The dragon warning was in effect. They were not screams, but the wails of mechanical voices. “Beware and Run,” they seemed to say.
Bewareandrun, bewareandrun, bewareandrun . . .
He had been sleeping in his duty suit, a uniform of shimmering purple synthe-fabric. The United Earth emblem graced his right arm: a dove sitting on a green globe. That was one symbol that always repulsed him. He pictured the dove loosening its bowels.
Stumbling across the room, he palmed open the door and stepped into the corridor, blinking away the remainders of sleep from his eyes.
Holden Twain was running down the ‘hall, strapping his nylon belt around his waist. “I have some poetry for you to look at while we’re in the shelter,” he said breathlessly, coming to a halt at Dante’s side.
Mario liked the kid. He was five years the poet’s junior, but his innocence seemed to add to his immaturity—and charm. He had not met Hemingway’s Discovery of Evil. He never understood “The Killers” when he read it. Dante made him plunge through it every few weeks, searching for that glint of understanding that would mean he saw it all.
“Fine,” Mario said. “That’ll help pass the hours in that dreadful hole.”
They set out at a steady trot down the hall, past the large windows that peered out upon the alien landscape.
At the stairwell, Mario ushered the younger man down and waited at the head for the others from that corridor. He was captain of the block and was to be the last into the shelter from that particular accessway.
He glanced out of the nearest window. There was sure to be wind. The spindly pine-palms were swaying erratically, some bent nearly to the snapping point in the gale. This was only the front of the tidal winds, he knew, and the soft breezes and the dragons would follow.
The dragons that looked so beautiful in pictures but which killed any man who looked directly into their eyes.
The dragons that seemed to live constantly in the air— without eating.
The dragons that killed with their eyes . . . ‘
He had a vision of the first victims, their eyes crystallized, shrunken within the blackened sockets, the brain wilted within the skull. He shuddered.
Still, it did not seem right to hide when they came.
Though the specially designed lenses failed, though dozens of scientists died trying to prove that they wouldn’t, that men’s eyes could be protected from the deadly dragons, it did not seem right to hide.
Though gunnery officers could not shoot them down (because only a shot in the eye seemed to kill the beasts, and aiming at those misty, pupilless orbs was impossible), it did not seem right to squirrel away in the earth.
The last man in the corridor pounded down the stairs. Dante swung the door shut, sealed it, then flicked the shutters that would partially protect the windows.
The shelter was filled with men. The city’s compliment numbered sixty-eight. They were sixty-eight prepared to wait out another three hours of dragons and silence in the cellar.
Dante decided the entire affair got more ridiculous each time. It hardly seemed as if the planet were worth all the trouble. But then he knew it was. There were the Bakium deposits, and the planet itself was central to this galaxy. Someday, it would be built nearly as heavily as Earth. A grand population.
Certainly more than sixty-eight.
Sixty-seven.
“Sixty-seven!” the Secretary shrilled.
“Impossible!” Marshall shouted.
“Menchen. Menchen isn’t here.”
“Who has that corridor?”
“I, sir.”
“Anamaxender. Why the hell didn’t you notice he was missing?”
“Sorry, sir.”
“You’ll be damned sorry before this is over.” Marshall turned to the other faces. “Who saw him last.”
“I believe just about everyone was asleep, commander,” Dante said quietly. Marshall opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it. He turned to Twain. “You know corridor F?”
“Yes, sir.”
Every man was required to have a memorized floor plan of the installation buried deep in the emergency vaults of his mind. It was a ridiculous question.
“Go after Menchen. Go to his room and see if he needs help. At any cost, get back here.”