Valeddom
4: vutu

By the time we had covered some hundreds of miles and endured weeks of marching, the landscape was more barren than ever – bleaker and sparser than I had noted anywhere since my coming to Valeddom, with hardly a leaf of vegetation, and none of the nutritional berry-bushes to be seen. The rocks were of a lunar grey, gritty and dusty, rather than the smooth chocolatey brown of the more southern plains. The former flatness had given way to one low hill after another, while on our left a range of mountains gradually drew near as we plodded northwards. The mountains reminded me of those which I had been close to when I first awoke on Valeddom, though I realized we must now be far north of that point, and in even less hospitable country.
    Columns of steam rising to westward, against an extra brightness in the sky, confirmed that we were edging towards Dayside – the eternal blazing furnace of the sunward face of Mercury. Common sense – Earthly common sense – assured me that we were shielded by the mountains, but to be anywhere near the Dayside frontier gave me random shudders whenever the thought of it sneaked in to my Mercurian brain, whispering the fears of millions of generations which had known the sun as a savage killer, its rays scorching all life.
    My spirit sank and my strength ran low until I managed to settle upon obstinacy as my defence against despair. Dull optimism. Absurd, the way I repeated to myself, when we escape, we’ll have to make sure of our supplies. “Should be easy,” I muttered stupidly. We would not need all that much in the way of food and water. Thanks to the superior efficiency of the Mercurian metabolism, we’d require only about a tenth of what we would have needed on Earth. But we would need that. On this journey we were fed and watered, sparely, from containers thrown down or (when Navon was, I suppose, in a slightly better mood) lowered to us on slings by the riders of the squarls. When we escape, I repeated to myself, we will have to make sure we take enough of these bottles and concentrates with us.
    That was my way of taking escape for granted – refusing to question or doubt that it was only a matter of time before some brilliant scheme turned up.

                                                   *****

I began to notice streaks on the ground.
    It wasn’t so obvious when you were standing on one, for they were wide and vague. But the ones further off were easy to make out. They were visible as straight lines of brighter rock, running almost parallel but promising to converge on some point which, I reckoned, must lie beyond the next grey hill.
    I asked Bryce what he thought they were.
    He muttered, “Ejecta lines.”
    “What?” I asked, hoping he meant something artificial, something to do with a city.
    “Splashes from a crater impact. A purely natural phenomenon.”
    “Oh,” I said. My face fell. I so wanted some signal that this dreary slog was nearing its end! Even the enemy stronghold would be a welcome sight, or so I thought then.
    We were trudging uphill some minutes later when my cast-down eyes noted a different, more exact kind of stripy disturbance in the dust. No doubt about it this time – it was a track made by a vehicle.
    We topped the rise. The squarls halted and therefore so did we. Down we gazed onto a great smashed region of broken rocks and puddles of frozen lava, in the midst of which lay a crater some two miles wide.
    From where we stood we could see the upper part of a building, of some highly reflective green-grey metal, jutting up beyond the near wall of the crater.
    I hadn’t spoken with my Mercurian family for a long time. In the monotonous stupor of the trek I had even forgotten that one of them – my sister’s man, Tmaeu – was by origin a Vutuan.
    Now as I stood wondering what we were all waiting for, I heard a muttering from Tmaeu:
    “There you see it. The Palace of the Toach. As you might expect, it’s sticking up taller than anything else.”
    I feasted my eyes on the visible top of the palace. At last, at long last, we had got somewhere. Civilization of a sort – any sort – hurrah.
    To me the structure’s shape, for some reason, appeared rather revolting. If it had been transparent it would have looked like an enormous tuft of soap bubbles; complex, interesting, perhaps even beautiful in its way, but not exactly restful to the eye. But we can hope, I thought, that the rest of Vutu, not visible from here, turns out different from the palace.
    Why weren’t our captors moving? Their vehicles’ tentacular legs surrounded us like the bars of a cage. We were waiting for something.
Movement on the outside crater wall! An up-sliding door: a tunnel mouth, opening. I froze with a this-is-it certainty.
    Bryce reacted quite otherwise.
    He began to talk fast and quite loudly, in Valeddomian, using technical terms which showed that his grasp of the language now exceeded mine. “An impact crater,” he lectured. “Notice those rays of brighter rock streaking outwards, getting fainter with distance – they are ejecta. And those other ripples that overlie some of them, they’re subsequent lava flows, indicating that the shock of the impact may have triggered volcanism....”
    It came to me, what he was up to. In the hope that the squarls were listening, he was showing off – for the best of motives. For now that we had reached Vutu our fate might well depend on how highly our Earth minds were respected.
    While he spouted geology, and while I waited for something to come out of the newly-opened tunnel, my eyes picked out a track which led from it and away to our left, towards the mountains. Westward, away from Vutu, I traced that track up the mountain pass to where it ended at a distant, gigantic, shield-shaped wall. Such a structure, apparently alone in the wilderness, could not help but seem sinister, even monstrous.
    It looked like – and I guessed it actually was – a dam. Not a river dam, of course. There wasn’t any flowing water here, and anyway this thing hadn’t been placed part-way up a valley, as you’d expect a river dam to be. Instead, it stood at the high point of a deep pass. But it was surely a dam of some sort, hundreds of feet high, blocking the pass, holding back something. Its position and its sturdiness reminded me of the defence built by the natives of Skull Island in King Kong, but the threat beyond this particular barrier must be in a different class from any giant gorilla.
    A nudge from Bryce. My gaze swept back to what lay in front of me, to the main panorama. I was in time to see that a gleaming snout of white metal had poked out of the tunnel in Vutu’s crater-wall.
    It was the front of a vehicle. I watched as it lumbered into the open.
Built like an elongated army tank, with half-shielded tracks on cleats, it advanced ponderously. The whole picture leaped into proper scale when I noticed the vehicle’s double row of portholes and realized it was two storeys high.
    A buzzing above my head made me look up and I saw lights flash. Our guardians were making sure that we were seen.
    The tank halted, and from its stern a mast pushed up. The tip of the mast flashed an answering light.
    The squarls responded with more flashes.
    Then a hatch opened in the tank’s roof and I saw little silver figures which were people climb out and down the exterior ladders that were fixed to the hull. I counted the crew members – four, five, six.... eight, ten.... They reached the ground and fanned out in two lines to receive us, while in their hands they brandished what looked like long-barrelled pistols which my mind whispered were energy weapons – while we captives, ridiculously, clutched our spears. How stupid of us to have lugged spears for hundreds of miles.
    Behind me, I heard a growl of disgust from Fnekt, and then a clatter. The rest of us, following his example, threw down our primitive weapons.
    Through the thin air we faintly heard what sounded like a cheer. Were those men laughing at us? I wasn’t sure because something else was happening close by. A shape was descending, right in front of us – one of the squarls was lowering its rider.
    Navon, the chief of our three abductors, was placed upright on the ground, facing us, and I got a proper close look at him for the first time.
His upper torso was wrapped in a broad silvery chest-band, the front of which glowed like the face of a digital watch. On it shimmered a “1048” about six inches high (expressed in Valeddomian numerals, of course).
He covered us with his energy-gun while the other two squarls lowered his colleagues to the ground behind us. I looked over my shoulder and noted that these two also had numbers on their chests (I can still remember, they were “994” and “578”). Navon then went round us to join them. His stride was as firm as though he hadn’t been cooped inside a squarl-hood for goodness knows how many hundreds of hours.
    From behind us he spoke a single word: kannesh. “Forward!”
It’s funny how you end up, in some situations, walking of your own accord towards your fate, when the feeling comes over you from all directions, that there just isn’t anything else to do. Even without compulsion we would have had to seek food in the city. And even without that practical need, I think we would have sought shelter in Vutu rather than continue to wander in this desolate region of Yonnimay. So, obediently, we picked our way downwards across the cracked, debris-littered slope towards the waiting tank crew.
Yet as we did so some hunch made me look round. Our three guardians were spreading out a little, as though they were squaring off against the tank crew, in a manner which put me in mind of Wild West gun-fighters taking up position for their duels, but of course this was ridiculous – the squarl-riders and the tank crew were all on the same side, all wearing the same uniform of numbered chest-bands and bright blue cloaks. They weren’t about to fight each other, surely? No, whatever the tension that was building up (and I could sense it, like the charge in the air before a thunderstorm), it couldn’t be hostility.
    When we were close enough to read the actual numbers which the tank crew wore on their chests, the “storm” broke.
    I had to blink as those numbers in front of me flashed brilliantly for a half-second. And at the same time, light from the opposite direction – light which must have been projected from the guardians behind me – prompted me to swing about and I saw that Navon was no longer “1048”, he was now “1539”. His two henchmen had acquired bigger numbers likewise – they were now “1305” and “889”.
    Yet for some reason the increase hadn’t happened to the men in front of us. The exchange of blasts had left the numbers on the tank-crew’s chests unchanged.
    At bewildering moments like this I still had the bad habit of looking at my ex-teacher as though I expected him to provide an explanation. This time I really wished I hadn’t looked. Bryce’s agonized face wasn’t pleasant to behold. He was most likely going half nuts trying to work it all out, whereas I knew better; I refused even to begin....
    When we got to within about five yards of the tank, we stopped without being told. It was obvious that the next move was up to the tank commander.
    He identified himself by swaggering forward: a thick-set, grinning man with “1105” across his chest, his eyes flicking as if following an inner movie as he strode up to Navon and gave him a palm-to-chest salute, saying: “Keep away from Nought!”
    “Keep away from Nought!” Navon replied, as heartily as if he were saying “Happy Birthday”.
    The tank commander then turned to me. Or so I thought, though his tilted stare made it hard to be sure whom he was addressing. In the garbled Vutuan speech he sang out: “Windfall for us, presence of you, regular proving in the Blazing Land.”
    Tmaeu sidled up to me.
    “I’d better translate,” he said. “You and Semor are appointed as mascots. They reckon you may bring them luck. On their expedition. Just now leaving for Dayside.”
    “Mascots?” said Bryce indignantly. “What is the meaning of this?”
    “It means you’re going to be taken for a ride.”
    Bryce looked towards the west, up the valley towards the great dam. He spluttered, “This is stupid!” He protested to “1105”, his voice rising, “How can we possibly be useful to you out there? We’ve only just got here, we’re exhausted, we know nothing of your expeditions.... After all the weary distance your people have brought us, surely you can at least take us into your city....”
    He was in fear, and so was I; my guts were churning as though I were being invited by devils to take part in a tour of hell. But though I was as desperate as Bryce, I could tell that a different approach was called for.
I spoke out, forcing myself to use the Valeddomian language at a more advanced level than I ever had before. Not that I had any real hope – I just had to try something, anything, to get out of having to go for that ride.
“We came at the right time – yes – but suppose you don’t seize us as mascots? Suppose you go without us? Suppose you voluntarily pass up the chance to take a couple of Earth-minds on your expedition? What then? I say, that to turn down the offer of luck is to show even greater bravery. And fortune favours the bold, so take the risk: throw away this opportunity!”
Never in my life had I felt so daft as when I looked at the frozen expressions around me after that odd speech. Awful seconds ticked by. What if my twaddle, inspired suddenly by my hudar faculty, had made things worse? Suppose it had undermined the scientific impression Bryce had been trying to give? But I had to brazen it out. I was naturally bound to feel like an idiot, considering how little opportunity I’d had so far to fathom the Vutuan mentality.
    1105’s arm shot up as if he were a referee about to blow the whistle.
“Yebbeorr,” he shouted.
    “Yebbeorr,” wailed the other tankmen.
    They all began to trot back towards their vehicle. They swarmed up the ladders and disappeared. A few more shouts of “Yebbeorr”, ringing with exultation, resounded as I gaped.
    Floating in my dreamy amazement, I vaguely felt the pat on the shoulder as Bryce congratulated me. I had won my point! They were going to do what I suggested! This, for me, was almost as scary as the alternative would have been. It was an unbalancing thing, it was a door of unexpected opportunity opening when I leaned against it, leading me to an un-guessable future of peril and power.
    As the tank moved off, we were left standing with our three original guardians, who now motioned us forward towards the tunnel, and we turned our steps that way. Having escaped the trip to Dayside, we must now face the entry into Vutu.
    And all the time the ritual phrase, keep away from Nought, pricked my imagination like a needle.

                                                   *****

The tunnel wasn’t lit, but enough daylight penetrated close to the entrance to reveal two pairs of rails running down its length, one pair on each side. On the near side, the left as we went in, an open metal container, like a skip on wheels, rested on the rails. Navon and his two henchmen gestured for us to climb into this contraption.
    Navon then pushed a lever and we all began to move towards the spot of daylight at the other end of the tunnel.
    The container came to a stop just before the rails ended. We got down, took a few steps and emerged inside Vutu crater – into a silent, dingy forest of giant tubby mushrooms.
    I blinked and stood gawping. The “mushrooms” were cylindrical houses topped by hemispheres. They were about the same size as ordinary houses in my world, though their strange bulging shapes, and their lack of windows, made them seem to loom larger. But the sense of being inside an immense field, rather than a city, came also from the silence, the lack of bustle. I saw only a few people walking along the ways between the houses and in the main avenue which ran straight from where we stood towards the centre.
I could see about a mile down that avenue as far as the palace – the foamy-looking mass heaped on the crater’s central rise.
    I turned to see how my companions were reacting to the view. From their expressions I guessed they felt as subdued as I did. The exception was Tmaeu, of course, for he was a Vutuan. He had seen it all before.
    I happened to notice that Navon was still standing in the tunnel; he seemed to be making some adjustment to the wheeled container on which we had just ridden. From him, my eye was drawn upwards to something bright above the tunnel entrance. It was a plaque. It displayed a flashing sign: lemon-yellow figures blinking “903”, “903”, “903”. Again a number! But, this time, not attached to a person.
    Then as Navon finished what he was doing and came forward to join us, and he passed under the flashing plaque and entered the city, the number changed from “903” to “904”.
    Bryce had seen it too.
    “Clear, eh?” I said – in English – and looked meaningfully at him.
    But the next thing I heard was a curt order spoken in Valeddomian; it was Navon speaking his favourite word.  “Forward.”
    We all began our walk down the bare-rock avenue towards the palace.
Bryce walked beside me. I tried again to make use of the opportunity to exchange a few confidential words in our own language. “You saw it,” I went on, “that plaque – it’s a population counter. So that’s good news, Sir – there are only 904 people in Vutu! So getting out of here may be no harder than escaping from a village....”
    He wasn’t answering and I became impatient. All right, maybe my logic wasn’t that good. Maybe it was just as hard to escape from a village-sized population as from a bustling city. Maybe in some ways it might be harder. If you’re on the run you’re more conspicuous among hundreds than among thousands. Nevertheless my teacher might have had the kindness to say something....
    Finally some words came from him – not the ones I wanted.
    “You did it,” Bryce said, in a tone that made it plain he hadn’t been thinking at all about what I had just said; perhaps he hadn’t even heard it; he wasn’t thinking about anything except my speech to the tank commander. “I don’t know how you did it,” he went on, “but you’ve latched onto a way of dealing with them. You’re in tune with their psychology. We’re in your hands now.”
    Look, I felt like telling him off, I really don’t need this.
    Of course it was nice to be praised, nice to know I had done something clever and right, or rather it would have been nice but for one thing – they were going to expect me to do it again! Despite the fact that I had absolutely no idea how I had done it the first time! If this was what it was like to be blessed with hudar, I didn’t think my nerves would stand much more of it. Mr Bryce, if you don’t say the sort of thing I want you to say, I may blow my top. The others, the family, were even less use than he. As soon as I spoke they turned their admiring and helpless faces to me as though I alone could be counted on to arrange for a successful escape with provisions and transport laid on, to get us all safe to Ixli.
    I was never one for using bad language in English, but Mercurian might be a different matter. KMEFFULSH, said I, but not out loud. I wasn’t yet sure of the meanings of Mercurian cuss-words. In such a case it’s wiser to throw a secret tantrum inside one’s own head.
    The mushroom houses, the unpaved ground, the greyness everywhere, made this whole place look dark in spite of the plentiful light pouring down from the sky. Not quite ugly, Vutu was dingy. The scarcity of folk added to the bare grimness of the scene. And I kept getting the sense that I was missing something, failing to notice an important point about this off-putting city. Hudar faculty at work again? I guessed it was. In which case, hudar was doing a fine job of disturbing my mind by hints without being good enough to explain what the hints were about. KMEFFULSH to hudar. If it was just out to tease me, I would ignore it.
    That’s precisely what I did when the incident occurred, which I shall now describe. We reached a point where the avenue ran across the side of a square, and as the scene widened I saw, to our left, two groups, one of five people coming down a side-street, the other of two people going along the main street, each group hidden from the other by the corner between them, until the point came when they suddenly saw each other and saw that they were converging. Immediately, blue cloaks swirled as they skittered to position themselves, face on. Flash! flash! – the chest-bands blazed. I had no doubt that some of the numbers displayed on those bands changed in that instant. In the cellar of my mind a coiled truth stirred and threatened to wake and bring the mystery of Vutu forth into the full light of day. But though I think I almost grasped the answer then, I drew back, allowing it to turn over and relax back into slumber, and I wasn’t sorry to let it lie.
    We were now within a hundred yards of the palace towering before us. It was like nothing so much as a gigantic pile of solidified soap suds painted grey.
    Navon pointed his energy gun into the air and fired a sizzling white bolt into the sky, whereupon a sentry came running, spoke briefly with Navon, ran back and disappeared beyond an arched doorway which slid open to admit him and slid shut behind him, and when we reached that door, accompanied by Navon, his two henchmen and two further guards, we crossed the threshold. So without any further ceremony we found ourselves inside the Palace of the Toach.
    We were in a maze of giant frozen spherical spaces lit by a pearly glow. Flooring sliced across the middle of the spaces as though to arrest the jostling chaos. Amid these intensely alien surroundings, hudar was whispering:
    The search for understanding is a trap. You must reject it. Reject knowledge.
    I was ready to agree. Knowledge would not aid us, it would only distract us from our efforts to escape.
    We reached a hemispheric throne room or audience chamber, perhaps thirty yards across. On a round platform in the centre rested a hooded chair, and in the chair sat a man, who, like everybody else, wore a chest-band and a blue cloak, but, unlike anybody else, wore also a belted robe of creamy white.
    No one stood close to the Toach. His courtiers – so I termed them – lounged or chatted in groups round the wall.
    Before we had covered half the distance to the throne, our guide, Navon, motioned us to stop, and he then called out to the ruler:
    “Keep away from Nought, Toach Mnuvax Veffih! I bring you the Ixlian Awakened, his Ixlian family, and the Awakened from Jempeldex.”
    In reply, the voice of Mnuvax boomed resoundingly through the hall:
    “Keep away from Nought, Navon. Approach and report.”
    We had to watch while Navon walked on alone to confer with his master. They bowed their heads together.
    The Toach looked to be about sixty (in Earth years), hale and strong, with a big chin and powerful jaw. Once or twice when he raised his head and looked in our direction I noticed the scatty glitter common to Vutuan eyes. On his chest-band I caught a glimpse of a four-digit number.
    Bryce made me jump by muttering suddenly, “If he’s the boss, why isn’t he number 1?”
    I winced and in the lowest of murmurs I replied: “It’s not like that, Sir. The numbers change.... they’re not for identification....”
    Then the Toach looked up again and called to us, speaking an English word:
    “Welcome!” And he laughed. So very funny Bryce and I must have looked, hearing English from the ruler of Vutu. You know how it is in a dream; just a little nudge, just one too many, can edge you into nightmare. Certainly at that moment things seemed to me to be on the verge of a plunge into something irrevocably bad.
    Bryce, who had not been a lot of use recently, was good just then. He muttered with great presence of mind: “Don’t jump to conclusions, Hugh. Don’t worry that he’s laughing. People who laugh when things aren’t funny, even on Earth, sometimes do it for harmless reasons – ”
    Mnuvax Veffih had clicked his fingers. Six guards emerged from behind his throne. They strode towards us, carrying broad white bands of material.
    The ruler then spoke to us again, and this time (except for one word) he spoke in Valeddomian: “What, you say, no more English? Forgive me, the rest is too rusty. It is a long time since any of the Awakened came here. Raise your arms.”
    We thought it best to obey, though it was not pleasant to stand in surrender posture while those guards bore down on us. Swiftly the white Vutuan-style bands were fitted round our upper torsos. It was done with no buttoning or zipping, just an instant seamless merging when the ends came together; light, loose, comfortable and, perhaps, impossible to remove. We looked at each other. All six of us wore the same flashing number –
    1000.
    “You see,” I remarked to Bryce. “Not much use as an ID.”
    Mnuvax boomed, “Approach!”
    We walked hesitantly towards the Vutuan ruler. The guard had disappeared. Well, we now wore chest-bands and the guard had gone – did that mean we had become Vutuans?
    “Here,” said the Toach in a gentler voice. He had picked up a sheaf of what looked vaguely like photo frames, and now he handed out the “frames” to us, and as he did so, leaning towards us, taming us with a show of trust, I saw that the “frames” were maps of the city.
    We were being made to feel at home. And there seemed to be another point, too, which suddenly made me more cheerful –
    Mnuvax’s words hadn’t been garbled in the common Vutuan fashion. In fact his speech was so clear that I had been lulled into taking its comprehensibility for granted. Now that I thought about it, this seemed to bode well. If, unlike Navon and the tank commander, the Toach could speak Valeddomian in a way that made sense to non-Vutuans like me, surely he wasn’t the only one; he must belong to a class of educated Vutuans who can communicate properly to outsiders. This in turn suggested that Vutu might turn out to be in some sense a normal, endurable city, a possible home.
    “At your convenience,” the Toach went on graciously, “make your way to the addresses shown. Settle into your quarters. You too, Tmaeu – we bear you no ill will. You fled from us as a boy; now we start you again as a man, on 1000, same as your companions. All of you: keep away from Nought.”
    Amazingly, the audience was over. After the staging of it all, the approach to the throne, the Toach’s almost rubbing his hands with glee as he remarked that it had been long since he’d captured any Awakened Earth-minds – why, after all this, weren’t we being interrogated, tested, examined?
    The answer might be that the real exam would start when we walked out the palace door.

                                                   *****

We stood in the street, if you can call the space between lines of giant metal mushrooms a street.
    No one seemed to be watching us.
    Tmaeu lifted his framed street-plan and began to examine it, whereupon the others crowded round him, eager for guidance in how to decipher the thing. I was glad to see them so keen to consult him; better him than me.
Peering over Tmaeu’s shoulder, Fnekt scowled. “Why haven’t they lodged us together? It looks as though our rooms are scattered all over Vutu.”
    Tmaeu sighed, “Let’s not be that distrustful. Need we be surprised if the only free spaces available at the moment are in different buildings? Unless you’d be content to crowd into one of the derelict ones. Plenty of those.”
    “Still, we ought to stick together.”
    “Don’t you think I know that? When they’ve been given time to make swaps and rearrangements, then they may manage to lodge us all in the same building....”
    Opavedwa said, “Come on, let’s find out what they’ve given us. I’m dying for some rest on a real bed.”
    In one respect I still seemed to be the centre of attention, insofar as my family decided that they would find my lodgings first, and settle me in, before locating any of the others.
    We soon arrived at the right “mushroom”. It had four doors. Tmaeu, with a glance at the plan, marched up to one of them. I meanwhile thought idly: the word “quarters” fits nicely here – my apartment a quarter-mushroom. The door swung open when Tmaeu pushed it. Then as we crowded forward, he waved the palm of his right hand in front of a wall-plate, a glow appeared on the ceiling, and by this light we saw....
    Bed, sofa, chairs, table, bookshelves, lamp.
    Had I expected such comforts as these, in styles not tremendously different from what I’d known on Earth? What had I expected? How many ways can you furnish a room? Ludicrously, I was reminded of the time I had gone with my parents to see my older half-brother installed in his rooms at college. Now I was the one being installed. Just one of those cute comparisons which don’t shed any light on anything.
    The place was small, no more than a bedroom/study/lounge. No kitchen, no bathroom, no dining area. But never mind the frills - having the room was what was important. For the first time since I had found myself on this planet, I had an indoors place to call my own.
    And – why not give it a go? The idea rushed upon me as I sat upon the bed. Despite some sinister aspects of this city, so far nothing bad had actually happened to me in it, so why not give life here a fair trial? Life as a Vutuan – why not? Forget the mood-swinging uncertainties, the terrors, the hearsay. Vutu had given me a home. Its folk were probably nuts by our standards, but that was no bad deal so long as they were harmlessly nuts.
    I kept these thoughts to myself as we wandered around, visiting each other’s lodgings. Opavedwa lay down and had her rest, for half an hour, while the rest of us sat and chatted, getting used to the hope that we were going to get quite reasonable treatment from the authorities. After her half hour, Opavedwa wanted to come with the rest of us to explore the city.
    So together we saw the sights of Vutu.
    We passed some blocky buildings which were state kitchens, canteens, baths; such facilities seemed to be communal in Vutu, but this did not worry me much – I wouldn’t be needing them all that often anyway, since Mercurian skin repels dirt, and Mercurian metabolism is so efficient that it only requires about one tenth as much food as an Earthman eats.
    We visited a hangar where two colossal armoured vehicles rested, just like the tank which we’d seen departing on its expedition – the one which had almost taken Bryce and me “for a ride”. A vacant space awaited the return of that third vehicle.
    On the far side of the city, we found an enormous low dome that enclosed maybe three or four acres. We were allowed into a viewing gallery. Through portholes we peeped into the main enclosure. We saw a glowing orchard being nibbled at by some leaf-grazing animals rather like mini giraffes. Bryce, being the geography teacher, was fascinated to see how the city got its food, but he wasn’t sure why this area was all enclosed and under artificial light – or was it “piped” natural light? My attention wandered as he fell into conversation with the Vutuan caretaker of the building – a conversation in which Tmaeu had to act as interpreter. I had become more tired than I knew. I found myself yearning to go back to my room and to flop on the bed and sag into sleep, and I didn’t care just then if none of the secrets of the universe got worked out, ever.
    So I separated from the others, saying I wanted an “early night”, or rather, since day and night mean nothing in the Twilight Belt, an “early tireding”. Feeling quite safe, I walked back to my allotted room.
    As I lay down on the bed, for once I was glad to be alone.
    Bryce was a good friend, but having seen him poking around and asking sensible practical questions about those orchards, I simply knew he wasn’t on the right track. And as for the others – Tmaeu was going to have to keep his head down, and the others weren’t Vutuans and knew no more than Bryce did. Neither did I, of course, but then I had hudar.
    Perhaps it was trying to tell me something, only the clouds of sleep were drifting closer and I was too tired. “Tomorrow”, perhaps, I would listen.

                                                   *****

Because I awoke in a room, I thought of other normal things, including having a wash.
    Not that I really needed it, even though, as I had done on the march, I had slept in my clothes. Not only does the Mercurian body lack the hygiene problems Earthlings have, but also the fabrics they use for clothing are wonderfully dirt-resistant, repelling anything oily or dusty. Even so, Earth habits re-asserted themselves and made me wish for a bath.
    I thought of the Vutuan communal baths. And then I thought of the chest-band I wore. Would I be able to take it off? I struggled with it, realizing that if I couldn’t remove the thing, it wouldn’t be easy to change the shirt underneath it that I had been wearing for what would have been many Earth weeks. Not that it really mattered yet, but still I found myself glancing around for a mirror.... there, to the right of the door; I went over to it –
    Oh no, oh no.
    My number was no longer 1000. It had gone down while I was asleep. Flashing on my chest-band was the number 980.
    I heard a loud knock on the door.
    I was in a mad city, I was sliding towards Nought – whatever that meant – and now a knock on the door. Think – decide –
    No use; I must open.
    They were two men and one woman. One of the men looked youngish; the others middle-aged. The woman, handsome in a fortyish way, smiled pleasantly and stepped forward, the band above her bosom flashing “1594”.
“Keep away from Nought, Ren Nydr,” she greeted me and went on in proper, grammatical Valeddomian: “I am Hyth Siedr and this is my crew, pilot Nio Blaid and trainee Semm Dword. All hoping that an Earth-mind will bring us luck on our trip.”
    As was typical of her people, she was looking through me as she spoke, like a politician reading from an auto-prompt. Neither was I looking at her, much; instead I gaped at the great tank that stood in the middle of the street.
    Hyth Siedr went on, “Laridd Merrer and his crew, who set out last wake period in Crawler 02, have not returned.”
    “Er.... ah,” I said, playing for time. “So now you’re here with Crawler 03....”
    “Precisely. Whenever a crew has been lost in Dayside, we have always sent another.”
    “You want me to go....” But instead of protesting, or resisting, or trying a clever argument or two so as to get out of it like I had done last time, I came to a snap decision.
    I returned Hyth Siedr’s greeting:
    “Keep away from Nought.”

                                                   *****

    Following the others, I clambered up the vehicle’s side, onto its roof and then down through a hatch. I entered the tank’s cabin “amidships”. From there I walked into the forward control cabin, where I was shown to a seat. By this time the tank had already started forward.
    It wasn’t too different from being inside an ordinary Earth car, except that the interior was much wider. The two seats in front of me were both double. Nio Blaid sat on the right, at one set of illuminated controls. He drove, while Hyth Siedr and Semm Dword sat on the left, where the control panel was dark.
    I registered all this while continually returning to the dazing thought that I had joined the expedition of my own free will. I hoped I wasn’t mad; I preferred to think that some burst of insight had inspired me. Be that as it may, I was well and truly in for it. Silently I cursed the city, and the Crawler and its crew, and the whole culture I was trapped in, a culture which I was beginning to understand just enough to allow me to hope that there might be something to be gained from this trip if I didn’t crack, if I got back with my life and sanity.... for then I would get further from Nought.
    The tank lumbered up to where the door in the crater wall slid aside. Because I now rode at the altitude of the top deck of a double-decker bus, I was almost at eye level with the population-counter flashing its “904” above the tunnel door, and I pictured it going down to “900” as soon as we were past.
    We were just about to enter the tunnel, when Hyth Siedr ordered Nio Blaid to stop the vehicle.
    Somebody was running like mad to catch up with us.
    “Let him in.”
    The ceiling hatch re-opened. Puffing and panting, Bryce climbed into the tank and plumped down on the seat beside me, giving me an exasperated look. Outside, dimness engulfed us as we began our passage through the crater wall.
    Bryce called out to the Vutuans, “What exactly is the purpose of this expedition?”
    Hyth Siedr replied, coolly, “You will learn only from experience.”
    “Bah.” Bryce turned to me and said, in a tight-lipped manner, “I’d just rushed to your place to warn you.”
    “Warn me?” I prompted. I wished he hadn’t come; I didn’t want the responsibility of looking after him.
    “Warn you that you were going to get asked! Just as I was asked, a few minutes previously! You couldn’t by any chance explain, could you, why you’ve actually agreed this time to go along?”
    “Yes, Sir, I can explain.” I pointed to his chest, where the number showed, like mine, a decrease from 1000 to 980. “I took this step so as to keep away from Nought.”
    “Meaning?”
    “‘Nought’ must be something final, wouldn’t you say?”
    “Huhhh,” he puffed. It was obvious that he wanted to give me a telling-off but wasn’t sufficiently sure of his ground. “I hate the way you trust to hunches. But I suppose you’ll say it’s your hudar, whatever that is.”
    “Actually,” I replied – though I knew it was no use telling him – “my plan is simply to live through this and get back alive. If I do, I’ll be in their good books. Which may help us all to escape from this nuthouse, Sir! You don’t need hudar to see that.”
    He responded with a half-smile.
    “You’re up to something,” he said.
    I shook my head, “I’m trying to keep things simple.”
    The near-darkness outside suddenly lifted, following our exit from the tunnel.

                                                   *****

TO BE CONTINUED