Lord Tyger (45 page)

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 revolver.

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.

One of the busts serving as book ends was Tarzan and had been created for Boygur by a man called Gutzon Borglum. "It was made secretly," Boygur said. "Only Borglum and I knew of the deal, and it cost me plenty."

The other bust was of Ras and had been done by a sculptor who had studied photographs and films of Ras.

There were many paintings of Tarzan, most of them by St. John, whom Boygur said was the great illustrator of The Book and The Hero.

There were also five photographs of Ras taken at various ages. Ras had been told about, them by Yusufu, who had had to explain first what "photographs" were. One showed him as a baby in Mariyam's arms with Yusufu nearby and, in the distant background, five gorillas feeding or watching the human beings. A second was of Ras at about the age of five, a naked little boy with long, black hair playing with a baby gorilla while two females ate bamboo shoots nearby. A third showed him fishing from a dugout in the lake. A fourth had been taken inside the log cabin by the lake shore a year before it had burned down when hit by lightning. The angle was from his right, and he was sitting at the rough wooden desk and studying a big picture book, while two large candles burned before him. He realized now, because of what Yusufu had told him, that a hidden camera had taken that photograph.

The fifth photograph showed Ras, when he was sixteen, coming down a hill with the body of a leopard draped over his shoulders. The photograph also showed the dried blood smeared over his chest and shoulders and the claw marks. This was the time that Ras had been jumped by the gorilla-eater while Ras
was hunting him. Ras had lost his knife in the first minute of fighting, but he had been able to tear himself loose, literally, and grab the leopard by the tail. The leopard had jumped into the air and at the same time had turned to get at him. Ras never knew later how he had done it, but he had whirled the big cat, which must have weighed at least two hundred and fifty pounds, around and around, gripping its tail with both hands and working a step at a time toward the nearest tree. The final step forward and the final whirl had slammed the head and shoulders of the leopard against the trunk of the tree. While the half-unconscious beast had tried to stagger to its feet, Ras had searched for and found the knife and got it into the throat of the leopard before he could recover. Later, Ras had been furious with Yusufu and Mariyam because neither had believed his story of how he had killed it.