The same river of rock had knocked out the beamer, and we were choking in the dark, coughing and hacking in the dust. For a moment I could do no more than lean against the wall and try to ease my tortured lungs. Then somehow I got my belt light on. In the place of the wide rays of the beamer, it was only a small thrust against the dark. And what it showed made me want to switch it off again.
Our cart, which had been left in the middle, must have acted in part as a dam, though the force of the sweep had carried it on. And in the debris that had piled up behind it—Lugard—he must be caught in that!
"Gytha! Dinan! Thad!" Annet's voice, so husky that the names could barely be distinguished, rang out from beside me. She was calling the roll.
One by one they answered. But I was already at the pile of rocks and Thad not long in joining me. We had to work with what seemed painful slowness since the stuff moved and we were afraid of starting a second slip. Then Gytha joined us, also lighting her belt torch, and Emrys. Lights flashed on, giving us a good sight. Annet took from me the stones I freed to put to one side, and I saw each of us had such a coworker.
We made no sounds except the coughs that hurt the throat, and I knew that all were doing as I did, listening with both fear and hope gnawing at them. We had to go slowly when there was such a need for speed.
It was part of the cargo of the cart that had protected him from an instant crushing death we discovered when we had him free. By some chance, two of the bundles had fallen on either side of his body, providing a part defense.
I hardly dared to move him from where he lay face down. He made no sound, and I was certain he was gone, but we cleared a space about him, and Annet quickly unrolled blankets, spreading them out as long as his dust-covered body. Somehow we got him over, face up, on that small easing.
His eyes were closed, and there was a dark trickle from the corner of his mouth. I am no medico, my knowledge being only enough to provide first aid in an accident. He had broken bones and, I was sure, internal injuries. Annet had the kit open. Luckily it lay close to the wall against which Lugard would have been safe had he not returned for Dagny. But there was little in that save what might alleviate pain for a short time. And to move him, even onto the cart, could kill him, but it could be our only chance to save him.
"Get the cart free," I ordered Thad. "Then strip it down."
He nodded and shooed the other boys before him to that task. Annet spilled some water to sponge Lugard's face from her canteen onto a strip of cloth she tore from an inner garment, and under her touch his eyes opened. I had hoped he would remain unconscious. Such hurts as he had taken must keep him in agony.
I saw his lips move and leaned over him. "Don't try to talk—"
"No—" He got that out as a whisper. "Map—inner seal pocket—get on—to safe quarters." Then his face went oddly slack, and his mouth fell loose, while the trickle from it became a dark froth, which Annet wiped away.
My hand felt for the pulse at his throat; I feared to try to touch his chest to hunt for heart beat. He was not gone—not yet.
Only I did not believe he could stand even lifting to the cart, and to carry him in a blanket would be worse. There were supplies ahead—he had mentioned that earlier. Suppose there were medical ones among those? Lugard had had all the stores of the Butte to plunder. In such there might be something—though one part of my mind told me that anything less than quick hospitalization at the port would not save him.
But you cannot sit and wait for death, not when there is the slimmest of fighting chances. Annet must have agreed with that, for she looked across to me.
"Take the map, go on. There may be things there—"
But to leave the rest—Again she read my indecision.
"It is the best. We cannot move him now. There may be a stretcher there—other things—"
"And if there is another rock fall?" I demanded.
"We can pull the blankets over there." She nodded to the side, her hands still busy with that patient washing away of the ever-gathering blood foam. "We shall have to do that much. And we shall stay there. We can't leave him here, and we can't wait forever. There has to be something—perhaps a better cart. You must try it, Vere."
We pulled Lugard a few inches at a time over to the wall. As gently as I could, I unsealed his stained tunic and took out a folded piece of plasta-mat. The lines on it caught fire from our lamps, and I saw it was drawn with cor-ink for use in limited light. But the branching passages on it were many, and it took me a moment's study to locate the tunnel that held us. Once I had traced that from our entrance point, I could see the path ahead running reasonably straight. And perhaps Lugard's secure place was not too far beyond.
Thad had found the beamer and set it up. It had been made for hard usage in the field, and after he had tightened a loose connection, it flashed on again. I took up one of the canteens, longing to drink but prudence warned me to endure the thirst as long as I could and conserve water, the more so as we found that the tank of liquid on the cart was leaking. Annet moved quickly to add what she could of its contents to all our canteens and began hunting around for other possible containers.
I stood for a long moment over Lugard before I left. He was still breathing, and as long as a man lives, there is hope. I clung to that as I went.
The beamer provided a beacon behind me for a space, but I did not turn to look at it. Then I came to one of those divisions of ways, and this time my fire-drawn map said not to stay on the main course but to take a new. Within moments I was in the dark and flashed on my belt torch.
Caves have their inhabitants, which vary with the depth, moisture, content, and the like. I had seen in the labs some blind creatures taken out of this eternal dark. Beltane had once had a small biospeleology department, but when Yain Takuat had died, there had been no replacement for his specialty.
Only the creatures I had seen had come from the moist water-formed caves, while this was different country. I swept my light from side to side, hunting for any hint that this was not just dead rock. I would have welcomed a single slime trail, a single flatworm clinging to the roof overhead.
What my light did pick up was a curl of skin and bones rolled against the wall. I took a step closer. My first aversion was not justified—these were no human remains but the dried remnants of a wart-horn, one larger than I had seen before. But those lived in swamps. What was such doing here? Unless there was some outlet in the maze, leading to water, and the thing wandered in and became lost. That was reassuring in its way with the promise of water.
It was only a little way beyond that I came to where Lugard had said we could not take the cart, for here the floor of the tunnel, which had been sloping gradually all the way since we had left the surface, now gave way. There were a series of ledges—a giant staircase—to descend. I looked at it in despair. We could never get Lugard down unless we could find some aid—
I thought of a stretcher, even a section of crate or box. Could he be lashed tightly to that and lowered? When one is desperate, one can always improvise. Now I swung from one ledge to the next, my belt torch showing a wild scene of fallen rubble and bad footing below.
The air here was colder, far more so with every ledge I passed. I found it hard to lay hand to the surfaces of the rock, for there was frost on some of them. Then I reached the bottom and picked a way among heaps of fallen scree. There was a path here. Heavy objects had been dragged along, leaving a road. I wondered at the energy Lugard had expended. Or were these signs left by those who had once thought to make an underground war retreat before Butte Hole had been closed?
This lower cave widened out from the narrow end where I entered. Then my light picked out what was there, and I was startled into a full stop. There were structures, three of them, though my light could barely reach the end of the farthest one. Between them were stockpiles of boxes and crates. Lugard certainly could not have done all this. It was the remains of the plan never carried through.
Each of the buildings was walled with cor-blocks, which had probably been fused together on the spot. They each possessed a single door in one wall but no other openings. And the roofs were half arcs made of sheets of cor that had been welded into solid masses.
If they had been locked, Lugard must have opened them. Perhaps the same master key that controlled the Butte door also worked here. The first I explored must have been intended for a headquarters, perhaps also a com center. The divisions in it did not reach the ceiling but arose about seven feet from the floor to make three rooms of the structure. One had two desks, a rank of files, and the board of a small computer. The next had banks of com boards almost as elaborate as those in the Butte. I tried to activate one. I do not know what I hoped for—perhaps to reach some answer on the surface—but here all was dead. The third and last "room" had four bunks and very simple living arrangements—by the look never put to use.
The next building held more bunks in one large room and at its end a smaller compartment with a cooking unit and water taps. I turned one, and there was a thin trickle from it, dripping down into a cor-basin. Water, anyway.
In the third building was a bewildering array of control boards, not coms I was sure. Perhaps they were meant to aim and fire missiles or destructs—weapons that might never have been installed on the surface at all, or if they were, had been dismantled when the last of the Security forces were ordered into space.
I went back to the bunkhouse. One of the light metal cot frames there was the only possible stretcher I could find. It took me some time to loosen it from the support stanchions. I looked at my watch. It must be well after nightfall now—not that day or night had any meaning here. At least the buildings had been insulated against the cold and could be made warmer if we could use the heating units. We had a far safer refuge here than I had hoped for.
The bunk frame made an awkward burden to pack, and I had found no rope we could use for making Lugard fast to it or for lowering it back down the cliff. Perhaps we could cut blankets into strips to serve. The climb up the ledges pulling the frame with me was a struggle that left me panting and ready to take a long rest when I at last reached the top. Only there was no time for that now.
At last I dragged it behind me, changing hands time and time again as my fingers cramped about the end rod. It scraped and banged along the rock, making enough din to give one an aching head. I had to stop again and again to flex my fingers free of cramp lest I lose the use of my hands. It was just too heavy to carry along and too large to drag well. Also it caught now and then on rough bits of rock, and I had to halt to free it, until the whole world shrank to my struggle with the stubborn thing and I could have gladly smashed it to bits with my bare hands.
I came out of the side tunnel and saw the light of the beamer. A black shadow ran toward me, and Thad came into the light of my own torch. He stared for a moment then hurried up to lay hands on the frame. I unhooked my fingers one by one and let him take it, and I staggered a little as I went.
"What's it like?" Thad asked.
"Good." I rasped hoarsely. "Lugard?"
"Still alive."
I had not dared to hope that would be the answer. But if he continued to hold to life and we could get him down to the lower cave—I had not hunted for medical supplies, but surely there would be some.
It was all I could do to make the gathering by the cart. I went to my knees there, breathing heavily, while Thad thumped the bunk frame flat on the rock.
Annet had covered Lugard, all but his face. She no longer wiped the dribble from his lips. That had stopped, and I could not guess whether that was a good or bad sign.
"Tie him on that." I made my idea as simple as I could. "Take him on the cart. But we will have to lower him to another cave. They had a Security base down there—even houses—"
"Houses?" she echoed. She held out to me an E-ration can from which she had just twisted the self-heating top. The smell of it was so good that I stretched out my hands, but my fingers were so numb that I would have dropped it had her grasp not continued. She held it to my lips, and I drank the rich contents, their warmth and refreshment bringing me out of the fog of fatigue.
"Installations in them," I said between gulps. "But there is a bunkhouse. We can camp out there."
Annet glanced down at Lugard. "He is unconscious—"
"Better so." It was the truth. We must handle him to get him on the bunk frame and to secure him there. I did not want to think what that might do to his broken body. Only I—we—had no choice. To go on gave him a slim chance; to stay, that was to do nothing but wait for the inevitable end. And there might be a second rock fall, though Annet assured me that nothing had threatened while I was gone.
We worked as best we could, lifting Lugard in the blanket, settling him on the bed frame, then winding about it all the strips Gytha and Pritha cut from our blankets, rendering him as immovable as possible.
The supplies, except for our own kits, we stacked to one side of the cave, but our packs we took with us. The frame we had slung on blanket straps that went about my shoulders and Thad's so we could lift him to the cart.
So we transported him at a slow pace, Annet and the children at the sides, the cart, with Thad and me to steady it, down the center. Gytha, with the beamer, was our fore-scout, and with such light it was easy to avoid the roughest bits. Yet all our straining could not make it really smooth going.
I was ridden by the need for haste; yet that we dared not attempt. The framework that held Lugard was balanced precariously on the cart, and the least shift, in spite of our efforts to steady it, might send it crashing to the rock.
We turned into the side that led to the lower cave. Annet came once to look into Lugard's face. There had been no sign he was conscious. I hoped he was not.
"We must get out. He needs help—Dr. Symonz at the port."
If there was still a Dr. Symonz and the port, I thought. But either she continued to hold stubbornly to the idea that Lugard was wrong in his story of bombing, or else she wanted to preserve hope for the children. I had no intention of trying to find out which. I was too busy trying to plan for that drop down the ledges.
"Look!" Emrys pointed to the withered carcass of the wart-horn. "What's that?"
"A wart-horn, silly," Gytha answered. "Probably got in here and was lost. But then he must have come from water—"
She made the same deduction I had.
"There's water below," I returned, "but it's piped in." But those pipes came from somewhere. And water could be a guide to the outer world.
We came at last to the drop, and Gytha swung the beamer down the slope to pick up in bright light and dark shadow all the roughness of that descent. I heard an exclamation from Annet.
"Down there! But we'll never be able to lower him—"
"We have to. I didn't have any luck finding ropes, though." I stared dully down that stairway of ledges, and threatening slope of scree at its foot. To go down and return—I did not know whether I had the strength. But Thad had the answer.
"Emrys, Sabian, uncoil what we found!"
At his order the two younger boys began to pull lengths from beneath their tunics. What they had when they spread it on the floor was no conventional rope that could be trimmed or broken, but strands of tungfors—the same alloy that was used to coat rocket tubes. These had been fashioned as chains, and there were hooks of the same durable metal at either end.
"Found 'em in the supplies we had to dump," Thad reported. "They what we need now?"
I could not have done better had I been able to pick and choose from a variety of equipment, and I said so as we laid them straight. They would reach from one ledge to the next, but whether we could take the strain of Lugard's weight for lowering I did not know.
"You go ahead with the children," I told Annet. "Thad, Emrys, Sabian, and I, we'll try to manage it. But I want you all safely down and out of the way first."
I could foresee that a single slip might rake us all from our feet and send us crashing, not only to our own peril, but also to that of anyone ahead. She might have protested, but then she looked at Dagny, whom she had carried most of that weary way.
"How? Yes, the pack harness!" She laid the little girl on the floor and began to shuck her own burden.
"I don't believe that—"
"I can do it!" She turned on me with some of the same fierceness she had shown when she tried to reach the surface after the bombing. And I could not deny her the effort. What strength I had left I must use for Lugard.
So we watched as they went over one by one—Gytha first, having shored up the beamer on the lip of the cliff to give light, taking Pritha's hand, cautioning her not to look down but only immediately before her; then Ifors; and last and very slowly, with Dinan between her and Ifors, Annet, Dagny made fast to her in the pack harness. Luckily, the ledges made a fairly easy descent, but the treacherous pile below troubled me more. I shivered with far more than the outer cold of that place as I watched them win, shelf by shelf, to the floor below.
Gytha was down, then the others—all but Annet, who moved slower and slower. By my own experiences in dragging the bunk frame, I could understand what wearied her. She rested for what seemed to me a very long time before she made the final drop into the scree.
Then they were all crawling through that. Emrys moved to loose the beamer. I shook my head.
"Leave that! We shall need all the light we can get."
"How do we go now?" Thad wanted to know.
I could see only one way—perhaps not the best, but the only one visible to me.
"Hook these, one end up here." I picked up one of the chains. "Other on the stretcher. One of us gets down to the ledge to steady it. I lower one line—you two the other."
Thad nodded. "Sabian to do the steadying."
Sabian was the smallest. We would need our major strength on the lowering. I looked to him.
"Think you can do it?"
"I don't know," he answered honestly. "Can't tell till I try, can I?" With that he slipped over to reach the surface of the first ledge and stood there, looking up, his eyes large and dark in a face that seemed unusually pallid by the beamer's glare.
We set the hooks in the frame at either end and tested their hold. The others we pounded into the rock beyond the lip and again tested. Then we slid the frame and its silent burden toward the lip and began what were the worst hours of my life.
It took us more than two hours to make that slow crawl down since we paused on each ledge to test, to rest the strain in our shoulders and arms, to bend over Lugard and hear those painful bubbling breaths and know that we still dealt with the living and not the dead. I lost all measure of time as I had known it in a sane and normal world. This was time as some evil being might have conceived it as a special torture. During the last part I moved in a kind of thick fog, so that when we came to stable footing I collapsed, unable to do more than breathe shallowly. Nor were the other boys any better. Emrys lay limp at the side of the frame; Thad hunched at its other end. I heard a shuffle and then a thin cry of welcome.
"Annet!"
Something was pushed into my hands and, when I could not hold it, held then to my mouth. Again I sucked feebly, rather than drank, a hot mouthful of ration. I knew that such emergency food was laced with restoratives, but whether that could get me on my feet again now, I doubted.
In the end we staggered along while Annet, Gytha, Pritha, and Ifors made use of the blanket shoulder straps and carried the frame and Lugard ahead of us. I roused enough to put an arm about Emrys' shoulders and pull him up and to give some support to Thad. My shoulders and arms had gone numb. Now they began to ache, first dully and then with increasing pain.
We slipped and slid, though we never did quite fall, until we were past that treacherous pile and in the wider part of the cave. There was a blaze of light streaming from the door of the barracks, and to that we were drawn. I remember crossing its threshold, looking dully at the room—for the rest nothing at all.
When I awoke, I was lying on the floor, under me a pad that I had stripped from the bunk I had earlier dismantled. And I ached—how I ached!—as if my arms had been pulled from shoulder sockets, the bones of my spine put to such strain as no man could be expected to take.
Perhaps I made some sound. Even turning my head required painful effort. Annet's face hung over me, a face drawn with dark shadows beneath the eyes and a set to the lips I had never seen before.
"So, you're awake—" Her voice was sharp, and something in the tone brought the immediate past into focus.
I tried to sit up and found it an effort. She made no gesture to aid but sat back on her heels watching me with a kind of impatience in her tense position, as if she had been waiting too long for me to move.
I rubbed my hands across my face, felt the grit of rock dust between palm and cheek, and blinked.
"Lugard?"
"Is dead." She answered me flatly.
I think my first reaction was a kind of anger that all our struggle had been for nothing, almost anger at Griss that he should have slipped away when we had done what we could to keep him with us. And after that another thought grew. With Lugard gone, who did we have to turn to? As long as I had had the problem of getting him to this shelter, I had never looked beyond. There had been a kind of completion when we reached the foot of the cliff, as if our greatest struggle now lay behind. But that was not the truth.
Somehow I wobbled to my feet. Thad lay in a bunk to my left; beyond him, sharing another, were the two others who had aided in our ordeal on the ledges. From the back room where the cooking unit was installed, I heard the murmur of voices.
"Vere, you're awake!" I turned my head slowly. There was a feeling that if I tried any swift movement, I might fall apart. Gytha came out of the mess room.
She caught me by the arm. "Come on—supper is ready. You slept most of the day."
I yielded to her pull. Annet was on her feet, too, and when I staggered, she suddenly put out her hand to steady me.
"There is plenty of food, anyway," she said, as much to reassure herself, I thought, as me. "And the cook unit runs."
Perhaps the smells were not as enticing as the ones back in a Kynvet kitchen, but they seemed to me to be so at that moment.