Pyramids

by Fred Saberhagen

  At the last moment Scheffler thought of trying to do something else in secrecy from Nicky. Now was his chance to come up with a masterstroke of cleverness, if he had one in him. While she was dressing he considered going into the kitchen and quickly leaving a message on the phone-answering machine. He could record something there that would reveal the secret of the hidden "elevator," then unplug the machine. Mrs. White in her determination to have things in proper order would certainly plug it in when she next entered the apartment. Was that next entry scheduled to take place on the following morning? He couldn't remember.

  The end of the cord would be left lying right on the kitchen counter, and there was no way Mrs. White could fail to see it. She might ignore it though. Meanwhile the others, whatever electronic juggling they might manage, would hardly be able to get at the message to erase it unless they were to return to the apartment.

  Some story about a ring of smugglers and illegal excavators, that would be it. That, if Scheffler and Becky were to disappear, would provoke an investigation that none of the other parties would be anxious to have. Especially if old Montgomery Chapel were to vanish from the face of the earth at about the same time.

  Scheffler considered it all carefully. He thought about Pilgrim, and Becky, and Olivia. He didn't do it.

  Nicky came out of her room, fully dressed again, wearing the clothes she had arrived in, clean now, but badly wrinkled. While she was gone the pile of supplies in front of the grillwork door had grown substantially, and Scheffler was getting down toward the bottom of the list.

  "I'm going to take the time," Scheffler announced, "to run over to Becky's apartment and get the stuff she asked for. I don't know if any of her roommates are there or not—she thought they were probably all still home for the holidays. Want to come along and see a little of the new world?"

  Nicky looked doubtful. Before she could reply, there was the sound of a key entering a lock from the front door of the apartment. There was no time to use the closed-circuit TV to see who was trying to get in. No chains on that door, of course. Just those beautiful locks, that someone with the right key could always open from the outside.

  "Who—?"

  "Mrs. White. The housekeeper. She's the only one who has a key. Unless—" With frantic motions Scheffler sent Nicky into the adjoining room. He put down the rifle he was holding and faced the doorway expectantly.

  The door opened. It was his great-uncle Montgomery who walked in.

  The old man, dressed as nattily as ever, in fur cap and fur-collared coat, stopped in his tracks at the sight of his sunburnt grandnephew. The look on Uncle Monty's face was not exactly surprise; it was as if he had been expecting to find drastic changes of some kind.

  "What's happened—?" he started to ask.

  At that moment Nicky stepped in from the next room. The light Winchester was still in her hands, though not aimed anywhere in particular.

  Monty turned. He gaped at her. Then a small object dropped from his right hand to thud gently on the carpet—it was a pistol. Then his eyes rolled up and he collapsed to the floor.

  Scheffler sprang forward. His first move was to close and lock the front door of the apartment, which his great-uncle had left open behind him. Then he bent over the crumpled figure on the carpet, making sure that the old man was still breathing. Then he picked up the pistol—a small revolver—and after a moment's thought dropped it into his own pocket.

  Nicky pressed forward, staring at the fallen man. "What happened? Who in the hell is that?"

  Scheffler sat back on his heels. Somehow angered by her attitude, he said: "This is the man you were going to marry."

  He hadn't meant it to come out quite so much like an accusation, but his own nerves were nearly shot. Nicky turned pale and knelt down too beside the victim. The whole time-displacement business, Scheffler supposed, hadn't really been real to her until that moment.

  But Nicole recovered quickly. After a moment she said, "I'll get some water." She sprang up briskly to her feet, then turned back for a moment in hesitation. "Maybe brandy would be better."

  "It's in the dining room," Scheffler called after her.

  By the time she came back with two glasses, brandy in one and water in the other, the old man was sitting up, trying to push free of his grandnephew's supporting arm. Monty looked at her with exhausted eyes, to which intelligence was now returning, like a curse.

  Once more Nicky knelt lithely down beside Montgomery Chapel, looking back at him with fascination.

  In a moment she said softly, "Monty, you damned old—Monty, what's happened, what've you done?"

  Montgomery Chapel stared at her. He took another sip of brandy and water before he would trust himself to speak. But it appeared to Scheffler that his mind was working all the time. At last he said, "I have grown old, my dear, over the course of fifty years. I wonder if you will be able to accomplish as much as that."

  "Now what are we going to do with him?" She had turned back to Scheffler, and now she spoke angrily, in shock, as if the old man couldn't hear her. "What can we do now? Can we just leave him here?"

  "I don't think," said Scheffler, "that Pilgrim would want us to leave him here."

  "To begin with," said Uncle Monty, making a sudden effort to take charge, "you must tell me what has happened."

  "Pilgrim's back," said Nicky, turning back to her fiance as if reluctantly compelled. "The man you told me about."

  Uncle Monty, unsurprised, nodded feebly. "I feared as much. Where is he now?"

  "At the other end of the timelock, in the usual place. He has a woman with him—as a prisoner—" Nicky stopped.

  "Who?"

  "She says her name's Olivia, and she represents herself as being a police agent," said Scheffler. "Not from this century. Maybe not from this planet, I don't know."

  "Ah." Uncle Monty ruminated on that point too. But it seemed that the existence of Olivia did not take him by surprise. "I expected something like that, too. What else?"

  "What else?" Scheffler could hear his own voice cracking awkwardly with strain. "What else? That ought to be enough. We're going to have to take you back there with us."

  "Oh, I insist upon it." The old man fought his way up into a sitting position. "For fifty years I have been waiting for the lock to open so I could make that journey once again. Nothing is going to keep me from it now."

  FOURTEEN

  Montgomery Chapel was on his feet again, standing alone in his bedroom with the door closed while he changed into desert clothing. The garments all fit him well enough, being almost new. He'd had them for a few years though he'd seldom worn them. They were part of his continuing policy of readiness.

  Having gained a few minutes alone with the door closed was something of an accomplishment. Scheffler was naturally suspicious of him, and had looked ready to drag his great-uncle forcibly into the timelock if he had argued about going.

  Montgomery had to smile at himself in the mirror when he thought of that; he was as well prepared as a man his age could be to go to ancient Egypt. For decades, ever since he'd adjusted the controls of the timelock and shut it down, he'd been aware that almost certainly it would open again one day. And he'd thought that this month, of this year, was one of the most likely times for that to happen. Pilgrim had evidently made the same calculation.

  Of course the plan of shutting down the timelock hadn't worked out just the way Montgomery had hoped. Far from it…

  Buttoning up his khaki shirt, Montgomery looked closely at himself in the bedroom mirror. Old man, are you really ready to go adventuring again? But the question was only rhetorical. The answer was, yes, he was ready, readier than he had ever been. Of course the body at his present age couldn't do nearly as much as it had once been able to accomplish. But the mind—the all-important mind—was quite as capable as ever. And the mind had been granted fifty years of study in which to prepare for this enterprise.

  There came a knock on Montgomery Chapel's bedroom door. It caught him at an a
wkward moment, just when Pilgrim was intruding again into his thoughts, and the sound chilled Montgomery Chapel like the knocking in Macbeth.

  But this time it was only young Scheffler at his door, coming suspiciously to check up on what the old man was doing. And then to complain in injured tones about all the difficulties he'd had to go through: being menaced by strange dwarfish aliens, and then kidnapped. Why hadn't this great-uncle warned him such things were likely to happen in this apartment? And, worst of all, they hadn't happened only to Scheffler, but to some innocent and unsuspecting friend of Scheffler's too.

  Montgomery was calm and soothing. In response to his questions it turned out that Scheffler's friend was a young woman, who had been sleeping here last night, and was now apparently being held hostage by Pilgrim at the other end of the time-connection.

  Thinking it was time he put the youngster on the defensive, Montgomery demanded: "Did Pilgrim hurt you? Either of you?"

  "No. It's just that he forced us to go along with him."

  That was about what Montgomery would have expected; but he said, "Then I would suggest you count yourselves fortunate. You don't realize, perhaps, just how fortunate. Tell me the details."

  As Montgomery pieced the story together, Scheffler and the young woman had been surprised by Pilgrim and several of the Asirgarh. (At that Montgomery sighed, privately. He had only glimpsed those creatures briefly, fifty years ago, and he had been hoping that they wouldn't come back.)

  Then the two captives had been taken through the timelock—apparently the first trip for the girl but not for Scheffler—and shortly thereafter Scheffler had been persuaded to cooperate actively with his captor. Pilgrim had trusted him enough to send him back to collect arms and other supplies.

  "All that Becky and I want is to get out of this!" the young man concluded earnestly.

  Nicky had come into the room behind Scheffler as he spoke, and she had been listening to the explanation as if at least part of it might be news to her also. She was still looking at Montgomery in a puzzled and thoughtful way, which under the circumstances was hardly surprising.

  When Montgomery had heard the story through, he faced the two young people with his best air of kindly authority. "I never expected that it would come to this, my boy. Nicky, my dear, I'm sorry. Very sorry indeed not to have spent the last half-century with you."

  Young Thomas Scheffler looked at him in frank disbelief. "You didn't expect anything like this?"

  "No, of course I didn't. Do you think I would have left you alone here if I had anticipated any such intrusions?"

  "Yes. I think you set me up for this."

  Montgomery, looking wounded, shook his head.

  "You set me up to fool around with your timelock. So if anything happened to the first person to use it again after fifty years, it'd happen while you were safely far away."

  Montgomery did his best to look sadly bewildered. After a moment he sighed, and said: "I suppose that it must appear that way to you." Then he stopped fiddling around with his spare clothing on the bed and faced his grand-nephew squarely. "Look here. Some explanations are obviously in order. Nicky's heard them before, but you haven't. I—along with my brother Willis—first became involved with Pilgrim half a century ago. So I know something of what I'm talking about when I tell you what he's like."

  "I'd like to hear."

  "Of course. Well, to make a long story short, my brother and I were both young scholars then, intensely interested in the East. And one day this man—approached us.

  "We didn't know what to make of him at first. He told us that his name was Peregrinus—later he used Pilgrim. Of course we understood that those names were aliases. He was obviously wealthy and knowledgeable, but some of the things he said made us suspect that he was mad… until he demonstrated certain powers that convinced us he was not mad at all. He showed us his spaceship. He took us in it to ancient Egypt. I can tell you that now, without fear you'll think that I'm a lunatic.

  "At that point we had to believe his claims that he could make us immensely wealthy.

  "So—rightly or wrongly—Willis and I struck a deal with him. He provided—from where I don't know�the money for me to buy this apartment, in this building, which was then under construction. He said there were several reasons this site would make a convenient location for the timelock, and he saw to it—somehow—that the timelock was installed and functioning. Once Will and I went through it with him—well, you've done that now yourself. Perhaps you can begin to understand what it meant to two young, adventuresome archaeologists in the Thirties. If you can understand that, you can understand much that followed.

  "And there were also the implied threats, quite subtle at first, of what was likely to happen to us if we didn't do exactly as he wished. By then we had some understanding of his power. Also we had begun�too late—to have new doubts and fears. We undertook to work for him in ancient Egypt while he was gone. There were circumstances, he said, that would keep him from staying to do the work himself.

  "Willis and I didn't know it, but the police—Olivia's police—were already after Pilgrim at that time. He told us nothing about any of that—his fugitive, criminal status in his own society—until he had to. Somehow he managed to elude his pursuers, to fence them out from this entire region of spacetime—I suppose from the whole Earth, during most of the twentieth century. The only problem from his point of view was that, in order to fence them out, he had to fence himself out of the region as well. For a time.

  "Now. This is the part that Nicky hasn't heard yet." Montgomery's throat felt dry, and he stepped into his bathroom for a glass of water. The explanation was going well, he thought, perhaps because much of it was the truth.

  He came back into the bedroom and faced his audience again. "Another problem developed later�fifty years ago for me, Nicky, four days ago for you. The timelock stalled. For some reason it ceased to function properly. We had come to believe that it was perfect, I suppose. It seems simple enough in operation, but obviously it is based on a science far beyond anything born of the twentieth century.

  "Pilgrim and the Asirgarh had departed by then. I was stuck here when the malfunction happened, and Will and Nicky were trapped in ancient Egypt—it appears now they didn't realize that they were trapped, if only for four days."

  "No, we didn't." Nicky had paled slightly under her tan.

  "The world of course believed that they had betrayed me and run off together… there was no other explanation I could offer for their absence."

  Nicky, standing in the doorway, appeared to be moved by that. Montgomery could only try to imagine what the treacherous, faithless bitch was feeling at the moment.

  Montgomery could see from the changed expression on the young man's face that at least a seed of doubt regarding his great-uncle's guilt had now been planted in his mind. Well, that would have to do for now. Later, whatever else might happen, he would have to cultivate that doubt.

  The real challenge, of course, was going to come when he faced Pilgrim.

  Not that he had quite disposed of Scheffler yet; here came another question.

  "One more thing, sir."

  "What's that?"

  "The people. There in Egypt. I'd like to know what happened to them all."

  "Ah. I take it that by 'all' you mean the bulk of the native population?" Montgomery put on a grim face; this was going well. "There are, or were, a few survivors."

  "That's right, a few. A handful of Egyptians living with your brother and the others by the pyramid.

  What happened to all the rest? I got the feeling no one there wanted to give me a straight answer about that."

  "Ah." Montgomery hesitated, deliberately. "I suppose Pilgrim is the only one who could really do so—if he would."

  "How's that?"

  Montgomery proceeded as if reluctantly. "My idea is that… something happened there, when the timelock was established. Perhaps having too many people around, in the way, would simply have been inconve
nient for Pilgrim." Montgomery paused again, looking at his grandnephew. "At first he told us, Willis and me, that most of the populace had probably taken fright and run away when they saw his ship. Later—I began to have doubts about that explanation. But by then of course the crime—if indeed there was a crime of the kind you fear—had already been committed. There was nothing for Willis and myself to do but make the best of the situation. Try to help the surviving Egyptians in every way we could. Which we have done."

  "Wow," said the young man, soberly.

  "Perhaps you are beginning to see what I mean, about Pilgrim. He may have conducted himself like a perfect gentleman, so far, with you and the young lady who was with you here—"

  " 'Perfect gentleman' would be stretching it some."

  "Now, if I might continue dressing alone?"

  Nicky and Scheffler went out into the hallway, talking seriously.

  Montgomery could have finished his hasty physical preparations in their presence, but he needed to reorganize his thoughts as well. Young Scheffler's survival had not really surprised him. No, he had allowed for the possibility that the young man might be able to make it to Egypt and back through the timelock without destroying himself and perhaps some sizable portion of Chicago.

  No, what had really stunned Montgomery was Nicky's return, not only still alive but as young and beautiful as ever. That was a vision he had never expected to be confronted with again in a million years. In that first moment today, when he'd seen her with a rifle, he had been sure she knew what he'd done and meant to shoot him.

  He wondered if her youthful presence was going to turn out to be more than he could bear. All the gods, ancient and modern, knew it was going to take him time to come to grips, with it. And now that the passage to the past had reopened, and events were starting to move rapidly again, he was not likely to be allowed enough time to think or even to pull himself together.