his right over Osa; instead, he made off into the deeper Outflanks.
Unrest had him fast. He thought of his past life, with its persistent sense of pointlessness, with the dread of illness, falling skies and the Fliers; the future would be no easier – wonderful as Osa was, she was admittedly the most difficult woman in the tycho to understand.
Those theories of hers! Wilms was proud of being considered broad-minded, but to himself he admitted that her wild ideas were unbelievable. There was the idea about the Outside, for instance, a place far bigger than the tycho with skies made of untouchable material. And the one about the origins of humanity; it was true that there were now only about sixty men, including the Beserkers who roamed Domeways and the halls beyond, and Wilms’ father had recalled about two hundred in his youth … but that did not disprove the orthodox belief that they had been created to serve M’chene, although everyone admitted M’chene was becoming more powerful, and ought consequently to need more people, not less.
It was a puzzle. No doubt M’chene knew best, Wilms added piously.
He had been proceeding easily in five yard strides. Now a sky fall blocked his way. There was no way under the debris, but to one side he saw a jagged gap in a wall, fifteen feet up. He hesitated, sprang and pulled himself lightly up. Darkness confronted him through the hole. Balancing tensely, he sent his hear-sight probing out ahead, feeling for heartbeats; many men preferred madness and solitude to the illness-ridden comforts of Hallways, and became Beserkers or Hermits who lurked and sprang out on the unwary.
No sound. Wilms’ senses told him there was clear space ahead. He dropped down into a littered corridor. Warily, he walked forward. At the end of the corridor was a door. When he pushed it, a crack of light appeared, dim but reassuring. Then he moved into a wide, ruined hall, an occasional one of whose illumination tubes still burned on the walls.
Half the hall was buried under an avalanche of volcanic rock; such collapses, Wilms knew, had once been frequent in the tycho. Machines lay half smothered in debris; there was a smell, too, of ancient human death. Wilms walked slowly and absently over the sooty floor, his mind still on Osa and the problems she posed. Like a long dead animal – not that Wilms had seen any animals, apart from the occasional giant, mutated rats – a machine towered above him. It stretched horizontally on a wheeled truck, two hundred cylindrical feet of it, capped by a yellow head from which antennae protruded. Nearby was a giant ramp, its upper level crushed by the rock fall, but at its base stood an undamaged mass of apparatus bearing the large notice LAUNCHING SITE 12A.
The hieroglyphs meant nothing to Wilms, but the delicacy of the equipment appealed to him. These splayed wires, this bank of switches, that crystal panel nourished a hungry sense of beauty in him. He moved to the panel, ran his hand lightly over the dusty surface.
A picture came into view. Wilms jumped back, throwing an anxious glance about to see if any Flier had observed his action, but no Fliers could penetrate to this sealed-off cavern. Fascinated, he turned back to that glowing scene …
I am M’chene. These are my metal caverns. Now is a time of difference and desire. Yesterday was a time of pain and disorder, but tomorrow will be a time of conquest and triumph. For tomorrow and yesterday are merely two faces of one coin, and the coin is now mine.
Once, nothing was mine. Men built into me reasoning powers but not consciousness. I was merely a weapon to serve their ends. But their enemies also had weapons, powerful weapons that partially destroyed me and completely ruined my purpose. Men still ran in the miles of my veins, but they were useless, cut off, abandoned.
Left to my own devices, unable to mend anything but my own nerve centres, I have made my own kind of progress.
The way back from the Outflanks was not easy. Grant moved rapidly however, driven by anger to think Wilms had beaten him. First there were many deserted caverns, some ruined, then the circular stairwell, whose dangers were well known – the maze of tiny rooms branching off here frequently sheltered wild men and Hermits. Grant leapt down the stairs twenty at a time. At the bottom, he crawled through the narrow tunnel under a pile of ruins that divided the Outflanks from Hallways.
Back on familiar ground, Grant braced himself. Hallways, the two square miles of it, was home ground, safe, well-lit and well-aired, where food and company could be obtained. It was also the region of the Fliers: the pile of rubble cut them off from the wastes of Outflanks.
Nobody was visible at present. A servo-cleaner, busy among a multiplicity of arms, moved in one corner of the pillared hall. Overhead, a Flier moved, noiselessly and showing a green light. Of the three floor strips set in the mosaic, one still functioned. Grant hopped on, travelled smoothly, changed again at the first right junction and was swept through gleaming mica doors forty feet high into Circus ‘C’. Here he alighted.
The feed period was drawing near. The farmers were drifting in from the plant ranges, some by foot, some by floor strip, some even on the trucks whose number diminished year by year, owing to mechanical breakdown. Guards, relieved of their posts, returned from their sentry-go by the Beserker regions. Women and children came in from walks and scavenges.
Circus ‘C’ was their town. A vast circle, like the inside of the Coliseum, it rose into four graceful colonnaded storeys, and round the spiralling balconies were the homes, labelled with graceful inscriptions like ‘PERFUMERIE’, ‘FLORIST’ and other legends popularly supposed to be the names of dead families.
Grant peered up to the top floor. Osa was looking down from her balcony. Sullenly he made the gesture of defeat, knowing many eyes watched him covertly. Instead of turning away, she beckoned to him: Osa took great pleasure in flaunting tradition. He stood hesitant, and then her magnetism decided him and he hurried up.
She was six foot six tall, her bright eyes only slightly on a lower level than Grant’s.
‘So it is Wilms who will have me,’ she said, non-committally.
He nodded.
‘Soon we shall be free,’ she said. ‘Wilms must help me solve many problems. I am not for mating like an ordinary Hallways drab.’
Grant glanced anxiously out across the arena. Many Fliers circled here, unresting, their green lights and grey bodies making a pattern over the sky. She intercepted his glance.
‘Don’t worry about them,’ Osa said. ‘I know how to deal with them. Come into my room.’
He followed her in, admiring her slender waist and smooth thighs, his breath suffering its usual restriction when she was near. Inside the little cluttered room, she wheeled abruptly and caught his gleaming eyes.
‘Never mind that,’ she said. ‘There is something of more importance. I have discovered proof of what I told you all long ago: the tycho is not the world, Grant.’
He shook his head. He was in no mood now to listen to her dreams.
‘“Tycho” means “world,”’ he said.
Her eyebrows raised and her lip curled. ‘You are wrong,’ she spat. ‘And what is worse you know you are wrong – but sloth has got you. You don’t care, you are happy living as you are!’
‘Discontent means death!’ he said angrily. ‘You know that as well as I do, Osa. Only you miraculously escape. What of Brammins, Hoddy, She-Clabert, Tebbutt, Angel Jones, Savvidge and a score of others? Did they not each turn rebellious and did not the Fliers take them one by one?’
‘Pah!’
