He was passed from one creature to the next, and from that one to the one beyond, like a bucket in the hands of a line of amateur firemen. Out through the hatchway he was bodily shoved. Looking upward, he could see nothing but a pale ceiling that had a frosty gleam to it—crystals of ice, he supposed—and he could hear nothing at all. More tentacles received him. He did fancy that it was colder, if anything, outside the ship than inside. Then he was flung down roughly, like a bale of clothing, upon the doubled fabric of that palm-leaf sail. He dared to peer stealthily about.
The ship, he could see, had settled into'a great chamber with a flat floor, smooth curved sides and a ceiling that was made in two pieces, like jaws, that could open and shut. Over floor, sides, and ceiling was a sheath of hard, white frost crystals. Hooded lamps gave radiance, showing him that in all directions opened the mouths of tunnels, darker than the chamber itself. Nowhere could he see the source of that green ray that had captured him and drawn him down-perhaps it was emitted by some apparatus that could be moved. In the center of the floor was the ship, and at the hatchway were a dozen of the Cold People, eagerly giving their attention to what was going on inside.
More things were being passed out from the cabin. There came Darragh's saber. This drew more attention than had any single discovery up to now. All of the observers gathered around their companion who held the saber, then hunched over to where lay the two dead bodies. No doubt but that they connected that gleaming, well-sharpened blade with the fatal stab in the body of the pilot.
It was high time to get away, anywhere, while for a moment there was no observation toward his position. Darragh rose suddenly to his knees, gave a great spring, found his feet, and darted into the nearest of the passageways.
Commotion boiled up behind him, a great slapping and wriggling of swift, heavy bodies. Something shot gleamingly past him—a cold, narrow streak of the colorless explosion-ray. It missed him, but the wall it grazed seemed to fluff away in sudden steam, and a buffet like that of a sudden gust of high wind almost hurled Darragh flat.
He floundered to keep his feet under him, turned and plunged into a side opening, and made a turn around the curve beyond. That was the way to dodge their cursed murdering rays—keep angling away, even into the interior of this unthinkable frozen hive. If they should catch him in a straightaway tunnel or an open space, they could bring their rays to bear. He would be done for, like a scrambling bug under a showering spray of insecticide.
He was tired and confused, but his strong, long legs made swift leaping strides. The tunnel widened as he ran along it, then brought him out into a great courdike opening with a luminous ceiling high overhead. A row of machines whirred here, like a battery of looms, with Cold Creatures pottering here and there among the spinning wheels and hurrying dark belts. Darragh did not stop, he slowed his pace only long enough to locate the mouth of another corridor on the far side. Then he crossed the floor past the bank of machinery in desperate leaps. He reached the new tunnel and flung himself into it almost before those machinists could turn toward him.
But what, he found half of an instant to ask himself, would be the end of all this headlong dash? For all his length and hardness of limb, for all his splendid young strength and health, he was already puffing. His head whirled, and blood beat in his ears. The cold nipped and dragged at him, like a living foe trying to throw him down. His breath clouding out through the scarf, fell around him in shimmery crystals as he ran. He wanted to stop, but he knew that stopping would be fatal. The cold would fell him and finish him.
He ran more slowly despite himself, and reached another open space, a mere lofty chamber at which tunnels crossed. In the instant that he slowed up to choose a new route, a patrol of Cold People moved into view across the way, ready for him.
Three held ray-throwers and stabbed the beams toward him, making steamy furrows in the clotted frost of the floor. He stopped still, once again recognizing the futility of escaping death longer. But the rays did not touch him. One played past him to the right, like a stream from a hose; another flicked the tunnel-way from which he had emerged, cutting off his retreat in that direction. Perforce he turned to his left, and into that passage.
One inside, he ran again, his breath beginning to sob in his laboring lungs.
But no ray blasted him, and even in his weariness he swifdy outdistanced the things that had thus menaced him. On shaking legs he ran until he reached another open space, this time as large as a public square.
Along its walls were ranged shantylike little structures, of dull metal or smooth concrete, and direcdy across his path ran a single rail of supports. As he came into the open, a flat one-wheeled car came into view along this rail, smoothly whispering. It stopped, and down from it hopped three Cold Creatures. They, too, had rays, and these rays began to glow, weaving and crossing around him.
He stood still and glared.
"Why don't you finish me, damn you?" he yelled hoarsely at them.
But the rays, two of them crossed, only crept toward him.
This was some complicated cat-and-mouse game. Darragh had heard all his life that the Cold People were merciless in their warfare, but never that they were wantonly cruel. He wished for a gun, for arrows, for his lost saber, that he might charge and perhaps kill yet again before he was exploded into atoms. Closer crept the crossed rays ... closer.
He could stand still and perish, or he could keep running. One of the alleys was still open to him, and he swung around and staggered into it. He was fagged and fainting, but he ran.
The single rail went along this passage, and after a moment he heard that one-wheeled car behind him. He snatched a backward glance. The three tormentors followed, but not swifdy, not so closely as to overtake him. Once or twice a ray came flicking, as a herdsman might crack a whip over a refractory animal. He must keep moving somehow, stay ahead of their car, their rays. Up ahead, this tunnel, too, widened.
Another crossing of ways, but here both side exits were guarded by inexorable squads of helmet-shaped devils with poised ray-weapons.
He had come more than a mile, at a speed that made him sweat inside his leather despite that ineffable cold. Again and again he had been sure that his last moment had come, but teasingly it had delayed. Now ...
Now it could delay no longer. Darragh was running toward a blank wall at the end of the last tunnel. Frost ridged the partition, hung in shaggy beards before him. Behind him came the Cold People, three of them on the car that rode the rail, the others hitching nimbly along on their pseudopods.
Darragh swung around to face them. He was utterly happy to stand still.
"All right, get it over with!" he found wind and strength to croak. "Kill me and be damned to the last one of you! I'm through making sport for . .
His drooping shoulders touched the wall, and the wall slipped beneath it. One of the Cold Creatures was at a stand of levers at the side of the tunnel, was pressing one down to open some sort of a panel. Blackness came through behind Darragh, a blackness almost palpable, and a wave of cold that surpassed anything he yet had felt. He reeled and caught his breath.
He heard the lapping of liquid behind him. Turning, he gazed down into a ditch. Along it flowed swift, steaming water—no, not water. Water could not flow here, at many degrees below zero.
He faced toward the Cold People again. They ranged themselves across the tunnel down which he had run those last stumbling moments. The car was stopped, and upon it was a squat mortarlike device with around lens.
One of them touched buttons with its tentacles. Out sprang green light, dark green, such as had filled his aircraft at the moment of its recapture.
Darragh felt as though he had been struck in the center of his leather-clad chest by the end of a flying log. He flew from his feet and whirled backward through the air, soared across the floor. Under him burbled that torrent of liquid in the ditch. Then he hung spread-eagled against a perpendicular partition on the far side, held there by the ray as by a crushing h
and. A moment later, the partition, too, gave way, sinking back and down.
Darragh fell through, clumsily and heavily, and the valve snapped shut, as though forced by a great spring. He struck on a solid level space and lay there crumpled.
For long moments he could only gasp for breath. Brightness stabbed at his eyes, and he closed them beneath the goggles. He never wanted to move again.
Then something touched him. He had not the strength to pull his exhausted body away. There was a fumbling at his hood. The scarf, frozen across his nose and mouth, began slowly, painfully, to peel away.
"Stop," he moaned miserably. "Ill freeze."
But he was not freezing. He felt warmth on his exposed face. An arm slid behind his shoulders, lifting him from where he lay.
"Take it easy," said a hushed voice. "You're among friends."
CHAPTER VII
Mark Darragh lay quietly, as though he could never summon energy or inclination to move again. Take it easy, the soft voice had advised, and the advice seemed good after all the fighting, flying, running. You're among friends, the voice had added, and it had sounded friendly. Darragh opened his eyes.
He sprawled with his head out of the hood and supported on an arm. Close above him bent the face of a woman—a girl really—a pleasant blue-eyed face just now full of concern. Corn-yellow hair made bright masses around the face. Beyond and above were the faces of other people, stooping to look.
"He isn't one of us," said a man's voice. "Who are you, anyway?"
Darragh had some of his wind back. "I was going to ask that question of you," he replied.
"He can talk," said another. "He speaks English."
Darragh sat up, then, and gazed at the people around him. They were clad neatiy, in what he had seen in pictures of the days of his unconquered grandfathers—the men in jackets and trousers, the women in dresses of print or stout weave. There were a dozen of them and, beginning to press around this inner group, twice as many more. The blonde girl who had knelt beside him gazed with relief as he moved and half rose, and he smiled at her. She looked capable and intelligent and pretty. She wore dark slacks, a white blouse with short sleeves, and slippers that seemed to be made of coarse cloth, like canvas. Her bare arms and face were tanned, the darker because of that bright hair.
"You mean, who are we?" prompted the nearest man, a fellow perhaps thirty, with canny eyes set rather close together. "Why—we've been here ever since this settlement has been here."
Darragh only half-heard those words. He was getting up and looking beyond the gathering of people.
A town was there. At least it looked like the towns that Darragh had seen in old salvaged pictures of the civilization from which his own forebears had fled. There were ten houses or so—cottages, he remembered such houses were called—or white-painted planks with roofs of snug red tile. They had green lawns and beds of bright flowers, and they were ranged around a wide central court. Behind and around those cottages rose a great lead-colored wall, that extended in a sweeping curve to enclose the houses and the central common, holding them as,at the bottom of a tube. Looking up, Darragh was aware that this wall rose to a tremendous height. It was as though he and these men and women and their houses were at the bottom of an immense chimney.' Far above them, the shaft was filled with radiance, dazzling and warm, that came down and touched everything with brightness.
The blonde girl, too, had risen. She stood straight beside him, as tall almost for a girl as Darragh was for a man. All the excitement and mystery could not keep him from seeing that her body was both strong and graceful, that she was somebody he would like to know better.
"Where did you come from?" she asked.
"Why, from outside there." Darragh gestured to the wall at one side.
"From the Owners?"
"Owners?" repeated Darragh. "Who are the Owners?"
"They just threw you in here with that ray," said the man with the close-set eyes.
"Oh," said Darragh. "You mean the Cold People. No, I didn't come from them. Do I look like one of them?"
Everybody was staring. "I say that I came from outside, "he repeated." Far away from here. Down on the Orinoco, if you know where that is."
"South America," said the blonde girl. "You mean you come from South America?"
"I was scouting the Cold People," Darragh elaborated. "I got hold of one of their aircraft and came here to look at this dome where they live. They got my ship down, but I got away and ran off through about eighty-eight miles of tunnels, and for some reason or other they pushed me in here among you." He laughed. "I don't blame you for staring at me, I know it sounds fantastic. Or should I say it sounds foolish?"
Nobody answered that. Everyone kept staring for a moment. Then the man who had first spoken crinkled the brow above his close-set eyes. "You'll have to forgive us. It's hard to grasp the notion that there are still free human beings."
"Why, aren't you free?" demanded Darragh.
Another man spoke. He was broadly built, with short grizzled hair. "How can we be free? Don't you see this pen we five in?"
Darragh gazed around the lead-colored walls again. "Is this a prison, you mean? The Cold People keep you prisoners?"
"Cold People," repeated the younger man. "That's a good name for them."
"And you call them ..." began Darragh.
"We call them Owners." A harsh, bitter flash of teeth. "They own us, you see. What's your name, may I ask?"
"Mark Darragh."
"I'm Orrin Lyle." He held out a hand, long but slimmer than Darragh's. "And this is Brenda Thompson."
"He means me," said the girl beside Darragh. "But aren't you still shaky on your legs?"
Darragh realized that he was, and nodded.
"Let's take him to my place, Orrin," she said.
"Wait a second," spoke up Darragh suddenly. "Excuse me if things take a while to sink in, but they get there. You're prisoners, and you were brought here alive. Why don't you fight your way out again?"
There was silence at that, and more stares; somewhat abashed stares, as though Darragh had said something embarrassing.
"You're not in shape to fight your way out just now," said the man called Orrin Lyle. "Come with us to Brenda's."
The others made way for Darragh. Orrin Lyle took Darragh's leather-clad arm and twitched him toward one of the cottages. Brenda Thompson came along at Darragh's other side. As they walked, Darragh could feel eyes watching them go-
"In here," said Brenda Thompson, opening a door, and Darragh walked through.
Inside the cottage things were tasteful and comfortable. A hand-braided rag rug covered the concrete floor. There were chairs, old but well kept, a sofa, a shelf of books. On the walls hung pictures. To Darragh these pictures looked strange and vivid, masses and arrangements of color.
"I did those," said Brenda Thompson, seeing his interest. “Do you like them?"
"I don't really know about art," confessed Darragh.
"But you know what you like, eh?" Orrin Lyle completed the old cliche. "Sit down, Mr.—eh—Darragh."
He spoke as though doing the honors in his own home. Darragh, who had been well brought up, stood where he was with his eyes on the girl. She smiled.
"Go ahead, sit down," she seconded Lyle's invitation. "I'm going to get us some tea."
She was gone into another room, sure and confident of movement. Lyle dropped into an armchair, the most comfortable-seeming of all the seats in the room. Darragh sat down opposite him.
Now he noticed that in the center of the room rose a joist or support, a pole perhaps four inches square. It seemed to support the ceiling. On the wall beyond, the rear wall of the room, was a rectangular stretch of glass, perhaps a mirror.
Orrin Lyle spoke again: "If I may be frank, Mr. Darragh, let me caution you about talking escape to the people here."
"Why not?" demanded Darragh. "Don't they want to escape?"
"Ill put it like this: We have our own plans for escape. Our time's coming.
" Lyle leaned forward, an elbow on the arm of the chair. "You see, I'm pretty much in command here. I'm like the mayor of this community, or you might call me the captain of this band. I'm in charge of escape plans, among other things."
"Maybe I can help you," said Darragh. "I've been in traps twice—traps of the Cold People—and escaped both times . . . No, the second time I blundered in here with you."
"Suppose," said Lyle, "that you tell me more about how you came all the way up here from the Orinoco."
"Shouldn't we wait for Miss Thompson?"
"I'm here," she called, entering with a dark wooden tray. It bore a teapot and cups, figured in green and red. She set the tray on a table near the upright support, and poured steaming liquid into the cups. One of these she handed to Darragh. As he took it, he saw Orrin Lyle gazing at the girl, in a strange mood of mingled suspicion and relish.
The second cup she gave to Lyle, and seated herself with the third cup in her hand. "All right," she smiled to Darragh. "Begin."
He told them, as briefly as possible, about how his people lived in the tropics; how a group of chieftains planned a counter-assault on the Cold Creatures; and how he had gone out as a spy and a scout, to what adventures so far. Both Brenda Thompson and Orrin Lyle asked frequent questions. To illustrate his tale, Darragh fumbled inside his leather suit to drag his drawings from his belt-pouch and offer them.
"This is the kind of shelter the Owners make?" asked Brenda Thompson. "I've never seen one."
"Never seen one?" echoed Darragh. "How did you get in here?"
"I was bom here," she told him, and handed the sketches to Lyle. "He draws very well, doesn't he, Orrin?"
"Very well indeed," granted Lyle. "Now, Mr. Darragh, I find a couple of odd points in your story."
Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1959 Page 6
