For it was no “sun” that Gill had ever imagined—and yet it must be, for it was “his” sun. Twice or three times as large as Earth’s sun, it hung there in the sky and defied acceptance. It was a giant, silver ball-bearing a million miles across, peppered with blow holes which blasted out spokes of fire and light and radiation—a never-ending chain reaction of nuclear energy—a machine sun set centrally in a machine system of worlds!
Gill looked away, shook his head, refused to consider it; but in the next moment he narrowed his eyes as they lighted upon a lesser, more acceptable wonder. Coming towards them, but on the other track, gong-banged a duplicate of the great engine whose back they were riding. Gill woke up the others with a warning: “Don’t ask me about the sun, for I don’t know. But here comes another Heath-Robinson mobile.”
A mile away, the thing stopped. A twisted tower of metal lay collapsed on the track directly in front of it. Appendages at once commenced to work: great piston-driven arms that shoved and jostled, pincer claws tugging and lifting, a giant sledgehammer fist that hammered and battered. Finally the obstruction was broken up; and their own engine gong-banged its way towards the other, rapidly narrowing the distance between.
But now the second engine began carefully piling the twisted rubble of its success onto the other track, in the way of its passenger-carrying colleague! It made an untidy pyramid of the stuff, then came gong-banging on. As the two engines passed each other by, so they toot-toot-tooted derisively.
“That’s better!” said Gill. The others looked at him. He nodded. “It makes no sense, what that machine just did. If it had made sense, something would be wrong. Heath-Robinson, remember?”
They had reached the rubble-piled section of track; their engine came to a halt, began piling the wreckage back where it had been; it finished the job and stood as if appraising its handiwork, then thrust a pincer deep into the rust on one side of the tracks and drew out a huge iron girder, which it rammed haphazardly into the stack like a stanchion.
“That’ll teach him!” said Turnbull, almost hysterically.
And then they were off again: Gong-bang! Gong-bang! Gong-bang!
An hour later and the atomic sun was that much closer to the horizon. The tracks beelined along an elevated gantry over a desert of rust dunes, where the shadows were growing longer by the minute. For the past half hour the engine’s human cargo had seen nothing of note: no collapsed towers or twisted girders, no burnt-out boilers scabbing their way to oblivion, no metal parts at all except the gantry and interminable tracks stretching fore and aft. And upon all sides wave upon wave of red rust, sifted as fine as sand.
Then, on the horizon up ahead, three dark nodules or knolls became apparent, seeming to grow up from the rust desert as the engine gong-banged towards them. Because they were the only irregularities in an otherwise monotonous vista, Gill and the others took special interest in them, watching them enlarge and expand as the distance narrowed down. They were gigantic, oddly shaped, spired like mountains or castles painted by an artist of the fantastic, with nothing regular or mechanical about them at all. In short, while they did not appear to be junk as such, neither were they of a mechanical construction. On the other hand, nor were they manufactured. Natural? It seemed unlikely, in this most unnatural of places.
The track-runner gong-banged a little slower now; it put up a tall, telescopic periscope from its flank and surveyed the—land?—around. There came a thick, glutinous gurgling from the rear of the moat, and Gill crawled over to that section to take a look. The moat was deeper here, where the bottom sloped off into a massive funnel welded onto the rear of the engine. Gill wrinkled his nose; the funnel was full of the fish-smelling oil.
Oil began to spray from a system of sprinklers down by the wheels, a fine stinking mist of the stuff that clung to rails and gantry, permeated and darkened the rust from ten to fifteen feet outwards from the desert-bordered rim of the track.
Turnbull joined Gill, suggesting, “Protection from the rust?”
Gill looked at him and frowned. “That would be the obvious answer,” he said. “The logical answer …”
“Spencer!” Angela’s voice calling over the racket of the track-runner held a note that trembled a little, and Gill thought: Oh, yes—too logical by far! He looked where she was pointing.
Out in the desert to the left of the tracks, maybe fifty yards away, something was creating a new dune! Red rust was being thrust aloft in a straight line that kept pace with the engine, building a long, shuddering barrow of the stuff like a mole run in a country garden. Turnbull, checking the other side of the tracks, said, “Oh-oh—flanked! We have an escort.”
More runs appeared even as they watched, parallel lines of rust forming themselves as if by some weird seismic force just beneath the surface. The one on the left suddenly changed course, came angling in towards the tracks. Then it hit the oil-soaked belt and hastily veered away again, keeping a respectful distance. “Things that burrow through loose rust at fifteen to twenty miles an hour,” said Gill, “against which these tracks and engines are self-protected by use of this stinking oil.”
“Creatures?” Turnbull was tense. “Animals?”
“I get on with machines.” Gill was as thoughtful as a man could be under the dinning of the engine. “I used to, anyway. Machines are the tools that lifted man up from ignorance. I’d hate to see machines threatened. This is my nightmare. In this world they’re not only being threatened but devoured, turned to rust. All of them. This rust desert is encroaching on the machine cities, with only the tracks and engines left to link them together across endless graveyards of long-dead metal.”
“Iron to filings,” said Turnbull, “rust to rust, amen. What are you getting at?”
“I’m not sure.” Gill shook his head. “But it’s just dawned on me that this bugger”—he rapped his knuckles against the metal wall of the moat—“must be rapidly running out of fuel!” The gaps between each gong-bang! were definitely lengthening.
“My God!” Anderson cried his alarm. One hundred yards out, rust erupted volcanically—scabs and flakes and tons of grains of the stuff hurled aloft—as one of the fantastic burrowers thrust up its snout and emerged … .
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The thing was a telescopic worm of dull grey metal eighty feet long and five feet thick. Its upper head was flat, spadelike, with eyes like auto-inspection lamps behind protective grilles. Under the eyes a tapering snout, and beneath that a huge mouth like that of a basking shark, gaping and scoop-shaped. Inside the scoop bright flashes of sputtering purple energy made a curtain of “teeth” between the upper and lower jaws.
“Metal-eater!” Gill breathed.
“Eh?” Turnbull’s enquiry was more an exclamation, a gasp of amazement. But then what Gill had said got through to him. “How do you know?”
I don’t know how I know! Gill thought, his skin prickling. But I do. It was as if something had suddenly slotted itself together in his mind, a piece of the Big Jigsaw falling neatly into place. He “knew,” for example, that this was a new order of machine. It was of his mind, yes, but at the same time it was alien. He and the House of Doors had built it. This time it wasn’t just Heath-Robinson but more truly alien. It was of that same generation, that same origin, as the Castle, the silver rod weapon, and the thing that had hunted Haggie. But Gill had “made” at least part of it, and therefore he could understand it—almost. Certainly he knew what it was: a metal-eater.
Gill stared in fascination at the thing where it reared up and swayed as tall as the gantry, its head moving this way and that like a cobra’s head. He tried to get inside it, understand it, divine something of its workings. It was seamless and yet its telescopic segments were flexible; it was a machine, but it “thought” like an animal and probably—no, unquestionably—reproduced its own kind. Gill knew these things were, but he didn’t know how they were.
He looked at it and felt its parts flowing like mercury, yet solid as steel. The answe
r was close. It was the difference between fractions and decimals. One-third may be expressed as 1/3 and as such it is a complete concept; but as a decimal it’s .3333333 and so on forever. So that no one can ever really visualize one-third as a decimal because no one can picture or ever have the time to picture a line of threes marching to infinity. Gill knew all the fractions. All he had to do now was convert them to decimals and the problem would cease to be. He would know how the House of Doors and its machinery worked, which would be half the battle.
“Nests!” Turnbull gasped, destroying Gill’s concentration and drawing him back to the present. “Christ, look!”
The nearest knoll was now little more than a mile away. The machine sun was setting between its lumpy spires and those of its closest neighbour. A little way beyond both of them, the third anthill was a dark blot, reduced by the sun to a silhouette with one scintillant-gleaming edge.
Rust worms came and went around the bases of the two closest, half-mile-high stacks, so that they seemed enveloped in dust storms. And for all that the strange termite towers reared tall and precipitous, still they were holed and tunnelled to their topmost spires like giant wedges of Gorgonzola cheese. Worms were active on the outside as well as the insides of their nests, toing and fro-ing between the myriad circular holes like bees in a honeycomb.
“Hives,” Gill corrected Turnbull. “Rust-worm hives.”
The tracks had now split up, the one snaking to the right and theirs to the left, carrying the labouring engine around the hives in what could be the beginning of a wide circle. Rust-worms accompanied the track-runner for a little of the way, then slowed and gradually fell behind. When none of them remained to be seen on the ground, the periscope folded itself away and the gurgling in the oil sluice stopped; funnel and sump were seen to be half-empty. Gill and Turnbull rejoined the others, who had come to their own, similar conclusions.
Anderson said, “Are we to take it that this engine ‘knows’ when these damned things are about?” The track-runner seemed too rustic to him, too far removed from his idea of a computer, to have any “intelligence” of its own.
“It has its periscope,” said Gill, shrugging. “It must be programmed to spray when the worms are on the go. Maybe that’s the purpose of the tracks and engines in a nutshell: to encircle the worms and confine them to their stacks, stop them from spreading.”
“Wrong,” said Varre. “Those metal beasts were on both sides of the tracks, inside and outside your circle—if it is a circle. And anyway, wouldn’t that explanation be just too logcial, too easily understood?”
Gill shook his head. “The difference between logic and lunacy is instinct,” he said. “And it’s also where they meet—in all worlds. Does a madman stop breathing just because he’s mad? No, because breathing is automatic, instinctive. It’s a question of survival. In order to survive, the machines must keep the worms caged. Except now they seem to have broken out. Or … maybe I am wrong!” He shrugged again.
“You’re not wrong,” said Turnbull, too quietly. “Look up ahead there.”
They looked. Half a mile in front, close to the third hive, the gutted remains of an engine lay toppled on its side, half-buried in rust. The worms had piled up rust on the inside of the circle until the wall was higher than the gantry. Then, when the track-runner had come along, they must have avalanched the stuff down onto the gantry, wrecking it and throwing the engine off the track. There was still a large party of worms in attendance, dismantling the crippled machine and making off with claws, pistons, hammers, iron plates, and other unidentifiable bits and pieces. Then one of them reared up and spotted the new prize where it came gong-banging to its doom. And as if someone had fired a starting pistol, the things came burrowing at the double.
“Why doesn’t this crazy bastard back up, then?” Turnbull urgently demanded of no one in particular. “I mean, if survival’s the driving force, this bloke’s not much of a driver!”
Gill thought that the question, like an accusation, had been aimed at him. “Christ, I don’t know!” he said. “But right now if I were you I’d worry about your own survival.”
Gong … bang! Gong … bang! Gong …
The track-runner gave a last gasp and clanked to a halt. Deep down inside, strange gears clashed and clattered; iron guts grated and groaned, crying out desperately for fuel to convert into energy and receiving none; there commenced a trapped, hysterical, mechanical screaming.
“She’s going to blow!” Gill cried, drowning in a sudden wave of empathy. He felt entirely helpless, forced himself to surface, fought to maintain a measure of control. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he gulped, “Here’s where we have to get off!”
“Get off? You’re crazy!” Anderson. floundered about in the fish-oil moat.
“Over here!” Turnbull called to them. He’d hauled himself slitheringly around the moat’s perimeter to the right-hand side of the hopper, was looking over the rim. As they made to join him he stood up, shouted, “Here goes nothing!” —and jumped.
On that side the rust-worms had been busy; they’d piled up rust in a great wave, presumably to use in the same way they’d used it up ahead. The drop was about thirty feet; Turnbull had thrown himself far out, landed just beyond the crest, gone tumbling in a rust storm down the other side of the wave. “It’s fine as flour!” he yelled, spitting the stuff out where he sprawled.
They jumped. Gill saw the other men and Angela on their way, and watched with his heart in his mouth until the girl had landed safely, then spoke to Bannerman. “Jump for all you’re worth,” he said. “Jump forward, not down. Gravity will do the rest.”
Amazingly, Bannerman did as instructed, and as he leaped Gill gave him a massive shove in the back. By then the track-runner was shuddering convulsively as its engine continued to pound itself to pieces. Gill jumped, and as his feet left the rim of the hopper he looked far out across the rust desert and saw the third hive clearly illumined in flashing rays from the setting sun—saw it, briefly, as something other than a silhouette—saw, in fact, that it wasn’t a hive.
He landed—flew head over heels down the powdery rust slope—rolled to a standstill close to the others. By some miracle of good fortune, no one had been hurt. And in the same moment that Turnbull hauled Gill to his feet, but on the other side of the worm-piled dune, the track-runner blew. A terrific explosion hurled metallic debris into the sky in a sheet of fire, black smoke and a spray of foul oil. But the blast had been contained by the wall of rust, and most of the shrapnel rained to earth on the other side.
“What now?” Turnbull yelled, over secondary rumblings and explosions.
“That way,” said Gill, pointing. “Let’s get away from here, and quickly!”
Almost knee-deep in powdered rust, they climbed a dune. Near its crest, Varre came to a halt and gasped, “But surely we’re heading in the direction of the third hive. Shouldn’t we go back across the tracks and move away from the—” He paused as he climbed one more step and his head came up over the top of the dune. Gill stood there, pointing. And now Varre’s jaw fell open.
Turned red as a scene from hell by swirling rust and the atomic sun’s lancing rays, the third hive was roughly the same size and shape as the others, but its purpose was entirely different. Steep ramps of solid red rust fanned out like spokes from its more or less circular base, and at the top of each ramp, set back in arched-over, cavernous recesses—
“Doors!” said Angela.
A whole houseful, Gill silently agreed with a nod of his head. And taking her hand, he plunged with her down the far side of the dune.
After that … in a muscle-wrenching, maddeningly slow-motion march—floundering in the soft rust like beetles in a sand pit—the group made its weary way across the doomed-metal desert towards the House of Doors … .
Finally, exhausted, they arrived at the foot of the nearest ramp. From behind, throughout their gruelling trek across the rust dunes, savage rending sounds had carried to them in the red twilight: soun
ds of ruptured iron and dismembered steel. But so far the worms had not bothered with them. They’d seen runs snaking under the dunes and the occasional flurry of rust as a worm’s back broke the surface, but that was all—until now.
Almost on the ramp, suddenly a pile of rust erupted to one side of them not fifty feet away, and a monstrous flat head emerged, basket jaws fully extended. The worm fixed them with its headlamp eyes and snaked closer. Its head reared and commenced to sway from side to side. The movement became more rapid, a threatening vibration, a bunching of metallic muscles. In the gaping mouth, rods of electrical fire made a brilliant blue and white mesh where “teeth” of energy crackled between electrode jaws.
“Freeze!” Gill croaked. “It thinks we’re machines. We have to be because we’re moving. So freeze …”
Everyone froze—for a little while. But as the great head swayed closer and its vibrations became a blur, so Anderson cracked. “Not me! Not me!” he cried. He broke and ran—or staggered—up the ramp. The worm snaked after him along the base of the ramp, its head reaching up to his level; he stumbled and fell; the thing’s scoop mouth took him—and spat him out! Screaming, he bounced on the ramp and lay still.
The worm reared back; Gill took a chance and ran up the ramp towards Anderson, waving his arms and yelling hoarsely at the metal monstrosity. The worm backed off more yet, seemed confused, undecided. Suddenly it made a dive down into the rust and started a run which disappeared under the nearest dune. As quickly as that it was over.
“The fish oil,” said Gill. “Worm repellent. We’ve got the stinking stuff all over us—thank God!”
They picked up Anderson under his arms and dragged him without ceremony up the ramp and into the cave at its top. There were scorch marks on his tattered clothing, and his face and hands were crisscrossed with a fine mesh of burns, as if he’d run into a section of white-hot chicken wire. But apart from that he was breathing and seemed to have suffered no serious injury.