While she was speaking, “Simon Salcombe” and “Guyler Schweitzer” moved closer, flanking her, until all three Mordris now stood together facing in the same direction. Keeping watch, however, their familiar Khiffs had perched on the narrow shoulders of their kaftans, their little red eyes scanning in all directions, even covering the cleared area to the rear of the cavern, which lay directly beneath the primed, circular section of the ceiling.
“Very well,” Mordri One continued. “Bear what I’ve said in mind—that all shall be put to rights—and I shall tell you how we three came to be here. We are travellers from a far star whose conveyance failed and broke on these mountainous peaks on this alien planet. The more important parts of our vessel which could be salvaged were brought here; they became vital elements in the construction of a new conveyance, as did you yourselves! For we must continue our journey, and there being only three of us even our great energies were insufficient to the task in the time allowed . . . for we must be gone in just four more days!”
Pausing, she glanced at her number Three, “Guyler Schweitzer,” indicating that he should take up a tale that so far had been more or less true: for instance, the failure of their gravity vessel. What Mordri One hadn’t mentioned, however, was that far from being castaways here, the Earth had been their target.
Now Mordri Three’s sickly mother-of-pearl teeth glinted in a salivating smile; he waved a long arm expansively, if erratically, as if to encompass the crowded mass of sometimes freakish faces before him. And his voice when it came was resonate, booming:
“Our vehicle is now in the final stage of reconstruction,” he said, with a second flourish of his long-fingered hand, this time indicating the great metal cylinder where it was seated in its cradle, inclined at an angle toward the explosively charged section of the ceiling, “while as yet our exit from this cavern remains sealed. That, however, is very easily remedied. And now we shall test the accuracy of those who placed the charges.”
A third wave of Schweitzer’s hand was the instruction that the trustees in the hard hats had been waiting for. One of them shot a hand into the air, almost a salute, while others pressed buttons on their remotes to cause a series of sharp, near-simultaneous gunshot detonations in the ceiling.
Dust and other small particles of stony debris jetted from the circle of drilled holes, obscuring what little daylight had gained entry through other holes where charges had been thought unnecessary. And like a titan plug yanked from its hole a great cylinder of rock slid inward at an angle, crumbling as it came, emerging in shards and fragments from the ceiling, and crashing down onto the cleared area. The sound was thunderous, reverberating, and the cavern shuddered as a billowing wall of dust rose up and chunks of rotten rock large and small bounded, clanging and clattering against the carbon steel barrier before tumbling to the floor on the far side of that protective screen.
For several long moments the thunder of the fall continued to echo; then as the rumbling gradually faded, a circular shaft of light all of twelve feet across blazed through the swirling, thinning dust cloud where the ceiling had been cut through. And its clean ray fell directly on the metallic bulk of the cylindrical vehicle on its ramp.
Meanwhile Mordri Two, called Simon Salcombe, had come down from the dais. He loomed tall where he stalked, apparently idly at first, through the fearful ranks of human slaves. For now it was his turn—time for the second act—when he would find a way to urge or “inspire” these workers to greater, and to truer efforts.
“Now see!” he called shrilly, drawing the attention of any who still peered upward through drifting dust into the morning light. And with all eyes turned to him, he continued. “See what can be achieved when your work is unstinting and . . . unspoiled.” The last word was delivered with an especially threatening emphasis. “But what a shame,” he went on, “that in other areas your work has been . . . so much less than satisfactory; and, indeed, that it would have failed—or would have been caused to fail—so miserably and so drastically!”
Mordri Two moved with more purpose now, nodding to himself, picking or even pecking his way through the workforce like some strange, agitated bird or insect. He was searching for someone, turning left and right, thrusting his angular, phasmid features first into one man’s startled, gasping face, then into another. And not all of these faces were as they should be; neither the faces nor the forms of any who had suffered the mutative touch of the Mordris. Instead they wore the nightmarish masks and the warped limbs of deliberate deformity—like the man whose lips had frozen into smiling lumps on his left cheek, and whose nose had been repositioned between his eyes, leaving twin pits wetly gaping where sinus passages were laid bare . . . or the scientist whose eyes stuck out on crimson two-inch stalks, so that he was obliged to protect them behind goggles . . . or the labourer whose right arm was only half the length of his left, and which ended in a hand that was fused into a club.
But now Salcombe went more surely, until at last he jerked to a halt midway down the row of electrical workbenches. There, thrusting with his face, he cried, “Aha! And what have we here?” For he had found the one he sought, whose location he had known all along.
It was Hans Niewohner, once of Niewohner Electrics, but he was not the same would-be escapee whom “Direktor” Gunter Ganzer had spoken to so very recently. For now he was a gaunt, hollow-eyed spectre of that man, whose mouth had been sealed over with living flesh as if it was never there in the first place, whose nose was a flattened ridge lacking nostrils, and who managed to breathe only gaspingly through the puckered, half-inch blowhole in his fluttering right cheek!
Cringing, almost falling to his knees, Niewohner clung to the workbench with a white-knuckled hand as Salcombe pointed a long, quivering finger at him, slowly arched his pipestem frame over him, and thrust his own insect features down into the hideously transformed face of his victim. And:
“You!” hissed Mordri Two, silvery slime dripping from his curling lower lip. “You, given your position of some importance here, only to abuse it!” Straightening up, he looked at the other workers close by; they at once backed off, made room. And speaking to them, Salcombe said, “Now let me list this . . . this treacherous creature’s criminal deficiencies. Since his arrival here—since first we, er, made him welcome—he has spoken to others of his desire to desert us. Such conversations were overheard, of course, and our leader, known to you as Frau Lessing, found it necessary to reprimand him. Her touch was delicate; no great damage was done; nothing that could not be repaired if he repented and gave of his all. But look, see here . . .”
Hooking a crooked finger in Niewohner’s blowhole and drawing him upright, Salcombe looked this way and that, making sure that everyone in the vicinity could see. “Frau Lessing’s lesson went all unlearned, wasted, to no avail. She left him this hole to suck at the air—she let him live, to complete his work—the ungrateful wretch! Perhaps it were better if she had sealed his entire face, and so put an end to him. Bah! For what did he do but seek revenge for what he must have considered an injustice! What? The Mordri Three, unjust? How completely ridiculous! Oh, ha-ha!” Mordri Two “laughed,” but briefly, then sobered and went on. “As for the shape, the design of his intended revenge, his treachery: it was sabotage!”
Releasing the gasping, writhing Niewohner, Salcombe thrust him back against the bench, and continued: “With no thought for his fellow workers, and certainly none for myself and my Mordri colleagues, this animal deliberately sabotaged these capacitors. And not just one but two dozen of them!” He snatched a complicated instrument from the bench and hurled it down to the floor. “What? Did he think—did any of you think—that it would not be discovered?” Jerking his head this way and that, looking all about as if searching for an answer, Mordri Two was now plainly insane, made more so by the fact that no answer was forthcoming; and the many members of the electrical team backed away farther yet, well out of his range.
“Hah!” Salcombe snapped at them. “But just as he s
et about to destroy us, so he would have destroyed you! For if these instruments had failed us that failure would have created a great disaster throughout all Schloss Zonigen, and none of you in the hour of your freedom—with your families returned unharmed to you, and the changes we have wrought reversed—not one of you would have lived through it! And all that we have achieved here gone for nothing.”
He turned back to the cringing Niewohner, clasped his face in both hands, and went on: “Very well, and now I shall tell you how it’s going to be, Hans Niewohner. You have three hours, you and your crew at these benches . . . three hours to put right what you have put wrong. Then we test the capacitors again. And only let us find that your work is unsatisfactory, in any way deficient—then it’s the black disc for you, and for half of your workforce! Yes, and the ones who pay the price shall be chosen at random.”
Again Mordri Two thrust Niewohner stumbling away, and without looking back returned to the dais. Behind him nothing stirred; everything remained silent, static, frozen—for perhaps a count of five. And then an eruption of activity, as frantic men collided, caroming off one another in a sudden, desperate rush to the workbenches.
And Hans Niewohner’s tears of hatred, loathing, impotence, washed his face where lips might once have tasted them, and he fell to his knees, crying out to a God who seemingly had deserted him and every other human being in this terrible place. But he cried silently, of course, for as well as his visible mutilations Frau Gerda Lessing’s touch had welded the tip of Hans’s tongue to the roof of his mouth . . .
33
Two days later, about 2:00 P.M., Ben Trask and his team of five ESPers and two techs were somewhere over France on their way to Lugano in Switzerland. Travelling standard class in a Swiss Air jet, they were ostensibly a party of amateur botanists, destination the Lepontine Alps and prebooked rooms at a small chalet hotel in Idossola, an allegedly picture-postcard village of one hundred seventy-seven souls in a beautiful valley under the mountains. From Lugano their route would be north in two rented cars, then east following the shore of the lake itself, finally north again, along steep, narrow, precipitous zigzag roads into the heights . . . and into whatever else lay ahead. For Idossola, picture-postcard pretty or not, lay in the shadow of that freak of nature, that jutting, permanently frozen spur known locally as Schloss Zonigen.
Looking down from his window through wisps of summer cloud onto sun-dappled countryside all of thirty thousand feet below, Trask’s eyes were half-shuttered against the sporadic, dazzling flashes of sunlight reflected from the silvery hairline threads of rivers where they wandered through patchwork fields and disappeared into a hazy distance. A perfect summer day, with never the slightest hint of a threat; to all intents and purposes the world seemed an entirely safe place . . . or perhaps not entirely safe, for Trask had never much cared for flying.
Turning his head he looked at Ian Goodly seated beside him. The precog was poring over a large-scale map of the Lepontines, and Trask inquired, “Aren’t the details too small to be of use? Large in scale, small in detail—you know what I mean?”
Goodly nodded, folded the map, and put it away in his briefcase. “I was trying to memorize the names and directions of the villages and towns in the neighbourhood of Idossola, that’s all. If we have to get out of there fast, it might be—”
“It would be a good idea to know where we’re going,” Trask anticipated him. “And you think we may need to get out of there fast? But in the event of the sort of disaster you’ve been talking about, what would be the point? What I’m asking: what’s the good of scrambling for the barn if someone is dropping nukes on the outhouse?”
“Well,” said the other, shifting uncomfortably in his seat—which might or might not be because with his height and long legs he was uncomfortable—“well, I had a word with Anna Marie English before we left, and she’s no longer sure about things.”
“Things?” said Trask, turning more fully toward Goodly and taking a lot more interest. “What things specifically? This Big Bang you’ve both been forecasting? So what are you saying, that it isn’t going to happen? And if so, why the hell have you left it till now to tell me?”
The precog looked at Trask and looked away, then offered an odd little grimace and half shook his head. And Trask didn’t need to know the truth of things to be aware that his friend of so many strange years and even stranger adventures was suddenly uncertain.
“Well?” he said. “Is it or isn’t it? Take your best shot.”
And finally: “Oh, it will happen,” Goodly answered. “I can assure you of that. It’s just that . . . that I haven’t seen it!”
Now it was Trask’s turn to frown, and he was getting angry. “But didn’t you tell me—you and Anna Marie both—didn’t you assure me you’d experienced it and that it was something devastating?”
The precog nodded, shrugged apologetically, and said, “But isn’t that just it? Hearing a sound in a dark, unfamiliar room, we can experience fear without knowing what made the sound. And that’s about the best analogy I can offer. I’ve never seen this—this convulsion, whatever it is—but I have experienced it, sensed it, felt it. And so has Anna Marie, through me. But now, well, now she’s no longer sure.”
“So what made her change her mind?” But a lot of the heat had gone out of Trask’s voice now. Getting mad at someone whose talent was as freakish as Ian Goodly’s wouldn’t benefit anyone. For after all, it was a long accepted fact that the future was a devious thing. On the other hand, however, Trask’s own weird talent told him that the precog hadn’t told him everything. He wasn’t “lying” as such; it was simply the absence of the truth in its entirety. And so:
“Let me guess,” Trask growled. “You were playing at young lovers again; Anna Marie held your hand; you tried to scan the future, and she saw . . . what?”
Goodly smiled a wry little smile, and answered, “If I may quote several American action heroes: ‘Damn, you’re good!’ Yes, we gave it one last try, and for me the chaos was still there, unchanged, precisely as before. But as for Anna Marie, she saw . . . a continuation—”
Trask breathed a sigh of relief, until the precog went on: “—of sorts.”
“Explain.”
“Well, as you know, she’s an ecopath—the ecopath—and her concerns are for the Earth. She experienced, she felt, the Earth going on! Which of course it will. But that doesn’t mean that we’ll go with it. The reason I haven’t mentioned it until now is because it really doesn’t change anything.”
Trask sat back and for a moment was silent. Then he said, “You know something? You may be an old friend, but sometimes I don’t much like talking to you at all . . .”
Trask used the toilet at the front of the plane and on his way back to his seat looked into the faces of his team. He tried to appear cool, calm, collected—while in fact feeling nothing of the sort. If anything he felt confused.
The techs, Alan McGrath and Graham Taylor, however disparate in appearance, were seated together. The former was a redheaded, rough and ready Scotsman from Edinburgh. Only five feet seven in height, but strong and sturdily proportioned, McGrath was in his early forties. An ex-Ordnance Corps weapons instructor turned computer buff, he’d worked in the field on previous occasions and was wholly reliable. His partner, Graham Taylor, was in his late thirties; tall, spare, and wearing spectacles, his appearance didn’t at all do his abilities justice. For one thing his glasses were a front: while they loaned him the fragile, intellectual look he desired, their “lenses” were of clear glass with no optical properties whatever. And for all that he was relatively new to E-Branch, he was top of the range in his specialist subjects. Like McGrath he was ex-army. Intelligence Corps trained in strategy, subterfuge (propaganda), demolition, and espionage in general, he had worked for five years with the British Military Mission (BRIXMIS) out of Berlin into East Germany, and so spoke fluent German. Both men were marksmen with the stripped-down, easily assembled crossbows that were stowed away in their
suitcases.
Trask nodded at the pair as he passed them down the narrow aisle, and thought, Crossbows: the only weapons we’re carrying this time out. Remarkable how quickly they’ve become essential items in our armoury since the Necroscope’s time. But actually it wasn’t at all remarkable. A crossbow loaded with a hardwood bolt may make an excellent weapon against vampires—and in the not so distant past there’d been plenty of use against such as them—but it will kill a man just as easily, and silently, too.
As for why they weren’t carrying guns: Trask thought back on the last briefing he had given, the startled looks he’d seen on the faces of the team when he told them, “Weapons: we’re not taking any.” And then he’d given the reason. “We’ll get guns in Switzerland, if or when the Swiss antiterrorism squad think we need them. So if we get them they’ll be Swiss weapons—no 9mm Brownings on offer this time, that’s for sure—but stoppers I guarantee. The Swiss are a pretty sensitive lot; they won’t let us bring lethal automatic weapons into their backyard. I can’t say I blame them. So you might want to familiarize yourselves, get up to scratch, on whatever Swiss artillery our techs have managed to lay their hands on . . .”
Later at that same briefing, the telepath Paul Garvey had asked, “Just when will we get to meet these Swiss specials, and how much of a say will they have? Or will we be as self-reliant and independent as usual?”
“We’ll be meeting our Swiss counterparts at the Gasthaus Alpenmann,” Trask had answered. “They will be ‘tourists,’ who just happen to be staying there, too. Whatever their plans are we’ll agree to them, but if or when it becomes necessary—if our own intelligence, our gadgets and ghosts, tell us otherwise—then we’ll go our own sweet way.”