From down in the streets came a scrape and rumble as battered cleaning-machines picked up trash. From the building above came a chorus of yells:
“Kill the lousy mechs!”
A fusillade of bottles smashed down on the machines’ armored tops. Loudspeakers broadcast appeals for law-abiding cooperation, and the air shook with curses flung back in answer.
Roberts and Hammell stared out the window at the buildings and parks, laid out like the alternating squares of a checkerboard, and stretching off to the horizon. In the distance, lit by the setting sun, the buildings looked almost magical. Nearby, rats scurried amidst the trash in the park. From overhead, a bundle of garbage plummeted past the window, opening up as it fell.
Hammell turned away from the window. “Now what do we do?”
“The first thing is to get out of here. Kelty seems to think a little experience of this will make us eager to join him. I wouldn’t want to stay in this place on any terms.”
“The forest is murderous. The City won’t help. That leaves the technicians.”
Roberts nodded. “If we can get them to help, maybe we can straighten the mess out yet.”
“If they haven’t already helped, it’s too bad for Matthis, Warner, and Cassetti.”
Roberts nodded soberly. The three men had been too badly hurt in the crash to carry out. “Well, if we get out of here early in the morning, we should avoid getting waylaid by a gang. I hope we can find where we cached our packs, guns, and canteens. Then we can start back.”
“Personally, I’m half-dead from the last hike.”
“If we stay here, we could be all-dead before we know it.”
Hammell glanced around. “There’s truth in that, all right. Well, while it’s still light, let’s get set. This could be a rough night.”
The two men blocked the apartment door with a battered bedstead and a bureau with all the knobs broken off its drawers, then cleaned out a small room and collected in it all the bottles they found in the litter, just in case they should need ammunition. They carried the wreck of a mattress into this one room, stuffed the baseboard’s ratholes with smashed glass and the bent lids of tin cans, and jammed another can into the hole where the corner of the closed door was gnawed away.
The night started out like a bad dream. The mattress was lumpy, the room damp, and the garbage smell overpower-ing. Toward morning, someone began to scream, and someone else began to laugh hysterically. The louder the screams rose, the louder was the laughter.
Roberts came dizzily awake to find the room faintly lit by a reflected glow from below, where powerful street lamps stood protected by big metal shields and heavy wire mesh. From the walls came a twang of metal as the rats wrestled with the tin shoved into their holes. From the door came a scrape that Roberts interpreted as a rat trying to move the can jammed between the door frame and the gnawed corner. Then the scrape came again, louder, and Roberts sat up. He reached out carefully, and closed his hand around the neck of a heavy bottle.
Wide-awake now, he could see that Hammell was out of bed, but he couldn’t see where he was. Carefully, Roberts got up.
From the doorway, came a louder, longer scrape.
Slowly, the door swung open.
From the darkness of the next room, a stooped figure eased in, the faint light glinting on the edge of a broken bottle in its hand.
From behind the door came a brief glint of reflected light. There was the rap of glass striking bone. The intruder dropped. There was a crash and the sound of splintering glass.
A long moment passed, and nothing else happened.
Hammell stepped out from behind the door, glanced toward Roberts, and waited a moment. The screams and laughter overhead rose to a peak, then died away.
Hammell said, “How much rest are we going to get in this place?”
“You’re right.” Roberts felt carefully along the floor. “Here, help me turn the mattress over on top of this broken glass. All we need is a cut foot.”
They gathered their bundles of clothing, carefully checked to make sure they had everything, and eased out into the next room. Around them, there was the scurry of feet as rats went across the floor. Then they found the door, eased out into the pitch-black hall, and a low voice spoke, close to Roberts:
“You get their ears?”
Roberts shifted his bottle, landed a solid blow, heard something thump to the floor, and groped forward toward the steps. As he carefully felt his way forward, something ran across his foot. He eased onto the steps, and started down. The slow descent to street level seemed to take all eternity. Then they reached the lower hall, found the front door, and eased it open.
* * *
Outside, the street was brightly lit.
A roboid policeman, whip antenna up, rolled past with a silvery flash from its swiftly-turning wheels.
Roberts waited, then carefully pulled the door wider. The policeman was a dwindling speck in the distance. Roberts and Hammell slipped out, walked quickly down the block, and turned left, toward the west and open fields.
Up under one of the streetlights, a loudspeaker blared:
“Halt, thieves! You are detected on the central board! Mobile police units are already on the way. You cannot escape!”
“Run!” said Roberts.
From overhead, someone shouted happily, “Hunt! A hunt!”
Roberts and Hammell ran, hampered by the bundles they were carrying. Overhead, fresh loudspeakers blared. There was the sound of banging, shouting, and a concerted rush to the windows. Screams of “Hunt! There they go!” rang out. A bottle crashed into the street just behind. The next bottle hit to the right and in front, scattering broken glass over the street. “Thieves! Thieves! Kill them. Look out! Here come the mechs!” There was a pause, then a loud jeering, and a deafening rattle and smash further back.
Urgently, the loudspeakers boomed, “You must cooperate! Do not obstruct the law-enforcement officers!”
Straight ahead, the brightly-lighted street abruptly came to an end, a garbage-filled park on one side, and a high building on the other side. From this building, streaks of light flashed down, the reflections from hurtling bottles, as Roberts and Hammell sprinted past.
“Look out!” screamed someone overhead. “You’re headed Out!”
Roberts and Hammell shot over an embankment in a headlong rush, heard a squeal of rats as they plunged knee-deep in a mass of garbage, then slammed forward on their bundles. As they pulled free, they glanced back, to see the police robots, bottles bursting and splintering in a dazzle of light from their metal tops and sides.
Roberts and Hammell stumbled across the dump, fell forward on soft earth, and looked back to see the robots spreading out along the edge of the embankment. But they didn’t go down the steep bank, where they might overturn or mire down in the piles of garbage.
The loudspeakers blared, “You have left the City! Before you is only bare ground and the killer forest!”
The hail of bottles had let up. Voices shouted from the buildings, “You’re Out! You can’t live out there!”
“Come back!” shouted fresh voices.
“Return!” blared the loudspeakers. “Here you have Universal Care. Out there is only the Wild.”
Roberts glanced at Hammell. “You hurt?”
“No. By some miracle, I didn’t step on any glass.”
“Neither did I. Let’s get further away from this place.”
By daybreak, the voices and lights had long since faded into the distance. In the gray light of dawn, they located the cache, changed to their own clothes, checked their guns, slung their packs, and headed toward the forest. At an irrigation ditch, they stopped to drink, refilled the canteens, and munched emergency-ration bars from their packs. Then they went on. Late that afternoon, the forest came into sight far ahead, barely visible across a flat field with endless rows of small, geometrically-spaced plants.
“Better stop here,” said Roberts.
Hammell nodded. “We don’t want to hit that forest at night.”
* * *
Worn out, they lay down in the soft earth, to fall asleep at once, and wake early the next morning, stiff, chilled, miserable, and dumbfounded that the night had somehow passed already.
Today they had the forest to get through.
* * *
By noon, they found themselves looking across a wide dry ditch at the mingled trees and shrubs of the forest. The forest edge ran in an almost mathematically straight line, north and south.
“Now,” said Roberts, “we can’t just walk into that mess. We’ve got to find the cleared path we came out on. Is it to the north or south?”
Hammell looked around. “Why didn’t we follow our own footprints back?”
Roberts glanced back. In the enormous field, the only irregular feature was their fresh footprints in the soft soil.