“The-bom-om-om . . . .” The sound went on and on and on as if he had no control over his own voice. “Shankar-ar-ar . . .”
There was a flicker of blackness among them—the cutout figures, moving silhouettes of two-dimensional men, swinging clubs. Rafe spun about and pulled Gaby to her feet from the chair. He glanced about, but in the flickering blackness her vehicle was no place to be seen. He turned her toward the door. She stumbled, but managed to walk with surprising speed, his arm supporting her. On their way out, they passed Martin Pu-Li, pursued by a black figure that a second before had been invisible, edge on.
Rafe leaped in the air and lashed out with his right foot at the figure. It crumpled and disappeared. Rafe seized a dazed Martin by the elbow and shoved him at a run from the room.
Gaby swerved suddenly to avoid a half-seen, fluttering black shape, and once more Rafe kicked out and cleared the way. He felt the jar of impact up his leg, and then the corridor before them was clear. Together, clumsily, they ran.
They passed three more of the black silhouettes, but these were engaged in clubbing or knifing other inhabitants of this mountain stronghold. The air remained rippled and unnatural—thick and difficult to breathe. The three of them continued until they came at last to the open area just inside the slot in the cliff face where the craft that had brought them had entered.
The vertical door to the huge slot was raised now. On the floor of the open area were several planes of the type that had brought them here, and also a half-dozen transparent-sided, coffin-narrow craft within which could be seen the ranked bodies of men apparently in a trance. They did not move except to twitch or change expression as Rafe and the others ran past, but from the open doorways of each of these different craft could be heard a heavy, grunting breathing like that of people caught asleep in a nightmare.
“A five-place ship, he said—” snapped Rafe breathlessly at Gaby and Martin. “Must be that one—over there—go!”
He pushed them ahead of him as two black silhouettes with knives flickered toward them. Rafe meant to meet them, being sure to take the nearer one first, and alone. He broke the figure’s wrist, tripped the body—and found the second one on him before he was quite ready. He chopped out with his free hand, saw the second silhouette crumple, and turned, starting back toward the five-place craft.
Almost there, his knees went oddly weak. He was aware of Martin scrambling out of the craft to catch him, and then the light darkened badly . . . .
He woke to the steady humming of the plane. There was a constriction about his chest and he looked down to see his shirt off and a tight band of white cloth swathing him just below the nipples. For a moment he felt nothing else, and then he became aware of a deep ache in his right side, about the area of his floating ribs.
The face of Gaby loomed above him.
“Lie still,” she said. “You had a knife sticking in you when you tried to get into the plane.”
A wave of chagrin that was almost shame passed through him.
“I took too long with the first one,” he said. “I knew I took too long. Where’s Martin?”
“Up with the controls. Lie still!” she said. “There’s no telling how badly you’re hurt. Martin’ll get us to a doctor.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Wait. Let me try something . . . .”
He closed his eyes and tried for the calculus of undermind thought again. It would not come. It was there, all right, but the excitement of other happenings since had buried it. He persisted, and then, suddenly he had it.
If the body is hurt, he thought, I ought to be able to feel exactly how and where. His different thinking roamed the switchboards of his nerves, not seeing but feeling.
“It’s all right,” he said to Gaby, opening his eyes. “No real damage done. No bones, muscles, or major blood vessels hurt. Wonder why I folded up like that?”
“Lots of people,” said Gaby angrily, “wouldn’t think it was funny if they folded up with a knife sticking in them!”
Then she heard her own words and started to laugh. It was a sort of choked laugh to begin with—a laugh that was close to a sob—but it went on and grew into pure, hysterical merriment. She went on as if she could not stop and finally put her head helplessly down against the unwounded side of his chest. He could feel her laughing all through him.
Martin’s face loomed above her head, looking anxious.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
Gaby straightened up and finally controlled herself, putting her hair back with one hand. She sobered.
“It’s all right,” she said. “He’s all right. I just exploded, that’s all.”
“No doctor,” said Rafe, looking past her into Martin’s face. “Give me a hand up to the controls.”
“You can’t move!” said Martin.
“Can, and will.” Rafe pushed himself up into sitting position.
“Look out! You’ll start bleeding—”
“No,” said Rafe. “And I’m going to heal up faster than anybody in the medical records, too. Help me to the controls, Martin—or do I have to crawl there on my hands and knees?”
Martin’s lips parted and closed. He took hold of Rafe’s arm on the unwounded side of his body and helped him to his feet. Supporting Rafe, Martin steered him into one of the pair of seats facing the controls in the front of the craft.
“Thanks,” said Rafe. He ran his eyes over the banks of instruments. “Good. You didn’t wipe it off—”
His left hand caught Martin’s right hand as it closed on the controls of the autopilot.
“Careful,” Rafe said. “I may be injured a bit but I can still break your fingers, Martin. Let go now.”
For a second, Martin did not move. Then his hand dropped from the autopilot.
“Thanks,” said Rafe. He touched the replay button of the autopilot, coding for the destination previous to the one Martin had begun to program. The destination-point map already on the small autopilot screen disappeared, and in its place he saw a map of England with a dot perhaps fifty miles northeast of London. “So. That’s where we were to be passed on to?”
“It’s just a location—a general location. Specific control takes over the plane when it gets close,” said Martin raggedly. “No one back there—I swear that no one back where we were—knew who’s waiting at that spot. If we had, we probably wouldn’t have been questioning you and Miss Leesing.”
“Then”—Rafe looked up into the other man’s face—“why were you going to send us there?”
“We didn’t have a choice about it,” said Martin. “I told you someone or something else has taken over down here on Earth.”
“So?” Gaby spoke behind both of them. “Shaitan—Thebom Shankar or whoever he is—was supposed to be waiting for us there? Then why did he send those shadows to kill everybody?”
There was a shudder underlying her words, although she kept the tone light.
“I don’t know!” said Martin. His long face twisted. “Maybe it wasn’t him. I don’t think he—if it is just one man—is at just that dot on the map. That’d be too easy. And I think they were sent to kill us because someone found out we were trying to pump information out of you before passing you on to him. But that’s only my thinking. I don’t know!”
“We’ll go find out in a few days, as soon as I’m up to it,” said Rafe.
He reached out and punched the autopilot for the general destination North America.
“Where are we going?” asked Gaby’s voice.
“Back to join up and hide out with Lucas,” Rafe answered, and the aircraft, obedient to its autopilot, began a slow quarter turn to put the afternoon sun behind it.
* * *
10
“Lucas?” called Rafe. “Lucas?” Reaching out with his under-mind, he found the wolf, and the mind of Lucas led him to the Canadian north woods, where Lucas waited by a pine-fringed lake so lonely and untouched in appearance it looked as if it had hidden itself successfully
even from Black-foot, Cree, and nineteenth-century fur-trappers. The five-place aircraft reached the lake and sank down into a little clearing on the hard earth by the shore, under the light of stars only—for the sun was down back here and the moon not yet risen. Rafe sagged wearily in his seat at the controls.
“Come on,” said Gaby, helping him to his feet. “You can’t sleep outside. Martin and I set up a bed for you in the back of the plane.”
“Not necessary,” said Rafe, but the words came out in a sigh of exhaustion, and he did not object further as Gaby helped him to the rear of the plane. “This isn’t going to be anything. I don’t even feel too bad now—just tired: And I think I can heal myself in a hur-ry ....”
He let himself be pushed into the makeshift bed in the back of the aircraft and covered with blankets that smelled faintly of the mothproofing of an airplane emergency stores’ locker.
“All right,” he said. “But I’ll be up and around tomorrow morning before the rest of you are.”
Only he was not.
He woke later to fever and pain and drifted off into hallucination. Once more, endlessly, he walked the caverns where the hollow and useless things lived and the papery monster ruled. Now and then he was other places as well—places out of his own personal memory of the real world. But both there and in the caves, everywhere his fever dreams took him, there were pain and struggle. He fought or fled endlessly, emerging from his hallucinations to rest a little while in reality, then returning to fight with shadows and flee again.
When he finally came back to the real world to stay, he felt like a hollow man. He was aware of his own mortality, like a ticking clock inside him which must run down someday, and the feebleness of his own muscles was like a special curse laid upon him.
Fury moved in him against his new helplessness. But then that emotion passed and he was conscious of a new feeling, one he had never felt before. It was almost as if he were glad to be weak, glad to put off the feeling of physical superiority with which he had been born and which had always directed the course of his life. Maybe I could be human like everybody else after all, he found himself thinking, if I stayed like this.
The thought pierced some ancient barrier in his mind. For the first time he could remember, he was conscious of how lonely he was, how lonely he had always been—isolated by his physical superiority and that powerful empathic talent that every so often wrenched him out of himself and plunged him without choice into the minds and emotions of others. These two gifts had forced him to be superhuman, to be almost a god, whether he wanted to or not. And near-godhood had brought the loneliness. Now, he realized, he would be glad to give up his speed of reflexes and near-telepathic empathy altogether, just to be an ordinary man among men. But how do you give up things that are built into you—parts of yourself? Only death could break down the wall the two talents had raised between him and other human beings. He was cursed with strength as other men were cursed with weakness, and only death could lift the curse. But he was not ready to die yet . . .
“How long?” he asked.
“Five days,” Gaby answered.
He shook his head weakly.
“You’ve been healing fantastically, though,” Gaby said. It was midafternoon of a pleasant Canadian summer day. A watery-smelling breeze blew from the lake into the open door of the aircraft, and Gaby, with Martin and Lucas, was seated along the open side of his makeshift sickbed.
Rafe laughed—thinly, for lack of energy.
“In body,” he said.
“You’re just feeling depressed because you’re weak,” Gaby said. Martin said nothing. Nor did Lucas, whose animal eyes were steady on Rafe.
Rafe shook his head a little.
“No,” he said. “I’ve been chopped down to size. Old mortality. You know there was a time when I really believed I couldn’t be killed? Did I say anything while I was out of my head?”
“You were fighting something a lot of the time,” Gaby said. “You talked a lot about gods not suffering. ‘Gods don’t feel pain!’ you said, and ‘Gods don’t die!’” She looked at him curiously, frowning a little.
“One day we’ll all be gods,” said Rafe. “All of us. Not yet. We’re still men and women now. I resent it, but it’s a fact. We’re still only human. And I’m just a man. But give me a little time, after all, and maybe I can go back to being the best man there is.”
She frowned and touched his forehead with her hand.
“You’re cool to the touch,” she said. “No fever. How do you feel?”
“I’m through being out of my head. Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t feel good, though. I feel punched in the stomach. I’ve been reminded of my humanness and its limitations. I’m only a man, but I’ve got to fight gods. We’re all only human, but we’ve got to fight gods. That’s the way it’s always been; that’s why we need new generations, coming on new and new all the time to replace those the gods chew up or conquer. Someday, when we’re strong enough, we won’t have to die so soon.”
Martin cleared his throat and spoke for the first time.
“He’s still a little out of his head, Gaby.”
“No. You’re only human, too,” said Rafe. He looked into the wolf’s mask. “Lucas understands.”
Lucas said nothing, neither with his artificial voice nor with the back part of his mind by which he had talked silently to Rafe across distance.
“Lucas?” said Rafe then, with the underneath part of his mind.
“I’m here,” said Lucas in the same silent language.
Rafe looked back at Gaby and Martin.
“I’m all right,” he said. “It’s just that now I believe in Thebom Shankar—the Old Man of the Mountain or whatever you want to call him. That’s all. But he’s not Ab Leesing, Martin.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” said Martin.
“I’m sure enough for our purposes,” said Rafe. He struggled up on one elbow. “Help me outside. I want to get into the sun and the air. There’s a cocoon of sickness around me as long as I go on lying here.”
With Martin bearing most of his weight, they managed to get Rafe outside and onto his feet. Gaby walked now as easily as if she had never been crippled. The feel of the cool, open breeze on his face and in his lungs was like a miracle. Outside the plane there was a small, almost smokeless, fire burning; beyond it were a couple of bedrolls made of the aircraft emergency blankets, with a canopy of other blankets on stakes above each of them.
“I’m hungry,” Rafe said, smiling. He turned to Gaby, but Gaby looked dismayed.
“There’s nothing but emergency foods,” she said. “Hard bread and some canned water. I can make you coffee or tea.”
He stared at her.
“Is that all you’ve been eating for five days?” he asked. “Just what emergency supplies there were on the plane?” Even as he asked it, he knew it was fact. Lost in fever he had not missed food until now. But if he was hungry, she and Martin must be starving. He glanced at Lucas, who had followed them out and was now sitting, yawning at him.
“What’s the matter, Lucas?” he asked. “Couldn’t you catch them a rabbit or a grouse?”
“There’s no game close,” said Lucas unexpectedly. “I wouldn’t leave Gaby.”
“Of course,” said Rafe, angry with himself suddenly for not thinking. To hunt meant to travel in these woods. A wild timber wolf had to cover many miles daily in a continual search for enough game just to support himself.
“Lucas hasn’t even had bread,” said Gaby. “I offered him some. But he wouldn’t eat it.”
“I know,” said Rafe. “I didn’t think, that was all.”
They settled him by the fire with blankets around him, and he sat there chewing on some of the hard bread and drinking hot black coffee that Gaby made him from powdered supplies. The bread was unimpressive, but the coffee was like new blood flowing into his veins. He looked across the fire to see Martin now rolled up in one of the sets of blankets. A faint snore came to his ears
.
“Five days,” Rafe said softly, as Gaby came and sat down beside him with a cup of coffee in her hands. “That’s a long time for someone like Martin to be missing. Has he been wanting to get out of here?”
“He hasn’t said anything,” she answered. “I taught him about doing his natural sleeping in the daytime to get away from the effects of the broadcast as much as possible. I think he’s changed his mind about some things.” She looked at Rafe curiously. “What made you change your mind—about Thebom Shankar?”
He smiled. He did not realize the smile was savage until he saw the reacting expression on her face. Then he stopped smiling.
“Recent hallucinations changed my mind,” he said. “Whatever or whoever’s behind everything that’s going on, there have to be two things true about him. One, he’s real, and two, his tools are pretty basic. Or else he wouldn’t be able to reach through to me and stir me up the way this is doing.”
She sat cross-legged, the coffee cup in one hand with her wrist resting on her right knee, her brown hair loose now and a little fallen forward around her face as she watched him.
“You don’t stir up easily?”
He shook his head.
“No,” he said. “And for good reason. I’ve been a winner all my life. Something like that gives you a good deal of mass in the self-confidence area, and a low center of gravity when it comes to being jarred by the unusual.”
“Where did you come from?” she asked. He saw that her eyes were hazel, with little brownish lights in them. He had not noticed that before.
“Everywhere,” he answered. “My father was an architect—Sven Harald—”
She frowned suddenly.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “The man who designed the insurance Gardens Complex in Tokyo.”
“And others,” Rafe said. “All over the world. He moved. My mother and I moved with him. I was in and out of schools all the time I was growing up. It’s the sort of thing that can wreck a kid. But I thrived on it. These reflexes of mine.”
“That’s right,” she murmured. “Ab said you were unbelievably fast at everything. But I thought it would show—I mean, I thought I’d see you moving faster than other people. But you don’t seem to do that. The only thing that shows is that you win.”