A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist (21 page)
Read A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Online
Authors: Ron Miller
“I take it that you’re the first of these drastic steps?”
“Yeth. Lord Thithcundman reprethenth the power to tranthform earthly creatureth into thea creatureth, ath you are well aware. To a lether and limited degree, thith power can tranthform a thea creature to a land creature. In your cathe, for you to become a merperthon it was nethethary for you to retain thome of your humaneth.”
“My what?”
“Humaneth. Ah, your quality of being human.”
“My humaness?”
“Yeth! Exactly. Becauth of thith remnant, it wath thimple to rethtore you when you requethted it. If a thea creature ith tranthformed, then it mutht altho retain thome of ith original characterithticth, though tranthliterated, ath it were, into terrethtrial termth.”
“If you’ll pardon me, I’ve been wondering about that. But what I don’t understand is, well, I hope that I’m not being overly personal, but, you look very much like a
cat.”
“I do?”
“I like cats very much, you understand.”
“Well, that’th exactly what I wath trying to explain. You were quite correct in athuming that Lord Thithcundman hath no humanth at hith thervith and in order to contact you he had to create one, which, of courth, meant tranthforming one of hith thea creatureth. Tho he chothe me.”
“And you were originally . . . ?”
“A catfish.”
“But wouldn’t it have been simpler to have transformed one of the merpeople? Aren’t they practically human to start with?”
“One of thothe idioth? They can thcarcely remember to breathe.”
“I see. But what can a cat man do?”
“I’m not thure. I wath hoping that you would have thome idea. At leatht one of my mithionth ith to find out more about thith Doctor Tudela and hith planth, and then to report back to Lord Thithcundman. Pardon me, do you have any more of that deliciouth thnack I found over there?”
“In the sink? Those were scraps from breakfast!”
“Ith that what it’th called? Thcraps? Very nithe. What’th that over there, then: that container that hath thuch a tantalizing thmell?”
“Good heavens, Captain, that’s the garbage!”
“Oh. Pardon me. A thpecial treat, I take it?”
“Look, Captain. You must tell Sithcundman that the situation is very, very serious. Almost all of the Great Sea will be obliterated, and probably most of the life in all of the seas and oceans everywhere. And this is going to happen in just a matter of days! There is no time at all to waste. If we wait too long, then there will be nothing that anyone can do to stop the moon from falling.”
“I thee. If thomething were to be done now, what, in your opinion, would the motht effective thomething be?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I suppose destroying the transmitter, the device that he’s been using to move the moon. Professor Wittenoom said that only a few more nudges are needed to send it into its final spiral toward the earth. I suppose that if it didn’t get those last nudges, it wouldn’t fall.”
“What ith thith
tranthmitter?”
“Come with me, I’ll show you.”
She led the cat captain to the front of the house and, parting the curtains, pointed to the black dome that protruded like a toadstool above the roof of the stone generator building.
“That round thing is the transmitter,” she explained. “It sends electrical waves up to the moon that disturb its orbit. That big building in front is where the power is generated by huge machines driven by volcanic steam.”
“Hmm. Tho if either the tranthmitter were dethtroyed or the generatorth thtopped, that would be thufficient?”
“Sounds like it. But both places are very well-guarded, besides being very strongly built. They are the one place on the island where I can’t go unescorted. And the only escort that I’ve ever been permitted is Tudela himself. You would never be able to get near it.”
“And what’th that mountain?” he asked, pointing to the smoldering cone beyond the rim of the caldera.
“That? I don’t think that it has a name. It’s just a volcano, though it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover that it has been named Mount Tudela.”
“Hmm. I have jutht one more quethtion.”
“And that is?”
“Well, exactly where doth Doctor Tudela plan to be when the collithion taketh plathe?”
The princess was absolutely taken aback: this had never occured to her. Where, indeed,
would
the doctor be? Even more to the point, where would she and the professor be? This is something that she would need to discuss with Wittenoom at the first opportunity.
Captain Wow requested that Bronwyn carefully write out everything that she knew about the doctor’s laboratory on sheets of waxed paper, using the same waterproof greasepencil as before. Carefully folding this and inserting it into his breast pocket, the little captain bowed formally, saluted and promised that he would bear her message to Sithcundman with the greatest dispatch. She offered to accompany him back to the cliffs, but he declined, explaining tactfully that he could much more easily evade detection alone.
“I’ll return immediately with Lord Thithcundman’th tholution to thith problem,” he promised.
“I look forward to it,” she replied, but with little of Captain Wow’s self-assurance. The gods, for all their powers, seemed to her to be anachronistic, certainly impotent against science. Good enough for what amounted to parlor tricks, but against the cosmic forces that Tudela could wield? Well! She watched from a window as the lithe figure melted into a shadow.
She went up to the library, which was situated in a large room on the second floor, and reported to an astonished professor what had just occured not more than ten feet vertically beneath his feet.
“Do you think that this Captain Wow will be able to do anything?”
“It’s not him that I’m expecting to do anything, it’s Sithcundman.”
“Ah, yes. An entity whose existence I would have doubted had I not been an eyewitness to his handiwork. That’s an experience of yours that I would very much like to discuss with you sometime. First-hand knowledge at being a fish may have some peripheral bearing upon my field of research.”
“I’d be glad to help. In the meantime, I think that it would be not unwise to prepare for the worst.”
“The collision taking place unimpeded?”
“Yes. And do you have any idea just exactly how Tudela plans to avoid his own annihilation?”
“Interesting question. I have no idea. I hadn’t thought about it, to tell you the truth. I suppose that all we need to do is ask him.” Which Wittenoom did, that evening, over dinner.
“I thought that you’d never get around to considering that problem,” smirked Tudela.
“Yes, yes,” replied Bronwyn testily, “I know that we’re but ignorant tubers. Just tell us what you have in mind and save the condescension for those with inferiority complexes, if you don’t mind.”
Tudela glared at her, his steel-colored eyes seeming to spit sparks like a pair of overcharged cathodes.
“It’s simple enough,” he said, stiffly, “and, if you will consider this the absolute truth rather than condescension, I am suprised that neither of you thought of it yourselves.”
“Go on.”
“We’ll avoid the brunt of the collision’s effects on the earth by not being on the earth when it happens.”
“Not another spaceship!” cried Bronwyn.
“No, no. That is hardly neccessary. I have caused an aerostat to be constructed, an enormous device of unique design, that will bear us to the highest strata of the atmosphere where we shall remain safe and sound during the impact, ultimately descending when all danger is past.”
“A balloon, you mean?”
“A balloon, if you will. A floating village in reality. Come with me and I’ll show you what I’ve done.”
He rose peremptorily, leaving the others to follow, abandoning their half-eaten dinners. He led them from the house to the generator building, past its guards, up a narrow flight of stairs to the second floor and into a padlocked room. An electric light was switched on, illuminating a broad, low-ceilinged chamber whose most outstanding furnishing was a pair of large drafting tables. Going to a cabinet, Tudela pulled from one of its pigeonholes a long tube of paper, which he unrolled across the top of one of the tables. The professor and Bronwyn looked over his shoulders.
The drawing on the paper showed several views of a device that the princess certainly would never have immediately recognized as a balloon. It consisted mainly of a large, rectangular platform, perhaps twice as long as it was wide, supported by fourteen globes: four at the corners, three each along the long sides and two apiece on the short sides. Bronwyn did not fully grasp the scale of the machine until she realized that the little cubes arranged in neat rows on the upper surface of the platform were not cases of cargo, as she had first supposed, but were in fact
buildings
. It was a regular, miniature village of perhaps a dozen small houses or huts with two or three larger, windowless buildings among them. Each of the houses, Tudela explained, had room for a score of the workers and their families while the larger structures contained equipment and supplies. “Everything,” he said, “necessary for reconstructing a civilization.
“Each balloon,” he continued, “contains 720,900 cubic feet of hydrogen, for a total for all fourteen balloons of 10,206,000 cubic feet. Since a thousand cubic feet of hydrogen, which as you well know is sixteen times lighter than common air, can lift about seventy pounds, you can see that the total lift of the combined balloons is over seven hundred thousand pounds or three hundred and fifty tons, more than sufficient to carry aloft not only the passengers, but all of their supplies in addition to the platform itself.”
The whole affair was constructed of the lightest possible materials: bamboo, pine, paper and molded cellulose. There was little provision for human comfort, beyond the necessity for simple shelter. Tudela did not expect to have to maintain his aerial village aloft for more than a few days, a week at the most, though he provisioned it for a month. This was, of course, in addition to the year’s supply of preserved foodstuffs that was stored in the large warehouse in the center of the platform. The whole affair was being constructed as a separate project in a small subcaldera between the main encampment and the volcano, where it would be protected from winds until the time of its launch.
“It looks like you’ve allowed for a great many more people than I’ve seen here at your camp,” observed Wittenoom.
“True,” agreed Tudela. “Several ships will soon be arriving from the mainland, carrying scientists and technicians and their families, all of whom are sympathetic to my cause. Did you think that I planned to create a new civilization solely with the untutored, brute workmen out there in the crater?
“We will begin the ascension,” he continued, “as soon as I am assured that the moon will fall where I have directed it shall fall. The balloons will carry us as high as practically possible, perhaps twelve thousand feet or so. If the passengers undertake no undue physical effort, they should not undergo any harm remaining at that altitude for a few days. Taking along a quantity of oxygen and its necessary supply system would have meant either constructing a larger balloon or leaving behind much more important things. The people can do with a little less oxygen for a while.
“Once the moon has crashed to the earth and formed the new continent, I will allow the balloon to descend and it will form the provisional capital of my empire.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen,” sneered Bronwyn. Tudela angrily gathered up his plans and turned to her, his face black with restrained fury, the rolls of brittle, translucent paper crushed to his narrow, starchy bosom.
“You are an ignorant little animal and the sooner the earth is rid of your kind, the better off it will be!”
I think,
concluded the princess sourly,
that I have just forfeited my ride on his balloon.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
WAR & MAGIC
Rykkla and Basseliniden were landed just south of the entrance to Sommer Bay, where the shore met the sea in the form of a vertical, chalky cliff more than four hundred feet high. A long, sloping beach of white shingle allowed them to easily pull the longboat out of the reach of the waves. Since there might not be any easy way up the cliffs, they might need the boat to row around Porkkalla Point and into the bay itself before they could make a practicable landing.
Rykkla turned to look back out over the water, shading her eyes against the glare of the early sun, and saw that the
Amber Princess
had already set sail and was rapidly diminishing in size.
Well
, she thought, a little sourly,
they certainly didn’t waste any time.
“Rykkla!” came a shout from the captain. “Take a look over here!”
She joined her companion where he had wandered a hundred yards away, to the rubble and boulder strewn base of the cliff. “Look at that,” he said, pointing to a shadow that looked inkily black against the white chalk.
“It’s a cave,” she shrugged. “So what?” But she had spoken before thinking and Basseliniden, knowing this, kept his silence, allowing her brain to catch up with her mouth.
She was confounded: how could she so easily have forgotten her connection to caves, or, more specifically, subterranean worlds?
Perhaps,
she offered herself as an excuse
, because I had grown to accept Thud so completely as a
man
that I had dismissed or supressed my knowledge of what he really was and where he had come from.
“It’d be pretty far-fetched,” she said, “to have any hope of this being a lead to the Kobolds. That’d be much too easy.”
“Of course it’s far-fetched,” he replied cheerily, “but then almost everything is far-fetched, some things just more so than others. The tide’s going out and it’s going to be hours before we can relaunch the boat. Neither can we scale these cliffs. Unless you’ve something else to do, why not pass the time exploring?”
“Why not, indeed?”
She returned to the longboat where she gathered together enough food to make a dinner for them both, including two bottles of wine, wrapped it all up in a spare shirt whose sleeves she tied in such a way as to convert the whole bundle into a makeshift rucksack.
Meanwhile, the captain had taken the two signal lanterns from the boat and fueled them from a gallon can of oil. Handing one of these to Rykkla they were ready for their exploration.
The cave entrance was relatively high up the cliff face, well above the line of high tide, and could only be reached with some difficulty; the chalk boulders that had fallen from the cliff above were frangible, slippery and treacherous.
The cave, once they reached it, was revealed to be a large circular opening perhaps forty or fifty feet across. Cool air blew from it in a constant, moist exhalation and a small stream gurgled over its lip only to be lost in the labyrinthine talus slope.
“In order to save the lanterns, we’ll go as far as we can before lighting them,” Basseliniden suggested.
The floor of the cave was only slightly concave and not difficult to traverse, as long as the bed of the stream was avoided, which was difficult since it would change capriciously from meadering rivulet to a broad sheet that made the chalk as slippery as wet ice. Fortunately, the rising sun poured light directly into the tunnel, which ran straight for several hundred feet before gradually, almost imperceptibly, turning downward. The cool wind continued to blow, carrying with it a mossy scent that was not at all unpleasant.
“How far do you think we ought to go?” Rykkla asked.
“A little further, at least. We haven’t even had to use the lanterns yet.”
“We’ve been going downhill for some time now. I’ve just noticed that we’ve lost the stream somewhere.”
“So we have, not that I miss it much.”
As the tunnel descended it also began to twist in broad curves to the left and right; they were soon in an impenetrable darkness and Basseliniden stopped to ignite the two lanterns. Their lenses threw out a yellow gleam that was quickly devoured by the dark, like a stream of warm butter lapped up by a black panther.
They descended another few hundred feet and the tunnel became perceptibly steeper and narrower; Rykkla could almost touch both walls with her outstretched hands. The steepness of the path was becoming a problem; there was little foothold on the water-polished stone. Rykkla knelt and felt the glossy surface. It was no longer chalk, but instead a hard, lustrous mineral that must have been laid down layer by infinitesimal layer, like a patient artist who built up his colors in transparent glazes. It shimmered polychromatically beneath her lantern light like mother-of-pearl or moiré silk. She rose, wordlessly and without looking to see if Basseliniden followed, continued her descent.
The path grew ever steeper and Basseliniden finally voiced his concern and suggested that they give up the effort and return to the beach. Rykkla ignored him and found that after a further few dozen yards she had to half sit and brace herself with her hands against the walls or floor in order to keep from plunging headlong into the abyss.
“Rykkla!” called the captain, in a curiously hushed voice, as though he were afraid of disturbing someone. “Come on, let’s call it quits. This isn’t getting us anywhere. It was a long shot and a pretty far-fetched one at that. There’s no point in getting ourselves lost or hurt. There’s nothing here.”
“Just a little farther. I want to see how steep this gets, then I’ll come on back. Promise.”
“I’m afraid that you’re getting so far down that slope that you won’t be able to get back up. How’re you going to turn around? We should have brought a rope.”
Rykkla’s answer was not at all what he hoped, but was half what he expected: a sudden scream that was quickly engulfed by its own echoes.
“Rykkla!” he cried, but when the echoes of his own shouts finally died down, there was no sound at all.
Rykkla opened her eyes slowly only to discover that it was darker with them open. She lay still, a little afraid to move for fear that pieces might fall off and that they might be important ones. The fall had taken her entirely by surprise; she would no doubt have broken every bone in her body, all two hundred and six including the sessamoids, or at the very least her neck, had not her acrobatic training taken automatic control and prevented the worst from happening. She discovered, as she carefully unwound her tangled body, that she suffered only painful sprains and bruises, but nothing seemed broken or dislocated. She waited for several long minutes, letting her wits piece themselves together and not finding anything immediately important missing. She listened for a good half hour to a distant drip of water that was like the ticking of a liquid and mournful clock. The surface she was sitting upon was cold and slightly damp; it was sandy and she was in the deep depression made by her impact.
A depression,
she thought morosely,
that is the result of more than just landing on my butt.
The air smelled damp, earthy and slightly mildewy. The darkness was a palpable substance, like a sheet of wet velvet dropped over her head, clinging to her contours like an opaque enamel. It was as physical a presence as the ground beneath her, the small sharp stone at her back or the aches in her body. She had to consciously suppress the urge to tear the nonexistant opacity from her face.
As her wits became more particularized, she began to wonder what subterranean creatures might be regarding her with atrophied eyes, perhaps not inches from her body. She had always been burdened by a not entirely irrational fear of the kind of unearthly, white creeping things that have the perverse preference for living in lightless, damp places. She loathed the very idea of turning over rocks or logs and seeing the pale, soft creatures that writhed and scuttled in blind, mindless panic at the sudden light. She decided that she’d prefer being erect, rather than sitting on the ground, where she’d be further above the level of albino worms, salamanders and spiders. She put out a hand and suddenly recoiled in disgust and horror as her fingers fell on something unspeakably clammy and slimy, that turned beneath her touch. She scuttled back on her haunches with a sharp cry of repulsion, before a faint scent recalled the lunch she had brought with her and the cold chicken leg that it included.
She rose unsteadily to her feet to find herself in a darkness that was not as complete as she had first thought. There was instead a faint glow in one direction that was just barely distinguishable from the sparkles and drifting colors produced by otherwise bored retinae. She had to move her head slowly from side to side before she was convinced that the glow had a reality outside of her own head. She turned to look up in the direction in which she believed she had come, but saw there only an even deeper blackness. She reached out gingerly with her arms and discovered the steep slope down which she had tumbled. It was almost vertical and slick as greased glass; she abandoned any hope of reascending it. She listened, but could hear nothing significant beyond the beating of her own heart and the distant trickling of water. like most people suddenly deprived of their sight, Rykkla was terrified of moving for fear of walking into something: a rock wall or a bottomless pit. She advanced with mincing, shuffling, inch-long steps, her hands held at arm’s length before her. As she moved, she discovered that the floor of the cave seemed to be sandy and dry; the almost subliminal glow became almost imperceptibly brighter, but brighter it was indeed: a hazy blue-green that was scarcely lighter than the gloom surrounding it. For all of its near-nonexistence, it drew her like a sunflower.
She bumped against the smoothly curving wall of the tunnel, and discovered that the latter was swinging in a broad, gentle arc to her right. Keeping her left hand lightly touching the stone, she moved with a little more assuredness, a confidence encouraged by the rapidly brightening glow.
Rykkla was just beginning to be able to distinguish patchy features in the cavern around her when she suddenly stopped, hunching behind a blocky boulder that had fallen from its place in the ceiling. She found herself breathing as hard as she had when she had first fallen into the pit, and she struggled to bring both it and her fluttering heart under control.
There had been sounds from ahead; regular sounds like that of machinery and low murmuring sounds that couldn’t have been anything else but voices.
Musrum! was this silly venture on the right track after all? Have I really stumbled onto the Kobolds . . . or, or the Weedking himself?
She had never fancied herself as being particularly superstitious; she had always believed herself to be a skeptical pragmatist, but nevertheless felt the hairs on her nape bristling with the atavistic wariness of the unknown.
There seemed to have been some ancient cataclysm that had shaken huge stones from the roof of the cave, and these formed a line of hiding places of which her boulder was the first. Scuttling from one to the next, she approached the light and sound as stealthily as a gypsy stealing up on a pie-laden windowsill. As the light grew brighter around her and the sounds grew ever louder, if no less comprehensible, she had to forcibly prevent herself from succumbing to what was becoming an almost intolerably intense curiosity. Nevertheless, she finally reached an enormous boulder that seemed to her to be the only thing opaque and substantial remaining between her and the mystery. Taking two or three deep breaths to calm her pattering heart, which was thumping audibly like a tiny, trotting horse exercising in her chest, she cautiously protruded her head, inch by inch, beyond the sheltering rock.
Her first thought upon seeing the round, smooth, almost featureless rock that presented itself to her, not more than a yard from her face, was
How strange! A rock formation that looks just like a bust of Thud!
It was about the size of a large cantaloupe, balanced atop a much larger, nearly spherical boulder. It had a thin crack where the mouth ought to be, a bump for the nose and a pair of tiny inset obsidian beads that blinked at her in mutual wonderment.
“
Thud?
” she whispered, experimentally, automatically, as hopelessly as she was hopeful.
“Hi, Rykkla!” the cracked rock said.
“Thud?” she repeated, this time just as automatically, but as an expression of disbelief.
“I sure am glad to see you, Rykkla. I’ve been talking and arguing until I’m just sick of it, but no one will believe that I want to get back up to the top. Besides, there’s the war, you know.”
“War? What war? Thud? Is it really you?”
“Huh? Sure it is. How’s the weather been?”
“Oh, Thud!” she cried softly, throwing herself onto his broad, convex chest. “Damn the weather!” His powerful arms, as thick and corded as oak boughs, enfolded her gently, firmly, completely. “Oh, Thud, I thought you were dead! How did you get here? What happened to you?”
“I fell into a hole.”
“No, you were beaten and thrown into it. I was sure that they had killed you.”
“Nope.”
“I searched and searched, but there was no sign of you at all. What happened?”
“The Kobolds found me.”
“The Kobolds?”
“Yeah. They’re always interested in any big new holes in the ground. They sure were real surprised to find me there.”
“I can imagine. You’re all right, then?”
“Sure.”
“I’ve missed you so much. You have no idea of what I’ve been through since I lost you. It seems like forever.”
“Has it been very long?”
“It’s been months, Thud.”
“Really? It seems like yesterday. Or maybe the day before yesterday.”
“You look well.”
“Thank you. You look pretty good, too.”
“How do we get out of here?”
“Out?”
“Uh huh. You’re well. I’m pretty good. Let’s get out of here.”
“I don’t know,” Thud responded hesitantly. “I’ll have to ask.”
“Ask? You need permission to leave?”
“Nope. I just don’t know how to get out.”
“Then let’s ask.”