Cycle of Nemesis (13 page)

Then Hall Brennan said laconically: “Seems old K the U has done it for us this time."

Below the eminence on which we stood, an outpost of the cultivated land against the encroaching sand, a water course wended its way. Strange shapes moved in the water and on the banks, where palm trees leaned dustily.

“How so?” demanded Pomfret, peering about.

“I mean,” said Brennan cheerfully, “we can walk on the line without trouble. Water, food, what else do you want?”

“Transport,” suggested Pomfret, feelingly.

We all laughed.

Comradeship, excitement, adventure, they had all worked on us insidiously over the last few days. I detected even a faint hope that when we reached Khamushkei the Undying this time—as I was absolutely confident we would—this time we’d know what to do.

We began again to trek toward that spot where we believed lay the Time Vault of Khamushkei the Undying. We were very much like moths, stubbornly battering their heads against the screens to get at the light, whose very beckoning radiance would destroy them. In a line we wended our way down toward the watercourse —whose regular banks and masonry and mud confinements indicated its artificial canal origin, walking proudly, little people though we were—walking steadily and undeviatingly toward our self-chosen future.

“The old blighters slow in reacting this time,” observed George Pomfret jovially.

We all agreed. “Unless,” said Lottie with her usual capacity to spread alarm and despondency by a simple word or two, “he’s sending off some more horrible beasts.”

“And thank you, Mrs. Lottie Pomfret to be
!
” said Phoebe feelingly.

Again I was forced to remark to myself the rock-like conviction of personal immortality we shared in common with the personal beliefs of everyone else. So the Time Beast was sending outrageous monsters of nightmare to kill us; but we still talked about tomorrow as though tomorrow would come as surely as yesterday had been.

Hesitatingly, the policemen began to follow us down to the canal. We walked cautiously, alert, ready to take whatever action might seem appropriate in whatever circumstances Khamushkei the Undying might next put us.

But we kept on a straight course for his lair.

At the canal bank we stopped. Logs floated on the still water and other logs encumbered the far bank.

“ “Ware crocs,” pointed out Pomfret.

“So I see.” Brennan judged the width of the canal. “A good thirty yards. I’d say the sand is blowing over this civilization. They’re losing the battle for cultivable land. Another collapsing order of world history.”

“This was once a main arterial canal, I’d say,” Phoebe picked a handful of sand and tossed it into the water.

Miniscule intermingling ripples spread.

"We can’t jump it.” Brennan shook his head. “It doesn’t bear thinking of-that Khamushkei the Undying is going to stop us by a canal and a large number of crocodiles!”

“We can swim it by numbers and the others on the banks can shoot the crocs as they attack,” Pomfret suggested.

I started an immediate protest. Then I halted. No trees grew on this sandy side of the canal. It stretched in a curving line both ways as far as we could see without a single bridge over it. The crocodiles existed. They were no figments of the imagination—equally, I judged, they were not agents of Khamushkei the Undying. We had to cross the canal in order to get on with our self-imposed mission. Well. What other way was there?

“You figure it out, then," said Lottie, truculent when her lover was challenged.

In the end we agreed. We explained what we were going to do to the police sergeant and he, terrified lest he be left alone in the desert, agreed to cooperate. Then we stripped down for swimming. Charlie collected up all the discarded gear—the police made their own arrangements—and eyed the water balefully with his quartz lenses aglitter in the sun.

"Charlie!” I exclaimed. “Well, old son, you’ll just have to walk across the bottom. We’ll oil you out on the other side.”

Charlie clanked an arm. “I’m worried.” He indicated the clothes. “If the water is deeper than I can reach up, then your clothes will get wet.”

Of course, in the mood that had taken possession of us, we laughed.

We arranged the system, and Brennan, as leader, waded out first. The logs stirred.

I stood right down by the water’s edge. I felt a strange mixture of comfort and alarm at dealing once more with water, if only the tiny amounts in this wet trench.

As for the crocs, I could deal with one or two of them easily enough waterborne, but en masse I wouldn’t stand a chance. Everything would depend on the quick shooting of the guards on the banks.

Brennan smiled up. “Okay!” he shouted. “Into the deep end on Christmas Day!” He dived in with hardly a splash.

With strong overarm motions and a strong trudging of his feet, he knifed through the water. To me, the very actions of swimming like that, half in and half out of water, smacked of the quaint and unscientific. Brennan reached halfway, then the nearest crocodile nosed in with a sudden flick of tail, and Pomfret steamed the water around him into a broiling bath. The croc disappeared.

But the trouble started then; the damage had been done.

The Farley Express boiled off vast quantities of steam. We couldn’t see Brennan as Pomfret and I, forced now to fire at anything, set up a barrier against the reptiles.

Then over the frying-pan hiss and the squeals and the bubbling boiling sounds, Brennan’s strong hail reached us: “Okay! Cease fire! I’m across.”

We waited five minutes for the water to cool down.

Then, in a similar though better managed way, Phoebe went across.

Then Pomfret went across with his gun and Brennan could join in from the far side with the Creighton Eighty Phoebe’d brought. I’d forseen the problem of that; how to get the gun across without taking the chance of not being able to hurl it thirty yards. The tricky business would come when I took my Farley across. The Creightons just didn’t pack the same all-inclusive punch— though they didn’t heat up the water in the same way.

Lottie and I were left on the bank, with the policemen fiercely arguing among themselves. Some wanted to cross as we had, one or two even had joined in with the guarding guns; others, it was quite clear, wished to walk around the canal. I believe that some of them now thought if they went far enough around they’d come across Baghdad, miraculously appearing from the horizon, just as they had left it.

Charlie said, “I’ll wait for you, sir.”

I nodded. “Good man. With you running interference I feel much happier.”

Lottie looked enchanting, ready to plunge in. I smiled reassuringly at her. “Just start swimming and keep on swimming in a straight line, across to George. Don’t let anything distract you, got it?”

She looked doubtful. Then she said, “I’m not a very good swimmer. I’m a strictly non-wet swimsuit gal. Pinups, not piscean, I’ve been told.”

“Can you swim as far as the other bank, for God’s sake?”

“I—I think so.”

“Now she tells me!”

“Well, you needn’t be so unpleasant, Bert.”

“Well, you needn’t be—oh, go on
!
Get in there and swim
!
”

She jumped in and started off, her white limbs splashing a great deal. The crocs, their numbers not appreciably diminished, started their attack at once. Those who attacked now did so under their habitual urge to eat whatever morsel happened along; they didn’t learn from what had happened before. Those who had learned were dead.

Then Lottie’s white limbs started to thrash in a very familiar and ugly way and she ceased to make progress forward. Her frightened shout reached me over the hiss and roiling of superheated steam.

“Help! Bert—I’m drowning!”

Poor swimmers in trouble always assume the worst. I snapped at Charlie: “Keep the crocs off, Charlie,” hurled him my gun and took a running leap into the canal.

Even in that moment of terror with a beautiful girl screaming wildly and drowning, with crocodiles swirling in with hungry eyes and greedy jaws, with the stunning crash of gunfire in my ears, even then I felt the water close around me like a mother’s embrace.

Without my fins I couldn’t hope to match the speeds attainable at home, but I made the short distance to Lottie in no time at all. I came up from beneath her, grabbed her around the waist and shoved her head up out of the water.

She went limp in my arm. I ducked my head down again into the element in which it belonged and looked around. The silver sky here was broken and boiling off, shards and shafts of blistering heat lashing through to destroy the segmented bodies of crocodiles. I drew the knife I had thoughtfully carried since the Baghdad hotel.

Whether Charlie was not a very good shot, or whether the crocs were at last learning, I didn’t know. But they began to slide in deep and fast.

I saw the first come paddling up with lashing tail, his jaws agape, skimming over the bottom of the canal. He jerked up with that savage sideways-twisting motion of crocs that is so disconcerting to those who have never experienced it.

We new aquamen have grown accustomed on our farms and factories in the oceans to look after ourselves against far more fearsome monsters than mere crocodiles; but I confess that, burdened as I was with a helpless girl, I did not relish this as a fair fight.

My underwater breathing kept nice and steady as, with my left hand still supporting Lottie, I turned about to meet the croc's rush. He came in confidently. At the last minute I lunged sideways, dragging Lottie with me, and drawing the knife deeply down the croc’s belly, released a gouting flood of blood into the water. Without a pause I kicked hard and pushed us both away from the cloying mess. We had to clear that area fast. Otherwise, blinded and unable to see, we’d be easy prey for the next crocodile.

Through the water the steady detonations of shell-bursts reached me as a pattering drumming. I hoped the policemen had reinforced the guard. The second croc, more wary than the first, incensed by the blood, tried to pounce from the other side.

I gave Lottie a shove, stuck my head out of the water close to her ear, and yelled, “Float on your back
!
I’ll not be long!”

Then I kicked downward hard and at the last moment avoided the gaping jaws with their rows of crunching teeth and hooked my left arm around the beast’s foreleg and neck. Half astride him upside down I could plunge the knife in deeply in a frenzied repetition. Then I vaulted free and kicked the loggy body down. The croc rolled and eddied in a mass of blood. I avoided breathing the muck in and shot for the sky again.

Lottie was barely awash, her body looping down and her feet and hands paddling doglike, pathetically.

When I grabbed her up and started to swim in earnest she relaxed and seemed to understand that I knew what I was doing.

Personally, I felt far from satisfied in my own element. Aquamen are naturally proud of their prowess underwater and as the new men, harbingers of good living to the worlds of the system, we fancy ourselves as a cut above ordinary men. Aquamen are the 61ite of the human beings of the system. Or so we believe. Yet I could imagine the derisive grins that would greet me if 1 ever told the story of this little shambles.

When we reached the far bank Pomfret, agonized for Lottie, helped us out. He grabbed her and held her in his arms, patting her back, smoothing her soaked golden red hair, mumbling about the terrible time he’d had waiting for her. I laughed at him. I felt it to be a mean action, but my annoyance with myself had to be assauged somehow.

Brennan was still gaping at me with a foolish stare.

Pomfret looked up to say, “Thanks, Bert. Thanks a lot— Oh, Halil You didn’t know Bert was an aquaman? Oh, well, they’re almost human.”

“Churl!” I growled at him.

Our reactions, although childish, were quite normal. When Charlie came stumping up out of the water with our sopping wet clothes and the tail of a croc which he had used as a flail to lay about him as he crossed, we laughed at that, too. The nearness of Khamushkei the Undying unnerved us all. We sought refuge from our fears in flippancy and idiotic repartee.

Neither Pomfret nor Brennan could break down in front of their women, and the two girls had obviously a personal feud in chin-up-womanship going on. As for me, well, simply put, an aquaman, being a cut above drylanders, just couldn’t be seen not to be superior.

Well, I mean to say—aquamen
are
superior, aren’t they?

On the far bank the policemen still had not decided what to do. I could sympathize well enough.

“Come on, troops.” Brennan, dressed once more in his khaki shirt and trousers, motioned us forward. We all

began to march away from the canal. The authority of the policemen had vanished the moment we had time-jumped and now they viewed the departure of their prisoners without the faintest interest. They had the problems of the crocodiles to face. I promised myself not to forget them.

In a little band we marched on southwest, bedraggled and weary, but determined. Somewhere ahead of us over the horizon lay the Time Vault of Khamushkei the Undying.

One time or another, we’d get there.