“It would be easy. O Lord, yes, I’d like that. No work, nothing, just accept. But … You can’t give rnc what I want.”
He looked at the stars.
“Nothing can be given, ever.”
The stars were growing dim.
“It’s really very simple. I must borrow, I must earn. I must take.”
The stars quivered and died.
“Much obliged and thank you, no.”
The stars were all gone.
He turned and, without looking back, walked upon darkness: He hit the door with his palm. He strode out into the City.
He refused to hear if the machine universe behind him cried out in a great chorus, all cries and wounds, like a woman scorned. The crockery in a vast robot kitchen fell. By the time it hit the floor, he was gone.
It was a Museum of Weapons.
The hunter walked among the cases.
He opened a case and hefted a weapon, constructed like a spider’s antennae.
It hummed, and a flight of metal bees sizzled out the rifle bore, flew away, and stung a target-mannequin some fifty yards away, then fell lifeless, clattering to the floor.
The hunter nodded with admiration, and put the rifle back in the case.
He prowled on, curious as a child, testing yet other weapons here and there which dissolved glass or caused metal to run in bright yellow pools of molten lava.
“Excellent!” “Fine!” “Absolutely great!”
His cry rang out again and again as he slammed cases open and shut, and finally chose the gun.
It was a gun that, without fuss or fury, did away with matter. You pressed the button, there was a brief discharge of blue light, and the target simply vanished. No blood. No bright lava. No trace.
“All right,” he announced, leaving the Place of Guns, “we have the weapon. How about the Game, the Grandest Beast ever in the Long Hunt?”
He leapt onto the moving sidewalk.
An hour later he had passed a thousand buildings and scanned a thousand open parks without itching his finger.
He moved uneasily from treadway to treadway, shifting speeds now in this direction, now in that.
Until at last he saw a river of metal that sped underground.
Instinctively, he jumped toward that.
The metal stream carried him down into the secret gut of the City.
Here all was warm blood darkness. Here strange pumps moved the pulse of the City. Here were distilled the sweats that lubricated the roadways and lifted the elevators and swarmed the offices and stores with motion.
The hunter half crouched on the roadway. His eyes squinted. Perspiration gathered in his palms. His trigger finger greased the metal gun, sliding.
“Yes,” he whispered. “By God, now. This is it. The City itself … the Great Beast. Why didn’t I think of that? The Animal City, the terrible prey. It has men for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It kills them with machines.
It munches their bones like breadsticks. It spits them out like toothpicks. It lives long after they die. The City, by God, the City. Well now … “
He glided through dark grottoes of television eyes which showed him remote parkways and high towers.
Deeper within the belly of the underground world he sank as the river lowered itself. He passed a school of computers that chattered in maniac chorus. He shuddered as a cloud of paper confetti from one titan machine, holes punched out to perhaps record his passing, fell upon him in a whispered snow.
He raised his gun. He fired.
The machine disappeared.
He fired again. A skeleton strutwork under yet another machine vanished.
The City screamed.
At first very low and then very high, then, rising, falling, like a siren. Lights flashed. Bells began to ricochet alarums. The metal river shuddered under his feet, slowed. He fired at television screens which glared all white upon him. They blinked out and did not exist.
The City screamed higher until he raved against it, himself, and the marrow of his bones shook out an insanity of black dust.
He did not see, until it was too late, that the road on which he sped fell into the gnashing maw of a machine that was used for some purpose long forgotten centuries before.
He thought that by pressing the trigger he would make the terrible mouth disappear. It did indeed vanish. But as the roadway sped on and he whirled and fell as it picked up speed, he realized at last that his weapon did not truly destroy, it merely made invisible what was there and what still remained though unseen.
He gave a terrible cry to match the cry of the City. He flung out the gun in a last blow. The gun went into cogs and wheels and teeth and was twisted down.
The last thing he saw was a deep elevator shaft that fell away for perhaps a mile into the earth.
He knew that it might take him two minutes to hit the bottom. He shrieked.
The worst thing was, he would be conscious … all the way down …
The rivers shook. The silver rivers trembled. The pathways, shocked, convulsed the metal shores through which they sped.
Wilder, traveling, was almost knocked flat by the concussion.
What had caused the concussion, he could not see. Perhaps, far off, there was a cry, a murmur of dreadful sound, which swiftly faded.
Wilder moved on. The silver track threaded on. But the City seemed poised, agape. The City seemed tensed. Its huge and various muscles were cramped, alert.
Feeling this, Wilder began to walk as well as be moved by the swift path.
“Thank God. There’s the Gate. The sooner I’m out of this place the happier I’ll—”
The Gate was indeed there, not a hundred yards away. But, on the instant, as if hearing his declaration, the river stopped. It shivered. Then it started to move back, taking him where he did not wish to go.
Incredulous, Wilder spun about, and, in spinning, fell. He clutched at the stuffs of the rushing sidewalk.
His face, pressed to the vibrant grillework of the river-rushing pavement, heard the machineries mesh and mill beneath, humming and agroan, forever sluicing, forever feverish for journeys and mindless excursions.
Beneath the calm metal, embattlements of hornets stung and buzzed, lost bees bumbled and subsided. Collapsed, he saw the Gate lost away behind. Burdened, he remembered at last the extra weight upon his back, the jet-power equipment which might give him wings.
He jammed his hand to the switch on his belt. And in the instant before the sidewalk might have pulsed him off among sheds and museum walls, he was airborne.
Flying, he hovered, then swam the air back to hang above a casual Parkhill gazing up, all covered with grease and smiling from a dirty face. Beyond Parkhill, at the Gate, stood the frightened maid. Beyond even further, near the yacht at the landing, stood Aaronson, back turned to the City, nervous to be moving on.
“Where are the others?” cried Wilder.
“Oh, they won’t be back,” said Parkhill, easily. “It figures, doesn’t it? I mean, it’s quite a place.”
“Place!” said Wilder, hovered now up, now down, turning slowly, apprehensive. “We’ve got to get them out! It’s not safe.”
“It’s safe if you like it. I like it,” said Parkhill.
And all the while there was a gathering of earthquake in the ground and in the air, which Parkhill chose to ignore.
“You’re leaving, of course,” he said, as if nothing were wrong. “I knew you would. Why?”
“Why?” Wilder wheeled like a dragonfly before a trembling of storm wind. Buffeted up, buffeted down, he flung his words at Parkhill, who didn’t bother to duck but smiled up and accepted. “Good God, Sam, the place is Hell. The Martians had enough sense to get out. They saw they had overbuilt themselves. The damn City does everything, which is too much! Sam!”
But at that instant, they both looked round and up. For the sky was shelling over. Great lids were vising in the ceiling. Like an immense flower, the tops of buildings were petalling out to cover themselves. Windows were shutting down. Doors were slamming. A sound of fired cannons echoed through the streets.
The Gate was thundering shut.
The twin jaws of the Gate, shuddering, were in motion.
Wilder cried out, spun round, and dived.
He heard the maid below him. He saw her reach up. Then, swooping, he gathered her in. He kicked the air. The jet lifted them both.
Like a bullet to a target he rammed for the Gate. But an instant before, burdened, he reached it, the Gates banged together. He was barely able to veer course and soar upward along the raw metal as the entire City shook with the roar of the steel.
Parkhill shouted below. And Wilder was flying up, up along the wall, looking this way and that.
Everywhere, the sky was closing in. The petals were coming down, coming down. There was only a last small patch of stone sky to his right. He blasted for that. And kicking, made it through, flying, as the final flange of steel clipped into place, and the City was closed to itself.
He hung for a moment, suspended, and then flew down along the outer wall to the dock where Aaron-son stood by the yacht staring at the huge shut Gates.
“Parkhill,” whispered Wilder, looking at the City, the walls, the Gates. “You fool. You damned fool.”
“Fools, all of them,” said Aaronson, and turned away. “Fools. Fools.”
They waited a moment longer and listened to the City, humming, alive, kept to itself, its great mouth filled with a few bits of warmth, a few lost people somewhere hid away in there. The Gates would stay shut now, forever. The City had what it needed to go on a long while.
Wilder looked back at the place, as the yacht took them back out of the mountain and away
