The Sky Is Falling Part 9

Then he ran. The desert was like molten iron under his bare feet, and the savage radiation on his back was worse than any overseer's whip.

His mind threatened to blank out with each step, but he forced himself on. And slowly, as the distance increased, the sun's pyre sank further and further over the horizon. The heat should still have been enough to kill any normal body in fifteen minutes, but he could endure it. He stumbled on in a trot, guiding himself by the stars that shone in the broken sky toward a section of this world where there had been life and some measure of civilization before. After a few hours, the tongues of flame no longer flared above the horizon, though the brilliant radiance continued. And Hanson found that his strong and nearly indestructible body still had limits. It could not go on without rest forever. He was sobbing with fatigue at every step.

He managed to dig a small hollow in the sand before dropping off to sleep. It was a sleep of total exhaustion, lacking even a sense of time.

It might have been minutes or hours that he slept, and he had no way of knowing which. With the sun gone and the stars rocking into dizzy new configurations, there was no night or day, nor any way to guess the pa.s.sage of time.

He woke to a roaring wind that sent cutting blasts of sand driving against him. He staggered up and forced himself against it, away from the place where the sun had fallen. Even through the las.h.i.+ng sandstorm, he could see the glow near the horizon. Now a pillar of something that looked like steam but was probably vapor from molten and evaporated rocks was rising upwards, like the mushroom clouds of his own days. It was spreading, apparently just under the phlogiston layer, reflecting back the glare. And the wind was caused by the great rising column of superheated gases over the sun.

He staggered on, while the sand gave way slowly to patches of green.

With the sun gone and the sky falling into complete shreds, this world was certainly doomed. He'd a.s.sumed that the sun of this world must be above the sky, but he'd been wrong; like the other heavenly bodies, it had been embedded inside the sh.e.l.l. He had discovered that the sky material resisted any sudden stroke, but that other matter could be interpenetrated into it, as the stars were. He had even been able to pa.s.s his hand and arm completely through the sample. Apparently the sun had pa.s.sed through the sky in a similar manner.

Then why hadn't the sh.e.l.l melted? He had no real answer. The sun must have been moving fast enough so that no single spot became too hot, or else the phlogiston layer somehow dissipated the heat.

The cloud of glowing stuff from the rising air column was spreading out now, reflecting the light and heat back to the earth. There was a chance that most of one hemisphere might retain some measure of warmth, then.

At least there was still light enough for him to travel safely.

By the time he was too tired to go on again, he had come to the beginnings of fertile land. He pa.s.sed a village, but it had been looted, and he skirted around it rather than stare at the ghastly ghoul-work of the looters. The world was ending, but civilization seemed to have ended already. Beyond it, he came to a rude house, now abandoned. He staggered in gratefully.

For a change, he had one piece of good luck. His first attempt at magic produced food. At the sound of the snapping fingers and his hoa.r.s.e-voiced "abracadabra," a dirty pot of hot and greasy stew came into existence. He had no cutlery, but his hands served well enough.

When it was gone, he felt better. He wiped his hands on the breechclout. Whatever the material in the cloth, it had stood the sun's heat almost as well as he had.

Then he paused as his hand found a lump under the cloth. He drew out the apprentice magician's book. The poor devil had never achieved his twenty lifetimes, and this was probably all that was left of him. Hanson stared at it, reading the t.i.tle in some surprise.

_Applied Semantics._

He propped himself up and began to scan it, wondering what it had to do with magic. He'd had a course of semantics in college and could see no relations.h.i.+p. But he soon found that there were differences.

This book began with the axiomatic statement that the symbol is the thing. From that it developed in great detail the fact that any part of a whole bearing similarity to the whole was also the whole; that each seven was the cla.s.s of all sevens; and other details of the science of magical similarity followed quite logically from the single axiom.

Hanson was surprised to find that there was a highly developed logic to it. Once he accepted the axiom--and he was no longer prepared to doubt it here--he could follow the book far better than he'd been able to follow his own course in semantics. Apparently this was supposed to be a difficult subject, from the constant efforts of the writer to make his point clear. But after learning to deal with electron holes in transistors, this was elementary study for Hanson.

The second half of the book dealt with the use of the true name. That, of course, was the perfect symbol, and hence the true whole. There was the simple ritual of giving a secret name. Apparently any man who discovered a principle or device could use a name for it, just as parents could give one to their children. And there were the laws for using the name. Unfortunately, just when Hanson was beginning to make some sense of it, the book ended. Obviously, there was a lot more to be covered in later courses.

He tossed the book aside, s.h.i.+vering as he realized that his secret name was common knowledge. The wonder was that he could exist at all. And while there was supposed to be a ritual for relinquis.h.i.+ng one name and taking another, that was one of the higher mysteries not given.

In the morning, he stopped to magic up some more food and the clothing he would need if he ever found the trace of civilized people again. The food was edible, though he'd never particularly liked cereal. He seemed to be getting the hang of abracadabraing up what was in his mind. But the clothing was a problem. Everything he got turned out to be the right size, but he couldn't see himself in hauberk and greaves, nor in a filmy nightgown. Finally, he managed something that was adequate, if the brilliant floral sports.h.i.+rt could be said to go with levi pants and a morning frock. But he felt somewhat better in it. He finally left the frock behind, however. It was still too hot for that.

He walked on briskly, watching for signs of life and speculating on the principles of applied semantics, name magic and similarity. He could begin to understand how an Einstein might read through one of the advanced books here and make leaps in theory beyond what the Satheri had developed. They'd had it too easy. Magic that worked tended to overcome the drive for the discipline needed to get the most out of it. Any good theoretician from Hanson's world could probably make fools of these people. Maybe that was why the Satheri had gone scrounging back through other worlds to find men who had the necessary drive to get things done when the going was tough.

Twice he pa.s.sed abandoned villages, but there was nothing there for him.

He was coming toward forested ground now, something like the country in which the Sons of the Egg had found refuge. The thought of that made him go slower. But for a long time, there was no further sign of life. The woods thinned out to gra.s.slands, and he went on for hours more before he spotted a cl.u.s.ter of lights ahead.

As he drew nearer, he saw that the lights seemed to be fluorescents.

They were coming from corrugated iron sheds that looked like aircraft hangars strung together. There was a woven-wire fence around the structures, and a sign that said simply: _Project Eighty-Five_. In the half-light from the sky, he could see a well-kept lawn, and there were a few groups of men standing about idly. Most wore white coveralls, though two were dressed in simple business suits.

Hanson moved forward purposefully, acting as if he had urgent business.

If he stopped, there would be questions, he suspected; he wanted to find answers, not to answer idle questions.

There was no one at the desk in the little reception alcove, but he heard the sound of voices through a side door leading out. He went through it, to find a larger yard with more men idling. There should be someone here who knew more of what was going on in this world than he did now.

His choice, in the long run, seemed to lie between Bork and the Satheri, unless he could find some way of hiding himself from both sides. At the moment, he was relatively free for the first time since they had brought him here, and he wanted to make sure that he could make the most use of the fact.

n.o.body asked anything. He slowed, drifting along the perimeter of the group of men, and still n.o.body paid him any attention. Finally, he dropped onto the ground near a group of half a dozen men who looked more alert than the rest. They seemed to be reminiscing over old times.

"--two thirty-eight an hour with overtime--and double time for the swing s.h.i.+ft. We really had it made then! And every Sat.u.r.day, never fail, the general would come out from Muroc and tell us we were the heros of the home front--with overtime pay while we listened to him!"

"Yeah, but what if you wanted to quit? Suppose you didn't like your s.h.i.+ft boss or somebody? You go down and get your time, and they hand you your draft notice. Me, I liked it better in '46.

Not so much pay, but--"

Hanson p.r.i.c.ked up his ears. The conversation told him more than he needed to know. He stood up and peered through the windows of the shed.

There, unattended under banks of lights, stood half-finished aircraft shapes.

He wouldn't get much information here, it seemed. These were obviously reanimates, men who'd been pulled from his own world and set to work.

They could do their duties and their memories were complete, but they were lacking some essential thing that had gone out of them before they were brought here. Unless he could find one among them who was either a mandrake-man housing a soul or one of the few reanimates who seemed almost fully human, he'd get little information. But he was curious as to what the Satheri had expected to do with aircraft. The rocs had better range and alt.i.tude than any planes of equal hauling power.

He located one man who seemed a little brighter than the others. The fellow was lying on the ground, staring at the sky with his hands clasped behind his head. From time to time, he frowned, as if the sight of the sky was making him wonder. The man nodded as Hanson dropped down beside him. "Hi. Just get here, Mac?"

"Yeah," Hanson a.s.sented. "What's the score?"

The man sat up and made a disgusted noise. "Who knows?" he answered.

There was more emotion in his voice than might be expected from a reanimate; in real life on his own world, he must have had an amazing potential for even that much to carry over. "We're dead. We're dead, and we're here, and they tell us to make helicopters. So we make them, working like dogs to make a deadline. Then, just as the first one comes off the line, the power fails. No more juice. The head engineer took off in the one we finished. He was going to find out what gives, but he never came back. So we sit." He spat on the ground. "I wish they'd left me dead after the plant blew up. I'm not myself since then."

"What in h.e.l.l would they need with helicopters?" Hanson asked.

The man shrugged. "Beats me. But I'm beginning to figure some things out. They've got some kind of trouble with the sky. I figure they got confused in bringing us here. This shop is one that made those big cargo copters they call 'Sky Hooks' and maybe they thought the things were just what they're called. All I know is they kept us working five solid weeks for nothing. I knew the power was going to fail; they had the craziest d.a.m.n generating plant you ever saw, and it couldn't last. The boilers kept sizzling and popping their safety valves with no fire in the box! Just some little old man sitting in a corner, practicing the Masonic grip or something over a smudgepot."

Hanson gestured back to the sheds. "If there's no power, what are those lights?"

"Witch lights, they told us," the man explained. "Saved a lot of wiring, or something. They--hey, what's that?"

He was looking up, and Hanson followed his gaze. There was something whizzing overhead at jet-plane speed. "A piece of the sky falling?" he said.

The man snorted. "Falling sidewise? Not likely, even here. I tell you, pal, I don't like this place. Nothing works right. There was no fuel for the 'copter we finished--the one we called Betsy Ann. But the little geezer who worked the smudgepot just walked up to it and wiggled his finger. 'Start your motor going, Betsy Ann,' he ordered with some other mumbo-jumbo. Then the motor roared and he and the engineer, took off at double the speed she could make on high-test gas. Hey, there it is again! Doesn't look like the Betsy Ann coming back, either."

The something whizzed by again, in the other direction, but lower and slower. It made a gigantic but erratic circle beyond the sheds and swooped back. It looked nothing like a helicopter. It looked like a Hallowe'en decoration of a woman on a broomstick. As it came nearer, Hanson saw that it _was_ a woman on a broomstick, flying erratically.

She straightened out in a flat glide.

She came in for a one-point landing a couple of yards away. The tip of the broom handle hit the ground, and she went sailing over it, to land on her hands and knees. She got up, facing the shed.

The woman was Nema. Her face was masklike, her eyes tortured. She was staring searchingly around her, looking at every man.

"Nema!" Hanson cried.

She spun to face him, and gasped. Her skin seemed to turn gray, and her eyes opened to double their normal size. She took one tottering step toward him and halted.

"Illusion!" she whispered hoa.r.s.ely, and slumped to the ground in a faint.

She was reviving before he could raise her from the ground. She swayed a moment, staring at him. "You're not dead!"

"What's so wonderful about that around here?" he asked, but not with much interest. With the world going to pot and only a few days left, the girl's face and the slim young body under it were about all the reality left worth thinking about. He grabbed for her, pulling her to him.