"We don't know, do we, Sergeant? We don't know who the Q'oornans are, where they originate, why they are bringing people here. Not just people like ourselves, either. Extroids, tempoids, cybroids. We're just beginning to learn what this world is all about, Sergeant Smythe. And I think our goals may be changing, too."
"I don't quite take the major's drift, I'm afraid, sah."
They had put most of the swamp behind them, although the land to their left was still marshy. There were distant sounds—the call of wild beasts, the slither in the reeds that indicated the path of some water- dwelling serpent or amphibian, the occasional flapping of great wings, or the call of a bird.
Then a crackling and a whoosh like a Guy Fawkes Day rocket.
They halted and stared skyward.
Something gleaming and streamlined tore across the afternoon sky. It could have been a railroad train, but a railroad train snatched from some fantastic future and set down in the present. Only set down is hardly the term to use, for this apparition passed hundreds of feet above their heads. It was coming from the direction of the chasm and the ruined bridge, and as they stood watching, it passed over the swamp that had nearly taken their lives, and slid down the sky.
"It—it's going to crash!" Smythe gasped.
Even as the sergeant spoke, the great vehicle dropped toward the surface. In that frozen moment Clive could make out clearly the shape of the vehicle.
If he'd had pen and paper he could have made a perfect sketch of it for The London Illustrated Recorder and Dispatch. It was hundreds of feet in length, with a sleekly pointed tip. Rows of windows ran along the sides of the cars, which were jointed like those of a steam train.
There were no tracks, and no visible means of levitation. Enough attempts had been made to envision flying caravans of the future, and men had made efforts actually to build them, although only the most modest of gliders—in truth, little more than oversized children's kites—had achieved any degree of success.
Whatever had held this marvel in the air, the mechanism had failed. The aerial train did not plow nose-on into the ground, but instead dropped to the surface and ran along it like a true railroad vehicle, leaving behind it a long furrow of earth.
The four travelers began to run toward the vehicle. At first Clive Folliot was in the lead, but Finnbogg quickly outdistanced him and headed on.
They risked their lives by crossing the marshy borders of the swamp. Fortunately there was no quicksand there, and Finnbogg's broad, padded feet distributed his weight sufficiently that he was able to splash across the muddy areas undeterred.
It took several hours to reach the crashed vehicle. By the time they arrived, late afternoon was beginning to give way to Q'oorna's gloomy version of dusk.
The vehicle was very much like an earthly train. The travelers climbed onto an outside railing on the rearmost car. The cars did not appear severely damaged. Clive surmised that the vehicle had lost its power—rather as if the firebox in a steam locomotive had been permitted to go out, causing the boiler to lose pressure. The train would roll to a stop but it would remain undamaged.
Because this train had moved through the air rather than upon rails, it had come to earth with a heavy impact, and some damage would be expected. Still, should the power plant be repaired, the train might resume its journey.
Could the four travelers make their way on the train? Where would it take them? Possibly—probably!—to a major center of population, commerce, and authority among the Q'oornans. There, Clive thought, they would make a decision rapidly: whether to attempt to blend in to the local populace and seek information without contacting the authorities—or to head straight for the seat of power and confront the Q'oornan ruler.
Their experiences in the Black Tower did not encourage the latter course, but Clive was feeling increasingly confident and assertive. He had been half-hoodwinked, half-abducted into this mad world. He was not subject to its local tyrannies. He would not submit to the whims of any petty princeling.
He pulled back a door and led his party into the rearmost car.
He had stepped into a scene straight from the most scandalous work of Edward Gibbon. Marble columns rose in a stately arrangement surrounding a splendid bath. Statues painted in the most lifelike of colors captured the eye. All were nude, and some were engaged in astonishing activities.
The bath itself was filled with sinuous ladies and muscular youths. The ladies wore their hair bound up in colorful ribbons. These were the sole garments visible in the pool.
Beside the bath a group of musicians played softly on lyres and reeds, while servants brought baskets of fresh fruit.
Of all the sights and activities, perhaps the greatest shock to Clive was the variety of colors before him. Gone were the shades of blackness that had filled his every sight for days past. Reds and pinks, yellows and greens and browns and blues rioted until he felt that he could see no more. He was like a gourmand who had feasted to repletion and yet had to sample one more delicacy, one more flavor, one more and always one more.
User Annie dashed past him and ran to the bath. She plunged headlong into the blue-tinged water— and remained dry. The bathers around her continued their sport as if nothing had happened.
At Clive Folliot's side, Quartermaster Sergeant Horace Hamilton Smythe picked up a splendid yellow pear—or attempted to pick it up. Like a ghostly apparition passing through a wall, his hand passed through the fruit.
Clive recognized one of the statues, apparently a Roman sculptor's copy of a work by the great Greek artist Praxiteles. Clive touched the statue—or tried to, for he had no more success than Annie in swimming in the bath or Horace Hamilton Smythe in eating the yellow pear.
"It's unreal," he exclaimed. "All an illusion!"
"Or a mirage," Smythe amended. "It may all exist, but it's separated from us by distance. Ah, or by some more subtle thing than simple distance, Major. I think it is real. We can see it, but we just can't touch it."
As if to support Smythe's assertion, several of the Roman youths had given up their disporting in the bath and were staring at the newcomers.
One young man, startlingly physical, had approached User Annie. Annie had regained her feet and was staring at the Roman. He reached to place his hand on her shoulder, but the hand passed through her body. An expression of startlement appeared on his face.
Annie responded, placing her hand on the Roman—not on his shoulder—but with the same lack of contact. Annie giggled, made more advances, all without tangible effect.
"They are completely silent!" Folliot exclaimed.
"Holograms," User Annie said, between flights of giggles, "virtual images. Temporal displacement circuitry!"
Clive shook his head. "Wherever they are, whatever they are, we cannot do more than signal to them. Let us move on."
Finnbogg had remained quietly watching the activity. But he joined the others as they advanced to the next car of the train.
It was a scene from Dante, or perhaps from the preachments of some fundamentalist pastor who spouted fire and brimstone with his every breath. Flames danced about them, devils with pitchforks jabbed and twisted at tormented souls, rivers of glowing lava poured into pools of living sparks.
Finnbogg ignored the demons and the flames. Perhaps, to his distant mind, they were meaningless images. Perhaps, in his alien brain, they registered as sylvan glades and pleasant pastures—or did not register at all! In any case, he led the others through the inferno and on to the next car.
Each compartment of the train seemed a different world. Some were worlds of ineffable beauty, others of indescribable horror. Some offered temptation almost impossible to resist—until Clive and the others discovered that all was illusion, nothing was reality.
At length they stepped into what appeared—to Folliot and Smythe, at least—a most ordinary nineteenth-century railroad coach.
Ladies in long skirts and modest bonnets sat with baskets of knitting or hampers of food on their laps. Gentlem
en in plug hats and side-whiskers attended them. Others sat quietly reading the latest newspapers or paperbound novels.
At the end of the car two seats had been arranged so as to face each other. A portable table had been set up between the knees of the four individuals who occupied the seats. A deck of cards and piles of colored wooden chips lay upon the table.
One of the four persons was a portly gentleman of advanced years, a brandy glass before him, his facial expression one of partial intoxication. Although he was richly dressed, there were no chips before him.
A gold pocket watch and chain lay on the table, as did a pile of large-denomination notes. The heavy- set man was perspiring freely and appeared to be distressed.
The person seated beside him was a comely woman. She sat very close to the man, and was whispering encouragement to him, her shapely lips held close to his ear.
The newcomers halted beside the group.
"Philo Goode!" Smythe exclaimed.
"Amos Ransome!" Folliot exclaimed.
"Lorena Ransome!" they both exclaimed.
The three sharpers sprang to their feet, leaving their latest victim startled and baffled as to what was transpiring. Without a backward glance they raced for the front of the car and leaped out.
Folliot and Smythe followed, trailing User Annie and massive Finnbogg in their wake.
Even as they leaped from the platform, hot on the trail of the sharpers, somewhere in a detached part of his mind Clive was considering that he had heard Lorena Ransome's whispers, heard the exclamations of the gamblers, heard the slap of their shoes on the floor of the railroad coach even as they fled. These persons were not mere images.
They were real!
But Clive had no opportunity to give thought to such metaphysical maunderings. The solid plain should have been a few feet below the level of the railroad coach.
Instead he found himself tumbling through a pitch- black void. As he revolved he could see Horace Hamilton Smythe and User Annie and the dwarf Finnbogg, all of them tumbling and falling like himself. And farther below, the three sharpers.
Somehow the sharpers were falling more rapidly than Clive and his companions. At first a few feet ahead of them, the sharpers moved faster and faster, shrinking to miniature versions of themselves, then to points of light and color. Then they disappeared altogether.
Wind whistled in Clive's ears and whipped past him, tearing at his clothes. He had the cybroid claw still—his only tool or weapon other than his bare hands and battered wits. He knew that Annie had her Baalbec A-9, a device of unknown and possibly crucial capabilities. Smythe was with him. Clive had regarded the man as his staunchest ally, but now he had become an enigma. And there was the eager, faithful Finnbogg.
The passage of air rose to a shriek. Then Clive realized that it was not merely the wind whipping past his ears that was responsible for the sound. Something else was shrieking, something huge and terrible, something that would make all the wonders and the horrors that he had encountered since leaving the flat of Miss Annabella Leighton pale to insignificance.
He revolved once more in the air, and beneath saw a face surrounded by tentacles, a face similar to the one he had destroyed in the fissure as he had descended the cliff. But this face was a hundred times more horrifying, and it was screaming at Clive, its mouth open wide, rows of terrible, razor-edged teeth chomping, and Clive was tumbling toward it, helpless to stop himself.
CHAPTER 19
Enter Shriek
Clive had time to wonder, Is this what happened to the sharpers? Then there was no more time to think, no more time for anything. The jaws clamped together. The glittering triangular teeth snapped shut, forming a solid surface of gleaming enamel, surrounded by horrid, fleshy lips that were drawn back in a hateful snarl.
With a jolt, Clive smashed into the granite-hard surface. With the impact of his boots on the teeth he bounded aside, tumbling over the snarling lips and falling onto a rock-strewn clearing. User Annie, Horace Hamilton Smythe, and Finnbogg all tumbled after him bouncing and tangling with one another. There were grunts and whooshes of rapidly expelled air but they all got quickly to their feet and checked themselves cursorily. There were no major injuries. That in itself was a relief.
But the quartet had no time to examine themselves for lesser cuts and bruises. The clearing was surrounded on three sides by shadowy woods. The fourth was a steep hillside where hardy shrubs and stunted trees struggled for purchase and for survival, nestling against boulders that might protect them from being swept away every time there was a rainfall.
At the foot of the slope an opening possibly four feet high and three feet across showed in stark contrast. It led into the hill, into a depth and a darkness that could not be judged from outside. For a split second, as Clive staggered to his feet and stood swaying uncertainly, staring into the opening, he thought that he saw a distant glimmer, a remote concatenation of lights that might—-just might—have been the by-now familiar and menacing spiral of stars, glittering and revolving enigmatically.
Clive blinked. The outdoor illumination was dazzling. He swiveled his neck for a quick look at the sky.
The perpetual blackness that he had grown accustomed to on the plains of Q'oorna was no more. Here was a different sky, a sky of a different color, a sky the green of teal ducks' feathers. There were no brilliant, spiraling stars, nor the distant constellations and fuzzy-edged nebulae that had given Q'oorna its pallid daylight. Instead there were two suns in the sky!
One was a giant, lurking, red cinder that seemed prepared to plunge to earth, consuming the entire world in a final fiery orgy. The other was a point of brilliant blue that made its way across the orb of the red giant, unconcerned that it traversed the face of a neighbor a billion times its size.
"What now, sah?" Horace Hamilton Smythe asked Clive. "Shall we enter the cave?"
Clive shook his head, as if that could clear the cobwebs and give him an answer to Smythe's question. Before he could speak, the thunder of pounding feet sounded nearby. It was followed by the growling cacophony of a dozen voices.
A band of primitive huntsmen appeared, armed with spears and clubs, dressed in crudely fashioned garments of animal hide. Even these were a welcome sight to Clive. The hunters halted, facing Clive and his companions. This was as startling a moment for them as it was for the others.
Clive and his friends stood in a semicircle, its center the mouth of the cave.
Before anyone could speak, the primitives ranged themselves before the cave, blocking Clive and his band from the opening. Their leader disappeared within while his followers stood with their backs to the cave mouth, holding Clive and his friends at bay with their spears.
User Annie screamed.
Clive whirled and saw the newest arrival. It looked vaguely human, even as Finnbogg had at first glimpse looked vaguely human. But as Finnbogg's canine nature had become more noticeable upon closer examination, so also did this shrieker's nonhuman characteristics.
There were four arms instead of two, so the creature could perform several tasks at once, or could bring all four arms to bear upon a single task. And there were four legs instead of two, so that the creature could walk or run or climb or scramble with incredible agility and stamina.
Its torso was oddly made, with a thin chest and a massive abdomen, and its face featured not two eyes but eight that glowed redly beneath the double suns. There remained vestigial hair on the creature's body, hair of a stiff and spiky composition.
From its mouth extended toothlike projections, yet as Clive peered into the face he realized that these were not true teeth but mandibles like those of a spider. He thought of the giant spider that he had fought for his life, first on a jungle trail and then on a beach near the Wami River, and for an instant felt himself becoming light-headed.
He knew now what Mr. Darwin had referred to in his much discussed and much condemned work. If ever the race of spiders had advanced through thousands of millions of years of—he tried
to remember Mr. Darwin's word—evolution—to attain a status comparable to that of humankind . . . then this amazing creature might be the result.
The primitives stood facing the strange newcomer. After a moment of stunned inaction, they fled, screaming in terror.
Now the strange creature settled itself into the mouth of the cave. Clive had seen the leader of the primitive huntsmen disappear into that opening. He was trapped, cut off from the outer world and from his fellow tribesmen, by the newcomer's body.
The creature sat staring at Clive and the others. It made no sound, but Clive felt a message emanating from it. Stay where you are, it seemed to tell him. He looked at his companions. They nodded to him. All of them, even Finnbogg, had received the creature's message.
"What now, sah?" Horace Smythe asked.
"I wouldn't want to fight that thing," Clive said. "Even with the aid of our claws."
"No, sah. Do you think we might just quietly start to edge away? These woods look as if one could find a hiding place."
"I'm sure those huntsmen are all around us now, Sergeant. I think we might profit by standing our ground. This new creature doesn't appear hostile." They settled themselves on the ground. As a spider will remain motionless, infinitely patient, at the center of her web, awaiting the arrival and selfentrapment of her prey—the great spiderlike being remained motionless in the mouth of the cave. The two suns made their way slowly toward the horizon.
Clive and his friends were alone, cut off from their ordinary reality, helpless there in the clearing. Or were they?
"Annie," Clive said. "Have I mentioned my friend du Maurier to you?"
"No." Annie shook her head. "Eyedee reference Daphne?"
"Daphne? No. George du Maurier. The cartoonist." Annie smiled. "Oh, pozzi tiff. I've input his books. Trilby. The Martian. Good entry level seffer."
The Black Tower Page 20
