sapling. No curve, no nothing. Bigger at one end than the other. But it
worked as a bow, after a fashion. Used reeds for arrows. Killed one of my
mother’s chickens with one once. She whaled me good and proper.”
“It’s getting warm in here,” Caroline told him. “We can’t waste any time.”
He grinned at her, exuberant now that there was something to do.
“Hunt up some cord,” he told her. “Any kind of cord. If it’s not strong
enough, we’ll twist several strands together.”
Whistling under his breath, he got to work, tearing the flag off the end of
one of the more supple poles, notching either end to hold the cord.
From another stick he split long wands off the straight-grained wood,
fashioning them into arrows. There’d be no time for feathering… in fact,
there were no feathers in the ship, but that was a refinement that would
not be needed. He would be using the bow at close range.
But he did have arrowheads. With snippers, he clipped off the sharp tips
with which the poles had been shod, drove them into the head of each arrow.
Testing them with a finger, he was satisfied. They were sharp enough… if
he could get some power behind them.
“Gary,” said Caroline, and her voice was almost a whimper.
He swung around.
“There’s no cord, Gary. I’ve looked everywhere.”
No cord!
“Everywhere?” he asked.
She nodded. “There isn’t any. I looked everywhere.”
Clothing, he thought, desperately. Strips torn from their clothing. But
that would be worse than useless. It would unravel, come apart between his
fingers when he needed it the most. Leather? Leather was too stiff to start
with, and it would stretch. Wire? Too stiff and no zip to it.
He let the bow-stick fall from his hands, reached up to wipe his face.
“It’s getting hot in here,” he said.
He twisted around and stared at the forward visors. The smoke was a cloud
and there was a ruddy reflection in it, the reflection of the fire that
blazed around the ship.
How much longer, he wondered. How much longer before they’d have to open
the port and make a dash for it, knowing even as they did that it was a
hopeless thing to do, for the Hellhounds would be waiting just outside the
port.
The shell of the spaceship crawled with a dull, dead heat, the kind of heat
that comes up off a dusty road on a still, hot day in August.
And soon, he knew, it would be a live heat, not a dead heat any longer, but
a blasting furnace heat that would pour from every angle of the steel
around them, that would shrivel the leather of their shoes and scorch the
clothing that they wore. But long before the leather of their shoes
shriveled and curled, they would have to make their break, a hopeless dash
for freedom that could end in nothing but death at the hands of the things
that waited by the port.
Like an oven, like two rabbits roasting in an oven.
We must turn, thought Gary. We must keep turning about so that we will
roast evenly on all sides.
“Gary!” cried Caroline.
He swung around.
“Hair?” she asked. “I just thought of it. Would hair make you a bowstring?”
He gasped at the thought. “Hair,” he shouted. “Human hair! Why, of
course… it’s the best material there is.”
Caroline’s hands were busy with her braids. “It’s long,” she said. “I was
proud of it and I let it grow.”
“It’ll have to be braided,” said Gary. “Twisted into a cord.”
“Your knife,” she said, and he handed it over.
The knife flashed close to her head and one of the braided strands dangled
in her hand.
“We’ll have to work fast,” said Gary. “We haven’t got much time.”
The air was dry and hard to breath. It burned one’s lungs and dried out the
tissues of the mouth. When he bent over and placed a hand against the steel
plates of the ship’s deck, the steel was warm, like the pavement on a
summer’s day.
“You’ll have to help,” said Gary. “We have to be fast and sure. We can’t
afford to bungle. We won’t have a second chance.”
“Tell me what to do,” she said.
Fifteen minutes later, he nodded at her.
“Open the port,” he said, “and when you do stand back against the wall.
I’ll need all the arm room I can get.”
He waited, bow in hand, arrow nocked against the cord.
Not much of a bow, he thought. Nothing you would want to try against a
willow at three hundred paces. But these things outside aren’t willow
wands. It will last for a shot or two… I hope it lasts for a shot or two.
The port clanged open as Caroline shoved the lever over. Smoke billowed in
the opening and in the smoke he saw the bulk of the ones who waited.
He brought the bow up and the wood bent with the sudden surge of hate and
triumph that coursed in his being… the hate and fear of fire, the hate of
things that wait to do a man to death, the fury of a human being backed
into a corner by a thing that is not human.
The arrow made a whispering sound and was a silver streak that spurted
through the smoke. The bow bent again and there was another whisper, the
whisper of cord and wood and the creak of human muscles.
On the ground outside, two dark shapes were threshing in the smoke.
It was just like shooting rabbits.
Chapter Fifteen
“VERY ingenious,” said the voice. “You won fair and square. You did much
better than I thought you would.”
“And now,” said Caroline, “you will send us back again. Back to the city of
the Engineers.”
“Why, certainly,” said the voice. “Why, of course, I will. But first, I
have to clean up the place. The bodies, first of all. Cadavers are such
unsightly things.”
Fire puffed briefly and the bodies of the two Hellhounds were gone. A tiny
puff of yellow smoke hung over where they had been and a tiny flurry of
ashes eddied in the air.
“I asked you once before,” said Caroline, “and you didn’t tell me. What are
you? We looked for signs of culture and…”
“You are befuddled, young human,” the voice told her. “You seek for
childish things. You looked for cities and there are no cities. You looked
for roads and ships and farms and there are none of these. You expected to
find a civilization and there is no civilization such as you would
recognize.”
“You are right,” said Gary. “There are none of those.”
“I have no city,” said the voice, “because I need no city. Although I could
build a city at a second’s notice. The mushroom forests are the only farms
I need to feed my little pets. I need no roads and ships because I can go
anywhere I wish without the aid of them.”
“You mean you can go in your mind,” said Caroline.
“In my mind,” the voice said. “I go wherever I may wish, in either time or
space, and I am there. I do not merely imagine that I am there; I am really
there. Long ago my race forsook machines, knowing that in its mental
ability, within the depth of its collective mind it had more potentiality
than it could ever get from a clattering piece of mechanism. So the race
built minds instead of machines. Minds, I say. But mind, one mind, a single
mind, is the better explanation. I am that mind today. A single racial
mind.
“I used that mind to pluck you from the space-time tunnel at the very
moment you were about to emerge above the city of the Engineers. I used
that mind to bring the Hellhounds here. That mind grounded your ship and
blanketed your guns and that mind could kill you in a moment if I thought
the thought.”
“But you,” said Caroline. “The personal pronoun that you use. The ‘I’ you
speak of. What is that?”
“I am the mind,” the voice told them, “and the mind is me. I am the race. I
have been the race for many million years.”
“And you play God,” said Caroline. “You bring lesser things together, into
the arena of this world, and you make them fight while you sit and
chuckle…”
“Why, of course,” the voice said. “Because, you see, I’m crazy. I’m really,
at times, quite violently insane.”
“Insane!”
“Why, certainly,” the voice told them. “It’s what would be bound to happen.
You can’t perfect a mind, a vast communal mind, a mighty racial mind to the
point that my mind is perfected and expect it to keep a perfect balance as
a good watch would keep perfect time. But the mind’s behavior varies.
Sometimes,” the voice said, quite confidentially, “I’m battier than a