The Dosadi Experiment

"Glad to get off there," Bahrank said.

Their narrow ledge had turned at right angles away from the cliff onto a broad ramp which descended into grey-green jungle.  The growth enclosed them in abrupt green shadows.  McKie, looking out to the side, identified hair fronds and broad leaf ficus, giant spikes of barbed red which he had never before seen.  Their track, like the jungle floor, was grey mud.  McKie looked from side to side; the growth appeared an almost equal mixture of Terran and Tandaloor, interspersed with many strange plants.

Sunlight made him blink as they raced out of the overhanging plants onto a plain of tall grass which had been trampled, blasted, and burned by recent violence.  He saw a pile of wrecked vehicles off to the left, twisted shards of metal with, here and there, a section of track or a wheel aimed at the sky.  Some of the wrecks looked similar to the machine in which he now rode.

Bahrank skirted a blast hole at an angle which gave McKie a view into the hole's depths.  Torn bodies lay there.  Bahrank made no comment, seemed hardly to notice.

Abruptly, McKie saw signs of movement in the jungle, the flitting presence of both Humans and Gowachin.  Some carried what appeared to be small weapons - the glint of a metal tube, bandoliers of bulbous white objects around their necks.  McKie had not tried to memorize all of Dosadi's weaponry; it was, after all, primitive, but he reminded himself now that primitive weapons had created these scenes of destruction.

Their track plunged again into overhanging growth, leaving the battlefield behind.  Deep green shadows enclosed the lurching, rumbling machine.  McKie, shaken from side to side against the restraints, carried an odor memory with him:  deep, bloody musks and the begi

McKie stared across Bahrank through the slits.  The city was nearer now.  Their rocking descent swept his gaze up and down Chu's towers, which lifted like silvery organ pipes out of the Council Hills.  The far cliff was a series of misted steps fading into purple grey.  Chu's Warrens lay smokey and hazed all around the fluted towers.  And he could make out part of the city's enclosing outer wall.  Squat forts dotted the wall's top, offset for enfilading fire.  The city within the wall seemed so tall.  McKie had not expected it to appear so tall - but that spoke of the population pressures in a way that could not be misunderstood.

Their ledge ended at another battlefield plain strewn with bodies of metal and flesh, the death stink an inescapable vapor.  Bahrank spun his vehicle left, right, dodged piles of torn equipment, avoided craters where mounds of flesh lay beneath insect blankets.  Ferns and other low growth were begi

"There're informers everywhere, of course, and after this . . ."  His head nodded left and right.  ". . . you'll have to move with more caution than you might've anticipated."

A brittle explosion punctuated his words.  Something struck the vehicle's armor on McKie's side.  Again they were a target.  And again.  The clanging of metal against metal came thickly, striking all around them, even on the glass over the view slits.

McKie suppressed his shock.  That thin glass did not shatter.  He knew about thick shields of tempered glass, but this put a new dimension on what he'd been told about the Dosadi.  Quite resourceful, indeed!

Bahrank drove with apparent unconcern.

More explosive attacks came from directly in front of them, flashes of orange in the jungle beyond the plain.

"They're testing," Bahrank said.  He pointed to one of the slits.  "See?  They don't even leave a mark on that new glass."

McKie spoke from the depths of his bitterness.

"Sometimes you wonder what all this proves except that our world runs on distrust."

"Who trusts?"

Bahrank's words had the sound of a catechism.

McKie said:

"I hope our friends know when to stop testing."

"They were told we couldn't take more'n eighty millimeter."

"Didn't they agree to pass us through?"

"Even so, they're expected to try a few shots if just to keep me in good graces with my superiors."

Once more, Bahrank put them through a series of dazzling speed changes and turns for no apparent reason.  McKie lurched against the restraints, felt bruising pain as an elbow hit the side of the cab.  An explosion directly behind rocked them up onto the left track.  As they bounced, Bahrank spun them left, avoided another blast which would've landed directly on them along their previous path.  McKie, his ears ringing from the explosions, felt the machine bounce to a stop, reverse as more explosions erupted ahead.  Bahrank spun them to the right, then left, once more charged full speed ahead right into an unbroken wall of jungle.  With explosions all around, they crashed through greenery, turned to the right along another shadowed muddy track.  McKie had lost all sense of direction, but the attack had ceased.

Bahrank slowed them, took a deep breath through his ventricles.

"I knew they'd try that."

He sounded both relieved and amused.

McKie, shaken by the brush with death, couldn't find his voice.

Their shadowy track snaked through the jungle for a space, giving McKie time to recover.  By then, he didn't know what to say.  He couldn't understand Bahrank's amusement, the lack of enduring concern over such violent threat.

Presently, they emerged onto an untouched, sloping plain as smooth and green as a park lawn.  It dipped gently downward into a thin screen of growth through which McKie could see a silver-green tracery of river.  What caught and held McKie's attention, however, was a windowless, pock-walled grey fortress which lifted from the plain in the middle distance.  It towered over the growth screening the river.  Buttressed arms reached toward them to enclose a black metal barrier.

"That's our gate," Bahrank said.

Bahrank turned them left, lined up with the center of the buttressed arms.  "Gate Nine and we're home through the tube," he said.

McKie nodded.  Walls, tubes, and gates:  those were the keys to Chu's defenses.  They had "barrier and fortress minds" on Dosadi.  This tube would run beneath the river.  He tried to place it on the map which Aritch's people had planted in his mind.  He was supposed to know the geography of this place, its geology, religions, social patterns, the intimate layout of each island's walled defenses, but he found it hard to locate himself now on that mental map.  He leaned forward to the slit, peered upward as the machine began to gather speed, saw the great central spire with its horizontal clock.  All the hours of map briefing snicked into place.

"Yes, Gate Nine."

Bahrank, too busy driving, did not reply.

McKie dropped his gaze to the fortress, stifled a gasp.

The rumbling machine was plunging downslope at a frightening pace, aimed directly toward that black metal barrier.  At the last instant, when it seemed they would crash into it, the barrier leaped upward.  They shot through into a dimly illuminated tube.  The gate thundered closed behind them. Their machine made a racketing sound on metal grating beneath the tracks.