Baby Is Three (35 page)

They stood at the crest of a wooded slope that fell away almost vertically to the clearing below. The Hall stood in the center of the clearing, and beyond it was another rise—the mountain shoulder itself, not quite as high as the elevation on which they hid. The weed-grown court offered no shelter except a couple of giant trees, one of which towered over the central building. One thick branch held a mighty, protective arm over the low roof. Garth stared at it and at the opposite slope.

“Bronze!”

Bronze was by him, almost crowding him in his eagerness to serve. “What, Gesell?”

“Just how good are you with that womera of yours?”

“Good enough, Gesell. I once killed a deer at ninety yards.”

“How many?”

“Seventy,” said Bronze, finding himself fixed by Garth’s deep eyes. He gulped and grinned.

“It’s damn near a hundred and fifty over to the top of the bluff—see it there, the sheer rock straight over the Hall?”

“Uh-huh. I could peg a spear over there. Wouldn’t hit too hard, though.”

“Could you put it exactly there?”

Confidently, Bronze made a ring of his thumb and forefinger. “I could put it through that.”

“Show me.”

Bronze selected a spear and fitted the butt of it to the cup-shaped hook in the end of his throwing stick. He tested the ground under his feet, glanced overhead to check for overhanging brush, and moved a little to the left. For a moment he stood poised, fixing the opposite cliff with a hypnotic eye. Then he moved. His arm was a blur, and the stick itself was invisible. It all but crackled as it cleft the air.

For a brief moment Garth lost sight of the spear altogether. Then his quick eye caught its flicker just before it stopped, deep-buried in
a tree-trunk at the lip of the rock cliff. He held his breath, and in a second or so he heard, through the warm afternoon air, the soft, solid
thunk
of its impact.

Incredible! He thought. He said, boredly, “Not too bad. I’d hate to depend on that thing if there was any wind, though.”

Garth threw off his belt. He stood up in a single garment, a skin-tight shorts-and-tunic combination of midnight blue, with a narrow white stripe all the way around under his armpits and another just below his waistline. Raising his arms he felt along this line and drew out a small ring, which he slid along the stripe. It was, judging by the wide eyes and slack mouth, Bronze’s first view of a slide fastener.

Garth repeated the movement with a second ring on the lower stripe, and drew off the center portion of his tunic over his head—a single, resilient tube of soft, thin fabric. He ran its edge through his fingers, stopped, and carefully picked out a thread, which he worked free. Ignoring the astounded Bronze, he began to unravel the material.

“What you doing?”

Garth said, “Make yourself useful. I want you to sweep the ground clean—really clean—some place where it’s solid. I want an area six by six feet without so much as a straw on it, with clear air above it. Get to it.”

Willing and mystified, Bronze did as he was told. By the time Garth had thirty feet of thread cleared, the area was ready and Bronze, panting, was back at Garth’s side. Garth took pity on him—he was obviously about to burst with curiosity. He held up the thread. “Break off a piece for me, Bronze boy.”

Bronze took the end of the thread, wrapped it around his fists, and—“Wait!” laughed Garth.

He picked up two heavy pieces of tree branch, unwound the thread from the big unresisting fists, and took a couple of turns of the thread around each piece of wood, leaving about six inches of thread between them. “Now try it,” he said. “Grip the wood, not the thread.”

Puzzled, Bronze grasped the two pieces of wood and pulled. The thread went taut with a musical twang which rose in pitch as Bronze
pulled. A look of utter amazement crossed his broad face. He relaxed, turned the two pieces of wood so that he wound up more thread and had only two inches between them. He set his back against a tree, knotted his jaw, and, with his great hands close to his chest, began to pull. His triceps swelled until the stretched skin shone. His body moved visibly away from the tree that he leaned against as his scapular muscles bunched and crawled.

There was a muffled crackling from his shoulders, and Garth stepped forward in alarm. Then one of the pieces of wood gave. The thread sliced through it like a scythe through a stand of wheat, and Bronze stood gasping, staring foolishly at the cleancut stub of branch in his hand. The thread fell away, unstretched, unbroken.

“I gave you the wood,” Garth grinned, “because it would’ve sliced through your paws.”

“What Ffanx stuff is that?” gasped Bronze.

“That isn’t Ffanx stuff; it’s strictly human. Molecularly condensed fibre spun under massive ion bombardment, if that makes any never mind to you. It has linear cohesion in the order of six tons test and eight and a half tons breaking strain. And it has no rotary cohesion at all.”

“Yeah,” said Bronze, “but what is it?”

“It’s what you’re going to tie to a spear and fire over the gulch for me. Now let’s get busy and flake it out here. There’s four hundred yards of it in this shirt. Half that should be enough. We’ll give it a little more.”

For two hours, as the afternoon shadows grew long, they worked, laying the thread meticulously in a series of small coils. Each turn of each coil lay flat and obedient. Slowly, the coils began to carpet the cleared area. They talked little, except toward the end of the laborious job. Finally—“That should do it,” Garth said.

Bronze straightened up and punched himself in his aching kidneys. “I’m hungry.”

“Feed us,” said Garth.

Bronze took up his quiver and throwing-stick without a word, and glided away through the underbrush. Within a quarter of an
hour he was back, carrying two large rabbits. One had a ragged hole through the head just behind the eyes, and the other was still impaled through the ribcage and heart by one of the stubby spears. Bronze squatted down, pulled out a worn knife, and with the swift casualness of long practice, gutted and skinned one of the animals and handed the warm and dripping quarters to Garth.

“Now listen to me,” Garth said with his mouth full. “I don’t know for sure who those Guardians are. But this I do know for sure—that green fire you saw doesn’t come from them. It comes from under the ground—an energy field activated by something they carry under those long robes … Why do I bother to explain anything to you?”

“I’m listening,” grunted Bronze, spitting out a piece of gristle.

“All right. Now get this, it takes two Guardians, both on the line of those underground cables, to set off that fire. But
it takes two of them to do it
. Do you understand? If I can get one of them out of the way, you can jump the other one without any danger.”

“Uh?” Bronze wiped rabbit blood off his chin.

“Are you following this? I’m going to leave you in a minute, and I want to know I can depend on you. Are you going to take my word for it—that you can tackle a Guardian without danger of getting burned?”

Bronze looked at him. “You said I could, didn’t you?” he asked simply.

Garth let the grin come through again. “I think we’re going to make it, Bronze boy,” he said. “Now here’s the plan.”

The night was cool and still, but Garth, naked except for his belt, his boots, and the briefest of shorts—which were all that was left of his tunic—was warm and slick with sweat as he completed the long, silent climb to the top of the bluff. He filled and emptied his lungs in deep, open-throated gasps as he felt his way along the lip of the sheer rock wall of the cliff. He found the bald spot and the tree into which Bronze had sunk his test spear that afternoon.

He stepped behind the tree in which Bronze’s spear still stuck, and, reaching around it with his flashlight in his hand, sent a quick, white beam up the trunk.

Then he waited.

There was a crescent moon in the sky, a chunky moon that urgently wanted to be gibbous. Somewhere a katydid cried for the grease like the proverbial squeaky wheel, and a tree-toad plucked away at its piano-wire heartstrings. Over the brink was blackness—eighty feet or better, straight down—and then, away from the cliff’s shadow, a hundred yards from the base of the bluff, stood the arched shadow of the great tree with its limb stretched out over the main building like a giant frozen in a gesture of benison.

Where was Bronze? The opposite hill was a featureless mass of shadow and shifting moonlight. Was he there, sighting carefully on the place where he had seen Garth’s gleam of light? Or was he gone, freed from the spell of wonderment and awe that Garth had put on him, strolling back toward his village to spend tonight and the rest of his musclebound life with idle speculation about the time he almost helped to open the Gateway?

The katydid and the treefrog suddenly were more than Garth could bear. With a snort of impatience he stepped from behind the tree. Immediately there was a whining whisper that crescendoed closer—air fanned his nose and eyes, and something slammed into the tree trunk. He went to his knees, staring up into blackness and then, in spite of himself, laughed. “I hope I’ve used up all my dumbness for tonight,” he thought ruefully. He had known the impossibility of Bronze’s hitting the tree again, especially in the dark—and had almost stepped out of the shelter of the tree-trunk in time to catch the spear with his silly head.

The spear hadn’t stuck in the tree, for he had cautioned Bronze to bury the point in a piece of heartwood; he’d never have been able to pull it out of the tree, and, to do what he had to do, the thread-end must be free.

He fumbled about for the spear and found it. From his belt-pouch he drew a pair of molded gloves, thin, light, impenetrable, made of the same condensed matter as his tunic. Slipping them on, he picked up the spear and purely by touch found the thread. He brought it in hand over hand, yards of it, until suddenly it jerked sharply, twice, in his grip. He grinned. That was Bronze’s “Good luck!”

Taking a bight of the thread, he walked once around the tree, thrust the loop of the bight under the main part where it would be pinched between that part and the tree-trunk. A slight tug on the free end would cast the line adrift.

He took a deep breath and walked to the cliff-edge. Everything depended on his estimates of the distances involved.

This is it, he thought
. Carefully he took the thread at the point his measurements had brought him to, and tied it to the back of his belt. He knelt and swept a space on the ground, and carefully recoiled the line so it would flake away freely. Then he went to the edge of the cliff, reached up over his head, and got his gloved hands on the anchored part of the line, where it passed tautly from tree to tree across the hollow. He watched then, and tried not to think.

The buildings were dark, except for a dim orange light in the main Hall. He could see a flickering, an occasional movement as if restless figures inside passed and re-passed the light.

What the hell was Bronze doing over there?
Had he forgotten what he was supposed to do next? The big, stupid, slow …

From the other side of the canyon came a titanic crashing as a boulder went bounding down the slope, and with it a blood-chilling yell that echoed and re-echoed and faded repetitively off into the distance. It sounded like a score of lost souls calling and answering from strategic points up and down both sides of the valley.

What a set of pipes!
Garth thought, and stepped off the cliff.

He could feel the rod-hard, stretched thread humming in his hands as the gentle night wind stroked it. He hung for a moment, then put one hand before the other. And again. And again. His body began to swing forward and back as he went along the line. He swore under his breath and checked the movement by a swift, synchronized run-and-stop, run-and-stop with his hands.

His shoulders began to ache and he tried to forget it. He hung by one hand for a moment and allowed himself the luxury of bringing the other arm down, flexing the fingers. Hand over hand over hand over hand …

He put his hands together and crossed the wrists, so that his body turned to look back the way he had come. The shadowed cliff he
had left was already distant, one with the hill-blackness that surrounded the buildings. He went on. Before and below him, the great tree came closer and closer and closer as he inched along. Too close?

He swung along, arms all but numb, shoulders an agony, hands reduced to two stiffly disobedient hooks that grasped, released, grasped, released, with greater and greater reluctance.

There was some sort of commotion by the building. Someone called out. A Guardian? At that moment he couldn’t have defined a Guardian, and wouldn’t have cared. The universe was one hand after another.

It came! He had watched for it each second, and when it came it took him totally by surprise. There was the faintest of tugs at his belt as the free end of the line drew tight, and then, far behind him, the thread whipped away from the tree he had left.

He dropped like a nighthawk.

The ground struck his knee a single, stunning blow and then he was hurtling upward toward the eaves of the Hall. He reached the top of his swing and all the strain was suddenly gone from his arms. For a single, terrifying split-second he was afraid his cramped hands would not let go. Then he was free of the line. He concentrated his whole being into keeping his balance, flexing his knees.

The dark roof came up and took him. He gathered the shock in his thigh-muscles, turned one shoulder down and rolled.

Then for a long, luxurious minute he lay still and rested.

After Bronze shoved the boulder over the edge and roared his terrible challenge into the night, he scuttled like a frightened rabbit through the dark tunnel of a trail that angled down the slope. “Crazy, crazy,” he muttered. It couldn’t work, that crazy plan of Gesell’s. It was marvelous, heroic, brilliant, but—crazy. And he, Bronze, was crazy too, to think of helping. He’d go home. He’d had enough—enough to tell all Prellton about for the rest of his life.

But in spite of his thoughts, his legs carried him cautiously down the slope to the deadly courtyard of Gesell Hall.