The Genocides

Anderson squirmed back out of the narrow hole and into the cave proper. “Well, it won’t be any use to escape by. It’s solid up above. It goes down, though—farther than I can see. Look for yourself if you want.”

Orville wormed into the hole. He stayed there so long, Anderson became annoyed. When he reappeared he was almost grinning. “That’s where we’ll go, Mr. Anderson. Why, it’s perfect!”

“You’re crazy,” Anderson said matter-of-factly. “We’re bad enough off where we are.”

“But the point is—” (And this had been his original, unexpressed hope.) “—that it will be warm down there. Once you get fifty feet below the surface, it’s always a comfortable fifty degrees Fahrenheit. There’s no winter and no summer that deep in the ground. If you prefer it warmer than that just go down deeper. It warms up one degree for every sixty feet.”

“Ah, what are you talking about?” Neil jeered. “That sounds like a lot of hooey.” He didn’t like the way Orville—a stranger—was telling them what to do all the time. He had no right!

“It’s one thing I should know about, being a mining engineer. Isn’t that why I’m alive, after all?” He let that sink in, then continued calmly: “One of the biggest problems in working deep mines is keeping them at a bearable temperature. The least we can do is see how far down it does go. It must be fifty feet at least—that would be only a tenth of its height.”

“There’s no soil fifty feet down,” Anderson objected. “Nothing but rock. Nothing grows in rock.”

“Tell that to the Plant. I don’t know if it does go that deep, but again I say we should explore. We’ve a length of rope, and even if we didn’t, those vines would support any of us. I tested them.” He paused before he returned to the clinching argument: “If nothing else, it’s a place to hide if those things find their way to us.”

His last argument turned out as valid as it had been effective. Buddy had only just gone down by the rope to the first branching off of the secondary roots from the vertical primary root (Buddy had been chosen because he was the lightest of the men), when there was a grating sound at the entrance of the cave, as when children try to fill a glass bottle with sand. One of the spheres, having tracked them to the cave, was now trying to bulldoze its way through the narrow entrance.

“Shoot!” Neil yelled at his father. “Shoot it!” He started to grab ftr the Python in his father’s side holster.

“I don’t intend to waste good ammunition on armor plate. Now, get your hands off me and let’s start pushing people down that hole.”

Orville did not have to prompt any further. There was nothing left for them to do. Not a thing. They were the puppets of necessity now. He stood back from the melee and listened as the sphere tried to shove its way into the cave by main force. In some ways, he thought, those spheres were no smarter than a chicken trying to scratch its way through a wire fence that it could walk around. Why not just shoot? Perhaps the three spheres had to be grouped about their target before they could go zap. They were, almost surely, automatons. They directed their own destinies no more than did the animals they were programmed to track down. Orville had no sympathy for the dumb machines and none for their prey. He rather fancied himself at that moment as the puppeteer, until the real puppeteer, necessity, twitched a finger, and Orville went running after his fellow men.

The descent into the root was swift and efficient. The size of the hole insured that no more than one person passed through at a time, but fear insured that that person got through as fast as he could. The unseen (the lamp was below with Buddy) presence of the metal sphere grinding at the ceiling and walls of the cave was a strong motivation to speed.

Anderson made each person strip off his bulky outer clothing and push it through the hole ahead of him. At last only Anderson, Orville, Clay Kestner, Neil and Maryann were left. It was evident that for Clay and Neil (the largest men of the village) and for Maryann, now in her eighth month, the hole would have to be enlarged. Neil chopped at the pulpy wood with frantic haste and much wasted effort. Maryann was eased first through the expanded opening. When she reached her husband, who was astraddle the inverse v formed by the divergence of the branch root from the greater taproot, her hands were raw from having slipped down the rope too quickly. As soon as he laid hold of her, all her strength seemed to leave her body. She could not go on. Neil was the next to descend, then Clay Kestner. Together they carried Maryann on into the secondary root.