Land Beyond the Map

Crane watched him go, even then undecided whether or not to pump a shot after him. But the man had, looking back, merely offered to warn him and had taken the map at the point of a gun — then Crane remembered that callous shot at the bush in the ditch and his finger tightened on the trigger. But he let McArdle go. The man — if man he was — had been right. Crane couldn’t shoot a defenseless man in the back when there appeared no need. Then McArdle disappeared behind a tree that lurched forward on its insensate line of march.

X

Crane climbed the last flight of green and gold-veined marble steps and stood looking up, one hand resting on the alabaster urn with its draggle of scarlet poppies crowning the handrail. Behind and below him the hundred-yard wide staircase dropped away to the point where the road ended. Only when he’d stepped off the road, onto the first marble step, had the importance of that road in the scheme of things struck him. It had been like a first solo.

His eyes squinted a little as sunlight bounced back from the tower before him. Glistening white was that tower; tall and wide and round, a drum tower, crenellated, loop-holed, flanked by curtain walls almost as tall as itself. In the center of the tower, directly facing him, the door seemed odd, out of place, small, black, mean — and shut.

He stared at that wall and that tower and that door and the thick heady scent of the poppies hung in his nostrils like a warning. The feel of the rifle in his hand could give him only passing, illusory comfort; for here he envisaged joining battle with beings that were not of the Earth that had borne him.

“Well,” he thought, for his own comfort, “better get on with it.”

He lifted the rifle. From what McArdle had said the problem of ammunition supply would not arise; the arm was charged and would last what, oh — five thousand rounds? Something that would normally burn out the lands into inaccuracy in mundane weapons. He body-aimed, ignoring the sights, and touched the trigger feather-light — but three distinct crumps of light splashed over the door and battered it into shredded rags hanging from warped hinges.

He smiled. “This is a real jim-dandy piece of ordnance,” he said, admiringly, and began to tramp the remaining distance to the tower and the shattered opening.

Under the arch he paused. Murdering holes leered down on him; but nothing spurted from them and he had long since formed the hard opinion that nothing lived in these ramparts girdling the city. His goal lay over there, in the city proper — if city it be. Glistening with pimpled light like a Christmas tree a missile gantry lifted — high, higher than any he had seen before on any film. This was real. This towered. It was the tree he had seen as a child and from which he had lately fled. Multiplicity of lattice-work and elevators, of pump lines and conveyers concealed the ship within — she was a ship. Crane knew that simply enough. A missile that size could blow half the Earth into mushrooms.

Beside the gantry, workshops and hangars crouched low, busy with fire and thunder. Vast areas of roof covered industries stretching for acres. Streets bisected in neat patterns. The towers and turrets of his childhood vision resolved now into a complex of engineering workshops and refineries from which the glow and flood of color illuminated everything about.

In dominant tandem with the ship gantry lifted the bowl — the fiery bowl like an Olympic flame magnified ten times the size of Wren’s dome over Saint’Paul’s. That, still, he could not neatly docket into a file of understanding.

He began to walk down the metal slatted road into the city. He walked on an escalator, a moving road; but the treads had long since ceased to move and weeds and daisies grew from the dirt trapped between them.

The first scuttler poked a stalked eye from the crumbled ruins flanking the stalled escalator. Its body followed: bucket-sized, scuttling on six jointed metal legs, gnashing metal mandibles before it, scrabbling out with hostile intent. This time Crane’s trigger pressure accurately released one shell. The scuttler vanished in a blooming detonation that rolled around the ruins in powdery echoes. Crane smiled.

“So the Wardens have baby brothers,” he said cheerfully. The first evidence of tangible opposition cheered him; he lost the sensation of boxing shadows.

He knocked off three or four more scuttlers as he pressed on determinedly for the squat blue-columned, ocher-walled building supporting that enormous bowl. They skittered out at him from the ruins and then, as he pressed on, from between rows of factory workshops from which sounded the heavy beat of machines in full production. And he remembered that all the time he’d been with McArdle not one single Warden had attacked. Odd, that.