Special Deliverance

14

The Brigadier strode forward to greet them.

“The long-lost lambs,” he said. “We are glad to see you.”

Sandra ran forward and embraced Mary. “We had been watching for you,” she said. “Late last night we saw your fire. Or at least I thought it was your fire. The Parson wasn’t sure.”

The Parson pulled down the corners of his mouth. “In this barbarous land,” he said, “one can be sure of nothing. It is a place of snares.”

“The city looks deserted,” said Lansing. “We would have come down late yesterday, but it had a fearsome look. We decided to wait till morning.”

“It is not only deserted,” said the Parson, “it is dead. It died very long ago. The buildings are crumbling of their very age.”

“Still, we have found a couple of things,” said the Brigadier. “What appears to have been an administration building, facing on a plaza. We’ve set up headquarters there, an operating base. And we have found inside it what we call a graphics tank. Mostly ruined, of course, but one corner of it—”

“In another room,” said Sandra, “there is a group of statuary. The only art we’ve seen. Carved out of the whitest stone. And the exquisite work! It looks like statuary carved out of souls.”

The Parson grunted at her. “But we have found nothing that throws a ray of light on why we’re here. You,” he said to the Brigadier, “were certain that we would. You were certain we would find people here…”

“One meets each situation as it comes,” said the Brigadier. “You do not tear your hair nor weep nor lie down and kick your heels upon the ground when a circumstance does not meet your liking.” “Have you had breakfast?” Sandra asked. “No,” Mary told her. “When we saw you here, we came down immediately.”

“Neither have we,” said Sandra. “So let’s go back to headquarters and all eat together.”

The Brigadier led the way and Lansing fell in step beside him.

“We’ll have to go a little slowly,” Mary said, “so that Jurgens can keep up.”

The Brigadier turned about. “Well, all right,” he said. “Jurgens, how are you getting on?”

“A little slowly,” Jurgens said. “But I am all right.”

The Brigadier started off again at a somewhat slower pace. “If it’s not one damn thing to hold you up,” he said to Lansing, “then it’s another.”

“You’re the only one,” Lansing told him, “who is in any hurry.”

“It’s hard to change,” said the Brigadier. “I’ve been in a hurry all my life. Back home you had to be on your toes every blessed moment or someone would sneak up and clobber you.”

“And you loved it. You loved every minute of it.”

“I’ll say this,” said the Brigadier. “I clobbered more than ever clobbered me.”

He led the way down what once had been a street, but now was little better than a trail. Many of the flat stone paving blocks that had floored the street were canted out of position, and huge blocks of stone that had fallen from buildings on either side added to the clutter. Vines and shrubs grew in the soil that had been exposed by the upheaval of the stone. In the crevices between the blocks that still remained in place grew grass and weeds.

The buildings were not tall — four and five storeys for the most part. Doors and windows gaped. The stone of which the structures were built was either red or brown.

“Oxidation,” said the Brigadier. “The very stone is rotting. No damage — no violent damage, that is. No sign of fire, no deliberate wrecking. The damage that you see is weathering and time. It has been looted, though. Perhaps time after time. There is virtually nothing left. At one time there were a lot of people here, but none now. The whole damn city’s empty.”

“You said you found something. I think you said a graphics tank. What’s a graphics tank?”

“I don’t know if it’s one or not. I called it that. I could be wrong. Back home there are graphics tanks. You feed problems into them—”

“Military problems?”

“Well, yes, mostly military problems. A sort of war games deal. Factors are fed in and the tank works them out, showing what would happen. Showing it pictorially. That way it can be understood the better. The one we found here is ruined, for the most part dead. One small corner of it is still operating. As if you were looking out a window at another world. At times you see creatures in the picture.”

“Maybe creatures that once lived here.” “I don’t think so. This city is designed for humans, or approximate humans. The doors and windows are the right size. The stairs are the kind of stairs that can be climbed by humans.”

The city had a creepy feeling. Despite its emptiness, something still lurked in it, something hidden, something hiding, watching and waiting. Lansing found himself closely examining each building as they came up to it, alert against the elusive flicker of something that had been watching, ducking out of sight.

“So you feel it, too,” said the Brigadier. “That, dead as the place may seem, there is someone left.”

“It’s just natural caution on my part,” said Lansing. “I’m scared by shadows.”

“It may give you comfort to know that I feel much the same. As an old military person, I watch for the hidden enemy. I never go it blind. All the evidence is that the city is empty, and still I watch against the hidden enemy. I would feel better if we had some weapons. Can you imagine an expedition such as this without a weapon to its name? I still think that rascally innkeeper was lying in his teeth when he said he hadn’t any.”

“Maybe we don’t need them,” Lansing said. “So far on the trip there has been no need of them.”

“That doesn’t factor,” said the Brigadier. “You pack a weapon a hundred miles, or a thousand, to use it only once.” A short while later they came out onto the plaza.

“That building over there,” said the Brigadier, pointing. “That’s where we are camped.”

It was the largest building facing on the plaza and though in falling-down condition, it seemed somewhat less haggard than the others. The plaza was large, with a number of streets running into it. All around it crouched the brown-red buildings with blocks of stone that had fallen from them lying in their fronts. The building the Brigadier had indicated had one tower still standing and broad stone stairs leading to the entrance.

“Dust lies everywhere,” said the Brigadier. “On the streets, even in the center of the plaza, in the buildings, everywhere you go. It’s the dust of dying stone, the wearing down of stone. In the building where we camped, we found old tracks in sheltered areas where no breeze could reach — the spoor of others who had gone before us. Other visitors, I suspect, very like ourselves. I am fairly certain one such group may be just ahead of us, for some of the tracks we found were fresh. They don’t stay fresh for long. More dust settles on them, or they are blown away or covered by each little gust of wind.”

Lansing looked back and saw that the rest of the band was close behind them. Jurgens was doing nobly, hobbling along at a better clip than was his usual gait. Mary and Sandra walked on either side of him and behind them came the Parson, resembling a stalking crow, with his head bent low, chin almost resting on his chest.

“I must warn you,” said the Brigadier. “We must watch the Parson. He is, without doubt, a madman. He is the most cross-grained person I have ever met and there is no reason in him.”

Lansing made no answer and, side by side, the two of them climbed the stairs that led up to the entrance of the building.

It was gloomy inside and there was the smell of wood-smoke. In the center of the foyer a tiny red eye gleamed at them — the burned-down campfire with a great pile of wood to one side of it — and yellow packsacks leaned against the wood. The faint flicker of firelight glinted off the polished surface of a metal cooking pot.

Even in the silence the interior of the building had a booming emptiness, and the sound of their footsteps on the floor came hollowly echoing back to them. High above their heads massive arches disappeared into a gloom that deepened into night. Wild shadows seemed to dance in the emptiness.

The others came in behind them and the conversation of Mary and Sandra, chattering at one another, set up a series of rolling, distant, booming echoes that made it seem there were a hundred hidden people talking deep inside the structure.

All of them walked together to the fire. The Brigadier stirred it up and piled on more wood. Flames began to leap, eating their way along the wood, and the shadows ran all about the walls. Lansing caught a sense of a horde of winged shapes flying high in the vault between the looming arches.

“I’ll get busy with breakfast, but it will take awhile,” said Sandra. “Brigadier, why don’t you take the others to see the graphics tank. It’s not too far away.”

“Good idea,” said the Brigadier. “Let me get my flashlight. Farther back it gets a little dark.”

“I’ll stay and help you,” Mary told Sandra. “Later on I can see the tank.”

The Brigadier led the way, cutting a swath before them with the flashlight. The thumping of Jurgens’s crutch kept the echoes rolling back at them.

“The tank is witchery,” grumbled the Parson. “It is no fit subject for anyone to look upon. I would recommend that we complete the ruin of it. A few sharp blows with the blunt end of an axe should do it.”

“You try it,” growled the Brigadier, “and I’ll use the axe on you. The tank is one feeble remnant left to us of what, at one time, must have been a talented and sophisticated people. What it is, I do not pretend to know.”

“You call it a graphics tank,” said Lansing.

“I know I call it that because it’s the handiest description that came to mind. But I’m sure it’s more than that. I think it’s a reaching out into another place, using a knowledge and a technique we have not yet thought of and that our people may never think of.”

“And best we don’t,” the Parson said. “There are things that are better left alone. I’m convinced that throughout the universe there is a great morality—”

“A pox on your morality,” said the Brigadier. “You always mumble of it. You mumble all the time. Instead of mumbling, why don’t you speak out?”

The Parson did not reply.

They finally reached the graphics tank. It was located in a room in the far corner of the building. There was nothing else in the room and at first glance, the tank didn’t look like much. It was a large mass that could have been described most readily as a mound of scrap. It was dead and faceless and covered by dust. Here and there the rusty red of eroding metal showed through the dust and grime.

“What I still fail to understand,” said the Brigadier, “is how one small segment of it can still be operating while the rest of it is junk.”

“Maybe what you are seeing,” said Lansing, “is the business end of it. Maybe you are seeing all that ever could be seen — the viewing component. The rest of it may be no more than operative mechanism that still is barely hanging together. Someone stamp his foot too hard on the floor, and the last surviving connection that makes it function will crumble and then all of it goes dead.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said the Brigadier. “You may be right, but I doubt you are. I think this pile of junk was, at one time, a panoramic viewing screen. What we have left is just one corner of it.”

He rounded the end of the heap of junk and stopped, snapping off the flashlight.

“Have a look,” he said.

What they saw was something that looked like a twenty-five-inch television screen, although the outline of the screen was jagged.

Within the jagged screen lay a haunting, red-tinted twilight world. In the foreground a clump of faceted, tumbled boulders glittered in the dim light of the unseen sun.

“Like diamonds, don’t you think?” asked the Brigadier. “A clump of diamond boulders!”

“I couldn’t say,” said Lansing. “I have slight acquaintance with diamonds.”

The diamond boulders, if they were diamonds, stood on a sandy plain with sparse vegetation, occasional clumps of wiry grass and low-growing shrubs that were scrawny and prickly and in their conformation gave the illusion of animals — strange animals, certainly, but still more animal than plant. On the distant skyline half a dozen trees were etched against the red-tinged sky, although, looking at them, Lansing could not be certain they were trees. They were humped in a grotesque manner and their roots (if they were roots) did not go straight into the ground, but were also humped along the surface, looking somewhat like the humped posture of a traveling worm. The trees, he knew, must be huge for the details to show so sharply from so far away.

“Is that what you always see?” asked Lansing. “The scene always is the same?” “Always the same,” said the Brigadier. A blur flickered across the screen, left to right, going very fast. For an instant, as if a camera had clicked in his brain, Lansing caught its shape. Basically it was humanoid — it had two arms, two legs, a head — but it was not human; it was very far from human. The neck was thin and long, the head small, the line of the neck extending up to the top of the skull and the head hanging down in front of the neck, both neck and head so slanted from its desperate speed that the head was almost horizontal with the ground. The outthrust jaw was massive, but the face (if there was a face at all) was tiny. The entire body was slanted forward, in the direction of its speed, both the arms and legs pumping. The arms, which were longer than a human’s arms, ended in blobs that were not hands, and the one lifted foot (the other buried in the sand) ended in two claws. It seemed to be a dull gray color, but that, Lansing realized, might have been an implied coloration occasioned by the blurring speed at which it moved.

“Is this something new?” asked Lansing. “Have you seen it before?”

“We’ve seen it once before,” said the Parson. “If not this one, another very like it.”

“Running each time?”

“Each time running,” said the Parson.

Lansing said to the Brigadier. “You told me creatures. You said that you’d seen creatures here. More than one, apparently.”

“There is a spider thing,” said the Brigadier, “that lives in the boulder clump. Probably not a spider, but that’s as close an analogy as I can summon up. A spider has eight legs; this thing has more than eight, although it’s hard to tell — they’re always twisted up so it’s impossible to count them. Usually you can see it peeking out, but it’s hiding now. It’s pure white, very hard to see in the diamond glitter. Every once in a while there is a three-legged egg that strolls across the screen. The body is egg-shaped, with slots running all the way around the upper end of it. Sensory organs, I assume. The three legs are hoofed and there seem to be no knee joints. It flings each leg stiffly forward as it strolls along. Cool, nonchalant, not scared of anything. Yet, so far as I can see, totally without protection of any sort at all.”

“A place of horrors,” said the Parson. “Something that no God-fearing man should allow himself to look upon.”