Stalking the Nightmare (8 page)

Balthazar pointed. “Look.”

The ground was covered with the permanent shadows of the bat-troops that had flown overhead. Dark, sooty shapes of fearsome creatures in full flight.

“I’ve always thought they looked like the flying monkeys in the 1939 MGM production of
The Wizard of Oz,
special effects by Arnold Gillespie, character makeup created by Jack Dawn,” Kaspar said ruminatively.

“Listen, Yellow Peril,” Balthazar said, “you can exercise that junkheap memory for trivia later. Unless the point is lost on you, what this means is that they know we’re coming and they’re going to be ready for us. We’ve lost the element of surprise.”

Melchior sighed and added, “Not to mention that we’ve been following the star for exactly one thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine years, give or take a fast minute, which unless they aren’t too clever should have tipped them off we were on the way some time ago.”

“Nonetheless,” said Kaspar, and fascinated by the word he said it again, “nonetheless.”

They waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence.

“And on that uplifting note,” Balthazar said, “let us get in the wind before they catch us out here in the open.”

So they gathered their belongings—Melchior’s caskets of Kru-gerrands, his air mattress and inflatable television set, Kaspar’s chalice of myrrh, his Judy Garland albums and fortune-cookie fortune calligraphy set, Balthazar’s wok, his brass-bound collected works of James Baldwin and hair-conking outfit—and they stowed them neatly in the boot of the Rolls.

Then, with Balthazar driving (but refusing once again to wear the chauffeur’s cap on moral grounds), they set out under the auspices of power steering, directly through the perimeter of the dream.

The star continued to shine overhead. “Damnedest thing I ever saw,” Kaspar remarked, for the ten thousandth time. “Defies all the accepted laws of celestial mechanics.”

Balthazar mumbled something.

For the ten thousandth time.

“What’s that, I didn’t hear?” Melchior said.

“I said: at least if there was a pot of gold at the end of all this …”

It was unworthy of him, as it had been ten thousand times previously, and the others chose to ignore it.

At the outskirts of the dream, a rundown section lined with fast food stands, motels with waterbeds and closed circuit vibrating magic fingers cablevision, bowling alleys, Polish athletic organizations and used rickshaw lots, they encountered the first line of resistance from the Forces of Chaos.

As they stopped for a traffic light, thousands of bat-winged monkey-faced troops leaped out of alleys and doorways with buckets of water and sponges, and began washing their windshield.

“Quick, Kaspar!” Balthazar shouted.

The Oriental king threw open the rear door on the right side and bounded out into the street, brandishing the chalice of myrrh. “Back, back, scum of the underworld!” he howled.

The troops of Chaos shrieked in horror and pain and began dropping what appeared to be dead all over the place, setting up a wailing and a crying and a screaming that rose over the dream like dark smoke.

“Please, already,” Melchior shouted. “Do we need all this noise? All this
geshrying!
You’ll wake the baby!”

Then Balthazar was gunning the motor, Kaspar leaped back into the rear seat, the door slammed and they were off, through the red light—which had, naturally, been rigged to stay red, as are all such red lights, by the Forces of Chaos.

All that day they lay siege to the dream.

The Automobile Club told them they couldn’t get there from here. The speed traps were set at nine miles per hour. Sects of religious fanatics threw themselves under the steel-belteds. But finally they came to the Manger, a Hyatt establishment, and they fought their way inside with the gifts, all tasteful.

And there, in a moderately-priced room, they found the Savior, tended by an out-of-work cabinetmaker, a lady who was obviously several bricks shy of a load who kept insisting she had been raped by God, various shepherds, butchers, pet store operators, boutique salesgirls, certified public accountants, hawkers of T-shirts, investigative journalists, theatrical hangers-on, Sammy Davis, Jr. and a man who owned a whippet that was reputed to be able to catch two Frisbees at the same time.

And the three kings came in, finding it hard to find a place there in the crowd, and they set down their gifts and stared at the sleeping child.

“We’ll call him Jomo,” said Balthazar, asserting himself.

“Don’t be a jerk,” Kaspar said. “Merry Jomomas? We’ll call him Lao-Tzu. It flows, it sings, it soars.”

So they argued about that for quite a while, and finally settled On Christ, because in conjunction with Jesus it was six and five, and that would fit all the marquees.

But still, after two thousand years, they were unsettled. They stared down at the sleeping child, who looked like all babies: like a small, soft W.C. Fields who had grown blotchy drinking wine sold before its time, and Balthazar mumbled, “I’d have been just as happy with a pot of gold,” and Kaspar said, “You’d think after two thousand years someone would at least offer me a chair,” and Melchior summed up all their hopes and dreams for a better world when he said, “You know, it’s funny, but he don’t look Jewish.”

Driver Hall was an impressive pastel blue building in the center of the city. Akisimov had no difficulty finding its spirally-rising towers, even though the sykops were close behind, but once within sight of the structure, he found himself lost.

How could he do it?

No Driver would intentionally help a criminal escape, yet a Driver was his only possible chance of freedom.

Akisimov’s bleak, hard features sagged in fright as he sensed the tentative probes of the sykops in his mind. They had found the flower girl, and they were circling in on him, getting his thoughts pinpointed.
Why
had that stupid urchin wandered across his path? It had been a clean escape, till he had run out of the mouth of that alley, and stumbled into her.
Why
had she clung to him? He hadn’t
wanted
to burn her down … he was only trying to get away from the sykops.

Akisimov cast about hungrily with his eyes. There had to be some way, some device to corner a Driver. Then he spotted the service entrance to the Hall. It was a dark hole in the side of the building, and he sprinted across the street, in a dead run for it. He made the comparative safety of the entrance without being openly noticed, and crouched down to wait. Wildly, he pulled the defective mesh cap tighter about his ears. It was the only thing standing between him and capture by the sykops, poor thing that it was. Had it been a standard make, not a lousy rogue cheapie model, it would have blanked him effectively, but as it was, it was the best he had.

With unfamiliar phrases he prayed to some unknown God to let the mind-blanking cap work well enough. Well enough to keep the sykops off him till he could kidnap a Driver.

Rike Akisimov had been sentenced to Io penal colony for a thousand years. The jurymech knew such a sentence bordered on the ridiculous; even with the current trends in geriatrics,
no
man could live past three hundred. The body tissue, the very fiber, just wouldn’t stand up to it.

But in token hatred for this most vile of criminals, the placid and faceless jurymech had said: “We, the beings of the Solarite, sentence you, Rike Amadeus Akisimov, to the penal colony on Io for a period of one thousand years.”

Then, as the jury room buzzed with wonder, the machine added, “We find in your deeds such a revulsion, such a loathing, that we feel even
this
sentence is too light. Rike Amadeus Akisimov, we find in you no identification with humanity, but only a resemblance to some odious beast of the jungle. You are a carrion-feeder, Akisimov; you are a jackal and a hyena and a vulture, and we pray your kind is never again discovered in the universe.

“We cannot even say, ‘God have mercy on your soul,’ for we are certain you have no soul!”

The jury room had been stunned into silence. For an implacable, emotionless jurymech to spew forth such violent feelings, was unprecedented. Everyone knew the decision-tapes were fed in by humans, but no one, absolutely
no one,
could have fed in those epithets.

Even a machine had been shocked by the magnitude of Akisimov’s crimes. For they were more than crimes against society. They were crimes against God and Man.

They had taken him away, preparing to lead him in the ferry-flit designed to convey prisoners from court to the spaceport, when he had struck. By some remarkable strength of his wrists—born of terror and desperation—he had snapped the elasticords, clubbed his guards and broken into the crowds clogging the strips, carrying with him a sykop blaster.

In a few minutes he was lost to the psioid lawmen, had ripped a mind-blanking mesh cap from a pedestrian’s head, and was on his way to the one escape route left.

To the Hall and the psioids known as Drivers.

She came out of the building, and Akisimov recognized her at once as a senior grade Driver. She was a tall girl, tanned and beautifully-proportioned, walking with the easy, off-the-toes stride of the experienced spaceman. She wore the mind’s eye and jet tube insignia of her class-psi on her left breast, and she seemed totally unconcerned as Akisimov stepped out of the service entrance, shoved the blaster in her ribs, and snarled, “I’ve got nothing but death behind me, sister. The name is Akisimov …” The girl turned a scrutinizing stare on him as he said his name; the Akisimov case had been publicized; madness such as his could not be kept quiet; she knew who he was, “… so you better call a flit, and do it quick.”

She smiled at him almost benignly, and raised her hand lazily in a gesture that brought a flit scurrying down from the idling level.

“The spaceport,” Akisimov whispered to her, when they were inside and rising. The girl repeated the order to the flitman.

In half an hour they were at the spaceport. The criminal softly warned the psioid about any sudden moves, and hustled the girl from the flit, making her pay the flitman. They got past the port guards by the Driver showing her i.d. bracelet.

Once inside, Akisimov dragged the girl out of sight behind a blast bunker and snapped quickly, “You have a clearance, or do I have to hi-jack a ship?”

The girl stared blankly at him, smiling calmly and enigmatically.

He jabbed the blaster hard into her side, causing her to wince, and repeated viciously, “I
said,
you got a clearance? And you damned well better answer me or so help me God I’ll burn away the top of your head!”

“I have a clearance,” she said, adding solemnly, “you don’t want to do this.”

He laughed roughly, gripped her arm tightly. She ground her lips together as his fingers closed about the skin, and he replied, “They got me on a thousand yearer to Io, lady. So I want to do any goddam thing that’ll get me out of here. Now what ship are you assigned to snap?”

She seemed to shrug her shoulders in finality, having made a token gesture, and answered, “I’m snap on the
Lady Knoxmaster,
in pit eighty-four.”

“Then let’s go,” he finished, and dragged her off across the field.

“You don’t want to do this,” she said again, softly. He was deaf to her warning.

When the invership took off, straight up without clearance coordinates and at full power, the Port Central went crazy, sending up signals, demanding recognition info, demanding this, demanding the other. But the
Lady Knoxmaster
was already heading out toward snap-point.

Akisimov, gloating, threw in the switch and knew the telemetering cameras were on him. “Goodbye, you asses! Goodbye, from Rike Akisimov! Stupid! You thought I’d spend a thousand years on Io? There are better things for me in the universe!”

He flicked off, to let them call the sykops, so the law would know he had bested them. “Yeah, there isn’t anything worse than a life term on Io,” he murmured, watching the planet fall away in the viewplates.

“You’re wrong, Akisimov,” the girl murmured, very, very softly.

Immediately the sykops and the SpaceCom sent up ships to apprehend the violator, but it was obvious the ship had enough start momentum to reach snap-out—if a Driver was on board—before they could reach it. Their single hope was that Akisimov had no Driver aboard, then they could catch him in a straight run.

On board the
Lady Knoxmaster,
Akisimov studied the calm-faced psioid girl in the other accelocouch.

Drivers were the most valuable, and yet the simplest-talented, of all the types of psionically equipped peoples in the field. Their one capacity was to warp a ship from normal space into that not-space that allowed interstellar travel; into inverspace.

Though the ship went through—set to snap-out by an automatic function of the Driver’s psi faculty—the Driver did not. That was the reason they were always in-suit and ready for the snap. Since
they
did not snap when the ship did, they were left hanging in space, where they were picked up immediately after by a doggie vessel assigned to each takeoff.