Almost before the meal was over, the men were putting their kit together, though they had little enough in the way of possessions. They moved out in single file, into the gathering dark. As I got up, Jess detained me.

  “I must question you on one thing, Knowle,” he said. “Our biggest problem is not the enemy but the disease. Cancerous people we’re happy to have, because it isn’t infectious, but tuberculous or other diseases we sometimes have to turn away. Now, when you were brought before me, you were plainly in a kind of senseless state, and crying out about losing something and I don’t know what. You will have to tell me what it is that ails you.”

  Letting my head hang, I tried to find myself words. The truth is that I was very ashamed of my ailment.

  “If it’s some kind of a mental thing, we don’t mind that. Most of us are out of our right minds anyhow.”

  In a low voice, I said: “It was a sort of food poisoning I got as a child in the orphan centre in the city. A doctor said it affected a part of my brain and my retina. He called it a scintillating scotoma, I think, with something else I can’t remember. That was why I was arrested and made to serve as a landsman - I had a sort of vision one day when I was in the street, and I walked out into the traffic way and caused a bus to run up on to the pavement. So they sentenced me to the village.”

  He said gently: “You must become one of us in mind as well as in the flesh. It’s your only hope of survival. We have a talent for recognizing those who may betray us. We shall know when you are really a Traveller, heart and soul, and then you may get a woman and we will look after you whatever happens; no true Traveller ever deserts or betrays another.”

  “You needn’t think I would ever betray you! I’m not that kind,” I said angrily.

  With infinite calm, he looked into my eyes. That lean face seemed keep enough to cut into my inner mind.’

  “If you are with us long enough, you will grow to know yourself. It is that that makes the desperate life of a Traveller worth living; you can escape the guards, but never yourself. When that day comes, you will see where betrayal lies.”

  I remembered his words bitterly later, though at the time they meant little to me. This I will say: that in that ragged bunch of desperadoes survived, I do believe, all that was left of the nobler codes of an earlier way of life, debased, trampled by the necessities of life, but still apparent. And Jess kept the spirit alive in the others. Without him, some of them would have been little better than wolves.

  Soon it was dark, and we were moving.

  I fell in with a man called Garry, a soft-spoken man who rarely smiled. His silence made me welcome. We moved two abreast, the couples spaced apart.

  Overhead, a lonely Iron Wing was dusting crops. We paid it no attention. It was robot-controlled and would not see us. We were moving away from the village from which I came. Disquiet rose in me. I longed to get back to that world I knew, to Hammer, to the familiar routine. I did not wish to be a Traveller, to be bound to cross and re-cross for ever the reeking earth without hope or home. But how could I escape from this band?

  The Travellers formed a free society within the great prison of England. Because conditions on the farmlands were so inimical to life, only men and women convicted of “crimes” worked there. To keep up the number of land workers, the laws in the great teeming cities had to be made increasingly strict, so that new infringements would maintain a supply of new labour. But some of these labourers escaped from the villages, and formed themselves into bands.

  There was no hope of their getting back to their families in the cities. The cities, perching on their high platforms above the land, were impossible to enter illegally, or almost so. So the Travellers travelled, living as free a life as possible within their wide prison, until they were hunted down by machines or dogs or men.

  We showed we were free all right. We marched till near morning, and then camped in an old garage, no longer used, on the edge of a main highway. Easy though it was, the pace we had kept almost killed me, for I was unused to their sort of walking. But I saw now why they were legend; they came and went as they pleased, often on regular routes of their own; they migrated and hibernated, they appeared and disappeared.

  “Where are we heading?” I asked Garry.

  He named the place, without particularizing too much, as if he had not too much faith in me. He told me we were escorting two men who were merely passing through this territory. They had come from the north and would be passed over to another band of Travellers farther south. They were heading for the sea, and hoped eventually to sail to Africa and freedom.

  “Aren’t we going to the coast?” I asked.

  He shook his head. With prompting, he described the shore that I had never seen, and the sea beating endlessly against a margin endlessly bound by concrete and plastic and metal -for the old beaches had all been eaten away in the manufacture of artificial soil.

  He snuggled down to sleep. Tired though I was, I remained awake until long after the daylight insinuated itself through a hundred cracks into our shelter.

  Over the days that followed, I learnt more about the travelling life. Though I admired it, some sort of fear kept me from feeling myself part of it.

  Jess himself never made any attempt to extend his liberty, however much he helped others. He lived his desperate life in the heart of the enemy. The same held for his more faithful followers. Some of the men - now that their faces became individualized and less strange to me, I saw they numbered about twenty-five - told me that it was fairly simple to remain at liberty as long as one kept away from the villages and did not venture on to the roads, all of which were well patrolled by robots.

  “Besides, robots are fools,” one of the women said. “By relying so heavily on their machines, the Farmers don’t realize what liberty they give us.”

  “But what sort of liberty is it, after all?” the man next to her growled. “The liberty to die far from a doctor, and to starve ragged in the winter! Why, a couple of winters ago I spent two months lying in a village north of here within the shadow of death. How I pulled through, it was a miracle! But for Nan, I’d be a gonner. I tell you, it’s well enough to be a Traveller at this time of year, when you see the sun through the stinking mists, but when the frosts come - ah, the winter’s a cruel time. Every summer, I spoil the bright days thinking of the cold ones what’s in store.”

  “When it’s spring again, you forget,” Jess said. “Somehow the birds always return, no matter how much the madmen try to kill ‘em, flying back over here from Russia and Africa and Scandinavia. And all these beastly weed killers they put down, what make the toughest cabbage wilt, aren’t able to choke off the primrose and the nettle and the buttercup. We’re real men then, the Travellers, when we hear our first cuckoo, aren’t we, lads?”

  This woman, Nan, attracted me. She was younger than the man she slept with, cleaner than most of them, and with wonderful wide blue eyes. I used to make a point of lying on the ground near her, so that I could watch her. I used to feast my eyes as if they were starving on the sweep of her legs, their almost straight line to the front, the cunning and varied curve of her calf. Sometimes I glimpsed also the fine width of her thighs. She took care of her legs, and she saw me looking at them. She and Jess made me want to become a Traveller ; but I still dreamed of escape, for freedom meant very little to me -their kind of freedom, I mean.

  Nan talked to me. On the night we handed over the men who were trying for Africa, we met with another group of Travellers in underground warrens that had been carved out of an old mine. There we felt safe, and celebrated. I took Nan to one side, into a shallow gallery where we were alone and the lights of their lanterns hardly reached us. It smelt of earth cleaner than any we smelt above ground.

  There, I slid my hands over those legs I so admired, I felt her generous body, and thrust my tongue between her lips. She allowed it for a while, let me do what I would, helped, and then drew back.

  “You can’t, Knowle, you know you can’t! You’re not a Traveller!”

  We argued. At last she explained what she meant. There was a ritual of acceptance in becoming a Traveller. When you were trusted, you were sterilized and then were a fully fledged member of the band. Then you might have a woman, but not otherwise. In their hazardous way of life, babies were too much of a handicap to the Travellers. A pregnancy was as good as a death sentence to a travelling woman.

  It was the sourest example I ever knew of the fact that everything entails sacrifice.

  The shock of this disclosure sent me that day into a hallucination. When I woke, Garry and Jess were kneeling by me, swabbing my face. A bandage was tied round my mouth; I had been screaming so loudly that even down the mine they became alarmed.

  Weakly, I got up and accepted soup. They were on the move again, and we were to go back the way we had come. It was that time in autumn when the leaves are falling but the trees still have a cover to them. The nights through which we travelled were crisp and chill, and always I knew that I could never be a Traveller.

  There came the night when again we slept together in the ruinous garage. On the next night’s march, I recognized the landscape. Though it differed very little from the lands we had covered, I knew it because I had worked over it many a time. We were back near my village! Hammer snored not a mile away, snug in Dormitory Five.

  Suppose I broke away - but they would punish me unless I could offer them something of value to them ... and at once 1 knew what that something could be.

  Directly my thoughts had fallen into this way, I was like a man possessed. Either I must act now or not at all. My idiot plan was good for this very strip of earth I plodded over.

  Uttering a brief cry, I fell face down into the soil.

  “Get up, club foot,” Garry said, pausing. I groaned. He bent over me. The two men behind came up and stopped. I went on groaning, developing it, building up the sound, though it made my hair stand on end inside my suit.

  Though I could, of course, see nothing, I could hear that the Travellers were beginning to gather round me. “Spread out, you fools!” a woman said.

  Someone gathered me up roughly and half-rolled me over so that they could peer at my face through the face-plate. I groaned the louder, changing it slowly to a sort of wailing noise that was more easy to keep up.

  “He’s having another of his bloody fits. Better leave him,” someone said. This met with grunts of approval.

  “He’s no Traveller - he’ll be dead by morning,” another voice I recognized as Haagman’s declared. “Leave them a bit of real fertilizer for their farm!”

  They dropped me back on to the ground. Then I heard Jess’s voice.

  “We made the boy join us. He’s one of us - what’s how long he’s been with us to do with the question? Are we rats to leave him lying in this furrow?”

  “Don’t give us that old nonsense, Jess,” Haagman said harshly, “You know we’re rats. And you know he’s not a Traveller yet. Let’s get on.”

  But Nan’s voice came to me out of the darkness. “Knowle’s in pain, Haagman.”

  “Huh, who isn’t? The kid’s dying! Listen at him!”

  “All the more reason not to leave him!” Garry said.

  Jess’s voice came again, sharp and decisive. “Haagman, and you, Garry, get Knowle up between you and let’s get moving. Carry him carefully.”

  When the decision was made, they did not argue. I felt their hands fumble for purchase along my rough suit - and then the lights came on!

  Instantly, I knew that we were discovered. Perhaps my noise had given away our position. Though my blood froze, I was foolish enough not to know whether to be sorry or pleased. But at once something else happened that broke my nerve entirely. The brave and rugged men who called themselves Travellers fell down and screamed in terror. My horror and surprise were so great that I sat up and opened my eyes. I too uttered a strangled cry of fear.

  We were surrounded by a row of devils.

  Six of them stood there. They were metal-clad and shone in the lights carried by their companions. Two horns grew from their heads, their eyes gleamed with a cloudy redness that suggested hell fire.

  In a minute I recognized them. They were the whole of our night patrol, from the village, and the Travellers were unlucky enough to cross their path. They were only machines, machines of a new model introduced only a month before I left. The Travellers had obviously never met with them before; certainly their shock value was great, materializing as they had done out of the night. Behind them stood two human figures, the Guard Commander and his Deputy. They strode forward with weapons raised.

  “You are all under arrest. Any false move and we shoot to kill.”

  As if to emphasize their words, one of the Travellers sprang to his feet and dashed between two of the devil robots. Both machines blazed fire. The man fell flaming on to his face. We heard him crackle long after he had hit the ground.

  We were made to get to our feet. Covered by the robots, the guards searched us and removed all weapons, unzipping our landsuits to do so. By this time, a whirler was hovering overhead, holding us all in a pool of radiance projected from a light in its belly. It was so bright that the worlds outside the light faded to nothing.

  Then we had to march.

  We did not go to the village, as I had expected. They took us the other way. We marched unbrokenly for four hours -no, not quite unbrokenly, for at one point two of the men tried to escape, one dashing in one direction, one in the other. The devils roasted them instantly.

  At last we came to a long low building I had never seen before. It stood isolated among the crops. It was windowless and had only one low door. Directly I saw it, my heart began to hammer. The very look of the building told me it was there for no fair reason. Every line proclaimed that it existed for a bad purpose.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The irrational terror that sprang on me as we approached the sinister building must have snapped me into another of my unfortunate hallucinations. If so, I am unable to remember the details of it; that was the worst. When I remembered hallucinations, sometimes so clearly that they thenceforth became almost part of my life, it could be painful enough; but when I forgot them, and could recall no detail of them, they seemed to lie undigested in my mind, cold and dreadful.

  Not that the sight I saw when I returned to my normal sense was not dreadful enough.

  Twenty-three of us stood in the interior of the large shed, guarded by the devils and the two guards, and illuminated by powerful lights that shone at us from a barrage of spotlights placed at chest level at one end of the chamber. It was not only the strange positioning of these lamps that contributed to our unease. Oh no! Behind us, the wall was pocked and chipped with bullet marks, most of them at about the height of a man’s lung.

  We stood motionless. No word was spoken. How long I had stood in my horrible trance, I have no means of knowing. The two guards did not wait as patiently as the devils, and walked now and then to the door. Evidently they were waiting for someone. But we were not allowed to move. If we needed to relieve ourselves, it had to be as we stood. I looked at Nan, but her pale face did not turn in my direction.

  Finally someone arrived. We heard the noise of a hover-car landing outside. An officer in black uniform walked in and surveyed us.

  He was a big man. His face was heavy, and he wore a heavy pair of spectacles. He looked at us without expression. His uniform was trim, and I guessed from his general appearance and from the delay he had caused that he had flown here from the city.

  The guards now showed him some badges. These I recognized as prisoner’s badges of the sort issued to everyone when they became landsmen. No doubt my own was there, taken from me during my fit of unconsciousness. This officer could read, for he checked the badges off against a thick list that he produced. At last he turned to us and addressed us.

  His manner was curt, and what he had to say was brief.

  “You are all landsmen and all of you have escaped. The penalty for escape you all know; it is death. By virtue of the authority invested in me by the central government, I have the power to impose this sentence upon you without further hindrance. Accordingly, I declare that you shall be executed by shooting where you stand.”

  As we drank in this edifying news, one of the guards who had marched us into the execution shed conferred with the officer; he nodded his head and looked serious. The Travellers peered frantically about for a way of escape, but the devil robots gave them absolutely no hope. Brave and hardened men that they were, they showed few signs of the terrible sense of impending dissolution that I felt; one of the women even smiled cynically and spat on the floor when the sentence was pronounced.

  Again the officer came forward.

  “I am told,” he said, “that among you is the notorious gipsy known as Jess, for whose capture a reward is offered. Which of you is Jess? Step forward at once.”

  Nobody moved. I started to turn my head towards where I knew Jess stood, but at once someone dug me sharply in the back, and I stayed petrified. Silence.