He crossed the room to where one of the folding chairs stood ready, picked it up, placed it at an angle near the open doorway, sat down, and folded his arms. “Allow me to point out, Obersturmbannfuehrerin von Cruewell, that you are in no position of authority over me, and that my wife’s safety is paramount.”
“Valkyrie!” said von Cruewell, and added a few words in German. The dog leaped up.
Even as Corwin regained his feet, Valkyrie sprang with a force that caught him offbalance, the chair still at his knees. Over they went, the chair skewing out of the way. He landed on his back, less bruised than terrified, with the dog atop him, her forepaws planted firmly on his chest. She didn’t bite, but she growled, and when he tried to bring his right arm up to shield his face, she made a warning snap.
“You will be well advised, Herr Poe, to lie very still.” The obersturmbannfuehrerin stood and, after feeling out his exact position with the tip of her walking-stick, strode around him to the door, closed it, latched it, turned and took her stance in front of it. “Valkyrie!” she repeated, with another German command.
To his relief, the dog left him and sat on her haunches beside her mistress.
“I heard a chair fall,” von Cruewell went on. “You will pick it up and bring it here to me.”
Shakily, he complied. As he neared them, the dog stood up and the woman extended her walking-stick until it met the chair. “Here,” she directed. “Set it here. Gut. Now you will go and sit in the armchair.”
“It would appear that you are in some position of authority, after all,” he said as though capitulating. But instead of going to the armchair, he made a curve to the room’s other door, the one leading to the VIP Suite. He paused, gripped the door handle, and tried to turn it noiselessly. It clicked and wouldn’t open.
Von Cruewell showed no hesitation in identifying the sound. “Nein, Herr Poe, that door will not help you. Our god and goddess have left it locked from their side. Now either you will sit in the armchair, or you will lie on the floor again with my little Leibstandarte on your chest.”
The library was small. From the VIP door to the armchair was a mere two steps. He traversed them in less than a second, sat, and slapped the cushioned arms. “I am seated.”
“Lean back and cross your legs at the knees.”
Hardly reflecting any longer on what her ears could tell her and what they could reasonably be expected to miss, he obeyed. Absurd as it was in a fully modern conveyance, crowded with fellow human beings and well equipped with communication devices, he appeared to be at the mercy of a blind woman and her guide dog. I have a true genius, he reflected wryly, for embroiling myself in such absurd situations! Yet this time he could find no unjustifiable imprudence in his own actions to have brought it about.
It was also the first time such a predicament had developed while he was perceiving standard reality. At least, he believed he had still been in reality mode up to the moment of trying the VIP door, though now the chamber was wavering into a place of sable draperies, the obersturmbannfuehrerin taking on a definitely inquisitorial aspect ...
He shook his head. Not tonight. Not at this hour, with Angela lying helpless in drugged stupor and their Taut Melon, become a Tarr and Fether asylum, flying perhaps unguided through a storm. (Was it still storming? Difficult to be sure, with the windowall closed and screened; but by the rare rumble not quite smothered in sound-soak insulation, the rare heave of the ship as though on an updraft or downdraft, he guessed it was.) Blinking hard, he attempted to concentrate on standard reality: the doors with their simple quickturn latches, the holographic bookshelves three-dimensional only in appearance, the Carpello original that tastefully concealed a flip-down desk and neat computer in beige plastifold, no-glare screen ... With great effort, he managed to continue seeing von Cruewell in her own semi-costume of tan trousers and tan tunic, Iron Cross at her throat, twin lightning slashes on her high collar, and swastika band round her sleeve.
“Sehr gut,” she repeated, nodding. She positioned the folding chair in front of the door to the passage and sat facing him. “Now you will tell me exactly why you refused to eat the soup.”
“Because I dislike the combined flavors of iguana and anise. Dr. Junge, what state of affairs did you find on the bridge?”
She smiled slowly and reached down to stroke her dog. “You should have accompanied me, Herr Poe.”
“I was under the impression that you wanted to talk the situation over with me as between the only two unaffected passengers aboard this airship.”
“That is what we do. It is clear that the whammy was in the soup—”
“Whammy!”
She repeated its full scientific name, demonstrating that she was among the half-dozen people in the world who could pronounce it. “I find this of great interest, mein Herr, that a registered fancier perceives the soup is not to his taste and thus very conveniently escapes the effects of a contraband substance that incapacitates all his fellow passengers for several hours.”
“Except yourself, Frau Doktor. And you also refused the soup.”
She snapped her walking-stick against one leg of her chair. “My Leibstandarte put me on guard. I could not be sure, but I could suspect. And even if I had eaten the soup, it would not have had its effect on me. You see, I take the antidote. Every day I take the antidote. Jawohl, Herr Raven, I am on your trail for a very long time.”
“What?”
“Nein, Herr Raven, do not try to deny it, now that you are finally caught. It is ungraceful of you.”
He jerked his gaze away from her dark spectacles and gave a shaky laugh. “I won’t try to deny or verify anything until I know a bit more exactly just what I am in your perceptionary world.”
“Do not think you can befuddle me. You are to my perceptions what you are in life: Code Name Raven, called Russia’s greatest living spy. But not better than Obersturmbannfuehrerin Ilna von Cruewell, the She-Wolf of the SS.”
He drew a long breath. “If I were a secret agent, no doubt ‘Raven’ would be my code name. Nor do I object to playing such a role in your personal fantasy world. Indeed, it’s rather flattering. But—if you’ll excuse me—not tonight!”
On the last sentence, having very quietly uncrossed his legs and pushed his body forward, he stood. So did Valkyrie, and so, almost simultaneously, did von Cruewell, uttering another command. Corwin leaped behind the armchair just in time.
As a refuge, the armchair’s usefulness was limited at best to seconds of time But by snatching off its back cushion—tugging it from the dog’s very teeth—he gained a shield of sorts, which he somehow contrived to keep between him and Valkyrie all the nightmare way across the little chamber.
Had the obersturmbannfuehrerin had her eyesight, no doubt she would have jumped him from behind and that would have been that. As it was, she stood waiting, walking-stick in hands and grim smile on lips, blocking the door, and it was touch and go. He sidestepped. She caught him a sharp rap on the shoulder. With a desperate lunge, he sandwiched the savaged cushion and himself between her and the door, with the dog still on the other side, briefly entangled with her mistress.
The confusion lent him precious seconds to fumble at the latch, flip it down, slip out the door, and pull it shut on von Cruewell and her hound of Hell. He heard the latch click, but that would hold them in only until she turned the knob. Like the bathroom door, the library door couldn’t be locked from the corridor. He plunged across the narrow space—colliding with the Firebird on her way back to the promenade deck.
“Ah!” she cried, careening to one side. “These noodles!”
Having been knocked back against the library door, he scrabbled forward again on hands and knees.
The dancer had caught herself against the wall. “Foxslipper’s curse!” she exclaimed. Leaping back to the center of the corridor—he jerked his legs out of her way—she lifted both arms above her
head, crooked one leg high, and started a spin.
Not wearing toe shoes, she faltered at once and fell into the obersturmbannfuehrerin, who was just issuing from the library. Corwin didn’t linger to help untangle them. Hauling himself up, he flung open the bathroom door, staggered through, and cast his entire weight on it, swinging it shut in Valkyrie’s teeth.
With a brief and flitting meditation on his lack of gallantry in failing to make sure that neither woman was injured, he locked the door from the inside and rested there a few moments, panting heavily. Though less than an inch separated him from the corridor, the superb sound-soak muffled all noises of tumult save Valkyrie’s barks, and even they were reduced to faint yaps like distant echoes. He prayed the lock would prove as effective as the sound-soak.
The windowall soundproofing was less perfect, for between Valkyrie’s barks he could hear a steady murmuration of rain. Gradually, as his own pulse quieted somewhat, he became aware that it sounded less like the storm on the airship’s skin than like tapwater flowing into the bath. With this understanding came a slow tremor that seemed to begin in his soul, undulate forth through organs and flesh, tighten anew with every layer, and finally catch his heart in a spasm. Not until he felt the beating start once more in his breast did he venture to look.
The screen was retracted, so that the windowall gave its panoramic view; but the panorama of a night storm over the ocean was dark, especially when seen through the one-way mirror with its inevitable slight duskiness on the viewing side. Yet this windowall, murky though it was, provided the chamber’s only present source of light; and such appurtenances as protruded high enough could be seen only as black outlines and shadows. Hand trembling, he groped for the light control.
Before he found it, a long, close flash of lightning illuminated sky and bathroom for perhaps two seconds. And in those seconds, he glimpsed a dark form, like a corpse, bobbing gently in the pool beneath the flow of water from the dolphin-shaped tap.
The long thunderclap, which followed before the lightning had quite faded, sounded very loud even through the sound-soak.
Chapter 11
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. ... Sometimes the patient lies, for a day only, or even for a shorter period, in a species of exaggerated lethargy. ... Then again the duration of the trance is for weeks—even for months; while the closest scrutiny, and the most rigorous medical tests, fail to establish any material distinction between the state of the sufferer and what we conceive of absolute death.”
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Premature Burial.”
He found the light control and spun it to its brightest. The body was someone else’s, not hers—he could see that at once, now, with light. But whether or not it was a corpse, that he could not see. For the first time within his immediate memory, he had been thrown back into his own world at a moment when he would have preferred exact knowledge of standard reality.
In three strides he was at the door to the Honeymoon Suite. It was still locked, as he had left it. Had it been open or unlocked, he wouldn’t have lingered to drag the heavy body from the bath and turn off the flow of water.
It was Jeremy Tolliver, the highwayman, clad—to Corwin’s present perception—in the style of the Venerable Edgar’s twenty-ninth century A.D. as shown in the famous illustrations by Thomasina Pavlok. That much worked in Corwin Poe’s favor: that his namesake, by setting the airship tale centuries in the future, had left scope for such marvels as curious plastic materials and brilliant light at a finger’s touch. The bath chamber’s present appearance was not so far removed from Corwin’s recollection of its standard reality, the chief differences being in colors, textures, atmosphere, a certain abnormal strain in the contrast between light and shadow…a reality perceiver might have attributed it to the storm raging outside, its sound muffled but its tumult visible in the recurrent lightning scarcely veiled by one-way glass. Corwin, however, had plenty of experience with these sudden perceptional shifts.
He thought—he feared—that Tolliver was dead. But in a world often attuned to corpses, he might easily mistake mere unconsciousness for death, as Angela in her world of perpetual cheer had once mistaken death for healthy slumber. And as a further complication, in the Poesque world, the pinprick, the mirror held to the mouth, all the common tests might indicate death when the comatose victim was in fact under threat of premature burial. Yet Corwin thought that Tolliver was dead.
Of drowning, or of an overdose of the terrible drug? That fear drove him once more to his feet. For a moment, his own heartbeat sounded louder in his ears than did the hammering at the outer door. Ignoring both, he dashed back to the inner door, caught down its latch, and tumbled through.
* * * *
Again and again Angela struggled almost to the top, only to be sucked back under tons of thick black water. For a long time she thought the balloon had ripped open against a lightning saw and plunged them all into the stormy sea. That was how Saint Edgar’s story ended—the balloon ran into something, or something ran into the balloon, and Pundit and Pundita and everyone else fell into the water and probably drowned.
After that long time she floated up on a little island, or whale’s back, or bubble, and it was her bed. Now she thought she was better. But she was alone, alone, and what if the rest of the Melon had fallen away and only this stateroom was left, whizzing up and up forever on a single balloon cell? Plucking away countless strands of prickly sticky seaweed, she climbed to the control and tabbed open the screen. The night was dark outside, so dark she could hardly see the blue splatters of rain on the windowall, except when lightning broke, and then the room shrank. The lightning broke almost without stopping. So the rest of the ship was gone! The big balloon was made of a lot of little balloons, and lightning had snapped them all away, one by one, till now only one single balloon was left, pulling her up higher and higher, faster and faster, all alone, all alone forever ...
The bed was a huge distance away, but after a long, long time, an interminable time, she got back to it, pulled herself up into it, and lay there sick and shaky. Every time lightning flashed, the room shrank into a tiny thing, no bigger than a goldfish cage. Between flashes, it extended out into a place as vast as the Sahara. And even though lightning followed lightning without a pause, there was always a century in between.
She heard rapping on the door. The wind and rain and lightning reaching up from nothingness to scratch bony knuckles. She would get up, open the door to them, and tumble out, down into the sea again, back to Pundit ...
But it was so hard to stir from her bed, and so long, between lightnings, from the bed to the door…and whenever she did reach it at last and open it, a coffin slid in. It would knock her down and roll over her, reach the back wall thousands of lightyears away, burst open, and someone would spring out. Then lightning would flash, and the someone would be standing over her, choking her, and she would be hitting back, trying not to be choked.
Sometimes it was Ozzie, or Captain Denne, or Dr. Ilna Junge. Sometimes it was just a figure in black, and sometimes it was a skeleton with orange eyes. Sometimes it was Corwin, and that was worst of all. It kept happening, over and over. Always it would end with another lightning flash, she would be back in bed, and hear the tapping, and start it all again.
Until the last time. The last time the coffin burst before she could get up. It did not slide to the far wall, it stood up, and was Corwin, but he didn’t try to choke her. This time he kept stroking her hair, rubbing her arms, murmuring soft words to her ...
* * * *
At last she stopped pummeling him with her fists, relaxed, and app
eared to sink once more into a quieter, more nearly natural sleep.
Falling to his knees beside the bed, he smoothed her hair with one trembling hand. He trembled in every limb, tears rolled freely down his cheeks, and he felt drenched in perspiration. But now, thank God! her breath soughed in and out easily, almost smoothly. “Angela,” he whispered. “Angela.”
“She has the wham-trollies, I think,” said von Cruewell.
With a violent start, he looked up and saw her standing outlined in the doorway, brightness at her back, her face in shadow. In his rush, he had left the bathroom light on and the stateroom lights off. It would make no difference to the She-Wolf of the SS.
“A nightmare dose,” she went on in what was, for her, a compassionate tone. “At one time people called it a ‘bad trip.’”
“I am very much afraid so. Frau Doktor, how did you get in?”
“Laplace-Rougier bolts, pah! They are no obstacle. They are a brief annoyance, nothing more.”
“How comforting.” He stood. “I must warn you, Dr. Junge, if you—”
“Nein. I do not mean any harm at all to your pretty frau. But we must finish our conference, you and I.” Her dog keeping close beside her, she stepped into the stateroom and closed the door, softly and firmly.
“Oh, yes,” he murmured, speaking low lest he disturb Angela. “Your game of cat and mouse with Gospodin Raven, Russia’s greatest living spy.” Edging backward, he managed to tab on the light switch beside the door to the passage. To his present perception, von Cruewell now wore black robe and monkish cowl. “Really, Frau Doktor, if tonight’s whammy debacle—assuming that you are correct in attributing it to whammy—were of my doing, would I have administered a dose to my own wife?”
“That is an interesting argument, Gospodin Raven,” she replied, ever maintaining the interview in pianissimo, which intensified its strain. “But tab the light off again.”
“You heard that?” The circular control had turned smoothly, with neither sound nor resistance that he could detect.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 78
