“Take their word for it and go,” I said.
“While the drells remain up here talking about me behind my back. They’ll say I couldn’t hack it because I’m a woman.”
Spencer hushed her with a touch. “You gave plenty and were ready to give more. Now they’re offering you something to take away. Don’t question it.” He looked around at me. “I, too. They’ve given me the boot.”
“I can’t believe it!”
“They haven’t done it right,” said Will. “They’ll have us going home thinking we weren’t good enough.”
“No, you must be hacked to pieces first,” I said. “Your bodies mustn’t be whole or you’ve held something back. You two can go ahead and complain. As for me, I’ll crow every inch of the way down this black mountain.”
Spencer didn’t look at me. “Your name isn’t on the list. They haven’t dismissed you.”
Forgetting that I carried the body of an alien in a paper bag, I hurried out of the room and down the hall to the foyer where the duty roster was posted. The area was empty except for Hallistair, who stood looking at the names with a black expression.
“Here,” I said, thrusting the bag into his hands. While he opened it, I studied the list and found that several people had been excused from weapon duty. Too many, in my opinion.
Meanwhile Hallistair shrieked, dropped the bag and ran away. I was left to ponder upon Sargoth’s motives in scrapping most of the staff.
“It’s just that we’re going to make more use of fewer resources,” Jolanne said to me after I managed to corner her at a table in the cafeteria. It seemed incongruous to me that she would need the same kind of nourishment as I, but such was the case. I couldn’t exactly see the chewed wads sliding down her gullet, though I tried, the same as I had once tried to watch the passage of food down Sargoth’s hatch.
Jolanne didn’t appear to be embarrassed or annoyed that I was so attentive, but calmly forked her meal into her mouth and listened to me.
“What you mean is that fewer recruits will be assaulting the weapon more frequently,” I said.
“Yes, I believe that’s what I tried to say.”
“Why?”
“It has to be obvious. We’ve been wasting everything up here for far too long without fighting a winning battle. It’s time we changed our tactics.”
“Which will be?”
“Sorry, you’ll get no more info from me. Go hunt up Mills, or Sargoth as you call him, and pump him for a while.”
She agitated me sufficiently to make my finger tingle. “What about the creature that tried to kill me in my room?”
“It would be better if you had managed not to lose it.”
“I don’t think I lost it. I think someone stole it. I set it down on a bench for a minute and while my back was turned it disappeared.”
“I can’t form an opinion about something you haven’t got.”
I hadn’t had any appetite to begin with and now I couldn’t even pretend to eat. Laying down my fork I stared at her smooth face. Her eye stared at me like a winking emerald. “You know, don’t you? All of you know perfectly well that Hallistair is from the dark side. You know he has a personal vendetta against me. I know you know. What I don’t know is why you don’t care.”
I was standing on the blue line wondering if I was going to slip off the girder and plunge into the black ocean below when a small hard object struck me in the back. Turning slowly and carefully, I saw Leece standing well behind me. He had a pea shooter with which he peppered me from head to foot with tiny missiles that stung like fire.
I was so enraged that I forgot all about where I was. Giving a cry of anger, I began running along the line toward my persecutor who immediately fled. I chased him all the way through the crossover into the tunnel and the machine room.
“What’s wrong?” said Sargoth, leaving his position by the monitor. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I was surprised that I didn’t see Leece. In fact there was no one else in the room besides myself and the drell.
“Where is he?” I asked. “Where is Leece?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
I stepped near to the glass man and stared into his green eye. Momentarily I was startled to realize that it was a shade below my own eyes. It seemed only yesterday that Sargoth had looked like a giant to me.
“It won’t work,” I said. “You can all give academy award performances but I’m not that gullible. I don’t know where he is now but he was in there potting me with pellets.” I held out an arm, pointed to a spot of blood above the elbow. “You made a mistake, or I should say you made another in a whole legion of mistakes. You ought to have provided him with something that wouldn’t leave any marks on me.”
I turned to go.
“Where are you going?” he said. “You have to go back in the weapon.”
Not bothering to turn around, I spoke over my shoulder. “I’ll go when I feel like it. Since we’re playing games, the terms are going to be mine, not yours.”
Leece was in the game room playing cards with Conray and two people I scarcely knew. He kept his head down as I approached the table. I spoke to the biggest man at the table, a heavily muscled Nordic type who still had all his limbs.
“I don’t suppose he left the table, did he?” I said, indicating Leece. “In the last thirty minutes?”
“That’s what I thought.” I tipped Leece’s chair back so that he pitched onto the floor. Waiting until he got to his feet, I hit him in the face. He didn’t say anything after he fell, just lay looking up at me.
“Nobody is going to mess around in the weapon,” I said to the room in general. “If you follow me in there I’ll get you afterward.” I was hoping the big blond would get hostile but he only sat silently and watchful. No one said anything. None of them were my friends, or at least I hadn’t had an opportunity to get close to any of them. All my friends were gone. Sargoth had dismissed them. Except for Grena.
“I hope you’re imagining it,” she said later. We sat in our favorite place outside in the sun. The rock at my back was warm and so was she.
“This place is mad. It gives me a paranoid complex. Did you know that Mills Suttler lived in my house from the time I was a little kid?”
“You’ve told me that. It seems incredible. He’s been working steadily up here all those years, at least some of the time.
“Why did he do it?”
She shook her head. “My entire life has been strange and full of questions I can’t answer. Still I had my father. I don’t know why Mills did it. He must have had a reason. I’ve studied your profile but I can’t see anything outstanding in it. I mean, you’re intelligent and healthy and you can ride the jinga, but that’s a description of everyone up here.”
That night while I sat out on the peak using my mind to help keep the crack in the sky from splitting open, a swarm of termites came through. Almost before I knew it the alarm in the barracks was jangling and I was jumping to my feet to see what was invading us this time.
At least they weren’t carnivorous or they would have taken me along with my clothes. They came down on me like an avenging cloud, blocking out stray moonbeams, fanning away the cloying heat, settling on me like a thousand munching mouths. All they took was what I was wearing.
They were the only invaders I had ever seen before I came up to the peaks. Down in Emera we had been told that the tiny creatures came from the desert. They couldn’t eat vorite but they seemed to enjoy stripping people of their coverings. Other than that they didn’t do much damage. Here on Timbrini they were another matter. Straight for the nearest building they headed and I was about to follow them when someone on the roof shot off a torch gun. For a few seconds the sky was hot and yellow, just long enough to incinerate the swarm. It was over so quickly I never had time to get down off the peak onto the plateau. Whoever it was on the roof, he went about his business as if it were a commonplace happening to cook flying enemies. As for me, I gathered the tatters left to me and settled back down to my duty.
The next day Jolanne came up to me in the cafeteria.
“Don’t go in the weapon unless Mills Suttler or I am in the control room. Don’t go in at all if no one is present.”
“Why?” I asked.
“So we can protect you.”
“What will you do, keep the weapon from attacking me?”
“Don’t be wise. Just take some good advice.”
I had seldom done that in my life, mostly because I scarcely ever received any advice that I thought was good. That evening I went quietly into the machine room, turned on the crossover field and prepared to make a lone assault. Some sound behind me caused me to back out of the tunnel and give the room another close scrutiny. There was no one that I could see and the noise must have been due to creaking walls or my imagination.
It was the same in the weapon, no matter what time it was behind me. Not that I was optimistic, but I knew that if I could succeed in blazing a blue trail all the way through the maze to the control panel on the far side someone else could run in and plant a bomb. The structure would be blasted to kingdom come and I could go home with my arms and legs.
The idea had already occurred to me that the area by the control panel on the weapon might change into fractured space. Maybe a bomb wouldn’t go off even if it did get planted. I had checked that possibility. According to the readers in the machine room, the area east of the maze was more normal. Though not exactly like Earth’s atmosphere, the air contaitied enough of the proper ingredients to feed an explosion. Now all I had to do was get through the obstacle course to it.
The blue line came to an end well within the maze and about one hundred feet from the controls. Soundlessly, I set out along uncharted territory, minding my business, watching out for cold red fog, listening for the whistling of dropping blades.
I couldn’t believe it when nothing happened; no illusions, no sounds, but it was miserably hot, enough to make my feet slippery on the girder. Unable to resist looking down, I saw black waves forming high points of froth. Was it ordinary water down there? I doubted it. It was probably acid or sludge that would take a sinking body and pick it clean of flesh before it touched bottom.
Slowly but surely I found myself edging out the other side of the contraption. Blue and red lights obscured the sky while cold fog drifted everywhere about me. Numbly I let go of the last girder to step onto a metal platform. Ahead of me was a banked panel of knobs, buttons, and dials while behind me the huge weapon swayed and bucked.
I could see the blue line through the darkness like a shining path that beckoned to me. The feeling of danger filled my mouth, my throat, my chest. I might have been stalked from all sides, so great was the tension and pressure building inside me. Without knowing how, I knew I had made a mistake, not just, in crossing the entire weapon but in even coming near it at this particular time.
Crouching on one knee, I blinked sweat from my eyes and cursed in a low voice. Why hadn’t I been pulled out on the retriever beam? As soon as I entered the crossover, every alarm in the complex had sounded. I knew this. Sargoth, Jolanne and all the other drells were in the machine room. They knew I was where I was, knew I had to be brought out. I had done their filthy job for them. Why didn’t they yank me?
Were my eyes deceiving me or did the blue line jump like a scared snake? There was atmosphere here so that I was able to catch my breath. Dumbly I knelt on the platform and watched while the safety path broke up. In glittering pieces it darted or drifted around and between girders, disrupted, destroyed, done away with. It meant the space inside the weapon had altered. The maze had shifted. There was no more trail of safety leading from my world to this one. I was on the alien side.
The platform’ began to pitch like a raft on rough water. Up and down it went until my stomach went into an endless spin. Desperately I clung to the banked panel, wondering if I should dive forward to grasp one of the girders of the maze, knowing full well that if I did so I was likely to lose both hands.
Had any human ever been here before? I didn’t think so. No matter how frantically Sargoth and the others worked in the machine room to try to save me it would do no good. I was beyond their help.
I hung on while my strength gradually ebbed. Somehow I managed to wedge myself between the panel and the first girder so that the pitching couldn’t dislodge me. It went on and on until my brain threatened to close down. Perspiration formed a pool between me and the metal, dangerous, threatening. The more I perspired the more precarious my position became. The muscles in my legs cramped with the exertion, my back went taut with spasms. Then my arms locked in cramps. I was done. There was no way I could keep from being thrown into the black ocean.
I lay on my back wondering how long I had been fighting the motion. It had been quite some time. An hour. No, more. All night? I didn’t know. Whether I had concussion or brain fever, I wasn’t functioning in a normal manner. Blood poured from my nose and had I been able I would have felt to see if it was also coming from my ears.
Sliding about on the metal, I looked up at the sky which was curiously blank. I seemed to fall partially asleep and for some reason I remembered the time when Sargoth kidnaped me from my bed and brought me to the peaks of Timbrini.
How peculiar that I should think of that or anything when I was about to take a fatal dunking. Still, I did. I remembered how drowsy I felt when I opened my eyes and looked up at the fog. It was gray and warm, not red and cold as it was on the dark side.
Either it was raining or I was sweating up a shower. Groaning, I rolled a bit and tried to feel the platform under my fingers. It wasn’t there, which meant I must have fallen off. I couldn’t see so I was unable to say what lay about me.
Again I groaned and this time I heard myself. It surprised me so that my eyes flew open. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the falling rain, decided it was illusion that spattered on my face.
Gradually I felt the rain on the rest of my body, but only on one side. The other side, my back, lay on something hard that pressed and gouged in a cruel manner. Sore as a boil, I tried to raise my head. It made no sense but I seemed to be lying on one of the peaks of Timbrini, whole and substantial. For an illusion, it was disturbingly real.
I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes again the dawn was breaking over the mountain. Above my head the crack in the sky glared like a purple wound while behind it the weapon huffed and puffed as it tried to breach through.
It took me a while to realize that I was all right. My head hurt, as did all of me, but the fear and despair were gone. Something or someone had delivered me from the platform and back on to my own dimension.
It required all my willpower but I made myself get up. Like a creaky old man I walked across the flat floor of the mountain to the entrance of the last building. It took me awhile because I kept losing my bearings. I felt as if I had run back-to-back marathons.
I was in better shape by the time I got halfway through the place. People stopped to stare at me as I went by but no one spoke or tried to interfere. I had one goal in mind, which was to get to the machine room before Hallistair could get away. I knew he was there clucking over the fact that the nasty weapon had upended itself and destroyed the safety path while I was in it.
He was there along with Sargoth and Jolanne.
He saw me first so that I was the only one who noted the expression of disbelief and pain that grew on his face as I staggered down an aisle.
Then Sargoth spotted me. “Ashlin!” he said.
Somehow I maneuvered down the aisle between two sections of spectator seats. Small and agile, Hallistair could be quick when it was to his advantage, which it was now. He left his post at the machine and leaped into a seat section where I couldn’t reach him so easily. One by one he hopped seats until he was near enough to an exit to make a dash for it.
He got away from me by darting down the hall and taking a left at the nearest intersection. Exhaustion returned to me so that I forgot everything except the need to get to my room. There I bolted the door and fell into bed, filthy and full of pain.
A few minutes later Sargoth came banging at the panel to let me know he was there wanting in. When I didn’t get up he knocked the door down.
“Not now,” I said as he tried to roll me over. “Go away.”
“You’ll come to see me as soon as you’ve rested?”
“Yes,” I said. Then I drifted into one of the deepest, most dream-filled slumbers I think I ever had.
It was late afternoon when I awakened. I showered and dressed. Then I stepped across the broken door and went outside to the grassy plateau. It wasn’t often that my movements on Timbrini went unobserved but this was one of those times. I even had sufficient to grow enraged at the jinga who were in the mood, as usual, to play coy. My mental commands must not have been direct enough to send them hastening to do my bidding, but they cavorted over my head until I reached up to yank on a leg. I let go right away, else the owner would have loved lifting me and dumping me into the mile-deep hole only a few yards away.
At last one of them dropped low enough for me to climb aboard, after which we had a rickety, chopety, loopy ride to the foothills. An hour later I was in Falloway’s genealogical library. If he had been there I wouldn’t have gone in, knowing him for the liar he was, but I sneaked peeks in a window until I ascertained that Shiri Karl was in charge of business today.