"Sazhje," he said with a shake of his head, "there's a mind in that head of yours. There is. I wish I could reach it. I wish you could understand—so many things; and that I could understand you."
"What? What, Ssam?"
"I wish I knew myself… but you're not the halfwit they think you are, are you, girl? You think. You feel. And I don't know if that makes you human or not—or what it makes me."
Something stirred in the leaves outside, a curious rhythmic sound. Merritt opened his eyes on murky daylight, on leaves outside that were being spotted with moisture. It was raining.
He dragged himself up on one arm, startling Sazhje, who wakened and leaned over him to see what was the cause of the commotion outside. When Merritt edged out of the hole into the rain she scolded him as if she had lost respect for his good sense, but as he had dragged his coat out with him and she realized he was leaving, she came out too and held to his hands, talking at him and chattering with distress.
He answered her with a pat on her face, the only way he could make her know she was not to blame—and ran, ran all out, tugging his coat on whenever he must stop for breath, through a graying sheet of rain.
He reached the lookout by the dam to find the men there already: it was long after daybreak. They stood about in small groups, as drenched as he, the rain turning the gravelly earth glistening wet. Lightning lit the landscape, tinging things with white. A moment later thunder rolled from one end of the valley to the other.
Young Miller was the first to see him; and Tom Porter was the second. Merritt stopped short of the group, dead still as he saw Porter come toward him and the others group behind.
"Glad you found it important enough to be here," said Porter.
Merritt had no answer for him, felt the aura of menace as the others spaced themselves out close to him.
"Half-human," one of them said with loathing, "what's it like with her, Merritt? What's the attraction?"
Merritt looked toward the speaker. Someone else seized his arm from the other side. He spun about on reflex. It was Jim Selby.
"Bill," Jim said, "Sam's not the problem. And he doesn't question our ways, what we do. He's sweated plenty over this dam of ours. It's his plans, his work before most of you even got up here. He came all the way seven years' voyage to this world of ours, and there ain't a hard job or a long one he ain't showed you how to do first. So if you got some temper to work off, you go cuss at the weather. You'll get about as much done either way."
"You choose your friends, Selby—or whatever your name ought to be. You're only a shade more Hestian than he is; and from what I've heard, his habits must run in the blood."
Merritt looked at Porter. "Is this solving anything? So you've all unloaded what you think: we haven't that much time to waste. It's your farms in the way downriver, nothing of mine."
"Oh, you have an interest in seeing that dam finished, Merritt. You got a great deal of interest—because you'll never make that starship if this project fails. You'll be with us, whatever happens."
He moved the others off with that last remark, and Merritt stared at their rain-hazed backs with a great shiver of anger, hardly felt Jim's hand on his shoulder.
"Sam. Sam, you were right. You can't fight them and come out of it alive. You had to take it, same as me."
Merritt looked at him and managed to nod agreement
"Was it," Jim ventured, "was it what they said it was, Sam? What happened last night?"
"Is that really the issue? Does it matter to you, one way or the other?"
"No," Jim said, without needing to think about it. "But to them it does."
Chapter 11
There was a wind up, in addition to the rain, a southerly wind that breathed of spring and set the rope bridge swaying. Merritt staggered on the planking and kept both hands on the ropes. Far under his feet the river was louder than usual, the enlarged flume thundering an increased flood down beyond the dam, while to the upriver the earthwork diversion dike had backed up increasingly deeper water, still water to all appearance, until it slipped violently down that chute and boiled among the rocks before it started its seaward course again.
Work was still proceeding on the far side of the dam. The crest of the dam, at last reared to respectable height and recognizable form, was aswarm with miniature dark figures: the rammed-earth and timber platform on which most of the work was done was nearly level with the dam surface. Patient oxcarts labored back and forth from the blast site to the platform where they discharged their cargoes, rock dumped and spread in endless repetition: blasting in the upper ridges, to oxcart, to the dam, like the action of ants worrying at a carcass, until the cliffs disappeared bit by bit and the dam grew.
There were no stops in the work now, not even by night. Armed crews by lanternlight, in all weather, plied the roads between the blasting area from which they took the stone, and carried the loads that daylight crews would move to more precise location. Half the human population of Hestia was encamped at Burns' Station now, in shacks, in tents, within the walls and in a wooden stockade where the sheep meadow had been: in potential population, Burns' Station was far larger than New Hope itself, if all three shifts had ever been in camp at once.
There was a trail that led past the guard station as one left the bridge. Merritt took it, moving quickly with the wind at his back, his clothing long-since drenched. His hair streamed blinding water into his eyes, his boots were over the ankle in most of the puddles, and for the rest, he was well-spattered with the omnipresent yellow clay. The rains had been a frequent thing these last weeks: not yet the full deluge that spring would throw down on them, for the icemelt of the high mountains had not yet joined it; but there was an endless seeping moisture driven on the winds, dripping from ropes and hair and making the clay and rocks of the upper slopes treacherously slick.
Andrews was standing where the road from the blast site and that from the dam met the trail from the bridge. Merritt came up behind him and stood beside him as they waited for one of the lumbering, perilously loaded oxcarts to make its way past and enter the tortuous downward road to the plateau by the dam. Joints groaned, wooden wheels scraped and bumped over the rock, and the patient animals made the first turn. A hand-sized rock came loose and bounced and rattled down the road ahead of the wagon.
"We got one stuck up there an hour ago," said Andrews, who was plastered with mud more than the average on such a day. "Finally got it free, but it snapped an axle."
Merritt looked down the perilous incline the oxcart was following. It made another turn, brakes squealing, swaying the load against the wooden slats. Inexorably the whole overloaded wagon began to slew round to the curve, oxen straining in vain to hold it.
At the very last moment it stopped, with one wheel dropped over, the shaken driver screaming at the oxen and trying to make them move.
Merritt had begun to run without realizing it, Andrews hard behind him, and every other man who had seen the accident came converging on the spot. The imprudent driver, one of the Harpers, was flailing hysterically at the animals and trying to force them to move the wagon. The beasts rolled their great eyes and heaved against the weight, but it was beyond their strength to do more than maintain the pull. The effort only eroded the rain-slick clay the more and sent a miniature mudslide cascading downslope.
"Get off!" someone advised the driver. But as he tried it, the shift of weight caused the wagon to rock back alarmingly. Men cried out and braced the reachable wheels, ignoring the danger of a crumbling edge and a dizzying drop below, helped the frightened oxen bring it back into balance again.