by C. L. Moore
He looked pale, but he didn't say yes or no just yet. "Let's tie it up," he said. "Maybe the bleeding will slack off. I want to get on if I can."
I was very helpful.
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CHAPTER XIX
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER we were bouncing along in the 'hopper side by side, me at the wheel. We were going ahead, not back. I'd brought it off exactly as I'd known I would. I couldn't go wrong today.
The mountains rose in big wooded ridges on both sides. I took us northeast, heading as my new-found victim directed me. His name was Cliff. I asked no questions. I didn't need to. Under the 'hopper I knew the little box was hugging the metal and sending out its invisible, inaudible beeps of signal. Somewhere on a Comus map a little dot of light was crawling as we crawled. Maybe on the map they could see where we were heading. I couldn't. But it didn't matter. Cliff knew and so would I, eventually. Twice I heard the beat of a distant helicopter hovering after us. Both times I talked fast and Cliff was too preoccupied with his battle wound to notice.
I thought of the troupe far behind me, waking, packing, wondering what had become of me. I let the images of them move through my mind—Guthrie and his conflicts, Polly and Roy with their knot of commonplace trouble, Cressy the focus of so many kinds of desire from all of us, the Henkens with so little of life left. How long would they wait on me?
I felt a little sorry for Guthrie, in an agony of indecision by now, not sure whether he still had a show with Rohan missing. Let him sweat, I thought. Douglass Flats isn't too far away. I'd looked up the next stop on our itinerary and I could make it before opening time. Or if I didn't, I'd have a reason.
But I knew in my own mind I'd be there. The troupe would know it too. They wouldn't be really worried. Wild horses couldn't have kept me off my stage last night. I'd make it if I had to tear down mountains to get there. Meanwhile there was another kind of work before me, and that looked promising too.
About half an hour later we topped a ridge and rolled downhill through high, streaming grass into one of the prettiest little mountain meadows in the world. A blue stream snaked through it and the floor of the valley was shoulder-high with flowering reeds and grass.
Cliff leaned forward, pointing. "There," he said.
You had to look twice to see it. The building was wide and low, with a roof thatched with growing grass so the reconnaissance planes that can tell the difference between green paint and chlorophyll couldn't spot it!
I said, "What is it?" and Cliff said, "Distribution center," and went back to the careful nursing of his knee, which had a large, bloodstained bandage around it. I stared eagerly at the place, my heart beginning to thump a little heavily. So much depended on the next few minutes. And minutes was all I'd have. What I could accomplish before the helicopters closed in on us might determine success or failure for me, whether Rohan went back to the Croppers or rose to the top again in New York. And I had no idea even what I wanted to do. I'd have to snatch the moment as it came.
The grass streamed like water against the glass as we went rocking along the marshy valley floor. Twice sentries stopped us and demanded our business over the muzzle of a shotgun. We left the 'hopper under a tree at the corner of the building and Cliff, leaning heavily on me, progressed with painful hops toward the door. I could hear a busy hum of voices from inside now. I kept telling myself that every minute counted. I had to get as good a look as I could at the inside and pick up some kind of lead—any kind—before hell broke loose.
The inside was like a hive. I had time for one quick look too confused to tell much before anyone noticed us. This was more like a factory than a building clear back of beyond, hidden in a mountain meadow. How all these people had got here without leaving more traces I had no time to wonder. Comus must have been hunting hard for places like this. There were long tables with people working in assembly lines packing boxes with ammunition and food. There were shelves and racks of clothes, boots, blankets. There were stacks of combat ration packs and first aid boxes.
And off in a corner behind a screen somebody was operating a machine that gave out long, muffled shrieks of metal on metal now and then. A smell like burned iodine came from behind the screen, and several people appeared to be moving around a table on which something absorbingly interesting was being assembled back there. I could see two or three of the bent heads from where I stood, and one of the heads was a woman's, with a dark, braided coronet of hair I seemed to remember.
At this point somebody near the door looked up and saw us. From then on for a few moments we had a minor riot, everyone wanting to know immediately what had happened to Cliff, and if this might be the forerunner of a raid. Several voices in overlapping sequence called for Elaine and Dr. Thomas, who happened to be the same person. The crowd opened for her, cool and efficient, wearing a blue shirt and slacks today that did a lot more for her than the white coat I'd last seen her wearing. The black eyes went suddenly round and alert when she recognized me.
A gray-haired man with a scar across his cheek seemed to be in charge here. Elaine Thomas broke out a first aid kit and went to work on Cliff's leg while I told them my simple story. It was, perhaps, lucky for me that Elaine had been present at the scene of my induction to rebellion back in San Andreas.
"I ran the lie-box test on him myself," she said, glancing up briefly as the gray-haired man shot questions. "Unless he's had a complete change of heart since, he's still on our side." She gave me a quick upward look. "Or are you?" she asked.
"I'm on my own side. I told you that from the start." I returned her look. The black eyes were managing to convey that she still thought there might be something interesting and exciting between us if we ever met away from the crowd, but she went on bandaging with quiet competence.
The gray-haired man was intensely interested in the alleged raid by two men on the 'hopper back there on the outskirts of San Andreas. I found it hard to keep my story plausible. I talked fast, making a good production of it, knowing all I had to do was keep talking for a matter of minutes, because Comus was on the way and coming fast. I told him about the 'hopper parked outside by the tree. I described the two men who were supposed to have jumped me. And all the while I was trying desperately to pick some lead out of this busy hive that could help me lever money out of Nye. I had to have something. I couldn't go back now without information of value, something to sweeten the reception already waiting for me.
I think just about then was the time I heard the first buzz of the helicopters. I heard it because I was listening. For the others, no heads rose. Elaine finished off the bandage and straightened, holding her bloody hands away from her, palms up with the fingers curled in, and gazed at me with a faint smile. "Now what are we going to do with you, Rohan? This is a private place here. You aren't really supposed to know about it. Makes things awkward."
"You might just shoot me," I suggested, smiling at her. The black eyes, grave and considering, flickered at me with that readiness in them for the time when we might find ourselves alone together and free to explore whatever might come next. How much we might enjoy it, and how little chance there was that the time would ever come. But there was confidence in the look, and a kind of wary trust, and it occurred to me that nobody had looked at me like that for a long time.
It made me think of Miranda. A woman with warmth and beauty, a woman skilled in her profession, looking up at me with expectation. Miranda had looked at me like that. Miranda had thought—for a long time, perhaps—that the expectation was based on something real. That I had something in me to give. I don't know what. Something besides the fierce drive I always focused on my work, something under the savage temper and the hard control. But for Miranda there hadn't been anything there at all.
Suddenly all the warm confidence that had been brimming through me in bright, hot waves cooled and receded. Suddenly I felt again like the hollow man I had been so long. I looked down with hatred at Blaine Thomas. I wanted to yell at her, "You think I've got what Miranda thought
I had, and not getting it from me killed her. And killed me. But I don't know what the hell it is you want, and whatever it is I haven't got it. All I know how to do is drive straight at what I want the hard way, no matter what it costs anybody. Me or anybody. No matter if I have to shut Miranda out of my life. No matter if I have to play the rebels here who trust me against Nye, who knows me for what I am, and double-cross Nye with the rebels to get the thing I'm after. I don't know any other way. I can't do it any other way. If I could I wouldn't. I'm Rohan, nobody else. I'm Rohan, and I do things my way!"
It all went sizzling through my head in the click of an instant while the black-eyed girl stood there with her bloody hands palms up, faintly smiling at me. While I stood hollow and shaken, hating her, a sudden crackle of gunfire made flat, slamming noises just outside the door. Somebody's yell of warning flatted upward into a scream.
After that everything went wild.
For just a moment longer I was hollow. Everything had drained out of my life again. I'd lost my chance too fast to accomplish anything. Here it ended.
But there was order in his sudden wildness. It took them only seconds to get organized. And out of that order I saw my chance. The warm, bright upward waves of confidence came welling back and Rohan was himself again.
I saw men and women jumping for the gun slots in the wall, grabbing up weapons as they went. The rest of the workers went into purposeful action, organizing under my eyes into a well-rehearsed drill they must have run over a hundred times, in readiness for the Day Comus Finds Us. The gray-haired man swung away from me, yelling orders over the tumult from outside, where gunfire still slammed deafeningly. The Comus . And the sentries out there were having a brisk battle. Nobody inside had yet fired a shot, though at the gun slots everybody with weapons stood tense, waiting for—something.
I jumped into action with the rest. I had it all back again, the happy confidence, the good luck. I couldn't miss. Even this was good. Because the things they salvaged were the important things. They were telling me plainer than words what to follow up.
I played it straight. Two women were struggling to rip the lid off a crate of rifles, and I grabbed the chisel out of their hands and levered the boards apart, nails shrieking. People at the antibiotics shelves were cramming their pockets with little boxes, and I dragged up a stool and handed down supplies off the higher shelves into their hands.
That was how I happened to see the box with the rings in it. Up on a top shelf, with DANGER—POISON in big red letters cross the front. I flipped the lid open while I was reaching for more packets of antibiotics, and two rows of neat gold finger rings looked up at me out of their nests, each with a round blue set like an innocent eye. They came in graduated sizes. Inside the lid of the box my quick glance had time to read the one matter-of-fact line of typed instruction pasted to the lining.
"Crush glass between teeth. Cyanide—Instantaneous Death."
I stood motionless for a moment, letting that information sink it. The rings looked up at me, blue-eyed and full of instantaneous death. My mind felt very still in the midst of all this hubbub as I thought about it. I closed the lid quietly.
Shoveling down the boxes with automatic motions, I tried to remember why the rings hadn't looked entirely strange to me. I'd seen one on somebody's hand here in this building in the last few minutes. Just a passing glance, hardly noticed. Who? Whoever it was, he had to be important. You don't wear a cyanide ring for fun. You have to know important things that you don't dare risk talking about, even under narcosynthesis. Who?
Then I had it. The gray-haired man with the scar.
I was standing there thinking it over when the uproar from outside slackened and ceased. My ears drummed with the silence for a moment. Then an enormous metal voice roared through an amplifier outside.
"On the count of ten," the great voice bellowed, "we fire sleep bombs. You have a ten-count to come out with your hands up. One! Two ...!"
I felt an instant of panic.
I'd never been on the receiving end of a sleep bomb, but I knew a percentage of the gassed victims just don't wake up. How big a percentage no two people ever agreed on.
If anybody else was scared, no one showed it. I heard rapid orders in half a dozen overlapping voices, confusing like crowd voices on stage.
"All ammunition carriers this way—meet Pedro at Eleven Eighty."
"All food carriers scatter and meet at the Olsens' after sundown."
"Diversion crews, work from the southeast corner. Cover the 'hopper getaway." This last time was from the gray-haired man, who got up on a table to make sure everybody heard him. I looked at his hand and saw a blue ring glint briefly. He was shouting over the hubbub, waving his arm for attention.
"Cover the 'hopper getaway!" he was repeating. "Pull attention away from the 'hopper! Have you all got that? Do it any way you can, but do it!"
From outside the vast metallic voice counted ominously, "Five! You have a five-count now to come out with your hands up. You inside there! Six! Seven!"
The man on the table glanced around the walls at the people standing ready by the gun slots. He lifted his hand ready to signal. "Here it comes," he called. "Brace yourselves, everybody. All right—fire!" And he dropped his hand.
All around the walls I heard the simultaneous crackle of the shots. The enormous noise from outside came so sudden and so loud I had the strange feeling I'd missed hearing how it began. One moment all was comparatively still. The next my head was reverberating like a gong and the whole room was solid with the crash of sound, and I had no memory of just when it started.
Some reeling element of reason told me the rebels must have set off some kind of buried mines in the area outside, around the building. Maybe by the simple expedient of firing a prearranged trigger spots. But all of us inside, even those who knew what to expect, were stunned for a moment by the noise.
Then the rumble of heavy doors sliding open sounded all around the walls of the building. Light gushed in blue with smoke and seething with dust, and out through the clouds of it the rebels went scattering. Everybody but me knew exactly what to do.
I had one brief second of hesitation. Then I found I too knew what I was going to head for. The 'hopper. Make for the 'hopper. Whatever they load into the 'hopper is the big thing. That's what you're here for. Don't miss it.
Outside, blinding in the sunlight, I saw the Comus helicopters sitting heavily in the flowery meadow a little way off. All around the building a ring of blackened grass and raw earth lay smoldering heavily. Bodies lay among the embers, and what Comus men were still on their feet looked dazed and unsteady. But they were recovering fast. Not quite as fast as the rebels scattered, but almost fast enough.
Now an outburst of yells and shots rang out noisily from the far corner of the building, and a series of minor explosions burst out toward the river. I wanted badly to turn and look, but I thought it was cover-up action from the diversion crews. I knew the 'hopper was the really important spot.
The scattering crowd ran like purposeful rabbits for the forest. They ran in all directions. But a few converged toward the tree where the 'hopper sat, and I was foremost among them. I was second on the spot. But in moments I was the center of a busy, silent throng loading boxes into the seat beside the driver's. Elaine Thomas was shoving packets this way and that to make room for a big, flat, square bundle about two feet across and wrapped tenderly in blankets like a baby susceptible to draughts. The way she handled it, and the way everybody here seemed to touch it with respect verging on awe, made me look at the thing with gathering excitement.
I wondered what it was. I wondered if this could be wishful thinking, or was it what I thought it was ...
The gray-haired man was giving orders in a quick, firm whisper. "All right, that's it," he said after a fast thirty seconds of work that seemed a lot longer. "In with you, Elaine. Don't argue. Quick! Keep to the high grass and try to cross the ridge at the gap. The rest of you, scatter out and run alongside th
rough the grass. Thresh around. Make it wave. All right, get going. Good luck!"
We went. We spread out and ran blindly, I running with the rest, the reeds whipping my face, the marshy ground sucking at my shoes. Behind me scattered gunfire broke out as the Comus men began to get their wits back. All around me I heard feet thump, reeds lash, men breathing heavily as they ran, and to my right the beelike humming of the 'hopper carrying Elaine and the unknown treasure away from me faster than I could ever hope to run.
I wasn't getting anywhere this way. I'd had one glimpse and no more of something that might be, could be, just possibly was the biggest thing in California. Or a part of the biggest thing. But in minutes the 'hopper would take to the rising ground and go heaving up the slope and over into the woods. And after that I was finished. Somebody else would trace the 'hopper by its signal box still clinging to the metal. Somebody else would get the credit. Unless——
The gunfire from behind us picked up in volume. I heard the deep, heavy throb of a helicopter engine starting and realized that whatever I did I'd have to do fast. And anonymously. I was playing both sides against the middle and if either of them caught me at it I was done.
Underfoot the ground seemed firmer. It didn't cling to the feet any more and a slope was beginning to rise under the thick grass. I heard the 'hopper's buzz quicken as its wheels got better purchase and its laboring motor heaved it upward with a sudden burst of speed. Then the reeds thinned and through them I saw the little machine swaying and grinding up the slope, Elaine bent low over the wheel. She had outdistanced her escort already. In a moment or two she'd be over the ridge and out of my reach.
