City of the Cyborgs

T
he only thing moving in the sky above was a single vulture. It kept circling high over the small band of teenagers stumbling through the desert. Only a dot at first, it made a slow swooping curve, coming closer and closer. Something ominous lay in the way it descended.

Finally the bird came close enough so that Reb Jackson lifted his head and gazed at it.

“That’s all we need. A vulture to keep us company!”

Reb was a lean boy of fifteen. He was the tallest of the young travelers who plodded painfully over the sand and rocks that made up this bad country. He had on a well-worn Stetson that shaded his eyes from the blistering sun. Now, stopping and taking it off, he pulled a scarlet bandana from his pocket and mopped his forehead. His face was red. Reb glared up at the vulture. “You come a little closer, and I’ll bust you with a rock!”

“Better save your strength, Reb.” Josh Adams and all the others stopped as well. Josh’s face felt sunburned, and his tongue was thick in his mouth. He shook the leather bottle at his side. “Not more than a few swallows here,” he said. “How much have the rest of you got?”

“I don’t have anything left.” Jake Garfield, short and fourteen, had red hair now shaded by a straw hat. He held up his own leather bottle. It was flat. He could hardly speak. “We’ve got to get to water soon, Josh, or we’re goners.”

Josh looked at the others. Brown-haired Dave Cooper was ordinarily strong and athletic. But their trek across the desert had worn him down. He did not speak at all but suddenly just sat down on the ground and hung his head.

“Come on, Dave, you can’t give up.” Gregory Randolph Washington Jones—Wash—was, at thirteen, the youngest of them. He held out his own water bottle and said, “Here. I got a little left. I’ll split it with you.”

Dave looked up at the black boy. “No,” he said stubbornly. “I’ve drunk mine. You’d better save it for yourself.”

“Aw, go ahead and drink some, Dave,” Wash urged. “I’m smaller than you are. I don’t need as much water.”

“That’s plain silly,” Dave mumbled.

Josh wanted to sit down and rest, too, but he knew that would be fatal. He squinted at the sky. “About three hours of day left. We’ve got to find a spring or a pool or something. The heat will be better when the sun goes down.” Then he walked over to the two girls. Both were sunburned and looked ready to drop. “You girls all right?”

Sarah Collingwood had on a pair of brown shorts, and her unprotected legs were blistered. She wore a bloused hat over her black hair, and that sheltered her face. She tried to smile at him. “We’ll be all right, Josh. Don’t worry about us.”

“Be all right!” Abbey Roberts wailed. “How can you say that? We’re going to die of thirst out here in this desert!” Abbey was usually very careful of her appearance, but now she was dressed in faded, worn clothes as were the rest of the Sleepers.

Josh knew that he had to get them moving. He was the leader of the Seven Sleepers. So he said as cheerfully
as he could, “Come on, gang. We’re bound to find water. And one thing’s for really sure—that sun has got to go down.”

It took some encouraging, but he finally got the group going again. He tramped ahead of them, his eyes searching for any spot of green. After a while, Sarah came up beside him, and he said, “If you see anything green, we go for it. If it’s green, there has to be water close by.”

“They can have this land of Grobundia,” Sarah said. She took a small sip of water from her bottle.

Josh glanced at her. She was holding the liquid in her mouth, enjoying the delicious moisture as it soaked into her dried tissues.

Then she swallowed and said, “We’ve heard some pretty bad things about Grobundia. After this, I believe them all.”

“We didn’t have any choice,” Josh said. “We had to go through this territory. There’s no other way. Couldn’t go around it. Couldn’t fly over it. Wish the eagles were here to carry us over.”

“The eagles! I’ve been thinking about them myself,” Sarah muttered. “Wish they’d show up again.”

“Maybe they will. Maybe Goél will send them. He knows what we need. The eagles came before when we needed them—just like we do now.”

Josh looked up at the sky. It looked unfriendly and hard enough to scratch a match on. There were no eagles. “Not a cloud,” he said, trying not to sound bitter.

“Well, don’t give up, Josh. We’ve been in tighter spots than this in Nuworld.” Now Sarah was being the encourager.

Nuworld. That weird place that now existed after an atomic war had destroyed most of the world as it
had been. There were strange mutations here. There were giant eagles large enough to ride on. More than once those eagles had carried them away from danger. But now, looking up, Josh saw only the lone vulture.

“We’ll make it,” he said grimly. “Goél hasn’t forgotten us, and we’ll make it. That old buzzard might as well go fly someplace else.”

The sun seemed pasted in the sky, as though it were not going down at all. On and on the Seven Sleepers trudged with sore feet and sunburned skin and mouths as dry as dust.

Of course, finally the sun did go down, and, just as it did, Josh suddenly cried, “Look over there! There’s a patch of green! Come on!”

The stones bruised his feet as they straggled, half-running, across the desert floor. At the green patch, a small spring was making a pool no more than three feet across. Water from the pool trickled off for a little ways and then disappeared into the dry earth.

“Be careful,” Josh said as they knelt about the pool. “We drink what we can, then we fill our water bottles.”

“I could drink it all!” Jake cried.

“Save some for me, Jake,” Reb grinned through chapped and dried lips. “I need an ocean!”

“The girls first,” Josh said.

Not all could drink from the small water supply at one time. The girls drank, and then the boys took turns.

Josh was the last. He drank and drank, then said, “I’ve drunk all I can, and I’m still thirsty. My tissues are all dried up.”

“We’ll have to fill the water bottles a little at a time. This isn’t much of a spring,” Reb said.

Night came on quickly. Overhead the stars glittered like diamonds. A full moon rose above the eastern horizon.

They had lost all of their equipment including their weapons. They had nothing to eat. They were without blankets. All they could do was to curl up on the sand.

Sarah and Abbey huddled together because, as hot as the day had been, the air cooled off rapidly. Josh could hear their murmured conversation.

“I wish we had something to eat,” Abbey said.

“We’ll get to someplace tomorrow. There’s probably a village up ahead.”

“I surely hope so,” Abbey said, “and I need some makeup. I must look awful.”

“Makeup!”

“I don’t feel
human
without makeup, Sarah. You know that!”

Listening, Josh could not help but smile, miserable as he was. He had often noted that no matter how bad things were, Abbey’s first thought was either of boys or her makeup.
Oh, well
, he thought as he started to doze off,
I’d settle for a good steak myself. Abbey can have the makeup
.

But the water had refreshed him, and the singing winds of the desert lulled him to sleep.

Josh did not know how long he had slept. He hated to come out of it, though. Consciousness slowly came back, but he still felt he was half asleep.

I wish I could just sleep for a month
, he thought,
and wake up in the middle of a nice, green place with lots of lakes and rivers and streams and …

More and more he came out of his almost comalike sleep, and his mind began reviewing what had happened.
Since coming to Nuworld, he had been leader of this small group of young people who had been safely brought from Oldworld by means of sleep capsules. The Seven Sleepers soon found themselves under the command of a strange and wonderful figure named Goél.

Their mysterious leader appeared to the Sleepers from time to time. He led the battle against an evil force commanded by the Dark Lord, and often he had sent them on dangerous missions. Right now Josh lay thinking,
I’d be happy if we didn’t have any more missions. I’d just like to take a break for a while
.

A
slight sound caught his attention, and he opened one eye. He expected to see one of his friends turning over in his sleep. Instead, what he saw brought him fully awake. Instantly.

At first he could not make out what it was, and then he saw someone’s feet standing not three feet away from him!

In alarm, Josh instinctively made a grab toward his waist, but no sword was there. He came to his feet then with a bound but stopped stock-still at once, for something sharp probed right at his heart. He looked down and saw a long, cruel knife, held in the hand of a small, strange being.

Josh looked around wildly.
Dwarfs!
Their entire camping area was surrounded by little men wearing flowing desert robes and carrying blades that glinted in the moonlight. The bright moonlight fell on their dark-skinned faces too. Their robes had hoods that could cover their heads. Their faces were thin and hard. Worst of all, none of them seemed friendly.

Looking down at the little man who held the knife, Josh swallowed hard. “Hello,” he said. “My name is Josh Adams.”

“I am Gulak. And you’ll have no name soon.”

Gulak had slanted eyes. When he grinned, as he did now, he showed stained, broken teeth. And although he was no more than three feet tall, he appeared tough and wiry and dangerous.

One of the other desert raiders said, “Let’s kill them now.”

“Why should we kill them, Mudnor?”

By now the other Sleepers were on their feet. But they were as weaponless as Josh was. Mudnor laughed evilly as he looked about at them. Suddenly he reached out and grabbed Abbey Roberts by the hair. With the other hand he whipped out a knife and held it to her throat. “Just for the pleasure of it,” he said. “I have not killed anyone in weeks now.”

“Wait a minute!” Josh cried. “You can’t kill us like that!”

Laughter went up from the surrounding band of dwarfs. Gulak said, “Who are you to be telling us what we can do? You come into our land uninvited, and we will do as we please with you.”

“Let me have this one to play with,” Mudnor said, keeping the blade at Abbey’s throat. The girl’s eyes were wide with terror, and she struggled to free herself. But Mudnor was very strong, though not as tall as Abbey.