"Field study. I want at least twenty intelligent men and a permanent
camp somewhere in Lundy Forest."
Bidgrass folded his arms and shook his head. "Can't spare the men. And
it's too dangerous--stompers would attack you day and night. I've had
over two hundred egg hunters killed this year, and they're trained men
in teams."
"Let me go out with a team then, use my own two eyes."
"Men wouldn't have you. I told you, they're superstitious about
outworlders."
"Then it's failure! Your money and my doctorate go down the drain."
"You're young, you'll get your doctorate another place," the old man
said. "You've tried hard, and I'll tell Belconti that." His voice was
placating, but Cole thought he saw a wary glint in the hard gray eyes.
Cole shrugged. "I suppose I'll settle in and wait for _Gorbals_. But
I've had pleasanter vacations."
He turned his back and scanned the shelves ostentatiously for a book.
Bidgrass left the room quietly.
It was a boring evening. Pia was not in the garden. Cole looked at
the barrier and the incredible cliff of Lundy Forest. He would like
to get into that forest, just once. Hundred and fifty days before
_Gorbals_ ... _why_ had they ever sent for him? They seemed to be
conspiring to cheat him of his doctorate. They had, too.... Finally he
slept.
* * * * *
He woke to a distant siren wail and doors slamming and feet scraping in
the main house. Dressing in haste, he noted a red glow in the sky to
southward and heard a booming noise. In the hall outside his room he
met Pia, face white and eyes enormous.
"Stomper attack!" she cried. "Come quickly, you must hide in the
basement with us!"
He followed her into the main house and downstairs to where Mrs.
Vignoli was herding a crowd of the giant domestics down a doored
staircase. The giant women were tossing their heads nervously. Several
were naked and one was tearing off her dress. Cole drew back.
"I'm an ecologist, I want to see," he said. "Stompers are data."
He pushed her gently toward the women and walked out on the front
veranda. From southward came an incredibly rich and powerful chord of
organ music, booming and swelling, impossibly sustained. Old Hawkins
danced in the driveway in grotesque pointed leaps, shrieking "Hoosa
maida! Hoosa maida!" Overhead the moons Cairdween, Morwenna and Annis
of the blue shadows were arranged in a perfect isosceles triangle,
narrow base parallel to the horizon. It stirred something in Cole, but
the swelling music unhinged his thought. With a twinge of panic he
turned, to find Pia at his elbow.
"They're after me, after us," she cried against the music.
"I must see. You go find shelter, Pia."
"With you I feel less alone now," she said. "One can't really hide,
anyway. Come to the watch tower and you'll see."
He followed her through the house and up two flights to the roof of the
tower on the southeast corner. As they stepped into the night air, the
great organ sound enwrapped them, and Cole saw the southern sky ablaze,
with flyers swooping and black motes hurtling through the glare.
Interwoven pencils of ion-flame flickered in the verging darkness and
the ripping sound of heavy blasters came faintly through the music.
A hundred-yard section of the barrier was down in flames, and the
great, bobbing, leggy shapes of stompers came bounding through it while
others glided down from the top. Flyers swarmed like angry bees around
the top of the break, firing mounted blasters and tearing away great
masses of wood. The powerful chord of music swelled unendurably in
volume and exultant richness until Cole cried out and shook the girl.
"It plucks at my backbone and I can't think! Pia, Pia, what _is_ that
music?"
"It's the stompers singing," she shouted back.
He shook his head. Bidgrass Station seethed, lights everywhere, roads
crowded with trucks. Around the base of the breakthrough a defense
perimeter flared with the blue-violet of blasters and the angry red
of flame guns. As Cole watched it was overrun and darkened in place
after place, only to reform further out as reserves came into action.
Expanding jerkily, pushed this way and that, the flaming periphery
looked like a fire-membrane stressed past endurance by some savage
contained thing. With a surge of emotion Cole realized it was men down
there, with their guns and their puny muscles and their fragile lives
against two-legged, boat-shaped monsters twenty feet high.
"Sheer power of biomass," he thought. "Even their shot-down bodies are
missiles, to crush and break." A sudden eddy in the flaming defense
line brought it to within half a mile of the house. Cole could see men
die against the glare, in the great music.
The girl pressed close to him and whimpered, "Oh, start the fire mist!
Morwenna pity them!" Cole put his arm tightly around her.
A truck convoy pulled up by the manor house and soldiers were
everywhere, moving quickly and surely. A group hauled a squat, vertical
cylinder on wheels crashing through the ornamental shrubbery. Violet
glowing metal vaning wound about it in a double helix.
"It's a Corbin powercaster," Pia shouted into Cole's ear. "It
broadcasts power to the portable blasters so the men don't need to
carry pack charges or lose time changing them."
Cole looked at the soldiers. The same big men he saw every day, the
same closed and hostile faces, but now a wild and savage joy shone in
them. This was their human meaning to themselves, their justification.
The red boundary roared down on them, they would be dying in a few
minutes, but they were braced and fiercely ready.
The music swelled impossibly loud and Cole knew that he too was going
to die with them, despised outworlder that he was. He hugged the girl
fiercely and tried to kiss her.
"Let me in your world, Pia!" he cried.