that night, hradzka slept under a bridge across a fairly wide stream; the next morning, he followed the road until he came to a town. it was not a large place; there were perhaps four or five hundred houses and other buildings in it. most of these were dwellings like the farmhouse where he had been staying, but some were much larger, and seemed to be places of business. one of these latter was a concrete structure with wide doors at the front; inside, he could see men working on the internal-combustion vehicles which seemed to be in almost universal use. hradzka decided to obtain employment here.
it would be best, he decided, to continue his pretense of being a deaf-mute. he did not know whether a world-language were in use at this time or not, and even if not, the pretense of being a foreigner unable to speak the local dialect might be dangerous. so he entered the vehicle-repair shop and accosted a man in a clean shirt who seemed to be issuing instructions to the workers, going into his pantomime of the homeless mute seeking employment.
the master of the repair-shop merely laughed at him, however. hradzka became more insistent in his manner, making signs to indicate his hunger and willingness to work. the other men in the shop left their tasks and gathered around; there was much laughter and unmistakably ribald and derogatory remarks. hradzka was beginning to give up hope of getting employment here when one of the workmen approached the master and whispered something to him.
the two of them walked away, conversing in low voices. hradzka thought he understood the situation; no doubt the workman, thinking to lighten his own labor, was urging that the vagrant be employed, for no other pay than food and lodging. at length, the master assented to his employee's urgings; he returned, showed hradzka a hose and a bucket and sponges and cloths, and set him to work cleaning the mud from one of the vehicles. then, after seeing that the work was being done properly, he went away, entering a room at one side of the shop.
about twenty minutes later, another man entered the shop. he was not dressed like any of the other people whom hradzka had seen; he wore a gray tunic and breeches, polished black boots, and a cap with a visor and a metal insignia on it; on a belt, he carried a holstered weapon like a blaster.
after speaking to one of the workers, who pointed hradzka out to him, he approached the fugitive and said something. hradzka made gestures at his mouth and ears and made gargling sounds; the newcomer shrugged and motioned him to come with him, at the same time producing a pair of handcuffs from his belt and jingling them suggestively.
in a few seconds, hradzka tried to analyze the situation and estimate its possibilities. the newcomer was a soldier, or, more likely, a policeman, since manacles were a part of his equipment. evidently, since the evening before, a warning had been made public by means of communicating devices such as he had seen at the farm, advising people that a man of his description, pretending to be a deaf-mute, should be detained and the police notified; it had been for that reason that the workman had persuaded his master to employ hradzka. no doubt he would be accused of causing the conditions at the farm by sorcery.
hradzka shrugged and nodded, then went to the water-tap to turn off the hose he had been using. he disconnected it, coiled it and hung it up, and then picked up the water-bucket. then, without warning, he hurled the water into the policeman's face, sprang forward, swinging the bucket by the bale, and hit the man on the head. releasing his grip on the bucket, he tore the blaster or whatever it was from the holster.
one of the workers swung a hammer, as though to throw it. hradzka aimed the weapon at him and pulled the trigger; the thing belched fire and kicked back painfully in his hand, and the man fell. he used it again to drop the policeman, then thrust it into the waistband of his trousers and ran outside. the thing was not a blaster at all, he realized—only a missile-projector like the big weapons at the farm, utilizing the force of some chemical explosive.
the policeman's vehicle was standing outside. it was a small, single-seat, two wheeled affair. having become familiar with the principles of these hydro-carbon engines from examination of the vehicle of the farm, and accustomed as he was to far more complex mechanisms than this crude affair, hradzka could see at a glance how to operate it. springing onto the saddle, he kicked away the folding support and started the engine. just as he did, the master of the repair-shop ran outside, one of the small hand-weapons in his hand, and fired several shots. they all missed, but hradzka heard the whining sound of the missiles passing uncomfortably close to him.
it was imperative that he recover the blaster he had hidden in the hollow tree at the head of the valley. by this time, there would be a concerted search under way for him, and he needed a better weapon than the solid-missile projector he had taken from the policeman. he did not know how many shots the thing contained, but if it propelled solid missiles by chemical explosion, there could not have been more than five or six such charges in the cylindrical part of the weapon which he had assumed to be the charge-holder. on the other hand, his blaster, a weapon of much greater power, contained enough energy for five hundred blasts, and with it were eight extra energy-capsules, giving him a total of four thousand five hundred blasts.
handling the two-wheeled vehicle was no particular problem; although he had never ridden on anything of the sort before, it was child's play compared to controlling a hundredth century strato-rocket, and hradzka was a skilled rocket-pilot.
several times he passed vehicles on the road—the passenger vehicles with enclosed cabins, and cargo-vehicles piled high with farm produce. once he encountered a large number of children, gathered in front of a big red building with a flagstaff in front, from which a queer flag, with horizontal red and white stripes and a white-spotted blue device in the corner, flew. they scattered off the road in terror at his approach; fortunately, he hit none of them, for at the speed at which he was traveling, such a collision would have wrecked his light vehicle.
as he approached the farm where he had spent the past few days, he saw two passenger-vehicles standing by the road. one was a black one, similar to the one in which the physician had come to the farm, and the other was white with black trimmings and bore the same device he had seen on the cap of the policeman. a policeman was sitting in the driver's seat of this vehicle, and another policeman was standing beside it, breathing smoke with one of the white paper cylinders these people used. in the farm-yard, two men were going about with a square black box; to this box, a tube was connected by a wire, and they were passing the tube about over the ground.
the policeman who was standing beside the vehicle saw him approach, and blew his whistle, then drew the weapon from his belt. hradzka, who had been expecting some attempt to halt him, had let go the right-hand steering handle and drawn his own weapon; as the policeman drew, he fired at him. without observing the effect of the shot, he sped on; before he had rounded the bend above the farm, several shots were fired after him.
a mile beyond, he came to the place where he had hidden the blaster. he stopped the vehicle and jumped off, plunging into the brush and racing toward the hollow tree. just as he reached it, he heard a vehicle approach and stop, and the door of the police vehicle slam. hradzka's fingers found the belt of his blaster; he dragged it out and buckled it on, tossing away the missile weapon he had been carrying.
then, crouching behind the tree, he waited. a few moments later, he caught a movement in the brush toward the road. he brought up the blaster, aimed and squeezed the trigger. there was a faint bluish glow at the muzzle, and a blast of energy tore through the brush, smashing the molecular structure of everything that stood in the way. there was an involuntary shout of alarm from the direction of the road; at least one of the policemen had escaped the blast. hradzka holstered his weapon and crept away for some distance, keeping under cover, then turned and waited for some sign of the presence of his enemies. for some time nothing happened; he decided to turn hunter against the men who were hunting him. he started back in the direction of the road, making a wide circle, flitting silently from rock to bush and from bush to tree, stopping often to look and listen.
this finally brought him upon one of the policemen, and almost terminated his flight at the same time. he must have grown over-confident and careless; suddenly a weapon roared, and a missile smashed through the brush inches from his face. the shot had come from his left and a little to the rear. whirling, he blasted four times, in rapid succession, then turned and fled for a few yards, dropping and crawling behind a rock. when he looked back, he could see wisps of smoke rising from the shattered trees and bushes which had absorbed the energy-output of his weapon, and he caught a faint odor of burned flesh. one of his pursuers, at least, would pursue him no longer.
he slipped away, down into the tangle of ravines and hollows in which he had wandered the day before his arrival at the farm. for the time being, he felt safe, and finally confident that he was not being pursued, he stopped to rest. the place where he stopped seemed familiar, and he looked about. in a moment, he recognized the little stream, the pool where he had bathed his feet, the clump of seedling pines under which he had slept. he even found the silver-foil wrapping from the food concentrate capsule.
but there had been a change, since the night when he had slept here. then the young pines had been green and alive; now they were blighted, and their needles had turned brown. hradzka stood for a long time, looking at them. it was the same blight that had touched the plants around the farmhouse. and here, among the pine needles on the ground, lay a dead bird.
it took some time for him to admit, to himself, the implications of vegetation, the chickens, the cow, the farmer and his wife, had all sickened and died. he had been in this place, and now, when he had returned, he found that death had followed him here, too.
during the early centuries of the atomic era, he knew, there had been great wars, the stories of which had survived even to the hundredth century. among the weapons that had been used, there had been artificial plagues and epidemics, caused by new types of bacteria developed in laboratories, against which the victims had possessed no protection. those germs and viruses had persisted for centuries, and gradually had lost their power to harm mankind. suppose, now, that he had brought some of them back with him, to a century before they had been developed. suppose, that was, that he were a human plague-carrier. he thought of the vermin that had infested the clothing he had taken from the man he had killed on the other side of the mountain; they had not troubled him after the first day.
there was a throbbing mechanical sound somewhere in the air; he looked about, and finally identified its source. a small aircraft had come over the valley from the other side of the mountain and was circling lazily overhead. he froze, shrinking back under a pine-tree; as long as he remained motionless, he would not be seen, and soon the thing would go away. he was beginning to understand why the search for him was being pressed so relentlessly; as long as he remained alive, he was a menace to everybody in this first century world.
he got out his supply of food concentrates, saw that he had only three capsules left, and put them away again. for a long time, he sat under the dying tree, chewing on a twig and thinking. there must be some way in which he could overcome, or even utilize, his inherent deadliness to these people. he might find some isolated community, conceal himself near it, invade it at night and infect it, and then, when everybody was dead, move in and take it for himself. but was there any such isolated community? the farmhouse where he had worked had been fairly remote, yet its inhabitants had been in communication with the outside world, and the physician had come immediately in response to their call for help.
the little aircraft had been circling overhead, directly above the place where he lay hidden. for a while, hradzka was afraid it had spotted him, and was debating the advisability of using his blaster on it. then it banked, turned and went away. he watched it circle over the valley on the other side of the mountain, and got to his feet.
