He pulled from the bulging pocket of his jacket one of the tennis-ball-sized plastic gas grenades. He twisted the pin in its north pole to the left and then yanked it out and heaved the grenade into the fog. Six seconds later, a roar and a faint orange flash came through the fog.
He removed another grenade and pulled the pin but he never had a chance to throw it. Dark figures suddenly appeared ahead of him. And something struck him in the shoulder and spun him around.
He staggered backward then. His shoulder and arm felt as if they had been cut off. But he knew even in the shock that a bolt from a small crossbow had hit him. The plastic chain mail beneath its covering of shirt and jacket had kept the plastic point from piercing him. The shock of the impact from the bolt, fired at about five feet or so, had paralyzed his side for a moment.
He had dropped the grenade, and it had rolled to one side out of his sight. He staggered back away from where he thought it was, shouting to the others to run. They did not hear him because they were struggling with the people who had run into them.
The grenade had bounced and rolled further away than he had expected. It split the fog in a blaze of light and a wave that half-deafened Caliban. He saw the body of a man flying, turning as it arced toward him, its legs and arms spread out as if it were sky diving. The body struck near him, but the light was gone, and he could not see it.
A large man, striking out with a baseball bat, sprang at him. Doc jumped to one side, lost the man, jumped back in as the man was turning around to locate him or perhaps to make sure that no one was sneaking up on him. Doc still could not use his right arm, but his left drove in with the plastic dagger he had pulled from its sheath on his belt, and the sharp point went over the man’s raised right arm and into his jugular vein. Doc stepped back, pulling the knife out, whirled in case anybody was behind him, crouched, and caught another man in the throat as this man flew out of the fog. The man dropped his crossbow. Doc picked it up—he suddenly remembered having dropped his when the bolt hit him—and he waited. Because he was still partly deafened, the sounds of battle came dimly from all around him: shouts, snarls, shrieks, bats hitting helmets and flesh or other bats, the twang of a released crossbow string, the grunt of a man hit with something.
Then a woman came running through the fog, and Doc, instead of shooting, threw himself in a football player’s block at her legs and knocked her over. Then he was sitting on Barbara Villiers’ chest and twisting her wrist with his left hand to force her to drop her dagger.
Another figure shot out of the fog. Doc knocked Barbara out with a left to the jaw and sprang up and rammed his head into that man’s stomach.
The man went, “Oof!” and staggered back. A released crossbow gut twanged and the bolt touched his ear, burning it. The crossbow fell to the ground, and then the man was on the ground. Doc’s left hand gripped the man’s throat and squeezed just as the point of a plastic dagger drove through his shirt into the chain mail undershirt. The dagger fell, and the man choked and then became still. However, he was not dead. Even in the gray wetness, Doc Caliban had recognized the man was Carlos Cobbs. His hair was short and yellowish, and his nose was long and his chin too jutting. But the gait had been Cobbs’. Even though he had had only a second to see his manner of carrying himself, he had identified it.
Trish loomed out of the pearly mists. She put her mouth close to his ear, and said, “You deaf, Doc?”
“Partly. But my hearing is coming back. I’m taping these two up. Get her before she comes to, will you?”
Carlos Cobbs, sitting on the ground and bending over, his wrists bound behind him, coughed and choked for a minute. Finally he gasped, “So it’s you, Caliban! I thought...!”
“Thought what?” Caliban said. He was squatting so he could see Cobbs’ expressions better.
He had to keep twisting his neck to look around because the struggle around him, though much diminished, was still going on. From the shouts he could hear, as the victors identified themselves to others, his men seemed to be winning. Then Barney Banks appeared with the announcement that the group they’d run into had either been killed or had run off into the fog. As far as he could tell, they had three men left who could fight, not counting Trish, and Caliban and himself, of course.
“You started to say that you thought that...?” Doc Caliban said to Cobbs.
“Never mind that!” Cobbs said. “Let me go! And you get out of here! Fast! If you don’t, we’ll all get killed! I’m telling you this because I have to! Get out of here!”
“Why?” Caliban said. Cobbs did not seem to be acting; his voice shook with urgency and with dread.
Barbara suddenly sat up. She said, “You fool! He’s left a bomb back there that’ll go off in fifteen minutes, in less now, and blow everybody for a half a mile around to kingdom come!”
“That’s right!” Cobbs said. “It’ll take the Nine with it! They’ll not get away this time! Anana and Ing and Yeshua and Shaumbim and Jiizfan and Tilatoc, they’ll all go out in a blaze of glory! And I, I will have done it! Listen, Caliban, we don’t have time to talk about this here! We have to get going! Now! I’ve got plastic bicycles waiting on the road and we can get away on them to my steam cars only a quarter mile down the road and get out of here before the bomb goes off! Don’t delay, man! I cut it close as it was, too close! But I didn’t want them to get suspicious and take off! You know how Anana is! She’s got a nose for anything that smells of death!”
A grenade cracked about forty yards behind him. More screams and yells.
Brightness dispelled some of the fog high up in the mists. (The flare was non-metallic, of course.) Doc could see for at least a hundred feet. Shadowy figures struggled at the edge of his vision, and then, when he turned his head, the flare died.
“We could all take off and talk at my leisure,” Doc Caliban said. “But friends of mine are out there fighting, and if we ran they’d die with the Nine. They might say that the sacrifice would be worth it. But I can’t ask them, and if I could, I wouldn’t. You tell me what kind of bomb it is and where we can find it. Now! Either I stop it from going off or we all die!”
“You stupid mortal!” Cobbs screamed. “What do you care what happens to your friends if you can live forever? Listen, I can get you the elixir! I’ll give you the formula! I know you’ve been cut off, and that the aging has started! And you’ll die in a few years because you’ll never have the elixir unless one of... The Nine gives it to you!”
“One of... us?” Caliban said. “What’s your part in this, Cobbs? It’s obvious you’re hand in hand with Iwaldi. You were just pretending to be prisoners of Iwaldi, for some reason I can’t comprehend, unless it was to infiltrate into my organization and catch us all when you had us cold.”
“Time’s running out!” Cobbs said, his voice cracking. “Would you throw away eternity, man?”
Caliban reached out and pulled Cobbs’ large nose loose. It came off with a slight tearing sound, and the rest of the pseudoskin over his face followed. When the wig came off, the Cobbs he knew looked out of the fog.
Barbara Villiers said, “For God’s sake, Caliban! We don’t have time to play around! Get us out of here and then we’ll give you whatever you want! The elixir! The map of the caves of the Nine and the traps set in it! Even some of the addresses of the Nine, though they won’t go near there anymore, of course, unless they think we’re all dead!”
“For two who are just candidates, or maybe just servants, you know a great deal,” Caliban said. “Old Iwaldi must have taken you into his deepest confidences. By the way, where is Iwaldi? He wouldn’t have let you go running off while he fought a rearguard action. Not old Iwaldi. He may be a mad goblin, but he’s not that mad. Unless he thinks you double-crossed him figuring to blow him up with the rest of the Nine and then you two would take over. Did you plan on carrying out his ideas, releasing the phytoplankton bomb? Or did you plan to kill him so you could stop that but still get the elixir and his wealth?”
Cobbs be
nt over so he could get his face closer to Caliban’s. His features were twisted with agony, and the moisture on his face seemed to be even heavier than the fog droplets could account for.
“Get us out of here, and I’ll tell you where you can lay your hands on Iwaldi!”
“You’d betray him?”
“Why not? He’d betray anyone if it meant saving his life!”
Barbara Villiers’ voice cracked, too. “We can’t tell you at this moment. He sent us in to do his dirty work for him. But we’ll show you where you can ambush him. Just get us out of here!”
“What kind of bomb?” Caliban said.
“It’s a heavy irradiated plastic box containing the explosive in liquid form! The dial and the time mechanism are all plastic or hard wood, too! I set it to go off in fifteen minutes! The mechanism pulls a pin out of a vial of plastic containing the gas that’ll mix with the liquid and set it off! There won’t be anybody living left within a half a mile radius and it’ll kill many outside that area! The stone monuments of Stonehenge will be knocked down and maybe shattered! Old XauXaz’s body and his coffin and the stones he set up as a temple for the sun god—himself— will be gone! Along with the rest of the Nine! Even old Anana, who said she was going to defeat death!”
“Who’s fighting the Nine out there?” Caliban said. “Or are they blundering around fighting among themselves? Grandrith can’t be responsible for all that!”
“I left most of my men there to hold them, keep them occupied!”
“Double-crossing your own men, too? Well, that’s to be expected, Iwaldi!”
Trish and Barney said, “What?”
Villiers gasped. Cobbs’ jaw dropped.
“He can do what I can do,” Caliban said. “He has enough control of his muscles to pull his spine and add or subtract inches to his height. I’ve done it plenty of times myself. It takes much practice and knowledge. But what I can do in my short lifetime, Iwaldi has had many lifetimes to learn.”
He pulled on Cobbs’ nose and when that would not come pulled on the skin of the face and then on the dark hair.
“That won’t do any good, you fool!” Barbara Villiers said. “That is his own skin and hair! The old goblin you knew was the false one! The wrinkled skin and the redshot eyes and the long white hair and beard, those were the fakes! They were true enough once, but when he regained his youth—”
“Shut up!” Iwaldi yelled.
“We haven’t got time to carry this deception out!” Villiers said. “Besides, there’s no sense in not telling him that we have the rejuvenation elixir. He won’t leave us here to die if he knows that he has to take us away to get the elixir! You should have known that, you greedy old man! It was our main card, and you’ve wasted too much time holding out! It may be too late because of your stupidity!”
“You can’t talk to me that way, my dear Countess Cleveland!”
Caliban’s eyebrows went up. He said, “Then Barney was telling the truth, not kidding you as he thought he was, when he said you must be the Lady Castlemaine whose petticoats hanging out to dry made Pepys flip? Charles the Second’s mistress, mother of his three sons? You did not die as history said, but you used makeup to look as if you were getting older and then you pretended to die and some woman died so that you could be buried, and you—”
“Yes!” Barbara Villiers snarled. “Yes! How many candidates have done that? Hundreds, thousands? You and Grandrith are my own descendants! My grandson had a child by a Grandrith woman; so I’m your many times great-grandmother! For the sake of us all, for the sake of eternal life for you and your friends, and for me, your ancestress, get us out of here! You will not only have eternal life but eternal youth!”
“I appropriated your notes, after you turned against us,” Iwaldi said. “I knew you’d been working on rejuvenation and I hired the best scientists in the world to develop the elixir from the information in your notes. One did develop it, and I got rid of him in an ‘accident.’ In two years’ time, I became a young man again! The wrinkles and the white hair and the ropy veins disappeared! But I used makeup so that the others would not know! But... must I talk away our lives! Let’s get out of here! Plenty of time for talk later!”
The old man—now turned young man—knew that even if he was taken out of the explosion area, he was in grave danger from Caliban. But he was wily, and he had survived so many millennia by being more tricky than his contemporaries. He must have something up his sleeve besides sheer desperation.
“It’s too late!” Barbara Villiers wailed. “We can’t get away in time now!”
“Then give me the combination!” Caliban said.
“Why not make him do it?” Trish said.
There was the sound of running feet nearby, a twang, a cry, and a man slid across the cold wet winter grass on his face. He stopped so close to Caliban that he could see the crossbow bolt sticking out of the back of his neck.
“We might not even be able to find the bomb!” Caliban said. “Quickly, Iwaldi! The combination! It does have a combination to turn it off, I hope?”
“If I tell you, you’ll kill me!” Iwaldi said. The voice of Cobbs had become the familiar deep growling voice of Iwaldi. The panic and the cracking were gone.
“I promise to release you and Villiers,” Caliban said. “After you give me the formulae, of course. But my word is not to be given lightly and will not be broken. I will let you two go free, give you twelve hours’ headstart, after which I will try to kill you, Iwaldi. Villiers can go with you if she chooses, in which case I’ll try to kill her, too. But if she wants to work with me, and I decide I can trust her, well, I don’t like the idea of breaking the neck of my own grandmother several times removed, even if she’s so distant I couldn’t possibly have any of her genes.”
“Talk our lives away!” Villiers said. “Iwaldi, tell him the combination! Now! There isn’t much time left! He doesn’t even know where the bomb is! He may not even be able to get to it in time!”
“Hey, Doc! Trish! Barney!” a deep grunting voice said somewhere in the fog. “Pongo! Pongo!”
“Pongo! Pongo! You hairy ape!” Barney called out joyfully. “This way!”
The squat and monstrous form of Pauncho van Veelar appeared. He rolled toward them and then stopped. “What the hell’s going on? Cobbs! Barbara!”
Barney capsuled what had happened, but Doc listened to Iwaldi.
“There are ten numbers on the dial,” Iwaldi said. “You set the dial on each number from 1 to 10. Then go right to 3. Then back to 9. If you do that in time, you can make the mechanism push the pin back into the gas vial container. But you’ll have to push in on the dial while you’re working the combination. Push in hard! If you don’t, the mechanism not only won’t reinsert the pin, it’ll pull the pin immediately. And you’ll have to keep the pressure applied for five minutes after you have worked the combination.”
“Why all those provisions?” Caliban said.
“You never know when they can be used to your advantage. Now, if I could have gotten away in time, you would have set off the explosion trying to stop it. But it didn’t work out that way. Also—”
“Never mind. Later.” Doc stood up, then said, “Pauncho, where’s Grandrith?”
“Out there. I left him to find you. Why weren’t you at the long barrow?”
“I sent Rickson to meet you.”
“He must’ve been killed before he got there.”
“Watch these two,” Doc Caliban said. “I’m going after the bomb. Watch for Grandrith.”
He picked up a crossbow, fitted a bolt to the string and pulled it back to the third notch and locked it. Then he walked off into the fog while Trish said, “Doc! I want to go with you!”
He did not answer. He did not want to be hampered. He ran back and forth, bent over, looking at the ground between glances on all sides. No grenades had burst for several minutes, but the crack of bats and yells were still filtering through the woody dampness. And then, as the dim figure of a trili
thon— two upright stones with a third laid across them—solidified out of the grayness, he saw a body with a plastic shovel beside it. There were other bodies near it, but this one was the one that Iwaldi had told him to look for. It was that of the man who had dug the hole into which the bomb had been put. A bolt from out of the fog had caught him in the right eye as he straightened up, and he had fallen across the heap of dirt.
Caliban rolled him over and then began digging. The box was buried under a few inches of dirt, so it did not take him long to unearth it from its chalky cavity. While he was working, the grayness became luminous, as if the sun had appeared and was striving to burn the fog away. At the same time, a grenade boomed about thirty yards away, and he dived for the ground. He was up at once but heard cries from near the ruins. He faced toward the trilithon but kept on digging. Then he got down on his knees and pried out the box. It was about eleven inches square and was smooth except for the dial and the numbers around it on its top.
He had to bend close to distinguish the numbers, which was lucky for him. A bolt whizzed over his head. Two figures, interlocked, whirled by him and were swallowed up in the grayness. One of them cried out a minute later, and then Doc heard footsteps on the wet earth. He wanted to start working the combination, because he had no idea of how much time was left before the pin would be entirely pulled out of the detonating gas container. But he could not start turning the dial unless he knew that he would not be disturbed. If he had to release the pressure, he and everybody here were done for.
The man suddenly came out of the fog. Doc said, “Pongo?” and the man cursed and jumped back. Doc could not afford to wait any longer; he fired at where the man had been, aiming so the bolt would hit the belly, if it hit at all.
The gut twanged; the bolt leaped out; a thud came; a man groaned. And immediately after, Doc heard the slight squishing of feet in wet earth and the rustle of weeds. He turned, and a giant was on him, striking out at him with a baseball bat.