Brothers to Dragons (21 page)

They followed the line of her well-muscled arm, to where the gently rolling horizon was broken by a sequence of steep, snow-covered ridges. Job heard a faint rumble of engines. Four dark specks appeared over the horizon and grew rapidly in size.

"Drones," said Ormond. "Pilotless." She was still driving, but with little attention on the road. "Five-hundred-ton capacity. Hope they get the release right this time. Last year they missed the target area and dumped two thousand tons right on a bunch of our buildings. Hell of a mess."

The specks had grown to giant winged planes, bee-lining for the snowy ridges that marked the middle of the Tandy. They were a few thousand feet up when they leveled off over their target zone, but so big that Job could see the bays beneath them opening. Scattered masses of objects fell out.

Ormond was watching with a critical eye. "Close to center," she said. "I'd say within a few hundred yards, every one of them. That makes the cleanup and salvage job a lot easier."

The last of the drones had delivered its load, and the ridged snow hills had become a jumble of dark debris. The planes turned in a wide circle. As they did so, a louder sound of motors arose from behind the van. A convoy of a dozen bizarre objects appeared, moving in line across country and heading for the middle of the Tandy. They ignored the roads. Job could see that although they held to a rigid line they were not connected to each other.

Black against the snow, each member of the convoy possessed a long, broad body flanked by tracked wheels like a tank. Beside each wheel were three leglike pillars, and rising from the forward end of that broad gray base was a tall cylindrical body with two pairs of jointed arms, each red-painted and ending in black pincers. On top of the body, ten feet above the ground, was a small, narrower cylinder that swivelled constantly from side to side, like a watchful, flat-topped head. The strange centaurlike vehicles—they
were
vehicles, whatever else they might be—trundled along surprisingly fast, leaving straight grooves in the unmarked snow.

"What the hell are
they
?" The speaker was a middle-aged woman. It was the first word that Job had heard from any prisoner in the van.

"Cleanup squad." Ormond had driven far from the line of approach of the tracked vehicles and allowed the van to coast to a halt. "They go into the drop zone first, check out what's there, maybe move it around and start sorting."

"There are people in those things?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. Each one can operate in two modes, either with somebody inside—in a lead-lined chamber, of course; radiation levels from new waste get pretty extreme—or remote controlled. We try to use remote control for the hottest material, old reactor fuel rods, broken isotope ampoules, stuff like that, but it's more flexible when you have a human controlling. Better at picking up odd shapes, more stable on hills. There's plenty of big heaps of old trash to be climbed. That's why they need those legs." Ormond stared at the questioner. "I'm surprised you don't know all this. I'd heard of Tandymen long before I was sent here."

Tandyman! The childhood chant rolled into Job's head:

T-A-N-D,
Nuclear waste taste good to me.
Nuclear core she drive me wild,
Pull the rods and spoil the child.

Just machines. But how easily imagination could transform giant cleanup vehicles into terrifying bogeymen, prowling the night, seeking out a sleeping child. The grimy, battered bodies. The wicked-looking pincers and shears, clever enough to tease apart whole reactors and strong enough to slice through the hardened metal cans of nuclear fuel rods. The questing cylindrical head with its red-lensed eyes, never ceasing in their survey.

Ormond might not share Job's fancies, but she certainly gave the Tandymen plenty of space. Only when the great robots were half a mile in front of the van did she again move into gear.

"I'm going to follow, so you can get a look at Tandy Center. But don't worry, I won't take us too close." She gestured at the dashboard. "See the monitor? That's the ambient radiation level. You must always keep your eye on that. You don't want the reading to go above twenty if you can help it—that's two rads a day for received dose. In the first couple of months you won't have much choice, but it's good to get careful early."

Everyone in the van craned to see the monitor. "It's reading down below one," said a man at the back.

"It is now. But keep watching."

The little van eased forward along the deserted road, parallelling the path of the vanished Tandymen. On the dashboard the monitor drifted higher, to two, to three, to five. They were still a mile from Tandy Center. Job stared out of the forward windshield, seeking twisted, misshapen vegetation or monstrous animal life. He looked, even though he knew that the idea was nonsense, part of the folklore of the Tandies. Mutated plants and animals born in the toxins and the radiation would be sickly and defective, unable to compete with the robust natural forms of the region. But still he stared and stared.

Everything seemed normal. Beneath the thin blanket of snow Xanadu lay peaceful under a bright blue sky. Except . . .

Job peered at the broken ridges ahead. It was not imagination. The snow was melting faster there than anywhere else. The released radioactivity of long half-life isotopes was heating the ground, and the monitor had crept up past six. The air around Job was filled with a silent sleet of radiation. Forget the effects on plants and wild animals. Every person in the van was burning, slowly cooking from within.

They were hardly moving forward now, with Ormond keeping a careful eye on the monitor and the road ahead.

"See that?" she pointed to a blue sign by the roadside. "That marks the official limit of Tandy Center. As you'll find out, it's not an absolute boundary like the outer edge of Xanadu. You don't die automatically if you go inside—lucky for you, because you'll be doing that when you get your first assignments. And you're not safe just because you're
outside
it. Some days, like today, there's new high-radioactive materials been dumped, and you don't want to go even as far as the marker unless you have to."

She brought the van to a halt.

"We don't have to, so we won't. But I wanted you to know that you can come to Tandy Center, and survive. Some people get too scared to think straight here, and that's a fatal mistake. Remember, the Tandymen handle the hottest stuff. Before you're done you'll have to pilot one. But they're real well-shielded. Tuck away inside one of them, you'll get less dose than sitting out at the edge of Xanadu."

"Why does anybody go in right away?" asked a voice from the back of the little bus. "Why not wait a while, until the short-lived radioactives get less hot?"

"Because the bad stuff can spoil the good—half the containers split when they land, so unless we go in real quick the leakage gets to everything." Ormond turned to glance back along the bus. "Any more questions? If not, we'll head back."

There was a movement from the people in the van, like the release of long-held breath. The dashboard monitor had edged its way up past twelve. As the van turned, Job took a last look at Tandy Center. One of the Tandymen was climbing down the side of a steep ridge, black legs pumping and sturdy tracks digging in for a grip. The bright-red arms were clutching a roll of wire to the barrel chest, and the lenses of the red-eyed head glittered in the sunlight.

Job watched until the Tandyman had trundled around the base of the ridge and out of sight, then did his own exhaling of breath. He leaned back in his seat. It was not every day that a long-feared demon was so cleanly exorcised.

Chapter Fourteen

. . . and it shall bring him to the king of terrors.

—The Book of Job, Chapter 18, Verse 14

Again, the informality came as a surprise.

Ormond drove to a fair-sized town eight miles from the center of Xanadu, where she assigned each person a dormitory and a room. They were fed in a dining room big enough to hold four or five hundred. One hour later they were assembled in the main square, along with fifty other newcomers who had arrived at the Tandy during the past week. Only then did Job learn that Ormond was not merely their driver of the day. She would be their watchdog, tutor, and absolute boss until the end of their three-month training period. After that they would be assigned to other duties and become someone else's worry.

"Always assuming that you make it," explained Ormond. "You probably want to know what the odds are. There are sixty-four of you. A month from now that will be fifty-one, in two months you'll be down to forty-four, and by the time training's over I expect to shake hands with thirty-nine. Sixty-one percent training survival. If you don't like the sound of that, check around. My figures are as good as anyone's.

"Study those numbers, fix 'em in your head. They're only averages, naturally, but they ought to tell you one thing:
the first month is the worst.
And the second month is the
next
most dangerous. If you make it through them and the rest of training and don't get sloppy after that, you can live here for years and years. Like me."

Job was reevaluating Ormond. The young face and casual manner disguised a lot of self-confidence.

"When in doubt," she went on, "
ask questions.
Xanadu charges a high price for ignorance. So who's going to start, and ask me something useful?"

The new arrivals stared at each other and at their surroundings. The square they stood in was broad and open, flanked by big brick buildings intended to house a hundred people or more. Beyond the town were cultivated fields, empty of crops and fast losing their snow cover in the late afternoon sunshine. It would be dark in another hour. The group stood cold-footed in melting slush.

A tentative hand went up near the back.

"Why do new people like us have to work near the middle of the Tandy, where the hot drops are made? Why not fence that part off, and just leave it?"

"Good question. Anyone like to answer for me?"

Job had been absorbing her intonations and speech patterns. Xanadu was a melting pot for people from all over the country, but it also seemed to have developed its own characteristic accent. Job had noticed it in Paley, and now he was tracing it in Ormond. He needed to hear as much as possible, and he needed to
speak
it. He could not do that following his usual rule of remaining silent and inconspicuous.

He raised his hand. "Because you need what's dropped at the center of Xanadu."

That brought a flash from Ormond's gray eyes. "All right, so far so good. Go on."

"People come in from outside, but they don't bring supplies. Even if you are self-sufficient for food and fuel, you need finished products. The buses we came in stay here, but that's not much. You need the things that are dropped off by air, whatever happens to be mixed in with the toxic wastes and nuclear by-products. They're your only source of outside materials."

"Right answer. There's just one thing wrong with it. Anyone know what it is?" She was cocking her head at Job.

Challenging me, he thought. Testing me. But he could find nothing wrong with his answer. He shook his head.

Ormond grinned. "Just a detail—but an important one. Think of the way you gave your answer.
You
need finished products, you said, and
you
need what's dumped at Tandy Center. What you should have said is that
we
need those things. You're part of Xanadu now. Don't forget it.

"All right. Any more questions?"

Before the group could respond a growing rumble sounded from behind. They all turned. One of the Tandymen was chugging along the road that led to the square. As it neared it suddenly accelerated. In a few seconds the mechanical robot was traveling at top speed, fast as a running horse.

"Wild Tandyman! Scatter!" Ormond was off like a rabbit, racing for the nearest building. After a confused pause, everyone followed.

The long journey west to the Nebraska Tandy had stiffened Job's legs. They had not yet recovered, and he was slower off the mark than the others. Lagging the field, he heard the clatter of Tandyman tracks behind him. The thick concrete of the square was shaking under his feet. He ran on. Already he could imagine metal treads on his back, snapping his spine, flattening his rib cage, squirting the lifeblood from his open mouth.

And then the Tandyman was
past
him. It had singled out one man from the group, a balding forty-year-old, and it was ignoring everyone else. Twenty yards short of the building the Tandyman caught its prey. Four pincered arms reached out and down, seized the man at waist and shoulders, and lifted him into the air. He screamed in wordless terror, wriggling and twisting in the metallic grip. The Tandyman brought him up to touch its broad chest, then lifted him higher on telescoping arms. In a few seconds he was dangling upside down, bald head fifteen feet above the concrete of the square.

Everyone else had reached the safety of the building. They turned and looked. Job, with the Tandyman between him and safety, did not know what to do. He backed away, while the man hung suspended in midair, shouting and writhing.

And then, inexplicably, the metal arms shortened and swung down. The man was rotated in midair and placed lightly on the ground. His legs buckled beneath him and he sank sobbing to the concrete.

The Tandyman's pincers released their hold and rubbed slowly up the man's body from knees to neck. At the head they paused for a few seconds longer, running pocked metal claws around the naked scalp. The man shivered and began to crawl away through the slush. The Tandyman retracted its pincered arms. It turned and rolled quietly away, the questing head rotating back and forth on its smooth bearings.

Job started to walk forward. The man had risen to his knees and was rocking backwards and forwards, eyes wide open and staring.

"Are you all right?" asked Job.

"I thought I was dead." The man brought his soaked hands up to his face and gave a shuddering laugh. "God in Heaven, I
knew
I was dead. I was sure it was going to tear me apart."