XVII

 

 

It was nightmare made flesh from that moment on. For a long time the sea of fire overhead glared down so brilliantly eyes could barely be kept open; those who fought to rescue victims trapped in the leisure hall and the worst hit of the apartment blocks had to improvise antiglare filters from loose-mesh cloth, or use one eye only and squint narrowly between two fingers, keeping the other eye closed.

The heat was terrible. It was as though the whole sky had suddenly been filled with suns.

Wherever the incandescent magnesium had fallen, there was appalling destruction. Some of the first spurts from the ore tub as it broke apart had created liquid drops of the metal fully twenty pounds in weight, and wherever they fell on steel girders—mostly on the roof of the leisure hall—they melted them through. The girders bowed, caved, broke, spilling the roof on the ground below.

Aside from the leisure hall, the buildings worst affected were food storage warehouses set a short distance back from the dwelling area, and the shipping complex. A veritable river of liquid magnesium poured off the incredible barrier in the air and flooded over the loading bay where yet more magnesium was in store. There were explosions which sent gouts of white death soaring for miles across the countryside.

After the heat, as after a nuclear explosion, the rain that had been poised ready to fall in the air came gushing down.

A crust of white insoluble magnesium oxide formed over the settlement and darkness followed, almost less bearable than the hideous glare which had gone before. Most of the power was out, and people had to work in the ruins by hand-lights. There was effectively no disease among the workers on Vashti—the land was sterile for many miles around—and the resources of the medical staff were only designed to cope with the occasional injury and with the known allergies which sometimes resulted from contact with native vegetation.

Where fats remained in the food warehouses they were pillaged to provide emergency burn dressings; the deaths were amazingly few, but the casualties numbered more than half the total population, from sprains and scratches to third-degree burns and broken limbs.

Through an inferno of collapsing walls and moaning victims Kazan walked like an unseeing ghost. He kept thinking of the fear which was to him a certainty—that when Hego turned aside from his work, he had left unrepaired a flaw in the hull of the ore tub, and no one had remembered the fact in the confusion following his attack on Kazan.

True enough. “He’s bad. You can feel he’s bad just by being close to him.” True enough. This happens; without intention, simply by Kazan being Kazan.

Was this the purpose of the devil that possessed him? A devil was said to hail from a place of torment; this was a place of torment now. He was too dazed to wonder why—if pain and destruction were intended—he had suddenly regained the power to make air solid, and so saved the settlement from total obliteration.

All he could think of was that this happened because he was here.

He came to what he recognized as his own apartment block; a small fire burned at one end, allowed to remain alight so that rescue workers could see to carry casualties to the emergency hospital set up in front of the building, but carefully watched by grim-faced men with hoses ready to damp it down when there was no more need for it. Squatting or lying hopeless on blankets were more than a hundred injured people, some with terrible burns. He walked between them, scarcely seeing.

“Kazan!” a shrill voice called to him. “Kazan!”

He turned slowly, and saw Clary rising from beside one of the casualties, a roll of bandage in her hand. She was dusty from head to foot and her shirt was ripped jaggedly from the left shoulder down, but she moved smoothly as she hurried towards him. He did not move when she flung her arms around him.

“Kazan, you’re safe!” she sobbed. “I was afraid—!”

“Of course I’m safe,” Kazan said in a gravelly voice. “It was my doing. What do you expect?”

“What did you say?” Disbelieving, she drew back from him. A pace or two distant two men who had paused to rest and wipe their faces after carrying a casualty to join the rest exchanged glances and moved closer. Clary read menace in their faces and tried to pull Kazan away, but he was like a wooden dummy.

“What happened?” the nearer of the men said. “I still don’t know what happened.”

“Did you see it?” his companion demanded of Kazan.

“I saw it,” Kazan said. “The ore tub. The power unit broke loose. It spilled its cargo of magnesium over the settlement.”

“Everyone knows that by now!” Clary said, still trying to make Kazan move away.

“Yeah!” the first speaker said. “What held it up? That’s what I want to know!” He gestured at the opaque roof closing in the settlement. “It’s up there! Hot as blazes-like the sun falling down!”

“Don’t worry what caused it—just be glad!” his companion contradicted. “Aren’t things bad enough? Look at these poor devils half-roasted on the ground here! Look at the buildings! Look at the whole place. It’s a shambles!”

Another man, husky, dirty, moving tiredly, helped a limping woman to a place on the roadway where a doctor was at work, and turned to go. He caught sight of Kazan and the two men interrogating him, and came suddenly alert. He strode over.

“Kazan!” he said. “I’d hoped something fell on you! We could spare you well enough, but I’ll lay you aren’t even scratched!”

Dorsek, Kazan realized dully. He said, “I—I don’t know. I guess I’m okay. But by the wyrds I wish something had fallen on me.”

“Do you now?” Dorsek said softly. “I wonder why that is.”

And in the same moment came Clary’s despairing cry, “Kazan! Don’t listen to him—he’s suffering from shock!”

“You keep quiet!” Dorsek snapped, round on her. “I want to hear this. Go on, Kazan—bring it up!”

“Hego,” Kazan said thickly. “The seam he was going to plug when I came this morning. He didn’t do it, and nobody realized.”

Dorsek’s face twisted into an ugly mask of rage. He said, “Why, you miserable sniveling insect! Aren’t you satisfied yet with what you’ve done to Hego? You aren’t going to get away with this! You aren’t going to unload the blame that easily! It happened because you’re here, and we knew it was going to happen and we tried to stop it. If you’d kept your contagious nose out of that inspection shop then from what you just said it would never have happened and—”

“Stop him!” Clary shrieked, and the two puzzled men standing by made to grab Dorsek as he lunged forward, but they were too slow. Kazan made no attempt to avoid the blow. The fist took him full in the face, and he toppled and slid to the ground, the last sound in his ears being the voice of Clary crying his name.

 

Eyes red-rimmed, Snutch looked around the assembled remnants of his senior staff. Some of them were wearing surgical dressings, and all of them were dirty and weary. The only light came from a hand lamp on the table in the middle of the room, which gave each of them a vast shadow like a carrion-eating bird poised with folded wings on the wall behind.

“What in the name of the wyrds is it?” he said.

They all knew what he meant, and exchanged worried glances. For lack of the chief scientist—unconscious for the past several hours—Rureth spoke up.

“A force field, I guess,” he said. “I know force fields are supposed to be impossible. But that’s one. There’s an invisible dome over the settlement. We mapped it.” He took a rolled paper from his front pocket and threw it down on the table; several people craned to stare at the circular red line inscribed on the outline of the settlement.

“Far as we can tell, there isn’t anything there but air,” Rureth went on, bowing his head to rub his eyes and then shaking back his thin fringe of hair. “It’s fairly elastic, but if you hit it with a heavy hammer it transmits force instead of absorbing it. It’s coated on the outside with a layer of magnesium oxide which in places is feet in thickness. I’ve got a couple of dozen men working on the thin areas. We’ve managed to crack loose a few sheets of the crust and we won’t have to worry about ventilation because air diffuses through the field. Or whatever you like to call it.”

“What shape is it?” Snutch demanded.

“Roughly spherical, but since it’s elastic there’s a dip in the middle where the remains of the ore tub are lying. We figure there’s about three to six hundred tons poised up there. If whatever’s sustaining the field gives out, it’ll come crashing down on our heads. Has anyone any theories about it?”

He looked dispiritedly along the table as though expecting no reply. His expectation was fulfilled. He went on, “I guess to be on the safe side we’d better evacuate the spot directly under the wreck of the ore tub. But if the field collapses we’re going to be buried under chunks of magnesium oxide anyway, so I don’t think the odds are good.”

“Anybody left outside?” Snutch said.

“The control staff at the landing field,” someone said. “I hear they’re all right.”

“Any chance of our getting out?”

“Right now, I’d say none whatsoever.”

“And nothing can get in,” Snutch muttered. “And until the master ship comes to collect the ore tubs, no way of getting a signal out because we haven’t the power to reach Marduk with surviving equipment, and even at maximum drive it’ll take weeks to get supplies here and they’ll have to be—Rureth! How about a tunnel?”

“We thought of that,” Rureth said. “But the trouble’s this. The whole area where the force field meets the ground is concreted, except for a small stretch where it’s been so hammered by the impact of the ore tub that it’s practically fused together. Inside the field, where we can get to, there isn’t enough equipment to break through concrete and make a tunnel. I signaled the landing control staff to see if they could find some equipment out by the mines themselves, but there’s been subsidence and a lot of the underground machinery is buried. When the ore tub hit, it must have been equivalent to a small earthquake. Shook all the tunnels down.”

Snutch’s hands were shaking where they lay on the table.

He noticed them and clasped them hastily together. With much effort he said, “Casualties—oh, what’s the use? We’re done for.”

All eyes switched to him. Someone said, “While there’s life—”

Snutch thumped the table and leaped to his feet. He said hysterically, “Hope? Where’s the hope? When’s somebody going to show me hope? All you do is drone on about disaster and how we’re imprisoned and—”

Inconspicuously Rureth exchanged glances with the chief of the medical staff, on whom Snutch had been about to call for his casualty report. The doctor nodded; he made some motion or other beneath the table, and suddenly clapped his hand against Snutch’s thigh.

The manager’s eyes rolled upwards and he began to sag at the knees. Rising unhurriedly, the doctor helped him to fall back accurately into his chair.

“Shock,” he said to the others. “He’ll be out for about three minutes. I gave him a palm-injector load of antitension specifics. I’d pass them round, but my supplies are short.”

“All supplies are short,” someone said pessimistically.

“Yes,” the doctor said thoughtfully. He looked at Rureth. “By the way, some of your men aren’t helping any. Last night, we had enough casualties from the main disaster without having to waste material on men beating each other up.”

“My men?” Rureth said.

“Yes. The one who started it seemed to have been unstabled by shock, and claimed that the guy he was beating up was responsible for the crash. Dorsek was the name. The other was a youngster.” He snapped his fingers. “Someone did tell me who he was; he couldn’t talk for himself. He had a concussion and his face was badly bruised.”

“Kazan?” Rureth said.

“That’s right. Young fellow. Fair-haired.”

“Dorsek’s fault, then,” Rureth said after a pause. He debated with himself: should he inquire how Kazan was, do anything about him? He found he hadn’t got the spare energy. He said, “Dorsek has a case of the same thing as that moron Hego I sent over to you yesterday. What did you make of him?”

The doctor shrugged. “I didn’t get very far. Ran some tests. But when the disaster hit, I figured a strong man was going to be useful in rescue work. So I turned him loose. I guess we can pick the threads up later. After all, he can’t run away.”