Chapter 14

The dam was in sight, the gorge a brighter area in the dark. Merritt wiped the rain from his eyes and scanned the area for any sign of the enemy, aided by the lightning flashes that a moment from now must aid the enemy, betraying him to any observers as he crossed that open ground to the guard station.

He gasped another mouthful of air and stumbled ahead, slipping in the mud and the puddles, the ache in his side like a mortal wound. He had made it. He had managed to keep ahead of whatever pursuers might be behind him, and there was the goal in sight, the log shack that guarded the nearside of the bridge.

"Hey!" he hailed the unseen guards as he came within view of the slit windows. He was not about to become victim of a nervous sentry in this murk of night and storm. "Hey, in there—"

The lightning showed a pale face in the slit, glimmered wetly on a gun barrel.

"It's Merritt," he heard someone say; and then in the stop-action sequence of triple lightning flashes he saw the man lift the gun to aim.

The shot might have hit the area he vacated; he did not stop to see, not until he was well into the woods again. There was no motion of apology from the guard post. It had not been a mistake.

Shaken, trembling, he paused to wipe his vision clear again and to look over the trail behind him, anxious that the shot might have drawn his pursuers to his track. The lightnings showed him nothing but the dark trunks of trees and interlacing branches.

He sucked air and turned, started running again, the path for the ravine, the only way that was left. The river was up: he heard the thunder of it spilling off the flume; there was no time to chance the riverward ledge, that way around under the promontory, not since the rains. He headed up, up the long incline out of the water-filled ravine, and out of the trees again. Thunder rolled down the canyon and the sound of the river roared up out of it, drowning all else.

The lights were lit, the great outer gate barred. Merritt reached the first corner of the stone wall and leaned there a moment, panting, fighting for breath. The lightning played strange tricks with the landscape, creating shadows between him and the wooden wall of the outer-camp stockade.

Ahead were the steps down, that led to the dock and Celestine. And before he could make that first stage, he must for a moment come under the guns of the guards at the mainhouse gate… who just perhaps would have heard that shot from the dam; the wind and the rain could play tricks with sounds.

And perhaps Celestine was gone; or perhaps Amos and Jim had sheltered in the house this night. Perhaps it was all for nothing, such a risk.

He wiped at his eyes and went, keeping close to the wall, trying to do something he had himself designed the guard-posts to make impossible—slipped along the wall in small quick moves from shadow to shadow while he could, then hit the open and sprinted for the steps.

A shot exploded behind him and kicked up water from a puddle ahead. He threw himself over the earthen bank, rolling, sliding in the clay until he bumped over the first tier and caught hold of the steps, bruised and stunned… clawed his way to them and gathered himself up, started down them, praying the Selbys would not be so quick on the trigger. An alarm dinned from the house upslope. But Celestine was there, riding at her moorings.

"Amos!" he shouted, slipped again on the wet boards, gathered himself and ran staggering down the heaving dock. "Amos! Jim!"

A lantern flared into the open on deck. Merritt waved at it violently, redoubled his effort to reach the gangplank before someone could get a clear shot at him from behind, outlined as he was against that light.

"It's Sam!" he heard Jim's voice across the gangway, and when he staggered out on that heaving board and leaped for the deck, friendly hands pulled him on board and steadied him.

He had no words. He slumped to the deck and leaned on his hands trying to catch his breath, the alarm up at the house still clanging in his ears, voices shouting somewhere. Amos and Jim were trying to pull him to his feet against his will, and he could not get enough breath to protest being set upright against the slot of the gangway.

"Sam," Amos said, holding his arm. "Sam, you hurt?"

Merritt shook his head, gasped down more air. In his hazed vision he saw lights start filing down the steps from the house toward the dock. Frantic, he looked toward the Selbys.

"I tried to warn them. —They fired…"

"We supposed to ask where you been?" Amos cut him off in a harsh tone. "Or do we just guess this time?"

"Amos—" He staggered for his feet, holding to the rail. "Amos, the People have blasting materials and they're probably headed for the dam right now."

Jim jerked him left and slammed him back against the wheelhouse, himself too stunned and out of breath to resist. He stared at Jim in bewilderment.

"How they got the stuff we already know," said Jim, his young face hard with anger. "We got Miller's body back two days after the stuff turned up missing out there at the site. But if they can use it, you tell me how they know, Sam. Or maybe the People turning up with explosives and Sam Merritt missing is supposed to add up different."

Merrill's eyes focused for a fraction of a second beyond Jim's shoulder, at the line of lanterns that had reached the dock; and snapped back lo Jim's face.

"There's not much time," he told Jim. "You'd better stop them or you'll never hear my side of it."

Jim stared at him, anger still twisting his face, but he relented a little at the look Merrill gave him. He turned to one side, made his decision and picked up the rifle that lay against the rail. He threw the safety off and his father made a tentative move to stop him, then took the rifle from Jim's hand and faced the oncoming crowd himself.

"Hold your fire!" Amos shouted across the distance to the dock. "Don't you come any farther!"

"You all right out there, Amos?"

"We're fine. You just hold off, Porter. We got Merritt back. —You keep your distance, the lot of you, til I'm done talking."

"Ask Merritt where those explosives are."

"He says the People are going to blow the dam. —Listen to me, you—I don't know the whole story; I ain't had time to ask him, but you hold off out there til I make my mind up. And I mean that. You know I do."

"You were always blind to him, Selby—but take your time. If he's got an answer to this, let's hear it."

"I'll tell you the answer," Merritt shouted back and recklessly leaned against the railing to do it. "Miller's death was a surprise to me and so was it that they had the explosives. They got them without my help."

"We ain't sure," a new voice cut in, "but what you sent them after them for you."

"That's not true!" Merritt shouted back.

"You never wanted that dam to work, Merritt." That was Porter again. "You fought it all the way. I hear you was trying to get off this world when the governor's men caught you up in New Hope."

"I built that dam. What more do you want? And if you don't want it blown apart, get more guards up there on that site tonight."

"If the People can use explosives, who showed them how, Merritt? Answer us that one."

"I never showed them. But they're ready to fire. Maybe Miller did—I have no way of knowing."

"That's a lie." The voice was that of one of the Miller cousins. "That's a rotten lie, Merritt, to save your own hide."

"I can't argue it with you, John. I don't know how they got them. Maybe they got them from Dan after he'd fixed them at the site; or maybe he meant to blow them in their camp—maybe he tried. But the People have brains to figure things out. They're intelligent beings, and they have the means to destroy the dam. Anything could set those charges off now. Maybe we'll be lucky and they'll blow themselves up before they get to the dam, but they know I'm loose and they'll know they haven't much time left.

Get up there and warn those men on guard duty, whether you think I'm lying or not. There's too many of the People out there for a few rifles to stop."

"And maybe you want us all to go running off up there for reasons of your own."

"Porter," said Amos, "maybe you'd better listen to him."

"You believe that offworlder, Selby? Then you'll believe anything."

"I think we're all standing in a confounded unlucky place if that dam goes."

"I think he'd like to send us all up that trail into an ambush while he's at it—and leave the station unguarded."

"Are you going to send men up to the dam or not?"

There was a long hesitation, no one volunteering. "Sure," said Porter. "We'll check it out. But we'll check out a few things with Merrill first. Put down that rifle, Amos. He isn't worth it."

"You do your talking from there, Porter. First man steps out front I'll try to scare him, but I can't see much in this rain and I don't want to shoot my neighbors. You just keep your distance. And while you're at it, send someone up to round up a relief party for the men at the dam, or are you just going to leave them up there alone?"

"What do we do now, Dad?" Jim asked quietly, when there was silence from the crowd.

"I think you and Sam better fire up that boiler. We got one way out of here and besides, I don't trust Porter to send that relief party at all."

"Amos—" Merritt began, offering gratitude.

"Sam, I'm figuring you're telling the truth, or part of it. If I find out otherwise you'd better not be in my sights. Get moving. I don't know how close we can get old Celestine to that dam, but if it goes, I figure we'll be the first to know."

The wind was coming down out of the narrows, driving a blinding rain and spray against little Celestine, and she moved slowly, painfully slowly, her deck awash and her bow probing darkness and uncharted channel.

"Don't know how much farther we'll make it," Amos said. He took a fresh grip on the rain-slick wheel and let one hand go again to wipe his forearm across his eyes.

Spray hit them and current and wind tried to turn them; Amos fought them even again, but the chug of the engines faltered and Jim grabbed for the doorlatch and ducked out, slammed it after. The boat wallowed, rolled, and rock hove up starboard in the lightnings.

"I'll see if Jim needs help," Merritt said, and had his hand on the latch when Celestine tilted and shuddered in every plank. With a squeal of wood the boat wallowed back to rights again. Merritt let go the breath he had held and Amos breathed an obscenity.

Again the boat scraped rock and Amos put the wheel over hard in the attempt to clear it. She hung a moment, screaming, and dragged herself past the obstacle on a surge of the river.

There was no need to search after Jim: the door ripped open and he thrust his soaked head into the wheelhouse, hanging in the doorway.

"We can't get any farther. Dad, for—"

"Ain't no boat ever made farther than this, for sure," Amos shouted back. "I know, son, I know, and I'm heading for the only landing we got."

He was plying the wheel with all his concentration now fixed ahead, rock walls and rocks half-submerged looming up out of the lightning-lit spray like a swift-moving nightmare. Celestine was moving now toward the nearside bank, where Merritt recalled a single stretch of shore that sloped gradually up to the heights beyond, a place piled high with brush and sand.

And if in seeking that shore they took Celestine's bottom out and the boiler blew—it would be quick, at least.

The bank entered their view, a great line of brush lit with the sporadic flashes of lightnings, between the rise and fall of Celestine's spray-drenched bow.

"Boy," said Amos, "you and Sam get out there on that deck and get ready to jump. Carry cable if you can. I don't want to lose the old girl if I can help it."

Merritt grasped the doorframe and pulled himself out after Jim; and holding where they could, they worked their way to the bow and the coiled cable. The shore was coming up fast now, dipping and rising crazily in the dark, and suddenly Celestine's bow hit sand. The shock hurled them both to the deck, and even as they were getting to their feet again the boat was tilting and slewing round to the action of the current

A final lightning flash showed the shore almost under them, and Jim put his hand at Merritt's back and urged him over the rail.

He hit the water, a numbing shock of cold; and for a moment he fought, then found bottom with his feet and broke surface. He moved back from Celestine's dark shape just as the cable snaked out and uncoiled toward his uplifted hands. Jim went over the side, and together they seized the cable and dragged it toward a projecting rock, snubbed it round and tried to hold it.

It tore from their hands, ripping flesh raw, and Celestine turned her bow from the shore and was taken by the current.

"Dad!" Jim howled into the wind.

A moment later a shadow leaped from the nearside rail into the water, a white splashing afterward in the lightnings, and Amos came stumbling up onto the bank coughing and swearing at once. He cast one look back at stricken Celestine, that had swung half-about and was heeling toward a swifter current, then seized Jim and Merritt each by a shoulder and turned them for the higher bank, pushing them into movement.

The scent of burning was on the wind as they came upon the road, an acrid, foul smoke. The rain had slackened by now to a spattering of drops, most of that shaken from trees by the wind, but the fire-scent was strange on the wet air.

And when they had come near the construction area itself, there was something clearly ablaze, red winking through the trees.

They kept to the woods, then, rather than venturing the open—weaponless, for all they had had gone with Celestine.

"Guard-post," Merritt said hoarsely, reckoning position. "Inside's dry enough to burn, once they took it."

And a moment more of moving through the dripping woods put them in clear view of it, fire-stained smoke rolling aloft into the dark. Runners of fire were licking out even to the bridge ropes, fire-dried, a lattice of flame.

There was no enemy in sight, nothing at all moving in the area of the firelight. Bodies lay in the mud in the area of the guard-station, puddles of water reflecting up fire about them.

Amos breathed an oath. Merritt cast a last look in either direction and left cover, aware that the Selbys were both with him, unasked. He scuttled to the side of a dead man, found a rifle in the mud, wiped it off, searched the man's pockets—it was one of the Burnses, Sid—and turned up two shells.

"How many men out here?" he asked of Amos, who was plundering one of the others.

"There was four this side, five the other. Looks like they got them all."

And the bridge went: burnt rope parted, and the structure swayed gracefully downward and away across the canyon, trailing burning fragments like stars.

"Sam, Dad—" Jim called suddenly, from his place nearer the rim. "There's a light moving down there."

Merritt ran to see, Amos close beside him, and they slid in beside Jim, where a large rock marked the beginning of one of the several trails down to the dam. Jim pointed. There was a faint gleam of fire far down the path, that wound down to the site, the diversion dike, from which the big flume carried its thundering load toward the black mass of the dam and over.

"Could be," said Amos, "that it's some of the boys from the farside station come down to hunt out the trouble."

"I hope it is," Merritt said, and started down.

"Sam," said Jim, catching his arm and sliding down to stop him. "You're crazy to go down there."

"What do you want? If they aren't some of ours—"

"You're going to run into more than you bargained for," said Amos. "And you're a lousy shot, Sam, leastwise with one of our kind of guns. You'd better give Jim that thing before you waste what shells we've got. —Jim, you do me a favor, son, and stay up here."

"No, sir," Jim said.

Merritt hesitated a moment; and considered Amos, who had a rifle from one of the dead, and Jim, who had no weapon. He thrust the rifle into Jim's hands and turned and headed downhill, slipping at the turn, recovering. The two Selbys were behind him when he glanced back. He looked forward again. The lights showed, heading out away from the area of the dike. Then they went out of sight. There were some large rocks down there. He moved as rapidly as he dared, running where he could; the path was slick on the descent, clay mixed with scattered gravel. They moved, the three of them, as quickly as they could, using hands to guide them in the dark and to balance against the wind that whipped up at them from the bottom.

"I can't see it anywhere," Jim said when they reached the bottom of the trail, where was the great rush of the river on the one side of them. Merritt gasped for breath and started running the muddy and jagged ground, ran until they had reached the base of the next steps down, past the dike and down into the dark where the spillway took shape; the great timbers of the diversion flume supports rose above them, water cascading down about them in an unending shower—mere fraction of the torrent that roared overhead and thundered off the end of the flume into the pool below the dam. Sound was lost in that place; it quivered in the bones, in the brain.

Then a gleam of light showed far along that earthwork that dammed the river toward the flume, a glimmering like illusion, a trick of the eyes in the night and the curtain of water.

"There!" Merritt screamed, pointing; and close at hand a shadow moved among the supports—only that much warning, out of the tail of the eye. Merritt whirled about and caught it full in the chest, a bruising impact, bearing him backward.

A human voice shouted; that came faintly in the thunder, but he could not answer. His hands were locked at the creature's shoulders, trying to keep that face from his throat, and losing.

A shock jolted through the wiry limbs and the creature let go, staggered up with an almost-silent scream and went for Jim and Amos. Merritt came to his knees and saw another of them coming at them… seized up a handsized rock and lurched from knee to feet, aimed for the back of the one's head with all the power in him.

Even so it took a moment for the creature to fall— slowly, as if the hard-muscled body had a force of its own beyond the shattered brain; and in that slow moment the others closed in.

The rifles went off and hit true, dropped two of them writhing to the ground; and Merritt found himself locked with another. He avoided a first slash at his arm and hit hard enough to stagger the creature. The returned blow came low in the side, a bruising pain. He ignored that and the breathless ache that followed, smashing with dogged fury at the fanged countenance that breathed so close to his face, until the grip weakened and the lifeless body sank down, hands dragging at his clothing even as it fell.

A rifle discharged again, dim in the thunder, collapsing another of the creatures over Jim's prostrate form; and Amos bent down to heave the dead thing off his son—Jim trying weakly to get to his feet. Merritt swaggered away from the support where he was leaning and started to help them, when the movement of lights still showed.

"Give me that gun," he said to Amos, trying to take the weapon, and could not—swayed on his feet when Amos jerked back on it. "They're out there by the dike," he insisted, pleading. "Amos, they're still out there."

"Stay with my boy," Amos said. "Get him out of here."

"Amos—" Merrill protested, but the elder Selby swore and pushed him roughly aside, began to run. Merritt tried to follow: the ache in his side was such that he could not run, his legs shaking under him. He brought up against one of the supports, and Amos had far outdistanced him by now. He staggered instead back to Jim, hauled him up. Jim tried to walk, tried to help him; he hastened, dragging the injured youth a limping course across the face of the dike, back again, to the base of the steps, upward.

A shot sounded feebly in the distance; and another. Merritt stopped and looked back, searching for the lights, heaved at Jim and the two of them climbed another turn of the trail, to open sky.

Another shot.

"He's still all right," Merritt.

Then incredibly there was a great flare of light, a belated shock of sound, and all that great pent-up tide crested white and poured toward the dam, washed up in one great wave and broke, crashed, thundered toward the flume supports and snapped them like kindling, boiling white at their stumps and churning over the unfinished spillway, eroding, ripping great quantities of rock away, widening the breach.

"Dad," Jim was saying, over and over again, and Merritt finally pulled him back, drew him away and up the trail, step by slow step. Sometimes he had to rest, to ease the ache in his side, and it was a long time before they reached the rim.

There he had to stop, sank to his knees and let Jim down, gasped for breath and touched at Jim's blank face.

"Jim. Jim, you hear me?"

Jim murmured something and tried to move.

"Jim, there's no place left. We've got to make it to the station, whatever's there. You understand me? They're all over these woods. Can you hold yourself up?"

For answer Jim tried to rise again, and Merritt made to help him; his hand closed on Jim's arm and Jim made an animal sound of pain, steadied himself, made drunken steps.

By now the pain in his own side had taken on a steady pulse: he was bleeding, he thought, remembered that the one who had attacked him had had a knife and did not want to feel to know. It was not a killing wound; he was still on his feet and a killing wound ought to be numb—he had heard that somewhere in his youth and chose now to believe it. He took a better grip about Jim and turned for the forest road, the way back to the station, putting from his mind what they might meet there, or how many of the People might be left.

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