“Still the same.” Julia phrased the query beginning to dominate all men’s minds. “They aren’t any better yet—the beam’s still too high—but when are they? Our grandparents didn’t have detector beams to worry about—”
“But we have,” Thorburn said, cutting her off. “Come on, there’s the signal from Sims.”
Julia flashed him a glance which said eloquently, Go get trodden on! And then obediently flattened out—with her figure it was no easy task—and squashed through. Pushing and pulling, the three eased the stranger under the detector beam.
Why was he bothering with this man? Thorburn didn’t know the full answer to that, but he saw clearly that some of the answers were bound up in that quick glance from Julia.
Apprehensively but quite firmly, Honey squeezed through, her lissome figure finding the task simple, and then Cardon, with a last long look back, followed.
Outside the door they skirted the tiled landing, and saw their goal, the banister-flanked head of the stairs, remote and yawning, three hundred feet away. They took time negotiating the shadow-fringed skirting board, checking each point and then clearing it in a controlled rush that ended in frozen immobility.
“This is a small house,” Thorburn said irritably. “And poor. I’m surprised the Demons have a detector beam here at all. And,” he finished with the age-old sarcasm of the Forager for his commanders, “H.Q. briefed us entirely incorrectly. Not a scrap of steel in the whole place.”
Sims and Walls, being young, automatically patted their empty sacks. “Steel weighs heavy,” Sims said. “Make an easier touchdown without it,” said Wallas.
Both smiled as though they had said something profound.
Old Chronic cackled at them, clicking his dentures. “We live in a poor empire, my lads. Every scrap of whatever it may be is useful. Don’t be gleeful over empty sacks.”
Only half repentant, Sims and Wallas led out to the head of the stairs. Here Thorburn, as regulations demanded, checked batteries. This time it was a mere formality; he knew that they’d only used their antigravs once on the incoming trip to ascend the stairs down which they must now drop. “All right,” he said, grasping the stranger more firmly over a shoulder. “Honey, you’re the lightest. Give me a hand with him.”
Help in dropping down with a burden on antigrav was not really necessary—they could drop under adequate control with a three hundred pound sack—but he felt the need to give orders. This trip had not resulted in any way as he had expected. And Old Chronic, almost in abandon from what a proper Forager should do, kept watching him, cackling and mumbling to himself. Let the old fool get stepped on!
The seven Foragers and the inert passenger dropped, plummetting past the floor levels, even this long plunge unable to give them a comprehensive outline of what this place was like. It was far too big to be understood as a single unit. This house—they knew it to be that from careful architectural drawings by their leading geographers—appeared to them as a\ vast number of individual places—a dark comer, a beamed doorway, a landing, a long plunge downwards on antigrav, a convenient hole, a whole succession of convenient holes—into which they could dart the moment the snorting and blowing and ground vibration of a Demon warned them.
You could not grasp the entire scene. Only if you stood off—preferably in a high vantage nook—and surveyed a distant prospect, could you understand that the world was a succession of buildings. Not many people ever had that opportunity and fewer of those really understood, as Thor-burn had only recently understood, just what the world really was.
A man labored his life away at his task down below; only the Foragers and the Hunters were ever likely to see a Demon and many a man and woman was bom, lived and died without once hearing or seeing a Demon. Thorburn knew that he was glad he was not one of those, but the price came high.
The group landed in the shadow of the lowest stair, checked, froze, then sprinted hard for the slot beneath the five hundred foot tall front door. Vague and misty that doorway towered up, the glow of Outer Sky shining through vast areas of colored glass. All seemed quiet. They tumbled through the slot where wood and tile failed to meet with precision, stumbled down in faint reflected light. A man could see in almost pitch-darkness just so long as there was light enough to strike back from corners and projections. Now Thorburn ordered their lamps switched on, alternately, each two men stepping along in the radiance from one headlamp. He wanted to get this limp stranger home. The responsibility so rashly undertaken now weighed him down, to add to the loss he felt at the failure of the trip. H.Q. was bound to have nasty things to say about that.
The light of Outer Sky had not been bright today and the Foragers had not worn their dark glasses as, usually, they were forced to do. Even so, it was a relief to return from the stark nakedness of outside to the safe runnels of the familiar human world.
“Keep closed up,” Thorburn said. The order was unnecessary; still that compulsion lay on him. He had been chosen leader and as leader he had taken the decision to bring this stranger in. He wanted the others to know and keep on knowing that he was leader.
So far there had been no real time to examine the stranger. He lay, white and breathing shallowly, a limp weight on Thorburn’s shoulder. Old Chronic voiced the doubt preying in Thorbum’s mind.
“He’s not one of us,” Old Chronic said, sucking a tooth so that his dentures palpitated clickingly. “He’s an enemy, sure as sure. What you going to do when he wakes up, Thorburn?”
Thorburn hadn’t really thought. Fumblingly, he groped for an answer.
“He may be an enemy,” he said slowly as they marched through the dark runnels. “Or he may… may not be. But he’s a man. I couldn’t leave him for the Demons to step on and kick over the edge.”
“You’re a fool, Thorburn,” said old Chronic with the liberty of age.
Surprisingly, Julia turned on the old man.
“You keep a civil tongue, Old Chronic. Thorbum’s the leader. Remember that.”
Thorburn, studiously, did not look at Julia. He felt a strange warmth in him, and, failing at first to recognize it for what it was, denied it for weakness.
“Checkpoint coming up,” Wallas called back.
The dim blue light welcomed them. They marched in with a swagger, the swagger and panache that all Foragers cultivated at home, their eyes still roving, roving, roving. The steel-helmeted guard lowered his gun. He saluted Thorburn. Behind him a sergeant pulled the switch and the barrier rose.
“Hullo,” said the sergeant, a brass-voiced, barrel-bodied man, huge in his armor. “What have you got there?”
“A stranger.” Thorburn was short with the soldier. “We’re taking him to Forager H.Q.”
That was quite enough to silence the loquacious sergeant.
Very soon Thorburn was able to lower his burden onto a sofa in the Forager anteroom. He had not felt the strain of carrying the man, but a weight lifted from him as the stranger flopped back, a weight that was not physical. Wil-kins walked up and stood pensively looking down.
“Tell me,” said Wilkins in his soft voice.
Thorbum swallowed. Wilkins, whilst a Forager, was a Controller. And Controllers ran all of life, everything, when they felt impelled to do so. Controllers did not speak like the lower classes, did not think like them; Controllers represented an achievement in humanity bewildering and yet perfectly accepted by men in Thorbum’s position. Thorbum told Wilkins, watching furtively the Controller’s ascetic face and slender hands, watching the faint frown gathering between those aristocratic eyes, watching the full mouth pucker.