Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Five

There were no broad meadows in Heaven.

In Stirling’s childhood dreams the He had been a place of rolling pastures, gentle hills and clear streams—a montage of all the ideal features of a world he had never known. Much later, he had realized that, if the He resembled any feature of prewar America, it would probably be a huge market garden; but the boyish visions had persisted, overlaying deduced fact with inherited fantasy.

The lie was divided into plots of a hundred feet, and each plot ran the whole of its fifteen-mile length. Each was tended by an agricultural “robot”—if the word could be applied to a machine resembling a beam crane which straddled the plot and could move along it on metal tracks at speeds up to fifty miles an hour. Hanging from the underside of the beam was a room-sized casing which could move laterally to reach any point on the plot. And beneath the casing clustered a tangle of multi-jointed spider legs, tipped with the tools of its trade: spades, nozzles, knives, metal claws. Some of the appendages had eyes.

Stirling had been walking for almost ten minutes before he got his first good look at one of the machines. The sector through which he was moving was planted with coarse beans on both sides—the heavy foliage dappled here and there by white flowers with huge petals like butterfly Wings. There was a choking smell of rank greenness; and Stirling, walking in the sunken track bed, found himself passing along a narrow alley of vegetation whose walls were higher than his head. He had never seen anything approaching it, even in underground hydroponics plants. A part of him tried to respond gratefully to the private world of green silences, but who could enjoy solitude?

I’m alone. The thought kept hammering at him. I’m alone, alone, alone.

Never in his life having been separated from other human beings by more than twenty feet, never having been free of the insensate pressure of walls and ceilings, he discovered completely new levels of pain in merely standing upright and walking when his instincts were to find a dark hole and crawl in. Every sense channel seemed to purvey its own brand of agony. He kept his gaze fixed on his feet and walked slowly, heading for the distant boundary of the He where, logic told him, a rebel would hide.

The rails under his feet had been vibrating for several seconds before Stirling realized he was in danger again. He raised his eyes and saw the bright yellow, crab-legged structure of an agricultural robot bearing down him with the speed of an automobile. He threw himself to one side, and the huge machine swept by with only inches to spare, its steel wheels singing viciously on the track. It disappeared in the direction of the transit area with its spider legs drawn up beneath the sentiently revolving turret.

Stirling began walking faster. There had been a strangely purposeful air about the robot’s furious rush. It might have been returning to base for new supplies; but— there was no way of telling how sensitive it was about the welfare of its crop—it could have been hurrying to investigate the damage Stirling had done when he leaped into the greenery. He guessed that the robot could keep in touch with sensor units located every few yards and that it was tuned to detect damage by, say, picking up the smell of newly released sap.

And there was that crimson metal demon which had rushed him in such frightening, insane determination to smash him with its arms. What was its function? Stirling got a momentary vision of the red object summoning one of the great agricultural robots, mounting its back, and going hunting for the intruder.

The idea would have been ridiculous if considered in the smugness of the Record’s office, but Heaven had been nothing like he had expected, and up here it seemed almost probable. Anything could happen in this world of vivid green and aching blue which had the simplicity of a nursery rhyme landscape—and all the underlying menace.

Thinking it over, Stirling was struck by bow little he had known about the lies. Slightly anachronistic they might be; but the air-borne farms were still an important factor in the country’s food supplies, and people were bound to be interested. The absence of adequate feature coverage in all the visual media could only mean that Hodder and his cohorts of faceless men in the F.T.A. were pulling strings for reasons of their own. In view of all the virulently anti-F.T.A. articles he had written, Stirling concluded, it was a little surprising that he had been allowed to continue in the newspaper business at all. It would have been child’s play for one of the Authority’s puppets in the East Coast administration to have had him removed permanently. The so-called Press Council, set up after 1992 as the government’s major propaganda instrument, had absolute control of all communications media; and all its members were, directly or indirectly, F.T.A. nominees. Perhaps, then, the material he had written had not been as good as he had thought at the time.

Stirling scowled as he tried to keep up his speed between the closely spaced tracks. Having his views suppressed was one thing; not even being noticed by the suppressors was another.

There was no way he could estimate how fast he was moving; and, after two hours’ steady marching, he felt like a man utterly remote from civilization and swallowed up in an alien dimension of green life—like an ant crossing a lawn. So far, he had seen nothing growing except beans: but a mental calculation showed him he was moving between only two of the hundred-foot strips out of some five hundred similar plots running the length of the He. Summoning up all his resolution, he heaved himself up onto the level of the soil bed and looked out across the broad acres. The scene was unexpectedly beautiful.

Stirling had not realized vegetation could assume so many different shades of the one basic color. The mid-evening sun had moved behind him. Its light washed along ruler-straight strips of green which converged in the distance and ranged from bottle green in color to near lemon, like the warp of a huge tapestry or the striations in a rare precious stone. Agricultural robots were visible on many of the strips; they flamed with ocherous brilliance in the sunlight and looking less inimical when working quietly at their appointed tasks.

A fourth of a mile ahead, and slightly to Stirling’s right, the flatness of the He was broken by a large windowless block. He identified it as the upper side of the central power station which he had seen from the skimmer on the way out from Newburyport. The sight of the station was an uneasy reminder that, right at that moment, clouds were drifting below his feet, that everything he could see was supported on thin air by a mathematical trick—a judo hold which man had put on gravity to turn some of its strength back on itself.

Stirling got down into the more reassuring confines of the track bed and began walking again. At this rate, held back by the ankle-twisting rails, it would be nightfall by the time he reached the far end of the He. The cuts on his shoulders and lower legs were stiffening up and becoming painful—another reminder that he had not simply opened a magic door into another dimension. Duke Bennett would have to be dealt with as soon as Stirling had his feet on solid ground again.

He kept going for another hour, then sat down to rest and eat one of the protein tablets from his pack. Through sheer force of conditioning, he had almost finished the dry, sickly compress of marine micro-organisms before realizing he could have fresh vegetables with it. Stirling had eaten beans perhaps three times in his whole life, always at Christmas. Filled with a strangely exhilarating sense of breaking every rule in the book, he broke off one of the velvety, still immature pods and slit it open with his thumb. The pale green beans were cool when lifted from the moist, white lining, and they tasted good. He began gathering them in handfuls.

As he ate, Stirling realized he felt quite warm—which was surprising considering that the He was three miles above the Atlantc. At this height the daytime temperature in summer should have been below freezing. Now that he thought of it, the transit area had been thick with frost, and the air in that region had been painful to breathe. The builders of the lies must have provided heating elements for the protection of their crops, which meant another detail of the boyhood plans had been wrong. Johnny had not needed Dad Considine’s boots, after all.

Stirling began to wonder how Johnny had made out since his arrival in Heaven. He had been aloft for a month now and had had time to establish himself, perhaps with a tent if there was a margin between the end of the soil beds and the outermost edge of the He. The concept appalled Stirling. While he and billions of others had been sheltered below in snug herd-warmth, could his kid brother have crouched over the ashes of a cooking fire and stared into the darkness of the lie with bleak, watchful eyes? What had Bennett said? A guy would need to be sick.

Shouldering the pack, Stirling stood up and moved on, suddenly anxious to make contact with his brother as soon as possible. The possibility had occurred to him that Johnny could have died on the He. Up here a comparatively minor accident or illness could result in a skull bleaching among the green stalks, eye sockets choked up with soil.

Sometime later, Stirling found himself approaching the yellow angularities of another robot. From the distance, it appeared to be stationary; but, when he got close, he saw it was rolling along at a slow walking pace. Several appendages were extended from the turret down into the bean rows on his left. He clambered into the soil bed on his right and hid until the huge machine had inched its way past If, as he suspected, there was one machine to each plot, he could expect to reach the eastern end of the lie without any further encounters and without being seen by robot eyes.

It was dusk when he discovered he was nearing the edge. A suggestion of a high wall began to emerge from the gathering darkness ahead, and there seemed to be a considerable open space between it and the ends of the soil beds. Stirling’s legs were aching from the long and difficult walk, and he was tired. He began to feel something approaching a childish glee. What a shock Johnny was going to get! If he was camped somewhere along the lateral strip, Stirling was bound to find him shortly; and it would be good—even up here—to sit down with his own brother and talk things over, just as they had done in bed at nights when Heaven was only a shadow in the sky. Stirling suspected that exhaustion, strain, and perhaps a lack of oxygen were playing tricks with his emotional balance; but it would be good to see Johnny again, regardless of the circumstances.

He finally reached the end of the fifteen-mile alley of vegetation and stepped out into an open area, which disappeared into the gathering twilight on both sides. The space was a good hundred yards across and was bounded on the eastern side by a high metallic wall, beyond which was the unthinkable. Almost immediately his nostrils picked a strange, heavy smell eddying on the evening breezes—a stench of decay. He looked around hoping to see the orange speck of a fire in the distance.

There was light, but not from a fire.

Ghostly shapes drifted hi the air close to the wall, luminescently flickering with cold, purple radiance. Instinctively Stirling took a step backwards, but he was much too late.

A bomb of pain exploded in his head and he fell forward, unable to suppress a mental scream as the three-mile well of darkness opened up to receive him.