Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Ten

“Where is Heaven? I cannot tell. Even to the eye of faith, Heaven looks much like a star to the eye of flesh. Set there on the brow of night, it shines most bright, most beautiful; but it is separated from us by so great a distance as to be raised above our investigations as above the storms and clouds of earth.”

Stirling took off the reading glasses and lay in the resultant pitch darkness. Judge Latham had marked many passages like that in the strange collection of books that made up his library. In the five months that had passed since his attempt to escape, Stirling had spent most of his spare time flicking through the micro-library, hoping to find that the judge had slipped the missing frames from the encyclopedia into some other volume. All he had achieved was the discovery that Latham had a mystical streak in his nature, and in choosing the He as the place to die had been pursuing a vision, perhaps one more vivid than that which had activated both Johnny and himself. The Judge had even written one quotation on the inside of the micro-library’s lid:

“Great Spirit, give to me a heaven not so large as yours but large enough for me.”

Its significance escaped Stirling, but he did not feel qualified to criticize another man for overlaying the hard reality of the lie with the colors of his own dreams. He pulled the sleeping bag up to his chin and waited for sleep. Although winter had come early to Heaven that year, the shell field and a minimal amount of under-soil heating had kept the temperature to reasonable levels. The snow clouds crowded by, far below the raft, in great gray rivers, while the villagers lived in the thin, pure sunlight of a faded water-color.

Stirling now knew almost everybody in the community and admitted to himself that he had begun to look like the other villagers. At his most conservative estimate, he had lost thirty pounds in weight, and felt as though he could have run the full length of the He. His skin had darkened to the color of polished teak, and his stubble had developed into a rakish, seignorial-looking beard. But underneath his new, piratical exterior, his early instinctive desire to get off the He had crystalized into a diamond-hard determination, which was with him every second of every day. In his dreams he walked city streets, drinking in the sights and sounds of the culture which had spawned him—but sleep was not always easily achieved.

Stirling had been lying in darkness for an indeterminate time when he became aware of distant voices rising and falling, like the sound of waves sifting shingle. Several people ran by the stockade, talking excitedly hi breathless whispers. Recognizing an unusual amount of activity for the time of night, Stirling got up again and crossed to the door. He waited until he heard more leisurely steps outside, then rattled the lashed door against its frame.

“What’s going on out there?”

“Go back to bed, Vic,” someone replied. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Will you tell me what’s happening, or do I kick this door down?”

“Ah, it’s nothing. Old man Latham has finally bought it. His daughter’s having some kind of a fit back there.”

Stirling went to his pack and took out the final cigarette he had been saving for some unspecified occasion. He puffed it into life and drew deeply; but the dry smoke ravaged his lungs and made him cough. And, when he had snuffed out the tiny orange spark, the night seemed very much darker than before.

Stirling was not allowed to attend the funeral, but he saw the party wind its way along the margin to the grass-covered bank of drifted dust which served the villagers as a graveyard. The bank, heaped against the eastern wall by air eddying through a configuration of larger tanks, was not long and was only four feet hi depth at its maximum. Stirling had no idea how many people had died on the He, but he guessed their bodies were keeping each other pretty close company. The Great Spirit was seeing to it that Judge Latham’s allotted heaven was not over-large.

While the straggling procession was returning a westbound jet grumbled its way down through the sky, and the villagers dispersed into the background. Stirling returned to the work of repairing the nets used by the food-foraging teams.

An hour later, during the midday break, Melissa Latham came to the stockade where Stirling had been doing much of his work during the colder weather. He had not seen her, except at a distance, for several months and was surprised to realize how much of her already economical body had been pared away by the strain of tending her father. Her eyes looked bruised.

Stirling stood up. “I’m sorry …”

“He told me to give you this.” She held out Latham’s gold wristwatch. “I couldn’t take it.”

“It’s all right. It doesn’t work, and the gold is meaningless.”

“I don’t mean that—I mean, it was your father’s.”

“I don’t need it.” Melissa looked at him with a new curiosity. “He made me promise you would have it.”

“All right—thanks.” Stirling accepted the watch and warmed its chilly metal in his hands. “I don’t know how much it would mean to you at this moment, but when your father knew he was going to die he picked the place where he wanted to go… . And I think he made a good personal choice.”

“He told you he was ill before he came here?”

“Yes. You don’t …”

“It happened afterwards. He could have been cured if he had been able to go back.”

“Didn’t he try?”

“No.” Melissa sounded almost defiant.

“But that’s …” Stirling searched for the right word, and found his vocabulary inadequate. “What are you going to do now?”

“Too soon … Too soon …” Her gaze flicked past him. Stirling looked around and saw Johnny Considine approaching, for once without his entourage. It was the first time in five months that he had come within speaking distance. His eyes were fixed on Latham’s watch with a look of overt covetousness which Stirling found puzzling.

“Here, Johnny.” Stirling offered him the watch. “I suppose I’m expected to render unto Caesar.”

Johnny put out his hand, carefully wrapped Stirling’s fingers around the watch, and squeezed down on them. He gave Stirling a stare of resentment from stranger’s eyes, but did not speak. Stirling suddenly understood that the watch was a symbol, not in its physical reality, but in the giving of it by the judge.

Still without speaking, Johnny put his arm around Melissa’s shoulders; and she allowed herself to be led away. When they were almost out of earshot Melissa said something in a low, angry voice. Johnny, glancing back once over his shoulder, answered her; and Stirling knew why he had been so silent when they were together. His voice was a thin, plaintive squawk which showed that the vocal prosthetic was rapidly failing. Johnny was destined to be a king who gave commands with his fingers.

Stirling put the watch in his pocket and returned to the nets. Second in importance only to the rule that nobody went back, was the villagers’ law that the food supplies had to be gathered over the widest possible area. The foraging teams traveled the full width of the He and diffused their demands to escape the electronic musings of distant computers—and nets were necessary for transportation.

Stirling worked stolidly with the tough plastic strands, while his mind re-ran the brief encounter with his brother. Johnny had changed again, this time for the worse. His personality seemed to be imploding on itself, building up internal pressures which would not be contained, like a fission-fusion bomb. The symptoms would not have been apparent to anyone else; but Stirling had read them hazing through Johnny’s eyes like the wind patterns drifting on his striated kingdoms of grain. But what was eating into Johnny? Disillusionment with the He and the pettiness of his chieftainship? Imagined or real rejection by both Judge Latham and Melissa? That might explain his reaction to seeing Melissa hand Stirling a worthless watch.

The skin of Stirling’s face prickled coldly, as though it had been dusted with ice particles.

A worthless watch!

He stood up, stretched casually, and made his way into the stockade. Just inside the doorway—where the light was still good—he stopped, took out the watch, and sprang open its case. Nothing, except its magnetic motor and escapement. He examined the plastic of the strap for stitching which might have been disturbed; but it was made of a single thickness. Again nothing. Breathing heavily with frustration, he studied the body of the watch for the second time. The face was a lamination of gold which could be lifted away from the backing plate. Stirling pried it up with his thumbnail and saw the imprisoned corner of a microfilm frame. He began to tremble.

Stirling waited four days before the right opportunity came. The big robots had become less active during the colder weather; but on two occasions one of them came right to the end of a strip near the village. Each time, there was another close by, and he decided to pass up the chance. He did not want to ride out on one of the yellow machines if the villagers were able to jump others close behind, because at the western end of the He there would be a five-mile run to the elevator’s head. Even with his new flat-bellied physique, Stirling had no desire to race that distance against a horde of ragged cheetahs without a substantial headstart. The best solution would have been to go along the western margin to the center line before making his break; but his earlier escape attempt had barred that road.

On the afternoon of the fourth day, he was operating the crude press which made fuel briquettes from dried grass and roots when a robot advanced right to the end of its strip and halted. Sterile sunlight glinted on the spider legs as they moved solicitously beneath the turret; apparently they were preparing the open soil for next spring’s planting.

Stirling surveyed the He cautiously and saw that the southeast corner was otherwise free of the robots. The village itself was gripped by the mid-afternoon somnolence. The sound of a woman singing mingled with a faint, regular hammering of a man working at the distant end. Thin plumes of smoke drifted up from the shielded cooking fires in the central area and mixed with the ever-present canopy of water vapor. Even the nameless midget who had been appointed to watch Stirling was not in evidence.

Suppressing the unpleasant idea that this might be a more elaborate, and final test of his trustworthiness, Stirling began walking towards the patiently grazing robot. During the four days’ wait, he had tried to analyze Latham’s motives for breaking the self-imposed pact with the villagers, ‘the pact to which he had sacrificed his own life. His tentative conclusion was that the judge had intended him to bring Melissa with him, if Johnny had decided to take her by force and she had objected strenuously enough. But Stirling had seen neither of them since the morning after Latham’s death, nor had he heard of any scenes of spectacular rapine. He had decided to go when the going was good—regardless of any concomitant feelings of guilt. Besides, there was always the risk something would go wrong.

From close up, the nearside bogey of the robot was reminiscent of a locomotive, with its massive steel wheels and profusion of cylinders and levers. The yellow-painted structure was covered by a beaded blanket of condensation, under which were ancient streaks of oil, hydraulic fluid, and the other liquids which coursed its plastic arteries. Resisting the urge to take a final look around—the familiar, furtive gesture which so often attracts attention where flagrantly unusual conduct has failed—Stirling climbed up the sweating metal until he had reached the level of the beam which spanned above the soil bed to the bogey on the opposite side. He walked along its broad, upper flange, still trying to maintain an air of nonchalance, until the complex bulk of the turret was beneath him. The lower flange of the beam carried the rails upon which the turret could travel the full width of the strip. Praying there was nothing there which would electrocute him, Stirling dropped down onto it through a flexible tangle of helical pipes, and crawled into the turret itself. He located the panel giving access to the robot’s alarm-system relays and began releasing the stiff, spring-loaded catches. From the corner of his eye, he saw a small black figure dart away through the village.

The solution to his problem had been simple. In fact, he had been given a good clue during his first minutes on the He when a big robot had passed him at full speed. It had been heading for the point where he had dived into the bean rows to escape the scarecrow.

Along the fifteen-mile length of each soil bed was a sensory network designed to warn the robot of crop damage, at any point, by detecting cellulose particles emitted from crushed or broken stems. The network also monitored soil moisture in case a malfunction of the irrigation system should cause localized parching or flooding; but it was the former function which gave the villagers the power to control the robots. In retrospect, Stirling was able to piece together what had gone wrong with his first escape bid. While he had been slogging along the He on foot, someone had found Biquard and raised the alarm. The hunters had summoned a robot by smashing down some plants; then they mounted it and manipulated the alarm relay panel to make the big machine think there was trouble at the opposite end of the strip. The fretful monster had thundered off at fifty miles an hour to investigate, incidentally overtaking Stirling on the way.

In theory it was perfectly straightforward, but the catches of the access panel appeared not to have been disturbed for years and had been designed for robotic pincers anyway. Stirling had wasted a precious minute and torn the skin of his fingers, before the last clamp fell away. He glanced towards the village and saw men running, loping across the margin like black wolves. Some were carrying what seemed to be spears. He clawed at the panel and discovered it had bonded itself to the surrounding casing.

Down below him one figure outstripped all the others, and Stirling recognized it at once. Dix was moving over the tough grass at an incredible speed, more like the shadow of an aircraft than a man, and his pike mouth was agape, scooping in air. He was also carrying an automatic pistol.

Swearing in sudden panic, Stirling scrabbled at the panel’s edges and felt it lift slightly. He worked his fingertips in and pulled the rectangle of thick plastic upwards, revealing orderly rows of miniature relays, each of which was covered by a transparent case. The spring clips of the end case defeated his bloodied fingers for a second, then the smooth plastic cover popped off. Stirling saw Dix leap onto the robot’s bogey and swarm up it, seemingly without losing speed. He jabbed his finger down on the exposed relay, closing its contacts—and nothing happened.

He had chosen the wrong end of the relay banks. He had ordered the robot to go to the sector it was already in.

Stirling was wrestling the cover from the relay at the opposite end, when Dix appeared above him on the upper flange of the beam. Dix steadied himself, lower teeth bared, and leveled the automatic. Stirling skimmed the access panel at him—causing him to duck away—and at the same time drove his heel down through the relay covers, splintering the fragile plastic and closing half-a-dozen contacts at once. The big machine lurched into motion; and as Dix overbalanced down onto the turret, he windmilled his arms against the sky. Stirling brought up his right knee, catching the falling man in the small of the back and bouncing him clear of the turret for a twenty-foot drop to the soil bed. Two alloy-tipped spears clattered off the metal behind Stirling; but the robot was quickly gaining speed, and the frantically running figures lost ground.

Stirling leaned back against the beam and somberly Watched them dwindle away into the distance. He had calculated that the robot, traveling at top speed, would travel the length of the He in eighteen minutes. This was very much better than leaving on foot, but it was such a spectacular form of departure that his headstart could also be measured in minutes. To be precise, it would be the number of minutes it took for the villagers to summon another robot and get it under manual control. Ten minutes would be a good lead to achieve under the conditions, and that was not much in the context of the five-mile run waiting at the He’s western end—especially if his pursuers had guns.

From his vantage point high on the speeding machine, Stirling could see the full spread of the He and the random scattering of the other robots. He kept watching to the north, across the bare brown strips, and was surprised to note that a good five minutes had passed before one of the yellow structures, which had been tilling close to the He’s lateral axis, suddenly moved off in the direction of the village. Allowing two minutes turnaround time, he was going to have a lead of some fourteen minutes. He thought about the unexpected bonus for a moment before remembering that, in the absence of growing crops to be damaged, the villagers could summon a robot only by means of the flood-alarm system. It would have taken them some time to transport water to the end of a strip.

When he had manually tripped the relay which would ensure that the machine would travel right to the end of the strip, Stirling climbed around to the forward side of the beam and sat watching the transit area expand ahead of him. Beyond the He’s western rim, blue vistas of distance opened up, and Stirling’s wind-watered eyes picked out the ordered verticalities of the coastal conurbation standing out through the haze like a cut-out stage prop. The sun was setting redly in the shady immensities beyond the towers, and already the automobiles on the lower street levels were using their lights. Looking at the flickering points of brilliance, Stirling felt a suddenly intensified yearning to be back there, snug and tight in his own slot in civilization. I can make it, he thought in wonderment, I could be back home tonight. He felt an icy focus of anxiety grow in his stomach: after almost half a year in Heaven, it all seemed too good to be true.

At the end of the strip, the humming, vibrating machine slowed down and covered the last hundred yards at walking pace, while its baffled logic circuits exchanged arguments at the speed of light, Stirling waited his chance and sprang onto the raised transit area. Immediately, he was hit by the lower temperature; but he put his head down and began to run. The elevator terminal was almost five miles away to the north, and there was not time to coddle protesting lungs.

As he ran, Stirling discovered there were irregularities in the He’s shell field which permitted the ambient subzero temperatures outside to encroach a short distance at some points. This was the first evidence he had found of maintenance failure, and he wondered if the Food Technology Authority was beginning to win its battle against the lies. The shell field generators would be expensive to replace, and perhaps the East Coast administration had been forced to curtail its spending.

Although the shield itself was invisible under normal conditions, the areas where it was weakest were easily identifiable by the thick coating of frost which lay over everything, and by the raw pain which tore his lungs and throat each time he passed through. Stirling ran on steadily, amazed at the sheer efficiency of his body now that it was unhampered by its former blanket of fat. In each new sector he entered, a bright red scarecrow sprang into life and pursued him with flailing arms and a fusillade of loud reports; but he had learned that they moved on their own track system and for that reason were easily avoided.

He kept glancing back over his right shoulder, waiting to see a robot traveling westwards at speed. As the minutes went by and the lighted gantries of the elevator head became visible far in front, Stirling began to relax. He had begun to feel more confident the last time too—just before the sky fell in on him— but this time he had figured many more of the angles. The distance he had run, coupled with the effect of the thinner air near the shell failures, began to tell on him, and he felt his legs slow down of their own accord. Stirling tried forcing them to move faster; but after all, a wheedling voice told him, he was further ahead than he had dared hope to be.

When he finally saw a robot speeding out of the dusk that was gathering in the east, Stirling realized that, once again, he had underestimated the villagers. The robot was in the wrong place! He had been glancing backwards for signs of pursuit; but this machine, which was perhaps five miles out from the transit area, was thundering along a strip which ended half-a-mile ahead of him.

As geysers of dismay and anger fountained through his system, Stirling called upon suddenly available reserves of energy and discovered what it was like really to run. He experienced the sensation as a hunted animal experiences it. Skimming along over the frosted tracks, he saw that the robot was moving along a strip devoted to winter wheat. Somebody in the village had decided not to use the slower flood-alarm method of summoning a robot, and had run along the He’s eastern margin to the area where crops were still growing. That way they had saved a lot of time and—great cymbals of panic crashed in Stirling’s ears—would be only a matter of yards behind their quarry when they leapt out, fresh and eager, onto the transit area.

He tried to run faster, but his body had reached realms of exhaustion in which adrenalin was unable to perform its ancient duties. Beyond the reach of biological expedients, only human will kept Stirling’s arms and legs pumping in the desperate rhythms of flight. He heard his breath come and go in guttural shouts; his mouth filled with salt froth; and the horizons rocked uncontrollably about him. The distance between himself and the robot closed rapidly; he glimpsed dark figures poised along the beam; then he was past the point of intersection, with only seconds to spare. Shouts rang out close behind him as the ragged skirmishers sprang from their fantastic chariot.

There’s a fourth of a mile to go yet before you reach the monitor cameras at the elevator head. You’ll never make it— give up now before you burst your heart.

The voice in his head seemed to be that of a friend who genuinely loved him, but Stirling ignored it. He tried to find some miraculous loophole in the laws of body chemistry which would allow him to go faster, but knew at last that he had failed. A short spear skipped past him like a furious reptile; then something had chopped across his ankles. He fell forward, rolling and slithering, as his precious momentum squandered itself.

Stirling sensed, rather than saw, the villagers overtake him. Rough hands turned him over… . Dark figures loomed against the sky. … A knife was raised and began its downward curve… .

“Leave that man alone!”

Stirling barely heard the voice amid the roar of the blood torrents in his own system, but he saw the villagers freeze into black statues. He turned his head towards the voice and saw men running from the direction of the elevator head.

Men in the white uniforms of the Food Technology Authority.