Asgard's Secret (35 page)

They were drawn to
us, but not all the way. They came to stand and stare, but they kept their
distance. Because we were walking along the street, they formed up to either
side of us in two long ranks. Not one of them was carrying anything—neither a
weapon, nor a tool, nor a toy. There was no evidence that any of them had been
doing
anything when the news of our arrival began to spread. There had been no work
going on, and no play either, so far as I could tell.

They jostled for
position in their discreet fashion, but not violently. None spoke to us, and
none made any gesture of greeting. They just watched us—and those we had passed
by fell into step behind us, following us at a distance of eight or ten metres.

Myrlin said
nothing, so I figured that it was up to me. I caught up with him easily enough
now that he'd slowed down, and raised my arms. I gestured theatrically.
"Can anybody talk?" I asked—in parole, although I knew perfectly
well that none of them would have been able to understand it even if they could
hear me; it just seemed more appropriate than English.

They didn't react
to the pantomime, let alone reply. I was at a loss.

30

It didn't make sense. There might be energy
to spare down here, but that didn't mean that there was no competition, no
struggle to survive. If these people were as passive as they seemed, and as
helpless as they seemed, then somebody had to be looking after them—somebody,
given their response to our presence, who looked more like us than they did.

"I think
they're all children," Myrlin said. "Don't be fooled by the
wrinkles."

"I'm not so
sure," I said. "But whoever—or whatever— supplies their food and
clothing doesn't seem to have been doing a very good job lately. Maybe not for
a long time."

"They don't
seem to be making much headway in learning to fend for themselves," Myrlin
observed. "They should have begun showing a little enterprise some time
ago. Natural selection favours the adventurous in circumstances like
these—unless these are an unrepresentative sample. Maybe the adventurous are
out adventuring."

We were still
moving, but our walk had slowed to a mere stroll. We didn't have anywhere in
particular to go, but we were still headed towards the city centre.

"They're not
afraid of me," he observed. "They must see big people sometimes—if
not adults of their own kind, people of another kind. Maybe people in suits—not
cold- suits, I suppose, but maybe sterile suits."

"If they come
from elsewhere," I said, "they certainly don't use the dropshaft we
came down. If there's another,

the sensible place to put it is in the
city."

"Wishful
thinking," Myrlin observed. He was right—but so was I.

I glanced behind.
The crowd behind us had grown considerably. There must have been a hundred or
more ahead of us, discreetly placed to either side, but there were three or
four times as many in the rear.

"They expect
something," I said, "but no matter how badly they need it, they know
how to behave."

"Dumb
animals," the android suggested. "Maybe it's the clothes that are
misleading. They're built like humanoids, but they might not be humanoids at
all in
our
sense."

"Maybe,"
I conceded. "Maybe they're androids—obsolete androids, put out to
grass."

"Built for
what purpose?" he countered.

"Built small
to alleviate the possibility of rebellion," I suggested. "If I were
thinking in terms of manufacturing people to do my bidding, I wouldn't make
them your size."

"That was a
mistake," he conceded. He came to a halt then, and just stood there,
scanning the sea of wrinkled faces—waiting.

I wasn't sure that
it would work, but it was worth a try. I stopped too.

"Okay," I
said, as if to the crowd, in parole. "You can take us to your leader, or
bring your leader out to us, or whatever you want. Just give us a sign."
In the meantime, I raised both arms in an expansive gesture of helplessness—
although it would have been a lot more expressive if I hadn't been wearing a
cold-suit.

They weren't in any
hurry, but they looked at one another, and jostled one another a bit. They
seemed to have got the idea that the onus was on them to find somebody willing
to show a bit of initiative.

In the end, the
tension was too much for them. The crowd behind was densely packed now, and it
was difficult to see what was happening beyond the first few rows, but someone
was pushing through—or being pushed through by his companions ... if it were,
in fact, a "he."

"He" came
forward very tentatively, one step at a time. We turned to face him—and to look
down at him.

He stopped a couple
of metres short, and looked up at Myrlin's faceplate. He was presumably making
the assumption that the android was the senior authority-figure because he was
taller.

He began talking. I
could hear him, even through the faceplate—but not very distinctly. It didn't
matter. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't pangalactic parole that he was spouting, or
any other language I knew.

I waved my arms,
hoping to signify that I wasn't getting it, tapped my helmet to signify that I couldn't
hear very well, then tapped the palm of my left hand with the forefinger of my
right, in the hope of suggesting to him that he might do better to try sign
language.

He wasn't very
quick on the uptake, but at last he stopped looking at Myrlin. I continued
signalling madly. I pointed in four different directions, to indicate that we
didn't know which way to go. I mimed walking and tried to impress upon him the
urgent need I had for guidance. I was glad that I didn't have to try to get
across any notion of
where
I wanted to go.

For a while, it
seemed that I was making no headway at all. He looked at me with a stare so blank
that I might as well have been dancing a jig or performing a mating ritual.

Somewhere out in
the crowd, though, the penny finally dropped. Some local genius figured out
that we were all standing around because the big guys didn't know where to go,
and figured that it was up to him—or maybe her—to think of an appropriate
destination. "He" thrust himself forward, babbled at the spokesman
for a few moments, got into an argument and eventually won it. He moved around
us and looked back at us, expectantly.

I gave him a Star
Force salute. "Lead on," I said.

He set off in the
direction we'd been heading in before we stopped, and we followed. Everybody
else followed us.

We didn't turn
right or left for such a long time that I began to wonder whether the little
person was merely going ahead of us in the direction he thought we wanted to go
rather than actually guiding us.

I estimated that
there must be at least six hundred "people" following us by now—maybe
as many as a thousand. The city was big; it must have been built to house at
least a hundred times as many—but it still seemed reasonably populous to me,
given that everyone seemed to be on the brink of starvation.

At last, we turned
aside, and found ourselves in a new region where the buildings were larger—not
just because they had been very obviously built to accommodate people my size
rather than the little people, but because they were municipal buildings rather
than dwellings. They had suffered even more from the ravages of time than the
simpler edifices; more than half had been reduced to rubble or to gaunt skeletons
of jagged pillars and broken arches. Spears of shadow crisscrossed the cracked
and thickly begrimed pavements on which we walked, although the open plazas we
crossed on occasion showed much whiter in the relentless glare.

My heart rate
increased when I saw the place to which our guide was leading us. It was a
hemispherical dome, brilliantly lit from within so that beams of yellow light
radiated like spines from its many rounded windows. Alone among the buildings
it seemed untouched by decay. It did not belong here.

Our guide took us
right up to a great circular portal that looked like the airlock of a
starfreighter. He didn't touch it. Once he was ten metres away, he turned
sideways and beckoned us on. He obviously felt that he had done his bit. I hoped
that he wasn't expecting a tip.

Unfortunately, the
door was tightly sealed and we hadn't the slightest idea how it might be
opened. There was some kind of panel beside the door, set at the height of my
shoulder in the curved surface of the dome, but it was shielded by a plate of
transparent plastic that didn't yield to gentle pressure or prising by our
gauntleted fingers.

I had to stand on
tiptoe to look through the nearest of the brightly-lit "windows," but
I couldn't see anything inside; the light was so bright that I wondered
whether it was an incandescent bulb rather than a window.

The crowd was
waiting.

"We must look
like a couple of idiots," I said to Myrlin, after several minutes of
experimental probing and prodding.

"It seems to
be locked," he agreed—but he still had a cutter suspended from his belt,
beside my flame-pistol, and he was already unshipping it.

I wasn't sure that
it was the wise thing to do, but I didn't have any alternative to suggest.

I had a knife, and
I opened it. I made one last attempt to lever off the plastic cover, but I couldn't
shift or scratch it.

"Let me,"
said Myrlin.

I stepped aside,
and he activated the cutter's beam. I looked around to see how the crowd
reacted to the sight of the flame, but they didn't fall back in awe or display
any alarm. They just watched, and waited.

Myrlin cut the
centre out of the plate in a matter of seconds; the plastic shrivelled and
melted away. He switched it off and waited for the edges to cool; then he inserted
his vast fingers into the gap and started pressing the panel beneath.

Nothing happened.

I drew his
attention to a vertical slit to the left of the panel. "A keyhole, do you
think?" I said.

"Probably,"
he admitted. I looked back at the crowd, still thinking that we must seem like
total incompetents. Myrlin activated the cutter again, increased the power, and
thrust the head of the device into the panel-box. The surface began to sizzle,
and the metal of the console flared magnesium-white as its components began to
burn.

"Be
careful," I said.

It was too late for
that. The lights in the dome suddenly went out. Then the lights above the city
went out too— every last one of them.

The crowd reacted
to
that.
Its members scattered like frightened rabbits. At least,
that was the impression I got. It seemed very dark, although Myrlin's torch
continued to give off a fervent glow until it sputtered out.

"What
now?" the android asked.

I switched on my
headlamp, and slowly played its beam over the deserted pavement where the crowd
had been assembled a few moments earlier.

"I don't
know," I said—and the city lights came back on just as I pronounced the
final syllable.

"Well, we know
that the repair systems are efficient," he observed—but there was
something different about the quality of the light now. It was no longer pure
white, and it was no longer perfectly steady.