Cycle of Nemesis (11 page)

There is life here; but life operating at a level so low, so slow and retarded, it is barely still alive.” He pointed at the solid metal curtain. “Up there is other lif e. Strange. I am trying to determine—” He fell silent.

Brennan, still a little surly after his petty outburst, chuckled with harsh lack of humor. “That fits. If this bum Khamushkei the Undying is sending these fabled beasts after us from here, they’d have to be kept in deep-freeze, suspended animation, so that he can send them off against his enemies.” He ki
cked the metal floor. “And I’m h
is enemy
!
”

“Not so loud!” Pboebe whispered in agony.

The echoes hissed and chirruped about that gigantic hall.

At the wall I stopped to study the carvings. The frieze seemed composed of a substance I could not readily identify; not metal, not stone, not plaster. I touched it More like rubber. Hard but yielding rubber. I walked a little further.

Between a snarling g
riffin
and a beast composed of parts I could not even put a name to, the frieze showed a gap. A rough outline indicated a monster had once been carved here; now the wall showed metal slick and blue-black beyond with the frieze ends jaggedly ripped away in a feathery-edged shape. I began to get ideas; nasty ideas.

An electrical disturbance began around my hair. I felt hot and sticky and the palms of my hands were suddenly wet.

I walked back to the others.

Phoebe said, “My head itches.”

Brennan, about to make an allegedly funny remark to show he wasn’t such a bad guy after all, paused, then put a hand to his own hair.

“Yes,” he said. He put an arm around Phoebe’s waist

Only then I realized I still held the Farley Express.

Just at that moment seemed a poor time to put it away.

The electrical disturbance built up. Charlie hiccoughed, and said, “If I were human now I’d be building up the mother and father of a hangover for tomorrow.”

That ought to have been funny; we’d been laughing at sillier things since this adventure began; but here in this remote place, cold and aloof and breathing nameless horrors, the laughter died in our throats.

“Hold onto your pledge, Charlie,” said Pomfret.

Now blue sparks and waving lines of force began to spirochete from the walls. Small silvery-blue lightnings began to snap down from the ceiling. A trembling began in the floor.

Charlie said, “I’m damping myself down, boss—I’ll try to stay with you—but—”

He sounded just like a run-down spring gramophone.

“He’s a fine lot of help just when he’s needed” Pomfret
!
aid disgustedly.

Lottie giggled again and Brennan cursed at her.

Phoebe huddled into Brennan.

What could we
do?

“Can anyone see a door?" I said harshly. I felt the electrical tingles spidering over my body and I didn’t like the sensation. “If we can get out of here, maybe—”

I didn’t finish the sentence.

With the others I cowered back, staring in open-mouthed disbelief.

A utukku detached itself from the frieze on the wall, stalked across the shining metal floor, its claws scratching and clicking on the metal.

Pomfret lifted his gun.

“No
!
Wait, George!”

I pointed at the feathered and clawed monstrosity.

“It’s still half asleep. That frieze is a kind of time vault itself. Khamushkei the Undying just wakes up the ones he wants—”

“We know!” said
Brennan. He dragged in a great g
ulp of air. "We watch it. See what it does. It’s eyes are dosed—see! But if it opens them—if it sees us—shoot!”

“We won’t need telling twice, Hall,” said Pomfret, who had not lowered his gun a millimeter.

The utukku staggered as it drew away from the frieze. A wide turkey-beak opened, crimson and blue, hooked.

A shimmering violet ball formed instantaneously in the lir to enclose the utukku in lambent purple light. Its eyes opened. In the inst
ant it saw us and screeched in a
utomatic reflex anger the violet ball disappeared—and with it went the monster.

We sagged back, limp, the electricity dra
ining from the air and ceasing to prick
le on our skins.

“That was super-science,” Brennan said softly. “There was no mumbo-jumbo magic about that!”

We felt, stupidly enough in the circumstances, free.

Charlie said: “Hie!”

“He’s on a real bender!” Pomfret sa
id, with, I saw with s
ome amusement, considerable envy. “Hey! Charlie! Snap out of it! Were still in
this
confounded hell-hole!”

Charlie struggled up with a clash of metal legs.

“Sure, boss. Life-fo
rce dropped down now—but—” His u
gly metal face turned again to those somber steps and the ebony curtain hanging
in harsh metallic folds above th
em. “There’s something—something I can’t understand—”

We all turned as one to stare up the stairs.

Black they were, ebony with a patina of age-old evi
l.
We knew, we all knew, now, that Khamushkei the Undying must be imprisoned behind that curtain.

The very simplicity of the surroundings, when we realized where we were, amazed us.

Lottie’s giggle died on the sour-sweet air.

“If this is the place we’re trying to reach—” Pomfret began. Then he stopped talking, to look at us with a baffled, tense expression.

Phoebe finished it for him. “Just how do we go about it?”

We presented a scarecrow appearance, standing there on the steel floor of that vast chamber, midgets grimed and tattered in a futuristic cathedral.

Lottie took out her compact from a tear in her dress; how any of us had anything left remained a mystery; our gun holsters were about the only items not so damaged as to be virtually useless. Decency, for what we cared about that in this time and place, was still sketchily preserved.

Down at the far end of the chamber a yellow light glowed into being. Like a still candle flame, taller than a Trafalgar Square Christmas tree, the lambent yellow flame seemed to draw light into itself rather than shed its own yellow radiance upon those dark steel walls.

Our eyes still smarted from the fire, yet this calm yellow flame burned without a flicker and seemed, in some unreal way, to soothe our eyes and reassure us.

A few yards to the side and rear a second rose-colored flame burned as steadily and as still as the yellow.

“They—they weren’t there just now,” Phoebe said in a quivery voice.

“They’re not moving—are they flames?” Brennan’s face showed the strain under which he labored: grim, dirty, unshaven, with purple bruises beneath his eyes.

“I don’t know what they are.” Truculently, Pomfret aligned his Farley Express. "But a little tickler will serve to open them up for
us—”

“Hold it, George!” I once more stopped Pomfret from firing. “They don’t alarm you, do they? Not like the beasts? Not like the things with the iron boots?”

“No-o. Well?”

“Maybe we’ve got friends—”

Lottie cried out in disbelief, a passionate affirmation of a creed: “We’ve got no friends, no friends at all!”

The strangeness of our position and the hollowness of feeling I sensed all about us, the very proportions of this place and the lowering threat of the iron curtain all contrived to unsettle us—and I wondered then if this might not be part of the Time Beast’s means of destroying us. I moved toward the wall and the frieze, drawn by a desire to feel once again the texture of the frieze and to try to connect the Time Beast’s beasts and our own time’s artificial-body industry. All the time two unwavering flames, one yellow, one rose, stood tall and glowing at the end of the chamber.

A feeling, not so much of friendship but of a lack of animosity, reached me from the flames. I received an understanding of detached aloofness, of disinterest beyond and above mortal humanity.

Perhaps the life-force Charlie had sensed flickering low came not so much from the quasi-alive beings of the frieze but from these two flames, so tall and unwavering and pure. I touched the frieze, feeling the feathers of a wing sweeping powerfully down from bull-like shoulders.

The flames wavered. Like wind-tossed rush-lights they quivered with a ripple of color and radiance.

A wind soughed through the long steel room.

Lottie screamed and dropped her compact.

Phoebe pushed her as she sought to run, and, deftly, Pomfret caught her around the waist. “Easy, old girl,” he said. “Easy does it.”

They were about twelve feet from me. I turned to watch the flames, to see what they would do next. My hand, touching the wall, felt the feathers stir and move. A claw scraped the steel floor at my back.

Phoebe shouted in panic-stricken falsetto. “Bert
!
Bert!”

Around the group of four humans and Charlie, like a mistily insubstantial bubble, a violet sphere began to form.

I put my head down and ran.

Real terror clawed at me. I had never felt more frightened in my life. If that violet shell whisked my friends away—they could be flung into any period of time—I would be left here, here in this steel room with the beasts of Khamushkei the Undying—alone.

There would be no future for me—no past—only a present of eternal torture.

In that single lunging outpouring of effort I plunged toward my friends.

I could hear the awakening beast from the frieze—by the super-science of Khamushkei the Undying prised from an aeons-long sleep to rend and tear me. The soft obscene sounds drove me on in terror. In sheerly frenzied panic I leaped for the thickening violet shell; I thrust with my feet and jumped—headlong I smashed into a violet haze where up and down, backward and forward jumbled and diminished and vanished in time....

The
lights of
home beckoned.

With a gentle thrust my finned feet propelled me through the greenly translucent water whose warmth and welcome reached out to me. Friendly fish finned amiably by. The light and warmth spread around me. Over my head, rippling, bubbling, mosaically moving, never still, my own silver sky reassured me that all was well in the aquasphere of my world.

There had been some problem of administration—or had it been that rogue bunch of killer whales again? Something had taken me away from my home out into the deeper depths. But now I was coming home. Freely flying with leisurely fanning motions of my fins I swept down to rest and refreshment, peace and quietude again —but strangely the soft yellow glow of my home lights changed, deepened, darkened, became a more ominous violet . . . the violet hue spread and grew and rose and engulfed
me....

“You all right, Bert?”

A familiar voice—and yet a voice that could never sound in my undersea home.

If I opened my eyes I should see the entrance way with the statues and the waving undersea fronds, the guard-fishes and the row of friendly lights from the terraces. In that disturbing violet light I opened my eyes and saw Hall Brennan bending over me, his face concerned.

Over his shoulder George Pomfret and Phoebe and Lottie stared down at me, and Charlie poised his ugly ungainly bulk above them, his eye crystals glittering purple.

“What the hell?” I gasped.

“He’s all right,” said Pomfret with decision. “He can still swear.”

“I can still cuss you out, George,” I said with a wonderful gush of irritation. “Lemme up, will you?”

Brennan moved back and I staggered up. My forehead hurt and stung. I lifted my hand to touch it and Brennan quickly said, “Don’t, Bert. It’s all bloody. We’ve some of Phoebe’s slip wrapped around your head.”

We stood on the steel floor with the curving wall of the violet bubble surrounding us; even as I stood up, the bubble moved and canted and we braced ourselves.

The violet shell shifted in that subtly disturbing molecular rearrangement we had experienced before. Then it vanished. We stood on a flagged pavement, the paving stones quite unremarkable, with a brick wall at our backs and a perfectly ordinary evening street scene before us.

Helis and cars passed and repassed. Men and women pushed by, some turning to stare at us in shocked disbelief. The evening smelled warm and fragrant. Huge stars burned in a deepening blue sky. Most of the people wore modern-day Middle-East dress—there was even an occasional burnoose.

“What’s Khamushkei the Undying done now?”

“My clothes
!
”

“Those people looking at us—we must look a sight
!
”

The comments my friends made were predictable.

I pointed at a heli just rising from a rooftop across the road.

“That’s a B.M.C. Californian. Model came into use last year. So.”

“Last year,” Brennan said. He laughed. “That dates us, doesn’t it.”

“You mean . . . ?” Phoebe’s face suddenly lost all its color so that the mud where she had failed to clean showed like patches of corrosion. “You mean we’re
back?"

“Back home—in our own time?” echoed Lottie.

“Damn near to it,” said Pomfret, cheerfully.

"And,” I suggested, “this is Baghdad.”

“Check,” nodded Brennan. He’d been staring across at a hotel. “I have that feeling, too. Should know the bigger sections well enough, but this must be a back-street suburb.” He indicated the hotel. “That’s for us.”

All manner of strange thoughts crowded my mind as we went across the road to the hotel. Middle-Eastern hospitality went into action the moment we stepped through the swinging doors, despite our bedraggled and tramp-like appearance. Red fezzes bobbed, their robot owners ushering us up to five separate but connected rooms. A quick telephone call by Hall Brennan to a branch of his bank in Baghdad confirmed not only that his credit was still good in the city, but also, and much more importantly, that we were back exactly in our own time. Only yesterday we had taken off from Standstead. Our intervening adventures had occupied no time at all in this time-stream but had occurred in a loop of time.

That, also, made me suspect the present.

Somewhere Arabic pipes plaintively made atonal music. The smell of the city rose about us, fragrant with spices, aromatic, very different from the abominations such cities made of themselves not so very long ago. I remembered with pleasure the restored replica of the gates of Nineveh, built to full scale as the entrance to the national museum. The bulls there, too, now meant a lot more to me than they had.

Despite the ease of our present position, the slavish attentions of the robots, the steaming and scented baths, the food and wines, the air-conditioning, all the pleasures and luxuries to which we, as civilized modem men and women, were accustomed, despite all this mollycoddling I still felt the itch of disbelief and the nagging unease of uncertainty.

Surely, Khamushkei the Undying had not given up?

There, probably, lay the answer. He credited us with normal human desires.

I said to Brennan as, rested and freshened, with new clean clothes from the autovend, my forehead mended, we sat on the balcony overlooking a distant prospect of the city with its minarets and domes, its mosques and office blocks with the greater dome of the sky above: “This is very peaceful. We’ve not even exchanged a cross word since we arrived. But—”

Phoebe chuckled. “Are you stirring again, Bert?”

“He can’t leave well enough alone,” Pomfret said, looking up from a private conversation with Lottie. “If such things weren’t anachronisms I’d say he suffered from an ulcer.”

“Thank you, too, George,” I said, keeping up the air of light banter. This might be better considered that way. “Why do you think Khamushkei the Undying flung us back to our own time?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Brennan. He looked at Phoebe and smiled. “When we shifted in time only—as we did in the airplane—we experienced a whirling sensation, so brief as to be missed if we were asleep.

Then we’d arrived. But when the violet globes formed about us, we moved not only in time but also in space.”

“That’s true, by jove
!
” said Pomfret, with a blink of surprise.

“That being so, it’s no surprise we’re here in Baghdad.”

I smiled and sighed. “I didn’t mean that. Accepting that the Time Beast can fling us about in time, I still believe he didn’t mean to take us back to his vault. He thought he’d got us beat—he had, really. When he brought some of his creatures back, the iron boots, we came along for the ride.” I looked around at my comrades on the balcony, to Charlie standing quietly and humming below the threshold of audibility in the background. They listened to me talk in the softness of the evening.

“We spent some time in that chamber—I don’t pretend to understand that—and then, it seems to me, Khamushkei the Undying panicked. He realized he’d brought aliens into his own domain and he reacted instinctively. He flung us out.”

“But why here?”

“We must have been some time in the violet sphere?” I checked across with Brennan. “I was knocked out getting back into the thing. Only after I came around were we dumped here, in our own time. I’d say Khamushkei the Undying did a hurried spot of thinking in that interlude.”

“And?”

“And he dumped us here for a purpose. Think a minute. We’re after him and he knows it. He’s tried to knock us out and so far he’s failed. But we’ve had a rough time of it. He could be saying to us, ‘Look. I’ve dropped you back into your own time. Now lay off.’ ”

"You mean,” said Lottie with indignant fury, “he’s trying to bribe us?”

“Yes.”

“We-ell,” said Brennan slowly.

“It makes sense,” said Phoebe practically. “It sure as hell makes sense.”

“He could have dumped us back into Borsuppak. But he was ferrying his monsters out. He couldn’t be sure what we’d do. This way, he feels we’ll pack it up and leave him alone.”

Well aware as I was of the missing link in this argument, the truth, I felt sure, lay near enough to this theory as to make it a practical proposition to work on that assumption. Big flashy words, really, to describe what was essentially simple: we now had a chance to duck out.

As though on cue, we all looked at Hall Brennan.

This was his baby. He was the man who had burst into our lives with the big words and the determination and the get-up-and-go after Khamushkei the Undying.

If it weren’t for Hall Brennan none of us would be here.

“We-ell,” he said again. He looked down at the balcony carpeting. I felt a shriveling inside me, knowing what he was thinking, guessing what he would say.

“We-ell, we’ve had it rough. We’re lucky to be here, really, at all.”

“Yes?” Pomfret said. He glanced at me. I gave him no sign or guidance. This was for each one of us alone.

I was wrong there; I saw that in the next thing that Hall Brennan said. “Phoebe,” he said, taking her hand. Then, “I guess, Bert, I’ll take a rain check on Khamushkei the Undy—”

“What the hell!” exploded Pomfret. He looked incensed. “You chickening out Hall?”

Brennan did not rise to it. He looked very different from the tough outdoor he-man who had burst into our lives demanding the globe, telling us of his adventures, browbeating us into believing in the Time Beast locked —locked so precariously—in his Time Vault. Now he looked smoother, more worn, slicker. The tiredness in him, shared by us all, had fined off that essential roughness. He looked more civilized now.

"I’m not scared of Khamushkei the Undying, George. You should know that—”

“Well, hell, Hali
!
Of course I know that—”

“—but I am tired. And I’m not happy about—anyway, the Time Beast won’t get out of that vault. At least, not for a long time.” He didn’t look at us but his hands tightened on Phoebe’s. “Anyway, I’m not sure my calculations were right over the seven thousand years. That city we found couldn’t have been as old as we figured. Sumer came before Akkad. Maybe we—”

“Maybe nothing, Hali!
” Phoebe flashed at him. She withdrew her hand. “If you’re thinking of me, well, that’s not a compliment. If we don’t see about this beastly thing in its tomb someone will suffer.” She glared at Brennan, almost crying with her passionate conviction. “Now look here, Phoebe,” Brennan said uncomfortably. “Someone will suffer. And I’ll tell you who that will be
!
It’ll be our kids, that’s who! Our kids who’ll just be growing up when—wham! Khamushkei will come rampaging out of his Time Vault and smash everything up. Blooey! All the whole boiling! Gone! And our kids as well.” She waved a hand out into the star-spattered night. “So it’s no good your sitting there and saying you’re not going to do anything about it. Think of our kids!”

“Well, Phoebe—” Brennan was completely taken aback.

Then Lottie giggled.

Brennan swung on her to storm abuse, when Pomfret, his arm around Lottie, said in his dignified Board Room voice, “Phoebe’s quite right, Hall. This meeting, as far as I can see, accepts the validity of her case. The sense of the meeting is: we go on.”

"But not with the girls?” I said, tentatively. I had long lost any nonsensical ideas about girls being fragile Dresden china figurines in undersea life, but I hated to see them dragged unnecessarily into danger. Mainly, I guess I was thinking about that horrific fragment from time glimpsed by Phoebe and myself: Lottie fleeing screaming down the picture gallery at Gannets pursued by an iron-booted monster.

That, if possible, should be avoided.

“Not,” said Brennan in his hard voice. “Not with the girls.”

Phoebe opened her mouth to object, then saw me staring at her with my lopsided smile, shut her mouth, pouted, then, a little petulantly, as though losing the serve at tennis, said, “Well, I think Lottie shouldn’t go.”

What?” said Lottie. Her figure had been set off admirably in a low-cut blue evening gown, the richness of the blue bringing out all the soft beauty of her red-gold hair. “Why me? What did I do?” She said it so plaintively that we all had to chuckle.

But neither Phoebe nor I could explain.

The other two men, once Phoebe had announced her intention of carrying on, couldn’t see why Lottie should be excluded. I thought Brennan should know, and decided to tell Phoebe, as soon as possible, to inform him.

That was all I could do. If Lottie didn’t do anything at all, we could not protect her from what had already happened—or could we?
Had
it already happened?

The City of Harun al-Rashid stretched around us, beneath the same stars that twinkled down on him as he sought adventures disguised and in company with his vizier; those same stars now shone down on lis and on an adventure that even the magic of Scheherazade would be sore put to bring out successfully. We five human beings and our robot, Charlie, could badly do with some scientific magic for our own use.

Lottie made her point.

“If Phoebe’s going,” Pomfret said with a gravity I felt to be a genuine expression of his feeling for Lottie, “then I suppose we can’t stop Lottie.”

“That’s right,” said Lottie, truculently, her battle won.

Then a thing happened that in any other context would have raised goose-pimples of fear and sent me screaming like a baby for the illusory safety of the bedroom.

For from out of the night, impalpably, an emanation brooded toward us sitting there on the balcony, a force malefic, implacable, insatiable. We all felt it. Pomfret started back and his chair crashed over. Phoebe put a hand to her lips, Lottie a hand to her breast. Brennan cursed thickly, half-rising, one hand outspread before him.

Like a ghost of evil the sensation washed over us as though we wallowed in mire. Haunting, defacing, overpowering, the feeling passed and left us shaken and sick and knowing.

“Khamushkei the Undying
!
” whispered Brennan, staring.