A Call to Arms by Robert Sheckley Read Free Book Online

of a better world, all of it bright and clean and shiny.
    But Down Below was a different sort of a vision-a glimpse of what a place comes to look like when no one pays any attention to it, and when it’s occupied by a floating population that doesn’t care how they live.
    She was in a crowded, industrial-looking area, something like a warehouse district in some ancient Earth city. A line of cars rattled by on overhead rails, throwing down showers of sparks. Machinery, disused and abandoned, lay piled against the walls or out in the rudimentary streets that wove, seemingly in haphazard, patternless lines, through the area. The air was warm, moist, hazy, with a tang of machine oil and chemicals. Steam oozed from fittings on pipes long past their time of inspection.
    There were people passing through this area, or just hanging out; people in ragged, shapeless clothing, warming their hands over heat barrels, killing time while time slowly killed them. Dureena noticed representatives of half the races of the galaxy, not all of them humanoid. Most of them were air-breathers, although a few wore respirating equipment to let them function here in this common area before returning to the more congenial atmospheric mixes of their own special sectors. But most of them seemed able to function in B5’s oxygen atmosphere.
    Dureena glided through the populace, trying not to call attention to herself--though she was aware that her costume stood out too much in this place, and wished she’d brought along something more appropriate.
    Despite the amazing variety of beings found there--each wearing his or her own native garb--many of the denizens of Down Below seemed to possess some intuitive sense that told them when someone new had arrived. Since she was the only survivor of Zander Prime, she couldn’t help but stand out in the crowd. To Dureena, it seemed as though all eyes had turned her way.
    Nonetheless, she was trying to act as if she had always lived here, a wised-up citizen of this place. And so she moved through the multicolored, fantastically arrayed crowd of the lost people of Down Below, looking for she knew not what, yet somehow aware that this was the end of the line, for the moment.
    Down Below! It was said that your nerves and your bad luck brought you here, far from whatever world you originated in. And here you ran out of your last vestiges of luck, or nerve, or both, and settled into the scruffy, comfortable life of scuffling along, taking it one day at a time, getting by, and not even noticing that the sands of your life were running out of the huge hourglass that marked each sentient creature’s days and hours.
    There were rules of behavior, even in a place like this. Especially in a place like this. Dureena picked them up intuitively. The people of Down Below minded their own business. Many of them just liked to drift along in their own dreams, content to mind their own concerns, ignorant of the greater life that pulsed around them.
    But not everyone could afford to be so out of it. Nor did everyone want to. Many, rich and poor, had a living that had to be won each day. They all had to keep their eyes open for what came up, the unexpected opportunity or unprecedented disaster, and find a way to put it to good use. Any object, carelessly lost or discarded or stolen, might be sold, because there was a market here for just about everything.
    But if you couldn’t find something to sell, there was always the possibility of latching onto some person new to Down Below and unfamiliar with its ways. Using who or what you found helped you get by another day, or maybe even another year, if you hit it lucky.
    Hycher Vlast was thinking such thoughts as he idled beside a heat barrel. He was a short, long-nosed, weasel-faced man with small darting eyes. A scar along his jawline bespoke an encounter with someone even less amiable than himself. Three healing scratches on his face gave evidence of his relationship to the opposite