The Third Science Fiction Megapack

by E. C. Tubb

  He caught her and yanked a single hair out of her head. She screamed and tried to claw him, then fought for the hair. Bork was immovable. He held her off easily with one hand while the fingers of the other danced in the air. He spoke what seemed to be a name, though it bore no resemblance to Nema. She quieted, trembling.

  “You’ll find a broom near the entrance, little sister. Take it and go back, to forget that Dave Hanson lives. You saw him die and were dragged off with us and his body. You escaped before we reached our hideaway. By the knot I tie in your true hair and by your secret name, this I command.”

  She blinked slowly and looked around as Bork burned the knotted hair. Her eyes swept past Bork and Dave without seeing them and centered on the broom one man held out to her, without appearing to see him, either. She seized the broom. A sob came to her throat. “The devil! The renegade devil! He didn’t have to kill Dave! He didn’t—”

  Her voice died away as she ran toward the clearing. Dave made no protest. He suspected Bork was putting the spell on her for her own good, and he agreed that she was better out of all this.

  “Now where were we?” Bork asked. “Oh, yes, I was trying to convert you and knowing I’d failed already. Of course, I don’t know that they killed you first—but those are their methods. Take it from me, I know. I was the youngest Ser ever to be accepted for training as a Sather. They wanted you, so they got you.”

  Dave considered it. It seemed as likely as anything else. “Why me?” he asked.

  “Because you can put back the sky. At least, the Satheri think so, and I must admit that in some ways they are smarter than we.”

  Dave started to protest, but Bork cut him off.

  “I know all about your big secret. You’re not the engineer, whose true name was longer. We know all that. Our pools are closer to perfection than theirs, not being contaminated by city air, and we see more. But there is a cycle of confirmation; if prophecy indicates a thing will happen, it will happen—though not always as expected. The prophecy fulfills itself, rather than being fulfilled. Then there are the words on the monument—a monument meant for your uncle, but carrying your true name, because his friends felt the short form sounded better. It was something of a coincidence that they had the wrong true name. But prophecy is always strongest when based on coincidence—that is a prime rule. And those words coupled with our revelations prophesy thatyou—not your uncle—can do the impossible. So what are we going to do with you?”

  Bork’s attitude was reassuring, somehow. It was nearer his own than any Dave had heard on this world. And the kidnapping was beginning to look like a relief. The Sons of the Egg had gotten him off the hook with Sather Karf. He grinned and stretched back. “If I’m unkillable, Bork, what can you do?”

  The big man grinned back. “Flow rock around you up to your nose and toss you into a lake. You’d live there—but you’d always be drowning and you’d find it slightly unpleasant for the next few thousand years! It’s not as bad as being turned into a mangrove with your soul intact, but it would last longer. And don’t think the Satheri can’t pull a lot worse than that. They have your name—everyone has your secret name here—and parts of you.”

  The conversation was suddenly less pleasant. Dave thought it over. “I could stay here and join your group. I might as well, since I can’t really help the Satheri anyhow.”

  “They’d spot your aura eventually. They’ll be checking around here for us for a while. Of course, we might do something about it, if you really converted. But I don’t think you would, if you knew more.” Bork got up and headed for the entrance. “I wasn’t going to let you see the risings, but now maybe I will. If you still want to join, it might be worked. Otherwise, I’ll think of something else.”

  Dave followed the man out into the clearing. A few men were just planning to leave, and they looked at Dave suspiciously, but made no protest. One, whom Dave recognized as the leader with the snetha-knife, scowled.

  “The risings are almost due, Bork,” he said.

  Bork nodded. “I know, Malok. I’ve decided to let Dave Hanson watch. Dave, this is our leader here, Res Malok.”

  Dave felt no strong love for his would-be murderer, and it seemed to be mutual. But no protest was lodged. Apparently Bork was their top conjurer, and privileged. They crossed the clearing and went through the woods toward another, smaller one. Here a group of some fifty men were watching the sky, obviously waiting. Others stood around, watching them and avoiding looking up. Almost directly overhead, there was a rent place where the strange absence of color or feature indicated a hole in the dome over them. As it drew nearer true vertical, a chanting began among the men with up-turned faces. Their hands went upwards, fingers spread and curled into an unnatural position. Then they stood waiting.

  “I don’t like it,” Bork whispered to Dave. “This is one of the reasons we’re growing too weak to fight the Satheri.”

  “What’s wrong with a ceremony of worship, if you must worship your eggshell?” Dave asked.

  “You’ll see. That was all it was once—just worship. But now for weeks, things are changing. They think it’s a sign of favor, but I don’t know. There, watch!”

  The hole in the sky was directly overhead now, and the moaning had risen in pitch. Across the little clearing, Malok began backing quietly away, carefully not looking upwards. Nobody but Dave seemed to notice his absence. There was a louder moan.

  One of the men in the clearing began to rise upwards slowly. His body was rigid as it lifted a foot, ten feet, then a hundred above the ground. Now it picked up speed, and rushed upwards. Another began to rise, and another. In seconds, more than half of those who had waited were screaming upwards toward the hole in the sky. They disappeared in the distance.

  Those who had merely stood by and those who had worshipped waited a few seconds more, but no more rose. The men sighed and began moving out of the clearing. Dave arose to follow, but Bork gestured for him to wait.

  “Sometimes—” he said.

  They were alone now. Still Bork waited, staring upwards. Then Dave saw something in the sky. A speck appeared and came hurtling down. In seconds, it was the body of one of the men who had risen. Dave felt his stomach tighten and braced himself. There was no slowing as the body fell. It landed in the center of the clearing, without losing speed, but with less noise than he had expected.

  When they reached the shattered body, there could be no question of its being dead.

  Bork’s face was solemn. “If you’re thinking of joining, you’d better know the worst. You’re too easily shocked to make a good convert unless you’re prepared. The risings have been going on for some time. Malok swears it proves we are right. But I’ve seen five other bodies come down like this. What does it mean? Are they stillborn? We don’t know. Shall I revive him for you?”

  Dave felt sick as he stared at the ghastly terror on the face of the corpse. The last thing he wanted to see was its revival, but his curiosity about the secret in the sky could not be denied. He nodded.

  Bork drew a set of phials and implements in miniature size from under his robe. “This is routine,” he said. He snapped his fingers and produced a small flame over the heart of the corpse. Into that he began dusting powders, mixing them with something that looked like blood. Finally he called a name and a command. There was a sharp explosion, a hissing, and Bork’s voice calling.

  The dead man flowed together and was whole. He stood up woodenly, with his face frozen. “Who calls?” he asked in an uninflected, hollow voice. “Why am I called? I have no soul.”

  “We call,” Bork answered. “Tell us what you saw at the hole in the sky.”

  A scream tore from the throat of the thing, and its hands came up to its eyes, tearing at them. Its mouth worked soundlessly, and breath sucked in. Then a single word came out.

  “Faces!”

  It fell onto the grass, distorted in death again. Bork shuddered.

  “The others were the same,” he said. “And he can’t be
revived again. Even the strongest spell can’t bring back his soul. That is gone, somehow.”

  Dave shivered. “And knowing that, you’d still fight against repairing the sky?”

  “Hatching is probably always horrible from inside the shell,” Bork answered. “Do you still want to join us? No, I thought not. Well, then, let’s go back. We might as well try to eat something while I think about what to do with you.”

  Malok and most of the others were gone when they reached the cave again. Bork fell to work with some scraps of food, cursing the configurations of the planets as his spell refused to work. Then suddenly the scraps became a mass of sour-smelling stuff. Bork made a face as he tasted it, but he ate it in silence. Dave couldn’t force himself to put it in his mouth, though he was hungry by then.

  He considered, and then snapped his fingers. “Abracadabra,” he cried. He swore as something wet and slimy that looked like seaweed plopped into his hand. The next time he got a limp fish that had been dead far too long. But the third try worked better. This time, a whole bunch of bananas appeared. They were a little riper than he liked, but some of them were edible enough. He handed some to the other man, who quickly abandoned his own creation.

  Bork was thoughtful as he ate. Finally he grimaced. “New magic!” he said. “Maybe that’s the secret of the prophecy. I thought you knew no magic.”

  “I didn’t,” Dave admitted. He was still tingling inside himself at this confirmation of his earlier discovery. It was unpredictable magic, but apparently bore some vague relationship to what he was wishing for.

  “So the lake’s out,” Bork decided. “With unknown powers at your command, you might escape in time. Well, that settles it. There’s one place where nobody will look for you or listen to you. You’ll be nothing but another among millions, and that’s probably the best hiding place for you. With the overseers they have, you couldn’t even turn yourself back to the Satheri, though I’ll admit I’m hoping you don’t want them to find you.”

  “And I was beginning to think you liked me,” Dave commented bitterly.

  Bork grinned. “I do, Dave Hanson. That’s why I’m picking the easiest place to hide you I can think of. It will be hell, but anything else would be worse. Better strip and put this cloth on.”

  The thing he held out was little more than a rag, apparently torn from one of the robes. “Come on, strip, or I’ll burn off your clothes with a salamander. There, that’s better. Now wrap the cloth around your waist and let it hang down in front. It’ll be easier on you if you don’t attract much attention. The sky seems to indicate the planets favor teleportation now. Be quick before I change my mind and think of something worse!”

  Dave didn’t see what he did this time, but there was a puff of flame in front of his eyes.

  The next second, he stood manacled in a long line of men loaded with heavy stones. Over their backs fell the cutting lashes of a whip. Far ahead was a partially finished pyramid. Dave was obviously one of the building slaves.

  VI

  Sunrise glared harshly over the desert. It was already hot enough to send heat waves dancing over the sand as Hanson wakened under the bite of a lash. The overseers were shouting and kicking the slaves awake. Overhead the marred sky shone in crazy quilt patterns.

  Hanson stood up, taking the final bite of the whip without flinching. He glanced down at his body, noticing that it had somehow developed a healthy deep tan during the few hours of murderous labor the day before. He wasn’t particularly surprised. Something in his mind seemed also to have developed a “tan” that let him face the bite of chance without flinching. He’d stopped wondering and now accepted; he meant to get away from here at the first chance and he was somehow sure he could.

  It was made easier by the boundless strength of his new body. He showed no signs of buckling under physical work that would have killed him on his own world.

  Not all the slaves got up. Two beside him didn’t move at all. Sleeping through that brutal awakening seemed impossible. When Hanson looked closer, he saw that they weren’t asleep; they were dead.

  The overseer raged back along the line and saw them. He must be one of those conjured into existence here from the real Egypt of the past. He might have no soul, but a lifetime of being an overseer had given him habits that replaced the need for what had been a pretty slim soul to begin with.

  “Quitters!” he yelled. “Lazy, worthless, work-dodging goldbrick artists!” He knelt in fury, thumbing back the eyelids of the corpses. There was little need for the test. They were too limp, too waxen to be pretending.

  The overseer cut them out of the chain and kicked at Hanson. “Move along!” he bellowed. “Menes himself is here, and he’s not as gentle as I am.”

  Hanson joined the long line, wondering what they were going to do about breakfast. How the devil did they expect the slaves to put in sixteen hours of work without some kind of food? There had been nothing the night before but a skin of water. There was not even that much this morning. No wonder the two beside him had died from overwork, beatings and plain starvation.

  Menes was there, all right. Hanson saw him from the distance, a skinny giant of a man in breechclout, cape and golden headdress. He bore a whip like everyone else who seemed to have any authority at all, but he wasn’t using it. He was standing hawklike on a slight rise in the sandy earth, motionless and silent. Beside him was a shorter figure: a pudgy man with a thin mustache, on whom the Egyptian headdress looked strangely out of place. It could only be Ser Perth!

  Hanson’s staring came to an end as the lash cut down across his shoulders, biting through to the shoulder-bone. He stumbled forward, heedless of the overseers’ shouting voices. Someday, if he had the chance, he’d flay his own overseer, but that could wait. Even the agony of the cut couldn’t take his mind from Ser Perth’s presence. Had Bork slipped up—did the Satheri know that Hanson was still alive, and had they sent Ser Perth here to locate him? It seemed unlikely, however. The man was paying no attention to the lines of slaves. It would be hard to spot one among three million, anyhow. More likely, Hanson decided, Ser Perth was supervising the supervisors, making an inspection tour of all this.

  Of all what? Apparently then this must be another of their frenzied efforts to find a way to put back the sky. He’d heard that they had called up the pyramid builder, but hadn’t fully realized it would lead to this type of activity.

  He looked around him appraisingly. The long lines of slaves that had been carrying rock and rubble the day before now were being formed into hauling teams. Long ropes were looped around enormous slabs of quarried rock. Rollers underneath them and slaves tugging and pushing at them were the only means of moving them. The huge stones slid remorselessly forward onto the prepared beds of rubble. Casting back in his memory, Hanson could not recall seeing the rock slabs the night before. They had appeared as if by magic—

  Obviously, they had really been conjured up by magic. But if the rocks could be conjured, what was the need of all the slaves and the sadistic overseers? Why not simply magic the entire construction, whatever it was to be?

  The whip hit him again, and the raging voice of the overseer ranted in his ears. “Get on, you blundering slacker. Menes himself is looking at you. Ho there—what the devil?”

  The overseer’s hand spun Hanson around. The man’s eyes, large and opaque, stared at Hanson. He frowned cruelly. “Yeah, you’re the same one! Didn’t I take the hide off your back twice already? And now you stand there without a scar or a drop of blood!”

  Hanson grunted feebly. He didn’t want attention called to himself while Ser Perth was around. “I—I heal quickly.” It was no more than the truth. Either the body they’d given him or the conjuring during the right split second had enabled him to heal almost before a blow was struck.

  “Magic!” The overseer scowled and gave Hanson a shove that sent him sprawling. “Blithering magic again! Magic stones that melt when you get them in place—magic slaves that the whip won’t touch! And they exp
ect us to do a job of work such as not even Thoth could dream up! They won’t take honest work. No, they have to come snooping and conjuring and interfering. Wheels on rollers! Tools of steel and the gods know what instead of honest stone. Magic to lift things instead of honest ropes that shrink and wood that swells. Magic that fails, and rush, rush, rush until I’m half ready to be tortured for falling behind, and—you! You would, would you!” His voice trailed off into a fresh roar of rage as he caught sight of other slaves taking advantage of his attention to Hanson to relax. He raced off, brandishing the whip.

  Hanson tried to make himself inconspicuous after that. The wounds would heal, and the beatings could never kill him; but there had been no provision in his new body for the suppression of pain. He hungered, thirsted and suffered like anyone else. Maybe he was learning to take it, here, but not to like it.

  At the expense of a hundred slaves and considerable deterioration of the whips, one block of stone was in place before the sun was high overhead in the coppery, mottled sky. Then there was the blessing of a moment’s pause. Men were coming down the long lines, handing something to the slaves. Food, Hanson anticipated.

  He was wrong. When the slave with the wicker basket came closer he could see that the contents were not food but some powdery stuff that was dipped out with carved spoons into the eager hands of the slaves. Hanson smelled his portion dubiously. It was cloying, sickly sweet.

  Hashish! Or opium, heroin, hemp—Hanson was no expert. But it was certainly some kind of drug. Judging by the avid way the other slaves were gulping it down, each one of them had been exposed to it before. Hanson cautiously made the pretense of swallowing his before he allowed it to slip through his fingers to mingle with the sand. Drug addiction was obviously a convenient way to make the slaves forget their aches and fears, to keep them everlasting anxious to please whatever was necessary to make sure the precious, deadly ration never stopped.

  There was still no sign of food. The pause in the labor was only for the length of time it took the drug-bearing slaves to complete their task. Ten minutes, or fifteen at the outside; then the overseers were back with the orders and the lashes.