“That’s not my fault. This chap” — he glanced pityingly at Niall — “forgot to bring his whip.”
“That was careless.” Again, Doggins looked at Niall as if he had been a stranger. “All right, get ’em over to the quarry.”
“Right, Cap’n.” The bald-headed man saluted, then beckoned to Niall. “You, come with me.”
Doggins said quickly: “No, I’ll be needing him for the next hour or so. You go ahead with this lot. And don’t let ’em get near the fireworks.” He turned his back on them, saying casually over his shoulder: “You — come this way.”
Niall followed him up the steps. They entered a large, dim hall whose cool blue light was welcome after the blaze of the sun. Bombardier beetles and their servants bustled about them, the beetles towering above the humans. Niall sensed about them that same indifferent friendliness he had perceived in the camel spiders of the desert. Without glancing back, Doggins led him across the hall and pushed open a door labelled: Director of Explosives. The room had no windows, but a cool blue light filtered through the walls, creating a curiously soothing effect. Doggins flung himself into an armchair behind a huge desk and glared at Niall.
“Well, you’re about the last person I wanted to see.”
Niall, who had been hoping for a friendlier welcome, said: “I’m sorry.”
“You bleedin’ well ought to be. What are we going to do with you?”
Niall said apologetically: “You don’t have to do anything with me. I’m supposed to be in charge of the slaves.”
“I know that. And where will you go tonight?”
“Back to the slave quarter.”
Doggins stared at him incredulously. “You must be crazy. They’re all looking for you. We had ’em here first thing this morning.”
Niall asked quickly: “What happened?”
“What do you think? We’ve promised to look out for you and send you back if we catch you.”
“And are you going to?”
Doggins shrugged irritably. “Now look, son, you’d better get one thing clear. We’ve got an agreement with the crawlies — live and let live. If we gave you shelter, and they found out, it’d be war. And we just can’t risk that. I shouldn’t even be talking to you now.”
Niall stood up. “I’m very sorry. I don’t want to get you into trouble. I’ll go away.”
Doggins’ glare became less pugnacious. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“I’ll hide somewhere until it’s time to go back.”
Doggins grunted. “There’s no point. They won’t be back looking for you. You’d better stick around here and act normal. And if anybody asks, I don’t know you. Right?”
Niall nodded. “Right.”
Doggins stared into his eyes for a long time. He said finally: “So they found out.”
“Yes.”
“I warned you about that.” He gnawed his lower lip. “They’ll kill you if they find you.”
“I know.”
There was another long silence. Then Doggins said: “Your only hope is to get back to your own country. We might be able to smuggle you across on one of our boats.”
Niall said: “It’s very kind of you. But I don’t want to go back. I can’t leave my mother and brother behind.”
“You can’t help them much if you’re dead.”
“I’m going to try to hide in the slave quarter.”
“They’ll find you sooner or later.”
“Perhaps. But I can’t just give up. I’ve got to try.”
Doggins shook his head with exasperation. “Try what? What are you hoping to achieve?”
Niall met his eyes. “To destroy the spiders.”
Doggins smiled pityingly. “And just how do you propose to set about that?”
“The spiders aren’t physically stronger than we are — they just have a stronger will-power. And that’s no different from having stronger muscles. We could fight them if we used our intelligence.”
Doggins regarded him thoughtfully. “Yes, now I can see why they think you’re dangerous.”
It made Niall realise that, without intending it, he had been concentrating his attention through the thought mirror; the result was that his words struck Doggins with immense conviction. He pressed the advantage.
“You could blow up the whole spider city with your explosives.”
“Of course we could — if we had enough explosive. But we wouldn’t, and they know we wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re the servants of the beetles, and the beetles would never order us to do it.”
“But why should you be a servant? Men were once lords of the earth.”
Doggins gave a snort of laughter. “And a right bleedin’ mess they made of it! Do you really want to know why the crawlies don’t like human beings? Come with me and I’ll show you.”
He stood up and led Niall out into the hall. It was totally empty. They climbed a short flight of steps and halted in front of a door made of gold-coloured metal. Doggins pulled this open and beckoned Niall to go inside. The room beyond was dark.
A moment later there was a tremendous crash, and a blinding flash of light. Niall jumped backwards and cannoned into Doggins. Doggins gripped his elbow.
“Steady. It’s all right. Just stand quietly.”
Still trembling with shock, Niall stared with horrified amazement. The opposite wall had turned into a vast expanse of blue sky, with fleecy white clouds, and across this expanse, machines that he recognised as aeroplanes hurtled with a shrieking roar that deafened him. Suddenly, the view changed; he was looking down from an aeroplane, watching egg-shaped objects fall towards the ground. They continued to fall until they diminished into dots and disappeared. Then, from the ground below, there was a series of white puffs, one after another, in a straight line. This time the explosions were distant and muffled.
Once his eyes were accustomed to the semi-darkness Niall could see that he was in another large hall. In front of him was an audience of bombardier beetles; he could sense their breathless attention. Now it dawned upon him that the scene he was watching was not some form of magic. A cone of wavering light overhead told him that it was merely an illusion, projected onto a wall-sized screen.
Doggins grasped him by the elbow, steered him into the semi-darkness and indicated a chair. Without taking his eyes from the screen, Niall sat down. He was witnessing a bombing raid on a large city, and the destructiveness took his breath away. He watched tall buildings shudder, then crumble slowly to the ground, sending up a cloud of dust. Fire exploded in clouds of red and yellow, then merged into a whirlpool of black smoke. Firemen directed jets of water into the flames; then another building collapsed and buried them.
Doggins whispered in his ear: “This is just an old movie, not the real thing. The real thing comes later.”
Niall said: “It’s horrible!”
“Don’t let them hear you say that. They think it’s marvellous.”
The screen went blank for a moment; then there was a burst of loud marching music, and a man’s voice announced impressively: “Demolitions!” There was a sibilant stir of applause from the audience; this was clearly a favourite. A semicircular tower block appeared on the screen, photographed from below so that its walls seemed to rear up like the sheer face of a cliff. Then, by some trick of photography, the camera moved slowly into the air and rose towards the roof of the building; the time it took to do this emphasised its enormous height. Finally, the camera was looking down on it from above. It pulled back to a safe distance. Niall held his breath. There was a puff of smoke at one corner of the building, then a second. At the third puff, the walls began to crumble; slowly, the walls cracked and buckled; a cloud of dust went up at the base as the building disintegrated into falling masonry, then subsided into a heap of rubble. Niall had to admit that there was something magnificent about the spectacle.
The remainder of the film followed the same pattern; skyscrapers, building developments, factory chimneys, even cathedrals, all collapsed into the same cloud of smoky dust. And as each one crashed to the ground, there was a sibilant hiss of applause from the beetles — they seemed to make the sound by rubbing their feelers together.
For Niall, this was a shattering experience. By turning the thought mirror towards his chest, he was able to absorb its full impact and appreciate it as a reality. His vision in the white tower had enabled him to grasp something of the extent of human destructiveness. But this unending panorama of violence made him aware that he had not even begun to grasp its enormity. There was old footage of the First World War, showing the artillery bombardments that preceded an attack and disembowelled bodies sprawled on the barbed wire; there were newsreels of the blitzes of the Second World War, and of dive bombers strafing undefended cities. There was archive material of the dropping of the first atom bombs on Japan, then of the testing of the hydrogen bomb on Bikini atoll. As the smoke cloud rose above the ground and revealed that the atoll had ceased to exist, even the beetles seemed too stunned to applaud.