“Stop it!” Nestamay exclaimed, deeply shocked. “Jasper, that’s a dreadful thing to say! Skip my watch-why, that’d be unforgivable!”
“I’d forgive you,” Jasper grinned. “And nobody else would have to know.”
“I’ll tell my grandfather!”
“Him!”Jasper curled his lip. “He’s a pig-headed fool, and you ought to know by this time. Driving everyone to waste time ‘on watch’, as he calls it-slaving over foolishnesses in the Station all day instead of something constructive like making more food or pulling bits out of the Station and improving the huts.”
“But it has to be done!” Nestamay objected.
“Does it? Who says so? Your grandfather and a few other addlepated old folk! I don’t think he believes these stories he feeds us-I think he just uses them to maintain his position over the rest of the people. If he really believes what he says about walking to other and better worlds, why doesn’t he try it himself-on solid ground instead of through some hole in the Station full of horrible things?”
White-lipped, Nestamay forced words between her teeth. “My father did try, Jasper! You know perfectly well!”
“And was never heard of again,” Jasper said. “So much for your grandfather and his tales.”
Almost blinded by rage, Nestamay might have taken the hatchet to him in the next few seconds, but that the night was riven apart by a rising wail from the Station. Jasper whirled.
“Now look what’s happened because you held me up!” Nestamay shrieked, and fled towards the source of the noise. Behind her, the doors of the huts opened and men and able-bodied young women came running out, bearing handlights and weapons. Some of them had been resting after their daytime stint of work in the Station, and hadn’t bothered to put on their clothes.
Once it would have been possible to head straight into the Station and reach the room-Grandfather called it the “watch office”-where someone always waited during the night for the automatic alarms to indicate the arrival of a thing. Long ago, however, the direct passageways had become choked with vegetation, and some had caved in, while others held poisonous thorns and grasping plant-tentacles. Nestamay had to use a roundabout route, up twisted stairways and along rickety catwalks, to arrive at her destination.
Panting, she flung open the office door. There was no one here; day watches were kept by members of the working parties, and they would have knocked off no later than sunset, half an hour ago. She almost fell into the chair, frantically scanning the detector dials. Half of them were cracked and useless, but some were functioning.
And, by a miracle which would conceal her lateness, those dials provided her with the information she needed.
“Nestamay!” her grandfather’s acid voice thundered from a speaker high on the wall. “We’re waiting for you to tell us where it is-we can’t move until you do!”
“Sorry,” Nestamay mumbled. “I was just-uh-making a double check. This is a big one, Grandfather, probably too big to kill. Mass about two hundred kilos. It hatched in Sector 2-A and started moving immediately. It’s somewhere in Sector 4 by now, but there’s a dial broken-just a moment, a signal’s coming up!”
She leaned forward and rubbed dust from the glass over a dial.
“Yes, it’s in 4-C now and still moving. You may be able to hear it!”
A voice in the background behind Grandfather said something affirmative, and, straining her ears, Nestamay caught a faint crash that reached her almost simultaneously via the speaker and directly from the heart of the Station around her.
“Right!” Grandfather snapped, and went on to his companions. “Margin for error in a two-hundred-kilo body is too great-we might not hit a vital organ. Try and flush it into Channel Nine and drive it clear of the Station. Light first, noise next, and only then anything which might enrage it without doing serious harm. Quickly, now!”
There was a pause. Nestamay saw from the dials that the thing had stopped moving; more crashes from the direction of Sector 4-C suggested the creature had found something to interest it for a while.
“Nestamay!”
It was Grandfather again. She called an answer.
“Nestamay, it’s a bad one-wild! It charged the handlights and someone’s been hurt. No time for half-measures! I want power fed to the Channel Nine electrofence, and the storage cells for the heatbeams topped up.”
Nestamay’s heart lurched. On this watch of all watches, when a dangerous killer came through, Jasper had to delay her on her way to the office! She was going to give Jasper a piece of her mind when she next saw him-a going-over with a heatbeam would be even better, but hard to organise …
“Full power!” she reported, having tripped the necessary switches.
“Full power!” Grandfather told his companions. “Move!”
Nestamay jumped from her chair and ran to the window overlooking that side of the Station known as Sector 4. She stared into the gloom under the cracked and sagging roof.
At first she saw nothing. Then glimmering handlights appeared, masked by vegetation and rubble. Caught in their beam for a second, something glistening reared up. A howl at a teeth-rasping frequency split the air, followed by a vast crash and a completely human scream. Nestamay found she was biting her fingertips in agony.
Then the heatbeams came on. Like dull red pokers, they stabbed through the murk, striking swirls of smoke from anything they touched. Behind Nestamay, there were clicks as the power-level readings dropped with frightening rapidity.
The thing howled again and made a couple of stupid rushes at its tormentors, but the heat increased inversely with the square root of the intervening distance, and provided the beams remained steady it was impossible for the thing to come closer than some fifteen feet. It realised this at last, turned-howling more than ever-and blundered into Channel Nine, which would lead it to the bare ground beyond the Station.
“Electrofence!” Grandfather ordered. Nestamay dived for the power-switch.
The electrofence wasn’t precisely a fence, but a tubular mesh of wire completely enclosing each channel. Its original function might have been connected with the transportation of goods; currently, it served as their best weapon against the things. It induced microwave frequencies in sufficient quantity to half-cook anything inside it.
With a howl far louder than any preceding, the thing felt the first effects, and panic took over. Nestamay hadn’t seen whether it had legs or not, but it must have done; nothing else but good, muscular legs could have carried its substantial mass out of the channel so fast. Off into the surrounding desert it fled, trumpeting its intolerable pain to the stars.
It might come back-if it was stupid enough. Men with heatbeams would have to watch for it for the next few days, which meant taking people away from the regular working parties. Not all the things were as bad as that-some were huge and harmless, some were little and harmless … and some were little and deadly, and they were the worst of all. But it had been a long time since anything in a swarm, which was particularly frightening, had hatched out in the Station.
Nestamay wiped her face; it was running with sweat. Now she had to trace the original point of emergence of the thing, so that it could be blanked off for ever.
Was there never to be an end to this existence? Would they never find the last hole through which things leaked from-wherever they originated?
Those were questions she knew she couldn’t answer. She drove them from her mind and went about her work.
VII
The five wise men, Yanderman himself, and the servants who came and went with jugs of beer and plates of cheese and onions made the room crowded. The ceiling was low and the walls were rough. The layout suggested to Yanderman that this fort had been the whole of Lagwich at one time, with perhaps a mere hundred people living in crude cabins around it and taking refuge inside the stone wall when necessary; the palisade and ditch lower down the hill would have followed the expansion of the population to its present figure of eight or nine times the original number.