The Mad Goblin_Secrets of the Nine

by Philip José Farmer

  An hour later, the first one left the building. No one who had seen any of them enter would have recognized them, though the simian body and features of Pauncho and the giant body of Caliban were difficult to disguise. Doc, however, was a bent-over old man with the palsy, and Pauncho looked like a fat middle-aged man with definitely feminine characteristics. Barney wore a waxed handlebar moustache and very long sideburns. His eyes bulged out as if he had goiter disease. Trish was a blonde with a big nose and big ears.

  None of their disguises were designed to make them merge into the woodwork. They did not care if they were noticed as long as they were not recognized. They left at intervals of ten minutes apart and took taxis to Charing Cross station. They went into the restrooms and when they emerged they had shed their former disguises. Now Doc was a big American mulatto tourist with a camera hung from his neck. Pauncho was a rather brutal- looking turbaned Sikh. Barney was a racetrack toff. It hurt him to dress so flashily, since he had inherited his father’s delight in sartorial elegance. Trish was a bulky-bodied, wattle-chinned, dowdily dressed, middle-aged woman with messy gray hair.

  As she passed Doc, she said, “Called Clio. No answer.”

  Doc Caliban took a taxi to a rental car agency and, using the forged papers and credit cards, rented an automobile under the name of Mr. Joshua King. He drove away, picked up the others one by one at different places and then drove into a large warehouse. A man wheeled several large boxes on a cart out of an office. Doc gave him some money after the boxes were loaded into the trunk of the big Cadillac.

  Mr. Sargent was a tall, thin, heavily moustached, middle-aged man. He had once been one of the best safecrackers in the world, operating in the States and England. Doc had caught him one night when he was trying to open a safe in Doc’s laboratory in the Empire State Building. Doc had taken him to the Lake George sanatorium after finding out who had hired him. He had performed the usual operation, implanting a micro-circuit in his brain and then putting him through a series of hypnotic treatments. The man was unable thereafter to crack safes, even under legitimate circumstances. He got a job as a salesman for burglar alarm systems and seemed well on the way to being a completely honest citizen. But, as had happened more than once before, the ex-criminal backslid. Not into his former profession. That was forever barred to him. Sargent became a dope addict and a pusher. To raise money for his habit, he became a lowly stickup man.

  Doc Caliban heard about him and again sent him to his sanatorium. He cured him of his dope habit and gave him more hypnotic treatments. Sargent went to England to work as manager of a warehouse which Caliban owned in London. (Caliban owned businesses all over the world.) He was one of Doc’s most trusted agents. He had done much for Caliban when Caliban was in the Nine but the Nine did not know of his existence (as far as Doc knew).

  Sargent was also the last man on whom Doc had ever operated to change his criminal ways. It was just too discouraging to implant a repulsion against one form of criminality only to have the man take up another. Or, sometimes, to go insane from, apparently, a subconscious conflict.

  Sargent pulled an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to Caliban. “Gilligan not only saw them getting off an airliner, he took their photos,” he said.

  Doc opened the envelope. Pauncho, looking over his broad shoulder, said, “Cobbs! And Barbara!”

  Trish looked over Doc’s shoulder, too. “No wonder you said she was so beautiful! Makes me jealous just to look at her!”

  “She looks a lot like you,” Pauncho said. “That’s why I flipped over her.”

  “I heard him say he’d leave anybody, even you, for her,” Barney said.

  “You should’ve been a lawyer like your father,” Pauncho snarled. “The truth is not in you.”

  Doc turned the photo over. On the back was the address of a Carlton House Terrace mansion.

  “They left yesterday, late last night,” Sargent said. “Crothers didn’t know where. He asked around but the servants were mum.”

  “Salisbury,” Caliban said.

  A minute later, the four drove out with Caliban at the wheel. The trip was mainly occupied with telling Trish what had happened at Gramzdorf and with Doc going over their plans for Stonehenge. Pauncho kept coming back to Barbara Villiers as if he could not believe that she could be guilty of collaboration with Iwaldi.

  “That Cobbs cat, yeah, he’s pretty oily. I could believe it of him. But that Barbara, she’s just too beautiful to be anything other than an angel. Besides, Doc, you haven’t got any real proof! Maybe Iwaldi is forcing them to help him. They know what he’s capable of; they don’t want to be tortured.”

  “They could go to the police,” Trish said.

  “A man with Iwaldi’s connections and organization could get them, police protection or not,” Barney said.

  “I had Sargent check them out at the university,” Caliban said. “A Villiers and a Cobbs are on leave from the archaeology department. Their photos resemble those of the Cobbs and Villiers we know. But they’re not the same. And the university said they’re supposed to be digging in Austria, not Germany.”

  “What do you make of that?” Pauncho said. He did not ask Caliban if he was sure. Caliban never made a statement unless he was sure or he had defined it as speculation.

  An hour later, they pulled into a farm off the highway and drove the Cadillac into the barn. Leaving by the back door, they went down a tree-covered path to a small hangar on the edge of a meadow. The two men here assured Caliban that the plane was ready.

  On the way, they disguised themselves again. Doc was an English businessman with brown hair and eyes, a crooked nose, and a walrus moustache. Trish became a housewife with a more conservative mini-skirt. Barney and Pauncho became informally dressed Americans.

  Forty miles from the southern coast, the gray day suddenly became gray night. The plane flew into a dense fog, and from then on it was on instruments. They circled a while above the airport at Salisbury and then made a perfect landing.

  “How long has this fog been here, Doc?” Trish said.

  “Since two days ago. It’s extraordinary for it to go so far inland for so long. The papers have been full of stories of letters from cranks who insist that a coven of witches near Amesbury are responsible for it. Or so the radio says. I wouldn’t be surprised if Old Anana had something to do with it. Not with the coven. With the fog. She’s the most ancient and most powerful of witches.”

  They were tramping down the sidewalk to report in at the office before driving away. Trish could not see his face, so she did not know if he was kidding or not. Her cousin was not the least bit superstitious, but he admitted that some superstitions might turn out not to be such.

  “Whatever is responsible for the fog,” Doc said, “it’ll suit the purpose of the Nine fine. They can hold the funeral of XauXaz without being observed. Of course, the Nine can bring enough pressure so they could get Stonehenge to themselves even during the winter solstice tomorrow. But this way nobody will be spying on them with binoculars. The good thing about it is, we’ll have a better chance to get close to them.”

  “And Iwaldi’ll have a better chance to sneak in a bomb,” Pauncho said.

  “Everything has its checks and balances,” Barney said. “Except maybe you, Pauncho. Aren’t you overdrawn at the bank?”

  “My patience is overdrawn!”

  While at the airport, Doc showed an official a photo of Cobbs and Villiers and asked if they had landed there that day. The official said no, not while he was on duty. Doc was satisfied that they had probably motored down, unless the official had been bribed to deny that they had flown in, or unless the two had been disguised.

  Caliban did not plan to send his people around to hotels in Salisbury and Amesbury to find out if any of the Nine were staying there. It would arouse suspicion, since it could be assumed that the servants of the Nine would be looking for too-nosy strangers. Also, it was doubtful that any of the Nine would trust themselves to a hotel. Wit
h their immense wealth, they probably owned houses all over England. These would be left unoccupied most of the time, waiting for whenever the owners needed them.

  They got two hotel rooms under their aliases, Mr. and Mrs. Clark and John Booth and William Dunlap. A half hour later, a man phoned in a message for Mr. Clark. It was from a Mr. T. Lord (the T. was for Tree) and said he and his party would be arriving at Bournemouth at the stipulated time. The landing would be made at the agreed-upon spot.

  Caliban called the two men in. “We’ll go up to Stonehenge late tonight after we get some sleep,” he said. “You’ll go with us, Pauncho, but you’ll leave as soon as you know how to get back to us. Then you’ll go to Bournemouth. Crothers will handle the first meeting with Grandrith; you’ll pick him up and bring him to us. Barney, Trish, and I and six of my men will be waiting for you to join us.”

  When they awoke—having put themselves to sleep with the hypnotic techniques taught them by Caliban—they were refreshed. They ate and dressed and then left the hotel. Their equipment had remained in a rented Rolls Royce. Two more cars, filled with men and equipment, joined them. They drove away swiftly in the fog with Doc at the wheel of the first car, watching the big radar screen he had affixed to the instrument panel. They drove on A360 out of Salisbury and in fifteen minutes had slowed down for a right turn onto A303(T). They could see the signposts quite clearly when they were close because they were wearing the blacklight projectors and the goggles. Doc drove onto the side of the road near a fence a few yards past the junction and stopped. The goggles enabled them to see the ancient burial mounds, the long barrows beyond the fence.

  Doc advanced cautiously, a mass detector held out before him. Pauncho held a small box with several other instruments before him, and others carried shovels and pickaxes and weapons. They went over the fence on a folding stile brought from the car and walked about twenty yards past the barrow. Here two men started digging.

  Others made several trips back to the cars, each time bringing parts of a device switch that, put together by Doc, made a metal box two feet high, four feet broad, and six feet long. Two short antennae stuck out of the top of the box. The device went into a hole and was covered with dirt with the antenna tips barely sticking up.

  “No doubt the Nine have already buried theirs or will soon,” Doc said. “And if Iwaldi shows, he’ll bury his somewhere around here. Which one of us activates his first is anybody’s guess. But you can bet it’ll be some hours before the ceremony starts.”

  He stuck a device in his pocket. When the time came for it to be used, it would activate the buried equipment, which was an atomic-powered generator of an extremely powerful inductive field. In its field of influence, a cone-shaped beam with a range of a mile and a half, metal objects turned hot. Copper wires and aluminum wires would eventually melt. Gasoline was ignited and explosives were detonated because of their metal containers. Radar and heat-detectors would be unusable in its field because the circuits would melt and then the cases, if they were thin.

  Doc had already ascertained that no one in the party had any metal fillings in his teeth or metal plates in his skull.

  Tomorrow, when the ceremony began, the only weapons would be the baseball bats, plastic knives, crossbows, and the gas grenades that Doc had brought along. They were wearing plastic helmets and chain mail under their clothes. The crossbows were of wood and plastic and gut, a small type with a pistol-like butt held in one hand. They fired wooden bolts with sharp plastic tips.

  If the fog held, the battle would be conducted by almost-blind soldiers.

  Doc looked at his watch and then removed it. A man was putting everything metal in a bag which would be taken away in a car.

  Pauncho shook Barney’s and Doc’s hands and kissed Trish before he left. He hated to go, but he did not complain. If Doc wanted him to carry out his mission, so be it.

  “We won’t be staying here,” Doc said, “since the Nine will undoubtedly send men through here ahead of them. We’ll be hiding out across the road north of Stonehenge. But I’ll be back by the long barrow by the time you return with Grandrith’s party, unless something prevents me. In which case you and Grandrith just come on up to the ruins. That’ll be where it’s at.”

  Pauncho drove off. The other cars were driven away to a point half a mile away along A303(T) to the west. Doc figured that they would be outside the range of all three of the inductors he expected to be operating by morning. The men would bicycle back on the plastic collapsible vehicles they had brought along in the trunks of the cars. The others had been unloaded.

  They waited. Presently, they heard footsteps and issued soft challenges, ready to fire if they proved to be the enemy. But the proper codeword—Pongo—was returned, and the men joined them. Then they went across the field, blindly, the wet grayness allowing them to see only a few inches. They carried their weapons in their hands and packs on their backs. These contained pup tents, which could be folded into the space of a large box of kitchen matches, and cans of self-heating food and water and medical kits.

  After a walk of about four-fifths of a mile, they came to the fence along A344. They crossed it and the road and went over another fence into a field near the Fargo Plantation and The Cursus, that strange roadway that the builders of Stonehenge had made. There they bedded down for the night.

  “The servants of the Nine will be poking around,” Doc said, “but they’ll probably confine their scouting to the triangle formed by the three main roads. Then the old ones will be coming in their plastic steam-driven cars—my invention, ironically enough, and made for just such occasions—and they’ll start the ceremony, fog or no fog. They won’t be able to bury XauXaz in the circle of Stonehenge. Not even the Nine could do that without causing embarrassing questions. So they’ll probably bury him someplace close by.”

  “Why hold the ceremony here?” Trish said. “I thought XauXaz was at least 10,000 years old when Stonehenge was built. What’s his association with it?”

  “I don’t know. Stonehenge was built in three phases from about 1900 B.C. to about 1600 B.C. by the Wessex People (so named by the archaeologists). It may have been built as a temple to some deity. No one knows except the Nine. It does seem that, whatever else the rude enormous monoliths were, they did form a sort of calendar to predict seasons, and they could be used to predict lunar and solar eclipses. Those circles of monoliths and trilithons made a prehistoric computer.

  “XauXaz may have been a living god of the Wessex People. He may have supervised the building of Stonehenge. His name would not then have been XauXaz, since this was a primitive Germanic name meaning High. In fact, our English word high is directly evolved from XauXaz. But primitive Germanic did not even exist then. It hadn’t developed out of Indo-Hittite yet.”

  After a system of guards was arranged, they got into their sleeping bags. At five a.m., Doc was awakened to stand his watch, the length of which was determined by the time it took sand to fill the bottom of an hourglass. He squatted on top of his sleeping bag by the fence for a while, then got up and walked slowly back and forth. The fog showed no sign of thinning out; he was in a cold and wet world without light. Though his party was only a few feet away, he could not see them. He could see nothing. He could hear the snores of a few men and, once, far off, muffled by the fog, the barking of a farm dog. This was the world after death, and he was a soul floating around in the mists of eternity, cut off from the sight and touch of other beings but tortured by being able to hear them in the distance.

  When would the struggle stop? When would the killing cease? When would he be able to live as he wished: peacefully, studying, researching, inventing devices to help mankind?

  Probably never. The only long-lasting peace was in death.

  His sense of time was almost perfect. When he lit a match and held it by the hourglass, he saw that only a few grains remained in the upper part. The match went out, and suddenly the activator in his pants pocket began to get warm. He knew then that either the N
ine or Iwaldi were in the area and had turned on an inductor. He removed the activator from his pocket with his bare hand, since it was not yet too hot to hold. He pressed its button and then threw it into the fog. It had done its work and its circuits would, in a few minutes, be melting.

  He awoke everybody and told them what was happening. They bundled up their bags and ate a light breakfast from their cans. About fifteen minutes after Doc had noticed the activator’s warmth, they heard shouts down the road.

  They went over the fence, which was becoming hot, and ran across the road to the fence on the other side. After climbing over this, which was by then red-hot, they proceeded slowly along it. It was the only guide to the east. If it were out of sight, they could just as easily have turned around and gone westward or southward within a few steps.

  Doc suddenly stopped and held up his gloved hand, though those behind him could not see it until they had bumped into him. More shouts and a few screams had come from ahead. He estimated that their sources were about a hundred yards away, but it was difficult to be accurate because of the distortions caused by the heavy fog. Underneath the cries was a strange note, a heavy grinding noise.

  He moved on, and within a few yards he thought he could identify the strange noise. It was the growling of many dogs.

  It would be a good thing to use dogs in this fog. They could not see, but they could smell, and this would lead them quickly to the enemy.

  But the hemispherical devices could not be used because of the inductive fields. The metal in the circuits of the hemispheres and the controlling boxes and the wires inserted into the brains would get too hot. The dogs were being used without cerebral regulators.

  His guess was confirmed a moment later when a dog yelped sharply. He went on, and then two more dogs cried out in agony. The crack of clubs against bone and flesh pierced the fog. And then a loud boom made them stop.

  “They must be out of their minds, using grenades!” Trish said. “They have to be throwing blindly!”