Skin all over his body prickling with hyperawareness and nerves, he grabbed his stick a little tighter and started walking again. He could have sworn that he heard another furtive rustle just then but shrugged it off. Hyperawareness and nerves. He was sensitive. He also was running late, and he didn't want to get into trouble again for bringing the hogs back after nightfall. That had happened one too many times lately, and Sahar, no doubt goaded by that nosy zealot of a wife of his, had begun asking some awkward questions.
But sneaking back to the ruins as often as he could had become a necessity. Each time he'd find something else that jogged his memory. He remembered Charybdis now, though the satisfaction of having been right where that was concerned hadn't lasted terribly long. Being right wasn't going to fix his current predicament. Though the technological iconoclasts who were running the planet had never gotten round to trashing the equipment left among the ruins, said equipment had been subjected to what probably amounted to several centuries worth of rain. None of it worked.
Given time and a little bit of ingenuity-and Rodney had a lot of the latter, if he said so himself-he might be able to repair some of it, but whether that would extend to such crucial bits as the dialing console was anybody's guess. That aside, even if he managed to get the gate to work, where would he go? The ruins and remains left little doubt that he was, in fact, on Lantea, trapped in some fourth-dimensional nightmare concocted by Charybdis.
Oh, he'd so been right!
"You're overreacting, Rodney. Let's just see what it can do, Rodney. We've got it under control, Rodney," he rapped out angrily.
And no, he had no trouble thinking badly of the dead. After all, they'd taken the easy way out, sat in some cushy Nirvana or paradise or wherever their personal belief structure said they'd go in the Hereafter, and left him stuck here. It sure as hell lent a whole new meaning to `caller in the wilderness.'
The hogs seemed to have recognized some hidden landmark or caught the scent of home; they shifted gear and broke into a bumbling downhill trot. He stumbled after them, slipping and sliding in the perennial mud and never even bothering to sidestep the small streams that had decided to make the trail their temporary bed.
Fifteen minutes later he emerged from the edge of the forest. Below and surrounded by water-logged meadows lay the jumble of barns, sheds, stables, bunkhouses, and residences that made up the farm. Above and pressing closer hung the leaden bellies of clouds, pushing up against the mountains and waiting to burst. Somewhere there had to be vast stretches of open water for such ridiculous amounts of rain to develop, but the claustrophobic cocoon of rock and forest and fog all around offered no clues as to where the sea might be.
Down on the farm tiny dots scurried about their tasks, and from what they were doing and where they were going, Rodney estimated that it must be coming up for the evening feed. He'd barely be in time. Way ahead, the first hog obviously scented the swill. It gave an excited squeal. At the sound the dots below behaved as if word had gotten out that the Vandals were coming. They stopped whatever they were doing, briefly peered uphill, and, to a man, scattered and disappeared into the safety of the buildings.
Frowning, Rodney froze in his tracks. The weirdness levels in this place were naturally high, but this was a little on the bizarre side, even by local standards. Maybe it was some kind of holiday he hadn't heard about yet. Shaking his head, he prodded the nearest hog and started walking again. He'd find out soon enough.
He found out as soon as he reached the yard.
They swarmed from sheds and stables and-so he had heard something! — down the hillside behind him like some giant cockroach infestation. He remembered the roaches; a local militia he'd first encountered during his brief stay in the city an eternity ago. They were steel-clad and armed with swords and lances and looked purposeful in a less than reassuring way.
Rodney spun around, looking for a bolthole. There was no way out. The yard was enclosed by buildings to make the farm more easily defensible. All the doors were shut and where they weren't shut they spouted armored men. Behind the windows clustered faces, wide-eyed, not with fear as he grasped in a splitsecond's realization but with anticipation; Rilla, glowing with righteous satisfaction, Sahar next to her, trapped somewhere between shame and fury-ringside spectators, waiting for the bull to be brought down to shouts of Caramba (or whatever the appropriate exclamation was) and the rattle of castanets. Rodney had no doubt as to who was starring as the bull.
Throwing down his stick-in a non-confrontational manner, he hoped-he raised his hands. Blood sports offended his esthetic sensibilities, and he'd be damned if he gave them the spectacle they obviously were spoiling for. Besides, he had a remarkably low pain threshold.
"Come on, let's just be-"
The blow struck the back of his knees, made them buckle under him, and Rodney pitched face-down into the stinking gunk that covered the farmyard. So much for striking a conciliatory note… and breathing was a bad idea, too.
His nostrils were blocked, and when reflex kicked in and he gasped for air, he sucked up a mouthful of mud and suddenly remembered that unforgettable occasion when he was forced to fix a problem with the waste disposal system on Atlantis. Same stink. Choking and coughing, he tried to raise his head, an effort made substantially more difficult by the fact that somebody had planted a boot between his shoulder blades. Rough fingers tied his hands behind his back, and then he found himself abruptly hauled to his feet. Raising his face into the perpetual rain, Rodney hoped the downpour would clear off enough sludge to enable him to breathe again.
The roaches closed ranks around him as though they expected him to run. Fat chance of that. He'd never even get past the midden heap. The chief cockroach glared at him from squinty eyes and spat. "Heretic!"
An acidy fist of panic began to pump in his stomach. He was up against the fundamentalist death squad. Every child here had heard the tales, and the stories all had one thing in common: they made medieval witch hunts seem civilized by comparison.
"Look," Rodney began, annoyed to hear that the shivers caused by rain and cold and fear managed to seep into his voice. "I'm not even from here. You're making a huge mis-"
"Silence!" roared Chief Roach. He was worse than Caldwell on a bad day. "Bring him!"
Among gradually more daring jeers from behind the windows, they escorted him into the largest of the barns. It had one thing going for it: in here it wasn't raining.
The center of the barn had been cleared to accommodate a large table, flanked by a couple of smoking braziers. Behind that fetching arrangement stood a large, fur-covered armchair that looked more comfortable than any other piece of furniture Rodney had ever encountered in this place. Then again, so would a bed of nails. Besides, it wasn't the chair that was of interest so much as the personage sitting in it. He was withered and skinny and scraggly-bearded and the dyspeptic aura made him a bureaucrat of some sort.
That was good. Bureaucrats had rules, and they lived to abide by them. Rodney was a physicist, and physics was all about rules. Which meant they had some common ground. So perhaps-
The barely formed, anemic little bubble of hope burst with what Rodney could have sworn was an audible pop. On the table in front of the bureaucrat and illuminated by three oil lamps sat the complete contents of Rodney's secret cache; a jumble of equipment, odds and ends he'd one by one salvaged from the ruins, smuggled back to the farm hidden under his cloak, and stashed away under some loose floorboards in a derelict stable. Among them were a handful of still intact control crystals, a meager selection of rusty tools, a laptop that was dead as a dodo but maybe good for gutting, a spiral notebook and pen he'd used to keep an inventory of his finds and jot down any thoughts, and the potential treasure of treasures, a zero point module that might or might not be depleted. His first order of business had been to try and jury-rig a simple voltmeter to test the ZPM. By the looks of it, that plan had just been deferred indefinitely.