Kenneth Bulmer - Demons' World

At last Thorbum, panting, called a halt to the rout.

“That’s enough! You all know Rangs can’t follow us through the crannies. Relax! It’s all over.”

He gave them five minutes for a breather. They sat all in a row, their backs pressed against the wall, breathing heavily, eyes still glazed with the horror of that last charge.

Then Old Chronic cackled and clicked his dentures.

“Trust a Rang to work you up! Wait until you’ve seen as many as I have.”

Sunk in his own thoughts Stead ignored the oldster. That Rang—that thing— had been twenty-five feet long from snout to tail, with sixteen thick legs and fangs and claws; the scrabble of those homy claws on the floor rang still in his memory. If monsters like that ravened in the Outside world of buildings, no wonder no one volunteered to be a Forager!

And this was the mad horrible world into which the Captain had so indifferently cast him. A strange, grim, frightening and wholly animalistic anger built up in Stead, one with his consuming desire to know more about the real Outside world of buildings.

“Rangs,” Vance was saying, squatting next to Stead. “I hate ’em. I’ve seen ’em. I’ve seen the foul things catch a man and play with him, tossing him about between their claws, letting him think he’s going to escape and then pouncing on him just when the poor fool thinks he’s free. Rangs—we ought to begin a systematic slaughter of them all!”

“Good idea,” said Thorburn. “But the Controllers won’t spend resources on it. You know that.”

“All they want,” said Old Chronic with a morose flash strangely in contrast to his usual sarcasm, “is for us to come home with full sacks and cheer, boys, cheer! They don’t care if we’re all stepped on so long as they grow fat and lazy.”

Cardon summed up in tones of such bitterness that Stead felt a shiver of dread, “Controllers are no better than Rangs in human form.”

He thought of Simon and Delia and Astroman Nav. Were they Rangs in human guise? Of course not. They were gentle, civilized persons. But they accepted the order of things; they expected Foragers to go out and risk their lives so that the Controllers might continue theirs in all their luxury. Perhaps—

The Controllers had given him a party when he’d left to train as a Forager. They’d wished him well. Did they know into what sort of life he was going? Certainly, he felt confident they had no inkling of the store of bitterness seething in the lower ranks, no notion at all of the hatred with which they were regarded.

He’d been sent here to learn. And, by the immortal being, he was learning!

He’d wanted fervently to fit into life in the Empire of Archon—a term these Forager comrades of his scarcely ever bothered to mention; he’d wanted to be a good Controller, thankful of the opportunity. Being a good Forager, he had thought, had been a part of his education.

But now, now he wasn’t so sure.

He began to see two sides to life in Archon—two sides that had nothing to do with inside and outside.

He wondered, not without panic, where his loyalties would lie in the future.

“Come on,” said Thorbum, rising. “We’ve full sacks. The Controllers will love that. Let’s get back home.”

On the seventh day of his life with the Foragers a letter was delivered to him along with the ordinary signals service mail. It was the first letter he had received in his life, at least, of his life in Archon.

“I do hope you are settling down nicely,” Delia wrote. Simon and I often think of you and wonder how you are faring. I expect you have made plenty of new friends. We hope, Simon and I, that you won’t forget us. Astroman Nav asked after you the other day. If you do decide to accept novitiatship, Stead, do not make a final decision until you have come back to us. Remember, there are still the final educational motions to be gone through.”

The letter left him with mixed feelings. “Settling down,” “how you are faring,” “asked after you.” Pretty, empty phrases. He was quite likely to settle down to a meal for a Rang.

“Ready, Stead?” called Thorbum.

Lieutenant Cargill, the soldier, he remembered had made a small prophecy about a Rang. Now, as a Forager, he knew that Cargill almost certainly never had seen a Rang with his own eyes. Like all the Controllers, it was hearsay talk. They lived in the warrens. What did they really know of the world of buildings?

“Ready, Stead? Come on, lad. The car’s waiting.”

“Sorry, Thorbum. All ready.” Stead went out of the Foragers’ waiting cubby and climbed into the back of the truck. He sat down among comrades. As the soldier at the barrier raised it, the antigás curtains swishing up, Stead saw the action as symbolic. That barrier, that antigás curtain, that blue light cut a man off from one world and ejected him into another.

Well, he’d been ejected Outside; perhaps he had found his niche in society here, after all. Perhaps, in that misty, forgotten, un-dreamable earlier life, he had been a Forager. It would have been suitably ironic.

The truck jounced along the dirty corridor and left the lights behind. Six others followed. This time the forage was going to be different, at least for Stead.

From time to time, he had been told, when the immortal being had created a new fresh and potentially rich quarry of food or raw materials, the Foragers and Hunters set up an outside H.Q. They made their forages and returned to the temporary H.Q. with their sacks, making the short journey a number of times, building up a depot which could be removed by a supply train of trucks. Regulations still applied. Only certain amounts of food must be taken at a time. All traces of the men’s visit must be erased. They could show themselves outside only in short periods, as usual.

The Regulations covered all sorts of strange possibilities.

One, which had flummoxed Stead, and in which he still saw elements of humor despite the tall tales of his comrades, said quite clearly that no human being must shoot at a Demon. “Shooting at phantoms, at figments of the imagination,” Stead had said. No one had laughed. They had scarcely heeded him. The Foragers clung to their childish stories about Demons with a relish and love of circumstantial detail that impressed and annoyed Stead. They should listen to Simon and Delia for a half hour. That would soon knock the nonsense out of them.

The time scales had had to be patiently explained to him.

“Our twenty-four-hour day and its eight-hour divisions doesn’t apply outside.” Thorbum touched his wrist watch. “Out there you have an eight day period of darkness with only an occasional and erratic lightening. Then a two-day period of steadily growing light—you recall that light on your first trip—then an eight-day period of brighter and brighter light until, after four days, you can’t go out at all. That gradually wanes to another two day period of slight light and so back to the darkness.”

Old Chronic nodded. “In my father’s time that scale was different. Nearly all dark, then, it was. Only about three days of brightness.”

Julia struck into the conversation on the back of the jolting truck. “My grandfather told me that his grandfather had told him that it used to be nearly all bright outside, for days on end. Horrible, foraging was, in those old days.”

Stead had been calculating. “That means the bright light is on the wane Outside?”

“Yes. That accounts for our day or two’s breather. But now we’re off again.” He glanced back.

Following the seven Forager trucks rolled another ten filled with soldiers. Up ahead as point rode two more. Ar-chon meant to protect the wealth her Foragers would bring in. And that had dropped another piece into place for Stead. There were two sorts of outside, he had soon realized. The outside of tunnels and corridors and crannies behind walls that lay outside the warrens. This was the outside in which soldiers from rival Empires and Federations fought over women and wealth. This was the outside the Controllers talked about so grandly. But there existed another outside, outside the first—The Outside—the world of the Foragers and Hunters, a world that the Controllers talked of again, but not so grandly. And there, Stead knew with a sick feeling dread, was the land of rooflessness, of Rangs and… of Demons?