“Stop him!” Clary shrieked, and the two puzzled men standing by made to grab Dorsek as he lunged forward, but they were too slow. Kazan made no attempt to avoid the blow. The fist took him full in the face, and he toppled and slid to the ground, the last sound in his ears being the voice of Clary crying his name.
Eyes red-rimmed, Snutch looked around the assembled remnants of his senior staff. Some of them were wearing surgical dressings, and all of them were dirty and weary. The only light came from a hand lamp on the table in the middle of the room, which gave each of them a vast shadow like a carrion-eating bird poised with folded wings on the wall behind.
“What in the name of the wyrds is it?” he said.
They all knew what he meant, and exchanged worried glances. For lack of the chief scientist—unconscious for the past several hours—Rureth spoke up.
“A force field, I guess,” he said. “I know force fields are supposed to be impossible. But that’s one. There’s an invisible dome over the settlement. We mapped it.” He took a rolled paper from his front pocket and threw it down on the table; several people craned to stare at the circular red line inscribed on the outline of the settlement.
“Far as we can tell, there isn’t anything there but air,” Rureth went on, bowing his head to rub his eyes and then shaking back his thin fringe of hair. “It’s fairly elastic, but if you hit it with a heavy hammer it transmits force instead of absorbing it. It’s coated on the outside with a layer of magnesium oxide which in places is feet in thickness. I’ve got a couple of dozen men working on the thin areas. We’ve managed to crack loose a few sheets of the crust and we won’t have to worry about ventilation because air diffuses through the field. Or whatever you like to call it.”
“What shape is it?” Snutch demanded.
“Roughly spherical, but since it’s elastic there’s a dip in the middle where the remains of the ore tub are lying. We figure there’s about three to six hundred tons poised up there. If whatever’s sustaining the field gives out, it’ll come crashing down on our heads. Has anyone any theories about it?”
He looked dispiritedly along the table as though expecting no reply. His expectation was fulfilled. He went on, “I guess to be on the safe side we’d better evacuate the spot directly under the wreck of the ore tub. But if the field collapses we’re going to be buried under chunks of magnesium oxide anyway, so I don’t think the odds are good.”
“Anybody left outside?” Snutch said.
“The control staff at the landing field,” someone said. “I hear they’re all right.”
“Any chance of our getting out?”
“Right now, I’d say none whatsoever.”
“And nothing can get in,” Snutch muttered. “And until the master ship comes to collect the ore tubs, no way of getting a signal out because we haven’t the power to reach Marduk with surviving equipment, and even at maximum drive it’ll take weeks to get supplies here and they’ll have to be—Rureth! How about a tunnel?”
“We thought of that,” Rureth said. “But the trouble’s this. The whole area where the force field meets the ground is concreted, except for a small stretch where it’s been so hammered by the impact of the ore tub that it’s practically fused together. Inside the field, where we can get to, there isn’t enough equipment to break through concrete and make a tunnel. I signaled the landing control staff to see if they could find some equipment out by the mines themselves, but there’s been subsidence and a lot of the underground machinery is buried. When the ore tub hit, it must have been equivalent to a small earthquake. Shook all the tunnels down.”
Snutch’s hands were shaking where they lay on the table.
He noticed them and clasped them hastily together. With much effort he said, “Casualties—oh, what’s the use? We’re done for.”
All eyes switched to him. Someone said, “While there’s life—”
Snutch thumped the table and leaped to his feet. He said hysterically, “Hope? Where’s the hope? When’s somebody going to show me hope? All you do is drone on about disaster and how we’re imprisoned and—”
Inconspicuously Rureth exchanged glances with the chief of the medical staff, on whom Snutch had been about to call for his casualty report. The doctor nodded; he made some motion or other beneath the table, and suddenly clapped his hand against Snutch’s thigh.
The manager’s eyes rolled upwards and he began to sag at the knees. Rising unhurriedly, the doctor helped him to fall back accurately into his chair.
“Shock,” he said to the others. “He’ll be out for about three minutes. I gave him a palm-injector load of antitension specifics. I’d pass them round, but my supplies are short.”
“All supplies are short,” someone said pessimistically.
“Yes,” the doctor said thoughtfully. He looked at Rureth. “By the way, some of your men aren’t helping any. Last night, we had enough casualties from the main disaster without having to waste material on men beating each other up.”
“My men?” Rureth said.
“Yes. The one who started it seemed to have been unstabled by shock, and claimed that the guy he was beating up was responsible for the crash. Dorsek was the name. The other was a youngster.” He snapped his fingers. “Someone did tell me who he was; he couldn’t talk for himself. He had a concussion and his face was badly bruised.”
“Kazan?” Rureth said.
“That’s right. Young fellow. Fair-haired.”
“Dorsek’s fault, then,” Rureth said after a pause. He debated with himself: should he inquire how Kazan was, do anything about him? He found he hadn’t got the spare energy. He said, “Dorsek has a case of the same thing as that moron Hego I sent over to you yesterday. What did you make of him?”
The doctor shrugged. “I didn’t get very far. Ran some tests. But when the disaster hit, I figured a strong man was going to be useful in rescue work. So I turned him loose. I guess we can pick the threads up later. After all, he can’t run away.”
XVIII
You could feel the terror, Clary thought. As though the fantastic enclosure of the settlement were a bowl, filling slowly, trapping the people inside with a rising wave which in the end was sure to drown them.
How long they were going to be safe, she dared not guess. This was the safest place she had been able to find, and by the same token it was the least safe of all, because it was precisely under the sag in the—whatever it was—force field, someone had said; they were theoretically impossible according to someone else but that was what it seemed to be. Anyway, the orders had been to abandon this building, which was half devastated by fire but still had many habitable rooms, in case the field gave way and dropped the remains of the ore tub to the ground.
She stared out cautiously over the settlement. There were some lights on now, like little miracles in the overpowering gloom. At a few points the domed crust had been smashed away, and gray sky could be glimpsed, but there was almost no light from overhead.
There was some sort of rescue work still going on. She felt guilty to be hiding here when she was uninjured, but there was no knowing how the poison of suspicion was working on the minds of the terrified workers.
A moan came from behind her. She darted back from the gap in the wall through which she had been peering, and dropped to her knees beside Kazan. She could just make out that his eyes were open in the mask of regenerative ointment the doctor had smeared on him so angrily the night before.
“What—happened?” he said thickly.
She laid her finger on her lips. “They’re looking for you,” she said. “I’ve had to hide you. Dorsek tried to beat you up. Do you remember that?”
“I remember.” He forced himself into a sitting position, grunting with the effort. “And I remember that I was too dazed to talk to the doctor, isn’t that right?”
Clary felt a heart-lift of relief. She said, “That’s right!”
“And you—you helped me away, and then somebody shouted for Hego. I remember that.?
?? She could see his frown as a kind of blurring of his forehead. “Someone came after us. And then a wall fell down, I think.”
“It saved our lives,” Clary said. “I’m sure of that. A piece out of the side of a building fell in front of them.” She hesitated. “Kazan, what were they angry with you for?”
He made to-bury his head in his hands, but she stopped him with a quick movement. She told him about the ointment on his bruised face. He shrugged, nodded, and folded his hands.
Then he told her about the seam that Hego hadn’t plugged.
“And they think the disaster is your fault?” Clary said incredulously. “When it’s Hego’s?”
“Is it?” Kazan said. He coughed; there was a lot of dust in the air. Then he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Or does it go back a lot further? It’s Bryda’s fault, maybe. Or the conjurer’s—whoever he was. But they aren’t here. I am. And—Clary, why is it so dark?”
“There’s something over the settlement. Nobody knows what it is. It stopped the ship from exploding right in the middle of the settlement and killing everyone. But nobody can get through it to the outside.”
“So that’s what I did,” Kazan said.
“Kazan!” She seized his hand. “You’ve got to stop blaming yourself for all this!”
“No, I’m serious.” He sounded calm now, as though his faculties were coming back. “I remember quite clearly. I made the air solid. I’ve done it before, and I forgot how I did it because, of course, it wasn’t me that did it at all.” He gave a hysterical chuckle. “It was the black thing that did it. Well, at least I know beyond doubt now.”
She stared at his vague gray outline, uncertain whether she was really seeing his face or only remembering it. She said, “Can you undo it again?”
There was a silence between them. At last, in a voice like dead leaves, he said, “No. No, I’ve forgotten again.”
He cocked his head, listening. “What’s that?” he said, his tone changing completely.
Clary lingered for a moment and then she too strained to hear a kind of rasping sound, coming from one of the inner walls, or rather from beyond it. Footsteps, cautiously feeling for secure support among powdered debris.
“Don’t move!” Clary hissed, and soundlessly rose from beside him. Casting about for something to serve as a weapon, she saw where a chunk of the room’s ceiling had fallen, and for want of anything else caught it up clubwise in her hand. She took three light steps towards the door.
The door ground back and a hand light transfixed her with its beam,
Instantly it was extinguished; there was a scuffle and the door closed rapidly.
“It’s Rureth!” a voice said. “For the love of life don’t beat my skull in, you fool!”
“Clary! Stop it!” Kazan said, rising on one knee and feeling himself too weak to go any further. “Rureth, what are you doing here?”
“Finding you ahead of Hego and Dorsek,” Rureth said. He moved shadowy across the floor, his feet crunching slightly in the powdery droppings from the damaged ceiling. “I should have come looking for you earlier, but I was so exhausted. I got myself a meal and some pickup drugs from the doctor and then I started to make sense of what was happening around me. You know that Hego and Dorsek have more or less taken charge of the Berak workers and made them up into teams to find you and murder you?”
Clary drew in her breath with a little moaning sound.
“And you!” Rureth said, half-turning to her. “Damned, lucky I got here first. I gave you credit for thinking that the area we kicked them out of with such dire warnings would be the area they’d be most reluctant to look for you in. So far that’s held good. I can’t say how long it will last.”
He pulled some dark lumpy objects from his pockets and held them out to Kazan and Clary. “Stole some provisions for you,” he added gruffly. “Thought you’d need them by now.”
They accepted the food silently and began to eat. Kazan’s jaw was so stiff after Dorsek’s attack on him that he could barely chew.
“I gather you decided to take the blame for what happened,” Rureth said after a brief pause. “Better set me straight on the facts.”
Kazan did so. When he came to the end of his recital, he heard Rureth give a low whistle of astonishment.
“I never took any of these tales about you seriously,” he said. “I thought they were just so much superstitious garbage, but come to think of it, you told me yesterday that you had to believe in devils. Now I’ve seen that force field holding up the wreck of the ore tub, I’ll accept anything. You can destroy it again? Hold it—even if you can, that means the wreck, and all the tonnage of magnesium oxide it’s supporting, will come down round our ears!”
“Anyway, I don’t know how I did it,” Kazan said shortly.
“We’ll fix that,” Rureth countered. “Get the doctor to work on your memory, and the scientific staff. But we’ll have to start by getting you out of reach of Hego and Dorsek, and that won’t be easy. Better get you to Snutch’s office, or his quarters. No, his office would be better. People don’t break into the manager’s office so readily. Not that Snutch will be exactly pleased to see you.”
“I can imagine,” Kazan said.
Rureth pondered for a moment. He said finally, “I guess it must be the fact that I know if I don’t do something I’m going to die right here. Otherwise I’d never take this business of you creating a force field seriously, let alone, the part of it involving devils. I’ll go make certain the coast is clear; then you’ll have to run like blazes straight to Snutch’s office and we’ll take it from there.”
Luck was on their side. They saw several people on their way, but no one who recognized Kazan with the mask of ointment on his face or who knew Clary as his companion. And Rureth, of course, was hardly a suspicious character. But there was no doubt about the terror reigning beneath the impossible roof.
No one was in any of the administrative offices they had to pass through to reach Snutch’s; no pretense could be made of keeping up normal work, and anyway power was too precious to be squandered on office equipment. There was a smell of dust in the rooms. It seemed appropriate.
Their entrance into the actual office was spectacular. With Snutch were Lecia and the medical chief; they could be heard through the door discussing something in raised voices. Rureth wasted no time on politeness and opened the door abruptly with no warning. All three of the room’s occupants turned, exclamations rising to their lips.
But it was Snutch who made himself heard. His face went death-pale and he rose slowly from his chair, pointing a shaking arm at Rureth and looking at Kazan as if hypnotized.
“Are you insane?” he said in a shrill voice. “What do you mean by bringing him here? They want to kill him, and they’ll kill us too if you don’t take him away!”
Rureth hesitated, taken aback, and glanced at the doctor, who shook his head barely perceptibly.
“What good do they think killing Kazan will do?” Rureth barked. “Is that going to get us out of here? I don’t pretend to understand how he did it, but it seems pretty certain it was Kazan who stopped the ore tub falling right in the settlement and killing the lot of us!”
“He’s going to make up for it by coming here!” Snutch broke in. “Take him away!”
“Shut up,” Rureth said coldly. “Sit down. You don’t have to prove that you’re overwrought—just keep quiet.” He turned to the doctor and briefly outlined what Kazan had told him.
“What it needs, obviously,” he finished, “is to bring back the conscious knowledge of how it was done. I don’t know if you have any drugs or anything which you can use, but it seems our only chance. We can’t wait for outside help. We’ll die of thirst even if we don’t starve first.”
The doctor put his hands to his head. “It makes as much sense as anything else that’s happened,” he said. “I don’t know about drugs I can use. What I had, I had to use as make-do analgesics or euphorics. But I guess I could try hy
pnotic regression.”
“It’s up to you,” Rureth nodded. “We’d better call together as many of the scientific staff as we can, to see if they can make sense of whatever physical principle is involved.”
The doctor was going through his pockets; he laid half a dozen palm-injectors on the desk. “Those may help,” he said. “Random assortment, but the best we have.” He looked at Kazan speculatively. “So Dorsek wasn’t so crazy when he tried to beat you up,” he added.
“I guess not,” Kazan said listelssly.
Snutch, who had been staring wildly from one to another of the people in the office, burst out, “Don’t any of you understand? If they find he’s here—”
“Go cut your throat,” Rureth snapped.
And there was a sound of heavy footsteps in the anteroom.
They all froze, wondering who it might be, except Snutch. He paused for only an instant, his mouth working, and lunged forward past his desk, avoiding Rureth’s startled attempt to catch hold of him, and flung open the door. As the others started to rise, appalled, they saw the blank and astonished face of Hego over Snutch’s shoulder. The bully was covered in dust, and there was dried blood on his forehead. Behind him were two more of the Berak workers, each carrying a length of metal rod as an improvised club.
“He’s in there!” Snutch babbled. “You can have him! Take him! Get him away from me!”
“Who?” Hego said in a thick, uncertain voice, frowning at the manager’s peculiar behavior.
Rureth caught the doctor’s attention and gestured at the palm-injectors on the desk. The doctor’s eyes widened. Nodding, he snatched up two of the little sac-and-needle devices and thrust one at Rureth while palming the other himself. They rushed after Snutch.
Perhaps mistaking their appearance for the launching of some unaccountable attack, Hego’s two companions blanched and beat a hasty retreat. Rureth caught Snutch on the nape with his injector; the doctor sank his into the flesh of Hego’s bare forearm. In a moment they were slumping unconscious.