Tomorrow's Crimes Page 17

  Could I do it anyway? If I could hold on to the top of the trailer front wall with my right hand, and stand on two of those cables which passed from underneath the cab to underneath the trailer, it was still possible. The cables were thick and looked rough-surfaced, but my bare feet were used to walking on the pulverized rock of the compound. As to the height, it seemed to me I would just be able to reach the top while standing on those cables.

  In any case, I didn’t have the choice. I dared not try to get back again to my workshed. Nor could I stay here, atop the treads in plain view. After only a second’s hesitation, I went over the side of the treads, slid carefully down until I felt one of the cables beneath my left foot, and gradually inched myself into position.

  It would work. I was extremely uncomfortable, and had to stretch to my limit to reach the top of the trailer and hook my fingertips over it, but I was nevertheless fixed in place.

  And just in time. Just behind my back, the truck engine started. I braced myself, waited, and after the longest five seconds I had ever lived the truck at last lurched forward. Out of the aimer of my eye, above the treads, I caught a glimpse of the wall as we passed by.

  I was free!

  XIX

  If I had known in advance what that journey was to be like, it is possible I would have chosen to remain a slave.

  In the first place, one of the cables—the one on which I had my left foot—must have had something to do with the exhaust system from the engine, because it soon grew hot, and hotter, and quickly was too hot to touch. I had to keep my left knee bent, holding on only with my right foot on the cable and the fingertips of my right hand clutching the top of the trailer.

  If I’d had two hands, it’s possible I could have pulled myself up once we’d started, climbed out on top of the load of ore, and traveled in relative comfort. As it was, with only the one hand, I could do nothing but hold on and wait.

  If only they’d stop. There were two drivers; sooner or later they’d have to stop while they switched places. But they wouldn’t do it. I held on, and chewed my lower lip till it bled, and when I got weak and began to pass out my left foot sagged down onto the hot cable and snapped me awake again.

  I considered hammering my elbow against the metal partition behind me, signaling the drivers. But if they found me they would only rum me in at the compound. And I wouldn’t go back, not now, not after all I was going through to get out.

  Still, I didn’t want to die. And I would die. I knew that without doubt; I would die if I lost my grip and fell. Part of me would hit ground while part was still between cab and trailer; I would be tom to pieces.

  I finally decided on a gamble, a bad gamble but the only thing I could think of to do. I would try to attract the attention of the drivers, and then I would try to avoid being discovered by them.

  Accordingly, I hit my left elbow against the partition. And again. And again. And again.

  My elbow was numb, and I was about ready to believe the partition was too thick for them to hear me pounding, when at long last I felt the brakes being applied, The truck ponderously slowed, and the great clattering treads on both sides of me came shuddering to a stop.

  The instant the truck stopped, I let go my grip and dropped down onto the ground. I landed wrong, and painfully, on sharp stones, but immediately pushed Earther down, squirming my legs under the trailer until I was sitting on the ground, then squirming more, hitting my head against the bottom edge of the cab body, forcing myself along the jagged ground until I was completely under the trailer, on my back, staring up at the pitted metal inches from my face, and waited to see what would happen.

  The drivers both looked in the area I’d just vacated, and talked back and forth about what had been making the noise. Something obviously had come loose, but what? One of them got down on hands and knees in front of the cab and looked under;

  I heard him plainly as he said, “It’s pitch black under there. I can’t see a thing.”

  “We’ll report it,” the other one said. “Come on, let’s get going,”

  They talked about it a minute or two more, then got back into the truck and drove away, the trailer sliding past above me and suddenly leaving clear sky, the violet color of evening on Anarchaos.

  It was now necessary to get off the road. I was far too weak to walk by now, but I could still crawl. Slowly, heavily, I rolled myself over onto my stomach, bent my knees, stretched my right hand out ahead of me as far as it would go, and began to drag myself to the side of the road.

  I crawled what seemed a considerable distance, over rough, broken, rocky ground. When at last I could move no more, I was in darkness, in the shadow of a large boulder. I lay my face on the cold ground and closed my eyes.

  I came to semi-consciousness some time later, aware of the cold. I could no longer feel my feet or fingers. I thought, “I must get up and walk, or I will freeze to death. I must get up and walk, or I will die.”

  I thought that. But I didn’t move.

  XX

  I knew I was dreaming. I knew it, and yet everything that happened seemed real and urgent. I was loading an ore cart, down in the mine, and had to hurry, but instead of ore there was stacked a gray mound of severed hands. Both my own hands were missing, so I had to pick up each one between my forearms and raise it high and drop it over the side into the ore cart. Then Gar came and said, “You aren’t doing very well. I expected better things of you. Jenna and I expected better things of you.” Then Jenna was beside him. and he had an arm around her. She smiled as though to tell me it was all right that I was a failure, and a great river of water came washing down the tunnel, sweeping me away. Gar and Jenna just stood there, the water swirling around them and unable to move them. I wanted desperately to stay with them, but the water washed me down the long tunnel and out into an Arctic night, with icebergs floating by. I was freezing, and drowning, and I climbed out onto a block of ice and lay there, shivering and wet. Then a polar bear came along and stretched out on top of me. I grew warm, with the polar bear on top of me, but I was very frightened of it. My stumps began to sting and bum, and so did my feet. Then someone was cooking stew, and I was sitting at the kitchen table in the house where I’d lived as a boy, and I said to my mother, whose back was to me as she stood at the stove, “Where’s Gar?” She turned, not saying anything, and it was the polar bear. Then it was a man with white hair and a white beard, dressed in a long coat of gray fur, with heavy black boots on his feet. He had a spoon in his hand, with which he’d been stirring the stew, and he said, “So you’re awake,” and I realized I was.

  I looked around. I was in a large, crowded wooden room figured by firelight. Flickering darkness and shadows hid the details of the ceiling. The walls were rough logs, the floor was logs planed smooth and the cracks filled with mud, and thick-haired animal skins hung everywhere, on the walls and from beams and draped over furniture. Almost everything in the room was wood, and rough-hewn, home-made: a table, some chairs, shelves on the walls, a trunk, a chest of drawers, a closet. The fireplace was of hand-fashioned tan bricks, with a great fire going inside, lighting the room and cooking the hanging pot of stew. How beautiful was the smell of stew.

  I was lying on my back on something soft and deep, and over me were spread blankets of animal skins. I was very confused. I remembered being a slave, and I also remembered some son of journey spent clinging to the side of a truck, and I remembered a jumble of details from my dream. But what was dream, and what was reality?

  And what was this place w-here I now found myself? And who was the man who had spoken to me? I was sure of little, but of one thing I was certain: I had never seen him before in my life.

  He came forward, little drops of liquid falling from the spoon, and he said, “Could you eat? You w-ant some stew?” His voice was rough-grained, as though he seldom had a chance to use it.

  My own was worse, when I said, “Please. Thank you.”

  Good.

  I closed my eyes, trying to restore or
der to my jumbled brain. The truck? Yes, now I remembered it, traveling on it and managing to leave it, and that I’d been escaping from the compound in which I had been held a slave. My mind ran backward, encompassing Anarchaos, Ulik, Jenna Guild and Colonel Whistler, Gar (dead), prison, fighting, being myself in all situations, everything. All (sack. All secure.

  I was me again.

  I opened my eyes, and he was approaching me with a wooden bow I from which steam was rising. I said, with my voice as rusty as unused track, “You found me out there. You brought me in.”

  “That’s right,” he said. He stood beside me, and somewhere inside his beard he was smiling, beaming at me.

  “You saved my life.”

  “More than likely. Can you sit up?”

  I could, but only with his help. I could now see that I was lying in his bed, a home-made affair like everything else here, built into one corner of the room. I sat with my back propped against the rough wall, feeling dizzy, my body stiff and aching, but not too badly, not much worse than after a normal work period inside the mine. My rags had been stripped off me and I was wearing a bulky fur coat like my rescuer’s. Beneath it I was naked.

  “Here,” he said.

  I held out my cupped hand, palm up, and he placed the bowl in it. It felt heavy. ‘Thank you,” I said.

  “Is it too hot?”

  Acute heat drilled into my palm through the bottom of the bowl, but I welcomed it. “It’s good,” I said. “It’s just right.” I brought the bowl to my mouth, tipped it, tasted gravy and meat and vegetables. Gravy dribbled down my chin, making me smile with comfort, like a cat.

  “You eat,” he said, “and then sleep some more. I’ve got work to do outside.”

  I nodded, my mouth full of stew.

  It was good food, and I think would have been good even if I hadn’t been starving. But it was too rich, and I couldn’t keep it down. I was alone in the cabin now-, but I felt the roiling in my stomach and I refused to soil either the bed or the floor. I rolled out of the bed, my right hand clutching at everything for support, and somehow I staggered around the walls to the door and pushed it open and lurched outside.

  Snow!

  I fell fact down into it, and emptied my stomach.

  “What’s this? What’s this?”

  I raised my head and saw him trotting toward me, bearlike in his heavy clothing, a large axe in his hand. He chopped the axe down into the snow and left it there, the handle angling upward for his return, and ran over to me, shouting, “What are you doing? You’ll kill yourself!”

  He picked me up, and cleaned my face with a handful of snow. Past him I could see black peaks, snow’ everywhere, pale moonlight. Moonlight! Where was I?

  He carried me inside and put me back to bed. “I didn’t want to make a mess in here.” I said.

  “Sure,” he said. “But stay here now. Do you want to try biscuits?”

  “Yes.” I was very hungry now, hungrier than before I had eaten the stew.

  He brought me three pale, hard, bumpy biscuits, and I lay on my back, covered by furs, the biscuits sitting on my chest. I nibbled at them, slowly, and they tasted of salt and soda. But they stayed down. I ate all three, and then I closed my eyes and slept.

  XXI

  I said, “Am I on Earth?”

  He turned to look at me. “You’re awake, eh?” He’d been sewing hides together, and he now’ put them down on the table, got to his feet and came over to look at me. “How do you feel?”

  “Better. But weak.”

  “You want to try the stew again?”

  “I think so. And a biscuit with it, to help it stay down.”

  “Just the thing.”

  I managed to sit up by myself this time, and prop myself against the wall, while he got a bowl of stew and two more biscuits and brought them over to me, I rook the bowl in my cupped right hand again, but then there was net way for me to hold a biscuit. He saw my difficulty and said, “That’s all right; just a minute.” He brought a chair over and sat down beside me and said. “When you want some biscuit, hand me the bowl.”

  “Thank you.”

  “We’ll have to get you strong,” he said, and smiled within his beard.

  I chewed meat, and swallowed it, and said, “My name is Malone.”

  “Torgmund,” he said. “That’s me, Torgmund. Nobody ever gave me a name to go in front of it.” He laughed, and took the bowl while I are some biscuit. Watching me eat, he said, “Why’d you ask about Earth? You’re on Anarchaos, w here you’ve always been.”

  “Not always,” I said.

  He was surprised. “You came here from someplace else?”

  “Earth.”

  “And that out there, that looked like Earth?”

  “Because of the moon,” I said. “I didn’t know Anarchaos had a moon.”

  “A lot of them don’t,” he said. “Daysiders,” he added, contemptuously. “They never see it, because they’ve got daylight all the time. But we on the rim, we see it.” He chuckled, and gave me back the bow l. “Gives us a kind of day and night,” he said. “You take a look out that door now, it’s black as the bottom of a hole; you can’t see your hand in front of your face.” Then he glanced at my stump, and seemed embarrassed.

  I said, “We must be Earther east. A for Earther than where you found me.”

  “A full day,” he said. “I was coming back from Ulik when I found you. I put you in the back of the wagon and took you home.”

  I said, “A full day? What son of day?”

  He laughed again, and pointed skyward, and said, “Rim son. By the moon. Twenty-seven hours, fifteen minutes, Earth Standard. Little longer than an Earth day, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You’re a trapper.”

  “That’s what I am. And you’re a slave.”

  “Yes.”

  “Got away from one of those mines they have around there.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I never heard of one of you escaping.” he said. “How’d you do it?”

  Between mouthfuls of food I told him about working in the mine, and the loss of my hand, and the change of jobs, and how I’d found a way to escape and did it. He listened, bright-eyed, interested in what I had to tell him about a slave’s life and enjoying the story of my escape and also. I think, pleased merely at the prospect of someone else in the cabin to talk to. Looking around, I could see that no thought had ever been given to more than one person occupying this place. His had to be a very lonely life.

  When I was done eating and telling my story, he took the bowl away and then came back and said, “How’s it sitting?”

  “Better,” I said. I felt warm and comfortable and totally at ease. My eyelids kept closing of their own weight.

  “Go ahead and sleep.” he said. “We’ll talk more tomorrow.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I can talk now.” But even as I said it my eyes shut themselves down and I felt sleep covering me like a net.

  When I awoke, the cabin was empty. I rolled over and dozed some more, but lightly, so that I heard Torgmund when he came in. I rolled over again and saw him beating snow off his coat and out of his hair. He saw me looking at him and called, “Snow! A good one!”

  “So I see.’

  “I’ll make us something to eat,” he said. “You watch me; you’ll want to know where I keep things.”

  He fried eggs this time, and made up something hot that looked like coffee and tasted like charcoal. The eggs, too, were somewhat different in taste to what I remembered from Earth.

  After we ate, Torgmund sat beside me again and said, “So you’re not a local product, eh?”

  “No, I’m from Earth.”

  “Funny place for a foreigner to come,” he said.

  “I wanted to study the social structure,” I said. I hadn’t mentioned (Jar or my reasons for being here or anything that had happened before my enslavement, and I felt obscurely it was best to keep all of that to myself.

  He accepted my a
nswer at once, nodding and saying. “Student. You fellows think you’re immune, nothing’ll touch you. I guess you know different now.”

  “I guess I do,” I said.

  He got to his feet and pushed the chair against the wall, saying, “ lime for me to get back to work.”

  “Outside?”

  “Naturally. Clot to get your room done.”

  I frowned at him. “My room?”

  He pointed at the far wall. “Right there. When I get the roof on I’ll put a door through there; you’ll be able to come back and forth without going outside.”

  I said, “You think I’ll be sick so very long?”

  He laughed and said, “I sure hope not. I never had a slave before. I wouldn’t want one that was sick all the time.”

  “Slave?”

  “You,” he said, pointing at me. “What’s the matter with you? You addled in your wits?”

  I said, “You want to keep me here?”

  “You’re my slave,” he said. “I found you, you’re mine.”

  “I’m not a slave.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” he said. “You already admitted it. Slave in a mine, ran away.” He laughed again and said, “You won’t want to run away from here; I’ll treat you right. Besides, you’d never get back to dayside on foot.” He went over to the door and called back, “You take it easy now, rest up. Two or three days you should be able to get up from there, start earning your keep.” He went on out.

  I lay in the bed for a long while after he left, staring into the fire across the way. He had been kind to me. More than kind; he had saved my life. And vet, and yet, I couldn’t stay.

  I knew what I had to do, knew it from the beginning, but I lay there anyway and stared into the fire as though no answer would come to me. Partly that was because I was still so physically I weak and such a bad match for the obvious strength of Torgmund, but partly also it was because I did owe him my life, and he was operating out of a simple view of the world, doing nothing that seemed to him wrong. A trapper was a trapper. Daysiders were daysiders. And slaves were slaves. Forever.