The Guardians (6 page)

Very little light came in. The sky behind the man's head was gray with dusk—it must be around eight in the evening. Rob came out stiffly. Fresh air made him feel faint.

“Nothing to stop you going now,” the man said.

There was something else besides faintness. Free of the stink of rabbits he was ravenously hungry. Apart from the sandwich and biscuit he had eaten nothing since early morning. The bar of chocolate was in his case and the case had been left in the car when he made a dash for it.

“I'm hungry,” he said. “Could you give me something?”

The man looked as though he might refuse, then nodded. “Wait here.”

He went up to the house and came back with a paper bag. “Take it away and eat it.” His tone was grudging.

Rob could see he was anxious to get him away. “The County's not far from here, is it?” he asked.

“Not far.”

“What's the best way?”

“What do you want to go there for?”

The tone this time was not grudging but amazed.

“I just want to.”

“You must be mad,” the man said. “And anyway there's the Barrier. Wire fences fifty, a hundred feet high, with electricity running through. Char you to a cinder if you put a finger to them.”

“What about gates?”

“None. Patrols, though. With dogs that kill you on sight.”

They were the sort of rumors Rob had heard before, but more frightening when he had the prospect of testing the truth of them.

“You won't get within a mile of it,” the man said.

“I'll
get far enough to forget I was ever here. Are you going to feed the rabbits tonight?”

The man's face tightened and Rob thought for a moment he would hit him. But he said, “It's your own lookout.” He pointed down the alley. “That takes you into Chepstow Street. Turn left and you're heading north. Keep on that way and you'll reach nomansland in a mile or two. After that . . .” He shrugged. “I've no idea how far it is.”

“Thanks,” Rob said. “And for the food.”

He set off along the alley. The man watched him go, a silent fading figure in the twilight.

•  •  •

This was plainly a poor part of the town and it got worse. The streets were meaner, the houses more and more dilapidated. You could see in the light of the street lamps that they needed repairs, a coat of paint. The street lamps themselves were of the old-fashioned electric-bulb kind. They had probably been there for a hundred years and looked even older.

It was dark by now, though there was a half-moon fitfully appearing between scudding banks of cloud. A breeze had got up and Rob found himself
shivering. He could have done with a jersey but that too had been lost with the case. He was cold and hungry. He thought of the food he had got from the man with the rabbits but decided it might attract attention to eat it as he walked.

When he came out of the alley he had checked that north roughly coincided with the position of the moon, low in the sky, and had continued in this direction through the warren of roads and houses. He had reached a part where there were not even the little two-seater electrocars because no cables had been laid. There were few people about—more and more of the houses he passed were empty. Then he came to a crossroads and saw that the continuation of the road was unlit. Not only were the lamps out, but the houses on either side stood dark and deserted. In the moonlight he could see that the road extended for perhaps fifty yards, and that beyond was open ground.

People, he knew, did not like living over by nomansland. That was why the houses had not been pulled down but left to rot: if they were demolished there would be a new edge and people would move
away from that in turn. Rob found himself shivering, not just with cold but at the sight of darkness, the thought of the emptiness beyond. All his life, like everyone else in the Conurbs, he had been surrounded by the comforting presence of others—all the millions of them. Being glad to have a little privacy occasionally was not the same as wanting to go out there, alone.

He wondered whether he ought not to lie up until morning. In that house on the corner, say, from which one could see the street lamp under which he now stood. The door was probably not locked, and anyway one could get in through the glassless windows. It might be better to cross nomansland by day when one could see the way. There was the electrified fence to think of, and the possibility of stumbling into it in the dark.

But traveling by day meant more chance of being seen as well as seeing. The moon, which had gone behind cloud, sailed out into a sea of stars and taking the sign for encouragement he walked on.

G
RASS GREW IN THE CRUMBLING
street and the front gardens of the houses were choked with bushes. In one place a quite large sapling grew out through an empty window frame. Where the road ended there was open country, dotted with trees and undergrowth. A noise somewhere ahead, sepulchral hooting, startled him. He realized it must be an owl, but he had never heard one before except in holovision thrillers. He had seen them, of course, in the zoo, but silent, sitting hunched and blinking.

Rob fought an impulse to turn back, and
plodded northward. There was a fair light from the moon but the ground was uneven. He put his foot in a hole and almost fell. The coldness and hunger were worse and the thought of a warm bed, even one likely to be surrounded by tormentors at any moment, was an attractive one. He decided he could at least do something about the hunger, and opened up the paper bag. There was bread and cheese. In the moonlight he could see that the cheese had mildew on it and the bread was stale and hard, a week old at least. He might have known the man with the rabbits would not have given him food he could eat himself. Still he was hungry enough to eat anything. He crunched the bread with his teeth and bit alternately at the hunk of cheese. It was sour but it filled his stomach. He felt thirsty now, but there was nothing to be done about that.

He went on, his back to the glow of light which was the Conurb, into a night lit only by the half-moon and a scatter of stars. He could not have imagined such loneliness. The urge to give up, to turn back toward the comfort and warmth of his fellow men, was almost overpowering. Once he did
stop and look around. The glow stretched in a band across the southern horizon, made up of millions of lumoglobes, neon signs, electrocar headlights, display illuminations. It would diminish as the night wore on, but it would never completely die. There was always light in the Conurbs. Resolutely he turned again and walked away from it.

The ground was rising and dimly in the distance he could see the slopes of the hills. When he had been traveling for two or three hours the moon went behind a cloud. But the sky was mostly clear. He saw the stars, sharp and bright against deep black. The glow of the Conurb had become a faraway smudge. He had never seen such a sky before because of the other lights all around. It was breath-taking to see how many stars there were, to look at the diamond dust of the Milky Way. Breath-taking, and frightening. He shivered and resumed his march. The moon came out, a small comfort.

There were sounds, mostly unidentifiable, more or less alarming. A howling which could have been one of the wild dogs which were supposed to run in packs in nomansland, fortunately a long way off.
Squeaks and rustlings and clickings. Once, almost under his feet, a hoarse grunting which made him jump away. Later he was to learn that it was nothing more terrible than a hedgehog, but at the time it was horrifying.

Rob wondered, as he had done a score of times already, how far he was from the Barrier; and in that instant saw it. Moonlight gleamed on metal farther up the slope. He advanced cautiously and investigated. Nothing like a hundred feet high, or even fifty. About twelve. It was constructed of diamond wire mesh, supported by heavy metal posts a dozen or so feet apart. That was as much as could be made out. The obviously sensible course, now he had found it, was to wait until daylight and examine it then.

He found a hollow in the ground, somewhat protected from the wind, and lay down and tried to sleep. It was not easy. He felt the cold more keenly, having stopped walking, and the bread and cheese lay heavily on his stomach. In the end he had to get up and walk about, slapping his arms to restore circulation. He alternated lying and exercising while
the hours of night crawled past. Eventually, worn out, he fell asleep and shivered through dreams for an hour. When he awoke from one in which the Master of Discipline was accusing him of having a nonaligned eye and several limbs out of place, to the accompaniment of jeers and howls from the prefects, there was a different, wider and paler light all around. Dawn was breaking.

•  •  •

Rob slapped himself into something like life—he was tired and cold, hungry again, and aching from sleeping on ground, which made the hard mattresses of the boarding school seem like plastifoam. He went to the fence and looked at it. It ran as far as he could see in either direction, straight to the east, curving inward and out of sight to the west. The mesh was in a pattern of half-inch diamonds, the metal supports several inches thick and sunk in concrete blocks. The bottom of the fence disappeared into the ground. Electrified? He did not feel like touching it to try.

He looked through the mesh. It seemed no different there—open grassland and trees in the
distance. The ground rising to a near horizon. Farther off, featureless hills. He decided he might as well walk on, to the west since it looked less depressing than the long line of fence to the east.

He came to a part where there were more trees on this side, some growing quite close to the fence. If there were one right up against it which he could climb . . . Or if, for that matter, he had one of the long flexipoles used by jumpers in the Games, and the skill to vault with it, he could get over very easily. But there wasn't, and he hadn't. He checked, glimpsing something, a small flash of movement, on a branch of a tree ahead of him. A small brown shape. Something else known only from the zoo: a squirrel.

It stayed on the branch for several seconds, sitting up with its paws to its face, nibbling something or washing itself. Then it whisked back toward the trunk and down to the ground. Rob lost sight of it when it disappeared into grass. Not long after, though, he saw it again, this time racing up and over the fence! That solved one problem. He put a finger, tentative still, against the mesh. It was cold, harmless metal.

He still had to find a way of getting over it. He was no squirrel. The small-gauge and the smooth poles offered no kind of toehold. There was nothing for it but to carry on walking. At least it helped him forget how cold it was. The sky behind him was pale blue, beginning to flush gold with the invisible sun. But it was cold enough. There were places where the grass crackled with frost.

He found the answer at last in a minor landslip. The hill had crumbled slightly, above and below the fence, and rain had washed the loose soil down. It did not amount to much but the steel mesh instead of running down into the ground showed a gap underneath. It was no more than an inch or so, but it gave him the idea. He squatted down and set to work enlarging it. The ground was friable but it was not easy. His fingertips burned with cold. He kept at it. Bit by bit he dug earth away until there was a gap he thought he could wriggle through. But he had been too optimistic and had to go back to digging.

The second time he made it. He scratched himself on the sharp base of the mesh and had a moment's
panic when he stuck half way, but he managed at last. He stood up shakily. He was in the County.

•  •  •

The slope still shortened his horizon to the north, but the brow was no more than fifty yards away. It should offer a vantage point. Rob climbed it, and climbed into the warmth and brightness of the rising sun. A bird was singing far up in the sky; he looked for it but could not find it. All was blueness and emptiness.

He stood at the top of the rise and looked around. There were hills on either side, the sun's orb just clear of one to the east. He was dazzled by sunlight and had difficulty taking in the landscape before him. It went down in a gentle fall and was not wild but patterned with fields and hedges. To the left a cart track led in the distance to a lane. To the right . . . He dropped to the ground. A man was staring toward him.

He thought he must have been seen: the man was no more than thirty yards away and he must have been outlined against the sky. But the man did not move as seconds passed. Rob's eyes, growing
accustomed to the bright sunlight, took in details. A face that was not a face. Where legs should have emerged from old-fashioned black trousers there were sticks. A scarecrow, in fact. He had read of them in an old book.

It stood in the center of a ploughed field. He went across and looked at it. Turnip face with eyes and mouth roughly cut, a worn black suit stuffed with straw. The trousers were badly holed, the jacket torn under the sleeve but otherwise in fair condition. Rob fingered the cloth and then undid the front buttons and pulled it off. Straw fell around his feet. He shook dust and insects from it. When he put it on it felt cold and damp but he reckoned it would soon warm up. It would make a difference the coming night if he were still sleeping out. It was too big, of course. He turned the sleeves back inside which improved things, though it bagged around his chest. The scarecrow looked sadly naked—solid to the waist but above just a turnip head supported on a stick. Rob looked closely at the head. A bit mildewed but it might be edible. He decided he was not quite hungry enough for that.

He went roughly northwest. There were different crops in the fields. In one big field there were rows of small green-leaved plants with tiny purple flowers. Would they bear some kind of fruit in due course? They would have to be very small. He pulled at one and it came up with white oval things hanging from its roots. Potatoes, he recognized. He could not cook them, but filled the pockets of his jacket in case he found a means later.