The multitude looked at the swordsmen, who were close enough to be discerned in detail. They breathed out one marveling and shocked syllable: “X!”
Yes, each one of the thousands of descended beings was a replica of X, the entity known in other lands and other tongues by a thousand other names. X was one of his signs, and it was the one chosen by the prophet Dafess to designate the entity because X was an unknown quantity to the pagans.
It was X, so wrote the prophet, who had visited Dafess in person and assured that man of wisdom that he alone was being given the monopoly of the sacred teachings. Nor did it matter to the prophet that hundreds of others had made prior claims. He, Dafess, was sure that only his descendants were to be X’s heirs on earth until such time as the entity returned.
To prove it, they had marched into the wilderness and built this city and had then written a thousand books to bolster the tradition.
"I will carry a sword,” X had promised.
The Dafessians believed this, but they had been assured by their Elders, who were skilled in reading between the lines, that the swoi'd would be for the Untruncated. The peace would be the Truncateds’.
Now X, as foretold, had returned to their city. He brought a sword, and if he also carried peace with him, it was a peace that passed understanding. And his name, in this place and time, had suddenly become Legion.
Each one of the horde was X, but such an X as had never been dreamed of. He was eight feet tall and made of etemalloy over which plastiskin had been stretched to simulate flesh. So clever was the craftsmanship that only one who knew beforehand, like Revanche, that the creature was begotten in the factory could have told that here was not a living X.
The artistry extended to the magnificent body, which had broad shoulders that tapered to slim hips and long, panthermuscled legs. The delicate feet were shod in brass.
IV
REVANCHE, who was seeing for the first time the Messinan’s work, scrutinized with cynical elation the creature who had landed closest to him. Awed despite himself, he saw that a fast-whirling halo hovered perhaps a foot above the noble head. Every five seconds the luminous ring changed color.
Even as he watched it, it changed color. From gold it dissolved into a bloody red, and then into a gangrenous green. Next it became a bruise purple, a witching hour black, and finally shifted back to gold.
The aspect that startled Revanche most, however, was the face. The false flesh-mask stretched over the metal skull was a grotesque representation of the features of X as seen in the paintings of the Spanish and Italian masters.
There was the somewhat narrow and bearded face with the “sensitive” full-lipped mouth and the gentle nose that poised between straightness and aquilinity. There were the same eyes—flowing and compassionate.
But on the mask those conventional features had been slightly altered, or, as it were, “pulled.” Though the lips had been cast with meekness and love on their curves, the smile had been lengthened, and subtly twisted until it had passed over the boundary of a smile and became a snarl.
Whatever fearsome hand had fashioned that mask had known that a snarl is an elongated smile, just as a smile is a modified snarl. The hand had perceived that it was the snarl of the ape that had become the smile of the man, perceived too that, the process of evolution continuing, the smile of the man had passed into the ultra-tender mouth-curving of X.
And now, that smile which was the apex of Nature’s efforts, had been remolded, recast, rehammered, and returned into a caricature of itself.
Da Vincelleo was not only a scientist, he was an artist supreme. In that mask, he had shown the people of Dafess a reflection of themselves. And he made them see what they had done to X, how they had twisted the face of universal love into an inverted image of their true nature—that of self-love.
The mask was the face of X—reductio ad absurdum.
The gentle curve of nostrils had been expanded into derision and an almost savage fierceness. The glowing compassion of the eyes had become intense with a flame so hot it made the onlookers wonder how the lashes and brows resisted melting and running into the cavernous eyesockets.
Yet, though fiery, the lineaments combined into a chilling sight. And, as there were thousands of the masks, they contributed to a geometrical progression of terror.
Revanche, though he was safe, felt struck with fear and guilt that had been instilled into him when he was a child.
At that moment, an Elder who had been eyeing the nearest X, afraid to go into the ritualistic embrace with it because of its fearsome aspect, suddenly ran to it. He threw himself at its feet, clasped its legs, and howled: “Mercy!”
A deep powerful voice that sounded more like the roar of a motor than anything else answered, “Justice!”
Justice was what the Elder had prayed for all of his life. Now he got it.
The automaton lifted the sword and brought it down on the Elder’s chicken-skinny neck.
“Chuck!” rasped the blade.
“Bump!” replied the head.
The white-bearded ball rolled on the pavement until it stopped against the curb. Upside down, it looked at everything from a new and possibly revelatory viewpoint, for its expression was not only bewildered and hurt but, for the first time, educated.
Dafess City became bedlam, pandemonium, terror on a cataclysmic scale. The white body of the Truncated broke into fifty thousand fragments that fled here and there, circled, whirled, zigzagged, leaped, crawled, bounded, darted, and lunged.
The legion of X stalked after them. They moved jerkily but swiftly. Above all, they moved relentlessly.
When a cornered person could not get by the awesome figure, he or she would go down on his or her knees and clasp hands and howl, “Mercy! Mercy!”
“Justice!” roared the immobile lips of the mask.
“Slush!” smacked the lips of the blade.
"Thud!” echoed the head.
Though many skulls rolled, a more or less objective observer, such as Revanche, would have noticed that many more were spared.
They were unharmed for a reason, however, for always the flailing swords forced the mob in a general direction.
They were being herded towards the Temple of the Righteous, a truncated pyramid not far off the square. This pyramid also housed the First Dafess Sacred-Secular Bank and had grown to such proportions that it had crowded out the Finance Corporation. Peculiarly enough, the latter institution former and now occupied the center of the building. The Dafessians had accepted what seemed to them to be the will of X and had moved the holy section to one corner.
Through the huge marble doors the multitude was forced. They had no place else to go, for, wherever they turned, the blazing eye and the flashing sword headed them off.
B. T. Revanche allowed himself to be borne along with the current. Once inside the pyramid, however, he separated himself from the crowd and ran down a side-passage. The main body was being forced into the open door of the vault. He did not wish to go with them. He had persuaded Da Vincelleo to prepare a private entrance for him.
He ran with all the speed his short legs could muster, puffing hard. When he rounded a comer, he stopped short. His heart, which had been pounding only moderately now suddenly went into the Walpurgisnacht terror music of Mous-sorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. A Bioid X was stationed down the hall, exactly in front of the mural that concealed the secret door!
He paused, sucked in oxygen and courage, and then walked briskly up to the thing, confident that the electronic “in-terferer” he wore strapped to his belt would neutralize it.
But, when he got up to it, his suppressed doubt and suspicion were translated into action. The flame-eyed X lifted its sword, and lashed out at him.
“You have been chosen!” the frozen lips roared.
The keen tip missed by a spiderweb taking Revanche’s Adam’s apple out in one neat chunk.
Appalled, the financier turned and fled.
While he ran, he turned
his head and shrilled back, “You are making a mistake!” It was a futile thing to scream out, for the plastiskin ears were deaf, to meaning, if not to noise.
Revanche’s hand fumbled on the interferer’s switch, and clicked it back and forth. It seemed to be working; it was warm and humming. What then was the matter?
He cursed Da Vincelleo for a strictly third-rate artisan—a bungler, botcher, and bonehead.
Suddenly he was running down another empty corridor, his hard soles bouncing echoes off the faraway walls. Slap! Slap! Puff! Wheeze! There was an open window at the distant end of the hall. If only he could make that. ... 1
Again, he stopped short. Half hidden in the shadows stood an X on guard. It turned its head, and tiger-bright eyes flamed.
Revanche choked off a scream and whirled. He expected to see the other destroyer behind him, but it was not in sight. When he reached the junction of the two corridors, he saw it standing there, sword held out before it in satiric salute.
There was but one way for Revanche to go—straight back to the bank’s vault.
For the first time he realized that he himself, B. T. Revanche, was being herdedl
He spun around again to face the oncoming terrors. Frantically, his fingers flicked the switch.
“Stopl Stopl I am your master! I am Revanche! I own you!”
“You are the chosen!” they bellowed.
He whirled, and began running again.
When he reached the vault, he found the X’s lined up in a double row, like the guards at a royal reception. They stood facing each other with eyes blazing at eyes, swords held straight out before them and legs widespread above gleaming shoes of brass.
Revanche did not stop but sped down between the guard of honor as if he were afraid they would all begin chopping at once. He had a vision of tiny fragments of meat swimming in a pool of blood, like protozoa jerking in a drop of water beneath a microscope.
When he came to the huge steel door of the vault, he stopped and looked within. The floor immediately before him had raised up to form a wall. Benath it was a round hole, the entrance to a large metallic, and greasy tube.
Down that funnel had slid the entire population, screaming, wailing, weeping, clutching at one another for support, striking out in a burst of maniacal fury.
Down they had gone notwithstanding, with a gnashing of teeth and tongues, and frantic clawings at the smooth and slippery sides in a desperate attempt to keep from hurtling to the doom they knew awaited them.
How well they knew it! This tube was exactly that which had been foretold in the Celestial Blueprint as the passageway for the heathen when they fell headlong to Rejectus!
Revanche had planned to slip down his private stairway to the little balcony that would overlook the other end of the tube. There, he would have watched the doomed spilling out in a white and frenzied flood. There, he would have lapped up revenge as a Greek ghost would have lapped blood at a Trojan hecatomb.
Instead, trembling, and bursting with terror, he turned and faced the X’s. “You haven’t got me yeti” he screamed at them.
He kicked the little wheel that closed the vault from the inside. Once the two hundred ton door clanged shut, it could not be opened as long as the inside wheel remained locked in place. It was an antirobbery device that he was well aware of, having in his youth once planned to plunder the bank in order to get a start in business.
The huge door swung shut swiftly.
Revanche shook his fist at the onrushing horde, then jerked around, and leaped into the tube. The thunder of brass shoes filled the vault walls. Just before he slid out of view, Revanche twisted his head for one last look.
A Bioid was leaping through the air in a desperate endeavor to sacrifice itself by stopping the door with its hard and almost indestructible eternalloy body.
The financier did not see whether or not the Bioid made it, for he dropped abrutly into blackness.
V
NORMALLY, he would have shot down the smooth funnel, inclined at thirty-five degrees, at a terrific speed. But he had not become the most resourceful financier of the solar system for nothing.
So it was that he flicked the switch of the antigrav unit around his waist and quickly slowed to a half-speed. He had wanted to wear a full power machine, but it would have been too bulky to conceal beneath the loose folds of his garments. He had to be content with a moderate rate of descent.
After twenty seconds of sliding, he slipped out of the mouth of the funnel. It was as he had hoped. His checked speed enabled him to drop onto a granite ledge beneath the opening. Even so, he fell close to the very edge. A little more velocity, and he would have gone completely over.
Shuddering, he clutched the rim of rock until he’d regained some of his composure. After a while, he inched forward until his head hung over the lip of the precipice, and he could gaze downward into the abyss.
Below, seemingly a thousand feet down, though he knew the distance must be an illusion fabricated by Da Vincelleo, was a lake of molten lava rising in great billows, then sinking into deep valleys, and releasing gigantic bubbles that rose and burst, and loosed a stench of sulfur that almost suffocated him. Smoke spiralled up past his head, and collected against the roof far above. The heat that ascended was strong enough to crisp his face if he had looked long into it.
Nowhere was there a sign of Dafess’s inhabitants. All had been dissolved in the roaring sea of lava, in the hell that had been prophesied for all their enemies.
Quailing, Revanche looked to left and right along the narrow ledge for an avenue of escape. There was none. Both ends tapered off into the rock.
Straight across, perhaps a hundred feet away, was the balcony from which he had hoped to see the show. If he had the guts, he thought, he could step up his antigrav past the danger point and, almost weightless for a second, could leap to the balcony.
If the pack didn’t bum out while he was in midair. If he didn’t misgauge and miss the balcony ... if the hellish blast from below didn’t crisp him before he completed the jump . . . if . . .
He stood up, and by the glow thrown up from the bright ocean, he peered up the slide. Another if. What if he could brace his legs against the sides of the O, and painfully work his way back up?
At that moment, a figure shot out of the shadows of the tunnel, a figure that approached at express-train speed and quickly loomed larger and larger. Its blood-colored halo, the mask with the snarl of tenderness, the furnace-door eyes, and the dripping sword—all could be made out in frightening detail.
Like the lost soul he believed he was, Revanche screamed and dropped flat to the ledge, crushing his snipped nose into the granite. He moaned and waited for the clang of armor and the final whistle of the blade through the air before it thudded into his neck.
Above him, something dark and monstrous shot out of the O and roared by.
Whooshl
It missed the ledge by many feet and fell into the lava ocean.
A train of shadows flickered over Revanche. The air was disturbed by the constant passage of flying elephantine bodies.
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
One by one, like living shells exploded out of a circus cannon, they projectiled over their intended prey. By the thousands, they meteored over him, eyeballs matching the glare of the lava below, swords automatically slashing out even as they spun and turned over and over, and splashed into the liquid rock.
Whish! Brrr! Whoosh! Splash!
Suddenly—silence.
Slowly, Revanche rose. He could not believe it. He looked over the ledge. Only the bare and boiling sea. He turned and glanced up the tube. Silence and shadows and the gleaming greasy symbol for zero.
Understanding melted the glacier on his brain. He broke into a wild dance, wept tears for gladness, whistled three times, and shouted, “I’ve won! Revanche has won! And I’ve beat them!”
Clippety-clop! Clippety-clop!
The unbelievable ring of
iron horseshoes jumped out of the tub’s mouth.
Revanche froze in a pirouette, stood poised, then seemed to collapse into a strange loose creature that shambled over to the funnel and leaned backward to look up, like a dazed and stiffnecked Neanderthal.
The liquid film of joy glazed over his mind again, grew white and cold and lumpy.
A mount and its rider were coming out of the darkness and into the brimstone glare. The horse was a nightmare black, its eyeballs burning tiger-yellow bright. It stretched back cruel and foaming lips, and revealed teeth sharp enough to rend him.
A ghost horse, it cried for blood while its magnetic shoes clung briefly to the metal floor before lifting again.
Clippety-clop rang its hooves.
Then, it stopped and hung its head down over the tube’s lip and fixed Revanche with one demon’s eye while its rider dismounted. It remained in that attitude, and did not move even when its master dropped gently onto the ledge to face Revanche.
The financier felt his bulging eyes threaten to leave his head, like balloons tugging at their moorings.
His eyes understood before his brain did.
They took in a face that was a compound of two persons, a masterly paradox of features and traits: compassionate and merciless, sensitive and coarse, loving and hating. It was a hybrid of X and of himself.
It was not that contradictory face that told him so much, that explained why his interferer had failed to work, even why he had been “herded,” and was now facing this fantastic and vengeful creation.
It was something else that told him that not only Dafess City but he, Revanche, had been the victim of a Caligulan sense of humor, the butt of the most colossal practical joke the Messinan had ever played.
That something else he had been too shocked to think about. Why had the Bioids, who carried full-power antigravs within their bodies, fallen over the ledge? It was because Da Vincelleo had deliberately destroyed them to raise his hopes. And then had brought out this—this thing—this joke! Not satisfied to make Revanche squirm, he had wanted him to sweat blood.