Turnbull fought his fear, fought the numbness in his limbs to raise his right arm and hand. He would reach inside his jacket, take out his gun, and point it into Bannerman’s face. And he would say, “All right, you bastard. Go on, let me fall. But the split second after you drop me I’m going to pull the trigger and blow your fucking head off!”
Except … Bannerman wasn’t smiling but straining, and Turnbull could feel himself being lifted up, up, up to safety. He got a leg over the ledge, flopped over onto his back. He was alive—safe! Thank God for Bannerman! he thought.
But even as he passed out, still he wasn’t sure … .
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Stay here,” Bannerman told Clayborne. “Wait for me.”
They had moved back maybe fifty yards to a spot where the ledge was roofed over in tangled vines and the rushing of the cataract was just a dull, distant booming. Bannerman had carried Turnbull over his shoulder, only putting him down in a place which was absolutely safe.
“Here?” Something of his previous terror had gone out of Clayborne’s eyes; now, in a moment, it was rekindled. “Stay here?” he repeated. “But … are you leaving me?”
“I’m leaving both of you,” Bannerman answered, without emotion. “I can move faster and more safely on my own. I’ll find an easy route down and come back for you. Meanwhile, you stay here and look after him.”
“But … what can I do for him?” Clayborne got down on his knees on the ledge beside Turnbull and looked into his pale, drawn face. Turnbull’s breathing was shallow, ragged. There was a patina of cold sweat forming droplets on his upper lip and in the hollows of his cheeks.
Bannerman shrugged. “I don’t suppose there’s a lot you can do for him,” he said, “but it’s a certainty you can only hinder me. So stay and watch over him.”
“But—” Clayborne began, yet again.
Bannerman dismissed his protest before he could give it voice, saying, “I’ll be back.” And without another word he began retracing their steps up through the dusty, vine-enclosed zigzag of the fissure.
In a little while he came out into open air, abandoned the fault, and doubled back along a narrow, horizontal striation which had weathered into the merest strip of a ledge. The way took him in the same direction but on a higher elevation than their previous route. It wasn’t a path which Clayborne might even have contemplated, but that didn’t stop Sith-Bannerman. Finally he reached a jutting, striated spur and climbed it to a vantage point from which he could scan almost one hundred percent of the scene below and around.
No more than a hundred yards to the south, Anderson and Varre were returning up the bottom part of the boulder slope in search of another route. The reason for this manoeuvre was plain to see: below them the slope had given way to a sheer, moisture-slick face descending blindly into the waterfall’s spray. From their position directly overhead, the two hadn’t been able to see what Sith-Bannerman could see. Even if they had seen it, he doubted if they’d have reached or responded to the obvious conclusion.
What he saw under the cataract was this:
About sixty feet below the vertical spout of shining water, a misted pool lay in a deep stone basin hollowed from a wide ledge or false plateau. It was hidden from the pair overhead by the spray and the almost sheer angle of the cliff, just as it had been hidden from Turnbull’s party at the spot where their route had petered out. And at the edge of the pool—which overflowed gently at several points around its perimeter, to continue its fall in a series of frothing white rills and curtains of spray and foam—the girl Angela Denholm sat bathing herself in the shallows, plainly relishing the laving effect of the cool waters after the heat of her climb. Gill and Haggie were down there, too, seated on a flat boulder at the pool’s rim. Obviously their chosen route down the side of the spur had turned out to be the best one.
Like members of most of the galaxy’s sentient races (with the notable exception of the dark-minded Ggyddn) Sith-Bannerman had a sense of humour, though in his case sardonic. He chuckled inwardly at the thought of how the three of them down there at the pool would react to his, Turnbull, and Clayborne’s abrupt arrival in their location—and from such an unexpected direction! It was something he looked forward to.
Meanwhile, Anderson and Varre had crossed the boulder slope diagonally to the base of the next spur, where now they made the connection with Gill’s recently used trail. They had also spotted Sith-Bannerman, and paused to wave at him across the depression between spurs. He waved back, pointed out and confirmed the route they should follow, and continued to observe them as they commenced that section of their descent. Finally, satisfied that they would arrive safely at the pool, he went back for Turnbull and Clayborne.
Once move retracing his steps, Sith-Bannerman automatically checked that his recorder was working and pondered the strangeness, the ambiguities and contradictions of these self-proclaimed “human” beings. And what a mass of contradictions they were, what a hodgepodge of strengths and weaknesses, mores and immoralities, faiths and faithlessness.
Short-lived and yet inflated and bombastic as immortals (but elastic, too, and resourceful, and at times even remorseful) he pitied their apparently futile existence—while at the same time almost envying them. For all their phobias and neuroses, and their physical as well as mental disorders, still they had come a long way along the evolutionary track—by their standards if not by those of the Thone. Having studied them, however, Sith-Bannerman found it astonishing that they’d reached even their current level of attainment. But they had, and it quite appeared that given time they might yet achieve greatness … except that he had made it his business to deny them any such span.
They were, he knew, a fifty-fifty case. That being so, and according to Thone law, he would normally make his recordings and let the synthesizer, which the test group now called the House of Doors, complete its various analyses, and leave the rest of it to the judgement of the Grand Thone himself. But this was not a normal occasion.
Nor was it normal or even deemed acceptable that Sith should use his Bannerman construct guise to insert himself into the synthesizer’s analytical programme. But he had his reasons. And of course he would take time later to go over the records carefully and to edit himself out. A grand falsification of the facts, obviously, but he was the only one who would ever know, and he was quite sure he could live with his conscience.
If there had been more time and another way … but there wasn’t. This was the single guaranteed stairway to the pedestal room of the Grand Thone. And that was Sith’s driving ambition: to occupy that crystal pedestal. Ah, but there were others just as ambitious, and their feet, too, were set upon that spiral stairway. What? And should he let a race of self-tormented Neanderthals stand in his way? Of course not! Not when the nearest Higher Authority was half a million light-years away, anyway …
By now Sith-Bannerman was back on the ledge under the vines, descending the dusty slope to where Clayborne waited with the unconscious Turnbull. Clayborne looked up, startled, at his approach. “That was quick. Any luck?”
Sith-Bannerman nodded. “We were right on it,” he said, “but we couldn’t see for looking.” He stooped and picked up Turnbull, hoisting his dead weight to his shoulders. As he did so he felt a warning tremor of unequal motion in the liquid elastic motor in his construct’s back. That would need attention.
“Something we missed?” said Clayborne, frowning. “You mean on our way down?”
“I said we were right on it,” Bannerman answered. “On top of it. Up ahead.”
Urging Clayborne on before him, he followed the same route as before and once again they came out at the spot where the ledge had been washed away and spray rose up from the thunder of falling water. Clayborne went deathly white; despite the fact that the ledge where he stood was at least three feet wide, he clung to the cliff face almost as tightly as the creature Turnbull had dislodged.
Deep inside his Thone self, Bannerman smiled the alien equivalent of
a cruel smile. These people were here to be tested, weren’t they? According to the rules of the game, Clayborne should now be given a choice, and his decision would count for or against him in the tally when the tests were completed—but they were playing this game by Bannerman’s rules.
That was why he’d become a player: to manipulate the game and make sure that Clayborne and the rest lost. But in his own good time, after he’d first reduced them to fighting, tearing, mindless animals and turned them against each other. Of the six of them, Clayborne would be the first to crack, that was obvious. And in his case Bannerman had no objection to speeding up the process.
Closing with the gasping, trembling man where he stood spread-eagled to the cliff, Bannerman said, “This is it.”
“This is what?” Clayborne gulped, his Adam’s apple bobbing.
“Gill, Haggie and the girl are directly down below. I mean, directly down below.”
“What?” In his extremity of terror, Clayborne wasn’t taking it in. Bannerman had supposed it would be so.
“Explaining my meaning wouldn’t make it easier for you,” said Bannerman. “And it wouldn’t change anything, either.” He yanked Clayborne from the cliff and shoved him into space. Clayborne didn’t have time to draw breath for a scream; he simply disappeared into boiling spray and tossing water. And without pause Bannerman lobbed Turnbull from his shoulder into the waterfall slightly to the right of where Clayborne had fallen, and he himself jumped a little to the left … .
Five minutes earlier, Haggie had said to Gill, “Known her long, have you? The bint?”
“Bint?” Gill answered, absentmindedly. He was toying with the silver cylinder, frowning as he concentrated his attention on it and turned it in his hands. He knew (in that way of his) that he should be able to dismantle it, but there were no seams, no screws, no external mechanisms of any sort that he could see. Finally Haggie’s question got through to him and he looked up.
The redhead’s piggy eyes were on Angela where now she stood up and began wading back towards them through the shallow water at the edge of the pool. “Brr!” she said. “I’m afraid it’s cooled me down a bit faster than I intended.”
“Yeah?” said Haggie under his breath. “Well, it’s done just the opposite for me!” Gill had heard what he said, and he saw where the small man’s eyes were looking.
Angela’s black ski pants were tight-fitting and had shown her legs off to their best advantage right from square one; but now she was showing even more, for her white, frilly blouse was of a material which turned almost transparent in water. She couldn’t know it, however, or she would realise that her half-cup bra was now plainly visible, holding firm to her tip-tilted breasts.
“God, but I’ve been missing a bit of that!” said Haggie, again under his breath, while still she was far enough away not to hear him. But she did see his eyes fixed on her body and the way he licked his puffy lips, and she was aware of Gill’s agitation.
She looked down at herself and gasped, and covered herself by crossing her arms over her breasts. “Spencer,” she said, coming to a halt, “will you bring me my parka, please?”
The garment lay between the two men in a hollow in the rock. But Haggie was quicker off the mark. He snatched up the parka, grinned at Gill and jumped down from the boulder into inches of water. Three paces took him to the girl, and he tentatively held out her coat to her. She made to take it but he at once backed off.
“Try it with both hands,” he advised, grinning.
She stood there undecided, biting her lip, her colour rising.
“What, are you ashamed of them?” he taunted. “Believe me you don’t need to be! Not with tits like those!”
Gill climbed down from the boulder. “Haggie,” he said, “you have a dirty mind, and it’s so full of crap that it’s dribbling out of your mouth! Give her the parka.”
“What, have you laid claim to this piece?” Haggie half-turned towards him. Angela saw her chance and snatched the parka, then climbed up out of the water. Gill went to her, helped her into her coat.
“You know,” said Haggie, “I’ve been watching you pretty carefully, Mr. Gill. Er, Spencer? Now me, I’ve never been much physically, you know what I mean? But I reckon I’ve got your measure any day. In fact, you’re a bit of a wreck, aren’t you? So from now on, if you have any more real cool, real hard comments to make, you keep ’em to your frigging self, right?”
Normally Gill would know how to keep a tight rein on himself. He’d learned to control his temper some years ago, when his disability had first begun to affect him. But not this time. Even knowing he’d probably take a beating, still he couldn’t let things stand like this. If he did, the situation could only get worse. He bunched his fists and took a pace into the water in Haggie’s direction—and in the next moment the entire scheme of things changed!
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Anderson and Varre were just in time to witness the whole thing. They had come down the side of the spur at the narrow, southern extreme of the shelf, and had been obliged to pick their way around the scattered debris of huge boulders where they had fallen or been washed down from above. Now, as they approached the main pool over a terrain of smooth, humped rocks, where smaller pools glinted in weathered hollows, they saw Angela where she stood with her back to them, and beyond her Gill and Haggie squaring up to each other, ankle-deep in the shallows.
Fifty feet beyond the two men where they stood poised for battle, a shining spout of water crashed down and made the surface of the pool boil where it was deepest. Lesser spouts and rills cascaded down the slick cliffs behind the main deluge, sending up spray which drifted as it climbed from the tossing pool; the face of the escarpment overhead was for the greater part obscured behind its shifting milky curtain. But even as Gill and Haggie were on the point of hurling themselves at each other, so there came a diversion.
Down from the unseen heights, borne by the main spout like matchsticks down a gutter, a trio of whirling human shapes came crashing, plunging one after the other in rapid succession into the pool’s deepest part. First to surface was Clayborne, who came choking and floundering, kicking feebly for the shallows. Bannerman’s head next appeared from the spray, only to submerge again as he went in search of Turnbull. A moment more and Gill was wading out into the deeper water, offering his outstretched hand as Bannerman resurfaced with Turnbull’s limp form in tow.
Anderson and Varre reached the pool in time to relieve Bannerman and Gill of the unconscious Turnbull, drag him out and commence pumping the water out of his lungs. Angela assisted them as best she could, and in so doing was the first to notice his poisoned left hand.
Turnbull’s hand had puffed up to about twice its normal size, making it look as though he’d perhaps broken his wrist and all the fingers. But when she carefully turned the hand palm down, then the true story revealed itself.
Gill saw the look on the girl’s face and examined Turnbull’s hand. He saw the yellow, soft puffy flesh, and right in the centre of the hand’s main pentagon, twin incisions white as good-quality paper. They were half an inch apart, each a quarter inch long, dark slits as keen as razor slashes between the pulsing purple veins—which they’d barely missed.
Gill looked at Bannerman where he sat on his own, testing his right shoulder with probing fingers. “What bit him?”
Bannerman looked up. “A crustacean sort of thing, something he accidentally disturbed. It was, oh, so big.” He described its size and shape with his hands. “It clamped itself to his hand and did that.”
Clayborne could be more descriptive than that. He’d got his breath back, something of his colour, too, and lay where he’d dragged himself onto a patch of shingle between rounded boulders, clinging to the earth as if it were a pillow. Now, shakily sitting up, he said, “The thing was … nightmarish! I mean, I’ve never much been bothered by bugs and the like—Christ, back in the States I’ve seen cockroaches as big as your thumbs in five-star hotels!—but this thing was a real monster
. Facedown it was like a rock, but faceup it was something else. Its legs were like a crab’s but extendable, and it had too damned many of them! It had sharp, bright little eyes … it was all yellow and purple … it moved about as fast as lightning. Yes, and it looked venomous as hell!”
“It was venomous, all right,” said Gill. “How long ago did it happen?”
“No more than half an hour,” said Clayborne. He got up and moved quietly to where Bannerman continued to massage his shoulder and exercise his back. “Just before this bastard threw me off the goddamn cliff!” Without warning he lashed out with his foot, catching Bannerman under the chin and knocking him flat. He went to kick him again but Anderson got in the way, trying to placate him.
“He threw you off the cliff?” The Minister repeated Clayborne’s words. “What on earth do you mean? That he tried to kill you?”
Clayborne stood there clenching and unclenching his fists. “No,” he finally said. But in the next breath: “Yes—yes he did. He damn near frightened me to death!”
Bannerman sat up, and now his right shoulder was hanging a little limp. He touched his jaw and looked at the blood on his fingers. “I shoved him into the waterfall,” he said. “If I hadn’t, he’d be up there on that ledge right now. And he’d stay there. He was in a state of shock. His phobia. I couldn’t waste time, look for a new way down, carry Turnbull and look after Clayborne. It was the easiest way—and by far the quickest.”
“Easiest for you!” Clayborne snarled.
“Should I have left you there?” Bannerman’s logic was unshakable. “Should I have left Turnbull there, or risked my life trying to carry him down—and him probably dying? Were you fit to help me carry him down? You weren’t fit to carry yourself.”