Warlock

shattered glass of that operator's booth, the white bones of a man looked out at them The hollow eye sockets of the skull seemed to stare with inordinate interest. They came up to the front of it and set down the stretcher with Barrister slung in it. Mace propped the unconscious neophyte-Shaker, Gregor, against the gutter curb and stretched to get his cramped muscles in order, as if he expected to lift this mammoth obstacle himself.
        
        “Half a mile yet, I'd say,” Richter said quietly, turning to Shaker Sandow.
        
        “Perhaps we can go over it,” the Shaker said. “There seems to be some four or five feet clearance from its side to the ceiling.”
        
        Richter ordered Tuk to scale the cab and scout the way ahead, to ascertain whether or not it was worth the trouble of getting the entire party onto the tilted side of the huge vehicle. Tuk, still holding the long, tar-tipped length of kindling which served as a torch, grasped one of the great wheels, stood on another of them, and swung up. There were repairman's rails all along the train, and he had no trouble reaching the relatively level side of the canted machine. He started off, hunched over to protect bis head from the ceiling, and soon was gone from sight, the faint glow of his torch swallowed by the darkness ahead.
        
        “How is the boy?” Richter asked.
        
        “Still unconscious, and turning black from the ankle down. It looks bad.”
        
        “The other?”
        
        “Mace?”
        
        “Yes, him. We would all be dead earlier than now if he had not been with us.”
        
        “He will hold up, I think,” the Shaker said. He looked at the giant where he sat next to Gregor, tending the boy, though there was little that he could do. “Though I can't be sure. I know that he would never succumb to physical exhaustion. Strain and effort mean nothing to him. But I've never seen him this emotionally weary. I had not realized, to be truthful, that he was capable of such deep feelings toward anyone.”
        
        “We learn new things about each other on this journey,” Richter said. “For instance, I learned that you have more stamina in your frail body than any man could sanely guess.”
        
        The Shaker paused, thinking about that, as if it had not occurred to him how much punishment he had dealt to his frame. Then he nodded. “And I have discovered that you are more than a flawless officer and a wise man. As with the General's woman, you are capable of indiscretions, like any man. Let me tell you, Solvon, I actualy rested far easier when I learned, that night in the mountains, that you had given the world a bastard child. Until then, you had seemed too perfect, too cool, too utterly collected and on top of things. I thought you were either one of our assassins, or perhaps such a rigid disciplinarian that you would be useless when we reached the city that was our goal.”
        
        “How could my being a rigid disciplinarian affect my command in the city?” the officer asked. He had not taken umbrage at anything the magician had told him.
        
        “We will be coming face to face with things that none of us can hope to envision, wonders stacked upon wonders. If you had no weaknesses, no human streak within you, if you were nothing but the traditionalist I thought you to be at first, you would not be able to cope with such a store of marvels. You would be unable to accept the alien and the unexplainable, and you would lead us to destruction. But inside that shell of serenity, old man, beats a heart like mine.”
        
        “Ho, there!” Tuk called from the top of the train, peer ing over the edge at them.
        
        Richter shook his head, as if to throw out the mood which had settled over him and the Shaker. “What is it, Tuk?
        
        The way ahead is blocked. Two cars shredded open in the crash, and huge flanges of rolled metal tore up and gouged into the ceiling. I managed, only with difficulty, to get around the first, then saw the second only ten feet further on, sealing the way even more tightly than the first.”
        
        Then must we go back?” Richter asked.
        
        “We cannot,” Shaker Sandow said. “Once the fields have burned, once the ashes have cooled, they will be scouting for our bones. When they do not find them, they'll discover the foundations of the buildings,