see if these guys are wanted for anything.'
'A temporary expedient. I appreciate it, but…'
'You're right.'
Maria Torres, roused from a reverie by someone's voice calling her name, found herself leaning over a balcony at the Tyrrell House, contemplating the depths. Something very alluring was down there…
Daydreaming. She was daydreaming on the job. Maybe this was just the kind of thing the Canyon did to people.
Chapter 11
Half an hour after sunset, on the day after Jake's abortive attempt to start a fight with Edgar, the two of them were in the workshop-cave together, talking calmly and unhurriedly about the job. Jake's right arm still ached when he moved it in certain ways, but other than that it was almost as if yesterday's scuffle had been forgotten.
Edgar was inspecting the day's work Jake had just accomplished. Basically the boss's comments were favorable, though now and then he pointed out some detail with which he was not completely satisfied.
Jake had spent the day mining the deep Vishnu schist in the bottom of the cave for small white nodules. Edgar kept a sizable collection of these on his long workbench and in bins just below it. He used some of the nodules for his carvings. Jake had seen him carry others back toward the secret rear chamber of the cave, putting them down on the floor of the cave just in front of the crevice, as if sooner or later that would be their destination.
The mining itself, working hard rock with nothing but hand tools, had gone very slowly today. To Jake's relief, Edgar didn't seem to care that the process was a slow one, only that the search for nodules should be thorough and that Jake should occupy himself with it during most of the daylight hours. Every time he discovered one of the lumps of peculiar white stone, he had to excavate it carefully, undercutting to free it at the bottom. Then he carried it to the workbench, where he sorted all nodules by shape and size.
The bench was a long, crudely built but well-lighted wooden table, running along one wall of the cave beside the entrance. Here a dozen or two of the white nodules of modest size were scattered, a couple of them fixed to the bench in jigs and clamps, obviously in the process of being carved into the likenesses of living things. The white stuff was stone—at least Jake wouldn't have known how else to classify it—but in its feel and texture unlike any other material that he had ever handled.
Edgar told Jake that he, Edgar, had gathered some of the nodules already on the workbench, from the local rapids in the Colorado. Edgar also cautioned him—quite unnecessarily—that such methods of collection were not something that either Jake or Camilla could undertake and expect to survive.
There seemed to be plenty of white nodules here now, as Jake could see for himself. He wondered momentarily whether Edgar really needed or wanted more of them, or if he just wanted to keep Jake busy and out of mischief. Camilla's warning that Edgar really wanted something else from both of them came back to Jake now.
Most of the day Jake had worked with his shirt off, sweating like a pig. The cave was a little cooler than the sunbaked canyon outside, but not much. He took frequent breaks, and at intervals during the hot hours Camilla brought him cold lemonade. He had had the electric lights turned on for part of his workday; he needed them if he really wanted to get a good look at what he was doing, unless the sun was coming in the entrance at just the proper angle. They were still on now, of course. Jake noted that Edgar's vision seemed to be extremely good. The old man could see small details from a distance, and he wore no glasses.
On the job Jake used hammers and pry bars and chisels. Edgar had explosives on hand—Jake had seen the little locked-up shed, just outside the mine—but said he rarely employed them.
Edgar was saying to him now: 'I've tried dynamite, but this is a ticklish place to try to blast; much better to dig out what's wanted carefully, with hand tools. That's where you come in.'
Jake nodded. The old man today was taking such a reasonable, businesslike attitude that Jake couldn't help getting the feeling, in spite of everything, that there was some chance this would turn out after all to be a decent, acceptable job. It was a crazy attitude, he realized whenever he stopped to think about it; but somehow when Tyrrell was talking so reasonably it seemed only natural.
'What's back there?' Jake inquired, nodding toward the almost completely blocked chamber at the rear of the cave. Things were going so reasonably at the moment he thought he might receive an answer.
Edgar looked at him. Then: 'My work,' said the old man shortly, putting a slight emphasis on the first word.
'Hey,' said Jake, half an hour after arriving back in the little house, about an hour after sunset. It was almost the first syllable he'd uttered since Edgar had told him he could go home for the night.
At the moment he was standing in front of the electric refrigerator, holding the door open and looking in. A strange fact had just caught his attention, and he was wondering how he could have been so slow to notice it.
'What?' Camilla, moving around behind Jake, was in the prosaic process of getting dinner ready.
'Somebody went to the store, looks like.'
Only last night Jake had become aware, without really giving the matter any intelligent thought, that the stocks of supplies in the refrigerator were starting to run short. The cabinet shelves had still been deep in canned goods; there was no prospect of actual starvation, and so he hadn't really thought about where the eggs and ham and cheese were coming from. But this morning there had been fresh food, as there was now.
Overnight, somehow, the refrigerator had been newly stocked. 'Where'd all this stuff come from? There's eggs, there's beer, there's apples—'
'Edgar brings it. He brought stuff last night. Every week or so he goes on what he calls a shopping trip up to the Rim. The real Rim, the one where there are people. Some of the stuff he steals from El Tovar, some he gets in other places.'
Thoughtfully Jake hefted a little wooden box of Kraft cheese. The familiar brand name on the box was heartening. It proved that the real world wasn't entirely out of reach. 'Somehow I thought he stayed down here all the time.'
'He says he'd like to stay here all the time and work; he grumbles about having to go out. But he needs tools and other stuff. So while he's up there he gets some breathers' food.'
'Huh?'
'That's what we are. You and me. We're breathers. Edgar isn't. You didn't notice yet? Edgar doesn't breathe.'
Jake stared. But now he was beginning to know that here in the Deep Canyon, the stranger a thing sounded, the more likely it was to be true.
Camilla was nodding. 'That's right. Watch him close, next chance you get. No breathing, unless he needs the air to talk.' She lowered her voice to a whisper. 'Jake, that's what vampires are like.'
'Vampires. You mean like in the movies.'
'No. Not like that.' Looking at the restocked shelves, Camilla giggled strangely. 'The way he stocked up this time, it looks like he really wants to keep both of us going.'
After a time Jake said: 'He must need food for himself.'
'He doesn't eat like you and me. Not like breathing people.'
'Huh?'
'Warm blood is all that Edgar really needs. Could be my blood, or yours, or a dog's. He sometimes catches him a wild animal, big or small, and drinks its blood.'
Jake couldn't answer.
Too many things, impossible things, had forced themselves into his life, made themselves part of his vision of reality, over the last couple of days. By his own subjective reckoning, he had only been gone from the CCC camp three days now. He wondered if that was, if that could be, right. He could believe Camilla now, that time, like the big river itself, ran different here in the Deep Canyon.
He said now: 'I wonder what they're doing back at camp.'
'Ha. They might have forgotten you already. On their calendar, you might have been gone a month.'
Yesterday Camilla had talked casually about taking the shotgun, loading it with something lighter than what
