To Conquer Chaos (10 page)

Two strangers. Two
strangers! Two new human beings!

XIX

To Conrad, seeing the towering monster approach, it had been for an instant as though the rest of the universe had ceased to exist. All his childhood terror of
things
from the barrenland leapt up to dominate his mind. Here was that terror incarnate, howling and flailing its uncountable limbs. The dome, the people, the outside world ceased to matter. There was only Conrad and the raging menace.

Then Yanderman spoke softly beside him. “Aim carefully, boy. Aim at the underside. At this range your slug will strike high rather than low.”

Aim? Slug?
With a start Conrad remembered. He had been given a gun salvaged from Duke Paul’s camp, an eternity and an infinity ago. Gasping, thinking the monster was almost on him, he flung down his other equipment and jammed the gun’s stock to his shoulder as Yanderman had told him.

“Work the bolt and cock the gun,” Yanderman whispered. With a handful of thumbs Conrad managed it, a full second after Yanderman. He closed one eye and squinted along the barrel. Underside? What underside did a beast like that have? It was nothing but a seething mass of—

“Now!” Yanderman barked, and more by reflex than anything else Conrad fired. The two shots sounded very slightly apart, but it wasn’t the combined noise that startled Conrad; it was the way the gun had hit back at him, bruising his shoulder.

“Hold it tighter this time,” Yanderman instructed, as coolly as if the oncoming
thing
had been a harmless bit of game. “Work the bolt now. Aim again.”

The second time was much better. The two shots were simultaneous. The
thing
uttered a pain-crazed scream and seemed to lose control of its numerous legs. It swayed and lowered some of its tentacles, revealing huge smears of bluish-grey ichor on the front of its body.

“We’re getting it!” Conrad yelled, and without waiting for Yanderman’s order fired again. A moment later, having taken more care with his aiming, Yanderman let go his own third shot.

And the
thing
gave a bubbling moan and fell sidelong to the ground.

Conrad jumped up, clutching his gun in both hands, to stare at the dying monster, and would have gone rashly forward had not Yanderman caught his arm.

“It may take a long time to die!” he warned. “Keep well clear of those tentacles. See what I mean?”

As though to illustrate the lesson, a lashing limb had whipped through the air and cracked whipwise to the ground at least thirty feet from the prostrate body. Conrad shivered and took a reflex step back.

“I doubt if it’s in a fit state to come after us,” Yanderman murmured. “All we have to worry about now is the reception committee. I just hope they weren’t saving this beast for some special purpose!”

Conrad blanched. Yanderman sounded appallingly serious, though it was hard to imagine what purpose a
thing
like this could possibly be wanted for. Nonetheless, it was true that the people who had come in pursuit from the dome at the foot of the slope and who now had seen the two newcomers were approaching with some wariness, pausing to retrieve javelins and arrows expended on the fleeing monster.

“Wait for them to react first,” Yanderman recommended. It was a strain on Conrad, but he complied.

The reaction was a peculiar one. Instead of coming close at once, or even calling out a greeting, the dome people halted the other side of the dying
thing,
out of reach of its tentacles, and stared up the slope. There was some discussion among themselves in tones too low for Conrad to catch, while still more people moved from the direction of the dome to join them.

“Ah, I see,” Yanderman said with a nod. “Waiting for a leader of some kind, I imagine. See the old man, the one with grey hair, being helped along by another man and a girl?” He pointed. Conrad did see the trio he was referring to.

The guess was correct. It was the old man himself who broke the spell after a moment’s quick consultation with two or three other mature men of the group. He put his hands to his mouth and called out.

“We are the descendants of Station Repair and Maintenance Crews A through G!” he shouted, his voice cracking a little. “Who are you?”

Silently uttering a prayer in memory of the Duke, who had accurately predicted this encounter, Yanderman called back. “Jervis Yanderman of Esberg and—uh—Conrad Lagwich! I hope we did right to kill this
thing
you drove towards us!”

Conrad gave him a respectful glance. He had barely managed to follow the old man’s pronunciation, let alone make sense of the words he used. He whispered,
“
What
did he say they were?”

Surprised, Yanderman glanced at him. “Don’t you—? Oh, of course not. That was something I dug out of you in trance, which you don’t remember consciously. I’ll explain later.”

“Come forward and be welcome!” the old man shouted. “It’s a long time since we saw anyone from the outside world!”

“How long?” Yanderman asked. There was a pause for consultation. When the answer came, Conrad could hardly believe it.

“About four hundred and sixty years, we think!”

Now some of the old man’s more venturesome companions were cautiously closing on the collapsed monster. A last tentacle twitched, and a young man with an axe dived to the ground to avoid it, while one of his companions, wielding a single-edged sword, slashed it in two. The severed part seemed to have a life of its own, and writhed for minutes, making Conrad’s scalp crawl.

He tried to concentrate on the people instead. They were all, without exception, short and wiry and most of them were heavily tanned. Their clothing was various; some of them wore jerseys and pants of dark but clean-looking material, while others wore only a kind of kilt supplemented with belts and other body-harness. They were staring at him with just as much curiosity as he was exhibiting, but not at all uncivilly. It was as though they had been waiting personally for this moment … waiting four hundred and sixty years.

With gravity, the old man bowed to Yanderman and then put out his hand. “Do you—do you have any news of my son?” he said after a pause.

“Your son?” Yanderman said slowly. He looked around the silent group of isolates. “Was it your son who set out to cross the barrenland and reach the outside world? About twelve years ago?”

“Yes.”

“Then I am afraid he is dead. The journey was too much for him. But it was because we found his remains that we set out in search of you.” Yanderman phrased the half-truth instantly.

The old man winced and put his hand on the arm of the girl beside him for support. He said, “So! Still, if his death served to bring you here, that’s a reward.” He coughed, a dust-dry noise. “Well, no matter now. I myself am Maxall—Chief Engineer, I suppose one would say if one kept up the ancient forms. Ah … Keefe, crew boss Maintenance,” he went on, indicating the one-eyed man who had helped him out from the vicinity of the dome. “Egrin, crew boss Hydroponics—oh, and my granddaughter Nestamay here.”

The girl at his side shook back her long hair and smiled, and Conrad felt suddenly faint.

He had seen that face before. He had copied that face, struggling to make it more like Idris’s, as he carved his fine white block of soap the day of Yanderman’s arrival in Lagwich, the day his life was turned topsy-turvy for good and all.

But he had no chance to utter the words that boiled up in his mind. Nestamay was looking at him with frank physical interest, and he realised abruptly that among these lean, almost starved-looking people he was as much taller than the average as Duke Paul’s troops had been in Lagwich. Moreover, the days when he had been Idle Conrad, the dirty soap-maker, were past. Now he was Conrad the explorer of the barrenland, Conrad the gifted visionary who could remember the secrets of the past, Conrad the killer of monsters!

Well …
a
monster, anyway. Nobody could question this second one.

The girl was smiling broadly now, and there was no doubt what was pleasing to her. Conrad smiled back, hoping the expression wouldn’t spread into an idiot grin. He cut it short and tried to look purposeful instead, as Yanderman did.

“Maxall,” Keefe was saying, “we can’t stand out here till sunset, you know. There’s business to attend to—a little matter of an alarm which should have gone off and didn’t.”

“Yes!” Nestamay took her eyes off Conrad for the first time in some while and turned to her grandfather. “Now you don’t need to swallow Jasper’s dreadful behaviour any longer!”

The old man sighed and nodded. He spoke to Yanderman in terms of courtly apology.

“It’s quite true. We must see why the alarm which usually warns us of the advent of a dangerous
thing
failed to operate this time. You must be tired and hungry after your magnificent journey, and as soon as we’ve settled this urgent question we’ll place ourselves at your disposal. If you’ll come with us …?”

The curious but largely silent group fell in behind the old man and Yanderman, and made their way towards the dome. Nestamay stepped to Conrad’s side.

“Hello!” she said.

“Ah—er—hello!” Conrad echoed. “Ah—er—ah—oh yes! It was—uh—your father, wasn’t it, who tried to contact the outside world? He must have been a brave man.”

Not a good choice of subject.
The girl’s face clouded. She said after a pause, “Not brave. Desperate. You two are the brave ones. You weren’t driven to it, were you?” She paused. “It must have been a terrible journey.”

“No, it wasn’t as bad as we thought,” Conrad said, wishing he could convey that he wasn’t being modest, only speaking the plain truth. “We had a compass, you see, which perhaps your father didn’t have, and Yanderman made a map of all the streams and rivers so we didn’t have to carry our own water all the time. Eight hours was the longest we had to spend away from water.”

“A map?” Nestamay sounded astonished. “Where did you get a map?”

“Yanderman drew it up.”

“But from what?” she persisted.

“Well—” Conrad was about to explain, when he realised the party had halted facing the dome. He heard Yanderman.

“You mean the
thing
just tore clear through the dome to the outside?” he was demanding, his eyes on the enormous gash it had left. Conrad glossed the words: why, this must be the place where the
things
originated, as Yanderman had suspected! And yet here were all these people …

“Ohhhh!” Nestamay’s fingers were suddenly tight on his arm; with the other hand she was pointing into the darkness under the dome. Something moved there—another monster? No, a human shape. A human shape beginning to scream as it emerged into the open. There was a wave of shock and terror tangible about them.

“Jasper!” she whispered. “It is—it
is
!”

How she recognised him, Conrad could not tell. For his head and shoulders were completely covered with a glistening black jelly-like mass, at which his hands clawed hopelessly while his voice grew weak with shrieking.

For a long second nothing moved except the condemned Jasper. Then Grandfather Maxall stirred and spoke.

“Kill him,” he said in a voice like death itself.

“No! No!” A woman came running from the fringe of the group, clawing at the old man with crazed violence. “No, you can’t kill my son!”

“If you would rather watch him die as the seeds grow on his body,” the old man said, and let the rest hang in the air. The woman paid no attention, but clung to him and cried for mercy.

There was no mercy. There could be none. Again, Maxall gave the order, and this time a white-faced Keefe obeyed it. He took a javelin from a bystander, aimed carefully, and threw. It sank into the black jelly about where the boy’s throat must be. Black-smeared hands reached up to it, failed in the attempt, and fell back as the life leaked out of his body.

“Burn the corpse!” Keefe said harshly, and two young men moved to pick up a heatbeam projector. Jasper’s mother had released Maxall by now, and was kneeling with her face to the dust, yelling curses.

“What—what happened?” Conrad whispered to Nestamay. In a cold voice she answered.

“Because of something I did—or wouldn’t do—he tried to take his revenge by turning off the alarm which warns us of a
thing
hatching. It was meant to scare me during my night’s watch. Only a
thing
came through before he expected. While all the rest of us were out chasing it away and meeting you, he must have come back to try and cover up what he’d done—re-connect the alarm, I imagine. But in his haste, he …”

“He what?” Conrad prompted from a dry throat.

“The black stuff,” Nestamay said. “It’s the seed-mass of one of those plants there. We have a working party out every day to cut back or burn off such seed-masses on the outside where we can get at them and they might get at us. But inside the dome there are huge areas where we can’t venture in, and the seed masses grow there, too. That’s why we can’t get rid of the vegetation permanently. And you see they—well, in some fashion they’re sensitive to movement near them. They burst over
things
that go too close. I’ve seen it happen to
things.
I never saw it happen to a person before, and I hope I never see it again!”

She gave a fierce shudder. “They say it doesn’t kill you,” she finished. “You just die, and it takes a long, long time.”

Conrad swallowed hard. By now the searing heatbeam had reduced the miserable corpse of Jasper to a blackened smear and calcined bones, and Maxall was turning to Yanderman again. He was standing noticeably straighter, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.

“One of the dangers of our existence,” he said. “Though nothing compared to what you’ve faced to come to us. I’ll send my assistant Keefe to make certain the alarm is functioning, and perhaps we can enjoy a short rest after the day’s turmoil.”

Yanderman spoke only with an effort. He said, “We faced dangers, as you put it, for a matter of days to get to you. If you’ve had to endure this kind of thing for four and a half centuries, all I can say is that my friend and I had the better bargain!”