Cycle of Nemesis (6 page)

“It’s okay,” said George Pomfret, rejoining us. “I’ve hired time on Capital. That stands to a Johnson-Hayes as a hydrogen bomb stands to a bow and arrow. Okay?”

“The bow and arrow would have done the work quite satisfactorily, George.” Brennan smiled at Pomfret. “But thanks. The thought was there.”

The days when the decipherment, translation and rendering into coherent English of Babylonian cuneiform had taken the devoted time of experts and the semantic juggling of syllabic groups, word associations and the sheerly inspired Biblical language of Victorian discovery were long past. Now, assuming everything to be in order, we could expect a standard English transcription within five minutes of putting the tablet on Capital's screen input.

“Go ahead, Hall,” Pomfret said, indicating his phone.

With a little smile at himself, no doubt, Hall Brennan walked across to the phone, sat down and showed the tablet to the scanner.

“What do you think ... ?” began Phoebe.

“The whole system is a place of mystery and wonder,” I said with what I hoped was not a patronizing inflection. “And our Earth is not least in providing us with some of those wonders. Why don’t we just wait and see what Hall and Capital between them come up with?”

The other phone rang and Pomfret, with a face at us, answered.

On the screen, angled so as not to interfere either in scanning or reception with the other phone, on which Brennan was waiting for an answer from the computer, the gray face of Benenson showed. He seemed to be in a remarkably mixed state of anger, disappointment, fear and downright ditheriness. By that, I mean a man who fiddled with his oxy taps undersea. Benenson was a dryneck of drynecks, but the impression he gave was precisely that.

“What’s the trouble, Paul?” asked Pomfret politely.

"Trouble? How should I know?” Benenson swabbed at his neck with a handkerchief. Maybe I'd been wrong; he wasn’t so much of a dryneck as I’d supposed. “It’s all gone wrong here. I’m coming across to you, George. I don’t understand why you left the sale at all.”

Again Pomfret surprised me. “I thought you’d do a good job, Paul, on your own.” Pomfret winked at me, off sight.

I smiled back. Pomfret, despite his awful upper-crusty appearance, was turning out to be an interesting comrade.

“Well, of course I’d have done a good jobl” brayed Benenson, his gray flabby mouth swabbing away at his jowls. “But there have been the most crazy goings-on here! Men and women running about stark naked and firing guns! You’ve never seen anything like it!”

“No—” Pomfret swallowed.

“We sure haven’t,” I said to Phoebe, with a frown.

"So we weren’t—” she began; but I cut her off with a quick shake of the head.

“We’ll be expecting you, then, Paul,” said Pomfret, breaking the connection. He faced me, a bluff, brick-red
faced man out of his depth. “What the hell’s going on Bert?”

“So they’ve had to shut down the auction after all,” I chuckled. “Sorry if I sound heartless, George, but, like Phoebe, I don’t intend to get maudlin over this. If we handle this right it could all be Great Fun. And damn me for an insensitive Philistine if you wish. I am perfectly well aware that a girl has been murdered.”

“I know what you mean,” said Phoebe, all in one breath.

“Well, I’m blessed if I do!” grumbled Pomfret. He went across to the table and picked up the Farley Express and hefted it. “We’ve been hunting together, you and I, Bert, with nothing more lethal on our sights than a camera. If this little lot demands something more final, I’m as ready as you.” He lifted his head then, and his rich port wine laugh bubbled. “Even if I don’t understand the finer nuances of it all.”

“You will, George,” I promised him. “Before it’s all over. You’ll know why.”

Hall Brennan was taking longer at the computer extension than I’d expected, but I refrained from wandering across and peeking over his shoulder. I knew how I felt about kibitzers when I was working.

“This reminds me of waiting for a tricky experiment to prove or disprove me an idiot,” said Phoebe, brightly. “And I’ve had some of that, believe me.”

“Oh?”

“Why, yes. I’m not a wealthy layabout like you or George.”

"Who says I’m a layabout?”

"Well—at least I earn a respectable living at the University while you spend your time larking about beneath the sea.”

I laughed. “You think what you like, madam, about me. As for you, how do you—?”

“Physics. A moderately difficult and unrealistic comer of the field. Having graduated rather well I was given the opportunity of staying on in post-graduate work, with a spot of tutoring thrown in—mainly cloth heads who can’t keep up with the general pace.”

My ideas of Phoebe Desmond subtly shifted to encompass her lecturing in a tutorial to a group of cloth-heads. The concept intrigued me. Like using a razor blade to chop firewood.

“Damn and confounded damnation!” shouted Brennan, stamping back from the phone.

“Trouble?”

“I’ll say! The tablet is just a compilation of ritual curses. There are no directions or signs of any indication at all of where the Time Vault of Khamushkei the Undying could be!”

When Paul Benenson
turned up we were all sitting around cuddling drinks and trying to think what to do next.

He brought a red-headed girl with him. She simpered a little as Benenson introduced her curtly as Lottie, not giving her surname, trotting her out perfunctorily and then edging her into the background as he started rampaging on about the disgraceful scenes at Gannets.

As soon as I saw Lottie I exchanged horrified glances with Phoebe.

Phoebe nodded desperately at me.

“It is!” she mouthed.

I nodded back. Then I glanced again at Lottie, at the girl I had first seen stark naked running for her life down the picture gallery, fleeing from a loathsome monstrosity spawned from some unnamed hell.

My glance wanted to linger on her; with a sudden upturn of her head, however, she stared straight at me, her dark eyes intent. I looked away. There could be no mistake. The naked girl fleeing for her life and this secretary of Benenson’s were one and the same.

“. . . turned us all out!” Benenson was braying. The fool had lighted a cigarette and now puffed out clouds of filthy blue-gray smoke. I waved a hand and George Pomfret, pointedly, stood up and snapped an order at one of his house robots. The robot trundled across and robotically bypassed the automatic controls and opened up the ventilation. Phoebe and Brennan coughed a little, and then the ventilation sucked the vile smoke out and we could return to civilization.

“Turned us out! And the Bernini hadn’t been put up yet. I tell you, George, if they sell it before I’ve a fair chance to bid I’ll raise such a rumpus it’ll break the auctioneers.”

“Well, now, Paul,” bumbled good old George. “They wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

“What happened?” I asked bluntly.

“Happened?” Benenson blew more smoke, his fat gray face like a slug enveloped in slugkiller. “A girl with no clothes on ran out into the ballroom, the brazen hussy. She saw us and tried to get away but the guards were too quick.” His face, that a moment before had brightened with lecherous thoughts, clouded in puzzlement now. “But the guards lost her, somehow. Then a—” He stopped and said to Pomfret, “Got a drink, George?” “Certainly,” said Pomfret, and I chuckled to myself at the lack of the familiar “old man” that would have been Pomfret’s unfailing tag of yesterday. He flicked for the robots to do their duty.

“Did you recognize the girl?” asked Brennan. He had asked my question for me, so I could go back to a little eyebrow wiggling at Phoebe, warning her.

“No, of course not. I only caught a glimpse . . .” Benenson sounded regretful over that. “She had auburn hair, like Lottie’s, but that was all.”

He hadn’t been looking at her face, that was for sure. But-but if the girl was Lottie—I glanced again at Benenson’s secretary. Could she have got away and dressed herself in time to join the odious Benenson as the police emptied Gannets? If that were so—then why did she sit like a silent mannequin; why didn’t she say it had been her? Why, in fact, wasn’t she having the screaming hysterics right now?

Phoebe lifted her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug that never happens in real life except in circumstances like those in which we found ourselves. I smiled back at her and then rose, meaning to inveigle her out for a quick notes-comparison, when Pomfret said, “It’s time for a meal—I’m starving. We’ll think better on full stomachs.”

“I don’t need to think!” snapped Benenson. “I know what I saw.”

“Too right,” said Brennan, standing up. He yawned widely. “I’m tired.”

“You’ll stay the night, Hall?”

“That’s very civil of you, George. I’d like that.”

The robots prepared the meal which we had elected to, eat from trays clipped to our chairs rather than make a formal meal of it. I noticed Pomfret’s robot butler, a splendid ironman, a good eight feet tall with a plug-ugly metal face as though he had gone fifteen rounds with a steam roller.

“That’s Charlie,” explained Pomfret with a laugh. “He fell down the cellar steps when I’d just bought him and he’s been a little—peculiar—ever since. I’ve never bothered to have his faceplate remodeled. I think he has character the way he is.”

“I’m sure,” said Phoebe.

“He knows what he’s doing.” I thought of the Domestic/Gardener/Chauffeur/General duties robot I had for a wild moment considered bidding for at Gannets. Charlie must hold all those accomplishments in his memory tanks with a whole lot more. Butlers were one of the highest grades of robots, more akin in their random sampling of human traits to a human than any other robot engaged in any other business, maybe because some of the sheerly quirky behavior patterns of the human beings they deal with rub off.

Now Charlie superintended the automatic vending of our meal with a smooth and silent perfection of overseeing that delighted me. I wondered if I could be irritable with Charlie.

Benenson ate in the way one would have expected.

I thought of an old and hungry grouper snouting along near the bottom.

Outside, the daylight began to fade, almost unnoticed by us as the interior lights strengthened in compensation-almost, for I knew I shared a common feeling with the others who knew of Khamushkei the Undying that with the going of the light and the coming of darkness, forces—symbolically, at least—could be released that might alter entirely what we were doing. One can wait all night for dawn; equally one can wait for darkness. And we were waiting for the more menacing of those two expectancies.

For Benenson whose postprandial digestive juices were, from the point of view of the auctioneers and owners of the Bernini Aphrodite, going sadly to waste, our odd behavior must have seemed in a queerly inverted way to be an expected homage to him. He was, as we knew, a powerful man of business, dealing in airlines and factory complexes and banking houses and trusts; our halting speech and sidelong glances must have been familiar to him. For myself, I still could not quite take the situation seriously enough. I thought of the dead girl. That was serious. But that had happened with the fleeting inconsequence of a play or an old tragedy, i
mpinging not at all on my true li
fe.

Finally I could stand it no longer.

Standing up and wiping my mouth with a paper napkin, I smiled at Benenson with the right treacly content and said, “I have some work to do which won’t wait any longer—”

Before I had finished speaking Hall Brennan and Phoebe Desmond were standing at my side.

“We’ll help you, Bert,” they said.

The three of us walked off toward Pomfret’s study.

“D’you mind if we use your study, George?”

“Go right ahead,” Pomfret said, with a smile like that of the man on the scaffold who isn’t sure what his part is. “I’ll join you as soon—ah, that is, later.”

Benenson took out another cigarette.

We left hurriedly but in good order.

In Pomfret’s study we grabbed the globe and Phoebe said, “This has got to work right—I never thought we’d get away from that horrible little man.”

“He’s a very big man,” Brennan said, feeling along the wire. “And don’t you forget it.”

“D’you know him, then, Hall?”

“Of him. No wish to go further in that acquaintanceship.”

I didn’t press. Brennan would tell me about himself when he wanted to. As for Phoebe, she was a tutor at the University and therefore moved in a sphere for which I held ambivalent feelings.

“It’s got to be right here,” said Brennan. He had his fingers inside the globe, feeling around the wire, and his other hand pointed a fiber-point pen a millimeter off the surface. The pen wobbled.

“That’s no good, Hall.” Phoebe sounded practical. “The problem of transferring a point from the interior of a sphere to a corresponding point on the outside without making a hole through—”

“Is a tough one,” I put in helpfully.

She chuckled like a little girl. “Science will always find a way. We can’t use the old light and shadow technique, but we can use magnetism—”

“Of course!” said Brennan, annoyed with himself. “Now why didn’t I think of that!”

“You’re not a physics man—or are you?” I said.

“Nope. Where’s the magnet, Phoebe?”

We took apart a panel in one of Pomfret’s automatic consoles and soon found a long enough magnet so we could isolate one pole. Carefully, Brennan shoved the magnet up against the wire, moving it to an exactly arranged position alongside. Then Phoebe dropped a pinch of iron dust she had nail-filed from a wall-bracket. The iron filings slithered and shimmied as she tapped the globe with a shining fingernail.

“Gently—gently—” She breathed to one side as she spoke. “We’re not after pretty concentric patterns. What we want—is—uh—a
dot!”
She looked up with a cry of triumph. “And there it is!”

I checked the distance the magnet would be against the wire, cuddled up against it, and the direction. Then I put Brennan’s fiber-tipped pen down in a single small dot.

“There.”

“Hmm.”

We all stood looking at that dot, a little lost.

The globe was—or had been—a fairly good-sized representation with Iraq shown in some detail; but now we had gone beyond that scale. I went over to Pomfret’s bookshelves and pulled out the big Oxford Atlas, feeling the comfortable weight of the pages. Tape recordings had undercut book publication for years; atlases tended to be a trifle difficult-although not an impossibility—to put on tape for the civilian.

I opened the atlas.

“Iraq. Well, Phoebe, you’re the mathematical genius around here. You figure in the area on this atlas that the dot on the globe encloses. Can do?”

“Easy. Take a little time—not too long.”

“Check. While you’re doing that I’ll ransack old George’s shelves for an ancient atlas. If he has the Muir we’re in luck.”

I didn’t mean an atlas produced, like the globe we had bifurcated, in the past, but an atlas showing the world as it was in antiquity. Modem states have given new names to old places. Babel had become Babylon, so they say, and we were now researching in an area of the past where Arabic names meant little. Eventually, tucked down on a low shelf among assorted magazines and fishing papers, I found a Manxton Historical Atlas.

Back at tike table I opened the atlas at the pages devoted to Sumer and Akkad and then looked across at Phoebe, bent over her pencil, her brows drawn down, a pink tip of tongue visible between her teeth. I figured she was probably doing something in her head for the first time in a long time, without the use of a handy computer. In that, as I quickly found out, I did her an injustice.

“It’s as well I keep my brain in trim with mental problems,” she said, brightly, looking up. “Have you the atlas, Bert? I have the coordinates here.”

I smiled at her, giving her a mental apology.

On the Oxford Atlas the circle centered around a dot marked cryptically: “As Samaiya.” That stood on a thin broken line representing one of the old caravan tracks where, in these days of aerial transportation, only a few diesel-electric buses would speed dustily over the desert sands that for so long had borne only the shuffling pad of camels.

Transferring that across to the Manxton resulted in a circle of nothing.

“Right in the middle of nowhere!” said Phoebe, disgustedly.

Brennan and I heaved sighs of relief.

“If these coordinates had given us a place around, say Eridu, or Uruk, or Dilbat, I’d have been very uneasy.”

“Disappointed and alarmed.” I upped the stakes.

“But why?”

“Because,” explained Brennan, “that would mean the area had been very thoroughly dug over. You know the sort of tourist traps those old Sumerian diggings are these days. No, with a blank map to start from we stand a good chance of uncovering something new.” Then he stopped, shook his head and laughed. “What I mean is: if Khamushkei the Undying is there, we would expect to find him in an area not particularly well explored.”

“Savvy,” nodded Phoebe understanding^.

“Nearest jet-field would be Baghdad, I suppose.” I cross-checked with the Oxford as Phoebe hunted an airline timetable. “They’ll have jet services running into the desert from there.”

I glanced across at Brennan. “I’m a wetneck myself, Hall. I do know the desert a little,
but...
?”

For a moment he hesitated. I wondered why. Then he said with decision, "All right. I’ll take charge. But if I’m running this show I’ll expect absolute obedience to orders. I do know the desert.”

“That’s okay, Hall. I can’t answer for the others, but you have my word."

“And mine, Hall,” said Phoebe, looking up at him. She bustled across with the timetable, moving with a sudden nervous energy puzzling to me then.

“Now just who said you’d be coming, too?” asked Brennan.

She put the timetable behind her and arched her body back. She looked very nice. “Ill hide the timetable if you don’t let me come too!” she threatened. We laughed. Corny as the joke was and despite, or probably because of, the perils of what we planned to do, we took a pleasure in this free chitchat. We hadn’t yet reached the time or place for frightened monosyllables.

“We can catch the twenty-three fifty-nine midnight flight from Hampden,” she informed us when she had looked down the flight listings. “That’ll give us time to organize here.”

“We can hire most of what we’ll need in Baghdad,” pointed out Brennan. “But you’ll want to take a few personal things. I shall. We’d better get George in on this. He’ll want to come, of course.”

“This is quite an adventure,” said Phoebe. I could not fail to notice the sparks flying out of her eyes and the warm pink glow radiating from her face. I glanced at Brennan and began to get the picture.

At that point in our deliberations a shrill scream scythed in from the other room, followed by an immense roaring, human voices yelling, the hard metallic clatter of robot feet and then the unmistakable bacon-frying- in-a-pan sizzle of a Farley positronic-incoherer being fired at full power.

The three of us dived for the door.

Brennan wrenched the door open and then we tumbled to an astonished halt. The scene was nothing if not lively.