Demons' World

Chapter Eight

On the seventh day of his life with the Foragers a letter was delivered to him along with the ordinary signals service mail. It was the first letter he had received in his life, at least, of his life in Archon.

“I do hope you are settling down nicely,” Delia wrote. Simon and I often think of you and wonder how you are faring. I expect you have made plenty of new friends. We hope, Simon and I, that you won’t forget us. Astroman Nav asked after you the other day. If you do decide to accept novitiatship, Stead, do not make a final decision until you have come back to us. Remember, there are still the final educational motions to be gone through.”

The letter left him with mixed feelings. “Settling down,” “how you are faring,” “asked after you.” Pretty, empty phrases. He was quite likely to settle down to a meal for a Rang.

“Ready, Stead?” called Thorbum.

Lieutenant Cargill, the soldier, he remembered had made a small prophecy about a Rang. Now, as a Forager, he knew that Cargill almost certainly never had seen a Rang with his own eyes. Like all the Controllers, it was hearsay talk. They lived in the warrens. What did they really know of the world of buildings?

“Ready, Stead? Come on, lad. The car’s waiting.”

“Sorry, Thorbum. All ready.” Stead went out of the Foragers’ waiting cubby and climbed into the back of the truck. He sat down among comrades. As the soldier at the barrier raised it, the antigás curtains swishing up, Stead saw the action as symbolic. That barrier, that antigás curtain, that blue light cut a man off from one world and ejected him into another.

Well, he’d been ejected Outside; perhaps he had found his niche in society here, after all. Perhaps, in that misty, forgotten, un-dreamable earlier life, he had been a Forager. It would have been suitably ironic.

The truck jounced along the dirty corridor and left the lights behind. Six others followed. This time the forage was going to be different, at least for Stead.

From time to time, he had been told, when the immortal being had created a new fresh and potentially rich quarry of food or raw materials, the Foragers and Hunters set up an outside H.Q. They made their forages and returned to the temporary H.Q. with their sacks, making the short journey a number of times, building up a depot which could be removed by a supply train of trucks. Regulations still applied. Only certain amounts of food must be taken at a time. All traces of the men’s visit must be erased. They could show themselves outside only in short periods, as usual.

The Regulations covered all sorts of strange possibilities.

One, which had flummoxed Stead, and in which he still saw elements of humor despite the tall tales of his comrades, said quite clearly that no human being must shoot at a Demon. “Shooting at phantoms, at figments of the imagination,” Stead had said. No one had laughed. They had scarcely heeded him. The Foragers clung to their childish stories about Demons with a relish and love of circumstantial detail that impressed and annoyed Stead. They should listen to Simon and Delia for a half hour. That would soon knock the nonsense out of them.

The time scales had had to be patiently explained to him.

“Our twenty-four-hour day and its eight-hour divisions doesn’t apply outside.” Thorbum touched his wrist watch. “Out there you have an eight day period of darkness with only an occasional and erratic lightening. Then a two-day period of steadily growing light—you recall that light on your first trip—then an eight-day period of brighter and brighter light until, after four days, you can’t go out at all. That gradually wanes to another two day period of slight light and so back to the darkness.”

Old Chronic nodded. “In my father’s time that scale was different. Nearly all dark, then, it was. Only about three days of brightness.”

Julia struck into the conversation on the back of the jolting truck. “My grandfather told me that his grandfather had told him that it used to be nearly all bright outside, for days on end. Horrible, foraging was, in those old days.”

Stead had been calculating. “That means the bright light is on the wane Outside?”

“Yes. That accounts for our day or two’s breather. But now we’re off again.” He glanced back.

Following the seven Forager trucks rolled another ten filled with soldiers. Up ahead as point rode two more. Ar-chon meant to protect the wealth her Foragers would bring in. And that had dropped another piece into place for Stead. There were two sorts of outside, he had soon realized. The outside of tunnels and corridors and crannies behind walls that lay outside the warrens. This was the outside in which soldiers from rival Empires and Federations fought over women and wealth. This was the outside the Controllers talked about so grandly. But there existed another outside, outside the first—The Outside—the world of the Foragers and Hunters, a world that the Controllers talked of again, but not so grandly. And there, Stead knew with a sick feeling dread, was the land of rooflessness, of Rangs and… of Demons?

He became aware that Honey was looking at him, and he smiled. She turned her face away at once, fiddled with her radio set, sat stiff and unyielding to the bumpy ride. Stead felt the usual mystification strike him and shrugged it off. Honey was a woman. That explained that. A shy, timid little soul, she aroused in him a feeling he found difficult to define—a different and yet allied feeling to his attitude towards Delia and, yes, of his chaotic impressions of Belle.

Julia now, well Julia could as well have been a man for all the difference it made to Stead. Thorbum seemed to be interested in her, though. Stead had found an unyielding wall of rectitude between him and his comrades whenever he had carefully, casually, artfully, brought up the subject of men and women and why they were different.

More than once an odd expression had escaped one of them, usually Sims or Wallas, and Thorburn had shut them up. Stead had gradually become voicelessly convinced that Simon and Delia had given instructions to his comrades not to discuss the question with him. That rankled at first, but then he thought of Delia and her dedicated fire, and smiled and waited until the time came for her to explain. Somehow, he wanted Delia to explain it all, not these Foragers, however strong the ties of friendship now binding them.

For he felt now very much a Forager. The Hunter nom-clature, although still used, was an archaism, from the days when Foragers and Hunters had been different classes. The Foragers foraged and quarried; the Hunters hunted live game. Now a Forager hunted what came to hand.

The journey this trip was longer, a good twenty miles. At a halt the Commander—a Controller officer stiff and grim in his armor—walked down the line of trucks. With him strode his Bosun, squat, tough, craggy, merciless. The Foragers didn’t think much of hun.

Cardon said fiercely, “Class traitor!”

The Commander reminded them all that they were now driving near the border with the Empire of Trychos. Alertness. Anticipation. Ready weapons. On the ball.

“We know,” said Cardon blackly to the group when the soldier had stalked on. “A Forager will spot an enemy, human or animal, miles before a soldier!”

The depths of class distinctions and hatreds within the single body politic continued to astound Stead. If men faced the hazards he knew they faced outside, surely, common sense said, they should stick together. Somehow, they didn’t. And, again somehow, the machinery of the state creaked on.

B. G. Wills had said that it would not creak for very much longer.

The convoy reached a narrow crack between two runnels made by a large, earth-boring animal whose runs were frequently used by men. Driving through with whining electrics, they came out onto a flat, low but wide expanse. A solid concrete wall faced them. Down this ran a pipe some six feet in diameter, loud with splashing water. Further along, cables looped down as though sagging through rotten wood—the men had to fight and rout a small army of twelve-legged animals two feet long, and clear away their nests and cocooned young—each cable about eighteen inches thick, alive with electricity.

“The immortal one provides us with light, heat and water,” commented Thorburn as the camp arose under the men’s capable hands. “If only he’d made it all a little easier!”

The Commander told off pickets, guard details, duty rotas. On this important trip Forager Manager Purvis had come along to supervise his men on the spot. Forage parties went out on schedule, returned with bulging sacks. The pattern of life developed its own rhythms in the advance depot.

Thorbum’s group had been allotted a sleeping area against the earth wall built at right angles to the concrete wall of the world. They had their own electric light and heater. Their sleeping bags lay neatly in two rows. Julia slept next to Thorburn. Honey, for some odd reason uncompre-hended by Stead, slept a little apart from the rest.

They carried out three trips, very short, going through runnels well marked and signposted, carrying back full sacks.

The quarry they had mined staggered Stead in the proportions of its bounty. Food lay heaped in quantities limitless to the eye. Regulations would wait long before they called a halt to this gathering.

Four more trips were completed, and now they marched the runnels as along familiar streets in the warrens. The signposts became unnecessary. On their eighth trip and halfway out, Honey called Thorbum. They stood beneath a signpost which said: Quarry Nine and displayed an arrow, pointing onwards.

“Signal, Thorbum,” said Honey, looking up uneasily. At once their easiness, their casualness, evaporated.

“It’s Rogers, up ahead. Some of the signposts have been torn down since he went in. They’ve run across traps.”

“Well, this was too good to last,” said Thorburn grimly. And then he said something that, at first, unutterably shocked Stead. Only as the words rang in his mind did he see how they fitted in with Simon’s theories, only with stunning force.

“The Demons,” Thorbum said. “They’re trying to stop us again.”

“But… but—” protested Stead incoherently. “The Demons can’t do anything to a man with a rational mind! They are figments of the imagination, controllers of the spirit to order our consciences. It is the immortal being who provides us with food and who also sets the traps.”

“Now what sort of immortal one would that be,” demanded Julia scornfully, “who’d deliberately trap a man and mangle his body?”

“I see,” said Stead unsteadily. “The traps and the Rangs are facts of life, but it is not the immortal one—who cannot be seen—who puts them there, but the Demons— who cannot be seen—”

It all fitted.

Well, he was learning.

“Relay the signal back to depot, Honey,” said Thorbum. “Purvis will have to know.”

“There’s an awful lot of clutter on the air.” Honey’s silky black hair bent closer in automatic reflex as her slender hands played with her dials delicately. “All right, I’m reaching him.”

The secondary runnel seemed clear. No traps. But up ahead Sims and Wallas walked with immense caution, and Cardon, rear marker, swung his head as though it pivoted on a universal joint. They reached their exit hole without further trouble. Rogers and his group marched past with full sacks, cheerily.

“The Demons are on to us, Thorburn,” said Rogers. “But no Rangs. Is Purvis sending out any more parties?”

“Couldn’t say. We came in by the secondary route. I’d advise you to try that.”

“Thanks. We tripped all the traps we could find. But you’ll have to go in some way. Regulations have been reached close to the exit hole.”

Thorburn’s party groaned at this. It was a groan of affectation, mock dismal; Stead found an amazement that they could joke in such gruesome ways when their every move might bring their deaths.

“All right,” said Thorburn crisply. “All in. We’ll have to go to the far edge of the quarry. Keep closed up.”

Julia flashed him a glance. Thorburn nodded his head at her. “I know, my dear, I know.”

The two Forager groups, standing by the hole their engineers had cut into the food quarry beyond, shadowed and dimly illumined by a faint seeping light, turned all as one as Rogers’ point man called back sharply.

“Yobs! Action front! Yobs!”

Everyone, including Stead, who had been trained in this, flung furiously to the ground, diving for cover, flattening out, snouting up their splutter-guns. Even so, one of Rogers’ group farthest out, was slow. He screamed, staggering back, off balance. A long arrow protruded from his shoulder, artfully penetrating between the junction of arm and shoulder leathers. Before he was snatched down by a raking friendly arm four other arrows feathed into his armor.

Eyes slitted, Stead peered carefully out into the dusty crawling darkness behind the wall of the world. His heart thudded painfully against the ground. His gun felt suddenly cold to his fingers.

“See ’em, Cardon?” rumbled Thorbum.

“Not yet. If there are more than a dozen they’ll rush us in a second or two.”

“I hope they do.” Julia’s tones lashed the dark viciously. All their headlamps had been turned off. “You can pick a Yob off then.” She glanced at Stead. “Don’t let one get to close quarters, Stead.”

Stead gulped. “So I believe,” he said in his Controller’s voice that had long since ceased to amuse his Forager comrades. He peered down the sights of his gun and willed the tremble in his fingers out of existence.

“Here they come!” someone yelled.

Fire and explosions rippled from the prostrate line of men. Bullets ripped and tore into the charging mass ahead. Firing with the others, Stead tasted the acrid stink of burnt powder, felt the sweat rilling down his face, heard the insane hammer and clatter and the weird alien screams, saw the darting arrows striking down all about.

Then it was all over. Through the roaring in his ears and the streaking retinal after-images in his eyes, Stead understood that another peril of outside had been met and conquered. With the others, shakily, he stood up.

He walked across and looked down on a Yob.

The beast was more than a beast. Nine feet long, it propelled itself on six of its legs, the front pair of this world’s usual multiple-limbs being elevated like a man’s, the front portion of the Yob lifting up into a grotesque parody of a man’s chest. The head was flat and puffed and round, like a tureen, with four hom-hooded eyes, a wide mouth, nostril slits and a cockscomb of flesh, bright ochreous yellow, rising above. Furless was a Yob, like a man. The forelimbs were clumsily manipulative, almost like a man’s, the thumb not quite fully opposed. And, like a man, a Yob clad itself in skins and furs, wore a wide leather belt from which depended a knife, carried an ugly cudgel and a bow and a quiver of long, wickedly barbed arrows.

Intelligent, after their fashion, were Yobs.

“Now you’ve made the acquaintance of the highest level of intelligent animal in the world,” said Thorburn. “And now I know why the Demons set those traps.” He kicked the sprawled, riddled body of the Yob contemptuously. “They are savages; they live by no Regulations. They quarry and forage without check, leaving traces, telling the Demons everything. No wonder the traps appeared.”

“I lost a man,” said Rogers. “Wilkins will be pleased.”

“Take him back all the Yob equipment. You deserve it.”

Stead was not surprised at Rogers’ reaction of thanks. Yob artifacts fetched a great price in service and resources among the Controllers. They were curios, objects of an alien and strange culture, if culture it could be called.

“Right!” Thorburn grated the words deliberately. “All in.”

Old Chronic cackled. “Bring along the least damaged Yob. Usual drill.” Chuckling with a Forager’s amazing resilience, cheerful seconds after hideous danger, Sims and Wallas obeyed. The Yob was dragged through the exit hole, bundled inside through the mountains of food.

“There’s a trap,” nodded Julia.

Quickly the men draped the dead Yob artistically in the trap, grappled his naked left hind foot, pulled. The trap swished horribly down. They undid their grapnel.

“Now the Demons might be placated a little.”

Stead saw the wisdom of that. Working with the others, right over on the edge of the quarry, hard up against a painted metal wall that reared upwards for thirty feet, until the floor above created the ceiling to this shelf, he stuffed his sack with round white eggs, each over half his own size. He worked with a will, anxious to be off.

The damp moss packing he rammed down between the eggs finished, and still the sack was not full. He walked a few paces towards the metal wall, where one of the mixed-up bread and fruit mountains lay, cut open and crumbling. His axe sliced out neat wedges which he rammed gently down on top of the eggs. Absorbed in his task he heard the click and whoosh of air as though from a distance. He did not look up.

A vivid bar of light crashed down across the floor.

“Stead! Run, man, run!”

Thorburn’s frantic yell brought Stead up, all blinking, his eyes closing against that ferocious white light. He had seen no light so powerful, so actinic, so devastatingly blinding.

Fumbling, he dropped his sack, reeled, tried to run, crashed into the food mountain. Panting, he clung on, feeling it as the only solid refuge in a world of merciless light.

Then… horror.

Through streaming eyes that he forced agonizingly to open he saw the floor drop away. He felt his body rising, felt the movement as though his antigrav had been switched on under full power, and had gone wrong.

Swaying, sickeningly swooping, the section of food mountain soared into the air, out into that blazing whiteness of light.

The floor passed beneath his feet. Below that, incredibly far below that, dwindling it seemed in impossible perspective, another floor appeared, so far below him that blueness edged its outlines. He clung onto the food with all his strength. Something white and shiny appeared below. His feet struck it jarringly. The food fragment tilted and, blessedly, its shadow dropped over him. Now he could see.

Now he could see.

How long he crouched there, dumb, numb, sick, filled with a horror that engulfed his entire being, he did not know. It seemed to him like hours.

The ground beneath his feet was hard and white and shiny, like china. It encircled his vision. Beyond it stretched a great plain of brightly colored material. Distantly, he made out two upright columns of wood and two cross bars joining them. He was staring at these in wonder, in a maelstrom of fear and panic and bowel-loosening terror, crouched down, unable to move, when the final horror burst upon him.

Something appeared from the side. Something so huge and vast it dwarfed his being. He did not, dared not,- look up. He knew within his soul that there must be a roof up I here, but suppose there wasn’t? And now, as he watched this something move slowly, so slowly, across in front of the wooden structure, his whole being and body screamed silently and his brain curdled in his skull.

The thing was vast. Impossibly vast. It towered. And it moved. Slowly it moved, until it stopped in front of the wood. Then, slowly, it sank down.

Stead stared up… up… at a vast, a world-filling, an earth-shaking, snorting, breathing, moving Yob.

A Yob so huge that it blotted out all vision, so de-vastatingly monstrous that his overstrained mind could no longer accept the evidence of his senses.

Stead’s muscles collapsed. He slid down in the shadow of the fragment from the food mountain.

The Yob reached out an arm twelve feet thick. The fingers, eighteen inches thick, held a bar of steel that winked and gleamed and reached above him with monstrous purpose. The knife descended.

Then Stead knew what he looked at was real.

He knew what it was.

He had met his first Demon.