Around Nicky the press of phantasms melted back, as if the brutal energy of heavy bullets somehow negated their reality. Only seconds passed before the powers of ancient Egypt resumed control, but those seconds offered opportunity enough. Before the gods came back, Scheffler and Willis, with Nicky between them, were fleeing the place of judgment.
"The Hall of the Second Hour," Willis gritted as he ran. On endless floors of polished stone, long lines of human-looking prisoners, with hands tied behind their backs, were waiting as if for sentence or punishment. No one paid attention to the fugitives. Willis's long legs led the way; he kept trying to tow Nicky along with him until she pulled her hand free.
"Back to the river—we've got to catch the spaceship, " Scheffler urged, directing their course down-slope. Casting a hasty glance behind him, he could see Thothmes waving his arms in rage, urging the Devourer after the escaped victims. But Uncle Monty was nowhere in sight.
Monty, running through the dark cavernous Hall of the Second Hour, fleeing like a madman from the Devourer, could feel the pounding of his real, fleshly heart, still safely in his chest. He was too old for this exertion. But his lungs pumped strongly, and his heart thudded in an even rhythm, as if the touch of the gods hand in his vitals had strengthened them somehow.
Somehow he managed to come back to the place on the riverbank, marked by grotesque rocks, where he had left the Boat. But when he came in sight of the landing he realized to his horror that both Barque and spaceship had moved on inexorably without him. Straining his eyes into the remote distance downstream, he could just glimpse Pilgrim's craft. Ahead of it moved some faint source of light, itself invisible. The spaceship was still moving after the Barque of Ra, as if there were nothing else that it could do in this world.
And there was nothing else that Monty could do but run after it. There was some hope, he thought, because he could see that the river moved in broad meanders. There was a pain in his side now, and the muscles in his legs were quivering with every stride, but still his breath sufficed to run, and still he ran. He angled away from the river's curving course, cutting across the dark land to intercept it farther on. He dodged among black rocks as tall as houses…
The Devourer was waiting for him between two rocks, no more than four strides ahead of him when first he saw it.
Montgomery had no breath with which to scream. He made a noise of retching terror, and tried to turn, and felt the ten bright talons, as real as fishhooks, fasten in his flesh from behind.
Scheffler, Nicky, and Willis were also able to see the two vessels far ahead of them, moving along a curve of the nameless river. They too began a desperate attempt to cut across country and intercept Pilgrim's spaceship.
"We are going to have to enter the Third Hour to overtake it," Willis groaned.
"What's in the Third Hour?"
"Just follow me."
At least Thothmes and the pursuit he had been trying to organize were no longer visible behind them. The fleeing humans moved through a rocky, sunless wasteland, lit only by reflections from the cliffs that paralleled the stream. The river curved away out of sight, then back into view again, looping toward them, and the two vessels with it. The Stream of Osiris, now murmuring, sounding and looking half-alive, bore both craft on at the same pace. The winglike fins of the spaceship sometimes overhung the banks.
Casting a glance back, Scheffler thought for a moment he could see yet another vessel on the darkened stream far behind them. Some other god with his entourage?
A new murmuring, again the sound of many voices, swelled up ahead, making him turn his gaze forward. To Scheffler it sounded as if the Third Hour had a vast if not entirely human population.
A great deal of that population was soon in sight. And violence was raging among the shadowy beings who populated these darkened' shores. As the refugees drew closer, they could see how weapons were ceaselessly brandished and employed, with mangled bodies falling everywhere. An endless screaming noise, in many voices, went up into the darkness.
"Look out!" yelled Nicky. "Run!" Her attention was on something much nearer than the spaceship. Here came Thothmes, leading a' pursuing mob of minor gods and creatures, threatening to overtake the three fugitives who were still on shore.
Scheffler loaded and fired the last pair of huge brass rifle cartridges into the mob of half-solid apparitions. He clubbed at another monster with the empty Winchester and felt the weapon wrenched away from him. Willis still had some ammo and was still blasting; the assailants at last fell back, their shapes dissolving around that of Thothmes, who still stood in the way. Scheffler hit him, and saw the smaller man go tumbling backward into the river. As the three ran on, they could hear him splashing and struggling to climb out.
Relentlessly as the hour hand of a clock, the Barque of Ra moved on, with the spaceship following as if the two craft were fastened together by some underwater framework. They moved now toward a giant doorway, and now the entire population of the Third Hour lifted up their voices in a deafening, wailing uproar. The din blended into the noise of the minor cataract separating this Hour from the next.
The nose of the Barque could be seen tilting sharply down. Then it was gone.
Willis, Nicky and Scheffler ran on, slipping and sliding down the rocks beside the waterfall, hoping for another shortcut that would offer another chance for them to overtake the speeding vessels. Boat and spaceship had now increased their speed, and were moving somewhat faster than the people on the shore could run.
Now, after the cataract, the river was quiet again.
"The Fourth Hour," Willis gasped, pausing for breath before they ran again.
It was a region of fog, shot through with glaring light from remote and unknown sources, its landscape studded with pits of darkness. And Scheffler soon realized to his horror that the whole scene was filled with huge and fearsome snakes. These reptiles covered the ground so thickly that in places it was possible to walk on them without touching the ground at all. In general they reacted sluggishly to being trampled; but always their heads reared, their fangs threatened.
And the river in this Hour had been strangely diminished. It had been reduced to a purl of slime, oozing over the hard ground, with giant snakes wriggling through it.
Looking ahead, they could see that now the dead-looking form of Ra was being carried forward. The Boat had been transformed into a litter that held an open coffin, borne on the shoulders of the silent rowers. Behind it the spaceship was still held at a fixed distance, sliding forward through the mud. The snakes surrounded Pilgrim's vessel so thickly that even if the humans on foot had been able to overtake it, they might not have been able to fight their way aboard.
Nicky, Scheffler and Willis were struggling near exhaustion, staggering along on a course paralleling that of the moving vehicles, climbing over and ducking under loops of the smooth, glistening snake-bodies. Scheffler had his pistol drawn but didn't want to use the last of his cartridges till they were absolutely needed. The snakes writhed out of the way of those who bore the corpse of Ra, but closed the gap quickly again as soon as the bier had passed. Gradually the laboring human party fell behind.
The weakened light of the sun god still persisted, even here, as a dim glow. But it was unable to penetrate deeply into the surrounding gloom. The only effective illumination in the midst of this horrible darkness emanated from the hull of Ra's transformed boat, which had now taken on the aspect of a giant, firebreathing serpent.
The landscape in its darkness was treacherously uneven. When the snakes at last thinned out, the night prevailing along both banks of the river was thick with roaming, jackal-headed figures.
"If we can only make it to the Sixth Hour," Willis groaned.
"What happens then?"
Willis didn't answer; probably he lacked the breath. But in a minute another transition point had been reached. Beyond it the river deepened again, for no apparent reason. The Barque was suddenly so close ahead that Scheffler could see it had resumed i
ts normal shape, and the rowers once more had taken up their oars and seated themselves upon their benches. Here, thank all the gods, the stream still meandered broadly, and Willis, Nicky and Scheffler, splashing into the shallows, could leap for a translucent overhanging fin of the spaceship and hang on until two of the Asirgarh appeared to help them scramble aboard.
Pilgrim turned in his chair to raise an eyebrow at them. "I am touched by your confidence in choosing to rejoin me," he remarked. "I trust it will not prove to have been misplaced."
None of the three tried to answer him. Collapsing limply inside the cabin, lying limply between Willis and Nicky, all that Scheffler could hear was the roar, faint and distant and disconsolate, of some beast. He pictured the Devourer, cheated of its prey. He shivered profoundly.
During the Seventh Hour, at the very portal of a titanic structure Willis recognized as the Gate of Osiris, Thothmes reappeared. He had come, it seemed, to make an oration on the riverbank, but what it would have been about the people on the spaceship never learned. Pilgrim, rousing in an instant from hours of inertia, snapped an order, and two of the Asirgarh, moving as fast as animals, scrambled ashore and seized the Egyptian from his riparian rock. In a moment he had been brought aboard.
"Eighth Hour," Willis whispered. He, Scheffler, and Nicky, their clothing still caked with drying Fourth Hour mud, still lay exhausted within the glassy hull. "The place of punishment ruled by the fiend Apep. Shall I recite his catalogue of punishments?"
"Don't bother," Scheffler gasped.
Willis bent forward suddenly with a groan, hiding his face in his hands.
"What's wrong now?" Nicky laid a hand on his shoulder.
He groaned again. "It was my fault," the words came out half-strangled. "What Monty did." He raised his head, slowly as if he were afraid to look at Nicky.
"He did see me at the edge of the swamp, that day, with a woman. It wasn't you, of course. You were nowhere around. It was Nekhem. She'd borrowed some of your clothes that day, and I—I—"
He was not going to be able to go on with it. Nicky patted his shoulder, pityingly, and stared into her own exhaustion.
The Ninth Hour really had something of the aspect of a city. Ra once more sat up, as boldly as if he had never been dead, and made a speech. Scheffler and Nicky could understand not a word of the oration, but the shadow-creatures at the oars, and those on shore, seemed to find it edifying.
Throughout the Tenth and Eleventh Hours, more violence churned among the dwellers along the riverbanks; Scheffler could see the shadowy struggles vaguely, but he had given up trying to make sense of the Underworld or its inhabitants. Khufu was no longer visible in the Boat ahead. Where and how the Pharaoh had gone ashore, and whether he had taken his gold with him, no one on the spaceship could say.
The cool winds that normally preceded dawn in the Egyptian desert were rising now. There were stars to be seen again, a bright torrent of them in the form of giant sparks, bearing the boat along toward daybreak.
The Twelfth Hour was a cylindrical tunnel, moving swiftly past. Ra was now not only alive again, but restored to youth.
And now, first ahead of the Boat of Ra, and then engulfing it, was something like a sky.
Dawn had returned, to a twisted, altered country that was no longer Egypt. Or no longer recognizable as such by Scheffler.
The spaceship, coming from the Underworld of darkness into the sky of morning, was finally able to break free of the forces that had held it for so long in the same position relative to the Barque.
But now the Barque of Ra, with renewed power, was coming once more to the attack.
TWENTY-TWO
Ra no longer lay upon his bier, but paced his deck, fully awake and imperiously angry. At his direction the Boat of Millions of Years, glowing like the sun it once had been, came rushing to rejoin battle with the much larger spaceship. The shadowy figures at the oars pulled sturdily, propelling the vessel of Ra and Khufu across the constricted sky. That sky was no longer even approximately normal. It had turned into a great inverted bowl. The radar, or something analogous to radar, on Pilgrim's ship showed its solidity.
Willis had no ammunition left, and Scheffler only a few rounds in his revolver. When the range had closed to something like fifty yards, he used them up with no apparent effect upon the Barque.
Despite all Pilgrim and the Asirgarh could do at their controls, the weapons of the spaceship itself continued to be useless in this peculiar space.
Around the two contending craft, the pocket universe was entering a state of accelerated collapse. Air, sky and space were blending into one across the domain of Ra and Osiris.
The rays of Ra flared out again, and the shields of the spaceship burned.
The spaceship took evasive action, and behind it strange serpentine clouds appeared. The flames of Ra, weakening with distance, shot after Pilgrim's vessel, but the solar Barque did not pursue its routed enemy.
Pilgrim ignored the parting shot.
As soon as the Barque had been left behind, Pilgrim abruptly changed course once more. A minute later the pyramid loomed dead ahead, and then Scheffler realized that the ship was coming gently down to earth beside the temple. A few figures came running to meet it; Pilgrim issued orders. The surviving population was summoned from the various places in which they had been attempting to find shelter from the wrath of Ra, and hurried aboard the ship. Even Ptah-hotep was now eager to evacuate.
Pilgrim concentrated his energies on getting everyone aboard. There was a delay in locating all of the women and children, and the delay stretched on into minutes, in which the sky grew ever more ominous. But Pilgrim waited with an appearance of calm, until the last Egyptian was aboard his ship.
A few moments after that the ship was under way again. There were violent flares outside the hull, and rolling colors. And then there was only milky nothingness.
Afterward Scheffler was never able to form any good estimate of how long their journey back to Chicago had taken in subjective time. He slept through part of it, to awaken abruptly with Nicky's sleeping head on his shoulder, and the realization that Pilgrim had just said something to him about being home. Those words were followed, almost instantly, by the roar of a mighty splash as the spaceship was engulfed in deep water.
"Twentieth century," called Pilgrim, catching his eye again. "This is as far as we carry passengers." The vessel had surfaced again by now, and was wallowing like a ship at sea. Stars were overhead; the horizon was darkly watery in three directions, and in the fourth a familiar skyline was in sight. Scheffler realized that Pilgrim had dropped them into the depths of Lake Michigan.
Pilgrim was now opening an interior bulkhead, revealing another wonder of his ship—a timelock door. He made adjustments and announced that it was now connected with the timelock in Uncle Monty's apartment.
"Get moving, all of you. I shall miss you all. We are pressed for time but consider that I bid you a fond farewell."
Willis, Nicky and Scheffler were crowded into the first departing car along with a great number of Egyptians. "Not you, Olivia, my dear. You go in the final shipment. I expect some of your friends will meet you in Chicago."
Scheffler called out from amid the crush at the far end of the timelock: "What date are we arriving on?"
"Don't worry. The spirits have done it all in one night. Or very nearly so. I beg of you, Scheffler, restrain your emotions, do not allow yourself to be overpowered by your gratitude."
When the door of the timelock opened again it was on Gallery Two once more. Scheffler had just time to realize that the room was fall of Olivia's police before some painless weapon plucked his nerves and sent him toppling into sleep.
TWENTY-THREE
"Why do you want to know?" asked Scheffler. "What does it matter how many bathrooms there are in the apartment?"
Morgan—that was the name claimed by Olivia's bass-voiced assistant—answered only with a grunt, and with a stylus made a small notation on a pad. He and Scheffler had
been touring the place together this morning, taking inventory of supplies and facilities for some purpose the policeman had not yet revealed.
"Olivia," Scheffler declared, "has already told me that I'm free to get on about my business. How am I supposed to do that with you still hanging around here?"
"Be out of your way shortly," Morgan grunted, unperturbed by the protest. He looked into another bedroom and tallied another note. "Count your blessings. " To Scheffler it sounded as if he were trying to imitate Pilgrim's usually jaunty manner. But Scheffler did not make the comparison aloud; right now Pilgrim, still at large, was an extremely sensitive subject with these people.
It was Saturday morning, the day after the general return to Chicago. Outside, January for once was presenting a sky so balmy as to be almost spring-like�the mess on the streets was melting, and with a little luck it might even melt away completely before the next freeze came.
Only a few people were in the apartment as Scheffler and Morgan went about their inventory. Mrs. White had left a neat note of resignation on the kitchen counter, weighted with her household keys and addressed to Scheffler, directing him where to send her last paycheck. Exactly what had caused her to quit just now after so many years he did not know, and he had no intention of asking.
Moments after their arrival, the entire contingent of Ancient Egyptians had been spirited away by Olivia's police. Scheffler was not expecting to see any of them again, any more than he would see Uncle Monty, who had never made it back to the spaceship. He could only hope that the Egyptians would be resettled safely somewhere.
Willis Chapel, already provided by Olivia's efficient colleagues with suitable nineteen-eighties identification—birth certificate, Social Security file and so on—was sitting in the study this morning, writing a new resume to go with his new identity. Willis had already picked out a new name for himself from a list presented by Olivia. He hadn't, Scheffler felt sure, given up on his yen for Nicky. But with her or without her the elder Chapel brother was ready to begin his re-entry into the twentieth-century world of art and antiquities dealers and collectors.
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