And The Devil Will Drag You Under (1979) (23 page)

Mac surveyed the man with more than idle interest now. Obviously this man was from his own world in real time and was, therefore, probably his competitor.

He was a tall, thin, muscular man who appeared to be in his mid-forties. His hair and bushy mustache were a premature gray, as were his equally bushy eyebrows, which seemed to connect at the apex of the bridge on his nose. He looked more classically Slavic than German, though.

"Calm yourself, my friend," Abaddon soothed. "I would not forget you, at least."

"You cut it pretty damn close, almost too close," the newcomer grouched, but he had softened a bit from his previous anger as the realization came that, close or not, he
had
been spared.

"Come! Sit! Eat if you wish. We have just finished, but you should not go hungry," the demon invited. "Thanks, but no, thank you," the man responded. "I had my last meal an hour or so ago-everything I ever wanted to eat, even a bottle of Rothschild 'forty-seven. If I get hungry again I can always whip up something else to eat
here."

That was bad. It meant that this stranger knew the demons for what they were and implied that he also well understood how to use this training ground. Abaddon had called in an old-timer, his best. Mac turned to the demon and whispered, "Aren't you even going to introduce us?"

The demon laughed. "Well, bless me! Of course! Mac Walters, this is-let me get it right-Dr.

Hans Martin Kroeger, head of the secret police of the GDR."

"GDR?" Mac responded, a bit puzzled.

"East Germany," snapped Kroeger impatiently. "Besides, that was only my current identity, and it's gone now with the planet. I prefer my classical name, which I have not been able to use in a very long time. I am Boreas." He said the last as if the name should have meant something to Mac.

When it didn't he looked doubly annoyed.

"Look, see? That's the trouble with that world today, anyway. Just as well it was blown away.

He's never even heard of me," the man complained. "Americans," he mumbled under his breath.

Abaddon leaned over and half whispered to Mac. "He was one of your plane's leading sorcerers and alchemists. One of the best minds of what you would call the early Middle Ages."

That gave Mac a start. "And he's still
alive?
"

Boreas shrugged and gave a curious half-smile in Abaddon's direction. "One of my own developed processes," he told him, "although I dare say it pays to have friends."

The demon dismissed the topic with a gesture. "Well, come over and sit, anyway. I have a job for you for high stakes. If you want to enjoy
this
life, you'll have to win."

Boreas was suddenly tense. He came over and sat, fixing steel-gray eyes on the demon; his finely etched Slavic face, rough-hewn and almost triangular beneath the bushy mustache, was all business. "So you
were
going to leave me to die there," he said in a low but steady tone that conyeyed acid. "You only pulled me because I was needed."

Abaddon sighed. "Look, I could argue with you, I know, but why bother? The result's the same no matter what."

"He didn't even know the Earth was in trouble until I told him," Mac put in, hoping to drive a further wedge. Instead his comment seemed to ease the sorcerer's mind considerably.

"All right, then. I know you've been out of touch. Hell-when was it last? Sometime in the seventeen hundreds, I think."

"Earlier," the demon responded. "Besides, with all my people you've talked to over the centuries, I'm the one who saved you."

"Fair enough," Boreas admitted. "So what's this little game all about?"

"That's exactly what it is," Abaddon told him. "A game." Quickly he explained what was going on, what Mac was doing there, the stakes and the general rules they'd agreed upon.

"Sounds fair enough," the sorcerer agreed. "I'm ready any time."

Mac was somewhat appalled by the man. There was something inherently evil in him, something that radi-ated a sense of the sinister. Yet here he was readily agreeing to a contest which, if he won, would doom his native world, and Mac said as much.

"Harumph!" The sorcerer snorted. "So what's worth saving about it? With the technocrats in full charge it was rapidly moving either toward nuclear self-destruction or to being a sterile world of robotic people. No character, no stomach. I don't know why you're so keen on it. Maybe a few dozen of all the billions would do the same for you-and they're all dead now, anyway. All the greats are gone, too-Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the best of a bad lot. Look who's replaced them!

Colorless little men turned out in a bureaucracy factory, so lacking in anything that even the people they rule can hardly remember their names and faces! So here, with this deal, I team up with a powerful man who's also my gateway to thousands of other worlds and with a crack at a piece of the action on an Eye of Baal. Don't give me any of that duty crap. Your own popular democracy would gleefully murder you if you were the slightest bit of incon-venience to it. Don't bother to refute that-just think about a half million dead in Vietnam and let's get back to the business at hand!"

Mac Walters had no intention of responding to the tirade, yet it disturbed him. Why
was
he doing this, anyway? All that he'd learned on this mission so far was just how insignificant the human race really was, created playthings and perhaps byproducts of some inhuman scientific team's project. Rats in a specially constructed maze, no more. Even the religions were shams, all of them. If you received life after death, it would still be as the plaything of some godlike demonic professor like Abaddon, perhaps as a sub-human monster like the girl in the graveyard. He could understand Boreas now, a little-the man was ready to make the best of a humiliating position. And yet, and yet-that understanding worried him. There
had
to be something more to being a human being than Boreas and the demons had made it out to be. Something more. The fact that the rats had been created and placed in the maze did not automatically make them inferior, just less powerful. But only at the moment-not absolutely less powerful. These demons had the edge because of superior technology and eons of experience-yet they did not seem any smarter than the average person he knew.

Perhaps the rats could triumph over the maze and turn the tables on the experimenters. He had plun-dered one of their precious amplifiers; the girl, Jill, had also done so at least once. If the lab is burning down and the rats save themselves, what, then, did
that
say about their relative positions? He wasn't sure, but it must mean something. It just
had
to mean something!

"Shall we establish the specifics?" Abaddon sug-gested. When the other two men nodded he continued.

"All right. We'll start right outside the cafe here, in the street. Both of you will begin naked and un-armed, although what you do once the contest is begun is up to you. Seven kilometers down the road will be a life-sized granite statue of me. To make the game more interesting, I'll put the jewel in my outstretched stone palm. There is no time limit. The first man to the jewel will touch it and say the name he must-you, Mr. Walters, will say Asmodeus and so take it to him; you, Boreas, will utter my name. You know the thing will destroy you if you don't, so I have no fear there. I will establish conditions whereby no one but you two or myself can touch the jewel, so no matter what stray souls are around, they can't queer the deal. In addition, there will be no teleporting and no growing wings or levitation flying. You must make it the hard way. If either of you kills the other, the survivor wins, of course; if both of you are killed, then I still win."

That last got to Mac. "And you will not in any way set up anything to kill either of us," he added. "You will not interfere in any way to help or hurt either of us, even to give your man, here, information."

"Fair enough," the demon agreed. "I will be a spectator, nothing more, once the race is under way. But you could still kill each other, you know, or be done in by leftovers on this plane pledged to others, like your little girl ghoul. I can't do much about them."

That sounded fair enough. "Let's do it," Mac said flatly.

The three of them got up and went outside. The ghostly choir was still chanting in the church down the street, and other ghosts seemed to be living it up in the saloon across the way.

Abaddon smiled, snapped his fingers, and they were both naked. Mac's useful side arm was gone as well.
It doesn't matter,
he told himself.
I can wish it back in a second.

"I said I would not interfere in any way once the race began, and I will not," the demon told them. Mac was barely listening. Boreas had the body of a youth-ful man, reminding him of a linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.

"Seven kilometers down the road you are facing," the demon reminded them. "Ready?" Both men tensed visibly.

Abaddon smiled wickedly and snapped his fingers once again.

Suddenly they were no longer in the tiny western town facing a bleak and featureless dirt road.

There was traffic and crowds and noise and sky and tall buildings all around.

"That's cheating!" Mac screamed, but it was too late.

"Go!" yelled the demon gleefully.

He was honorable, yes. He would not interfere after they had begun. Before, though- Mac felt he'd been had, and could only console himself that Boreas must be equally confused.

Both men, naked as the day they were born, were standing on a grassy knoll in the warm sunshine under a blue sky. They were in an exact copy of the Battery in New York City, facing uptown-people, traffic, and all-and the little old ladies were already appropriately shocked.

The street they were facing was the foot of Broadway.

3

It
was
a fair complication. Boreas looked as shocked as he did. The difference was that the sorcerer recovered a split second before Mac, dropped to the grass, and suddenly there was a gun in his hand. He fired.

Mac dropped and rolled as people screamed and scattered in all directions. He poised for a second, sure now that he'd lost at the start and that a second shot would finish him.

It didn't come. He looked up to see a veritable horde of cops, guns drawn, running toward them, then risked a quick glance at where Boreas should be, very near him.

The sorcerer wasn't there. There were people run-ning all around, but no one who looked remotely like the demon's agent. Mac didn't waste any time now; the cops were closing in on him as well and he was still naked and exposed. Clearly Boreas didn't want to risk being shot by the cops and had changed into someone who could blend into the crowd. Mac decided he'd better do the same. No teleporting was one of the rules, and no flying; but, Manhattan or not, this was really still the training ground and he could still influence things.

Suddenly he was up, a pistol in his hand, and run-ning toward an empty spot on the grass near him. The transformation had been instantaneous and was accompanied by a wish that the cops would not notice it.

They didn't. They caught up to him and surrounded the same empty space he'd reached, and they all looked puzzled.

Mac Walters, now just one of the uniformed cops, looked puzzled, too. He glanced around for any sign of his foe but saw none. That was bad. He wondered how familiar the European was with New York-probably very much so, which was why Abaddon had picked it.

As for him, he'd only been in New York for games, and they hadn't been in Manhattan. His business was a western one; he'd just never had occasion to really be in the city any more.

It also took him some time to extricate himself from the masses of cops. He noticed that some were wearing walkie-talkies, added one to his own belt, then wished a call for him to report back to his squad car. It helped.

As he walked across the park he considered the possibilities. Why not a squad car? The street was Broadway and there Broadway was. Just get into the car, turn on the light and siren, and off he'd go.

He saw one by the curb, lights still flashing, and headed toward it. Just a few meters before he reached the car, though, it blew up in a tremendous ball of smoke and flame. The force of the explosion knocked him down, and he got back to his feet unsteadily but growing angry now.

Boreas! That son of a bitch was somewhere around and actually
toying
with him! Ap-parently the bastard thought the game so easily won, the opponent so poor, that he would play a while before the kill.

And maybe he was right, unless . . . Mac looked around, spotted a steel grate that had a rumbling noise issuing from it, a noise that was almost com-pletely covered by the conflagration-which was also again attracting cops and passersby.

I wish I were made of smoke and sucked right down that grate!
he
thought angrily.

In a split second, almost before he realized that his wish had come true, he was pulled to and down through the grating.

A young stockbroker type with tweed suit and horn-rimmed glasses standing nearby yelled something an-grily, turned to smoke, and followed him.

Mac Walters drifted lazily over the crowds waiting for the subway and congratulated himself.

By all rights he should have been dead now; sheer luck and Boreas's overconfidence had allowed him to escape. Now he could simply turn into anyone he wanted to, blend with the crowd down there, and make it fairly quickly to Times Square. A map behind some plastic on a post in back of the platform gave him a color-coded guide to the New York subway system. He looked it over, found he had to be on the other side of the platform, and lazily drifted that way.

He knew he should be elated; even if the sorcerer were around here himself, drifting invisibly as Mac was, it would be impossible now for Boreas to get a clear fix on him. And yet something in the back of his mind nagged at him, a certain feeling he couldn't shake that he'd made a mistake somewhere. Not an error in this-he knew that he was free of Boreas unless he did something stupid. Something else. He tried to think, pressured suddenly by the rumbling far off in the tube that told him that a train was coming. It would be easy now; just step on the train, ride to Times Square-perhaps with Boreas himself aboard-and make the final race to the jewel. Simple. Direct.