The Deadly Sky (2 page)

I wasn’t in my lab. I was midway in the world and wondering what to do with myself. With hatred and loathing I eyed the black fowl circling in the sky. Should I attempt to ride one back across the gulf or stay here all night and freeze? Whichever way I looked at it, I was going to be late for dinner.

A brisk wind came up as the fog higher on the mountain began drifting my way. It wouldn’t be long before the entire area was blanketed. I searched for the birds and discovered that they still winged freely above me.

I chased one to the brink but failed to catch up with it. Skidding to a halt, I ran back the other way and stood on the opposite lip. A large specimen came swooping up out of the abyss close enough for me to grab a wing. Hanging on as best I could, I waited for it to fly up the wall and dash me to a pulp. One thing it would not do was drop me; my fingers were firmly wrapped around a spiny tendon growing close to its side.

Now and then the thing cast me a wicked look before suddenly plummeting into the pit. Along a wall we hurtled until we were deep within the gorge. Tiring of this, the bird ascended to the plateau, darted in circles for a few minutes before finally heading for the homeward side.

My heels gouged furrows in the dirt before I finally got up enough nerve to let go, and then I pitched belly-first into a patch of tall weeds. Sitting up and cursing my wild mount, I spat out dust and grass, gained my footing and headed down the slope.

As I reached the next plateau a large boulder came thundering down the trail behind me. It was all I could do to find cover beneath a jutting ledge before it pounded straight along the path where I had been walking. It pitched over the side and, though I listened, I didn’t hear it land.

Complete darkness found me resting in a cave some two miles from the ground. While the wind built a small hurricane just beyond the mouth, I lay on the earth and slept.

At dawn I climbed the rest of the way down, walked five miles to the nearest train station and rode to Section Ten.

The door of my house was seven feet high and four feet across. There was a dial at mid-height upon which I played a code of lights. Immediately the door opened and Sargoth was there to greet me.

Heading for my apartment, I said, “Don’t tell him anything, not when I came in or that I looked like I crawled from under a rock. Not anything. Got that?”

“Whom do I work for, you or him?”

“Isn’t that irrelevant? You know how old he is. I mean, how many men do you know who have their only child at age sixty?”

“I don’t see what difference age makes.”

“That’s because you’re a drell. If you were still human you’d see.” I closed the door in his face before he could argue.

The late morning sun came through the wall of my bedroom to awaken and annoy me. Stretching to reach the switch on the floor, I changed the angle of glass shingles outside so that the bright light became shade.

Since the bed would have slid into the wall if I got off it, I sat on an edge and groaned. The muscles in my back were stiff and sore and as I gingerly tried them out I envisioned myself riding a bird across a crevasse. Like a honcho. Like an idiot.

I made the mistake of raising my rear off the bed and away it went into the wall, noiselessly and efficiently, There to discard its clothes. Tonight when I switched it out again it would be wearing new sheets with a fresh blanket neatly folded at the foot.

In the bathroom I took a capsule from a tube, switched it on and placed it in my mouth where it ran around cleaning my teeth with tiny bristles and suction cups. I inserted my head in a hole in the wall and gasped when the water came out cold. The glass shields on the water tank were becoming too corroded to reach out for heat and light. That was my fault. I had replaced the original shields with some of my own making.

My bedroom was no more than a gleaming space fifteen by twenty-five by ten feet. According to Sargoth, and most people, a room wasn’t really neat and clean unless it was absolutely empty. Switching my bureau out of the wall by depressing a red disc on the floor, I rummaged in the top drawer for coins and fed them into a slot in a wall. Twenty-five cents for a shirt, blue since I had worn yellow yesterday, thirty cents for a pair of gray pants, twenty cents for underwear and socks, two dollars for a jacket and new boots. None of the clothes were sturdy except for the boots. At the end of the day, or whenever I pleased, I would throw them into the disposal chute.

My father had never known what to do with me. Left a widower when my mother died in a train crash, he did his best to take care of me. I think he was relieved when I ran away at age twelve because it gave him an excuse to have Sargoth in the house.

The kitchen was a glittering, empty cavity. Instead of switching everything out, my father had waited for me.

“Good morning, Dad,” I said.

“Good morning, Ashlin. How are you?”

“Fine. And you?”

“Very well.”

My toe on a floor disc brought out the chairs from the wall. He sat on one while I did the things that had to be done, table switched out, coins fed into food slots, coins fed into napkins-glasses-salt-pepper-flatware slots. Father had cocoa, toast, juice and a boiled egg. I had everything imaginable.

He sat on one side of the table eyeing me over his cup while I sat on the other side and eyed him over my fork. At eighty he was still a vigorous man in good health who could expect thirty or forty more years of life, barring disaster. He hadn’t lost his hair, which was thick, white and wavy. Looking at it made me think of my mother who had had a sandy thatch like my own; not a wave or motion in the strands anywhere. Father had china-blue eyes and so did I. He had a classical nose whereas my own was common and somewhat small. At least I was a bigger man than he but that was probably because he was a bit shrunken with age.

“What time did you get home last night?” he said, staring at me with eyes the color of the morning sky.

“Didn’t Sargoth tell you?”

“He said he didn’t know.”

“Early. I needed to catch up on some sleep.”

“I think you were mountain climbing yesterday.”

“I try to keep busy.”

“Are you well?”

“Yes, why?”

“You’ve a tic under your left eye.”

When we left the kitchen it was a glittering, empty cavern.

“Who were you with yesterday?” he said. “Not that Willmett ruffian?”

“He’s all right.”

“He drinks and drugs.”

“Only occasionally. Most of the time he’s as straight as you are.”

Mrs. Pelf from next door came over five minutes after my father went to work.

“You just missed him,” I said.

“Oh? Well, I came to see you, you know.”

“Really?”

“Don’t I do that quite often?”

“Of course.”

“Been climbing the mountain again, haven’t you? Maude Lape saw you on the train at dawn. Said you looked like a dirty rat.”

Sometimes I thought Mrs. Pelf would have been better off pursuing Sargoth rather than my father. She and the drell were two of a kind.

“Tell Bruner I stopped by, will you?” she said and left.

I went down into the lab. When Sargoth followed, I said, “Go to the library and hook your learning lead into the bird bank.”

“Is this a clumsy ploy to get rid of me?”

“Big birds. Like horses.” As he reluctantly turned to leave, I added, “The history bank, too. Just about the mountain.”

He paused. “Which mountain?”

I kept forgetting Emtra wasn’t the world. “Our mountain. The one out the window.”

My father allowed me to have free run of his lab because he didn’t know how to handle my anxieties. The place was large and furnished with the very latest in scientific equipment. I didn’t know what ninety-five percent of it was or what it was used for. All I cared about was my supply of glass chips, slabs, slices, globes, shards, plates and the tools used to cut and shape them.

In his younger days my father worked with the space program but now he was in semi-retirement. Five days a week he went to his office and dabbled in genealogy, advised small businessmen, created economic plans, made suggestions about satellites and did similar things. When he wasn’t doing any of that he was running from Mrs. Pelf or trying to cope with me. Not that I was a delinquent or hard to get along with, but it had been too many decades since he was a young man and he simply didn’t know what made me tick.

Sargoth returned from the library, let himself into the house and came down to where I was working.

“Do you really expect to make a million dollars before you’re twenty-five?” he said.

“I do.”

“Mr. Merrik has all the money you need.”

“I don’t agree. Besides, I want my own.”

“What will you do with it?”

“I don’t know. Buy a bigger house, a better wardrobe dispenser, a tastier menu, finer furniture, stuff like that.”

“Everything bigger, better and nicer. What makes you think people want to wake up to the sights and sounds of a thunderstorm?”

“I’d like it. Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because they haven’t as much imagination as you do.”

I looked at him. “Have you been talking to Willmett?”

“An interesting young man. He thinks the universe emanates from his soul.”

“Only when he’s been indulging. Normally he knows where reality comes from.”

“Do you?”

I didn’t give him a glance. “Reality isn’t what you or I think it is. It’s just there.”

“Like the thunderstorms you want to give to the people of Emera?”

Sargoth was just under six feet tall, colored like a rainbow, with one green eye and two thin arms. His specialty was detecting or solving mysteries. When I was twelve and he found me in the suburbs hanging out with some other trash my age, I hit him with my fist. My little finger still had a knot on it where it had broken. Sargoth was of the drell cult and I had never been able to figure out how a sane human being could relinquish his mortal coil and have his brain put in a glass house all for the sake of peculiar principles.

To get back to my inventions, there hadn’t been a storm in or over Emera since a group of scientists discovered how to divert them by orbiting light shields in the sky. Heat and air were diverted elsewhere so that the weather in the city remained constant. Neutral was what I called it. Like a docked cat. Neuter. Not once had I ever awakened in my bedroom to the bang of thunder, the flash of lightning or the pouring of rain. To experience those natural disasters I had been forced to climb the mountain.

“Birds,” said Sargoth. “Big ones, like horses. Such do not exist. However there is a species called jinga that lives in the open fields between cities. They are also sometimes seen flying toward the mountains. There is nothing unusual about them. They would probably roost on Emera’s spires the same as pigeons try to do except for the sprays of icy water. As you know, all flying fauna are kept away by the small vents in the ledges and spires—”

“Is that all you found out?”

“Not by a long shot. I can tell you anything you want to know about birds.”

“Except for the jinga.”

“I know all about them. I did as you told me, hooked into the library computer—”

“You found out that people ride them.”

“Not at all. People ride horses. Asses, too.”

I gave him a wary glance. “People don’t ride the jinga?”

“The only birds people ride are planes made of glass or vorite.”

“What about the history of the mountain?”

“That particular request of yours puzzled me all the way downtown. Mountains don’t have histories. They pop up out of the planet’s crust, sometimes they behave like volcanoes, and that’s really all there is to it.”

“Tell me about Timbrini.”

Sargoth shrugged, glistened, moved around the table in order to watch me cut a plate. His brain lay in its transparent globe where I could clearly see it, motionless, not pulsing or throbbing like a heart but hunching like coils of engorged intestines. Arteries made of vorite carried streams of blood up the sides of the globe, flooding the coils now and then, distracting me, fascinating and repelling me. The only thing human about Sargoth was the brain. All else had been given up and now he lived like a glassman, with head, thorax, arms and legs. He somewhat resembled the models I once constructed as a boy.

“How will it work if you ever get it perfected?’ he said, referring to my latest project.

“Like an antenna on the roof. It will catch the light from storms out in the wilderness.”

“And the sounds?”

“That I can’t catch with glass. Hmmm. I don’t think I can. Anyhow not yet. I’ll need a recording.”

“I don’t think it’s an innovation that will catch on.”

“Why not? Just think of it. Before dawn you’re lying there in a half-sleep and the sky suddenly lights up like a thousand candles. Ear-splitting noises rock your bed while rain floods over your roof.”

“I sleep in catnaps.”

“Tell me about Timbrini,” I said.

“A hunk of granite. A very ordinary mountain. There’s one to the south that is even bigger. Anyhow, Timbrini is ten thousand feet high—”

“It’s at least twice that.”

“Indeed it isn’t. Ten thousand, almost to the inch.”

“I’d like to talk to the liar who recorded that.”

“It has a few caves, bad weather in places, and it hasn’t peeped in five hundred years. A most common peak.”

I stopped long enough to look at him. “What about the people living up there?”

“There are no permanent residents. Now and then a juvenile climbs part of it. No wild men or women prowl its ledges, no scientist cares enough to take a look at it nowadays. It’s nothing. A pimple on the face of the earth.”

I dropped the plate I had been holding. It shattered into a hundred green splinters.

“A green thunderstorm?” said Sargoth.

A couple of neighbors came out into the street to watch as I climbed upon the roof. There was old man Terris, who once told me he believed I was arrogant and disrespectful, and then there was Mrs. Pelf, who found everything about my father interesting, even me.

The gutter leading to the roof was a series of glass bubbles colored like a rainbow. Since it never rained in Emera the gutter was strictly for show. I don’t think the builders realized it made a good ladder.

Of course the glass antenna I fashioned wasn’t made only of oxides and phosphorus. Scarcely anything in the city was with the exception of inner window panes, mirrows, certain pieces of dinnerware and some jewelry. My antenna included vorite, which had remarkable properties as far as light was concerned.

Old man Terris said he didn’t know what I was doing but I should be quick about it as the weather report predicted a wind of some ten knots toward noontime. Mrs. Pelf smiled at me and promised to call an ambulance when I fell.

Seated in the middle of the bumpy roof, I could look down into the house. In fact I stared right through it. Quick-welding a bar into a glittering shingle, I stuck the antenna straight up in the air and adjusted it to the exact degree after which I climbed back down to the ground. If it worked properly the light rays from a valley miles westward would be picked up and sifted through the internal sensors. I wanted only gloomy, chilly rays or the flickerings of lightning picked up and held.

Feeling as if I were standing alone in the world against logic, reason and good sense, I went back to my lab. In a little while Sargoth returned. I had sent him on another errand.

“A man named Falloway wants to see you,” he said.

“What for?”

“You reminded me that I’m basically a detective so I went hunting for the information you wanted regarding people living in the mountain. Naturally there is no such material but I asked several people about it. First I tried the historical museum. They wanted me to look at some fossils. Then I went to the archeological foundation and they showed me some ancient volumes they dug out of a tomb; nobody can read them. Personally I believe the two organizations are confused about what they’re supposed to be doing. Next I visited the genealogical society. They didn’t know a blessed thing, but the man who runs the place seemed interested in meeting you.”

“You haven’t answered my question. What for?”

“Because no one lives on top of Timbrini.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

Later Sargoth said, “Do you think your father will ever marry Mrs. Pelf?”

“Why?”

“It occurs to me that I might be out of a job.”

“I don’t see why. He bought you to keep an eye on me until I grow up. Since he’s sixty years older than I, it seems unlikely he’ll ever believe I made it.”

The trouble with experiments was that one often had to wait to see if they were going to work. In this case I had to bide my time until the next morning to see if I was going to be awakened by a thunderstorm or sunshine.