.

“Blane’s calling again… Hard to hear. He’s in trouble… but this interference is wicked. Howling all over the bands—”

Julia interrupted in a firm voice. “Here come Thorbum and Sims and Wallas. Full sacks. Now maybe we can pull out of here.”

The three were running fast. They panted across the floor, heading for the slot, and ever and again they swiveled their heads around to stare behind them.

Out there in the great emptiness that that cold and chillingly eerie illumination made only a vast cavern of strange shapes and tall distorted shadows, a form moved.

Something big and looming bearing down out of shadows pouncing down on the running men.

Stead heard a shrill, painful hissing, a gargantuan wrathful spitting, a clicking as though of metal on stone. Looking up in appalled horror he saw a monstrous shape with four round and enormous eyes, shining balefully in that strange radiance, a blasphemous form from nightmare, lunging clumsily forward on sixteen stubby legs that moved with a rippling repulsive unison.

“A rang!” screamed Julia. “No… Thorbum—”

Cardon and Vance were firing now, a lethal hammer of sound rolling from their guns. Quickly Stead aimed his own splutter gun, cocked it, pressed the trigger. He aimed for one of the four eyes. He saw the shining orb sprout crimson and blackness, the shine shimmer with liquid and then dull and relapse into a matted grayness.

His lips were dry, his mouth sandpapery, his hands clammy. Two other eyes went out. Three streams of lead struck the remaining eye and blotted it out as a man stepped on a blood-sucking pest. But still the rang hurtled on, spitting and snarling, great jaws opened wide and streaming saliva, pounding on by sheer momentum.

A long raking claw slashed. Sims, ducking, struck on the shoulder, stumbled and fell. He did not release his stubborn grip on his sack. At once Wallas turned, hoisted his comrade up, pulled him along.

Thorburn brushed them both aside in a slithering rush of action. The rang, sightless, screaming madly in pain, raging, hurled itself full at the wall above the slot. A thick coarse wall of fur sprang into life before the slot, blotting out the light.

“Along its side—hurry!” That was Old Chronic.

The men and women dashed aside, scrambling over the litter beneath the wall. Thorburn appeared, staggering, waving his gun. Sims fell through and then Wallas. They were snatched up, their sacks slung; eager hands propelled them into the sheltering darkness of the cranny behind the wall.

Everyone was gasping for air. A thick and miasmic cloud of dust had been blown up. Stead felt the grains slick and furry on his tongue. He stumbled along after the others, the blaze of their headlights switching and swathing the darkness before them.

The rush became a rout. Their feet slithered and slid, raking over the dust and brick chippings, the plaster nodules fallen from the back of the wall. At each gap in the wood Stead leaped with feet to spare; he was consumed by the desire to run and run and go on running.

At last Thorbum, panting, called a halt to the rout.

“That’s enough! You all know Rangs can’t follow us through the crannies. Relax! It’s all over.”

He gave them five minutes for a breather. They sat all in a row, their backs pressed against the wall, breathing heavily, eyes still glazed with the horror of that last charge.

Then Old Chronic cackled and clicked his dentures.

“Trust a Rang to work you up! Wait until you’ve seen as many as I have.”

Sunk in his own thoughts Stead ignored the oldster. That Rang—that thing—had been twenty-five feet long from snout to tail, with sixteen thick legs and fangs and claws; the scrabble of those homy claws on the floor rang still in his memory. If monsters like that ravened in the Outside world of buildings, no wonder no one volunteered to be a Forager!

And this was the mad horrible world into which the Captain had so indifferently cast him. A strange, grim, frightening and wholly animalistic anger built up in Stead, one with his consuming desire to know more about the real Outside world of buildings.

“Rangs,” Vance was saying, squatting next to Stead. “I hate ’em. I’ve seen ’em. I’ve seen the foul things catch a man and play with him, tossing him about between their claws, letting him think he’s going to escape and then pouncing on him just when the poor fool thinks he’s free. Rangs—we ought to begin a systematic slaughter of them all!”

“Good idea,” said Thorburn. “But the Controllers won’t spend resources on it. You know that.”

“All they want,” said Old Chronic with a morose flash strangely in contrast to his usual sarcasm, “is for us to come home with full sacks and cheer, boys, cheer! They don’t care if we’re all stepped on so long as they grow fat and lazy.”

Cardon summed up in tones of such bitterness that Stead felt a shiver of dread, “Controllers are no better than Rangs in human form.”

He thought of Simon and Delia and Astroman Nav. Were they Rangs in human guise? Of course not. They were gentle, civilized persons. But they accepted the order of things; they expected Foragers to go out and risk their lives so that the Controllers might continue theirs in all their luxury. Perhaps—

The Controllers had given him a party when he’d left to train as a Forager. They’d wished him well. Did they know into what sort of life he was going? Certainly, he felt confident they had no inkling of the store of bitterness seething in the lower ranks, no notion at all of the hatred with which they were regarded.

He’d been sent here to learn. And, by the immortal being, he was learning!

He’d wanted fervently to fit into life in the Empire of Archon—a term these Forager comrades of his scarcely ever bothered to mention; he’d wanted to be a good Controller, thankful of the opportunity. Being a good Forager, he had thought, had been a part of his education.

But now, now he wasn’t so sure.

He began to see two sides to life in Archon—two sides that had nothing to do with inside and outside.

He wondered, not without panic, where his loyalties would lie in the future.

“Come on,” said Thorbum, rising. “We’ve full sacks. The Controllers will love that. Let’s get back home.”