She said, “Do you want to return to the General now, make a report that we were unsuccessful?”
He didn't even have to think about that. He looked away from her and said, “We'll wait a bit.”
“And I suggest that we wait in quiet,” the girl said. “Our echoing voices may carry quite far in these tunnels.”
They stood together in the center of the walkway with their backs to the tunnel out of which they had come moments earlier, uncertain that even that route was safe but prepared to trust it because it was, at least, known to them.
The rat with six legs came back from the opposite tunnel, looked at them, twitched its trunklike proboscis, disappeared again.
Merka Shanly was displeased at having drawn this duty, not chiefly because it was dangerous or frightening (though it was surely both), but because it must be performed in the company of Kane Grayson. She knew the man intimately, all there was to know about him, for she had been ordered by the Committee on Fruitfulness to share a conjugal bed with him some eighteen months ago. They had made love, regularly, nightly, for a year with no offspring to show for it and had, at the Committee's order, discontinued their relationship. Actually, she thought now, watching all the black tunnels, they had never really made love but simply screwed, mechanically, like a couple of prewar machines that worked mindlessly on programmed schedules. Kane had been rather uninteresting as a lover, as inept at that as he was at almost everything, a man frightened of his own shadow and too enamored of luxury to risk anything in hopes of advancement within the enclave's social structure. He was one of those who could not see that someday, in the not-too-distant future, the stores of prewar goods, once vast, would be so badly depleted that sweeping changes in Pure life-style must be instigated. When that time came, he would not be able to cope. His mind would go; and since insanity was classified as a mutation, he would be swiftly exterminated. Merka was a realist, prepared for the changes in Pure ways that were certain to come, and she intended, in the days of unrest, to climb the ladder of position within the Pure social structure and make it, if possible, to the very top.
The rat returned.
It's snakelike nose raised, sniffed them, lowered.
Ignoring them, it began rooting in the fungus and moss along the wall, foraging for food.
Aside from her adaptability to new conditions — which was not unlike that of the rat, which had quickly learned to accept their presence — Merka felt she had several useful qualities that would ensure success in the enclave structure. She was intelligent, fearless of the outside world in comparison to other enclave-raised Pures, and she was sexually attractive by the standards of her kind. Like almost all Pures, she was slim, with a softness to her flesh rather than a tautness of musculature. But where other women might have appeared slack and toneless, her softness was like that of a cloud, receiving, sheltering, warm. Her breasts were slightly larger than normal, well shaped and full; her flat stomach, flat hips and slim legs were equally alluring. She wished that the Committee on Fruitfulness would mate her to some man of position and power; then she could use her abilities and her beauty to cut herself a niche from which to make further social advancement. If she were always mated to Grayson's sort, she would remain a soldier in the ranks, her ability to please unappreciated by a man who would become excited over anything that was breasted and female.
Something moved in the mouth of the opposite tunnel, a lighter darkness against the black shadows there.
“Kane!” she said.
But even as she called and brought up her flashlight, a huge mutant, resembling a wild bear like the pure strain kept in the enclave, rushed onto the promenade, scooped up the squealing, six-legged rat and hurled it across the pit.
It struck Kane Grayson in the chest, dug claws into his cloak and held on, jabbering wildly.
Grayson dropped his flashlight and rifle and screamed so loudly that the echoes, compounding his own shrill voice, were deafening, rebounding from the cold walls like the cries of ghosts, demons.
When Merka looked back at the mutant, she saw that it had shuffled around the well in the center of the room and was almost upon her: heavy, fur-covered arms raised, claws unsheathed, teeth bared in a black and hideous face. She swung her rifle up to shoot, caught sight of a Pure man running along to the side and slightly behind the bruin, momentarily checked her shot for fear of hurting one of her own kind. Then, in the same instant, she realized the Pure was no Pure at all but was, instead, Jask Zinn, the esper, the tainted man. By then, the mutant had struck her, hard.
She slammed back against the stone wall, her head smacking it audibly. She staggered away, almost fell into the pit, then toppled sideways, still holding the prewar rifle in both hands, her flashlight lying on the floor and shining across the open pit.
Grayson was still screaming.
She heard the mutant snarl, heard him strike the other soldier.
The rat squealed, fell off onto her chest, scrabbled away into the shadows.
Grayson, mortally wounded, pitched over the brink of the drainage well, crying out, steadily, until he collided with a distant floor or a curve in the main shaft.
“Tedesco, no!”
She was not certain who had shouted, then realized it must be Jask Zinn.
“No!” he called again.
Miraculously the bearlike mutant checked the wicked, slashing blow it had aimed for her face, ripped the rifle out of her hands in one brutal movement, and was gone, taking Jask Zinn with him, leaving her badly shaken, stunned, but definitely alive. Hurt, yes. She was wracked with pain across her shoulders and breasts; lights of searing intensity shot through her head from the place where she had struck the wall. Chiefly, though, she was undamaged and alive.
When she had her breath back, she sat up, crawled to the edge of the central pit and shone her flashlight beam into it.
Darkness.
She could not see far enough to view Grayson's body. Suddenly she decided that was just as well. She got to her feet and looked for the other flashlight and for Grayson's rifle, found that the mutant had taken those with him. Turning, she stumbled into the tunnel out of which they had first come. She had to reach the General and tell him what had happened, what she had seen and what, from this encounter, she had surmised about the espers' purpose.
8
More than two kilometers beyond the tainted village, the storm drains broke open among the ruins of an unimaginably ancient city that had not harbored any form of intelligent life since centuries before the Last War, a place of canted walls, crumbling stone, rusted artifacts, a place of vines that fed on plastisteel but had not even now, after all these ages, consumed half of the available fodder. Three walls of what might have been a cathedral still stood, great arched windows free of glass, stone pews occupied by a few scattered bones, which may or may not have been the bones of men or quasi-men, its altar filled up with vines that consumed the plastisteel images that had once been symbols of some forgotten anthropomorphic god or goddess, demon or angel. Slabs of stone, some of them as much as eighty meters high, others as little as Jask himself, lay on edge, flat, or were still standing, carved with messages that could no longer be read, in words that were now without meaning. Odd machines, with skeletal frameworks that disappeared into the earth, with pincer hands, blank glass eyes, rusted speakers, stood on concrete pedestals, looking out over the vine-tangled vista that had once, presumably, been choked with life, with bustling, thinking creatures.
Jask and Tedesco passed what appeared to be a great, battered spacecraft, though Jask knew that was impossible. Spacecraft were only myths, fairy tales, heresies. Yet this monolithic hulk, pointing halfway to the sky, broken at its midsection, charred and dented, wound round with creepers and shaded by trees that had grown from saplings into mighty giants during its long sleep, had all the characteristics of a spaceship, according to the myths.