Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Twelve

In the first light of morning, Stirling examined the effects of the blotch gun charge which had caught Melissa. There was a hand-sized blob of the strange metal at her waist, where she had been hit; and rigid tentacles radiated from it lapped around body and limbs. He discovered that the streamers could be uncoiled individually if he held them tightly and was careful not to let them snap back. The blotch gun’s efficacy depended on trussing the victim so securely that he was unable to exert any leverage to free himself. The only drawback to his releasing Melissa was a social one: the fast-moving tentacles had traversed every part of her body.

“Perhaps,” Stirling said as he worked to separate metal, clothing, and skin, “I should leave your arms till the end. This sort of thing always earns me a slap on the face.”

Melissa looked up at him with a wickedness he had not expected. “You mean this is the way you usually get your women?”

“I don’t need to use force,” he said haughtily. “Some-tunes I just sneak up from behind and chloroform them.”

Melissa laughed easily, seemingly at peace with her world, now that she was going back to the village. Stirling was amazed at her inability to understand that the He, as she and the other villagers knew it, was virtually a thing of the past. The vacation in the sky was drawing to a close.

He stood up and cautiously looked out of the nest of tall winter wheat in which the sled was lying. There was no sign of pursuit; but he thought he could detect figures moving on the roof of the He’s central power station projecting up out of the haze several miles behind.

“Lomax seems to have taken over the power station,” he said. “They really mean business, Melissa. How many months or weeks does Johnny think you’ll be able to hang on now?”

“Victor,” she replied, using his name for the first time, “Johnny didn’t take over the village by muscle power alone. I know Dad didn’t like him; but he has qualities which Dad might have recognized if he hadn’t been growing timid and afraid towards the end.”

“But what can he do when a thing like this is sprung on him?”

“That’s the point. It wasn’t sprung on him. Johnny knew about those men the first day they arrived a month ago to build their headquarters. He’s been making plans —and I think you ruined them by breaking away just when you did.”

Stirling felt swamped. “Plans! Have you been up here so long you’ve forgotten what you’re up against? The Food Technology Authority, the Government, and the people of the United States’—that’s what you’re up against. What plan could compensate for odds of a million-to-one against you?”

Melissa looked unperturbed. “Johnny says it isn’t force that counts—it’s leverage.”

“Come on,” Stirling said heavily. “We’d better leave this thing and go on to the village on foot.”

It was mid-morning when they neared the village, but there was no sign of the thin columns of smoke from the central cooking fires. Stirling was scanning the grass-shrouded tank structures on either side as they reached the area representing the community’s northern limits. Even his practiced eye could detect no life; and he decided the villagers had moved out, or were better at concealment than he had realized.

“I thought we had seen the last of you,” a voice said from behind.

Stirling spun around and saw Paddy walking a few paces to the rear. He was carrying a rusted, but obviously still functional, pistol in one brown hand.

“Put that thing away,” Melissa said quickly. “You can tell Johnny he’d have seen the last of me if Vic hadn’t been there.”

Paddy shrugged. “You tell him. He doesn’t listen to me much.”

When Stirling was shepherded into the Council’s hut, it looked pretty much as it did the first night he had seen it. The same faintly burning glow-globe—brought by some thoughtful rebel many years earlier—was casting a sickly light over the matted walls. Johnny was, as usual, stripped to the waist, and his eyes burned at Stirling through reddened rims. He looked like a human time bomb.

“I hear you brought Melissa back. Is she all right?”

Stirling almost winced as he heard the reedy caricature of a voice which issued from the prosthetic at Johnny’s throat. He nodded.

“For that much, thanks.”

Stirling felt a pang of guilt which prompted him to explain. “I like Melissa. I wasn’t doing you any favors, Johnny.” “You weren’t doing me any favors.” Johnny laughed. “Oh, brother!”

Stirling allowed some time to pass in silence to give the emotional potentials a chance to subside. “Listen, Johnny. I’m truly sorry about all this, but isn’t it time you woke up? I dislike the F.T.A. as much as you do—if for different reasons—but you’re fighting them the wrong way.”

“How would you do it?”

“With publicity. The Authority has taken a risk by moving into the lies with the elections coming up this year, and they didn’t expect to find anybody already in residence. That’s your lever against Lomax and the others. Make enough noise and you’ll tear down the walls of Jericho.”

Johnny traced patterns in the dust at his feet. “How about a radio broadcast from the He direct to everybody in the States?”

“Ideal—but how would you do it?

“From the power station.”

“You’d never get near it. Lomax has men all over it, and there’s no cover for miles around.”

“Yeah. He has now. Before you gave the whole show away there was no … Anyway, there is still a way we can get in. Will you help? I need at least ten men.”

“Ten?” Stirling began to feel uneasy. “But you’ve over a hundred here already. Why do you need another volunteer?”

Johnny looked up, smiling crookedly, and Stirling felt a sensation which had not troubled him hi months—an icy awareness of gray clouds prowling beneath his feet.

“Johnny, you’re not…”

A woman screamed outside, and the sound was choked off by the angry rattle of machine rifles. Stirling and Johnny dived for the door. They found Paddy kneeling in the grass, hands holding his stomach, while deltas of blood coursed over his knuckles. West of the village four of the large sleds were shuttling just above soil bed level, and gunners on board them sprayed everything in sight.

Stirling lay prone in the long grass and watched the big sleds waltz and skid across the sky as their rifles searched through the village by filling the air with howling ricochets. It took less than three minutes for the gunners to empty their magazines; but time itself seemed to have been shocked into immobility. When the sleds finally skimmed away on full boost, silence came down hard for a few seconds; then, somewhere in the distance, a child began to cry. Johnny jumped to his feet and went to Paddy, who had fallen on one side.

“He’s dead,” Johnny said as Stirling approached. Something had added a new degree of distortion to his voice, beyond what the failing prosthetic could do. “He didn’t even like me.”

“The bastards,” Stirling whispered in disbelief. “The dirty bastards.”

“Well, how about it, big brother? Do we hit the power station?”

Stirling looked at the fifteen-foot eastern wall of the He, beyond which the invisible wind-rivers ran free, and his mouth went dry. “Is that the only way?”

“That’s the only way, big brother. Over and under.”

They waited until the following morning and set off at first light to cover the maximum distance before dark.

Stirling climbed the crude ladder which had been raised in the lee of a water tank where it could not be seen by F.T.A. observers using binoculars. At the top he looked down once. Far below him lay arctic kingdoms of tumbled clouds, and beyond that again—visible through ragged tears in the vapor fabric—the gray Atlantic waited implacably. Microscopic ships trailed their miniature white chevrons through the close-packed corrugations of ocean waves.

Stirling wrenched his eyes away from the aerial immensities, and concentrated on the knotted rope which snaked down the outer side of the wall. Johnny had gone down first, while the rope was swinging free at the bottom end, and had tied it to the He’s substructure. Heedless of how ungainly he might look to the men behind, Stirling rolled carefully over the metallic parapet and began working his way down the rope. The cold sliced into him immediately, in spite of the extra layers of clothing. At the bottom end he found himself looking into an incredible, upside-down landscape of massive, ice-incrusted lattice girders. Their multiple triangulations spanned the bays between the beams of the He’s main grid, which carried in its boxy thickness the stolid, patient negative-gravity units. Johnny was straddling the broad back of the outer main tie, his hard body masked by heavy clothing, straps, and coils of rope. And, three miles under his feet, the gray Atlantic Still waited implacably.

Transferring his weight from the rope to the main tie gave Stirling one bad moment; then he was sitting behind Johnny, listening to the lowing of the wind. He soon discovered that normal consciousness was impossible under the hideously alien circumstances. As the other eight members of the party came down the rope, Stirling concentrated on shrinking his radius of perception until the only real things in the universe were his own body and the narrow highway of icy metal underneath.

Johnny gave a signal and, still straddling the main tie, began pulling himself along towards the intersection of the nearest longitudinal lattice girder. Stirling and the others jockeyed along behind him like children playing a dangerous game. At the juncture it was necessary to stand up and edge round a massive vertical member to get onto the new tie. While trusting his life to the grip of numbed fingers on glassy metal, Stirling vowed to be deliriously happy twenty-four hours a day when he got back into the Compression. Johnny kept moving on ahead, tirelessly dragging himself along by his arms. In the line behind him, Stirling heard Dix swearing monotonously as the physical strain built up. Dix had survived his fall from the robot’s turret—apparently without injury—but on learning that Stirling had been accepted as an equal member of the raiding party, he had relapsed into a watchful silence. The group’s painful progress was slowed down even further when they encountered huge nodes, where structural members intersected in three planes. It had taken them over an hour to travel a fourth of a mile when Johnny signaled the others to catch up. He moved a little way along a lateral tie, and the villagers formed a silent audience on the nightmarish crossroads.

“It’s getting warmer. There’s less ice this far in from the edge.” The wind noises made it difficult to hear the ventriloquist’s falsetto to which Johnny’s voice had been reduced. “At this rate it’ll take us a couple of days to reach the power plant, and we’ll be finished when we do make it.”

“So what do we. do?”

“We walk. Just like we’d do up top. That way we can reach the plant before dark.”

Before anybody had time to protest, Johnny stood up, stepped confidently across onto the longitudinal tie, and walked along it by leaning slightly into the north wind.

Feeling gray and old, Stirling followed him, while he told himself that the slowly shifting masses far below might seem like clouds. But that was impossible because everybody knew the sky was always above your head, not ever licking around your heels. Somehow he managed to keep putting one foot past the other, until the act of leaning on the wind—at an unconsciously computed angle which balanced the lateral pressure of air streams against the lethal yearnings of Mother Earth—became an automatic process. And, even at the faster rate of travel, it was dusk when they neared the downward-projecting hulk of the He’s central power house.

They had a light supper of wheat cakes and water, then lashed themselves in sitting positions against vertical struts to wait out the long night. Stirling finally went to sleep, with his eyes fixed on the softly flickering lights of Newburyport glimmering through the indigo haze that lay to the west.

The power station had one door which could be reached from the underside. It was there for the benefit of the human maintenance crew who took a trip up to the He once every ten years to renew the fuel cartridges in its closed-system reactor. The trouble was that the crew always arrived in a twenty-foot-square raft which fitted snugly into a docking area adjoining the door. A space had been left for it in the He’s structure—which meant the villagers found themselves staring at the rectangular door across a dismaying void filled with ocean-reflected light. The door was fitted with a conventional handle and lock which had a ghastly incongruity, when three miles of nothing waited at the threshold.

Johnny worked his way around the docking bay to the power station’s streaming wall, tied a rope to a vertical strut, and went right round the opening again to the opposite side. When he also tied the rope there, it spanned the gap about a foot out from the wall and on a level a few feet from the top of the door. He repeated the operation again, working lower down, creating what might have been regarded as a bridge by a very desperate man.

“Neat,” Stirling shouted. “But what about the lock?”

“My job,” said a small man called Borges, who was sitting close to Stirling. “That one’s a pushover—I can tell from here. I don’t know why they bothered in the first place. I mean, nobody’s likely to break into a place like … Well, it isn’t much of a lock.”

“That’s the way I lose most of my arguments too,” Stirling said sympathetically. “Good luck.”

“I got it already. I don’t weigh much; so that rope isn’t likely to snap under my feet.” Borges edged his way around the docking bay to where Johnny was standing. He hesitated for a moment, whispered something to himself, then raised his arms while Johnny tied a third rope around his chest to act as a lifeline. With a final and strangely shamefaced grin at the other villagers, Borges got into the plastic ropes, slid his feet along the lower, and held onto the higher one by twining both arms around it. The ropes bore his weight with very little sagging; but Stirling had learned they were woven from the high-tensile plastic used in the agricultural robots’ control lines. At the door Borges took some fine tools from his pouch and went to work on the lock. Two minutes later he cautiously tried the handle, nodded, and came back along the ropes. Pearly morning light poured upwards around him.

“I told you I was lucky,” he said as he found his place beside Stirling again.

Four of the party were equipped with pistols—which apparently had been brought to the lie many years earlier by rebels, who were taking no chances about what they would find. The weapons had been absorbed into a communal armory and were being carried on the raid by Johnny, Dix, and two other Council members: a narrow-shouldered, balding man called Forsythe, and a muscular Chinese known as Theodore. These four were to go in first, followed by the other villagers armed with knives and stubby spears. Stirling, who had not been given a weapon, was to be last into the station.

Johnny edged his way along the ropes, tried the door handle, pulled it open, and vanished into the darkness inside.

Dix followed, then Forsythe and Theodore.

Stirling listened intently, wondering if Lomax had any men right in the station and not merely camped out on the roof. There was a delay while the advance party sized up their immediate surroundings; then the door opened and Theodore signaled the others to come on. Four men went along the ropes one at a time and scrambled in through the door. Only Borges and Stirling remained behind. If I were Lomax, Stirling thought uneasily, I would put my men inside.

“Well, here goes.” Borges was still grimacing with relief at having got back safely from his first trip across the void. He went carefully along the ropes and was almost at the door when muffled gunfire made itself heard above the wind. There were several separate shots, followed by the continuous thunder of an automatic weapon. Borges froze, and his face, a contorted mask of shock, turned back to Stirling.

“Don’t stop,” Stirling shouted. “Get inside.”

Borges shook his head and began slithering back the way he had come. The automatic weapon sounded again, metal-tongued holes appeared in the sheeting of the door, and the door itself abruptly burst open as a body hit it from the inside. The swinging edge jerked the ropes away from the wall, taking the lower one out from under Borges’ feet. He fell silently, pedaling his legs like a man running for his life, shrinking into a frantic manikin which was swallowed by the impassive clouds. Stirling snatched his own soul back from a vicarious dive into eternity and strung his body into the vibrating ropes. The rational part of his mind immediately dissociated itself from the venture, and he moved mechanically, hardly aware of the significance of the drifting white and gray masses below. He clawed open the door, threw himself into the opening, and sprawled across the body that lay just inside. It was wearing a white F.T.A. uniform.

Stirling looked up and saw Dix standing a few feet away with an automatic rifle cradled on his hip. His lower teeth were displayed hi an inhuman grin, and he kept the gun pointing at Stirling’s face. Stirling was beginning to feel hopelessly afraid when there was a sound of running feet, and Johnny and Theodore appeared from behind a screen of heavily shielded cables. “All clear up top,” Johnny said. “I see you got one.”

“Yeah.” Dix nodded complacently. “I got one.”

“Two,” Stirling corrected. “Borges was just outside the door when you decided to have your bit of fun. You got two.” He kept his eyes fixed on Johnny’s as he spoke, and saw them cloud momentarily with pain and doubt.

“I had to do it, Jaycee,” Dix said sullenly. “That guy came at me like a crazy man.”

“He must have been a crazy man.” Stirling got to his feet. “Considering you had his gun.”

Johnny hesitated, fighting some lonely battle far inside himself; then he shrugged and turned away, avoiding Stirling’s eyes.

“Why are you standing about?” Johnny’s voice filled Stirling with a dismayed sadness. “The world’s waiting to hear from us.”