The Ladder in the Sky (10 page)

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 hypnotic 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.

“That gets rid of two of our problems,” the doctor said without emotion. “Call up the rest of the scientific staff, Rureth. I’ll try and get some drugs here before the word reaches Dorsek. Hego is merely a fool, but from the way he’s been behaving since the disaster, I’m inclined to think Dorsek is insane.”

XIX

“Summary of human existence,” the doctor said with a twisted smile, looking round the office.

“What?” Rureth said, glancing up, eerie in the fading glow of an over-used hand light.

“Look around you,” the doctor said. “I feel there’s something—I don’t know—epic? That’s not the word.” He snapped his fingers. “Archetypal is what I mean. About situations like this. The contrast.”

“Don’t understand you,” Rureth said curtly. He wiped his face. It was getting stuffy.

The offices were in a state of siege. They had called up on the surviving communicator channels all the personnel who could be spared from such essential duties as power maintenance or nursing, and there were now fifty-odd people in the office and the anterooms. Most of them were the uninjured members of the Marduk staff. Hego and Snutch, who would be unconscious for some time yet, were roughly piled on the floor in the corner.

The doctor said, “I’m a romantic, I guess. But hasn’t it generally been like this in history? A permanent crisis between ignorance and fear on one hand, and desperate attempts to get at the facts on the other?”

“Could be,” Rureth said, not seeming very interested.

“I’d like to talk with you, Kazan,” the doctor said, turning. “If we get out of here alive, that is. Those workers out there, from Berak, who seem to have decided that you’re purely a bad influence and they’d solve everything by getting rid of you. I can understand their situation, I think. It’s got precedents. Primitive history is full of them. Like—what were the great prespace empires?”

Kazan, sitting passively beside Clary at the side of the room, seemed to spark alert. He said, “I didn’t think of it like that. The—the Romans, I read about.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said. He picked up some surgical cleansing cloths from a pile on Snutch’s desk and wiped his exposed skin. “They came, and they built their surprisingly advanced houses with underfloor hot-air heating systems, and their metaled roads that lasted for centuries, and the serfs all around kept on grubbing in the dirt and worshipping their nature spirits. And later on, when the Age of Technology got started, some people were traveling in airliners and rockets and enjoying quite an advanced standard of living, while a lot more people were still at the nature-spirit and manual agriculture stage. And, as I picture it, the situation where you come from was similar again. Your home world was colonized, and because it was hospitable the population increased rapidly, and then because it did increase so fast and there wasn’t a solid foundation of production to feed and clothe and house so many people you got this unlikely return to basics—staying alive and fed. And political divisions, and contrast between wealthier and poorer areas on the same planet. Isn’t that the picture?”

“I guess so,” Kazan said. It felt strange to be making this academic analysis in the shadow of death, but it also felt calming, because it was exercising his rational faculties, and he needed to be reminded that he possessed some. “I don’t know the whole story. But as I piece it together, when the main wave of expansion caught up with the trail-blazers and the pioneers, Berak was an isolated backwater. When I was a kid—Luth’s father was the ruler then—there wasn’t a spaceport on the continent. Luth had one built, but it wasn’t until he was kicked out that much use was made of it. And even then it didn’t make much difference to most people.”

“Right.” The doctor eyed him speculatively. “But your background is the same as that of most of those howling idiots out there, and you’ve managed to escape your circumstances. I want to find out how. Afterwards.”

One of the young men from Marduk who had been keeping watch outside thrust his head through the half-open door of the office. He said, “Group of Berak workers coming this way. Some sort of trouble—I couldn’t see what.”

“Any sign of those supplies they were supposed to be bringing up from the hospital?” the doctor rapped.

“That seems to be what the trouble’s about. There’s one of your staff with them, being frog-marched along.”

There was a clanging hammering noise from outside. The doctor looked at Rureth.

“Any use reasoning with them?” Rureth said hopelessly.

“Probably not,” the doctor said. “But we’ll have to try.”

Gloom lay over the settlement like a pall. It was like being inside a tomb to emerge into what should have been open air and instead was the hollow semidarkness over which the impossible roof arched. There were perhaps forty or fifty people approaching in purposeful silence, with Dorsek at their head.

Seeing that someone had come out to meet them, Dorsek gave a brusque command to his companions and walked forward the last few paces alone.

“You got him in there?” he said.

Rureth stared at him stonily. “Do you mean Kazan?” he said.

“You know who I mean. The man who condemned us to death like this.”

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Rureth snapped. “Kazan is there. And that man you’re holding captive”—he pointed at the medical aide who had gone to fetch the necessary drugs from the half-ruined hospital—“has drugs which the doctor wants.”

“Kazan’s in need of no drugs,” Dorsek said. “He wasn’t even scratched till I got my hands on him. And I was pulled off before I’d done more than bruise him.”

“I need them to get at facts he can’t remember,” the doctor said. “To learn how to get us out of here.”

Dorsek drew his lips back from his teeth. He said, “He’s got you fooled too, hasn’t he? But he doesn’t fool us. He caused this. He’s got to be punished for it.”

There was a grumble of agreement from those behind him.

“What are you expecting to happen if you get your hands on him?” Rureth demanded. “You expect to kill him and find the dome, whatever it is, vanish? So you can get out?”

“We’ll make him let us out,” Dorsek said.

“You’re out of your mind!” Rureth said after a moment of astonished hesitation. “You can’t—”

“Hold it,” the doctor cut in quietly. “Explain, Dorsek.”

“What is there to explain?” Dorsek countered stubbornly. “He put us here, he gets us out, or we square accounts with him before we all die.”

“Where is he?” someone shouted from behind. “Get him out to us!”

“You heard that,” Dorsek said. “Send him out. Unless you want us to smoke you all out.”

“You want to suffocate yourselves?” the doctor said evenly. “You’re not such a damned fool that you can’t smell how thick the air is getting, even though we managed to knock away some of the crust overhead. Smoke us out? You’d stifle first.”

Dorsek hesitated. The doctor seized the opening.

“I want twelve hours,” he said. “If he can undo the—well, whatever it was that made the force field over us—if he can, it’ll have to be done in that time.”

Dorsek shook his head. “Twelve hours is too long,” he snapped.

“I want to get out of here as much as you do,” the doctor retorted. “More, apparently!” He raised his voice to make sure his words would carry to Dorsek’s companions. “You’re talking about smoking him out, and all that would do would be to kill the lot of us quicker than jump! You don’t want to get out of here alive, apparently—but I’ll bet that the rest of you do! In twelve hours we can find out if there’s a way.”

“And if there isn’t?” Dorsek said.

“How can we be any worse off than we are right now?” the doctor demanded.

“Six hours,” Dorsek said suddenly. “That’s all. Then we come in after you—clear? If you don’t send him out to us.”

The doctor blanched. He said, “I’ll need—”

“You get nothing!” Dorsek cut in. “Except time. And six hours is a hell of a long time. Count yourself lucky. And I warn you, if you’re lying, we’ll settle accounts with you as well as with Kazan, understood?”

“I’ll need the drugs that man was bringing me,” the doctor said firmly.

“They got spilled,” Dorsek said. “You can go sort them out of the dirt on the ground, if you like, He oughtn’t to have struggled.”

The doctor seemed to go limp. He said nothing, but turned and went back into the building with his head bowed. With a final glare at Dorsek, Rureth followed him.

“What are you going to do now?” he demanded when he and the doctor were inside again. All those waiting for the outcome of the argument with Dorsek tensed to hear the answer.

“I’m not beaten yet, by the wyrds!” the doctor said. “The smug gasbrained fool!” He drew himself up and looked at Kazan. “I’ll have to use the oldest and most primitive technique still in the medical repertory, and
will
it to work.”

As though to himself, he added, “You’re intelligent, you ought to be a good subject. But I wish I had the right drugs to help you along.”

“You mean me?” Kazan said.

“Yes.” The doctor indicated a vacant chair which had been shoved into the middle of the room in front of Snutch’s desk. “Sit there. Lean back. Close your eyes and relax completely. The rest of you, shut up. I don’t want a sound to be heard.”

Kazan obeyed. Clary rose from where she had been sitting and peered anxiously forward, her hands clasping and unclasing.

“Make yourself comfortable,” the doctor said. “That’s right. Have you ever been hypnotized before by voice alone?”

Kazan shook his head, looking startled; his surprise was shared by all the others present.

“That makes us even,” the doctor said with an attempt at gallows humor. “Relax, close your eyes—that’s right. You feel comfortable, you’re quite relaxed, you feel sleepy, you feel your eyelids getting heavy, now they’re shut, you can’t open them again, you feel sleepy, you feel relaxed and comfortable, relaxed and comfortable, your eyelids are very heavy and your body is getting heavy because it’s relaxed and you feel sleepy.”

He reached out, continuing his droning flow of instructions, and took Kazan by the wrist. He raised the arm to shoulder-height and abruptly stroked it for its full length.

“It’s rigid!” he said. “You can’t lower it, no matter how you try. Your arm is rigid!”

He let go. The arm trembled, and stayed where it was. A sudden bead of sweat trickled down into the doctor’s eye, and he wiped it away mechanically.

“Fantastic,” he said in a low tone. “It works.”

“Four hours!” Rureth said. “And nothing! Nothing!”

The doctor fell wearily back into a chair, staring at Kazan. He said, “It’s like a wall. It’s as if he himself wasn’t responsible for creating the force field—and yet he did! The memory of how he did it simply isn’t there!”

“They’re getting restive outside,” Rureth said. “I went out to see a few minutes ago. Can’t you do anything else?”

Wringing her hands, Clary said desperately, “There’s got to be something! There’s—Doctor! You just said maybe he himself wasn’t responsible for the force field!”

A wild hope lit her face. The doctor glanced at her.

“The—the thing he always talks about!” Clary said. “The devil that appeared in the conjurer’s ring! You haven’t taken that seriously, but suppose it
was
real?”

“What do we do?” the doctor countered. “Even if it was!”

“Well—” She cast around. “Well, maybe he remembers what the ring was like, what the conjurer did.” Her voice trailed away, and she added defensively, “We haven’t got much time, you know!”

“I’ll try,” the doctor said. He forced himself to his feet. “Kazan! Remember again, remember clearly. Go back in your mind. Go back to the time when the black devil appeared in the ring!”

Kazan’s body was racked by a vast shudder. He said, “I—I remember.”

“What was the ring like? What did the conjurer do?”

“He—I don’t know. It was dark in the room. I didn’t see.”

“Remember!” the doctor insisted.

There was a sudden noise behind him, and he glanced round angrily, words forming on his lips to rebuke the person who was interrupting. He never uttered them. The noise was from Hego, still half unconscious in the corner, who was struggling to speak.

“What’s happened?” Rureth said in a low voice.

“He’s probably in a susceptible state,” the doctor answered equally softly. “It often happens. I knocked him out with a heavy dose of the same drug I would have used to help Kazan go into trance if I’d had any more of it.” He turned back to Kazan.

“You saw the ring!” he insisted. “You remember it, you remember what the conjurer did!”

“Yes,” a thick voice said. “I saw the ring.”

The doctor looked at Rureth with an expression almost of fright. Together they turned to look at Hego again.

The bully was struggling to get to his feet, and failing because his muscles were limp with the aftereffects of the drug he had been given. He could speak, though, and he was speaking, mumbling incoherently.

“The ring—I saw when the conjurer showed it to Bryda. Ring of copper and gold sliding like this.” He made an indeterminate gesture. “Pictures on it. Carved on it. Pictures of things. I remember. I see it now.”

His face was streaming with perspiration, and when he broke off his teeth started to chatter with terror.

The doctor closed his eyes for a moment, seeming to gather his strength. Then he said in a calm voice, “Can you remember it so clearly that we could make one, Hego?”

“I see it now!” Hego insisted. “I see it right in front of me. Like there!”

He was staring now at a place on the floor in front of Kazan where there was nothing anyone else could see. Shaking, he raised his arm and pointed for a moment. Then he gave a tremulous groan and fell forward on his own knees.

“I think,” the doctor said with much effort, “that something is happening. Here in this room. Do you feel it, Rureth?”

The tubby man nodded. Together and in silence, with those watching, they waited for whatever it was to be fulfilled.