A Feast Unknown (11 page)

“Doc said he invented this beamer back in 1943, believe it or not,” Wilfred said. “Hey, we need another transceiver!”

He opened a cabinet while I watched him closely for a trick. He brought out a deflated sausage-shaped balloon about a foot long and attached the open end to a nozzle. The balloon filled up and became a blimp about four feet long. He fastened a small blue cigar shape to four eyelets along the blimp to make a tiny gondola. He released the airship, and it rose swiftly, carried eastward by the wind. Wilfred adjusted controls on a board, and the airship, visible in the light streaming from the open top of the camper, turned southwards.

I watched the picture on the screen. It was a bird’s eye of the country beneath the balloon, as seen in the moonlight.

I asked how Caliban got such a bright picture in the dark.

Wilfred shrugged and said, “I don’t know. He might use heat-radiation to help develop the images, but I don’t know just how an ultra high-frequency beam could pick up heat images. I just don’t know. I do know that the CIA and the Commies, Chinese and Russians, got wind of this device, and Doc was fighting his own people as well as the Commies. For some reason, he didn’t want the U.S. to get it.”

Apparently, Wilfred did not know about the Nine.

I watched the screen. Presently, the Kenyan camp was in view.

The balloon must have been directly over it.

“You mean it when you say you’ll kill me if I don’t show you how the missile-launcher works?” he said.

I did not reply, and he said, “You mean it.” He grinned. “Doc doesn’t care, anyway, if I get rid of a few Kenyans. He says they’re interfering.”

I said nothing. I had expected him to object because the Kenyans were blacks, but he seemed to regard them as enemies, which, indeed, they were, if Caliban did not want interference with his hunt.

Wilfred loaded the missile into the tube. Another appeared in the opening in the floor.

The tube rotated and elevated in response to Wilfred’s adjustments of the controls. A grid appeared on the screen. A white dot danced out and went past the intersection of the X and Y axes and then shot back to it.

Wilfred straightened up. “It’s all automatic now. If you want Little Miss Annihilator to land dead smack in the middle of their camp, press that button there.”

“What about the hot jets from the missile?” I said.

He grinned. He had been standing in one corner, as far away as possible from the flames which would issue. Undoubtedly, he had hoped I would be caught and burned. Moreover, I did not put it past the doctor to have a dummy button with a poisoned or drug-coated needle to pierce the thumb that pressed the button. I suspected that there were many traps which Wilfred was aching to use.

I picked up a pair of pliers with insulated handles—watch out for electrical shock, too—and pushed the button with the nose of the pliers. The missile flamed and whooshed away. The truck did not even rock with the take-off. The heat from the jet warmed my skin as I stood beside Wilfred. If I had been unwary enough to be closer, I might have gotten a bad burn and been off balance enough for him to attack me.

I was watching the screen but also flicking glances at Wilfred. He was staring wide-eyed at my penis, which had been rising as the rocket rose.

The missile shot up in a high arc which the eye might not have been able to follow if the jets were not burning so brightly. It curved over and behind the hill. I looked back at the screen. The missile appeared suddenly, and whiteness gouted and smoke roiled out and up. Bodies, pieces of bodies, a truck, a jeep, and pieces of vehicles and equipment flew out of the cloud.

I kept hold of my knife and my eye on Wilfred as I shook
and groaned with the ecstasy. He moved away from me, his eyes on my spouting penis.

“Man, you got a beautiful setup!” he whispered. “But you’re sure weird!”

I said, “Load another!”

He obeyed, while a third missile rose from the floor. He crouched beneath the tube, and I punched the button. The third missile completely destroyed the Kenyans.

Three times, I jetted. I writhed in powerful orgasms and waved my knife at Wilfred to keep him away. He stared with bulging eyes, and, after the third ejaculation had ceased, and my penis had drooped somewhat, shook his head.

“You’re sick, man, real sick,” he mumbled.

I came towards him. He backed away, hands out, and said, “You don’t want to fuck me with that knobkerrie, do you? Don’t, man! It’d split me wide open! Doc didn’t say anything about you being queer!”

“Quit talking and scan that mountainside now,” I said.

Since he could get a direct beam against the mountain, he switched off the balloon’s transceiver but left the balloon cruising around in a circle. At that moment, we heard the distant but unmistakable noise of a helicopter. It became louder in a minute. Wilfred switched the transceiver back on, loaded another rocket in the tube, and this time, at my order, punched the button. I felt nothing then. Apparently, only killings directly done by me brought on the aberrated reaction.

The Kenyan helicopter went up in a great bloom of fire.

15

The beam probed the mountainside. The slope looked like solid vegetation, but the view could be squeezed down with the beam so that we could see a square of two feet from a seeming height of ten feet. Thus, we could look between the trees. It took an hour before we located Doctor Caliban and his party. I could see the dark bronze head of the doctor near a tree. He was holding a metallic box with an antenna.

“All right,” I said to Wilfred. “Blow the good doctor and his colleagues to kingdom come or wherever they’re going after death.”

Wilfred howled and leaped at me. He tried a karate hand chop. Again, I grabbed the hand. I clamped down on it and jerked him past me and slammed him into a bank of instruments. He fell unconscious.

The little white ball came out on the grid of the screen and stopped at the center lines, which were cross-haired on Caliban.

Caliban looked up, and his mouth moved.

His voice came out of a cabinet behind me.

“Very well done, my dear Lord Grandrith. I underestimated you. I made certain that you were halfway up the mountain before I took off after you. I didn’t think you’d sneak all the way back down and attack my camp. But I was wrong!

“How well you’ve performed! But not well enough! Don’t you know I have only to press a button on this transceiver, and all four vehicles will explode, along with the remaining missiles in your truck?”

I froze. Caliban had been listening in, perhaps even watching, and I did not think that he was lying.

I said, “If you blow me up, you also blow up Wilfred.”

“Too bad!”

Behind me, Wilfred groaned. He rose unsteadily, one arm limp, his eyes as red as if his brain had burst. He said, “Not you, Doc! You were the only good man I ever knew. I trusted you, Doc, even if you were a honky. I loved you, Doc, like I never loved a man before!”

“You always did flap your big lips too much,” Caliban said. “Well, my lord, are you leaving peacefully, without pressing that button, or do I have to end it all now and cheat both of us?”

“He means it! He’d kill us both!” Wilfred moaned. “Old Rivers and Simmons were right. Doc has turned evil! He’s a regular Jekyll and Hyde!”

“Shut up, Wilfred,” Caliban said emotionlessly.

“My lord, I have to blow up the trucks and jeeps in any event. One of my black colleagues, Ali Hamidu, has shinnied up a tree and scanned the scene with binoculars the power of which would astound even the scientists of this progressive century. He
reports that the Albanian and his Arab mercenaries are sneaking up on you. They pulled the same trick you did, apparently. I think they spotted you when you came back down. Shame on you. Are you losing your touch? In any case, they see the light shining from the open roof of the camper.”

I got out of the camper. Calibans voice said, “Get back here! They’ve got the camp surrounded. You couldn’t get two feet without being chopped down! I’m going to explode the two jeeps first, and then the supply truck! You stay in the camper until then, and take off under cover of the smoke! When you do, run like hell! The camper will be the biggest explosion by far!”

An automatic rifle began firing about fifty yards away. The bullets stitched the dirt and then ran across a jeep. Somebody shouted in Arabic; I thought it was a command to hold the fire. Probably, it was Noli shouting, because he wanted to take me alive.

I had no choice. I got back into the camper, the roof of which was closing up. Wilfred secured the door and the windows, and when the camper was tight, he said, “We’re protected by double walls with fiber glass and steel wool insulation. It’d take a direct hit from a shell to get us.”

He was watching the screen, which showed about thirty armed men slowly advancing through the bush. I said, “Didn’t you see me when I was sneaking up on you?”

Wilfred curled back his lips and clenched his teeth. Then he said, “You were born under a lucky star, bwana honky. I was watching a leopard over the next hill and I didn’t see you at all. When you got inside the camp, I couldn’t use the beam to sight you then. You were too close. Otherwise …”

He paused, and then said, “I got orders not to kill you,
anyway, unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

The first explosion rocked the camper, but the noise was muffled. The second came almost immediately after. And the third two seconds later. The last must have been the supply truck. The camper seemed to lift up and tilt at the same time, and the blast half-deafened us. If it had not been for the thick insulation, our eardrums would have been blown out.

Wilfred leaped up and opened the door and plunged out into the heavy smoke and the flames. He turned just before he disappeared and shouted at me. I could not hear him, but I could read his lips.

“Split, mother!”

16

I ran after Wilfred, but our courses diverged. My goal was to get down the slope of the hill as far as possible and to put as many trees behind me as possible. Wilfred had said there were ten missiles in the truck yet with a total explosive force equivalent to 400 pounds of TNT. There would not be much left of the hilltop after Caliban pressed the button.