The intrepid climber turns a barricade into a ladder.
ONE ON TRIAL
The place they emerged into—the General wheezing a little spasmodically like a man with something stuck in his gullet, but trying not to show it—was a pleasant little glade, vaguely tropical in appearance. The General—everybody called him that now that he had become a sort of terrible old man, although he had no real right to the title—paused just inside the screen of bushes; and his companion, the boxlike machine on stilts, also halted.
As they stood there, there was an odd, baritone moan of pain off in the pines to their right. A sound like that of a giant quietly suffering. The General turned, conscious suddenly that he had no direct memory of how the sanity technicians had brought him to this place; and a magnificent, black-maned lion with tawny, rippling fur limped into the clearing, holding his right forepaw awkwardly clear of the ground.
“Fear not,” said the machine. “I will protect you.”
“Who’s afraid?” exploded the General. “I haven’t been scared for forty years. They said war would shake the guts out of any civilian officer—but it didn’t me. They said I’d never have the brass to put five billions on the line to open up the Sahara—every cent I had, every cent I’d ever made. But I did.” He looked toward the lion, which was gazing off to one side of them. “Now what? What’d they stick this beast in here for?”
The machine did not answer. Looking closer, the General perceived a heavy black thorn embedded in one pink-and-dirty pad of the upheld paw. The lion turned its head toward him and again made its low, heart-rending moan. The General shook his head and turned away.
“So limp,” he said, and strode off. The machine trundled after. “Quit crowding me!” snarled the General, as he pushed through a small stand of tall ferns and emerged on a sort of animal track, leading down amongst bushes and tall purple flowers like lilies. “I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“I am only here to hear anything you have to say,” said the machine, in its pleasant, sexless voice. It leaned to him almost confidentially, a rectangular, gunmetal box on four dull-shiny, stiltlike legs of adjustable heights. “To accompany you and protect you. But to demand nothing.”
“You’re a cute hunk of junk,” said the General. He went down around a curve in the path and found himself on an open hillside. He stopped. “You might store up in that tin brain of yours one fact,” he said. “I could have dodged this business, if I’d wanted to. You think I lived sixty years without finding out how to get around a simple health law? But no board of directors are going to run me . . . This the way out of here?”
“That could be interpreted as paranoia,” observed the machine.
“Could it now? Well, well,” said the General, with the throatily purring pleasure of a tiger lying at its ease with its eyes closed, cracking bones in its teeth.
“Persons with paranoia are a danger to society,” said the machine.
“Society’s yellow,” said the General. He paused. “No, you wouldn’t get that, would you? . . . About that lion; what good would it have done if I’d taken the thorn out of his paw?”
“It would have eased his pain,” said the machine.
“Yeah,” said the General, like a man spitting tacks. “I asked you before—this the way out of here?”
“The only way out of here,” said the machine, “is for you to discover for yourself. You may save yourself, or destroy yourself, but those are the only two alternatives there are for you here.”
The General reached out and pounded with one skinny, brown, hard fist on the side of a nearby boulder of gray-speckled granite half as tall as he was.
“It’s real?” he said.
“Absolutely real,” said the machine. “An illusion would have no practical curative force. That lion back there might have killed you.”
“I’ll take my chances with him,” said the General. He began to descend the slope of the hill among the ankle-high, sharp-edged grass, setting his feet down carefully sideways, so that the slick soles of his business shoes would not slip. He was a little stiff, and one ankle joint cracked dryly as he put his weight on it, the way a knuckled-joint cracks. Halfway down the slope, he became aware of a faint, thin screaming off to his right, and stopped to look.
For a second he could make out nothing but the grass, and then a small stir of brown caught his attention. He stepped over a few feet and discovered a large dirty-white hare caught by a noose that encircled its neck and one forepaw. As the general stepped up close, a small, brown weasel-shaped animal with lusting red eyes backed rustling into the grass and disappeared.
The General looked down at the hare which looked back up at him with the drowning eyes of all helpless wild animals. The General considered it, his sour, gray, old-man’s fierce face unmoving.
“Another,” he said. He spoke aside to the machine. “What was that after it, just now?”
“A ferret,” said the machine.
The General gave a sort of a humphing grunt, and turned away, down the slope. The machine rolled smoothly after him. Behind him, the screaming began again.
“You could have let the hare loose,” said the machine. “You could have given it that much of a chance.”
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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