"Good point," Clive conceded. To Finnbogg he said, "Was that—bad thing—Q'oornan? Did the people who set you to watch the bridge send that thing after us, do you think?"
Finnbogg stood still, slowly shaking his shaggy head. Finally he said, "No, no Q'oornan. No, no. Q'oornans bad, sky thing bad. Bad, bad. Two bad, not one bad, not same bad, bad, bad. No, no." He swung his head mournfully.
Sergeant Smythe was meticulously picking through the remnants of the defeated attacker, confidentially exchanging low words with Sidi Bombay. The sergeant looked up at Clive. "Some very nice workmanship here, sah. If that's the right word for it. Har!" He grinned at his own joke.
"What do you mean, Smythe? What's the point?"
"Bit of salvage, sah. Look here, sah." He was carefully removing dozens of black pellets from the remnants of the attacker. "These little beauties seem to explode on impact. Could use 'em as bombs if we had to, doesn't the major agree? And look here, sah."
He had managed to separate one of the creature's claws. It was an odd contrivance of horny matter and metal, with a complex arrangement of hinges and gears in it.
"Don't even know what this might be good for, sah, but it looks as if it could be some sort of universal tool." He lunged with the thing, raked it across an imaginary opponent. The claw snapped viciously at the air. "Have to be mighty careful with this thing, sah; it looks as if it might turn on you, don't you know. But it might make a very nice weapon, don't you see."
He proceeded to remove and distribute undamaged claws to Clive, Sidi Bombay, and User Annie. Annie held the claw before her face, ran her hands over it, and nodded happily. "Eyedee protocol complete, cybroid device, Io linkage interrupted. Hah!" Her single burst of laughter was like a tinkling bell.
Horace Hamilton Smythe slipped one into a pocket of his tattered khaki garb. When he held one toward Finnbogg, the latter accepted it graciously, crunched it between his teeth, and threw it away. "Not taste nice," he growled. "Bad, bad." He snuffled and started forward again.
Soon they reached the peak of the bridge.
Clive stood at the apex, peering slowly in a full circle.
It was both the most magnificent and the most terrible sight he had ever experienced.
At last they had climbed above the level of the mist that rose from the gorge. Directly beneath the party, the mist floated like a thick London fog. It spread up and down the gorge, so that a seeming river of fog flowed to the travelers' left and right, winding and twisting away to the limit of sight in both directions.
But ahead and behind, the mist dissipated and the Q'oornan landscape stretched majestically as Roman Pluto's stygian realm. Black ground, smooth and rolling, stretched mile after miles. Here and there a stand of vegetation, recognizable by its brushy, irregular shape and mottled texture, but as black as the ground upon which it stood and the sky that towered above.
And at greater distances, scattered irregularly, clusters of gleaming diamond-white and diamond-brilliant lights. Lights that must mark cities.
And in those cities—what? There was no way of knowing, short of making their way to the far end of the bridge and then crossing the plain to investigate.
Clive felt a warm presence and looked down to find User Annie holding his arm. Her head was pressed against his shoulder. Obviously her Baalbec A-9 electrofield was shut off, for he felt no shock of galvanic fluid—only that of the press of female flesh.
"Little Annie," he murmured, "strange creature out of time. Do you understand this world? Do you understand Clive Folliot? Will I ever achieve the vaguest inkling of your world and of you?"
She looked up at him, and in her eyes he saw something both strange and comforting, both alien and familiar. What did he see? He shook his head in bafflement.
"Opsys malfunction?" Annie asked softly. "Error analysis program loaded? Debugging in process? Ah, User Clive, motherboard plug-in components, ah."
Clive thought he saw a tear on her cheek. In the strange half-illumination that was as close as Q'oorna ever came to daylight, a tiny spark glowed within the tear. But surely that was an oddity of their locale, a reflection of some immensely distant star.
"Aiee! Save me 'ere Vishnu strikes!" Perhaps it was the heat of Sidi Bombay's naked feet that had melted a thin layer of ice and caused him to lose his footing. Sidi Bombay fell to the black bridge and started to slide toward the brink. They had descended from the topmost peak of the span, and once within the milky mist the bridge was again slippery with ice.
Finnbogg growled and launched himself toward Sidi Bombay. At the same time that gaunt individual pulled the claw from within his tattered robe and punched its needlelike tip into the ice. It held, and he grasped it desperately with both hands, his body swinging in a circle around it until he dangled desperately over the edge of the chasm, flailing his limbs and crying for help.
Finnbogg extended a pawlike hand and grasped Sidi Bombay's wrist. The massive, doglike dwarf pulled the skeletal figure back over the edge of bridge. Sidi Bombay clung to Finnbogg, uttering soft moans and touching his forehead over and over against the muscular torso of his savior.
"Bad," Finnbogg intoned solemnly. "Sidi Bombay man fall, go away. Ah, ah, all break Sidi Bombay, no. Come Finnbogg, Sidi Bombay." Amazingly, Finnbogg lifted Sidi Bombay in one hand and cuddled him against his massive, bulldog chest.
"Others, come. Tempoids, come Finnbogg." He gestured over his shoulder.
Making a basket of his tree-trunk arms, Finnbogg lifted Clive and Annie and Horace Hamilton Smythe. There was hardly room for them, but the massive creature's thick bones and mighty muscles bore their weight as if they were dolls.
Finnbogg set a steady, rolling pace, the clawlike nails on his toes providing firm purchase on the ice-covered basalt. The powerful voice boomed out chorus after chorus of hymns, music hall tunes, and every so often a stirring reprise of "God Save the Queen."
Clive scanned the sky above them. The deeper they penetrated into the mist, the less visibility remained. That meant they could not see their potential attackers, but the handicap was mutual, and no more aerial creatures appeared.
But a slithering sound could be heard. Clive peered down at the bridge itself. Finnbogg's plodding limbs moved rhythmically, soothingly. It would be easy to yield to their soporific effect and doze, but the unexplained sound kept Folliot alert.
He thought he saw the flicker of a death-white something at the edge of the pathway. The motion of anything white in this black Hades was itself strangely shocking, but there it was. It appeared again, flickering over the edge of the basalt, waving about for a brief moment, then disappearing again.
Without other warning, the entire bridge shook.
Finnbogg emitted a startled grunt and halted, digging in the claws of his extremities to steady himself. He waited for a few seconds, then started forward again.
Again the bridge shuddered.
Clive peered at the edges of the roadway. Perhaps the white feelers were connected with the shaking. They had to belong to some creature that clung to the lower surface of the bridge just as Finnbogg was clinging to its upper.
Again Finnbogg started forward, but by now the vibration had grown into a steady, pulsing beat. Thud-thud-thud, and with each repetition of the sound the bridge shook.
"Put down little friends," Finnbogg grunted. He halted and shook himself as Clive and the others climbed from his arms and stood cautiously on the basalt, by now merely wet and slippery rather than coated with ice.
The massive dwarf Finnbogg planted himself in the center of the bridge.
Peering around him, Clive saw the source of the shaking. It was advancing, slow stride by stride. Silhouetted against the newest arrival, Finnbogg was converted, suddenly, into a pitiable midget.
FOUR
MORE WORLDS
THAN THESE
CHAPTER 16
"Damn You, Clive Folliot!"
The tentacles belonged to this thing, Clive Folliot realized. They were long, whiplike
organs with which it felt its way along. It was a horror that consumed everything in its path.
In its totality it was like nothing Clive had ever laid eyes on. But in its separate parts it was familiar to him, and that made it all the more horrid.
It slithered forward on its tentacles. They were countless, some fat, some thin, the longest of them hardly less long than a polo field. Above the tentacles came its astonishing hulk of a torso. It was as thick as a great tree. It was totally covered with protruding organs. Suckers, feelers, mouths, mandibles, and claws. It was like a titanic war machine—but one that was the product of some mad, satanic deity. No human designer of munitions could ever have conceived this horror.
So huge was the thing that the upper end of its trunk faded into the layer of mist that engulfed and towered over the bridge. Clive peered at the monstrosity like a country bumpkin gawking at the Nelson Monument in Trafalgar Square. The upper end of the monster's trunk supported a second ring of tentacles that hung from it like the cape of an elegant matron arriving at a charity ball. Farther yet, hidden both by the upper ring of tentacles and by the thickening mist, must be the creature's head.
A slender tentacle slithered from beneath the basalt roadway and moved tentatively toward the travelers. Clive watched fascinated as it felt its way, rising and falling, feeling to the left and then to the right, like an independent being, a pitiable and yet deadly menacing blind creature trying to find its way.
It touched User Annie's ankle. She screamed and cowered away from it. Clive wondered whether she had switched on her Baalbec A-9. Had she forgotten her defensive electrofield, or was its jarring effect too tiny to bother the monster?
The tentacle rose and wove blindly to and fro. Another tentacle rose from the other side of the basalt and wavered toward the first. Sergeant Smythe stood between the two. With perfect coordination they moved to entrap him, wrapping themselves around his waist.
More quickly than the eye could follow, Smythe raised the half-mechanical claw he had taken from the aerial cybroid. As if his arm and the claw were a single organic whole, he attacked the tentacles that had wrapped themselves around him. The edge of the claw was miraculously sharp, and Smythe wielded it with astonishing skill.
Almost from the first moment the tentacles writhed and danced.
Smythe was spun around like a dervish.
A tentacle withdrew from his body and snapped like a whip a fraction of an inch from his face. Smythe grinned a grin that Clive Folliot had seen on Smythe's face more than once before, in the heat of battle. His expression was that of the berserker. His manner was that of the surgeon: cold and efficient and determined to perform his bloody but necessary task.
Smythe slashed the tentacles to ribbons, then with even more astonishing speed and skill he grasped the frazzled ends and wove them together in a sailor's knot.
From above them in the mist where its head was hidden from view the monster gave a howl like a thousand damned souls in one.
Sidi Bombay stood nearby, his own claw at the ready. With his empty hand he gestured to Horace Hamilton Smythe.
Sergeant Smythe nodded and tossed his claw to the Indian. "Go to it, old friend. Show this thing your special talent!"
User Annie had come to stand beside Clive Folliot. He placed his arm around her shoulders and held her. Fascinated, they watched Sidi Bombay.
The gaunt man held a cybroid claw in each hand. Using them like mountaineer's pitons, he scrambled up the thicket of tentacles that writhed and snapped in the cold mist.
Finnbogg, in the meantime, had reverted to his apparent ancestry. He seized a cluster of tentacles in his powerful underslung jaw and set his four limbs firmly against the surface of the bridge. He tugged furiously at the tentacles, all the while clamping down with his incomparable jaw muscles and grinding with his terrible fangs.
Above the roadway, Sidi Bombay was scrambling like a crazed mountaineer. The sight was truly incredible. He would swing a cybroid claw upward, plunging it into the writhing mass of tentacles, holding himself in place with his other hand and his bare feet, then swing the second claw upward, moving his feet as well until he had raised himself the length of his body. How he managed to keep his purchase in the jungle of slimy, squirming tentacles was a mystery to Clive.
In front of Clive and Annie, Finnbogg kept up his attack on the monster's lower tentacles. A writhing mass tore away from the creature, followed by a steaming gush of hot, stinking fluid. Wherever it struck on the basalt it formed into glittering puddles that steamed and sizzled and bubbled as they sublimed into a searing gas and drifted away into the blackness.
Sidi Bombay had disappeared into the mist overhead. The sounds of the creature were louder now.
A violent thrumming, something somewhere between the massed hoofbeats of a great, malevolent herd and the rumbling of a terrible landslide.
The monstrosity began to sway back and forth.
A nest of twisting tentacles seized Sergeant Smythe again, and this time he had no weapon to use against them. Frantically, with his bare hands alone, he attacked the imprisoning strands.
They coiled upward, lifting Smythe bodily into the air. Before Clive's and Annie's horrified eyes the sergeant was passed from tentacular cluster to cluster. His shouts echoed back to them but they were incomprehensible. The path that he followed was circuitous, moving him around the creature at the same time as it tended ever upward, toward the gigantic torso covered with its organs of terror and destruction.
Mighty Finnbogg had worked his way partially into the clustering tentacles. Only half of the canoid creature was visible. From within a curtain of tentacles could be heard his growls and the snapping of razorlike fangs against rubbery organs.
Until this moment Clive had been frozen in place by the horror and fascination of the sight. He shook himself and then he saw that Annie had joined the fray. Armed with a cybroid claw, cursing his failure to act more promptly, he ran to assist Finnbogg.
Clive grasped a rubbery tentacle and began hacking at it with the claw. He could see User Annie doing the same.
Without instruction in the use of the claw, still Clive felt a sudden surge of confidence. The weapon was so perfectly designed that it took no lessons but merely a will to make use of it. He cut away the first tentacle he had seized and reached for another.
He could see Finnbogg's hindquarters. The fearless but slow-witted Finnbogg had belatedly realized his peril. Struggling and fighting his way ever deeper into the nest of tentacles, he now ran the risk of becoming trapped, unable to withdraw.
Then, like a tree before the axman, the giant creature toppled toward the surface of the bridge. Slowly at first, it leaned away from the companions. Its thousands of chelae, tentacles, and feelers beat the air, setting up a clattering and whirring that sounded like a hurricane crossing the tropical jungle of an ocean isle. The atmosphere itself was whipped into a froth of mist and spume and human sweat and the stinking, sticky excretions of the wounded monstrosity.
The pounding and thrumming and grinding of the creature's internal organs grew louder.
Its voice rose, howling as if it would echo from the farthest nebulae.
It crashed against the roadway, rebounded once, and landed again, lying the long way and covering the entire width of the path. Its tentacles writhed and its chellae waved painfully in the blackness. It emitted noise like a moan of pain and despair.
A rumble sounded, and a creaking.
The bridge itself shifted.
Clive could see the base of the monstrosity. It was nearly round. Most of it was made up of a transparent membrane. The membrane was surrounded by a row of frantically writhing tentacles. Through the transparent membrane he could see partway into the thing's innards. He saw horrible things there, entire creatures, humans and aliens alike, swallowed whole and floating in a heavy, viscous liquid. Some of them were mere skeletons, others were still fleshy, and still others, most horrifying of all, were apparently still alive, waving their ar
ms and legs, struggling feebly against their unavoidable fate.
Swimming lazily among the bodies were miniature replicas of the great monster. One or another would stop and extend a proboscis to pierce a human or an alien being. As Clive watched in helpless horror, the victim would shrivel while the feasting monstrosity swelled.
Now User Annie moved out of Clive's grasp. She reached inside her bodice at last and moved her hand. Folliot could see that she was switching on her electrofield.
She held a cybroid claw. She ran toward the transparent membrane, the claw extended in front of her.
Clive thought she was going to saw through the membrane in a heroic but futile attempt to save the captives floating inside the monstrosity. He shouted and ran after her. The creature's earlier victims were beyond saving. She would only free the creature's young, free them and then face their renewed attack.
Annie reached the membrane before Clive could overtake her. She attacked it, using the cybroid claw. But whatever her intention, the effect of the electrofield on the creature was far greater than that of the claw alone could possibly have been.
Every tentacle, pod, feeler, and cilium of the monster spasmed.
The howling voice rose to a pitch and volume beyond even that of any earlier moment in the battle.
The entire creature slithered and whirled as if it were a pair of spokes on a wagon wheel.
Annie and Clive were both swept backward, barely avoiding being swept from the surface of the bridge into the misty chasm below.
The monstrosity revolved through a full 180 degrees, so that its hitherto unseen upper end roared past Clive and Annie.
As the monster's end drew into sight, Clive had a horrifying premonition of what he was going to see. The upper collar of tentacles was still spasmed outward like an Elizabethan ruff, only they twitched and clutched at nothing as they approached.
They swept past Clive and Annie with an awful stench and spray of disgusting fluids.