It could take care of itself for an instant. I risked a glance out, and saw that the FBY men were moving slowly into the gallery. Two big searchlights, behind them, warred with the place’s shadows.
As the men advanced, they made sowing motions with their hands and I heard a series of faint plops. What—? Oh, they were wearing gas masks.
I waited until they were all within the gallery. Their movements were cautious; they were looking for us in every shadow and behind every stalactite. I smelled a sweetish smell, and knew they were using anesthetizing gas.
Now. The moon was just past the meridian; it was time. I motioned to Despoina. We made the phantasm stand up.
It was just under six feet tall, faintly luminous, and as unsubstantial as a ghost. In fact, strictly speaking, it was a ghost, being made of what old-fashioned mediums called ectoplasm. But I thought it would pass muster, if only I could startle our enemies enough.
The phantasm floated forward, until it stood just within the mouth of the gallery. As loudly as I could, I bellowed, “You sons of bitches, now you’re in our trap!”
They must have heard my shout as coming from all sides at once. They spun round, hands on their guns, ready to fire. And they saw the phantom, its arm raised over its shoulder, poised to throw a bomb at them.
Some nervous character fired at it; I heard the coughing roar of a mini-burp. My ruse was going to work; it was working. In the next minute everybody would have been throwing grenades. But Despoina, who had been supplying most of the plasm for the phantasm, gave a little moan and fell forward. She had fainted. And the phantasm collapsed like an umbrella shutting up.
There was a crisscrossing of shouts within the gallery. An authoritative voice overrode them. “Silence! That was nothing but a trick, one of their magic tricks. They are unarmed. Arnaudi and Bacon, stand guard at the entrance. The rest of you, go on with your search!”
Their famous discipline held. Arnaudi and Bacon detached themselves from the group, and the others went on with their cautious investigation of the lower gallery.
I felt sick with defeat. In a minute or two they would realize we weren’t in the gallery, and start looking elsewhere for us. What were we to do? If we left the shelter of the rock outcrop, Arnaudi and Bacon would see us; and if, by some miracle, we got past them to one of the exits from D, the FBY would have men stationed at the top.
What could we do? We might be able to evade them for a few hours, perhaps even for a couple of days. They were sure to get us in the end. And then…
Would they really dissect—? Of course they would. They had blown up a whole level, with half a thousand people in it, merely to insure that we Wicca should no longer be able to get to H. They certainly would not balk at a little dissection. And then Despoina and I would have the opportunity—the very undesirable opportunity—of finding out just what the FBY man had meant, that night on the edge of the burial ground, when he said, “If they can be turned…”
Despoina stirred against the rough rock where she was lying, and opened her eyes. In a thread of a voice, she said, “The rock.”
For a moment I hated her. What did she mean by that? If she had not fainted, we would not now be in this desperate pass. Then I looked at the inner side of the rock and saw, about shoulder level, a half-detached, roughly globular rock chunk about the size of a baseball.
In a moment I was prying at it frantically. If I could get it loose—if it could be thrown—Why not? It was worth trying. We couldn’t be any worse off.
I got the chunk loose just as, to judge from their footsteps, the FBY finished searching the gallery and started back toward the entrance. The moon was well past her peak. With only an instant to aim, I threw the globe, baseball-pitcher fashion, for all I was worth.
I had aimed at a point near the entrance, at a cluster of stalactites depending from the gallery’s low roof. I missed the first; my rock crashed into the second stalactite. There was a dull, hollow noise, and then the whole lower half of the limestone mass broke off. It struck the gallery floor only a few feet from the advancing FBY.
Even then it might not have worked. But the men on guard at the entrance had seen the flight of my missile and heard its impact. One of them panicked. He threw a hand grenade at us.
It did no harm. But somebody inside the gallery, hearing the crashing rock and then the explosion, decided it was an attack. He threw a grenade toward the middle of the gallery. He must have heard the explosion of Arnaudi’s grenade as coming from there.
The beams of the searchlights danced about crazily. Someone threw another grenade, and then another. In the next half-minute there must have been a dozen explosions, interspersed with rifle fire and the coughs of a mini-burp.
The authoritative voice was bawling desperately, trying to reestablish order. But by then it was already too late. I felt a long, grinding shudder through the floor.
The roof of the gallery began to shake. It bulged downward, lower and lower, like a straining membrane. Then it broke, and ton upon ton of earth and rock came pouring in.
I had gathered Despoina in my arms and stood pressed tight against the rock face, praying the rock here would hold. A man—Arnaudi or Bacon—ran toward us, yelling something. A section of the roof fell behind him. Then a shower of earth covered him up. The noise of pouring rock grew louder, and then slowly grew less, and ceased.
It seemed to be over. The lower gallery had collapsed completely; all sound of voices from within it had died. But I had felt another warning tremor from below. I stood waiting, holding Despoina so tightly my arms ached.
There was a long, enormous roar, that somehow sounded melancholy. Another, another, and the roaring grew nearer. The floor tipped under me. I clutched at the rock.
The floor sloped even more violently. Off to the right, where the main-level structure was, I heard an advancing noise, a mighty, dreadful roaring. I knew what it was. No need to speculate—the levels were falling in.
Everything before me was abruptly wiped out in a cascade of falling rock. There was nothing to breathe; the air seemed solid. Too dazed to be frightened, I held Despoina in my arms and waited for life or death.
I had braced my feet against the rock outcropping. Now it, too, broke away. I felt myself slipping forward helplessly.
More rock. A barrier that I clutched at the last moment. And then, from the riven levels hundreds of feet above us, the glorious light of the moon broke in.
I sighed shakily. Despoina stirred in my arms, and I set her down carefully on the sloping floor. The air was full of a choking dust. It settled heavily for a long time.
26
The moon was our guide. Looking up I could see, between the jagged side of the shaft and the edge of the gigantic rubble heap, clear spaces through which it might be possible to climb. I leaned out from the shallow, slowly sinking ledge, and caught at the end of a length of construction steel over my head. It gave a little, but it was solidly weighted under tons of rubble. I was able to pull myself up on it and straddle it.
From there I leaned over for Despoina and gave her my hand. When we were both astride the girder, we inched our way along it briefly, took a couple of steps on the sliding rubble, and caught at the skeleton of a steel door that stuck out higher up, from where D had been. From here we were able to grasp a reinforced concrete column that must have been a roof support. Our progress was painfully slow, partly because we had to test everything before we put our weight on it, and partly because we were desperately tired.
We worked our way up past the protruding legs of office furniture, crumpled refrigerators, sections of steel bookcases, broken lavatory basins, fifty-gallon drums of coolants, shattered power equipment, steel bedsteads—all the material side of an autarkic private world. And now that world had sunk into the depths.
When we got to where level C had been, we had a bit of luck. At the very edge of the excavated level an escalator was still standing. It was not running, of course, and it hung out over nothing, but we c
ould climb it at our own pace.
After some thirty feet there was a landing, and the escalator made a turn of 180 degrees. We went on climbing. At the next landing there was an interruption. A concrete boulder lay between us and the next steps.
It could be climbed over, I thought, but we were so tired that we had to have rest. The escalator seemed solid enough. I had seen a foam rubber mattress hanging limply out of the rubble near us. Telling Despoina to wait, I snagged the mattress with a length of angle iron, and drew it up to the landing.
I spread it out on the hard floor. Then we lay down, and with Despoina in my arms I fell into the deepest and most refreshing sleep that ever I had in my life.
When I woke, the moon was halfway down the sky. Despoina opened her eyes and smiled at me. They say you can’t tell colors by moonlight; that’s nonsense. Her hair was still a burning red.
Without a word being spoken, we began to make love. What surprised me most was how easy everything was. But then, this pleasure had been in preparation for a long while.
When I had first met Despoina she had been the great witch, the high priestess, naked to the waist, but clothed in authority. Next she had been my companion, a woman by my side in stresses and dangers. Now it was neither of these that I embraced, but the very spirit, wild and sweet, of the ageless, immortal earth.
When we were satisfied, we slept for a little while. Then—reluctantly, but the moon was getting low—we left our bed and pulled on our clothes.
We got around the concrete mass without much difficulty. At the top of the escalator the floor had broken away, but a service ladder, seemingly quite strong, was still against the rock and led up toward level A.
When the ladder ended, I reached out for a pipe. This came away when I put weight on it; I looked about for something else, and found, above and to the right, a large square opening.
From what I remembered of A’s geography, this would lead to one of the many subsidiary entrances. There would be a passage, sloping gradually upward, and then we would be on the surface again.
The trouble was in getting up to the opening. Despoina, below me, saw what the difficulty was. She called up, “There’s the back of an office chair where I can reach it. If you wedge the end under the top ladder rung, you can climb up the slats.”
“Okay,” I answered; “hand it up.”
The chairback was sturdy oak, the kind of chair one finds in seminar rooms. I turned the concave face toward the wall, hooked the top under the rung, and went up the slats before I had time to worry about falling back. I threw the upper part of my body forward into the opening. At the cost of two barked shins, I was inside. Then I reached down for Despoina. She was bigger than Kyra, but she didn’t weigh very much more.
The passage was lighted by a fluorescent glow, dimmer than the light of the dying moon outside. There was a draft of air down it from the still distant and invisible surface.
I said, “Despoina, how did you happen to know Ames?”
She laughed. “Has that been on your mind all this time?”
“Yes. You did know him, you know.”
“I never denied it.” She sighed.
“When I first began to dream about you,” she went on, “I never could see your face… Do you know now who you are, Sam?”
“I think so. I’m the devil.”
“You’re the person our persecutors called the devil,” she amended. “They gave that name to the male counterpart of the high priestess, the other focus of power in the circle. You’re of the old blood, Sam.”
“I know. I mean, now I know.”
“Yes… When I first began to have dreams about you, I never could see your face. I had to hunt for you, and the most likely place to find you seemed in the FBY, who obviously were in possession of some of our techniques.”
“So Ames—”
“Ames was one of the people I thought might be you. He passed the first tests well, but failed further along.
“Ames’s contacts with me attracted the attention of his superiors, and Gerald was assigned to spy on us.”
“Who was Gerald?” I asked.
“He was the man you saw die of the pulmonary form of the plague on level F1. Don’t you remember, when Kyra first saw you she said, ‘You’re not Gerald’? She didn’t know he was dead.
“I had been inclined to take him at face value, but the elders distrusted him. They set a trap for him, a trap an innocent man would have ignored. His death was the proof of his guilt. But we didn’t mean him to die.”
We had been walking along, slowly but steadily, while we talked. Now I said, “Was Nipho another of your candidates?”
She laughed. “No. He saw me with Ames a few times, and remembered me.”
I sighed. “Are you still vexed?” she asked.
“Vexed? Yes, I suppose I am. I’m wondering what the future will be like—
“After the plagues, society fell apart because people could no longer cooperate. But what I’m carrying in my pockets—what we went down to level H to get—will change that. And then what will happen, Dess? If people can cooperate again, won’t they cooperate for mutual destruction? That is what has always happened in the past.”
She nodded. “Yes, there is a chance. But the plagues have produced physical changes in people, and not all of them are reversible. We are different from what we used to be. If there is the possibility of the old bad world again, there is also the possibility of building it up better than it was. The risk is worth taking. We have come through so much! We must be hopeful about this.”
We had reached the very end of the passage. The night lay before us. The moon had set. The sky was quite dark. Cassiopeia was at its highest point above Polaris, and the bright stars of Orion burned in the east.
“Which is it, Despoina,” I asked musingly, “‘the clockwork of the heavens, impressive in a rather boring Newtonian way,’ or ‘the army of unalterable law’?”
“You are well-read, Sam,” she answered. Her profile glinted faintly in the starlight. “I don’t know the answer. But perhaps it is enough that we have left the underworld forever, and can say with a mightier poet, ‘We issued forth, and saw again the stars.’”
Sign of the Labrys Page 17