CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"Clear-sighted," suggested one current of Elysian thought. "A response almost before he knew the problem."

"A ruthless response," amended the other viewpoint. "All those deaths accepted—caused—so long as they were not of his tiny caste."

"Can anything human be responsible for all humans?" protested the first. "Can we . . . ?"

* * *

"Well, welcome to Stagira," said Don Slade to the scouting party he had assembled in Bay 4.

The only sounds beyond were the ping of cooling metal and the breeze hissing above the docking pit. "Via, we should never have come here," grumbled Reuben Blackledge. The outlaw's mouse-blond hair was beginning to grow out beneath its blue tips. "The whole colony's died off."

"They landed us, didn't they?" said another of the outlaws staring out of the hold. But the long corridors facing the heavily-armed party were empty, and even the glow-strips lighting them seemed pale from encrusting grime.

"That was on automatic codes," said Slade. The ship's crewmen were too valuable to risk in scouting, but Slade had been on the bridge during the landing. "The machines work, at least some of them. If there aren't any humans to trade with, then we'll just have to pick up what we can, won't we?" To the microphone on his belt, Slade added, "Leaving the bay. You can secure in thirty seconds." To the score of mercenaries with him, "Come on, boys." The big tanker stepped off with his left foot.

The idea had been Slade's. In the confusion of the last hour on Toler, the others were stumbling back to the ship or aiding the sorm's victims to do so. The tanker had dragooned Levine and another navigator to help search the Port Office. It had been a grisly job for Slade and a far worse one for the spacers. They gagged at the thirty-odd corpses, some of them still twitching like frogs on a dissecting pan.

In the end, the search had paid off with a case of navigational microfiches which had probably accompanied the original settlers to Toler. There was electronic equipment which might have been nearly as old in storage. The colony had obviously shifted to symbiosis and biological data-storage very shortly after landing. It would have been almost impossible to decipher obsolete machine codes with the resources of GAC 59, however. There was no reason to assume that background radiation would not by now have degraded the stored data to random uselessness anyway.

By comparing the ancient microfiches with the vessel's own navigational data, Levine and his crew had found a nearby colony with a high technical rating which was no longer listed in current files. With luck, this one—Stagira—would be unfrequented but would have useful items that even GAC 59 alone could loot.

"I hadn't," Slade admitted aloud as he and his men echoed down the broad corridor, "expected the hardware to be in such good shape and nobody around."

"Any sign of farms when we landed?" asked one of the men.

"No sign of nothing," said Blackledge, who had also been on the bridge. "Place is bare as a whore's bum."

"Didn't seem to be any native life at all," Slade agreed. "Hydroponics would've been simpler than surface farming, no lack of raw materials. That doesn't explain why they didn't build at all on the surface . . . but there wasn't any lack of odd-ball notions when the first colonies cut loose from Earth, either."

"Here's a door!" called one of the men who had ranged furthest ahead.

"Then let's see what's behind it," Slade said in a calm voice. As he walked toward the portal and his clustering men, the tanker hitched up his equipment belt. The others carried shoulder weapons of one sort or the other. Slade wore only a holstered pistol—and, on his back, a satchel of plastic explosive. Fiddling with his belt gave him a surreptitious chance to wipe his sweaty palms on his coveralls.

"Shall I blow it in?" demanded one of the outlaws. Each man carried either a block of explosive like Slade or several blasting caps. The caps were touchy and bloody dangerous, but it was the men who carried the—quite inert—blocks of explosive who seemed most interested in shedding their burdens.

"Via, let's just try the touch plate," Slade said. When nobody else moved, he tapped the square in the center of the panel himself. There was no blast, no paralyzing shock as they had all managed to psych themselves into expecting. Instead, the door whispered sideways. It gave onto a scene in sybaritic contrast to the bleak corridor outside.

"Bingo," Slade called on his commo unit. Its signals would be drunk by the walls when he stepped inside, so the tanker wanted to tell those on the ship of the good fortune. "We've got our roughage and probably our protein besides. I'll scout around, see what we can raise, and report in a moment."

The air that puffed from the verdant interior was humid enough to condense noticeably in the corridor. The vegetation was varied. At least most of it was Earth-standard stock. There were no walls visible save the fifty centimeters between the corridor and the interior. The carefully-tended pathway felt like real sod beneath Slade's feet as he stepped inside.

"Just for the hell of it," the tanker said as the last of his men were following him into the artificial environment, "let's put something solid in the door's slideway. Pergot, your gun'll do. Just something to block it if it decides to close itself. Gives us room to set a charge."

The outlaw obeyed. He was unhappy about disarming himself, but he was unwilling to make an issue of the fact. The shoulder weapon's heavy iridium barrel should at worst only deform under the stresses that the closing mechanism could exert on it through the massive door.

As the men started to turn, secure in their retreat, the gun sank into the trackway's gray, nondescript lining. The door began to slide shut as quietly as it had opened.

Pergot lunged back, either to snatch up his disappearing weapon or to get into the corridor again. He accomplished neither. Or, at any rate, most of the outlaw did not reach the corridor. Pergot's left boot and right leg from mid-thigh lay inside the cavern when the door hissed to rest. Very possibly Pergot's head and hands were clear on the other side, so that only the half-meter of his torso had disappeared within the tonnes of door.

Something burst out of the undergrowth behind the party. The men were already tense with the horror before them. They spun, several of them screaming. The pig that had appeared now disintegrated in a squeal and cyan glare.

"Put 'em up!" Slade shouted as he bulled forward. The pig was scattered gobbets. Wallace, who had jumped aside at the animal's appearance, was on the ground also. The garish tunic the outlaw wore was afire, and there were two cratered holes in the small of his back. A companion's submachine gun had raked him.

Slade smothered the fire with his own broad chest, then ripped the smoldering remnants free. "Poles for a stretcher—Kuntz, Reecee," he ordered, naming two of the men who wore heavy knives.

The SpraySeal from the tanker's medical pouch was closing off the wounds, but it could do nothing for the internal damage. Powergun bolts had limited penetration, but abdominal wounds like these would be bordered by cooked flesh as much as a centimeter deep. There was nothing Slade could do about that. He was not even sure the ship's medicomp was up to the task. The Slammers could have handled it; anybody who got back to a Battalion Aid Station with his brain alive was going to make it.

But right now, Friesland seemed about as close as the ship, with that massive door separating both from the scouting party.

Slade set a cone of Hansine against the base of Wallace's spine. The wounded man trembled slightly as the drug entered his system. It would disconnect his sensory apparatus until the dose was counteracted. That would not keep ruptured blood vessels from leaking, and it would not keep Wallace's belly from swelling as his intestines writhed around patches of dead muscle in their walls.

"What happened to Pergot's gun?" asked Blackledge, now that there was leisure again for recollection. "That molding looked just like zinc sheet, but the gun slipped through it like water." After a pause, the outlaw added, "You know, the whole wall looks like it's covered with the same stuff. Howes, poke at it, why don't you? Maybe we can slip right through."

"Screw yourself, why don't you?" Howes snapped. He leveled his 2 cm weapon at the door, however.

"Hold up, dammit," Slade said as he stepped out of his coveralls. The tanker had worn standard battle-dress for the sake of its pockets and attachments. Most of the party was in looted finery of one sort or another. The tough fabric of the coveralls would make a much better bed for the stretcher.

Howes fired. The air sizzled in a blue-green flash. The door's sheathing acted as a reflex reflector, splashing the bolt back in the direction from which it had come.

The reversal was imperfect enough that the whole party caught some of the charge. Howes, the gunman, was at the center of the spreading cone, however. Foliage beyond the men hissed. Slade shouted at what felt like a bath of nettles over his bare calves and buttocks.

Howes dropped his gun. The skin of his hand was fiery, and the surface of his eyes had baked in the glare that seared away his brows. When the gunman began to scream, his cracked lips gemmed with blood.

"All right," Slade said. He immobilized Howes with one hand while his other fumbled the SpraySeal from the kit again. The spray contained a surface analgesic that would take care of Howes' immediate pain, though the blindness was another matter. "We're going to move out," the tanker continued with both volume and authority. "We're going to find out who's behind all this. And then we're going to change it."

The tanker put the sealant back into the kit. His own buttocks and the similar burns of other pirates could wait for better supplies, though his harness chafed angrily as he moved.

"Marshal and Dobbs, first shift on the stretcher," Slade said. "Broadfoot, you guide Howes here. Let's move it, boys, we've got some convincing to do."

As the party moved off down the path, Slade scooped up the gun Howes had dropped.

 

They found the first building a hundred meters away, in a glade. Because it was windowless and completely unadorned, the leading outlaws drew up abruptly and raised their guns at an apparent fortification.

Stoudemeyer had been born on Telemark. "Hey!" he said in wonder, giving two syllables to the exclamation. He slung his submachine gun and pushed past the others to reach the door.

"Via, yeah," Stoudemeyer said as his hand caressed the door without touching the latch plate. "Captain, do you know what this is? It's a true to God bubble house! There's only five of them on Telemark, and I'd have said there wasn't another in the galaxy!"

"Well, what's it do, then?" Blackledge demanded. He gestured toward the man and building alike with a prodding motion of his gun muzzle.

"It does everything," Stoudemeyer said. He palmed the latch. "It does every curst thing you could imagine."

The others, even Slade, twitched a hair to the side as the door slid open. It was too reminiscent of the cavern's outer portal. The man from Telemark strode through without hesitation. "I tell you," he called over his shoulder, "being caught in here is like a bee drowning in honey. It don't hurt a bit . . . ." The door closed behind Stoudemeyer, then opened again before the babble of fear could even start. "The latch works fine from this side too," said Stoudemeyer, "but suit yourselves."

Blackledge was the first to follow Stoudemeyer. Slade was the last, and he decided not to order someone to stay back with Wallace. Never give orders you know will be ignored . . . and the tanker did not want to miss his own first look into this candy store, either.

The interior walls were a neutral gray when Slade first glimpsed them through the open door. By the time he was inside, however, Stoudemeyer had activated a control orally. The house was running through a series of panoramas, three or four seconds apiece, in which the walls seemed to melt into the far distance. Then the whole scene would dissolve into a radically different one. Slade did not appreciate the level or realism until the third example, a knoll of sere grass beneath a sky of cloud and purple lightning. Hard-spitting raindrops began to lash the men from hidden outlets. Among the curses and shouts of anger, Stoudemeyer's voice cried, "Cancel climate! Cancel sound!"

The sparkling desert that followed—in a few seconds, for a few seconds—did so without the blast of heat that would otherwise have probably accompanied the blue-tinged sunlight.

"Tell it to find something and hold it, Stoudemeyer," Slade directed irritably. The tanker could not hear Stoudemeyer's response over the general rumble of so many men in a small building.

The background segued to a glade much like the outside. Via, it was the glade outside; there lay Wallace twitching under stimulus of the breeze that ruffled the grass beside him. It was as if the party had been covered by a glass bubble thick enough to block out all sound.

"What do you sit on?" an outlaw demanded.

Stoudemeyer shrugged. "Ask for a chair," he said.

"All right, give me a chair," said the other man. He stumbled forward and the fellow behind him jumped away. The floor between them rose into a sculptured chair mounted on a pedestal that seemed too thin to support itself and a seated man. Neither Slade nor anyone else doubted that the construct would hold; but prodding at it with a finger was as much of a trial as anyone would make for the moment.

The Telemark mercenary was basking in his sudden importance. "Swivel chair," he said, pointing at the floor in front of him. From the point indicated extended a seat with the liquid grace of an amoeba. The seat looked like the one earlier called to life; but when Stoudemeyer sat in this one, he was able to spin it in further display. "Everything," he repeated, "anything. All you have to do is ask."

Outlaws were moving apart as far as the four-meter diameter of the floor permitted them. They were experimenting with shapes. Some of the more imaginative were creating subtle forms from their home worlds. They could even mime wood grains and basketry.

"Food?" asked Slade. He could simply have checked for himself. He did not, however, care to push buttons—even verbal ones—at random when there were directions available.

Stoudemeyer waved expansively. "Ask," he said as if he himself were the provider.

"Bring me Tethian rock-cruncher in a pepper sauce," the tanker said firmly.

"I'm sorry," responded a voice. It seemed only millimeters from Slade's ear. "That is not in my inventory. You may describe the dish by reference to others; or, if you prefer, you may make another selection."

Stoudemeyer must have heard the house's response, or at least enough of it to extrapolate the remainder. He hopped out of his chair with the smug expression replaced by one of concern. "Hey, I'm sorry, sir, I forgot. This place is probably as old as the ones back home. I mean—maybe eight hundred standard years. Can you believe it? That old and work like this still? He was a genius, a bloody genius."

"You mean try Earth food, not Tethys', because this place was built before the Settlement," Slade said to clarify what he had just been told. One point at a time.

"Right, or Telemark food," Stoudemeyer agreed. In test and demonstration, the man from Telemark said, "Bring me hassenpfeffer and a mug of, oh, any lager."

Slade could hear the voice saying from beside the other mercenary, "Yes sir, your food will be brought in forty—three—seconds."

"And this isn't half of it," Stoudemeyer confided to Slade. All around the room, outlaws were exploring this new capacity of the dwelling. Some of the men were demanding protein rations after a series of failures to come up with any other meal from the hidden menu. "The real thing about bubble houses is the dream-code feature." He kept his voice very low. "It's supposed to be as good as, as, you know—the sorm."

Stoudemeyer turned his head. He looked somewhat embarrassed. "I wouldn't really know, you know. On Telemark, you've got to own a province, practically, to even think of owning a bubble house. I mean, there's five that Kettlemann built before he disappeared. But everybody knows about them."

"Your dinner, sir," said the voice that was as cunningly projected as the rain had been some minutes earlier. The floor bulged like asphalt bubbling in the sun. The bulge rose on a stem like those that lifted chair seats. It halted with a hydraulic, not mechanical, smoothness at the height of Stoudemeyer's mid-chest. The bulge then irised open from the top to form a platter around a poultry-in-gravy dish which Slade presumed was hassenpfeffer. At any rate, the man from Telemark seemed satisfied as he took a thigh bone and began nibbling at the dark meat. "It's good," he said. "Try it."

Rather than attempt the meat right at that moment, Slade lifted the half-liter beer mug from the center of the tray. He expected the gravy to cling to the gray alloy of the container. The gravy did not, but the tray itself exuded a flexible tendril by which it retained the mug. Just, come to think, as the floor retained the tray. The tanker's pause was only mental. There was no obvious break in the slow progress of the mug to his lips. The lager, when he drank it, was cool and sharp and in no discernible way frightening.

"He was a genius," Stoudemeyer repeated around a mouthful of his pickled rabbit. "Certified Scientist Theodor Kettlemann. Started building bubble houses for the richest men on Telemark. I mean, nobody can figure now how this stuff works. And it still works." His gesture around the room spattered Slade with some of the tart gravy.

"Thing is," Stoudemeyer went on, "we had a planetary government then but not really, you know? And Kettlemann had some notions about genetics that didn't sit well with some people. He wouldn't work for anybody of Italian stock, for instance, even if they could trace their line right back to Landfall. And they were willing to pay his price. There was trouble about that. So when Kettlemann disappeared, a lot of people thought he'd been snatched—or wasted—by somebody he wouldn't build a house for."

"And instead, he recolonized," Slade said. He looked at the tangle of furniture and men wrangling over food of various types. "Picked a barren world that wasn't of interest to anybody else but gave him raw materials. And peace. Via, though, this must have cost a fortune to set up, the transport and the processing equipment alone."

Stoudemeyer nodded. "Kettlemann might have had that," he said. "Around the time he disappeared, so did a lot of other people. Rich people with their families. There was a lot of talk about it, all the way from mass murder to secret bases that were going to wipe out all the wops when the time was right. The whole business didn't cause the Partition Wars, exactly. But it didn't help things one bit, either."

"Well," said Slade. "Maybe it's time to go find what passes for a government here. And get our butts off-planet. Doesn't look like there's a whole lot of this—" he released the mug which snapped back onto the tray of which it was part, "—that we could dismantle and carry with us. Though the protein and vegetation still is handy for our synthesizers."

As Slade turned to the door, he adjusted his slung weapon out of habit. What he saw in the wall caused him to pump the gun live and to kick the latch-plate with the toe of his boot. That was the quickest way of opening the door without interfering with the business of shouldering his weapon.

Wallace and the makeshift stretcher were disappearing into the ground.

The scene was not an artifact of the wall display. The drugged man had sunk a centimeter further by the time Slade could see him through the open door. "Contact, you bastards!" the tanker roared to the startled remainder of the scouting party. None of them had noticed what was going on outside. "Everyone out!" As he spoke, Slade launched himself into the glade behind his gun muzzle.

The turf was beginning to close over Wallace in a neat seam. Slade fired twice into the ground, aiming a hand's breadth above the peak of Wallace's head even as the seam covered that head. Point blank, the big powergun would shatter ceramic armor and burn a hole through eight millimeters of iridium.

The soil gouted upward, blasted by the vaporizing water trapped within each clod. Fifty centimeters down, the second bolt gouged bare a different layer. Not clay, as on a normal world, nor the bedrock overlain by manufactured soil as Slade had rather expected here. There was instead a dull gleam that covered itself as soil fell into the hole. Wallace lurched completely out of sight.

Slade did not fire again. He had seen what happened when that omnipresent alloy took a bolt from a powergun. Howes was enough of them to be blind and partly flayed from that nonsense.

Pirates were pouring out of the bubble house in panic. They lacked, in general, any notion of what was going on. Wallace's disappearance was not obvious except to one who had seen it in process; and that was Slade alone of the party. One man began to hose the undergrowth. A dozen others took up the activity. They flushed out a variety of birds and small animals as the succulent foliage burned.

"Hold your fire!" the tanker ordered. He had to shout three more times before he was at last obeyed. The volleying powerguns did not make enough physical racket to overwhelm a voice as strong as Slade's. The whole incident had a level of psychic noise that had to run its course, however.

Even as the last shot sizzled from a submachine gun, Slade was saying, "Reecee, give me your knife." The party had no proper entrenching equipment, but the long fighting knife would serve.

Slade probed with the borrowed weapon, gingerly at first though he was sure there was no harm the blade could do to Wallace now. Other pirates crowded around. The hot barrels of their weapons added an angry tinge to the stink of ozone. The turf through which the blade cut appeared perfectly normal. The halves of a severed worm flexed to either side of the knife. Soil crumbled from a yellow insect larva the size of a man's thumb-joint.

With a curse and an order snarled to the men closest, Slade dug the blade through the sward in a vicious circle. Outlaws who were late in obeying the order now leaped aside to save their toes. The tanker used his broad left hand as a spade to fling up the turf the knife had cut. Then he slashed again, deeper. The soil was still rich-looking and crumbly. Roots no longer bound it in their web-work this far below the surface. Slade scattered two double handfuls, then cursed and began to scoop deeper with his helmet. The blunt edge and padded interior of the helmet made a bad shovel, but the loose soil did not fight his efforts.

The helmet thudded on metal like that which the shots had uncovered before. There was no sign of Wallace, his clothing, or the stretcher on which he had lain. Slade used his bare hands again to squeeze a patch of metal clear. The gray surface was now covered with iridescent ripples like those of oil on still water. The colors blurred and fused and sank to neutral gray again even as the men watched. The surface had its usual metallic sheen . . . but Slade was no longer sure that it was metal at all.

Most of the men around Slade had no idea what was going on. Stoudemeyer had seen some and guessed more, perhaps much more. "There's a thing about Kettlemann that didn't make a lot of sense," said the man from Telemark. "He already had a reputation when he got into building bubble houses. But he wasn't an engineer. He was a geneticist."

Slade stood up, swearing very softly. He wiped dirt from the blade on his own thigh before he handed the knife back to Reecee. The party watched the tanker apprehensively, though they had not all realized that Wallace was missing.

"All right," Slade said. "We break up into groups of three. Every group has a radio. Reecee, Stoudemeyer, you're with me. We'll lead Howes. We're going to cover as much of this place as we have to to find who's in charge. Or at least where it's being run from. Report anything funny, and we'll all check in every quarter hour."

As Slade separated and numbered the remaining groups, he could feel Stoudemeyer staring at him somberly. The man from Telemark did not believe that the search would uncover what they needed to find to escape.

Slade could not very well object to his subordinate's pessimism. Not when the two of them were completely of the same opinion.

Four hours of searching disappointed Slade's hopes if not his expectations. The cavern was large but not endless. The parties sent in opposite directions around the wall had met on the other side of the circle. They had not found a door besides the one by which they had all entered, nor was there anything else that looked promising.

The groups had located thirty-seven bubble houses. There might have been some duplication before Slade directed groups to turn up a clod at the doorway of each house they found. Even so, it was probable that the cursory search had failed to find all the unobtrusive structures.

It was even possible that there was a headquarters building somewhere, a planetary capital—but by now, Slade and Stoudemeyer were not alone in doubting that.

The team Slade led personally sat around a table in the seventh bubble house they had found. The houses had been identical; though of course identical in their infinite variety. Howes had recovered enough to eat with the rest of them. He was still blind. His face had swollen like a pumpkin, but contact analgesics remained adequate for pain.

Slade gestured with a chicken drumstick. "The system works fine," he noted aloud. "Not just mechanically, but the life forms, vegetation, animals up to the size of pigs. At least to the size of pigs," he corrected himself.

"Only no people but us," Stoudemeyer said.

"Blood, we know why that is," said Reecee angrily. "Same curst thing killed them as killed Wallace after we'd lugged him all that way. Your Kettlemann just thought this planet was empty, Stoudemeyer. Something got him and something's going to get us if we don't get the hell out."

"You know, I thought about Wallace," said the man from Telemark. He put down his fork in order to give full attention to what he was hoping to explain. "I think he was dead. It's this food, you see?"

"Go on," prompted the tanker. His expression was non-committal.

"Well, it's not magic, you know," Stoudemeyer explained. He raised his fork again as an example. "There's a synthesizer, but it starts with advanced constituents—proteins and carbohydrates, not rock dust and water. On Telemark they're fed by plankton, the bubble houses are, mostly. But here, where the whole place is controlled—not just the house—the system acts as, well . . . ."

Every eye was focused on the lump of meat on the fork. "As a clean-up system too."

Reecee gagged. He lurched away from the table.

"I think you've got something very close," Slade said. His mouth had dried up, but he continued to chew away at the morsel already taken. You could not let—ultimate sources—get to you, or you'd never be able to eat fish from a sea in which men drown. "Only Wallace wasn't dead. I heard him mumbling as the soil zipped itself over his face. And Team Two said Pergot was still there at the door, what was left of him. The system doesn't recycle carrion. This was set up for very rich people, remember. It crops fresh meat as required."

"No, that's crazy—" began Stoudemeyer. His chair seat extended itself upward like tube-stock being drawn from a billet. As the man's knees lifted toward his chest, his whole body dropped. The chair pedestal was being reabsorbed by the floor, even as the seat enfolded the man who had been sitting on it.

Sliding from his own chair and reaching around the table should have been two motions for the tanker. He accomplished his goal of grasping Stoudemeyer's hand with a fluid grace that would have done credit to a gymnast in free-fall. Slade's whole body, legs and back and muscle-knotted shoulders, reacted together as he pulled Stoudemeyer from the gray maw that was engulfing him. The victim was off-balance and unable to extricate himself in the seconds available to him. For the moment, however, his body was held by little more than gravity. Slade's brutal snatch-lift dislocated the smaller man's shoulder, but it popped him from the tube like the cork from sparkling wine.

"Outside fast!" the tanker roared. His left hand slapped the latch plate. Momentum and the continuing pull of Slade's arm cracked the whip with Stoudemeyer. The man from Telemark snapped through the opening, wheezing with fear and gratitude.

As Slade turned back, Reecee caromed off his chest. Their legs tangled as Reecee fell. It was probably too late for Howes already, even if Slade had not been tripped.

The blinded man's screams reverberated as what had been his chair closed over him. The action must have been triggered when Stoudemeyer shot free. The mechanism was more similar to a tar pit than to a mouse-trap; but it was quick enough to take Howes, fuddled by pain and drugs.

Reecee scrambled to his feet to run again. Slade caught the outlaw by the shoulder with one hand—there was no time to talk—and retrieved Reecee's fighting knife with the other. Should've brought a blade of his own, Via . . . .

Stoudemeyer's chair had reformed. Howes' chair and the man himself were a bubble on the floor, a giant copy of the shape from which the house extruded furniture and food. This bubble was shrinking. Howes' whimpering had been shut off instantly when the metal closed over him. Slade struck at the seam joining the bubble to the floor proper.

The atomic shells of the knife's point and edges had been shrunk in a magnetic forging process more rigorous than that which contains the plasma in a fusion plant. The result would stay needle-sharp as it was rammed through steel plate or ceramic body armor. It was not sharp enough to penetrate the fluid surface that had just swallowed the blind man, however. The blade skidded and rang. Slade shouted a curse and struck again. When the knife slipped away this time, it took a thumb-nail-sized circuit from the toe of Slade's right boot. The bubble was almost flat by now.

Howes was a pompous ass, a fool before he blinded himself and a useless burden since. Slade caught up the shoulder weapon slung on his own chair. He ran outside. His nostrils stung with suppressed tears.

"What are we going to do?" Reecee blubbered. "It can take us out here just as easy, can't it? What are we going to do?"

"We're all right if we keep moving," Slade said.

"But why's it taking people?" Stoudemeyer asked. He spoke in a normal voice, but the words were more an apostrophe to his own doubts than a question to his companions. "There's plenty of animals out here, the pigs and the rabbits. They must be here as food stocks. Why does it take us instead?"

"You're not going to sleep, Captain?" Reecee demanded. He was a big man also, but only blind panic could have driven him to bait Slade. The tanker stood with the knife naked in his hand. "You're such a hero that you're going to walk around laughing while the bloody dirt buries the rest of us like it did Wallace?"

"Don't guess it does take people," Slade said. He let out a shuddering breath. His hands were shaking, but there was no sign of his fear and adrenalin as he spoke. "I think your Professor Kettlemann just programmed the system with a narrower definition of human than you or I might've used. Different, that's sure a cop. Got any wog blood in you, Stoudemeyer? Bet your home-grown genius wouldn't approve. May he burn in Hell!"

"But what do we do?" Reecee repeated.

"We fucking think of something!" Slade roared back. As the outlaw stepped back, shocked as if by a slap in the face, Slade flung the knife.

It buried itself to the cross-guard in the sod between Reecee's boots.

 

It was usually easy to forget they were trapped in a chamber rather than a walled enclosure. The shock waves were a brutal reminder. The blast shuddered on and on until the noise that could not escape had damped itself to silence. Leaves had been stripped from the nearest trees. The ears of the scouting party continued to ring long after the cavern itself had ceased to do so.

The door by which the party had entered was still closed and still unmarked.

Slade set down the detonator. He began methodically brushing leaf-mold from his bare knees. When they were clean, he strode toward the door where other members of the group were already gathered and arguing. Slade's pack, with the shoulder weapon across it, lay by the tree which had sheltered him.

"Didn't do a bloody thing!" snarled one of the outlaws. He slammed the butt of his weapon against the dull metal. None of the men were too angry to remember what shooting into the door had brought Howes.

"We've got plenty more explosives," said Blackledge. "We'll put them all against this door and that'll do it."

"No," said Slade. "Not uncontained. Even if we did punch a hole, it'd seal before we could use it. We need to get the system itself. If we set our charge in one of these houses—" he waved beyond the trees, in the general direction of the nearest bubble house— "close it up with a time fuse, we might be able to kill the whole thing." The tanker took off his helmet and fanned himself with it.

"Cop," said Blackledge. His tone cleared a broad aisle between him and the tanker two meters away. "We don't need a house blown up, we need a door gone. This didn't work, fine. We got ten times that much left. We'll set it all off together, right here." The blue-haired outlaw's submachine gun already pointed squarely at Slade's midriff.

"Ten times nothing is still nothing," the tanker said tensely. He rapped the door with the knuckles of his left hand, holding the helmet.

"I tell you something else that's bloody nothing!" Blackledge shouted. He waggled his gun in needless emphasis. "The way you've been bloody running things! That's nothing!"

Slade fired. His bolt clipped the rim of the helmet with which he had hidden the pistol. Enough of the energy got through to handle the job, however.

The outlaw's submachine gun blew up. Slade had fired at it rather than at the man for better reasons than misplaced mercy. Even a brain shot might not have kept Blackledge's trigger finger from one last spasm. The flash of the magazine exploding was a blue-green so intense that it was almost white. Flaming droplets of plastic and metal sprayed the men.

Blackledge lurched sideways and fell as if a truck had hit him. His right hand and right side from shoulder to knee were charred black except where bone poked out. Blackledge did not scream because shock had not yet let the pain through. The only sound he made was the clicking in his throat as he tried to draw a breath.

Slade did not reach for his medikit, but he extended his pistol for careful aim. There was enough cruelty in the universe without letting someone suffer needlessly. Even Blackledge, even someone as useless as Blackledge . . . .

The tanker lowered his weapon again without firing the second shot. The rest of the scouting party relaxed unconsciously. None of them had thought to gainsay Slade. Even the pair of outlaws who had also been with Aylmer could see that a quick end was the best that Blackledge could hope for even if they managed to get him back to the ship.

"Petrie," said Slade, after the pause had allowed him to get his breathing if not his pulse back under control, "strip off your coveralls. Mine went off with Wallace, and we need another stretcher now."

Slade bent over the wounded man. The pistol's barrel was still too hot for the holster. Slade transferred the weapon to his left hand while his right took another cone of pain blocker from the limited medical supplies. Without the blocker, Blackledge would die of shock; and he might die too soon.

"Taylor, Hwang," the tanker went on as he straightened again, "you'll carry him. Be as easy as you can, but we may not have much time. Rest of you, gather your gear and let's get moving. We need one of those bubble houses to get out of this place."

In the confusion of movement and released tension, Stoudemeyer stepped closer to Slade. In a low voice the man from Telemark asked, "Do you really think there's a way, ah—Captain?"

"Lord help me," Slade muttered back, "I think there is."

* * *

"But what do I ask for?" called Taylor through the open door.

"Ask for any curst thing you want!" Slade shouted back. "Ask for raw beef. And keep asking, like I bloody told you!"

Beside the kneeling tanker, Reuben Blackledge began to mumble the words to a song. It sounded as if it were in Latin, a hymn from deep in the outlaw's consciousness. The coveralls lumped misshapenly over the wounded man's body.

In the bubble house, Taylor was saying, "Raw beef. More raw beef. More raw beef." The house's response was inaudible to the rest of the party outside. Except for Slade, the outlaws' hands were clenched on the guns he had ordered them not to use.

"The system has to be centralized," Stoudemeyer said nervously. "It may not replenish itself here, just because Taylor's—"

Taylor screamed. He leaped with his boots pedaling like those of a man who hears a rattlesnake beneath him. The real stimulus was a negative one, the feeling of the floor beginning to drop away beneath his feet. Taylor was out the door even as the third platter of synthesized beef was beginning to unfold in front of where he had stood.

Another mercenary shouted and jumped sideways as the ground began to shift under him. Slade jerked the igniter wire. He prayed that the time pencil's stated thirty-second delay was fairly close to its reality. "All right, dammit," he said as he jumped to his feet, "let's get back a ways. Don't separate!"

When he watched the process from the beginning, Slade could see the wink of metal as tendrils parted the soil. Blackledge twitched his left arm. It was the only movement of which the drugged man was capable. His chanting trailed off into a one-sided argument of some sort as the grass closed over his face, then his swollen body.

"Twenty-four," Slade whispered, "twenty-five, twenty—"

Forty kilos of high explosive went off, literally in the bowels of Professor Kettlemann's closed system.

It was hard to determine the epicenter of the blast. The ground seemed to hump up about ten meters from the point it had fed itself Blackledge and his wrapping of explosive. The bulge hammered the cavern's interior as if the ground were the hard-struck membrane of an enormous drum. Light had been omnipresent in the high ceiling. Now the light died in a logarithmically expanding wave from the point above the blast. It was a reversed vision of an incandescent bulb going out, when the filament retains an orange glow for instants after it no longer illuminates its surroundings.

Slade picked himself up carefully. Somebody cried out at the darkness. Several of the team were switching on the light-wands they brought and had promptly forgotten in the lighted cavern. Streaks flickered through the fuzzy yellow glows. It was not rain but grit, oxidized metal raining from the ceiling.

The tanker wiped and lowered his upturned face hastily. "Let's move!" he shouted to the men of his party. "Bloody thing may regenerate, or it may come down on our heads like a drop forge. Curst if I want to be around either way."

The door that had crushed Pergot was crumbled open like a heap of smelter slag. It buried whatever was left of the dead outlaw. Flies buzzed away from the pig carcass as the men stumbled past behind their light-wands. The corridor beyond was still illuminated. Slade wondered vaguely where it led, whether to more self-contained habitats or to something quite different. He had no real interest in finding out.

Several of the group cheered as they bolted into the corridor. Birds fluttered past them, called to the light.

Be damned to replenishing stores, thought Don Slade. What GAC 59 needed now was out.