To Your Scattered Bodies Go/The Fabulous Riverboat (17 page)

G
öring started chewing, stopped, stared, then said, “Why should I? I don’t have any authority here, and I couldn’t do anything to you if I did. I’m just a guest here. Damned decent people, these; they haven’t bothered me at all except to ask if I’m all right now and then. Though I don’t know how long they’ll let me stay without earning my keep.”

“You haven’t left the hut?” Burton said. “Then who charged your grail for you? How’d you get so much dreamgum?”

Göring smiled slyly. “I had a big collection from the last place I stayed; somewhere about a thousand miles up The River.”

“Doubtless taken forcibly from some poor slaves,” Burton said. “But if you were doing so well there, why did you leave?”

Göring began to weep. Tears ran down his face, and over his collarbones and down his chest, and his shoulders shook.

“I…I had to get out. I wasn’t any good to the others. I was losing my hold over them—spending too much time drinking, smoking marijuana, and chewing dreamgum. They said I was too soft myself. They would have killed me or made me a slave. So I sneaked out one night…took the boat. I got away all right and kept going until I put into here. I traded part of my supply to Sevier for two weeks’ sanctuary.”

Burton stared curiously at Göring.

“You knew what would happen if you took too much gum,” he said. “Nightmares, hallucinations, delusions. Total mental and physical deterioration. You must have seen it happen to others.”

“I was a morphine addict on Earth!” Göring cried. “I struggled with it, and I won out for a long time. Then, when things began to go badly for the Third Reich—and even worse for myself—when Hitler began picking on me, I started taking drugs again!”

He paused, then continued, “But here, when I woke up to a new life, in a young body, when it looked as if I had an eternity of life and youth
ahead of me, when there was no stern God in Heaven or Devil in Hell to stop me, I thought I could do exactly as I pleased and get away with it. I would become even greater than the Führer! That little country in which you first found me was to be only the beginning! I could see my empire stretching for thousands of miles up and down The River, on both sides of the valley. I would have been the ruler of ten times the subjects that Hitler ever dreamed of!”

He began weeping again, then paused to take another drink of water, then put a piece of the dreamgum in his mouth. He chewed, his face becoming more relaxed and blissful with each second.

Göring said, “I kept having nightmares of you plunging the spear into my belly. When I woke up, my belly would hurt as if a flint had gone into my guts. So I’d take gum to remove the hurt and the humiliation. At first, the gum helped. I was great. I was master of the world, Hitler, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Alexander, Genghis Khan, all rolled into one. I was chief again of von Richthofen’s Red Death Squadron; those were happy days, the happiest of my life in many ways. But the euphoria soon gave way to hideousness. I plunged into hell; I saw myself accusing myself and behind the accuser a million others. Not myself but the victims of that great and glorious hero, that obscene madman Hitler, whom I worshipped so. And in whose name I committed so many crimes.”

“You admit you were a criminal?” Burton said. “That’s a story different than the one you used to give me. Then you said you were justified in all you did, and you were betrayed by the….”

He stopped, realizing that he had been sidetracked from his original purpose. “That you should be haunted with the specter of a conscience is rather incredible. But perhaps that explains what has puzzled the puritans—why liquor, tobacco, marijuana, and dreamgum were offered in the grails along with food. At least, dreamgum seems to be a gift booby-trapped with danger to those who abuse it.”

He stepped closer to Göring. The German’s eyes were half-closed, and his jaw hung open.

“You know my identity. I am traveling under a pseudonym, with good reason. You remember Spruce, one of your slaves? After you were killed, he was revealed, quite by accident, as one of those who somehow resurrected all the dead of humanity. Those we call the Ethicals, for lack of a better term. Göring, are you listening?”

Göring nodded.

“Spruce killed himself before we could get out of him all we wanted to know. Later, some of his compatriots came to our area and temporarily put everybody to sleep—probably with a gas—intending to take me away to wherever Their headquarters are. But They missed me. I was off on a trading trip up The River. When I returned, I realized They were after me, and I’ve been running ever since. Göring, do you hear me?”

Burton slapped him savagely on his cheek. Göring said, “Ach!” and jumped back and held the side of his face. His eyes were open, and he was grimacing.

“I heard you!” he snarled. “It just didn’t seem worthwhile to answer back. Nothing seemed worthwhile, nothing except floating away, far from….”

“Shut up and listen!” Burton said. “The Ethicals have men everywhere looking for me. I can’t afford to have you alive, do you realize that? I can’t trust you. Even if you were a friend, you couldn’t be trusted. You’re a gummer!”

Göring giggled, stepped up to Burton and tried to put his arms around Burton’s neck. Burton pushed him back so hard that he staggered up against the table and only kept from falling by clutching its edges.

“This is very amusing,” Göring said. “The day I got here, a man asked me if I’d seen you. He described you in detail and gave your name. I told him I knew you well—too well, and that I hoped I’d never see you again, not unless I had you in my power, that is. He said I should notify him if I saw you again. He’d make it worth my while.”

Burton wasted no time. He strode up to Göring and seized him with both hands. They were small and delicate, but Göring winced with pain.

He said, “What’re you going to do, kill me again?”

“Not if you tell me the name of the man who asked you about me. Otherwise….”

“Go ahead and kill me!” Göring said. “So what? I’ll wake up somewhere else, thousands of miles from here, far out of your reach.”

Burton pointed at a bamboo box in a corner of the hut. Guessing that it held Göring’s supply of gum, he said, “And you’d also wake up without that! Where else could you get so much on such short notice?”

“Damn you!” Göring shouted, and tried to tear himself loose to get to the box.

“Tell me his name!” Burton said. “Or I’ll take the gum and throw it in The River!”

“Agneau. Roger Agneau. He sleeps in a hut just outside the Roundhouse.”

“I’ll deal with you later,” Burton said, and chopped Göring on the side of the neck with the edge of his palm.

He turned, and he saw a man crouching outside the entrance to the hut. The man straightened up and was off. Burton ran out after him; in a minute both were in the tall pines and oaks of the hills. His quarry disappeared in the waist-high grass.

Burton slowed to a trot, caught sight of a patch of white—starlight on bare skin—and was after the fellow. He hoped that the Ethical would not kill himself at once, because he had a plan for extracting information if he could knock him out at once. It involved hypnosis, but he would have to catch the Ethical first. It was possible that the man had some sort of wireless imbedded in his body and was even now in communication with his compatriots—wherever They were. If so, They would come in Their flying machines, and he would be lost.

He stopped. He had lost his quarry and the only thing to do now was to rouse Alice and the others and run. Perhaps this time they should take to the mountains and hide there for a while.

But first he would go to Agneau’s hut. There was little chance that Agneau would be there, but it was certainly worth the effort to make sure.

B
urton arrived within sight of the hut just in time to glimpse the back of a man entering it. Burton circled to come up from the side where the darkness of the hills and the trees scattered along the plain gave him some concealment. Crouching, he ran until he was at the door to the hut.

He heard a loud cry some distance behind him and whirled to see Göring staggering toward him. He was crying out in German to Agneau, warning him that Burton was just outside. In one hand he held a long spear which he brandished at the Englishman.

Burton turned and hurled himself against the flimsy bamboo-slat door. His shoulder drove into it and broke it from its wooden hinges. The door flew inward and struck Agneau, who had been standing just behind it. Burton, the door, and Agneau fell to the floor with Agneau under the door.

Burton rolled off the door, got up, and jumped again with both bare feet on the wood. Agneau screamed and then became silent. Burton heaved the door to one side to find his quarry unconscious and bleeding from the nose. Good! Now if the noise didn’t bring the watch and if he could deal quickly enough with Göring, he could carry out his plan.

He looked up just in time to see the starlight on the long black object hurtling at him.

He threw himself to one side, and the spear plunged into the dirt floor with a thump. Its shaft vibrated like a rattlesnake preparing to strike.

Burton stepped into the doorway, estimated Göring’s distance, and charged. His assegai plunged into the belly of the German. Göring threw his hands up in the air, screamed, and fell on his side. Burton hoisted Agneau’s limp body on his shoulder and carried him out of the hut.

By then there were shouts from the Roundhouse. Torches were flaring
up; the sentinel on the nearest watchtower was bellowing. Göring was sitting on the ground, bent over, clutching the shaft close to the wound.

He looked gape-mouthed at Burton and said, “You did it again! You….”

He fell over on his face, the death rattle in his throat.

Agneau returned to a frenzied consciousness. He twisted himself out of Burton’s grip and fell to the ground. Unlike Göring, he made no noise. He had as much reason to be silent as Burton—more perhaps. Burton was so surprised that he was left standing with the fellow’s loin-towel clutched in his hand. Burton started to throw it down but felt something stiff and square within the lining of the towel. He transferred the cloth to his left hand, yanked the assegai from the corpse, and ran after Agneau.

The Ethical had launched one of the bamboo canoes beached along the shore. He paddled furiously out into the starlit waters, glancing frequently behind him. Burton raised the assegai behind his shoulder and hurled it. It was a short, thick-shafted weapon, designed for infighting and not as a javelin. But if flew straight and came down at the end of its trajectory in Agneau’s back. The Ethical fell forward and at an angle and tipped the narrow craft over. The canoe turned upside down. Agneau did not reappear.

Burton swore. He had wanted to capture Agneau alive, but he was damned if he would permit the Ethical to escape. There was a chance that Agneau had not contacted other Ethicals yet.

He turned back toward the guest huts. Drums were beating up and down along the shore, and people with burning torches were hastening toward the Roundhouse. Burton stopped a woman and asked if he could borrow her torch a moment. She handed it to him but spouted questions at him. He answered that he thought the Choctaws across The River were making a raid. She hurried off toward the assembly before the stockade.

Burton drove the pointed end of the torch into the soft dirt of the bank and examined the towel he had snatched from Agneau. On the inside, just above the hard square in the lining, was a seam sealed with two thin magnetic strips, easily opened. He took the object out of the lining and looked at it by the torchlight.

For a long time he squatted by the shifting light, unable to stop looking or to subdue an almost paralyzing astonishment. A photograph, in
this world of no cameras, was unheard-of. But a photograph of
him
was even more incredible, as was the fact that the picture had not been taken on this world! It had to have been made on Earth, that Earth lost now in the welter of stars somewhere in the blazing sky and in God only knew how many thousands of years of time.

Impossibility piled on impossibility! But it was taken at a time and at a place when he knew for certain that no camera had fixed upon him and preserved his image. His mustachios had been removed but the retoucher had not bothered to opaque the background nor his clothing. There he was, caught miraculously from the waist up and imprisoned in a flat piece of some material. Flat! When he turned the square, he saw his profile come into view. If he held it almost at right angles to the eye, he could get a three-quarters profile-view of himself.

“In 1848,” he muttered to himself. “When I was a twenty-seven-year-old subaltern in the East Indian Army. And those are the blue mountains of Goa. This must have been taken when I was convalescing there. But, my God, how? By whom? And how would the Ethicals manage to have it in their possession now?”

Agneau had evidently carried this photo as a mnemonic in his quest for Burton. Probably every one of the hunters had one just like it, concealed in his towel. Up and down The River They were looking for him; there might be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Them. Who knew how many agents They had available or how desperately They wanted him or
why
They wanted him?

After replacing the photo in the towel, he turned to go back to the hut. And at that moment, his gaze turned toward the top of the mountains—those unscalable heights that bounded The Rivervalley on both sides.

He saw something flicker against a bright sheet of cosmic gas. It appeared for only the blink of an eyelid, then was gone.

A few seconds later, it came out of nothing, was revealed as a dark hemispherical object, then disappeared again.

A second flying craft showed itself briefly, reappeared at a lower elevation, and then was gone like the first.

The Ethicals would take him away, and the people of Sevieria would wonder what had made them fall asleep for an hour or so.

He did not have time to return to the hut and wake up the others. If he waited a moment longer, he would be trapped.

He turned and ran into The River and began swimming toward the other shore, a mile and a half away. But he had gone no more than forty yards when he felt the presence of some huge bulk above. He turned on his back to stare upward. There was only the soft glare of the stars above. Then, out of the air, fifty feet above him, a disk with a diameter of about sixty feet cut out a section of the sky. It disappeared almost immediately, came into sight again only twenty feet above him.

So They had some means of seeing at a distance in the night and had spotted him in his flight.

“You jackals!” he shouted at them. “You’ll not get me anyway!”

He upended and dived and swam straight downward. The water became colder, and his eardrums began to hurt. Although his eyes were open, he could see nothing. Suddenly, he was pushed by a wall of water, and he knew that the pressure came from displacement by a large object.

The craft had plunged down after him.

There was only one way out. They would have his dead body, but that would be all. He could escape Them again, be alive somewhere on The River to outwit Them again and strike back at Them.

He opened his mouth and breathed in deeply through both his nose and his mouth.

The water choked him. Only by a strong effort of will did he keep from closing his lips and trying to fight back against the death around him. He knew with his mind that he would live again, but the cells of his body did not know it. They were striving for life at this very moment, not in the rationalized future. And they forced from his water-choked throat a cry of despair.