“Who? You must have meant somebody.”
I could feel her considering whether to speak. “Kyra,” she said at last.
“Kyra? My half-sister? What did she do?”
“We didn’t know whether to admire her or to punish her. Kyra… loosed the yeasts.”
I didn’t understand what she meant immediately. Then I thought what an odd revelation this was to be made under these particular circumstances—silence, pale light, and Despoina and I descending gently together toward the end of our quest. I said, “You mean that Kyra was responsible for the outbreak of the plagues? I don’t believe it. It’s impossible.”
“No, it’s true. Kyra was a medical student then, in her last year of school. She was working part time as a lab assistant, to help with her expenses.
“The laboratory she was working in was under contract with the government, investigating fungi for possible use in biological warfare. One day Kyra found a cage of guinea pigs dying with something they hadn’t been infected with. It was the pulmonary form of the plague.
“Kyra should have destroyed them at once, or have called in her superior to decide what was to be done. She didn’t. She made cultures of the spores and released them. People began to die. And then the pulmonary mutated into the neurolytic form of the plague.”
My face must have shown my shock, for Despoina said hurriedly, “Consider the situation, Sam. Have you forgotten? Nuclear war seemed absolutely inevitable. Nobody knew from day to day—from hour to hour—when it would begin. We lived in terror, terror which was sure to accomplish itself. Nobody even dared to hope for a quick death.
“Kyra realized what had come into her hands. She acted. She took on her shoulders a terrible responsibility; she assumed a dreadful guilt. She knew that plagues are never universally fatal. She decided it was better that nine men out of ten should die, than that all men should.”
Still I was silent. Despoina went on, still defensively, “Was she wrong, Sam? Can we really think so? Some people did survive. And Kyra had no reason to believe she was immune. She risked her own life just as much as anyone’s else.”
“She broke the law, though,” I said finally.
“Yes, the witch law. Such a decision should never have been made without the concurrence of the elders. So there had to be a punishment.”
“Was that why she was sent to level F?”
“Yes. She hasn’t been there constantly, though—only for the last three years. She was resentful at first. Her time of exile is nearly done now. Soon she can come back to the surface again.”
I nodded. What a person Kyra was! Unhesitatingly she had taken on her young shoulders—she couldn’t have been over twenty at the time—the agony of a decision a god might have flinched from making. Mrs. Prometheus—I felt proud to be related to her.
The light had been dimming. Now it was almost dark. Our gentle descent continued, but from the feel of the air I thought we must be getting near the bottom of the shaft. I was quite unprepared, though, when Despoina called out loudly and suddenly, “Cover your eyes, Sam! The light!”
I obeyed, but I was a fraction of a second too late. A terrible light broke over my eyes.
It left me blinded. It was not only the intensity of the light—though that was bad enough—but an odd paralyzing quality it had. My optical apparatus was intact, but the nerves could transmit no messages.
My feet touched bottom. We had landed. I said to Despoina, “Can you see anything?”
“A little. I think I know where we are, though H is a big level. I’ll try to lead you. I expect our sight will come back. They can’t have meant to blind users of the anti-grav permanently, only long enough to let them disarm any hostile people coming in that way. Come on.”
We began to stumble forward, Despoina holding my left hand and using her free arm to guide herself along the wall. The other time I had been on H, my eyes had been dazed with fever; now I was literally and actually blinded. To this day, I know little of what H was really like. The people I have asked about it, including Dess herself, are always cagey.
“Can you see any better?” I asked as we lurched along.
“A very little. But I think it’s not much farther. We must be almost there.”
We moved on for three hundred—five hundred feet more. Then Despoina opened a door and guided me inside. “My sight’s coming back,” I announced.
“Good. Mine is almost normal. Sit down on the bed, Sam. I know where our stuff is.”
I felt behind me, located a padded surface, and let myself down on it. I heard the sound of drawers being opened. My vision was returning in patches—small bright areas separated by big stretches of dark. But I could see enough of the wall in front of me to realize that I was once more in the little room with the sagging American flag on the wall, and the desk with the battery of telephones. I had come back to the spot on H designed to safeguard the “one most precious life.” (He had probably not felt very precious toward the end; the military had done a lot of arm-twisting on him. Death must have come to him as rather a relief.)
The patches of perception in my field of vision grew larger, and suddenly the darkness was gone. I saw Despoina standing before me, her face radiant with triumph, holding something out to me in her hands.
“Is that what we’ve been hunting?” I asked. “Two bottles marked ‘Anacin,’ and a bottle of Tums?”
She laughed. I had never seen her look so glad. “The spores of the mutated fungus are in the Tums bottle,” she said, “and the extracts we made from them are in the bottles marked ‘Anacin.’ I think we have enough just in the two bottles to allow everybody alive in the United States at present to have a substantial dose. The extracts are potent stuff.
“Put the bottles in your pockets, Sam. I haven’t any way of carrying them.”
“And the lab notes?” I asked. I was buttoning the Tums bottle in my right breast pocket.
“Here.” She picked up a filing folder marked “Classified” and handed it to me.
I took the lab notes out—there were only four or five pages of them, on thin bond paper—and folded them up. I put them in my breast pocket with the Tums bottle. The two plastic bottles marked “Anacin” I bestowed separately, one in my left breast pocket, the other in my hip pocket, where I buttoned the flap.
Now that what we had come for was safely lodged on my person, I felt an intense relief. Not only had we attained our purpose, but also, if there should be more trouble with the FBY, we had something to bargain with.
And now one question was inescapably the next item on the agenda. Despoina and I had consciously shirked mentioning it to each other; now it had to be faced. How were we to get up to the surface again?
From the corridor I heard the tinkling of tiny bells.
22
The sound of bells was coming from a man in the plum-colored uniform of the FBY. He had a little crystal dinner bell in each hand, and whenever he moved or made a gesture, the bells tinkled. The uniform itself was considerably the worse for wear.
He stood poised on the balls of his feet, looking at us with his shoulders hunched and his head forward. The skin of his face and scalp had a frosty, translucent brightness, like that of certain whiter berries. He was completely bald.
“It’s—is it Nipho?” Despoina asked doubtfully.
“I guess so,” the man answered. He rubbed his nose, and the bell in his hand made a pretty noise. “Call me madam.”
“What—how do you happen to be here?” she asked.
“They left me here when they closed the level off,” Nipho told us. “They didn’t want me with them any more. They tried to adjust me, you see. Yes, they tried to adjust me. But it didn’t work.”
“What do you mean by that?” I said.
He turned toward me. “Why, that they—Do you have the seeing? Look in my head.”
I tried, and saw, after some effort, that the two hemispheres of his brain were crowded together by a rubbery fig-like structure on the le
ft side. “Does it hurt?” I asked involuntarily.
“No, but there’s always a fussing going on in my head. That’s why I ring the bells… They put it up my nose.”
“You mean the FBY?” I asked.
He nodded, and there was a tiny tintinnabulation. “Yes, the FBY. I volunteered.”
“What were they trying to do?” Despoina asked.
He turned a little to face her, and the bells tinkled again. “It’s Despoina, isn’t it? I can’t see very well. Yes, Despoina. They were trying to make me like you.”
“Like me? Why?” she asked.
“So I could do the things you do. It was an experiment. If it had worked, we would all have been adjusted to be like Despoina. We know what you people can do. We wanted to do it better and more easily.”
I had noticed before an odd overlapping between us and our opponents. And Kyra had said that they had some of our techniques. But somehow it had never occurred to me that the FBY could be trying to duplicate our abilities for itself. I had thought their objective was simpler and more classic: to set up a new version of an old-style police state.
Ames had said his organization wasn’t interested in Despoina. He ought to have known better. They were interested in whatever he was interested in. His organization keeps a tight grip on its men.
“It wasn’t just the result of my work you wanted, then?” Despoina asked.
He pouted. “Oh—that too. Certainly that too. But Daddy-O used to say that what we needed was to take one of you people apart and find out what made him tick.
“Why are you two in such a sweat to get back to the surface? There’s nothing up there that’s so special. It’s apt to be windy and damp.”
Neither Despoina nor I had mentioned getting back to the surface; Nipho must be somewhat telepathic, I thought. It wasn’t surprising, considering what had been done to him. The extra structure in his brain should have had some effect.
“Never mind why we want back,” I told him “Just take it that we do.”
“Oh. But you could stay on down here with me, if you weren’t so stubborn. It’s not so bad, once one gets used to it. There’s plenty to eat, and I sleep in the president’s bed. It’s lonely, though. I could use some company.”
Despoina had been peering at him, her hands on her shoulders in one of the ritual attitudes. Now she said, “Do you know another way up, Nipho? A way that wasn’t blocked off when they blew up G?”
“No, I don’t,” he answered readily. “There may be one, but I don’t know about it. Why ask me, Spina? You know more about H than anybody else.”
There it was again—the hint of familiarity between my lady and our pursuers. What had Ames been to her? Her lover? Probably. But I didn’t like the idea at all.
Nipho turned to me. “I like you,” he said. “I always wanted to be a girl… Why don’t you try to get up by the way you came down? That isn’t blocked off.”
I thought of the interminable descent, and the practical impossibility of getting up the shaft again, even with the pull of gravity much reduced. And at the top of the shaft was Ratty, eating desserts and unable to transmit a pile of planks without splintering it into excelsior. “We can’t,” I said. “It won’t work.”
“Oh… Do you hear something?” He cocked his head in the manner of a dog picking up a scurry of mice.
I listened. “No,” I said.
“Well, I do. I have good ears. It’s”—he cocked his head again—“it’s a digger. They’re digging down to you. You could get up that way.”
I still didn’t hear anything. “A digger? Who’s using it?” I said.
“Who do you suppose?” he asked, and launched himself at my throat.
The attack caught me by surprise. Usually, before a man jumps you, his eyes move, and this gives you a little warning. I went over backward, unable to break my fall, and hit my head on the rock floor. For a moment I lay stunned.
Nipho sat down on my chest and started to strangle me. I tried to throw him off, but all I could do was to thrash futilely with my legs in the air behind him. My upper arms were held down by his knees.
I got halfway up, and then he forced me down again. I made myself go limp, hoping he’d relax his hold, but it didn’t work.
I was getting awfully short of air. My field of vision swam in a reddish haze. I was still trying to get my body up off the ground when Despoina, who had circled around back of Nipho, gave him a vicious rabbit punch on the nape of the neck.
Nipho grunted, a long, bubbling grunt, and collapsed sideways. I pushed him off me, got to my feet, and looked around for something to tie him up with.
I couldn’t find anything. Despoina, seeing my difficulty, went into the little room with the American flag and came back with one of the president’s bed sheets (no paper sheets for him). I managed to get it torn into long strips, and by the time Nipho came back to consciousness I had him tied up like a holiday turkey.
“How could you, dear?” he said, and then, more viciously, “You’ll be sorry. Wait till Daddy-O gets through with you.”
“I doubt it,” I told him. I had to raise my voice to make myself heard. The corridor was full of a grinding, thudding noise that kept getting louder.
For a moment I couldn’t think what it was. Despoina put her lips close to my ear. “It’s the digger,” she said.
23
The nose of the digger broke through the rock roof in a flood of diamond light. It was like the misty aureole of rainbow color one sees at the bottom of a high waterfall, and for a moment I thought of ferny grottoes and cool greenery. Then the big helical stairway slid silently through the fifteen-foot-wide opening and made a noiseless contact with the rock floor.
Two men in the familiar plum-colored uniform were standing on the lower steps. One of them reached behind him and touched a lever on the central shaft around which the helix was mounted. The digging cone retracted, the noise ceased. There was an effect of seafaring about it, as if men at the prow of a ship had put her in to shore and run her up on the beach.
I saw other men on the steps above them. The abrupt cessation of the noise of the digger made me feel confused, and this feeling was increased when the two men stepped lightly from the lower turn of the coil and came toward the president’s office, their hands on their side arms.
They had certainly seen us. I did not know what to do. For a moment I felt utterly lost, as if an invisible thread I had been following had broken without warning and left me empty-handed in the midst of unknown dangers. The rock walls and corridors around me had a pointless artificiality, like the setting for an insipid play. Then Despoina put her hand on my shoulder, and my mind steadied.
I was of the Wicca, after all, and though the men who had dug down through G to capture us would certainly be on their guard against any of our devices, I might be able to do something. Kyra had taught me a good many things.
The FBY men were still a few yards away. “Come along, you two,” the man in the lead said in a brisk voice. “We’re taking you topside.”
“No, you’re not,” I answered. I pushed Despoina behind me for her better protection. “I want to speak to the chief.”
“What!” The man in the lead (he was blond and clean-cut, very much a member of an elite) gave a hard, snorting laugh. “Nonsense! Prisoners don’t ask to speak to the chief. Come along.”
“We’re not prisoners,” I replied. I unbuttoned my right breast pocket and pulled out the glass bottle labeled “Tums.”
“In this bottle,” I told the two men, “are spores of a new form of plague. It is a mutated form of the yeast that causes neurolytic plague, but it is even deadlier. If I undo the cap on the bottle and pull out the cotton, you and everybody on that digging contraption will be dead in less than sixty seconds. The lady and I, because of our physical peculiarities, are immune.”
His jaw set. “And if I simply stun you?”
“There’s a good chance the bottle will break as I fall.”
He g
ave me a piercing look. Plainly, he thought I might be lying, but he couldn’t be sure. For a long moment we stood facing each other, locked in a mutual immobility. Then, without turning his head, he said to the man with him, “Davis, please go tell our head that the prisoner would like to speak with him. Tell him the circumstances.”
“Very well, captain.” Davis went toward the digger at a brisk walk, leaving his superior and me once more staring into each other’s eyes.
I kept my gaze steady, but my mind was elsewhere. I was running over the small armory of devices Kyra had taught me, wondering which of them would serve. Fith-fath? Almost certainly not—we couldn’t keep it up long enough, and even if we were able to evade the FBY men’s eyes, we wouldn’t be able to get past them on the helical stair. They would detect us by touch, if not by sight.
Wasn’t there anything else? “Magic” indubitably works; but its processes, generally speaking, have an organic slowness like the growth of a flower. It is difficult to hurry them. I remembered something Kyra had told me once, while she tossed up the athame and caught it again: that the dead have set up a pattern that can sometimes be contacted and used. That is why they are called “the mighty dead.”
While these thoughts ran through my mind, the FBY s man and I had stood confronting each other, our eyes locked. Now from the helical stair behind him a man stepped to the floor and came toward us at an even pace.
He was older than the others, his hair lightly gray, and his bearing had the ease of uncontested authority. When he got to me he looked me up and down for an instant and then said, “What do you want?” in a civil, but quite , impersonal way.
“We want to go back to the surface,” I told him, “but not under guard, and not as prisoners. You are to let us go completely free.”
As I spoke, I became aware that my mind had separated into at least three parts: the part with which I was speaking to Daddy-O; the part which was anxiously trying to contact one of the patterns of power; and the part which was planning an over-all strategy. Yet “I” was in command of all three, and I felt as easy about it as a man might who was simultaneously smoking a pipe and reading a book. Despoina was standing close behind me, her hand on my shoulder, and that may have had something to do with it. There never was a greater witch than my lady.
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