Stairway to Forever

by Robert Adams

  "Tom ...r gasped Fitz. "What. . . ? How?"

  The huge feline used the inches-wide tongue to lick a massive paw and begin to wash its face, remarking the while, "Rather an inept name to keep

  using, since it denotes a male cat and I now am a female cat, but we'll let that pass, for the nonce. If you will recall, I told you when I visited you last that you saw me in that other world, then, as I always had looked to you when I was alive there. I thought that, as you will be coming to the hills, it was better that you see me once as I now look, lest you not know me and thus fear me.

  "Yes, it is me, the one you call Tom. Still the same cat, only bigger and better. Now that youve seen me, I'm going to leave and get across the Pony Plain while still it's dark. You go back to sleep, old friend."

  inner and the outer shutters over the stern-ports, locked all save one of the outer doors and secured in place sheets of plastic film that would, hopefully, prevent sand sifting into his home during his absence.

  With everything locked or bolted or secured, he shoved the heavy planks over the gunwales into the waist of the ship, mounted the now-warmed bike and put it into gear, then began to negotiate the miles of dunes that lay between the ship and the plain that separated dunes and the forested hills and valleys of the interior, these latter, his destination.

  As he drove up and down the dunes under a rising, warming sun, Fitz tried in vain to sort out the—events? dreams?—of the preceding night. It would have immeasurably comforted him to have been able to confidently assure himself that everything concerning the repeated nocturnal visits of his long-dead cat had been nothing save dreams, but he could no longer so assure himself with anything approaching confidence, for so very many completely impossible things had recently taken place in his life that he now lacked the confident assurance to name anything, any circumstances as impossible, ever again.

  "All right, then," he thought to himself, while the vibration of the bikes sizable engine permeated his body, "let's say that Tom—or what used to be Tom, in that other world—was really there, in a locked and barred chamber that not even a house cat-sized beast could have really entered, much less a two-hundred-odd-pound feline. No, forget for the moment the imposs ... no, improbabilities of it all and concentrate on the premise that it really happened. Right? Right!

  "Okay, Tom was there, not only last night but all those other nights, too. He says he lives in the hills and he wants me to come there, also. That much is

  understandable, at least, he was always a sociable cat and I don't doubt that he longs for the companionship of a proven friendly human being. It's this other business of which he spoke, though, that really throws me; this business of some powers I'm supposed to regain or develop in those hills, this personage or thing called 'Dagda' I'm supposed to meet.

  "And what am I to think of this bugaboo, this thing Tom calls Teeth and Legs. He says that it, they, are shaped like a man, but with the jaws and teeth of a true predator, can run as fast as my bike can travel at top speed—which sounds a bit imposs . . . unlikely— and that not even the biggest pony-stallion can stand against one of the creatures. And there's supposed to be one or more right now, on the very section of plain that I have to cross to get to the hills from here, the shortest route.

  "Am I to believe that Tom was really there last night, then I guess I have to believe in this Teeth and Legs, too, so I'd better keep my eyes peeled and my weapons ready; if I can't outrun it, then I'll just have to be prepared to kill it, like it or not."

  From the crest of the last high dune, Fitz could see no animals on the plain, unless a cloud of dusty sand far and far to the westward represented a herd of ponies. It was unusual to sit his bike in this spot and not to see at least some rat-tailed ostriches, a small herd of grazing ponies or a few of the flying rabbits, but the only living creatures he finally sighted—and even these so far away to east or west that he needed to make use of his big binoculars—were a couple of scurrying, tailless rats and a high-wheeling raptor or buzzard, lonely in the clear sky and so far up and away that he could not clearly identify it.

  He began to really worry, then, while he negotiated the inland slope of the dune, knowing from his

  hunting experiences in the other world that when animals failed to follow usual patterns of behavior, there was always an excellent reason for such deviance. Rather than just speeding up and over and down the succession of low dunes that lay between him and the seaward margin of the plain, he now stopped upon each low crest to examine the country ahead for possible danger. And, on the crest of the last one, he drew his carbine from its scabbard and chambered a round, replacing it in the tube with one from his supply.

  He rode slowly and most warily across the seemingly deserted plain, assiduously avoiding the higher, thicker stands of plumed grasses and bushy shrubs, trying to keep at least fifty yards distance of unobstructed terrain between him and anyplace that might give concealment to any large predator. Tom had said that the Teeth and Legs were shaped like him but taller, larger and heavier than him, so that gave him at least a little idea as to just how much in the way of concealment might be required to hide one of the things.

  At midday, he halted in a carefully selected spot that gave him a view of seventy-five to over a hundred yards on all sides. There, while keeping close watch on the horizons and peering with binoculars at any closer declivities or stands of plants that might mask the presence of a large beast, he ate hurriedly out of his supplies, topped off the fuel tank of the bike and painstakingly rechecked his weapons—carbine, drilling, revolver, the Ka-bar knife at his belt and the Gerber Frisco shiv in his boot, even the flare projector, for in a real pinch it too could serve as a close-range weapon.

  But he thought that he was to make it completely across the plain without so much as sight of one of

  the monsters, for the sheen of sun upon the spring-fed pond at the inland margin of the plain was in easy sight and he was headed toward it, angling a bit to the east in order to avoid a declivity some five or six feet deep and some twenty feet long by ten wide, when suddenly, it was there. Up, out, over the lip of the hole it came with a bound, covered the intervening yards with but one or two racing, leaping strides, a black-skinned, five-fingered hand tipped with black, flat, blood-dripping nails reaching for Fitz at the end of of a long, hairy arm.

  Warned by his peripheral vision, the man swayed to his right and gunned the bike, which leapt forward, momentarily leaving the ambusher in a cloud of dust and fine particles of sand. But it was only a thing of the moment; a swift glance over a shoulder told Fitz that much. Impossible as it seemed, the incredibly long legs of the dark, hairy predator were covering ground at at prodigious rate. Tom had been right, then, Fitz no longer doubted it; that thing would not take long to overhaul the bike even at top speed, which speed he dare not maintain for long over the rough, uneven landscape, in any case.

  Making a quick decision to take advantage of the small lead he still owned, Fitz braked hard and spun the bike about at the top of a low rise in the terrain, drawing the carbine from out its scabbard while still the dust and sand thrown up by his wheels was in the air all around him. The hirsute pursuer stopped in mid-stride, paused, then came on a bit more slowly, clearly wary of such unusual prey conduct.

  Breathing and moving deliberately, Fitz brought up his weapon and nestled the toe of the butt in his shoulder, just below the clavicle. He released the safety, observed the hairy apparition over the length of the barrel and considered just where it would be

  best to place the first—hopefully, the first, last and only—shot. Months of target practice with the piece had given him understanding of and thorough respect for both the weapon and the cartridge—the hollow-nosed, soft-point weighing two hundred and forty grains, leaving the muzzle at a speed of over one thousand, seven hundred feet per second and with an energy of something more than sixteen hundred pounds. Compared to the personal weapons with which he had fought World War Two and the Korean War, this carbin
e was truly awesome in its potential lethality.

  Even so, the relatively short-barrelled weapon did have limitations of accurate fire at distance. This might have been helped had Fitz succumbed to the blandishments of the gun shop that had sold him the piece, then customized it to his personal specifications, and allowed them to install a scope, but he had thought then and still thought now that a carbine was basically a rather short-range weapon, at best, and that a scope was just one more thing he could have break or go out of kilter at a bad moment and of which he knew nothing about repairing.

  Recognizing the value of predators in Nature's scheme of things, he did not really want to kill this one, but if it came to a question of his life or its, he would. Nonetheless, he tried a warning shot, hoping that the roar and muzzle blast of the Remington magnum would terrify the whatever-it-was into finding other prey. He aimed the shot just above the thick-haired crest of the things head.

  It did stop for a brief moment, just long enough for Fitz to jack another round into the smoking chamber and eject the empty case, but then it came on, relentlessly. He set his jaws and compressed his lips in a tight line; there was no help for it, then, he'd have to kill the beast.

  He saw dust puff up as the big, heavy slug struck the animal's body, some eight inches below the left shoulder. To his way of thinking, that should have been a true heart-shot . . . but the Teeth and Legs obviously did not know it, for it just kept coming, gnashing its fearsome fangs, the cuspids looking to be big as a tiger's. So he worked the carbine's action, aimed and fired again at the same spot. . . and with no better results.

  Taking a deep, deep breath to try to lay the panic that could easily be fatal under these tight circumstances, Fitz fired yet again, aiming for the head, but hitting the neck and throat, the mushrooming slug visibly tearing out a chunk of flesh and exiting on a fanning spray of blood. The creature squalled and staggered, but still came on, though more slowly. It now was only twenty-five yards away, if that.

  "What the hell does it take to kill you, you bastard?" Fitz cried aloud as he chambered yet another round. This time, all else having failed, he aimed much lower. Maybe, if he could knock a leg from under the monster . . . ?

  The big bullet had luck riding on it. It struck the left knee and demolished that joint. Again squalling, the runner spun to the left and fell. But it caught itself on its hands and still came on at Fitz, using the two overlong arms and the sound leg for a fast, three-legged gait. However, its position gave Fitz a shot that had been unavailable while it had remained erect on two legs. It having attained the very base of the low hillock, Fitz sent a bullet smashing through the beast's spine, between its shoulder blades, driving it belly-down upon the sandy plain and stopping it for good and all.

  The only other sound that the creature made as it lay there, bleeding and twitching, was a long, rat-

  tling expiration of air, just before it voided its dung and its black-pupiled, reddish eyes began to glaze in death.

  Fitz could only sit on the seat of the bike and watch, trembling like a leaf in reaction to the nerve-shattering experience. He now knew that the .44 magnum carbine was not truly the powerhouse of a weapon he had thought it to be, not for all animals, and that knowledge was, to say the very least, unnerving. He momentarily debated the idea of returning to the ship for the Holland and Holland elephant gun, but decided not to do so, in the end; that would have meant camping the night somewhere out on the sandy plain, the hunting ground of these all but unkillable things.

  When his legs once more felt up to the job of supporting him, Fitz swung his leg over the handlebars, stood up and used the carbine to put one more slug into the base of the creature's huge skull before daring to go down and examine it at closer range. Yes, he knew that it now was dead, but did it know and admit that fact?

  Even up close, however, he was at a loss to say just what the long-legged, long-armed, hefty, hairy, very toothy beast was. Although the long-fingered hands had opposed thumbs like his own, there still was something about them that put him more in mind of apes or monkeys than of man, and the feet were even more reminiscent of the pongids, being only slightly thickened and flattened duplicates of the hands, the thumbs of them thicker, a little shorter and a little less opposed. But both hands and feet were equipped with flat, thick, sharp nails that looked fully capable of serving the purpose of claws.

  The general color of the beast's coat was a dark agouti. Its flat rump was padded with thick, hairless

  calliosities, and above them sprouted a hairy tail a good two inches in diameter. That this dead creature had been a male of its species was readily apparent to Fitz. Its head was as big as that of a full-grown lion, though with longer snout, and Fitz doubted that any lion would have been ashamed of the array of orangy-white fangs and other teeth. There could also be no slightest doubt that the thing had been a meat-eater, either, for its dung was full of undigested bits and pieces of bone.

  All things about the dead monster considered, Fitz could think only of something vaguely resembling a baboon. Only, who ever had seen or heard of a baboon that stood about six feet tall and hunted singly rather than in a packs?

  A cold chill then coursed down Fitz's back. God, if these things do hunt in packs . . .? What if this was only one separated from the pack? If it takes five shots to kill each of them, hell, I'm dead meat.

  In the seat of the bike, he stayed in place only long enough to fully reload the carbine, then turned the vehicle about and headed for the hills as fast as he dared to go.

  As his bike climbed the rising ground beyond the pool that marked the verge of the sandy plain, the grasses gradually became shorter, less coarse and tough, greener. Shrubs became taller, denser, more colorful, and trees, real trees, began to appear here and there; thanks to his Boy Scout training, he could recognize a few of them—doveplum, myrtle oak, turkey oak, sweetbay and others he foiled after all these years to remember. On the lower reaches of the slope, nearer to the sandy plain, there were a few palms of some sort, but there were none as he ascended higher, just more and larger hardwood trees and some pines of several kinds, junipers and cedars.

  As the first slope gained altitude, more and thicker growths of underbrush grew among the tree boles until, finally, he was proceeding only by hacking out a way just wide enough to pass the bike and its attached sidecar, while thanking his stars that he had thought to pack along a machete and a pair of sturdy work gloves to save his hands.

  But the heavy brush only ran for a distance of some dozens of yards; then, as abruptly as if cut with a sharp knife, both the incline and the brushy woods gave over to a level plateau on which stately trees sprang up from short, almost lawnlike grass. There was no natural crowding of these trees—oaks, maples, elms, a few chestnuts and ginkos and, within his sight, one huge mimosa covered with a pink froth of flowers—they therefore looked less like a true forest than a carefully tended park.

  Startled by the noise of the engine, two deerlike beasts looked up, then burst into full flight, quickly disappearing among the tree trunks and folds of gently rolling greensward. They were clearly not the white-tails of his own world and hunting experience, however; he got a good enough glimpse of the departing creatures to at least tell that much. For one thing, both of them were spotted, though obviously adult, and they bore antlers more like those of a moose than a deer or elk.

  Nor were the cervines the only animals to be seen and heard in the parklike expanse. Squirrels scampered up trees, to turn and scold at him from safe altitudes; brown voles and striped chipmunks scurried through the grass and dove into their burrows among the spreading roots of the trees; while high in a persimmon tree, a scaly-tailed opossum blithely ignored the noisy, smelly intruder and went about gorging himself on the rich, yellow-orange fruits.

  And there were the birds. He knew that he never had before seen so many different kinds of birds in one place at one time. They flew, they perched, they hopped and stalked through the grass, stopping now and again to peck
at something that had caught their avian eye among the stems of the grasses. They were of every conceivable color and hue and of all shapes and sizes—flycatchers, larks, swallows, wrens, thrushes, warblers, sparrows, finches, doves, woodpeckers, clouds of multi-hued parakeets, a tiny hummingbird hovering with blurring wings to sip from mimosa flowerlets, a brace of huge, blue-and-yellow macaws assisting the opossum in stripping the persimmon tree of ripe fruit.

  Farther along toward the line of steep, pine-covered hills that filled the northern horizon in the near distance, small green parrots fed on the green-and-purple fruits of berries of some strange tree, and a flock of grey pigeons marched in a skirmish line through the grass beneath and around that tree, policing the area of any scraps that the parrots dropped, the sunbeams flashing on the bright, metallic bits of color that flecked their drab bodies.

  Closer still to the upthrust of the hills, the grasses grew higher and, within them, scurried quail and small, fuzzy rabbits. A family of one large and a half-dozen smaller raccoons dove beneath the thorny foliage of a clump of blackberries upon which fruits they had been feeding at the approach of the growling bike, while from out the other side of the spreading thicket, a creature a good deal larger—honey-colored, possibly a hundred pounds in weight, looking a bit like a bear, save that its legs were too long and slender and its body was not hefty enough—hurriedly exited and scampered into the brush of the hillside nearby.

  The hill was indeed steep, so much so that by the time he reached its summit-ridge, he was afoot and laboriously pushing the bike by its handlebars. The hill beyond looked even steeper and Fitz decided to look for a place where he could park the bike, then go on afoot. In the trailless wilderness, he needed a place that he could find again with relative ease and one that would, if possible, give concealment and at least a measure of protection from the elements to the machine as well as to those items he would not be able to pack on his back.