The Robert Silverberg Science Fiction MEGAPACK® (43 page)

La Floquet’s harsh breathing was the only sound audible. He was shaking his head, clearing it, readying himself for a new assault. Thornhill tried to blank out the searing pain of the gash in his arm.

He stepped forward and hit La Floquet quickly, spinning him half around; bringing his slashed right hand up, Thornhill drove it into La Floquet’s middle. A wall of rocklike muscle stunned his fist. But the breath had been knocked from La Floquet; he weaved uncertainly, gray-faced, wobbly-legged. Thornhill hit him again, and he toppled.

La Floquet crumpled into an awkward heap on the ground and stayed there. Thornhill glanced at his own arm. The cut was deep and wide, though it seemed to have missed any major veins and arteries; blood welled brightly from it, but without the familiar arterial spurt.

There was a curious fascination in watching his own blood flow. He saw Marga’s pale, frightened face beyond the dim haze that surrounded him; he realized he had lost more blood than he thought, perhaps was about to lose consciousness as well. La Floquet still slumbered. There was no sign of the Watcher.

“Sam—”

“Pretty little nick, isn’t it?” He laughed. His face felt warm.

“We ought to bind that some way. Infection—”

“No. There’s no need of that. I’ll be all right. This is the Valley.”

He felt an intense itching in the wounded arm; barely did he fight back the desire to claw at the gash with his fingernails.

“It’s—it’s healing!” Marga said.

Thornhill nodded. The wound was beginning to close.

First the blood ceased flowing as ruptured veins closed their gaping sides and once again began to circulate the blood. The raw edges of the wound strained toward each other, puckering, reaching for one another, finally clasping. A bridge of flesh formed over the gaping slit in his arm. The itching was impossibly intense.

But in a few moments more it was over; a long livid scar remained, nothing more. Experimentally he touched the new flesh; it was warm, yielding, real.

La Floquet was stirring. His right forearm had been bent at an awkward angle; now it straightened out. The little man sat up groggily. Thornhill tensed in case further attack was coming, but there was very little fight left in La Floquet.

“The Watcher has made the necessary repairs,” Thornhill said. “We’re whole again except for a scar here and there. Get up, you idiot.”

He hoisted La Floquet to his feet.

“This is the first time anyone has bested me in a fight,” La Floquet said bitterly. His eyes had lost much of their eager brightness; he seemed demolished by his defeat. “And you were unarmed, and I had a knife.”

“Forget that,” Thornhill said.

“How can I? This filthy Valley—from which there is no escape, not even suicide—and I am not to have a woman. Thornhill, you’re just a businessman. You don’t know what it’s like to set codes of behavior for yourself and then not be able to live by them.” La Floquet shook his head sadly. “There are many in the galaxy who would rejoice to see the way this Valley has humiliated me. And there is not even suicide here! But I’ll leave you with your woman.”

He turned and began to walk away, a small, almost pathetic figure now, the fighting cock with his comb shorn and his tail feathers plucked. Thornhill contrasted him with the ebullient little figure he had first seen coming toward him up the mountain path, and it was a sad contrast indeed. He slouched now, shoulders sloping in defeat.

“Hold it, La Floquet!”

“You have beaten me—and before a woman. What more do you want with me, Thornhill?”

“How badly do you want to get out of this Valley?” Thornhill asked bluntly.

“What—”

“Badly enough to climb that mountain again?”

La Floquet’s face, pale already, turned almost ghostly beneath his tan. In an unsteady voice he said, “I ask you not to taunt me, Thornhill.”

“I’m not. I don’t give a damn what phobia it is that drove you back from the mountain that night. I think that mountains can be climbed. But not by one or two men. If we
all
went up there—or most of us—”

La Floquet smiled wanly. “You would go, too? And Marga?”

“If it means out, yes. We might have to leave McKay and Lona Hardin behind, but there’d still he seven of us. Possibly there’s a city outside the Valley; we might be able to send word and be rescued.”

Frowning, La Floquet said, “Why the sudden change of heart, Thornhill? I thought you liked it here … you and Miss Fallis both, that is. I thought
I
was the only one willing to climb that peak.”

Thornhill glanced at Marga and traded secret smiles with her. “I’ll decline to answer that, La Floquet. But I’ll tell you this: The quicker I’m outside the influence of the Valley, the happier I’ll be!”

When they had reached the foot of the hill and called everyone together, Thornhill stepped forward. Sixteen eyes were on him—counting the two stalked objects of the Spican as eyes.

He said, “La Floquet and I have just had a little discussion up in the hill. We’ve reached a few conclusions I want to put forth to the group at large.

“I submit that it’s necessary for the well-being of all of us to make an immediate attempt at getting out of the Valley. Otherwise, we’re condemned to a slow death of the most horrible kind—gradual loss of our faculties.”

McKay broke in, saying, “Now you’ve shifted sides again, Thornhill! I thought maybe—”

“I haven’t been on any side,” he responded quickly. “It’s simply that I’ve begun thinking. Look: We were all brought here within a two-day span, snatched out of our lives no matter where we were, dumped down in a seemingly impassable Valley by some unimaginably alien creature. Item: We’re watched constantly, tended and fed. Item: Our wounds heal almost instantly. Item: We’re growing younger. McKay, you yourself were the first to notice that.

“Okay, now. There’s a mountain up there, and quite probably there’s a way out of the Valley. La Floquet tried to get there, but he and Vellers couldn’t make it; two men can’t climb a twenty-thousand-foot peak alone without provisions, without help. But if we all go—”

McKay shook his head. “I’m happy here, Thornhill. You and La Floquet are jeopardizing that happiness.”

“No,” La Floquet interjected. “Can’t you see that we’re just house pets here? That we’re the subjects of a rather interesting experiment, nothing more? And that if this rejuvenation keeps up, we may all be babies in a matter of weeks or months?”

“I don’t care,” McKay said stubbornly. “I’ll die if I leave the Valley—my heart can’t take much more. Now you tell me I’ll die if I stay. But at least I’ll pass backward through manhood before I go—and I can’t have those years again outside.”

“All right,” Thornhill said. “Ultimately it’s a matter of whether we all stay here so McKay can enjoy his youth again, or whether we try to leave. La Floquet, Marga, and I are going to make an attempt to cross the mountain. Those of you who want to join us can. Those of you who’d rather spend the rest of their days in the Valley can stay behind and wish us bad luck. Is that clear?”

Seven of them left the following “morning,” right after the breakfast-time manna fall. McKay stayed behind with little Lona Hardin. There was a brief, awkward moment of farewell-saying. Thornhill noticed how the lines were leaving McKay’s face, how the old scholar’s hair had darkened, his body broadened. In a way he could see McKay’s point of view, but there was no way he could accept it.

Lona Hardin, too, was younger looking, and perhaps for the first time in her life she was making an attempt to disguise her plainness. Well, Thornhill thought, these two might find happiness of a sort in the Valley, but it was the mindless happiness of a puppet, and he wanted none of it for himself.

“I don’t know what to say,” McKay declared as the party set out. “I’d wish you good luck—if I could.”

Thornhill grinned. “Maybe we’ll be seeing you two again. I hope not, though.”

Thornhill led the way up the mountain’s side; Marga walked with him, La Floquet and Vellers a few paces behind, the three aliens trailing behind them. The Spican, Thornhill was sure, had only the barest notion of what was taking place; the Aldebaranian had explained things fairly thoroughly to the grave Regulan. One factor seemed common: All of them were determined to leave the Valley.

The morning was warm and pleasant; clouds hid the peak of the mountain. The ascent, Thornhill thought, would be strenuous but not impossible—provided the miraculous field of the Valley continued to protect them when they passed the timberline and provided the Watcher did not interfere with the exodus.

There was no interference. Thornhill felt almost a sensation of regret at leaving the Valley and in the same moment realized this might be some deceptive trick of the Watcher’s, and he cast all sentiment from his heart.

By midmorning they had reached a considerable height, a thousand feet or more above the Valley. Looking down, Thornhill could barely see the brightness of the river winding through the flat basin that was the Valley, and there was no sign of McKay far below.

The mountain sloped gently upward toward the timberline. The real struggle would begin later, perhaps, on the bare rock face, where the air might not be so balmy as it was here, the wind not quite as gentle.

When Thornhill’s watch said noon, he called a halt and they unpacked the manna—wrapped in broad, coarse, velvet-textured leaves of the thick-trunked trees of the Valley—they had saved from the morning fall. The manna tasted dry and stale, almost like straw, with just the merest vestige of its former attractive flavor. But as Thornhill had guessed, there was no noontime manna fall here on the mountain slope, and so the party forced the dry stuff down their throats, not knowing when they would have fresh food again.

After a short rest Thornhill ordered them up. They had gone no more than a thousand feet when an echoing cry drifted up from below:

“Wait! Wait, Thornhill!”

He turned. “You hear something?” he asked Marga.

“That was McKay’s voice,” La Floquet said.

“Let’s wait for him,” Thornhill ordered.

Ten minutes passed, and then McKay came into view, running upward in a springy long-legged stride, Lona Hardin a few paces behind him. He caught up with the party and paused a moment, catching his breath.

“I decided to come along,” he said finally. “You’re right, Thornhill! We have to leave the Valley.”

“And he figures his heart’s better already,” Lona Hardin said. “So if he leaves the Valley now, maybe he’ll be a healthier man again.”

Thornhill smiled. “It took a long time to convince you, didn’t it?” He shaded his eyes and stared upward. “We have a long way to go. We’d better not waste any more time.”

Chapter Six

Twenty thousand feet is less than four miles. A man should be able to walk four miles in an hour or two. But not four miles
up
.

They rested frequently, though there was no night and they had no need to sleep. They moved on inch by inch, advancing perhaps five hundred feet over the steadily more treacherous slope, then crawling along the mountain face a hundred feet to find the next point of ascent. It was slow, difficult work, and the mountain spired yet higher above them until it seemed they would never attain the summit.

The air, surprisingly, remained warm, though not oppressively so; the wind picked up as they climbed. The mountain was utterly bare of life; the gentle animals of the Valley ventured no higher than the timberline, and that was far below. The party of nine scrambled up over rock falls and past sheets of stone.

Thornhill felt himself tiring, but he knew the Valley’s strange regenerative force was at work, carrying off the fatigue poisons as soon as they built up in his muscles, easing him, giving him the strength to go on. Hour after hour they forced their way up the mountainside.

Occasionally he would glance back to see La Floquet’s pale, fear-tautened face. The little man was terrified of the height, but he was driving gamely on. The aliens straggled behind; Vellers marched mechanically, saying little, obviously tolerant of the weaker mortals to whose pace he was compelled to adjust his own.

As for Marga, she uttered no complaint. That pleased Thornhill more than anything.

They were a good thousand feet from the summit when Thornhill called a halt.

He glanced back at them—at the oddly unweary, unlined faces.
How we’ve grown young!
he thought suddenly.
McKay looks like a man in his late forties; I must seem like a boy. And we’re all fresh as daisies, as if this were just a jolly hike
.

“We’re near the top,” he said. “Let’s finish off whatever of the manna we’ve got. The downhill part of this won’t be so bad.”

He looked up. The mountain tapered to a fine crest, and through there a pass leading down to the other side was visible. “La Floquet, you’ve got the best eyes of any of us. You see any sign of a barrier up ahead?”

The little man squinted and shook his head. “All’s clear so far as I can see. We go up, then down, and we’re home free.”

Thornhill nodded. “The last thousand feet, then. Let’s go!”

The wind was whipping hard against them as they pushed on through the dense snow that cloaked the mountain’s highest point. Up here some of the charm of the Valley seemed to be gone, as if the cold winds barreling in from the outlands beyond the crest could in some way negate the gentle warmth they experienced in the Valley. Both suns were high in the sky, the red and the blue, the blue visible as a hard blotch of radiance penetrating the soft, diffuse rays of the red.

Thornhill was tiring rapidly, but the crest was in sight. Just a few more feet and they’d stand on it—

Just up over this overhang—

The summit itself was a small plateau, perhaps a hundred feet long. Thornhill was the first to pull himself up over the rock projection and stand on the peak; he reached back, helped Marga up, and within minutes the other seven had joined them.

The Valley was a distant spot of green far below; the air was clear and clean, and from here they could plainly see the winding river heading down valley to the yellow-green radiance of the barrier.

Thornhill turned. “Look down there,” he said in a quiet voice.

“It’s a world of deserts!” La Floquet exclaimed.

The view from the summit revealed much of the land beyond the Valley, and it seemed the Valley was but an oasis in the midst of utter desertion. For mile after gray mile, barren land stretched before them, an endless plain of rock and sand rolling on drearily to the farthest horizon.

Beyond, this. Behind, the Valley.

Thornhill looked around. “We’ve reached the top. You see what’s ahead. Do we go on?”

“Do we have any choice?” McKay asked. “We’re practically out of the Watcher’s hands now. Down there perhaps we have freedom. Behind us—”

“We go on,” La Floquet said firmly.

“Down the back slope, then,” said Thornhill. “It won’t be easy. There’s the path over there. Suppose we—”

The sudden chill he felt was not altogether due to the whistling wind. The sky suddenly darkened; a cloak of night settled around them.

Of course
, Thornhill thought dully.
I should have foreseen this
.

“The Watcher’s coming!” Lona Hardin screamed as the darkness, obscuring both the bleakness ahead and the Valley behind, closed around them.

Thornhill thought,
It was part of the game. To let us climb the mountain, to watch us squirm and struggle, and then to hurl us back into the Valley at the last moment as we stand on the border
.

Wings of night nestled around them. He felt the coldness that signified the alien presence, and the soft voice said,
Would you leave, my pets? Don’t I give you the best of care? Why this ingratitude?