Sixteen
Trace awakened slowly, painfully. He didn’t want to wake up again. He wanted to return to the void which sleep had brought this time, a void with no thoughts, no pains, no thirst. A groan escaped his lips when he moved and slowly he dragged himself from the seat-bed and stood up. He looked down at himself with disgust and loathing.
His body was filthy with sweat, dust, sand, dried blood…
He was gaunt and bony. Fever, work, heat and worry had carved away his flesh until little was left but leather-like skin stretched over sharp bones.
He knew he was feverish that morning, probably had been slightly feverish ever since arriving in this hell. Thank god for the anti-fever capsules. There was a tic on the side of his face when he reached for a tube of the food, and he felt a wave of nausea pass through him. He had to take it; it contained some moisture and his water was down to less than a cupful. He took out the water bag and stared at it regretfully: less than half a cup actually. He sat down with half of the water, and a tube of fruit mixture and two of the anti-fever capsules. His mouth felt caked inside, hard and sore with deep cracks on the outside. His tongue was swollen, filling his entire mouth. He touched water to his tongue, took his time with the first scant spoonful. It hurt his throat going down. Something had happened to him. He couldn’t seem to concentrate on anything long enough to think it through. It took more water to get the capsules down, and his throat burned all the way down. At the first taste of the pasty fruit, he put it aside. He could not take that now. He looked at it for a long time and finally tried again, this time managing two swallows of it. He finished his water then and could have wept for more.
He had to inspect the passage he had worked on. Without thinking of anything, he got into his suit, left the audio on full this time, left the lights on in the dinghy itself, and he went outside. His feet seemed not to be making contact with the ground as he crossed the valley floor, and he felt that the short trip either took only an instant, or was endless. He felt that it was important to decide which, but even as he wondered about it, he forgot how he was trying to apply the time scale. When he got to the entrance of the passage, he forgot why he was there. He turned to go back to the dinghy, hesitated, and for no real reason went instead into the passageway between the cliffs. A barrier stopped him and he gaped at it with surprise. He couldn’t remember it at all. It was made of sand and rocks, was over his head, stretching from one wall to the other. Unsteadily he climbed over a rock or two to get a higher viewpoint, and from there he could see that the barrier appeared to stretch out the rest of the length of the passageway. He remembered working on it then, but dimly, as if that were an incident from ages past, from another lifetime. He decided to rest in the shade of the cliff and he sat down and again time was meaningless to him.
The medication moved through his system sluggishly; until the stimulants contained in it reached his brain, he sat unmoving in the shade. He sat without thought until very slowly patterns started to form again and he knew this was the fifth day, that on the following day he could expect the arrival of the robot. He got up and when he looked again at the sand and stone barriers, he knew they would prevent entry through this passage into his valley. Concentrating on his movements he left the passage and went to the one that remained. It was even broader, with only two narrow spots in it. It was a straight cut most of the way through the granite cliff, fairly steep but not so steep that the robot could not manage it. He followed it to the end, coming to one turn of about 100 degrees after two more gentle curves. The grade at the turn was steeper than it had been both below and above that spot. Trace stared at it for several seconds, turned and studied the passage behind him, and then clambered up to the top and outside. He examined the passage from the top. He could see that it went down into the valley, although he couldn’t see past the turn. The robot would know this was an entrance. If he could block it there where it curved…
Whatever he planned to do, he knew he had to do it that morning and afternoon. Time was running out on him, and there was the problem of the recurring fever attacks. But what difference if he did block it from the valley? It could only be temporary. Once it knew that he was in the valley, the robot could get in. His pitiful barricade would bar it no more than a wall of loosely stacked children’s blocks would bar an adult from a room. He slumped to the ground again and looked out at the world beyond his valley. The sun was nearly overhead already, but would not reach into the passage for half an hour or longer, would not shine directly into it longer than another half-hour before the other wall provided shade again. He could remain in it working… “For what?” His voice was a croak, hoarse from dryness, from screaming in the night hours. His throat rasped and hurt when he spoke. There had been the slight chance that he might find the other dinghy in the five or six days that he had gained by returning to this end of the mountains. The gamble had been lost. The robot was able to control the screen from a distance. He knew he could not enter the dinghy as long as the screen was effective. If he could trap the robot, force it to turn off the screen… He laughed wildly. The laughter stopped abruptly and he stared again at the passage. Had this been what he had worked for all along without realising it? He could build a trap, a trap using what he had: wind, sand, rock, and the natural pitch of the passage…
From where he was at the outer end of the passage he could not see past the turn; from here it appeared that the floor of the passage itself sloped fairly evenly, a little steep, but not dangerously so, until there was a sudden dropping away of the floor over a twenty-foot stretch immediately before the twist in the passage. Seeing the change in grade he could brace for it, be prepared for it… If it were concealed under loose sand, it would make a trap. The passage was heavily strewn with rock and boulders, both above and below the turn. If the robot were mired in sand there, it might be possible to bombard it with the rocks. It might be damaged by the sand itself, lose its balance and be unable to rise again.
If it got that close to him, he had to have something ready for it, something to slow it down. Otherwise it would enter the valley and kill him and the whole flight and fight would have been for nothing, only a delay of the inevitable. Trace knew he could not give up after fighting so hard. He started to build another wall of rocks.
He brought rocks from the valley floor and one by one hauled them up the passageway and laid them down until he had enough to start piling them. The barrier would have to be four feet high where it was hidden from the outside by the turn. When the wind blew the sand, it would dump it over the fence on the other side, where, hopefully, it would be levelled out and give the impression of being the floor itself. The passage was three hundred feet long and contained many tons of loose rocks and boulders, many more tons of sand. The hours passed; the sun blazed down into the narrow cut between the massive cliffs, and then started to descend, leaving the cut to deep shadow.
Trace worked deliberately, not thinking about the work he was doing, not thinking about the agony of his body as he lifted rocks, staggered with them up the passage and dropped them by the growing wall. He didn’t ask himself why he didn’t use the rocks nearer at hand, why he returned the two hundred and forty feet to the valley floor for his supply each time. The world swam in a red haze before his eyes and he did not find it strange. There were murmurs in his ears, words, phrases, snatches of song and music, and he did not find them incongruent. Somewhere between the valley and the turn in the passage he began speaking; when he opened his mouth to utter the words, one of the cracks started to bleed and the trickle of blood oozed from his lip, rolled crookedly down his chin and out of sight down his neck.