In the darkness and silence of the dwelling's upper hallway, and the
shadowed gloom, no longer pierced by shafts of early morning sunlight,
of the main-floor room, it was hard for them to realize that it was
still broad daylight outside the house. But the instant they emerged
from the dwelling's paneled doorway the brightness of the sky and the
almost shadowless clearing made them instantly aware again that only
the forest was a gloom enveloped sanctuary.
They stood for an instant motionless in the doorway, dazzled by
the brightness and experiencing a sharp stab of apprehension. If a
para-guard had been crouching at the edge of the clearing, with steady
eyes and a leveled weapon, blasting them both down would have presented
no problem. They had to trust to their instincts solely, the feeling
that they both had that the house was not yet completely surrounded. Or
that if it was, the guards were under orders not to open fire, but to
take them by stealth, withholding all violence until they moved around
and away from the house and reached the high wall of wind-stirred
foliage at the rear of the dwelling, where the forest began again and
the shadows clustered thickly.
Teleman pressed Alicia's hand and whispered: "We've got to move very
fast and keep moving. They may close in on us the instant we're between
the trees, so we'll have to keep our wits about us, and watch out for
the slightest stir of movement. If we see a guard I'll know what to do.
Trust me."
"I will, darling!" she breathed. "And I'm not too frightened to think
clearly."
"All right. Here we go then."
They did not break into a run immediately, but waited until they
had moved cautiously around to the back of the dwelling and were
facing away from it, with an open space that could be quickly crossed
stretching out in front of them. The forest wall was less than eighty
feet away and could be reached in a matter of seconds. Teleman's hand
had darted to his pocket and he was firmly clasping the stock of the
hand-gun.
They exchanged no words, but started across the clearing at once,
running swiftly with only a few feet separating them. They were out
of breath when they reached the trees, but paused only for the barest
instant, their eyes darting toward a patch of weaving darkness where
the foliage was dense enough to provide instant shelter but not too
close to keep them from tearing a few of the branches apart with their
hands and clearing a wide enough space to move about in until they
could find a natural path in the underbrush or beat their way through
it toward a more open stretch of forest.
They were several feet inside the foliage screen, breathing harshly
and keeping their heads lowered to avoid the stinging backlash of
whipped-apart branches, when the para-guard came crashing toward them.
There was blood on his face and he was cursing savagely and in an
instant briefer than a dropped heartbeat there flashed into Teleman's
mind an image of the man waiting for them, crouching in the underbrush
and prevented by the dense growth from leaping instantly out at them.
The image blurred and vanished and Teleman saw only the man himself,
the looming, dangerous bulk of him. The hand-gun was recoiling in his
clasp, its roar deafening, in what seemed no more than another split
second of time, so quickly that Teleman had no clear recollection of
whipping it from his pocket, only of leveling it and firing it at
almost pointblank range.
The para-guard screamed and went staggering backwards, his hands
clutching at his chest. Light from the expiring energy charge bathed
his head and shoulders for an instant in a ghastly, pale green
radiance, making him look almost ghostly as he sank to his knees, and
fell forward on his face. His arms jerked convulsively for a moment,
and then the trembling and twitching ceased and he lay completely
still, a crimson gleaming appearing in both sides of his body and
spreading outward over the dry leaves of the forest until they
resembled leaves but recently fallen, all of their autumn brightness
restored.
Alicia swayed and turned deathly pale. Teleman went to her, drew her
into his arms and held her tightly, stilling her trembling with a few,
calmly spoken words.
"If I hadn't killed him, if I had just wounded him, he might still have
had the strength to go on fighting. He might have seized you and used
you as a shield, or grabbed me by the legs and dragged me down. He was
too near, coming right at us. It was his life or ours."
"Yes, I know," she breathed, her arms tightening about his shoulders
with an understanding that went deeper than words. "He was only obeying
orders, but they were brutal orders and it would have been madness to
take risks with a man so enraged. If we had resisted, he would have
killed us without hesitation. He might even have tried to ravish me.
Did you see his face?"
"I saw it," Teleman said. "We've got to get through the forest and try
to reach one of the travel strips on the other side before another
face like that has a chance to wear the kind of smile that means he's
won and we're either dead or bound hand and foot. That hand-gun blast
may bring a dozen guards down on us before we can get far. But we're
not giving up, or stopping to let the possibility weaken what we've
got--a strength that comes only to lovers. It's a very special kind of
strength and we've got to believe in it. Is that clear?"
"Yes, darling, very clear."
"Then the only important thing right now is to keep moving. Our luck
has held so far. And there are seven more charges in this gun. I'll
shoot to kill as many times as I have to."
The forest was alive with shadows and almost night-dark where
the trees towered in groups of five or six, gigantic oaks with
interlacing branches that completely blotted out the sky. Even the
few, downstreaming shafts of sunlight had become fewer and more widely
scattered and the gloom was so all enveloping that it brought a chill
to Alicia's heart.
They were a mile and a half from the thick tangle of underbrush where
the guard lay with his body half in shadow and the leaves about him
turning dark again when they heard the rustling. It was faint at first,
but it came swiftly nearer and for an instant Teleman thought that more
para-guards were descending to the forest floor through the rustling
canopy of leaves and interlocking branches directly ahead of them.
He stopped advancing abruptly and gripped Alicia's arm, drawing her
quickly into the deep shadows which clustered about the base of
a moss-grown oak so huge that its bole had the girth of a dozen
slenderer trees fused by some strange freak of lightning into a massive
whole, its charred surface completely hidden by the bright emerald
moss, and circular patches of darker coloration where the moss had
shriveled and died.
The rustling had taken on a strange and disturbing loudness, hard to
associate with just the swaying of the foliage about the descending
boots of para-guards, and the dry leaf crackle of their tread on the
forest floor. It was accompanied by clickings and a dull, droning
sound, and suddenly, as Teleman stared with a coldness creeping up his
spine, light flashed between the trees and a deafening blast echoed and
reverberated through the forest, shaking the ground and filling the
aisles of the forest with a swirling shower of leaves.
Teleman was hurled back against the oak and Alicia was thrown with such
violence to the ground that she lay for an instant motionless, too
stunned to cry out or free herself from the tangle of charred creepers
and smoke-blackened leaves which had descended upon her face.
Teleman dropped to his knees and dragged himself toward her, his
temples pounding, a dull ache in his back. He cleared away the clinging
vines with a single sweep of his arm and lifted her up, holding her
tightly and gently massaging her cheeks with the back of his hand.
Her eyes opened and she stared up at him, her eyes wide with fright.
"Hurt bad?" he whispered, afraid of what her answer might be and
wishing that he did not have to ask the question at all.
She shook her head. "No, I'm all right. Help me to get up. What was it?
Another bomb? For a moment I thought--"
"Don't try to talk," Teleman said, his voice sharp with concern. "I
think I know what it is, and it's coming toward us fast. We've got to
get away from here!"
He helped her to rise and they stood for an instant swaying a little,
still too shaken to do more than stare. Teleman was the first to speak
decisively, and with all uncertainty driven from his mind by the
ground-shaking tread which had come to his ears.
"It's one of the new walking ground-warfare machines," he said, his
fingers tightening on Alicia's arm. "All metal, segmented, and equipped
with scanners and atomic blast tubes. They weigh several tons and are
fifty feet tall. Too heavy to be transported here in a flying machine.
It must have been set in pursuit of us right after I killed that guard
and has apparently circled around in front of us and is blasting the
trees directly ahead in an effort to halt our advance. It is operated
by remote control and its scanners have probably flashed back our exact
position. We'll have to try to break that circuit in some way. I still
think they're trying to capture us alive, but we can't be sure."
"How long have we got, darling?"
"I don't know. It's very near. We'll have to do some circling back
ourselves. They'll expect us to flee in the opposite direction, back
toward where we were. But if we make that mistake we'll be welcomed by
a dozen or more armed guards. We'll have to move sideways, circling
back just a little but keeping almost parallel to this tree."
"But what if that--that terrible machine follows us. If it's equipped
with scanners isn't it certain to follow us?"
"It's certain to, yes. But if we can find--never mind, we haven't time
to talk about it now. It's coming straight toward us. It may still be
several hundred feet away, because that was a restricted atomic blast
and all we felt were the vibrations at the edge of it. Those charred
leaves were blown toward us from a considerable distance."
"But the sounds! I can hear its tread!"
"That rustling sound may have been made by terrified birds and small
animals directly in its path. Its tread we can hear now because it
is very near and is moving ponderously. But it could still be a
considerable distance away. We'll have time to get out of its path if
we hurry."
"Do you think it can overtake us, if we run? How fast is it moving?"
"I don't know," Teleman said. "I've never seen one of the machines in
action and I just don't know. I don't think it's moving very fast,
but it takes enormous strides. It will overtake us in ten or fifteen
minutes at the most, unless we can mislead the scanners. Come on, let's
get started."
They were just turning when the foliage lighted up again, but this
time there was no thunderous detonation. The foliage at the far end
of the forest aisle, a hundred feet from the massive oak tree, was
merely enveloped for an instant in a blinding glare that spread outward
until it filled every shadowed crevice and swaying vine-canopy between
the tree and its point of origin. As it spread it became more diffuse
and less blinding, until every boulder, plant and fallen log that it
touched began to glow with a cold, almost spectral radiance.
The foliage at the far end of the clearing burst into flame as the
great, robot-like figure came into view, a metal giant with long,
segmented legs and globular body-box, surmounted by a conical head with
almost human features.
That the ground-warfare machine looked both intelligent and
terrifyingly humanoid in aspect would not have surprised or startled
anyone familiar with the psychological subtlety which the Monitors were
capable of exercising. It had been built with the terror motif in mind,
and if it was an almost unbelievably efficient mechanism of destruction
it was equally efficient as a shape which could inspire such fear in
the beholder that he would become completely demoralized, particularly
if he harbored rebellious impulses or thought of himself as a criminal.
But Teleman and Alicia did not think of themselves as criminals and
Alicia had been forewarned by Teleman's description of the machine and
had visualized it as both formidable and terrifyingly robot-like.
That the actual machine surpassed in hideousness the mental image she
had formed of it was not a sufficiently shock-producing circumstance
to make her succumb to panic, and after the first moment of shock her
strength of will carried her past the danger point and enabled her to
look upon the machine simply as a very dangerous weapon of warfare that
threatened her life and the life of the man she loved, but in no way
menaced her sanity.
It was Teleman who for a moment experienced the most acute fear, not
for himself but for the safety of the woman at his side. He gripped her
wrist tightly and urged her forward, moving away from the tree with
such rapid strides that she had to run to keep up with him.
For ten minutes they fled through the forest in silence, climbing over
logs and lichen-encrusted boulders, and sinking ankle-deep at times in
soggy patches where damp leaves in heavy layers and the moisture in the
soil made walking difficult and running impossible. They had put a mile
between themselves and the towering ground-warfare machine when they
were brought up short by a pool of still, dark water.