The Dancers of Noyo

by Margaret St. Clair

  "Don't touch anything," Franny cautioned me again.

  "Aren't we going backward?" I asked after a little.

  "Yes, but we have to. This is the best way out."

  We made a wide circuit through the big room. I heard the dripping noise, a long way off, and another slime mold lapped coldly at our feet for a few minutes. That was all, and yet I was so keyed-up I felt I would almost have welcomed the pad-pad of a Hunter following us.

  How cunningly O'Hare had known how to exploit the archetypal terrors of the human mind! Corny and gothic his horrors may have been; they were certainly never crude or bathetic. He made no use of spiders or bats: his agents of fear were strange shadows, and darkness, and danger and pursuit in the dark. What a nasty man O'Hare must have been! And yet Franny, who was in many ways an admirable girl, was his daughter.

  We reached the end of the enormous room. There was a blank wall before us. "It's a maze," the girl whispered, "but it's simple, easy enough. You always turn right."

  We made a couple of right turns. We never went more than a few feet without a change of direction being offered to us. Then I began to hear a sharp noise, a sort of clicking tap, coming after us.

  Franny heard it as soon as I. Her face changed frighteningly. I thought she was going to faint.

  She looked about her wildly for a moment. Then she grabbed my hand and pulled me through right turn after right turn until we reached a little niche, a recess in the wall whose entrance was almost closed by projecting walls on both side. "Get in," she said. "Get as far back as you can and flatten against the wall as much as you can. Get in!" She pushed at me desperately.

  I worked myself into the crevice, taking some skin off my chest and buttocks in the process, and flattened myself against the rear wall. Franny followed, flattening her pelvis and arching her neck to get through. The crevice, though shallow, was broad enough for us to stand side by side, plastered hard against the rear wall.

  Just in time. The clicking taps were getting louder, and an instant later another of O'Hare's inventions was standing before us.

  I saw a beak like a parrot's, Atlantean shoulders, broad, stubby, almost fingerless hands. It was quite short, not more than three feet tall, and it made an impression of enormous strength.

  "What is it?" I asked in a whisper.

  "A Digger," she answered in a normal voice. "You don't have to speak softly here, Sam. It's deaf."

  "What does it want?" I asked. The thing had begun to break pieces off the sides of the protecting wall of the niche where we stood. It worked quickly, but with a sort of finicky delicacy, like a man rolling bread pills.

  "Calcium. The calcium in our bones."

  "Fee fi foh fum," I said, in an attempt to be light-hearted. "Why doesn't it eat the concrete pieces it's breaking off the wall? There's calcium in concrete."

  "Yes. But it's only interested in organic calcium."

  The edges of the wall were going a little faster than I liked. I remembered the bow slung over my shoulders. The light was wretched, and I had hardly room to draw the weapon. But before the Digger could come in after us, I resolved to try a shot.

  "Don't worry too much, Sam," Franny said, as if she read my mind. "I think it's going to be all right. The Digger'll go away pretty soon. It has to."

  "Why? Does it—unh—run down?"

  "No, but at pretty frequent intervals it has to go take a bath in formaldehyde." She explained about the chemical's use as a preservative.

  "But—isn't that stuff poisonous?" She nodded. "How come the Digger can go bathing in it?"

  "It isn't really alive. I mean, it's not ordinary life. It's a kind of development of the robot workers my father used when he was building this place. Anyhow, it hasn't got the defenses against microorganisms that normal animals have. If it didn't bathe in formaldehyde, it wouldn't last long. The formaldehyde keeps it from spoiling while it's alive."

  The thing was working straight down one edge of the wall. The opening was now about two inches wider than it had been. I thought that pretty soon the Digger would be able to put one of its short-armed hands in the opening and pull me or Franny out.

  "How big is this place, anyhow?" I asked. My throat was awfully dry.

  "Not as big as it looks, but pretty big. He told me once how many tons of earth they moved, and how many yards of concrete."

  I wondered what the Boonters had thought of the enormous construction going on so near them. Still, Francesca had said her father had used robot workers—she must have meant androids—and he probably had drawn on local resources only when it couldn't be helped.

  "How come you know so much about this part of it?" I asked.

  "Father took me through once. I hated it. But I think he was proud of it, in a way. That big room, the room with the funny furniture, is the worst."

  "Why? It didn't seem so bad."

  "No, but it's full of booby traps. If you'd touched the laboratory bench, for instance, a laser beam would have sliced through you. And the chairs and stool were fixed to come out with a cloud of dioxins if anybody sat in them. That's a bad room."

  Dioxins. I thought I'd rather have taken my chances with the Avengers if I'd known what Franny was leading me into. Still, we'd probably have been lying on that hillside by now, with arrows in our chests. We had survived so far.

  It seemed to me the Digger, though the opening had got alarmingly large, was working a little more slowly than it had been. "Why did your father make the Dancers, anyhow?" I asked. "I mean"—I was conscious of a certain non sequitur in this question—"you said the Hunter had been a preliminary study for the Dancers. And that this thing that's trying to get in to us was a development of a robot worker. But why did he make the Dancers?"

  She countered with a question. "Why did he take all those drugs? It was a hobby, in a way. And he liked the sense of power it gave him. He liked to have people begging for them."

  "How could he afford it? It must have cost a fortune to grow the Dancers. He never took money for them, did he?"

  "No, he didn't benefit financially. And the Dancers were expensive. But he had a big income, for a while, from royalties on drug sequences he'd patented. When the income ran out, he persuaded one of the big foundations to take over the growing of the Dancers. Foundations will take over anything, if they're approached right. Father died a poor man."

  The Digger had definitely slowed down. It stopped. It stood for a moment wagging its beak from side to side, like a punch-drunk fighter. Then it turned and went tapping away, clicking its hands on the floor. The smell of -concrete dust was in the air.

  "When will it be back?" I asked as we extricated ourselves from the niche.

  "Not for quite a while. It has no memory, so it won't come after us as soon as it's had its bath in formaldehyde. We ought to be out of here and gone by the time it gets the idea again."

  She took my hand and led me on out through the maze in a succession of right turns. At last we emerged into an open space, a little more brightly lighted than the maze had been, and with a tesselated floor. The floor seemed to stop in front of us and be resumed after a gap of some ten feet. There was a solid wall to our right and a broad hall, one of whose walls was on the other side of the gap in the pavement, leading to the left.

  Francesca's face seemed to relax. "Almost there," she whispered. "Father put a deep ditch—a moat, really—between this place and the part where the Dancer growing tanks are. That's what that gap in the floor is. But there's a way over, with a series of baffles to keep things-from this side back. It just means a bit of walking, that's all."

  We started down the broad hall. I wondered how deep the moat was. Franny didn't warn me against touching anything, and it really wasn't necessary to warn me. But the sole of my moccasins were slippery from our last encounter with the slime mold, and as we made a jog to the left my foot slipped. I feel against the wall rather heavily. The next minute something warm and wet had come plopping out of the ceiling and was clinging to the top of my
head.

  It caused me no physical pain though, as I afterward discovered, it was attaching itself to me in a leechlike way. (It could get no purchase through my hair, but around the edges of my scalp, where the skin of my face was exposed, it was sucking in.) What I did feel, as soon as the flap of tissue closed over my head, was a blank, paralyzing fear.

  It was a fear without content—inordinate, inexplicable, staggering. I could have howled like a dog from it. And, since the mind always tries to fill in something as the object of fear when fear is felt—Pomo Joe had taught me that—my mind kept picking up danger after danger as an explanation of what I felt, and always discarding the explanation again. Not the least of my troubles was that I didn't know what I was so horribly afraid of. And yet the walls seemed to drip dread, the air crawled and writhed with fear. Fran said that I gave little indication of what I was experiencing; my eyes were closed, and I stood swaying from side to side and trembling, occasionally licking my lips.

  I couldn't put my hands to my head to try to dislodge the grayish flap. That would have meant that I recognized the ambiguous tissue as the source of my distress, and such insight was beyond me. Franny was puzzled for a moment to know what had happened. My expression, she said, was as blank as the fear I felt. Then she began to pull and tug at the edges of the gray pad that covered my scalp. It was moving a little and it looked, she said, like some horrible kind of mobile hair.

  It resisted her fingers. I was standing paralyzed in my trance of dread, with the beating of my own heart frightening me. But as soon as Fran pried the thing loose a little, so that some of its contact with my skin was broken, I could recognize it as the source of my crushing fear. I pried too; and between us Fran and I got the flap of stuff entirely detached. It lay in my hand writhing and humping sluggishly.

  Its underside was covered with my blood. I threw it as far from me as I could, off to the left. I stood panting and trembling for a minute or two, trying to regain my emotional equilibrium.

  "Let's go," I said at last. I suppose the pad-pad in the background had been coming nearer, but I was too self-absorbed to notice it. Then Franny screamed. I turned to see a Hunter standing beside me.

  It hesitated for an icy moment—I suppose the blood trickling down my face attracted it—and then went after the flap of flesh that was lying writhing on the floor. It stood bowing and humping over it, in a sort of ecstasy. Seconds later three other Hunters came bumping up and joined it. It was like a nonhuman religious rite.

  I looked at Franny. Her face was greenish white, and she was breathing shallowly. I felt that she was momentarily at the end of her resources. "How long—" she said, and shuddered. I put my aim around her, and she seemed to draw comfort from the contact. I resolved to see what my bow could accomplish against the Hunters, though four of them would be heavy odds.

  Franny drew a deep breath. "We still have a chance," she said. "Do you see the dartboard on the wall on the other side of the moat?"

  I had, in fact, noticed the blue-and-orange thing, incongruous against the rough concrete wall, with a corridor to the right of it. "Yes," I said.

  "Do you think you can shoot straight into its center on the first shot?"

  I gauged the distance. "I think so, yes."

  "You've got to get it right the first time. We have a few minutes before the Hunters sober up and start after us. Study the shot. Be sure you can do it well. You won't get a second chance."

  Blood from my scalp kept getting in my eyes. I got down on my knees and leaned out over the ditch. I wished I weren't feeling so shaky and weak. I remembered that I had a dusty coca leaf in my medicine bag, and fumbled for it.

  The leaf was dry and tasted bitter. I chewed hastily, swallowing my saliva. Almost at once my nerves steadied. I felt much better. Once more I leaned out over the ditch.

  "Is it as deep as it looks?" I asked.

  "Deeper, I think," Franny answered. She kept trying to swallow. Her mouth seemed to be dry.

  I wet a finger and held my arm out over the gulf. No marked sensation of coldness. There didn't appear to be an updraft from the gulf, which made it easier.

  Franny didn't say anything, but she kept looking uneasily toward the Hunters. "What happens after I shoot?" I asked.

  "If you hit the center, a bridge will come down. Go right on over then, Sam. You must hurry. I'll follow."

  I wondered why she wanted to be last over, but the Hunters were beginning to drift away from the still writhing gray tissue. I unlimbered my bow and picked out my truest arrow. I aimed very carefully, remembering Pomo Joe's lessons. I released the string.

  The arrow went straight and clean into the gold, with a solid thunk. Instantly a plank shot out at floor level from the other side. I didn't recognize it for a bridge immediately. "Cross!" Franny said imperatively. "Hurry up!"

  I obeyed. There was a slender handrail on one side of the plank. Franny was right at my heels as we ran across the moat.

  The instant we were over she pressed her hand down hard on the bottom edge of the dartboard. Then she pushed me into the corridor and down to the floor. "Brace yourself," she said.

  There was a crash. A steel curtain had shot down between us and the moat. A split second later there was a terrific explosion. The ground shook. It was like a big dog shaking a shoe. Back in Boonville they must have thought it was an earthquake.

  I had my arm around Franny. We were still on the floor. "So that was why you wanted to be last over," I said.

  "Yes. There wasn't time to explain about the steel curtain and the explosion. Father had it set to self-destruct."

  I picked myself up and looked about me. Francesca's father had certainly had some unpleasant drug dreams. But we had come through. The smell of formaldehyde was less here, the light was better, the place altogether had a more normal air. We had come through.

  -

  Chapter XV

  "I thought I heard voices," the man with the whip said. He gave the remains of the meal we had been eating a scornful glance. "I suppose you know you're trespassing."

  Franny and I looked at each other; he looked at us and made the lash of his whip run and ripple along the floor. It wasn't a neat, dainty whip like a riding crop, but a brute of a thing, with a lash that must have been twenty feet long and a stock that was about as thick as the thin part of a ballbat.

  "Trespassing?" Franny said after an instant. "My name is Francesca O'Hare. I'm O'Hare's daughter."

  "Are you?" the whip man said. "I don't see that that has anything especial to do with it." He was a tall, heavy man a few years older than I, with a heavy, sagging face. "You seem to have been making yourselves quite at home in the lab kitchen. Those are my cookies, I think."

  Franny turned dull red. "I bought those cookies in Boonville a couple of weeks ago myself," she said. "As far as trespassing goes, who are you? What are you doing here?"

  "Oh. I suppose I should have introduced myself. My name is Jack Binns, dear heart, and I'm from the Rothein Foundation. I pop in every other day or so to see how the embryos in the growing tanks are getting along.

  "Not that I have anything to do with their development—the whole process is automatic—but I do feel involved with them. You must know about the embryos, if you're really O'Hare's daughter." He picked up one of the chocolate biscuits from the plate and began to munch on it. "I can't think how you got into the lab. The place is locked up like a bank."

  "Never mind that," I said. "Is the Foundation going to keep on growing an distributing the Dancers just the way O'Hare did?"

  "Well, we'll keep on giving them to tribes that ask for them. I don't know how long we'll keep on with the growing. There are four in the tanks now, and it takes them about fourteen months from the initial clone to maturity.

  "Actually, our interest in the Dancers is experimental. I'm working on a piece of independent research in connection with them."

  "Unh," I said. "What's the research about?"

  "Well, the title of my paper will be:
"The effect that the introduction of a Dancer has on the economy and religious expression of three typical Mendocino coast tribes.' I may take up the question of social relationships, too. It depends on how much material I can get." He took another cookie from the dish.

  I said, "The Dancers are highly unpopular with all the younger tribesmen."

  "That may be," Binns answered. "But we don't intend to give them out unless we're asked. I told you that.