The Crystal World (14 page)

"Still here, Doctor? I've got a couple of guides for you." He pointed to the two Africans who stood at the bottom of the steps. Members of the crew of his motorcruiser, they wore jeans and blue denim shirts. One had a white peaked cap pulled down across his forehead. Both carried carbines and were scanning the forest with marked interest. "My boat is moored near here," Thorensen explained, "I'd send you back by river if the engine hadn't seized up. Anyway, they'll get you to Mont Royal in no time."

With this he strode off into the kitchen, and a moment later Sanders heard him enter the bedroom.

Surrounded by the glistening figures of the four Africans, etched in hoar frost against the darkness, Sanders waited for Thorensen to reappear. Then he turned and followed his guides, leaving Thorensen and Serena Ventress barricaded together in the sepulchre of the summer house. As they entered the forest he looked back at the veranda, where the young African, Kagwa, was still watching him. His dark body, almost exactly bisected by the white bandages, reminded Sanders of Louise Peret and her references to the day of the equinox. Thinking over his brief conversation with Kagwa, he began to realize Thorensen's motives for trying to keep Serena Venrress within the affected zone. Fearing that she might die, he preferred this half-animate immolation within the crystal vaults to her physical death in the world outside. Perhaps he had seen insects and birds pinioned alive inside their prisms, and misguidedly decided that this offered the one means of escape for his dying bride.

Following a path that skirted the inlet, they set off toward the inspection site, which Sanders estimated to be some three-quarters of a mile down-river. With luck an army unit would be stationed at the nearest margins of the affected zone, and the soldiers would be able to retrace his steps and rescue the mine-owner and Serena Ventress.

The two guides moved along at a rapid pace, barely pausing to choose their direction, one in front of Sanders and the other, wearing the peaked cap, ten yards behind. After fifteen minutes, when they had covered very nearly a mile and yet were still within the main body of the forest, Sanders realized that the sailors' real task was not to guide him to safety at all. In turning him out into the forest Thorensen was no doubt using him, in Ventress's phrase, as a decoy, confident that the architect would try to reach Sanders for news of his abducted wife.

When, for the second time, they entered a small glade between two groups of forest oaks Sanders stopped and walked back to the sailor in the peaked cap. He started to remonstrate with him, but the man shook his head and beckoned Sanders on with his carbine.

Five minutes later Sanders found that he was alone. The pathway ahead was deserted. He made his way back to the glade, where the shadows shone emptily on the forest floor. The guides had disappeared into the undergrowth.

Sanders glanced over his shoulder at the dark grottoes around the glade, listening for any footsteps, but the sheaths of the trees sang and crackled as the forest cooled in the darkness. Above, through the lattices that stretched across the glade, he could see the fractured bowl of the moon. Around him, in the vitreous walls, the reflected stars glittered like fire-flies.

He pressed on along the path. His clothes had begun to glow in the dark, the frost that covered his suit spangled by the starlight. Spurs of crystal grew from the dial of his wrist-watch, imprisoning the hands within a medallion of moonstone.

A hundred yards behind him the roar of a shotgun drummed through the trees. A carbine fired twice in reply, and a confused medley of running feet, shouts and gunfire reached Sanders as he crouched behind a trunk. Abruptly everything fell quiet again. Sanders waited, searching the darkness around him. A few fragmentary, half-formed noises came down the pathway. There was a brief shout, cut off by a second blast from the shotgun. As if far away, an African's voice cried plaintively.

Sanders made his way back through the trees. Five yards from the path, in a hollow among the roots of an oak, he found the dying figure of one of his guides. The man half-sat against the trunk, knocked back across the roots by the force of the gunbiast. He watched Sanders approach with vague eyes, one hand touching the blood that ran from his shattered chest. Ten feet away lay his peaked cap, the imprint of a small foot stamped into its crown.

Sanders knelt down beside him. The African looked away. His wet eyes were staring through an interval in the trees at the distant river. Its petrified surface stretched like white ice to the jeweled forest on the opposite shore.

A siren sounded from the direction of the summer house. Realizing that Thorensen and his men would make short work of him, Sanders stood up. The African was dying quietly at his feet. Leaving him, Sanders crossed the path and set off toward the river.

When he reached the bank he could see the motorcruiser moored in a pooi of clear water a quarter of a mile away, at the mouth of a small creek that wound off past a ruined jetty. A searchlight shone from the bridge, playing on the white surface that swept past the open water down the channel of the river.

Crouching down, Sanders ducked in and out of the grass growing from the edges of the bank. His running shadow, illuminated by the sweeping searchlight, flickered ahead of him among the vitrified trees, the dark image speckled by the jeweled light.

Half a mile down-river the channel had widened into a broad glacier. Across the surface Sanders could see the distant roof-tops of Mont Royal. Like a causeway of frozen gas, it flowed on through the darkness, riven by deep faults. At its bottom ran the icy water of the original channel. Sanders peered over the edges of the fissures, hoping for some sign of Captain Radek's body stranded on the beaches of ice below.

Forced to leave the river, when the surface broke up into a succession of giant cataracts, he approached the outskirts of Mont Royal. The frosted outline of the picket fence and the debris of military equipment marked the site of the former inspection area. The laboratory trailer, and the tables and equipment near by, had been enveloped by the intense frost. The branches in the centrifuge had blossomed again into brilliant jeweled sprays. Sanders picked up a discarded helmet, now a glass porcupine, and drove it through a window of the trailer.

In the darkness the white-roofed houses of the mining town gleamed like the funerary temples of a necropolis. Their cornices were ornamented with countless spires and gargoyles, linked together across the roads by the expanding tracery. A frozen wind moved through the deserted streets, waist-high forests of fossil spurs, the abandoned cars embedded within them like armored saurians on an ancient ocean floor.

Everywhere the process of transformation was accelerating. Sanders's feet were encased in huge crystal slippers. These spurs enabled him to walk along the sharp edges of the roadway, but soon the opposing needles would fuse together and lock him to the ground.

The eastern entrance to the town was sealed by the forest and the erupting roadway. Sanders limped back to the river, hoping to climb the series of cataracts and make his way back to the base camp to the south. As he scaled the first of the crystal blocks he could hear the underground streams beneath the moraine sluicing away into the open river.

A long crevice with an overhanging sill ran diagonally across the cataract, and led him into a series of galleries like the aerial terraces of a cathedral. Beyond these the icefalls spilled away onto a white beach that seemed to mark the southern limits of the affected zone. The vents of the buried channels lay among the icefalls, and a clear stream of moonlit water ran between the blocks and opened into a shallow river, at least ten feet below the original course. Sanders walked along the frozen beach, looking at the vitrified forest on either side. Already the trees were duller, the crystal sheaths lying in patches against the sides of the trunk like half-melted ice.

Fifty yards along the ice beach, which narrowed as the water swept past it, Sanders saw a man's dark figure standing beneath one of the overhanging trees. With a tired wave, Sanders began to run toward him.

"Wait!" he called, afraid that the man might sidestep into the forest. "Over here-"

Ten yards from him Sanders slowed to a walk. The man had not moved from beneath the tree. Head down, he was carrying a large piece of driftwood across his shoulders-a soldier, Sanders decided, foraging for firewood.

As Sanders drew up to him, the man stepped forward, in a gesture that was at once defensive and aggressive. The light from the icefalls illuminated his ravaged body.

"Radek-good God!" Appalled, Sanders stumbled back, almost tripping over a half-exposed root in the ice. "Radek-?"

The man hesitated, like a wounded animal uncertain whether to surrender or attack. Across his shoulders he still carried the wooden yoke which Sanders had fastened there. The left side of his body gave a painful heave, as if he were trying to throw off this incubus, but he was unable to raise his hands to the buckle behind his head. The right side of his body seemed to hang loosely, suspended from the wooden cross-tree like a long-dead corpse. A huge wound had been torn across the shoulder, the flesh bared to the elbow and sternum. The raw face, from which a single eye gazed at Sanders, still ran with blood that fell to the white ice below.

Recognizing the belt with which he had fastened the wooden spar to Radek's shoulders, Dr. Sanders moved forward, gesturing to the man as if to pacify him. He remembered Ventress's warning, and the pieces of crystal that he had torn away from the body when he dragged Radek from the helicopter. Then, too, he remembered Aragon tapping his eye-tooth and saying "Covered-? My tooth is the whole gold, Doctor."

"Radek, let me help-" Sanders edged forward as Radek hesitated. "Believe me, I wanted to save you-"

Still trying to shift the wooden spar from his shoulders, Radek gazed down at Sanders. Unformed thoughts seemed to cross his face, and then the one blinking eye came into focus.

"Radek-" Sanders raised a hand to restrain him, unsure whether Radek would charge him or bolt like a wounded beast into the forest.

With a shambling step, Radek drew nearer. A gruntlike noise came from his throat. He moved again, almost toppled by the swinging spar.

"Take me-" he began. There was another lurching stride. He held out a bloody arm like a scepter. "Take me _back!_"

He struggled on, the heavy spar swinging his shoulders from left to right, one foot flapping on to the ice, his face lit by the jeweled light from the forest. Sanders watched him as he jerked forward, the arm held out as if to clasp Sanders's shoulder. Already, however, he seemed to have forgotten Sanders, his attention fixed on the light from the icefalls.

Sanders moved out of his way, ready to let him go by. With a sudden sidestep Radek swung the wooden beam and drove Sanders in front of him. "_Take me-!_"

"Radek-!" Winded by the blow, Sanders stumbled ahead, like an onlooker driven towards some bloody Golgotha by its intended victim. One lurching stride after another, his pace quickening as the prismatic light of the forest mingled again with his blood, Radek pressed on, the beam across his shoulders cutting off Sanders's escape.

Sanders ran towards the icefalls. Twenty yards from the first of the blocks, where the clear streams of the subterranean channels ran across his feet, as dark and cool as his memories of the world beyond, he turned and raced down into the shallows. Radek let out his stricken cry for the last time, and Sanders plunged to his shoulders into the river and swam away across the silver water.

Some hours later, as he walked dripping through the edges of the illuminated forest, Sanders came to a wide road deserted in the moonlight. In the distance he saw the outlines of a white hotel. With its long facade and tumbled columns it looked like a floodlit ruin. To the left of the road, the forest slopes moved upwards to the blue hills above Mont Royal.

This time, as he approached the man standing beside a Land-Rover in the empty forecourt of the hotel, his wave was answered by a ready shout. A second figure patrolling the ruined hotel ran across the drive. A searchlight on the roof of the car was played on to the road in front of Dr. Sanders. The two natives, wearing the uniform of the local hospital service, came forward to meet him. In the light from the forest their liquid eyes watched Dr. Sanders as they helped him into the car, their dark fingers feeling at the drenched fabric of his suit.

Dr. Sanders sat back, too tired to identify himself to the men. One of them climbed into the driving-seat and switched on the car's radio transmitter. As he spoke into the microphone his eyes stared at the crystals still dissolving on Dr. Sanders's shoes and wristwatch. The white light sparkled faintly in the dark cabin. The last of the crystals on the dial of the wristwatch gave out their light and faded, and with a sudden movement the hands began to turn.

The road marked the final boundary of the affected zone, and to Dr. Sanders the darkness around him seemed absolute, the black air inert and empty. After the endless glimmer of the vitrified forest the trees along the road, the ruined hotel and even the two men with him appeared to be shadowy images of themselves, replicas of illuminated originals in some distant land at the source of the petrffied river. Despite his relief at escaping from the forest, this feeling of flatness and unreality, of being in the slack shallows of a spent world, filled Sanders with a sense of failure and disappointment.

A car approached along the road. The driver signalled with the searchlight on the Land-Rover and the car turned and came to a halt beside them. A tall man wearing an army battledress over his civilian clothes jumped out. He peered through the window at Sanders, and then nodded at the native driver.

"Dr. Sanders-?" he asked. "Are you all right?"

" Aragon!" Sanders opened his door and started to get out, but Aragon motioned him back. "Captain-I'd almost forgotten. Is Louise with you? Mademoiselle Peret?"