The Project Gutenberg eBook of Between the dark and the daylight
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Title: Between the dark and the daylight
Author: David C. Hodgkins
Release date: November 8, 2023 [eBook #72067]
Language: English
Original publication: New York, NY: Royal Publications, Inc, 1958
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BETWEEN THE DARK AND THE DAYLIGHT ***
Between the DARK and the DAYLIGHT
By DAVID C. HODGKINS
Illustrated by DAN ADKINS
_All they wanted was to see their own
children. How could Brendan refuse?_
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Infinity October 1958.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
A curved section of the dome, twenty feet thick with the stubs of
re-inforcing rod rusty and protruding through the damp-marked concrete,
formed the ceiling and back wall of Brendan's office. There was a
constant drip of seepage and condensation. Near the mildew-spotted
floor, a thin white mist drifted in torn swirls while the heating
coils buried in the concrete fought back against the cold. There was
one lamp in the windowless dark, a glowing red coil on Brendan's desk,
well below the eye level of the half-dozen men in the room. The heavy
office door was swung shut, the locking bars pushed home. If it had not
been, there would have been some additional light from the coils in the
corridor ceiling, outside the office. Brendan would have had to face
into it, and the men in front of him would have been looming shadows to
him.
But the door was shut, as Brendan insisted it must be, as all doors to
every room and every twenty-foot length of corridor were always shut as
much of the time as possible--at Brendan's insistence--as though the
dome were a sinking ship.
Conducted by the substance of the dome, there was a constant _chip,
chip, chip_ coming from somewhere, together with a heartless gnawing
sound that filled everyone's head as though they were all biting on
sandpaper.
Brendan growled from behind his desk: "I'm in charge."
The five men on the opposite side of the desk had tacitly chosen
Falconer for their spokesman. He said: "But we've all got something
to say about it, Brendan. You're in charge, but nothing gives you the
power to be an autocrat."
"No?"
"Nothing. The Expedition Charter, in fact, refers to a Board of
Officers--"
"The Expedition Charter was written four hundred years ago, a thousand
light-years away. The men who drew it up are dust. The men who signed
it are dust."
"You're in the direct line of descent from the first Captain."
"Then you're recognizing me as a hereditary monarch, Falconer. I don't
see the basis of your complaint."
Falconer--lean as a whip from the waist down, naked, thick-torsoed,
covered with crisp, heavy fur--set his clawed feet a little apart and
thrust out his heavy under-jaw, clearing his sharp canine tusks away
from his flat lips. He lifted his enormous forearms out from his sides
and curved his fingers. "Don't pare cheese with us, Brendan. The rest
of the dome might be willing to let it go, as long as things're so near
completion. But not us. We won't stand for it." The men with him were
suddenly a tense pack, waiting, ready.
Brendan stood up, a member of Falconer's generation, no more evolved
than any of them. But he was taller than Falconer or any other man in
the room. He was bigger, his cruelly-shaped jaw broader, his tusks
sharper, his forearm muscles out of all proportion to the length of the
bone, like clubs. His eyes burned out from under his shaggy brows,
lambent with the captive glow of the lighting coil, set far back under
the protection of heavy bone. The slitted nostrils of his flat nose
were suddenly flared wide.
"You don't dare," he rumbled. His feet scraped on the floor. "I'll
disembowel the first man to reach me." He lashed out and sent the
massive bronze desk lurching aside, clearing the way between himself
and Falconer's party. And he waited, while the other men sent sidelong
glances at Falconer and Falconer's eyes slowly fell. Then Brendan
grunted. "This is why I'm in charge. Charters and successions don't
mean a thing after four hundred years. Not if a good man goes against
them. You'll keep on taking my orders."
"What kind of paranoiac's world do you live in?" Falconer said
bitterly. "Imposing your will on all of us. Doing everything your way
and no other. We're not saying your methods are absolutely going to
wreck the project, but--"
"What?"
"We've all got a stake in this. We've all got children in the nursery,
the same way you do."
"I don't favor my son over any of the others. Get that idea out of your
head."
"How do we know? Do we have anything to do with the nursery? Are we
allowed inside?"
"I'm this generation's bio-technician and pedagogical specialist.
That's the Captain's particular job. That's the way it's been since
the crash--by the same tradition you were quoting--and that's the way
it has to be. This is a delicate business. One amateur meddling in it
can destroy everything we're doing and everything that was done in the
past. And we'll never have another chance."
"All right. But where's the harm in looking in on them? What's your
point in not letting us at the cameras?"
"They're being overhauled. We're going to need to have them in perfect
working order tomorrow, when we open the nursery gates to the outside.
That's when it'll be important to look in on the children and make sure
everything's all right."
"And meanwhile only you can get into the nursery and see them."
"That's my job."
"Now, listen, Brendan, we all went through the nursery, too. And your
father had the same job you do. We weren't sealed off from everybody
but him. We saw other people. You know that just as well as we do."
Brendan snorted. "There's no parallel. We weren't the end product. We
were just one more link in the chain, and we had to be taught all about
the dome, because the hundred-odd of us were going to constitute its
next population. We had to be taught about the air control system, the
food distribution, the power plant--and the things it takes to keep
this place functioning as well as it can. We had to each learn our job
from the specialist who had it before us.
"But the next generation isn't going to need that. That's obvious. This
is what we've all been working for. To free them. Ten generations ago,
the first of us set out to free them.
"And that's what I'm going to do, Falconer. That's my job, and nobody
here could do it, but me, in my way."
"They're our children too!"
"All right, then, be proud of them. Tomorrow they go outside, and
there'll be men out on the face of this world at last. Your flesh,
your blood, and they'll take this world away from the storms and
the animals. That's what we've spent all this time for. That's what
generations of us have huddled in here for, hanging on for this day.
What more do you want?"
"Some of the kids are going to die," one of the other men growled. "No
matter how well they're equipped to handle things outside, no matter
how much has been done to get them ready. We don't expect miracles from
you, Brendan. But we want to make sure you've done the best possible.
We can't just twiddle our thumbs."
"You want work to do? There's plenty. Shut up and listen to what's
going on outside."
* * * * *
The gnawing filled their heads. Brendan grinned coldly. And the
chipping sound, which had slowed a little, began a rapid pace again.
"They just changed shifts," Brendan said. "One of them got tired and a
fresh one took over."
"They'll never get through to us in the time they've got left,"
Falconer said.
"No?" Brendan turned on him in rage. "How do you know? Maybe they've
stopped using flint. Maybe they've got hold of something like diamonds.
What about the ones that just use their teeth? Maybe they're breeding
for tusks that concrete won't wear down. Think we've got a patent on
that idea? Think because we do it in a semi-automatic nursery, blind
evolution can't do it out in that wet hell outside?"
Lusic--the oldest one of them there, with sparse fur and lighter jaws,
with a round skull that lacked both a sagittal crest and a bone shelf
over the eyes--spoke for the first time.
"None of those things seem likely," he said in a voice muffled by the
air filter his generation had to wear in this generation's ecology.
"They are possibilities, of course, but only that. These are not
purposeful intelligences like ourselves. These are only immensely
powerful animals--brilliant, for animals, in a world lacking a higher
race to cow them--but they do not lay plans. No, Brendan, I don't think
your attempt to distract us has much logic in it. The children will
be out, and will have destroyed them, before there can be any real
danger to the dome's integrity. I can understand your desire to keep us
busy, because we are all tense as our efforts approach a climax. But
I do think your policy is wrong. I think we should long ago have been
permitted a share in supervising the nursery. I think your attempt to
retain dictatorial powers is an unhealthy sign. I think you're afraid
of no longer being the most powerful human being in our society.
Whether you know it or not, I think that's what behind your attitude.
And I think something ought to be done about it, even now."
"_Distract!_" Brendan's roar made them all retreat. He marched slowly
toward Lusic, and the other man began to back away. "When I need
advice from a sophist like you, that'll be the time when we all need
distraction!" He stopped when Lusic was pressed against the wall, and
he pointed at the wall.
"There is nothing in this world that loves us. There is nothing in this
world that can even tolerate us. Generations of us have lived in this
stone trap because not one of us--not even I--could live in the ecology
of this planet. It was never made for men. Men could not have evolved
on it. It would have killed them when they crawled from the sea, killed
them when they tried to breathe its atmosphere, killed them when they
tried to walk on its surface, and when they tried to take a share of
food away from the animals that _could_ evolve here. We are a blot and
an abomination upon it. We are weak, loathesome grubs on its iron face.
And the animals know us for what we are. They may even guess what we
have spent generations in becoming, but it doesn't matter whether they
do or not--they hate us, and they won't stop trying to kill us.
"When the expedition crashed here, they were met by storms and
savagery. They had guns and their kind of air regenerators and a steel
hull for shelter, and still almost all of them died. But if they had
been met by what crowds around this dome today, they would never have
lived at all, or begun this place.
"You're right, Lusic--there are only animals out there. Animals that
hate us so much, some of them have learned to hold stones in their paws
and use them for tools. They hate us so much they chip, chip, chip away
at the dome all day, and gnaw at it, and howl in the night for us to
come out, because they hate us so.
"We only _hope_ they won't break through. We can only hope the children
will drive them away in time. We don't know. But you'd rather be
comfortable in your hope. You'd rather come in here and quibble at my
methods. But I'm not your kind. Because if I don't know, I don't hope.
I act. And because I act, and you don't, and because I'm in charge,
you'll do what I tell you."
He went back to his desk and shoved it back to its place. "That's
all. I've heard your complaint, and rejected it. Get back to work
re-inforcing the dome walls. I want that done."
They looked at him, and at each other. He could see the indecision
on their faces. He ignored it, and after a moment they decided for
retreat. They could have killed him, acting together, and they could
have acted together against any other man in the dome. But not against
him. They began going out.
Lusic was the last through the door. As he reached to pull it shut, he
said, "We may kill you if we can get enough help."
Brendan looked at his watch and said quietly: "Lusic--it's the
twenty-fifth day of Kislev, on Chaim Weber's calendar. Stop off at his
place and tell him it's sunset, will you?"
He waited until Lusic finally nodded, and then ignored him again until
the man was gone.
* * * * *
When his office door was locked, he went to the television screen
buried in the wall behind him, switched it on, and looked out at the
world outside.
Rain--rain at a temperature of 1° Centigrade--blurred the camera
lenses, sluicing over them, blown up through the protective baffles,
giving him not much more than glutinous light and shadow to see. But
Brendan knew what was out there, as surely as a caged wolf knows
the face of his keeper. Near the top of the screen was a lichenous
gray-green mass, looming through the bleakness, that he knew for a line
of beaten, slumped mountains. Between the mountains and the dome was a
plain, running with water, sodden with the runoff from the spineless
hills, and in the water, the animals. They were the color of rocks at
the bottom of an ocean--great, mud-plastered masses, wallowing toward
each other in combat or in passion, rolling, lurching, their features
gross, heavy, licking out a sudden paw with unbelievable speed, as
though giant hippopotami, swollen beyond all seeming ability to move,
still somehow had managed to endow themselves with the reflexes of
cats. They crowded the plain, a carpet of obscenity, and for all
they fed on each other, and mated, and sometimes slept with their
unblinking eyes open and swiveling, they all faced toward the dome
and never stopped throwing themselves against its flanks, there to
hang scrabbling at the curve of the concrete, or doing more purposeful
things.
Brendan looked out at them with his chest rising in deep swells. "I'd
like to get out among you," he growled. "You'd kill me, but I'd like
to get out among you." He took a long breath.
He triggered one of the dome's old batteries, and watched the shells
howl into the heaving plain. Red fire flared, and the earth trembled,
erupting. Wherever the shells struck, the animals were hurled aside ...
to lie stunned, to shake themselves with the shock of the explosions,
and to stagger to their feet again.
"You wait," Brendan hissed, stopping the useless fire. "You wait 'til
my Donel gets at you. You wait."
He shut the screen off, and crossed his office toward a door set into
the bulkhead at his right. Behind it were the nursery controls, and,
beyond those, behind yet another door which he did not touch, was the
quarter-portion of the dome that housed the children, sealed off, more
massively walled than any other part, and, in the center of its share
of the dome surface, pierced by the only full-sized gateway to the
world. It was an autonomous shelter-within-a-shelter, and even its
interior walls were fantastically thick in case the dome itself were
broken.
The controls covered one wall of their cubicle. He ignored the shrouded
camera screens and the locked switch that would activate the gate. He
passed on to the monitoring instruments, and read off the temperature
and pressure, the percentages of the atmospheric components, and all
the other things that had to be maintained at levels lethal to him
so that the children could be comfortable. He put the old headphones
awkwardly to his ears and listened to the sounds he heard in the
nursery.
He opened one of the traps in the dome wall, and almost instantly there
was an animal in it. He closed the outer end of the trap, opened the
access into the nursery, and let the animal in. Then, for a few more
moments, he listened to the children as they killed and ate it.
* * * * *
Later, as he made his way down the corridor, going home for the night,
he passed Chaim Weber's doorway. He stopped and listened, and coming
through the foot-thick steel and the concrete wall, he heard the
Channukah prayer:
"_Baruch Ata Adonai, Eloheynu Melech Haolam, shehichiyanu vikiyimanu,
vihigianu lazman hazeh_...."
"Blessed be The Lord," Brendan repeated softly to himself, "Our God,
Lord of the Universe. Who has given us life, and is our strength, and
has brought us this day."
He stopped and whispered, "this day," again, and went on.
* * * * *
His wife was waiting for him, just inside the door, and he grunted a
greeting to her while he carefully worked the bolts. She said nothing
until he had turned around again, and he looked at her inquiringly.
"Sally?"
"You did it again," she said.
He nodded without special expression. "I did."
"Falconer's got the whole dome buzzing against you."
"All right."
She sighed angrily. "Did you have to threaten Lusic? He's only the
representative of the previous generation. The one group inside the
dome detached enough to be persuaded to back you up."
"One, I didn't threaten him. If he felt that way, it was only because
he knew he was pushing me into a corner where I might turn dangerous.
Two, anything he represents can't be worth much, if he can accuse me
of bringing in a red herring and then can back down when I bring that
selfsame herring back in a louder tone of voice. Three, it doesn't
matter if anybody supports me. I'm in charge."
She set her mouth in a disgusted line. "You don't think much of
yourself, do you?"
Brendan crossed the room. He sat down on the edge of the stone block
that fitted into the join of floor and wall, and was his bed. Sitting
that way, bent forward, with his shoulders against the curve of the
overhead, he looked as though he might be trying to help hold up the
dome. "We've been married a long time, Sally. That can't be a fresh
discovery you're making."
"It isn't."
"All right."
"You don't even care what _I_ think of you, do you?"
"I care. I can't afford to pay any attention."
"You don't care. You don't care for one living soul besides yourself,
and the only voice you'll listen to is that power-chant in your head.
You married me because I was good breeding stock. You married me
because, if you can't lead us outside, at least your son will be the
biggest and best of his generation."
"Funny," Brendan said. "Lusic thinks I've been motivated by a fear of
losing my pre-eminence. I wonder if your positions can be reconciled.
And do you realize you're admitting I'm exactly what I say I am?"
She spat: "I hate you. I really do. I hope they pull you down before
the nursery gate opens to the outside."
"If they pull me down, that'll be a sure bet. I changed over all the
controls, several years ago. I'm the only man in this dome who can
possibly work them."
"You _what_!"
"You heard me."
"They'll kill you when I tell them."
"You can think better than that, Sally. You're just saying something
for the sake of making a belligerent noise. They don't dare kill me,
and they'd be taking a very long chance in torturing me to a point
where I'd tell them how the controls work. Longer than long, because
there'd be no logic in my telling them and so passing my own death
sentence. But I expected you to say something like that, because people
do, when they're angry. That's why I never get angry. I've got a
purpose in life. I'm going to see it attained. So you're not going to
catch me in any mistakes."
"You're a monster."
"So I am. So are we all. Monsters with a purpose. And I'm the best
monster of us all."
"They'll kill you the moment after you open that gate."
"No," he said slowly, "I don't think so. All the tension will be over
then, and the kids will be doing their job."
"I'll kill you. I promise."
"I don't think you mean that. I think you're in love with me."
"You think I love you?"
"Yes, I do."
She looked at him uncertainly. "Why do I?"
"I don't know. Love takes odd forms, under pressure. But it's still
love. Though, of course, I don't know anything about it."
"You bastard, I hate you more than any man alive."
"You do."
"I--no...!" She began to cry. "Why do you have to be like this? Why
can't you be what I want--what you can be?"
"I can't. Even though you love me." He sat in his dark corner, and his
eyes brooded at her.
"And what do you feel?"
"I love you," he said. "What does that change?"
"Nothing," she said bitterly. "Absolutely nothing."
"All right, then."
She turned away in unbearable frustration, and her eyes rested on the
dinner table, where the animal haunch waited. "Eat your supper."
He got up, washed at the sink, went over to the table and broke open
the joint on the roast. He gave her half, and they began to eat.
"Do you know about the slaughtering detail?" he asked her.
"What about it?"
"Do you know that two days ago, one of the animals deliberately came
into the trap in the dome? That it had help?"
"How?"
"Another animal purposely stayed in the doorway, to jam it. I think
they thought that if they did that, the killing block couldn't fall.
I think they watched outside--perhaps for months--and thought it out.
And it might have worked, but the killing block was built to fall
regardless, and it killed them both. The slaughtering detail dragged
the other one in through the doorway before any more could reach them.
But suppose there'd been a third one, waiting directly outside? They'd
have killed four men. And suppose, next time, they try to wedge the
block? And then chip through the sides of the trap, which are only
a few feet thick? Or suppose they invent tools with handles, for
leverage, and begin cutting through in earnest?"
"The children will be out there before that happens."
Brendan nodded. "Yes. But we're running it narrow. Very narrow. This
place would never hold up through another generation."
"What difference does it make? We've beaten them. Generation by
generation, we've changed to meet them, while all they've done is
learn a little. We've bred back, and mutated, and trained. We've
got a science of genetics, we've got controlled radioactivity, gene
selection, chromosome manipulation--all they've got is hate."
"Yes. And listen to it."
Grinding through the dome, the gnaw and chip came to them clearly.
They began to eat again, after one long moment.
Then she asked: "Is Donel all right?"
He looked up sharply. They had had this out a long time ago. "He's all
right as far as I know." He was responsible for all of the children in
the nursery, not just one in particular. He could not afford to get
into the habit of discussing one any more than another. He could not
afford to get into the habit of discussing any of them at all.
"You don't care about _him_, either, do you?" she said. "Or have you
got some complicated excuse for that, too?"
He shook his head. "It's not complicated." He listened to the sound
coming through the dome.
She looked it him with tears brimming in her eyes. He thought for an
instant of the tragedy inherent in the fact that they all of them knew
how ugly they were--and that the tragedy did not exist, because somehow
love did _not_ know--and he was full of this thought when she said,
like someone dying suddenly. "Why? Why, Sean?"
"Why?" She'd got a little way past his guard. "Because I'm the Captain,
and because I'm the best, and there's no escaping the duty of being
that. Because some things plainly must be done--not because there is
anything sacred in plans made by people who are past, and gone, but
because there is no other reason why we should have been born with the
intelligence to discipline our emotions."
"How cut-and-dried you make it sound!"
"I told you it wasn't complicated. Only difficult."
* * * * *
The common rooms were in the center of the dome, full of relics:
lighting systems designed for eyes different from theirs; ventilation
ducts capped over, uncapped again, modified; furniture re-built times
over; stuff that had once been stout enough to stand the wear of human
use--too fragile to trust, now, against the unconscious brush of a
hurried hip or the kick of a stumbling foot; doorways too narrow,
aisles too cramped in the auditorium; everything not quite right.
Brendan called them there in the morning, and every man and woman
in the dome came into the auditorium. They growled and talked
restlessly--Falconer and Lusic and the rest were moving purposefully
among them--and when Brendan came out on the stage, they rumbled in the
red-lit gloom, the condensation mist swirling up about them. Brendan
waited, his arms folded, until they were all there.
"Sit down," he said. He looked across the room, and saw Falconer and
the others watching him carefully, gauging their moment. "Fools,"
Brendan muttered to himself. "If you were going to challenge me at all,
you should have done it long ago." But they had let him cow them too
long--they remembered how, as children, they had all been beaten by
him--how he could rise to his feet with six or seven of them clinging
to his back and arms, to pluck them off and throw them away from him.
And how, for all their clevernesses, they had never out-thought him.
They had promised themselves this day--perhaps years ago, even then,
they had planned his ripping-apart--but they had not dared to interfere
with him until the dome's work was done. In spite of hate, and envy,
and the fear that turns to murder. They knew who their best man was,
and Brendan could see that most of them still had that well in mind.
He searched the faces of the people, and where Falconer should have
been able to put pure rage, he saw caution lurking with it, like a
divided counsel.
He was not surprised. He had expected that--if there had been no
hesitation in any man he looked at, it would have been for the first
time in his life. But he had never pressed them as hard as he meant to
do this morning. He would need every bit of a cautious thought, every
slow response that lived among these people, or everything would go
smash, and he with it.
He turned his head fleetingly, and even that, he knew, was dangerous.
But he had to see if Sally was still there, poised to one side of the
stage, looking at him blankly. He turned back to the crowd.
"All right. Today's the day. The kids're going out as soon as I'm
through here."
Sally had told him this morning not to call them together--to just go
and do it. But they would have been out in the corridors, waiting. He
would have had to brush by them. One touch--one contact of flesh to
flesh, and one of them might have tried to prove the mortality he found
in Sean Brendan.
"I want you in your homes. I want your doors shut. I want the corridor
compartments closed tight." He looked at them, and in spite of the
death he saw rising among them like a tide, he could not let it go at
that. "I want you to do that," he said in a softer voice than any of
them had ever heard from him. "Please."
It was the hint of weakness they needed. He knew that when he gave it
to them.
"Sean!" Sally cried.
And the auditorium reverberated to the formless roar that drowned her
voice with its cough. They came toward him with their hands high,
baying, and Sally clapped her hands to her ears.
* * * * *
Brendan stood, wiped his hand over his eyes, turned, and jumped. He was
across the stage in two springs, his toenails gashing the floor, and
he spun Sally around with a hand that held its iron clutch on her arm.
He swept a row of seats into the feet of the closest ones, and pushed
Sally through the side door to the main corridor. He snatched up the
welding gun he had left there, and slashed across door and frame with
it, but they were barely started in their run toward his office before
he heard the hasty weld snap open and the corridor boom with the sound
of the rebounding door. Claws clicked and scratched on the floor behind
him, and bodies thudded from the far wall, flung by momentum and the
weight of the pack behind them. There would be trampled corpses in the
auditorium, he knew, in the path between the door and the mob's main
body.
Sally tugged at the locked door to the next section of corridor.
Brendan turned and played the welder's flame in the distorted faces
nearest him. Sally got the door open, and he threw her beyond it. They
forced it shut again behind them, and this time his weld was more
careful but that was broken, too, before they were through the next
compartment, and now there would be people in the parallel corridors,
racing to cut them off--racing, and howling. The animals outside must
be hearing it ... must be wondering....
He turned the two of them into a side corridor, and did not stop to use
the welder. The mob might bypass an open door ... and they would need
to be able to get to their homes....
They were running along the dome's inside curve, now, in a section
where the dome should have been braced--it hadn't been done--and he
cursed Falconer for a spiteful ass while their feet scattered the slimy
puddles and they tripped over the concrete forms that had been thrown
down carelessly.
"All right," Brendan growled to himself and to Falconer, "all right,
you'll think about that when the time comes."
They reached the corridor section that fronted on his office, and there
were teeth and claws to meet them. Brendan hewed through the knot of
people, and now it was too late to worry whether he killed them or
not. Sally was running blood down her shoulder and back, and his own
cheek had been ripped back by a throat-slash that missed. He swallowed
gulps of his own blood, and spat it out as he worked toward his door,
and with murder and mutilation he cleared the way for himself and the
mother of his boy, until he had her safe inside, and the edge of the
door sealed all around. Then he could stop, and see the terrible wound
in Sally's side, and realize the bones of his leg were dripping and
jagged as they thrust out through the flesh.
"Didn't I tell you?" he reproached her as he went to his knees beside
her where she lay on the floor. "I told you to go straight here,
instead of to the auditorium." He pressed his hands to her side, and
sobbed at the thick well of her blood over his gnarled fingers with the
tufts of sopping fur caught in their claws. "Damn you for loving me!"
She twitched her lips in a rueful smile, and shook her head slightly.
"Go let Donel out," she whispered.
They were hammering on the office door. And there were cutting torches
available, just as much as welders. He turned and made his way to the
control cubicle, half-dragging himself. He pulled the lever that would
open the gates, once the gate motors were started, and, pulling aside
the panels on cabinets that should have had nothing to do with it, he
went through the complicated series of switchings that diverted power
from the dome pile into those motors.
The plain's mud had piled against the base of the gate, and the
hinges were old. The motors strained to push it aside, and the dome
thrummed with their effort. The lighting coils dimmed, and outside his
office door, Brendan could hear a great sigh. He pulled the listening
earphones to his skull, and heard the children shout. Then he smiled
with his ruined mouth, and pulled himself back into his office, to the
outside viewscreen, and turned it on. He got Sally and propped her up.
"Look," he mumbled. "Look at our son."
There was blurred combat on the plain, and death on that morning, and
no pity for the animals. He watched, and it was quicker than he could
ever have imagined.
"Which one is Donel?" Sally whispered.
"I don't know," he said. "Not since the children almost killed me when
they were four; you should have heard Donel shouting when he tore my
respirator away by accident--he was playing with me, Sally--and saw me
flop like a fish for air I could breathe, and saw my blood when another
one touched my throat. I got away from them that time, but I never
dared go back in after they searched out the camera lenses and smashed
them. They _knew_, then--they knew we were in here, and they knew we
didn't belong on their world."
_And Falconer's kind would have gassed them, or simply re-mixed their
air ... they would have, after a while, no matter what.... I know how
many times I almost did...._
There was a new sound echoing through the dome. "Now they don't need
us to let them out, anymore." There was a quick, sharp, deep hammering
from outside--mechanical, purposeful, tireless. "That ... that may be
Donel now."
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