And the Devil Will Drag You Under

by Jack L. Chalker

  The two of them looked exactly as they had when they'd entered the bar only a few hours before, ob­jective time.

  "I wonder if you're right," she replied grimly. "I don't see Mogart or anybody else anywhere."

  Mac shook his head. "He's here someplace. Only the five jewels have kept this place standing at all. If they're here, then so is he."

  They started searching the nooks and crannies. Jill finally walked around the bar and stopped short. "Mac! Here he is! Oh, my God!"

  Walters bounded over the top of the bar in an in­stant. Mogart lay face down on the floor, stark naked, his goatlike tail sticking almost straight up in the air.

  "Is he dead?" Jill asked worriedly, afraid to confirm her worst fears herself.

  Walters knelt down by the demon and gently tried to turn him over. Mogart groaned and issued a loud snore.

  Mac Walters grunted. "Damn! Out cold! Stinkol Look-he's still clutching a fifth of Scotch!"

  Jill spied the ice-water tap and hastily filled a pitcher usually used for mixing drinks. "We've got to wake him up!" she exclaimed almost hysterically. See­ing the water start to overflow the pitcher, she shut off the tap, aimed the container at Mogart, and turned it upside down over the little man's head.

  Mogart reacted. He shivered uncomfortably and gave a shrill, high-pitched snort of annoyance, but he didn't wake up.

  Walters grabbed him.

  "Mogart! Come on, you bastard! Wake up!" Mac screamed into the little man's face, then shook the frail-looking body violently.

  The demon seemed to come out of it, slowly, grog­gily, and just barely. His eyes opened halfway, re­vealing pupils wandering off in different directions, and he murmured something unintelligible and sank back again to the floor.

  "More water!" Mac called frantically to Jill, and she hastily filled another pitcher. He took it from her hands and poured it slowly over the little man's head while continuing the shaking motions. Both of the humans were screaming now for Asmodeus Mogart to wake up.

  Oh, dear God! No! Jill kept thinking even as she yelled. He's got to wake up! After all we've just been through!

  Walters slapped the demon a few times in the face, trying to jar him awake. Mogart stirred again, the tail drooped, and be opened his dazed eyes and looked around. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble focusing on anything.

  For the first time, Jill noticed the number of empty whiskey bottles behind the bar. She could count a dozen at least without even trying. Enough to kill any normal human being. The, term "alcoholic" was far too mild to describe Asmodeus Mogart.

  "More water!" Mac commanded, and she again filled the pitcher. "I think his eyes are staying open!"

  She almost dropped the pitcher in her anxiety. An impossibly violent gust of wind shook the whole build­ing-or was it the wind? It sounded and felt as if the very Earth were crumbling around them.

  Again Mac poured the water, and this time Mogart knew what was happening. He screamed and tried to knock away the pitcher.

  "Enough! Enough!" he screamed at them in that high-pitched whine. "Begone, foul fiends! Water shall not touch these lips unless well diluted with Scotch!"

  "Mogart!" Walters yelled at him, almost nose to nose. "It's us! We have the fifth jewel, Mogart! We have the fifth jewel' You have to save the world!"

  A tiny light dawned in his brain. "Oh, yesh, yesh. Da crash. Gotta shtop the crash. Crishy, crashy, crunchy," he sang. "But firsht I gotta shleep," he an­nounced. His eyelids closed, and he tried to turn over.

  Jill was ahead of him, pouring more water on his head. Their actions seemed to infuriate him, and his manner changed. His eyes opened wide and glared at her menacingly. "Oh, foul bearer of that putrid liquid," he screamed hoarsely, "I shall turn you into a toad for that!"

  He reached over to a shelf behind the bar, knocking a few of the glasses onto the floor, where they shattered with a crash that seemed to please him. He liked the sound so much, in fact, that he started knocking over all the other glasses as well. Then, reaching back, he pulled out one of the jewels-then a second, third, fourth, and a fifth.

  He stared at them in fascination, then looked up angrily, facing his tormentors. He tried to stand, but it was too much for him.

  Mac turned to Jill anxiously. "Where's the damned jewel? We have to show it to him!"

  She started for a minute, then responded, "You've got it! I never even saw it!"

  He looked momentarily sheepish, then reached into a pocket where he had slipped the thing after remateri­alizing in the bar.

  Mogart saw it, and his jaw dropped. He stared down at the others in his hands and counted, "One . . two ... three ... four ... five! Five and one makesh shix!" He looked up at Mac, a look of childish anti­cipation on his face. "Gimme!"

  Nervously, Mac Walters handed the demon the sixth jewel. He was not too thrilled by the prospect, though, since he'd been told what six could do-and Mogart was in no condition to do anything right.

  The demon stared at his palm full of glowing, throbbing gems for a moment, as if deep in thought. Then he cupped both his hands and let the jewels tumble between them. Abruptly this stopped, and he cupped his hands together and pressed hard, so hard that the effort was obvious in his face. Smoke issued from his closed, joined hands, and Jill and Mac heard a slight hissing sound. Whatever he was doing was obviously painful, as his facial expression and jerky movements indicated, but Mogart didn't seem to mind. A change was coming over him, and the man and woman stepped back, watching the demon in growing wonder.

  There was a smile on his face, one of almost incon­ceivable rapture. He seemed to be growing in stature, to be filling out, becoming the potential of his body in full. The transformation was astonishing. He was no longer a thin and broken drunk but a creature of tre­mendous power, the image of the devil at his most fearsome.

  Suddenly Mogart relaxed and walked out from behind the bar, now in full command of his body and mind. The smile was no longer one of rapture but the look of total satisfaction, of one who has power and the ability to use it. He glanced around, ignoring the two humans, then slowly and deliberately walked around the far end of the bar and over to the door. Each second his metamorphosis became more pronounced; a tiny man before, he was now more than two meters high. A weak, frail man before, his chest was now massive, his arms bulging with muscles. Veins and sinews rippled with each slow movement. His skin had taken on a light bluish cast, and below his waist thick, curly black hair was now covering him like a coarse pair of fur pants. His legs were even more ani­malistic than they had been, somewhat goatlike yet thick and sturdy, terminating in great cloven hooves. His tail, extended now, whiplike, terminated in a trian­gular membrane that looked something like a cobra's hood.

  "Mogart!" Jill called to him. "The planetoid! You must stop the collision!"

  The strange being who only moments before had been a helpless, pitiful drunk turned slowly to face them. Great eyes seemed to blaze with a strange red-black fire; his nose was flatter, his teeth animallike and those of a carnivore when he smiled at them. He looked at them as if they were some kind of trained animals, not real people at all.

  Neither Mac nor Jill could help remembering the warnings they had received from the other demons, that Mogart was not at all what he seemed and would be dangerous beyond their wildest dreams given all the jewels. Mac gripped Jill's hand tightly, and both had the same thought, the same questions: What have we done? Have we done right?

  "I am not unmindful of the problem of the satellite," he told them in a voice at least two octaves lower than the old Mogart's. "I have been considering how to deal with it." He held up the object in his hands formed by the fusion of the six gems-a perfect larger gem, blaz­ing with that living fire around the edges and shim­mering blue-black along its facets.

  "Behold the Eye of Baal," he intoned, looking down at it with a mixture of wonder and excitement. "It has been long, far too long, since I have seen one, let alone possessed one."

  "You lie
d to us!" Jill accused him. "You never cared about this world! You just needed somebody to do your dirty work for you!"

  He grinned evilly. "Clever one, aren't you? Yes, this is what it is all about, but I think you have yet to perceive the fullness of my genius. Many times through the millennia I have tried to secure an Eye of Baal to replace the one taken from me so long ago. They said I was misusing the power, establishing myself as a self-indulgent god. As if-as if constructs, mere creations of a fertile imagination, artificial creatures formed by superior intelligence and science, had some sort of rights! In the past I failed. Security was too good. It was too easy for them to spot me, and when I sent others they were incompetent. What my envoys lacked, I decided, was motivation. When they had to face the problems, worlds, and creatures you faced, they were working for me, not for themselves, and the difficulties sapped their will to carry out the job." His grin widened.

  "Do you think," he continued, "that it' was just a coincidence that the two of you were here, in this spot, when you were needed? Did you think you accom­plished what you did without help, without training? I planned for years for this! Years! Ever since I detected the gravitational imbalances almost twenty years ago. I picked people, many people, to be my agents. They didn't know it, of course. Using what powers I had, I endowed them with superb bodies and even better minds. Thoughts and motivations planted in their parents', teachers', and all other close-contact people's brains shaped and molded their interests, their person­alities, so they would be the people best equipped to succeed in the Alternatives. There were thousands of such people, not just the two of you!"

  Mogart paused, enjoying the delicious shock on their faces, then continued. He was thoroughly delighting in this.

  "Such activities took a lot out of me. The jewel and its powers have very definite limits; as hard as it is for you to comprehend, there are immutable natural laws applicable to all the universes. What it took out of me left me that pitiful, drunken weakling you saw. Almost too much. The story I told you about being on a drunk for key weeks when I should have been gathering and sending out my agents was true. All of it was true, except why I was exiled here. It wasn't for alco­holism, but for what they, termed incurable megalo­mania." He shrugged. "They were probably right. It didn't matter to them. I resisted treatment because megalomania is such a wonderful thing to have. This is a working universe-projects go on here. But Earth was just a byproduct of the forces set in motion. As I think I told you, there are no real ongoing projects closer than the Andromeda galaxy. I was safely out of the way. And I accepted exile, since the alternative was a brainwipe, the destruction of my entire personal­ity and memory. I would still be here, a prisoner, had not a number of fortuitous events coincided."

  "The asteroid," Jill breathed.

  He nodded. "Getting the idea into the right people's heads to try and hold it captive was a problem-the project was so costly! Then it was discovered that the asteroid really did contain riches, and the way was cleared. Just as important a factor was that this event should not come about until there was adequate tech­nology to implement the plan. After that the pride and greed that are reflections of me in your race took over."

  "You're God?" Mac Walters gasped.

  "Of course not, you idiot!" Jill almost hissed at him. "God's a University Department back on the Main Line. He's the other one!"

  Mogart almost blushed and bowed politely. "At your service," he said mockingly. "Satan, Beelzebub, Old Scratch, Asmodeus-whatever your pleasure." He grinned. "Megalomania is such a wonderful illness!"

  "So the jewels, even individually, have a lot more power than you let on," Mac pressed. "I remember now Abaddon's demonic show and his comment that he ran cults on hundreds of worlds with just his jewel. I should have figured it out then."

  "Don't feel too bad," Mogart replied. "After all, you had time running out and more pressing puzzles to solve. And don't feel bad about giving me the Eye. After all, there was a danger, and only one solution. You had no choice."

  "So now what?" Mac asked him. It was a legitimate question.

  Mogart gestured with his now-imposing satanic head at the strange product of fusion he held in his right hand. "See that? An Eye of Baal, it's called. The single jewel, as you've now seen, is very powerful. Six of them in close proximity give a minimum of ten to the sixth power output of one. But the fusion is more economical, thus giving me ten to the tenth amplifica­tion-roughly ten billion times as much power as one. An Eye can deal with almost anything. It's the power of pure applied thought. Matter to energy, energy to matter, on any scale you want, and by tapping the central Main Line computers, you don't even have to know the composition or formulae. Just think of what you want and you've got it. Only ten of these are needed to create a new Alternative level. Come outside with me! I'll show you!"

  The bar still felt as if it were going to be ripped apart, and Mac and Jill watched nervously as the demon reached over and pulled the door right off its hinges, flinging it to one side like a matchstick.

  The scene outside was one of utter desolation. The whole city looked as if it had been the victim of some ancient war; buildings that remained standing at all were mere shells; I-80 was down and twisted, the ca­sino and motel signs were long smashed to dust. An evil-smelling wind blew dust and dirt around in swirling maelstroms; there were cracks in the Earth, faults large enough to swallow whole buildings, and it was cold as hell.

  It was daylight, but the stars were out, at least the nearest ones. The sky was a deep, dark blue, as it would be during a total eclipse. Mogart stepped into the street confidently and they followed hesitantly, realizing that safety lay only with Mogart. With the jewel gone, the bar, too, would fall victim to the holo­caust.

  They were almost blown over by the howling winds, and bitter cold ate into them. The very mountains all around them seemed to be trembling.

  Jill grabbed Mac's arm for support, coughing, and managed to look up. The sky-almost a third of it-was filled with a monstrous object hurtling down upon them, cold and black as the deepest night.

  Mogart stopped and turned toward the looming specter in the sky, his dark form itself almost as eerie against the bleak ruins of the city of Reno.

  But the Eye of Baal shone brightly in his hand. He put both arms out in front of him, tightly clenching his hands together over the Eye, which nonetheless radi­ated from every visible break in his grip.

  Then, raising his arms high as if in supplication to the dark god overhead, staring directly at the great object, he intoned in a voice like thunder, cutting through the pounding wind, commanding the object: "BEGONE!"

  And it was.

  Suddenly the sky was bright; the sun was up there in its normal position for midday, there were no stars visible, and the wind and most of the tremors in the Earth had ceased. It was still bitterly cold, but already they could feel warmth starting once again to bathe the Earth from its mother the sun.

  Mogart lowered his arms and turned to them with satisfaction. "See? Minor problems can be dealt with quickly."

  "Yeah, but now what?" Mac asked glumly. "Some world you've just saved. Probably only a handful of people left alive-maybe just us. Everything in ruins. You say you prepped hundreds, maybe thousands, of people for the job. Yet when you called, only the two of us showed up. Maybe only the two of us were able to show up. That doesn't say much for the rest of hu­manity."

  Mogart nodded agreement. "Yes, I believe there are only a few left, and probably most of these are still on the night side. But that's all right, you see. It is good that the old civilizations are swept away. Now something new can be built, to my specifications, in my image." That last was said in a tone of smug menace that sent chills through both of them.

  The demon turned again, facing the desolation, the hulking shapes of former buildings and the wreckage of smashed signs. As he looked again at the Eye of Baal in his right palm, there came a sudden rumble like a small earthquake. They watched as the ruins in front of them shimm
ered, then faded to nothingness, leaving only a barren plain against the still, unmoving mountains.

  Then there came another sound, like that of a far-off Chinese gong, and out of the plain a single huge building arose-a massive fortress gleaming golden in the restored sunlight, ten stories high at the very minimum. Through the open golden doors to the main hall they could see a great throne encrusted in precious gems, adorned with red satin and ermine trim.

  Jill McCulloch looked sharply at Mac Walters. "How much longer do you think you can stand all this bullshit?" she asked disgustedly.

  "About another second and a half," he replied in the same tone, feeling the same frustration she was feeling, thinking of the experiences they had undergone to bring this petty lunatic to power. The awe was gone, and fear simply didn't fit the unreality of the situation.

  They were angry, and perhaps more than a little mad themselves.

  Mogart walked close to the great palace, studying it with admiration, chuckling to himself in confident satisfaction.

  Jill moved to Mogart's left. Mac found he had been standing on a large, partially broken two-by-four that had been unaffected by the land transformation because it was part of the landscape behind Mogart, to which the demon had not yet paid attention. Mac reached down and picked up the board, then walked to Mogart's right.

  The demon was oblivious to them. He had totally forgotten anyone else was there in his ecstasy over achieving absolute power.

  Jill waited until Mac seemed to be in position and gave her a slight nod. Then, glancing around, she found a large gray rock and tested its heft; there was a look of determination on her face.

  "Okay, Mogart, this has gone far enough!" Jill yelled at the demon, and tossed the rock as hard as she could at his head. It struck him a glancing blow on the left arm, but his expression showed fury and his eyes blazed with contempt as he whirled to face her.

  "So!" he snarled. "What is a little earthworm to me?" He lifted up the Eye of Baal, and she felt real panic.