Tower Of The Gods

by Thomas A Easton

  “It had to have help,” Hrecker was saying. “It couldn’t have climbed those bars all by itself.”

  “So the assassin has to be real,” said the journalist. “Or at least, there had to be a third person on the scene. She might have murdered Crocin herself.” He emphasized the “she” that Hrecker had refused to use.

  “She could have,” said the historian. “Bots are strong devils.”

  “It didn’t resist on Earth,” said the consul. He eyed both the journalist and the historian as if their humanization of the enemy verged on treason.

  “It got away from you,” said Hrecker.

  “It said it wanted to taste the local dirt. They found it easily enough.”

  “It can’t be the same thing here,” said the historian. “There’s no soil.”

  “The greenhouse tunnels.”

  “We’re searching those now,” said the Security chief.

  “You said the other guy came from outside?” asked the journalist.

  “We don’t think so anymore,” said Hrecker. “There are no hidden vehicles on the surface. We searched for them first.”

  “Then he has to be one of us?”

  Hrecker nodded. “It must have seduced him.”

  “It did that on Earth,” said the consul. “Ruined a good man.”

  “Is that where she’s hiding, then?” asked the journalist. “How many apartments are there in this base?”

  Hrecker shrugged, his face as impassive as ever. “Twelve hundred and fifty eight.” He did not say that Pearl Angelica did indeed have to be hiding in some disloyal Engineer’s living quarters, but the implication was clear.

  The bot found the controls for the veedo set and turned it off. She swore. Half the people who had seen that panel would not believe that someone had rescued her and killed Crocin and was now sheltering her in his apartment. No Engineer could possibly do such a thing, after all. But yes, she could be in an apartment, perhaps in theirs or a neighbor’s. She could be hiding in a closet or a bedroom, ready to leap out and kill again. There was no reason to think one death had slaked the monster’s thirst for blood.

  The least unusual of sounds or sights would be enough to rouse suspicion—or even panic—and provoke a call to Security.

  She scarcely dared to move.

  Could Anatol’s neighbors hear the sounds she made? She could hear them, faint murmurings beyond the apartment’s walls, muffled steps and voices in the corridor outside the door. She could make out no words. She could not even tell whether the quieter sounds came from straight ahead or right or left, up or down.

  Of course, they could hear her too. But would they hear anything they were not used to hearing when Anatol was home? Would they be suspicious? Would they call Security?

  She decided it did not matter. It was a risk she had to take, for she had to know what was being said about her on the veedo. She had to move about. And she was hungry.

  She wondered whether anyone could tell that even though Anatol was gone his veedo set was turning on and off, the water was running in the sink as she filled the kettle for another cup of tea, the refrigerator was opening and closing as she found more of the biscuits they had shared at breakfast and a slim packet of cheese slices. A computer could monitor such things, she knew.

  But none did, or someone would have been at the door already.

  She was almost sure of that by the time she turned the veedo on again.

  The panel was still on the screen. Hrecker was saying: “The thing is far too good at hiding. I’ve posted extra guards on the power plant and air supply. It wouldn’t do to let it sabotage those.”

  “What about the Teller?” asked Earth’s consul.

  “We covered that first. If it’s a spy, that must be high on its list of targets. The Orbitals and Gypsies don’t want us out there with them. They don’t even want us on the Moon.”

  “You really think she intends to destroy the Teller?” asked the journalist.

  “Or the base itself,” said Hrecker. “The bot might actually have a bomb buried in its belly. We never thought it necessary to X-ray the thing. We should have. I’m sure our foes would consider one life a very cheap price for such a victory.”

  “No,” said Pearl Angelica even though she knew they could not hear her. She thought of the Racs. “We are builders, creators. We aren’t killers. We won’t give you a star-drive, but we don’t slaughter. Not even you.”

  She wished she really believed what she said. Unfortunately, she had heard too many times the tale of how the Orbitals had pounded Earth with rocks to aid the escape of the gengineers. She knew her people could kill.

  The sound of an opening door spun her around, her heart hammering in her chest.

  “I’m early,” said Anatol. The sack in his arms bulged with packages. “I picked up food.”

  Pearl Angelica’s relief at seeing him safe, at seeing Anatol come through the apartment door instead of some agent of Engineer authority and vengeance, nearly dropped her on the floor. But he was beside her even as she sagged, and their arms were around each other, his so tight her ribs creaked, her own so tight she wondered why his ribs didn’t.

  When they could talk, he told her he had heard more than was on the veedo. There were guards on every exit from the base and at every major intersection of corridors. No ships, not even ones from Earth, were being permitted to land for fear that she and her unknown ally would hijack a ride to freedom. No vehicles of any kind were leaving, not even supply trucks for outlying mining stations. And a room-to-room search was being planned for the next morning.

  “What can we do?” she asked. “They have to catch me that way.”

  “Us,” he said.

  “Me.” She smiled and shook her head. “You don’t need to get in trouble. I’ll step out that door and walk down the hall until I find one of those guards you mentioned. You’ll be safe.”

  “No,” he said. “If you do that, I’ll call them up and confess everything. I seduced you. I killed that man. I spirited you away and hid you.”

  “But you didn’t!”

  “Crazed infatuation, that’s what it was.” His tone was joking, but his smile was strained. Though their relationship was not that intense, what he said had an element of truth. They both knew that if it did not, there could be no relationship at all between an Engineer and a Gypsy, much less a half-plant bot. “It had to be. Innocent by reason of insanity.” His face twisted, and his tongue lolled like a beast’s. “Maybe then they won’t torture you.”

  “But they will. They won’t believe you, no matter how much you drool. And they’ll kill me anyway, no matter what.”

  “I won’t let you surrender like that.”

  “They’d question me anyway, wouldn’t they? And find out about you?”

  He nodded sadly. He was doomed either way, whether she surrendered or he confessed. He was also doomed if they found her. “We need a better hiding place for you.”

  “But where?”

  Neither of them sounded hopeful.

  They made love that evening with all the desperate, feverish intensity of two people who fear they may never have another chance to see or touch or hold each other. Yet neither one forgot what they had to do.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t know we had an amateur theater group here.” When she shook her head, he opened a cupboard in the wall and began to rummage.

  “I’ve been Rosencrantz and Eglamour and Pinch. Once we did a version of ‘Modern Times’, and I was Charlie Chaplin. Ah, here it is.” He produced a rack of small jars and bottles and cotton swabs. “I wish we could pluck the rest of your leaves…” When she looked alarmed, he laughed and added, “But no. Uh-uh. Can’t do that. We’ll have to see what we can do with this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Makeup,” he said. “Your skin’s a little green. A stand-out in bright light. But…” He opened jars, dipped swabs into their contents, and daubed at her cheeks and forehead, nose and chin, even ears and neck. When at
last he held a mirror for her to see what he had done, she gasped. Her face was fair with an overlay of tan, and her lips were pink.

  “Now your hands,” he said. “Your wrists. I don’t think your ankles will show.”

  He found her wig and put it on her head. He stood back and stared at her. “I saw a picture once,” he said. “A woman from a myth. Feathers covered her just like your leaves, though they were white instead of green. And both her breasts were covered.”

  When she covered the exposed flesh with a hand, he laughed. She snorted. “I’ll need my clothes too.”

  “Right here.” But first he handed her a narrow towel and said, “Put this around your chest.” He helped her draw it snug and pin it into place. When she had donned her shirt and pants, he pulled a jacket from his closet. “It’s a little big, but…”

  The sleeves were only slightly long. The shoulders sagged. But the arc of the rolled and padded collar behind her neck made her look, she thought, like a genuine, human Engineer. She would pass in the corridors outside Anatol’s apartment. She might even be able to avoid the searchers just by staying in the halls, walking on and on until the fuss died down.

  When she said as much, Anatol shook his head wearily. “You’re not that perfect. Someone would surely see. And the makeup rubs off on your cuffs and collar. It dries and cracks. It wears far too thin.”

  “At least I don’t look like a bot.” She stared at herself in the mirror. “Or a woman, except for the hair.”

  “Then no one will recognize you.”

  “Now what? Where do we go now?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But we can’t stay here.”

  “You mean I can’t.”

  He sighed as if growing used to her refusals to let him share her risks. “Okay. You can’t. We have to find you someplace to hide.” He opened the apartment door. “They haven’t dimmed the lights yet. But there’s no one around here right now. Let’s go.”

  Anatol had said that only the major intersections were guarded. That may have been true earlier in the day. Now, however, there were guards wherever one corridor met another or an elevator connected the base’s levels. Fortunately, they seemed content merely to peer at the passersby, looking for green skin or leafy scales. They said nothing when Anatol and Pearl Angelica brushed past them on their way toward the surface level. They demanded no identification.

  The guards in the bays that surrounded the entrances to airlocks were asking all who wished to enter or leave the base for their documents. Pearl Angelica shuddered at the thought of how easily such a demand would reveal her. She was grateful that the guards had not imagined that she might disguise herself with more than clothes.

  Did she imagine that she and Anatol drew a suspicious glance when they passed one airlock for the third time? Was she right to fear that once the lights dimmed for night and traffic disappeared from the corridors they would be far more conspicuous? That every guard would want to know who they were and what their business was?

  They passed another lock, larger than most, and the floor turned gritty. In spots the grit was visible in patterned strips. “Tracks?” she asked.

  “Tires,” said Anatol. “There’s a maintenance shop just ahead.” He pointed toward a wide, double-leaved door under which the vehicle tracks seemed to pass. The left-hand panel held a smaller door for people to use.

  She looked over her shoulder. The guards by the airlock were hidden in their recessed bay. Those at the intersection beyond the lock seemed more interested in conversation than in distant pedestrians.

  “We have to find someplace soon,” she said.

  “I know,” said Anatol. “But…”

  “Is it open?”

  Instead of answering, he tried the small door. It swung inward on well oiled, silent hinges, and they stepped into a broad, high-ceilinged space dominated by a single flatbed moontruck. The bed was at head height. The huge tires, which would be tautly swollen balloons in the lunar vacuum, were flaccid now that they were immersed in pressurized air. Its cab was as large as a small room, and both doors to its airlock were open. So was its motor housing, revealing a tangle of heat exchanger tubing, electrical converters, and cables surrounding a massive electric motor. Behind it all they could see one end of the massive cylinder that shielded them from the small nuclear reactor that powered the truck. Brackets, wires, tools, and electronic modules lay scattered on the floor beside the vehicle. A clipboard hung from a metal stand.

  At the back of the room, a single door opened into a tiny office that offered no concealment at all. There were no storerooms, no ladders, no catwalks. One wall held a rack of deep shelves full of metal sheets, slabs, and bars, pipes, rolls of wire, and unidentifiable shapes. In a nearby corner stood a dormant industrial robot that seemed capable of lifting and even bending the heaviest pieces. Not far away, a cabinet’s many drawers held nuts and bolts and other fasteners. More tools hung from the walls.

  “You can’t hide here,” he said.

  “What about the truck?” She indicated the open airlock.

  “They’ll be working on it in the morning,” said Anatol.

  There were two ladders on the side of the cab, one leading to the flatbed in back, the other to the lock. Pearl Angelica was already climbing the latter. Inside a padded driver’s seat faced a viewport and a rack of display screens, knobs, and switches. The viewport stretched the full width of the truck’s cab and arched from the top of the instrument console nearly to the ceiling. Its material was darkened by the reflective coating that outside the base would temper the glare of lunar day. A horizontal strip of angular digits glowed just below the level of a driver’s eyes. One set of digits flicked and flicked and flicked, counting seconds and minutes, hours and days.

  From one of the knobs on the console hung a radio headset that had been repaired with silver duct tape. Most of the truck’s controls were mounted in the seat’s broad arms. Behind the seat was a sliding partition, a narrow bunk, a toilet hidden by a curtain, and a small refrigerator. “There’s food,” she said when she emerged again.

  “But they’ll catch you right away!”

  “It’s my only chance,” she said. She took the clipboard from its hook and studied the sheet of paper it held. “And it may not be a bad one. Look.”

  He took the clipboard. “It needs a new drive controller.”

  “Which is on order.” She pointed at the paper. “From Earth.”

  “And they aren’t letting any ships land.” He shook his head. “But that won’t last.”

  She grinned at him. “I’ll stay out of sight. While you try to find something better.”

  * * *

  Chapter Fourteen

  Pearl Angelica shivered when the maintenance shop’s small personnel door closed behind her friend. Would Anatol return before the maintenance workers showed up for their workday? If he didn’t, would the workers find her? Until the drive controller arrived from Earth, they would be unable to fix the truck, and until it was fixed, the truck wasn’t going anywhere. So the workers would have no excuse to enter the truck. She would be in no danger of discovery as long as she remained within its shell. But…

  Would he return at all? Maybe he would decide that his own safety was more important than hers. He would go back to his work, risk no more discovery by Security and the punishment it would mete out to a traitor. She would have to hide for as long as she could manage, with no hope of escape from the base. Eventually they would find her. And her fate would be no different from what it would have been if she had remained within her cage.

  The silence in the maintenance shop was disturbed only by the rustle of a paper fragment stirred by the slightest of air currents. She could hear her own breath, her heartbeat, the hiss of cloth sliding over cloth, not the rustle of leaf on leaf, as she moved an arm against her side. She wished she were home, outdoors on First-Stop, no clothing, leaves exposed to sun and wind, watching a Rac scratch his muzzle and listening to his rough voice say, “Win
ter comes.”

  There really wasn’t any way, she told herself, that Anatol could find a better hiding place and hope to move her to it before night came again. Until then she would have to hide as best she could, just as she had promised him.

  The question was, where?

  She reentered the truck cab and began to search in earnest. The space beneath the bunk? It was large enough, but it was occupied by storage drawers. The toilet was hidden only by a curtain. There were no cupboards large enough to hold her.

  Eventually she thought to try the grille in the wall opposite the head of the bunk. To her surprise, it came free in her hand. When she looked at it closely, she found that it was held in place only by strip magnets. Screw heads were merely glued into their holes in the grille’s rim.

  She smiled at the picture of a smuggling trucker that sprang to her mind. A girl friend? “Slide in here, dear. It’s just till we’re out of the base, just in case of an inspection. We don’t want anyone catching you.” Or girls for the miners in the outer camps?

  Or could this be a route in and out of the base for Orbital agents or contraband? Then perhaps there could be a way for her to escape, if the base were not sealed and if the trucker could be found and if he did not think bots were agents of the devil.

  Sounds outside the truck announced that someone had just entered the maintenance shop. Pearl Angelica ducked reflexively away from the truck’s port before remembering that ports had sun-reflective coatings. No one could see her if she just stayed out of the line of sight through the airlock. Yet she could see outside the truck: Three men had entered the shop, each one carrying a large thermos. And they were walking toward the truck.

  She probed the heating duct behind the grille with one hand. There was a sharp bend and then a straight run beside the wall, extending as far as she could reach. She fitted her feet into the opening and twisted her body, pulling, pushing, straightening at last with a gasp of relief. She tugged the grille back into position and pushed herself a few feet down the duct.