There was a quietness here that had no counterpart anywhere I knew, a savage silence that stalked my psyche like a stealthy predator. My inclination was to turn and run, bellowing in horror. I wanted to grasp the nearest girder in a tight grip while I sought safety behind it. Or to one side of it. Or the other side. The danger was everywhere, close by or afar, through the misty layers of the thing constructed by inhuman persons. I had made a mistake. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do now that I had successfully made the transfer from one plane of reality to another. Plainly Sargoth hadn’t expected me to go any farther than the entrance. How could I when I had no instructions?
The blue line wasn’t wide enough and I kept slipping off it onto perilous ground. Though I felt impelled to assist myself along by taking support from the girders, I kept my arms tightly to my sides as I slowly moved forward. Not for a moment did I delude myself into thinking that I was being innovative. A man didn’t lightly relinquish his body parts. He would utilize his every faculty to prevent being maimed. Not just one man had gone along this same path but many men; all the drells I had seen heretofore; all the one-armed or one-legged men and women in Emera must have taken a shot at this scaffold.
Thinking of hangman’s nooses and guillotines, I passed the first row of girders and stayed on the blue line. No wind came to cool my face or try to knock me off my perch. There was nothing on the weapon but its many mechanical parts and myself. I tried to see through the mist but there were only the high girders, swirling fog and flickering images from my memory. For a few minutes I seemed to be ascending the basement stairs in my home. Immediately I came to a halt. As soon as my vision cleared I quickly moved forward along the line. This was known territory and I was wasting time. Why not get it over with?
The line finally stopped short in the midst of vapor and smoke, rearing tiers and dead silence. Though I perspired I didn’t breath. Unnerved by the realization, I stood with my head down while I assessed the situation. No longer on the home-world, I didn’t seem to require oxygen, or I was getting it through my pores, or perhaps an invisible tube tapped into my veins. Since I didn’t trust what I saw or felt, I couldn’t be sure.
Wondering what it was that Sargoth intended to do with this unholy weapon, I moved a foot beyond the line. Then another step. Straight ahead I went toward a curious red light. Stopping short of it, I tried to measure it. All I could say was that it was dense and malevolent. As I paused there speculating, something dropped past my cheek, something so vile and deadly that I was too shocked to move. If I hadn’t known better I would have said a blade had fallen from a height to zip close to me. Only I didn’t know better and it had been an actual blade. Nothing but the angle of my stance had saved me from mutilation. Of course it had been a blade, razor-sharp, no doubt, designed to slice an intruder in half, or to relieve him of some body protrusion. If I had been standing a bit more to the left, my shoulder would have been taken away along with half my side.
Now I knew that not everyone who came here ended up in a glass body. Some never made it out at all. Carefully, with ice in my mind and in my veins, I turned in as small a space as possible and retraced my steps along the blue line. It had extended with me as I moved so that I had no difficulty locating it.
I wasn’t conscious of the dividing area between the enemy zone and home. One instant I walked in light and mist, the next I moved along the metal tunnel.
Sargoth was waiting for me. “You weren’t supposed to go past the entrance. Good grief, man, you haven’t even been prepped!”
I didn’t respond or look at him. Walking on by, I entered the machine room and went out into the hall. I didn’t look back. I hated the sight of him.
My roommate’s name was Spencer. He had been on Timbrini three days.
“Been up here off and on since I was five years old and first rode the jinga,” he said to me. “Probably I would have stayed the first time if I could have gotten a little love and affection from the drells. They’re hard sorts in more ways than one.”
I felt left out because most of the occupants of this wing had been acquainted with jinga since childhood while I had never straddled one until a few weeks ago. I liked Spencer, though he was several years older than I.
“I ran for eight years,” he said. “After they recruited me. Rode a bird back home and became a bum. Lived in out-of-the-way holes so Falloway couldn’t find me. The man’s a hound. Knew where I was all the time.”
“He didn’t drag you?” I said.
“What good would that have done? They couldn’t make me work if I didn’t want to.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“A few, but they didn’t believe me.”
The drells were everywhere but I paid no attention to them except for Jolanne who came to our room to fill Spencer and me in.
“It won’t do any good to try and tell you how to move across the weapon. It’s a hit or miss proposition.”
“You haven’t got very far in three centuries,” said Spencer.
“The safety path changes without warning. One minute it’s where we’ve got it marked, and in the next it’s elsewhere.”
Spencer fidgeted nervously, took a quick look at me from the corner of his eye. He was a pink-skinned man with light hair and a million freckles. He wasn’t very big but he looked fit enough. “Right while someone’s on it, I’ll bet,” he said. “Has to be. How else can you know if it’s changed?”
“Why does it change?” I asked.
Jolanne didn’t answer. I had already become accustomed to that. It meant she didn’t know.
“We’re going to blow it up,” she said after a minute. “There’s a platform on the far side that has a panel of controls. We can see it through our scopes.”
After she went away Spencer and I watched TV. I don’t know what he was thinking about but my thoughts were on the grid. Nothing worked the right way on or in it because of the warped space. Maybe it wasn’t even part of true space but was a kind of crossover where the laws of physics didn’t totally apply. Sargoth and his crew could plant an explosive device on one of the girders, but they couldn’t make it go off. It wouldn’t explode. Beyond the tiers where the platform and the panels were situated was space that seemed to be more normal, or so it appeared through the scopes. There were no distorted areas, no warps or ripples. And if they did succeed in exploding a bomb? Sargoth said it would work without damaging anything on our side. It was only a weapon made of metal, the said. One the enemy had constructed in order to force an opening into our side. It would be blasted to pieces and that would be the end of it.
“It’s so stupid!” I believed I merely thought the sentiment but I must have said it aloud since Spencer responded.
“Sure it is, but it’s the only thing to do, take my word for it. To try, that’s the idea. Believe me, I’ve had eight years to think it all over. Blow that thing to kingdom come and tell those buzzards over there that we’re not all that easy to take.”
He turned green the next morning when Sargoth came knocking on the door to tell him it was time to go to work. I tried to follow but was turned back.
“What do you want to do?” said the glass man to me. “Stay in the control room and follow him every step of the way with your mind? Do you want to see every move he makes? What good will you be to us when your turn comes?”
I slammed the door in his face and remained in the room. It was full of books written by the people who had gone before me. I read for a while but my mind wasn’t on the pages. It was with Spencer.
He came back in about an hour, white as a sheet but with a cocky grin. “They pull you out with some kind of beam,” he said. He got a drink from the cooler with shaking hands. His hair stood on end as if he had been near an electrical field. “All you have to do is yell,” he said. “They suck you back out like a bit of lint in a vacuum cleaner. They weren’t mad at all.”
“What scared you?”
“Are you kidding?” He grinned again. “Let’s go live it up in the fun house.”
“They might call me.”
He shook his head. “You’re scheduled to go in after Davis down the hall. Didn’t you look at the roster?”
I hadn’t and didn’t intend to. We went to the end of the wing to a large enclosed area furnished with game machines. They also had a gym, bar, film room and library.
Davis nodded to me over a tall glass of something amber. It was only ten in the morning. Feeling queasy, I went into the gym, changed clothes and began jogging. Three women came in to work out with light weights. I paid no attention to them. I had no friends here other than Grena and if I pretended that she was nowhere nearby I felt better. It was no place to have someone you cared for.
All the genealogy material that had been removed from Emera’s archives could be found in the library. It gave me an unpleasant feeling to discover just how thorough Sargoth was. For seven generations my father’s line had been semi-capable of riding the jinga. Almost but not quite. Not that any of them ever rode the birds and in fact they probably never knew of their existence. But the potential was there to be seen in the gene patterns painstakingly aligned by the men who came before Falloway.
I was amazed that the human gene pool was so shallow. I had supposed that predicting a newborn’s personality and capabilities would be utterly impossible. Not so. With the aid of computers Sargoth had come up with the most likely patterns for each of us. There I was, along with Spencer, Davis, Lake, the women, several individuals I had known in Emera, all the men and women who had lost everything to become drells. Out of curiosity I looked for Grena’s profile but it wasn’t there. Neither was. Hallistair’s or the woman named Shiri Karl who had been in Falloway’s place of business that day so long ago. I remembered her; small, not particularly attractive, not friendly, with something about her that seemed familiar.
Spencer came to take me to see a film about romance and intrigue. Half-way through the picture a man down in front began screaming and ran out. I tried not to let it bother me, but I sat with my feet crossed, my hands in my pockets and my head ducked. That was the normal position or condition for the inhabitants of the last wing.
Grena came to see me the next day.
“I told them to tell you I’d gone home to stay,” I said.
“One thing about this place, everyone tells the truth. It’s like we’re in a limbo where black marks will keep us from getting to Heaven.”
Always cold these days, I suddenly felt even colder. Taking her by the hand, I led her to a couch in a secluded corner. “It wasn’t a good idea, your coming to this wing. For any reason. Go back to the other and stay there. I’ll come to see you.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, her tone light. “I belong here now. I’ve been assigned here.” She sat far away from me and looked past my shoulder. “It’s the reason they kept me here all these years. Do you know I flew in on a jinga when I was three or four years old? They didn’t know what to do with me so Father . . . Dean Falloway . . . adopted me.”
“Your work is with the machines,” I said roughly. “They need monitors.”
“They tried to locate my family but they never did. No one answered their ads.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll see that you’re reassigned out of here. You’ll be back at your machine before you know it.”
“What makes you think I want to go?”
I examined her closely for some sign of levity or stubbornness but hers was an expression that was difficult to read.
“You cut your hair,” I said. “Why?”
The disc was gone, the long light strands, the flow. Now her hair was short and lay on her head like a neat little wig.
“Yes, I felt like changing.”
“You felt like hitting back. It doesn’t matter. As if your hairstyle would affect me one way or another.”
She smiled. “I hear it’s important to keep your vision clear when you’re in the weapon. That’s the real reason I cut it.”
“You’re not going to find out because you’re not going in.”
She was assigned to a room down the hall from mine. When she grew exhausted she left me to go and rest. No one in this wing had regular sleeping hours. We wandered the corridors, frequented the game room, read books, watched films, anything to keep awake. A couch was good enough to flop on for a few quick winks. There were rare extended naps since someone always came by wanting to talk or do something.
Spencer caught up with me in the hall and insisted that I play cards with him. Davis and a woman named Willa were waiting for us.
“She’s already been baptized,” said Spencer as we sat down. “Go on, Will, show him your new arm.”
It was pinkish-colored glass, not clear like Sargoth’s. I made mention of the fact.
“It’s temporary,” she said. “It’s full of fluids to help the stump now. You know, blood, nerves, veins, arteries. In a while they’ll give me a permanent one. Colsan is a good surgeon.”
I was surprised. “Colsan! I thought he was a mechanic.”
“Jack of all trades.”
I didn’t like to be morbid but I hadn’t read enough. “I take it you lost your arm a piece at a time?”
She wasn’t bad looking though she wasn’t young. With a smile she said, “Odd, isn’t it? The field acts like a vampire, homes in on raw spots, sort of. Hardly anybody ever loses something from the rest of their body if they’ve already got a Stump.”
“A heat seeker?”
“Who knows? If Suttler and the others have been puzzling about it for so long, I doubt if I’ll ever solve it.” To Davis she said, “Deal.”
During a break I left them and went down the hall to the control room. It was the first time I had approached Sargoth since he left my father’s house. By then I had learned to recognize all the drells. As I came up to him he extended a hand to me which I ignored.
“I want to talk to you.”
He nodded. “All right.”
“Grena doesn’t belong here. She’s not suited to the work.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. She’s not even finished growing. Surely you’re not interested in recruiting children.”
“She’s your own age.”
“That’s different.”
“I recruit whomever I can get. If a ten-year-old could get through the tunnel I’d send her.”
“You just don’t care, do you?” I said, letting all my anger and resentment rush forth. “You’re not a man, and you haven’t been for centuries! You’ve no heart anymore, no soul. All you care about is statistics. How many arms and legs and lives will you forfeit before you give up? How many people have to die in that thing before you realize you can’t win.”
His response was calm, as ever. “It isn’t only my fight. It’s yours and everyone’s.”
“I don’t care about that. When I’m licked I have the good sense to know it. You’re playing a hideous little game with these people. You’ don’t even have a method to your insanity.”
“If you have one I’d like to hear it.”
Arguing with him was useless. It had always been so. As a boy I had tried to find his heart. “I have nothing to say to you except about Grena.”
“She stays.”
“Why?”
“Because she’s a body and we need bodies.”
My finger tingled. I wanted to hit him, smash the smooth glass of his face, crush the temples which seemed to throb as the cold and cruel brain within pulsed with intelligence. I was maddened because he knew exactly what I thought and felt. I had lost a battle that I loathed losing.
“You’ll use her all the way, is that it? It wasn’t enough that you used her to get me to come up here and commit myself!”
He hesitated for a moment. “If I were going to excuse anyone at all, it would be you.” He took a step toward me. “It isn’t all that easy to watch a boy grow up and then expose him to such danger.” Extending a hand to me, he said, “Friends?”
I stepped away from him. Coldly I said, “One more thing. Before I go into that contraption again I want your promise that my father will be given something to bury.”
I thought he flinched. In his usual voice he said, “How can I make such a promise?”
“You’ll think of a way. I’m not spending the rest of my life inside a hunk of glass.”
“You’ll change your mind if it comes to that.”
“The difference between you and me is that I know beforehand what I can tolerate and what I can’t. Give my father some kind of body. Any kind. Mutilate it, if you must, but it has to be human and he has to believe it’s me.”
“You have my word.”
I went back to the game room and the first person I saw was Grena sitting on a couch. Beside her was Hallistair. Handsome, sleek, diminutive, he perched on the couch arm stroking her hair. Once or twice he gave me a bland look as I played games with my associates.
My thoughts weren’t altogether on the present. They were also with Sargoth who had lived in my house for twelve years. What a divided existence he must have had. There was no doubt in my mind that he had been here on Timbrini at least part of every day yet not once did he let on that his interests lay elsewhere.
The entire affair made me sick, almost literally. Grena, myself, Willa and her pink glass arm, Spencer’s terror that irritated his scalp enough to cause his hair to stand on end most of the time, Davis and his drinking, Hallistair who was in love with Grena and probably hated my guts.
Davis missed his turn in the tunnel that evening because he was too drunk to walk. Jolanne came to find me on a couch.
“I’m sorry, dear,” she said as I sat up rubbing my eyes. She knew I hated the glass so she didn’t try to touch me.
I was thinking about Sargoth again as I walked through the corridors. How could I beat him? He was too informed, too erudite, too confident. How often I had sent him like a servant to this or that establishment to plug into various computers. He could do that because his brain was wired differently. It wasn’t hooked up to a slow pair of eyes or sluggish synapses but was like a sponge soaking up whatever the electronic circuits dumped into it. Conceivably he knew everything, which meant I couldn’t outwit him. Somehow I had to get him to admit that his way of fighting the aliens was wrong. He was in the Dark Ages but didn’t know it.