He looked up sharply. They had had this out a long time ago. "He's all
right as far as I know." He was responsible for all of the children in
the nursery, not just one in particular. He could not afford to get
into the habit of discussing one any more than another. He could not
afford to get into the habit of discussing any of them at all.
"You don't care about _him_, either, do you?" she said. "Or have you
got some complicated excuse for that, too?"
He shook his head. "It's not complicated." He listened to the sound
coming through the dome.
She looked it him with tears brimming in her eyes. He thought for an
instant of the tragedy inherent in the fact that they all of them knew
how ugly they were--and that the tragedy did not exist, because somehow
love did _not_ know--and he was full of this thought when she said,
like someone dying suddenly. "Why? Why, Sean?"
"Why?" She'd got a little way past his guard. "Because I'm the Captain,
and because I'm the best, and there's no escaping the duty of being
that. Because some things plainly must be done--not because there is
anything sacred in plans made by people who are past, and gone, but
because there is no other reason why we should have been born with the
intelligence to discipline our emotions."
"How cut-and-dried you make it sound!"
"I told you it wasn't complicated. Only difficult."
* * * * *
The common rooms were in the center of the dome, full of relics:
lighting systems designed for eyes different from theirs; ventilation
ducts capped over, uncapped again, modified; furniture re-built times
over; stuff that had once been stout enough to stand the wear of human
use--too fragile to trust, now, against the unconscious brush of a
hurried hip or the kick of a stumbling foot; doorways too narrow,
aisles too cramped in the auditorium; everything not quite right.
Brendan called them there in the morning, and every man and woman
in the dome came into the auditorium. They growled and talked
restlessly--Falconer and Lusic and the rest were moving purposefully
among them--and when Brendan came out on the stage, they rumbled in the
red-lit gloom, the condensation mist swirling up about them. Brendan
waited, his arms folded, until they were all there.
"Sit down," he said. He looked across the room, and saw Falconer and
the others watching him carefully, gauging their moment. "Fools,"
Brendan muttered to himself. "If you were going to challenge me at all,
you should have done it long ago." But they had let him cow them too
long--they remembered how, as children, they had all been beaten by
him--how he could rise to his feet with six or seven of them clinging
to his back and arms, to pluck them off and throw them away from him.
And how, for all their clevernesses, they had never out-thought him.
They had promised themselves this day--perhaps years ago, even then,
they had planned his ripping-apart--but they had not dared to interfere
with him until the dome's work was done. In spite of hate, and envy,
and the fear that turns to murder. They knew who their best man was,
and Brendan could see that most of them still had that well in mind.
He searched the faces of the people, and where Falconer should have
been able to put pure rage, he saw caution lurking with it, like a
divided counsel.
He was not surprised. He had expected that--if there had been no
hesitation in any man he looked at, it would have been for the first
time in his life. But he had never pressed them as hard as he meant to
do this morning. He would need every bit of a cautious thought, every
slow response that lived among these people, or everything would go
smash, and he with it.
He turned his head fleetingly, and even that, he knew, was dangerous.
But he had to see if Sally was still there, poised to one side of the
stage, looking at him blankly. He turned back to the crowd.
"All right. Today's the day. The kids're going out as soon as I'm
through here."
Sally had told him this morning not to call them together--to just go
and do it. But they would have been out in the corridors, waiting. He
would have had to brush by them. One touch--one contact of flesh to
flesh, and one of them might have tried to prove the mortality he found
in Sean Brendan.
"I want you in your homes. I want your doors shut. I want the corridor
compartments closed tight." He looked at them, and in spite of the
death he saw rising among them like a tide, he could not let it go at
that. "I want you to do that," he said in a softer voice than any of
them had ever heard from him. "Please."
It was the hint of weakness they needed. He knew that when he gave it
to them.
"Sean!" Sally cried.
And the auditorium reverberated to the formless roar that drowned her
voice with its cough. They came toward him with their hands high,
baying, and Sally clapped her hands to her ears.
* * * * *
Brendan stood, wiped his hand over his eyes, turned, and jumped. He was
across the stage in two springs, his toenails gashing the floor, and
he spun Sally around with a hand that held its iron clutch on her arm.
He swept a row of seats into the feet of the closest ones, and pushed
Sally through the side door to the main corridor. He snatched up the
welding gun he had left there, and slashed across door and frame with
it, but they were barely started in their run toward his office before
he heard the hasty weld snap open and the corridor boom with the sound
of the rebounding door. Claws clicked and scratched on the floor behind
him, and bodies thudded from the far wall, flung by momentum and the
weight of the pack behind them. There would be trampled corpses in the
auditorium, he knew, in the path between the door and the mob's main
body.
Sally tugged at the locked door to the next section of corridor.
Brendan turned and played the welder's flame in the distorted faces
nearest him. Sally got the door open, and he threw her beyond it. They
forced it shut again behind them, and this time his weld was more
careful but that was broken, too, before they were through the next
compartment, and now there would be people in the parallel corridors,
racing to cut them off--racing, and howling. The animals outside must
be hearing it ... must be wondering....
He turned the two of them into a side corridor, and did not stop to use
the welder. The mob might bypass an open door ... and they would need
to be able to get to their homes....
They were running along the dome's inside curve, now, in a section
where the dome should have been braced--it hadn't been done--and he
cursed Falconer for a spiteful ass while their feet scattered the slimy
puddles and they tripped over the concrete forms that had been thrown
down carelessly.
"All right," Brendan growled to himself and to Falconer, "all right,
you'll think about that when the time comes."
They reached the corridor section that fronted on his office, and there
were teeth and claws to meet them. Brendan hewed through the knot of
people, and now it was too late to worry whether he killed them or
not. Sally was running blood down her shoulder and back, and his own
cheek had been ripped back by a throat-slash that missed. He swallowed
gulps of his own blood, and spat it out as he worked toward his door,
and with murder and mutilation he cleared the way for himself and the
mother of his boy, until he had her safe inside, and the edge of the
door sealed all around. Then he could stop, and see the terrible wound
in Sally's side, and realize the bones of his leg were dripping and
jagged as they thrust out through the flesh.
"Didn't I tell you?" he reproached her as he went to his knees beside
her where she lay on the floor. "I told you to go straight here,
instead of to the auditorium." He pressed his hands to her side, and
sobbed at the thick well of her blood over his gnarled fingers with the
tufts of sopping fur caught in their claws. "Damn you for loving me!"
She twitched her lips in a rueful smile, and shook her head slightly.
"Go let Donel out," she whispered.
They were hammering on the office door. And there were cutting torches
available, just as much as welders. He turned and made his way to the
control cubicle, half-dragging himself. He pulled the lever that would
open the gates, once the gate motors were started, and, pulling aside
the panels on cabinets that should have had nothing to do with it, he
went through the complicated series of switchings that diverted power
from the dome pile into those motors.
The plain's mud had piled against the base of the gate, and the
hinges were old. The motors strained to push it aside, and the dome
thrummed with their effort. The lighting coils dimmed, and outside his
office door, Brendan could hear a great sigh. He pulled the listening
earphones to his skull, and heard the children shout. Then he smiled
with his ruined mouth, and pulled himself back into his office, to the
outside viewscreen, and turned it on. He got Sally and propped her up.
"Look," he mumbled. "Look at our son."
There was blurred combat on the plain, and death on that morning, and
no pity for the animals. He watched, and it was quicker than he could
ever have imagined.
"Which one is Donel?" Sally whispered.
"I don't know," he said. "Not since the children almost killed me when
they were four; you should have heard Donel shouting when he tore my
respirator away by accident--he was playing with me, Sally--and saw me
flop like a fish for air I could breathe, and saw my blood when another
one touched my throat. I got away from them that time, but I never
dared go back in after they searched out the camera lenses and smashed
them. They _knew_, then--they knew we were in here, and they knew we
didn't belong on their world."
_And Falconer's kind would have gassed them, or simply re-mixed their
air ... they would have, after a while, no matter what.... I know how
many times I almost did...._
There was a new sound echoing through the dome. "Now they don't need
us to let them out, anymore." There was a quick, sharp, deep hammering
from outside--mechanical, purposeful, tireless. "That ... that may be
Donel now."