by David Drake
* * *
A mercury vapor streetlight threw a line of saw teeth through the venetian blinds to the wall above the couch. Penske lay there, fully clothed, watching the whorls which his cigarette smoke etched across the pattern. The apartment was still.
Penske took a last drag on his cigarette. Its yellow-orange glow was momentarily brighter than the blue of the streetlight. He ground the butt out in the dish with the others and the crumpled pack from which they had come. Then Penske swung his feet over the side of the couch and stood, his right hand silently drawing his knife from its sheath in the same motion. He glided across the worn carpet to the door of Coster’s room.
For a moment the swarthy man waited with his ear pressed against the panel. There was no sound within. The door did not have a working latch; its hinges were nearly silent. Penske pulled the door open just enough to slip through into the pitch-dark bedroom. His whole body followed the knife as if he were a serpent and the blade was his questing tongue.
There was a metallic click from the bed, tiny and lethal as a cobra.
“The light switch is on the right,” Coster said quietly. “Better flip it on. Carefully.”
Penske’s hand found the switch. The room was narrow. The bed lay along its axis, the foot of it pointing to the door. The M14 pointed down that same axis. Coster’s index finger was within the trigger guard. The safety catch had clicked as it slid forward. The shorter man stared at the muzzle brake of the automatic rifle. He remembered the way bullets had shredded the earth-filled jug that morning. Now his blood and tissue and splinters of his bones would spray the inside of the door panel.
“Put your knife away,” Coster said.
The shorter man only blinked.
“We’re not here to kill you, Penske,” said the automatic rifleman. His voice was calm, almost wheedling. “Put your knife away and close my door behind you. It’ll all look different tomorrow. Kawanishi will be dead, and you’ll have as much of the credit for it as you want.”
Penske swallowed and began to back through the doorway. The gun muzzle waggled disapproval. “First the knife,” Coster said.
The shorter man hunched over, his eyes on the rifle except for quick dips down to the strait boot sheath. He jabbed the point into the flesh above his ankle the first time he tried. At last he succeeded.
“Fine,” said the rifleman. “You can go now.”
Penske’s face contorted with rage. “You bastard, you gotta sleep sometime!” he said.
Coster smiled like a skull. “Do we?”
The swarthy man slammed the door, turned, and jumped back before he realized that the figure hulking on the arm of the couch was Kerr. “What’re you doing up?” Penske demanded in a husky whisper.
Kerr shrugged. “Let’s go out on the landing,” he said. “Dee’s asleep.” But it was toward the rectangle of light around Coster’s door that he nodded.
The second-floor apartment was served by an outside staircase. Its landing formed a small railed balcony, open to crisp air and the stars of early morning. Kerr waved Penske outside, then followed and swung the door closed behind them. The big man was barefoot, but he wore slacks and a shirt. The latter was unbloused to conceal his pistol.
Penske clenched his joined hands. “He can’t shoot,” he said in a low voice. “Not worth a damn.”
“You could have fooled me, then,” said Kerr. “What I saw this morning was pretty convincing.”
“I tell you he’s afraid of it!” Penske burst out. “The recoil, the noise even—he flinched every time Dee shot, and when he was shooting himself—I swear to god he kept his eyes shut!”
Kerr’s fingers played at flaking paint from the bars of the railing. His complection was richened to a true black in the wash of the street light. “It looked like that to me, too,” he admitted, “but he hit everything he shot at. He couldn’t have done that if—if you were right.”
“Unless that goddam rifle was alive,” said Penske under his breath. He gripped the railing with both hands. His eyes were focused on the cars parked in the lot beneath them.
“Don’t be a fool,” Kerr snapped.
“George, I’ve seen people who can shoot,” Penske said urgently. “That bastard’s not one of’em. Besides, nobody’s that goddam good to shoot like he did off-hand. Nobody human. He got it somewhere, and he trained it up to look like’n M14 and shoot for him. Christ, he don’t even know the difference from one kinda ammo and another. But it don’t matter ’cause he’s trained this—thing—and it’s just like a guard dog.” The little man paused, breathing deeply. “Or a witch cat,” he added.
Kerr’s index finger began to massage the gum above his bad tooth. “That’s nonsense,” he muttered around his hand. He did not look at Penske.
The smaller man touched Kerr’s wrist. “It fits, George,” he said. “It’s the only goddam thing that does. The whole truth an’ nothing but.”
Kerr pursed his lips and said, “If we suppose that … what you say … could be true, does that change anything?”
“It changes—” Penske blurted, but he stopped when Kerr raised his hand. The question had been rhetorical.
“We accepted him as a man with a sophisticated weapon,” the big man continued as if he had not been interrupted. “That’s no less true now than it was. And our need for his weapon is no less real.”
Penske blinked. “Maybe you know what you’re doing. But I don’t like it.”
Kerr patted him on the shoulder. “After tomorrow it won’t matter,” he said. “After this morning, that is. Let’s both get some sleep.”
Coster’s door was dark when the two men re-entered the silent apartment. Everything was peaceful. Penske wondered briefly at what would have happened if instead they had returned determined to kill the automatic rifleman. He took his mind off that thought as he would have taken his hand off a scorpion.
* * *
The three men in the back of the van were each expressionless in a different way. Davidson swung to the curb in front of the office building. The street was marked “No Parking” but there was little traffic this early on a Saturday morning. Kerr nodded minusculy. Penske, carrying a Dewar’s carton, scrambled out the back door. Coster followed with a long, flat box stencilled “Ajax Shelving—Light—Adjustable—Efficient”. His right hand reached through a hole in the side of the box, but a casual onlooker would not have noticed that.
The entranceway door was locked. After a moment’s fumbling with the key Kerr had procured, Penske pulled it open. Behind them, the assassins heard the van pull away. It would wait in the lot of a nearby office building until time to pick them up.
The hallways were empty and bright under their banks of fluorescents. Coster stepped toward the elevators but Penske motioned him aside. “We take the fire stairs,” he said. “Get in a elevator’n you got no control. We can’t afford that.”
The stairs were narrow and sterile, gray concrete steps in a dingy yellow well. Penske slipped once as he took two hurrying steps at a time, barking his shins and falling with a clatter on the box he carried. He got up cursing and continued to leap steps, but now he held the liquor carton in his right hand and gripped the square iron rail with his left. At the third floor landing, the little man pulled open the door and peered suspiciously down the hall.
“Clear,” he said, stepping through. He let the door swing closed as Coster grabbed for it. Penske was opening an office with another key when the rifleman joined him. Then they were inside, the hall door closed and the fluorescents in the ceiling flickering into life.
Coster threw down the shelving box and caressed the M14 with both hands. Penske squatted on the carpet as he reassembled the stock and action of his carbine. He sneered, “You shoulda took that down ’steada hauling a goddam box that size around. Or don’t you know how?”
“I don’t take him down,” said Coster. “You handle your end, I’ll handle mine.”
Penske strutted into the inner office. From the letterheads o
n the desks, the suite was connected in some fashion or other to the university. The swarthy man pushed a swivel chair aside and raised the venetian blinds. “There,” he said, waving. “There’s where the bastards’ll be.”
Coster’s slight smile did not change as he ducked a little to follow Penske’s gesture. The rifleman had not visited the ambush site before. The window looked out on a parking lot, almost empty now, and the back street which formed a one-way pair with the street in front of the building. Beyond the lot and the street was a chainlink fence surrounding the building that sprawled across the whole block. The gates were open, but there was a guardhouse with a sign which read, “Carr Industries—Knitwear Division”.
The name had amused Kerr.
In the paved yard between the gates and the two-story mill were already gathered a score of newsmen and perhaps an equal number of plain-clothes security personnel. Many of the latter carried attache cases and binoculars. They looked bored and uncomfortably warm in their suits.
The phone beside Penske rang. He jumped, waggling his carbine. Coster grinned and lifted the instrument out of its cradle. He offered it to the shorter man. Penske glowered. “Yeah, everything’s goddam fine,” he said. “Just don’t screw up yourself.” He laid the receiver down on the desk instead of hanging up. At the other end of the open line was Kerr in a sidewalk phone booth. The sound of the shots through the telephone was the signal to start the van toward the pick-up point.
Coster swung the lowest window into the room. He pushed the desk further aside and knelt with the rifle muzzle a yard back from the frame. The relative gloom of the office shielded them from the security men who were dutifully sweeping windows and rooftops with their binoculars. Coster grinned in satisfaction. He lowered the automatic rifle and began scanning the crowd left-handed through the glasses Penske had brought.
“Gonna spray the whole load a’ the bastards?” Penske asked. “Supposed to be some big mother from the State Department, too.”
“Nobody dies but Kawanishi,” said Coster. He did not take his eyes from the binoculars. “We’d lose the effect, otherwise.”
Penske grunted. Coster grimaced at him and explained, “If Martin Luther King had been gunned down with thirty whites, there would have been doubt as to just … what we had in mind. It would have been an accident, not an attack—and maybe no cities had burned. American officials can die at, say, a Memorial Day parade. Here, only the Japanese. Only a slant-eyed Nip.” He turned back to the crowd.
The swarthy man stared at the side of Coster’s head. His right hand began a stealthy, not wholly conscious, movement to his boot. As his fingers touched the knife, there was a sharp snap. Penske jumped as he had when the phone rang. The rifle lay across Coster’s lap, its muzzle pointing at Penske. The safety had just clicked off.
The rifleman set the binoculars down between them. “Don’t even think of that,” he said.
Penske’s lips were dry, but he nodded.
There was a bustle around the mill entrance. Uniformed officers had joined the plain-clothes team and were forming a double cordon against the gathering sightseers. Down the cordon and in through the gate drove a city police car with its bar lights flashing, followed by a trio of limousines. The first of the black cars disgorged its load of civilians, both Westerners and Japanese. “Small fry,” mumbled Coster beneath the binoculars.
A security man from the third, open-topped, limousine ran to the rear door of the second big car and opened it. A tall, gray-haired man in a dark suit got out. He nodded and reached a hand back to help his companion.
“Yes…,” Coster breathed. He dropped the glasses and fitted his left hand to the forward grip of the automatic rifle. A stocky man, shorter than the first, straightened and waved to the cameras. Then he hurtled forward, face-first onto a patch of concrete already darkened by the spray of his blood.
The BAM BAM of the two-round burst struck the office like hammerblows. A Daumier print on the wall jarred loose and fell. Coster scrambled back to the outer office. Penske waited a moment, his eardrums still jagged from the punishing muzzle blasts. Three security men were thrusting the Undersecretary of State back into the armored limousine like a sacked quarterback. Cut-down Uzis had come out of the attache cases, but they were useless without targets. A cluster of security men was shouting into walkie-talkies while trying to shield Kawanishi’s body. They were useless too. Kawanishi was beyond human help, his spine shattered by two bullets.
Penske broke for the door, leaving his carbine and the binoculars where they lay. He could replace them in the van. They were too dangerous to be seen carrying now. The stairwell door was still bouncing when the shorter man reached it. Coster was taking the steps two and three at a time, his right hand hugging the rifle to him through the hole in the carton. Penske, unburdened, was only a step behind when the rifleman turned at the second-floor landing, lost his footing on the painted concrete, and slid headlong down the next flight of steps. The crack of his right knee on the first step was louder than contact alone could explain.
Penske paused, staring down at the rifleman. Coster’s face was a sallow green. “Give me a hand,” he wheezed, trying unsuccessfully to rise.
“You’ll never make it with a broken kneecap,” the swarthy man said, more to himself than to the fallen man.
“God damn you!” Coster shouted. He had flung the shielding carton away from the automatic rifle. He aimed the weapon at Penske’s midriff. “Help me!”
The safety clicked on. Both men heard the sound. Coster went a shade still paler and tried to force the slotted bar forward with his index finger. It would not move.
“Sure, I’ll help you,” Penske said softly. He slipped his dagger from its sheath and stepped forward.
* * *
The van was waiting at the curb with its rear door ajar. Penske leaped in, thrusting the carton before him. He shouted, “Drive!”
“Wait!” Kerr snapped to Davidson. “Where’s Coster?”
Penske had the automatic rifle out on his lap now. He was feeling a little dizzy. “He fell and I had to leave him,” he said. “Don’t worry—he won’t talk.”
Without further orders, Davidson swung the van out into traffic. Occasional pedestrians were looking around for the source of the sirens they heard, but no one gave the escape vehicle a second glance.
Kerr’s eyes narrowed as he watched the smaller man’s fingers play with the action of the automatic rifle. After a moment he said, “Well, maybe it’s for the best.”
Penske did not reply. His mind was filling with images of men staggering and falling, each scene a separate shard differing in costume and background. Together the images turned smoothly like gear teeth engaging, each a part of a construct as yet incomplete.
“You know, I don’t think I ever got a chance to look at that,” Kerr remarked conversationally. He reached out to take the weapon.
“No!” said Penske, and the automatic rifle swung to cover the black’s chest.
For an instant Kerr thought of drawing his pistol, but the thought passed and the pressure on the trigger of the automatic rifle passed also. “Okay,” the big man said, “so long as you shoot what you’re told to shoot with it.”
Penske was no longer listening. The pattern was now complete. It stretched from a cold world whose remaining energies were all harnessed in a great design, to an Earth without native life forms. Winds whipped sand and nerve gas around badlands carven in past millenia, and the poisoned seas surged against blue-glowing shorelines. But over those landscapes coursed metal creatures who glittered and shifted their forms and raised triumphant cities to the skies.
And in Penske’s mind something clicked. A voice said in no human language, “Yes, this replacement will be quite satisfactory.…”
THAN CURSE THE DARKNESS
“What of unknown Africa?”
—H. P. Lovecraft
The trees of the rain forest lowered huge and black above the village, dwarfing it and the group of men
in its center. The man being tied to the whipping post there was gray-skinned and underfed, panting with his struggles but no match for the pair of burly Forest Guards who held him. Ten more Guards, Baenga cannibals from far to the west near the mouth of the Congo, stood by with spears or Albini rifles. They joked and chattered and watched the huts hoping the villagers would burst out to try to free their fellow. Then killing would be all right.…
There was little chance of that. All the men healthy enough to work were in the forest, searching for more trees to slash in a parody of rubber gathering. The Law said that each adult male would bring four kilograms of latex a week to the agents of King Leopold; the Law did not say that the agents would teach the natives how to drain the sap without killing the trees it came from. When the trees died, the villagers would miss their quotas and die themselves, because that too was the Law—though an unwritten one.
There were still many untouched villages further up the river.
“If you cannot learn to be out in the forest working,” said a Baenga who finished knotting the victim to the post with a jerk that itself cut flesh, “we can teach you not to lie down for many weeks.”
The Forest Guards wore no uniforms, but in the Congo Basin their good health and sneering pride marked them more surely than clothing could have. The pair who had tied the victim stepped back, nodding to their companion with the chicotte. That one grinned, twitching the wooden handle to unfurl the ten-foot lash of square-cut hippopotamus hide. He had already measured the distance.
A naked seven-year-old slipped from the nearest hut. The askaris were turned to catch the expression on the victim’s face at the first bite of the chicotte, so they did not see the boy. His father jerked upright at the whipping post and screamed, “Samba!” just as the feathery hiss-crack! of the whip opened an eight-inch cut beneath his shoulder blades.
Samba screamed also. He was small even for a forest child, spindly and monkey-faced. He was monkey quick, too, darting among the Guards as they spun. Before anyone could grab him he had wrapped himself around the waist of the man with the whip.