by C. L. Moore
For one last moment I heard Eileen Henken’s defiant voice screaming the rally call in vast, metallic tones. Then the gun barked again and the sound amplifier gave a hoarse squawk and was silent. My ears roared with the stillness when it stopped.
From the row of flat-faced houses to our left and right I thought I sensed motion behind windowpanes. I wasn’t sure, because a Comus sergeant in a brilliant red coat had jumped out before the line of unmoving men as Eileen’s alarm began to sound, and I was watching him, ready to duck. His mouth opened and closed with some order nobody could hear while the amplifier horns still screamed. I wasn’t even paying attention to Guthrie just now. I thought this man was our nearest real danger—now.
When the roar of the amplifier died the sergeant’s voice bawled out with unexpected volume. He got some of the command out. “FI——” he yelled.
A rifle cracked sharply, with a sound of brisk authority. The yelling sergeant never finished his command. Guthrie whirled toward the noise, and in the same instant I realized that all alone the street gun muzzles were poking out from upper windows with a sharp crackle of breaking glass. Their fusillade swept the scarlet ranks, whined from the helicopter sides, sang on the pavement. The Comus men reeled in a moment’s wild disorder before they broke for cover, firing as they ran. The focus of the fight had changed with amazing swiftness.
So the rebels had known we were on our way. They had held their fire until now.
But it was still up to us to take the next step.
I felt the shape of Pod Henken’s gun solid and unexpected in my hand. I had forgotten I held it. Clumsily in my left hand I hefted the thing.
Then from behind us the wild, rising wail of the Prowler we had so briefly escaped came swelling toward us along the street. A burst of futile rifle fire rattled from windows above as it passed. I heard a dull boom and saw a flash of sullen reddish light reflected on the building fronts around us. The Prowler had fired a small bomb into one of the centers of rebel resistance as it passed. And it must be a building Comus had already searched, I told myself. They still wanted the Anti-Com and wanted it intact, or all of Corby would by now be rocking with explosions. I glanced apprehensively at the quiet stars. There might be bombs or bombers on the way already, poised to strike if all else failed.
Over the wild shrieking of the Prowler and the rattle of gunfire a voice was shouting in my ear from the back window of the cab. Roy’s voice, pitched to carry. He was almost at my ear but he sounded as if he were shouting over windy miles, the noise around us was so heavy.
“Where—we headed?” he called. “Where’s—Anti-Com?”
It brought me back to life. The tremendous noise and the numbing effect of all I had been through had dulled me briefly to the need for more action, and fast, while the rebel firing still gave us time to move. It occurred to me with a kind of impersonal inteřest that I was losing blood and had been for the past half hour—or was it less? Time had little meaning now. The loss of the blood had little meaning. It was somebody else’s blood reddening the bandage on my arm.
I leaned to look through the windshield at the skyline of Corby. Elaine had said you could see the church tower from anywhere in town. And after an instant I saw it, high and gray, underlighted from below by what might be the glow of an unseen fire somewhere near it. The belfry shone pink-lit and pale against the sky, and I could see one star shining through the arches.
A hand came through the window of the cab at my side groping for the inside handle. An arm with a checkered shirt sleeve. I looked down at Guthrie’s red, determined face, dark with anger. My gun was in my left hand and I swung it up and looked straight down the barrel at him, the gun sight centered between his eyes and the rest of his face so near my own hand blotted it out. He looked up at me, his eyes on mine, waiting because it was too late for him to do anything at all but await the explosion.
I couldn’t pull the trigger.
I tried. I couldn’t do it. From a distance, yes, maybe. From an impersonal distance when it was his life or mine. But not now, not this close, not with his eyes calmly gazing into mine. I knew him too well. He was a tough old man doing a job he didn’t much like, but doing it because he knew he had to. According to his lights, I was a fool.
I turned the gun barrel sidewise and struck him in the face with the back of my hand, heavily, knocking him backward into the street.
“Pod,” I said, keeping my voice as quiet as I could, “get going. Turn left into that street there. We’re heading for the gray stone church.”
The motor heaved into life before I fished speaking, and the truck rumbled into motion in a slow arc across the street. And not an instant too soon, either. The wail of the Prowler was all around us, bathing us in sound that made the viscera tighten. To our right just as we began to move an enormous crimson shape went hurtling by, so close its curved side shrieked against the side of the sound truck. They had meant to ram us. They had only barely missed. Next time they wouldn’t miss at all.
Pod knew it as well as I did. He didn’t try to straighten out of his arc and enter the street I’d pointed to. Instead he swung the truck broadside across its mouth, blocking the whole way.
“Outside!” he yelled. “We can’t outrun ‘em! Maybe on foot we can make it. Hurry!”
He was down in the street before he finished the last words. I scrambled across the seat after him and dropped through his open door, hearing the thud of hurrying feet in the truck behind me as the rest of the troupe scrambled too. Pod caught me as I hit the street and staggered. The next instant the whole truck boomed and leaped as the Prowler, accelerating backward with enormous speed and accuracy, crashed hard into the side I had just vacated.
It crashed and rebounded. The street was fully blocked—for a minute or two. For whatever that was worth to us. For under the continuous wailing of the Prowler I felt rather than heard a heavier beating throb, and knew that the helicopters were heaving their crimson weight into the air.
Cressy was on one side of me, Eileen Henken on the other. “You all right?” Roy asked anxiously, peering at me. I looked past him at Polly, her face strangely not haggard at all any more, but bright with a flamboyant freshness of excitement. Between them she and Roy were carrying the square box by its handles.
“I’m fine!” I yelled at them through the uproar. “Come on. Run!”
Somewhere down a side street another of the dull explosions boomed and another fan of crimson light sprang briefly up. Smoke blew toward us, veiling the buildings. People were running in the smoke, turning to fire back the way they had come. From the hidden side street the wail of another Prowler shrieked to a terrible crescendo and swooped down again with a shrill falling sound. Behind us the stalled sound truck reverberated again as the Prowler crashed once more into its side. A fusillade of useless rifle fire burst from a row of windows above us, bullets spattering against the high crimson curve of the Prowler futilely. We could see its gleaming red brow above the top of the sound truck drawing back for another blow.
We ran, under a slanting curtain of the rifle fire down the street toward the church tower in the distance.
It was like running through chaos. My head felt light and my feet seemed a long way off, hardly touching the pavement. The smoke that blew past us seemed to swirl through my mind. I remember a bright red ‘hopper rocking toward us down a street where men and women were running and falling, and I remember one man drawing back his arm to throw something bottle-shaped that gleamed in the ‘hopper’s single headlight and then crashed against its side. Oily lid splashed as it broke, flashed into fire, and spread a film of unsteady flame over the whole side of the ‘hopper. A homemade bomb, I thought. They’re fighting back with all they’ve got.
But it wasn’t going to be enough.
‘Hoppers you can knock out. But not Prowlers. Not helicopters. The machines were closing in on us all and rifles are no good against the kinds of machines Comus was mustering against us.
Only the Anti-
Com could knock these monsters out.
A heavy buzzing overhead made my very bones vibrate, and somebody’s hand on my arm dragged me under the overhang of a porch roof just before the search beam from the sky came splashing down, outlining startled runners in the street. They turned up frightened faces bleached white in the strong light. Bullets rattled down along the high beam and an irregular zigzag line of people doubled up and dropped onto the dazzling pavement.
Comus was out of control. Ted Nye was out of control. The safety fuse we carried with us was a safety fuse for Nye as well as the powerful thing we carried it to. I remember thinking desperately, They won’t take much more of this. They can’t. They shouldn’t. They’ll turn on the Anti-Com, safety fuse or not, and stop Comus in its tracks or blow up California trying. I heard Pod Henken’s voice wheezing in my ear.
“Guthrie’s behind us!” he yelled above the noise. “Look back!”
I saw the checkered shirt dimly through smoke. A swirl of people in the street moved between him and us, and when the view was clear again for a moment I saw red coats moving behind him. Not only machines were after us. Distantly I heard Guthrie shout, and a bullet spattered on the brick wall above our heads. Chips and brick dust rained over us.
Pod said in a firm, hurried voice, “You go on. It’s only a couple of blocks more. You can make it if I draw Guthrie off.”
I started to say, “No, we’ll——”
Pod cut me off. “Eileen can’t go any farther now anyhow,” he told me. “Look.” I turned my head and saw the red stain spreading across the side of her aproned costume. Her face was as white as her hair in the intermittent glare of the searchlights, but she still held her single carnation and she smiled at me almost placidly.
“It isn’t bad—I think,” she told me. “But I feel kind of—giddy. I think I’d better—sit down.”
Pod glanced around the smoky street. We seemed to be standing in rubble in a haze of dust that smelled of old wood and burning. I had no idea how we had got here. It was no surprise to me to see the pillows of a couch spilled helter-skelter across a broken wall. Pod kicked them together into a pile.
“Sit down here,” he said.
Roy and Polly, carrying the square case between them, hesitated only a moment. “We’d better not wait,” Roy said crisply. “Good luck, Eileen. See you later.”
“Get moving,” Pod said. “All of you.”
He glanced once at his wife. She smiled up at him and deliberately held the carnation to her nose, inhaling with delicate pleasure. Pod nodded as if she had told him something important. Maybe she had. Then he turned and lumbered heavily along the street, yelling at the top of his voice.
“Hey, Guthrie, Guthrie!” He waved an arm above his head. Bullets sang over him. Then a little knot of running people swerved between us. I saw a woman in the knot pause in her running when she saw Eileen on the cushions. I saw her stop, bend over the white head, call across her shoulder to a companion. Eileen waved me away with the carnation.
I ran dizzily after Cressy and Roy and Polly, my eyes stinging with smoke and pain and confused emotion I could not now stop to feel. Not yet. Cressy looked back for me and waited, taking my arm when I came within reach of her. I felt good and reassuring to let myself lean for a moment on her resilient young shoulder. I hadn’t realized how weak I was until I touched strength. But I knew my own weight. She couldn’t uphold me long. I straightened after a moment. I went on under my own power.
We had two blocks to run. We stumbled over rubble that blocked off half the street. Behind us suddenly rose the wail of another Prowler and we all looked back instinctively, seeing it loom above a welter of toppling walls and swerve up the street toward us, collapsing bricks and beams falling over it and sliding harmlessly to the ground. People scattered left and right as it came swelling and screaming down the long street. I saw another homemade bottle bomb glitter through the air and smash upon the broad red brow of the machine. Fire spread futilely and burned itself out across the undamaged hull.
The Prowler swerved again and vanished down a cross street with a fierce, diminishing wail. I had thought as I saw it come how beautiful it was, how perfect in shape and color and power. As Comus had been beautiful, once—perfect and powerful—before corruption took hold.
They were hunting us through the streets of Corby, but I knew they had lost us now. The chaos they had created was part of the force that defeated them, because the chaos was closing over us and we were only units of the mob, running and dodging and hiding when the Prowlers screamed or the helicopters roared overhead.
We had only one more block. At the end of the street the gray stone tower loomed against the stars. Once a bullet struck through the belfry arch and a bell sang out with a single startled clang that vibrated in my ears a long time after it had fallen silent again. And I had the curious feeling that Ted Nye was here in the roaring street behind us, searching frantically with fingers three thousand miles long. The Prowlers were his fingertips. The helicopters were his eyes. He was Comus, as Raleigh had been the nation, and with all the powers of omnipotence he was searching the streets of Corby for our four running figures and the box we carried.
A heavy roaring soared over us suddenly above the rooftops. A searchlight beam splashed down on a diagonal and for an instant bathed us all in its fierce white light that seemed to scorch the skin with terror where it touched us. Cressy and I dropped with a single motion under the shelter of a concrete wall. Roy jerked the box and Polly with it toward the nearest doorway. He made the cover himself, and the box was under the shelter too, but when the firing started Polly was still out in the white glare of the light. I think we all heard the bullet hit her, a solid, smacking sound.
She dropped as if the bullet had been a fist knocking her flat. The box thumped to the ground as Roy dropped his side of it and sprang out into the white moving beam. Bullets for a moment sang about him as he seized her under the arms and dragged her toward the doorway’s dubious shelter. They bounced like spring rain on the pavement, missing the two by a series of repeated miracles in the endless moment before the searchlight beam moved impersonally on and the hail of bullets ceased.
When Cressy and I reached them Polly was sitting up and cursing with weak fluency, her hand to her side where blood had begun to spring out between her fingers. Roy looked at me, his face suddenly haggard with all the haggardness Polly had worn so long.
“You’ll have to go on by yourselves,” he said in a flat voice. “I won’t leave her.”
Polly flashed one dazzling upward glance at him. She shut her lips for a moment over a curious look of weakness and warmth; she shut her eyes. Then she opened them again and said, “Get the hell on with it, Roy. I’m okay. Don’t be a fool.”
“Shut up,” Roy told her. “Lie down and stop worrying. Rohan and Cressy can make it. We’re almost there.” He gave me a resolute look.
“Don’t argue,” he said. “There isn’t time. Get going.”
A remote part of my mind laughed silently, thinking of the fresh-faced, irresponsible Roy of a week ago, who never made decisions because it was easier not to. I thought again-about crossroads, and I gave him a brief grin.
“We’re on our way,” I said. “Take care of her.”
Cressy had already heaved the box off the ground. “It isn’t so heavy,” she said. “I can handle it.”
I took hold of one of the handles with my good hand, squeezing her grip of it aside. “We’ll go faster together,” I said. “It’s awkward to run holding it in both hands. Let’s go.”
It felt strange to be running without feeling the ground underfoot. Like running in a dream. We cut across the dark street, staggering a little because our pace was uneven. Smoke blew past but, curiously, there seemed to be nobody in the street at all now. From near by and far off shots and yelling and the wail of Prowlers filled the night, but here we ran in a silence like a dream.
We were halfway to the church when I beard a sharp, cracking sound
behind us and felt something hit me heavily in the leg. The impact made me stumble. I was aware of a penetrating hotness that was very cold—or was it a coldness that was very hot—drilling through my thigh. And my leg failed under me.
I saw Cressy’s smeared face turn toward me with a look of appalled surprise as I fell, my leg folding under me. I felt grass under my hand as I caught myself. I had dropped on somebody’s dark lawn across the street from the church.
I said to Cressy, “Go on, go on!”
She caught the other handle, hefted the box with a two-handed grip before her, and ran without another word. I sat there watching her and trying somehow with all the power in my mind to evoke some magical wall of protection around her and the box. If she fell, the box would fall with her and crash upon the pavement. And the whole United States of America was inside the box. Every state and county, every city and farm and town, all packed neatly away and all the minuscule people going about their lives inside that crate. If she jolted it, I thought everyone in the nation would have felt the impact. Even I would. Because I was in there too.
I was sitting on a patch of dark grass behind a row of trampled geraniums. The night around me reeked with the odor of their crushed leaves, strong and sharp, and the smell of burning and gunfire and blood. I felt my leg gingerly to see what had happened to me.
The sound of footsteps crunching loud on the rubbled street and coming quickly toward me made me look up. Then I saw a familiar checkered shirt.
My leg gave a sudden throb, as if the wound knew the gun that had made it. I was sure without reason that my leg was right. Guthrie didn’t see me. He didn’t even know I was there. His eye was on Cressy in her bedraggled pink ruffles, running through the smoke with the nation in a box in her arms and the church looming just above her.
Without a sound I slid my hand in my pocket, eased out the gun. I bent my good knee up to brace my good left wrist across. The blood was running down on my leg now, and there was a strange, high, increasing roar in my ears that sounded strange and new. I wondered if I was about to black out. But I had a job to do first. A job I should have done back there in the street when we first hit Corby. I should have shot him then.
