Cycle of Nemesis (7 page)

Lottie had flung both arms around Pomfret, so that for a moment I missed seeing the Farley Express in his hand pointing at the ceiling. Benenson sat in his chair like a discarded wad of chewing gum. On the carpet a brilliant pool of blood shimmered in the artificial lights like a giant crimson ink blob. Smoke and the smell of charred flesh hung in the air, making my nostrils quiver in disgust.

“Are you all right, George?” asked Phoebe, the first one to speak and break that macabre tableau.

George Pomfret swallowed. His left hand around Lottie’s waist remained firmly in position. “I’m fine,” he squeaked. He swallowed again, harder, and in his normal voice said, "What a whopper!”

Charlie his robot butler said, “I do not understand this thing. Your instructions, please, boss.”

Trust George Pomfret to substitute the normal robot’s "sir” with the adrenalin-jerking “boss.”

“Hold on a sec, Charlie. I’m not sure I understand this myself.” Pomfret’s hand tightened on Lottie as she went to move away. She felt that pressure against her back and, seductively, swayed forward again against Pomfret. He put the Farley Express down on the chair wing at his side and put the thus freed arm around Lottie.

“You’ll be all right, Lottie.”

“I do not like this,” Charlie staccatoed in his chirrupy metallic voice. “Something—”

“What the hell happened?” bellowed Hall Brennan. The west window that had been covered by dark blue drapes, drawn when the last of the daylight had gone, now burst inwards. Curtains, glass, metal framings, the whole fifteen foot square window, showered in like a slow motion bubble. Shards of glass pattered down like flung spears. I caught at Phoebe but Brennan already had her around the waist and was hurling her into the cover of the overturned dining table.

“It’s another one!” shrilled Lottie.

The wad of chewing gum in the chair quivered.

Pomfret snatched up his gun.

Hall Brennan, his left arm familiarly around Phoebe Desmond, fished out a small gun from an inside pocket. I saw it was a Creighton Forty, a projectile weapon capable of blowing a hole in an elephant over half a mile away.

From the dark blue curtaining and the smashing uproar of the destroyed window emerged a shining figure.

In a single flashing glance I saw the figure, recognized it for what it was, and smash went another cherished myth.

Without dignity I joined Brennan and Phoebe at the back of the table.

Brennan was breathing in thick jerky gasps, his face upturned and a look of absolute unbelieving awe on his face as though he had seen the millennium. “Just like the ones on the entrance to the palace of Sargon at Khorsabad!”

I nudged him hard.

The thing that had broken through the window now heaved its bulk up from the floor, fluttering and fanning its heavy coppery wings and creating draft enough to blow debris away from it in all directions. It stood a good twelve feet tall and its hooves shone silver. Its bull flanks glowed in angry bronze, every curled hair in place. Its wings of red copper with every feather indented and in place settled now stiff and formal over its back. Down its chest depended a curled and gold-threaded beard, hanging from a face at once baleful and idiotic, with thick lips and almond-eyes and a mindless serentity made all the more awful by the glory of the crown that sat atop that gruesome head.

“A lamassu,” Brennan croaked. “A tutelary genie—”

“A winged human-headed bull!” Phoebe said. “And it’s
alive
!"

Then what Brennan said penetrated, for she coughed, “A tutelary genie! Hoo, boy!”

I said sharply, “Look after Phoebe, Hall.”

That should bring him around, as well as her.

Across the room George Pomfret shouted, “Don’t give it a chance this time!” But Lottie’s convulsive attempts to climb all over him threw the Farley off. He daren’t pull the trigger now or he’d bring down the roof.

The winged bull roared: a Bashan-like bellow that shook everything and made my head ring. It swung its hooves and they sliced razor-sharp into the carpet. Its human face swung around, the dark shapely eyes saw the three of us crouching behind the table, and its face went meaner than ever. It charged.

The solid mahogany table flew across the room split like a cheap orange crate. The wings clapped forward to smother us. The fore hooves lifted in a glitter of silver to slice us to pieces. I snatched the gun from Brennan and fired and saw the bullet explode on the feathers of a wing.

The genie did not stop. It came on unnervingly. I fired again at the face. Where the bullet went I didn’t know, for the thing had reared up and turned about, screaming. Blood siphoned from one side where Pomfret, desperately jerking his gun hand down, had fired a snap shot. Another shearing blast removed a wing and more dark blood gushed out. Charred flesh hung in ribbons. The thing went mad. It thrashed about, lashing its tail, and opening its bearded lips to scream and hiss.

Then Pomfret fired for the third time and the thing’s head, crown, eyes, beard, lips, vanished in a puff of incoherent positrons.

The body slumped fatly to the floor.

Then, clearly visible to us all, quite without the slightest margin for error, the body faded, thinned, became transparent, vanished. It disappeared before our very eyes.

Only the pool of blood was left, joining the earlier blood in a canal of crimson across the carpet.

We remained frozen in our positions for some time; then Phoebe said, “Whew I I wasn’t dreaming that—was I?”

“I’m afraid not, Phoebe.”

Brennan released her and stood up. I held out his gun to him. He took it, smiled ruefully. “Would you believe me if I told you it was like seeing a Sphinx in Trafalgar Square climb down off its pedestal?”

“I’ll believe you, Hall. Whatever it was, it meant more to you in that way than to us. To me, it was just another menace, a personal peril to my life, similar to many other intriguing monsters we have in the deeps.”

“Lions, stupid,” said Phoebe.

“Sure, anything you say. Lions, tigers, sphinxes—but that was a real honest-to-God three thousand year and more old carving from the gates of Sargon of Akkad’s palace at Khorsabad. I’ve seen ’em—”

“So have I, old boy,” said Pomfret, still holding his gun in his right hand and Lottie in his left arm. “But what’s concerning me more is they vanish when you shoot ’em!”

The wad of chewing gum emitted a long shuddery gasp and then tried to heave itself to its feet, quaking.

“Let me out of here
!
” yelled Paul Benenson when he could articulate. “Help
!
”

“Sit down, Paul, and take it easy,” sagely counseled Pomfret. “I’ll fix you a drink.”

“And me, too, darling boy?" cooed Lottie.

Brennan, Phoebe and I looked at one another, then we laughed spontaneously together. Reaction it may have been, but we all knew exactly what the others were thinking.

Still and all, she would be good for the old stick-in- the-mud.

“There’s a simple,
solid, scientific explanation for it all,” said Phoebe Desmond firmly.

“I’ll go along with you on the last two S’s,” Hall Brennan told her with a shake of his head. “But not the first. No sir. This just isn’t simple.”

We sat in Pomfret’s study while the household robots cleared up the mess and repaired the window, sitting there and talking about it, having missed the twenty-three fifty-nine midnight from Hampden. We hadn’t asked Phoebe to look up the time of the next plane. Speaking for myself, I needed time to think.

As Brennan had said, “Now you know what smashed up the rotor on my heli. Although it wasn’t quite like that human-headed winged bull. The one I tangled with was a winged griffin, potentially more dangerous but in my case a lot smaller than this last one.”

“So that,” I said to clear up a point that had been p
ullin
g me, “is how Khamushkei the Undying has found out about us. He was following you, Hall, and now we re all in the same pitch-pot.”

“ ’Fraid so, chum,” said Brennan. He smiled at me and I returned that smile; I, for one, did not blame him. As men who lived dangerously as part of our profession—I had automatically assumed Hall Brennan to be in a similar social position to myself—one more danger would just have to be figured into the odds.

Although, in all honesty, this quality and kind of problem posed questions far greater than any shark or squid or killer whale.

“I was thinking about your findings on this globe,” said Pomfret, “when I was entertaining our guest.” He glanced across at Paul Benenson who sat huddled in his misery in a chair, cradling a drink. He hadn’t as yet come out of the shock. His single panicky yell had not been repeated. Lottie sat conspicuously next to Pomfret.

“A smart piece of work, yes?” inquired Phoebe.

“Maybe. I just thought it might indicate the place where Vasil Stannard found the clay tablet.”

He might have dropped another winged bull into our midst. Good old George could always see the obvious.

“The devil!” exploded Brennan in mock amazement.

“Sure,” said Phoebe.

"You’ve saved us the plane fare to Baghdad, anyway, old boy,” I said with a chuckle to Pomfret—who was staring around at us with amazement.

We explained to him what we had been about to do before the lamassu burst in.

He screwed up his face and tried to look judicial and succeeded only in making me want to offer him an indigestion tablet. "We-ell, maybe,” he said pontifically. “But I tend to adhere to my original theory—”

If we hadn’t stopped him, good old George would have pontificated on for some time. Phoebe said, “If we don’t go to Baghdad and then into the desert to try to find this place, what else do we do?”

Lottie, in her sultry voice, asked, “Do we have to do anything?” She looked around with a bright infectious smile. “I mean. Do we? Wouldn’t it be
dangerous?”

We each left it to the others to say something, so George Pomfret had all the time he liked to lean over, press Lottie’s hand, and say with deep meaning, “I’ll look after you, Lottie.”

“Yes, but—” she said.

“Yes but nothing!” snapped Brennan. “I’ve been chasing a way to get to Khamushkei the Undying for a long time. If he’s not shut up tightly in his Time Vault—the whole world will be written off again!”

Lottie giggled weakly. We’d filled her and Benenson in on essentials. Benenson just hadn’t taken it in. If Lottie did it was only because she had seen the lamassu.

“And that’s odd,” I said to Brennan, following my own train of thought. “For I’ve always understood the lamassu to be the good genies. They looked after men against evil powers. The evil genies were the utukku and they appeared in terrifying forms of chimerical power—lions and eagles and serpents bodies all mixed up.”

“That’s so, Bert,” Brennan said shortly. “All this shows is the power of Khamushkei the Undying—he can order fundamentally decent creations into acts of violence against us. It’s all of a pattern.”

We did not discuss further the moral implications of what we knew. I suppose each of us must have thought that this thing might not have happened to us, that we resented its happening to us
at all. Someone else,
all must have thought angrily, someone
should have
been involved, not us. As to going to the
authorities
,
even with the evidence of a headless girl’s naked
torso
,
I did not believe we would have received much of a hearing. Following through that train of thought and confirming my belief in what the others were thinking, Lottie said petulantly, “Well, why don’t you tell the police? I’m sure they’ll know what to do. After all, they are our servants, aren’t they? That’s what we pay taxes to pay their wages for, isn’t it?”

“You can try if you like,” said Brennan harshly. “I’m more concerned over the next attack.”

“The next—1”

“You don’t think that a Time Beast like Khamushkei the Undying will relinquish the struggle after a little preliminary skirmish like this, do you?” Brennan thumped a fist into his palm. “If only we could be sure of where the Time Vault
is!”

“It would be wise,” I said softly, “I think, if we moved on. Those beasts found us by following you, Hall, and we’re still in the same place they last attacked. Simple tactical common sense indicates a move.”

“Check,” said Benenson. “Let’s grab what we need and hightail it outta here!"

Outside the house the night encompassed the land save where men’s lights drove back the darkness. For all the lavish expenditure of energy only a relatively small part of the world would be illuminated by night and I felt all too conscious of the dangers we faced. As we rose to gather what belongings we would take, Lottie moved to the phone. She used the standard emergency procedure for calling the police.

I, for one, did not blame her. How she would substantiate the vague story she could tell I did not know; her courage alone both surprised and amused me. She was wasted on Benenson, that was for sure.

“Come and choose a weapon, Bert,” Pomfret called. I went across to his armory and was content to choose a companion weapon to his Farley Express. He’d ordered the pair, he’d said, on a quick-drawing Wild West fad that had bitten him. Brennan, with a sour comment about his own vest-pocket Creighton Forty, selected a Creighton Eighty. “That,” he said flatly, “should punch through all right.”

Lottie came back from the phone with a face sullen and scarlet and ill-tempered. “They wanted to know if I’d gone onto drugs as well as booze.” She shook her head as though to rid it of a buzzing noise. “They’re sending a man out. I got the impression he was going to take me in rather than investigate my complaint.”

“Didn’t you tell them about the naked girl running into the auction?”

"Yes.” She drew a deep breath and Pomfret’s eyes widened in admiration. “They said they thought it might be someone not too far away.”

“They accused you, then?”

“Not in so many words. But”—here a puzzled expression dominated the storm of outraged emotions—“they said they had a description and it fitted. They didn’t say who it fitted, but—”

“You’d better clear out of here with us,” I broke in tartly. I couldn’t tell her that she had been that girl; if she didn’t know, then no amount of talk would convince her. It wasn’t possible, anyway, that it could have been her, except that Phoebe Desmond shared my belief. “Come on, Lottie. Stick with us.”

She looked at Benenson, who had managed to stand up to refill his glass at Pomfret’s drinks cabinet “What about—”

“Forget him, Lottie!” urged Pomfret.

“I was going to say,” she observed sweetly, “that I don’t have the kind of cash to buy tickets for Baghdad on me.”

If good old George not only bought that but bought the ticket as well, I, for one, wouldn’t object. Pomfret said, with a trill in his voice where he was trying to keep the thrill out, “Oh, don’t worry about cash, Lottie. I can always cover you for that, until—”

“Oh, George! How sweet of you.” She swung around and picked up her coat. “Let’s go.”

As we went toward Pomfret’s heli where the automatics had brought it up out of the garage, I thought I caught a glimpse of an immense winged figure against the moon, swinging down onto the house. Then the heli whined away into the night and the house fell away below.

“That copper is going to have an interesting experience,” I said. “If that was another genie, it won’t attack him.”

“Crack on some more speed, George,” said Brennan.

We had brought Benenson with us. Obviously, we could not leave him at the house with a policeman arriving or with a baleful genie arriving; either one would do him no good: the genie permanently, the policeman by finding out where we were off to and taking us all into custody along with the brave wad of chewing gum.

The heli flickered through the night with its robotic controls locked into the national grid. Below us the countryside spun past, nests and ribbons of light passing steadily away to the rear. Very soon now, if the policeman decided to take the matter further, he would call his station and they would check with various computerized controls. One center they would check would be the national traffic grid and then they would see our copter, individually identified by registration licensing George Pomfret to fly her, on the master route control plan. The phone in the heli would ring and if Pomfret answered he would be politely told to land at the nearest station.

We would be traced as unerringly as a bloodhound’s quarry.

“Give him fifteen minutes, George,” said Brennan. He was talking about the policeman. "Then we’ll put down at the quickest drop-out locus. Check?”

“If you say so, Hall. You’re running this show.”

“We haven’t hit the desert yet,” said Brennan cryptically.

Phoebe was checking the unrolling map in the center of the console.

“Little Larksrise is the likeliest place,” she said in her crisp professional voice. “Just a village church, a couple of pubs, one shop and a gaggle of houses. Hasn’t changed since the last century—and won’t now, not with these new zoning laws.”

“We’
ll
put down there.” Brennan’s voice came taut and controlled. Despite his words of a moment ago, he was taking command. “We can whistle up a taxi on my name. That’ll throw ’em off the scent.”

The heli spun down into the old carpark behind the largest pub and we alighted before the rotors had stopped. Benenson looked about blearily. Pomfret produced a brandy flask and Benenson took a long swig.

“You’ll enjoy this before it’s over, Paul,” he promised.

I chuckled. Brennan went to the call box on the wall of the pub and dialed. Somewhere a robot clicked into response. When Brennan rejoined us, he said, “Should be here in ten minutes. We’ve got to put your heli into that inconspicuous comer of the carpark, George.”

When it was found we ought to be digging in the sands of Iraq—if we were lucky, penetrating down to the sands of Akkad.

The taxi arrived, not by any means a modem model, and we all piled aboard. Lottie and Pomfret, and Brennan and Phoebe, as though by chance, were sharing two seats. I looked at Benenson. “If I’m sharing a seat with him,” I told Pomfret, “hand over your brandy flask.”

The robot whisked us into the air. Its rotors whirling windily, the taxi bore us away on course for Standstead. There we would hire an aircraft. After that, it depended on Khamushkei the Undying as to what happened to us.

This dark, and suddenly and unwantedly dramatic flight assumed proportions frightening to ordinary mortals. We were calmly setting off to shut the seals on a monster enchained for seven thousand years. I suppose it was because of the very incomprehensible nature of what we thought we were doing that we were acting in this insouciant way. Jokes and laughter were as much weapons as were positronic incoherers.

If what Pomfret had suggested was true, that the location toward which we were now making our way was merely the place where Vasil Stannard had found the clay tablet, then we were a pack of fools. Somehow, though, I doubted that he would go to the lengths he had to conceal that location if it had been merely where he had found the tablet. Why should he do that? Why the tablet wrapped inside the globe? Why the wire? Surely he would merely have noted the location down? The more I thought about it as the taxi whirled on through the night toward the airfield at Standstead, the more I became convinced that we were following the truth.

What Phoebe and Lottie were up to with their men I didn’t know. Benenson had appropriated the brandy and was fast relapsing into a stupor. I could see the wisdom of bringing him along, but I heartily wished we could be rid of him.

When the taxi slanted into the parking bay at Standstead the dawn was only a few hours away.

Without fuss or undue delay Hall Brennan arranged for the hire of a jet to carry us to the Middle East. He had no need to specify exact destination in this age of instant decision to travel for fun, where men and women would frolic all night aboard a jet aircraft circling the world, where businessmen had grown tired of continual conference by telephone and more and more took to the air to commute to conferences. Without surprising me, Brennan displayed credentials of a fully qualified pilot with a commercial license, so that we could dispense with the largely superfluous pilot the hirers would have wished oh us.

Just before takeoff we had to decide about Benenson.

I was all for buying him a bottle of brandy and leaving him in the waiting room.

Brennan wanted to take him with us.

Lottie said she couldn’t care less, that she had a new employer now, who knew much better how to take care of a secretary.

Pomfret couldn’t have cared less about Benenson, but recalled the Bernini and his business associations with the fat gray man of finance, and so put in his vote to leave him to that world of business.

Phoebe clinched it by a remark that, in its indication of what she felt for Benenson, revealed what she felt for Hall Brennan.

We left Benenson in the waiting room, giggling foolishly, trying to extract the last drop from Pomfret’s brandy flask. They didn’t have time to buy him the bottle I had suggested; our aircraft was ready and waiting on the apron.

As the flight bus took us out we looked back at the cheerfully lighted windows of the airport lounge. Benenson, it could easily be, was the lucky one of us.

Once we were airborne Brennan locked the automatics into a flight envelope that would take us out over the Mediterranean and ring the alarm when we would be crossing the eastern coast. He had routed us south of Cyprus and north of Beirut. With a yawn he announced, “I’m for some shut-eye. It’s a long time ago you were bidding for that globe, Bert.”

“True,” I said. “We could all do with storing up some sleep against whatever lies ahead.” Then I felt like a fool. I-went aft to the jet’s individually arranged sleeping berths and turned in. I was asleep the moment after my head hit the pillow.

Lottie woke me up, staring at me with a face pinched and gray, her red hair screwed up into a scarf of some sort on top of her head. She looked frightened. Her makeup gave her the appearance of a melting wax doll.

“Wake up, Bert! Hall wants you up front!”

“What is it?”

I swung my legs over the bunk and stood up. Lottie stepped back. I’d slept in my clothes; she looked as if she had, too. She shook her head and ran out of the cabin. I swallowed, rubbed a finger across my teeth, and followed.

The control cabin contained within its sweep of angled windows all the necessary equipment to direct the aircraft. Also provided were thickly cushioned seats for the aircrew: two pilots, navigator, flight engineer and a supernumerary seat. Brennan sat in the pilot’s throne, with Pomfret in the copilot’s; Phoebe hunched up in the navigator’s and Lottie had gone quickly to the flight engineer’s. I’ve been a supernumerary before.