She lifted away, was back almost instantly. I slipped the cleat attachments onto my boots, took her knife to cut steps into the tunnel wall. “I’m coming down, Crazy.”
“What about the bitch below?”
“She looks scared.”
“She’ll get over that. Stay out.”
“Crazy, you’re crazy.” I crawled into the sloping cave, hating to turn my back on the spider but unable to negotiate the steep passage headfirst. Every moment I felt as if she were rushing up the tunnel, mouth silently open and ready to kill. Painstakingly, I moved down.
Looking over my shoulder for brief moments, I could see the red eye watching. They never blinked. No lids.
I reached the side cave where Crazy was trapped, dirt packed so tightly under my fingernails that they ached. I hacked away the web, balled it up, and stuffed it behind him. I didn’t want to drop it down the main shaft for fear the jolt would bring the spider plunging upward, stomach open. When I had his head free and his arms loose, he was able to help himself. In short time, he had stripped away the remainder of the sticky thread.
“You first,” I said. “Can you make it up?”
“These hooves give perfect balance.” He kicked out of the egg pocket and started up the incline as if it were just another walkway through some charming garden. I waited until he was almost out, then launched myself on the climb. But all this action had shaken the mother spider to action. I could hear the scuttling of her feet coming up fast.
“I can’t shoot, Andy!” Lotus shouted. “You’re in the way!”
I started to say something (something probably better left unsaid) when the furry legs touched me around the waist, pulled me loose. It was hardly any use fighting the tremendous power behind her grasp. But she wasn’t prepared for all of my weight. She wobbled under me, collapsed, and we both crashed down the slope, twisted around a bend — all her legs kicking furiously — and dropped twenty feet onto a cavern floor.
I was on top of the spider.
She was screaming. God, the screams. They boomed from the walls. Even the echoes threw themselves back and reechoed. Then, despite the pounding of my heart, I saw that this place seemed to be a nest and that more than one spider, judging from excretion, inhabited it. We were alone now, but her screams would soon draw others.
I felt something wet, scrambled for a handhold on the flailing Beast, looked down. My foot was dangling inside her gut! She had rolled onto her back in the fall, and I was mounted on her deadly underside. The mandibles quivered. I jerked my foot back, discovered the knife still clutched in my hand. I was shaking violently — so violently that I feared I might drop my only weapon.
The head reared up as she tried to throw me off. I struck for the eye as Lotus had done earlier, pulled back the blade, was rewarded with gushing blood. She screamed even louder than the impossibly loud screams already filling the cavern, rolled about in fury. I was tossed free, thrown against the wall where I found a large boulder to crawl behind.
The spider did her death dance, flashing legs awkwardly akimbo.
I remained hidden in the rocks, holding tight to an aching arm as if the pressure of my hold would drive the pain off, afraid to look at my wound until I saw the Beast was dead and would never again be rushing me. It took her some time to die, but when she did expire it was with a great deal of thrashing and frothing. When I finally looked at my arm, I could see the reason for the pain: a small piece of white bone sticking through the flesh, white and spotted with blood. Head spinning roller-coaster mad, I felt more than a thousand years old — older, indeed, than the universe itself.
Above, from the tunnel that the spider and I had fallen through, came a noisy scuffling. My head spun even faster, my flesh burned with fever, and visions of the Beast’s mate swam through my head to magnify my fears. I got to my feet with a bit of difficulty and felt as if I were walking on a thin cushion of air instead of the rock floor. My eyes were flaming coals someone had dropped into raw sockets, while my head was made of ice — and melting. I staggered out of the large cavern, moving to a tunnel that glittered with light at its end, hoping that this — in some way — would lead me out. Light meant goodness, did it not? Light meant freedom — or is there a brilliant light at the end of death?
The stones seemed to melt and re-form around me. My teeth chattered in my ice head; I perspired.
The end of the tunnel was a branching-off place where the walls became glass and wound erratically under the floor of the vast Harrisburg Crater. Turquoise and crimson ceilings flashed over me, reflecting me as colored mirrors might. The walls threw my image back at me in various shades and sizes, shapes and textures. It was much like a mirror hall at a carnival. Reality was pushed even further from my mind, and delusion and fever grew stronger. I moved to the right with a thousand copies of myself, a shabby army in the corridors of eternity.
My arm had become a flaming tree, its roots grown deep into my chest, constricting my lungs. Panting, I moved on through the winding glass hallways, sane enough to know who I was and that I must get out, but just delirious enough not to think of turning back and retracing my steps. In this manner, I came across the Beast in its lair. The Beast.
The tunnel ended in a room where grasses had been dragged in, where bits of rotting flesh from past meals littered the floor grotesquely. There was a natural stairway, uneven, sharply edged, but usable, breaking one wall. It led to the ceiling where a half-moon aperture offered escape to the crater floor overhead. I felt like a man trapped beneath an ice-covered river who finally sees a thin patch overhead. But lying between that escape route and me was the Beast. And, though dying, it was not yet dead.
I stopped, swayed crazily. For a moment, I thought I would fall over onto the mutant and lay immovable while he mauled me. With a great deal of effort, I forced away an almost imperceptible fraction of the fogginess, just enough to keep tenuous control of my body. The Beast watched me from where it lay, its massive head raised from the floor, its single red eye a hideous lantern, bright even in this sparkling room of fantasy walls. It grunted, tried to move, howled. Its leg was a mess. That was the work of my vibra-pistol. It shoved its other leg under itself, pulled to a sitting position, all its weight on the good arm and good leg. It snarled. I saw that, even in its weakness, the Beast was going to attempt to leap.
I looked about for a chunk of loose glass, found one the size of my fist. I bent, growing dangerously dizzy with the effort, picked it up, weighed it in my palm. I brought my healthy arm back, heaved the glass at the Beast’s head. It struck its chest instead, knocking it onto its behind. The Beast struggled to a sitting position while I searched for another chunk of glass: the battle of the invalids, nonetheless deadly for its absurdity.
The walls shone, seemed to quickly approach and recede when I moved too much…
I found a sharp-edged piece, brought it back to throw.
And the Beast spoke. “Make Caesar shut up!” it said. “Make him shut up!”
I almost dropped the rock. The walls wiggled crazily. The Beast kept repeating the blasphemy over and over. Then it leaped.
The force of its impact was not as great as it would have been had the Beast been able to use both feet to propel itself. Still, it bowled me over, raked claws down the side of my face as we rolled. I kicked free, rolled across the floor to the far wall. Above was the exit.
“Andy!” Lotus and Crazy appeared at the entrance to the room. It had been they, not the spider’s mate, who had been scrambling down that inclined tunnel!
“Make Caesar shut up!” the Beast recited. “Make him shut up!”
The two of them froze. Crazy had his gun drawn and was about to fire. Now he left the weapon dangling from his fingers, unable to fire upon something that seemed human.
“Kill it!” I shouted.
“It’s intelligent,” Lotus said, rubbing her tiny hands together.
“It is like hell!”
“It’s more than an animal,” Crazy said, the gun
useless in his hand.
“It got that phrase from me!” I shouted hoarsely, and I suppose a little insanely. “I said that when I shot it in the woods. It must have been speaking then — something it picked up from a previous bounty hunter — and I thought it was intelligent. That’s why I couldn’t shoot it again. Man does not kill man. But this isn’t a man in any way! This is a myna bird!”
“It got that phrase from me!” the Beast shouted, struggling across the floor toward me, throwing a few cautious glances behind it at Crazy and Lotus. But its old trick was working. It was immobilizing the enemy. Crazy and Lotus couldn’t wipe out all those centuries of pacifism against other humans in one short moment. It talked; that might make it human. And they could not shoot it. “It got that phrase from me!” it said again.
“See!”
“See!” it echoed.
Lotus grabbed the gun from Crazy, aimed. But she could not fire. “Here, Andy!” And she tossed it over the Beast. It clattered against the wall five feet away. Wearily, I started after it, every inch a mile to me.
And the Beast was on me.
I kicked out with a last ounce of strength, caught it on the chin, stunned it. But it recovered and lunged again, thrusting claws deep into my hips and twisting them. I howled and found another ounce of strength despite what my body told me about this being the end. I kicked it again, pushed myself ahead a few more inches. My fingers slipped over the gun. It was a hard and reassuring feeling. I seemed to draw strength from the cold metal. Bringing it around, the barrel centered on the brutish face, I choked as my finger wrapped the trigger.
“See!” he shouted, reaching a long, hairy arm out for me.
Myna bird? Could I be certain?
The arm brushed my chest.
Strange scenes of a house afire, of a woman burning, of people turning into animals flashed through my mind. Noses became snouts everywhere I looked… I pulled the trigger, saw his face go up in a red fountain, and collapsed backward into darkness.
When I came to, it was to see a blue sky overhead, trees flashing by on both banks, and blue water underneath. Crazy had broken the top from one of the glass bubbles, had used it as a boat, placing it in the small river that drifted through Congressman Horner’s ranch. This would be a much swifter route than the one by which we had come.
“How are you feeling?” Lotus asked, rubbing my forehead.
“Relieved,” I croaked.
“I know,” she said, running a tiny hand over my cheeks.
“No. No, you don’t,” I said, turning my face to the glass bottom where the water was revealed in depth.
THREE: DIMENSIONAL LADDER
Ye shall know antiquity floating dragon-head on new waters…
I
“We will be arriving in eleven minutes, Mr. Penuel,” the hostess said, smiling white-white teeth and sparkling blue eyes. “We drop from hyperspace in three minutes.”
“Thank you,” Sam managed to say between yawns.
She smiled, turned and walked up the aisle, trim legs flashing tan and smooth in the dim light of the passenger cabin.
Penuel… Penuel… It had been ten months now since Hurkos had destroyed the pink grub in Breadloaf’s office. Ten months since the empty tank beyond the wall had poured forth cold air like the maw of a frozen reptile giant. Still, he was not used to his name. Often, he never thought to answer to “Mr. Penuel.” It had been Breadloaf’s suggestion. Penuel was Hebrew for “the face of God,” and Alex was fascinated by the pun.
Penuel… Without Alex, he would still be just plain Sam — and just plain lost. He was still lost, surely, but a little less than he had been that night ten months ago. It had been Alex Breadloaf’s encouragement and camaraderie that had saved him in his direst moment. It had been Alex Breadloaf’s concern and influence that had gotten him the position as Congressman Horner’s aide, a position that swamped him with work and forced him to forget about all the problems plaguing him. He had answers now. Temporary answers, but answers good enough to let him live comfortably with himself as long as he didn’t get morbid or melancholy and start recalling his previous funk.
There was a subtle whining and a stiff, prolonged bumping as the giant liner slipped from hyperspace into the real thing.
Sam flipped the switch on the viewer in front of him and stared at the picture embedded in the back of the other seat. Blackness of space, everywhere… then, slowly, the ship’s cameras tilted down and to the left, catching the green haze-covered sphere that was Chaplin I, an Earth-type, advanced colony. It looked normal from this altitude, but there had been no radio report from either of Chaplin I’s cities. Three and a quarter million people were either sleeping, in dire distress and dispossessed of their broadcasting stations, or dead. The government on Hope wanted to rule out the last thing. Common sense ruled out the first. That left only the middle, and this ship had been rushed to the rescue.
What sort of rescue, no one knew.
It was generally believed that some new sort of Beast had mutated on Chaplin I, since it had been a nuclear target during the last war a thousand and more years ago. With this ugly possibility in mind, one of the top bounty hunting teams had been brought along, complete with a huge, armored, multi-weaponed floater provided by the government. Sam had not seen the bounty hunters, for they had been busy the entire trip checking out their equipment and making trial tests with the functioning of the floater instruments. Aside from them, the only other passengers were two reporters who, when they had discovered that he was merely a representative of Horner there only on a political mission in a political year, lost interest in him rather quickly. And, of course, there were thousands of tons of food, water, medicines, and fifty-five robodocs complete with hypodermic hands and two giant mother-system disease analyzers.
The cloud-shrouded planet spun below, holding menace.
“Unable to raise response,” the pilot said, his voice booming along the aisle.
Sam was just about ready to turn the screen off when a thin silver needle detached itself from the clouds below and spun up at them, lazily. It was much too thin for a spaceship. A moment’s observation told him it was an ancient, deadly, and accurate missile…
II
Raceship, ponderous, vast, worldship by any other name, vibrated and was alive with activity. Its corridors were its veins, throbbing wildly with the blood that was its crew, its charge, its slavemen. Slug-forms moved rapidly down the winding hallways, their yellow-white bodies stretching at their segments as if their insides wanted to move faster than their skins could manage. All this for the tune of the Racesong. Slug-forms foamed in and out of portals in the honeycomb structure of the great metal walls as they were called to various points to take another duty, perform yet another task. Seek on the tune of the Racesong. Crews of disposal workers pushed down the snaking corridors, regularly clearing the deck of those slugs who had been pushed to their ultimate point of tolerance and had folded over when their double hearts had burst under the strain of the push-push-push of their existence. The disposal crew heaped bodies-mangled by the tramp of other slugs who had not stopped or gone around the warm obstacle of their dead comrade — on magnetic powered carts that floated silently behind them, unloading the carts later at disposal chutes, dumping the stacks of slugs into the grinning mouth of the fire-bellied dragon furnace that would take care of them quite rapidly. All the while, slugs hurried by, slugs dropped and died. Even members of the disposal crew, to keep with their task, were pushed to great extremes and collapsed to become fodder for the dragon furnace themselves. All of this madness, all of this costly rush was a burden they gladly bore in chaos. They gained a strange solace in the fact that, though they might die, generations upon generations lay in the nests, constantly hatching — hatching faster, in fact, than the tremendous death rate could deplete their numbers. And when a surplus built up, Raceship would send off a Spoorship under its direction, and the empire would grow and be greater. There was joy in knowing each death contrib
uted to the goal. This made them wildly happy, this feeling of a united goal to strive and die for.
And this maddening devotion was carefully structured and fostered by the Being in Ship’s Core.
III
The rocket had been non-apocalyptic, but it had torn a hole in the bottom of the ship that spelled certain death to everyone inside. Had it been a meteor, the ship could have evaded or destroyed it; but modern vessels were not equipped to defend themselves against seeker missiles, just as they were not equipped to fight in a peaceful world. They would crash now, spiraling downard to smash onto Chaplin I. Unless…
Unless, as Sam realized, they could reach the floater in the cargo hold, back where the bounty hunters were. If they could get into that and get it out of the ship before it crashed, they would save themselves. The floater could operate separately and bring them down safely.
A crackling, unclear and unintelligible, snapped through the shipcom as the pilot tried to say something the instruments would not let him say.
The ship spun faster and faster — down.
The ship screamed in expectation of the end.
Sam unbelted himself, gripped the seat in front, and pulled upward with a great deal of difficulty. He gained his feet and turned into the aisle when the ship took a more violent slant and almost knocked him down again. The hull moaned like a thousand banshees. The terrific stress of the multi-mile fall would start popping rivets shortly.
It was going to be an uphill fight — literally and figuratively. He had to grapple up the incline and reach the cargo-room hatch. Even there, it was not a certainty that he could open it under the vast pressures working against him. But he couldn’t just give up and die as the witless, shrieking reporters seemed to have done behind him. Panting, red-faced, with sweat streaming over his face and burning in his eyes, he fought his way, struggling over an ever-increasing inclination.
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