Part 19 (1/2)
I took a step forward, up the ramp, and two things happened, almost simultaneously: I caught a glimpse of myself in the glowing sh.e.l.l of the s.h.i.+p. It was not a pretty picture. My ghoul's mouth, drawn down and to the side like a knife wound. My eye, a mere slit of brightness, the sac so hideous and vein-streaked. I stopped on the ramp, with them directly behind me.
And the second thing happened.
I heard her.
Somewhere...far off...in a bright amber cavern hung down with scintillant stalact.i.tes...swathed in a s.h.i.+mmering aura of goodness and cleanliness and hope...younger than the next instant...radiantly beautiful and calling to me...calling with a voice of music that was the sound of suns flaring and stars twinkling and earth moving and gra.s.s growing and small things being happy...it was she!
I listened there for a moment that spanned forever. My head tilted to the side, I listened, and I knew what she said was truth, so simple and so pure and so real, that I turned and edged past them on the ramp, and returned to h.e.l.l again.
Her voice stopped in the moment of my touching ground.
They stared at me, and for a short time they said nothing. Then one of the men-the short, blond fellow with alert blue eyes and hardly any neck-said, ”What's the matter?”
”I'm not going,” I said. The girl ran down the ramp to me. ”But why?” She almost sounded tearful.
I couldn't tell her, of course. But she was so small, so sweet, and she reminded me of my wife, when I had first met her, so I answered, ”I've been here too long; I'm not very nice to look at-”
”Oh-” and she tried to stop me, but it was a sob, so it did not interfere.
”-and you may not understand this but I-I've been well, content here. It's a hard world, and it's dark, but she's up there-” I looked toward the black sky of h.e.l.l, ”-and I wouldn't want to go away and leave her alone. Can you understand that?”
They nodded slowly, and one of the men said, ”But this is more than just you, Van Horne. This is a discovery that means a great deal to everyone on Earth.
”It's getting worse and worse there every year. With the new antiaging drugs people just aren't dying, and they've still got the Catho-Presbyte Lobby to keep any really effective birth control laws from being enacted. The crowding is terrible; that's one of the chief reasons we're out here, to see how Man can adapt to these worlds. Your discovery can aid us tremendously.”
”And you said the Fluhs were gone,” the other man said. ”Without them, you'll die.” I smiled at them; she had said something, something important about the Flubs.
”I can still do some good,” I replied quickly. ”Send me a few young people. Let them come here, and we'll study together. I can show them what I've found, and they can experiment here. Laboratory conditions could never match what I've found on h.e.l.l.”
That seemed to do it. They looked at me sadly, and the girl agreed...the other two matched her agreement in a moment.
”And, and-I couldn't leave her here alone,” I said again.
”Goodbye, Tom Van Home,” she said, and she pressed my hand between her mittened ones. It was a kiss on the cheek, but her helmet prevented it physically, so she clasped my hand.
Then they started up the ramp.
”What will you do for air, with the Fluhs gone?” one of the men asked, stopping halfway up.
”I'll be all right, I promise you. I'll be here when you return.” They looked at me with doubt, but I smiled, and patted my sac, and they looked uncomfortable, and started up the ramp again.
”We'll be back. With others.” The girl looked down at me. I waved, and they went inside. Then I loped back to the hutch, and watched them as they shattered the night with their fire and fury. When they were gone, I went outside, and stared up at the dim, so-faraway points of the dead stars.
Where she circled, up there, somewhere.
And I knew I would have something for my noon meal, and all the meals thereafter. She had told me; I suppose I knew it all along, but it hadn't registered, so she had told me: the Fluhs were not dead.
They had merely gone down to replenish their own oxygen supply from the planet itself, from the caves and porous openings where the rock trapped the air. They would be back again, long before I needed them.
The Fluhs would return.
And someday I would find her again, and it would be an unbroken time.
This world I had named, I had not properly named. Not h.e.l.l.
Not h.e.l.l at all.
O Ye of Little Faith
NIVEN FELT for the rock wall behind him. His fingertips grazed the crumbling rocks. The wall curved.
He prayed that it curved. It had to curve, to go around the bowl in which he was trapped, or he was dead.
That simply: he was dead. The centaur advanced another few feet, pawing the red-dust earth with hooves of gold now dulled by a faint dusty crimson patina.
The creature's small gimlet eyes were as red as the ground it stomped. Half-man, half-horse, something out of a child's fable, it stepped carefully toward him, and he had the wildly incongruous thought that the beast's face might have been a double for John Barrymore. Only the little red eyes destroyed the comparison. Red and angry; not merely with volcanic hatred, but with something else...something primeval, something saved from a time before men had walked the Earth, when the centaurs and their fellow-myths had ruled the world.
And now, somehow, in some inexplicable fas.h.i.+on, Nivena man with no particular talents-had been thrown crosswise and slantwise through universes into a place, a time, a continuum (an Earth?), where the centaur still roamed. Where the centaur could at last have his full revenge on the creatures that had replaced him. It was the day of reckoning for h.o.m.o sapiens.
Niven backed around the bowl, feeling the dirt of the wall crumbling in his fingers as he felt behind him; in his other hand he brandished the rough-wood club he had found underfoot as he ran from the beast. He let it droop in his hand a moment, the weight of it difficult to keep at the ready for very long.
The centaur's face of frenzy glowed with heat. It leaped. Niven swung the club with a bunching of muscles that sent him whirling half-around. The centaur dug its hooves in deeply, and ground to a snorting halt, two feet in front of the flat arc swing of the club. Niven spun around completely, and the club struck the wall, and shattered to splinters.
The centaur's half-growl, half-snort bore traces of triumphant amus.e.m.e.nt as it exploded behind the dark-haired man, and Niven felt young sweat come to his back. The impact of the blow against the wall had sent a tremor through his entire body; his left arm was quite numb. Yet it had saved him. There was an opening in the wall, an opening in the rock-wall of the deep valley bowl, an opening he would not have seen backing around the wan. Now there was a scant hope of staying alive.
As the centaur gathered itself for a leap that would send its gigantic body plunging into Niven, the man slipped sidewise, and was inside the mountain.
He turned then, and ran. Behind him the light from that weird place-vaguely blue and light-mote laden-faded and was abruptly lost as he caromed around a sharp turn in the pa.s.sage. It was dark now, pitch absolute dark, and all Niven could see was the scintillance of tiny sparks behind his eyes. Suddenly he found himself longing to see even that light behind him, that snippet of blue and cadaverous yellow in a sky that had never been roof of any world he had known.
And then he was falling...
Suddenly, and without any sense of having moved, between one step and the next, he plunged over a lip of stone, and was falling. Down and down, tumbling over and over, and the walls of moist slippery stone reeled around him, unseen but cold, as he tried to grab some small hold.
The tips of his fingers skinned away from friction, and the pain was excruciating, for a long moment, but was lost in an instant as the shriek tore from his throat and he plunged, hitting painfully with his shoulders and the back of his neck that threatened to snap his spine, down into a depth of water black and viscous and bottomless that closed over him, filled his mouth with foulness, blind, dragged into the grave-chill body of a moist lover terrible in her possessiveness, jealousy and need.
Vapors of night. Echoes of never. Niven thrashed in a whirlpool vortex of total unawareness.
Memories-released from their crypt beneath his conscious mind-escaped, gibbering, rushed in a horde into his skull. He was back in the old soothsayer's shop. Had it been just a few minutes before finding himself trapped by the centaur? Merely a few minutes when he had stood in the prognosticator's shop in a Tijuana back alley, a tourist with a girl on his arm and a wisecrack on his lips? Had it been only that long ago, a matter of seconds, of a sometime long ago, when darkness had parted and swallowed him-as he was now being swallowed by these stygian waters?
Huaraches, the sign had said, and Serapes.
Berta stared at him across her Tom Collins. He could not look at her. He toyed with the straw in his Cuba libre. He whistled soundlessly, then bit the inside of his lip absently. He looked off across the Avenida Revolu?ion. Tijuana throbbed with an undercurrent of immorality and availability. Anything you might want. A ten-year-old virgin-male or female. Authentic French perfume minus the tariff. Gra.s.s. Hash.
Peyote caps. Bongo drums, hand-carved Don Quixotes, sandals, bullfights, jai-alai, horse races, tote-board betting or off-track betting, your photograph wearing a sombrero sitting astride a weary jacka.s.s. Jacka.s.s on jacka.s.s, a study in dung. Strip shows where the nitty-gritty consists of the pudenum fiat-out on the bar-top for convenient dining. Private shows with big dogs and tiny gentlemen and women with b.r.e.a.s.t.s as big as casaba melons. Divorces, marriages, tuck-and-roll auto seat covers. Or a quick abortion.
It had been lunacy for them to come down here. But they'd had to. Berta had needed the D&C, and now it was over, and she was feeling just fine thank you, just fine. So they had stopped for a drink. She should be resting in a motel halfway between San Diego and Los Angeles, but he knew she wanted to talk.