He decided to let the woman stay in the room undisturbed. She would be safe where she was, and she could not accidentally betray him or get in his way. He left the cell door and stood by the wall just outside the entrance to the hall at the bottom of the staircase. He could hear men talking near the entrance at the top of the steps and others shouting at a distance. Then he heard the rattle of metal against metal. Somebody was coming down the steps. He ran down the hallway and hid in the stairway leading to the storeroom, but, a few seconds later, he stuck his head out far enough to see with one eye. A short, thin, white man dressed in brown clothes was just straightening up from a tray of dishes and pots on the floor. He unsnapped a key from a ring around his belt and inserted it in the lock to the cell door.
The man was intent on looking through the window in the door, so he did not see Ras, who walked silently and almost leisurely down the hall, until he was within knife-throwing range. The man whirled then, and his hand went to his belt, but he had no weapon and he could not have gotten it out in time if he had. The knife drove almost to the hilt into the solar plexus. The man staggered back and slumped against the wall and started to slide down. Ras leaped to him and dragged him back down the hall out of view of the man standing at the top of the stairway. The man held a rifle, but he was looking into the sky at the moment--perhaps at the copter--and he did not see Ras or the dead man.
Ras laid the body down and pulled the knife out and wiped it on the corpse's shirt. Then Ras heard the guard calling down in an English that he could only half understand. The guard had seen that the man with the tray was not there and the door was unopened. Perhaps he thought that the man was inside the cell and doing something to the woman. Or perhaps he knew that he had not looked away long enough for the man to open the door and go inside. Whatever his reason, he was alarmed. His boot heels clattered, and he leaped out into the hall and started to turn to face down the hall.
Ras threw the knife again; it went straight into the man's throat. He fell backward, his rifle clanking against the floor. Ras pulled him out of view of anybody passing by the stairway entrance, and then he looked into the cell. The woman had not moved, and her color was as gray-blue as a corpse's.
The roaring became louder outside, and then it lessened, and the blades chopped the air weakly and collapsed. Ras could hear the voices of men clearly now, though they seemed to be at a distance. He checked his rifle again and went up the steps and looked around the corner of the entrance. It was walled around and roofed--to keep out the rain, he supposed. There was a small, dome-shaped house on his right. Four wires attached to the central part rayed out to metal hooks imbedded in the stone. These, he had been told by Yusuf, were to keep the "quonset" huts from being blown off the top of the pillar by the big winds. There were several more at irregular intervals and close to the rim of the top. The rim was walled to a height of four feet with mortared slabs of stone cut from the pillar. Several stone enclosures, like the one in which he stood, were visible. These must be above entrances to other rooms carved out of the stone. At the far end, less than a quarter mile away, was a wide space partly occupied by a huge copter with a bellying body. Around it were hoses and pipes, and devices he supposed were pumps. Four men were attaching hoses to the copter, and two men inside the copter were handing boxes and sacks through an open wall to two outside.
A tiny thing, glittering in the sun, was another copter approaching.
Ras looked the area over as fully as he could without exposing more than his head. He did not see anyone fitting Yusufu's description of Boygur. The men working around or in the big machine were either whites or the dark but straight-haired and eagle-nosed men Yusufu called Ethiopians. Before the doorway of a "quonset" house with several poles and many crossarms projecting from its roof, halfway between Ras and the far end, stood a short, light-skinned man with a bald head. He was smoking a cigarette, but when one of the men near the machine gestured at him, he ground the cigarette out under a shoe. The man started to turn toward Ras, who withdrew behind the wall of the enclosure.
He had no way of knowing where Boygur was or how many more men were here or where they were. He would have to make his move and then act accordingly.
When he looked around the corner again, he saw a fat-bellied, red-faced-white man leaving a large, domed building about thirty yards away. The man had a tall white cap and a white apron. He was probably on his way to find out what had delayed the first man.
Ras grabbed him as he came around the corner, choked him with an arm around his neck, and dragged him down the steps. He backed him against the wall and held the edge of the knife against his throat. The man was gray under the pinkish skin; his eyes were huge; he shivered.
"Where is Boygur?" Ras said in English.
The man chattered in a language Ras did not recognize as English until he made him repeat his words slowly. The language was still only half-intelligible, but Ras could understand enough of the stammering. Boygur was in the radio shack, the building outside which the bald, light-skinned man, the radio operator, had been smoking.
"How did you get up here, Ras Tyger?" the man said.
"I climbed up," Ras said.
He whirled the man around to face the wall and cut his jugular vein open and then stepped back to avoid the jet of blood. Whatever doubt he had had that the others were as guilty as Boygur was gone. This man had known his name and presumably all about him and also must have known about Mariyam's murder.
He dragged the corpse a little way down the hall to the other bodies and returned to the top of the stairway. The hoses still linked the big copter and the pumps and several raised iron discs, which must be the caps over the fuel tanks, which were placed in pits in the stone. The crew of the copter was in sight now. One was a tall, black-mustached white man, another was a shorter, brown-haired white man, and a third was a stocky black man. All three were walking toward the radio shack.
The other copter, a much smaller one, was nearer and apparently was going to pass over the big copter and land close to the radio shack.
Ras checked his rifle again and stepped out of the enclosure. He carried the gun in one hand and walked leisurely toward the shack. The black-mustached man slowed and turned his head to say something to the others, who were a few paces behind him, but none showed any alarm. Ras continued walking until he was almost to the door of the shack. He stopped, and for a moment was caught. The music swelling from out of the shack was like nothing he had ever heard before. It came from many unknown instruments the individual sounds of which thrilled him, and it had a complexity and a magnificence that shot him through with ecstasy. It spoke of the greater glories in the world beyond the sky, and it made him wonder what kind of men could create such music.
Then he shook himself and brushed his hand across his face as if he were removing spider webs. The smaller copter was settling down; its transparent body revealed a pilot and another man.
Ras brought the rifle up and triggered off the spray of bullets. The weapon barked, and chips of stone and stone dust danced along and caught the three men near the shack. They had stopped, their faces pale, their mouths black holes, and then they were knocked down and back, and he brought the rifle barrel up and played the stream across the transparent body of the small copter. The pilot had taken the machine up and away as the three men died, and the other man was behind the twin machine-gun barrels and swinging them toward Ras. But the pilot jerked at the impact of bullets, and the copter slid sideways and downward. It struck the rim of the pillar, tore out some of the slabs on top of the wall, and rolled over and disappeared.
Ras continued to shoot, hoping that the rifle would not jam, as Eeva had warned might happen. The men tending the machinery near the big copter and the four men unloading the copter were crouched as if bewilderment pressed them down with a big hand. Then some threw themselves on the stone. One fell as bullets caught him running.
Ras fired at the hoses carrying the fuel and then at the copter itself,
attempting to place the bullets, each tenth of which was an incendiary, near the places where the hoses connected to the body of the copter.
Suddenly, arrows of flame shot out, swelled, came together, became one, grew, and raced toward him. Smoke formed as if blown out of a giant mouth. The blast was like a crocodile's tail striking him. He was hurled against the side of the radio shack so violently that he dropped his rifle and, for a moment, did not know who he was, where he was, or what was happening.
Heat and smoke spread over him. He coughed. He was blind and deaf, but his senses returned quickly enough, and though he still could not see, he was beginning to hear the roar of the burning fuel. He rolled over to look under the smoke but could see nothing. Then a vagary of wind curled away a cloud for a second, and he saw a charred body. The smoke coiled back in. A door slammed. He saw shoes appearing out of the smoke, descending and touching the stone and disappearing again into the smoke. The owner of the shoes was coughing. The shoes raced by him a few yards away. The ankles were those of a skinny white man. The man coughed again, and then he was gone.
Another pair of feet appeared, disappeared, appeared, going in the same direction as the first. Ras found his rifle, fitted it with a fresh clip, and crawled in the direction the feet had taken. He bumped into the enclosure out of which he had first come. He lay down and stifled his coughing and listened. He heard nothing. The two men could be waiting down there for him or they could have taken refuge elsewhere. Or they might have gone down there to the storeroom to run the rope out the window with the machine and climb down it to the lake surface. Or perhaps neither might be aware of him. They might believe that the explosion was an accident. No, they could not think that, because even if they had not seen him, they had heard the rifle. The descending copter was noisy but surely not loud enough to drown out the sound of the rifle.
The wind blew more smoke down the stairway, so he could see no more than several feet down it. He quelled another coughing fit and crawled down the steps. At the bottom, he crouched and listened. The cell door was barely visible. Its little window was open, but no face looked out through it. He peered around the corner. The smoke was getting so thick now that he could not see its end. The two bodies were almost hidden in the clouds. He. could see, however, that the rifle and pistol and ammunition belt of the guard were gone.
He grinned. Whoever had come down here had either gone on down the corridor to one of the rooms along it or to the storeroom, or else was hiding in the cell. Unless he--or they--had a key, however, they could not get into the cell, since he had taken the key from the guard.
One man could have gone on to one of the rooms behind the three doors down the hall and left the other man in the cell so that they could catch Ras between them.
At that moment, a face appeared in the cell-door window. It was one Ras had not expected, because he had thought that the woman was too weak to stand up. Nevertheless, her gaunt face was there, and her eyes, sucked empty of feeling, were looking at him. Her head lolled to the right, and her whole bearing indicated that she was being forced to stand at the window and perhaps even being held up by someone.
This feeling was enough warning. He had his rifle up and his finger pressing on the trigger when a face appeared behind the woman's and a rifle barrel slid over her shoulder and out through the window.
There was nothing else he could do except to shoot. He could not help it that the woman was in the way. And so she fell backward with her forehead broken open and spouting blood, and the face behind her also jerked away. The rifle roared flame once, chips of stone hit Ras in the face as the bullet caromed off the wall beside his head, and then the rifle uptilted and slid back through the window.
Ras emptied the clip at the door, aiming low so that the bullets--if they penetrated the wood with enough force--would hit the man on the floor. After reloading, he waited several minutes. The only sound was the muffled roar of the burning fuel. The wind must have shifted again, because the smoke had disappeared from the entrance to the stairway. In a short time, the smoke in the corridor had dissipated. Ras, looking around the corner of the stairway, saw no one. He rose and then leaped across the corridor to the cell door. Again, he waited. No head appeared at any of the entrances along the hall, and no sound came through the cell-door window.
He looked through the window. Neither the man nor the woman could be living with that much of their heads and necks carried away. The man could be the radio operator who had been smoking outside the shack.
Ras regretted that he had had to kill the woman. Even when Boygur was at the end of his life, he had managed to cause Ras to kill another innocent.
After making sure that a third party was not in the cell, Ras cautiously approached the entrance and then went down the stairway to the storeroom. He placed his ear against the door. Faintly, through the thick wood, he heard a rumbling, a hissing, and a clanking. What caused the sounds, he could not know, but he guessed that the machine with the rope coiled around the cylinder was responsible. He looked through the keyhole but found that it was blocked. Boygur--if it was Boygur in the room--had left his key in the lock. If the key were to be pushed out, its fall would warn Boygur. No doubt he was keeping an eye on it.
Ras returned to the surface. He still could see very little, and the smoke set him to coughing again. He groped through it until he had reached the stone wall along the edge. By hanging over the wall, he got away from much of the smoke and could also see all the way down to the lake. The tiny dugout with the tiny figures of Yusufu and Eeva bobbed up and down. They were waiting; they must be quivering with uncertainty, wondering what had happened after the smoke rose from the pillar. There was too much smoke coiling around for him to be visible to them, but he waved at them.
Still bending out over the edge of the wall, he worked his way to a point directly above the storeroom window through which he had entered after climbing the pillar. The metal neck of the machine was sticking out the window, and the white rope was running out over wheels at the end of the neck. The rope was halfway down the black sides of the pillar. Its end was tied to a cradle, which held one of the small, metal boats Ras had seen in the storeroom. In the boat were three long bundles, two paddles, and a rifle. The sides of the cradle and the boat bumped now and then into projecting rock, but the descent was very slow at those times. The operator of the machine was taking no chances of damaging the boat. His white-haired head was stuck out the window as he observed the boat. Ras watched him for a few seconds and then withdrew when the head started to turn to one side. He did not want to be seen if the man should glance upward.
Ras hoped that he had enough time to locate a suitable rope before the boat would reach the surface and Boygur would have gone too far down the rope. He began looking at once, but the search took him longer than he cared. He went through the buildings at one side of the pillar. The other buildings had either been flattened or destroyed by the explosion or were too close to the heat for him to think of getting into them. One building, which had to be Boygur's, would have held him enthralled at another time. Just as he was about to give up and run back to the wall on the edge, he found the rope he was looking for. It was coiled on a wall in a room in Boygur's house. He recognized it at once as a rope that he had made and used several years before. Then it had disappeared mysteriously. He had suspected that a chimpanzee or a monkey had run off with it, but here it was, on a wall with many large photographs of himself and others and the mounted heads of some animals and some Wantso and Sharrikt weapons and the first spear that he had ever made.
He ran back through the smoke to the wall on the edge. The metal boat was swaying back and forth but not quite hitting the side of the pillar. It was apparently close enough to the surface for Boygur, because he was crawling out on top of the neck of the machine. He went very slowly and with frequent stops. He was now wearing a pair of brown pants and gloves to avoid rope burn when he let himself down the thousand-foot length. A holster on his belt held a revolve
r.
Among the weapons and tools that Ras had practiced with for over twelve years was the lasso. He dropped its noose over the white-haired old man's shoulders just as he looked upward. Boygur--it had to be Boygur from Yusufu's description--squalled. He threw his head back to look up; his eyes were wide; his beard stuck straight out as if stiffened with terror.
Ras pulled upward to tighten the noose. Boygur screamed and tightened his knees and hooked his feet around the metal frame. Ras could not use anything except his arms to haul Boygur up, but, nevertheless, Boygur, after a few seconds of desperate gripping, was broken loose. He twirled around slowly and swung back and forth under the push of the wind.
And so Ras hauled Boygur up as a man would haul up God caught in a noose, as the creature would haul up the Creator to ask Him why He had done such and such. Certainly, this old man, scratched, torn, bleeding, smoke-begrimed, was not Igziyabher. He was glaring like Igziyabher; his pale blue eyes seemed as angry and dreadful and mindless as the lightning of God. Yet he was only a man, though a man like none other. And if he was not the being who had created Ras, he was the being responsible for the shaping of Ras and the being responsible for many evils.
22
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
By late afternoon, the fires had burned themselves out. The blackened skeleton of the great copter sat at the edge of dark ruin. The buildings nearest the fire were burned up or flattened or scattered. Smoke lay over everything outside the building. Ras, looking into the mirror on the other side of the room, saw a face black with smoke.
They were in a large room containing many shelves of books, a leather sofa, a large desk, and a revolvable chair on wheels. On one shelf above the desk was a row of books bound in gorilla skin, set between two gold-plated busts. The books, so Boygur said, were all original English-language editions of the Tarzan series, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Each one had been personally autographed by Burroughs; Boygur had flown to California to get them signed by the author. Ras wondered why he spoke of this. Boygur seemed so proud and expected Ras to appreciate them, but the books and the pride were meaningless to Ras.