Brothers to Dragons (29 page)

The two cabinets each held a dozen transparent vials with color-coded stoppers. Within those tiny bottles, unless Job had totally misunderstood the argument among Hanna Kronberg and her colleagues, sat the key to Techville and the reason for the fences around it. The invisible microorganisms floating in their cloudy yellow fluid were human designed— Kronberg's saver-of-worlds, but also the Big Three's destroyer-of-worlds.

Job cautiously removed one plastic vial from each cabinet, checking that the stoppers were tightly sealed. The bottles went into his trouser pockets, then he continued to the first floor. He did not attempt to hide what he had done. By morning his presence here would have been noted in other ways.

He went out into the chilly predawn darkness and walked quietly back to the fence. There was a guard on duty at the gate, but he sat inside a heated kiosk, tilted far back on his chair with a cap shielding his forehead and eyes.

Job lay down in the soft mud at the side of the road and slithered through the nine-inch gap at the bottom of the gate. When he stood up he was shivering and close to exhaustion, but he could not stop now. He walked to the center of the town and into the dining hall. It was deserted, and the lights within had been turned down to a glimmer. Half a dozen leftover bread rolls and a tray of leathery pieces of cold cooked meat sat on one of the serving counters. He wrapped bread and meat in a table cloth, tied the ends tight around his waist, and went back outside.

He was afraid that the second fence, eight feet high and running all the way around Techville, might be a tougher proposition. At first sight, it was. The main gate was closed and locked, with two guards standing by it. But when Job, keeping to the darkest shadows, walked along the line of the fence, he came to a place where the recent thaw had turned the ground to a swamp. The line of the eight-foot barrier was drooping outward. Job splashed through six inches of icy water and put his weight onto the place where the fence leaned farthest. It tilted a few more inches, enough for him to scramble partway up the steep side, hang on as it sagged farther, and finally claw his way to the top and drop over into the water and gluey black mud at the other side. He pulled his feet free of sucking ooze and splashed onto drier land. It took a second or two to get his bearings. There were no stars or moon, but he knew that he had walked counterclockwise around the Xanadu fence, and that the entry gate was on the south side. If he kept going, he would be heading in roughly the right direction. When the sun rose he would learn where true east lay and could set his course for the exit from Xanadu.

But that was still far off, in distance and in time. For the moment there were more urgent priorities. Exhausted, dizzy, and feverish, he walked away from the fence.

He had to force himself to do it. His legs did not want to obey his mind. He began to count steps, as he had done so long ago on the return from the incinerator and city dump.
One, two, three.
A dozen lifetimes ago, he had walked and walked and walked like this.
Nine, ten, eleven.
Forever. He had walked forever then. But now—
eighteen, nineteen, twenty
—now he did not have forever.

He cupped his hands over his aching eyes. The clock was running. Fast. He must be out of sight of Techville before daylight, and dawn was less than an hour away.

Chapter Nineteen

My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh,
and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.

— The Book of Job, Chapter 19, Verse 20

Job walked to daybreak, and through it.

After the first half-hour his legs took on a momentum of their own, swinging his body forward across the dark, damp earth. If it had been hard to start walking, now it was much harder to stop. The need to keep moving, to travel, to press on towards the eastern edge of the Tandy . . . the urge was almost irresistible; only as the sun rose higher could Job force himself to halt.

The inducement was the shrunken remains of a snowdrift, piled against the north side of a dense evergreen shrub and protected from sunlight. Job knelt, took a handful of packed gray snow, and sucked it avidly. He held another handful against his forehead. No doubt about it, his fever was worse.

He stared east and made the calculation over and over. Less than a mile away the ridged trash mounds of Tandy Center rose above gentler hill slopes. He must circle that lethal central area and head east for another ten miles before he came to the fence around Xanadu. The total distance to be traveled was, say, fifteen miles. It would be dark again by six. The defensive laser ring would be turned off from eight P.M. to two A.M. Assuming that he started out promptly at sunset, he would have eight hours before the barrier closed for the last time and his chance to leave Xanadu vanished forever. Fifteen miles in eight hours; less than two miles an hour. It sounded trivial—if his legs could carry him so far.

And if the barrier around Xanadu could be opened.

Job sighed and lay full length on the ground, face up. He peered into the sky, into as deep a blue as he had ever seen. Somewhere in that void, hundreds of miles above him, unsleeping surveillance satellites stared back at Earth. Onboard sensors, if Wilfred Dell were to be believed, were even now scanning the Nebraska Tandy with their sensitive opdcs and cunning shape-detection algorithms, searching for the starfish form of a supine man against black earth.

Were they there? Would they see him?

Job forced himself to lie in the same place for two hours. The temperature gradually rose and the sun climbed higher, until even the gentle rays of early spring were enough to sting his ulcerated face. At last he crawled to the shelter of the scrubby evergreens and lay down by them. With the day to go before he could safely move on, what he needed more than anything was rest. But he was too feverish to sleep.

He began to munch on hard bread and tough meat, chewing with raw, lacerated gums and swallowing with a throat on fire with fever. The early lessons of Cloak House allowed him to endure the pain:
Eat when you can, not when you feel like it.

He swallowed every scrap that he had brought with him, washed it down with mouthfuls of melted snow, and stared about in search of a safer hiding place.

There was nothing. The Tandy was too flat and open. Its valleys were broad and shallow, not enough to conceal a human, even one lying at full-length. The evergreen bushes might seem like the best hiding-place—but that meant they were the first place that any searcher would look.

Job rose to his hands and knees. A couple of hundred yards to the southeast the spiky grass vegetation gave way to taller sedges and rushes. It suggested swampy ground. He crawled that way. As he came to the reedy area his hands sank deeper into cool, soft mud. He kept moving until he was at the center of a little depression. His hands were in above the wrist, and his knees and lower legs were covered, but the reeds and sedges were still not enough to conceal him. He had to burrow deeper. He lay flat on his back and wriggled, feeling his body sink slowly in the ooze until all but his head was covered. He reached out to each side, picked up handfuls of wet black mud, and daubed his burning face with them. Now he had become a man of earth, invisible from more than a few paces. He placed the mud-soaked cloth that had held his food over his fevered forehead, closed his eyes, and relaxed.

The cool embrace was exactly what he needed. As the day grew hot and the sun rose past its zenith, Job could feel the fever draining out of him, leached away by wet black earth. The soil above him dried and crumbled in the heat, while he drowsed and drifted and dreamed. He did not remember falling asleep, but when he opened his eyes the sun was suddenly a ball of orange fire, low on the horizon—and he was feeling human again.

He sat up. Time to be moving. And as he had that thought and stared around him, he learned that he was no longer alone. On the western horizon a long line of tiny figures had appeared. They were on the brow of a gentle hill, far off but steadily approaching. The line curved around him to both north and south.

He was hunted. And hunted in the most logical and inescapable way. Once Pyle, Gormish, and Bonvissuto had learned that Job had taken the vials from Hanna Kronberg's lab, they must have realized that their whole plan was in danger. Since they commanded the use of all the manpower in Xanadu, it would be easy to raise an army of ten thousand or more, send them to the outer border of the Tandy, and instruct everyone in the circle to walk inward. Only a hundred feet from each other at the outer perimeter of Xanadu, they would come closer and closer together as they approached the center. Nothing could escape them—not even a solitary man, lying flat and covered in mud.

Job could lie still, and wait for night. But only a fool would believe that they lacked flashlights and infrared detectors.

The behavior of the far-off line of men and women confirmed his assessment. They were in no hurry. They were convinced that they would find him, no matter where he hid.

And they were right. Job could not stay where he was. As the light faded he began to move in the only available direction—towards Tandy Center. He crouched low to the ground, seeking shelter from every meager bush or hummock.

He should have waited just a bit longer. As he was passing over the top of a little rise he heard a cry from behind him. Confirming calls rang out along the line.

Job stood up straight and began to run, taking the risk of being picked off by some sharpshooter. The main line was to his west. It was useless to run north or south—the cordon would surely continue there to form a full circle. All that he could do was run east, on into the central dump of Xanadu. Soon it would be totally dark, and already the tops of the trash mountains were beginning to merge into the sky. No sane person would pursue him into the deadly wilderness of the dumps. He could hide all night in Tandy Center.

His lungs began to burn in his chest, and he paused for breath. He could hide tonight, but to what purpose? Unless he had a way to escape in the morning it was pointless. In daylight, searchers wearing protective suits would have no trouble finding him in the dump, no matter where he hid.

He could not fault that logic, but his legs ignored his brain. He began to run again. Soon he was in a broad corridor that wound into the central drop-off zone. Chaotic mounds of unprocessed junk rose high on every side, providing an illusion of security from pursuers. They would not be reckless enough to follow into unknown dangers. But Job's own knowledge of Tandy Center had also been gained in daylight, and it was useless at night. He slowed his pace, staring in the sun's last gleam at twisted skeletons of metal, jumbled piles of contaminated aluminum sheeting, and seas of carboys and boxes and sharp-edged crates. He could see those clearly enough—what he could not see were the hidden dangers, the radioactivity and the toxins that permeated the debris.

At last the twilight faded to total darkness. Job squatted on the ground. Although he could sense the tangled wreckage on each side, he could no longer see it. Walking here at night was an invitation to disaster. He would have to wait until the tricky light of predawn, then try to slip through the cordon.

It was the half-hearted decision of a man who already knows that he has lost. And as he made that decision, a booming roar sounded out across Tandy Center.

JOB SALK.

As he jerked to his feet he recognized the grotesquely amplified voice. It was Gormish.

JOB SALK. I KNOW THAT YOU ARE HIDING IN THE DUMP, AND WE BOTH KNOW THAT YOU CANNOT ESCAPE. YOU HAVE SHOWN GREAT INITIATIVE TO COME SO FAR. SURRENDER NOW, AND YOU WILL NOT BE HARMED. MEN WITH COURAGE AND SKILL ARE HARD TO FIND. COME OUT, AND I GUARANTEE THAT YOU WILL HAVE A POSITION AT HEADQUARTERS. YOU HAVE MY WORD ON IT.

Job sank back to the ground. Shades of Wilfred Dell and his promises. He and Gormish looked nothing like each other, but they were brothers under the skin.

COME OUT NOW, JOB SALK. THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. COME OUT, OR WE WILL COME AND GET YOU.

Those were the words that finally forced Job to action. He might die here in Tandy Center, but he would die according to his own plan, not Gormish's. For half an hour more he rested, then rose and began to pace cautiously forward. If his signal had been received by Dell the eastern barrier of Xanadu would open in one more hour. The middle of the dump could not be far away. Even though it was a forlorn hope, he had to reach that middle and continue across Tandy Center, to confirm that its eastern edge was blocked by the same line of pursuers.

He stepped on a piece of hard board that cracked under his weight with a sound like a pistol shot. Appalled at the noise, he stood motionless; and then he saw, like a glimmer of false dawn, a faint light shining through an iron lattice in one of the mounds.

Surely they had not pursued him here to join him in suicide. He stepped closer for a better view. As he did so there was a clash of gears and the growl of moving treads. Through the open metal grid Job saw a familiar towering shape.

Tandyman!

His legs wobbled under him and he sank to the floor.

The Tandyman's pincered arms telescoped out, as though the machine was stretching and flexing its muscles, then retracted to the sides. Twin searchlights in the cylindrical head swiveled and moved to narrow beam. Then Job could see that it was not heading towards him. It had turned, to run down a corridor parallel to the one in which he was standing.

He started in the opposite direction. Before he could take more than two steps another rumble of treads came from his other side. He saw more lights, and heard more engines. All the Tandymen parked in Tandy Center were coming alive, one by one. Searchlights glared out, and behind them red crystal eyes glittered in the reflected beams.

They were after
him.

He could see lights at each end of the corridor. Job was trapped. Desperately he scrambled up the steep side of the nearest ridge, ignoring cuts from sharp metal edges and the danger that the whole face would slide down to bury him.