The flyer came to a landing at the crest of a large grassy hill. It was no mere meadow—the grass extended as far to the east as the eye could see, with only a few stands of trees providing a sense of distance and scale. Dust clouds rose from some distant herd of animals. Apparently they were very near the Wall, though not so near that any of them felt any effect from it.
What bothered Rigg was the crowd of people gathered on the far side of the Wall. “We have observers,” said Rigg.
They all got out of the flyer, including Vadesh, and stood beside it, looking at the crowd of at least a thousand people, probably more, who were arranged on a grassy slope beyond the Wall. Many of them jumped up and waved their hands wildly, so the motion could be seen across the width of the Wall.
“They knew we were coming,” said Umbo.
Because they all looked at Vadesh, the expendable put up his hands in a very human gesture of protest. To Rigg, it looked like his father telling him that he was about to refuse him a request. “It wasn’t me,” said Vadesh. “I didn’t tell any of the other expendables that I was coming.”
“I thought you told each other everything,” said Rigg.
“Eventually, yes.” Then Vadesh added, “Or at least I tell them. I think they are not all candid with me.”
“Nevertheless, these people seem to have known we were arriving, and they’re here to greet us,” said Olivenko.
“Or they’ve come to rush through if we bring down the Wall,” said Rigg.
“Bring it down,” said Vadesh. “This wallfold needs people.”
“People to wear your happy little facemasks?” said Param.
Vadesh made no answer.
Rigg was scanning the distant crowd, not with his eyes—the distance was too great to pick out individuals with any clarity—but with his path-sense. “They didn’t all come from the same place,” he said. “They’ve come from many places, and some of them very far away. They must have been traveling for days.”
“Well, I don’t want to cross here, then,” said Olivenko. “Who knows what they have in store for us?”
“Feels like a trap,” said Umbo.
“They seem to be waving to us,” said Param. “Cheerfully. Beckoning.”
“Laughing,” said Olivenko.
“You can’t possibly hear any laughter,” said Vadesh.
“But you can,” said Olivenko. “And I can see enough of their body movement and attitudes to see that they’re on a frolic. I don’t think they have any hostile intent.”
“Or that’s what they want us to think,” said Umbo.
“No danger,” said Loaf.
Everyone turned to him at once. Loaf had not spoken since he was possessed by the facemask weeks before.
“No weapons,” said Loaf, still looking across the grassy expanse of the Wall.
“Is this you talking?” asked Umbo. “Or the facemask?”
“Me,” said Loaf.
“The facemask would make him answer the same way,” said Param.
Loaf reached up a hand and rested it comfortably on the facemask, the way a pregnant woman might rest her hand on her swollen belly. “Husband of Leaky, soldier, innkeeper, it’s me,” said Loaf. “But yes, the mask is happy to have me say so. The mask is glad that I’m speaking now.”
“Why haven’t you spoken before?” asked Umbo, still suspicious.
“Nothing to say,” said Loaf.
Rigg laughed. “Yes, it’s Loaf,” he said. “Same sense of humor. Or at least it’s as much of Loaf as we’re likely to get. I don’t suppose you can take off that thing now?”
“Don’t want to,” said Loaf. “I see so clearly now. I see all the faces, all the hands, what they’re wearing. No weapons. All unarmed. And happy, interested, excited.”
“You can see that?” asked Olivenko.
“Seeing what you saw, you have a soldier’s eye,” said Loaf. It was the most generous thing he had ever said to Olivenko. “But the mask has clarified all my senses. Overwhelming for days. Too much. And it was trying to take control. Manipulate me. But I would not obey. And now it doesn’t try. But I see far and clear. I hear everything. I smell everything. The mask helps me sort it out. It’s a gift.”
“What did I tell you?” said Vadesh. “That’s how I designed it to work!”
“Even the original facemasks probably made their victims feel that way,” said Umbo sourly. He turned away from Loaf. For weeks, he had been holding the man’s hand, guiding him; now it was as if Umbo couldn’t bear to see him or be near him.
“We’ll have plenty of time to sort out who and what Loaf has become,” said Rigg. “Right now we have a few hundred people waiting to greet us on the other side of the Wall.”
“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty, including the babies,” said Loaf.
“You counted them?”
“All the ones who can be seen,” said Loaf. “There are more behind the hill, since a few dozen people have left and a few others have come out since we’ve been watching.”
“Three thousand, two hundred and twenty is a suspiciously round number,” said Umbo.
“It’s an estimate,” said Param.
“It’s the exact count,” said Loaf. “Someone just left, so it’s three thousand, two hundred and nineteen now.”
“Counting the babies,” said Olivenko drily.
“When people make up numbers and want them to sound exact,” said Rigg, “they usually make sure the number doesn’t end with zero or five. But in the real world, there’s a twenty percent chance that a random number of items will end in either zero or five.”
“So you believe him,” said Param.
“There are several hundred people behind the hill,” said Rigg. “I see their paths. And while I can’t say if Loaf’s count is correct, I have no reason to doubt it. We all saw how the facemasks fought in the battle we watched. Their precision, their accuracy. Facemasks enhance the abilities of the people who wear them.”
“The people controlled by them, you mean,” said Umbo.
“Loaf says he isn’t controlled,” said Rigg, “and we have no evidence to contradict him.”
“So you’re just going to believe him while he waits for a chance to plant baby facemasks on all of us?” said Param.
“I won’t do that,” said Loaf.
“They don’t reproduce that way,” said Vadesh.
“You don’t know half of what they do,” said Loaf, turning on Vadesh. “In all your years of studying them, you didn’t know they can give off spores within fifteen minutes of deciding to?”
“How can you possibly know that?” said Vadesh. “Humans and facemasks don’t communicate.”
“It would be interesting to take you apart and see how you work,” said Loaf. “So smart, and yet you’re only machine smart, not human smart.”
Vadesh stood in silence.
“I don’t want to cross through the Wall with all those people there,” said Rigg.
“Then don’t,” said Param.
“It’s what we came for,” said Umbo.
“I mean, don’t do it when those people are watching.”
“You think they’ll get bored and go away?” asked Olivenko.
Param looked at Olivenko with her are-you-really-this-stupid expression.
“She means that we should cross the Wall before these people show up,” said Umbo.
Rigg looked at the people’s paths. “They’ve only been here for a couple of days.”
“What does that matter?” asked Param. “Why don’t we go back ten years?”
The idea immediately appealed to Rigg. “You’re right. We don’t know when the next ship from Earth will come. Ten years will give us plenty of time to visit all the other wallfolds and figure out what we can do to defend against them, because we’d know the Earth ships wouldn’t come for at least ten years.”
Vadesh immediately dampened their enthusiasm. “You only got control of the Wall nineteen days ago. If you go back in time before that, you’ll have no control. You’ll have to pass through the Wall on your own, they way you got into Vadeshfold in the first place.”