A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist

by Ron Miller

  The life compartment’s propulsion unit was more interesting and appeared to be virtually complete. It was an hexagonal box about fifteen feet tall standing on spidery-looking tubular legs that unfolded from each of the six corners. These, she knew, would be collapsed against the sides of the spacecraft during the launch and flight through space and would not be deployed until needed for the landing on the moon. Since the legs raised the propulsion unit off the floor by several feet she was able to look beneath it. Visible were the 1,050 circular openings of the medium and small rockets that would enable the space flyers to cancel their enormous velocity and descend safely onto the lunar surface. Above these, she knew, was the bank of 600 small rockets necessary to escape the moon’s lesser gravity for the return to the earth. It made her skin crawl when she realized that the rocket tubes were in place and that the slightest provocation might be sufficient to ignite them, incinerating her as efficiently and completely as a bug under a blowtorch.

  As she stood erect she appreciated with a kind of unexpected certainty how close to realization the project actually was; its abstraction evaporated suddenly, leaving her chilled and uncertain of her mood. Wittenoom’s really going to do it! she thought, feeling as though someone had just plucked her spine, twanging it like the string of a violin . . . pretty much as Rykkla was almost simultaneously experiencing the same unpleasant phenomenon.

  As soon as the life compartment is completed, he’ll leave! she realized or, rather, admitted. No, as soon as the life compartment is completed, we leave! She corrected herself because when she had first arrived in Toth and rejoined Professor Wittenoom at the Academy, and he had explained his ambitions to her fully, she had immediately, in a kind of fit of enthusiasm and solidarity, volunteered to join him, an offer the scientist had seen no reason to refuse.

  CHAPTER THREE

  OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

  Rykkla’s prison was as squalid as she had anticipated it would be, which at least was something about which not to be disappointed . . . the only good thing about the situation that she could discover. She had been securely locked in a windowless cubicle attached to the back of the inn. Its six hundred cubic feet sounded voluminous until that number was back-calculated into a cramped ten by ten by six. Rykkla’s head brushed the dust and cobwebs from the undersurface of the ceiling, making her look decades older, she would have taken little comfort in the truth that it made her look corpse--like. The chamber had evidently been used as an animal pen altogether too recently. Rykkla reasonably concluded that there were no animals in it at the moment because they had all died, decomposed and eventually but inefficiently absorbed into the dirt floor, a supposition encouraged by the ripely sweet odor of recent decay. Then again, perhaps it had been used to house other unfortunate prisoners, who had been abandoned to the same fate of inevitable corporeal dissolution. She considered digging through the adobe walls, which would not have presented any particular difficulty (or so she thought; she was sadly underestimating the strength of two-foot-thick clay walls that had been fusing for generations under a desert sun); except that she had nowhere to go other than to disappear into the surrounding desert, which she would do like a krill absorbed into the indifferent maw of the baleen whale. Her survival skills were considerably too urban to be of use and, feeble as the prospect might be, she preferred taking her chances with the dimwitted villagers rather than the far more impersonal elements. Nothing she was capable of doing or saying would delay by even so much as a heartbeat the determined effort of the desert to dessicate her, or of the vultures, unimpressed by her wit, to pick their teeth, had they any, with her finger bones.

  On the other hand, she wondered if she would have any chance at all to employ her glib carnival-honed persuasiveness against her human adversaries since the last words she had heard from her imprisoners before they had barred her door were these: “You stay in here until we let you know when your trial is over and you’ve been condemned to die.”

  She knew that her friend the Princess Bronwyn had found herself more than once in similar seemingly hopeless situations and had undertaken the ordeal with bland resignation, the princess’s theory being that blind panic and the banging of heads against walls merely expends energy that would be better and more usefully employed in correcting a situation. Unfortunately, neither stoicism nor fatalistic resignation were things that Rykkla had ever counted among her otherwise considerable repertoire of talents.

  She had been wearing the accepted costume of the rural Ibrailan woman: plain high-necked wool blouse, with balloon--like sleeves and tight cuffs and collar, under an embroidered vest, and equally balloon--like pantaloons beneath an ankle-length woolen skirt. These all felt as though they had been woven from steel wool and itched like bloody hell, she was solid prickly heat from neck to calves. This was to say nothing of the menagerie of active and insatiably hungry organisms that now considered her body a happy home where they could roll up their tiny sleeves and settle down to the business of being fruitful and multiplying. She had no complaints about her boots, however, which came to mid-calf and were expertly crafted from heavy, pliable leather. She had been comfortable enough overnight, but the chilly desert night was rapidly replaced by the heat of day, a heat that if increasing arithmetically outdoors was increasing geometrically, perhaps even logarithmically, inside the unventilated prison. Since her costume had been dictated by the restraints of custom, she saw no particular reason to further placate local sensibilities. If I’m going to be unrightfully condemned as a witch, she thought, stripping away the blanket-like skirt and vest, and unbuttoning the dank blouse to her waist to allow a welcome exhalation of hot, moist air, I should as well be condemned for the hussy I really am.

  There had been neither food nor water given to her the evening of her imprisonment, and no food or water had appeared that morning, either. The heat was stifling; unspeakable greases sublimed from the fatty floor and the air inside the chamber was becoming glutinous as it gradually thickened like an overcooked roux. The cheap bastards, she thought. Why waste food and drink on someone who’s condemned? That must be their thinking, the miserly swine. And they expect me to be worried about shocking their overdeveloped morals.

  But these angry thoughts were only niggling intruders. Her mind kept shrugging them aside and turning back to the more important question, the problem, the mystery of Thud. Whatever has happened to Thud? Whatever could have happened to Thud? It isn’t possible, it can’t be possible that he is dead, she decided with a positive finality. But if not dead, then what? Then what, indeed. She could not erase from her mind the persistent conviction that at any moment Thud would come bursting through one of the walls like a cannonball through cardboard; yet, as more time passed, the more this happy image faded and the more concrete became the unthinkable conclusion that Thud was not going to come.

  Noon came and passed. The walls and ceiling radiated heat like five plates of incandescent cast iron. Rykkla felt like a baking breadstick; globules of grease condensed on her face like an oleaginous dew. Her blouse had become an unendurable torture and she pulled it off, leaving only a thin cotton camisole that clung to her torso like wet tissue paper. She took off her boots, pulling from them feet as wet as though they had been wading in a swamp. Fumes from a pit she had dug in a corner of the hard-packed dirt floor, in which to relieve herself, was now rapidly replacing what little air the chamber contained with something unspeakably unsuitable for respiration. She hammered on the thick wooden door, calling for water, to no avail. The only thing she gained was a shower of choking dust and cooked spiders. “You pimple-balled camel-sucking bastards! Fish-eyed sons of streetwalkers! Let me out of here! Get me some water, you bloody rotten hemorrhoids!” she cried, and then had the horrifying thought: What if they’ve already passed verdict on me, and this is the way they’ve decided to execute my sentence? It was an idea that was almost more than she could bear considering.

  Her mouth seemed filled with a sticky glue and her tongue was like a bal
led-up sock. The temperature in the room must have long since surpassed 120 degrees which was, she calculated, nearly sixty percent that of boiling water. It was not a particularly logical or even relevant thought, but understandable under the circumstances; even had she realized this, it would have made her feel neither cooler nor the least bit rehydrated.

  Evening had arrived when the door began to rattle preparatory to opening. Rykkla was slumped in a corner as limply as a spent pyrometric cone in a red-hot kiln and was only just able to lift her head and croak an insult as her captors entered. She was not so incapacitated as to not make it such a particularly foul insult that it managed to sizzle even in that air.

  “Musrum protect us!” cried one of the men, making a cabalistic sign in the air, which no one saw but some puzzled insects and a slowly circling buzzard, which had its eye out for something interesting to be momentarily taken from the dark door, it knew the odor of ripe death when it smelled it.

  “She is for certain one of the Weedking’s own harlots!” said another, clasping a crusty kerchief to his face. “There is the unholy stench of his kingdom in here!”

  “Look! Look!” panted a third man as he stared at the thin, damp cloth that clung transparently to Rykkla’s torso. “The unclean strumpet’s still trying to seduce us! Look at her! She’s flaunting her naked body at us yet! No! No! I mean don’t look!” He ineffectually tried to hold his hands in front of his companion’s faces while at the same time unable to tear his own bulging eyes from the girl.

  “Get a blanket,” ordered the first man, absolutely unmoved, “and get her covered and out of here. The judge is waiting.”

  Rykkla had struggled to her feet by the time one of the men had returned with a large sheet of light cloth. Her long legs, revealed from mid-thigh down since she only wore a flimsy pair of damp cotton step-ins, seemed to frighten him and he approached her warily, as though she might explode at any moment. He threw the cloth over her shoulders and retreated hastily.

  “Come, harlot,” demanded the leader, “thine deservéd fate eagerly awaits you.”

  Rykkla could barely stand, and the two yards between where she stood and the doorway seemed impossible of transit, it might as well have been two miles of open desert; the floor wavered under her feet like gelatin. She stumbled forward a few steps and, rather than help her, the three men stepped further away, stumbling over one another in their haste. It was not until she had passed through the doorway and into the incredibly silky coolness of the twilight air that two men, less fearful of the demoness’s prowess than the others, or perhaps simply less superstitious, stepped to her side. In any case, Rykkla’s arms were gripped tightly and she was half lifted and half dragged toward the center of the village where there was, she could see through blearily unfocussing eyes, a disturbingly large, black mass. This proved to be a head-high heap of lumber and brush, where the villagers had found this much wood, Rykkla could not imagine, surmounted by a heavy ten-foot pole. A chill vibrated down her spine that she would have welcomed not five minutes earlier. As she was dragged closer, she saw that there were several score torches contrasting luridly with the indigo twilight. When the torchbearing citizens caught sight of the approaching prisoner, a low murmuring arose from their cumulative lips. They’re not waiting for a barbecue, she thought before amending perversely: then again, maybe they are.

  Rykkla’s senses and strength recovered to a degree, but unfortunately far too late to be of any real use to her. She kicked and struggled, but to no avail against the powerful grip of her captors, who were impervious to her flailing legs and held her as motionless as a pair of blacksmith’s vises clutching a horseshoe. Equally impervious were their ears to the curses with which she abused them, curses vile enough to not merit repetition here.

  What angered her to such an uncivilized froth was the coarse, painful and hypocritical grasp of a hand on a breast, buttock or thigh.

  She was hauled with practiced efficiency and no gentleness at all to the heavy vertical timber, where her hands were then tightly bound behind her, her back to the stake. Neither her fear nor her anger knew any bounds, and she wept and cursed and struggled with an impartial devotion of energy. She believed absolutely in the reality of what was going on and the inevitability infuriated her. At the same time, the knowledge that she was about to die, and in horribly lingering pain, drove her to a despair that strained to breaking her not inconsiderable sanity.

  An elderly priest stepped in front of the circling crowd. This was evidently the Father Spranbran of whom the men had spoken; he raised his hands, which shook like leaves at the ends of a pair of skinny twigs, and the mob relunctantly hushed.

  “Father!” Rykkla cried, “uh, Your Reverence! Your Holiness! don’t let them do this! I’ve done nothing to die for! This is insane!”

  The priest looked up at the hapless girl, his eyes glowering either piggishly or in a well-advanced stage of senility beneath exuberant eyebrows that made his face look like a bursting horsehair cushion. Rykkla still had the sheet wrapped around her upper body and where it had not rucked up into a shapeless mass it was fluttering in the desultory breeze like enormous black wings. Below it her long legs kicked and strained at the post; above, her lank face was pale with fury and fright, long strands of black hair glued in meandering zigzags across it, making her countenance look like a shattered porcelain bust. Overall, her appearance did little to dispel the notion that she was in fact the vilest sort of demoness. The priest’s glare silenced her, as though his eyes were pins and she a specimen of disease-bearing insect. The old man’s first words, uttered through a spittle-encrusted beard, evaporated any hope she may have had for succor from the Church.

  “Thou art the vilest of vermin loosed upon us from the nethermost, stinking pits of the Weedking! Thou temptest these good, devout, Musrum-fearing people whom you have had suffer the most degrading sufferings, starvation, drought, disease . . . all that the poor human body can bear, thine evil master has inflicted upon them. Hast thou made their faith waver? Hast thou tempted their true and good hearts from the narrow and uneasy path of righteousness? Nay! Thou hast failed!

  “But for the Evil One this was not enough! Nay! Blasting their mortal lives was not enough! Making their every day a torment was not enough! Nay! Thou hast to try and corrupt their immortal souls as well! Thou, thou demoness, with thine lascivious displays and carnal temptations! Musrum Himself has condemned thee! He has blasted thine evil company from the earth with one mighty smite of His hand. He has left us thee, to deal with ourselves, as a test of our continued faith. How else to prove to Him that thou hast not bedeviled our souls than to faithfully and unquestioningly follow His example?”

  “Are you out of your mind?” shrieked Rykkla. “You feeble old fool! I’m no devil, damn you! I’m an acrobat, a performer, a gymnast, a dancer from Londeac!”

  “Aha! The very antechamber of Hell itself! Thou art indeed a wanton slut! A harlot of the Weedking himself! Sent to pervert us from the True Faith!”

  “You’re a filthy-minded old cat fart! You can’t stand a little decent arousal without feeling guilty, can you? You get a hard-on and you think it’s my fault! I don’t believe it! You’re the one who sees sex and filth wherever you look and you think that I’m the pervert! You must pray for an hour and beat yourself senseless every time you pee, just because you had to touch yourself. You probably haven’t wiped in fifty years. Or do you get the altarboys to do it for you?”

  “Thine own tongue condemns thee!” the old priest screeched in a piercing falsetto. “Cleanse her! Cleanse the very air she has befouled!”

  With a cry of relief, the impatient crowd surged forward and a dozen torches flew in sparkling arcs through the air, landing on the pyre where the dessicated wood caught the flames hungrily. Rykkla felt a rush of heat quite un-like the sodden torridity of her prison; this was a dry, searing heat like that radiating from an open furnace or kiln. The base of the bonfire had caught first and a broad circle of flame rose around her
, its highest tongues not five feet from her face, as though she were surrounded by a chorus line of lambent cobras. Encouraged by the breeze, the fire advanced quickly, eating into the pile of dry timber as though it were made of magician’s flash paper. Rykkla’s heavy woolen pantaloons protected her legs, but her face and arms were being scorched; the sheet of light fabric that enwrapped her was already smoldering. Within seconds a wall of flame blocked her view of the crowd; its crackling roar drowning their cheers and taunts, which was something to be thankful for, anyway, and she could feel the air being greedily sucked from her lungs. She coughed and choked on the billows of hot, acrid smoke that swirled around her face. She closed her watering eyes to await the final suffocation, which she fervently hoped would separate her from, anesthetise her against the pain of immolation.

  There was a sudden, searing explosion of agony down the full length of her body, as though it had burst into flame all at once, like a Saint Wladimir’s Day firework, and she had a bitter moment to curse the luck that had kept her conscious too long before she realized that it wasn’t fire at all that had stung her, but instead a drenching of icy water.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE METEOR

  There were fireworks on the evening after the great pyrotechnic tower was capped by the dome-shaped life compartment; the assembly of the space vehicle was complete. Bronwyn watched the fiery celebration with her usual gloomy foreboding, thinking that the spectacularly-erupting rockets were perhaps in fact doleful harbingers of a coming catastrophe, the disastrous nature of which would be all too obviously personal. Lit from all sides by the flashing, multicolored explosions, the hundred-foot-tall hexagonal prism looked translucent, like a looming crystal of quartz, too massive and monumental to ever be capable of leaving the earth, at the same time too ethereal to be dangerous. Yet, she knew all too well that the rocket was more than capable, were all of its tubes to explode simultaneously (something she had been assured was impossible more times than she cared to count, an assurance she doubted more with each earnest repetition), of fearful devastation.