Cycle of Nemesis (12 page)

“The Time Beast stirs from his Time Vault,” breathed Phoebe, shuddering.

We rose then and entered the hotel, leaving our chairs and our drinks on the balcony, leaving the openness of the balcony to the night and the stars and to whatever forces prowl the dark windy spaces when men sleep.

Lights blazed up reassuringly as the automatics sensed our presence and adjusted the light intensity.

With a fresh drink in my hand and the immediately preceding one wa
rm
ing my stomach I tried to look as though I were not in the grip of abject fear. There seemed to me now to be no question that Khamushkei the Undying could watch and hear us. Once Hall Brennan had joined us the Time Beast had locked onto us like a radar fix; the only time he had been bamboozled had been when inadvertently he had drawn us back to his own Time Vault’s bestiary chamber. For that, awkwardly, was how I conceived of the steel immensity in which we had been flung. So. We were under observation.

I said, “I suggest we all get our heads down in the same room.”

Four pairs of eyes locked glances.

I said, “There happen to be two beds in my room. I can sleep on the floor with a mattress. I shan’t see or hear a thing. I’m so fagged out I could sleep on a clothes line.”

“You poor old buffer,” said good old George, chuckling with his red face aglow, “you probably will have to, one day.”

“Well,” I answered him in kind. “This busted up aviator is for shut-eye. But
muy pronto!”
I hauled a mattress and a couple of sheets in from the next room. “Good night
!
”

The light went out.

What my comrades got up to in the darkness on the two beds was no concern of mine. I just wanted to catch up on my sack-time.

The telephone on the side table rang like all the clappers of hell going off at once.

A startled yell, smothered curses, heaving and thrashings on the beds, heralded a return to order. I waited until decorum prevailed. All the time the phone rang. Uncovering an eye I saw a long white naked arm reach out and Phoebe said grumpily: “Hullo?"

I listened quietly.

“All right—yes, I will tell him—no. No! No, of course not!” She slammed the phone down, its vid screen having remained mercifully dead throughout, and said to the four pairs of listening ears: “Confounded salacious-minded decadent twerp! Wanted to know if I was your wife or mistress, Bert.”

I let that pass. Trifles over other people’s thoughts about me had long since ceased to be important. I said, "What was it, Phoebe?”

“Police are waiting to speak to us. They’ve had a call from Interpol. All of us—they rang your room first, Hall, and got around to Bert’s before they found anyone.”

Lottie said, with primness most amusing, “They must think we are a peculiar lot.”

“Probably we can get away with it if we claim to be a way-out mixed-marriage sect,” I advised her. “You know—multi-marriages within the group. Great fun—or so I’m told.”

Lottie sucked it all up. Then she reached down and threw her slipper at me. “Beast!” she yelped.

The reactions of my comrades reassured me. In normal circumstances, for us to be awakened in the middle of the night by police would have been sufficient for a severe attack of nerves, of apprehension, of fear. But now, instead, we joked casually about other matters. Clearly, once one became involved with Khamushkei the Undying other problems receded with remarkable ease from the forefront of the brain.

“They’ll be knocking on the door any minute, now they’ve found which room we’re in.” Brennan spoke with decision. “I don’t think we want to talk to them like this, do we?”

“You lot creep off to your rooms,” I said. “I’ll stall them until you’re ready.”

By the time a heavy knock rattled the door—no using the robot annunciator for policemen—I was able to tell them come in and sit up in bed looking ruffled and annoyed.

The interview was painfully short.

I was under arrest so fast my feet didn’t touch the ground between my bed and the hotel lobby. I insisted that no woman had been in my room. The burden of proof being with the other side, they let it go. But I saw a nasty triumphant glint in the inspector’s eye as my friends were escorted downstairs one at a time, all fully dressed and all under arrest.

The paddy wagon whined up and we waited our turn to enter. “Imagine this is an old-time raid on a strip-joint,” said Lottie with practical sympathy to Phoebe. “That’ll help you to bear the disgrace, dear.”

To Phoebe, who had been showing signs of a very proper horror at being under arrest and involved with the police, Lottie’s generous advice came as a stiffening bolt of spine-juice. She snapped her back straight.

“Thank you, Lottie, dear,” she said tartly; “I’m afraid I have no knowledge of the circles you frequent.”

Lottie giggled wickedly. “Don’t be afraid, dear.”

Brennan and Pomfret, in the paddy wagon, moved in to sort it out and separate the combatants.

The police officers in their smart
unif
orms
had been impeccably polite. They had treated us as though visiting royalty from old Baghdad had inadvertently mislaid the royal checkbook. No reason for our arrest had been given; I felt pretty sure that if we had challenged them they would have backed down, but one does not antagonize policemen unnecessarily, not until one knows the score. We had not been searched and so still carried our guns.

“They must be laughing back at Gannets,” said Pomfret, stretching his legs. He yawned. “Now they’ve found us I’d like to know what they’re going to charge us with.” He pushed his aim more comfortably around Lottie, who leaned her head down against his shoulder with a contented little sigh. “And as for you, Charlie, did you secret any whisky about your mechanical person like I asked you?”

“Sure, boss.” Charlie’s ugly face slanted down as he turned from an inspection of the outside of the truck to look at his employer. “The best, just as you asked.”

“Good old ironman,” said Pomfret drowsily. “Always rely on old Charlie
...”

“Find anything, Charlie?” I asked.

“Ordinary truck, sir, converted for use as a police van. What you call a paddy wagon. If it is required I can overturn it, stop it, easily enough halt its continued progress.”

“Uh, no thanks, Charlie, not yet, at any rate,” I said.

There was one thing sure about a robot servant: once you
inaugurated
him on a course of action he was like a tornado over Borsuppak for difficulty in stopping.

The police van lurched as we turned out of the main street into one of those still-existing areas of old Baghdad. During the day, when the sun lay its hammer strokes of heat across the mud-walled buildings and arcades and domes, endowing everything with the color of mustard, the whole area looked leveled and flat, with the eyeless walls and flat roofs assuming the appearance of ant burrows in the sand. A languor swayed the city in wreaths of heat and yellow air. Now, at night, the scents persisted, the thin twanging of magical oriental instruments, rising against a bruised sky, entwined music and perfumes.

The paddy wagon lurched again.

“Shift over,” mumbled Phoebe. She nestled closer to Brennan.

Sitting across from them I wondered how on this earth I had got myself into this situation. A nice quiet holiday on dryland, I’d thought, a gentle visit with old friends, savoring fresh air and sunshine, up on the dry crust of the land. Well. The paddy wagon squealed around another comer and we all swayed back as it straightened up.

Out of the blue, Charlie said, “Were heading southwest now.”

At once I realized what he meant. The problem would be, of course, just how much Khamushkei the Undying made of this direction.

Speaking with a seriousness that made the others look across at me with renewed attention, I said, “Are we all agreed that we go on after Khamushkei the Undying? Do we resolve to continue, well knowing what troubles may lie ahead?” I stared about at them. “Well, do we?”

“Yes,” said Phoebe at once. “I’m thinking of my children.”

“That goes for me, too.” Hall Brennan nodded.

"And George and I have a stake in this, too, you know,” said Lottie with spirit.

“And,” I finished, “Charlie will tag along because he's Charlie.”

The police van skidded. We hung on as it squealed to a wheel-locked halt. The engine stalled.

For a moment there was absolute quiet. Then we heard a babble of frightened voices outside. The door bolts shook.

“Wherever it is,” said Brennan dryly, “we’ve arrived.”

The doors of the van began to open.

The
doors of
the van opened.

I surged up, ready for any number of crazy unlikely events; but Charlie, with a strength that made of me a wet-paper image, pushed past and bulked out of the doors, his metal body shining in the glancing golden rays of the morning sun.

“It’s night time!” whispered Phoebe.

The police inspector’s face appeared around Charlie’s bent knees. He looked as though he had been forced unwillingly into an old-time madhouse. His face was the color of moldy cheese.

"It’s—” He tried to speak. My Arabic was just as good as his English, and he tried to speak in both, plus French and Italian—all at the same time.

“Let’s get out, for God’s sake!” yelled Brennan.

Outside the confusion of voices continued.

We all jumped down to the sand.

Baghdad had gone. All around stretched unbroken dunes of sand. The Tigris had gone, also. Of the city of the Abbasid caliphs nothing remained.

Brennan chuckled a short, snorty sort of chuckle.

“Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in twelve fifty-eight and again in fourteen-one. But they never did
that
to it!”

Some of the policemen were down on their knees, heads to Mecca, bottoms in the air, praying hard. I felt for them, I felt guilty as all hell. Poor devils, why did they have to be dragged into this private war between us and the Time Beast?

Then the stupidity of that line of thought made me say roughly to Brennan, “Looks as though we have some recruits in the battle. Humanity, after all, is about to join in and help save itself.”

“It’s ironic, when you consider it,” pointed out Phoebe, joining us, with an amused glance at the praying policemen. “We couldn't go to the police because they wouldn’t have believed us. Now they’re here, willy-nilly. And,” she finished darkly, “they’ll damn well help us now!”

“Still and all,” said Pomfret, worried. “How are we to press on? The Black Maria won’t travel over
this
loose sand.”

“We’ll have to walk," Brennan was saying when he paused and shaded his eyes against the early sun. “No. No, indeed we won’t. Look there
!
”

Coming over the sand toward us at a fair speed were spread out half a dozen or so chariots, their high unsprung wheels, their lavishly embellished small horses clear indication of the importance of the charioteers. These were no rank and file chariots of the army. Nodding plumes, the tinkle of bells, squeal of greased wood axletrees, the cracking flicking of whips blended into a song of majesty and power in the desert kingdoms of which we were now a part.

The chariots swung around us in a spattering cloud of sand and dust as though they were American Indians encircling a wagon train. But that comparison was far from apt, as a moment’s thought showed. The chariots stopped as a shrill command knifed the din of wheels and harness. Then a single arrow sprang from the bow of the charioteer to the right of the king, and smacked solidly into the police van. The arrow struck the metal paneling, glanced off, and hissed into the sand.

I laughed.

“They didn’t expect that. Look at them! They expected the arrow to penetrate and stick in. That way it would have presented a stirring warning. But now!”

The warriors with their massive square beards, their coned and rounded helmets, low over their brows, their compound reflex bows all strung and with arrows quiveringly awaiting the command to loose, and with their long heavy robes of brilliantly dyed colors—all these warriors together with their chariots and their horses and their king could have— “Stepped straight down from the gates of Shalmaneser Three
!
” as Hall Brennan exclaimed.

“That dates us, anyway,” I said. “But I’d be happier if we knew if there’d been a violet shell about the Black Maria. Shalmaneser made Nimrud his capital, didn’t he? And that was a long way north of here.”

“The Assyrians were spreading out then,” Brennan said, not taking his eyes off the chariots. “I mean, the Assyrians were always on the warpath, rampaging about, sei
z
ing and looting and impaling, but they could have gone anywhere, really, in this area. We could still be on track for Khamushkei the Undying.”

“Like coming down as the wolf on the fold, is that it?” said Phoebe, staring at the Assyrian soldiery and their poised bows with genuine excited wonder.

“I say!” exclaimed George Pomfret. The tone of his high-pitched complaint made us all look at him. He looked excited. “I say, you chaps! These jolly old cutthroats are going to have a good go at doing us in, of raping the girls and impaling us—and you go off into an academic name-dropping exercise!” He pulled out his Farley Express.

“Isn’t that unfair, George?” Brennan asked.

“What, old boy?”

“Unfair. Your positronic incoherer. Against a primitive bunch of bow-and-arrow chariot boys?”

“Don’t you believe it!” Pomfret knew what he was talking about. “These little blighters would have your insides hanging out quicker than you could offer to shake hands.”

“It still doesn’t seem right,” I said. “Look at them. They don’t know what to make of us. The king doesn’t know. If it is the king. Anyway. They could decide we’re gods and worship us, or they could decide we’re devils and try to do us in. They’ve seen the girls, and that’ll incline ’em to the latter theory.”

The police inspector made his decision around then.

He had been listening to us; and now, from a source of pride in race and religion, he had regained his courage. He was, truth to tell, a very brave man.

He began to walk toward the Assyrians, with one hand held up before him in the universal sign of peace.

The Assyrians shot him, anyway.

The police sergeant, lunging up, dragged out his service gun and blew the center chariot into charred wreckage and bloody rags. His men finished off the rest.

“I see they’re issued with Karlsruhe One point ones,” observed Pomfret. “A nice little gun, if liable to feed choke at critical moments.”

Lottie was gripping his arm, her face whiter than ever against the red of her hair. “Horrible!” she said. “Horrible!”

"What a beastly affair!” said Phoebe, disgusted.

The policemen, shaken, were moving cautiously forward to inspect what was left.

“That’s the price you pay for progress,” I said, not particularly cleverly. I, too, felt nauseated by what had happened. Violence is universally evil unless the evil it ousts is more violent; that’s rule of thumb but it’s practical and nearly always right.

We had been landed by the Time Beast in an era of Mesopotamia’s past of exceptional cruelty and violence. Despite the treasures uncovered from the sands by devoted archaeologists, despite the great statues, the wall-carvings, the literature, despite these evidences of civilization, the Assyrians had been among the most bloody-minded of any peoples. Every year demanded its campaigns, its sieges, its looting and impaling. Life—even though the ordinary peasant went on, indestructibly—life was not pleasant
The policemen were picking up bits of chariot, shreds of gaily colored cloth, fused weapons. They all looked dazed. A dozen or so, they acted like leaderless sheep now their inspector lay dead, the arrow still feathered in his breast.

“I feel responsible for them, dammit all!” Brennan said, disgustedly.

“Missing your analyst already, Hall?” Pomfret said with unusual black perception.

“Well, we can’t just leave them lying about here,” Phoebe said expressively. “Can we?”

The policemen kept up their aimless wandering, their fingering of fragments of the carnage, their occasional abandoned prostrations to Mecca, their jerkily disjointed attempts at conversation.

Was this a foretaste of the reactions of the rest of the world when Khamushkei the Undying struck?

Recalling Paul Benenson’s reactions to what had been a nightmarish situation strengthened my unwilling belief that I, despite my own fears and reluctance, had to do all I, personally, could to avert this world tragedy.

So that was a bombastically egoistic point of view. I didn’t welcome that, either. But, apart from the few saintly exceptions, most of the trouble-shooters for the world over the centuries have been egotistical bastards.

“We’ll have to push on toward As Samaiya somehow,” I said roughly. “I’ve been forming an interesting theory about the Time Beast. I figure he’s half idiot—probably after you’d been walled-up for seven thousand years you’d be an imbecile, too—and he reacts to the slightest threat. If we make an attempt to reach him, however feeble, he is going to make some movement in opposition.”

“In his case, that means time-jumping us,” said Brennan.

“Yes.”

“A madman, walled up for seven thousand years,” breathed Phoebe. Her face showed her appalled feelings.

“A man, did you say?” said Pomfret, wiping sweat from his forehead. “A devil, more likely.”

“Or a god,” added Brennan, somberly.

“Now don’t start handing me out all that mystic mishmash about the idiot-god on his time-throne; talking about him with one eye hanging over your shoulder, all occult and primitive.” I spoke quickly and energetically, for if Khamushkei the Undying could not only see us but hear us also, then we must not feed him information that would finish us. “We all know what Khamushkei the Undying is.”

“Yes,” said Pomfret, and described him accurately, if obscenely. We all chuckled at good old George and that lowered the tone of the conversation satisfactorily.

For—for I suddenly understood, just as I myself spoke, why we had not so far failed. All we needed for death had been there in Borsuppak. Had, in fact, been there in that unnamed wilderness of stone knife-edges. Only the intervention of Khamushkei the Undying had dragged us away from death—admittedly, he had put us into another death-oriented situation—and he had done that because he was old and lonely and mad and very, very frightened.

Now, here in this very moment of time, we were as good as dead. I couldn’t say this out loud, for fear of the Time Beast’s prying eyes and ears; but he alone, ironically, could save us from the desert death into which he had consigned us.

“Grab everything useful,” I said. “Charlie, you’d better strip the van. Hall—you’re in charge, you’ll have to tell us what to do. Desert drill, I mean, and all that stuff.” I glanced at the aimless policemen. “They’ll have to be looked out for, too.”

Hall Brennan had been regarding me, his head cocked a little on one side, like a sparrow deciding about a starling.

Now he said, “We march light, Bert. Charlie can bring the big canvas cover from the van. That’ll be useful to shield us from the direct sun at noon. Water—well-well take what there is here, in the rad, what anyone has. I’m damn thirsty now; but as leader I now formally forbid anyone to mention how thirsty they are. Check?”

“Check,” we said in unison.

Explaining to the Baghdad policemen why they should begin to march into the desert on a southwesterly course would have been the sort of problem best left unimagined. They still possessed their weapons. Any attempt to overawe them with ours would provoke a blood bath. Surprising us, and yet with a predictable obedience, they simply joined up with us and began to march in our tracks.

No sooner had we begun this semi-comical Foreign Legion desert march than the blazing sunshine deepened and exploded into a series of pinwheels of fire. The desert rocked. A vast wind soughed over our heads. The policemen threw themselves to the ground, screaming their panic. We veteran time-travelers huddled around the comfortingly husky metal form of Charlie.

When everything quietened down we lifted our heads and took stock of our new situation.

Superficially, the scene to the north appeared the same: a yellow and brown wasteland of sand. The odd thought crossed my mind that the Time Beast might have used up all his powers to hurl us about in time and that his last attempt had failed. Then I looked south.

From a slight elevation we looked over a garden-land irrigated by sparkling narrow channels, broken by small fields and whitely dusty roads and by the brooding ocher bulks of square-towered and battlemented cities.

Each city was probably less than half a mile on a side, cramped and buttressed, with ziggurats rising here and there in pitiful expansion of political and religious muscles. I could see five cities within easy reach and contained in the field of vision directly ahead. To look to right and left would bring in as many more.

“Well, Hall,” said Phoebe practically. “When are we now?”

“When are we—” echoed Pomfret. Then he chuckled. “That’s good!”

Brennan considered. I looked at the policemen. Once more, dazed, baffled, not really believing what was happening to them, they had upended themselves toward Mecca. The direction of Mecca from Baghdad was roughly approximating the direction we wished to follow for As Samaiya. I regarded this as a capital ironic joke.

“Look,” I said, interrupting Brennan. “The policemen are praying toward Mecca, and also toward Khamushkei the Undying. I wonder if he’s getting a kick out of it?”

“I am,” said Phoebe. Little though I knew Phoebe Desmond’s feelings on life, her liberal university background with its unfettered permissiveness would almost inevitably give her a self-righteous tolerant contempt for religions of revealed godhead. She’d not taken the policemen seriously all along.

Lottie fished out her compact—a new one she’d got through the autovend and not the one she’d dropped back on that ebony steel floor—and began to do things to her face to protect its particularly susceptible coloring from the sun. Pomfret glanced at her for a moment with a fond smile and then joined the men to stare ahead into this fresh landscape.

For a moment I wondered if we were all staggeringly unaware of how cretinous we all were. Here, on the brink of a hideous death, we carried on with
trivialities
and personalities as though back home with the Sunday supplements.