The Immortals (28 page)

“They'll be back! Get down!” Christopher said.

“But they've got Marna!” Harry said.

“It won't help if you get killed.”

One glider swooped like a hawk toward a rabbit. The other, carrying Marna, continued to circle as it climbed. Harry rolled toward the ditch. A line of chattering bullets chipped at the pavement where he had been.

“I thought,” he gasped, “they were trying to abduct us.”

“They hunt heads, too,” Christopher said.

“Anything for a thrill,” Pearce whispered.

“I never did anything like that,” Harry moaned. “I never knew anyone who did.”

“You were busy,” Pearce said.

It was true. Since he had been four years old he had been in school constantly, the last part of that time in medical school. He had been home only for a brief day now and then; he scarcely knew his parents anymore. What would he know of the pastimes of young squires? But this—this wolf-pack business! It was a degradation of life that filled him with horror.

The first glider was now a small cross in the sky; Marna, a speck hanging from it. It straightened and glided toward Lawrence. The second followed.

Suddenly Harry began beating the ground with his aching arm. “Why did I dodge? I should have let myself be captured with her. She'll die.”

“She's strong,” Pearce whispered, “stronger than you or Christopher, stronger than almost anyone. But sometimes strength is the cruelest thing. Follow her. Get her away.”

Harry looked at the bracelet from which pain lanced up his arm and through his body. Yes, he could follow her. As long as he could move, he could find her. But feet were so slow against glider wings.

“The motorcycles will be coming back,” Christopher said. “The gliders will have radioed them.”

“But how do we capture a motorcycle?” Harry asked. The pain wouldn't let him think clearly.

Christopher had already pulled up his T-shirt. Around his thin waist was wrapped turn after turn of nylon cord. “Sometimes we fish,” he said. He stretched the cord across the two-lane pavement in the concealment of grass grown tall in a crack. He motioned Harry to lie flat on the other side. “Let them pass, all but the last one,” he said. “Hope that he's a straggler, far enough behind so that the others won't notice when we stand up. Wrap the cord around your waist. Get it up where it will catch him around the chest.”

Harry lay beside the pavement. His left arm felt like a swelling balloon, and the balloon was filled with pain. He looked at it once, curiously, but it was still the same size.

After an eternity came the sound of motors, many of them. As the first ones passed, Harry cautiously lifted his head. Yes, there was a straggler. He was about a hundred feet behind the others; he was speeding now to catch up.

The others passed. When the straggler got within twenty feet, Harry jumped up, bracing himself against the impact. Christopher sprang up at the same instant. The young squire had time only to look surprised before
he hit the cord. The cord pulled Harry out into the middle of the pavement, his heels skidding. Christopher had wrapped his end around the trunk of a young tree.

The squire smashed into the pavement. The motorcycle slowed and stopped. Beyond, far down the road, the others had not looked back.

Harry untangled himself from the cord and ran to the squire. He was about as old as Harry, and as big. He had a harelip and a withered leg. He was dead. His skull was crushed. Harry closed his eyes. He had seen men die before, but he had never been the cause of it. It was like breaking his Hippocratic oath.

“Some must die,” Pearce whispered. “It is better for the evil to die young.”

Harry stripped quickly and got into the squire's clothes and goggles. He strapped the pistol onto his hip and turned to Christopher and Pearce. “What about you?”

“We won't try to escape,” Pearce said.

“I don't mean that. Will you be all right?”

Pearce put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Christopher will take care of me. And he will find you after you have rescued Marna.”

The confidence in Pearce's voice strengthened Harry. He did not pause to question that confidence. He mounted the motorcycle, settled himself into the saddle seat, and turned the throttle. The motorcycle took off violently.

It was tricky, riding on one wheel, but he had had experience on similar vehicles in the subterranean Medical Center thoroughfares.

His arm hurt, but it was not like it had been before when he was helpless. Now it was a guidance system. As he rode, he could feel the pain lessen. That meant he was getting closer to Marna.

*  *  *

It was night before he found her. The other motorcycles had completely outdistanced him, and he had swept past the side road several miles before the worsening pain warned him. He cruised back and forth before he finally located the curving ramp that led across the cloverleaf ten miles east of Lawrence.

From this a ruined asphalt road turned east, and the pain in Harry's arm had dropped to an ache. The road ended in an impenetrable thicket. Harry stopped just before he crashed into it. He sat immobile on the seat, thinking.

He hadn't considered what he was going to do when he found Marna; he had merely taken off in hot pursuit, driven partly by the painful bracelet on his wrist, partly by his concern for Marna and the pain she was feeling as well as her likely fate.

Somehow—he could scarcely trace back the involutions of chance to their source—he had been trapped into leading this pitiful expedition from the Medical Center to the Governor's mansion. Moment by moment it had threatened his life—and not, unless all his hopes were false, just a few years but eternity. Was he going to throw it away here on a quixotic attempt to rescue a girl from the midst of a pack of cruel young wolves?

But what would he do with the thing on his wrist?
What of the governor? What would remain of his life if he showed up at the governor's mansion without his daughter? And what of Marna? He discovered that the last concern overshadowed all the rest and silently cursed the emotions that were dooming him to a suicide mission.

“Ralph?” someone asked out of the darkness, and the decision was taken out of his hands.

“Yeth,” he lisped. “Where ith everybody?”

“Usual place—under the bank.”

Harry moved toward the voice, limping. “Can't thee a thing.”

“Here's a light.”

The trees lighted up, and a black form loomed in front of Harry. Harry blinked once, squinted, and hit the squire with the edge of his palm on the fourth cervical vertebra. As the man dropped, Harry picked the everlight out of the air, and caught the body. He eased the limp form into the grass and felt the neck. It was broken, but the squire was still breathing. He straightened the head so that there would be no pressure on nerve tissue, and looked up.

Light glimmered and flickered somewhere ahead. There was no movement, no sound; apparently no one had heard him. He flicked the light on, saw the path, and started through the young forest.

The campfire was built under a clay overhang so that it could not be seen from above. Roasting over it was a whole young deer being slowly turned on a spit by one of the squires. Harry found time to recognize the empty ache in his midriff for what it was: hunger.

The rest of the squires sat in a semicircle around the fire. Marna was seated on the far side, her hands bound behind her. Her head was raised; her eyes searched the darkness around the fire. What was she looking for? And then he answered his own question—she was looking for him. She knew by the bracelet on her wrist that he was near.

He wished that he could signal her, but that was impossible. He studied the squires: One was an albino, a second had artificial lungs attached to his back, a third had an external skeleton of stainless steel. The others may have had physical impairments that Harry could not see—all except one, who seemed older than the rest and leaned against the edge of the clay bank. He was blind, but inserted surgically into his eye sockets were electrically operated binoculars. He carried a power pack on his back with leads to the binoculars and to what must have been an antenna embedded in his coat.

Harry edged cautiously around the forest edge beyond the firelight toward where Marna was sitting.

“First the feast,” the albino gloated, “then the fun.”

The one who was turning the spit said, “I think we should have the fun first—then we'll be good and hungry.”

They argued back and forth, good-naturedly for a moment and then, as others chimed in, with more intensity. Finally the albino turned to the one with the binoculars. “What do you say, Eyes?”

In a deep voice Eyes said, “Sell the girl. Young parts are worth top prices.”

“Ah,” said the albino slyly, “but you can't see what a pretty little thing she is, Eyes. To you she's only a pattern of white dots against a gray kinescope. To us she's cream and pink and blue and—”

“One of these days,” Eyes said in a calm voice, “you'll go too far.”

“Not with her, I won't—”

A stick broke under Harry's foot. Everyone stopped talking and listened. Harry eased his pistol out of its holster.

“Is that you, Ralph?” the albino said.

“Yeth,” Harry said, limping out into the edge of the firelight, but keeping his head in the darkness, his pistol concealed at his side.

“Can you imagine?” the albino said. “The girl says she's the governor's daughter.”

“I am,” Marna said clearly. “He will have you cut to pieces slowly for what you are going to do.”

“But I'm the governor, dearie,” said the albino in a falsetto, “and I don't give a—”

Eyes interrupted. “That's not Ralph. His leg's all right.”

Harry cursed his luck. The binoculars were equipped to pick up X-ray reflections as well as radar. “Run!” he shouted in the silence that followed.

His first shot was for Eyes. The man was turning so that it struck his power pack. He began screaming and clawing at the binoculars that served him for eyes. But Harry wasn't watching. He was releasing the entire magazine into the clay bank above the fire. Already loosened by
the heat from the fire, the bank collapsed, smothering the fire and burying several of the squires sitting close to it.

Harry dived to the side. Several bullets went through the space he had just vacated. He scrambled for the forest and started running. He kept slamming into trees, but he picked himself up and ran again. In one of the collisions he lost his everlight. Behind, the pursuit thinned and died away.

He ran into something that yielded before him. It fell to the ground, something soft and warm. He tripped over it and toppled, his fist drawn back.

“Harry!” Marna said.

His fist turned into a hand that went out to her, pulled her tight. “Marna!” he whispered. “I didn't know. I didn't think I could do it. I thought you were—”

Their bracelets clinked together. Marna, who had been soft beneath him, suddenly stiffened, pushed him off. “Let's not get slobbery about it,” she said angrily. “I know why you did it. Besides, they'll hear us.”

Harry drew a quick, outraged breath and then let it come out in a sigh. What was the use? She'd never believe him—why should she? He wasn't sure himself. Now that it was over and he had time to realize the risks he had taken, he began to shiver. He sat there in the dark forest, his eyes closed, and tried to control his shaking.

Marna put her hand out hesitantly and touched his arm. She started to say something, stopped, and the moment was past.

“B-b-brat-tt!” he said. “N-n-nasty—un-ungrate-ful b-b-brat!” And then the shakes were gone.

She started to move. “Sit still!” he whispered. “We've got to wait until they give up the search.”

At least he had eliminated the greatest danger: Eyes with his radar, X-ray, maybe infrared vision that was just as good by night as by day.

They sat in the darkness and waited, listened to the forest noises. An hour passed. Harry was going to say that perhaps it was safe to move, when he heard something rustling nearby. Animal, or human enemy? Marna, who had not touched him again or spoken, clutched his upper arm with a panic-strengthened hand. Harry doubled his fist and drew back his arm.

“Doctor Elliott?” Christopher whispered. “Marna?”

Relief surged over Harry like a warm, life-giving current. “You wonderful little imp! How did you find us?”

“Grampa helped me. He has a sense for that. I have a little, but he's better. Come.”

Harry felt a small hand fit itself into his.

Christopher led them through the darkness. At first Harry was distrustful, and then, as the boy kept them out of bushes and trees, he moved more confidently. The hand became something he could trust. He knew how Pearce felt, and how bereft he must be now.

Christopher led them a long way before they reached another clearing. A bed of coals glowed dimly beneath a bower built from bent green branches and stuffed with leaves. Pearce sat near the fire, slowly turning a spit fashioned from another branch. It rested on two forked sticks. On the spit two skinned rabbits were golden brown and sizzling.

Pearce's sightless face turned as they entered the clearing. “Welcome back,” he said.

Harry felt a warmth inside him that was like coming home. “Thanks,” he said. His voice was husky.

Marna fell to her knees in front of the fire, raising her hands to it to warm them. Rope dangled from them, frayed in the center where she had methodically picked it apart while she had waited by another fire. She must have been cold, Harry thought, and I let her shiver through the forest while I was warm in my jacket. But it was too late to say anything.

When Christopher removed the rabbits from the spit, they almost fell apart. He wrapped four legs in damp green leaves and tucked them away in a cool hollow between two tree roots. “That's for breakfast,” he said.