Cycle of Nemesis (14 page)

Then
followed
an odd, mixed-up interlude when we seemed to be time-jumping never-endingly. The Time Beast reacted with frantic sensitiveness to our dogged determination to march forward on the line that would bring us to his Time Vault. Nothing mattered now but the slogging onward march, over cultivated fields, over deserts, through glacier-sliding mountains, through the shrilling war-trumpets’ sound skirling over gory battlefields. Only my aquaman’s cunning enabled us to survive during a watery period when the Flood covered the land.

During this phase Charlie, sinking to the bottom, regained our company on the next transition.

Then, even after these breathtaking gyrations through time, we unexpectedly recovered from the slashing din of a time transference to see all about us the steel and plastic, the glass and concrete monoliths of a giant and futuristic city.

We stood on an overhead boulevard, clinging to the rails as strange shining vehicles swept past us in a transparent tube. The air smelled of freshly laundered linen. The sky’s blueness came down to us filtered through a geometrically designed globe.

“This is obviously the future!” shouted Phoebe, holding her hair which blew tendrils about her cheeks.

“How exciting
!
”

“Look at those buildings! Poised on nothing!”

The rushing, blowing sense of purpose and smoothly-oiled machinery entranced us as we stared out on the future of this dusty comer of the world.

“I vote we use the future to help us against the Time Beast,” said Brennan, eagerly inspecting a small kiosk with a button-covered panel.

“If this is the future,” Phoebe said, “it means we’ve won. Khamushkei the Undying can’t have destroyed the world
!
”

“That’s right!” said Lottie, delighted.

I pointed to one of the shining cars flashing past.

“Look in there.”

They looked. The beings sitting in the cars had not been born on this Earth, or, if they had, then they were no spawn of Homo sapiens.

“My God!” said Pomfret. “What the hell are they?”

“They’re either visitors from some other planet,” I said with cold comfort, “or they’re the next life-form along who took over from us. Let’s get on, for Pete’s sake!”

Somehow Brennan stopped a car. We climbed in. The sense of being trapped made me hold myself rigid. The car started off—going southwest.

In the moment of starting we saw familiar shapes, iron-booted, swarming up a moving stairway. They plunged over into the transparent tube. Our car hissed past them. Looking back through the rear window I saw the iron-booted monsters, denizens of this place, perhaps, summon a second car and board it. They set off in pursuit.

“Can’t you make this thing go any faster, Hall?” begged Phoebe, clasping her hands.

“I’ll tickle them up with the old Farley,” said Pomfret, grimly. He pushed the gun muzzle through the window, holding it steady against the slipstream, and pressed the trigger.

The frying-pan hiss of the positronic incoherer sizzled out. We saw the beam hit the following car.

But—the car remained within the transparent tube. It bore on after us. Steadily, undamaged, shrugging off all the awful power of the weapon, the car sped silently on.

“It doesn’t work!” yelled Pomfret, shattered.

“These future boys build in good materials,” I said.

“Our only hope is going southwest.. ..”

The following car, unquestionably driven by remote intelligences and not the iron-booted monsters within it, increased speed. Somehow, I knew that unless we made some overtly more hostile move against Khamushkei the Undying, this time keeping on course would not be enough.

Out of the tenseness of the moment, the apparently undramatic sight of two futuristic cars hurtling down a transparent tube through a dream-city of the future, I glimpsed part of the answer.

"Hall!" I shouted. The others’ faces swung toward me like flowers to the sun. They expected I knew not what.

“Hand over the translation of the seven curses on the tablet we found in the globe. Quick!”

Brennan complied without an instant’s hesitation.

The still-damp paper retained its wet-strength characteristics. I started at the top and, reading in a high, shrill, incanting voice, I began to read. I have no doubts at all that the others thought I had at last thrown my switch. What I read, I had no idea; the words meant nothing, mere processions of sounds. I felt the full roundness of vowels and the splintering of consonants. I read loudly, shouting, defiantly hopeful.

Within the space of three lines the car seemed to somersault. I caught an upside-down view of the following car with its iron-boots, now touching the rear of our car, circling around us. I knew the car had not turned upside down, for the transparent tube remained intact; so the seeming somersault was that, seeming only. Yet the vertiginous sensations persisted.

Joined together, the two cars traveled in a phantom universe of their own. Around us, clearly visible, at first cutting through the road and the tube and the passing buildings, the globular shell of violet radiance encompassed; then, gradually, taking over the outside, so that the two cars rested within that purple bubble.

“A time bubble’s got us!” yelled Phoebe.

“And the iron-boots!” seconded Pomfret, fiddling with his gun as though it had bitten him.

In my wrought up state I considered both statements to prove the fatuousness of drynecks. I stopped reading and shoved the paper into the pocket of my gray slacks. If the art of living is not to grow bored then we were living life to the full. When next?

Colors, streaks, swirls of radiance, lances of fire, pinwheels of coruscations exploded all about and, it seemed to me, imploded into the inside of my skull. My head rang.

All forward movement of the two cars had ceased the moment they left the transparent tube.

We clung to each other, using Charlie as the center prop again. His oily body smelt familiarly comforting.

“This is a big one,” said Brennan.

“Khamushkei the Undying must have panicked again!” Pomfret hallooed in my ear. “What d’you stop reading for, Bert? It has the old blighter worried!”

“Wait until we see where and when we land at.”

Although unaware of motion since the tube had been left, we knew because we were encircled by a violet time bubble that we were also moving in space. When the car jolted a little, as though adjusting to a fresh ground surface and the purple sphere disappeared, we waited, limply for this fresh shock.

In that tiny fraction of timelessness before I appreciated where we were I hardened my opinion about the Time Beast’s panic. So easily could I be wrong, so trustfully could I fall into the trap; but I now felt absolutely confident that Khamushkei the Undying was so badly shaken by our puny efforts that he reacted without thought, without sense, as an idiot, smashing out at the slightest sign of opposition.

The violet shell vanished. The two cars, released from the magnetic hold on them, rolled over, tipping both us and the iron boots into two heaps. Struggling out onto crisp green grass I saw a familiar although recently encountered sight.

We were on the lawns outside Gannets.

At once the iron boots, without a sign that we existed, began to run in their clumping fashion toward the house.

“Gannets!” yelled Brennan. His face looked flushed. “It is, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” confirmed Pomfret. He squinted up at the old house leaning its yellow-gray walls into a soft breeze, the blue roofs afloat on the evening.

“Although,” he sounded doubtful, “although half the north wing is missing. And the heli carpark doesn’t seem to be where I recall.”

We began to walk up toward the house, our feet crisp on the raked gravel.

An elaborately carved coach drawn by two magnificent gray horses swept with a rattle and a jingle out from the main porch of the house. The coachmen wore wigs. As we jumped into the shrubbery I looked back. In the coach, like an exhibition in a waxworks, sat a man and woman, gorgeous in late eighteenth century clothes, all red and gold and ivory. Their powdered hair shone silver. Elegance, a grandness, breathed from them.

“We’d best get up to the house sharpish,” I said. “Rapiers and
dueling
pistols won’t be much good against our iron-booted chums.”

As we neared the house strains of music beat out into the evening air. We crept up to peer through the long windows of the ballroom.

At once I thought of my reactions on first seeing the ballroom at Gannets.

Great ball-gowns, flower sprigged, satins and silks, dazzling colors, powder and patches, fans and feathers, tiny shoes lost amid a profusion of swaying skirts.

Many buttoned coats, long and elegantly brocaded, enormous pockets, huge cuffs, lace handkerchiefs displayed by elegant turns of wrists, perukes and powder, square buckled shoes, a beefiness of face.

A string orchestra, scraping and bowing.

A minuet—a gavotte; even, bowing to the wishes of the elders, a coranto.

“Charming, charming,” breathed Phoebe, staring in through the windows, lost in admiration.

“Another age, and yet a part of our age,” said Brennan. “It’s not like a film set, not at all. There’s life there, animation, and everything on so small a scale!’’

“Enchanting,” said good old George. He meant it, too. No one, the French Revolution apart, could fail to feel a quickened heartbeat, a response of great affection and pity for that gay, silvery, laughing world follying toward its destiny.

The ground shook, the evening sky darkened and blazed again with sunlight.

Through the windows of the ballroom the dancers had gone, vanished along with the Assyrian’s chariots, the crumbled Akkadian cities, the gentle civilization of the Flower People. Now we looked on a scene of apparent confusion. Bed after bed occupied the whole floor. Nurses in white caps and blue or gray dresses brushing the floor moved about carrying white enamel basins, blue rimmed.

A man stood close beside us. His young face showed the ravages of great fear and terrible strain. His eyes looked like bruised plums. He wore a khaki tunic, the buttons in a wedge-shape to his shoulders, open. On his breast were embroidered wings, the letters: R.F.C.

"So Gannets was a hospital—” Phoebe had time to murmur before the ground shook once more and the detritus of the Kaiser’s war vanished.

This time, still in the same spot, we looked into a meeting in progress in Gannets’ ballroom. Decorative changes had made of the austerely elegant eighteenth century room a pine-paneled monstrosity. Men at a table set on a dais hammered the table, argued, hurled abuse at the rows of doggedly-determined countrymen and women sitting before them.

“This must be the World Federation Great Debate of the twenty-first century!" said Pomfret. “Men argued like this all over the world. Nowadays you cant imagine what on earth they had to argue about, the world couldn’t have gone on split up into stupid warring little nations for much longer.”

“I’m more interested in what Khamushkei the Undying is up to,” grunted Brennan. “What’s he doing, shunting us through time like this?”

About to answer, I paused to let Phoebe say, "That’s obvious, darling! He’s looking for the tablet!”

“Or his iron-boots are,” I added.

“Yes, but!” protested Brennan. Then he, too, saw the logic of it. “Of course! If he can smash up that tablet then we won’t have the words to put him back in his vault.” He chuckled. “It’ll form a time-paradox, which we’ve been spared so far, but it would work!”

“It would work,” Phoebe said grimly.

“Here we go again!” said Lottie, gripping Pomfret’s arm.

The sensation of peering in through the windows and watching the time-changes within the room beyond resembled that of trick film, where a room is furnished and changed by stopping the film while the alterations are made.

Apart from the orderliness of the room and the absence of effects brought down for the auction and those rows of gilded chairs and their gilded occupants, the room as I now saw it resembled exactly the room as I had first seen it with George Pomfret as we had walked in for the auction. I had no time to dwell on all the things that had happened since then as Brennan grasped my arm.

"Coming up the drivel” he said, hard and edgily. I turned to look.

A chauffeur driven, old-fashioned model heli had landed and while the chauffeur took the machine to the garage the owner of this place walked toward his front door. He carried a leather briefcase. He look tanned and fit, a younger edition of the strangely brooding man who glowered down from the portrait I had seen.

“That’s Vasil Stannard
!
” said Pomfret. “But younger than his portrait—”

“And,” said Brennan viciously, “the tablet is in that briefcase! It’s got to be!”

From the bushes to Stannard’s rear burst a single iron-booted monster. He pounced in a lethal near-silent dash of fur and fury. Before his boots crunched the gravel Pomfret’s bacon-and-eggs hissing Farley snuffed the thing out of existence.

The pounce, the shot, happened in a twinkling.

Stannard turned, half-puzzled, his left hand gripping the brief case, his right still fumbling for a key.

“Oh, good shooting, George!” Brennan was saying as the world swayed, blackened, spun dizzily into another time sequence.

Once again evening lay across the countryside. Orange light glowed from the long windows of Gannets. Sounds of an orchestra bloomed into the evening air; tunes popular thirty years ago. Through the windows we could see a ball in progress; men and women in gay costumes paraded, danced, drank and lounged. The feeling of happiness, of leisure, pervaded us with a longing for a life that belonged to an age of innocence—the age before we had known of Khamushkei the Undying.

“It’s a fancy dress ball!” said Phoebe.

“How dishy!” said Lottie, staring eagerly.

“And look at that Assyrian king! That’s Vasil Stannard—he must be wearing some of the find
s he dug up!” Brennan’s eyes refl
ected the light. “He’s lording it in there as he imagines Assurbanipal might! What colossal effrontery!”

“He’s having a good time,” said Pomfret. “From all I’ve heard he didn’t have a happy life.”

“Well, he’s living it up now.” Phoebe indicated a figure nearer to us. “And lookit that one! If I didn’t know any better I’d guess he was a—”

Brennan cut her off sharply. "You don’t know any better, darling!” He motioned to me, saying to Phoebe, "He is! Bert—we’ve got to get in there!”

The man about whom they were talking moved then, a stiff-legged gait hampered by the heavy ankle-length garments he wore, their tassels brushing the floor. Clad in brightly colored woollen wrap-around clothes, he carried on his back many-feathered wings, fan-shaped, moving. His head was covered by an eagle’s mask, all cruel hooked beak and glittering eye, extraordinarily life-like on a mammoth scale. He represented, clearly, a winged genie with an eagle’s head, complete with the pointed cone and the so-called lustral water, in reality the agent for tree-fertilization. His fancy dress costume, in keeping with the Assyrian motif of his host, was very fine indeed—