The Magic Labyrinth (37 page)

Now would be a good time for Ah Qaaq to sneak up on him. But he neither saw nor heard anything except the crash of waves against the rocks some distance away. When he cautiously returned, he found Ah Qaaq sitting with his back against the wall, his eyes half closed, his head drooping.

Burton moved over to the opposite wall and leaned against it. After a while, the Mayan stood up and stretched. He signaled that he was going out to the cave. Burton nodded. Ah Qaaq, his heavy dewlap bouncing, waddled out through the tunnel. Burton decided that he’d been overly suspicious. A minute later, he thought that he hadn’t been suspicious enough. What if the Mayan was X, and he had another cave nearby in which was a boat? It might be behind a narrow fissure, an opening to which Ah Qaaq could wade through the shallow water on the shelf.

Ten minutes went by, not an unreasonable time for the absence. Should he go after Ah Qaaq?

While Burton was trying to make up his mind, he saw the Mayan enter. Burton relaxed. The watch was half over, and the others would be in the more shallow phase of sleep and thus more easily awakened by noise.

Also, it would be logical for X to wait until the tower was entered. Here, he would have to deal with many. There, he would be on familiar ground.

When the six hours had passed, Burton aroused everybody. They went out to the sea in two groups according to sex and returned complaining about the cold. By then Burton and Ah Qaaq had poured water from the canteens into the cups provided by the grails and were ready to add the instant coffee which also heated the water. They drank and talked softly for a while and then ate breakfast. Some left for the sea again. Croomes insisted that it was a shame to allow skeletons to lie unburied. She made such a fuss that Burton thought it would be better to mollify her. A delay wasn’t going to make any difference anyway.

They trooped out with the bones and hurled them into the sea while Croomes said a long prayer over them. The skeleton nearest the tunnel had to be Blessed’s mother, but no one mentioned this, and she would certainly have wept if she had suspected it. Burton and some of the others knew from Paheri’s story that, when the Egyptians had come here, they’d found some pieces of scalp which hadn’t rotted away entirely. These had held black kinky hair.

They returned and loaded up one of the thirty-person boats with their possessions and sixty cans of food. Four men picked up the big but very light craft and carried it down the tunnel to the cave. Two men and two women brought out a smaller one to be attached by a rope to the other.

When asked why the extra was needed, he replied, “Just in case.”

He had no idea what the
case
might be. It couldn’t hinder them, though, to take extra precautions.

The last to leave the chamber, he gave it a final look. It was very quiet and eerie here with the nine glowing lamps and the empty boats. Would anyone follow them? He didn’t think so. This was the third expedition and the most successful, so far. Things went by threes. Then he thought of Joe Miller, who had twice fallen into the sea. Surely he wouldn’t do it again?

Not unless
we
give him a chance,
he thought.

All but Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh got into the big boat. They pushed it into the water, climbed aboard, and began drying off their feet. Burton had studied the picture-chart in the craft until he knew what to do by heart. He stood on the raised deck behind the steering wheel and punched a button on the control panel. A light sprang out from the surface of the panel itself, a glow which enabled him to see the buttons. They had no markings, but the diagram showed the location and purpose of each.

At the same time, a bright orange outline of a cylindrical shape, the tower, sprang out on a screen just above the panel.

“We’re ready,” he called back. He paused, punched another button, and said, “We’re off!”

“Off to see the Wizard of Oz, the Fisher King!” Frigate said. “Off to find the holy grail!”

“May it
be
holy,” Burton said. He burst out laughing. “But if it is, what are
we
doing there?”

Whatever the propulsive power was—there was no trembling of the boat from propellers nor wake from a jet—the vessel moved swiftly. Its speed was controlled by a curious device, a plastic bulb attached to the rim of the wheel on the right side. By squeezing or releasing his grip, Burton could control the speed. He turned the wheel until the image of the tower moved from the right to the center of the screen. Then he slowly increased the pressure on the bulb. Presently, the boat was cutting through the waves at an angle. Spray drenched those behind him, but he would not slow down.

Now and then he looked behind him. In the dark fog he could not even see to the stern of the boat, but its passengers were huddled closely at the edge of the control deck. They looked in their shroudlike cloths like souls being ferried by Charon.

They were as silent as the dead, too.

Paheri had estimated that it had taken Akhenaten’s boat about two hours to get to the tower. That was because he had been afraid to make the boat go at top speed. The sea, as reported by the
Parseval
radarman, was thirty miles in diameter. The tower was about ten miles in diameter. So there were only about twenty miles to go from the cave. The Pharaoh’s vessel must have crawled at ten miles per hour.

The tower rapidly grew larger on the screen.

Suddenly, the image burst into flame.

They were very close to their goal.

The direction sheet indicated that now was the time to punch another button. Burton did so, and two extremely bright bow-lamps shot their beams into the mists and lit upon a vast curving dull surface.

Burton released all pressure on the bulb. The boat quickly lost speed and started drifting away. Applying power again, he swung the boat around and headed it slowly for the dim bulk. He punched another button, and he could see a big port, thick as the door in a bank vault, open in the seamless side.

Light streamed out through the O.

Burton cut off the power and turned the wheel so that the side of the boat bumped against the lower side of the open port. Hands seized the threshold and steadied the boat.

“Hallelujah!” Blessed Croomes screamed. “Momma, I’ll soon be with you, sitting on the right hand of sweet Jesus!”

The others jumped. The stillness, except for the slight thudding of the boat against the metal, had been so impressive and their wonder that the way was finally open for them had been so overpowering, they felt that her cry was near sacrilege.

“Quiet!” Frigate shouted. But he laughed when he realized that no one could hear them.

“Momma, I’m coming!” Blessed shouted.

“Shut up, Croomes!” Burton said. “Or by God I’ll throw you into the water! This is no place for hysterics!”

“I’m not hysterical! I’m joyous! I’m filled with the glory of the Lord!”

“Then keep it to yourself,” Burton said.

Croomes told him he was bound for Hell, but she subsided.

“You may be right,” Burton said. “Let me tell you, though, that we’re all going to the same place now. If it’s Heaven, we’ll be with you. If it’s Hell…”

“Don’t say that, man. That’s irreverent!”

Burton sighed. She was, on the whole, sane. But she was a religious fanatic who managed to ignore the facts of life and also the contradictory elements in her faith. In this, she was much like his wife, Isabel, a devout Roman Catholic who had managed to believe in spiritualism at the same time. Croomes had been strong, enduring, uncomplaining, and always helpful during their struggles to reach this place except when she was trying to convert her crewmates to her religion.

Through the port he could see the gray-metaled corridor which Paheri had described. Of his companions who had collapsed near its end, there was no sight. Paheri had been too frightened to follow the others. He’d stayed in the boat. Then Akhenaten and his people fell to the floor, and the port had swung shut as silently as it had opened. Paheri had been unable to find the cave, and he had finally gone over the first of the cataracts in his boat and had awakened on some far bank of The River. But now there were no more resurrections.

Burton unbuttoned the strap on his holster.

He said, “I’ll go first.”

He stepped up over the threshold. Moving air warmed his face and hands. The light was shadowless, seeming to emanate from the walls, floor, and ceiling. A closed door was at the end of the corridor. The entrance port had been opened by thick gray-metal curving rods that disappeared inside a six-foot-high cube of gray metal by the outer wall. The base of the cube seemed to be part of the floor. No welding or bolts held it.

Burton waited until Alice, Aphra, Nur, and de Marbot had entered. He told them not to go more than ten feet from the port. Then he called out, “You fellows bring in the small boat!”

Tai-Peng said, “Why?”

“We’ll wedge it in the door. It should keep the door from swinging shut.”

Alice said, “But it’ll be crushed.”

“I doubt it. It’s made of the same substance as the grails and the tower.”

“It still looks awfully fragile.”

“The grails have very thin walls, and the engineers in Parolando tried to blow them up, to crush them with powerful machinery, and to dent them with triphammers. They had no effect whatsoever.”

The corridor light shone on the faces of the men in the boat below. Some looked surprised; some, delighted; some, emotionless. He wasn’t able to determine by their reactions who X might be.

Only Tai-Peng had questioned him, but that didn’t mean anything. The fellow was always wanting to know the why.

With the help of all, the vessel was lifted up and gotten halfway through the port. It was just wide enough to stick in the middle of the O, leaving room for those outside to crawl in underneath after they’d passed in the packs and tins.

Burton backed away as they came in one by one. He held his pistol in his hand, and he told Alice to bring hers out. The others, seeing the weapons trained on them, were astonished. They were even more so when he told them to put their hands on top of their heads.

Frigate said, “You’re X!”

Burton laughed like a hyena.

“No, of course not! What I’m going to do now is to root X out!”

Nur el-Musafir said, “You must suspect all but Alice of being X.”

“No,” Burton said, “some of you may be agents, and if you are, speak up. But I have seen the Ethicals in their Council, and there are only two in this group whose physiques resemble the person I think might be X!”

He waited. It became evident that if any were agents none was going to admit his or her identity.

“Very well. I’ll explain. It seems obvious that X was Barry Thorn and perhaps Odysseus. Thorn and the self-proclaimed Greek were short and very muscular. Both had similar features, though Odysseus’ ears stuck out and he was much darker. But these differences could be due to disguise-aids.

“The two Ethicals who resembled them were called Loga and Thanabur.

“Two of this group could be either. Or both. I believe, however, that the engineer Podebrad, who was killed on the
Rex,
was Thanabur. I admit that it could have been Loga. In any event, we’re not going one step further until I question—most severely—two of this group.”

He paused, then said, “These are Gilgamesh, the self-proclaimed king of Uruk of ancient Sumeria, and Ah Qaaq, the self-proclaimed ancient Mayan!”

Alice said in a low voice, “But Richard! If you press him too hard, he can just simply kill himself.”

Burton roared, “Did you hear what she said? No? She said that all X has to do to escape is to kill himself! But I know that he isn’t going to do that! If he does, he can’t carry out his plans, whatever they are! No more raising from the dead for him!

“Now…I’ve finally taken action because we are at a place where we can go no further without him. Only X knows how to cancel the gas or supersonic frequency or whatever that felled the Egyptians. And I want answers to my questions!”

“You’re desperate, man!” Tom Turpin said. “What if none of us is X? You’re skating on mighty thin ice.”

“I’m convinced that one of you is he,” Burton said. “Now…here is what I plan to do. If no one confesses, then I’ll knock you, Gilgamesh, and you, Ah Qaaq, out. You’re my prime suspects. And while you’re coming out of unconsciousness, I’ll hypnotize you. I found out that Monat Grrautut, the Arcturan, and the men who claimed to be Peter Jairus Frigate and Lev Ruach had hypnotized my friend Kazz. They’re not the only ones who can play at that game. I’m a master hypnotist, and if you’re concealing something, I will get it out of you.”

In the silence that followed, the others looked uneasily at one another.

Croomes said, “You’re a wicked man, Burton! We’re at the gates of Heaven, and you talk of killing us!”

“I said nothing about killing,” Burton said, “though I’m prepared to do it if I must. What I want is to clear up this mystery. Some of you may be agents. I implore you to step forward and confess. You have nothing to lose and much to gain. It’s too late now to attempt to hide things from us.”

De Marbot said, sputtering, “But…but, my dear Burton! You hurt me! I am not one of these damnable agents or Ethicals! I am what I say I am, and I’ll strike the man who calls me a liar!”

Nur said, “If one or both of them is guiltless, then you will have injured and insulted an innocent. It would be brutal to do so. Moreover, you’ll have made an enemy of a friend. Can’t you hypnotize them without violence?”

“I hate doing this as much as any of you,” Burton said. “Believe me when I say that. But an Ethical would be an excellent hypnotist himself, and no doubt his powers of resistance will be very strong. I must knock these two out so that they won’t have these powers, catch them when they’re half-witless.”

Alice said softly, “It
is
terribly brutal, Richard.”

“Now,” Burton said, “I want you to take out your weapons and drop them on the floor. Do it one by one and do it slowly. You, Nur, you be the first.”

The knives and pistols clattered onto the gray metal. When they were all disarmed, Burton told them to step back while Alice picked up the weapons. In a short while there was a pile of them against the wall behind him.

“Keep your hands on your heads.”

Most of their faces showed anger, indignation, or hurt puzzlement. The faces of Ah Qaaq and Gilgamesh were iron masks.

“Come to me, Gilgamesh,” Burton said. “When you’re five feet from me, stop. Then turn around.”

The Sumerian walked slowly toward him. Now he was glaring. He said, “If you strike me, Burton, you will have made an enemy forever. I was once the king of Uruk, and I am the descendant of gods! No one lays a hand on me without punishment! I will kill you!”

“I am indeed sorry to have to do this,” Burton said. “But surely you can see that the fate of the world is the issue. If we were in each other’s shoes, I would not blame you for what you were doing to me. I’d resent it, yes, but I’d understand it!”

“After you’ve found I’m innocent, you would do well to kill me! If you don’t, I’ll kill you! I speak the truth!”

“We’ll see.”

Burton planned, if the Sumerian was not X, to install a posthypnotic command that Gilgamesh forgive him when he came out of the trance. He would have ordered him to forget the injury, but the others would no doubt remind him of it.

“Place your hands on the back of your neck,” Burton said. “Then turn around. Don’t worry about being hurt too much. I know precisely just how much force I’ll need. You won’t be unconscious for more than a few seconds.”

Burton reversed the pistol and lifted it by its butt. Gilgamesh, bellowing “No!” whirled, his arms flying out from his neck, and his hand struck the pistol and tore it from Burton’s grip.

Alice should have fired then. Instead, she tried to beat the Sumerian on the back with her pistol barrel. Burton was very strong, but he went down under the herculean power of Gilgamesh and then was lifted up. He struck Gilgamesh in the face, making his nose bleed and bruising the skin. The Sumerian lifted him above his head and threw him against the wall. Stunned, Burton dropped to the floor.

The others were shouting and screaming, and Alice was yelling. But she managed to bring the butt of her weapon, now reversed, down on the head of Gilgamesh. He swayed, then began to crumple.

Ah Qaaq, swift despite his fat, ran by Alice, snatching the pistol from her hand, and continued toward the end of the corridor.

Though dazed, Burton struggled to get up, shouting, “Get him! Get him! He’s the Ethical! X! X!”

His legs felt as if they were balloons out of which the air was whistling. He slid back down against the wall.

The Mayan—no, no Mayan he—slammed his palm against the wall on his left. Immediately, the door at the end of the corridor slid into a recess in the wall.

Burton tried to note the exact location of the area that X had struck. The blow had undoubtedly activated machinery behind the wall. And since it opened the door, it also was inhibited from releasing whatever it was that had felled the Egyptians.

Nur, a small skinny dark flash, scooped up a pistol as he ran by the pile. Then he stopped, and he lifted the heavy weapon in both hands. The gun boomed. The projectile struck the side of the door as X went around it. Pieces of plastic flew through the exit and against the wall opposite. X fell, though only his black-clothed legs showed for a moment. Then they were gone.

Nur ran after him but stopped at the doorway. He leaned out cautiously, and at once jerked his head back. The bullet fired by X smashed itself against the wall just outside the door. Nur got down on his knees and looked around the exit again. Another boom. Nur seemed uninjured.

By then the others had picked up their weapons and were running toward the doorway.

Though regrets were useless, Burton regretted that he had not chosen Ah Qaaq first for hypnotism.

He called to Alice, who was bending over Gilgamesh, to help him up. Weeping, she came to him and pulled up on his wrists. His head was clearing, and his legs seemed steadier. He’d be all right in another minute.

He called, “Frigate! Tai-Peng! Turpin! Get Gilgamesh out of here! Everybody else! Out! Out before he closes the door!”

Nur yelled, “He’s gone now!”

The three men came running, and they picked the Sumerian’s heavy body and bore it toward the doorway. Burton leaned on Alice, his arm around her neck, and they followed the others. By the time he got to the exit, he felt recovered enough to tell Alice that he could go it by himself.

Turpin placed his grail in the doorway so the door couldn’t be fully closed. Just as Alice and Burton stepped into the corridor, the door shot back out of its recess, slammed into the grail, and stopped.

Nur indicated the blood on the floor by the doorway and the red spots farther along.

“The bullet smashed against the wall, but some of the fragments got him.”

The corridor ran both ways as far as they could see. It was illuminated by the shadowless light and was forty feet wide and fifty high by eye estimate. It gently curved to follow the roundness of the exterior. Burton wondered what was between the outer wall of the corridor and the outer wall of the tower. Probably, some of it was empty, but other spaces might contain machinery of some sort or storage facilities. At irregular intervals, at his eye level, the walls held bas-relief letters or symbols some of which superficially resembled runes and others Hindustani characters.

Burton left a bullet by the wall to mark the entrance if the door should somehow close.

Shortly after the bloodstains ceased, the trackers came across a bay in the center of which was a circular hole about a hundred feet across. Burton stood on the edge and looked down. Lights streamed out along the black shaft from many levels, other bays or rooms. He didn’t know how deep the shaft went, but he guessed that it was miles. When he got down on his knees, his hands gripping the edge, and looked up, he saw the same thing. However, the shaft could go up no more than a mile, the height of the tower from sea level.

By then Gilgamesh was recovering. He sat on the floor holding his head and groaning. After a minute, he looked up.

“What happened?”

Burton told him. The Sumerian moaned, then said, “And you didn’t strike me? It
was
the woman?”

“Yes, I apologize, if it will do any good. But I had to know.”

“She was only fighting to save her man. And since you did not hit me, there is no insult. Though there is plenty of injury.”

“I think you’ll be all right,” Burton said.

He forbore to say that he had hit Gilgamesh in the face. Truth could be sacrificed in this situation. He’d gone through his life making enemies because he didn’t care if he did and even got a certain satisfaction from it. But during the past twenty years he’d seen that he was behaving irrationally in this respect. Nur, the Sufi, had taught him that, though not directly. Burton had learned while listening to Nur’s conversations with his disciple Frigate.

“I think,” Burton said, “that X took a lift of some sort. I don’t see any, though. Nor do I see any controls to bring one up or down to here.”

“Maybe that’s because there
isn’t
any cage,” Frigate said.

Burton stared at him.

Frigate took a plastic bullet out of the bag that hung from his belt. He threw it twenty feet into the emptiness. It stopped as if it were in jelly at the level of the floor.

“Well, I’ll be damned! I didn’t think it was so, but it is!”

“What is?”

“There’s some kind of field in the shaft. So…how do you go where you want to? Maybe the field moves you according to a codeword.”

“That is good thinking,” Nur said.

“Thank you, master. Only…if one person wants to go down at the same time another wants to go up…? Maybe the field can do both simultaneously.”

If the shafts—there must be others—were the only way to get from one floor to another, they were trapped. All the Ethical had to do was to let them starve.

Burton became angry. All his life he’d felt caged and he had broken out of some of the cages, though the big ones had restrained him. Now he was on the verge of solving this great mystery, and he was trapped again. This one, he might not escape from.

He stepped out into openness, putting one foot down slowly until he felt resistance. When he’d determined that his weight was going to be held, he moved entirely into the shaft. He was near panic; anybody unfamiliar with the setup would be. But here he was, standing on nothing, apparently, and an abyss below him.

He stooped, picked up the bullet, and threw it to Frigate.

“Now what?” Nur said.

Burton looked up and then down.

“I don’t know. It’s not just like being in air only. There’s a slight resistance to my movements. I don’t have any trouble breathing, however.”

Since it made him more than just uneasy to stand there, he walked back to the solid floor.

“It’s not like standing on something hard. There is a slight give to my weight.”

They were silent for a while. Burton finally said, “We might as well go on.”