Lord of the Trees (19 page)

“Doc told me all about you,” he said. “I don’t know anything about our gang, but he said that you were the boss at your end of things, so I’m your obedient servant. I think we’d better get going, ’cause time is of the essence. You got pocket communicators so you can tell ’em back here to stick close to us. Easy to get lost in this soup.”

I showed him the cigarette-lighter shaped transceivers which had a range of a half-mile. He was familiar with them, since Caliban had invented them. We got into the cars, I gave orders, and the four cars started up close on Pauncho’s rear bumper. He had exceptionally long arms, and the body under the coat was keg-shaped. He talked out of the side of his mouth while the cigar bobbed up and down.

“I ain’t got time to tell you everything that happened in Germany. Suffice it that we’ve tracked Iwaldi to this area. He’s here because he knew the Nine would be holding XauXaz’s funeral. They’re on to his being here. They are also on to us being here,
but all they know, so far, is that we are in the area, too. They’ve been looking for us; we’ve had some narrow escapes here. But that’s all polluted water under the bridge. Listen, watch the road signs, will you? We got to take A-three-six-o northwest out of town. I made a dry run last night, but in this fog... whoops! Watch it, you crazy fool!”

A dark form swerved away from us, its horn blaring.

“Listen, the radio last night interviewed some crackpot that claimed this fog was caused by witches. Said there was a coven lived near Stonehenge. I ain’t so sure he was too far off the beam. Doc says old Anana has some strange powers that reach way back into the Old Stone Age. But I’m getting off the track. Here’s the shape-up. Doc and Trish—what a dish!—and Barney, my dumb-dumb buddy, are near Stonehenge, by the long barrows at the crossing of A-three-six-o and A-three-o-three. Doc says if they’re gone when we get there, we should proceed on to Stonehenge. The ceremony’ll take place sometime today. The Nine won’t be bothered by tourists on account of the fog or the local police. They’ve pulled strings to assure that. Doc thinks the police have been told that the British secret service wants the area kept clear while they run down enemy agents there. It’s easy when you figure that some of the biggest big shots on Downing Street are servants of the Nine.”

Pauncho added that Iwaldi was in the neighborhood, though Doc and his aides had not actually seen him. The battle would be three-way with my forces and Doc’s definitely in the minority. But our strategy was to hit and run. If we could get just one of the Nine, we would feel happy.

Pauncho van Veelar told us to open the small chests on the
floors. We did so and brought out chain mail shirts and loinguards and close-fitting helmets. All were of irradiated plastic.

“Put them on now,” he said. “Once we get there, you won’t have much time to change. Those shirts, by the way, resist a direct impact to a considerable degree. But if a man is strong enough—I am—he can tear the links apart.”

We started to undress in the cramped quarters. I said, “Doc’s message was rather curt. It said not to bring anyone with metal fillings in their teeth or with metal anywhere in their bodies. Now that I see this plastic armor, I’m beginning to get a vague idea of what was behind that cryptic order. Would you mind explaining so our mental fog isn’t as thick as that out there?”

“Yeah, sure,” he grunted. “Sorry. One thing at a time, I always say. You see, one of Doc’s inventions is an inductive-field generator. It sends out a fan-shaped beam with an extreme range of half a mile. It’s atomic-powered and eats up a lot of power but an amplifier enables it to radiate almost as much as it takes in. It heats up all metals within its field. Teeth fillings, rings, various articles such as watches, guns, knives, you name it. Copper telephone wires and aluminum high-tension power lines melt, and the towers get too hot to take hold of. The gas in a car’s tank will explode from the heat of the metal.

“But we got weapons that we can use in a field in our trunks. Clubs—baseball bats—and plastic knives okay for stabbing but lousy for cutting. And small fiberglass crossbows with gut strings and wooden bolts with plastic points. And plastic grenades with compressed gas and detonators in them. Gunpowder, TNT, cordite, all types of explosives, become very
unstable so you can’t use them in plastic firearms or bombs. Even the gas in Doc’s grenades is a special type of gas.”

“So it’s back to the primitive?” I said. “I like that.”

It was ironic that the servants of the Nine and I had fought each other in the primeval forests of remotest Africa with helicopters, napalm bombs, automatic rifles, personnel detectors, and every up-to-date weapon available. Yet here in one of the most technologically advanced and most populated nations of the world, we were to engage in battle with clubs and knives and tiny bows. And with this heavy fog, we were liable to end up using only the clubs and knives and, indubitably, our hands and feet.

“Except for the materials, the weapons’ll be primitive,” Pauncho said. “And the inductor prevents the use of personnel radar or other detectors in this fog, too! The Nine’ll have their own inductor going, you can bet on that, and the same kind of weapons we’ll have, all of which Doc invented. And maybe Iwaldi’ll have his inductor on, if he really shows. Of course, he won’t unless he’s crazy, but he’s crazy, no doubt of that. The Nine’ll have an army of thugs, and they’ll be using them as a big net to catch Iwaldi, not to mention us, if they win the battle, that is.

“Oh, by the way, we’ll have to hoof it a mile or so. We can’t take the cars inside the inductor area. But Doc says that the Nine’ll have cars, enough to carry them inside the area. They got three. Steam driven and plastic. Doc made them for the old geezers for just such a setup as this. Antipoetic justice, ain’t it? We ride shank’s mare, and they ride in style in cars Doc’s genius built for them!”

We got onto A360, and Pauncho pushed the car at eighty all the way. He talked without letup. Ordinarily, such
chatter would have rasped my nerves, but he provided much information which I desired. He told me that he was the son of “Jocko” Simmons and that Barney Banks, his
dumb-dumb buddy,
was the son of “Porky” Rivers. These were the old men who had accompanied Doc Caliban on their last adventure at the age of eighty. I have described them and their heroic deaths in Volume IX of my memoirs. They were the last survivors of a group of five who had dedicated their lives to helping Caliban in his battle against evildoers. (Never mind that Caliban was also working for the Nine because they offered him immortality. Caliban was given a free hand to battle crime as long as he did not interfere with the Nine. I do not condemn him for that; I succumbed to the temptation of immortality, too.)

Pauncho and Barney were born in 1932, shortly after their mothers divorced their fathers. Rivers and Simmons spent too much time with their leader and their wives, fed up, cut loose.

“I remember my father, the old ape, visiting me now and then,” Pauncho said. “My mother remarried about two years after the divorce, and her husband adopted me. He was a great guy. But I was torn. I liked my father at the same time I hated him because he had, in a sense, deserted me. Now I can appreciate why he decided in favor of adventure. But I loathed chemistry even though my father was one of the world’s greatest chemists. Maybe because of that.”

Pauncho remembered visits from his “Uncle Doc” and visits to his wonderland laboratory in the eyrie of the Empire State Building. Pauncho and Barney had grown up together, since they lived three houses apart. They were in the same outfit in the Marines during the Korean War. They were visiting Doc
after the deaths of their fathers, when he invited them to join him. Both had apparently inherited a love for adventure and combat from their fathers, and when they found out that Doc’s own researches were close to the point where he would be able to reproduce the immortality elixir, they accepted his offer.

At the rate Pauncho was going, we would have reached the junction of the two highways in ten minutes. But we had to stop to avoid running into a pile-up of three cars. He slowed down to forty after that. Then, after a glance at the milometer, he crept along until the junction suddenly moved out from the fog. He turned right and drove for a few feet and then parked the car on the side of the road. The other cars followed. Two of the drivers got out swearing about the crazy fool Yank.

I could see no more than a few feet, but I knew that the country for miles around was as flat as Illinois farmland. A303 ran like a cannon barrel slightly northwest for about a mile and a quarter before crossing an untarred road. To get to Stonehenge, you turned left onto the untarred road and went about an eighth of a mile before passing Stonehenge, which was behind a fence in a field. At the junction of A344 and the small road, you turned left and then almost immediately were at the entrance to the “venerable and stupendous work on Salisbury Plain, vulgarly ascribed to Merlin, the Prophet,” as described by John Wood, architect of Bath, in 1747.

If the air had been clear, we would have been able to see the white chalk wherever the soil had been cut away.

Pauncho got out of the car and removed his heavy overcoat. Since I was only a foot from him, I was able to see how he got his nickname. His belly stuck out as round as a gorilla’s after a heavy
meal of bamboo shoots. But it gave the impression of being as hard as a gorilla’s chest. His arms were freakishly long, and his legs were very short. Even so, he stood six feet high, unlike his father, who had been not quite five feet high. Pauncho looked as if he weighed three hundred and twenty pounds or so.

He opened the trunk of his car and passed out the weapons to us. I took a baseball bat, a plastic seven-inch long stiletto, which I put in a sheath at my belt, a short quiver of bolts, also hung from my belt, and a crossbow. This was small and held with one hand, like a pistol, when fired. The bowstring was pulled back by hand, requiring a strong man to pull it all the way back. A catch secured the string, both of which were released when the trigger just ahead of the pistol-like butt was pulled.

“If the string is set at the extreme of the three positions and shot within a range of three feet,” Pauncho said, “the bow will send a bolt through the armor we’re wearing. Not very far, probably not more’n a half-inch into your flesh. But that’ll smart, and if the bolt hits unprotected flesh, it’ll go almost all the way through you.”

The grenades looked like tennis balls. From the top of each protruded a half-inch long pin.

“Twist the pin to the left as far as it’ll go. Pull the pin and then throw,” Pauncho said. “Don’t dillydally. Six seconds later, the mingling of two gases produces an explosion equivalent to one and a quarter pound of TNT. The plastic shell is almost atomized, so these depend on concussion for main effect.”

Two steps behind him, I followed Pauncho into the field. We sprang over a fence, the wire of which was warming up under the inductor’s field, and walked a few steps. He stopped.
The mound of the barrow had loomed out of the fog. Pauncho called softly, “Hey, Doc! It’s me, Pauncho!”

There was no answer. The others, fanning out around the barrow, called quietly. I went up and over the mound and then along its other side. There was no one there. By bending down with my eyes close to the grass, I could see footprints in the wet earth.

We returned to the cars. Pauncho swore and blew on his enormous hands. “It’s cold! That fog goes right through my bones!”

He called out, “Hey, Countess! You any good at warming up a man?”

Clara laughed softly and said, “You could chase me, my pithecanthropoid friend. That would warm you up! But save your strength!”

“We’ll talk this over a martini sometime,” he rumbled.

“I’ll meet you after the fight,” she said.

“Wait’ll I tell that would-be-swinger, Barney, about this,” Pauncho said, and he chuckled like a troll under a bridge.

I said, “Silence!”

Shouts were drifting through the gray wetness. Muffled cracks, as of bats striking bats or armor or, perhaps, bone, disturbed the cloud.

I called them in around me and told them what we should do for the moment. We started out just as a few more cracking noises came and then a scream which was cut off as if a knife had plunged into the throat. A grenade boomed three seconds later. Then silence returned.

If there were many people at Stonehenge, they were not conducting a full-scale battle. The sounds gave us the impression
of blundering around, of probing activity by men who were not sure even after they had closed with another whether he was enemy or friend.

“We’ll walk along the road until we’re just opposite the first of the tumuli.”

“What the hell’s a tumuli?” someone muttered.

“A tumulus is an artificial mound, a round barrow,” I said. “A grave for the ancients. This area is filled with them. We’ll scout around there, take it easy, because Iwaldi or the Nine may have stationed people there. Keep close together. We don’t want to get separated in this fog. Yes, I know bunching makes us better targets, but that can’t be helped.

“And don’t fire at the first person you see. He may be one of Doc’s people. Now you’ve gotten the descriptions of Doc and Banks and his cousin. If you can identify them, sing out and identify yourself. Pongo is the code word.”

“Identify them? In this fog soup?” a man muttered.

“Do your best,” I said. “Outside of Caliban’s group, everybody is our enemy.”

I did not really expect Murtagh’s men to refrain from shooting until they were one hundred percent certain. They were all very tough and self-centered characters, and they were not about to wait until hit before they opened up. But at least they knew what their allies were supposed to look like.

We walked on the edge of the road with me in the lead. I held the butt of the crossbow in my right hand and the bat in my left.

The sounds had ceased but as soon as we reached the burial barrow three explosions deafened us. All of us dived for the wet
ground, even though there was no indication that the grenades were being thrown our way. Then I rose, and, crouching, ran to the ditch around the outer wall of the barrow and dived into it. I fell on top of a man squatting on his heels. He grunted, I grunted, and I broke his jaw with a backhanded blow from the butt end of my bat.