Derron caught a glimpse of something metallic and low, four-legged, wide and fast-moving as a ground-car. He snapped open his jaw and pressed down, inside his helmet, on the trigger of his own laser weapon. From the center of the slave"s forehead a pale, thin shaft of light crackled out, aimed automatically at the spot where Derron"s eyes were focused.
The slave-unit"s beam smote the charging machine at a point somewhere amid the k.n.o.bs of metal that made it seem to have a face, then glanced off to explode a small tree into a cloud of flame and steam.
The shot might have done damage, for the enemy broke off its rush in midstride and dived for cover behind a hillock, a gra.s.s-tufted hump of earth less than five feet high.
Two officers in Operations, both of whom were evidently monitoring the video signal from the slave, began to speak simultaneously, giving Derron orders and advice. But even if they had gone about it more sensibly, he had no time to do anything now except go his own way. Somewhat surprised at his own aggressiveness, he found himself running the slave-unit in a crouch around the tiny hill.
He wanted the fight to be over quickly, one way or the other. He charged at top speed, yelling wordlessly inside his helmet as he fired his laser. The berserker burst into his view, crouched like a metal lion, squat and immensely powerful. If there had been a spare moment in which to hesitate, Derron might have flinched away, for in spite of all his training the illusion was very strong that he was actually about to hurl his own tender flesh upon the waiting monster.
As it was, he had no time to flinch. With all the inertia of its metal ma.s.s the slave ran at full speed into the crouching berserker. The trees in the swamp quivered.
A few seconds" experience was enough to convince Derron that the decision to use anthropomorphic fighting machines in this operation had been a great blunder. Wrestling was a tactic not likely to succeed against a machine of equal or superior power, one not limited in the speed of its reactions by the slowness of protoplasmic nerves. For all the slave-unit"s fusion-powered strength, which Operations had envisioned as rending the enemy limb from limb, Derron could do no more than hang on desperately, gripping the berserker in a kind of a half nelson while it bucked and twisted like a wild load-beast to throw him off.
Once the fight started it seemed to Derron that every authority in Operations was looking over his shoulder, and that most of them had something to say about it. Voices in Derron"s ears shouted orders and abuse at him and at one another. Some of them were probably trying to get the others off his back, but he had no time to hear them anyway. The green forest was spinning round him faster than his eyes and brain could sort it out. In a dizzily detached fraction of a second he could notice how his feet flew uselessly on the ends of his metal legs, breaking down small trees as the monster whirled him. He tried to turn his head to bring the Cyclops eye of his laser to bear, but now one of the berserker"s fore-limbs was gripping the slave"s neck, holding the slave"s head immobile. He kept trying desperately to get a more solid grip for his own steel arms around the berserker"s thick neck, but then his grip was broken, and he flew.
Before the slave could even bounce, the berserker was on top of it, far faster and more violent than any maddened bull. Derron fired his laser wildly.
The dizziness of the spinning, and now the panicky sensation of being painlessly trampled and battered, raised in him a giddy urge to laughter. In a moment more the fight would be lost, and he would be able to give up.
The berserker tossed him once again. And then it was running away, fleeing from Derron"s wildly slashing sword of light. As lightly as a deer the squat machine leaped away among the trees and vanished from Derron"s sight.
Dizzily he tried to sit up on the peculiar sandy slope where he had been flung. In doing so he at once discovered why the berserker had chosen to retreat; some important part had been broken in the slave, so that its legs now trailed as limp and useless as those of a man with a broken spine. But since the slave"s laser still worked and its powerful arms could still do damage, the berserker"s computer brain had decided to break off the fight. The berserker saw no reason to trade zaps with a crippled but still dangerous antagonist, not when it could be busy at its basic program of killing people.
The Operations voices had their final say.
"Odegard, why in the-"
"In the Holy One"s name, Odegard, what do you think-"
"Odegard, why didn"t you... ? Oh, do what you can!"
With a click they were all gone from his helmet, leaving their disgust behind. He had the dazed impression that they were all hurrying away in a jealous group, to descend like a cloud of scavenger birds upon some other victim. If his experience since taking the field was anywhere near typical, the foul-up of the whole operation must be approaching the monumental stage, that stage where avoidance of blame would begin to take precedence in a good many minds.
Anyway, he was still in the field, now with half a unit to work with. His disgust was mainly with himself.
Gone now was the wish to get things settled quickly, one way or the other. Even his dread of responsibility was gone, at least for the moment. Right now all he wanted was another chance at the enemy.
Holding the slave propped with its arms in a sitting position, he looked about him. He was halfway down the conical side of a soggy sandpit that was ten or fifteen meters across at the top. Nothing grew inside the pit; outside, the nearby trees were nearly all in bad shape. Those that had escaped being broken in the wrestling match were blackened and smoking from his wildly aimed laser.
What had happened to the boy?
Working his arms like a swimmer, Derron churned his way uphill through the sand to a spot from which he could see over the rim of the pit. He could recognize, a short distance away, the tall tree in which the youngster had been clinging for his life; but he was not in sight now, living or dead.
In a sudden little sand slide the crippled slave slid once more down the tricky slope toward the watery mess that filled the bottom of the funnel.
Funnel?
Derron at last recognized the place where the slave-unit had been thrown. It was the trap of a poison-digger, a species of large carnivore exterminated on Sirgol in early historical times. Looking down now at the bottom of the pit, Derron met the gaze of two grayish eyes, set in a large lump of head that floated half above the surface of the water.
Matt was standing just behind the boy Dart, while both of them peered very cautiously through the bushes toward the poison-digger"s trap. The rest of The People were a few hundred yards away, resting in the concealment of some undergrowth while they scratched up a few roots and grubs to eat.
Matt could just catch glimpses, above the rim of the funnel, of what seemed to be a head. It was certainly not the poison-digger"s head, but a shape as bald and smoothly curved as a drop of water.
"I think it is a stone-lion," Matt whispered very softly.
"Ah, no," whispered Dart. "This is the big man I told you about, the stone-man. Ah, what a fight he and the stone-lion had! But I didn"t wait to see the end of it; I jumped from the tree and ran while I could."
Matt hesitated, and then decided to risk a closer look. Motioning with his head for Dart to follow, he bent down and crept forward. From behind another bush they could see down into the pit, and Matt was just in time to observe something that made him gasp silently in amazement. Poison-Digger, who could master any creature once it had fallen into his pit, reared up from his slime and struck. And the stone-man simply slapped Digger"s nose with casual force, like someone swatting a child. And with a howl like the cry of a punished child, the Bad One splashed down under his water again!
The man of shiny stone muttered to himself. His words were filled with power and feeling, but spoken in a tongue unknown to Matt. He slapped at his legs, which lay twisted as if they were dead, and then with big arms he started trying to dig his way up out of the pit. Stone-Man made the sand fly, and Matt thought he might eventually get himself out, but it looked like a very hard struggle.
"Now do you believe me?" Dart was whispering fiercely. "He did fight the stone-lion. I saw him!"
"Yes, yes, I can believe it." Still crouching and keeping out of sight of the pit, Matt led the young one away, back toward the others of the band. He supposed that a fight between two such beings might have accounted for all the burnt and broken trees that had puzzled him earlier, and for all the noise that The People had heard. Now, while leading Dart away from the pit, Matt looked hopefully among the bushes for a huge shiny corpse. A dead stone-lion was one sight Matt wanted very much to see-it might help blot out another picture that would not leave his mind, the picture of what a stone-lion had done to his two young wives.
Huddling under bushes with the rest of the band, Matt talked things over with the more intelligent adults.
"I want to approach this stone-man," he said. "And try to help him."
"Why?"
Finding the words to explain why was not easy. For one thing, Matt was eager to join forces, if he could, with any power that was able to fight against a stone-lion. But there was more to it than that, for this particular stone-man did not look capable of much more fighting.
The others listened to Matt, but kept muttering doubtfully. Finally the oldest woman of The People took from her lizard-skin pouch (in which she also carried the seed of fire) the finger bones of her predecessor in office. Three times she shook the bones, and threw them on the muddy ground, and studied the pattern in which they fell. But she could not see the stone-man in the bones and she could offer no advice.
The more he thought about it, the more determined Matt became. "I"m going to try to help the stone-man. If he does turn out to be hostile, he can"t chase us on his dead legs."
The slave-unit"s ears picked up the approach of the whole band of The People, though they were being very quiet.
"I"m getting some company," Derron subvocalized. He got no immediate reply from any of the too many chiefs who had been overseeing him before; and that suited him just as well for the moment.
The People drew near, and the bolder among them peered cautiously from behind bush and tree trunk at the slave-unit. When they saw its head was raised, looking at them, they stepped one at a time out of concealment, showing weaponless hands. Derron imitated the gesture as well as he could; he needed one hand to support the slave in a sitting position.
The People seemed slowly to gain confidence from the slave"s peaceful gestures, its quiescence, and probably most of all from its obviously crippled condition. Soon the whole band had come out into the open and stood whispering among themselves as they peered curiously down into the pit.
"Anybody listening?" Derron subvocalized "I"ve got a crowd of people here. Get me a linguist!"
Since the start of Time Operations, a desperate effort had been made to learn as many as possible of the languages and dialects of Sirgol"s past. Disguised microphones and video pickups had been carried on spy devices to many places and times in the past where there were people to be studied. The program of study had been pushed as hard as possible, but the magnitude of the job was overwhelming. In the modern world there were just two people who had managed to learn something of the speech of these Neolithic seminomads, and those two were very busy people today.
"Odegard!" When response did come, it took the form of a blast in his helmet that made Derron wince.
The voice did not identify itself, but sounded like that of Colonel Borss. "Don"t let those people get away from you! Even if your unit"s crippled, it can offer them some protection."
"Understand." Derron sighed, subsubvocally. "How about getting me a linguist?"
"We"re trying to get you one. You"re in a vital area there.... Stand guard over those people until we can get another unit to the spot!"
"Understood." Things were tough in the berserker-ridden Neolithic today. But he might, after all, be better off sealed up in his master-unit than out in the foul-up and confusion that must be engulfing the Section.
"Anyone that size is bound to eat a lot of food," one of the older men was complaining to Matt.
"With his dead legs," Matt answered, "I don"t suppose he"ll live long enough to eat very much." Matt was trying to talk some of the braver men into giving him a hand in pulling the stone-man up out of the trap.
Stone-Man seemed to be waiting with some confidence of getting help.
The man debating against Matt cheerfully switched arguments. "If he"s not going to live long, there"s no use trying to help him. Anyway, he"s not one of The People."
"No, he"s not. But still..." Matt continued to search for new words, new ways of thought. He would help the stone-man alone if he had to. By arguing he was trying to make his feelings clear to himself as well as to the others. He saw this strange being who had tried to help Dart as a part of some larger order, one to which The People also belonged, as if there could be a band, a tribe-of-all-men, some group set in opposition to all the wild beasts and demons, that killed and afflicted men by day and night.
"Suppose there was a band of stone-people around here," suggested another man. A few of The People looked over their shoulders apprehensively. "They would be dangerous enemies to have, but strong friends."
The suggestion did not strike root; the idea either of friendship or of enmity with other bands did not have much importance in The People"s life.
But Dart piped up, "This one wants to be our friend."
The oldest woman scoffed. "So would anyone who was crippled and needed help."
A female linguist"s voice joined the muted hive that was buzzing anew in Derron"s helmet. She provided him with a rather halting translation of part of the debate among The People, though she was ordered away after only a couple of minutes to work with another operator. From Operations voices in the background, Derron overheard that so far two berserkers had been destroyed, but ten slave-units had been lost. And the appearance of the slave-units tended to terrify and scatter the people they were supposed to be protecting.
"Tell them to try pretending they"re crippled," Derron advised the Section. "All right, I"ll do without a linguist if I have to. That may be better than getting a word or two wrong somewhere. But how about dropping me some of those self-defense weapons to hand out to these people? It"ll be too late for that when the berserker comes back." The machine he had fought must have gotten sidetracked following some old trail or pursuing some other band, but he had to a.s.sume that it would be back. "And drop me grenades, not arrows. There"s only one man in this band who has a bow." Inside the slave"s big torso was a chamber into which small items could be sent from the future as required.
"The self-defense weapons are being prepared," someone a.s.sured him. "It"s dangerous to hand "em out until they"re absolutely needed, though. Suppose they decide to use "em on the slave? Or blow each other up by mistake?"
"I think it"ll be more dangerous to wait too long. You can at least drop them now."
"They"re being prepared."
The way things were going today, Derron didn"t know whether he could believe that or not.
The People seemed still to be discussing the slave-unit, while he kept it sitting in what he hoped was a patient and trustworthy att.i.tude. According to the brief translation Derron had heard, the tall young man with the bow slung over his shoulder was the one arguing in favor of helping the "stone-man."
At last this man with the bow, who seemed to be the nearest thing to a chief that these people had, succeeded in talking one of the other men into helping him. Together they approached one of the saplings that had been splintered in the fight and twisted it loose from its stump, hacking through the tough strings of bark with a hand ax. Then the two bold men brought the sapling right up to the edge of the poison-digger"s trap. Gripping it by the branches, they pushed the splintered end down to where the slave could grasp it. Derron caught hold with both hands.
The two men pulled, then grunted with surprise at the weight they felt. The boy who had been up in the tree came to help.
"Odegard, this is Colonel Borss," said a helmet-voice in urgent tones. "We can see now what the berserkers" target is: the first written language on the planet originates very near your present location.
The deaths so far haven"t weakened its probability too much, but one more killing could be the one to push it under the real-time threshold. There"s a peduncle effect, of course, and we can"t pinpoint the inventor, but the people in your band are certainly among the ancestors of his tribe."
Derron was clinging to the sapling as the slave-unit was dragged out over the edge of the pit. "Thanks for the word, Colonel. How about those grenades I requested?"
"We"re rushing two more slave-units into your sector there, Odegard, but we"re having some technical troubles with them. Three of the enemy have been destroyed now... Grenades, you say?" There was a brief pause. "They tell me some grenades are coming up." The colonel"s voice clicked off.
Their rescue job complete, The People had all fallen back a few steps and were watching the machine carefully. Derron braced himself on one arm and repeated his peaceful gestures with the other. This seemed to rea.s.sure his audience about the slave, but they promptly found something else to worry about-the setting sun, which they kept glancing at over their shoulders as they talked to one another.
Derron needed no linguist to know that they were concerned about finding some place of relative safety in which to spend the night.
In another minute The People had gathered up their few belongings and were on the march, with the air of folk resuming a practiced activity. The man with the bow spoke several times to the slave-unit and looked disappointed when his words were not understood, but he could not dally. Stone-Man was left free to help himself as best he might.
So Derron trailed along at the end of The People"s hiking file. He soon found that on level ground he could keep the slave-unit moving along pretty well on its long arms, walking it like a broken-backed ape on the knuckles of its hands with its legs dragging. The People cast frequent backward glances at this pathetic creature, regarding it with mixed and not altogether favorable emotions. But even more frequently they looked back farther in the direction they had come from, plainly fearful that something else could be on their trail.
If The People were not expecting the berserker machine, Derron was. The slave"s leg-dragging track was certainly plain enough, and the sight of it might cause the killing machine to approach with some caution, but it would still come on.
Colonel Borss came back to take over the situation. "Odegard, our screens show the berserker"s area of disturbance moving south away from you and then coming back; evidently you were right about it being on a false trail of some kind. Your berserker is the only one we haven"t bagged yet, but it seems to be in the most vital spot. What I think we"ll do is this: the two slave-units being sent to reinforce you are going to catch up with your band, in a few minutes present-time. We"ll have them follow your band"s line of march, keeping just out of sight, one on each flank; don"t want to scare your people with a lot of metal men and have them scatter-we"ve had enough of that problem today. When your people stop somewhere for the night, you stay with "em, and we"ll set up the other two units in ambush."
"Understand." Derron kept moving, walking with his arms, the master-unit rising and falling slightly as the slave jolted over the b.u.mpy terrain. A certain amount of feedback was necessary to give the operator the feeling of presence in the past.
The colonel"s plan sounded reasonable, as Derron thought it over. And by Derron"s interpretation of the law of averages, something should go right pretty soon.
Falling dusk washed the wilderness in a kind of dark beauty. The People were marching with the swampy, half-wooded valley on their right and the low rocky hills now immediately on their left. The man with the bow, whose name seemed to be something like Matt, kept anxiously scanning these hills as he walked at the head of the file.
"What about dropping those grenades to me now? Ho, Operations? Anybody there?"
"We"re setting up this ambush now, Odegard. We don"t want your people hurling grenades around at random in the dark."
There was some sense to that, Derron supposed. And his slave could not throw anything efficiently while it had to walk and balance on its hands.
The leader Matt turned suddenly aside and went trotting up a barren hillside, the other people following briskly. Scrambling after them as best he could, Derron saw that they were heading for a narrow cave entrance, set into a steep low cliff like a door in the wall of a house. Everyone halted a little distance away from the hole. Before Derron had quite caught up, Matt had unslung his bow and nocked an arrow.
Another man then pitched a sizable rock into the darkness of the cave, having to stretch around an L-bend at the entrance to do so. At once there reverberated out of the depths a growl, which scattered The People like the good survival experts they were.
When the cave bear came to answer the door, it discovered the slave alone, a crippled foundling on the porch.
The bear"s slap of greeting bowled the unbalanceable slave over. From a supine position Derron slapped back, bending the bear"s snout slightly and provoking a blood-freezing roar. Made of tougher stuff than poison-diggers, the bear strained its fangs on the slave-unit"s face. Still flat on his back, Derron lifted the bear with his steel arms and pitched it downhill. Go away!
The first roar had been only a tune-up for the one that followed. Derron didn"t want to break even an animal"s lifeline here if he could help it, but time was pa.s.sing, and his real enemy would be drawing near.
He threw the bear a little farther this time. The animal bounced once, landed on its feet and running, and kept right on going into the swamp. Howls trailed in the air behind it for half a minute.
The People emerged from behind rocks and inside crevices and gathered slowly around the slave-unit, for once forgetting to look over their shoulders along the way they had come. Derron had the feeling that in another moment they were going to fall down and worship him; before any such display could get started, he knuckle-walked the slave-unit into the cave and scanned the darkness-the slave"s eyes adjusted quickly to see in whatever wavelengths were present-to make sure it was unoccupied. It was a high narrow cavern with a second opening, small and windowlike, high up on the wall toward the rear.
There was plenty of room to shelter the entire band; Matt had made a good discovery.
When Derron came out of the cave, he found The People getting ready to build a good-sized fire at the mouth; they were gathering wood from under the trees at the edge of the swamp and lugging it hurriedly uphill. Far across the valley, a small spark of orange burned in the thickening purplish haze of falling night, marking the encampment of some other band.
"Operations, how are those ambush arrangements coming along?"
"The other two units are just taking up their positions. They have you in sight at the mouth of the cave."
"Good."
Let The People build their fire, then, and let the berserker be drawn by it. It would find the band as well protected as they would ever be.
From a pouch of some kind of tough skin, one of the old women produced a bundle of bark, which she unwrapped to reveal a smoldering center. With incantations and a judicious use of wood chips, she soon had the watchfire blazing. Its upper tongues reached high and bright against the fast-dimming sky.
The band filed into the cave, the slave-unit last to enter, right after Matt. Just inside the L-bend of the entrance, Derron sat his proxy, leaning against the wall, and relaxed his arms with a great sigh. He was ready for a rest. In spite of the servo a.s.sists, he had had a lot of exercise.
He had no sooner relaxed a notch than the night outside erupted without warning into battle. There was the crackle and slam of laser flame, the clang and squeal and crunch of armored bodies meeting. The people in the cave jumped as one person to their feet.