The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (38 page)

The bluff started in a low ridge running almost the length of the little island, like a lopsided backbone. Towards the centre it rose abruptly, sent a wing out towards the rocky outcropping at the beach where their equipment had been unloaded, and then rose again to a small, almost square plateau area, half a mile across. It was humpy and rough until they could see all of it, when they realized how incredibly level it was, under the brush and ruins that covered it. In the centre – and exactly in the centre they realized suddenly – was a low, overgrown mound. Tom threw out the clutch and revved her down.

“Survey report said there was stone up here,” Tom said, vaulting out of the seat. “Let’s walk around some.”

They walked towards the knoll, Tom’s eyes casting about as he went. He stooped down into the heavy, short grass and scooped up a piece of stone, blue-grey, hard and brittle.

“Rivera – look at this. This is what the report was talking about. See – more of it. All in small pieces, though. We need big stuff for the bog if we can get it.”

“Good stone?” asked Rivera.

“Yes, boy – but it don’t belong here. Th’ whole island’s sand and marl and sandstone on the outcrop down yonder. This here’s a bluestone, like diamond clay. Harder’n blazes. I never saw this stuff on a marl hill before. Or near one. Anyhow, root around and see if there is any big stuff.”

They walked on. Rivera suddenly dipped down and pulled grass aside.

“Tom – here’s a beeg one.”

Tom came over and looked down at the corner of stone ticking up out of the topsoil. “Yeh. Goony, get your girl-friend over here and we’ll root it out.”

Rivera sprinted back to the idling dozer and climbed aboard. He brought the machine over to where Tom waited, stopped, stood up and peered over the front of the machine to locate the stone, then sat down and shifted gears. Before he could move the machine Tom was on the fender beside him, checking him with a hand on his arm.

“No, boy – no. Not third. First. And half throttle. That’s it. Don’t try to bash a rock out of the ground. Go on up to it easy; set your blade against it, lift it out, don’t boot it out. Take it with the middle of your blade, not the corner – get the load on both hydraulic cylinders. Who told you to do like that?”

“No one tol’ me, Tom. I see a man do it, I do it.”

“Yeah? Who was it?”

“Dennis, but—”

“Listen, Goony, if you want to learn anything from Dennis, watch him while he’s on a pan. He dozes like he talks. That reminds me – what I wanted to talk to you about. You ever have any trouble with him?”

Rivera spread his hands. “How I have trouble when he never talk to me?”

“Well, that’s all right then. You keep it that way. Dennis is O.K., I guess, but you better keep away from him.”

He went on to tell the boy then about what Peebles had said concerning being an operator and a mechanic at the same time. Rivera’s lean dark face fell, and his hand strayed to the blade control, touching it lightly, feeling the composition grip and the machined locknuts that help it. When Tom had quite finished he said:

“O.K., Tom – if you want, you break ’em, I feex ’em. But if you wan’ help some time, I run
Daisy Etta
for you, no?”

“Sure, kid, sure. But don’t forget, no man can do everything.”

“You can do everything,” said the boy.

Tom leaped off the machine and Rivera shifted into first and crept up to the stone, setting the blade gently against it. Taking the load, the mighty engine audibly bunched its muscles; Rivera opened the throttle a little and the machine set solidly against the stone, the tracks slipping, digging into the ground, piling loose earth up behind. Tom raised a fist, thumb up, and the boy began lifting his blade. The Seven lowered her snout like an ox pulling through mud; the front of the tracks buried themselves deeper and the blade slipped upwards an inch on the rock, as if it were on a ratchet. The stone shifted, and suddenly heaved itself up out of the earth that covered it, bulging the sod aside like a ship’s slow bow-wave. And the blade lost its grip and slipped over the stone. Rivera slapped out the master clutch within an ace of letting the mass of it poke through his radiator core. Reversing, he set the blade against it again and rolled it at last into daylight.

Tom stood staring at it, scratching the back of his neck. Rivera got off the machine and stood beside him. For a long time they said nothing.

The stone was roughly rectangular, shaped like a brick with one end cut at about a thirty-degree angle. And on the angled face was a square-cut ridge, like the tongue on a piece of milled lumber. The stone was about 3 × 2 × 2 feet, and must have weighed six or seven hundred pounds.

“Now that,” said Tom, bug-eyed, “didn’t grow
here
, and if it did it never grew that way.”

“
Una piedra de una casa
,” said Rivera softly. “Tom, there was a building here, no?”

Tom turned suddenly to look at the knoll.

“There is a building here – or what’s left of it. Lord on’y knows how old—”

They stood there in the slowly dwindling light, staring at the knoll; and there came upon them a feeling of oppression, as if there were no wind and no sound anywhere. And yet there was wind, and behind them
Daisy Etta
whacked away with her muttering idle, and nothing had changed and – was that it? That nothing had changed? That nothing would change, or could, here?

Tom opened his mouth twice to speak, and couldn’t, or didn’t want to – he didn’t know which. Rivera slumped suddenly on his hunkers, back erect, and his eyes wide.

It grew very cold. “It’s cold,” Tom said, and his voice sounded harsh to him. And the wind blew warm on them, the earth was warm under Rivera’s knees. The cold was not a lack of heat, but a lack of something else – warmth, but the specific warmth of life-force, perhaps. The feeling of oppression grew as if their recognition of the strangeness of the place had started it, and their increasing sensitivity to it made it grow.

Rivera said something, quietly, in Spanish.

“What are you looking at?” asked Tom.

Rivera started violently, threw up an arm, as if to ward off the crash of Tom’s voice.

“I . . . there is nothin’ to see, Tom. I feel this way wance before. I dunno—” He shook his head, his eyes wide and blank. “An’ after, there was being wan hell of a thunder-storm—” His voice petered out.

Tom took his shoulder and hauled him roughly to his feet. “Goony! You slap-happy?”

The boy smiled, almost gently. The down on his upper lip held little spheres of sweat. “I ain’t nothin’, Tom. I’m jus’ scare like hell.”

“You scare yourself right back up there on that cat and git to work,” Tom roared. More quietly then, he said, “I know there’s something – wrong – here, Goony, but that ain’t goin’ to get us a runway built. Anyhow, I know what to do about a dawg ’at gits gunshy. Ought to be able to do as much fer you. Git along to th’ mound now and see if it ain’t a cache o’ big stone for us. We got a swamp down there to fill.”

Rivera hesitated, started to speak, swallowed and then walked slowly over to the Seven. Tom stood watching him, closing his mind to the impalpable pressure of something, somewhere near, making his guts cold.

The bulldozer nosed over to the mound, grunting, reminding Tom suddenly that the machine’s Spanish slang name was
puerco
– pig, boar. Rivera angled into the edge of the mound with the cutting corner of the blade. Dirt and brush curled up, fell away from the mound and loaded from the bank side, out along the mouldboard. The boy finished his pass along the mound, carried the load past it and wasted it out on the flat, turned around and started back again.

Ten minutes later Rivera struck stone, the manganese steel screaming along it, a puff of grey dust spouting from the cutting corner. Tom knelt and examined it after the machine had passed. It was the same kind of stone they had found out on the flat – and shaped the same way. But here it was a wall, the angled faces of the block ends obviously tongued and grooved together.

Cold, cold as—

Tom took one deep breath and wiped sweat out of his eyes.

“I don’t care,” he whispered, “I got to have that stone. I got to fill me a swamp.” He stood back and motioned to Rivera to blade into a chipped crevice in the buried wall.

The Seven swung into the wall and stopped while Rivera shifted into first, throttled down and lowered his blade. Tom looked up into his face. The boy’s lips were white. He eased in the master clutch, the blade dipped and the corner swung neatly into the crevice.

The dozer blatted protestingly and began to crab sideways, pivoting on the end of the blade. Tom jumped out of the way, ran around behind the machine, which was almost parallel with the wall now, and stood in the clear, one hand raised ready to signal, his eyes on the straining blade. And then everything happened at once.

With a toothy snap the block started and came free, pivoting outward from its square end, bringing with it its neighbour. The block above them dropped, and the whole mound seemed to settle. And
something
whooshed out of the black hole where the rocks had been. Something like a fog, but not a fog that could be seen, something huge that could not be measured. With it came a gust of that cold which was not cold, and the smell of ozone, and the prickling crackle of a mighty static discharge.

Tom was fifty feet from the wall before he knew he had moved. He stopped and saw the Seven suddenly buck like a wild stallion, once, and Rivera turning over twice in the air. Tom shouted some meaningless syllable and tore over to the boy, where he sprawled on the rough grass, lifted him in his arms, and ran. Only then did he realize that he was running from the machine.

It was like a mad thing. Its mouldboard rose and fell. It curved away from the mound, howling governor gone wild, controls flailing. The blade dug repeatedly into the earth, gouging it up in great dips through which the tractor plunged, clanking and bellowing furiously. It raced away in a great irregular arc, turned and came snorting back to the mound, where it beat at the buried wall, slewed and scraped and roared.

Tom reached the edge of the plateau sobbing for breath, and kneeling, laid the boy gently down on the grass.

“Goony, boy . . . hey—”

The long silken eyelashes fluttered, lifted. Something wrenched in Tom as he saw the eyes, rolled right back so that only the whites showed. Rivera drew a long quivering breath which caught suddenly. He coughed twice, threw his head from side to side so violently that Tom took it between his hands and steadied it.

“
Ay . . . Maria madre . . . que me pasado
, Tom – w’at has happen to me?”

“Fell off the Seven, stupid. You . . . how you feel?”

Rivera scrabbled at the ground, got his elbows half under him, then sank back weakly. “Feel O.K. Headache like hell. W-w’at happen to my feets?”

“Feet? They hurt?”

“No hurt—” The young face went grey, the lips tightened with effort. “No nothin’, Tom.”

“You can’t move ’em?”

Rivera shook his head, still trying. Tom stood up. “You take it easy. I’ll go get Kelly. Be right back.”

He walked away quickly and when Rivera called to him he did not turn around. Tom had seen a man with a broken back before.

At the edge of the little plateau Tom stopped, listening. In the deepening twilight he could see the bulldozer standing by the mound. The motor was running; she had not stalled herself. But what stopped Tom was that she wasn’t idling, but revving up and down as if an impatient hand were on the throttle –
hroom hroooom
, running up and up far faster than even a broken governor should permit, then coasting down to near silence, broken by the explosive punctuation of sharp and irregular firing. Then it would run up and up again, almost screaming, sustaining a r.p.m. that threatened every moving part, shaking the great machine like some deadly ague.

Tom walked swiftly towards the Seven, a puzzled and grim frown on his weather-beaten face. Governors break down occasionally, and once in a while you will have a motor tear itself to pieces, revving up out of control. But it will either do that or it will rev down and quit. If an operator is fool enough to leave his machine with the master clutch engaged, the machine will take off and run the way the Seven had – but it will not turn unless the blade corner catches in something unresisting, and then the chances are very strong that it will stall. But in any case, it was past reason for any machine to act this way, revving up and down, running, turning, lifting and dropping the blade.

The motor slowed as he approached, and at last settled down into something like a steady and regular idle. Tom had the sudden crazy impression that it was watching him. He shrugged off the feeling, walked up and laid a hand on the fender.

The Seven reacted like a wild stallion. The big Diesel roared, and Tom distinctly saw the master clutch lever snap back over centre. He leaped clear, expecting the machine to jolt forward, but apparently it was in a reverse gear, for it shot backwards, one track locked, and the near end of the blade swung in a swift vicious arc, breezing a bare fraction of an inch past his hip as he danced back out of the way.

And as if it had bounced off a wall, the tractor had shifted and was bearing down on him, the twelve-foot blade rising, and two big headlights looming over him on their bow-legged supports, looking like the protruding eyes of some mighty toad. Tom had no choice but to leap straight up and grasp the top of the blade in his two hands, leaning back hard to brace his feet against the curved mouldboard. The blade dropped and sank into the soft topsoil, digging a deep little swale in the ground. The earth loading on the mouldboard rose and churned around Tom’s legs; he stepped wildly, keeping them clear of the rolling drag of it. Up came the blade then, leaving a four-foot pile at the edge of the pit; down and up the tractor raced as the tracks went into it; up and up as they climbed the pile of dirt. A quick balance and overbalance as the machine lurched up and over like a motor-cycle taking a jump off a ramp, and then a spine-shaking crash as fourteen tons of metal smashed blade-first into the ground.