The Key to Irunium

by Kenneth Bulmer

I

All his life he had been vaguely aware of the way things around him disappeared without any reason. At his christening, so he was told with hearty guffaws, the water had vanished from the font. “Dried up in the hot weather, old man!”—that had been the official explanation, but it remained odd, all the same.

At school, his teachers—a faceless bunch by now—could never understand why Prestin’s books, rulers, pencils and other unlikely objects should always be in short supply, or why his classrooms always seemed to be short of educational items. But as he spent half his time in the United States and the other half in England, his schooling tended to grow empirically rather than be guided by firm academic regularity.

Walking out to the waiting aircraft at London Airport, a grown man with a job now, he knew he had never bothered about that. He hadn’t cared. He knew from the first what he was going to do: he was going to be a flyer like his father.

Prestin, naturally, had been mercilessly twitted about his name, Robert Infamy Prestin. Yes, all of them, all the permutations you could dredge out of it, he’d had them all. The initials on his traveling cases (written inside!) were R. I. P. An aviator would make a mine out of it, but he hadn’t worried about that, either. His every waking thought took wings, carried him away to the open blue, cavorted with him through the ethereal realms of the sky. He didn’t bother too much about anything else. He’d never concerned himself, for example, with girls.

Therefore, when he saw the dark-haired girl with the short skirt and the long legs so completely unoverlookable boarding the plane with the other passengers, he—certainly the only man there to do so—took more interest in the Trident with its lean and powerful tail-driving elegance.

Inevitably and without any conscious thought about the waste of time, Prestin rechecked his hand luggage as he sat down. Again, without any surprise or lack of it, he found he had still everything with him: the portable, the briefcase, the tape recorder, the magazines. He might have mislaid a paper or two, but that was not of major importance. He looked forward with intense interest to the forthcoming exposition in Rome. Italy always warmed him—physically, mentally and, if he admitted it guardedly, spiritually, too.

As an aviation journalist he had found himself a niche in the flying world that the lack of adequate eyesight would otherwise have barred him from forever. He would never forget the blank horror of that first refusal. The R.A.F., he was told, gently but firmly, required young men with impeccable eyesight.

He had passed every other test with ease.

Now he pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose and shook out the papers, selecting Flying Review. He would look out shortly. Right now he was using the magazine as a cover to shield the reactions his body experienced as the jet came alive beneath him.

Someone sat down next to him and, without looking up, he automatically shifted, although it was quite unnecessary in the super-luxurious Trident accommodations.

Rome would be nice. Not too hot there yet, although he reveled in hot weather and would wear pullovers long after more up-to-date American friends had donned their summer lightweights for the rigors of New York’s sweltering heat waves. Conversely, he didn’t mind cold (although he preferred heat) and he would continue to wear a light raincoat long after his English friends had shifted into thick topcoats and modish British Warms.

But of course climate toleration hadn’t done him any good with the U.S.A.F., either. Like the R.A.F., they wanted men who could see where they were flying.

Prestin had gotten over that double-barreled refusal now, even the wicked one-two disappointment. He wrote good stuff about flying, and he flew as a passenger whenever he could. But apart from a few callow hops in a Tiger Moth, a few circuits and bumps, a solo and a flyer’s ticket, he hadn’t done any real flying. But anyway, flying the old Moth gave you an experience that no Lightning or Phantom could ever give—so they said. He was never likely to make the comparison.

One of his clustered magazines dropped to the soft carpeting. Bending to pick it up, he became vaguely aware of white mesh stockings, long legs that went on and on and up and up—he looked up suddenly, face flushed, to stare into dark hazel eyes and a round saucy face smiling down at him. He was acutely embarrassed and felt like a fumbling fool.

“That’s the trouble with these damned skirts,” she said, wriggling and tugging—without noticeable effect—letting her handbag slide down so Prestin had to grab that, too. “Oh—thanks. And hadn’t you better get up? You’ll get curvature of the spine hunched over like that.”

He straightened up like a marionette. Another magazine fell. He let it lie. He couldn’t face another salvo if he bent over again.

“I—ah—I’m sorry—” he began, not at all sure what to say.

“Skip it, alf, life’s too short for mumbling apologies.”

The Trident bellowed into inaudibility, rumbled for a few moments and then, lifting her nose, catapulted into the air. Everything in the luxurious cabin settled down to relaxation. Bob Prestin settled down to a wary contemplation of the girl sitting next to him. He had no idea at all of what she might be; hazy notions of models, secretaries, film stars and photographers’ assistants flickered haphazardly through his mind. She appeared to be alone. That was nice. He took his mind off the plane a little more. That he hadn’t bothered with girls did not mean that he didn’t know what they were for; they’d merely figured low on his life priority list.

Covertly studying this one, he decided that a little upgrading of priorities was in order. After all, a man born in 1941 did have certain privileges.

The Trident whistled her stately efficient way along the airlanes leaving London, routed out over the Channel and straight across Europe—first stop Rome.

What had she meant by calling him Alf ? Prestin asked himself.

He frequented the hip joints in London; he knew the patter and kept abreast of it; he dressed well, if a little more sedately than most of his friends; and he was with it, in a minor sort of key—but he hadn’t come across that one yet. Alf. Never hit the popularity of Fred. Never.

The stewardesses were anxious to be polite to him, but this phenomenon was not unusual. They often seemed to regard him with his six-foot-one of brawn and muscle as a lost little boy. They—he squirmed at the idea but knew it to be just—they wanted to mother him.

If this bird sitting next to him wanted to mother him, he might have to be firm about that.

“You’ve been to Rome before?” she was saying, glancing at him under violet artificial eyelashes that adhered quite well. Her face had been made up with extreme attention to detail in the fashion currently in vogue: heavily emphasized eyes, unpowdered nose, glisten-lipsticked lips that, at least to Prestin, looked gangrenous.

“Yes,” he said, jerking his eyes away from her face. Poor thing, he felt with some compassion, a stunner in looks, really, and she does that to her face. “Oh, yes. I’ve been to Rome before.”

“This is my first trip. I’m looking forward—oh, you can’t guess how I’m looking forward to it.”

“No?” he said politely, amused by her freshness and unselfconscious awareness of herself. Her voice pitched high and clear without a falter.

She wore a short leather coat of darkish maroon and now she began to wriggle around to take it off, revealing a scintillant dress, loosely girdled at the hips, fashioned in slinky green, silver, and a shimmery rose color. Prestin liked it.

He helped her with her coat and waited while she snuggled back again, wondering why she had elected to sit next to him. Across the aisle he could see another girl, blonde and quite pretty, with the same outre uniform of facial makeup as this girl. Beyond her sat a dark man in the inconspicuous gray suit of business efficiency, wearing thick hornrimmed glasses on his thin pinched nose. Prestin had never been one to burden himself with the appurtenances of the modern world in any shape or form if they did not suit him. The idea of loading down your face with a massive pair of thick glasses because the theory went that it made you look important and impressive, lifted you into the executive class, amused him with its infantile idiocy; Uniforms belonged to uniformed minds. He wore his own dark gray traveling suit because he liked it; it was comfortable. That minor flunky’s glasses were going to torture him in Rome.

The girl fidgeted with her bag, eventually producing a cigarette pack and a small jeweled lighter. She offered a cigarette to Prestin.

“No, thanks,” he said, a little offended. “I’ve given up.”

“So that explains it,” she said with a barbed smile.

“Explains what?”

“I thought you were an American—then I thought I was mistaken, and you were English. So—”

Amused again that the old ambiguity should come up, and so quickly, with this girl, Prestin said, “I’m both.”

“Well,” she said, flicking her lighter. “Lucky you.”

“Yes,” said Prestin, meaning it.

“I’m Fritzy Upjohn.” The way she said it made it a formal introduction, nothing more.

“Robert Prestin.” He matched her tone.

The Trident wheeled, the power from her triple engines cutting a clean course through the upper levels. The quiet comfort and luxury of the cabin afforded a futuristic comparison with the old propeller-piston engine planes that had had their day lording it in the skies. Prestin’s father had told him long ago, while showing him how to control-line fly a remarkable gas job they had built together: “Aviation grew up almost too fast for its own good, Bob. Luckily for everyone, there were a few long-sighted and level-headed people around, and we muddled through. There won’t be many more opportunities for muddling through in the future. A mistake then—and blooey!—that’s the third planet gone.”

Even then young Prestin had known he wouldn’t be someone to blind himself to realities, to act out a fantasy against unreason and fear. He’d met the R.A.F. refusal, and he’d faced up to it, squarely. But this girl now, Fritzy Upjohn with the long legs and the pretty face ruined by makeup—this girl represented an area of life which, to employ the old routine again, he had so far failed to face up to.

The journey unreeled and, in his own stiff and punctilious way, he talked to Fritzy. She said she was a model, and this assignment was alf and gone, fab and all the rest. Young—she could only have been almost twenty—she bubbled with the animal confidence and poise of a self-possessed and extraordinarily observant young girl. Prestin found an amused awe stealing over his thinking; she tended to curl his ideas at the edges.

She took no time at all to skewer through to his preoccupation; maybe the magazines clued her in there.

“I always say that three engines are better than two, and four are safer than three. But then, I’m only the fare-paying passenger and my views in a technical world don’t count.”

Prestin smiled. “I’m only a fare-paying passenger, too. Or, to be correct, I’m a passenger with my fare paid. I prefer more than one or two engines myself; but if the technical and scientific boys tell us that two giant engines are all right—we have to believe them.”

“It sends shivers up my backbone.” She shivered, a most interesting and rewarding experience for Prestin. “Just think,” she said, flinging one limp hand out dramatically. “Four or five hundred people all crammed in on seats like on top of a bus, and one of these damned great engines stops or something. Why, she—she’d—”

“Spin in?”

“She’d ker-rash! alf, and that wouldn’t be funny.”

“It would be far from funny. But they guarantee the engines.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they do. I don’t want to talk about airplanes any more. Let’s talk about you or me or nothing.” She lay back and closed her eyes, the lashes moving with a gentle lagging motion of their own. She looked too young and defenseless to be out of the nest, even though Prestin knew well enough that the claws were only temporarily sheathed.

Preston almost always enjoyed flying. When the stewardesses came around with the meal trays he prepared to eat the excellent meal with gusto, glad when Fritzy opened her eyes, sat up and accepted her own tray. He knew she really had been asleep but even if she hadn’t been, he would be reconciled to a woman’s stratagem for disposing of his own unwelcome company.

He ate without worrying about the food, being fully committed to the girl now, dizzied a little and yet exhilarated. She ate hungrily, he could see clearly, without having any idea of what he was thinking. Why should she have? On a luxury air flight, flying non-stop to Rome, eating and drinking well, looking forward to the adventures that lay ahead, she was fully committed to her own life. She would have no time for him yet. Not yet.

Perhaps after she’d been through Ciampino-West and experienced Rome, she might wish for a companion, to share in these new delights with her. Robert Infamy Prestin saw with sardonic amusement the way he was going and yet he was incapable of halting that fool’s progress by a single step.

Soon they would be circling to join the pattern over Ciampino-West and coming in for one of the Trident’s smooth and foolproof landings. Just how should he go about retaining in conversation a young girl that he didn’t even know existed until a few hours ago? Lack of this kind of vital practice daunted Prestin. He would have to figure something out that, like the Trident’s landing, would operate in automatic and infallible perfection. While he was thinking to himself, Fritzy had left her seat and gone to powder her nose. He chuckled to himself about that unpowdered nose and he waited for her to come back.

The blonde girl leaned a little into the aisle and looked back. She half-smiled at Prestin.

“I didn’t see Fritzy get up,” she said in a husky voice. “I heard you two talking”—this by way of explanation—“but we’ll be fastening seat belts soon, won’t we?”

“Don’t worry, Sibyl,” the thick-glassed specimen said tartly. “You know Fritzy, madder than a March Hare. The stewardess will straighten her out.”

“Yes, well, I hope so,” said Sibyl. She sank back into her chair and stretched out chubby legs that, with their mesh-nylon stockings and short skirt, made Prestin think in a kind of hilarious rib-tickler of Fritzy’s long and elegant legs. But this Sibyl seemed to be a nice kid and also fond of Fritzy; his theory that she was traveling alone, and all his plans, had been incidentally knocked for a loop.

He leaned forward and glanced across the aisle past Sibyl at the man in the next seat. He looked like an unpleasant—yes, that was the word—an unpleasant character. Sleazy. With a high forehead, fair hair and somehow indecent big nose—soft, like putty—he looked overly large, blown up. His skin was pitted with tiny black-shadowed holes, like orange skin. His face held an orange cast, too. It wasn’t that Prestin had ever worried about the color of a man’s skin, but this strange hue suggested aspirations that had not materialized; he found it difficult to articulate his instinctive dislike for the man.

Fritzy did not resume her seat.

“Wherever can she be?” Sibyl fretted.

Prestin found it strange. Any minute now their plane would be in the layer and seat belts would become necessary. Fritzy had struck him as being an unconventional girl, a bit of a madcap they’d have said when ultra-short skirts were last in fashion, and she was liable to do anything. But this could be serious.

The stewardess went past, glanced at the empty seat, frowned, and tilted her head inquiringly at Sibyl.

“No,” said Sibyl. “I don’t think so.”

“I’ll check,” the stewardess said efficiently, and went swaying up the aisle, a gathering wave of reassurance following her progress.

A few moments later she returned, shaking her head. “She isn’t there. This is most odd. I’ve checked all over—where she can possibly be?” The stewardess, young, efficient, sterile-dressed and practical, found this contretemps more than puzzling. “I’ll have to speak to the captain. He’ll know what to do.”

Close though the aircraft was to Ciampino, the captain himself came back aft. Middle-aged, craggy, beginning to run to fat a little, with a round dedicated face, he poked about with the stewardess in all the obvious places. People in other seats turned their heads. Conversation went onto the private-I’m-talking-about-you channels. The Trident whistled serenely through the air and the captain grew shorter and shorter in his replies.

“The hatch hasn’t been opened. The doors are fast shut. Anyway, we’d have known—and the air pressure is normal.”

“She must be somewhere—”

An odd, thrilling shiver of unbidden alarm tickled Prestin unpleasantly. “You mean,” he said tartly, “she must be aboard somewhere.”

“Well,” said the stewardess, as though Prestin were a lunatic. “Well, of course, sir.”

“Fritzy wouldn’t jump out of an airplane!” Sibyl sounded as though the idea offended her mortal and immortal soul. “Of course she wouldn’t—”

“She couldn’t.” The captain didn’t want to hear any more about passengers—his passengers—jumping. “She is aboard somewhere. And if she’s playing a joke, when I find her, I’ll—I’ll—”

“If,” said Prestin, not too loudly. “If she’s still aboard.”

From that moment on until the Trident touched down with a featherlight impact and rolled smoothly to dispersal, the interior was searched, researched, and then searched again.

No Fritzy.

Gone.

Vanished.

No longer on passenger list.

“But,” said a chalk-faced Sibyl, “she can’t have just vanished into thin air!”

“She can’t,” said Prestin. “But she has!”

II

Eventually the police officials finished their inquiries.

Eventually the reporters went away.

Eventually the passengers were told, reluctantly, that they could go.

Eventually—after a long hard time—Prestin could catch up on his sleep.

No one knew where Fritzy Upjohn was. Everyone agreed that they most likely wouldn’t ever find out. Search parties were still going over the flight path, but that contingency seemed remote; a single body, a light and fragile long-legged body, falling free down the sky chute would leave precious little for identification.

But—something might be found. The searchers probed desultorily on. And Robert Infamy Prestin went to sleep.

Or he tried to go to sleep. At last he gave up the futile attempt and ordered a sleepy hotel porter to bring up a pot of coffee. It was times like these—small hours, small feelings, big problems—that made him wish he hadn’t given up smoking.

In the morning, which would soon be here after what was left of the night, he would have to rouse himself and breeze along to the exposition, where he would be expected to talk knowingly of bypass jets, ratios of efficiency, V.G. and S.T.O.L. and all the other slick shorthand of his trade. He slumped back in the armchair and looked dispiritedly about the comfortable hotel bedroom. He felt thoroughly depressed. Fritzy had burst into his life, bringing with her a whiff of promise that at last—and now she was gone.

But where?

People just don’t disappear from airplanes—at least not without some clue as to their disappearance.

He hadn’t noticed her rise. He’d been asked that over and over. NO—he hadn’t been aware that she had stood up. Trying with a muzzy mind to think back he could recall her saying something, something light and scatty, and his equally careless answer. But they’d both been dozing a little then, eyes half-closed, partially cut off from the outside world. No—he hadn’t noticed when she’d gone.

He felt that he should have done something. He felt it was all his fault. He felt—well, admit it then, R.I.P.—he felt guilty.

Guilty as all hell.

The phone rang.

He answered it with “Pronto!” before he thought to pretend to be asleep in bed.

“Mr. Prestin?” The voice was firm but faded, as though a man who had once been a master singer had lost the full timbre of vocal chords in prime.

“Ah—ye-es—who is this?”

“You don’t know me, Mr. Prestin. My name is Macklin. David Macklin. I have to see you right away.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s out of the question—”

“It’s about the—ah—disappearance of the young lady.”

“Maybe it is, Mr. Macklin. I’ve had enough talk about that tonight. I’m sorry. Call me in the morning.”

He put the phone down. It rang again, almost immediately.

Fuming, he snatched it up and shouted, “Look! I’m tired, I’ve had a shock and I’m trying to go to sleep. Get lost, will you?”

The voice he heard in reply said huskily, throatily, very champagne and tame leopards, “Are you talking to me?”

“Uh,” said Prestin, clearing his throat. “I’m sorry. I thought–”

“Never mind what you thought, Bob—I may call you Bob, mayn’t I?—I’ll let you off this time.”

Like an idiot, he said, “Thank you.”

“I know how you must have suffered, poor boy. I thought I ought to ring and tell you how sorry I am. It must have been too awful for you!”

“Yes—uh—who am I talking to?”

She infused more smile into her throaty voice. “I am the Contessa Perdita Francesca Cammachia di Montevarchi. You may, dear boy, call me Perdita.”

“I see. You knew Miss Upjohn?”

“Well, of course! A very dear friend—very dear. I am so choked up about it all.” He heard, very demurely produced, a muffled sob. “I must see you, Bob! I can come around, can’t I?”

“What—you mean—now?”

“Of course. You sound—forgive me—you sound as though you’re an American—”

“Half.”

“That does explain that, then. But here in Rome…”

“I know.” He didn’t know whether to laugh, to feel annoyed, or to put the phone down. But he knew he would not do the latter. “I’ve been in Rome before.”

“Ah!” The syllable sighed and enticed. “What a pity we have not met before.”

Her English was remarkably good; the faintest tinge of accent now and again accentuated the charm of her personality, or so Prestin told himself.

“I’ll leave the door ajar,” he said. “Room Seven Seven Seven.”

Again she cooed that soft syllable of delight. “Ah! A notable number, my dear Bob. I shall not keep you waiting.”

The phone clicked dead before he had time to answer.

Well.

The technical expression to cover this situation was, he knew perfectly well, a right turn up for the book.

Still and all…

He went through to the bathroom and rubbed a hand over his chin, staring blearily into the mirror. Then he began to unpack his razor and shaving foam, electric razors had never satisfied him. He was a meticulous person about some things, if not all.

An odd thought occurred to him. Fritzy had said this was her first visit to Rome—or would have been had she reached the city—so the seductive Contessa di Montevarchi must have met her somewhere else. Interesting, though. He’d formed the obviously erroneous impression that Fritzy was still fresh from the nest, despite her job and her attitude.

He half expected the phone to ring again as he shaved.

He felt reasonably thrilled. After all, this was the first time he had entertained a real live contessa in his room in the early hours of the morning. Of course he knew well enough that only her friendship with Fritzy had really moved him; all the sophisticated allure he felt so strongly from this European woman would have meant absolutely nothing to him in the normal course of affairs. He was no sucker for sophistication. Even in their short acquaintance, his affection for Fritzy had mingled with pity over her attempts to ape the sophisticated.

The door opened quietly as he was shrugging into a lightweight gray jacket. He saw the door swing inward, saw the glimpse of marbled paper in the corridor blocked by a moving shape. Then he was striding angrily forward, waving his arms as though shooing sheep, and yelling. “What do you want, bursting into my room at this time of night! Go on, get out!”

His own vehemence astonished him.

The man in the doorway carefully transferred his hand from the doorknob outside to the doorknob inside. Next, moving with the deference of an impeccably trained butler of the old school, he closed the door and flicked the bolt home.

Prestin stood there, speechless with outraged indignation.

The man removed a shapeless flowing black cavalier hat and tossed it casually onto a chair. He smiled most charmingly at Prestin. The clothes he assumed were covered by a black caped cloak. Beneath that a tight mustard-and-pepper plus-four suit, almost a knickerbocker suit, screeched in a loud and unfashionable fashion. Prestin blinked. The man carried a thick and solid-looking silver-knobbed cane. He could, Prestin realized, have stepped right out of the 1890s.

“I am sorry to disturb you in this way, Mr. Prestin,” said his visitor.

Prestin recognized the voice.

“You’ve a damned cheek, Macklin. It is David Macklin, isn’t it? You did call me just now—?”

“And you told me to go to hell. Yes, that’s right.” Macklin’s laugh bubbled cheerily. His hair shone parchment white and profusely under the lights, an odd comparison for Prestin to make. His face, thin and yet with chubby ruddy cheeks, seamed with good humor, could have modeled for a Santa Claus on a diet. He appeared to be in perfect running order, as old as he might be. A certain dapper briskness about him, a gesture of slender yellowish hands, a pert turn of the head, or a turn of phrase, all added up to present Prestin with the picture of an oldster perfectly capable of keeping his end up in any weather.

“I’m expecting a visitor,” said Prestin with what he hoped was a finality that he had, disastrously, begun to lose. This man Macklin possessed an aura. It snapped from his eyes and hypnotized Prestin with a realization that here stood no ordinary man. He felt resentful of that.

“A visitor, eh, Prestin. And a pound to a pinch of moondust she’s the Montevarchi.”

“How the hell–?”

“Don’t be so indignant, laddie. Simmer down. D’you mind if I rest my old bones? No—” He sat down with a firm and controlled movement and quirked a hard eye up at Prestin. “No laddie. If we’re to work together I won’t pull the old Falstaff tricks on you. You deserve better of me than that.”

“You do me an honor.” Prestin clasped both hands behind his back. “Now, if you don’t mind, I would like you to leave.”

“I’ve told you, Prestin, we must work together. I’m an old man but I still have my strength and yet, and yet I need a younger and stronger man to aid me now—”

Prestin made a grimace. “You mentioned you’d put the old Falstaffian tricks away. You do not impress me. I am ringing for the manager and I would advise you to leave.”

Prestin crossed to the telephone, put out his hand.

He did not hear Macklin move.

His hand quivered inches away from the phone, moving forward slowly to give time, he thought, for Macklin to climb down decently and remove himself. His hand almost touched the phone.

The black stick crashed down hard on the table alongside the phone, scraping his fingers. The phone went tinnggg and joggled in its cradle. Prestin snatched his hand back as though he’d been about to shake hands with a cottonmouth.

“Take it easy, you maniac! Here—” He turned abruptly, with some idea of snatching the stick away.

Macklin stood there, swaying slightly, eyeing him with lordly insolence, the stick half raised.

“I suppose,” Macklin said in a. drawling voice, “the Montevarchi told you she was a bosom friend of poor Miss Upjohn? Yes,” he nodded. “Yes, she would. I have never met Miss Upjohn. Until she—ah—disappeared from the Trident I had never heard of her, or of you. And neither had the Contessa!”

“But she said—”

“Act your age, boy! Think! Use what brains God gave you!”

“Well–”

“Yes. You’ll find out that in this business you can never take anything at face value. Even me.” He chuckled with wet sardonic humor. “Especially me.”

“What business? What are you talking about, anyway?” Prestin felt uncomfortably aware that something or other—he had no idea what—was going on and he had been dumped right in the middle of it all, paddle-less.

“If you’re going to spin me a cock-and-bull story about spies and secret agents or dope and guff like that, save it. I’ve had mine.”

Macklin shot him a sharp glance from beneath those tufty eyebrows. “What do you mean, you’ve had yours?”

“I was involved with a stupid spy—aviation is riddled with them—and the idiot got himself shot. I kept my name out of it at the time. If you have anything to do with all that old stuff, I’ll complain to Colonel Black. He promised me—”

“I have nothing, my dear boy, to do with your debauched past except in one particular.”

“What’s that?”

Macklin laughed and resumed his seat, laying the stick across his mustard-and-peppered knees. “You are direct. Good. I have found out a great deal about you in the time you have been in Rome. But I know full well that the Contessa has too. She has an organization almost as efficient as mine.”

Prestin wished he hadn’t given up smoking. Confusion annoyed him. Colonel Black—no names, no pack drill—had promised him. The spy had been shot, the secrets had been kept safe, and Prestin had discreetly faded out. And now this. Could Fritzy have been another spy? Act your age, son…

“How does finding out about me help us find Fritzy?”

Macklin kept a hard, sparrow-bright eye fixed on Prestin. “If the Montevarchi is to visit you she will be here shortly. My friend in London knew you well enough; he, too, has many contacts in the world of aviation journalism, as well as in other less fantastic worlds.”

Prestin didn’t follow that remark and, despite his own feelings of urgency, had to ask, “What’s fantastic about aviation journalism?”

“Not necessarily the journalism, my boy. But your sort of people live in the clouds; you young aviators, you don’t know what goes on in the real world. Any bright young man in any air force feeds on a peculiar heady atmosphere generated by his service. It’s fed by pride and snap and the proficiency of weapons and aircraft—my God! You kids play with toys that can smash the entire world!”

“Don’t you think they know that?”

“They know it, yes, in their heads. But do they feel what it is that they may smash up? What do they know about life as a civvy has to live it—facing unemployment, the knife-edge of employers’ displeasure, or sickness with no comfortable base hospital—they’re all the trifling little worries that gnaw a civilian into baldness and your grand bemedaled aviators know nothing about them!”

Prestin stood up and walked across to Macklin. He saw the frail humanity now for the first time, and he prepared to assert himself. He began to speak in a gentle voice. “Now then, David Macklin. You’re upset and—”

That was as far as he was allowed to go.

“Upset! Of course I’m upset! I wasn’t a flyer for twenty-five years and kicked out at the end without having a right to be upset! Confound you!”

“My father was an airman for longer than that, and he wasn’t kicked out at the end—and he would not agree with your sentiments, Macklin.”

“I’ve heard about your father, young Prestin. R.A.F. Very high and mighty. Air Marshal, wasn’t he, before he retired? Isn’t that a failure? If he didn’t make C.A.S.—didn’t he fail, too?”

“Nobody I know thinks so. You’d better leave, Macklin. I’m too tired to argue about myself, but if you begin to insult my father I shall have to break your stick for you—in a place it will do the most good.”

Macklin’s thin face with the chubby red cheeks suddenly broke into myriad lines and wrinkles as he smiled his charming smile. His dark eyes caught the light and glittered. “What the blazes are we two arguing for, Bob! Confound it all, we’re allies! Friends! We’re both on the same side, aren’t we?”

“You’ve got a lot of nerve. I’m on nobody’s side until I know what’s going on. Good Lord! You come bursting into my room in the middle of the night, babbling about this and that, telling me nothing, and then you can’t understand when I insist on your leaving! Go on, Macklin! Get out!”

The strangeness of this nighttime interview had been working on Preston and he was only too aware that the atmosphere could easily influence him to actions he might regret afterwards. David Macklin did not look dangerous now, despite his stick-banging expertise. What did the man want? For that matter, now that doubt had been thrown on her genuineness, what did the Contessa Montevarchi want? Whatever it was, if it meant getting Fritzy back, Prestin wanted to know.

Shouting at Macklin to get out was a juvenile reaction to unexpected stimulus. He said, “No, Macklin. Don’t go. Not yet, at any rate. I guess I do want to know what you want—if it will help Miss Upjohn.”

“That’s better, my boy. Much better. I am an easily aroused man and my temper flares up—you’ll get used to it, you’ll get used to it.”

“Maybe. What do you know about Fritzy’s disappearance?”

“I might know a great deal, if I’m right. If I’m wrong—why, then, I know no more than you or the police or anyone else.” Macklin stood up, brushing his cloak into neat folds. “But we can’t hang about here if the Montevarchi is coming. She won’t be alone. Of that I can assure you.”

“Not alone—?”

“You are a simpleton, aren’t you? The Contessa is as aware as I am of the power you possess.”

Prestin raised a halting hand, a half smile of amazement moving his lips in disbelief. “Power I have? Me? What are you talking about now?”

“I thought you knew? You mean?—my friend in London told me that your acquaintances were aware that you kept losing things, and always had, so they said. You mean you didn’t know? I only wish I had met you years ago—”

But the horrible implications had gotten through to Prestin. He sat back on the edge of the chair, unsteadily, feeling sick. He licked his lips. “I—I!” He shook his head. “No! You’re wrong! It wasn’t me!”

“How else do you explain it?”

Prestin glared at the older man, pleading for a release from this suddenly descended guilt. “I couldn’t have! Fritzy’s not a thing, not a book or a pencil or a paper clip! She’s a girl—”

“And you made her vanish!”

A soft knock sounded on the door and a husky voice said, “Bob? It’s me, Perdita. Open the door.”

III

“We’ll have to leave right away!” Macklin took Prestin’s arm and began to drag him toward the window.

Prestin shook the hand off. He felt even more bemused by the awful suggestion hurled at him by Macklin than by the man’s evident dislike and fear of the Contessa.

“Why?” Prestin demanded. “Why?”

“Because a locked door won’t keep her and her Trugs out! They’ll be in here and lasso you like a capon for the oven. Come on, boy!”

“I didn’t mean that! Why should Fritzy’s disappearance be my fault? Why? What did I do?”

“You know, Prestin! You know! And the Contessa will manipulate you for her own black ends! Come on, boy—you won’t stand a chance against her!”

Resentment, stubbornness and sheer bloody-mindedness jangled in Prestin. After his experiences he wanted to strike out and pay back some of his own guilt.

“Bob!” The Contessa’s voice purred from beyond the closed door. The handle turned and shook. “Bob! You said the door would be ajar! Open it up, there’s a good boy.”

Everyone was calling him “boy” all the time. That annoyed Prestin. It was a tiny focal point, but it was that. It showed him all too clearly how he was regarded by these two people: He was a pawn in their games.

“That door stays locked,” he told Macklin. “And you go out by the window—alone. I’m going to bed.”

“You idiot.” Macklin half lifted his cane. His dark eyes flashed toward the door. It shook now with far more than a polite young Contessa’s fragile hand butterflying the handle. Weight was being applied out there.

“Listen to that!” Macklin snapped. “If the Trugs get you, you’ll—”

“Trugs!” said Prestin, with a sarcastic bite. “And you can’t stop to tell me about them either, can you!”

“I could. But any minute they’ll be here to tell you themselves.”

A low groan shuddered from the door as the hinges and lock resisted the strain. The Contessa had not spoken again. Of course she knew by now that he had locked her out so the pressure being applied to open the door spoke more eloquently than words.

Suddenly, he felt afraid.

Trugs?

He looked at Macklin, now standing, leaning on his stick and regarding him with a saturnine scowl.

“Well, Bob? I’m not hanging around to welcome those monsters the Montevarchi keeps as house pets! If you won’t come with me, I must make sure you are of no use to the opposition.”

Prestin let out a shaky little laugh, the laugh of shock. “You mean—you’d kill me? Oh, come now, Macklin—”

“I wouldn’t kill you, Bob. You’re too valuable. I’d just freeze up some of your brain, denature your thinking apparatus. It’s a pretty trick—”

“Just a minute!” Prestin held out his hand appealingly. “Everything’s been happening so fast! You tell me this, half-tell me something else. I want to find Fritzy, and you make the horrible suggestion that it was my fault she disappeared. You tell me I have some power and that you and the Contessa are fighting for it—for me. What the blazes do you expect me to do about it all in a few seconds flat?”

“I would have thought it was all very simple and clear. If you’re going to stay alive and functioning usefully in this world, Bob, you have to think fast. Of course you have a power to make things disappear; you’ve had that all your life.”

The door shook and with a squeal the handle cocked up at an angle.

“They’ll be through in a minute. Those Trugs are hefty—and mean!”

“This power—?”

“Oh, yes. You know. My friend told me enough for me to recognize a Porteur in you at once. Just where do you think you have been sending your paper clips and your rubber bands and all the other little items you always lose?”

“What do you mean—where? I just lose them, that’s all.”

“Oh, no, Bob. They go somewhere. And now, because you must have gone through a nodal point at the right time, you Porteured Miss Upjohn across. You sent her, Bob. I’m willing to help you get her back, but not if you hand around here to fawn on the Montevarchi and deal with her Trugs. Oh, no. I’ll denature you first!”

Prestin’s first impressions of David Macklin returned with that hypnotic sparkle and that radiating good humor. Once having set his mind to a course of action, Macklin would enjoy it. That alone should have told enough, for Macklin, it seemed, would not enjoy a course of action that would harm anyone else. At least that’s what Prestin, undecided, worried, and dead-tired, tried to tell himself.

“Yes, well—” he said, fumbling for coherent thought.

A slashing slice of sound ripped from the door. Both men flinched around to look. A gleaming axehead grinned through a panel and, as they watched, it withdrew and then smashed loud and tearingly through again, splitting and splintering the wood. The axe wrenched around and, squealing, pulled back for another blow.

“Do Contessas usually,” David Macklin said softly, “come visiting in the middle of the night with an axe to open the door?”

“You must be right.” Prestin’s tiredness weighed on him now, pulling him down with indecision and fear. “All right. I’ll come with you. But I want to—”

“Sure, laddie, sure. You’ll want to know all manner of things and I’ll be telling you. But, right now, we scarper flo.”

Macklin slid the window blinds up and pushed the casement open. He hopped up with sparrow-agility onto the sill, then turned with a smile to Prestin. “The ladder’s in position. Come on.”

Up until that moment Prestin hadn’t considered how Macklin expected them to leave by the window. Poking his head out as the door resounded to more axe blows, he saw the long ladder reaching up from a balcony three stories below. A dark shape stood at its foot and Prestin caught a glimpse of a white wedge of face staring up. Macklin began to descend the ladder, his cloak and hat billowing in the night wind.

“Come on, Bob! The Trugs will be through soon!”

He put a foot on the top rung and then turned to look back into the room. The panel nearest the door’s handle had broken fully open now, splintered and gaping.

As he looked a hand reached in—a hand that glistened green and yellow with scales, that possessed two fingers and a stub thumb with long blood-red claws.

He stared, frozen, his mouth half open.

That blasphemous hand groped around for the bolt. As the hand turned the green and yellow scales caught the light and burned with a curious violet edging as though each scale were limned in radiation. The two fingers clicked against the thumb as the hand reached the bolt head.

Prestin felt sick. Macklin’s hand caught his calf.

“Come on, Bob! Hurry up! They’ll have us off this ladder!”

Prestin shut his mouth and swallowed hard. He wanted to see what came through the door; but Macklin was undoubtedly right. He began, stiffly and with a queasy sensation threatening to flood not only him but Macklin as well, to climb down the ladder.

Wind tore at him. He had to cling with a deliberate effort to each rung on the way down.

At last his foot was gripped and guided the last couple of rungs and he could stand on the stone of the balcony. He looked up, breathing hard, expecting to see—what?

“Don’t gawp, laddie! In with you!”

Macklin and the other man, so far not consciously identified by Prestin, bundled him through the window opening. With one foot stepping through and the other lifting up to follow, he felt a hand pull him urgently and he toppled forward. As he fell he heard a loud and authoritative crack. It sounded like a branch splitting in frost, or a whip licking across a naked back.

“Only just in time, thank God,” Macklin said.

The other man said in a firm, controlled voice, “I thought you were never going to make it, Dave.”

Macklin straightened up and smiled, helping Prestin to his feet. They were just in another hotel bedroom. The only object in the room to make Prestin look twice was the sawn-off shotgun on the bed.

He glanced at the stranger. “Aye, you can laugh,” the man said. “But you don’t know what we’re up against.”

“This is Alec,” said Macklin. “Further introductions later. Now we must decamp. They’ll be cramming the elevator down to this floor right now.”

“I saw a claw hand,” said Prestin.

The other two nodded.

“Well. Now you’ve some idea. Let’s go.”

They went out the door fast, Alec lifting the shotgun and stuffing it beneath the normal hacking jacket he wore. His open-necked shirt framed a tough bronzed throat and his face looked as though he had seen a few lifted corners on the problem-spots of the world. Evidently, he was the muscleman for Macklin.

The elevator lights indicated a car was on its way down.

“That’s them, the black-souled hellions,” growled Alec.

“We can take the other elevator. We’ll be out the front door fifteen seconds before them… If we’re lucky.”

Macklin slid the gates shut and punched the buttons. The car dropped. Prestin swallowed. Strange contessas, men who talked wildly of impossibles, a climb down a ladder from one hotel window to another in the middle of the night—it would all have been madness but for that single fleeting glimpse he’d gotten of that gruesome yellow and green scaled, two-finger and thumb hand with the blood-red claws.

The elevator stopped and the doors and gates slid back. Alec eased his bulky body out into the dimly-lit foyer. “All clear,” he said in his growly voice. He cocked an eye at the adjacent elevator indicator. “They’re almost here.”

“Let’s run!” snapped Macklin, and set off like a sprinter for the swinging doors.

Alec took off after him, and Prestin, thinking that they always seemed to leave him for last, tailed on.

Despite all that had happened—because of it, in all probability—Prestin had to keep forcing himself to take the affair seriously. He kept wanting to burst out laughing. Even that scaled claw could have been a plastic model from a tricks and jokes shop and in his heightened frame of mind, with excitement and fatigue addling his thinking, he had been taken in like a fool.

He halted stubbornly on the pavement. Rome lay breathing all about him, the air fresh but not cold, the wind only a minor breeze down at ground level. He caught hold of Macklin’s elbow, forcing the older man to stop.

“Now look here, Macklin. I—”

He did not go on.

A dark shape had appeared from the hotel doorway behind them. He could not see it clearly for it was wrapped in an enveloping raincoat, most unfashionably long, and with a down-drawn hat that might have doubled for Macklin’s own floppy one. Alec looked back and shouted, hard and high, “Get out of the way, Dave! It’s a Trug!”

Alec flung open his coat and dragged out the shotgun. Before Prestin could move or even shift his stance, Alec had lifted the sawn-off shotgun, aimed it, and pressed one of the triggers.

The explosion sounded like a house falling down.

The shotgun blast cut the dark form in two. Appalled, Prestin saw green ichor oozing from the falling body, saw the widespread green and yellow clawed hands, a deep and feral blood-red glitter from the place he expected eyes to be. He did not see the thing’s face. The body hit the pavement.

Then he was running away—running hard, feet slapping pavestone, head high, gasping for breath. He could hear Macklin running with him, then Alec, feet echoing his own. They ran and ran. One or two late-night passersby stared; Prestin ignored them. He wanted to get away and hide.

Walking normally some time later, flanked by the other two, he had calmed down sufficiently to say, “That was murder!”

“Sure,” said Alec, gruffly. “And we’d have been the victims if I hadn’t fired first.”

“What—” Prestin swallowed. “What will people say when they find that—that thing bleeding green blood all over the pavement?”

“They won’t find him. The Montevarchi will see to that.”

“You see, Bob,” put in Macklin, speaking with only the slightest panting after their flight. “Neither one of us wants to let knowledge of Irunium leak out.”

“That seems fair—” began Prestin. Then: “Irunium?”

“Irunium. That’s the name of the place. That’s probably where Fritzy’s gone.”

They had walked down to the corner of Via Due Macelli and Via del Tritone, the place very quiet after the narrow, crowded bustle of the day. Soon the noise and rush would start up again and the shops would be opening.

Prestin shook his head, feeling the tiredness like blotting paper sapping his energies. “Irunium. Well?”

“I intend to tell you everything you wish to know, everything you must know. But not here. You can’t go back to your hotel now—”

“But I’ll have to! All my gear is there—”

“I’ll arrange for it to be picked up. The Montevarchi just loves little boys like you to walk straight back into her webs.”

“Well. All right.” Prestin was thinking of the Trugs, and he felt no compunction to go near them again. “Where do we go from here?”

“Alec?”

The big bear-like man smiled, his broad face showing his delight in being able to be of service to Macklin.

“Out of Rome. That’s for sure. Margie has a car and we can hit the road south, the Autostrada del Sol. We can cut over to Foggia later, when we’ve thrown them.”

Alec called Foggia “Fozh”, Prestin noticed, remembering his father talking to him years ago.

“Just a minute,” he interrupted, walking briskly between the other two along the empty pavements. “I have an exposition tomorrow—that is, today. I can’t miss that.”

“Why not?” Macklin sounded amused.

“Why not? Well, hell’s bells, man! It’s my living!”

“And if you do go it’ll be your dying.”

A bass chuckle rumbled from Alec. “And follow that, if you can.”

“If I had a straw hat and a cane I’d do a song and dance routine for you!” said Prestin savagely. He felt the impotence of a leaf in the wind. “If it’s so all-fired important and deadly what are you two happy about now? What’s so funny?”

“You.”

He stood there, feeling like a fool, feeling annoyed, feeling so tired he could hardly stand.

“Thank you. That’s very nice—”

“Simmer down, Bob. I’ll explain it all. Right now you need a large cup of black coffee—and so do Alec and I.”

“Motion herewith adopted, nem con,” said Alec.

“You two are a real couple of clowns. But, yes—I could do with a drink of coffee, if there is no tea, and a sitdown. My legs are beginning to shake.”

At once Macklin took his arm. “Hold up, Bob. We’re nearly there.”

The house to which Macklin guided him at last looked no different from any of the other tall, narrow, golden-red bricked buildings of the street. The door opened to a touch and they went through to stand in shadow beneath a yellow lamp, with the arched opening to an inner courtyard before them. A tree sighed its leaves together and a fountain tinkled silver. The faintest of violet and pink and green flushings in the sky hinted at a dawn not too far off. The tiredness in his muscles dragged at Prestin now.

Presently an old woman wearing ragged carpet slippers and a shapeless shawl around her shoulders shuffled across, flicking the oval yellow spot from a hand flashlight ahead of her. She led them quietly into a small room off the entranceway, coughing a wet little cough, shuffling, saying hackingly, “Aspet” and again, weakly, “Aspet.”

They waited.

A light, quick step sounded on the flags outside and then the door opened and a girl muffled up in a long emerald cloak burst in. Prestin caught a vivid impression of impatience and laughter, of bright eyes and a mobile full-lipped mouth. She carried a silver-glitter handbag that strained at its fastenings. Her every action bubbled with a buoyant liveliness.

“Fit, Dave? Hi, Alec—so this is the Porteur.”

“Yes, this is Bob Prestin. Bob, this is Margie Lipton.”

“Pleased—” began Prestin.

“How about a cup of Java, Margie?” interrupted Alec.

“Can do. But if you want to be out of the city by dawn you’ll have to hurry.”

Macklin glanced at his watch. “It’s no go, Margie. I’m sorry to have dragged you away from your party, but time is running out on us. If you don’t mind, we’d better take off now. We can stop on the road and Bob can sleep in the car.”

Without a dissenting word she swung back to the door and they followed her out. At the curb waited a Jensen Interceptor FF. Prestin drew in his breath in a little whistle when he saw the car.

Margie smiled over her shoulder at him as they walked toward it. “Yes,” she said with that light confident voice. “It’s all car.”

They sat in the car whose comfort demanded that Prestin fall asleep at once. He forced himself to rouse up as they purred quietly through narrow roads, twisting and turning, rolling with a smooth motion as the big soft full-traction tires rumbled over cobbles’.

Alec sat in the back with him while Macklin, who must be as tired as anyone, sat up front with Margie.

“Why,” said Alec eagerly, “didn’t you get a white car, Margie? White convertibles are all the rage.”

She laughed, gently chiding. “Were all the rage, you mean, Alec. I like this primrose color, and I had that old has-been white painted over, alf. As for a convertible, they stand in the same position as a carriage and four.”

Remembering with a quick and bitter twinge that familiar “alf,” Prestin let his thoughts toll on; he too, knew what aristocracy thought of four horses to a carriage. This girl, this Margie Upton, promised to be quite a gal.

“I like it,” he said.

The car purred discreetly on through the outskirts of Rome, running on two-wheel drive. They turned at last to head south.

Before them, like a white unfolding promise of the sun, the autostrada led on to the scented lands of the south.

As the sun burst up over the hills away to their left and flooded down with its clear Renaissance-golden glow, Margie opened the Jensen up and they began to devour the miles.

Conversation in the car was held only desultorily at first and, without meaning to, Prestin let his head sag lower and lower. He jerked up, feeling a krink in the nape of his neck, a little off-balance mentally, yet determined not to fall asleep until these enigmatic people had answered a few questions.

Sunshine struck hard and brilliantly in from ahead. The car purred sweetly and all around lay the southern Italian countryside. Other cars passed, flashing by on the northern lanes; none passed them going south. Margie, Prestin saw as he looked over her shoulder, was keeping to a steady seventy. Sensible girl. Then he saw the time, realized the position of the sun, and felt the hollowness inside.

Eleven o’clock.

Never.

But, “Had a good sleep, Bob?” Macklin smiled back at him. “That’s good.”

Stiffness in his back made him stretch.

“Mind me, chum,” said Alec, stirring like a bear in the corner of a cage who’s been poked with a stick.

“Sorry.” Prestin had respect for the big man’s powers of sudden destruction; not that he was going to blow Prestin in half with a shotgun, but any man who could do that so—so casually—merited special caution.

“We’d better pull in soon.” Macklin’s smile held a small secret irony that for a moment baffled Prestin. “Should have done so before but we didn’t want to wake you, Bob.”

“Many thanks.” He thought of Fritzy. “I’ve been rushed around by you. Now I think you owe me some answers. You said you could help me find Fritzy from Iran—what was the name?”

“Irunium. Yes, we can. But it’s no good charging at it like a bull at a gate. Sit back and try to relax and enjoy the scenery. You’re hurtling along an autostrada in a primrose high-powered, ultra-expensive and most luxurious car, headed for the sun, and wine. Live a little.”

Only because Margie Lipton sat driving with nonchalant skill was Prestin’s foul language halted and his fist dropped. He swallowed. “By God, Macklin! You’d better have a good explanation or I’ll push your teeth down your throat!”

“That’s better, Bob.” Macklin was not in the least put out. “Work up a head of adrenalin. You’re going to need it.”

“There’s a place,” Margie said.

Looking out, fuming, wanting to say hard, hurtful words, Preston saw the neat white and green roadside ristorante, a modern place geared to handle tourists on their way to sample the sunshine of the south.

He slumped back in the seat. All his anger meant only that he felt his guilt. If he could make things disappear, instead of just mislaying them as he had always thought, well, then, that would explain Fritzy’s disappearance, wouldn’t it? Crazy, he told himself, crazy. You can’t just make people vanish.…

But Fritzy had gone somewhere and Macklin said it was to a place called Irunium.

Abruptly the car leaped forward, jerking him further into the upholstery. He pushed himself up. Margie was fairly spanking the car along the road and Alec, beside him, was reaching down to a long box beneath his legs and taking out an express rifle.

“What is it?” Prestin demanded.

Macklin had turned and was leaning over the back of the seat, his face grave.

“We have bullet-proof rear glass, and the seats have armor-plate backing; but he can always get the tires, even with the flaps down.”

“Flaps down,” Margie said crisply, pulling a lever on the dashboard.

“What is it?” shouted Prestin. He turned and looked through the rear window.

All he could see on the long, straight white road was another car, a blood-red Lancia, streaking along about five hundred yards or so behind.

“See the Lancia? That’s the Contessa di Montevarchi and she has her Trugs with her. They’re out to get us.”

IV

The Chrysler V-8 engine began to howl a little under the hood, like a cradle of kittens mewling. Those kittens would turn into tiger cats if you opened the hood now. Prestin noticed that Margie’d had an all-synchromesh four-speed gearbox installed instead of the automatic transmission system—a decision with which he agreed. “I’ve had the engine tuned and monkeyed with no end. The Chrysler boys wouldn’t recognize it now,” she said lightly.

“You just leave that Lancia behind, my girl,” said Macklin. He did not appear worried. Prestin sweated.

Alec began to assemble his express rifle, screwing the oiled blue steel together methodically and squarely, obviously enjoying what he was doing as thread ran sweetly on thread.

Prestin swallowed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He turned back again to follow Macklin’s glance through the rear window.

The Lancia hung on, if anything a little larger, a little nearer.

“Perdita has a Lancia Flavia now, hasn’t she?” asked Margie of no one in particular. “Such peculiar tastes for one who is so noisy about her culture and her quality.”

Prestin recognized the symptoms—the use of the Contessa’s name, the comparison of cars—and he gently said, “Hasn’t the old Flavia got a Kugelfischer fuel injection system to boost b.h.p. output? I’m not too hot on cars, planes are more my line.”

“Yes.” Margie spoke shortly. “But she’ll have done things to her Lancia like I have to my Jensen. The cat!” she finished with a fine feline sparkle.

Macklin chuckled dryly. “You’ll do, Margie.”

Alec said heavily, “Has anyone checked the maps? We want to do this thing right. The Contessa will never fall for that tired old oil on the road gag.”

The air of conspiracy in the car deepened. Macklin reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a map which was folded open to show an unwinding road system heading south. “Hum,” he said thoughtfully. He put a finger down on the map, and Prestin leaned forward sideways to peer over his shoulder. “That’s where we are, folks. Any ideas?”

“The next one, Dave,” said Margie shortly. For the first time, Prestin saw her face fully; it was tanned and young, altogether lovely. She wore her brown-gold hair long and it sheened with a clean healthy sparkle. Beneath the emerald green cloak, she wore a white woolen evening gown, demure and somehow enticingly pure. A diamond bracelet glittered on her wrist above the short gauntlet of her driving glove.

Looking at her, a memory of Fritzy flashed unbidden into Prestin’s mind; perhaps Fritzy, one day, would attain the clear goddess-like maturity of Margie.

“They’re gaining on us,” Alec said. He leaned forward, the rifle between his knees. “Can’t you burn a few more miles an hour out of this old jalopy, Margie?”

“You want to stay in one piece, don’t you, apeneck?”

Margie held the car steadily and the speed only came into consciousness in the flickering passage of wayside constructions, trees, and cars traveling in the opposite direction. “I’m holding a little in reserve for the bend.”

“Good girl.” Macklin stubbed his finger forward on the mapped road. “Here’s the place. About four miles, Margie.” He chuckled. “It’s a good sharp bend.”

“Check.”

Alec sat back but Prestin kept looking at the map. Scattered over widely spaced intervals, a number of neat red crosses had been inked in.

“What are they, then?” he asked.

“The crosses? They’re all the nodal points we know of so far. Here’s the one where Fritzy went through—”

He pointed to a red cross just northwest of Rome.

“I suppose you were, what, ten thousand at the time?”

“Nothing like that. We were lowering down. I dunno. We could find out. But—but you mean people have disappeared through all those red crosses?”

Macklin laughed sourly. “No. Of course not. Some won’t be large enough. But any Porteur could put through whatever the nodal point would accept. You could. You could put a whole lot through, and you could make the nodal point accept a lot more than most, I’d guess.”

A shivery thought ghosted unpleasantly. “Suppose,” Prestin said, and swallowed, “suppose we hit a nodal point now?”

Margie laughed shortly.

Alec said, “I’m holding onto my gun, man!”

“If we do, Bob, then whoever you have selected may be Porteured through to Irunium,” said Macklin.

“Oh, no!”

Something hard and sharp went pinnngg! against the back of the car. Alec grunted and half lifted his rifle.

“Save it, Alec.” Macklin looked ahead through the windscreen. “If they’re using ordinary bullets they won’t hurt us at this distance—providing they don’t sneak one under the flaps and hit a tire.”

“There’s the bend ahead.” Margie sounded cool and calm.

“Make your play now, Margie—”

Prestin jerked his thoughts back from the red crosses representing nodal points—he wondered how Macklin had obtained that information—to the smooth flow of action about him. The Jensen accelerated smoothly, and dived full throttle for the approaching bend.

“You’re going too fast—” Preston began, panicky.

“Quiet, laddie!”

“Hold on, troops.” Margie spoke with deceptive ease. Prestin caught hold of the door handle strapping. From the corner of his eye he saw Alec turn and crouch on the floor, the rifle raised. His hand pressed a lever beneath the armrest and a hole abruptly appeared between the rest and the side of the car. Alec thrust the rifle through and peered carefully down the telescopic sight.

“All set, Margie,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Margie put the anchors on.

In a chaotic bewilderment of jumbled sensations, Prestin was rapidly aware of being flung forward, wrenching his arm; of seeing Macklin cradled in the front seat straps; of Margie stiff-armed like a Grand Prix driver at the wheel; of Alec pressing the rifle trigger again and again, and hissing between his teeth in time to the soft coughing of the rifle.

He flung a glimpse back through the rear window as the Jensen hurtled around the bend. Just before the road shoulder came between him and the scene, he saw the blood-red Lancia sprawling forward in reaction to the viciousness of Margie’s braking. He saw the side of the car as the bend took them, saw the side windows shattering, saw the tires blowing, saw the car veering and lurching. It swayed across the lines between the lanes, staggering into the northbound lanes, smoke belching from the engine.

“That clobbered her!” said Alec with deep satisfaction.

“She’ll come out alive, the cat; she has nine times nine lives.” Margie spoke, Prestin guessed with a hysterical reaction, as one expert of another.

“That’ll hold her up for an hour or so, at the least.”

A bunched group of cars fled past going north.

“If those cars—” began Prestin.

“They’ll see her in time, if she’s still on the road.” Macklin chuckled. “She’s probably right over in the far ditch.”

“Hoo, boy!” said Alec, as though speaking of a football match. “Did you see the way she spun! There was a mite of smoke about, too. With any luck the Lancia’s a complete write-off.”

“Next time she’ll armor-plate the side of her new car.” Margie laughed shortly, a sardonic bark of sound in the speeding car.

“But this time the old bend trick worked again.” Alec began to take his express rifle to pieces, cleaning out the bore with loving care. His strong down-bent face carried deeply-engraved pleasure-lines. This was a man who could channel his mind onto one objective at a time, Prestin realized; a useful man to have around.

Margie raised the flaps over the rear tires. She settled back, letting the car drift along. “I’m still thirsty and peckish.”

“Yes, Margie. But we’d better keep going for a spell. Then we can all relax.” Macklin carried that casual habit of command well. “I don’t give the Contessa more than an hour before she’s after us again. They must have been monitoring the roads out of Rome—”

“I didn’t see any signs that they were,” said Margie.

“Nor me. They could have picked up my radio call to you. Yes, that could be it. Was the party a success?” he finished, apparently at random.

“So, so.” Margie shrugged her shoulders and the emerald green cloak slipped down a little. “Fabrizzi was there. Such a bore.”

“Now, just a minute!” Prestin said heatedly. He still felt keyed up—you’d have to be a cod’s head on a slab not to be shaken, he supposed—but he’d been in tight situations before where he’d felt calm, collected and able to plan his next moves. This situation had thundered along and tumbled him willy-nilly like a chip in a raging sea, so that he had to keep trying to grasp a hint of reality here, a fragment of normalcy there. With nodal points existing all over, how could he know when anything—anyone—would abruptly vanish? He couldn’t. He said, “I thought back there, at the bend, that we were coming up to a nodal point. I thought that’s what you meant.”

“No, laddie. We aren’t that desperate yet.”

“But I am! You sit calmly talking of parties and here I am—”

Margie laughed. “Doesn’t he know anything, Dave?”

“Not much.” Macklin laughed too, a gentle sound of friendly mirth. “The story is very simple, Bob. But The Montevarchi rather fouls it all up.”

“The cat!” put in Margie Lipton characteristically.

“She and we want the same thing—”

“Oh, yes,” Prestin said with some scorn. “I gathered that. You both want me.”

Alec clicked a metal part of the rifle and chuckled.

“Hole in one, son.”

“So?” demanded Prestin, wondering why he did not feel righteous indignation at their treatment of him. He wasn’t a side of beef, was he? “Suppose I don’t want to be had?”

“Remember the Trug, that’s what I say.” And Alec went back to his polishing and oiling.

The car murmured smoothly along the road. The sun shone. The air-conditioners freshened the interior and dissipated the last of the gunfire smoke. Macklin found a roll of mints and offered them around. They all sucked solemnly. Finally Prestin couldn’t stand it any longer.

“If you’re not going to tell me—”

“There isn’t much to tell. There’s this place Irunium.” Macklin’s face suddenly lost the laugh-lines; it grew grave and a little remote. “I’ve never been there. It is a wonderful country—wonderful and terrible. There is vast wealth there, so vast the old pot of gold at the end of the rainbow dreams would come true a millionfold.”

“Fairy tales yet.”

“And Trugs, son.”

“You must be familiar with the theory of the dimensions? That our dimension is paralleled by an infinitude of other dimensions, other universes, all existing continuously with us and able to be interpenetrated, provided one has the right key? It’s an old theory now, and one that has excited the imaginations of man ever since the possibilities of dimensional travel became feasible—”

“Feasible!”

“Everything has been kept very hush-hush, as you would expect. We here on this Earth are at a nexus of other worlds which do not approach us in idealogy, culture, scientific or technical attainment, or in many of the everyday devices we take for granted.”

“What’s all that supposed to mean?” Prestin said. He had heard of the dimensional theory, of course—any intelligent man who kept up with the literature had. There had been a case in the papers, a few years back, of a gang of skylarkers being arrested on the steps of an Underground station in London, all dressed up for a safari. Nothing came of it, though. At first they’d said they were going to another dimension; afterwards they produced the bottles. They were fined for being drunk and disorderly and told to go cool off. He’d remembered it, though. He’d thought, at the time, what fun it would have been…

Macklin went on. “It means this: unless there are other dimensions lying near us, peopled by advanced or very advanced races who—for their own reasons—do not wish to allow us to communicate with them, we can go across through the nodal points into other worlds. Irunium is the nearest at the moment.”

“At the moment?”

“They change, laddie, they change. We hear stories of other races and other people trying to cross, some in fact even crossing. We’ve been trying to communicate with other dimensions. But the Contessa needs money and jewels and they are to be found in profusion in Irunium. Consequently, she wants Porteurs to work for her—”

“She wants me to slave for her, is that it?”

“Slave? Well, I suppose you could call it that. You wouldn’t like it, that I can guarantee.”

“She,” said Margie, “is a cat whose father and mother were only nodding acquaintances.”

“We’d better pull in at the next cafe,” said Macklin. “A coffee will do us all good.”

Prestin held onto his calm rationality under this barrage. If Fritzy hadn’t disappeared, and if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes a Trug—he hadn’t imagined that, surely?—he wouldn’t believe a word of this farrago of dimensions and treasures that he was being handed. But they all took it so matter-of-factly—no tremendous drama, no heroics, no hysteria. These were three people coolly doing a job and getting on with it. That made him say, “Where do you come into all this?”

“We thought, at first, that the Montevarchi was a normal person, like anyone else. But she isn’t. She fooled us for a time; then we found out about her—and what she had been doing.” Macklin stopped talking and sat for a moment with a face gray and drawn, like granite chipped from a quarry and left to radiate blocky hate beneath ice.

“What—?” began Prestin.

“Hold it a minute, Bob.” Margie spoke sharply and with force, but compassionately, without malice.

Then, “I’m all right, Margie, you old fuss-pot,” said Macklin. “Young Mike—it always gets to me—hell, girl, you and he—it—”

“We’ll find him.” She spoke briskly. “And there’s a cafe or ristorante or what have you ahead. You need the coffee, Dave. That’s for sure.”

“Listen, Bob.” Macklin turned and laid a hand on Prestin’s arm, leaning on the back of the seat. “Mike is my son. The story, very shortly, is that he was the finest, truest, best lad—anyway, the Montevarchi has him. She has him and all the others in Irunium slaving, yes, slaving for her. That’s how she remains rich. She throws her money away on this side. And Mike and the others work to make more for her—”

“Coffee,” said Margie loudly and cheerfully, swinging the Jensen off the road. They bumped up over a concrete ramp and headed into a parking area. Prestin had not looked out since Macklin started speaking of his son Mike.

“Tell me,” he said as Margie cut the engine. “Why are we heading for Foggia? I mean, I know we’re escaping from the consequences of what happened in Rome, but why run to Foggia?”

“Fellow there I know, name of Gerstein, he knows as much about the dimensions as anyone does who’s never been through. He lost his son during the war—Fifteenth Air Force, B-17—and we’ve been collaborating. When he hears about you sending Fritzy he’ll—”

“That’s not fair! You don’t know I—I sent her!”

“How else did she disappear, then?” Macklin opened the car door. He turned to look back at Prestin, glaring angrily after him. “We hear rumors, stories of other people finding keys to the dimensions. There was a man called Crane, an Englishman, he had a map—but he won’t talk about it.”

“You told me,” Prestin said, sliding across after Alec and getting out that side. “You said it was feasible. That means there must be some other way—”

“Sure. But that wasn’t operating in this instance. A fellow called Alan Watkins dreamed up a formula for crossing the dimensions. Unfortunately, they found they had to work a new formula for each dimension, more or less. Guy called Phil Brandon told me. Said he had more information but wasn’t at liberty to divulge it. No, Bob. We’re on our own.”

They walked toward the ristorante, four people caught up together in a tragicomedy hanging between worlds, one of them hardly believing and yet forced to accept the evidence of his own senses. Prestin said, “All those red crosses. You can’t know they’re all nodal points. There must be another system besides me, or others you claim are like me. There must!”

“Maybe.” Macklin held the door open for them to enter. “One thing this guy Brandon did say kind of got to me. ‘Look out for the Porvone,’ he said. Porvone. The way he said it—kind of scary, hushed-voice. Porvone. A whole lot worse than Trugs.”

They went through without speaking for a moment after that, found a table and sat down. Alec, licking his lips, said, “I fancy everything on the menu, plus all the trimmings. I am—as they say—peckish.”

Prestin realized afresh how famished he was. Margie asked the fatly smiling proprietor if he had risotto with mushrooms and saffron available, giving him the necessary fifteen minutes to add the mushrooms and the saffron, pinch by pinch. Prestin followed her lead. Alec settled for a highly colored and spiced pasta dish and Macklin, abstemiously, for a little whitefish and cauliflower, with Genoese fish sauce.

When they had eaten, Prestin, for one, felt replete.

“I’ll drive if you like, Margie,” offered Alec, pushing his empty glass to one side and smiling as Macklin offered to refill it with the excellent local Vesuviana wine.

“I’m as sober as a circuit judge on Monday,” said Margie without offence. “And I’m not tired. And I prefer to drive my own car. And I’m not—”

“You have made,” interrupted Alec, giving in, “your point.”

The fat and smiling wife of the fatly smiling proprietor brought good coffee, not espresso, with cream circling galactically on its rich brownness. Prestin could almost imagine that nothing catastrophic had happened in the last twenty-four hours. This short interlude in the white-painted, flower-boxed little ristorante house, with small, friendly noises creeping in the open window, good food inside him, the wine and the coffee—he sat back in his chair, thinking—was how life should really be.

A buzzing sound drifted in through the window. The blue sky showed no clouds and the southern half of Italy promised a whole summer of heat. They had talked during the meal in a desultory fashion about the dimensions; the proprietor spoke a little Chicago English, however, and they had been discreet.

The buzzing sound grew louder.

“More coffee?”

“No, thank you, Margie.” Alec turned his blocky face toward the window.

“Well, we’d better be making a move. The Montevarchi will probably have found another car by now.” Macklin rose.

The buzzing sound interrupted itself with a regular chopping beat. Alec stood up, listening. “Helicopter,” he said. He held Margie’s chair for her.

After Macklin had paid, stilling Prestin’s instinctive reach for his wallet, the four went outside. The sun shone down gloriously, the sky ached with blueness, scrubbed into an intense paleness after dinner, and the road glimmered with heat. The helicopter had circled back.

“I suppose—?” Margie said, one hand hesitantly going to her lips.

“Could be.” Alec squinted up as he put his hand into his jacket pocket. Prestin thought that pocket had bulged a little too much for any casual contents.

Prestin looked up, shading his eyes. Splinters of sunshine glinted from the helicopter’s rotors. The domed perspex bubble and side windows blazed down eyes of fire. “That’s an Agusta 105. Probably the four seat B. Nifty little chopper.”

Macklin said, very gently, “You are all, indubitably, right. So—Run!”

He started for the Jensen as though his pants were on fire. The others followed. Prestin felt a quick jolt of fear, a sour taste in his mouth, a churning in his stomach—sensations which he had gotten too familiar with and whose acquaintance, nowadays, he had no desire whatsoever to resume.

He ran like hell.

The helicopter swung back. The chop-chop-chopping of the rotors whined a little and was then cut into by a more staccato, harsher, more brutal whick-whick-whick.

The automatic rifle’s bullets skittered across the concrete parking area.

Alec flung an arm up and fired off a full clip from his Luger.

Of course, as Preston saw, the bullets went nowhere.

The ‘copter circled around for another pass.

Margie fumbled with her purse, getting the car keys out. Alec shouted, “Hurry up, Margie! He’s got us cold!”

Looking up against the scraped white sun glare, Prestin saw the black vulture shadow chopping back across the ristorante. The proprietor and his wife had bolted inside and slammed the door; there had been no other customers. The chopper chugged down closer. Prestin could clearly see the snout of an automatic rifle protruding through the open window behind the pilot.

“Is it the Contessa?” he asked, his mouth feeling as though it were full of horse chestnuts.

“One of her henchmen—an Earthman, not a Trug.” Macklin stood by the car as Margie flung the door open and Alec dived in. The speed with which he assembled his express rifle astounded Prestin. Macklin dragged him back to the other side of the car.

“Margie paid over five thousand pounds for a bullet proof shield for us.” He sounded as though he thought the joke a good one.

Crouched down beside Macklin, with Margie tumbling out the near door to join them, and with Alec snouting his rifle up as the helicopter bored in wickedly, Prestin wondered where the joke lay.

The automatic rifle snickered through the vane noise and Alec cracked off six crisp rounds in reply.

The ‘copter veered above them sharply. Prestin could see no damage. He heard the loud and angry clamor of bullets striking the car. The ‘copter bucked. As it came toward them Alec fired again and this time Prestin saw the perspex screech shatter into shredded fragments. He saw the pilot lurch up and double over. He saw the helicopter falter in mid-air.

He heard Margie scream. “It’s coming down right on top of us!”

“Get out of the way!” yelled Macklin.

Somehow Prestin was springing up, feeling Margie’s arm beneath his fingers, hauling her to her feet. He felt a tight metal band encircle his head, an imaginary bond of steel to crush his skull and pulp his brains. He started to run, feeling Margie’s weight dragging on him. He caught a crazy glimpse of Macklin’s shoes, the soles dusty with concrete, of Alec snarling and firing still, as the great black shadow above them whickered down remorselessly.

He ran.

He was still running.

The concrete beneath his feet gave out and he was fighting his way through yellowish sand and stringy fronds of some dark green bloated weed. His feet hurt. The sand struck back with a heat out of proportion to the southern Italian sunshine, even through his own tough English leather hand-tooled shoes. He could not hear the chopper. He couldn’t hear Alec firing nor Macklin yelling at them to run; he couldn’t hear Margie—nor feel her arm beneath his gripping fingers that constricted on empty air.

Then he understood.

V

So they hadn’t been fairy stories, after all.

So here he was, in Irunium.

Great.

So how did he get back?

His whole attention had been directed on getting away from the falling Agusta helicopter and dragging Margie to safety with him. He must, he supposed with a dull headache as a memory of that imaginary steel band encircling his skull, have catapulted himself into this place through sheer cowardice.

The sun still shone. The sand gritted under his shoes. The sky possessed a bluer blue and the grass growing a few hundred feet from where the sand stopped grew a greener green. A clump of orangey trees shaped like tenpins sprouted straight up out of the grass and, looking around him, he saw numbers of these isolated growths dotting the landscape. Some clumps had ocher and jade trees, but most shone with that deep orangey tint. He thought he glimpsed a bird sailing off against a level wash of cloud, but he could not be sure. Judging his position by the sun, he thought that due north of him a dark band stretched across the horizon; again his eyes jumped as he tried to focus, so he wasn’t certain.

As far as he could see, the land alternated in that strange unpredictable way between patches of barren coarse red sand, patches of fine golden sand, and stretches of the blue-green grass that grew in luxuriant profusion, its greenness spotted and set off by the heads of myriad poppy-red flowers. Prestin noticed that there seemed to be no wind; at least, he could feel none and the grasses did not sway—and yet he felt there ought to be wind, and could not define why.

He told himself, I’m here. Bud—I’m here. So I have to get back. But how?

He supposed there must have been a nodal point through which, instead of pushing one of the others, he had himself jumped, willy-nilly. If he could find the same place again—he hadn’t moved more than a pace or two since he’d stopped running—he could… He could—what?

How could he return himself to the familiar world?

What mechanism did he employ? What abracadabra mumbojumbo? What psychological conundrums of mental agility?

He admitted that he did not have the slightest idea of how to get back other than just thinking hard and hoping.

He was damned thirsty, too.

The heat of the sand at last became too obnoxious and he walked across to stand on the grass. He felt he was desecrating it somehow, but his feet could not wait.

A spirit of zealous inquiry possessed him to the partial exclusion of fear—he was badly frightened and guessed dully that he might be frightened worse in the future—but right now he felt inclined to explore. If he was to make his way back to Italy he must work on the problem. Standing still worrying would be no help but exploring might turn up any number of answers.

The dryness in his throat emphasized his thirst and, he supposed with a quick stab of anger, his fear, too.

What to do? He turned around again to look. He saw only the bland otherness of the landscape, the strange bottle-shaped trees, the tall grasses, the sand, the alien emptiness of it all, the faint tantalizing bar of darkness all along the northern horizon.

Well? That strange bar of shadow must be something, even if only a range of mountains. So? Yes. He could not find a way back from here, that was perfectly obvious, and he could not go on living here, without food and water and shelter. At least at the foot of mountains there should be water and food and he could rig up a shelter. What else could he do? Short of break down into madness?

He began to walk.

Just how long he had walked before he saw the dark spot darting over the ground ahead of him he could not say.

He halted, wiping sweat from his forehead, and screwed up his eyes. Then he took off his glasses and wiped the sweat and fogginess from them. By the time he put them back on again the dot had resolved into an animal. At least, Prestin looked again, startled out of the lethargy that had been creeping over him during the monotonous tramp, he supposed it was an animal.

The body of the thing rounded out into a bulbous squab about two feet in diameter, a dark metallic blue. From this a yellow neck, some three feet long, swayed up to support a small cat-like head, oddly intelligent-looking and wise in its bewhiskered furriness. But what shocked Prestin into standing stock-still, frightened to move, were the thing’s legs. It ran on two long dragonfly jointed stalks, with another two projecting straight behind and held clasped together; still two more waved menacingly before it, like pseudo-arms, each ending in a wide-taloned claw. Out of shock Prestin counted the talons, and was relieved, somehow, to find that the thing had four claws, not three like the Trugs.

The thing shrieked a garbled string of invective at him as it came swiftly on.

The danger suddenly shook him out of his shocked stance. But before he could run, a talon struck solidly, sprawling him forward onto the sand; another talon swooped and closed around the back of his neck. He could feel the harsh scraping of bone. He could hear the shrill whistle of the thing breathing through its flattened cat’s nose and he could smell the rank odor of feathers and skin.

Desperately he thrust a hand into his pocket seeking for the small knife he usually carried. He found it and pulled it out. His face thrust hard into the sand as one talon around his neck held him. He realized numbly that he was being held, that the thing was doing nothing else. It had caught him. Now it guarded him. For what? He opened the knife convulsively and struck blindly upward.

The talons shifted a fraction so that he could jump up. He swung around to face the thing. The head weaved bewilderingly, the mouth ricked open and spitting. The talons struck and Prestin jumped sideways. A spot of greenish blood dappled the dark blue body where his knife had drunk.

Menace breathed from the thing like heavy musk in a shuttered room. At first it had only wished to hold him captive, but he resisted and struck back. Now, clearly, the thing would seek to kill him.

The talons lashed again. As he jumped this time, Prestin struck down and sideways with the knife. The blade razored through a talon, half-severing it, and the thing keened a high spitting, splitting shriek.

“You didn’t like that, did you?” said Prestin, panting, sweating, deathly afraid.

Preston could not run, for the thing was manifestly faster over the ground than he; but even if he could have, he felt through his fear, he would still choose to meet it face to face. He had done all the running in this life he would do. He moved in and slashed again and the thing jumped back, whistling.

The long snakelike neck snapped forward like a catapult and the cat’s head leaped at his throat. The fangs gaped wide, white and needle-sharp, showing the inside of the lips a dark green, the throat a bilious green-yellow. Prestin leaped aside, staggered, flung up an arm and felt the puncturing fangs bite through tendon and flesh.

He slashed with the knife again and missed. The head flicked around and then struck in again. He rolled over panting, screaming, and felt the fangs bite into his back and shoulder. He pushed up on one knee as the head flung itself furiously upon him again. He grabbed the neck just below the head and held on like a man on a bucking bronco. The head lunged insanely.

It jerked and screamed and swayed and spat. Prestin hung on. He dropped his knife and clung on now with both griping fists. The taloned claws kept battering at him and he kicked back, furiously slamming his heavy shoes into the dark blue body.

He heard—or thought he heard—a sharp crack.

The neck went limp. The head lolled. He felt warm green ichor welling out of the mouth and running down over his fists. With an exclamation of disgust he threw the thing from him.

The body fell away and Prestin saw the wooden haft protruding from it, the heavy wedge-shaped javelin head half-buried in blue flesh. He sprang up and turned swiftly.

The man laughing at him had a bronzed, dark-bearded face, blue eyes and tousled hair. He waved.

“Molto buono! Ecco—Andate!”

The Italian was thick and muddied, but recognizable.

Speaking the same language, Prestin said, “What—who are you?”

“Never mind that now. Bring the assegai. I need it. And hurry!”

With some repugnance, Prestin tore the javelin free. He felt shakiness and pushed it away; now was no time for reaction to weaken him. But it had been a very close shave…

He ran over to the dark-bearded stranger. The man wore neat enough green tights and a short green jacket. He had a quiver full of the javelins over his shoulder and a short sword at his left side. He wore no hat and Prestin felt cheated: the man should at least have worn a hat with a curly brim and a feather.

“Who are you?” the man said, in a voice that was gruff although not unfriendly.

“Prestin. And you?”

“Only Prestin. Some of you other-worlders have no realization of etiquette in names. I am”—he spoke now with a conscious dark pride, the thick Italian ringing more true—”I am Dalreay of Dargai, Todor Dalreay of the keep and lands of Dargai, nobly born—fugitive!” He finished with hard, hurting bitterness.

“Well,” said Prestin placatingly, “that makes two of us.”

“How so?” The man—Dalreay—could match Prestin’s own shifts of mood and feeling. His dark blue eyes showed a clear determination to surmount his present problems, and, although perhaps not in such a flamboyant way, the same purpose was firmly shared by Prestin.

“Well—you saw! That—that thing was going to kill me.”

“The Ulloa? I don’t think so. They hunt for the Valcini.”

“The Valcini?”

“There is much to learn if you are to stay alive. The first thing is speed. The Valcini will be following that Ulloa, or more of its foul kind may be hunting with it. We must abandon this locality for now. As a fugitive I am well used to that.” Again that soul weariness blurred his words and drew his mouth down in lines of dejection.

He began to walk toward a clump of the tenpin trees and Prestin followed.

At the foot of a jade specimen Dalreay bent and tugged fiercely at a tuft of the coarse grass. Instead of the grass tearing from its roots, a whole square section of ground opened up like a trapdoor to reveal steps cut in the earth leading down into darkness.

“I’ll go first, Prestin. But for Amra’s sake don’t fall on me! It’s a long way down.”

On the top step lay a bulky brown canvas bag and this Dalreay lifted and carried by means of a leather strap over one shoulder. Prestin noted the materials from which things were made—Dalreay’s clothes, the javelins, the bag—realizing they would give him a clearer understanding of this world’s technology and culture levels.

With his left hand scraping down the damp, crumbling earth and his feet treading cautiously down one step at a time in total darkness, Prestin descended after Dalreay.

He did not question doing this. He did not stop to argue. He simply felt that under the ground lay a possible haven that most certainly did not exist on the surface of this frightening world.

He started to count the steps. He felt this befitted a quondam scientific mind. After 365 he gave up, not missing the significance of the figure. Dalreay halted a short time after that, one hand behind him to stay Prestin, saying, “We’re nearly there. Now listen to this. You are an out-worlder and therefore can be easily killed. So do exactly as you are told and do not question others too much.” He made a small half-sniggering sound. “As for me, I am Dalreay of Dargai, and I know.” He went on down. “Come.”

Baffled, but strangely trusting this dark, sardonically bitter man—in much the same way he had felt he could trust David Macklin—Prestin went on down.

“Keep quiet from now on.” Dalreay’s hand showed now against a vague pinkish glow from below. His beard was thrust arrogantly up.

Prestin did not answer but by his silence acquiesced to Dalreay’s order.

They both moved down in complete silence, their feet soundless on the cut earth, their hands scraping without noise against the damp dark wall. Prestin could now see that myriads of tiny glittering facets, tiny jewels, had been set in the wall. The pinkish glow strengthened until they no longer needed touch to reassure their balance and the numbers of jewels increased. When they stepped at last onto a stone floor, the glow all about them blazed magnificently from solid walls of gems.

Prestin wanted to cry out in wonder but Dalreay gripped his arm and frowned. They moved on swiftly through a tunnel cut from the heart of a living jewel.

This Todor Dalreay—now that Prestin could see him again by the light of the jewels—seemed to be the archetype hunter, frontiersman, intrepid folk hero. Seemed to be. For, to Prestin, the air of doomed resignation, the bitter anguish with which the strong man had spoken of his home and of being a fugitive, carried overtones of tragedy and despair.

Dalreay now held a javelin easily balanced between the fingers of his right hand, his left clinging firmly to the canvas bag suspended from his shoulder. Prestin followed, treading warily.

The tunnel increased in size and the irregularities of the walls smoothed out until the passageway was as wide and lofty as an Italian basilica of the other dimension. A pair of grooves had been cut in the floor which, Prestin intuitively guessed, were tracks for the carts that carried the jewels cut from the rock.

Dalreay cautioned Prestin to silence yet again. He pressed himself close to the side of the passageway that here curved gently outwards, concealing anything at the farther end from their view. He slowed down and moved cautiously around that convex wall of brilliance. By now the scintillant light was hurting Prestin’s eyes. He wiped away tears and felt the burning sensation that told him in no uncertain terms that he was damaging his eyesight. He pressed both hands flat against the wall and shut his eyes tight, creeping along that way after Todor Dalreay.

He bumped into the tough green-clad huntsman.

His eyes flew open. Dalreay pushed against him with a hard elbow and shoulder and he half-fell sideways into a niche in the wall. Chisel marks showed on the rock and fallen jewels lay scattered on the floor. Noises suddenly spurted from around the bend: harsh footfalls, the clanking of metal, voices raised in arrogant confident tones, laughing, careless, authoritative.

Dalreay put his bearded face close to Prestin.

“Forsaken imps of Honshi guards! For the sweet sake of Amra, don’t let one get away if there are more than two. Here.”

He thrust a javelin into Prestin’s less than enthusiastic hands.

Prestin didn’t like this one bit. It now seemed he had made a serious mistake to come down here at all. The footfalls neared; the strong confident voices and the clanking of metal made a deep diapason with those arrogant fancies of a moment ago. If there were more than three… Well… He gulped. That meant he was to silence his man, at least.

Dalreay had put his canvas bag down, pushing it further into the niche. His whole body was tensed in absolute concentration on one objective. These Honshi guards—whatever they were—would receive scant shrift from Dalreay.

Prestin swallowed and tried to forget he was a civilized man of twentieth-century Europe and America; he tried instead to pretend that he was a lethal and bloody-minded savage from the palaeolithic age, armed anachronistically with a steel tipped assegai.

Three guards rounded the corner. Dalreay spat a single expletive under his breath, “Parduslikaloth!”

It sounded delightfully obscene. The Honshi guards just looked obscene. Their faces most resembled frogs’, wide and grinning, with large far-spaced eyes, flat wedge-shaped cheeks, gray and yellow, with a lick of blue around the chops. They stood perhaps five-foot-six and strutted on short bent legs; they were tough, nasty and altogether repugnant. They wore metal armor—a reddish metal Prestin thought more likely to be copper than bronze—with tall conical helmets, banded in red and black. From the top of each spiked helmet hung a cluster of hair, still attached to shriveled skin. They looked too small to be scalps.

Dalreay shouted, “Hieyea!” and lunged. His javelin passed clean through the sidepiece of the first guard’s breastplate; the death warrant of that Honshi was clearly written in the sudden spout of green ichor that bathed the woodsman’s hand.

The Honshi carried swords of a similar pattern to that now whipped out by Dalreay: short broad and leaf-shaped like Celtic or Greek swords, they were handy for circling and thrusting, evenly balanced for the short chop to a defenseless neck, but not so good for open attack on an armored man. Broader than the classic Celtic leaf sword, they would be clumsier, too. Prestin hurled himself at the second Honshi, his javelin held like a rifle and bayonet. His mind was clicking along grooves he had forgotten existed.

The Honshi gutturaled deep in his throat. His sword flashed up. Prestin carried on with his lunge; he felt the javelin strike metal, begin to penetrate, and then bend. The force of his rush carried him on and he collided heavily with the struggling Honshi. From the tail of his eye as he sought to grasp the sword arm, he saw Dalreay’s sword go up, in, out, and leave the third guard’s face a bloody mess.

The worst that could happen now was that this second guard would escape. Prestin brought his knee up sharply and pushed hard sideways, his head down and urgently thrusting into the thing’s breastplate, like a front row forward.

They went over together. Then he had the sword arm. He bashed it frenziedly against the floor. The Honshi resisted like a piece of sprung steel. They thrashed about, now one on top, now another, and all the time the thing breathed in hoarse, foul gulps and gasps that filled the air with a stink that made Prestin feel sick.

From somewhere he heard Dalreay say, “If you’d only keep still a moment, Prestin—Ah!”

He was underneath at the time and with a loud and coarse thwack! the thing collapsed on top of him like a bag of hops when the string is cut.

He struggled up, avoiding the green ichor.

“I had him, Todor!” he said indignantly. “I had him beat!”

“Sure.” Dalreay laughed, his face relaxed and filled with satisfaction. He kicked the corpse. “Sure. You had him beat, Prestin. I just helped him on his way.”

Prestin shrugged his jacket back on and tried to wipe some of the muck off. Dalreay began to strip the three dead Honshi of their weapons. He left the armor. Looking on, Prestin bent and picked up a helmet that rolled loose. He indicated the scraps of hair.

“Scalps?”

“Scalps?” Dalreay looked puzzled. “I have learned the other-world language, Eytalian, but this word I do not know—”

Prestin explained.

Dalreay chuckled as though at a huge joke. “The idea is the same,” he said. “But head hair, no. They’re pubic hair. The Honshi must have a sense of humor your redskins lack.”

Prestin didn’t think it was funny. He had been holding the helmet and looking at the hair. He dropped the thing with a clang.

Dalreay chided him. “Here in Irunium a man must be a man, friend Prestin. No state aid here.”

He draped the weapons around Prestin and then dragged his canvas bag out. He wedged it firmly into the angle of floor and wall, piling the three bodies onto it. He seemed to like his work. “We can’t go any farther. These tunnels aren’t being mined now—I’ve had a hand in that—but it seems they are well patrolled. We do it here.”

“Do what?”

But before he had finished, Prestin understood.

Dalreay produced a long length of rope and an ordinary box of terrestrial kitchen matches from his belt pouch. He wedged the fuse well into the bag, and walked back running it through his fingers. Prestin made sure he was not left behind.

When Dalreay lit the fuse, Prestin was irresistably reminded of a man at his devotions.

Then they both hared down the passageway past the glowing jewel-encrusted walls. The swords kept clanking together but Dalreay got a little ahead and Prestin, forgetting about the noise, raced like a madman to keep up. They had almost reached the foot of the earth-cut steps when the explosion boomed, banged, ear-deafened and air-blasted along the tunnel behind them.

Prestin was pitched forward against the jeweled wall.

Dalreay, one foot on the stairs, looked up and yelled.

From above, louder and growing louder every moment, the long, drawn-out rumbling of a rock fall thundered down to bury them alive.

VI

Savagely, Dalreay hauled Prestin past the end of the earth-cut steps. They crouched in a narrow recess gouged from the living jeweled rock, their ears ringing with the clangor of falling gem stones, their eyes blinded by the thick dust and the roiling clouds of rock chips; any single flying glint of rock could blind them forever if it struck their fleshy eyeballs. Prestin, hands over his face, cowered down and felt his fear lashing him unmercifully.

“I didn’t expect this!” choked Dalreay.

“How much powder did you use?” Prestin let the disgust rise to fight the fear. “Haven’t you any idea?”

“Of course I don’t know!” Dalreay spat out dust and rock chips. The dust whirled about their heads, sucked back and driven up as the air billowed in response to falling sections of roof. A glittering gray mass of rock and rubble poured down the steps, obliterating them. The noise rumbled like the inferno on Saturday night overtime.

Prestin pushed himself harder into the crevice.

“If Nodger were here I’d—I’d shove him into the rock fall!” Dalreay was really worked up. “He told me it would go well—strike another blow for our freedom, he said! Why—I’ll—”

“Who’s Nodger?”

“Him? He’s the most brainless, most useless, most sinful pile of offal this side of the Cabbage Patch.” Dalreay stopped shouting and wiped streaky fingers down the dust and sweat of his face. His beard stiffened, caked in dust. Their hair and eyebrows made them look like millers.

“It’s stopping.”

“By Amra, if it doesn’t the whole roof will cave in. We’ll be buried alive.”

“I thought,” Prestin swallowed and tasted flat dust, “I thought we were.”

“Maybe so. But we don’t know yet. This will bring Honshi, Trugs, rabble, maybe even a few Valcini themselves.” He stood up and bashed angrily at the dust on his green clothes. “We’ve got to find a way out before we’re caught.”

A single glance up the steps showed Prestin that no one was going in or out that way again until a million man hours with shovels had been put in. He felt dry.

Obediently, he followed Dalreay over the sprawled rock shards of the corridor. His eyes hurt and his feet hurt and his mouth felt drier than the rock dust caking his tongue.

“You wouldn’t, by any chance, Todor, have a drink?”

“No. And who gave you permission to use my own name?”

“Your own name—? Oh—I thought it was a title, like, mister—” Prestin licked his lips—unsuccessfully—and eyed Dalreay’s sword uneasily. The green had been cleaned off on the Honshi’s clothes, but the memory of it lingered. So did its smell.

“Todor is my own name. I do not know yours.”

“Robert. Robert Infamy Prestin.”

“So, Roberto—”

“Bob.”

“Bob. We have no water. We will walk until we find a way out. If we must kill guards, Honshi or Trugs, then we will do so. We cannot afford to lose now through any weakness of the flesh. Si?”

“Si,” said Prestin, and slogged on after his leader.

They reached the point at which their original explosion had brought down the ceiling and triggered off the fall down the steps shaft, and Prestin wondered what Dalreay would do. Obviously, they could not go on. The dust still drifted mindlessly in the air, the gems sparkled through it with an eerie persistent, glow, not a glitter, and Prestin’s eyes pained him badly.

“Through here.” Dalreay guided him roughly toward the wall.

A crevice had opened, a crack not more than eighteen inches wide. Dalreay slid through easily. Prestin followed with more difficulty, but he pushed on. Dalreay knew what he was doing. The ban on noise had long since passed, and as they edged their way along the crack Prestin heard swords and javelins clanking merrily against the encrusted walls. One good thing—a crack in the wall here brought its own light.

Sweat stung him, he panted for air, his arms and legs ached, but still he crabbed on after Dalreay, too scared of being left behind to stop for a breather.

How long he pushed and struggled on he didn’t know; he did not consult his wristwatch for he felt that he could not register time in this mad universe.

Dalreay halted with a sibilant hiss for quiet.

Tensely, the two men peered ahead where the crack, now widening, showed a darkness that struck back against the jeweled glow like a flung arc of ink.

Noises spurted from beyond the darkness—curiously muffled voices, laughter, a snatch of song, the trill of a guitar.

“Guards and their women,” said Dalreay viciously. “We must have bypassed the main workings, going parallel to the center passage. The whole place is interlaced with tunnels and runnels and cracks. It’s a common phenomenon in jewel workings.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Prestin meaningfully.

“Well, we’ve just got to go on. There’s certainly no way back.”

They ventured into the darkness where the gems’ sparkle ended and found their way blocked by a wooden door, studded with bronze.

“Looks as though the guards have a back door.” Prestin rubbed his hands thoughtfully over the stained wood. “This must be their way out.”

“And that means the passageway to the side must lead them to safety.” Dalreay chuckled. “Now it will lead us.”

The way became more difficult in the darkness but both men were now buoyed by hope that they would escape this rat maze with their lives. Soon a low opening showed grayly ahead. Dalreay put his head through, grunted deeply, and began to wriggle out.

“It’s clear,” he said. “Come on, Bob.”

They emerged into a vast cavern—it must have seemed larger to him than it really was, Prestin surmised, because of the previous claustrophobic tunnel—whose dim radiance poured into it from a high crenellation artificially formed against the groined roof. The place smelled unpleasantly of decayed fish.

“These are the Lancarno caves,” Delreay said joyfully. “All the time a back door to the Valcini mines and we never knew!”

“Well,” said Prestin sourly, his thirst almost unbearable, “you know now.”

They began to pick their way carefully over the littered floor. With grotesque rock formations rising on every side, in the dimness Prestin missed the sparkle of the jeweled rocks. Only the easement of the intolerable pain of his eyes gave him comfort. When he heard the tinkling plashing of water over rock he hurled himself ahead, sprawling full length to cup great double-handfuls of water into his mouth, slobbering and gasping and feeling the crystal water cut channels through the dust of his throat.

Dalreay joined him more delicately, and when Prestin sat up at last, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth so that drops flew, he was reminded of that story in the Bible of the choice between fighters and behind-the-lines men. He couldn’t have cared less.

Pushing on after that, they crossed areas of gravel and hard ridged outcroppings that took a toll on Prestin’s shoes—Dalreay wore leather ones hand-cobbled with an eye to strength rather than appearance—and reached a low arched opening beyond which they caught a glimpse of sky and cloud and a great bird wheeling in slow circles.

“Caution is indicated, Bob. There may be Ulloa about.”

Prestin made a face and hefted his sword.

Now that he had slaked his thirst he felt hungry. The risotto had worn off.

Once outside the low cave entrance, Prestin noticed how it blended in with the undulations of the land; he saw how the edge of one mound that normally would have been inconspicuous was cut into by the sharp edge of bare rock in which the cave entrance lay. The Lancarno caves. Well. A place worth remembering. Dalreay shaded his eyes against the sinking sun and sniffed the slight breeze, his face screwed up tight, concentrating.

Prestin let him get on with it. Presently Dalreay said, “They are there, waiting. But we must hurry for we have come a long way from the direct route, and my people are a hasty people when roused.”

With a panache and a swagger Prestin found most appealing, Dalreay started off across the weed-covered desert and the tall grasses bespeckled with red poppies.

Night fell before they had reached the end of their trek.

With the night, as was to be expected in a continental climate, came a severe drop in temperature. As the sun sank blindingly over the western horizon—at least they had a solar system of understandable function here—Dalreay said harshly, “You’ve had your last rest until we meet my people, Bob. To rest now without adequate shelter would be fatal. You must keep marching—and keep up with me! I shan’t wait for you. If I leave you—I’ll leave you. If you think you see me again after that—it’ll only be an apparition.”

“I know,” said Prestin. “It’ll only be an echo.”

Without bothering to find out what this other-worlder was babbling about, Dalreay started off with a long loping stride. Prestin was astounded that he could do it after what had happened, but he had to keep up. There was no going back now.

After about three hours Prestin heard a strange shuffling, padding, panting sound. He looked up blearily. Dalreay was hurrying forward. Under the starglow Prestin could see tall bulky shapes swaying like animated haystacks. He cried out and tried to run after Dalreay. His feet gave way, his legs gave way, his body gave way. He fell over. He lay on the ground, his face pressed against a clump of coarse grass, feeling its dampness icy cold against his cheek, and he knew he could go no farther.

Rough hands grasped him. He was lifted up. Shaded yellow light burst over his face. He heard Dalreay talking and a hoarse, gruff voice answering. “Kill him now and have done.”

“No!” Dalreay sounded firm. “He knows nothing. He came through the barrier like a floundering fish. He could be useful. He is a weakling, but he stuck by me—”

“Very well.” The harsh voice betrayed a weary heart. “Keep him. But if he causes trouble—you, Todor Dalreay, will answer. If necessary, with your life!”

“As I am Todor Dalreay of Dargai, I will so answer!”

Prestin tried to speak. “You fool,” he whispered. “You fool, Todor. Only your blind pride makes you take such a chance on a stranger—”

But he couldn’t frame the right words. He fell into deep unconsciousness as they were strapping him into a blanket and moss bed that heaved like a channel packet.

His dreams centered mistily around that old gift of his for losing things, for mislaying the everyday items of life. He dreamed that Margie mislaid her diamond bracelet. He dreamed that Fritzy mislaid her eye lashes and makeup and mini-skirt. He dreamed that he smiled at Alec, and the tough man was suddenly bereft of his express rifle. He had had a power all his life and had not known it. What other powers did other ordinary people possess that they knew nothing about?

These people among whom he had fallen, now. This proud man, Todor Dalreay, and his ready acceptance of what would be considered among civilized communities as a ludicrously imprudent obligation. This world of Irunium, itself. It was a real world. It had its own ecology and its own rules and it would not look kindly on a man from another world. But, stirring in his sleep and realizing that he was no longer dreaming, Robert Infamy Prestin made up his mind that he would survive and he would go back to his own world—he would…

He opened his eyes. The slow jog-jogging he had slept through all night continued and now he saw that his blanket and moss bed were strapped to the flank of an enormous beast. He could see a caravan of them, plodding methodically over the sand and grass, large and ponderous, like half-melted elephants, like the elephants of soap kids got at Christmas and, using gleefully, cried because ears and trunk, eyes and tucks sloughed away to a rounded vanishment.

Armored men with swords and spears paced beside the animals. Women and children rode panniers or walked with their men. The colors of scarf and dress were bright, fluttering bravely in the morning sun, but an air of defeat and despair hung like a pall over the caravan.

Dalreay trudged by. He glanced up, saw Prestin’s open eyes, smiled and waved. Hadn’t the man slept at all, then? Or was he entirely compounded of sinew and muscle?

“Buon’ giorno, Bob! How do you feel?” The wind caught his words.

“Fine, thank you. And you?”

“I can go on. In Irunium one must always go on, Bob. If I cut you down can you walk? Breakfast, such as it is, will be available in half an hour. The women are cooking it now.”

Prestin blinked. “But the caravan is still moving!”

“Of course.” Dalreay swung up lithely, drawing free the lashings of Prestin’s hanging bed. “Naturally. They cook on the backs of the Galumphers as we go—they have slate cooking slats and the Galumphers feel nothing of the fires—” He broke off. “Why do you smile?”

“Galumphers,” said Prestin. “I don’t believe it.”

“It is a name they were given,” he said casually. “I did not ask when I learned. They came down from the north, driven past the Cabbage Patch by King Clinton”—he made a small sign with his fingers as he spoke that name—” a good few years ago now. They are vital to our economy. Most of their bulk is water.”

Prestin gripped the lashings and eased himself out of the blankets. The wind whipped at him.

“Don’t lose any of the moss, Bob. The lumphers like to eat it, and we don’t want to leave trails.”

“Check,” said Prestin. He folded the blanket flap over carefully, gawped as he saw the machine-stitched label Witney. “That’s an English blanket!”

“I know.” Dalreay patted the hanging bed. “Best sort you can get. They come in trade.”

“Anyway,” said Prestin, dropping to the ground and walking alongside Dalreay—he had to slow down his normal impatient pace to keep level with the rolling Galumpher—”what do you mean about trails? This great Galumpher must leave a trail a tyro could pick up.”

“Not so, Bob. This little ground wind rubs out ordinary tracks. The Ulloas like to follow scents and they are our greatest weakness. Even so, they’re not too good at ordinary tracking. They’re not Dargan of Dargai.” He said with a conscious flashing pride.

Dargan of Dargai. A tribal name, obviously. Prestin knew well enough that he could spend a lifetime here learning customs; plenty of men had done that in the past on Earth, living their whole lives among primitive and savage peoples. But he did not have the time. One statement made by Dalreay, however, particularly interested him.

“You said the Galumphers were brought down past the Cabbage Patch by King Clinton recently.” He smiled at Dalreay, feeling the kinship for this man warming him. “Surely, Todor, you must know there are a dozen assumptions there I’d like to know about!”

“Of course. But you must have realized that I am not normally a nomad. The Dargan of Dargai should by rights still be living in Dargai but we were driven out—I assumed you would understand this from my green clothes. Why should green be a camouflage color in brown and golden deserts, in tall sere grasses with red Calchulik flowers? The green is a badge of honor!”

“I should have realized. But, Todor—the Cabbage Patch—?”

“Well, naturally King Clinton had to go around, even though the Galumphers are as strong as—he did say, once, how many of your horses they equalled, but I forget—but even they couldn’t force a way through the Growth.”

Prestin kept his temper. “I’ll try it another way. Who was King Clinton?”

“Oh—he was another out-worlder—but a very special one. Oh, yes,” Dalreay smiled as he spoke, making that small secret sign. “A very special one.”

“A few years ago, a good few years ago, you said. I gathered that was recently, that your culture had not employed Galumphers previously. But—how long ago?”

He was thinking of Mike Macklin.

“Oh—in our years, which are round and about the same as yours, so I am told, about ten. More or less. We have been wandering too long.”

“And King Clinton is dead now? I was hoping—”

“Dead? The King? I devoutly hope not! But he had to go away—some things neither man nor king can control and destiny is a harsh mistress—” Dalreay sounded mystical and Prestin let it go, since the mythical King Clinton was not available for a cozy chat. There were so many more things he had to know if he was to find his way back to the Earth he called home.

Quite evidently, these people were accustomed to trade across the dimensions. The strangeness of the concept to Prestin meant nothing beside the cheerful acceptance of him by Dalreay. Then Prestin said, “Clinton. That’s not an Italian name.”

“Why should it be?” Dalreay kept looking out to the featureless horizon, marked only by isolated clumps of the tenpin trees. “He wasn’t Italian—”

“Do,” said Prestin in English, “do you speak English?”

Before he had finished he knew the answer for, clear in his mind like a rock shaking free of receding waves, he recalled that hazy conversation of last night, when Todor Dalreay had promised to take on himself the responsibility for this new out-worlder Prestin. The man with the harsh voice of authority had spoken English. Preston had been too far gone in weariness and dizziness to react.

“Of course!” Dalreay laughed delightedly. “If you mean to say we’ve been prancing around each other in Italian all this time!” His English was excellent, uninflected by the thickness that marred his Italian. “Great jumping Jehoshaphat!”

“Amen,” said Prestin. He asked the next questions as though they were all part of what had gone before, but more than anyone else he knew the importance of what he asked; as much as he liked Dalreay and imagined he could come to endure and possibly enjoy this life, he had to get back. “Tell me, Todor. Where are we going now? Can I ever get back to my own dimension?”

“As to the second question,” said Delreay, squinting under his hand at the bar horizon, “I could not say. Only the Valcini have access to the Contessa, curse her black soul—”

“The Montevarchi!”

Dalreay halted and turned in a lithe panther motion that gripped Prestin’s wrists together, grinding the bones. He shoved his face close up to Prestin, his lips ricked back snarling as he spoke, his eyes boring in with hatred.

“You know that she-cat, that devil’s spawn! Speak, out-worlder Prestin, quickly—or you die—slowly!”

“Here—what the—” And then Prestin saw that here was no time for niceties of speech. “I don’t know her!” he screamed. “I’ve heard of her as an evil woman but I’ve never met her. She tried to kill me. I was escaping from her when I was trapped into this world!”

Dalreay glared levelly into Prestin’s face. What he saw gave him some reassurance. He let the Earthman’s wrists go and Preston rubbed them in turn, ruefully aware of the quick strength of the hunter.

“Look, Todor,” he said in his reasonable voice, the one he used arguing to get his byline on a story anyone could have written. “My friends on the other side were being chased by Trugs of the Montevarchi. We were shot and shelled”—he had had to alter that at the blank expression on Dalreay’s face—”We were in big trouble. A helicopter—a machine that flies—was about to fall on us when I came through here without knowing. I think maybe all my friends were killed.”

The look Dalreay gave him held a hard calculating decision. “You are not just an unfortunate fallen through a nodal point into our world, then. You have knowledge, I see. And you say you are fighting the Contessa?”

“Yes. I know little about all this.” He swallowed. “Do you know a man named Macklin?”

“Macklin? No. The name means nothing to me.”

“Too bad. Still. You haven’t told me where we are going. I was trying to head north when you found me.”

“North. Yes, toward the Big Green. You would have been sorry to have reached it.” And he laughed, a short ugly bark. “Come, friend Bob. Breakfast is ready. I am hungry.”

Sensibly, Prestin considered, he would let the subject lie. Naturally Dalreay would be suspicious of anyone knowing his enemies here, where any out-worlder would have come tumbling in helplessly—like Fritzy.

As they walked toward the kitchen Galumpher, Prestin nerved himself, and then said harshly, “Tell me, Todor. Have you heard of a girl called Fritzy Upjohn?”

He did not know if he wanted to hear a yes as answer—the subsequent details might harrow him so unmercifully that he would be unsane for a period long enough to approach insanity.

“No.” Dalreay glanced shrewdly at Prestin. “Is she—important to you?”

Prestin’s immediate answer would have been, “No! No, of course not.” But now he said slowly, “She could be, Todor. She could be, for I feel responsible for her.”

“Well, come and eat. You’ll feel more like life after that.” He clapped Prestin on the back and began to mount the leather-thonged ladder that swayed from the rear of the Galumpher. From the top, a mouth-watering whiff of frying savored down. Prestin climbed with a will. He could do nothing for Fritzy until he reached the approximate position in the north of Rome where she had been transferred. And he would go north, despite the vague warnings he had against that compass point.

The broad flat back of the Galumpher contained a ring of old women muffled in shawls, a number of the ubiquitous half-naked children, squealing and struggling, and a few men, clad like Dalreay in green. A man with one eye, a wisp of gray beard and a wisp of gray scalp hair, leered at Dalreay, his portly belly aswag with half the contents of the earthenware goblet balanced at his side. He wore dark brown patterned with yellow and his scant gray hairs were half covered by a lopsided helmet.

“Hey, Todor! I hear you did a grand job!” he said in good English but with a thick sloshing sound, a well-belching sound of good living. “You are to be congratulated!”

The women poked into a pot over the fire which burned thriftily on its bed of slate, ladling out fried rashers of meat onto earthenware plates. Prestin accepted one gratefully, with a twist of brown bread broken from a long roll. A gourd of water stood nearby.

Dalreay said something to the swag-bellied man in a tongue Prestin could not understand, at which the fat man half-reared up, spluttering, while the women cackled shrilly and the other men guaffawed, biting into their meat with strong white teeth.

“I gave you enough to do the job!” Once more the wine rose to the fat shining lips. “If you bungled it—”

“No, Nodger, I didn’t bungle it! You gave me enough powder to bring down half the mountains of the Daneberg!”

“I am the fire master of this caravan! I measure the powder—”

“Next time, Nodger, do not drink so deeply when you measure. Or I shall personally refuse to barter for wine the next time we go south!”

“You wouldn’t do that, Todor, would you, to an old man who has only his wine and his gunpowder for comfort and family? Think, Todor, what your poor father said—”

“Enough!” Flushed, Dalreay spat out a bone and fixed his unwinking stare on the old Nodger. “My parents are dead, slaughtered by the Honshi guards of the Valcini. No more, Nodger, if you value your hide.”

The oldster went back to his meat and bread with frequent sips of wine. Thinking of what David Macklin had said that first time he met him, Prestin had to smile. Every dimension, then, had its Falstaff? And a good thing, too.

“By Amra!” said one of the men through his meat. “I heard the accursed jewel mines spouted to the sky!”

“I,” pointed out Dalreay, “did not have the opportunity to see.”

Nodger spluttered and drank more wine, his one eye avoiding Dalreay’s icy glance.

Prestin warmed to the byplay. Clearly, these Dargan of Dargai were people who would not tamely bow down to the Valcini agents of the Contessa; they had struck back by blowing up one of the jewel mines. No doubt there was a running war in bloody progress. But as much as he might wish to know more of the Dargan, he had to find Fritzy. That quest alone gave him a single slender solace for living here.

His goblet was empty and he politely asked Dalreay for water, being offered wine and refusing. “Here, imp!” shouted Dalreay, hurling the goblet at the head of a half-naked youngster, who grinned wolfishly and caught the cup. Prestin watched him go to a wooden pipe protruding from the back of the Galumpher and turn a spigot at the top. Clear water gushed out, silvery and diamond-bright sparkling, cool just to look at.

“Is that—?”

“Certainly.” Dalreay laughed off-handedly. “The Galumphers carry a huge third stomach filled with water which they cool by exchange of body heat. They are engineeringly better than your earthside camels, and they carry a great deal more water, for which Amra be praised.”

“And you sink a tap and draw it off as required.”

“The Dargan of Dargai are hunters. We know animals.”

“You had to learn about the Galumphers, though. What was Dargai like?”

“Ah—!” went around the circle like a rolling wash of the ever-returning tide, a sigh of complete homesickness, the heartfelt cry of the wanderer, forever condemned, never to return. “What of Dargai…”

“By Amra, that is a question that demands a poet to answer!” exclaimed Dalreay, lowering his goblet, his eyes bright, his face flushed, his beard all abristle.

“Warmth and wine and women, wonderful!” said Nodger, brimming his goblet to his mouth, lost in the melancholic hindward gaze of all the adults. The children went on eating and drinking and gossiping among themselves. For them, Dargai was a name only, a name that meant sighs and whisperings from their parents; they would never know the despair of the homeless for they had been born wanderers.

The Galumphers slogged on and all down the line of the caravan the Dargan went to breakfast. Small Galumphers trotted between the legs of their parents, keeping up with the less-than-human walking-pace of the procession with ease. Some dust flew up from the great flat hooves. A few men walked ahead, but Prestin felt that they did it more as a genuflection to tactics than with any hope of avoiding attack by the Ulloas. Those cat-faced birds with the wingless bodies and dragonfly legs would race in at ten times the speed of a Galumpher.

Looking out on the scene, and being rocked by the somnolent swaying, Prestin could feel the timeless relaxed pace of life for these wanderers of Dargai. This life would breed a special kind of person, a person far different from the man that was Dalreay. There would be concern among the oldsters. Prestin could visualize it all.

A girl walked past below, her slender bronzed legs carrying her by their Galumpher with ease. She wore a yellow shawl and a kirtle, leaving much of her upper body bare to the wind; her dark hair blew free from her mantle, and a shake of her head as she went was clear indication that she knew Dalreay was watching. A very self-composed young lady, this, Prestin surmised. Then he smiled. Dalreay was gobbling away, trying to finish his mouthful of meat, his eyes bright, his hands fidgeting. He bolted the last of his food and swung down to land like a flying spider at the feet of the girl.

She pranced back, one hand upflung, teasing him. What they said was lost in the soft slosh-slosh-sloshing of the Galumpher’s broad pads, but Prestin heard Dalreay call the girl Darna; he felt a pang as he saw their two dark heads together as they walked up the caravan line, close, absorbed.

A thin trumpet blast cut through the bright golden promise of the scene like a squeal of brakes on an icy road.

Prestin jumped up. Everyone was rushing about with a purposeful activity. The children huddled down in the center of the Galumphers’ backs. The women put out the cooking fires and dismantled the trivets. Then they began to fashion the bales, packages and beds into parapets about the beasts’ backs, forming shelters. Helped by the older children, the work went fast, silently and with utmost urgency. The men appeared to cluster about the legs of the Galumphers and spread out to one side, each man carrying his arms, the metal bright under the sun.

“What is it?” asked Prestin of Nodger as the trumpet pealed again.

Nodger, his fat face and belly shaking, pulled a thick bale of pelts up for a shelter. “It is the warning, out-worlder! Someone attacks us! Pray Amra it is only a few miserable cowardly Ulloa—pray Amra!”

The lookout perched atop his scarecrow wooden tower on the Galumpher three over from Prestin screeched and pointed. The trumpet keened again. Prestin stood up, balancing on the long slow-swaying back, and stared at the horizon. Out there black dots speeded. They seemed to parallel the caravan’s course, but they were in a converging pattern, as Prestin saw when he looked more carefully, closing in, squeezing the parallel arms into a triangle.

Some ominous menace breathed at him from those distant shapes.

He realized what the menace must be as the watcher atop the rolling wooden tower shouted again for speed.

Those dots out there were traveling fast—faster than the Ulloa, faster than any normal animal had any right to travel. The watchman shouted, “Valcini!” And again, a hopeless wail against the wind, “Valcini!”

Dalreay caught at the leather thongs of the Galumpher, staring up, the cords taut, shouting, “Bob! The swords we took from the guards—they are still in your bed. Arm yourself! The Valcini attack and we must fight!”

Swallowing, Prestin scrambled down to the bed swinging from its thongs, the nearest cords empty as the women hauled up the blankets to form their parapet. He felt inside and touched the warm metal of the swords. He pulled them out carefully, handling their sharpness gingerly. Now he had two swords. What the hell was he supposed to do with them? Cry “Banzai!” and charge?

“Down here,” Dalreay called peremptorily.

Prestin joined him on the sand, walking along automatically as the caravan wended on, holding one sword in each hand. He waved them experimentally.

“The women will hurl javelins,” Dalreay said tightly. He looked worried. “We fight like men and hunters of Dargai!”

Prestin considered that Dalreay and his kinsmen would be deadly fighters with these swords. He understood that most of their equipment had been taken in the past from the Honshi guards. Iron smelting and steel forging would be difficult under the conditions of their pilgrimage; so, like most cultures in similar circumstances, pillage and acquisition had strong appeal for them.

Dalreay looked along the line at the clustered men, now ready to rush to the threatened point of the caravan. Prestin slogged along, keyed up but not too frightened, with the tough fighting men around him, of an Ulloa.

He looked again at the speeding dots. Not Ulloa. He licked his lips. The dots abruptly ceased all forward motion. He jumped with the suddenness of that—then he blinked as each dot seemed to bloat and grow in size as though being pumped up. Then he understood—they had turned inward and were charging head on.

A great cry burst from Dalreay. Prestin looked, saw what Dalreay saw, and understood what he faced.

“The Valcini attack! Armored cars! Recoilless rifles! Machine guns! Stand fast my people, for this is our doom!”

VII

Preston rubbed an unsteady hand over his unshaven chin. He could see with his own eyes the truth of Dalreay’s impassioned cry. The man knew enough about interdimensional traffic to be well aware of Earthside weapons—he felt wry disgust at his own delicacy on the subject.

If Alec had been here, now…

He wondered in that fleeting moment as the armored cars raced on, the wicked snouts of their guns aimed and poised, if, in the turmoil of fear, he could Porteur himself out of this world and back to his own.

He had not done it in those previous times of trouble so he doubted that he would now. The enormous unfairness of it struck him. The Montevarchi took jewels from this world (and other treasures besides, no doubt) and in return she would Porteur through weapons to enable her Valcini bully-boys and their Honshi cohorts to get slaves to work for her. As a system it would look marvelous on paper.

A flash spurted from the lead car. The Galumpher four over staggered sideways like a schooner hit by a cyclone. Great gobbets of red meat flew. Red blood rained. The Galumpher emitted a squeal like the siren of the Queen Elizabeth. Again the gun fired—a ninety mm job, Prestin judged—and again a shell smashed into a Galumpher. Women screamed. Children cried. A machine gun opened up, sweeping along the line of Galumphers.

Dalreay, his face ghastly, started to run out toward the armored cars. Other men followed him.

Prestin found himself running with Dalreay, expecting every moment a bullet to finish him. The noise shocked ears accustomed to normal city sounds. His glasses steamed up. But he kept on running, waving the two silly swords.

What price now the long-argued gun versus sword controversy?

Red bedlam battered at his brain. He could see the armored cars as they raced nearer, see the sand spurting disdainfully from their tires, see the evil wink of gunfire from their turrets. He thought they were Hispano-Suiza jobs but could not be sure. A spouting line of bullet pocks swathed down the string of running men. Swords and javelins flew into the air as relaxing fingers lost their grip. Prestin felt something excruciatingly hard hit him in the chest. Shouting, he dropped both swords, feeling ill, feeling the earth reeling up to smash into his face and mouth. Then, before he felt nothing at all, he felt the ice freezing from the center of pain in his chest.

Then—then came the nothing.

When he opened his eyes the first thing he felt was the numbness in his chest. It felt as though he had sent it to be dry-cleaned and it was late coming back. He could not feel his hands or feet, either. He didn’t think he had been sick but his mouth tasted like Hogmanay aftermath. He groaned.

Someone else, breathing heavily near him, groaned back.

“Where the blue-blazes are we?” asked the fierce, petulant voice of Todor Dalreay.

“Judging by what those guns did to us,” croaked Prestin, “we’re dead, buried and in hell!”

“No—” Dalreay made movements, then he relaxed, his back shoving into Prestin. “I’ve just checked. The Honshi haven’t pubicked me. So they won’t have you, I suppose.”

“Pubicked?” Then Prestin remembered and in a panic-stricken series of vigorous movements wriggled around and checked himself. He relaxed, shakily. “Nor me—thank Amra!”

“Thank Amra,” said Dalreay. “May Amra be praised.”

Now he could see the white-painted room in which they lay on the floor. There were two barred windows high up. The floor was made from a matted compost, judging by its smell, sketchily covered by a scrap of canvas. The door, made from laminated wood and bound in bronze, showed a small spy-hole, at the moment blocked by a bronze flap.

“Bronze,” said Dalreay. “Honshi.”

“But—”

“They use iron for weapons, bronze and copper for armor. The Valcini keep them geared to their own technology. There must be a reason.”

“Yes,” said Prestin, understanding only too well that reason and the Contessa’s reasoning behind it. “Oh, yes.”

The bronze flap lifted and a Honshi turned his head sideways so he could look in with one round eye, blank and horribly emotionless.

“Get lost,” growled Dalreay.

The guard hissed. Prestin didn’t know if the things could understand English, or if they could speak. Dalreay pushed himself up on his hands, his body lank on the floor. His clothes had been torn away from his chest, as had Prestin’s. Prestin looked quickly down at his own body. A sticking plaster covered the point where the numbness still persisted, and then he understood what had happened.

“We’ve been knocked out by a needle-bullet carrying an injection of sleeping sand-man drops, Todor! They weren’t shooting to kill—only to take us captive, as though we were wild animals!”

Dalreay laughed unpleasantly. “We are—to them!”

Prestin felt the shame of it, the reduction, of his own stature as a man. These Valcini held the pride, a dark lonely pride that would stand against Dalreay’s impatient honor as the smoke against the flame.

A fear of meeting the Valcini took Prestin then, threatening to unman him before the eyes of his comrade.

The door grated open and Honshi guards with pointed swords stalked in, the shriveled wisps of hair fleering from each helmet point. They moved warily.

Dalreay laughed theatrically and the Honshi stiffened. The swords quivered and they backed off. Prestin stared and took a deep joy from the impact of Dalreay’s power, futile though the gesture might be.

“We are special prisoners, friend Bob,” he said in his quick eager voice. “Just we two in this cell. Oh, yes, the Valcini intend to have sport with us before we die.”

“I thought,” said Prestin, appalled and suddenly much more frightened, “I thought they wanted us as slaves!”

“The Contessa gives the Valcini a number of slaves to play with from time to time. So we of Dargai hear.”

The Honshi guards moved forward and started to poke their swords at Prestin and Dalreay. The men staggered up, the stiffness not fully worn off, and stumbled out into the corridor. Each time the Honshi stuck their swords forward they said, “Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” The sound echoed with a terrible menace.

Slipping and stumbling, the two men somehow labored along the corridor, passing door after door of the cell block. The guards were quite evidently terrified of them.

Panting, Dalreay said, “Don’t let the guards fool you, Bob. They’re scared, but you have rats on Earth—King Clinton used the analogy”—exhausted though he was, when Dalreay spoke of King Clinton he made that small secret sign—”he said the Honshi always fought like cornered rats. They’re deadly dangerous.”

“What—what about the Trugs?”

“Just pray you never have to stand up to one in a hand-to-hand fight. Even I am not sure of that outcome.”

Prestin saw the first outside window as the corridor turned and the cell block finished. A green light shone through it. The Honshi pushed forward with their swords—each one red at the tip now—and a loud “Hoshoo!” The cuts and fang-wounds from the Ulloa still itched Prestin from time to time, but they had not been deep or serious; now he felt a vicious hatred for these mindless Honshi and their biting, stabbing swords.

“Don’t try to grab ‘em!” warned Dalreay.

Prestin saw the wisdom of that. Endurance had come to mean a great deal in this world of Irunium. With men and women of his own time riding in automobiles and mechanisms at their beck and call, endurance was being bred out. Irunium unmercifully exposed the chinks in the self-esteem of other-worlders. All the morale and strength-sapping artifacts of life back home added together to make a man unfit for life almost anywhere, let alone Irunium. Irunium demanded more than the home world, more than mere physical toughness, and Prestin had to face up to the next ordeal. He must endure.

All Prestin could see past the window was a green wall going up out of view. Dalreay, also looking out as they went by, looked sick.

“What is it, Todor?”

“They’ve brought us to the Big Growth—we’re right in the Cabbage Patch!”

“So,” said Prestin, thinking of what this meant to him. “We came north!”

“Fat lot of good that will do you! You just don’t know what the Big Green is like!”

“Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” shooed the guards and the two men stumbled on. The impatient tug of Honshi clawed-hands opened large double doors to reveal a wide amphitheater ringed by tiers of seats. In those comfortably upholstered seats reclined men and women—ordinary looking men and women. They were clad in bright, loose clothes, all gold, crimson, emerald and electric blue, ringed and roped and scintillant with jewels. Gold ornaments flashed from piled hair, white throats raised naked, and laughing faces, flushed and painted, stared down quizzically on the two ragged bloody men staggering into the center of the small ring. A silence fell.

“Let the vine be brought,” said a commanding voice from a box a few feet above ground level. Prestin stared. A man and woman sat there, smiling contemptuously, popping chocolates into their painted mouths, flashing their beringed fingers. The man looked to be a would-be-virile sixty; the sagging folds of flesh under his eyes and chin spoiled his anyone-for-tennis effect. He looked snakelike, very nasty, very dangerous. The girl could be classified with equal ease. Dalreay said, “Melnone and his strumpet! They run the Valcini for the Contessa. Filth.”

The spectators had resumed their talking and laughing, smoking and gossiping. They waited for the vine. “What the hell’s the vine, Todor?” Prestin whispered.

“You will see soon enough. I fear it—but if we are to die, then we die bravely, facing our foes. I die like a Dargan of Dargai!”

Prestin looked up. The roof curved over them as a shell of perspex or some other tough transparent building material. Thick lines pressed against the arch, as though somewhere outside trees were casting a shadow.

Beneath his feet was concrete, not sand as he would have imagined. An arena without sand to be bloodied did not seem quite right. Aggrieved, Prestin felt that if he was going to die here and now, at least he deserved the proper obsequies.

He was over being afraid. Like the man who fell from a tall building, he had reached an understanding with his fate before he struck the ground. He might yell blue bloody murder when the time came, but that would be from pain, not fear. Not any more.

An expectant hush slowly broke over the sightseers in their comfortable seats. A small electric handcart appeared, driven by a cowed looking man wearing stained dungarees.

“Hard luck, friends,” he said in colloquial Italian. “But don’t blame me. I only work here.”

On the truck stood a large plastic bell jar, surmounting an oversize flower pot. From the pot grew a bright green shoot which stood perhaps three feet high. Dalreay stared, fascinated.

“Part of the Big Green,” he said, swallowing.

The dungaree-clad menial struggled the pot off the trolley, handling it as though it were nitroglycerine. He placed it on the concrete, wiped his forehead, blew his nose and, whirring along with his trolley, departed.

Prestin realized that he stood now in the position of the man who kept calm because he did not understand the situation about him. He also knew that Dalreay stood so limply, so spinelessly, so like a husk of a man because he was face to face with a bogey he had heard about and feared all of his life, but had never felt existed in relation to himself. Now Dalreay had to face the hard fact that his nightmares, his childish fantasies, his secret terrors, were all out in the open. He, Todor Dalreay of Dargai, had to face the Big Green, the Cabbage Patch, alone.

“It’s only a part, you say, Todor. Well—”

“You do not understand.”

Honshi guards approached behind oval bronze shields. Others leveled javelins. Two very gingerly tendered their swords, hilt first. Prestin took his and at once the Honshi who had offered it leaped back, “Hoshooing” like a punctured steam boiler.

Dalreay took his own sword but he did not whirl it about to test the balance, or try a cut or two. He just held it down by his side, and his face looked green.

Prestin, in the middle of swishing the blade through the air, looked at Dalreay, and felt the blood drain from his own face. If so tough a campaigner as Dalreay looked like that…

A hook on the end of a jib swung out over their heads, manipulated, they saw, by the doleful, dungaree-clad menial from a caged-in box, descended and latched into the ring at the top. The Honshi guards left the arena very quickly, very smartly, stationing themselves in a phalanx at the entrance tunnel, just visible through heavy plastic partitions.

Now Prestin and Dalreay stood alone in the arena. Large plastic screens rose from slots in front of the first line of seats, forming a circular barrier.

The flower pot stood in the exact center of the arena.

“Back off,” said Dalreay thickly. Then he straightened his shoulders. “No.” He put his left hand on his right wrist and held it there, ironing out the shaking. “No, friend Bob. I will attack at the very first moment. There is a chance. I will go in straight away. You must do what you can.”

“Very well.” Prestin didn’t understand, yet he agreed anyway, sensing that Dalreay didn’t want to explain what was going to happen—didn’t want to think about it.

Melnone, guffawing and fondling his woman, shouted loudly, “Lift the cover, Tony!” His chuckle sounded like an over-ripe peach being squashed. “Eyes down looking! Now for the fun!”

Excitement vibrated all around the arena. Prestin heard bets being placed, times for the hunter and the other one—he was used to being the other one in life by now. He felt dizzy and shook his head. The hook snapped shut and lifted the swaying bell jar cover into the air. Men and women shouted. Dalreay leaped forward with his sword held high.

And the plant moved.

It writhed around like a tentacle. It rubbered back and avoided Dalreay’s great blow. A huge gasp of effort and dismay burst from the hunter. The plant whipped back and lashed Dalreay’s body like a cat-of-nine-tails—for in that short instant the tip had grown and branched. As Prestin watched, horrified, the tip grew and grew again, branched and re-branched. The vine slashed back at Dalreay. He lifted the sword and severed stems flew but he was down. Sobbing with effort, he rose on a knee as the vine looped him. Prestin, shaken by repugnance, forced himself to leap forward. He hacked as though he swung an axe. He slashed through three of the constricting loops holding Dalreay and jerked at the man’s arm. Dalreay swung his sword at Prestin’s head and chopped through the vine settling about his neck, the sword missing an ear by less than an inch.

“Thanks, Bob!” gasped Dalreay. “Back off now!”

Together the two men scrambled away, half on hands and knees, and half slithering over the concrete; they kept flailing behind them with panicky strokes that littered the ground with writhing green tendrils.

“The damned thing’s mobile!” panted Prestin, drawing gushing draughts of air, sweat drenching him.

“No, Bob. Not mobile. Just quick growing and vicious. It’s a small Lombok Liana, baby brother to some of them in the Big Green.” The two men backed away to the opposite end of the arena to watch the vine squirming from its pot, undulating over the concrete, blindly seeking them.

“Small! But look at the way it’s growing! It’ll fill the arena at this rate.” Prestin breathed heavily. “But how can it—there can’t be enough cellular building material in the pot, let alone nutriments—”

“The Valcini know all about the Cabbage Patch, Bob. They can compress nutriments. If there is the slightest sign of weakening through lack of material they just put more in. They aren’t as stupid as that.”

“But what can we do?”

“I bungled our best chance. When the Liana is young you can sometimes cut it down, but it would just grow again. I wanted to get it out of its pot—”

“Can’t we try that?” Prestin eyed a long tendril that wormed over the concrete searching for them, thrashing around like a super-speeded bindweed. “We can’t just stand here and let it strangle us to death!”

“You felt the strength of the stems—these swords will cut the smaller tendrils, but the big ones…” Dalreay shook his head.

Slowly then he said, “I know the story of King Clinton, of how he killed a Narwhal Liana—that’s five times as tough and vicious as a Lombok. We learn that story during English classes; it’s always a favorite, and the kids scramble to read it and show-off their English—but—but—we’re not King Clinton,” he finished depressingly.

Now the flower pot was lost among writhing vines that divided and spread, creeping to snuff out their lives. The Liana was a killer, Prestin knew, for he had clearly seen the immature mouth nestled at earth level in the pot. If that mouth grew with the same ferocious fecundity as the rest of the plant, it would be able to digest an entire man.

“King Clinton explained the parasite and the vine systems of your earth,” Dalreay said, speaking a shade too fast, but speaking, Prestin guessed, to keep his mind occupied and to stop from screaming. “This isn’t quite the same as Rafflesia, which is pretty rare by all accounts. This is more like the more common Nepenthes, which is used to poor soil. But the spines in the mouth, and the sheer muscular strength of the lid, are truly frightening in the Lombok…”

“If we get in too close, and that mouth snaps shut—”

“Precisely.”

Prestin hefted his sword. The nearest tendril crawled over the concrete three feet away. The continuous shouting from the stands during their brief engagement with the vine had ebbed to a spatter of shouts, jeers, catcalls and cries of encouragement: “Get in there with your swords, cowards,” and the like.

“I figure we can settle this another way.” Prestin moved slowly around the arena. “Are you game to chance everything on a gamble, Dalreay?” He laughed. “We haven’t any other choice, really.”

“I’m ready to chance anything.”

“We’ll jump the fat toad, that Melnone. If they want him alive, they’ll talk terms.”

“But the barrier, Bob!”

“I’ll go up on your back. I can haul you over by my belt and together well hold that slug at sword point. They might not like him, but if he’s the boss—”

“I’ll go up, Bob. I’m the hunter.”

Prestin, sensibly, did not answer. They circled, slashing if the vine came too close, watching with revulsion and awe as the thing grew like a genie from its pot.

Opposite Melnone, they became aware of his hoarse laughter, his jeering advice.

“It’s no use running, my fine friends!” His Italian was as bad or worse than Dalreay’s; he was no native Italian born. “Why don’t you stand and fight like men?” He gurgled coarsely, hugely enjoying the joke.

Prestin bent down. Dalreay put his sword between white teeth and went up Prestin’s back and over the top of the plastic anti-vine screen like an Olympic hurdler. As Prestin caught the dangling belt and began to punch and kick his way up, he heard the arena erupt into a bedlam of yells and screams. Dalreay leaped down on the seats, slashed into two cringing Valcini, kicked the woman out of the way and wrapped his left arm around Melnone’s fat throat—all in one smooth motion. He poised the sword dramatically at Melnone’s ear.

Tumbling after him, Prestin kicked a man in the stomach and ducked as another swung wildly at him. He did not realize that his sword had gone in and out until he ran on, staring stupidly at the bright red blood smearing the tip. He didn’t think he would feel like this when he killed his first man—he had never thought there’d be a first. He was far too busy to worry over the implications now.

The woman screamed shrilly, “He’s got the chief! He’s going to kill Melnone! Help! Help!”

The uproar became intense. Prestin shoved up alongside Dalreay and smelled Melnone’s foul odor. He wrinkled his nose.

“It’s working so far, Bob.” Dalreay shoved the sword tip closer to Melnone’s ear. “Tell ‘em!”

“If you harm us” shouted Prestin in his strongest Italian, “Melnone dies!”

A tendril of the vine looped up to the screen. A Honshi guard stood near it with drawn sword, too petrified to lop it off as was his obvious duty. Prestin laughed. “Here!” he shouted, and slashed. The vine fell away and the tip dropped into the seating. The guard ran.

“You fool!” gobbled Melnone. “Don’t let it lie in here! Throw it back on the concrete! For Anna’s sake, throw it back!”

Dalreay leaned down and backhanded the sword pommel across Melnone’s face. The fat man winced and groaned.

“By Amra! Don’t ever speak that foul name again! By Amra, I’ll edge your guts out!”

Obviously opposing religions, Prestin noted, and then forgot it as a second vine sprang up, inside the seat!

“The Lombok Vine is free!” screamed a man nearby. A rush ensued, an ugly rush as men and women screamed and fought to get away. The vine rose and at once Prestin saw the difference in size and ferocity. The Lombok in the arena had been controlled by the size of its flower pot. This new one, growing with unbelievable speed from that severed tip, had no restraints. Feeding on the muck and broken concrete shielding beneath each tier, it grew and looped around. One Honshi guard who ran too slow was caught and dragged neck first into the base of the plant under the seats. He screamed until his screams ended in a loud and squashy crunching.

“Get—away—” grunted Melnone past the arm around his neck.

“We’d better get out, Todor! Bring Melnone! He’s our hostage.”

They ran down the rows with Melnone dragging between them and the vine writhing and swaying behind them. The first vine was now over the barrier at a dozen places and sending down fresh roots. Soon the whole arena right up to the transparent roof would be one solid mass of liana.

Prestin had no idea where to go. He headed for an arched doorway where a crazed mass of Valcini struggled to get out. He could see no other exit. No one paid them the slightest attention when they went through at the end. The vine lashed at their heels. No one stopped to slam the door.

“That shows you what the Valcini are, Bob. They don’t try to rescue their chief, they don’t even shut the door!” Dalreay slammed it back with his foot. Prestin hit Melnone as he tried to run. They glared at all the corridors.

“Anyway, I suppose that if we keep this fat slug we can dicker with them when they get their senses back.”

“Yes.”

They had gone about ten yards, down the first corridor when Melnone gave a loud, harsh laugh. Six men appeared from a side turning directly in front of them. Each man carried a weapon, five of them had modern automatic rifles, Belgian FN’s by the look of them, and the sixth, obviously the leader had a Mauser nine mm automatic pistol. He dangled the pistol negligently, affectedly, and the immediate impression he conveyed was of decadence and vice. His too-smart fawn slacks and tunic, his thin face, thin black hair, thin moustache, and thin rat-trap lips, all repelled Prestin.

Melnone suddenly thrashed back against Dalreay’s arm.

“Please,” Melnone said. “Talk—” He tugged with frenzied helplessness against Dalreay’s arm. “Please, Cino. Talk.”

Cino said, “Are you Robert Infamy Prestin?”

Prestin, accustomed to astounding events, nodded.

“You will not, I think,” said Cino carelessly, “need your hostage. You are an important man, Prestin, in your own right.” Cino lifted the Mauser. Melnone screamed. Dalreay pushed him away, baffled.

Cino shot Melnone neatly through the head, splattering Dalreay with blood and brains.

“Come with me, Prestin. And bring your friend with you.” The Mauser waved with an authority Prestin could not disobey.

VIII

Crowded by Cino and his bullies, Dalreay and Prestin hurried along the corridor and entered a small cylindrical chamber. The door slid shut. The floor shifted and then rose rapidly. Dalreay grasped at Prestin, his face looking shattered by the experience.

“Elevator,” Prestin said. “We’re going up.”

“These hunters are mortally afraid of science,” scoffed Cino. The man made Prestin feel that life should sometimes not be allowed. “We’re going up inside one of the Sorba trees. They’re among the largest in the rain forest.”

“Rain forest,” said Prestin. “The Big Green, the Big Growth, the Cabbage Patch. I see.”

“We’re right in the middle of it—” Dalreay’s pallor tinged green around the edges. Prestin wanted to help the Dargan, but he felt that nothing he could say would be of any use. He kept himself away from Cino; the contrast between the two men could have served as the model for ying and yang.

The elevator stopped after what seemed like an over-long ascent for inside a tree. Prestin began to wonder if he was being duped—that the rain forest was not the Amazonian basin he had conjured up. As a city dweller, the ideas of jungles had always held a romantic lure for him, a golden-green promise of strange and gallant adventures.

They went out of the door as soon as it slid open, Cino swaggering ahead. Dalreay kept close to Prestin, who could take no comfort from the reversal of their roles. Ahead of them, a circular expanse of windows walled the aerial platform in perspex. Prestin guessed that the platform was a round construct bolted onto the tree trunk like a lollipop on a stick. He followed the others, with Dalreay half a pace behind him, and walked across to look out the windows.

He had not been duped: he was indeed looking out from the top story of a true rain forest. Slowly, and with growing realization and awe, he fathomed the true stature of those trees. It would have been impossible for him to have judged their height if there were no gaps in which he could see down far enough to what he imagined was the ground—or was it merely the top of another story of jungle trees? But a group of giants had fallen, tearing with them lianas, vines, and parasites of all sorts; the gap ripped the eternal closeness of the jungle to let in long beams of sunlight. Prestin could only guess at the heights involved. A thousand feet? That seemed impossible; then he remembered the elevator ride, and saw what his eyes told him of diminishing perspectives.

Birds and vividly colored flying animals flitted between the trees. The Sorba trees must be those he could see with the bushy golf-ball tops. They sprouted up here and there through the welter of greenery, that formed the topmost layer of continuous forest. To look down on that bunched series of treetops was to imagine it a solid surface that one could walk across as easily as a grass field.

He knew, of course, the surface existed as a closely integrated yet diffuse culture medium; no one was going walking there. Where that canopy had been broken and the sunshine poured through, plants below grew avidly, madly, with an almost visible reaching for the light. What went on down in those lower depths made any imagination boggle. He knew that a terrestrial tropical forest biome might support as many as five stories of trees. Looking down he could see three separate linked levels where certain trees reached their highest growth—he did not care to guess how many others there might be here. With water and sunlight in abundance, the rest could safely be left to nature, here on Irunium as well as on Earth.

“Strange, isn’t it,” said Cino with his patronizing sneer. “How the forest ceases so abruptly—there is quite a sharp edge where the savanna begins. The answer, of course, is that the dividing line is marked by the beginning of the jewel-bearing rocks. We live in the Big Green because it is safe for us.” He waved his Mauser casually and Prestin and Dalreay moved along. “But we mine the savanna. It’s nice that way.”

“That Lombok Vine,” said Prestin, appalled. “That grew out of there?”

Cino sniggered. “That was a baby one. Down in the Big Green the Lomboks and the Narwhals really grow big. We keep a constant check on our trees, like this Sorba. A strangler fig can germinate from an epiphyte reasonably high up on a tree, reach down to the ground, kill the tree and take over its place in the sunshine. We don’t like that happening to the trees we live in.”

“And this is safer than living out there on the open land?”

“Safer for us, surely, because we have the technology to cope with these brainless plants.” Cino took out a crumpled cigarette pack and shook one out. “Smoke?”

“No, thank you.” Prestin did not add, “It’s a mug’s game.”

They went on around the perspex-walled enclosure until they reached a short staircase going up. So the aerial platform had itself more than one story.

“You,” Cino said to Prestin. “Up. You,” to Dalreay, “wait here.” The cigarette moved between his lips as he spoke in a modish 1930-type fashion.

Prestin climbed up the stairs, wondering what nastiness awaited him. He had not forgotten Melnone, nor that ghastly seeking vine, and he felt himself acutely aware of the unanswered questions.

The head of the stairs was enclosed by a small anteroom, quite unremarkable, and he walked through it toward the double doors at the end. He pushed them open and heard a splashing of water and a girl’s soft voice saying, “In here, Bob.”

This, he told himself, not without humor, should be interesting.

He went in and forgot his flippancy; he stood for a moment on the threshold, dizzied by the scene.

Without question, the stage had been set. Ancient Greco-Roman statuary, voluptuous in its clean whiteness of line, stood on marble floors. A fine mist of scented vapors coiled langourously from the bath where, like Diana among her ladies, a girl lay half-submerged in the fragrant water. Her limbs and body shone with pink health, her toenails gleamed ah impudent scarlet. Her dark hair, coiffed and sprinkled with gems, had not been imprisoned by any bathcap horror. Three copper-skinned maidens, nearly as naked as she was, tended her, one with unguents, one with an oversized sponge, the other delicately applying an ivory strigil. They laughed in low, throaty giggles as he stood there like a loon.

Music floated wantonly in from some hidden source; it was soft, stroking, quarter-tone music, forgettable but creating an atmosphere of unquestioning relaxation.

“You are a little early, Bob. But you don’t mind if I keep you waiting, do you?”

Her voice, smooth and apparently unsubtle, reached Prestin very agreeably. He looked at her overtly now, aware that she was coolly enjoying his discomfiture. She was well worth looking at, at that, with her dark hair, her violet eyes, and her mouth that might have been too ripe and soft and pouting for some tastes.

“I’d like you to tell me what this is all about.”

“Of course, Bob. That’s why I asked you to come up. I hope Cino found you all right?”

“Oh, yes. He found me. He found a cringing little thing called Melnone, too—”

“Melnone was a fool!” The words cracked hard and then, with a soft smile and a splash of water, she covered them with a tinkle of merriment. Foam churned in the bath and the scarlet toenails disappeared. Knees—inevitably dimpled—appeared in their stead. “His usefulness was over. All the Valcini think of is their awful sports.”

“You are not a Valcini, then?”

“Bob!”

“No, I guess you’re not.” He walked a little further into the room, over the expensive-looking scatter rugs. “You had no further use for Melnone, and, slug that he was, you got rid of him.” He laughed gently. “Just when I happened by.”

She was certainly a magnificent creature. The foam of the bath prevented him from seeing much of her figure; but the flash of her eyes, indignant, hurt, pleading, the hand so earnestly thrust over the edge of the bath to him, the whole aura of personality flowing from her, all added up to a woman among women. Prestin unmistakably felt the effect she was having on him.

A copper-colored maiden stood lithely and brought a sea-green gossamer veil and held it ready for the girl in the bath. Towels were brought. Despite himself, despite all his own precepts, Prestin could not keep from looking as the girl rose from the bath. He did not see anything, of course. One never did.

Wrapped in the veils and the towels, she swayed toward an opaque glass cubicle where fresh hot air blew.

“You haven’t told me your name yet,” he said.

“Oh, Bob!” The veils and towels fell to the floor as she raised her hands behind the glass. The hazy silhouette charmed Preston, but he wondered what she meant.

“What do you mean, ‘Oh, Bob? You know who I am. Because we busted out of the arena you had an excuse to have Melnone killed. You brought me here. You must want something. Why be so cagey?” He jerked his head. “Cino’s down there with his Mauser and his bullies. What’s holding you up?”

Her handmaids were helping her into a flame-colored negligee. If she wore anything underneath it, Prestin hadn’t seen her put it on. She walked out toward him with a light, bouncing step, doing up the flowing ribbon bow about her waist. Her face was flushed but still meticulously made up, and now very close. She came up to about his shoulder.

“Oh, Bob! Surely you know who I am?”

He hadn’t a clue. He’d been hoping to find Fritzy who’d disappeared somewhere about here, coming through from a landing Trident. Maybe she’d hit among the trees and a Lombok had got to her—he shut his eyes. He’d been trying not to think about that for some time.

The girl’s voice sounded softly in his ear and he could feel her breath on his cheek, smell the sweet warm bath scent of her, feel her softness pressing against him as she raised on tiptoe. “Oh, Bob! And here I’ve been waiting so long to meet you after we talked. Of course you know who I am! I’m Perdita! You knew that all along, didn’t you, you naughty boy?”

“Perdita? The Contessa? The Montevarchi?” Prestin laughed. He took her upper arms into his fists and pushed her back, looking down on the sweet, lovely face staring up at him—seeing the sweetness and the loveliness as a carefully put on covering, “You! The Contessa!” He shook her gently, despite his feelings. “I spoke to the Contessa on the phone. I’d know that voice anywhere. Sorry, baby—try me with another one.”

“You’re a fool, Bob!” She wrenched herself free and stormed across the apartment, its luxury and refinement lost in her anger, her face indrawn and bitter. “What do you know of the dimensions? You puny Earth people think you are Lords of Creation! Well—you’re not—You’re not!”

“But you are?”

The thrust went home. She lifted her head like a snake, and like a snake her tongue flicked in and out. “We are of the dimensions! I am the Montevarchi—the name by which I choose to be known here, and on your world. This is the body of Perdita that I am using, her brain that I think with, her eyes that I see you with, her hands that I touch you with—” She swayed forward again. “Her lips that I kiss you with—”

Prestin fended her off. The three handmaids stood grouped by the door, ready to run. “I don’t want your kisses, Contessa. I don’t know what you’ mean about someone else’s body—”

“The body is mine now! I share it and use it—”

“Yes, well. You’ve had your fun. Now I would like to go back to my own world.”

“You refuse me?”

“I refuse you, yes. I refuse what you are, what you stand for, what your henchmen are. I hate the Valcini. I wish to go home now, and my friend—”

“Todor Dalreay of Dargai? Do not worry about him. He is already shackled among the mine slaves.”

“You cat!” He swung about sharply, some idea of bluffing his way past Cino buzzing in his mind. He could break out, given half a chance. Then Cino appeared at the door. His Mauser served the same purpose as a barred gate.

“He won’t play, Cino. You know what to do with him!”

“Yes, Contessa.” Cino flicked the Mauser at Prestin. “You will come with me.”

“She isn’t the Montevarchi—” said Prestin.

“For now, she is.” Cino jerked the Mauser again, his lips thin and antisocial. “Get with it, friend.”

“Just what did you want with me?” Prestin now understood the grandstand play where, days before, he would have been baffled. “You’ve been after me ever since Fritzy disappeared.”

“Don’t worry about Upjohn. She is—working—for her living.”

Prestin lunged forward and grasped the girl. “Fritzy! She’s alive! She’s all right—”

Cino hit him over the head with the Mauser and, half stunned, Prestin was dragged free of the girl. She shrugged her negligee straight, shuddering. “Take him away, Cino!”

His head a roaring inferno, Prestin was led down the stairs and back down the elevator shaft of the Sorba tree. If that girl was the Contessa, then he had made a pretty poor showing. She had offered herself in exchange for something. Now, Prestin knew, he was going to do what the Montevarchi wanted—without payment.

But Fritzy was alive! And must be somewhere near, if what the pseudo-Contessa had said could be relied on.

Most of the confusion below had been sorted out and Prestin saw squads of men, Honshi guards and ordinary security men in snappy uniforms with helmets, clubs and automatic rifles, maintaining order.

Cino sniggered. “They squirted the old acid all over that Lombok. It shrivels the devils a treat. A pity I missed the fun.”

Prestin could imagine. The lungings and swaying, the growing and shriveling, the clawing retreat, the gaping mouth and the fume of acid… Interesting tastes, friend Cino…

The settlement—or whatever one could call an intrusion by one dimension’s culture into another—sprawled half in and half out of the edge of the forest. Concrete had been used lavishly, and as they walked through covered streets full of box-like apartment houses, Prestin saw gangs of workmen repairing cracks and pouring boiling acids into crevices. He knew that the Valcini lived here from choice—albeit some of their decisions had been forced on them by the Contessa, it seemed—and so he knew they had good reasons.

Their slaves mined the jewel rocks. Evidently, to a Valcini mind, life was less safe there than here.

He saw gangs of slaves chained up, shambling dispiritedly on their way to and from the mines. He recalled Dalreay’s attempt to blow up a mine working, and he knew it would take an army to shift the Valcini now.

“When do you chain me up, Cino?” he said, surprised at his own tone. The absence of hope, the acknowledgement of complete defeat, could act as a drug, making a man drunk on apathy.

“You aren’t slaving in the mines, offal,” said Cino with a sneering grin that no ordinary human being grinned. “You’re joining the Transportation Corps.”

The overwhelming presence of the rain forest at their backs dwarfed everything else about them; one would never escape from that swarming green nightmare. They went into a concrete box with a few windows and a large red star over the door, masquerading as an office block, but even inside the building Prestin felt the domination of the Cabbage Patch.

A fussy little majordomo met them, wearing a neat gray suit off the peg of some smart Italian tailor’s shop. His face showed the oily will-to-please that brought out mulish disobedience in Prestin. Cino jerked his Mauser.

“This one is good, Cyrus. He’s the one who sent the girl, Upjohn, through.”

The faded little man rubbed his hands in usurious glee. “So! The Contessa drives us hard. Any extra help, especially at this time, is very welcome.”

“Your worries slay me.” Cino’s contempt dripped.

“Come with me—what’s his name? I did hear about that girl, but—”

“Prestin. Robert Infamy.”

The little man giggled. Prestin had to admit sourly that he possessed something that resembled a sense of humor. “R.I.P.? He, he! He’s come to the right place!”

“Get lost,” said Cino, holstering the gun. He left without a backward glance. Any ideas of jumping the little fellow and taking off were dispelled with sobering speed as two Honshi guards stepped up to escort him. Cyrus led with a skipping little walk.

They marched over cheap rush matting laid on the concrete and, oddly enough, Prestin found himself keeping step with the guards as Cyrus skipped ahead. The air of secrecy and mystery deepened when they entered a small room whose only light fell from blue lamps clustered in the ceiling.

“Quiet, now!” whispered Cyrus.

The cathedral hush and clinical sterility enveloped them.

A man sat on a plain wooden chair, a shrouded figure with his hands to his head, bent over, meditating. A small mound of jewels lay on a table before him, sparkling luridly in the diamond-bright spotlight, to form a focal-point of brilliance in the room. Prestin caught the vaguely outlined shape of Honshi guards in the shadows beyond. The man sat as though made from putty.

The jewels lay neatly heaped in the center of a yellow circle painted on the table.

The jewels disappeared.

Prestin blinked.

The hunched figure pushed back with a sigh, straightened, and rubbed shaking hands over white hair. The man turned his head so that the blue light caught stubbled jawbone and cheek, set a blue star in his pupil, turned his face and teeth into ghoulish terrors. The man’s hair could be gray, Prestin realized—the all pervading blueness made quick color identification difficult—but his hair should be white. The fitness of things ought to be preserved.

A Honshi—not a guard but some sort of overseer—placed another small heap of jewels on the yellow circle, counting them out meticulously. They were totaled up by an assistant operating a small comptometer slung on a leather strap around his neck.

“There you are, Graves!” Echoing from a speaker screwed to the wall below the spy-eye of a TV camera, a hard, young metallic voice spoke with level authority. “Porteur, Graves!”

But the shaking man had shrunk back, his hands raised as though to ward off a blow, his features sagging blue-gray and awful. “No more!” he said, croaking the words. “My brain is on fire! No more—give me a rest!”

“Two minutes, Graves!” the metallic voice hammered with all the insolence of youthful authority. “Then—Porteur! Otherwise you know what will happen!”

“Yes.” Graves collapsed back onto the chair, his shoulders heaving, his head sunk. “Yes, I know.”

Now Prestin understood what he was witnessing; understood what David Macklin and the Montevarchi had wanted; understood why the girl in the bath had offered herself; and understood, with choking claustrophobic horror, what was going to happen to him.

Cyrus said, “I have a replacement—if you would—”

The young voice from the speaker answered, “Very well, Cyrus. Wheel him in. And you, Graves. Go and rest. And, Graves, remember”—the voice harshened with a menace that prickled Prestin’s skin—”tomorrow you will Porteur twice as much! Go, offal.”

Honshi guards dragged Graves away; the beaten, broken man hung between them, shoulders peaked like steeples of the devil.

Cyrus pointed at the chair. Without arguing, Prestin sat down. He felt acutely conscious of all the frog-like eyes regarding him with that typical Honshi lack of external emotion; their fear of the human prisoner had abated with numbers and the surroundings. “Well?” he said.

“The yellow circle exists at the exact position of a nodal point, Prestin.” The hard voice from the speaker splattered the blue-lit room with sharp-edged echoes. “You will Porteur those jewels across. You will do this for the Contessa and she will be very pleased with you.”

“An interesting set-up.” Prestin spoke evenly. He felt sick. “But you have forgotten one thing. I cannot Porteur objects at will. I do not know how it is done.”

“We will teach you, Prestin. You can do it, that means you have a Porteur’s mind. With the equipment you have, you can be taught. I have heard of the girl, Upjohn. You will work well for the Contessa.”

“Until I’m a beaten wretch like Graves?”

“You were offered the alternative.”

Cyrus wheeled forward a trolley-mounted switchboard covered with high-voltage liquid switching units, ammeters, voltmeters, gauges the significance of which escaped Prestin, and electrodes on expanding leads. Cyrus took up an electrode and began to unwind it. He told Prestin, “This won’t hurt me as much as it’ll hurt you.” He giggled again.

Prestin felt his mouth fill with vomit. He swallowed and gagged and tried to rise, but the Honshi guards held him as Cyrus clipped the electrodes around his arms, legs and back. His clothes had been through a great deal since he had landed in Rome; this was their final indignity. Now he was dressed in rags. His beard was coming along nicely, too.

Cyrus’s sense of humor now only evoked the red desire to smash and rend and kill.

“Porteur those jewels through the nodal point, Prestin!” The metallic voice chipped at him like a pneumatic drill.

“I can’t!” he said viciously, trying to tear free.

An electric shock hit him. He froze in his position, stunned, eyes like billiard balls. There was more than a mere electric shock there; he felt his brain as a separate entity, as a separate thing apart from his body, like an egg frying in a pan.

The Honshi guards holding him wore thick rubber gloves. He glared down, his head bent, his mouth drooling, as the shock passed through him. He had never realized that anything could hurt so much.

When it was over he fell back against the chair like a plastic bag emptied of water.

“That was both to encourage and help you, Prestin.” The impersonality of the voice from the speaker outraged Prestin; he would have preferred someone on which to focus his hate. Hating a loudspeaker and a TV eye was a sure-fire way to the nut-house.

“I don’t know what to do!” he said, and heard and disliked and feared the note of pleading in his voice.

The shock hit him again.

He slumped when it ended, shaking and feeling the sweat dripping off his forehead. “What do I do?” he shouted.

The shock…

“Try, Prestin. We will help you. Focus your thoughts on the jewels. Use your God-given gift! Porteur them! Do it, Prestin!”

The shock hit… and he did it.

The jewels vanished.

Cyrus said, “Aaah!”

“I,” the remote steely voice said with immense self-satisfaction, “have always said the stick will beat the carrot, every time.”

Dazed, sick, aching, Prestin shook his head. “It’s a convincing demonstration—but it isn’t always so!”

The shock hit him then, gratuitously, and he went rigid. When it went away, the hard young voice said, “That was for impertinence. I do not tolerate that from offal.”

More jewels were placed precisely on the yellow circle.

He did not understand how he had done it and could not see how he was to Porteur again without that diabolic electric—and more than electric—shock. He looked at the jewels. They glittered back at him icily. The young voice said, “Porteur, Robert Infamy!” And the shock screwed him into a knot of agony.

He Porteured the gems.

“Good. You may soon Porteur without my help. But always remember, Robert Infamy, when you Porteur in the future—it was I who helped you. Without me, your gift would always have lain fallow. You have much to thank me for, Prestin, a very great deal. I hope you are grateful.”

“I’ve no doubt,” said Prestin out of his agony of spirit, “I’ve no doubt at all I can find a way to repay you.”

IX

They experimented with Prestin.

They took delight in their work. They increased the amounts they told him to Porteur, gradually building up bulk and weight, flogging him with the impetus machine’s electric—and more than electric—shocks, urging him to greater productivity.

When he passed out for the third time and had to be revived by water and shocks, they let him go. He was dragged off by the Honshi guards, flung down on a mattress in a small airless room and left to rot, his head a pudding-basin filled with burning slops. He slept as though drugged, which he was—drugged by the backlash of his exertions. He sprawled where they left him and scarcely stirred.

He had no idea how much time had passed when he awoke. Almost at once, though, as he sat up and put a hand to his head with a foul exclamation, he was aware of his hunger, thirst and pain. His head felt as though the top had been clumsily sawn off and sewn back on by an apprentice. It reminded him of that bar of steel encircling his head in the car park area as the helicopter had plummeted toward them. He must have worked hard to Porteur himself; he had noticed nothing when he sent Fritzy to this crazy place.

Then he heard the staccato of machine gun fire.

Voices shrilled beyond the door. People screamed and he heard the vicious “Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” that told him the Honshi guards were at play with the devil.

The door crashed open, bringing a blinding burst of light. He shielded his eyes, expecting to be killed at once. Dark shapes blundered in and excited voices said, “Come on! Come on!” They jabbered in Italian, French, German, Spanish, English and un-nameable tongues, all shouting out there beyond the door.

Prestin stood up, possessed by an excitement he could grasp, thinking of the wooden kitchen chair and the impetus machine, the nodal point’s yellow circle and the heap of evil jewels. He ran outside. In the haze of gunsmoke, men and women jostled and pushed, screaming and chanting, waving scraps of Etanshi armor, singing, carousing. He was shuffled and shoved and at once became merely another scrap of humanity flung about in the tides of uncontrolled movement. This was fiesta, Mardi Gras, Revolution, the breaking of bonds and the sundering of chains. He saw dismembered Honshi guards littering the runnels, dangling from overhead fluorescent lamps, strewn everywhere.

A swarm of people rushed out of a concrete side tunnel. Most of them were half-naked; all in rags, waving weapons, shrieking, laughing—some of them—with the violence of released emotions. Before them ran two Honshi guards, their swords gone, their tall conical helmets flapping the pubics around them. One Honshi fell. The crowd poured over him like lava.

Although the crowd had guns they did not shoot at the Honshi… They waited. He saw the other crowd ahead of him, staggered back, and halted to stare about, tilting his revolting head with those wide-spaced, unblinking frog-eyes. Then the crowd closed in.

From the heaving mass a spear suddenly thrust, spiking up. At its tip waved a scrap of hair, blood red, dripping.

The crowd screamed and cheered and hooted.

Much as the scene disgusted Prestin, he couldn’t really blame them. Treat men and woman like animals and you must expect them to react like animals, even though you may claim that it is no way for Homo sapiens to behave.

You sow violence, brother, and you reap violence.

Yeah, man.

Prestin grinned suddenly. He ran forward, holding out his hands.

“I might have known the revolution wouldn’t go off by chance just as I arrived!”

Todor Dalreay, his right arm bloodied to the elbow, the sword an extension of that arm of justice, swung around.

“Bob! So they found you! Yes, we have been busy. The revolution was all laid. All I did was talk them into springing it now.”

“Is it all—?”

The hunter’s face had grown thinner, more wolf-like, but the bristly beard lifted in a laugh. “No need to worry, Bob. It’s all under control. A large number of these people are from your dimension; most are from here though. The Dargan are more than lively in revolt. Taking our whole caravan into captivity was a mistake. The Contessa—”

“Yes?”

Dalreay looked searchingly into Prestin’s eyes. His own face held a remote, strong, judgement-day look. Then, “She escaped into another dimension. Oh, they caught and killed her alter ego—”

“Alter ego? You mean a beautiful young girl with dark hair and violet eyes?”

“I know you met her, Bob. And I believe you were not betrayed by her. Yes, that is the she-devil they killed. The girls who slaved for her were too frightened but it got done. There were those who counted it an honor.”

“I can imagine,” whispered Prestin. He thought of that girl who had taken such delight in bathing her body, who had tried to seduce him into working for the Montevarchi. She was dead. But the Contessa lived on. It would, perhaps, always be like that, surmised Prestin.

“One day, the Contessa will reap her own personal harvest.” Dalreay lifted his sword as the people ebbed and flowed about them. “But there is much to be done. This place must be fumigated of Honshi and Trug alike. Then we can see about our own future, and Dargai…”

“Listen, Todor!” Preston grabbed Dalreay’s arm as the Dargan made to stride off. “A girl—you know, Fritzy Upjohn—a girl they had working here—whatever that meant. Have you or your men seen her? It’s important, Todor!”

“A girl—?”

“Think of Darna, Todor. Yes, important—a girl!”

A rolling figure, a cough, and the glug-glug of an upended wine flagon heralded the arrival of Nodger. He hiccoughed and smiled around. His sword, too, shone with blood.

“I killed that snake Enrico,” he said flatly. “But his brother Cino escaped into the Big Green. So that’s him finished, too.”

“Bad cess to him,” growled Dalreay, fingering his beard. He waved his sword and shouted and men moved purposefully. “We ought to check for this girl of Bob’s—”

“That fool Cino.” Nodger wiped his mouth and drank deeply, the wine dribbing again down his chin. “He sought to bargain with us. Grabbed a girl and tried to use her to shield him. Of course, we didn’t listen. Enrico made a showing of it; but his footwork was so bad that even an old bones like me could make mincemeat out of him. But Cino, now—”

“Girl,” said Prestin. He knew. It had to be. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? That was the way Cino’s mind worked—if one could dignify his animal reactions by the name of mind. “Cino,” said Prestin dully, “has Fritzy. He must have. She’s the only girl he could bargain with. Really.”

“I am sorry, Bob—” Dalreay looked genuinely pained. “But if he has gone into the Cabbage Patch—”

“Cyrus would know,” said one of Dalreay’s men who must have been in the place a long time. All about them now in the open spaces, the tunnels, and, probably, clear up the elevators through the Sorba trees, the men and women of two worlds caroused and chased Honshi. The Trugs they would shoot down at a distance. On Freedom Day no one wanted to take a silly chance and miss all the fun by getting killed.

“Get Cyrus here,” shouted Dalreay. “Whoever he is,” he added.

“Let’s find a quieter nook,” said Nodger. “I feel the strongest desire to sit down and rest these weary old bones.” He belched most artistically.

His Falstaffian act had thinned out as soon as the fighting had begun: he hadn’t pretended to fight; he fought.

They found a cubicle room looking out onto the area where the big growth began, walled from the city by yards of thick concrete. Men and women reported to Dalreay, who with his own elders and other leaders began to sort out problems. Dalreay, after all, was not King Clinton.

Cyrus was found, brought out and thrust down on trembling knees. He tried to make a joke until someone kicked him.

“Yes, yes,” he babbled when the problem had been presented to him. “I know what he will do and where he will go. Enrico, too—”

“Enrico,” said Nodger around a chicken bone he had picked up somewhere, “was last seen wearing six inches of steel in his guts. Very becoming.”

Cyrus smiled weakly and turned even more green.

“Was he the one telling you to use the impetus machine, Cyrus, at the nodal point?” Prestin demanded.

“No! Oh, no! I do not know who that was. Some say he is the Contessa’s son, some her lover. He could be anything at all, for all I know.” Cyrus shook. “We never saw him.”

“Since you know where Cino will go, Cyrus,” Dalreay told him, inspecting the edge of his sword with extreme care, “you will not only tell us. You will take us.”

Cyrus quaked. “No! No! I cannot go into the Growth! Think of me… It is impossible—”

“If Cino can go, we can go and so can you! Get ready.”

Prestin glanced at Dalreay. More than ever now, he realized that Dalreay’s pose of beaten savage had been just that—a pose, a clever ruse to minimize attention. There must have been correspondence between the slaves and the free men, although Prestin couldn’t guess how it was done. Now Dalreay talked of going into the Cabbage Patch, and he wasn’t shaking all over. Then Prestin looked more closely and was immensely cheered—and, paradoxically, more scared. For he saw that although Dalreay was just as frightened of the rain forest, he now felt obligations to Prestin and was prepared to fulfill them.

Urging Cyrus on, they went up in the elevator to the top of a Sorba tree. From its flat roof where a helicopter stood waiting, they surveyed the Big Green. With them had come an Italian helicopter pilot, a tough, swarthy man with a cheerful smile and the marks of the manacles still on his wrists. They all looked out over the green carpet of the main mass of foliage while they listened to Cyrus.

“The Contessa must have her alter egos ready. Cino knew that; he thought he could bargain with them. You killed one, but this Upjohn girl, with others, was in reserve. She—”

Horrified, Prestin blurted out, “What do you mean? Fritzy an alter ego? Explain yourself, man!”

“I cannot! No one can!” Cyrus cringed from an expected blow. “There are dark stories. Tales of necromancy. I do not understand. But the Contessa is ages old, and yet she can appear as a young woman. I do not know how!”

“If Cino took a helicopter, we can find him.” Prestin looked at the pilot. “Are you game, Pietro?”

“And willing to find that devil. I owe him a score.”

They loaded the helicopter with weapons and a hamper of provisions—opened at once by Prestin—and they took off. Besides Pietro, Prestin and Dalreay, Cyrus and Nodger were aboard.

The machine whirred up and over the great forest.

“He will make for the northern end. There are rescue facilities there.” Cyrus had accepted his fate by then.

“Rescue facilities?”

“Caches of food in case anyone was forced down. He could live there until the Contessa comes for him. That is one reason he took an alter ego for her. Without one of those mysterious beings, she would be unable to travel the dimensions.”

“Just find the devil,” said Dalreay grimly. “Forget all the mystical nonsense. My sword will settle that problem.”

But Prestin, thinking of the Montevarchi, was not so sure.

Over the northern sections now, they could see great arms and branches of the forest and a river the size of three Amazons. And they saw Cino’s helicopter settling onto the golf-ball-like head of a Sorba tree. At once they went full-bore for it.

They landed with a swirl alongside Cino’s ‘copter on the flat roof of a tree house. Prestin snatched up an automatic rifle and leaped out of the machine. He felt icy cold and yet burning with heat; he couldn’t remember having felt like this before. It wasn’t even that he loved Fritzy—if anything he was more attracted to Margie—but he felt that Cino had it coming to him, and he wanted to be there personally.

They plunged down the staircase. This tree house looked very much like the others. A girl’s scream, abruptly cut off, bounced up. Prestin went clattering down, followed by Dalreay and Pietro. Nodger took his own time.

They trampled down into an open railed-in space where they halted suddenly, weapons raised but useless. Their faces paled as the meaning of the tableau hit them.

Cino lay on the floor with a parachute pack half ripped off his back. Fritzy crouched near him dressed in the remains of a glamorous flame-colored negligee. A Trug held her arms, pinioning them, and one of its clawed feet pressed Cino down savagely.

Cino was demented by fear, and kept babbling something in his own language. Prestin could not understand it, but Nodger leered. “He’s got it at last,” the oldster said. Prestin lifted his rifle. He aimed it at the Trug.

“Careful,” warned Pietro. “You have to hit those things square the first time. You don’t get second chances.”

“You’ll hit the girl!” warned Dalreay.

“Fritzy!” called Prestin. “Keep still. As soon as I fire, get down flat. Got it?”

She saw him. “I’ve got it, alf. Aim straight, that’s all.”

Prestin held his arms as loosely as he could to aim the rifle, but the shaking worried him. He gripped his teeth together and blinked, trying to steady the picture down. Sunlight bounced in harshly. Sweat dripped from his forehead. He aimed for the Trug’s throat, intending to catch the area of head and chest in the spread.

His finger touched the trigger—and the Trug bellowed madly and charged.

Prestin fired and then the automatic rifle was knocked from his hands like a peashooter from a child. He fell heavily sideways and hit the floor. The Trug was screaming like a herd of bull elephants gone rogue. He heard Dalreay shout, and heard the staccato of rifle fire. He flung himself at Fritzy who surged up to meet him and they collided. They slid together to the brink of the drop next to Cino. His wide, crazy face leered at them, but with none of the vicious, cynical cruelty of the old Cino; he drooled. Prestin saw the drop coming up and grabbed for a handhold, catching the parachute harness.

Fritzy was clinging to his legs now. Through the haze he could see the Trug flailing madly and knocking Nodger headlong. Pietro fired in a brown cloud of gunsmoke. Dalreay held his sword up, ready to dart in if he got the opportunity…

Fritzy gasped, “So it’s you! You came to this mad world, too!”

“Yes—I’ll tell you all about it later—right now I’ve got to get in there and kill that Trug.”

“This is where I was,” Fritzy said, still holding onto Prestin with a drowning grip. She was nowhere near as calm as she appeared, “Cino brought me back here—where I landed after falling out of the airplane. He was not a nice person.”

“You’re—you’re all right, Fritzy?”

“Of course. The Contessa looked after me. She wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” She laughed shrilly and then gulped it off. “Violet was killed. I saw it. Poor Violet.”

“Let go, Fritzy—the Trug—”

Pietro had fired away all his magazine. The Trug waved its clawed talons, the deep and terrifying scarlet of its eyes twisting in its head, its whole frame instilled with primal life energy. Dalreay shouted high and laughing and strong and moved in with his sword…

Prestin saw all that. He also saw the parachute harness slide off Cino’s lax frame, saw the floor unroll away from him, felt it scrape past his chest. He made a futile grab at a railing, and then he and Fritzy were falling freely into the rain forest.

The tree house receded above him. Below, the green canopy jumped clear.

Fritzy hung on to his legs and her scream echoed a long descending shrill down the airlanes.

He had to get them out of this, somehow, for they couldn’t live without protection in the Cabbage Patch. He shouted as he felt that steel band pressing in around his head, like a bacon slicer threatening to trepan.

Above him stretched blue sky and a few clouds. Below him lay a smiling land with the environs of Rome to the south.

So he pulled the rip cord.

“What do we say when we get down, alf ?”

He laughed. He laughed helplessly, hanging on to the chute as Fritzy hung on to him. He didn’t care what they said. The police might ask searching questions, but publicity stunts came in all sizes these days. Anyway, Dave Macklin and Margie were there to help. He looked forward to seeing them again. He felt, somehow, that they were alive and well and waiting for him.

And, he felt with passionate sincerity, so was Todor Dalreay still alive, bloody sword uplifted with the Trug dead at his feet. People like Macklin, Alec, Dalreay and Nodger were not easily disposed of. Free men usually made more of a mouthful than Borgia-type autocrats like The Contessa di Montevarchi could swallow.

He didn’t care if she waited for him below in person.

The sun shone and there was Fritzy and there was Margie. And there was Rome.

Life in this one dimension promised to be pretty lively.

A Porteur?

Never heard of it.

Content

The Key to Irunium
by Kenneth Bulmer

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