Fire breeds fire, literally as well as metaphorically. The dwelling of the travelers was ablaze when Brent reached it. A joyous mob cheered and gloated before it.
Brent started to push his way through, but a hand touched his arm and a familiar voice whispered, “Achtung! Ou vkhodit.”
He interpreted the warning and let the Venusian draw him aside. Nikobat rapidly explained.
“The Stappers came and subdued the whole crowd with paralyzing rods. They took them away—God knows what they’ll do with them. There’s no one in there now; the fire’s just a gesture.”
“But you— How did you—”
“My nerve centers don’t react the same. I lay doggo and got away. Mimi escaped, too; her armor has deflecting power. I think she’s gone to warn the Underground.”
“Then come on.
“Don’t stay too close to me,” Nikobat warned. “They’ll recognize me as a traveler; stay out of range of rods aimed at me. And here. I took these from a Stapper I strangled. This one is a paralyzing rod; the other’s an annihilator.”
The next half-hour was a nightmare—a montage of flames and blood and sweating bodies of hate. The Stasis of Stupidity was becoming a Stasis of Cruelty. Twice groups of citizens stopped Brent. They were unarmed; Bokor wisely kept weapons to himself, knowing that the fangs and claws of an enraged mob are enough. The first group Brent left paralyzed. The second time he confused his weapons. He had not meant to kill.
He did not confuse his weapons when he bagged a brace of Bokors. But what did the destruction of two matter? He fought his way on, finally catching up with Nikobat at their goal. As they met, the voice boomed once more from the air. “Important! New Chief of Stappers announces that offices of Chief of Stappers and Head of State be henceforth maked one. Under new control, travelers will be wiped out and Stasis preserved. Then on to South America for glory of Cosmos!”
Brent shuddered. “And we started out so beautifully on our renaissance!”
Nikobat shook his head. “But the bodiless traveler said that Stephen was to destroy the Stasis. This multiple villain cannot change what has happened.”
“Can’t he? We’re taking no chances.”
The headquarters of the Underground was inappositely in a loft. The situation helped. The trap entrance was unnoticeable from below and had gone unheeded by the mobs. Brent delivered the proper raps, and the trap slid open and dropped a ladder. Quickly they mounted.
The loft was a sick bay. A half-dozen wounded members of Stephen’s group lay groaning on the floor. With them was Kruj. Somewhere the little man had evaded the direct line of an annihilator, but lost his hand. Blood was seeping out of his bandages, and Mimi, surprisingly feminine and un-Amazonic, held his unconscious head in her lap.
“You don’t seem to need warning,” Brent observed.
Stephen shook his head. “We be trapped here. Here we be safe for at littlest small while. If we go out—”
Brent handed him his rods. “You’re the man we’ve got to save, Stephen. You know what Sirdam’s said—it all depends on you. Use these to protect yourself, and we’ll make a dash for it. If we can lose ourselves in the mob as ordinary citizens, there’s a chance of getting away with it. Or”—he turned to Martha-Sirdam—“have you any ideas?”
“Yes. But only as last resort.”
Nikobat was peering out the window. “It’s the last resort now,” he said. “There’s a good fifty of those identical Stappers outside, and they’re headed here. They act as though they know what this is.”
Brent was looking at Stephen, and he saw a strange thing. Stephen’s face was expressionless, but somewhere behind his eyes Brent seemed to sense a struggle. Stephen’s body trembled with an effort of will, and then his eyes were clear again. “No,” he said distinctly. “You do not need to control me. I understand. You be right. I will do as you say.” And he lifted the annihilator rod.
Brent started forward, but his muscles did not respond to his commands. Force his will though he might, he stood still. It was the bodiless traveler who held him motionless to watch Stephen place the rod to his temple.
“This bees goodest thing that I can do for mans,” said Stephen simply. Then his headless corpse thumped on the floor.
Brent was released. He dashed forward, but vainly. There was nothing men could do for Stephen now. Brent let out a choking gasp of pain and sorrow.
Then the astonished cries of the Undergrounders recalled him from his friend’s body. He looked about him. Where was Nikobat? Where were Kruj and Mimi?
A small inkling of the truth began to reach him. He hurried to the window and looked out.
There were no Bokors before the house. Only a few citizens staring dazedly at a wide space of emptiness.
At that moment the loud-speaker sounded. “Announcement,” a shocked voice trembled. “Chief of Stappers haves just disappeared.” And in a moment it added, “Guards report all travelers have vanished.”
The citizens before the house were rubbing their eyes like men coming out of a nightmare.
“But don’t you see, madam— No? Well, let me try again.” Brent was not finding it easy to explain her brother’s heroic death to an untenanted Martha. “Remember what your inhabitant told us? The Stasis was overthrown by Stephen.”
“But Stephen bees dead.”
“Exactly. So listen: All these travelers came from a future wherein Stephen had overthrown the Stasis so that when Stephen destroyed himself, as Sirdam realized, he likewise destroyed that future. A world in which Stephen died unsuccessful is a world that cannot be entered by anyone from the other future. Their worlds vanished and they with them. It was the only way of abolishing the menace of the incredibly multiplied Bokor.”
“Stephen bees dead. He cans not overthrow Stasis now.”
“My dear madam— Hell, skip it. But the Stasis is damned nonetheless in this new world created by Stephen’s death. I’ve been doing a little galping on my own. The people are convinced now that the many exemplars of Bokor were some kind of evil invader. They rebound easy, the hordes; they dread the memory of those men and they dread also the ideas of cruelty and conquest to which the Bokors had so nearly converted them.
“But one thing they can’t rebound from is the doubts and the new awarenesses that we planted in their minds. And there’s what’s left of your movement to go on with. No, the Stasis is damned, even if they are going to erect yet another Barrier.”
“Oh,” Martha shuddered. “You willn’t let them.”
Brent grinned. “Madam, there’s damned little letting I can do. They’re going to, and that’s that. Because, you see, all the travelers vanished.”
“But why—”
Brent shrugged and gave up. “Join me in some bond?” It was clear enough. The point of time which the second Barrier blocked existed both in the past of the worlds of Nikobat and Sirdam, and in the past of this future they were now entering. But if this future road stretched clear ahead, then travelers—a different set from a different future, but travelers nonetheless—would have appeared at the roadblock. The vanishing Bokors and Nikobat and the rest would have been replaced by another set of stranded travelers.
But no one, in this alternate unknown to Sirdam in which Stephen died a failure, had come down the road of the future. There was a roadblock ahead. The Stasis would erect another Barrier . . . and God grant that some scientific successor to Alex would create again the means of disrupting it. And the travelers from this coming future—would they be Sirdams to counsel and guide man, or Bokors to corrupt and debase him?
Brent lifted his glass of bond. “To the moment after the next Barrier!” he said.
Pelagic Spark
A.D. 1942:
Lieutenant L. Sprague tie Camp, U.S.N.R., thumped the table and chuckled. “That will settle the Nostradamians!”
His pretty blond wife made remarks about waking babies and then asked what on earth he meant.
“The prophecy fakers,” he said. “McCann and Robb and Boucher and
the others who are all agog and atwitter over Michel tie Notredame and his supposed forecasts of our world troubles. Prophecy in Mike’s manner is too damned easy. If you’re obscure and symbolic and cryptic enough, whatever happens is bound to fit in some place with your prophecy. Take the most famous of all Nostradamic quatrains, that one about Henri II—”
His wife said, yes, she had heard several times already about how that could be made to fit the de Camp family just as well as the French royal house, and what was the new idea?
“Every man his own Nostradamus, that’s my motto,” he went on. “I am, personally, every bit as much a prophet as Mike ever was. And I’m going to prove it. I’ve just thought of the perfect tag for my debunking article.”
His wife looked expectant.
“I’m going to close with an original de Camp prophecy, which will make just as much sense as any of Mike’s, with a damned sight better meter and grammar. Listen:
“Pelagic young spark of the East
Shall plot to subvert the Blue Beast,
But he’ll dangle on high
When the Ram’s in the sky,
And the Cat shall throw dice at the feast.
“You like?”
His wife said it was a limerick, of all things, and what did it mean?
“Why not a limerick? That’s a great verse form of American folk rhyme—a natural for an American prophecy, And as to what it means, how do I know? Did Mike know what he meant when he wrote ‘Near to Rion next to white wool, Aries, Taurus, Cancer, Leo, the Virgin’?
“But this I swear to: If this article sells and de Camp’s Prophetic Limerick is there in print for future McCanns to study, by 2342 it will have been fulfilled as surely as any quatrain Mike ever wrote, or I lose all trust in the perverted ingenuity of the human race.”
A.D. 1943:
By the time the magazine reached Sergeant Harold Marks, there was not much left in it to interest him. The Varga girls and the Hurrell photographs had gone to decorate the walls of long-abandoned outposts, and most of the cartoons had vanished, too. Little remained but text and ads, and Sergeant Marks was not profoundly concerned with what the well-dressed man in America was wearing last Christmas.
Until he had almost finished looking through it, he would have been more than willing to swap the magazine for a cigarette or even for a drag on one, but at the end he hit the de Camp article.
The Sergeant’s sister Madeleine was psychic. At least, that was her persistent claim, and up until she joined the WAACs nobody had been able to persuade her otherwise. Sergeant Marks had no later news from his sister than the discomforting word that she had received her commission and now outranked him, but he was willing to bet that she still spent as much time as she could spare telling her unfortunate non-coms about the wonders of Nostradamus.
It was good to see somebody tear into the prophecy racket and rip it apart. This de Camp seemed a right guy, and his lucid attack did Sergeant Marks’ heart good.
Especially the prophetic limerick. The sergeant was something of an authority on limericks. He had yet to find a man in the service whose collection topped his. But the pelagic young spark from the East tickled him even more than the unlikely offspring of the old man of Bombay or the peculiar practices of the clergy of Birmingham.
Sergeant Marks carefully tore the limerick out of the magazine and slipped it in his pocket. He’d copy it out in a V-letter to Madeleine when they managed to get in touch again.
He thumbed back over the magazine, hoping that he might have overlooked some piece of cheesecake that had escaped previous vandals. Then, without warning, all hell broke loose from the jungle and Sergeant Marks forgot cheesecake and prophecy alike.
Civilian Harold Marks used to scoff at stories of heroes who captured machine-gun nests single-handed. That was before he joined the Marines and learned that practical heroism is not a mythical matter.
He still didn’t know how it was done. He knew only, and that with a half-aware negligence, that he had done it. He was in the jungle, master of a green-painted machine gun, and he was alone save for a pile of unmoving things with green uniforms and yellow faces.
There were more of them coming. A green gun looks funny in your hands, but it works fine.
There were no more coming.
Toting the green killer, Sergeant Marks returned to the ambushed outpost. His throat choked when he recognized Corporal Witchett by his hairy palms. There was no face to recognize him by.
There had been few enough men here. Now there seemed to be only one. The ambush had been destroyed, but at a cost that—
Sergeant Marks hurried to where he heard the groan. He knelt down by the lieutenant and tried to catch his faint words.
“Reinforcements . . . tomorrow . . . try . . . hold on . . . up to you, Marks.”
“I will, sir,” the sergeant grinned, “unless they outnumber me. They might send two detachments.”
The lieutenant smiled dimly. “Saw you . . . nest . . . fine work, Marks . . . see you get medal for—”
“Swell custom, posthumous medals,” said Sergeant Marks.
A look of concern came into the officer’s too sharply highlighted eyes. “Sergeant . . . you’re wounded—”
Marks looked down at his blood-blackened shirt and his eyes opened in amazement. Then the jungle began to jive to a solid boogie and his eyes closed for a long time.
When they opened again, he saw a hospital ward and muttered warm prayerful oaths of relief. So the reinforcements had showed up before another Jap detachment. He hoped the lieutenant had held out. And what the hell had happened to Boszkowicz and Corvetti and—
Funny, having Chinese nurses. Nightingales from the Celestial Kingdom. All the other patients Chinese, too. Funny. And yet they didn’t look quite—
When the doctor came, there was no doubt of the situation. The teeth and the mustache and the glasses, the standard cartoon set-up. But not comical. And certainly not Chinese.
Sergeant Marks heard a strange croaking that must have been his own voice demanding to know what went on and since when did American Marines rate a pampered convalescence in a Jap hospital? He felt almost ashamed of himself. There seemed to be something like an involuntary Quislingism in enjoying these Nipponese benefits instead of sprawling dead in the jungle.
The doctor made a grin and noises and went away. He came back ushering in two men in uniform. The older one was a fierce little man with a chestful of medals. The other was young and jaunty and said. “Hi! What’s clean, Marine?”
Sergeant Marks said, “What am I doing here? Don’t tell me you boys are starting a home for disabled veterans?”
“Just for you, sergeant. You’re teacher’s pet.”
“Tell teacher I’ll send him a nice shiny pineapple first chance I get.”
The little man with the medals asked a question, and the youth answered. Marks grinned. “I’ll bet tea won’t give you an A on that translation. You the only one here speaks English?”
“English hell,” said the interpreter. “I talk American.”
“O.K., you hind end of a Trojan horse. Why am I here? What’s the picture? Shoot the photo to me, Moto.”
The officer went off again, and not in a pleasant mood.
“We’ll have cross-fire gags some other time, sergeant.” The interpreter said. “Right now the colonel wants to know what this is.” He handed over a bloodstained piece of paper.
Sergeant Marks’ brain did nip-ups. He got the picture now, all in a flash. Somebody had found this clipping on his unconscious body, failed to interpret it, and decided it was some momentous secret inscription. He’d been nursed back to consciousness especially so that he could interpret it. And if he told the truth—
He could see in advance the dumb disbelief of his enemies. He could foresee the cool ingenuity with which they would try to wrest further statements from him. He could—
He opened his mouth and heard inspired words coming out in the voice which he was beginning to
accept as his. “Oh, that? Well, I’ll tell you. I’m very grateful for what you’ve done for me, and in return— That’s our secret prophecy.”
“Nuts,” said the interpreter.
“I’m serious,” said Sergeant Marks, and managed to look and sound so. “You didn’t know that Roosevelt had his private astrologer, did you? Just like Hirohito and Hitler. We’ve kept it pretty secret. But this is the masterpiece of Astro the Great. We don’t know what it means, but all have to carry it so we can take advantage of it if it begins to come true. We’re supposed to swallow it if dying or captured; I’m afraid I slipped up there.”
The interpreter said, “Do you expect us to feed the colonel a line of tripe like that?”
“But it’s true. I’m just trying to save myself. I—”
The fierce little colonel burst into another tirade. The interpreter answered protestingly. The colonel insisted.
Then the nurse who had been making the next bed turned around and addressed a long speech to the colonel. Slowly his fierceness faded into a sort of mystical exaltation. He replied excitedly to the nurse, and added one short sentence to the interpreter.
As the three men left the room, the interpreter spat one epithet at Marks.
“Why, Moto!” the sergeant grinned. “Where did you learn that word?”
“I know rittre Engrish,” the nurse explained proudly. “When interpreter won’t talk, I say to kerner your story. Kerner very much preased. He send prophecy now to emperor. Emperor’s star-men, they study it.”
“Thanks, baby. Nice work. And what happens to my pal Peter Lorre for refusing to translate?”
“Him? Oh, they shoot him same time as you.”
One less Jap, one less Marine—“Well”—Sergeant Marks forced a grin—“we’re holding our own.”
A.D. 1945:
The Imperial courier asked, “Has astrologer-san any prophetic discoveries that I may report today to the Son of Heaven?”
The court astrologer said, “Indeed I have, and though the word of the stars seems black to us, yet will the rays of the Rising Sun dispel that blackness. Adolf Hitler will die today. The Yankees and the British will conclude a separate peace with Germany and will concentrate their attacks upon the Greater East Asia Prosperity Sphere.”
The Compleat Boucher Page 32