The gypsy driver was preparing the last of the trundlers. His golden earring caught the light, glinted like an eye in his lobe.
"Get the others," Belina said. "Bring them here. Even if he doesn't spot us this time, we've got to take care of him. If he gets away, he might not bring the authorities. But he will sure as hell come armed on his next trip. Surprise won't be with us then."
"What are we going to do?" Wissa asked.
"Catch him here, at the van, when he returns," Belina said. Her voice was soft and throaty. She shivered with excitement at what she was thinking, seemed to transmit her sweet anticipation to the others.
"And then?" Scratch asked.
"Kill him," Belina whispered.
Wissa grabbed the blond girl and squeezed her, kissed her. "Yes, baby! Yes, yes !" she hissed.
Scratch scampered away to collect the others. There were thirty-seven of them in all. The Furnace contained enough synthetic flesh to have sixty puppets alive at once. Belina had not found more than thirty-six she thought she could dominate without contention.
"How?" Wissa asked.
The bearded driver walked off after the last of the trundlers to supervise the looting spree. In a moment the arrival bay was quiet.
"You'll see soon enough," Belina said. "Oh, Wissa, it's going to be great fun!"
The gypsy trucker returned in half an hour, leading a procession of three robotic cargo trundlers. They were stacked with boxed goods, and he had his arms full of Arctic clothes. He stopped when he heard the noise of the van's rotars, looked up, startled.
The long vehicle fluttered at full power, blades beating so hard they were completely invisible. All the power was being used in a verticle maneuver while the horizontal mechanisms were braked. It hovered ten feet off the black beltroad.
"What the devil's this?" the driver asked, dropping the clothes he carried, scurrying to the edge of the pedestrian walkway that looked down on the arrivals avenue.
The walk was a good eight feet above the bottom of the road. The truck hovered only two feet above him. He stood on his toes and tried to see through the windows. There did not appear to be anyone driving.
He had never heard of a van acting up like this on its own. Yet who was there in the city to give him trouble? He wished he had taken his long-barreled pistol out of its glove on the driver's door. Now it was out of reach and he was weaponless.
He thought he heard the sound of chickens behind him, over the deafening boom of the van's blades. It was a cackling sort of laughter, tinny and uncertain. He turned and examined the place behind him. There was the arrival platform with its podium and computer module. Along the wall were booths for customs and the execution of certain types of business permits. They had never been used, and they were empty now. There was no place large enough for a man to hide.
The cackling came from his right now.
He looked that way.
A directory of city hotels. Reservation and registration screens. A water fountain. Again, nowhere large enough to conceal the bulk of a man.
Something giggled on his left. It was definitely the stifled laugh of a woman.
He looked left. Credit and banking facilities for the arriving visitors. A series of glass booths for private phone transactions. The empty swath of walkway.
Carefully, he walked closer to look. He had the feeling that unseen creatures were scampering about to keep out of his sight, from one point of concealment to another. But he couldn't be sure. He chalked it up to his natural superstition. Having been raised among gypsy truckers, he had had more than his share of superstition bred into him.
The thing was to find out if anyone was in the truck.
He walked back to the edge of the pedestrian way.
"Hey ! Bring it down !" he shouted.
The truck remained aloft.
He considered a moment before he said, "I have a gun here. You'll have to bring her down sooner or later, even if you try to escape. I won't shoot now, I promise you. Later, I might be mad enough to 1 " All of it was a lie, of course. Since it was necessary to deliver the speech in a loud, raucous tone to be heard above the blades, however, it seemed to have more authority than it deserved.
Yet it was not enough authority for the man who had crept into the van while he had been gone. That man knew it was a bluff, and he kept the truck ten feet above the avenue.
If there was anyone up there, he reminded himself. He still didn't know if this were some absurd malfunction in his van or some stranger's piece of dirty business. His rugged life style told him to expect the latter, while his natural optimism told him to hope for the former.
The chuckling sound came from all sides now.
He ignored it.
He concentrated on the van. There seemed to be no way of reaching it that was safe and sire. He didn't want to
leap for the door handle. If he missed that, he would slip down into the avenue and get caught by the blades or buffeted unconscious by the furious air cushion. Yet, if the van broke down here, he would have one damn time getting it out. If it was a major malfunction that couldn't be fixed on the spot with his tool kit, how was he to get back to civilization to secure the needed parts? Calling for help would only land him in jail for looting. This was a sweet racket, this city of his own, and he did not want to destroy what he had built for himself here.
Damn that chuckling noise!
With that and the blades only a few feet away, it was impossible to think clearly.
He turned to walk away from the worst of the rotars' noise and confronted six of the puppets on his right. They had come out from behind the hotel directory and the water fountain. Each of them held a sharp steak knife of the sort one was given in a robotic restaurant. Each of them was grinning. Their eyes were bright.
He did not understand what was happening. First of all, it was impossible to cope with the sight of the diminutive creatures in such short order. His mind accepted their presence, but seemed to draw back from analyzing them. He did know that there was danger and that it was of a deadly nature. He backed away from them.
Something pricked his calves.
He whirled.
There were seven puppets on the left. They had been hiding in the banking facilities by the telephone booths. They, too, were armed with steak knives.
When he turned to the rear, he saw a dozen puppets, some not exactly human in appearance. They were lined up by the customs booths and the arrivals platform.
He was hemmed in.
One of the puppets on the right slashed his leg.
He screamed, stepped backwards.
He could feel blood running down into his sock.
On the left, a horned puppet ran forward and drove his knife through the soft top of the gypsy's boot. The blade penetrated the driver's foot.
Pain lanced the length of his leg, seemed to coalesce in his hip, blossom from there across his broad chest.
The puppet did not dare' to pull it free. He turned and ran, letting it stick straight out of the boot, quivering . . . .
Neither did the gypsy dare to bend and pluck the steel loose. Now he was remembering stories told by other gypsy truckers, stories passed down from one generation to the next. There were little people who lived on the dark and empty highways. Usually they skittered off when you came near. Now and then they were caught in the beams of headlamps. And some few times, they boarded a truck as it went by and sought the soul of the driver. They were soulless creatures themselves. The human soul was not adaptable to their form. They had long ago learned this. Still, they tried another one from time to time, especially so the stories said-if that man were a virtuous man.
Heavens knew, he was no virtuous man. Yet he was not so rugged and crude as other earringed men of the highway. He had never killed a man, nor raped a woman.
Now he wished he had.
He could not walk on his wounded foot.
The line of puppets by the arrivals platform moved toward him.
&n
bsp; He danced backwards on one foot.
In all his years on the road, in a hundred fights over women in the gypsy camps, he had never been cut by a knife. He had always been too quick, too clever, too selfassured. And now one of these midgets had driven a blade through his foot. Panic and fear had overruled his usual efficiency. He knew that if he did not regain his calm shortly they would have him. Yet he could not stop the terror that coursed through him like current from a live cable.
It was not the pain that unnerved him so much.
It was not their size or their ruthlessness.
It was, instead, the insane glitter in their eyes, the slack and sensuous cast of their faces, as if they enjoyed delivering pain more than anything else in the world.
"Novel" a beautiful, blond midget exclaimed, waving her blade in the sir as if it were a knight's lance.
The puppets rushed him from all sides, squealing with delight, shoving and pushing to be the first at him
He stepped quickly backwards.
Too late, he remembered the drop to the avenue behind him.
He lost his balance, fell.
The blades caught his arm, tore it.
He fell away, was pounded unmercifully by the air cushion. His arm bled freely. The pain was almost more than he could bear, though he knew he must not lose consciousness.
Then the truck began to descend.
The blades grew closer; the fierce wind grew more fierce. Through the whirling rotars, he could see the fixtures that held the blade shield in place beneath the truck. He could see the spot he had welded last year when the shield had been dented and the blade had torn it open and punched it outwards. He could see grease up there.
And then the blades settled over him, chopping, and he saw nothing after that ....
"Wasn't it wonderful?" Wissa asked. Her voice was soft, distant, as if she still had not returned from that plateau of hypnotic delight.
"Yes, love," Belina said.
"Did you see him trying to scramble out of the way of the van when it was coming down?"
"Yes."
"He looked at me, Belina, as if he wanted me to come help him. He looked to me, pleading with me. He said something to me, but I couldn't hear what it was."
Belina kissed her.
"Will Sebastian be as good?"
"Better?"
Wissa squirmed with anxiety. "How long?"
"Tomorrow night."
"Why not tonight? Now?"
"We don't want to get it over with so fast. We want to enjoy this killing first- When the joy dies; then Sebastian. Don't gorge yourself all at once. After Sebastian there will be no one. For a while."
"You're pretty in blood," Wissa said.
Belina caressed her breasts and belly and hips The gypsy's blood was all over her. She had painted herself with ;t
"You're prettier," she told Wissa.
Wissa looked at the crimson film she wore. "Tomorrow night," she said. "Really?"
"Really."
The Last and First Night
In his later and more militant writings, the Rogue Saint Eclesian tells us that all the cruelty of man is the responsibility of God. He says: "Although the placement of souls in human bodies is an automatic process, it requires a periodic attention from the deity. When a new God assumes the throne of his father he often forgets this chore. As a result, the soul-giving machines break down and produce soulless men once every generation. These creatures have no scruples nor morals. They prey upon the vast masses of mankind who are good and honest. They steal and kill, cheat and lie, rape and torture. God does not even consider what he has set loose among us by his careless handling of the functions of creation. If he would attend his business properly, we would live in peace and good fellowship, for we are normally gentle men. Is not this enough to make some of you honey-sucking, sated, smug religious men stand and fight? If this cannot raise you from your awful lethargy of middle-class acceptance, then man must abandon all hope of ever ruling his own destiny. If this does not send you to rebellion, if this fails like all my teachings have failed, then my life is a waste, my message no more than an entertaining echo cast from the ledge of a canyon. Goddamn it, move I Move 1"
Eclesian was a wiser man than his contemporaries credited him. His teachings have lived. And so have his predictions, even if they have lived in a manner he might not have foreseen . ...
She spent the day in an air-conditioning shaft, in cool darkness and the smell of dust.
She was alone, because she wanted to be. And the others never failed to accede to her wishes.
Now and then the sounds of puppet laughter came to her, carried down hollow tin byways. She was oblivious to that, for the most. More often than not, she was tranced, carried away to distant worlds and other times by the rich visions of the Holistian Pearl.
For a while she had relived some of Pertos Godelhausser's most interesting adventures. But that was too uncomfortably close to home. The Pearl had sensed this and had carried her farther into the blackness of space, to entirely different intelligent races, on other worlds.
The visions affected her differently than they did most people. She was not inspired by them. She did not see themes and relationships in the broad vista of civilisations she was shown. She had no empathy with the characters of the dreams. She did not share their joy or their tragedy; she did not care at all. Instead, she watched the bright explosions of colors and events the way a dog might sit for a time before a television set: interested in the loveliness, in the action and the excitement of movement, but oblivious to any finer meanings or purpose.
Yet she was so pretty . . . .
The morning of the last day began for Sebastian as all mornings began those days. He rose, uncertain of his whereabouts. He sat on the edge of the bed, cradling his head in his hands, trying to figure out the place and the time. Gradually, he oriented himself. After that, it was a matter of playing out the script of his new life. Routine called for a sonic shower to be followed by a breakfast of eggs and bread at an automat only a block from his apartment. These things went well, leaving him refreshed. His hunger appeased, he had time for curiosity and was free to wander until lunch.
He was careful to avoid those places where he had accidentally encountered the strange puppets. If they were planning a surprise of some sort, he did not want to spoil it for them. Bitty Belina would be angry with him if he found out too soon. He could not bear her anger, for he wanted so much to have her like him as he liked her.
At noon, when he came back for lunch, there were no puppets in the apartments. He had not seen any in the halls, either. He checked the restaurants where they usually ate, but found no one. This was a bit out of the routine, but tolerable. Depressed, he took his lunch alone, in an Italian automat.
When, at suppertime, he could still find no puppets, he began to worry. Suppose something had happened to them and he was now alone, forever? Alone in this huge place with its moving stairs and softly murmuring maintenance robots.
He forced himself to cling to at least a small degree of calm. If something had happened to the puppets, he need only re-create them in the Furnace.
In Belina's rooms, he found the Furnace. It appeared to be undamaged, the Olmescian amoeba drawn to the rear where it trembled slightly. He wondered if he should forge a puppet to determine if the machine worked properly, then rejected such an idea. If, the little people were in some kind of danger, he should be on his way to find them not wasting his time here at these controls.
He searched the familiar parts of the city. The puppets could not be more than a thousand yards from the Furnace. Yet there were so many levels to the city that three thousand feet could encompass a great deal of actual space. By three in the morning, he had begun to remember some of the places he was searching. He knew he had covered every nook and cranny and that he would not find them here.
He returned to his own room to think.
He felt miserable. After all, he was the bi
g one here, the full-grown man. It was his job to see they came to no harm. And now they were gone.
While he was sitting there, the first of the spiders came through the grill over the air-conditioning duct. It was black with white markings, as large as a thumbnail. It hung there, its legs kicking, then slowly came down the light wooden paneling toward the floor.
Sebastian did not see it.
By the time it was halfway down the paneling, three other spiders followed it. They were all brown and twice as large as the first. They were intent, actually, upon attacking the first and devouring it. But the effect was of four spiders trying to reach the idiot.
He could not see them because they blended so well with the color of the wood panels.
What would Pertos have done? Sebastian wondered. He was sure the puppet master would not have sat here, elbows propped on his knees, undecided. And yet, what was there to do but wait?
The carpet in the room was beige, almost white.
The black spider touched it, hesitated. Behind it, the three large brown spiders came after it, running silently along the wood. The black spider skittered into the beige fibers, stumbled over them, mastered their pattern and rushed across the room.
Sebastian stood up. He did not know where he was going, but he knew he couldn't just bide his time.
The three brown spiders reached the carpet and started after their black prey. Because they were so much larger, they had less trouble with the fibers and made better time, closing the gap.
It was then that Sebastian saw the spider parade and froze where he stood, unable-for a long moment-even to draw a breath.
He had been thinking that Pertos would know what to do about the missing puppets, and he had been wishing that Pertos was here now to solve the current problem. But he had forgotten why Pertos was absent. Pertos was dead and had been killed by his assistant.
And now, in answer to the foolish wish silently issued seconds ago, Pertos had returned.
And he had brought three friends to help him against the idiot. Three friends: Jenny, Alvon Rudi and Ben Samuels
Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0) Page 12
