The Shadow Men Page 4

  The girl was calm. “It was natural. Most people want to be free, not to have to live in one place or to be tied to some stupid work. The world isn’t completely free yet. We floater folk are the only lucky ones so far.”

  Cargill had his own idea of a freedom where the individuals depended on somebody else to repair their machines. But he was interested in information, not in exploding false notions.

  He said cautiously, “How many floater folk are there?”

  “About fifteen million.”

  She spoke glibly but Cargill let the figure pass.

  “And the Tweeners?” he asked. “Three million or so.” She was contemptuous. “The cowards live in cities.” “What about the Shadows?”

  “A hundred thousand, maybe a little more or less. Not much."

  Cargill was left alone most of the rest of the day. He saw Lela briefly again when she came in and prepared lunch for herself and her father.

  It was not till afternoon that he started to think seriously about what he had learned. The population collapse depressed him. It made the big fight of life seem suddenly less important.

  All the eager ambition of the Twentieth Century was now proved valueless, destroyed by a catastrophe that derived not from physical force, but apparently from a will to escape responsibility. Perhaps the pressures of civilization had been too great. People had fled from it as from a plague the moment a real opportunity occurred.

  It was growing dark in the kitchen when Cargill realized the ship was sinking to a lower level. He didn’t realize just how low until he heard the metal shell under him whisk against the upper branches of trees.

  A minute later there were a thud and a shock. The floater dragged for several feet along the ground, and then came to a stop. Cargill grew conscious of a muffled roaring sound outside.

  Lela came into the room. Or rather, she walked straight through to the kitchen. Cargill had a sudden suspicion of what she planned to do and lurched to his feet. He was too late. The door of the engine room was open, and the girl was in the act of lowering a section of the glass wall.

  As he watched she eased down a hinged section of the outer wall and stepped through out of sight. A damp sea breeze blew into Cargill’s face and now he heard the roar of the surf.

  The girl came back after about a minute and paused in his room. “You can go outside if you want,” she said. She hesitated. Then, “Don’t try to run away. You won’t get far, and Pa might burn you with a spit gun.”

  Cargill said ruefully, “Where would I run to? I guess you folks are stuck with me.”

  He watched her narrowly to see how she took that. She seemed relieved. It was not a positive reaction but it was suggestive. It fitted with his feeling that Lela Bouvy would welcome the presence of someone other than her father.

  As he hobbled through the kitchen a moment later Cargill silently justified the plan he had of worming his way into the girl's confidence. A prisoner in his situation was entitled to use every trick and device necessary to his escape.

  He did not pause at the engine room door—how it opened, he would discover in the morning. He manipulated his chained legs down a set of steps— part of the outer wall, folded out and down on hinges.

  A moment later he stepped onto a sandy beach.

  They spent most of the evening catching crabs and other sea creatures that crowded around a light which Bouvy lowered into the water. It was a wild seacoast, rocky except for brief stretches of sand. A primeval forest came down in places almost to the edge of the rock that overlooked the restless sea below.

  Lela dipped up the tiny creatures with a little net and tossed them onto a pile where Cargill with his fingers separated the wanted from the unwanted. It was easy to pick out and throw back the ones that Lela pointed out as inedible, to toss the others into a pail.

  Periodically, the girl took a pailful of the delicacies back to the floater.

  She was in a visible state of exhilaration. Her eyes flashed with excitement in the light reflections, her face was alive with color. Her lips parted, her nostrils dilated. Several times when Bouvy had moved farther along the beach and the sound of the surf prevented her father from hearing she shrieked at Cargill, “Isn’t it fun? Isn’t this the life?”

  "Wonderful 1” Cargill yelled back. Once he added, “I’ve never seen anything like it,’*

  That seemed to satisfy her and it was true up to a point. There was a pleasure to open-air living. What she didn’t seem to understand was that there was more to being alive than living outdoors. Civilized life had many facets, not just one.

  She came into his part of the ship a dozen times the next day. Cargill, who had unsuccessfully sought the secret of how to open the engine-room door, finally asked her how it was done. She showed him without hesitation. It was a matter of touching both door jambs simultaneously.

  When she had gone Cargill headed straight for the engine room, paused for a moment to study the engine—that proved a futile process, since it was completely closed in—and then slid the wall section into the door and looked down at the world beneath.

  The world that sped by below was a wilderness, but a curious sort. As far as the eye could see were the trees and shrubbery associated with land almost untouched by the hand and metal of man. But standing amid weeds and forests were buildings.

  Even from a third of a mile up those that Cargill saw looked uninhabited. Brick chimneys lay tumbled over on faded roofs. Windows seen from a distance yawned emptily, or gazed up at him with a glassy stare. Barns sagged unevenly and here and there the wood or brick or stone had completely collapsed and the unpainted ruin drooped wearily to the ground.

  In the beginning the only structures he saw were farmhouses and their outbuildings. But abruptly a town flowed by underneath. Now the effect of uninhabited desolation was clearly marked—tottering fences, cracked pavement overgrown by weeds and the same design of disintegration in the houses.

  When they had passed over a second long-abandoned town Cargill closed the panel that had concealed the window and returned uneasily to his cot.

  Coming as he did from a world in which virtually every acre of tillable land was owned and used by somebody, he was shocked by the way vast areas Bad been allowed to revert to a primitive state. He tried to picture from what the girl had told him and from what he had observed how it might have happened. But that got him nowhere.

  He wondered if the development of machinery had finally made agriculture unnecessary. If it had, then this was still a transition stage. The time would eome when these ghost farms and ghost towns and perhaps ghost cities would return to the soil from which they had, in their complex fashion, sprung. The time would come when these costly monuments of an earlier civilization would be as gone and forgotten as the cities of antique times.

  They spent two more evenings fishing. On the fourth day Cargill heard a woman’s loud voice talking from the living-room. It was an unpleasant voice and it startled him.

  Curiously he had never thought of these people as being in communication with anyone else. But the woman was unmistakably giving instructions to the Bouvy father and daughter. Almost as soon as she had stopped talking Cargill felt the ship change its course. Toward dark Lela came in.

  “We’ll be camping with other people tonight,” she said. “So you watch yourself.” She sounded fretful and die went out without waiting for him to reply.

  Cargill considered the possibilities with narrowed eyes. After four days of being in hobble chains, with no sign that they would ever come off, he was ready for a change.

  “Basically, all I’ve got to do,” he told himself, “is catch two people off guard.” And he wouldn’t have to be gentle about it either.

  “Careful,” he thought. “Better not build my hopes too high.”

  Nevertheless, it seemed to him that the presence of other people might actually produce an opportunity for escape.

  CHAPTER VI Carmean

  Through the open doorway Cargill caught glimps
es of the outside activity. Men walked by carrying fishing rods. The current of air that surged through brought the tangy odor of river and the damp pleasant smell of innumerable growing things.

  It grew darker rapidly. Finally Cargill could stand it no longer. He stood up and, taking care not to trip over his chain, went outside and sank down on the grass.

  The scene that spread before him had an idyllic quality. Here and there under the trees ships were parked. There were at least a dozen that he could see and it seemed to him that the lights of still others showed through the thick foliage along the shore. The sound of voices floated on the air and somehow they no longer sounded harsh or crude.

  There was a movement in the darkness near him. Lela Bouvy settled down on the grass beside him. She said breathlessly, “Kind of fun living like this, isn’t it?”

  Cargill hesitated and then, somewhat to his surprise, found himself agreeing.

  “There’s a desire in all of us," he thought, “to return to nature.”

  The will to relax, the impulse to lie on green grass, to listen to the rustling of leaves in an almost impalpable breeze —all that he could feel in himself. He also had the basic urge that had driven these Planiacs to abandon the ordered slavery of civilization. He found himself saddened by the realization that the abandonment included a return to ignorance.

  He said aloud, “Yes, it’s pretty nice.”

  A tall powerful-looking woman strode out of the darkness. “Where’s Bouvy?” she said. A flashlight in her hand winked on and glared at Lela and Cargill. Its bright stare held steady for seconds longer than was necessary.

  “Well, I’ll be double darned,” the woman's voice said from the intense blackness behind the light, “little Lela’s gone and found herself a man."

  Lela snapped, “Don’t be a bigger fool than you have to be, Carmean.”

  The woman laughed uproariously. “I heard you had a man,” she said finally, “and now that I get a look at him I can see you’ve done yourself proud.”

  Lela said indifferently, “He doesn’t mean a thing to me.”

  “Yeah?” said Garmean derisively. Abruptly she seemed to lose interest. The beam of her flashlight swept on and left them in darkness. The light focussed on Pa Bouvy sitting in a chair against the side of the ship. “Oh, there you are,” said the woman.

  “Yup!”

  The big woman walked over. “Git up and give me that chair,” she said. “Haven’t you got no manners?”

  “Watch your tongue, you old buzzard,” said Bouvy pleasantly. But he stood up and disappeared into the ship. He emerged presently with another chair.

  During his absence the woman had picked up the chair in which he had been sitting and carried it some twenty-five feet along the river’s bank.

  She yelled at Bouvy, “Bring that contraption over here! I want to talk to you privately. Besides, I guess maybe those two love-birds want to be alone.” She guffawed.

  Lela said in a strained voice to Cargill, “That’s Carmean. She's one of the bosses. She thinks she’s being funny when she talks like that."

  Cargill said, “What do you mean, one of the bosses?”

  The girl sounded surprised. “She tells us what to do.” She added hastily, “Of course, she can’t interfere in our private life.”

  Cargill digested that for a moment. During the silence he could hear Carmean's voice at intervals. Only an occasional word reached him. Several times she said, “Tweeners” and “Shadows.” Once she said, “It’s a cinch.” There was an urgency in her voice that made him want to hear what she was saying but presently he realized the impossibility of making sense out of stray words.

  He relaxed and said, “I thought you folks lived a free life? Without anybody to tell you what to do and where to get off.”

  "You got to have rules,” said Lela. "You got to know where to draw the line. What you can do and what you can’t do.” She added earnestly, “But we are free. Not like those Tweeners in their cities.” The last was spoken scornfully.

  Cargill said, "What happens if you don’t do what she says?”

  "You lose the benefits.”

  "Benefits?"

  "The preachers won’t preach to you,” said Lela. "Nobody gives you food. The Shadows won’t fix your ship.” She added casually, “And things like that.” Cargill whistled softly under his breath. The power of the church of the Middle Ages couldn’t have been any greater. This was excommunication with a capital E and ostracism in a rather ultimate fashion.

  He said a. last, "So even the Shadows recognize her authority. Why?”

  “Oh, they just want us to behave.” “But you can capture Tweeners?” The girl hesitated. Then, “Nobody seems to worry about a Tweener,” she said.

  Cargill nodded. He recalled his attempts to get information from her during the past few days. Apparently she hadn’t even thought of these restraining influences on her life. Now, though she seemed unaware of it, she had given him a picture of an incredibly rigid social structure.

  Surely, he thought desperately, surely he could figure out some way to take advantage of this situation. He moved irritably and the chain rattled, reminding him that all the plans in the world could not directly affect metal.

  Carmean brought her chair back to the ship, closely followed by Bouvy. She set it down and then walked slowly over and stood in front of Cargill. She half-turned and said, “I could use a husky guy around, Bouvy.”

  “He isn’t for sale.” That was Lela, curtly.

  “I’m speaking to your Pa, kid, so watch your tongue.”

  "You heard the girl,” said Bouvy. “We’ve got a good man here.” His tone was cunning, rather than earnest. He sounded as if he were prepared to haggle but wanted the best of the deal.

  Carmean said, “Don’t you go getting commercial on me.” She added darkly, “You’d better watch out. These Tweeners haven’t got any religion when it comes to a good-looking girl.”

  Bouvy grunted but when he spoke he still sounded good-humored. "Don’t give me any of that. Lela’s going to stick with her Pa and be a help to him all her life. Aren’t you, honey?”

  “You talk like a fool, Pa. Better keep your mouth shut.”

  “She’s fighting hard,” said Carmean slyly. “You can see what’s in the back of her mind.”

  Bouvy sat down in one of the chairs. "Just for the sake of the talk, Car-mean,” he said, "what’ll you give for him?”

  Cargill had listened to the early stages of the transaction with a shocked sense of unreality. But swiftly now he realized that he was actually in process of being sold.

  It emphasized, if emphasis was needed, that to these Planiacs he was a piece of property, a chattel, a slave who could be forced to menial labor or whipped or even killed without any one being concerned. His fate was a private affair which would trouble no one but himself.

  “Somebody’s going to get gypped,” he told himself angrily. A man as determined as he was to escape would be a bad bargain for Carmean or anyone else. In the final issue, he thought, he’d take all necessary risks and he had just enough front-line army experience to make that mean something.

  The bargaining was still going on.

  Carmean offered her own ship in return for Cargill and the Bouvy ship. "It’s a newer model," she urged. “It’s good for ten years without any trouble or fussing.”

  Bouvy’s hesitation was noticeable. “That isn’t a fair offer,” he said plaintively. “The Shadows will give you all the new ships you want. So you aren’t offering me anything that means anything to you.”

  Carmean retorted, “I'm offering you what I can get and you can’t.”

  “It’s too much trouble,” said Bouvy. “I’d have to move all our stuff.”

  “Your stuff!” The big woman was contemptuous. “Why, that junk isn’t worth carting out! And besides, I’ve got a ship full of valuables over there.” Bouvy was quick. “It’s a deal if you change ship for ship with everything left aboard.”

  Carmean
laughed curtly. “You must take me for a bigger fool than I look. I’ll leave you more stuff than you’ve ever seen but I'm taking plenty out.” Lela, who had been sitting silently, said, “You two are just talking. It makes no difference what you decide. I caught him and he’s mine. That’s the law and you just try to use your position as boss to change it, Carmean."

  Even in the darkness, Carmean's hesitation was apparent. Finally she said, “We’ll talk about this some more tomorrow morning. Meantime, Bouvy, you’d better teach this kid of yours some manners.”

  “I’ll do just that,” said Pa Bouvy and there was a vicious undertone in his voice. “Don’t you worry, Carmean. You’ve bought yourself a Tweener and if we have any trouble in the morning there’s going to be a public whipping here of an ungrateful daughter.” Carmean laughed in triumph. “That's the kind of talk I like to hear,” she said. “The old man’s standing up for himself at last.”

  Still laughing, she walked off into the darkness. Pa Bouvy stood up.

  “Lela!”

  “What?”

  “Get that Tweener inside the ship and chain him up good.”

  “Okay, Pa.” She climbed to her feet. “Get a move on,” she said to Cargill.

  Without a word, moving slowly because of the chain, Cargill went inside and lay down on his cot.

  It must have been several hours later when he awoke, aware that somebody was tugging at the chain.

  “Careful,” whispered Lela Bouvy, “I’m trying to unlock this. Hold still.” Cargill, tense, did as he was told. A minute later he was free. The girl’s whisper came again, “You go ahead— through the kitchen. I’ll be right behind you. Careful.”

  Cargill was careful.

  CHAPTER VII Shadow Man

  CARGILL lay in the dark on the ' grass with no particular urge to move. The feel of being free had not yet taken firm root inside him. The night had become distinctly cooler and most of the machines were dark. Only one ship still shed light from a half-open doorway and that was more than a hundred feet along the river bank from where he crouched.