Matt was lashing out with his fists now, darting back and forth, too quick for the cold-blooded reptiles. The one who still had the laser gun snarled. CB tackled him and somersaulted between his legs so that the Visitor tripped, his head squishing into the mud. If only I could see better, if only it weren’t so dark! Tomoko thought, holding up the laser gun and beginning to panic. Where was the trigger on the thing? She’d carried one before, but she’d never been called upon to use it—
The two gunless lizards were getting up now, crawling towards her, mud and slime mingling on their scaly faces, rheum dripping from their canines, a metallic growling issuing from their throats. They were coming toward her, toward Willie! And he was just standing there, not doing anything, although he too now clutched one of the laser pistols in his hand.
“Do something!” she shrieked.
“Alas,” he moaned, “I cannot ... it is forbidden to me to kill by the precepts of preta-na-ma . . . please don’t force me!”
Suddenly Tomoko realized she was going to have to shoot. Ray was injured and her husband was fighting for his life. She saw the kid struggling with a lizard twice his size, who was bearing down on him and seemed ready to sink his teeth into his shoulder, and she had to save him, he had to . . . closing her eyes, she squeezed the trigger and . . .
A ray of blue fire sliced the darkness!
The lizard who had been attacking CB fell lifeless to the ground . . . then the second . . . then the third. But it had not been from Tomoko’s shot. Matt and CB stopped, looked at each other in astonishment.
The aliens were screaming in anguish, their faces were twisted and their limbs twitching like those of a hydrophobic dog. Such hideous death-screams . . . Tomoko trembled, ran into Matt’s arms. “Oh God, I thought I had lost you, 1 thought—” she said. He didn’t answer, but slowly rolled over the body of one of the aliens with his foot. In the Visitor’s writhings, he had dislodged the missile that killed him.
“Pick that thing up, CB,” Matt said.
The boy obeyed. “Totally awesome!” he exclaimed. “It’s a throwing star . . . and its been dusted with some kind of red powder. That’s why these dudes are, like, history. Even though it’s not a red dust zone. That was a narrow escape, too narrow, Matt. I didn’t realize you had laid in a supply of shuriken.”
“Wait a minute,” Matt said. “You got me wrong. I may be good at ninjitsu, but I can’t kill three aliens at once coming from three different directions with three throwing stars. Not to mention the fact that I don’t even have any of the suckers on me—”
“Then who was it?” Tomoko said.
He shrugged.
Tomoko looked past the clearing, to the cave mouth, up at the boulders that overhung the cavern and rose sheer up past the canopy of treetops, and she thought she saw something move. She pointed. “There,” she said, “look, there, there—”
“What?” They all turned to look, even the wounded Ray, who leaned against the front fender of his truck.
“Don’t you see it?” she said. It wasn’t there any % more. But for a split second she had seen something. She was quite sure of it. It was something dark, and it rustled, and there was something glinting, metallic, like the flash of sunlight on metal. It could have been a man, or maybe an animal. She kept thinking it was somehow like a black panther, but she knew that no such creature could possibly exist in the wilds of North Carolina.
Or could it?
“I swear to God, I saw something,” she said softly.
There it was again! The shifting of a garment among the trees that hugged the rockface ... the sound of feet and hands grappling with earth and stone.
This time they all heard it.
“I guess we got a secret helper,” said Ray. “Kind of like the Lone Ranger.”
CB laughed. “More like the Ronin Ranger, if you ask me,” he said, grinning and holding aloft the three throwing stars, from which Willie recoiled in terror.
“Forgive me,” Willie said. “I want so much to join you on your quest, but you must find your own path from now on. It is my belief that this cavern mouth is a route to the papinium labyrinth—a network of interlinking passageways that they have been building for a long time now, using converted slave labor—which may even lead all the way to Washington itself! But as for what they are planning to do once they reach Washington . . . even I have been unable to glean this in my spying. It is very high-level indeed, this secret, I suspect. And as to what Dingwall looks like, or what identity he may be masquerading under . . . who can tell? He may have constructed any of a thousand secret identities—”
“Like Fieh Chan did when he pretended to be Kenzo Sugihara,” CB said excitedly.
“Fieh Chan ...” Matt mused. “You don’t think . . . nah. Impossible.”
“Whatever I saw,” Tomoko said, “at least someone is on our side.” Then she turned to Ray and Willie. “The two of you have been so kind. But Ray, you’re wounded, and Willie, the longer you stay here the more dangerous it will be for you. If our mysterious friend finds out you’re a Visitor—” “No! Don’t call me by that hateful euphoria . . . euphemism,” Willie said mournfully. “I’m one of you. Remember, I loved an Earth girl once, and she died to save me.”
Tomoko grasped his hand. “You must leave,” she said. And she kissed him gently on the cheek. She gave Ray a hug that left bloodsmears on her clothes; he winced a little, but grinned at her.
Ray said to Willie, “You know what, space lizard? You ain’t that bad. I’ll go home and bind my wounds. Then I’ll drive you down to the next alien outpost fifty miles south of here. Reckon I owe you something.”
“Why? I have brought you nothing but trouble,” Willie said.
“You taught me something—that lizards are people too!” Ray said. “C’mon, buddy.” Willie helped him climb back into his pickup truck. In a few moments they were roaring into the shadows.
Matt watched them for a while. Then he said, “We’re on our own again, you guys.” On tiptoe, not wanting to step on a twig or otherwise give themselves away, the three of them made for the cavern mouth. Something gleamed from within . . . something blue and metallic.
The supermetal.
Nervously, Tomoko looked at CB. He was wearing it in his ear again.
Who had rescued them from the three reptiles who guarded the cavern mouth? Who on earth had such skill with the shuriken, that he could wield three at once and score three hits?
I don’t dare to hope, she thought to herself. But the memory of Fieh Chan returned to her in all its terror and passion as they entered the womblike entrance to the papinium underworld.
They stepped into the cave—
She gasped.
There was a human skeleton chained to the wall. It wasn’t one of those ancient ones that were traditionally found in Hollywood movies about buried treasure or lost kingdoms. This one had been freshly killed, and flesh still hung from it in strips.
“Don’t scream,” Matt whispered urgently.
She clamped her own mouth shut and followed the other two grimly.
Chapter 13
“So we really have to go to a reception at the Romanian Embassy?” Dr. Schwabauer said. “It seems like a waste of energy to me. And you know I hate these affairs. I’m a scientist, not a politician. Ever since our arrival in Washington, Setsuko, you’ve seemed very preoccupied with things.” He straightened his thin, old-fashioned black tie once more. He didn’t think he could bring himself to wear one of the new styles in formal wear, some of which were actually copies from the alien’s costumes.
“Well,” Setsuko said, emerging from her bedroom in the splendid costume of a geisha, her face painted white and red, her kimono of gold and purple silk set off by an obi of brilliant blues and fiery oranges. She smelled very fragrant, Schwabauer thought.
Even though they had had to seek refuge here, at the home of Setsuko’s cousin Dr. Yogami, who had once been a member of the Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States in the da
ys when such
things still mattered, even though they were in a new place and had no money, having sold everything they owned in order to bribe their way to America, Setsuko had never ceased to do those little but painstaking things that made her always beautiful to look at: coifing her hair and doing her face and dressing herself from the large wardrobe left by Dr. Yogami’s wife, who had been killed by the lizards in one of the battles of the days before the red dust. Schwabauer marveled at this.
Setsuko continued, “It is important that we associate with the right people, if we are to locate the nexus of the alien spy network. I’ve been suspicious of the Romanian ambassador for some time, because he’s constantly throwing these lavish parties and we have been incommunicado, as you know, with the Romanian government since they became a satellite of the Italo-Greek Visitor-controlled sector. How can he afford these things?”
It was true that this was someone to be suspicious of. Since the saurian takeover of many parts of the globe and the consequent collapse of many forms of government, many diplomats had been stranded in strange countries without any means of support from their devastated governments. Dr. Yogami, who had once held a reasonably important post as cultural attache, had been reduced to selling hamburgers ... a fate to which, more than once, he had wanted to react by honorable suicide. Indeed, on their first coming to Washington, one of the first things the three of them had done was to talk Dr. Yogami out of performing the act on the very steps of the Japanese chancery. It had been
Fieh Chan/Kenzo Sugihara who had talked him out of it, employing Zen arguments of such arcane complexity that Schwabauer had been (with his halting Japanese) ill able to follow them or construe their meaning.
He wished the man were here now so he could talk Setsuko out of going to the Romanian embassy. Then he would not have to wear these ridiculous clothes.
“By the way, have you heard from him at all?” he said to her.
“Not in several days . . . not since he decided to investigate the network of passageways that we discovered beneath the sewers of Alexandria.”
“Do you actually believe that there may be . . . reptiles in the sewers of this city?”
“There is something going on,” Setsuko said, “though 1 don’t know what it could be.” She smiled at him, then; but it was a Japanese smile, and he could not determine whether it conveyed grief or joy.
“Well,” he said at last, “I suppose we must go to your reception. Though why these superannuated ambassadors insist on carrying on as if the world was still the way it used to be—”
“Appearances are important to them,” she said. “My cousin Dr. Yogarni”—though they were relatives, Schwabauer noted, she still spoke of him in terms of the utmost respect—“still keeps his diplomatic license plates on his car despite the fact that he is now only a lowly hamburger chef. Poor man, it is one of the few shreds of dignity left to him, a small reminder of his former position in the universe. He often speaks of how they enabled him to park in forbidden zones; of course now, with the police practically nonexistent, and with no one knowing to whom their allegiance should lie in the first place, anyone can park anywhere. It is a little thing, but it distresses him profoundly.”
“Yes, it does seem to,” Schwabauer said thoughtfully. “Well, are you ready now?”
“As I’ll ever be!” said Setsuko, smiling.
Ferenc Andrescu, ambassador of Romania, paced back and forth in the foyer of his mansion, an ivy-covered brick house in McLean, one of Washington’s richest suburbs. He had attempted to contact his government a number of times that day, but to no avail; the lizard viceroy had refused to acknowledge his existence, let alone speak to him. He didn’t know why he even bothered to go into the office anymore.
His butler, Tedescu, entered. “Excellency, if you do not get ready, your guests will find you without appropriate clothing.”
"Dumnezeu!” said the ambassador. “Is it that time already?”
“I’m afraid so, Excellency.”
Sighing, Andrescu followed the butler up to the dressing room and stood like a mannequin while the Tedescu handed him an endless supply of studs, collars and cuffs starched to cardboard, and finally the dinner jacket which had been his since the Second World War.
“I hate this life,” he said, although in truth he would rather be here, stranded though he was, than in Romania. It was not for nothing that he had smuggled out of the country a small wallet containing the jewels of his late wife, who had inherited them from her mother, who had kept them concealed in a little box during the communist takeover of the country so long ago. Those jewels had served him well over the years. Even in Bucharest he had lived well, although he had been forced to be discreet. When he came to America he had been able to live far beyond the limited allowance that the government provided . . . but now there was no more government to nag at him, since those reptiles had extended their influence over Romania. First they had conquered Italy and the Mediterranean, warm countries where the red dust had soon lost its power; slowly they had been extending their sphere of influence. He couldn’t believe the myopia of his government, though! Imagine that, forging an alliance with the lizards just in order to force a break with the Soviet Union! Didn’t they realize that one bunch of overlords was pretty much like another . . . and that at least the Russians had not demanded a tribute of human lives?
“What is the ambassador thinking about?” Tedescu said, as he began meticulously to dust the dinner jacket with a little brush, a thing of camel-hair and silver that Andrescu had possessed at least as long as the jacket itself.
“I was thinking of lizards,” he said. “Ah, those lizards . . . nosferatu. ”
“Nosferatu, Excellency?”
“Yes. I was thinking of how much they are like our own legends. Do you think that the aliens are actually supernatural beings, like vampires—that they would flee, like nosferatu, from the cross and from garlic?” He looked at himself in the full-length mirror and put out his hand for his three medals, which he carefully pinned on to his jacket. “Do you think there would be a magical way of getting rid of them?”
“Do not speak of these things,” Tedescu said, crossing himself. “It is not ... I mean, Excellency, back in my old village they would take a dim view of such talk.”
Andrescu allowed a wan smile to play over his face.
“I had always thought, Tedescu, that there were no monsters in this world . . . slava domnului! But now I know that to be untrue. So who is coming to this little reception, my friend? You have perforce become my social secretary, maid, and chef as well as my butler, now that these dark times have come upon us. I do not know how much longer I shall be able to sustain the illusion of maintaining a proper diplomatic mission here.”
“Your old friend Jankowski, the First Secretary at the Polish Embassy, has been reduced to selling women’s underwear at a Lord and Taylor, I have heard,” Tedescu said as he knelt to polish the ambassador’s shoes. “But as for your question, Excellency, we have conjured up a reasonable semblance of a party for tonight. First there is this Dr. Yogami, formerly of the Japanese Mission—he’s now working as a clerk or a hamburger chef, I think, and was most gratified to receive an invitation; he is bringing some friends, scientists I believe. Most of them are your friends; only a couple you have never met. Among them, I think, is a Mr. Dingwall.”
“What an extraordinary name!” Andrescu said. “Of what manner of ethnic origin is that? What diplomatic mission does he represent?”
“He is not an ambassador, Excellency. He is a conductor.”
“Ah, we shall have some culture at last! Tell me, do you think he will be able to breathe some life into my battered old Steinway?”
“Well, I am not certain that he is a very distinguished conductor. He only directs the local Youth Orchestra. And yet . . . he seems to know a lot about the . . .”
“Those infernal lizards! You knew of my fascination with them, and you invited an expert to my reception.”
>
“Not exactly, Excellency. But he is actually conducting an alien symphony.”
“What an extraordinary idea!” Andrescu said, frowning.
“Yes ... do you remember the opening of the new shopping mall, the Spring Oaks Mall, to which you received a formal invitation?”
“Yes,” Andrescu said wryly as he carefully adjusted the twirl of his moustache in the mirror. “Why was I invited, I wonder! They must know that Romania has cut off ties with the free zones of America, having diplomatic representation only with the Visitor government in Los Angeles; that my whole position here is a kind of fraud. Their computer must be using a database that has not
been properly updated. Ah, the whole world is going to seed now that it is no longer our own!” “Well, this Dingwall is conducting the children in a performance of this alien symphony . . . something about interplanetary brotherhood.” “Maybe I’ll go,” Andrescu said. “After all, what else is there to do?”
Far away somewhere, a chime. The doorbell, was it? Why did they always come so soon?
“Tell them I’ll be right down,” he said.
He continued to gaze at his own face in the mirror. Tedescu, standing behind him, was also visible. The ambassador studied the face of his old butler. There was something about it that bothered him. It was in the eyes, he thought. The eyes. For the past few days, the old servant had ceased to look his master in the eye . . . something was wrong. Perhaps he was sick, Andrescu thought, and too considerate to tell him lest he be forced to spend money on a doctor, a rare commodity in these barbaric times. He could not tell.
He knew only that Tedescu had been almost like a different person of late. He was perfectly attentive in his duties, but he performed them like a zombie. And he walked around with a glazed look in his eye, almost as though—
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