Stirling’s mouth was dry. I’m three miles up in the blue, he thought, and there’s nothing above or below me. Will I be able to control my arms and legs? And my bladder?
At exactly fourteen minutes Stirling thrust himself upwards. The flexible plastic of the lid bowed upwards momentarily, then snapped flat again, throwing him back down on his knees. He swore furiously. So that was it! Bennett had secured the lid intending Stirling to remain in the container until it reached the blades. Or would it be crushers?
Bracing his hands against broad knees, Stirling put his back against the lid and exerted all the lift of which his outsized body was capable. The lid domed upwards, but did not break. Wait for me, Johnny. For God’s sake wait for me! Growling with effort, he drove up again with bunched shoulders. The plastic ruptured into sharp-edged tongues which tore into his skin as he went through.
As he struggled to extract his legs from the obstinately contracting hole in the lid, Stirling caught a glimpse of sterile blue sky patterned by overhead girders, a green horizon on his left, and his immediate predecessors in the line of yellow containers. They were jostling along a roller way and over a line of snarling circular blades which ripped them open from underneath, allowing the white powder to fall through into a hopper. There were less than five seconds to go before he reached the ripsaws, and his ankles and feet were still enmeshed in the tough triangles of plastic.
Stirling kicked out frantically, feeling cloth and skin give way on the rough edges; then he was tumbling sideways, clear of the train of containers. He leaped from the roller way into the struts of a lattice girder which paralleled it, dropped onto a flat area crisscrossed with metal tracks, and sprinted in the direction of the green horizon.
His feet were sliding on a thick coaling of frost, and the gelid air ravaged his throat and lungs. To his right, an angular, bright red object whined into life and sped towards him on wheels limned with purple fire.
Reaching the edge of the flat area, Stirling discovered, too late, that he was about fifteen feet above the level of the vegetation he had glimpsed. The red object chattered at him and whipped the air with chromium arms. He jumped blindly out from the edge and smashed down into a world of wet green foliage and black earth. His legs, unprepared for the impact, doubled up and he pitched forward, landing on a smooth rock half buried in the soil.
Incredibly, there was a moment of perfect silence and peace: the red machine seemed to have lost interest in him once he vanished from its precinct. Stirling sat up cautiously, trying to regain his wind, and noticed something unpleasant about the rock on which he had fallen. It was whitish in color, and had gaping eye sockets.
Gold fillings glittered in two of the teeth.
Chapter Five
There were no broad meadows in Heaven.
In Stirling’s childhood dreams the He had been a place of rolling pastures, gentle hills and clear streams—a montage of all the ideal features of a world he had never known. Much later, he had realized that, if the He resembled any feature of prewar America, it would probably be a huge market garden; but the boyish visions had persisted, overlaying deduced fact with inherited fantasy.
The lie was divided into plots of a hundred feet, and each plot ran the whole of its fifteen-mile length. Each was tended by an agricultural “robot”—if the word could be applied to a machine resembling a beam crane which straddled the plot and could move along it on metal tracks at speeds up to fifty miles an hour. Hanging from the underside of the beam was a room-sized casing which could move laterally to reach any point on the plot. And beneath the casing clustered a tangle of multi-jointed spider legs, tipped with the tools of its trade: spades, nozzles, knives, metal claws. Some of the appendages had eyes.
Stirling had been walking for almost ten minutes before he got his first good look at one of the machines. The sector through which he was moving was planted with coarse beans on both sides—the heavy foliage dappled here and there by white flowers with huge petals like butterfly Wings. There was a choking smell of rank greenness; and Stirling, walking in the sunken track bed, found himself passing along a narrow alley of vegetation whose walls were higher than his head. He had never seen anything approaching it, even in underground hydroponics plants. A part of him tried to respond gratefully to the private world of green silences, but who could enjoy solitude?
I’m alone. The thought kept hammering at him. I’m alone, alone, alone.
Never in his life having been separated from other human beings by more than twenty feet, never having been free of the insensate pressure of walls and ceilings, he discovered completely new levels of pain in merely standing upright and walking when his instincts were to find a dark hole and crawl in. Every sense channel seemed to purvey its own brand of agony. He kept his gaze fixed on his feet and walked slowly, heading for the distant boundary of the He where, logic told him, a rebel would hide.
The rails under his feet had been vibrating for several seconds before Stirling realized he was in danger again. He raised his eyes and saw the bright yellow, crab-legged structure of an agricultural robot bearing down him with the speed of an automobile. He threw himself to one side, and the huge machine swept by with only inches to spare, its steel wheels singing viciously on the track. It disappeared in the direction of the transit area with its spider legs drawn up beneath the sentiently revolving turret.
Stirling began walking faster. There had been a strangely purposeful air about the robot’s furious rush. It might have been returning to base for new supplies; but— there was no way of telling how sensitive it was about the welfare of its crop—it could have been hurrying to investigate the damage Stirling had done when he leaped into the greenery. He guessed that the robot could keep in touch with sensor units located every few yards and that it was tuned to detect damage by, say, picking up the smell of newly released sap.
And there was that crimson metal demon which had rushed him in such frightening, insane determination to smash him with its arms. What was its function? Stirling got a momentary vision of the red object summoning one of the great agricultural robots, mounting its back, and going hunting for the intruder.
The idea would have been ridiculous if considered in the smugness of the Record’s office, but Heaven had been nothing like he had expected, and up here it seemed almost probable. Anything could happen in this world of vivid green and aching blue which had the simplicity of a nursery rhyme landscape—and all the underlying menace.
Thinking it over, Stirling was struck by bow little he had known about the lies. Slightly anachronistic they might be; but the air-borne farms were still an important factor in the country’s food supplies, and people were bound to be interested. The absence of adequate feature coverage in all the visual media could only mean that Hodder and his cohorts of faceless men in the F.T.A. were pulling strings for reasons of their own. In view of all the virulently anti-F.T.A. articles he had written, Stirling concluded, it was a little surprising that he had been allowed to continue in the newspaper business at all. It would have been child’s play for one of the Authority’s puppets in the East Coast administration to have had him removed permanently. The so-called Press Council, set up after 1992 as the government’s major propaganda instrument, had absolute control of all communications media; and all its members were, directly or indirectly, F.T.A. nominees. Perhaps, then, the material he had written had not been as good as he had thought at the time.