“Heat...” she began, breathing heavily, gasping for breath. A line of sweat had risen on her forehead from the exertion of talking. “Any vegetable fiber... and the fungus. It’s rudimentary, but it could be enough to stave it off until Dr. Logan can recalculate his error...” She trailed off, on the verge of blacking out. Her head thumped and the dungeon walls began spinning crazily around. She fell back, worn out.
“Heat!” Koenig exclaimed. “That means we have to get out of here and build a fine.” He shook her limp form, rousing her from her reverie. “Okay, Helena you’re the doctor. How long have you got?”
“You want a prognosis?” she whispered. “Without treatment, death can be expected in a matter of hours.”
“How many hours?” he demanded, now very alarmed.
She was struggling to retais her awareness. “Six... eight... and, John,” she gasped, “if you don’t get out of here, you’ll be dead, too.”
She fell back into unconsciousness.
Suddenly, anguished, he grasped her head in the palms of his hands, crushing his lips to hers. “Oh, my God,” he prayed, cradling her, tears streaming unbidden down his face. “Oh, my God, my God.”
It had been a long time since he had believed in God.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
The dank, darkened room, reminiscent more of a cave than a civilized dwelling, began to pall on them. Its intense, tomb-like silence and lack of life save for the wan flickering of the torch preyed on their nerves. Three hours passed, and they had no idea whether it was now day or still night. By all that was humane they should have been released by now, if only for questioning. But they had received no sign that anyone else was present with them in the building, that their presence there had been remembered.
As Helena sank deeper and deeper into her illness, reviving for increasingly shorter periods of time, Koenig’s depression and grief turned gradually to anger and rage. All that was important now was that they escape and make their way back up the hill, where, he hoped, Logan would return them to civilization.
He and Carter began hammering violently on the door again. They kicked at it and banged on it with rocks. At length they heard the locking bars on the far side of the door being flung up, and they backed off, a mixture of satisfaction and apprehension stamped on their gaunt faces.
Carter positioned himself to one side of the door, out of the immediate line of sight of anyone entering. They waited while it was drawn open.
Two irate, hirsute guards, their glinting swords flashing as fiercely as their eyes, appeared in the doorway. One of them, the elder and the more solid-looking of the two, pushed his way inside toward where he saw Koenig standing.
“Stop the noise or...” he began growling in clearly understandable English, though with a strong Gaelic accent to it. He raised his sword, as though to show Koenig what he would do if they didn’t comply with his wishes. Then, sensing trickery, he began turning around. But before he was able to locate where Carter was, Koenig raised his arm, revealing his wrist indicator. The weird colored spectrum of light rays radiated over his and the guard’s faces. To the guards it appeared magical and sinister, transforming Koenig into a demon.
They shied away, gripped by a primitive terror of the unknown. Seeing his chance, Carter stepped forward. Expertly, he chopped one of the guards across the shoulder, hitting a key nerve point, and watched the man slump to the fioor in a tangle of kilt and hardware. While he fell, Koenig launched himself at the unfortunate man’s comrade and with equal accuracy dealt a second stunning blow. The guard collapsed, a cry of alarm sticking in his throat.
Quickly, Koenig bounded across the dungeon and scooped up Helena. “The fungus!” he cried to Carter as he carried her limp form to the door.
The Eagle pilot scraped more of the sickly growth off the rocky wall and deposited it in his sample collection pocket. Both men beat a hasty retreat from the room, pausing only to close and lock the door behind them.
“We’ll never get through the camp site,” Carter commented dejectedly as they moved rapidly through the gloomy rooms and passageways.
“Then we’ll have to find somewhere where they won’t think of looking,” Koenig panted, his whole body straining with the extra weight he was placing on it. “We must get some extra time—to save Helena.”
“Too late—English fugitives!” a proud, deep Scottish voice boomed out from in front of them.
They stopped abruptly, in the center of a large, stone-flagged room, almost as startled by the sound of the voice as they were by the fact that their getaway had been intercepted.
They were even more startled a moment later when, by the flickering light of several torches they saw the magnificently adorned form of a Highlander emerge from the shadows. He was a chief, and he was quickly surrounded by a dozen or so of his shabbily dressed soldiers, who formed a formidable circle about the Alphans.
Ten hours remained.
Verdeschi paced up and down the Command Center in agitation, while Maya, more tactful than he, conversed with Logan.
“Look at the problem again, Doctor,” she told the scientist urgently. “You’ve run your seismic reconstruction. On that basis you’ve recalculated again and again—”
“And the answer’s the same each time!” Logan interrupted her. His face was set in a look of complete exasperation. “Earth!” He sighed heavily and shook his hcad. “But it isn’t possible.”
“Because they’re still alive?” Verdeschi cut in.
“Exactly,” the other replied.
Verdeschi looked questioningly at Maya. The Psychon turned back to face the screen. “The possibility of their having landed on a planet with a breathable atmosphere is one in a billion. The probability that they are alive elsewhere is almost unacceptable.”
Maya’s superior sense of logic was beginning to be the prime source of Logan’s frustration. Quite simply, he was unable to compete with her powers. He felt deeply humiliated, the more so as he rnistook her for being one of his own ancestors, someonc he felt that he ought to be able to better. He kept silent, unable to add anything to what he had already said. He cringed when Verdcschi asked Maya, “Then, why can’t Logan find them?”
“Perhaps,” she replied slowly, glancing at both Logan and the Italian, “he is looking in the wrong time.”
“Impossible!” Logan blurted out. “I can’t accept that. I set my equipment to bring them back here in the present. Carla and I have checked and rechecked the instruments.”
But Verdeschi looked emphatic. “You know they can’t be alive on Earth’s surface in present conditions... well, we know they’re alive. So please rethink your chronological calculations.”
“And remember, Dr. Logan, we have only ten hours,” Maya reminded him coolly.
Logan raised his bushy eyebrows in despair and resignation. “All right... but if you’re wrong”—he looked at Maya menacingly—“there’ll be no time for any recalculations.”
“We’ll take that risk,” Verdeschi told him crisply. He turned away from the screen and strode over to where Mathias was busy behind Helena’s console. The console had been patched in to the neutrone link-up, and the doctor was repeatedly pressing a communications button, trying vainly to send signals to the three lost Alphans.
“Keep it going,” Verdeschi told him when he saw that there had been no developments.
“What good will it do?” Mathias asked. “How can they tell us where they are? And at what point in time?”
“Just keep signalling,” Verdeschi told him. “Let him know we’re searching. If they pick it up—which they might conceivably do on their wrist indicators—Koenig knows how to get a signal back.”
The banquet hall in the stone building was alive with kilted sword dancers, the wail of bagpipes, and the smell of roasting beef.
It was brightly lit with torches along the wall. A huge banqueting table was laid with a mouth-watering array of food. A score or so figures, all dressed in the more refined clothe
s of the clan chief, ate hungrily around it. They were waited on by as many foot soldiers and by pipers who lined all the walls. At one end of the hall was a massive, open-hearth log fire with a spit and the slowly-turning carcass of an ox.
The hall was in distinct contrast to the gloom and squalor of the dungeon, and Koenig, Carter, and a revived Helena could scarcely believe what their senses told them—especially their taste buds, as they dug into food of a richness and texture they had not sampled for more than six years. They were seated at the head of the table next to their imposing captor—MacDonald, of the MacDonald clan. He ate heartily, tearing huge strips of flesh from a chicken and stuffing them into his mouth. Whcn he had finished chewing one mouthful, he would drink from a large tankard of ale by his side.
He was an amiable, if fierce, lord. After he had recaptured them, he put them through an inquisition that had got him nowhere, as neither he nor they could make much sense of each other. He had then reverted to his earlier belief of assuming that they were fugitives—fugitives from the English. The idea staggered and astounded them. The fact that they had been re-materialized on Earth, after all, but in the remote past, during the English wars with Scotland, seemed too preposterous to believe. However, there was no way of refuting it. The evidence was too clear to see.
Noticing that Helena was ill, and admiring her beauty, the Highland chief had allowed them to prepare the fungi and restore her. Then he had brought them to the impressive hall.
All this had used up about eight more hours of their precious time.
Now, he leaned forward across his plate, thrusting his black beard into Helena’s face. There was a mischievous twinkle in his brown eyes. “You’re gentlefolk, that’s clear. And worth a pretty penny to some great lord in England,” he leered, slightly the worse for his drink. “But one thing I still don’t understand....”
Enraged by the liberties that the Scot had been taking with Helena, Koenig put his mouth close to her ear and whispered to her while she was being spoken to. Noticing that she had visibly paled again, he asked her how she was feeling.
“Rotten,” she replied out of the corner of her mouth. “Temperature’s rising again.”
“What I don’t understand is why do three English travel Scotland without armed escort? You must know you’d make fair hostages to any Scottish clan.”
He threw himself back in his chair, chuckling at her composure, which he mistook for shyness.
“Yes... explain that, Alan,” Koenig spoke across the table to Carter.
Carter shot him a look of anger. He turned to MacDonald. “Would you believe we lost our way?”
“No, my friends.” The chief slapped him on his back cheerfully. “But I’d believe one of you was running away with the wife of some great English lord.” He looked wishfully at Helena again. “And that lord would pay much gold to get her back.”
Carter shook his head as he tried to explain again that this was not the case, but Koenig stopped him by kicking him under the table. In a low voice, Koenig said, “Let him believe it.”
MacDonald pushed back his chair and rose to his feet. He glanced toward a large hourglass which was slowly registering the hour, the sand from its upper reservoir trickling away into its lower. He raised his tankard in the air as the seated assembly quietened and rose, following his example.
“With those last grains of sand,” MacDonald’s loud voice thundered heartily down the table, “the old year runs out—let’s drink that this new year will better it!” He raised his tankard even higher. “I drink to the New Year!” He looked sternly down at the three seated Alphans. “Raise your drinks to Robert the Bruce and Bannockburn.”
Quickly, they did as he requested.
“Bannockburn,” Koenig hissed urgently across to Carter. “When did the battle take place?”
“It’s a long time since I was at school, John,” the Eagle pilot replied above the roar of voices. “I can’t remember.”
“We know that this is New Year’s Day, twenty-five years after the battle.” Koenig looked hopefully at Helena. MacDonald had talked earlier about the battle and then later, when they had asked him the date, he had smiled cryptically and told them it was a “quarter of a century on from the Battle of Bannockburn.” Koenig continued: “If we could get the message to Maya, Logan’s computer will know the exact date.”
“But first we have to get a fix from the Moon Base,” Helena complained weakly. “They can’t radio us all this way through time and space.”
“No,” Koenig replied, “but with the neutrone beam they could. If they’ve had the sense to try it.” He put his arm around her consolingly. “It’s the only hope we’ve got.”
As he spoke to her, she went limp again. Her drink crashed to the table. Alarmed, he lowered her back into her seat.
The toasting was over, and now MacDonald noticed Helena’s relapse. He opened his mouth to voice his concern, but before his words were uttered, a deep frown of suspicion furrowed his brow. The hall fell silent. “Is the lady still sick?” he asked slowly.
“She has been,” Koenig told him, suddenly, dreadfully aware of what was on the Scot’s mind. “If she could sleep—”
MacDonald slammed down his tankard in sudden anger. His red face glared at Koenig. “I ask you—Is the lady sick?”
Koenig responded by encircling Helena again with his arm. “Give us shelter where she can rest. Put guards on us, if you like.”
The Scottish chief let out an oath. There was a sudden screech of tortured metal as he withdrew his sword from its scabbard. He straightened to his full height and placed its tip beneath Koenig’s chin. His eyes now held a look of fear in thern. “I understand now,” he said in a tone of finality that made their hopes sink for good.
He lowered his sword and backed violently away, upturning his chair. He turned to his officers. “The Plague-the woman has the Plague. That’s why they were wandering alone in the forest. Turned out by some great lord to die!” He looked down at himself in horror. “We might all be contaminated!”
There was a stark, multiple cry of terror from the assembly. Then came the sound of more swords sliding from their scabbards, accompanied by the wrathful chanting of Gaelic voices.
“Burn!” the voices rang vengefully through the hall. “Burn! Burn the exiles!”
Logan was sweating as he worked at his console. On the black screen in front of him bright green digits danced and flickered: 30-27... 30-26... 30-25...
They told him the time.
He lunged at the neutrone communications button, bringing Maya’s features back on the neutrone screen. “Moon Base Alpha...” he gasped. “Thirty minutes before the eclipse begins. I think we all have to accept now that we have no hope of recovering them.”
He looked the picture of a wrecked and ruined man. Maya was impassive.
“No, Doctor!” she said defiantly. “We accept nothing until the eclipse actually takes place.”
“I thought perhaps the people on Moon Base would like to use the last minutes to send messages to their descendants on Earth.”
Verdeschi’s image appeared on the screen. It looked hard and scathing. “There will be no personal messages. We insist you continue searching until the last second.”
For the last seconds... the last seconds of his career, Dr. Logan continued searching; privately with no hope of success.
The rank, musty smell of pine assailed Koenig’s nostrils. His wrists ached and were torn and bleeding where they were manacled, chained to the interior wall of a small wooden hut. Carter and Helena were likewise chained, one on either side of him. At their feet were piled heaps of brushwood and hay bales, stacked by the kilted soldiers - who now kept a good distance between themselves and the Alphans.
They had been marched out of the banqueting hall, out of the stone building, and across open land at the side of the building. They had been prodded at sword point, and no amount of reasoning with the MacDonald chief had convinced him of Helena’s true condition.
Dawn had just broken, although it was still dark when they reached the ramshackle hut. The weather had changed. The rain clouds had been blown away by the icy wind, and now the sky was studded with a million brilliant stars. And still high in the sky was the breathtaking white orb of the old Moon, with the familiar craters and mountains showing clearly on it. It had been a momentous and heartrending sight, to see their Moon as it had once appeared in all its glory and splendor, long before their fateful journey on it had commenced.
One of the soldiers thrust a torch in Koenig’s face and spat at him. Maddened, Koenig lunged out at him with his head and shoulders, held back by the chains which pinned his wrists to the wall above his head.
“It’s not the Plague!” he screamed out to MacDonald, who was somewhere outside the hut. “She can be cured!”
“Cured!” came the sarcastic reply. “For the pestilence, there’s only one cure! Out, soldiers!”
The men withdrew from the wooden hut, and the Alphans heard them stacking more hay bales against the outside walls. Several of the torches had been left burning inside, and Koenig now turned grimly to face Helena, who was slumped forward, barely conscious, by his side. Abruptly, their wrist indicators, which had been exposed when the soldiers had manacled them, began winking on and off.
“The Moon Base!” he exclaimed. “They’re signalling...”
He struggled more desperately than ever to free himself, the steel of the manacles biting deeply into his flesh. But he had to give up. He saw instead that it might be possible for them to reach each other’s indicators. His own indicator was nearest to Carter, and he turned to the Eagle pilot and explained what he had in mind. “Reach toward me as far as you can.” He began wriggling his own wrist as far as he could get it toward Carter’s straining fingertips,
A roar of approval went up from the tartan army outside, followed by the crackling of burning brushwood. The fire had been started. Over the jeering, chanting voices they could hear MacDonald’s loud but now mournful voice:
Space 1999 - The Edge of the Infinite Page 8
