Keepers of the Secrets

by Philip José Farmer

  Pauncho was bellowing in his ear, 'Hey.Doc! Can you hear me? You all right? I'm half-deaf, Doc!'

  'Quiet!' Doc shouted back.

  He put his mouth close to Pauncho's ear. 'Get rid of all your grenades, and mine, too, fast as you can. Maybe you can get those guys before -'

  The second grenade from the enemy was about three feet closer, and it was followed by a third which landed almost on the same spot. Since they were on level ground, the impact of the blasts was not softened. They were rolled over, and their heads sang and their ears were dead. But the plastic bombs depended almost entirely on concussion for effect, since the explosion reduced the plastic shell to dust. And they were not within the killing range of the blasts.

  They would be if the enemy continued to lob grenades at random. They got to their feet and ran on. Pauncho stopped to toss grenades behind him, and Doc lost sight of him. Suddenly, he saw a body ahead of him. He tried to dodge to one side, slipped, and fell on his side. He came down heavily because his primary concern was keeping pressure on the dial. He called, 'Pongo!' and then rolled away, holding the box up, hoping that if it was the enemy it would fire at where he had been. He wasn't worried about the person tossing a grenade, since he'd be committing suicide if he threw one that close to himself.

  'Pongo!' Trish said. She looked as if she were shouting, yet he could barely hear her.

  He got up and approached her cautiously, since it was possible the situation had changed and she was being forced to lure him in. He preferred to believe that she would die before doing that, but she might be depending on him to get her out of the situation, no matter how bad it looked. She tended to think of him as a superman, despite his lectures to her that he might be a superior man but he was also flesh and blood and one little .22 bullet or a slip on a piece of soap in the shower could make him just as dead as anybody else.

  He peered through the fog. Talk loudly. I'm almost deaf. Pauncho may be coming along, so don't shoot without giving the codeword. Where's Barney?'

  'He went after you,' she said, shouting in his ear. 'Well, not exactly after you. He said he was going to make contact with the enemy and explain the situation. He thought that if they knew about the bomb, and that you were trying to keep it from going off, they'd quit fighting. They might even take off and leave us alone.’

  'Doesn't sound like it,' Caliban said. The crump of grenades going off in the distance - somewhere around the Stonehenge circle - was still continuing. But there were no blasts nearer, where Pauncho and the three men should have been.

  Suddenly, there was a silence. From far off, as if behind piles of wood, a voice cried. It was saying something. And then another voice cried. And then he heard, very faintly - dimmed by distance or by his injured hearing, or both - a rushing sound.

  ‘Tires,' his cousin said. 'It could be the Nine taking off in their steam cars.'

  'Maybe Barney got to them,' Caliban said. 'He disobeyed orders, but he was doing something I should have thought of. Pauncho disobeyed, too, luckily for me.'

  A form like a truncated monolith from Stonehenge stepped out of the fog. Trish shouted the codeword back at him. Pauncho walked up to them and said, 'Where's Barney?'

  Trish told him. Doc had resumed his interrupted counting. He stared at Iwaldi and Villiers, who were standing up now. One of the three men, Elmus, was holding a loaded crossbow on them.

  'It's ironic that I came here to kill the Nine and now I have to let them go, even Iwaldi,' he thought, managing to count at the same time.

  Trish stopped talking to Pauncho. They had heard the squeal of tires as they suddenly accelerated and then the screams of men and the thump of a massive swiftly moving object striking flesh and bone. Then a grenade boomed, and immediately thereafter was another screech as of tires sliding on pavement. Then there was a crash, and a series of bangs. More screeches as a vehicle accelerated again and sped away. Another boom of a grenade. Then, silence.

  Doc continued to count. Barney came like a ghost out of the ectoplasmic pearliness. 'I thought I'd lost you,' he said. 'I've been wandering around, afraid to go too fast or to yell out. Even though I think most of the enemy has gone. They didn't know whether or not to believe me, but they must've decided they couldn't take a chance. Besides, as one said, it'd be just the thing the crazy old dwarf would do. They think he's insane; no doubt of that.'

  Doc Caliban did not ask him if he had seen anything of the Grandrith party. If Barney had, he would have said something about it.

  Doc kept on counting. Undoubtedly, five minutes were passed, at least seven minutes had gone by, but he preferred not to take a chance. The blasts had hurt his head, so that his sense of timing might have been disturbed. But he could put it off for only so long, and he finally decided to take his hand off the dial. He could see Cobbs - no, Iwaldi - and Barbara Villiers watching him. When they saw his hand drop away, and nothing happened, they sighed. At least, they looked as if they had. He could not hear them. He still could hear only loud sounds.

  Trish put a hand on his shoulder, causing him to jump. She put her mouth close to his ear and said, There's something still going on out there. In the ruins, I think. I heard a woman scream.'

  They waited. There was no more evidence that a fight was still occurring among the stones, but they had a feeling that something important was taking place under the monoliths and the trilithons standing like the ghosts of the ghosts in the mists.

  A faraway hoarse bellow, the cry of something not quite human, reached him. Silence again.

  'You said we could go free,' Barbara Villiers said.

  'Leave. Or stay here,' Doc Caliban said. 'Do whatever you wish. You have a twelve-hour headstart.'

  'Untie us,' she said. Iwaldi merely glared.

  'I said you could go free,' Caliban replied. 'I wouldn't feel easy with you in this fog and your hands free to pick up some weapons. Come on, the rest of you. We'll find the bicycles and then the steam car.'

  ‘I’ll come with you as far as the car,' Villiers said. 'Iwaldi told me he'd kill me because I betrayed him, though I don't know how he figures that.'

  'You want to throw in with us?' Doc said. He was not inclined to trust her one bit, but she undoubtedly had very valuable information about Iwaldi's organisation.

  She hesitated, then said, 'Why not? I know a winner when I see one.'

  'Thank you, Benedictine Arnold,' Trish said.

  Iwaldi strode off into the fog. The others started to walk away, staying close to each other so they would not lose sight of each other. But they had not gone more than five steps when Doc stopped. Trish had put a hand on his shoulder. She said in his ear, 'There was a low cry! I think Iwaldi -'

  They walked in the direction Iwaldi had taken. Suddenly, he was on the ground at their feet. His throat was still pumping blood through the broad wound.

  Something came through the fog, and only Caliban would have been quick enough to see it and to react with the swiftness of a leopard. He batted at the round object as if he were playing handball; his hand struck it and sent it back into the fog with terrific force. There was a roar. The blast knocked them all down, and his ears hurt even more, and his head felt as if it had been squeezed in a vice.

  They got to their feet with Doc assisting Villiers, whose hands were still taped behind her. They went ahead slowly, and then they felt the breeze, and before they had gone thirty feet, the fog began to fall apart. The sun dropped through in pale golden threads and then the threads coalesced into a blazing ball.

  A wisp of fog, like a snake, moved across the face of a man on the ground, seeming to disappear into his open mouth. Doc approached him cautiously, though the fellow looked dead. His clothes were half-ripped off by the explosion, and blood ran down from his nose, ears, and mouth. A bloody plastic knife lay near his outflung hand. His helmet had been blown off, revealing an extraordinary high forehead. He was bald, and his jaws thrust outward, giving the lower part of his face an apish appearance. His body was tall and skinny.
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  'I think I know him,' Caliban murmured. 'I've seen him at one or more of the annual ceremonies in the caves.'

  The name would come, though it would not matter to the man, who was dead. He had come across Iwaldi and cut his throat, though he could not have recognised him as Iwaldi. But he did not know him, and that meant that he was an enemy. Then he had heard the others and tossed the grenade and it had come back so swiftly he must have thought for a horrified moment that he had bounced it off a nearby wall.

  'Hey, Doc!' Pauncho bellowed. 'I think that's Grandrith inside the ruins! He's waving at us!'

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