The Crystal World (12 page)

Then, as they pressed on into the forest, leaving the stream in the hope of joining the river lower down its course, they came across the wreck of the crashed helicopter.

At first, as they passed the aircraft lying like an emblazoned fossil in a small hollow to the left of their path, Dr. Sanders failed to recognize it. Ventress stopped. With a somber expression he pointed to the huge machine, and Sanders remembered the helicopter plunging into the forest half a mile from the inspection site. The four twisted blades, veined and frosted like the wings of a giant dragonfly, had already been overgrown by the trellises of crystals hanging downwards from the near-by trees. The fuselage of the craft, partly buried in the ground, had blossomed into an enormous translucent jewel, in whose solid depths, like emblematic knights mounted in the base of a medieval ring stone, the two pilots sat frozen at their controls. Their silver helmets gave off an endless fountain of light.

"You won't help them now." A rictus of pain twisted Ventress's mouth. Averting his face, he began to move away. "Come on, Sanders, or you'll soon be like them. The forest is changing all the time."

"Wait!" Sanders climbed over the fossilized undergrowth, kicking away pieces of the glass-like foliage. He pulled himself around the dome of the cockpit canopy. "Ventress! There's a man here!"

Together they climbed down into the floor of the hollow below the starboard side of the helicopter. Stretched out over the serpentine roots of a giant oak, across which he had been trying to drag himself, was the crystallized body of a man in military uniform. His chest and shoulders were covered by a huge cuirass of jeweled plates, the arms enclosed in the same gauntlet of annealed prisms that Sanders had seen on the man dragged from the river at Port Matarre.

"Ventress, it's the army captain! Radek!" Sanders gazed into the visor that covered the man's head, now an immense sapphire carved in the shape of a conquistador's helmet. Refracted through the prisms that had efiloresced from the man's face, his features seemed to overlay one another in a dozen different planes, but Dr. Sanders could still recognize the weak-chinned face of Captain Radek, the physician in the army medical corps who had first taken him to the inspection site. He realized that Radek had gone back after all, probably searching for Sanders when he failed to emerge from the forest, and instead had found the two pilots in the helicopter.

Now rainbows glowed in the dead man's eyes.

"Ventress!" Sanders remembered the drowned man in the harbor at Port Matarre. He pressed his hands against the crystal breast-plate, trying to detect any signs of warmth within. "He's still alive inside this, help me to get him out of here!" When Ventress stood up, shaking his head over the glittering body, Sanders shouted: "Ventress, I know this man!"

Gripping his shotgun, Ventress began to climb out of the hollow. "Sanders, you're wasting your time." He shook his head, his eyes roving between the trees around them. "Leave him there, he's made his own peace."

Pushing past him, Sanders straddled the crystalline body and tried to lift it from the hollow. The weight of the body was enormous, and he could barely move one of the arms. Part of the head and shoulder, and the entire length of the right arm, had annealed themselves to the crystal outgrowths from the base of the oak. As Sanders began to kick at the winding roots, trying to free the body, Ventress shouted in warning. Wrenching at the body, Sanders managed to jerk it free. Several pieces of the crystal sheath fell from the face and shoulders.

With a cry Ventress jumped down into the hollow. He held Sanders's arm tightly. "For God's sake-!" he began, but when Sanders pushed him aside he gave up and turned away.

After a pause, his small bitter eyes watching Sanders, he stepped forward and helped him lift the jeweled body from the hollow.

A hundred yards ahead they reached the bank of the stream. The tributary had expanded into a channel some ten yards in width. In the center the fossilized crust was only a few inches thin, and they could see the running water below. Leaving Radek's glistening body on the bank, where it lay with arms outstretched, slowly deliquescing, Dr. Sanders snapped a large bough off one of the trees and began to break the crust over the water. As he drove the branch downwards the crystals fractured easily, and within a few minutes he had opened a circular aperture three or four yards wide. He dragged the branch over to the bank where Radek lay. Bending down, he lifted the body on to the branch and lashed Radek's shoulders to it with his belt. With luck the timber would support Radek's head above the water long enough for him to regain consciousness as the crystals dissolved in the moving current.

Ventress made no comment, but continued to watch Sanders with his bitter eyes. Propping his shotgun against a tree, he helped Sanders carry the body to the aperture above the water. Each holding one end of the bough, they lowered Radek feet-first into the water. The stream moved quickly and they watched the body swirl away down the white tunnel. The washed crystals on Radek's arms and legs glimmered below the water, his half-submerged head resting on the bough. Dr. Sanders limped across to the bank. He sat down on the marbled sand, picking at the sharp needles that pierced his palms and fingers. "There's a chance, that's all, but worth taking," he said. Ventress was standing a few feet away from him. "They'll be watching downriver, perhaps they'll see him."

Ventress walked up to Sanders. His small body was held stiffly, his bearded chin tucked in. The muscles of his bony face moved his mouth soundlessly, as if he were composing his reply with great care. He said: "Sanders, you were too late. One day you'll know what you took away from that man."

Dr. Sanders looked up. "What do you mean?" Irritably, he snapped: "Ventress, I owed that man something."

Ventress ignored this. "Just remember, Doctor-if you ever find me like that, _leave me_. Do you understand?"

They moved off through the forest, neither speaking to the other, Sanders sometimes failing fifty yards behind Ventress. Several times he thought Ventress had abandoned him, but always the white-suited figure, his hair and shoulders covered with a fine fur of frost, appeared into view before him. Although exasperated by Ventress's callousness and lack of sympathy for Radek, Sanders sensed that there might be some other explanation for his behavior.

At last they reached the fringes of a small clearing, bounded on three sides by the fractured dancing floor of an inlet to one side of the river. On the opposite bank a high-gabled summer house pushed its roof toward the sky through a break in the overhead canopy. From the single spire a slender web of opaque strands extended to the surrounding trees like a diaphanous veil, investing the glass garden and the crystalline summer house with a marble sheen, almost sepulchral in its intensity.

As if reinforcing this impression, the windows on to the veranda around the house were encrusted with elab orate scroll-like patterns, like the ornamented casements of a tomb.

Waving Sanders back, Ventress approached the fringes of the garden, his shotgun raised before him. For the first time since Sanders had known him, Ventress seemed uncertain of himself. He gazed across at the summer house, like an explorer venturing upon some strange and enigmatic shrine in the depths of the jungle.

High above him, its wings pinioned by the glass canopy, a golden oriole flexed slowly in the afternoon light, the ripples of its liquid aura circling outwards like the rays of a cruciform sun.

Ventress drew himself together. After waiting for any sign of movement from the summer house, he darted from tree to tree, then crossed the frozen surface of the river with a feline step. Ten yards from the summer house he stopped again, distracted by the glowing oriole in the canopy above his head.

"It's Ventress-take him!"

A shot roared into the clearing, its report echoing around the brittle foliage. Startled, Ventress crouched down on the steps of the summer house, peering up at its sealed windows. From the edge of the clearing fifty yards behind him appeared a tall blond-haired man in a black leather jerkin, the mine-owner Thorensen. Revolver in hand, he raced toward the summer house. He stopped and fired again at Ventress, the roar of the explosion reverberating around the clearing. Behind Dr. Sanders the crystal trellises of the moss suspended from the trees frosted and collapsed like the collapsing walls of a house of mirrors.

The back door of the summer house opened. A naked African, his left leg and the left side of his chest and waist covered with white surgical plaster, stepped out on to the veranda, a rifle in his hands. Moving stiffly, he leaned himself against a pillar, then fired off a shot at Ventress crouching on the steps.

Leaping down from the veranda, Ventress made off like a hare across the river, bent almost double as he darted over the faults in the surface. With a last backward glance, his thin bearded face contorted with fear, he raced toward the trees, Thorensen's burly figure lagging behind him.

Then, as Ventress reached the bend in the inlet, where it widened in its approach toward the river, the cropheaded figure of the mulatto rose from his hiding place among the sprays of swamp grass growing like silver fans from the edge of the bank. His immense black body, etched clearly against the surrounding forest by its white outline of frost, leapt forward like a bull about to gore a fleeing matador. Ventress passed within a few feet of him, and the mulatto whipped one arm and tossed a steel net through the air over Ventress's head. Knocked off balance, Ventress sidestepped and fell, then slid ten yards across the frozen surface, his startled face peering through the open mesh:

With a satisfied grunt, the mulatto pulled a long panga from his belt and lumbered forward to the small figure lying like a trussed animal in front of him. Ventress kicked at the net, trying to free the shotgun. Ten feet away, the mulatto slashed the air experimentally, then ran forward to deliver the coup de grace.

"Thorensen! Call him back!" Sanders shouted. The rapidity with which all this had happened left Sanders standing by the edge of the clearing, his ears ringing with the explosions. He shouted again at Thorensen, who was waiting arms akimbo below the steps of the summer house. His long face was half averted, as if he preferred to take no part in this final moment.

Still lying on his back on the ground, Ventress had partly freed himself from the net. Letting go of the shotgun, he pulled the net around his waist. The mulatto towered over him, the panga raised behind his head.

With an epileptic twist, Ventress managed to move a few feet away. The mulatto roared with laughter, then let out a bellow of anger. The crystal surface had given way beneath his huge feet, and he sank up to his knees through the crust. With a heave he lifted himself on to the surface on one leg, then sank through it again as he pulled out the other. Ventress kicked the net away, and the mulatto reached forward and slashed at the ice a few inches from his heels.

Ventress stumbled to his feet. The shotgun was still entangled in the net, and he seized the bundle and ran off across the surface, sliding in and out of the half-crystallized patches. Behind him the mulatto charged like a berserk sea lion through the collapsing crust, hacking it out of his way with blows of the panga.

Ventress was out of reach. Here, where the inlet widened, the deeper channel of water running below to join the river was covered only by a thin crust. The surface frosted under Ventress's feet, but the winding lanes of firm ice held beneath his small figure. Within twenty yards he had reached the shore and darted away among the trees.

As a final shot rang out after him from the bandaged African on the veranda of the summer house, Dr. Sanders stood in the center of the clearing. He watched the mulatto wallowing in his trough of half-damp crystals, slashing at them angrily and sending up a shower of rainbowing light.

"You! Come here!" Thorensen gestured Sanders toward him with his revolver. The leather jerkin he wore over his blue suit made his large frame seem trimmer and more muscular. Below the blond hair his long face wore an expression of sullen moodiness. When Sanders approached he scrutinized him warily. "What are you doing with Ventress? Aren't you one of the visiting party? I saw you on the quay with Radek."

Dr. Sanders was about to speak when Thorensen held up his hand. With a gesture at the African on the veranda, who moved his rifle to cover Sanders, Thorensen walked off in the direction of the mulatto. "I'll see you in a minute-don't try to run for it."

The mulatto had climbed up on to the firmer surface near the summer house. As Thorensen approached he began to gesticulate and shout, waving his panga at the broken surface as if trying to cover up his failure to catch Ventress. Thorensen nodded, then dismissed him with a bored wave. Walking forward across the surface, he began to test the half-formed crystals with his feet. For several minutes he paced up and down, gazing in the direction of the river, as if marking out the dimensions of the subterranean channels.

He returned to Sanders, the damp crystals on his shoes giving off glimmers of colored light. He listened in a distracted way as Sanders explained how he had been trapped in the forest after the crash of the helicopter. Sanders described his accidental meeting with Ventress and, subsequently, the discovery of Radek's body. Remembering Ventress's bitter protests at the time, Sanders stressed his reasons for this apparent attempt to drown a dead man.

Thorensen nodded dourly. "Maybe he has a chance." As if to reassure Sanders, he added: "You did the right thing."

The mulatto and the naked African half-swathed in surgical tape were sitting on the steps of the veranda. The mulatto was honing his panga, while the other rested his rifle on his one bare knee, scanning the forest. He had the slim intelligent face of a young clerk or junior foreman, and now and then glanced at Sanders with the look of a man who recognized another member, however remote, of the same educated caste. Sanders remembered him as the knife-wielding attacker whose dark reflection he had confused with his own in the hall of mirrors at Thorensen's house.