Red Dust Part 20

"But I also know I must go with you, to help save my people."Chen Yao, from deep within her aspect, said, "Save them?

Perhaps, but not as they are. They cannot survive without change, and change will destroy what they are. But that's true for all of us."

Sixty-eight.

'he old man, Li Pe, peered through a c.h.i.n.k in the corroded iron plating of the barred and chained gate of .. the Last House. "They are coming again," he said. The torch he held in his right hand sputtered and sparks whirled up past the keystone of the arch into the night sky.

Behind the old man, Lee said, "How many are out there?"

and Vette shifted her grip on her harpoon while Redd eased the mechanism of the hunting rifle he'd spent the last few hours cleaning and refurbishing. Across the little courtyard, Li Pe's blind sister fretted in the darkness just inside the house's door. The other survivor of the mountain town, Yang Go, told her not to worry, it wasn't different from any other night. "But it is," the blind woman said.

"I see three coming straight up the road," Li Pe said.

Redd said, "I guess there were at least fifty following us."

"Counted a hundred then gave up," Vette said in her pidgin Common Language. Her face was pale but set; Lee knew that she was as frightened as he was, but also that she was better at hiding her fear. He had learned that and more about her in the days of sailing the dust seas in the lee of Tiger Mountain's high flanks.

From atop the wall, Chen Yao called, "There are many more than that out there now. They are circling around on either side."

Li Pe said, "The little G.o.d has good eyesight, but you should ask her to come down. They may not know how to32O.

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321.climb walls, but they do know how to throw stones."

Lee said, "She likes to be doing something. I am sorry that we brought so many unwelcome guests to your door."

Li Pe said, "It would have happened, sooner or later. They run in little packs, but now and then the packs unite. Perhaps if I try the light show again... "Then he stepped back smartly. A moment later the gate rang from a heavy blow.

Shards of rust shivered to the ground. There was a sharp high gibbering outside, and Li Pe's sister gave a m.u.f.fled scream.

Yang Go came up behind Lee, shouldering a pole with a knife blade lashed to its end by wire. He held up a torch whose flame shook above his polished pate. "It wasn't so bad last year," he said. "Now they come every night. By day, too. Before that they mostly stayed away. There were more of us, then, even if more were sleeping than alive, and they only came at night; Li Pe could scare them off..."

"I'm afraid they've become used to my conjurations," Li Pe said.

Chert Yao called down, "But not to Wei Lee's. You'll see."

Yang Go said, "Is that so, little G.o.d! Then I was wrong: instead of hiding here with us, you pay us a social call."

"We rush them," Vette said. She shifted her harpoon from her right hand to her left, then back again. "Isn't as if they're animals. We can fright them."

Redd rubbed his bandaged hand and said, "I wouldn't be so sure."

"They are more dangerous than animals," Li Pe said. He stooped and set his torch in a socket by the gate. For a moment his wrinkled face was illuminated from below; then he stepped back and was in darkness again.

The gate clanged again; for Lee, the way the echoes spread defined what was outside. Three, as Li Pe had said, standing some way off. Lee remembered that Li Pe had said they had learned how to throw stones--and, as if to mock his thoughts, there was a sudden smack and rattle on the tiled roof of the house.

322.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.Chert Yao was suddenly standing beside him. "They've come right up to the walls," she said.

Stones made an irregular percussion on the tiles; some fell short and smashed on the courtyard flagstones. Everyone took refuge in the doorway of the house. Li Pe's sister, Li Qing, plaintively asked what was happening.

"It's all right, grandmother," Lee said. "There may be more of them, but they are still the same. They will not know how to climb the gate."

"We hope," Redd said.

The old woman's hand fumbled out, and Lee grasped it, surprised at its warmth. He crouched to let her fingers spider over his face.

"You have travelled far," Li Qing said.

"And I have farther to go, grandmother." He touched her face in turn, carefully kissed the half-closed lids over her milky eyes. Immediately, her eyes filled with tears. Li Pe bent to comfort his sister, although she seemed calm enough. "The young man will take care of us, brother. He is a good man. His friends are good people."

Vette said to Lee, "You do something."

Redd said, "Maybe you could pull that go-faster stunt."

"There are too many," Chen Yao said. "In the morning they will go away, perhaps. We are not here to fight them." "I could try this gun. Shoot over their heads."

"You should shoot them," Li Pe said.

Redd said, "I'm not about to start shooting little..."

"You won't have to." Lee had been listening to rocks rattling on the tiled roof, and now he had an idea. "Stay there,"

he told them, and took Yang Bo's torch and ran across the courtyard and swarmed one-handed up one of the twisted pillars of the gate.

The Last House stood on a slope above the ruined town.

By starlight, Lee's enhanced sight showed tiled rooftops stepping down either side of a road that twisted like a broken-backed snake. Many of the roofs sagged from storm damage; at the far end of the town some of the houses were already little more than sh.e.l.ls standing amongst the weedy RED DUST.

323.remains of their gardens. The townsfolk had retreated uphill, as if from a slow inexorable flood, until the last of them had been stranded here, unwilling to run because this was their home, and then unable to run because of what lived in the stony wilderness of Tiger Mountain's slopes.Infrared clearly revealed the small swift creatures that flitted this way and that in the starlight. Lee's torch flame drew them like moths, as he had intended. They were frightened of fire, yet they were also fascinated by it. Perhaps Li Pe's projections had brought them here as much as the unwitting pa.s.sage through their territory of Lee, Chen Yao, Vette, and Redd.Lee counted a hundred staring up at him from varying distances, and more were coming nearer, scampering over rocks, hooting and whistling to each other. He listened, wondering if his translation viruses could sift a pattern from their noise.Then the first stones started to sail out of the darkness.

Lee shifted to and fro atop the wall, using virus-enhanced reflexes to dodge the missiles. Only a few came near him.

These he plucked from the air and threw back, always. .h.i.tting his intended target. After ten minutes of this, the besiegers retreated out of range, two of them badly hurt, most of the rest with smarting bruises.Vette stood below, and Lee tossed her the torch before jumping down. "We'll have it quiet for an hour or so," he said.Redd said, "But they'll come again.""Truth," Vette said. "We make run for it?"Lee said, "We have to do something for these people, Vette. We brought it upon them."Vette whispered, "They are already doomed. Can't save everyone in the world, Lee." Then she smiled. "But you try, I know. I learn much from you."

Sixty-nine.

A.

fter they had escaped the Free Yankee Nation, they had taken ten days to find a place to land, fighting currents .and wind. The gig complained that the Free Yankees had taken them in the wrong direction. It followed a twisting path through the shoals and reefs which were outriders of the talus sh.o.r.e, always hugging close to the foot of the cliffs of the lava shield of Tiger Mountain. It bounced and swayed and spun over the dust swells through the hot days and cold clear nights, making its way north and east. Always, the sculpted talus sh.o.r.e stood off to starboard, so polished by dust that the boulders, some as big as hills, sparkled like gems: a necklace at the feet of cliffs that rose almost vertically six kilometers above them, cutting off half the sky.

Something was looking for them: culvers beat the air around the mountain. Scarcely a day went past without sighting at least one, but usually they were so far off that by unaided sight they were mere dots in the pink sky. But twice culvers came so close that the gig had to put into sh.o.r.e to hide. The first time it anch.o.r.ed in the shadow of a towering arch polished smooth as a gold ring, the second, inside a perfectly spherical cave of black rock half filled with the restless heave of the red-dust sea.

One night they glimpsed lights beyond the edge of the soaring cliffs, cold auroras that played and flickered until dawn. If the display was a response to an attack by the Sky Roader anarchists, there was no sign of it. Lee felt a brood324RED DUST.

325.ing hush that seemed to be centered above his head. The war was waiting for him.In the long reaches of the night, while Redd and Vette slept, Lee kept watch with Chen Yao. Like her, he slept for only two or three hours each night: the viruses had edited out the need, or relegated it to some part of his brain not occupied by consciousness. Lee ran and reran his memories of his intrusion into the dreamscape on the other side of the barrier. He talked them over with Chen Yao, but her aspect knew less than he did about information s.p.a.ce, and nothing at all about Heaven.Miriam Makepeace Mbele had not told him who the Blessed Isles were intended for, but Lee thought that his guess was right. They were for the people who had dreamed their way into death. But where were they? And if that was the paradise promised by the conchies, why was it on the far side of the barrier?Chen Yao didn't know, and the replicated residue of Miriam Makepeace Mbele was silent in his head.One thing was certain: Lee was changed. He was not who he had once been. That was true of everyone who has ever lived, of course, but in them change was a process of growth.

People grow layers of self, like the layers of an onion. Lee knew that he had been changed in a different way. As if his layers had grown into each other, and mixed with layers of others, Miriam and a host of minor partial personae sinking and intermingling with his own self, as paint mixes in the water an artist uses to clean her brush.He tried to talk about this with Vette as a way of trying to get to know her, but she didn't understand, or pretended not to. She said it was magic, and she didn't need to know how magic worked as long as she could rely on it.In the long hours while the gig tacked against the wind, they all four talked of their different histories, of their own lives, of their peoples, or Lee or Redd or both together sang song after song--the old old songs Lee had learned from the broadcasts of the King of the Cats, the plaintive songs with which the cowboys calmed their herds, even s.n.a.t.c.hes 326.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.of commercials, which Vette enjoyed more than all the others.

She worked hard at improving her rudimentary Common Language; Redd spent hours patiently teaching her tones and stresses.They came at last to landfall on a bright cloudless day.

Sunlight played through dust that whipped off the crests of soft slow waves, so that the air seemed full of fragmented rainbows. Far out to sea, the symmetrical peaks of the Three Sisters rose above a glittering haze that blended imperceptibly into the shocking-pink sky. Beyond them was the Great Valley, and beyond that the dry rivers and chaotic terrain of the high deserts.If you followed those dry rivers north, Lee thought, as he had followed them south, you found that they wove together, running out towards the Plain of Gold. On the way you would pa.s.s through a small settlement, sheltered in a bend of a muddy, shrunken river. The Bitter Waters danwei. He had travelled three-quarters of the way around the world.And now he would travel upward. There was a vast slumped gash in the high cliffs that ringed the raised lava shield of Tiger Mountain. A cold wind blew out of it. The gig tacked across choppy dust towards landfall, into the cold shadow of the cliffs. When they had all clambered ash.o.r.e, the gig promised to wait for them, and then sailed off to find an anchorage amongst the reefs beyond the mouth of this steep embayment.They all watched it until its sail flashed full of light as it pa.s.sed out of the shadow of the cliffs: a silver spark dwindling into the restless sea of red dust."Never thought I'd miss the little f.u.c.ker," Redd said, his voice m.u.f.fled by his filter mask.Vette shouldered her harpoon. They had little else to carry: packets of dried food and the few decilitres of water which the gig had decanted from its still. She said, with studied carelessness, "We explore."But Lee knew, even though her face was hidden by her hideous mask, that she was as apprehensive as Redd.

The ruins of a little port town ran along one side of the RED DUST.

327.embayment, most no more than frontages built across the mouths of natural caves, sheltered by a huge ledge that undercut the cliffs. It was as if a town had struggled to rise from the native rocks but had only half succeeded, and was now slumping back into dissolution.The town had been abandoned for at least a century. Drifts of fine dust had acc.u.mulated inside the buildings, waist deep in places. All the gla.s.s had been broken from the windows, and shards left in the frames had been polished to a milky smoothness by storms. Redd found the remains of a huge monomolecular screen which must have slid like a soap-bubble membrane across the face of the biggest cave; something had torn the almost indestructible stuff to shreds and tatters, and all that was left of the simple machinery which had manipulated the screen were the outlines of its tracks.

Nothing grew there, not even lichens, and there was no trace of the former inhabitants, no bones, not a stick of furniture or a shard of circuitry."Up," Chen Yao said impatiently. "It's the only way."It was the middle of the morning when they set off along the wide smooth road that threw a hundred luxurious switchbacks as it climbed the tongue of ancient lava that had smashed the windy, windy pa.s.s into the cliffs. Six kilometers of height translated into a hike of more than a hundred kilometers. It was three days before, hungry and exhausted, they reached the top.It was dusk, and they made camp by one of the fast-flowing streams which had carved deep channels in a layer of soft gray-brown tuff. The water was very cold and had a chemical taste, but they had nothing else to fill their bellies.

There were stands of tough bamboo and low, wind-sculpted spruce, and outcrops of black basalt were splashed with the bright round thalli of wild lichens, but there was nothing edible. Lee set some traps of looped wire anyway: something, probably ice mice, had been nibbling the lichen crusts.Later that night Vette came to him. He was huddled in a smooth narrow hollow beneath the side of the road, and she slithered down to him, wrapped him with arms and legs. All 328.

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around, wind hooted and whined without cessation as cold air poured down through the pa.s.s from the higher slopes of the mountain. Afterwards, she whispered in Yankee, "I've been waiting for this ever since you saved my life. Do you mind?""If I did save your life, then my life is yours." Lee could feel sweat cooling on his flanks. They hadn't undressed: it was too cold for that.She laughed. "Funny. We have it the other way around."

"I'm not even sure if I did save your life."

"You did, and that of everyone on the boat. If you hadn't killed the ray it would have sounded and sucked us under.

That's the sign of a hero. To do a brave deed by instinct and not even realize it.""I'm no hero, Vette. The opposite, if anything. I've been given gifts, that's all, and too often I show them off. I'm beginning to learn that they are not mine to use as I will.

If anything, they're using me."He knew that the totipotent viruses had infected his salivary glands; Mary Makepeace Mbele had changed him with a kiss. But he had withheld that burden from Vette. Fortunately, the Free Yankees, who habitually went masked, had lost the art of kissing."In the stories, a hero always has gifts, and a quest, and a band of friends to help him."Lee asked her about the stories, and she told him a few, and then they made love again and she slept. Lee chipped his viruses and found a place where he could rest his consciousness, and slept, too.And woke in cold, bright starlight. He was kneeling, hands on his knees, head bent forward, listening. He was at the top of the stream bank beside the road. Its broad white swathe ribboned away, eerily luminous in the starlight, empty. He called down infrared, saw, in green on green, shapes moving amongst the rocks on the far side. Something small was poised in the shadows between two big rocks. He could hear the little noises as those behind it urged it forward.

RED DUST.

329.Redd and Chen Yao crawled up the slope to where Leesquatted. Redd whispered, "They must be scared of us."

"What are they?" Chen Yao said.While Redd explained, Lee stood and advanced to the middle of the road. The shapes on the other side of the road froze for a moment. Then with faint scrabbling sounds their heat signatures faded away, ducking behind outcrops and boulders.Lee called after them and something sailed through the air towards him. A meter wide of its mark, the stone bounced once with a hard sound and splashed into the stream. Chattering from the watchers on the far side: then more stones.Lee retreated. Vette, lying beside Redd and Chen Yao on the slope beneath the road, wanted to know what was happening.Lee said, "They are testing us. I think they might be as hungry as we are. There are at least two handfuls. Probably more." He thought of the youngest, being urged to cross the road. An initiation dare or a sacrifice, or simply a matterof rank? Suddenly that seemed quite important."They're in four or five places," Redd said."Six," Lee said. His optical systems had tracked the trajectory of every stone.Redd said, "We could rush them.""You take the right," Vette said, and stood up, brandishing her harpoon. She stepped to one side and the other as stones sailed out of shadow. They were quite visible against theluminous road. Then she bounded away, and Redd followed.

Chen Yao said, "We should go on."

"We'll wait for our friends.""It's not necessary. They'll catch up.""We can wait, Yao.""I really think you would risk the whole world for the sake of one person.""It wouldn't be worth saving if I had to do it any other way.""I heard you. With the woman."

330.

PAUL J. MCAULEY."Are you jealous, Chen Yao?""Don't be silly. Listen."Vette and Redd came back in a hurry, dodging a hail of stones. "I caught one," Redd said, "but the little f.u.c.ker bit me. Hurts like h.e.l.l. Do you think they could have poisoned bites?"Stones clattered and bounced off the road. Lee could see the heat shapes of the throwers on the far side. It looked as if they were dancing."Up," Chen Yao said.But the stone throwers kept pace with them. A group would rush forward, throw stones and fall back when Vette brandished her harpoon at them. At first she made threatening noises, rolling her eyes outrageously and capering like an enraged ape. But she soon tired of this, and her gestures became stylized, token threats. Redd suggested that she put on her mask, but Vette, who didn't understand that it was frightening to others, said, "No dust here."After several hours of this Chen Yao said that perhaps they were being herded towards something, a trap or ambush."Would already happen," Vette said. Both she and Redd were tired now. Lee's viruses cleaned fatigue poisons from his muscles and set the rhythm of walking: so did Chen Yao's aspect. But Redd and Vette were only human.The land rose up ahead of them. It was the beginning of the long five-degree slope that climbed twenty-one kilometers out of the atmosphere, all the way to the lip of Tiger Mountain's vast caldera. By bright starlight Lee could see the road winding away to a line, a point. If there was a trap, surely he would see it... but the slope was broken by draws and bluffs, and crossed by belts of juniper and Himalayan pine. Whenever the road pa.s.sed through one of these dense forest belts, their followers would dart off the road, and they all quickened their pace until they reached open ground again.Dawn had touched the very top of the mountain, so that it seemed like a fiery rock floating kilometers above, when they entered the widest belt of trees. It took an hour to pa.s.s RED DUST.

331.through it. The trees were stunted, but they grew so closely together on either side of the road that it was impossible to see ahead. Lee's eyes and ears, turned up as far as they would go, ached from the bombardment of light and sound. There was no sign of their followers.Chen Yao agreed. "Animals," she said. "They don't think or plan."The far edge of the forest belt was as abrupt as a knife blade. Lee's heightened senses collapsed in on themselves so suddenly that he thought he'd gone deaf and blind. Vette and Chen Yao helped him to a little stream that sang in its bed of black rock beside the road. He splashed icy water over his head and drank what seemed like his own body weight.

Vette stood on a slab of upthrust rock, shading her eyes as she looked back the way they had come.Dawn was an hour away, but already there was enough light from the higher slopes of the mountain for Lee to be able to distinguish colors quite easily even with normal sight. The black and gray of the rocks; the blue-black of the fanned branches of the gnarled close-knit junipers; the yellow of Vette's baggy trousers and the different, lighter shade of her hair that fell unbound down the back of her black hide jacket. Scarlet ta.s.sels hung from the barbed head of her harpoon, vivid against her pale hair.When Lee joined her he saw that what he had thought, back on the other side of the forest belt, to have been just another field of boulders was in fact a small town cl.u.s.tered below one of the promontories left after partial collapse of the slope. It was at least twenty kilometers up the long curve of the mountain's slope, but every one of the straggling houses was sharp and clear in the clean air.Chen Yao said, "It'll be easy to avoid it. We just follow the road.""They could help us," Lee said."We can't trust anyone on this mountain."Vette said slowly, "Heroes of my people search adventure here, but none ever come back. Now I know why."They watched the little town for a long time, while they 332.

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waited to see if their followers were still with them. The dawn line crept down as the horizon fell below the gaze of the sun. At last Redd came back up the trail and reported that he couldn't see any sign of the little f.u.c.kers. He held his bitten hand close to his belly; it was swollen and flushed, and dead white around the crescent wound.

"That settles the matter," Lee said. "There must be medical help up there, so that's where we're going."

Chen Yao sighed theatrically. "You don't know your own powers, Wei Lee. But I won't argue with you."

They toiled through most of the rest of the day to reach the town, following the little stream rather than the white road, which threw a loop away from it. At last they crossed what had once been a patchwork of cultivated fields divided by stone walls. The elaborate irrigation system had long broken and run dry, and there was nothing left but bleached stalks of corn that crackled into dust under their feet.

The houses of the little town ran uphill alongside its only street. They were low and small, built of whitewashed blocks of hewn tuff under tiled roofs. There was no sound from the shuttered houses of the town, no trace of smoke or hum of machinery. Those nearest the fields had fallen into ruin.

Most of those beyond had their doorways and windows sealed with crudely mortared stones. Still, Lee and Vette and Redd walked up the street, shouting themselves hoa.r.s.e, before Chen Yao suggested that they break into one. Lee had left his traps behind, and they were all hungry: and food would keep a long time in the dry cold mountain air.

They were near the top of the town, where houses cl.u.s.tered around a flagstone square. An air still dripped water from its few unbroken vanes into a half-empty pool green with slime.

"Spiro!" Vette said, and went down on her knees at the pool's edge and scooped a dripping double handful of blue-green gunk into her mouth. She chewed noisily and said, "Good. You try it. Our winter rations." She licked clinging strands from her fingers. "Ancestors eat it, on shoals that RED DUST.

333.bring them here. Really, is good. High protein, most scientific.''It wasn't exactly good, Lee discovered, and Redd suggested that on a gastronomic level it rated slightly higher than eating Yak cud. But they were all hungry enough to eat their fill of the bitter, slippery strands, even fastidious Chen Yao.Afterwards, Lee put his shoulder to the door of one of the houses, and was surprised when it gave easily. Chen Yao slipped past him, pointed out the many footprints in the dust drifted over rotting rugs, put her finger to her lips. Two square rooms, lit by blades of light that pried through closed shutters. Furniture pulled over and smashed. A half-lifer coc.o.o.n in the middle of the second, bones inside, bones scattered on the floor: broken, gnawed. Lee saw the marks of teeth and showed them to Chen Yao, and her look of horror mirrored his.They fled into clean level sunlight and told Redd and Vette what they'd seen, and they all ran from the haunted place down the town's winding street.And at the end of the street saw what was coming towards them, far away down the gentle slope, already halfway between the line of the forest's edge and the beginning of the town's abandoned fields and growing nearer, small as flies, fifty, eighty, a hundred of them, stretched in a long line as they climbed towards the ruined town.Chen Yao wanted to run, but Lee argued against it.

"They'll wear us down, and besides, this is their territory.""Well, we can't fight that many. And anyway, the only way is up."Redd said, "I don't even know if I could kill one. They're only..."Chen Yao said, "They are less than that. They are only intelligent animals, with no society beyond that of the pack.""Drove us here," Vette said. "I kill, if need." She was leaning on her harpoon, its b.u.t.t grounded in stony dust. One hand shaded her eyes as she stared downhill."Yeah," Redd said, "but there are so many of them..."The ragged line moved steadily upwards. Lee could zoom 334.

PAUL J. MCAULEY.in on individuals. Many had daubed their naked bodies with ochre mud; some had filed their teeth to points. He said, "I don't think they are planners."Chen Yao said, "Whatever we do, we can't stand here and wait for them. Let's go higher."They turned and quickly climbed back up the street, past the pool and the violated tomb of the house. High crags reared above, stark against the slope of the mountain that rose into the dark sky. Night was coming on: the shadow of the mountaintop was sweeping down its slopes.There was one last house, its high-peaked tiled roof floating behind walls of polished lava blocks. They turned towards it, and climbed a narrow path that ran crookedly up a rubble-strewn slope. They kept turning to look back at the town and the line climbing towards it, and so they almost walked through the giant that popped into existence and barred their way with a gesture that conjured a wall of roaring flame.The huge figure was three or four times as tall as Lee, an old man whose lips moved, slightly out of synch with his amplified voice, within a thin silky beard that dropped to his waist."Go back, go back! Go back, demons from h.e.l.l!"His words shook from rock to rock. Flames roared higher, casting brilliant light but no heat. Sinuous black shapes seemed to writhe within the furnace light.Vette dropped to her knees, arms wrapped around her head. Chen Yao looked this way and that, squinting into the light of the flames; behind her, Redd had unsheathed his knife. Lee helped Vette to stand, and she clung to him while he explained that it was a simple hologram, the first stage in a defense system. "A trick of light, that's all! Scientific!"

He had to shout, over the amplified roar of flames. "A recording!""It certainly isn't," the old man said. Echoes knocked clouds of dust from the slopes. His voice was that loud. Lee clapped his hands over his ears. "Who are you, young man?

Who are your friends? From her harpoon, I would say that RED DUST.

335.your friend is one of the Yankee barbarians from the Dust Seas, but you are certainly not from these parts. Nor is the little girl, or the dangerous-looking cowboy. Oh, I'm sorry, let me turn this down." He disappeared for a moment, came back at normal size, dwarfed by his curtain of h.e.l.l fire. He said, in a normal conversational voice, "Is that better?"

Lee said, "Your flames are impressive, but like your voice they overwhelm us."

"Oh yes, how careless." The roaring light vanished. "I'm sorry," the old man said, "but it has been so long since we've had visitors. Apart from the wild ones, that is."

"I'm Lee. This is Vette. Over there, Chen Yao, and Redd.

Redd is the cowboy."

Vette squinted sideways at the old man's image with deep suspicion. "Bad conjuring trick," she said at last. "I see through him."

Redd said, "It kind of had you going though, didn't it?"

"It is more effective at night," the old man said. "The trouble is that the wild ones are no longer fooled by it."

Lee looked up at the walled house, saw a point of light twinkle there: the projector. He said, "We were seeking a place to shelter."

"That's something my companions and I would have to consider, of course. These are difficult times."

"I understand. But it is rather urgent."

Vette gripped Lee's arm. "They come up through the town!" she said, and turned to the projection of the old man.

"You hide behind walls! You let us in!"