Catacombs (54 page)

"How did you find the cylinder, Erika? Can't see a thing in here without my light."

"Yes, you can. Switch it off."

Clarke did so. For nearly half a minute the chamber was in darkness. He heard his men stumbling up the passage behind them and, speaking quietly, his voice carrying, he told them to freeze in place. He put an arm around Erika, felt her heart beating savagely.

And then he discovered he could see her face very well, as if it had developed its own source of light. The floor, which had seemed to be made of solid rock,' was now translucent. Every object in the chamber stood out in the shadowless illumination.

"Amazing," Clarke murmured.

"The light is from the solid central core of the Catacombs. You'll see it in a few moments."

"Central core? Just where are we?"

"In the first of two antechambers which represent the dawn of their culture. We're just above the first level of the Catacombs. There are seven circular levels in all, seventy huge chambers like slices of–angel cake, I suppose. But each slice is nearly a hundred feet high, measuring two hundred feet around the circumference of the wheel. There's no way to describe the immensity of the Catacombs. You have to experience it. And then you won't believe your eyes. But there is something we should take care of first."

"What?"

She held up the tapped-out oxygen bottle, the dangling inhaler.

"I think I know who discarded this. He's totally indifferent to everything but his own greed. That's why he came back. He may still be in the Catacombs. If so, his greed has trapped him."

"Who are you talking about, Erika?"

Her voice thinned as she tried not to sob. "Henry Landreth. He's responsible for the deaths of more than thirty of my colleagues and friends. He'll be in the Repository, of course. Stealing all the stones he can carry."

"The red diamonds?"

"Yes. How did you know–?"

"Oliver mentioned them to me. If we find Henry Landreth, Erika, is he worth taking alive?"

Her fingers gripped his arm with surprising strength.

"No. But I want him to live, long enough for the rest of the world to get a good look at him, to hear about his treachery."

"Where is the Repository?"

"On the lowest level."

"Is there a way out of the Catacombs from that level?"

"The only way out we could find is the way we came in," Erika said.

"Suppose I leave Simon here with our equipment and one of the guns. Ned will come with us. How long does it take?"

"Half an hour going down; much longer coming up, of course. It would be wise to carry a cylinder of oxygen."

"Why don't we get started, then? If you're sure you're up to it."

"Meeting Henry face to face will make it all worthwhile."

I
n the bungalow on the Ugalla River, Raun Hardie had been asleep for only a couple of hours when Jade shook her awake. She rolled over and looked up hazily at him from the borrowed bed. The only light in the room was the light of the moon.

"Matt?"

"Sorry, Raun."

She smiled, thinking he had come to sleep with her. She was much too tired to do anything other than close her eyes and snuggle against his body and fall hard asleep again, but he was certainly welcome . . . She blinked and realized he was fully dressed, and not doing anything about it.

"Oh no!" she groaned. She pulled the pillow over her face.

"We've gassed up the helicopter. I want to leave right away."

"You said–in the morning!"

"Raun, listen to me. The news on the radio isn't good. Kilimanjaro is blowing its stack, a cloud of gases and ash thirty thousand feet high. Seismic activity has picked up again. It might be the prelude to a cataclysm."

"And you want to go up there? In the dark? That's crazy!"

"There's a full moon. If the fallout from the volcano isn't too heavy you might be able to locate the entrance to the Catacombs tonight. I could be in and out of there in a few hours. And I have a feeling tomorrow will be too late."

"You could be in and out–? What are you saying?"

"There's no need. for you and Lem to gamble your lives on the timetable of a volcano. You'll drop me and take off again. Lem can pick me up at dawn. Pull your pants on, and let's get going."

There was something almost jaunty about him, she thought, with a dismal sinking feeling. He was manic. The nearness of death was the only thing that really mattered to him, the touch of a bony finger was like a needle loaded with heroin. Dear God, he hadn't had enough yet, he couldn't get enough.

I
n the Repository of the Catacombs Michael Belov stifled his own anger and marveled at what the tonic of rage had done for Henry Landreth.

For the first time in more than a day the desperately ill man was on his feet, suffused with a glow of false vitality. He stood in the hollow core of one of the three rock-crystal diamond vaults on the floor of the Repository, each a transparent replica of the Catacombs. The vault had been all but emptied of bloodstones. His howls echoed.

This chamber of the Catacombs was, in general dimension, exactly like the others Belov had explored and photographed. It had the height and breadth of all but the largest cathedrals of Europe. It was a tomb, immaculate despite its antiquity, without the dust of millennia lying thick on the floor. The rock walls and floor had been fired by some mysterious means and finished to a dull tan glaze. The inner walls of all the chambers, nearly eight feet thick, were perforated like Swiss cheese, allowing for a draft-less circulation of fresh air.

The source of this air and the source of the perpetual light, like moonlight, was the core, a smooth round column that rose, seamlessly, from the depths of the mountain to the roof of the Catacombs. In the farthest corner of every chamber of the Catacombs there was light from this unearthly column–nearly enough light for one to read a newspaper by without suffering eyestrain.

The intermittent fireballs also gave off light–it hurt to look directly at them. The ball lightning was unpredictable. Sometimes hours passed between occurrences. Then, with a slight crackling, hissing noise one would appear, red or orange or bluish-green, out of thin air, and hover near the floor or high above their heads. It might be the size of a grapefruit, or a beach ball.

Most of the time the fireballs drifted only a few feet, but one of them had appeared to follow Belov like a watchdog as he toured several of the chambers on other levels with his camera while Henry slept. When Belov betrayed no anxiety, the glowing plasma came within a few feet of his head. All of his hair stood on end and he received, in only a few seconds' time, a painful burn on one side of his face.

Don't worry, Henry had said. They won't hurt you. He seemed to regard them as something alive, intelligent. Belov wasn't so sure of the benign intent of the fireballs,. and hated to see them floating around, carrying power enough to light up a city the size of Stockholm, or vaporize anything they might touch.

"Robeson!" Henry screamed now. "He did this! He came here and took the FIREKILL stones! That's why he was trying to kill me!"

Belov joined him in the vault. Henry was snatching up the remaining diamonds, staring at them, throwing them down as if they were worthless glass beads when he failed to discover equations that satisfied him.

"How do you know?"

Henry stared at him, his blue under lip quivering. "Couldn't be anyone else! I brought him here, don't you see, weeks ago, to complete my translation of the essential equations. That was–Jumbe's idea. Neither of them trusted me."

"I wonder why not," Belov said with a sardonic smile.

"What? What?"

"Is it possible the stones are missing because they were never here in the first place? I've begun to think that you sold them a hoax, Henry. There is no such thing as FIREKILL. You've made the whole thing up."

Henry's rage and frustration found a new target, and with only a moment's hesitation he turned on his companion, hands shooting out to seize Belov by the throat. He had the extraordinary strength of a maniac. There was no room to maneuver in the hollow center of the vault. Belov slipped on one of the stones Henry had thrown down; he fell, wrenching his knee painfully, with Henry on top of him. The back of his head hit one of the rock-crystal shelves that held the diamonds in display sockets. Cloudy red pain flared in his mind. He couldn't breathe and began to panic, tried, too late, a badly aimed blow at the nerve center in Henry's armpit, a strike which might have killed him.

As it missed, Henry screamed and lifted the Russian's head. He hammered it against the shelf, again and again. After the third or fourth repetition Belov didn't feel the impact anymore. The red pain in his head turned into a pulsating, suffocating blackness.

O
liver was halfway up a long steep pitch of Kibo, on an approach to the sixteen-thousand-foot level where he had last seen Philip Goliath's little airplane. The slope, without significant vegetation, totally open to the blasting winds, was an unstable mass of gravel and clay held partly in check by the remains of a glacier that had once extended to the saddle between the peaks of Kilimanjaro, a solid monolith of ice thirty feet deep and a thousand yards wide.

The moon was above and behind him, but a pall of ash was drifting over it, dimming the light. Soon he would be climbing in Stygian darkness and gloom. Almost directly overhead the stars already had been blotted out by the towering column of smoke and ash and bits of fiery rubble, some of which was falling out of the cloud. So far the prevailing wind had kept most of it from Oliver's side of the mountain.

But the noise, the shaking, had cost him some of his precious strength. It was like creeping in a space between railroad tracks while two endless, heavily loaded freight trains thundered by in opposite directions. He had already done some serious backsliding as sections of icy scree, shaken loose by the action of the volcano, fell apart beneath him in mini avalanches. Also it was bitingly cold on the mountain, and the wind, snapping from one direction and then another, froze the sweat on his face when he stopped to rest and lifted his hooded head more than a few inches from the ground. His hands had little feeling left, although he'd used a spare pair of socks to fashion fingerless gloves.

Oliver carried the bedroll, with three plastic water bottles inside, across his back. Without the ice ax, which he had lashed to one wrist–his miner's habit that had proved worthwhile already on the slippery peak–he could not have gone any distance at all.

But four hours of clawing, groping, and inching hand over hand toward the top had exhausted him. He crammed the sleeping bag into a space between some boulders that he hoped would not crush him if an especially strong tremor hit. There was no other way to anchor himself on the steep incline. He crawled, shivering, into the bag and rinsed his mouth, having inhaled more fine ash than he thought, then drank as much of the water as he could retain with his stomach cramping from nausea. He lay down on his side, gulping air, hands thrust deep into the bag to find warmth. They hurt him ferociously. In spite of his discomfort and altitude sickness, he dozed.

Something awakened him a little later; perhaps it was only a lessening of the volcano's amplitude as it rested between eruptions of steam and ash. The freight trains were rolling to a stop and he heard a different, reverberating sound: a helicopter beating its way up the slope. It seemed to be only a few hundred feet overhead.

Oliver sat up in time to catch a glimpse of the copter's running lights as it hovered in a dense cloud from the crater. The moon's light had been dimmed by the same murky cloud. Oliver couldn't make out the helicopter, which seemed to be dropping slowly to land beside the other one he knew was up there, beneath the sheer rock face by which he had guided himself since the beginning of his climb. Then, in a brilliant blue-tinged flash as lightning arced dramatically out of the fulminating cloud and struck the tip of a rotor blade, he saw the copter and everyone in it clearly.

Four seconds later, after the helicopter had fallen out of sight, he heard a crash.

E
rika, Tiernan Clarke, and Ned Chakava were on Level One of the Catacombs when they heard Henry Landreth screaming dementedly in the Repository far below.

They were still in one of the diorama chambers they'd had to pass though in order to reach the pathway that spiraled around the central core. It was a typical room of the Catacombs, familiar to Erika; but the two men, of course, had never seen anything remotely like it. They couldn't be budged for more than half an hour, although the black man at first was in great fear of the creatures that stood, fixed for the ages in lifelike death, in upright tombs of rock crystal which were pure in their transparency but so hard the faceted surfaces couldn't be scratched with a knife. These men, more catlike in appearance than human, were among the elite of the early civilization of Zan, which had stretched in a wide belt across what was then the fertile heartland of Africa. They had flattened but shapely skulls; large, rounded, upstanding ears; blunt noses; and beautiful, yellow-gold, sensitive eyes.

Erika warned both men not to gaze directly into the eyes of the cat people, and explained why.