“Yes!” Nestamay took her eyes off Conrad for the first time in some while and turned to her grandfather. “Now you don’t need to swallow Jasper’s dreadful behaviour any longer!”
The old man sighed and nodded. He spoke to Yanderman in terms of courtly apology.
“It’s quite true. We must see why the alarm which usually warns us of the advent of a dangerous thing failed to operate this time. You must be tired and hungry after your magnificent journey, and as soon as we’ve settled this urgent question we’ll place ourselves at your disposal. If you’ll come with us …?”
The curious but largely silent group fell in behind the old man and Yanderman, and made their way towards the dome. Nestamay stepped to Conrad’s side.
“Hello!” she said.
“Ah-er-hello!” Conrad echoed. “Ah-er-ah-oh yes! It was-uh-your father, wasn’t it, who tried to contact the outside world? He must have been a brave man.”
Not a good choice of subject. The girl’s face clouded. She said after a pause, “Not brave. Desperate. You two are the brave ones. You weren’t driven to it, were you?” She paused. “It must have been a terrible journey.”
“No, it wasn’t as bad as we thought,” Conrad said, wishing he could convey that he wasn’t being modest, only speaking the plain truth. “We had a compass, you see, which perhaps your father didn’t have, and Yanderman made a map of all the streams and rivers so we didn’t have to carry our own water all the time. Eight hours was the longest we had to spend away from water.”
“A map?” Nestamay sounded astonished. “Where did you get a map?”
“Yanderman drew it up.”
“But from what?” she persisted.
“Well-” Conrad was about to explain, when he realised the party had halted facing the dome. He heard Yanderman.
“You mean the thing just tore clear through the dome to the outside?” he was demanding, his eyes on the enormous gash it had left. Conrad glossed the words: why, this must be the place where the things originated, as Yanderman had suspected! And yet here were all these people …
“Ohhhh!” Nestamay’s fingers were suddenly tight on his arm; with the other hand she was pointing into the darkness under the dome. Something moved there-another monster? No, a human shape. A human shape beginning to scream as it emerged into the open. There was a wave of shock and terror tangible about them.
“Jasper!” she whispered. “It is-it is!”
How she recognised him, Conrad could not tell. For his head and shoulders were completely covered with a glistening black jelly-like mass, at which his hands clawed hopelessly while his voice grew weak with shrieking.
For a long second nothing moved except the condemned Jasper. Then Grandfather Maxall stirred and spoke.
“Kill him,” he said in a voice like death itself.
“No! No!” A woman came running from the fringe of the group, clawing at the old man with crazed violence. “No, you can’t kill my son!”
“If you would rather watch him die as the seeds grow on his body,” the old man said, and let the rest hang in the air. The woman paid no attention, but clung to him and cried for mercy.
There was no mercy. There could be none. Again, Maxall gave the order, and this time a white-faced Keefe obeyed it. He took a javelin from a bystander, aimed carefully, and threw. It sank into the black jelly about where the boy’s throat must be. Black-smeared hands reached up to it, failed in the attempt, and fell back as the life leaked out of his body.
“Burn the corpse!” Keefe said harshly, and two young men moved to pick up a heatbeam projector. Jasper’s mother had released Maxall by now, and was kneeling with her face to the dust, yelling curses.
“What-what happened?” Conrad whispered to Nestamay. In a cold voice she answered.
“Because of something I did-or wouldn’t do-he tried to take his revenge by turning off the alarm which warns us of a thing hatching. It was meant to scare me during my night’s watch. Only a thing came through before he expected. While all the rest of us were out chasing it away and meeting you, he must have come back to try and cover up what he’d done-re-connect the alarm, I imagine. But in his haste, he …”
“He what?” Conrad prompted from a dry throat.
“The black stuff,” Nestamay said. “It’s the seed-mass of one of those plants there. We have a working party out every day to cut back or burn off such seed-masses on the outside where we can get at them and they might get at us. But inside the dome there are huge areas where we can’t venture in, and the seed masses grow there, too. That’s why we can’t get rid of the vegetation permanently. And you see they-well, in some fashion they’re sensitive to movement near them. They burst over things that go too close. I’ve seen it happen to things. I never saw it happen to a person before, and I hope I never see it again!”
She gave a fierce shudder. “They say it doesn’t kill you,” she finished. “You just die, and it takes a long, long time.”
Conrad swallowed hard. By now the searing heatbeam had reduced the miserable corpse of Jasper to a blackened smear and calcined bones, and Maxall was turning to Yanderman again. He was standing noticeably straighter, as though a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
“One of the dangers of our existence,” he said. “Though nothing compared to what you’ve faced to come to us. I’ll send my assistant Keefe to make certain the alarm is functioning, and perhaps we can enjoy a short rest after the day’s turmoil.”
Yanderman spoke only with an effort. He said, “We faced dangers, as you put it, for a matter of days to get to you. If you’ve had to endure this kind of thing for four and a half centuries, all I can say is that my friend and I had the better bargain!”
XX
Hoping that nobody was paying attention to him, and sure at least that Nestamay wasn’t, because her grandfather had sent her to fetch another jug of the curious fruit-flavoured concoction these people had instead of beer, Conrad leaned back in the corner of the Maxall hovel. It wasn’t much of a building compared with the solid stone-and-timber work of Lagwich, but it had one thing in its favour, which it had taken him a long time to track down. The air was cleaner than in a Lagwich house. Partly it was due to the absence of cooking smells, but mostly, he thought, it was because the people had fresh clothing two or three times a week.
He’d been given a suit of the same kind, and found it very comfortable. But he didn’t pretend to follow the explanation he’d been given about the source of the garments, any more than he was pretending now to follow the conversation between Yanderman, Maxall, Keefe and Egrin.
It seemed the local people would never run out of questions-how big is the barrenland, how long did it take you to get across, where is Lagwich and how big, where is Esberg and how big, are there any other barrenlands, how many people are there in the world …? It was about there that Conrad had decided to lean back and shut his eyes. He drowsed.
“More to drink, Conrad?”
He snapped back to awareness. Nestamay was offering him the jug, and in bending forward also a remarkable view of her young bosom. Remembering he was an explorer, Conrad viewed. A few seconds later, however, the sound of his name spoken by Yanderman made him turn guiltily and say, “Ah-yes?”
But Yanderman wasn’t addressing him. He was explaining the way they had compiled the map to spare themselves the need to carry water, and Grandfather Maxall was shaking his head apparently at the fact that his son had overlooked this possibility.
Did that imply that somebody here had the same gift as himself? Conrad leaned forward and paid attention. The answer was no, but there were salvaged scraps of drawings and diagrams from which at least some information about water could have been extracted, although in every other respect they had been rendered obsolete by the creation of the barrenland.