To Conquer Chaos

first, noise next, and only then anything which might enrage it without doing serious harm. Quickly, now!”

There was a pause. Nestamay saw from the dials that the thing had stopped moving; more crashes from the direction of Sector 4-C suggested the creature had found something to interest it for a while.

“Nestamay!”

It was Grandfather again. She called an answer.

“Nestamay, it’s a bad one-wild! It charged the handlights and someone’s been hurt. No time for half- measures! I want power fed to the Channel Nine electrofence, and the storage cells for the heatbeams topped up.”

Nestamay’s heart lurched. On this watch of all watches, when a dangerous killer came through, Jasper had to delay her on her way to the office! She was going to give Jasper a piece of her mind when she next saw him-a going-over with a heatbeam would be even better, but hard to organise …

“Full power!” she reported, having tripped the necessary switches.

“Full power!” Grandfather told his companions. “Move!”

Nestamay jumped from her chair and ran to the window overlooking that side of the Station known as Sector 4. She stared into the gloom under the cracked and sagging roof.

At first she saw nothing. Then glimmering handlights appeared, masked by vegetation and rubble. Caught in their beam for a second, something glistening reared up. A howl at a teeth-rasping frequency split the air, followed by a vast crash and a completely human scream. Nestamay found she was biting her fingertips in agony.

Then the heatbeams came on. Like dull red pokers, they stabbed through the murk, striking swirls of smoke from anything they touched. Behind Nestamay, there were clicks as the power-level readings dropped with frightening rapidity.

The thing howled again and made a couple of stupid rushes at its tormentors, but the heat increased inversely with the square root of the intervening distance, and provided the beams remained steady it was impossible for the thing to come closer than some fifteen feet. It realised this at last, turned-howling more than ever-and blundered into Channel Nine, which would lead it to the bare ground beyond the Station.

“Electrofence!” Grandfather ordered. Nestamay dived for the power-switch.

The electrofence wasn’t precisely a fence, but a tubular mesh of wire completely enclosing each channel. Its original function might have been connected with the transportation of goods; currently, it served as their best weapon against the things. It induced microwave frequencies in sufficient quantity to half-cook anything inside it.

With a howl far louder than any preceding, the thing felt the first effects, and panic took over. Nestamay hadn’t seen whether it had legs or not, but it must have done; nothing else but good, muscular legs could have carried its substantial mass out of the channel so fast. Off into the surrounding desert it fled, trumpeting its intolerable pain to the stars.

It might come back-if it was stupid enough. Men with heatbeams would have to watch for it for the next few days, which meant taking people away from the regular working parties. Not all the things were as bad as that-some were huge and harmless, some were little and harmless … and some were little and deadly, and they were the worst of all. But it had been a long time since anything in a swarm, which was particularly frightening, had hatched out in the Station.

Nestamay wiped her face; it was running with sweat. Now she had to trace the original point of emergence of the thing, so that it could be blanked off for ever.

Was there never to be an end to this existence? Would they never find the last hole through which things leaked from-wherever they originated?

Those were questions she knew she couldn’t answer. She drove them from her mind and went about her work.

VII

The five wise men, Yanderman himself, and the servants who came and went with jugs of beer and plates of cheese and onions made the room crowded. The ceiling was low and the walls were rough. The layout suggested to Yanderman that this fort had been the whole of Lagwich at one time, with perhaps a mere hundred people living in crude cabins around it and taking refuge inside the stone wall when necessary; the palisade and ditch lower down the hill would have followed the expansion of the population to its present figure of eight or nine times the original number.

Six nitre-soaked torches, fizzing and spitting occasionally, were set in wall sconces among relics of past victories-not military conflicts, but struggles against things from the barrenland. Some of the trophies were mounted as skeletons; others were skins stretched on crude wooden frames. Even in death the ugliest of them were still frightening.

He had thought through the probable history of Lagwich with a purpose-as a sort of exercise in deduction. These five who called themselves wise men and governed the town were very ignorant even when it came to facts lying in plain sight. Like the form their town had taken. They might say, “in the time of my father’s father it was said that the palisade was smaller than it is now,” or “That thing on the wall was killed by so-and-so, who killed sixty-nine things in twenty years-they came more often then.”

In fact, Malling had said exactly that when waiting for the others to arrive. Yanderman found the words disturbing, for a reason he could not yet pin down.

So far he had confined the talk to an exchange of courtesies and some restrained boasts about the wealth of Esberg; they were true enough, but he had no wish to make the folk of Lagwich feel small. They had done well, considering their situation. Of course, they’d have done better if they hadn’t been so stupidly ignorant. How could they say what they said about change or growth, and yet not grasp the idea that things were still changing, even if the world seemed much as yesterday?

Now, Yanderman decided, he could introduce his main topic. Since he was the honoured guest and the centre of attention he had only to clear his throat and they instantly hushed to hear him. He said, “The barrenland seems to me a strange thing. There is nothing else like it.”

The wise men rumbled and agreed. Yanderman went on, “The things that come from it, also, are very strange.”

They agreed to that, too.

“Tell me,” Yanderman said, “what do you believe caused the barrenland?”

As he had expected, the question provoked a blank silence. Eventually Rost, a dried-up man on Malling’s right, gave a shrug. He said, “Caused it? It’s a thing that is, like any natural object. And to speculate on what caused things to be as they are is a futile pastime.”

The other wise men concurred, looking relieved.

“The world changes, though,” Yanderman said. “For example, did you not tell me that in the old days more things came from the barrenland than come nowadays?” He looked at his host.

Malling was big, and ruddy-cheeked, and Yanderman would have guessed if no one had told him that he was the senior of the five, because he was much the most conservative. He said, “I concede that is so. Nonetheless those that come are if anything more dangerous than before. And the ways of devils are not as plain as the ways of men.”

“Devils?” Yanderman said. “All the things I’ve seen were animals, for they could be killed. What is a devil?”

“Oh, we have seen one,” the wise men hastened to assure him. “It’s in Rost’s house, across the yard of the fort.”

Yanderman, wondering what in the world they meant, showed his interest, and Malling obtained Rost’s permission to send a servant for the “devil”.

“This one,” Rost explained, “came from the barrenland not so many years ago-ten, or twelve. It had a voice,