Cycle of Nemesis (8 page)

“What’s this all about?” I asked a little too pugnaciously. If it weren’t important I would be annoyed over being woken up into a pale and friendless dawn; if it were serious, then I would be annoyed about being the last one informed. Either way, I meant to be as irritable as I felt.

“Look over the side, Bert,” Hall said. By twisting, the others could all look through the windows. I complied.

“It certainly looks as though either you or the autopilot’s gone on the blink,” I said sourly. Below us marched a procession of unending waves of gray stone, sharp-edged granite spines, roofs of veined rock that extended into a misty horizon. The sun placed slanting rays of light across the scene and set thick black shadows in the lee of every ridge. “I don’t recognize the landscape.”

“The computer says we are flying over Lebanon. There should be sand, with olive and date plantations. There should be roads and houses and cities.”

I put the knuckles of my forefingers against my eyes and rubbed experimentally. It felt like sand graters at work. I blinked, opened my eyes and said, “Well, we’re certainly not there. The computer’s off its tiny head.”

“I’ve checked. I know how to run a plane’s computer. We’re where we expected to be at this time; we’ve crossed the coast—”

“Well—this country’s a big place. It’s not all cultivated yet; a lot is still desert. Maybe this is where the sarxfs been blown off the ridges—”

“Go whistle in the dark somewhere else, Bert!” Brennan spoke with heat. The others had left this wrangle to us. Clearly they had no idea of what had happened.

“All right, Halil.
You tell me what you think.”

“I will.” Brennan’s tough face showed his distaste for what he had to say. “I believe Khamushkei the Undying has got to us in some way. He’s done something to us— or, rather, to the world around us!”

I felt a quiver of fear. I knew, well enough, that the scene outside did not belong in the world I knew.

A desert of sand, yes; not a sea of unending rocky waves.

Pomfret cleared his throat. He had changed his clothes and now wore a neat khaki suit and a vivid emerald scarf around his neck. “The question is: what’s to be done?”

“We can’t land. That’s for sure. We’re not equipped with V.T.O.L. apparatus on this jet, so—”

“So we either go on hoping for a field until our fuel runs out, when we will crash”—I looked around at the others—“or we turn back and see what the sea is like.” “We turn back . . .” Brennan repeated. His face suddenly tightened as though he now understood something he should have realized long ago. “Of course! That’s the answer. If we turn back we are no longer heading for Khamushkei the Undying.”

“Well?”

“That’s the answer.” He stormed at us. “Can’t you see? Why is Khamushkei the Undying called the Time Beast? I didn’t know—not until now
!
But now I understand! Somehow Khamushkei the Undying has flung us back in time. That land below us must have existed before the rock broke down to form the sands of the desert; before the seas, before—”

“Now hold on, Hall.”

“If we advance toward him now he will hurl us about in time. If we turn back—”

He seized the controls, uncoupling the autopilot, swung the plane around in a long smooth bank. When he had put the aircraft on a reciprocal course, he sat back in the pilot’s seat with a little gasp.

Expectantly, we all stared out the windows.

I have no idea what I expected to see. A miraculous change of the landscape, perhaps, in writhing undulations of rock and sand. Below, the fleeting shadow of the aircraft, clearly visible to us now that we flew westward in the dawning, a black cross rising and falling in swift irregular surges over the unceasing hogbacks, remained imprinted on the same tortured landscape.

Brennan let rip a curse.

“I thought—”

“Give it time, Hall.” I had my own ideas. “This isn’t pretty. Don’t let’s make it worse.”

He understood what I meant and glanced covertly across at Phoebe Desmond.

She was looking through the windows, her face screwed up and a growing look of horror on her face.

Quickly I followed the direction of her gaze, almost aware with a sickening precognitive fear of what I would see swooping down out of the sky upon us.

This time the beast was an utukku; clearly no benign influences had ever throbbed in that beastly breast. What combination of animal horrors had gone to make up the winged genie I couldn’t clearly make out for, without a moment’s hesitation, Brennan had flung the jet aircraft forward and up at full throttle.

“The thing’s actually gaining on us!” shouted Pomfret.

“I’ve given this crate full boost!”

“It’s darting in—”

The aircraft shook with a sullen blow, moving sluggishly, and I felt the unpleasant sensation of moving nothingness beneath my feet. “A blasted chimera can’t hurt a jet!” I said harshly; but I knew I was merely fanning my mouth.

Again the plane shuddered. The jets began to cough. What they had ingested I didn’t know, but I could no longer see the utukku.

“It’s gone into the intake!” yelled Brennan, twisted around in his seat up front, his face contorted.

The plane nosed down.

Lottie fell forward and Pomfret struggled to get out of his seat to reach her.

“Can’t you hold her up, Hall?” I yelled.

He wrestled with the controls.

“Without power she has the gliding angle of a brick. I’m trying.”

In a frightened group we watched as Brennan fought stubbornly to hold the plane up.

The jagged blades of rock masquerading as a landscape leaped up below.

Lottie sobbed and buried her face in Pomfret’s shoulder. He looked at me across her red-golden hair and tried to smile. I looked away. Phoebe huddled in her seat, not taking her eyes off Brennan.

“Strap yourselves in,” he said curtly, not turning around.

Pomfret managed to strap Lottie in somehow. I helped Phoebe. Our ears popped as we lost altitude. I didn’t like this one little bit. But Hall Brennan was up there in the hot seat and I remembered how I’d figuratively trusted him with the harpoon and the last oxy bottle; now he had the controls of all our lives in his hands.

““I’ll try to put her down athwart the ridges. If we’re lucky we’ll slide far enough to break our speed before we slip into a valley.” His shoulders heaved as he fought the controls. “Then the wings and tail will rip off and we’ll slue. Be ready to smash your way out at once. We’ll probably bum. I’ve set all the automatics, so the foam will come on, but...”

I’ve been through some excruciating experiences in my time. I never want to go through another airplane crash.

Looking through the forward windshield I could see the evil razor-backed ridges racing for us like a petrified sea storm. Lower and lower we swept. The wind screaming past the fuselage tortured ou
r nerves. I shut my mouth and t
ried to hold my jaws locked yet relaxed. I didn’t want to scream. ...

Lower. The nose came up with painful deliberation. Brennan hauled back on the stick. It looked as though we were going straight into the spine of a ridge. Then the starboard wing dipped. Brennan cursed and crossed the stick, pedaling the rudder controls. Laboriously the plane evened up but the nose dropped.

Before Brennan could pull the nose further up it struck.

The noise battered past my eardrums and rang insanely in my head.

Giant sparks flew off the metal hull; foam gushed from the fire outlets. I was thrown forward against the straps. I saw daylight spring into being past jagged sharks’ teeth of metal as the nose broke away from the fuselage. The wings fell off. One engine catapulted across the next ridge like a murderer’s head decapitated by one stroke.

Sparks blazed up inside my head, behind my eyes, dazzling me. No pain struck, yet I knew I had been cruelly smashed against the bulkhead as my seat supports gave way.

The last thing I saw before the blackness fell down was Brennan’s head bent over his controls, his arms and legs and body still trying to direct the shattered wreck that had once been an airplane.

Any ideas
I may have harbored that the altered ground below—that soul-shriveling expanse of naked ridged rock in place of the open sands of the desert—had been a form of mass hallucination imposed on us by a malign outside agency had vanished completely and brutally in the moment of impact.

A groan reached me and I tried to move. The straps restrained me. The weight of the chair had not fallen on me directly, fortunately, and I was able to wriggle a hand free and snap the clasps free. I could feel pains all over; standing up and moving arms and legs and neck convinced me I had no bones broken, though.

Then I set about helping the others out.

Standing, finally, outside the smashed fuselage on those hard and brittle slopes of rock, we presented a pretty miserable spectacle.

Lottie sniffled into her handkerchief tissues. Phoebe kept close to Brennan. Our clothes had been ripped and we had contusions and scratches enough to exhaust the first aid box. Patched up, we took stock of our situation.

“If we tried to walk on that we’d ruin our shoes in half an hour and have bloody flayed feet in another quarter,” Brennan said gloomily.

“But we can’t just stay here,” pointed out Pomfret.

“I know. So what do we do?”

“It’s not,” I said unhelpfully, “as though we’d crashed in normal circumstances. The radio is smashed anyway, but I’d gamble if Hall’s theory is right all we’d hear would be static. There just isn’t anyone else around to help.”

“Well, I’m not going to be beaten by that crumb Khamushkei the Undying without a fight!” snapped Hall Brennan. Mentally, I applauded his show. For the sake of the others, particularly the girls, he was whistling in the dark with a vengeance.

Unless we had the intervention of another party there would be no way out of this for us. So much was clear. Now all we had to do was hope that the third party— the intermediary between us and the Time Beast—would hurry to make his appearance; already I was thirsty and eyeing Brennan’s water bottle with a calculating eye. We couldn’t hold out for very long on these naked slopes of rock, with a sun scorching down and growing every moment more balefully brilliant.

When the distant drone of an aircraft engine reached down to us with fingers of mechanical hope the others reacted as though the impossible had occurred. They jumped up excitedly. Pomfret whipped off his tattered khaki shirt and began to wave it over his head like a maniac. Even Brennan shaded his eyes against the sun and tried to see the
dot of the aircraft long before human eyes could pick it up against that steely glare.

“The sound will carry along way in this absolute silence,” I said, still sitting on the cushions we had dragged out and arranged in the shade of the fuselage. “Whoever it is will get here soon enough now.”

“Well!” said Pomfret, astonished, I saw with a chuckle that held no malice for the brick-red-faced man. “You’re a cold-blooded fish, all right, Bert!”

“Not so. It is obvious that whoever that is is Coming for us. It just has to be like that. The Time Beast couldn’t have worked it any other way.”

Brennan lowered his head. His face showed stark orange and brown and silver highlights in the heat. “You’re pretty sure, Bert.”

“Look.” I pointed and then stood up, leisurely. “There he is.”

An airplane slanted low across the ridges, like a bumbling moth over a cabbage patch. Now we could distinctly hear the soughing beat of turbo-prop engines. The other four all waved and halooed like mad. I watched. Then I took out the Farley Express and held it loosely in my hand, pointing at that harsh rock beneath our feet.

The machine up there was not a helicopter nor an antigrav flier, the usual crafts for short-haul routes within city boundaries, so it must be some version of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft very familiar a century or so ago. I wondered why. It came to a swaying halt above us as the wings slowly rotated around their main beams until the engines and propellers pointed skyward. Then, with a screaming whine from the turbo-props, the aircraft began to let down.

"He’ll never make a landing on these knife-edges of rock!” yelled Pomfret.

“Warn him, George!” shouted Phoebe, both hands clasped together under her chin, her head tilted back.

Four long stilt-like legs thrust out from the fuselage of the V.T.O.L. turbo-prop. Two reached down perhaps two feet, the other two reached down a good ten feet
With a soughing jolt the aircraft came to rest. The props stopped spinning as the engines died. The silence creaked back.

The canopy opened. A dark figure appeared, turning its back on us, climbing down. I heard a gasp from Pomfret
“Charlie! For Pete’s sake!
Charli
e
!
”

“I trust I find you in good health, boss,” said Pomfret’s robot butler, his battered, comically ugly face bent quizzically above us.

“You old son of a gun! But how the hell could
you
be here?”

“There are a growing number of things I do not understand,” Charlie said in his cheerfully metallic voice. “I have been programmed on a liberal basis, thanks to your generosity and broad-mindedness, boss. I deduce we have in some unmechanical way been hurled back into the past.”

The way Charlie said unmechanical gave it the connotation of the deepest depths of depraved evil.

“Yes, we’d figured that out. But—why you as well?”

“I followed you, boss, when you left so hurriedly without a program for the house, without a forwarding address, without any means of contacting you—your radio channels were closed out on your heli—and when the police began asking awkward questions.” His metal face glinted in the sunshine and I could have sworn it held the father and mother of ironic smiles. "Thai another of those peculiar winged-bull creatures appeared. I then realized you must be in some danger and so I contacted my robot friends who quickly told me you had taken a taxi to Standstead. From there you left a plain trail—”

“Oh, no I” Brennan shook his head. “I won’t have that. No one could have followed us—especially in a propeller plane. You—”

Charlie moved his head and again the lights made me think his face smiled. If quartz lenses and speaker grilles can hold an expression, then he did. And who, in this amazing world, is to say that a robot’s face cannot express his reactions to external stimuli?

“You’ll pardon me, sir. I took the liberty of booking on the rocket flight to Beirut. From there I hired this antiquated desert buggy—the rocket must have passed your jet at considerable altitude and speed during the night.” His mechanical insides whirred. “Not so?”

I laughed out loud.

Phoebe jumped as though I’d stung her.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Lottie truculently. “I’m roasting alive. Let’s get aboard and have a drink.”

“As usual,” said Pomfret, helping Lottie up the plane’s ladder, “Lottie puts the most important essential in a nutshell”

“That I’ll grant you,” I said cheerfully.

“And, anyway,” said Pomfret, when we had collected in the smaller airplane’s cramped cabin, “you, I suppose, Charlie, must have used my name to hire this?”

"Why, yes, boss. I could not have obtained the hire otherwise.”

“If we go back, and assuming we can get back into our own time again, the cops will be waiting for us.

They’ll probably book us all for the murder of that girl at Gannets.” Pomfret took a long swig from the glass Charlie had provided by some robotic sleight of hand and sighed.

“We go forward.” Brennan spoke matter-of-factly.

“Forward?”

“We go on our mission. We have plenty of fuel, we have weapons, food and water. Once Khamushkei the Undying sees—in whatever way it is he sees what we are doing—that we haven’t given up, that were still after him, he’ll have to do something else.”

“Something else nasty,” Phoebe said, with a grimace.

“Sure. But one thing’s certain: we won’t be left to rot here.”

With that, Charlie at the controls, we rose into the air, turned sharply eastward and began to pick up speed.

Flying lower than when we had driven faster and higher across these frozen waves in the jet, I was able to study them more clearly, and reach one or two conclusions. Granites and not limestones meant that we must be a long way back in time-assuming Hall Brennan’s theory to be true. Nothing moved out there. No loose sand or dust whipped b
ack from those petrified crests. A
lifeless world fled past beneath our wings, a world which waited for the green hand of life to fall across it, a wait which would last for millions of years.

The plane tilted. Charlie reacted with robotic speed and precision. Again the plane swung and this time it tumbled across the sky in a sickening sliding motion before the robot had it under control again.

The sun went out.

The world went black.

Lottie screamed. Brennan cursed.

Then the sound of wind screaming past the fuselage told us the plane was diving. Charlie hauled back. Be* low us mist coiled as sunlight burst out again, bright ·yellow sunlight that bounced back from that silver mist below and stung our eyes.

Among the oaths and screams and cries, Charlie remained aloof and calm. The aircraft pulled out of that pitching dive and like a
s
kimmin
g
skate rose into the sunshine.

Below us the mist extended as far as we could see.

“We’re on course for Khamushkei the Undying,” Brennan exulted. “And he doesn’t like it
!
He’s panicking!”

After that terrifying alteration of the world around us, we
had
to believe, where I think that previously we had not fully comprehended our situation, and with that understanding came fear. I know I wished, then, that we could turn back. But that momentary weakness, or logical reaction, call it what you will, passed in a sense of responsibility for the others. Whatever they felt, they were going on. If that was what they wanted I could not dissuade them. Perhaps pride or fear made me shrink from making the attempt. Whatever it was, I determined not to let myself be deflected again.

Hall Brennan, too, must have shared much of the content of my thoughts, for he glanced across at me with a rueful smile.

“Phoebe,” he said to me. “She’s agreed to go along. We kinda—we kinda fit together, right, like, you know, Bert.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“I’ve no living relations; as far as I know, that is,” he went on as the aircraft drove hard over the mist eastwards. “And Phoebe has decided to join up with me. But George ... ?”

Pomfret stopped talking to Lottie to say briefly, “The same applies to Lottie and me. I decide my own fate. Lottie decides hers, and she’s decided to join up with me, like Phoebe and Hall.”

“I’ve an old mother somewhere,” Lottie said, holding Pomfret’s hand. “But I was the last of seven children. They won’t miss me at home. I took my earnings back to the slums for three good years. Then I quit. After that I bought my own clothes and fought my own battles and, well, a secretary to a financial tycoon like Paul Benenson
is
something, after all.”

“Hush, Lottie,” said Pomfret. “You did well. But now you’re with me.”

“And if that is the case,” Brennan said, with a fresh accession of cheerfulness that I, for one, found stimulating, “we’re off to see the Wizard.” He laughed. “We’re off to shut Khamushkei the Undying back into his Vault.”

This was as good a time as any, I decided, to tax Hall Brennan about
hims
elf I asked.

“All you need to know about me, Bert,” he said with that taut facial expression and the crow’s-feet around his eyes indicating plainly that he was not going to tell me anything vital, “is that I’ve been hunting the Time Beast for a long time now, that he killed a couple of my pals, that all my personal inherited fortune has been spent on that one object, and that I’m panting to get even with him.”

“So,” I said to them with what I hoped was not undue levity in my voice, “we’re all agreed and more or less happy about what we’re doing.”

“Yes.”

The plane bore on through the midday sunlight. Below us its shadow danced and. disappeared, reformed and rebounded from the mist. Nothing could be discerned through that bulky cloud layer.

The map I hauled out of my jacket pocket crackled loudly in the muffled cabin. Everyone craned across to look.

“We’d have been here,” I said, putting my finger on a spot nearly halfway from the coast to Baghdad, “if we were still in our own time.”

“We’re still in that position, I’d guess,” said Brennan confidently. “This land area suffered some peculiar ups and downs, seas, sediments, deserts—but my guess is we stay in the same geographic longitude and latitude coordinates.”

“That seems reasonable,” confirmed Pomfret.

Charlie clicked and whirred. We took that for assent.

The girls nodded together. So far, I felt with reasonable confidence and relief, they had behaved remarkably well. What they would do when we landed and took on Khamushkei the Undying at close quarters remained to be seen.

Charlie broke in. “A break in the clouds ahead.”

None of us had had the temerity to suggest we dive down through the clouds.

They probably extended right down to ground level.

When Charlie guided the plane down through the bulging cloud-cliffed break we saw that guess had been correct: like piles of candy floss, the clouds rose from the ground. We could see the billowing inner movements and the trailing wisps, creamy and pink from this angle. Then we looked at the ground.

“I’ve given up saying I don’t believe it,” said Brennan, with a stifled bark of laughter. “I suppose this time we’re in now must have been before the desert swept in and covered everything.”

Below us now lay a patchwork quilt of fields and meadows, trees and trickling watercourses. I looked quickly for a sight of a city or of any human habitation, for the very regularity of the fields indicated human husbandry and agriculture. The different shades of green down there came very restfully to my eyes after the brutal granitic grays and the featureless silver of the clouds.

“You must be right, Hall.” Pomfret shifted around to look downward better. “I don’t see any people . . He finished speaking doubtfully. We all knew what he meant.

Ahead of us the other side of the cloud break moved ponderously forward, this bank of clouds, we could see, not reaching all the way down to the ground. We could just make out the rain pouring down from the cloud base. The sunshine cut a sharp swathe of brilliance between the two cloud masses. A few birds pirouetted in the gulf.

Then, surprising us all, a small airplane drifted from the rain and slanted down to a landing on a narrow field. We stared at the plane. Bright orange in color, With dragonfly wings that blurred with speed, it held for a moment a magical jeweled quality.

“I’ve never seen a ship like that before,” Brennan spoke with the complete authority of the experienced aviator.

The insect-like wings blurred and then slowed and stopped. The plane touched down. Three men and a woman alighted and stood looking up at us. We could just make out the white dots of their faces, upturned to the sun.

“They’re as puzzled as we are.”

“I don’t like the idea of this,” said Phoebe, the conviction in her voice making us all look quickly at her before we returned our stares to the ground. “This is supposed to be back in the past a long way. Yet there is an airplane, of a type we all know perfectly well has never been developed by any aircraft company we can think of;"

“Orn
ithopters have been built,” Brennan said harshly.

“But that’s not an o
rn
ithopter. Not in the strict sense of the word.”

Pomfret said slowly, “That’s all very true. But what are we to do? That other bank of cloud is coming up fast. We may not hit another break in the overcast. . . .”

The type of decision with which we had to deal and the problems associated with those decisions were not the big tiger-hunt terrors—at least, not for the moment— but the more deadly apparently trivial decisions. Should we land? If we didn’t we could fly on into the deck.

“I vote for going down,” I said as smoothly as I could.

The plane began a gentle descent. Charlie, too, shared our reading of the situation.

“We’d better be ready for anything from these people; but start out by hoping they’ll be friendly.” Brennan clearly didn’t like this landing. But he, like us all, had to face up to reality. To have flown on into that cloud overcast would have been too reckless to be funny.

Charlie made a perfect normal run-in landing and the engines died. We could see the four people from the brilliant orange insect-plane running across the fields toward us. They wore white short garments and tall feathered headdresses. The men carried something at their waists but the distance was too great to make out weapons or not.

When they came nearer we saw they carried sheath knives. But, then, that could be normal wear. Their faces held a strange, remote, almost mystical look. The girl was very beautiful, in a dark, poised, idolesque way, with braided blue-black hair and red bps. Her body swayed as she ran, her long naked legs tanned and strong.

Brennan, with a sidelong look at Phoebe said, “She reminds me of what I’ve always thought an odalisque would look like.”

Phoebe, with a snort, interrupted. “If you want to stay in my good books, Hall Brennan, you won’t bring in a harem!”

"I’d thought she looked more like an idol,” I ventured, amused at the Brennan-Desmond tiff. The four people outside halted about ten yards from our plane and stood, barely panting, hands on hips, regarding us. Their eyes seemed to brood across the sun
li
ght. Their straight black brows, joined over the noses, accused us of crimes of which we knew nothing.

“Better say hello,” I said, and opened the door and jumped down.

The Farley Express remained in my pocket. My clothes were tattered and ripped so that the gun was likely to fall out any minute. I held the butt comfortably.

“Hello,” I said. “What language do you speak?”

They said something; the oldest of the men, muscular and laconic, spoke in words that meant nothing. I glanced up.

“Mean anything to any of you?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nothing.”

“Nope.”

“Better try all the lingos we know between us."

“I don’t think,” I said, turning back to the three young men and the girl and staring at them hard, "that will help any.”

Then Phoebe came out to join me carrying a silver something in her hand. For a moment it had me fooled; then I recognized the chocolate bar. With a smile that would have sent Hall Brennan pawing the ground had he not still been climbing down from the plane, Phoebe advanced on the statuesque girl, proffering the candy. She spoke in a soothing way, simple soft vowel sounds as though talking to a child or a nervous horse.