He stopped, realizing that he had been sidetracked from his original purpose. “That you should be haunted with the specter of a conscience is rather incredible. But perhaps that explains what has puzzled the puritans—why liquor, tobacco, marijuana, and dreamgum were offered in the grails along with food. At least, dreamgum seems to be a gift booby-trapped with danger to those who abuse it.”
He stepped closer to Göring. The German’s eyes were half-closed, and his jaw hung open.
“You know my identity. I am traveling under a pseudonym, with good reason. You remember Spruce, one of your slaves? After you were killed, he was revealed, quite by accident, as one of those who somehow resurrected all the dead of humanity. Those we call the Ethicals, for lack of a better term. Göring, are you listening?”
Göring nodded.
“Spruce killed himself before we could get out of him all we wanted to know. Later, some of his compatriots came to our area and temporarily put everybody to sleep—probably with a gas—intending to take me away to wherever Their headquarters are. But They missed me. I was off on a trading trip up The River. When I returned, I realized They were after me, and I’ve been running ever since. Göring, do you hear me?”
Burton slapped him savagely on his cheek. Göring said, “Ach!” and jumped back and held the side of his face. His eyes were open, and he was grimacing.
“I heard you!” he snarled. “It just didn’t seem worthwhile to answer back. Nothing seemed worthwhile, nothing except floating away, far from….”
“Shut up and listen!” Burton said. “The Ethicals have men everywhere looking for me. I can’t afford to have you alive, do you realize that? I can’t trust you. Even if you were a friend, you couldn’t be trusted. You’re a gummer!”
Göring giggled, stepped up to Burton and tried to put his arms around Burton’s neck. Burton pushed him back so hard that he staggered up against the table and only kept from falling by clutching its edges.
“This is very amusing,” Göring said. “The day I got here, a man asked me if I’d seen you. He described you in detail and gave your name. I told him I knew you well—too well, and that I hoped I’d never see you again, not unless I had you in my power, that is. He said I should notify him if I saw you again. He’d make it worth my while.”
Burton wasted no time. He strode up to Göring and seized him with both hands. They were small and delicate, but Göring winced with pain.
He said, “What’re you going to do, kill me again?”
“Not if you tell me the name of the man who asked you about me. Otherwise….”
“Go ahead and kill me!” Göring said. “So what? I’ll wake up somewhere else, thousands of miles from here, far out of your reach.”
Burton pointed at a bamboo box in a corner of the hut. Guessing that it held Göring’s supply of gum, he said, “And you’d also wake up without that! Where else could you get so much on such short notice?”
“Damn you!” Göring shouted, and tried to tear himself loose to get to the box.
“Tell me his name!” Burton said. “Or I’ll take the gum and throw it in The River!”
“Agneau. Roger Agneau. He sleeps in a hut just outside the Roundhouse.”
“I’ll deal with you later,” Burton said, and chopped Göring on the side of the neck with the edge of his palm.
He turned, and he saw a man crouching outside the entrance to the hut. The man straightened up and was off. Burton ran out after him; in a minute both were in the tall pines and oaks of the hills. His quarry disappeared in the waist-high grass.
Burton slowed to a trot, caught sight of a patch of white—starlight on bare skin—and was after the fellow. He hoped that the Ethical would not kill himself at once, because he had a plan for extracting information if he could knock him out at once. It involved hypnosis, but he would have to catch the Ethical first. It was possible that the man had some sort of wireless imbedded in his body and was even now in communication with his compatriots—wherever They were. If so, They would come in Their flying machines, and he would be lost.
He stopped. He had lost his quarry and the only thing to do now was to rouse Alice and the others and run. Perhaps this time they should take to the mountains and hide there for a while.
But first he would go to Agneau’s hut. There was little chance that Agneau would be there, but it was certainly worth the effort to make sure.
21
Burton arrived within sight of the hut just in time to glimpse the back of a man entering it. Burton circled to come up from the side where the darkness of the hills and the trees scattered along the plain gave him some concealment. Crouching, he ran until he was at the door to the hut.
He heard a loud cry some distance behind him and whirled to see Göring staggering toward him. He was crying out in German to Agneau, warning him that Burton was just outside. In one hand he held a long spear which he brandished at the Englishman.
Burton turned and hurled himself against the flimsy bamboo-slat door. His shoulder drove into it and broke it from its wooden hinges. The door flew inward and struck Agneau, who had been standing just behind it. Burton, the door, and Agneau fell to the floor with Agneau under the door.
Burton rolled off the door, got up, and jumped again with both bare feet on the wood. Agneau screamed and then became silent. Burton heaved the door to one side to find his quarry unconscious and bleeding from the nose. Good! Now if the noise didn’t bring the watch and if he could deal quickly enough with Göring, he could carry out his plan.
He looked up just in time to see the starlight on the long black object hurtling at him.
He threw himself to one side, and the spear plunged into the dirt floor with a thump. Its shaft vibrated like a rattlesnake preparing to strike.
Burton stepped into the doorway, estimated Göring’s distance, and charged. His assegai plunged into the belly of the German. Göring threw his hands up in the air, screamed, and fell on his side. Burton hoisted Agneau’s limp body on his shoulder and carried him out of the hut.
By then there were shouts from the Roundhouse. Torches were flaring up; the sentinel on the nearest watchtower was bellowing. Göring was sitting on the ground, bent over, clutching the shaft close to the wound.
He looked gape-mouthed at Burton and said, “You did it again! You….”
He fell over on his face, the death rattle in his throat.
Agneau returned to a frenzied consciousness. He twisted himself out of Burton’s grip and fell to the ground. Unlike Göring, he made no noise. He had as much reason to be silent as Burton—more perhaps. Burton was so surprised that he was left standing with the fellow’s loin-towel clutched in his hand. Burton started to throw it down but felt something stiff and square within the lining of the towel. He transferred the cloth to his left hand, yanked the assegai from the corpse, and ran after Agneau.
The Ethical had launched one of the bamboo canoes beached along the shore. He paddled furiously out into the starlit waters, glancing frequently behind him. Burton raised the assegai behind his shoulder and hurled it. It was a short, thick-shafted weapon, designed for infighting and not as a javelin. But if flew straight and came down at the end of its trajectory in Agneau’s back. The Ethical fell forward and at an angle and tipped the narrow craft over. The canoe turned upside down. Agneau did not reappear.
Burton swore. He had wanted to capture Agneau alive, but he was damned if he would permit the Ethical to escape. There was a chance that Agneau had not contacted other Ethicals yet.
He turned back toward the guest huts. Drums were beating up and down along the shore, and people with burning torches were hastening toward the Roundhouse. Burton stopped a woman and asked if he could borrow her torch a moment. She handed it to him but spouted questions at him. He answered that he thought the Choctaws across The River were making a raid. She hurried off toward the assembly before the stockade.
Burton drove the pointed end of the torch into the soft dirt of the bank and examined the tow
el he had snatched from Agneau. On the inside, just above the hard square in the lining, was a seam sealed with two thin magnetic strips, easily opened. He took the object out of the lining and looked at it by the torchlight.
For a long time he squatted by the shifting light, unable to stop looking or to subdue an almost paralyzing astonishment. A photograph, in this world of no cameras, was unheard-of. But a photograph of him was even more incredible, as was the fact that the picture had not been taken on this world! It had to have been made on Earth, that Earth lost now in the welter of stars somewhere in the blazing sky and in God only knew how many thousands of years of time.
Impossibility piled on impossibility! But it was taken at a time and at a place when he knew for certain that no camera had fixed upon him and preserved his image. His mustachios had been removed but the retoucher had not bothered to opaque the background nor his clothing. There he was, caught miraculously from the waist up and imprisoned in a flat piece of some material. Flat! When he turned the square, he saw his profile come into view. If he held it almost at right angles to the eye, he could get a three-quarters profile-view of himself.
“In 1848,” he muttered to himself. “When I was a twenty-seven-year-old subaltern in the East Indian Army. And those are the blue mountains of Goa. This must have been taken when I was convalescing there. But, my God, how? By whom? And how would the Ethicals manage to have it in their possession now?”
Agneau had evidently carried this photo as a mnemonic in his quest for Burton. Probably every one of the hunters had one just like it, concealed in his towel. Up and down The River They were looking for him; there might be thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of Them. Who knew how many agents They had available or how desperately They wanted him or why They wanted him?
After replacing the photo in the towel, he turned to go back to the hut. And at that moment, his gaze turned toward the top of the mountains—those unscalable heights that bounded The Rivervalley on both sides.
He saw something flicker against a bright sheet of cosmic gas. It appeared for only the blink of an eyelid, then was gone.
A few seconds later, it came out of nothing, was revealed as a dark hemispherical object, then disappeared again.
A second flying craft showed itself briefly, reappeared at a lower elevation, and then was gone like the first.
The Ethicals would take him away, and the people of Sevieria would wonder what had made them fall asleep for an hour or so.
He did not have time to return to the hut and wake up the others. If he waited a moment longer, he would be trapped.
He turned and ran into The River and began swimming toward the other shore, a mile and a half away. But he had gone no more than forty yards when he felt the presence of some huge bulk above. He turned on his back to stare upward. There was only the soft glare of the stars above. Then, out of the air, fifty feet above him, a disk with a diameter of about sixty feet cut out a section of the sky. It disappeared almost immediately, came into sight again only twenty feet above him.
So They had some means of seeing at a distance in the night and had spotted him in his flight.
“You jackals!” he shouted at them. “You’ll not get me anyway!”
He upended and dived and swam straight downward. The water became colder, and his eardrums began to hurt. Although his eyes were open, he could see nothing. Suddenly, he was pushed by a wall of water, and he knew that the pressure came from displacement by a large object.
The craft had plunged down after him.
There was only one way out. They would have his dead body, but that would be all. He could escape Them again, be alive somewhere on The River to outwit Them again and strike back at Them.
He opened his mouth and breathed in deeply through both his nose and his mouth.
The water choked him. Only by a strong effort of will did he keep from closing his lips and trying to fight back against the death around him. He knew with his mind that he would live again, but the cells of his body did not know it. They were striving for life at this very moment, not in the rationalized future. And they forced from his water-choked throat a cry of despair.
22
Yaaaaaaaah!”
The cry raised him off the grass as if he had bounced up off a trampoline. Unlike the first time he had been resurrected, he was not weak and bewildered. He knew what to expect. He would wake on the grassy banks of The River near a grailstone. But he was not prepared for these giants battling around him.
His first thought was to find a weapon. There was nothing at hand except the grail that always appeared with a resurrectee and the pile of towels of various sizes, colors, and thicknesses. He took one step, seized the handle of the grail, and waited. If he had to, he would use the grail as a club. It was light, but it was practically indestructible and very hard. However, the monsters around him looked as if they could take a battering all day and not feel a thing.
Most of them were at least eight feet tall, some were surely over nine; their massively muscled shoulders were over three feet broad. Their bodies were human, or nearly so, and their white skins were covered with long reddish or brownish hairs. They were not as hairy as a chimpanzee but more so than any man he had ever seen, and he had known some remarkably hirsute human beings.
But the faces gave them an unhuman and frightening aspect, especially since all were snarling with battle rage. Below a low forehead was a bloom of bone that ran without indentation above the eyes and then continued around to form O’s. Though the eyes were as large as his, they looked small compared to the broad face in which they were set. The cheekbones billowed out and then curved sharply inward. The tremendous noses gave the giants the appearance of proboscis monkeys.
At another time, Burton might have been amused by them. Not now. The roars that tore out of their more-than-gorilla-sized chests were deep as a lion’s, and the huge teeth would have made a Kodiak bear think twice before attacking. Their fists, large as his head, held clubs as thick and as long as wagon poles or stone axes. They swung their weapons at each other, and when they struck flesh, bones broke with cracks as loud as wood splitting. Sometimes, the clubs broke, too.
Burton had a moment in which to look around. The light was weak. The sun had only half risen above the peaks across The River. The air was far colder than any he had felt on this planet except during his defeated attempts to climb to the top of the perpendicular ranges.
Then one of the victors of a combat looked around for another enemy and saw him.
His eyes widened. For a second, he looked as startled as Burton had when he had first opened his eyes. Perhaps he had never seen such a creature as Burton before, any more than Burton had seen one like him. If so, he did not take long to get over his surprise. He bellowed, jumped over the mangled body of his foe, and ran toward Burton, raising an axe that could have felled an elephant.
Burton also ran, his grail in one hand. If he were to lose that, he might as well die now. Without it, he would starve or have to eke out on fish and bamboo sprouts.
He almost made it. An opening appeared before him, and he sped between two titans, their arms around each other and each straining to throw over the other, and another who was backing away before the rain of blows delivered by the club of a fourth. Just as he was almost through, the two wrestlers toppled over on him.
He was going swiftly enough that he was not caught directly under them, but the flailing arm of one struck his left heel. So hard was the blow, it smashed his foot against the ground and stopped him instantly. He fell forward and began to scream. His foot must have been broken, and he had torn muscles throughout his leg.
Nevertheless, he tried to rise and to hobble on to The River. Once in it, he could swim away, if he did not faint from the agony. He took two hops on his right foot, only to be seized from behind.
He flew up into the air, whirling around, and was caught before he began his descent.
The titan was holding him with one hand at arm’s length, t
he enormous and powerful fist clutched around Burton’s chest. Burton could hardly breathe; his ribs threatened to cave in.
Despite all this, he had not dropped his grail. Now he struck it against the giant’s shoulder.
Lightly, as if brushing off a fly, the giant tapped the metal container with his axe, and the grail was torn from Burton’s grip.
The behemoth grinned and bent his arm to bring Burton in closer. Burton weighed one hundred and eighty pounds, but the arm did not quiver under the strain.
For a moment, Burton looked directly into the pale blue eyes sunk in the bony circles. The nose was lined with many broken veins. The lips protruded because of the bulging prognathous jaws beneath—not, as he had first thought, because the lips were so thick.
Then the titan bellowed and lifted Burton up above his head. Burton hammered the huge arm with his fists, knowing that it was in vain but unwilling to submit like a caught rabbit. Even as he did so, he noted, though not with the full attention of his mind, several things about the scene.
The sun had been just rising above the mountain peaks when he had first awakened. Although the time passed since he had jumped to his feet was only a few minutes, the sun should have cleared the peaks. It had not; it hung at exactly the same height as when he had first seen it.
Moreover, the upward slant of the valley permitted a view for at least four miles. The grailstone by him was the last one. Beyond it was only the plain and The River.
This was the end of the line—or the beginning of The River.
There was no time nor desire for him to appreciate what these meant. He merely noted them during the passage between pain, rage, and terror. Then, as the giant prepared to bring his axe around to splinter Burton’s skull, the giant stiffened and shrieked. To Burton, it was like being next to a locomotive whistle. The grip loosened, and Burton fell to the ground. For a moment, he passed out from the pain in his foot.