Chthon a-1 Page 9

  “Time passed and the mystery deepened. Additional colonies were devastated, yet any victim removed within a day of the first symptom recovered promptly. If the chill were a contagious disease, why did time and location set such capricious limits? If it were a wave, why did so many escape?

  “Gradually the unwilling answers appeared. Compromise gained the day. The chill did travel in lightspeed wave formation—but that wave was neither singular nor local. There were many waves, approximately a light-month in depth and ninety-eight light-years apart. The intersection of any wave with any colony meant pandemic until it passed. But within that wave there seemed to be random particles of infection that struck solely by the law of averages. Presumably there was a nutrient ether that guaranteed the progress of the illness unless the victim was promptly removed from its field. As with the ether of yore, none of this was detectable by instrument of man. He understood its presence by dying.

  “The source was simply the center of the galaxy. There were other intelligent forms of life between man and that center, forms that also suffered variants of the illness, and it was rapidly understood that investigation was useless. The larger band of the chill impulse was twenty thousand light-years deep, and the source had been demolished long ago by a species now defunct. Yes, the chill was of artificial origin; no more was known.

  “Meanwhile the waves were locally charted and schedules set up. The rich saved themselves by vacationing elsewhere during the critical month, while the majority simply waited and ferried the stricken out of range, if they found them in time. Great numbers were discovered too late.

  “And Earth,” Hastings finished, “populous Earth, with far too many billions to transport, could do nothing but wait for the first of the waves to strike. This is the time: the year §400. I’m glad I’m not there.”

  The crowd drifted off. Hastings had made light of the threat, but the chill was frightening, deep inside, to all of them. For no prisoner knew where Chthon was located.

  The chill could strike tomorrow.

  8

  “Hey Fiver, pal—know what Garnet just done to me?” Framy was bursting with news.

  “I can guess.” Aton halted his chipping and sat down.

  Framy rushed right on. “She gimme a whole chow for free. I held out my garnet and she never took it. Just handed over my meal and went away, sort of dreamy. She ain’t never been so careless before.”

  Aton reclined against the wall, rubbing grit off his forearms as Framy ate. “It wasn’t carelessness.”

  Framy spoke around a mouthful. “But she never took the—you mean she done it on purpose?”

  Aton nodded.

  “She’d be crazy to do a thing Eke that. She hates me ’most as much as she hates you.”

  “Does she?” said Aton. Hate is such an interesting thing. I hate the minionette…

  Garnet appeared, interrupting their discussion. “Got your stone?” she gruffly asked Aton. Wordlessly he held it out. She took it and dropped the package on the floor.

  Framy stared after her until she was gone. “God of the Pit! I never seen it before. She soft on you, Five.”

  Aton opened his package.

  But the little man was still puzzled. “That ain’t no cause for her to be doing me no favors. I ain’t no woman’s idol. Why don’t she give you no chow for free?”

  Aton explained carefully so that the other would understand. Framy was incredulous. “You mean she don’t want to show how she’s soft on you, so she takes it out on me? ’Cause I’m your pal and don’t know nothing anyway?”

  “Close enough.”

  “It just don’t make no sense. No sense at all.”

  * * *

  They brought the half-eaten corpse in for everyone to see. A man had wandered too far out alone, downwind. He might have been searching for superior garnets, or perhaps for an exit from the lower caverns. The chimera had come. Help had come ten minutes after his agonized scream—but he had been dead ten minutes. Stomach and intestines had been ripped open and eaten; eyes and tongue were gone. Long dark streaks showed on the cavern floor, they said, where he had been found, where the blood had flowed and been licked up.

  “Remind me never to go on the Hard Trek,” Hastings said sickly. “I’m too tender a morsel to be exposed to that.”

  The black-haired beauty gave him a sidelong glance. “I hear there’s worse ’n that downwind on the Hard Trek,” she said. “Ain’t no one ever made it out. You can hear the howls of the beast-men that once were people like us, before they got caught.”

  “They live?” Hastings asked, obligingly setting up her punch line.

  “Naw—but they howl.”

  There was general laughter. It was an old joke, and not without a suspicion of accuracy.

  This is my opportunity, Aton thought. Now—while it seems natural. Feign uncertainty, but get it out.

  “I’m not sure, but it seems to me I heard about someone getting through,” he said.

  Framy took him up immediately. “Somebody got out? Somebody made the Hard Trek?”

  “There must be a way out,” Hastings said. “If we could only find it. The chimera had to get in somewhere.”

  “Maybe them animals never did get in,” the black-haired woman said. Aton had never picked up her name. She had been subtly interested in him since that first discussion, but refused to make an overt play. Possibly she was afraid of Garnet or just smarter. She certainly interested him more; she was able to fling her hair about in a kind of dress that hinted at the sensuality of clothing. Nothing, he had discovered here, is quite so sexless as complete nudity. “Maybe there ain’t no animals,” she continued. “We never see none.”

  “I seen a salamander—” Framy began, then cut himself off.

  “Salamanders, yes,” Hastings said. “But that’s about the only one a man can see and survive. That’s why we speak of the ‘chimera’—that’s what the word means. Imaginary monster. But we sure as Chthon didn’t imagine that.” His eyes flicked toward the corpse.

  “It was a doctor,” Aton said judiciously. “He was quite mad—but free.”

  Heads turned in his direction. Conversation stopped.

  “A doctor?” Hastings breathed.

  Aton held out his hand for a garnet, and everyone laughed. “About five years ago, I think. They never found out how he managed to escape. They had to put him in a mental hospital.”

  “Bedside!” someone cried.

  “He swore he’d get out.”

  “That means there is a trail.”

  “You sure about that?” Hastings asked Aton. “You remember the name?”

  Do I remember the name I pried so carefully from the prison librarian, knowing that this was the word that might free me? “It wasn’t Bedside,” he said. “Something like Charles Bedecker, M.D. Of course he lost his license when they sent him down.”

  “Yeah,” Framy agreed. “They defrocked him.”

  “I knew him,” Hastings said. “I had almost forgotten. We never called him by his real name, of course. He stayed about a month; then he set out with hardly more than his doctor’s bag. He said he’d make a trail for the rest of us, if we had guts enough to follow. But he was such a small, mild character. We knew he’d never get far.”

  “How come you let him go?” the woman asked. “Him a doctor—”

  “No sickness down here,” Hastings pointed out. “We’re sterilized—by the heat, perhaps. And death is usually too sudden. And he was a bad man to offend. Small, but what he could do—”

  “That’s not surprising,” Aton said. “Didn’t you know what he got sent down for?”

  Hastings put him off. “You remember a lot, all of a sudden. We never ask that question here. That’s none of our business.”

  “But there’s a trail,” Framy said, savoring it.

  “A trail to madness,” Hastings pointed out. “That’s as bad as death.”

  “But a trail…”

  The magic word was out. Aton knew that i
t would spread like the hot wind through the caverns. Proof—proof of a way out. They could never be fully satisfied now, until they found it.

  9

  Ten chows later Bossman called the meeting. Since the meals were distributed every twelve hours or so, governed roughly by the schedule of delivery through the elevator above, this meant five days, outside time. Aton found the distinction pointless; short intervals were measured in chows. Seven hundred chows came to about a year.

  “Must be something big,” Framy said as they gathered. “Awful big. We never had no blowout like this before.”

  Aton ignored him, observing for the first time the full complement of lower Chthon. There seemed to be hundreds of people, and many more women than men. Most were from other garnet mines—people he had never seen before. Tall, short, hirsute, scarred, handsome, old—every one an individual, every one condemned both by his society and by his fellow prisoners. Here was the ultimate concentration of evil.

  Every person was unique. Aton had become adjusted to a smaller circle, as though this were all there was to know of cavern society—but the people he knew had been selected by circumstance and not decision, and were representative. Bossman, Garnet, Framy, Hastings, and the black-haired one—bitter and violent, yes. But evil?

  If there is evil here, he thought, I have not seen it. The evil is in the minionette. The evil is in me.

  Bossman strode to the center of the spacious cavern, double-bitted axe over his shoulder. He stood on top of a small mountain of talus. Above him the intersection of a half-dozen ancient, gigantic tubes traced the history of the formation of this violent nexus. How many times had the rock been rent to form this jumble? As many times as human sensitivity had been rent to form this group. The wind eddied from several tunnels, now and again stirring up little dust devils which were in turn sucked screaming into the mouths of others. This room reflected the essence of subterranean power. It was a fitting meeting place.

  Bossman hallooed, establishing his claim for the attention due the leader. The call reverberated across the passages and mixed with the sound of the wind. Once more, cynically, Aton sized up the man. The chatter stopped.

  “They’re giving us a hard time upstairs,” Bossman said without further preamble. “They want more garnets.”

  There was a general bellow of laughter. “We’ll give the bastards all they want!” someone shouted derisively.

  “All they have to do is trot down and fetch ’em!” a woman finished.

  Bossman did not laugh. “They mean it. They’re cutting down our rations.”

  Now the murmur was angry. “They can’t do that.”

  “They can,” Bossman said. “They are. Each one of us got to give three stones for two meals to keep up the pace.”

  “They ain’t that many stones!”

  Aton looked around and saw faces suddenly haggard with fear. There would be hunger.

  “Why?” Hastings called out. A few snickered bitterly; he would be the first to suffer from a tight market. “What set them off?”

  “Because they gone crazy,” Bossman said. “They got some fool notion we got a blue garnet down here—”

  “Tally knows there’s no such thing. What’s the matter with him?”

  “Tally swears he’s got proof.”

  Framy looked at Aton and leaned over. “You didn’t tell nobody—”

  Aton shook his head. “Never said a word.” The evil is in me, he thought.

  “Me neither. I went back after the salamander was gone and found one of them pieces. It must’ve ate the other. But I thought about what you ’n Hasty said, and I didn’t say nothing.”

  Bossman was speaking. “Tally says they’re going to clamp down until they get that garnet. Ten chows from now it’ll be two stones per…”

  “Great Chthon! They’d kill me for sure if they knew I had a piece,” Framy whispered, his body tense and shaking. “Somebody must’ve found the other.”

  Aton thought, The chimera is the enemy you don’t see.

  “…Ain’t going to take it!” Bossman was roaring. “I don’t like it no better’n you do. They think they got us by the—” He paused. His voice dropped. “But I got a plan.”

  The cavern quieted. “We’re through trying to talk with those Laza-lovin’ weaklings,” he continued. “They been lording it over us too long. We been the ones doing the work. Now we’re going to put the callus on the other foot.

  “We’re going to take over!”

  He paused for the shocked commotion to subside. Revolution! Never before had such a thing been seriously conceived.

  “First thing to do is bribe the guard at the hole. Now we got to pool our information, figure what’ll move him. Maybe there’s a woman, above or below”—his eye fell briefly on the black tresses provocatively draped over one breast of the woman Aton knew—“or maybe we can soften him a little some other way. We got to form a committee, take care of that. Next thing is the plan of attack. I figure we got to get five, six good men up there first, to hold off the softies in case they get wind before we’re ready. Once they’re stationed, quiet-like, we’ll haul up the rest in the basket fast as we can. No one stays below. When we move out, first thing we got to take is their ’denser. They’ll fall in pretty quick without water. Next objective is the ’vator; they might try to bust it and make us all starve. We don’t worry about them freaks in the private cells; just leave ’em be and they won’t notice the difference. Once we got control, we ship all the softies down here and let them mine the garnets—and if they can find any blue ones…”

  Bossman went on, detailing plans in an atmosphere of growing excitement. He showed the qualities that made him a leader: no mere physical strength, but organization, practicality, enthusiasm, and ruthlessness. “But remember—this revolt is dangerous. If we try it and don’t make it, they’ll starve us out. Every one of us. It’ll mean the Hard Trek…”

  * * *

  “After the revolt,” Framy said, again almost dancing with excitement, “after we take over, know what I’m going to do?” The others gave him their attention, enjoying the discussion of grandiose plans. There were a dozen or so gathered at the mine, unable to concentrate on the work. Revolt day was coming; the decisive variable lay in the assignment of the Bribe Committee.

  “I’m going to catch ol’ man Chessy by his white goat’s beard and I’m going to twist his head off until he learns me how to play that game.”

  “You might have better luck with that li’l Prenty,” someone joked. “Bet she’d teach you a game.”

  “No.” Framy was firm. “It’s got to be Chessy himself. Nobody else. We’re going to lay out the pieces and play in front of the whole Chthon, and when I beat him a game the whole Chthon’ll know I’m a brain and never did nothing wrong.”

  They had the courtesy not to laugh. Each man had his secret desire, and many would look foolish in the open.

  Hastings took his turn. “I don’t think I’ll fit through that hole any more,” he burbled, and the others smiled with him. The hole was a yard in diameter. “But if the rope doesn’t break when they haul me up, and the floor above doesn’t sink, why then—”

  “I know!” someone put in. “He’s going to get himself ’pointed grinder on the ’denser!”

  “To reduce.”

  “Ma Skinflint’ll love that.”

  “Love what?”

  Hastings patiently waited for these to subside. “Why then I’ll go to Laza’s cave. I’m quick with my hands, you know”—they knew—“and when she comes at me with that stone knife, why I’ll just pluck it out of her hand, and then…”

  The others leaned forward.

  “Then…”

  “Get on with it, Hasty!”

  “Then I’ll give her what she’s been craving so long, so she won’t ever forget!”

  “What’s that, Hasty?”

  “I’ll pay admission to see that. Hasty!”

  “Don’t worry—you will,” another person said. “One
garnet per throw.” More laughter.

  Framy turned to Aton. “How about you, Fiver? What’s your piece?”

  Aton looked around. He had been expecting a surprise twist from Hastings, and wondered what had become of it. The man had let them down with an unclever climax.

  Garnet was standing quietly at the fringe. She too, it appeared, had misgivings about the future of the revolt. He felt the need to hurt her.

  “Tally’s got a girl, Silly Selene,” he said. “Know her? She made a play for me once, but I had other business. This time I think it will be different.” They gathered in for the telling. “Pretty, yes. You never saw such beauty. A creature of perfection. Her hair takes life when she loves; her eyes become black and green as the deep oceans. As with the hvee, she blooms only when—” He saw their glances of puzzlement. What was wrong? Did they find this fantasy of a simple cavern girl so confusing? He shrugged it off, not caring what they thought. The revolt would never come to pass. “I found her at last. She had been masquerading as human, but once I unveiled her she had to hide from man. I took her to an asteroid cabin—”

  “Not human?” Framy asked, puzzle-lines between his eyes. “Silly?”

  “I suppose her kind evolved from human stock. Genetic modification—but she looked human, divinely so. The legends attribute strange powers, and some… are true. She can’t be immortal, but I think she is semi-telepathic.”

  “She can read minds?”

  “I don’t know. That would explain a lot of things. But it also makes her actions more paradoxical. She made me do terrible things. I loved her when I searched for her, but I hated her when I found her. She was destroying me. I did not dare to give her the hvee—”