Gordon R. Dickson (25 page)

So, the following morning we tried
it. It took about an hour or so for Bill to satisfy himself, by throwing a
weighted line through the mistwall and pushing pipe lengths screwed together to
beyond the mistwall's far edge, that the terrain beyond was both level and
safe. Then we brought the jeep we were going to use up to the wall and got in
with our weapons. I climbed in behind the wheel with Bill on the other front
seat. Alan, Richie, and Waite got into the back. We made a pretty full load.

Then Sunday, purring loudly, as if
congratulating us all on a permission no one had given him, leaped up into
Bill's lap and settled down for the ride; and, before I could shove him out,
the girl began to climb into the back seat holding a rifle.

"Hold it!" I roared.
"Everybody out!"

We off-loaded, everybody except the
girl and Sunday, who took advantage of the available empty space to settle down
that much more firmly.

"Now, look—" I began to
the girl.

"I'm going," she said.
Sunday purred loudly and cleaned the fur on top of one of his forepaws. It was
a double declaration of insubordination.

Of course, there was no way I could
stop them. I could put them out of the vehicle, but they could walk in right
behind us. Sunday had proved that, unlimited times. In fact, I had known—
everybody had known—that he would be coming along. I had not counted on the
girl.

I glared around me. This particular
expedition was sorting itself out in exactly the wrong way. I don't know what
made me so convinced that there might be danger beyond this mistwall. I'd gone
into a number of others confidently enough. Perhaps it was Porniarsk's refusal
to tell me exactly what was beyond the wall. At any rate, I felt the way I
felt; and for that type of feeling, I was taking all the wrong people and
leaving all the wrong people behind.

An ideal expeditionary group would
have been myself, Tek, and a couple of the men, none of whom meant a great deal
to me—except myself; and I was too much of an egotist to think that I couldn't
survive whatever mystery lay in front of me. Sunday, the girl, Bill, even to a
certain extent, Marie and little Wendy, were people I cared about to one degree
or another and would just as soon have kept safely in the rear area.

But Bill could not be left behind,
in justice. The quest to understand the time storm was as much his as mine.
Sunday could not be kept out, in practice; and now the girl had proclaimed her
intention to go in with us whether I wanted her to or not. Meanwhile Tek, who
outside of myself was the one person fit to take charge of those left behind,
if enemies of some kind suddenly appeared over the horizon behind us, could, by
no stretch of common sense, be taken. Ever since Marie, Wendy, and I had run
into him and his group, I had been half-expecting that any day, we might bump
into another such armed and predatory gang.

"All right!" I said.
"If everybody's going to go, we'll have to use the pickup. Let's get it
cleared out!"

The pickup was our main transport.
In the back, it had all our camping equipment, food, fuel, and other supplies.
We had unloaded part of what it contained to set up camp the night before; but
if it was to be used as a battle wagon, the rest of the box had to be cleared.
We moved back and went to work.

Twenty minutes later, we once more
approached the mistwall; this time in the pickup, in low gear. The girl and
Bill and I were in the front seat with the windows rolled up, with me as
driver. In the open box behind were Alan and Waite and Richie, holding a
disgruntled Sunday on a leash. I'd shut the leopard out of the cab by main
force and snapped his leash around his neck when he tried to join the three of
us in the cab. As I pushed the nose of the pickup slowly into the first dust of
the mistwall, there was a heavy thud on the roof of the cab. I stopped, rolled
down the window and stuck my head out to glimpse Sunday, now lying on the cab
top. I rolled the window back up and went on.

The mist surrounded us. The dust
hissed on the metal of the pickup's body, as the motor of the truck grumbled in
low gear. We were surrounded by an undeviating whiteness in which it was
impossible to tell if we were moving. Then the whiteness lightened, thinned,
and suddenly we rolled out into sunlight again. I stopped the truck.

We were in a rocky, hilly section of
country. The thin, clear air that made everything stand out with sudden
sharpness signalled that we were at a higher altitude, and the sparseness of
vegetation —no trees and only an occasional green, spiny bush—suggested a high,
desert country, like the
altiplano
of inland Mexico. The landscape was
mainly rock, from hard dirt and gravel, to boulders of all sizes. Rough, but
not too rough for the jeeps to get through; and, if a clear route could be
found between the boulders, probably even the pickup could be nursed along.

The ground before us was fairly
clear and level, but boulder-strewn slopes rose sharply to the right and left
of us. Directly ahead, the level space dipped down into a cup-shaped depression
holding what appeared to be a small village. The buildings in the village were
odd; dome-shaped, with floorless, front-porch extensions, consisting simply of
projecting roofs upheld at each end by supporting poles. Under those roofs, out
in the open, there seemed to be a few machines or equipment—mechanical
constructs of some kind. No human beings were visible. Beyond the village, the
ground rose sharply into a small mountain—it was too steep to be called a
hill—wearing a belt of trees halfway up its several hundred feet of height. On one
side of the mountain, the bare peak sloped at an angle the jeeps could possibly
manage. But the other slopes were all boulder-strewn and climbable only by
someone on foot.

On top, crowning the peak, was a
large, solid, circular building, looking as if it had been poured out of fresh
white concrete ten seconds before we appeared on the scene. That was as much as
I had a chance to notice, because then everything started to happen.

A number of objects hit loudly on
the body and cab of the truck, one shattering the window next to Bill. At the
same time, there was a yowl of rage from Sunday and I caught sight, fleetingly,
of the leopard leaping off the roof of the cab to the right, with his leash
trailing in the air behind him. Suddenly the rocks around us were speckled by
the visages of dark-furred, ape-like creatures.

The guns of the men in the box were
firing. The girl, who had been seated between Bill and myself, scrambled over
Bill crying out Sunday's name, opened the door of the pickup on that side, and disappeared.
Bill exited after her; and I heard the machine pistol yammering. I jerked open
the door on my side, rolled out on to the hard-pebbled earth, and began firing
from a prone position at any furry head I could see.

There was a timeless moment of noise
and confusion—and then without warning, it was over. There were no longer any
creatures visible to shoot at, except for perhaps four or five who lay still,
or barely stirring, on the ground. I fired a few more rounds out of reflex and
then quit. The other guns fell silent.

I got to my feet. Sunday stalked
back into my line of vision, his tail high in self-congratulation. He headed
for one of the two furry figures that still moved. I opened my mouth to call
him back; but before he could have reached the creature, a rifle in the box
behind me began to sound again, and both the moving bodies went motionless.

"Quit that!" I shouted,
spinning around. "I want one alive—"

I broke off, suddenly realizing I
was talking to a man who wasn't listening. Richie, his round face contorted,
was kneeling behind the metal side of the pickup box, firing steadily at the
dark-furred shapes; and he kept at it until his rifle was empty.

I climbed into the box and took the
gun away from him as he tried to reload it.

"Simmer down!" I said.

He looked at me glassy-eyed, but sat
without moving. There wasn't a mark on him.

But the other two were hit. Alan had
one side of his face streaming blood from what seemed to be a scalp wound. He
was holding up Waite, who was breathing in an ugly, rattling way with his face
as white as the building on the peak. His right hand was trapped behind Alan;
but he kept trying to bring his left hand up to his chest, and Alan kept
holding it away.

My head cleared. I remembered now
that the barrage that had come at us had contained not only thrown rocks but a
few leaf-shaped, hiltless knives. One of the knives was now sticking in Waite's
chest low on the left side. It was in perhaps a third the length of its blade;
and evidently it had slid in horizontally between two ribs.

Waite coughed, and a little pink
froth came out the corners of his mouth.

"He wants to get the knife
out," said Alan, pleadingly to me. "Should we just pull it out, do
you think?"

I looked down at Waite. It did not
matter, clearly, whether we took the knife out or not. The blade had gone into
his lungs and now they were filling up with blood. Waite looked back up at me
with panic in his eyes. He was the quiet one of Tek's four men and possibly the
youngest. I had never been sure if he was really like the others, or whether he
had simply gotten swept up and tried to be like them.

There was nothing I or anyone else
in our group could do for him. I stood looking down at him, feeling my
helplessness, like something in my own chest being raggedly cut. This was one
of the people I had been thinking meant little or nothing to me and would be
easily expendable. I had not stopped to realize how close a group like ours
could come to be, living together like a family, moving together, facing a
possibly dangerous world together. Maybe he would die more quickly without the
knife blade in him and removing it would be the kindest thing we could do for
him.

"If he wants it out, he might
as well have it out," I said.

Alan let go of Waite's arm. The arm
came up, and its hand grasped the handle of the knife but could not pull it
out. Alan half-reached for the knife himself, hesitated, tried again,
hesitated, and looked appealingly at me.

I reached down and took hold of the
handle. The blade stuck at first, then slid out easily. Waite yelled—or rather,
he tried to yell, but it was a sound that ended in a sort of gargle. He pulled
away a little from Alan and leaned over forward, face tilted down intently
toward the bed of the box, as if he was going to be sick. But he was not. He
merely hung there sagging against the grip of Alan's arms, his gaze calm and
intent on the metal flooring; and then, as we watched, he began to die.

It was like watching him dwindle
away from us. His face relaxed and relaxed, and the focus in his eyes became
more and more general, until all at once there was no focus at all and he was
dead. Alan let him down quickly but softly on the bed of the box.

I turned and climbed out of the box
back on to the ground. I saw Bill standing on this side of the truck now and
Sunday nosing curiously at one of the bodies. Suddenly, it struck me.

"Girl!" I shouted at Bill.
"The girl! Where is she?"

"I don't know," said Bill.

I ran around the front of the truck
and the bouldered slope on the side I'd seen her disappear.

"Girl!" I kept shouting.
"GIRL!"

I couldn't find her. I found one of
the dead ape-creatures, but I couldn't find her. I started threading back and
forth among the rocks as I worked up the slope; and then, suddenly, I almost
fell over her. She was in a little open space, half-sitting up with her back
against a boulder and a torn-off strip of her shirt tied around one leg above
the knee.

For a moment I thought she was
already dead, like Waite—and I couldn't take it. It was like being cut in half.
Then she turned her head to look at me, and I saw she was alive.

"Oh, my God!" I said.

I knelt down beside her and wrapped
her up in my arms, telling myself I would never let go of her again. Never. But
she was as stiff and unresponsive in my grasp as a wild animal caught in a
trap. She did not move; but she did not relax either, and finally, this brought
me more or less back to my senses; I didn't want to let her go, but I stopped
holding her quite so tightly.

"Are you all right?" I
said. "Why didn't you answer me?"

"My name's Ellen," she
said.

"Is that all!" I hugged
her again. "All right! You'll be Ellen from now on. I won't ever call you
anything else!"

"It doesn't matter what you
call me," she said. "I'm not going to be here anyway."

She was still stiff and cold. I let
go of her and sat back on my knees so that I could see her face; and it was as
unyielding as the rest of her.

"What do you mean, you aren't
going to be here?" She was talking nonsense. She had evidently been hurt
or wounded in the leg, but that could hardly be serious.

"Tek and I are going away by
ourselves. It's already decided," she said. "We were just waiting to
make sure you got through this last mistwall all right. You can keep Sunday. He
only gets in the way all the time anyway."

She turned, grabbed hold of the
boulder against which she had been leaning, and pulled herself up on one leg.