The Probability Man Page 12

  He saw Ethel watching him a few moments later.

  “What’s going to happen to us?” she asked.

  “I wondered that too.”

  “Best guess?” asked the robot.

  Spingarn considered the question. “Go on.”

  “We’ll upset the balance of existence here. We’re not a random element in the situation.”

  “Balance of life!! Here! How can there be?”

  “Well, sir, everything here fits in.”

  The road swam through the night beneath them. They had traveled many hundreds of miles. The terrain had changed. There were towering mountains, their icecaps cold and severe in the moonlight; beyond them, a distant volcano belched abruptly, its thunder echoing through the vast peaks dragging deeper growling reverberations from their heights and depths. They listened in awe until there was silence.

  “But what’s going to happen when the Sergeant blows up the road?” demanded Ethel. “It’s all very well to talk about upsetting the Frames of Talisker—I want to know what happens when we land in one of them!”

  Sergeant Hawk’s voice roared out:

  “Prepare the saucisse, lad! Captain Devil, sir, we’re through to the foundations! There’s a sort of sewer beneath the road—d’ye hear, lad!”

  “Aye, Sergeant!”

  “Then listen! I’ve implanted the grenades in the deep conduit—precious lot of stuff I don’t see a use for down here—looks like a gunsmith’s shop! But we’ll put a stop to the Froggies’ engines, won’t we, Captain?”

  Spingarn extracted a long fuse from the Sergeant’s capacious knapsack. Momentarily he was thrown back to that archaic time of underground battles and an armored man whose sword was brilliant with the blood of the Pioneers. Ethel clung to him, overcoming her disgust.

  “Spingarn—do you know what you’re doing!”

  His tail whipped past her long, shapely legs.

  “Mind that damned object!” she complained.

  Spingarn saw the Sergeant smile grimly:

  “Sorry. I’ll get used to it.” He saw the wicked barb wink at him. It would be a handy weapon in close combat. He tried a few controlled passes; it was a matter of letting the lower part of the spine relax, and then applying a sideways motion beginning at the ankles.

  “Spingarn! You’ve torn my dress, you bastard!”

  “The saucisse?”

  Sergeant Hawk was losing patience.

  It was soon fitted. The long curving tube of gunpowder reached deep into the hole which Hawk had drilled; its farther end stretched a yard or two across the debris of the broken road. Hawk hauled himself out heavily.

  “Strikes me I could use me iron legs as a propeller?” he muttered. “Who’d have thought it for an old soldier of the Good Queen? What would the corporal say—but he’s dead like us, is Corporal Tillyard! Rest him,” he added piously. A frown came on his forehead, but Spingarn was spared an eschatological discussion by the robot’s interruption. He didn’t think he could have explained Tillyard’s absence for the Sergeant. It was fortunate that Horace thought fit to utter another of his vague warnings:

  “There’s a high probability that we’re coming to the end of the road, sir,” Horace announced. “There’s a distinct near-certainty that the mountain chain serves as another link in this primitive barrier, sir.”

  “Then fire the fuse, Sergeant!” called Spingarn.

  “Right gladly!” called back Hawk. “Stand away!”

  Spingarn thought of the violent anachronistic device below the strange, shifting road; then, like the others, he was caught up in the excitement of the moment. Nerves strung up, the three humans and the red-furred robot watched the bright, sputtering fuse travel along the saucisse leaving behind a trail of sulphurous smoke; Hawk in particular expressed his excited expectation by bawling imprecations upon the enemies he had left behind a Galaxy away:

  “Be damned to you, you subtle rogues—ye conniving audacious Frogs—be damned and may you burn in the mine and be blown to the veriest atoms!”

  Spingarn called to the others to lie face down, head shielded, at a distance from the gouged pit; but Hawk could not be prevailed upon to take this simple precaution.

  “Get down!” yelled Spingarn.

  “A coward’s part!” answered the delighted Sergeant.

  He was hurled at that instant fifty yards along the black road; a huge plume of red flame shot from the pit; tongues of yellow flames followed, and a pall of black smoke erased the light of the two tiny moons.

  Sergeant Hawk bawled his Huzzahs from a cracked throat.

  The force of the blast jerked Ethel from Spingarn’s tight grip, and it was only Horace’s telescoping claws that saved her from being swept over the edge of the ruined road and out into the blackness beyond.

  The road jerked, writhed like a living thing, and crumbled away beneath them. Spingarn glimpsed a sinister building set into the fabric of the eroded way as the smoke cleared: the interrogation center. It lay like some grim relic of surly authority, dead and yet eagerly waiting; disused but still functioning; a silent sentinel from a long-dead past.

  The four figures tumbled softly through the night air as the road fell away. Spingarn saw Ethel’s wings spread out instinctively.

  “Private Devil! Captain Spingarn! Capt——tain!!”

  It was Hawk yelling into the black night.

  “Horace!” roared Spingarn from the depths of his broad chest. “Horace, you bag of inhibitions—do something!”

  He could still see Ethel, though Hawk’s glinting iron base had vanished in the gloom; the girl was soaring upward on a chance column of air. But where was the robot! Spingarn saw the moonlight reflected below him in a trailing vapor cloud; what lay beneath?

  “Cap——tain!” bawled Hawk again. “ ’Orris! You French heathen—help!”

  “Spingarn?”

  Ethel was plummeting downward, her gossamer wings almost closed. She plunged below Spingarn, who, for a moment, had believed that she might check his own headlong descent. Chill air blasted his bare chest. His tail entangled itself about one ankle. Then a cold and clammy mist enveloped him, so that Hawk’s bawlings came as though from outside this existence altogether.

  “ ’Orris!” Hawk implored. “You clockwork monkey—do summat!”

  “Horace!” yelled Spingarn again. “This is your function, you buffoon—we’ll all be killed on the rocks!”

  “Coming, sir!”

  And then Spingarn found himself caught in an invisible network of force-fields as the robot splurged energy into the force-emitters it carried.

  He and Sergeant Hawk were held by huge energies, staring at one another in the dim, gray light, two distraught and terrified men.

  They swayed downward in a series of smooth cycles.

  The girl found them, and then the four visitors to the remote planet were together. The black-red shape of the robot was the center of a display of pyrotechnics as it altered the fields.

  “Soon be down, sir!” it reported.

  The mist cleared suddenly, and the gray blackness that had hidden the ground below was gone. They all saw the fires in the same instant.

  “Gawd!” said Hawk.

  “Most interesting!” the robot announced.

  “Spingarn!” shrieked the girl. “What are they?”

  By the light of the great fires stood a company of vast misshapen creatures, towering figures. Their eyes were turned upward.

  They had seen the unlikely group of visitors, but they did no more than stare. There was no greeting, no gesture of invitation; nor of hostility. In fact, there was no acknowledgment, other than that cold stare, that they had been noticed. But in the silent acceptance of the fact of their arrival, Spingarn detected a threat that was almost as bad as the eerie baying of the insubstantial creatures which had caught the Disaster Control agent.

  “Thryoid giants,” he said.

  He could see them now.

  The robot coughed deferentially.

&n
bsp; “If you’ll excuse me, sir?”

  15

  “They be huge!” Hawk said in an awed voice. “Hugeous, Captain! They’ll murder us—they can’t, we’re dead! What’ll they do!”

  “Horace?”

  “A most interesting chromosome transmogrification, sir!”

  “Get us away! Damn it, they’ll slaughter us!”

  “It’s a possibility, sir,” said the robot, unmoved. “It’s definitely within the Possibility Space comp predicted. But there it is, sir. I’m not allowed to intervene.”

  The monsters stared upward, heads sent in a delighted and implacable deadliness. Teeth glistened redly in the firelight.

  “Spingarn!” the girl shuddered. “Get us away!”

  They were nearing the heat of the fires and all strength seemed to have gone from her. Her gossamer wings dipped. “Spingarn!”

  “You can’t leave us!”

  “I’m sorry, yes, sir. I have to withdraw my services now.”

  “You can’t set us down here!”

  “Where else, my dear Director! This is a conjunction of Frame-Shift factors, sir. I’ve always admired your dexterity, sir, and I’m so looking forward to your handling of the situation!”

  Sergeant Hawk put his own personal interpretation on the scene below and Horace’s announcement:

  “The King of Darkness wouldn’t do it? His Satanic Majesty wouldn’t leave us to the giants?”

  “Yes,” said Spingarn. “He would.”

  They were waiting with a calm and unholy expectancy.

  First Ethel slumped to a central space among the giants.

  Then Spingarn and Hawk were dumped unceremoniously beside her.

  “Goodbye, sir! I’ve every confidence in you!”

  A slow sigh of satisfaction broke out from the misshapen creatures. It lasted for some seconds and then a low booming roaring began to reverberate among the caves and valleys around the central space, where Spingarn, Ethel and Hawk lay trying to regain their senses. The awful roaring of the giants took on a life of its own as echoes rolled back through the night.

  Spingarn realized that it was too late to phrase those powerful and utterly convincing arguments which would have kept the robot’s twenty-ninth century tools to hand. But Horace had gone in a flicker of luminescence, to the brief astonishment of the giants.

  But they seemed satisfied at what had been laid before them.

  To Spingarn, this seemed the worst part.

  The giants had expected them!

  Faces twisted and ballooned as the prominences regarded them with sinister satisfaction. Still there was no movement from the ring of giants. Spingarn took in more of the scene, quietly horrified by its import. That functional-looking contrivance over there, for instance: branches roped neatly around a wickerwork arrangement of baskets. The rough platform of stones at the center of a natural amphitheater: they had been moved recently. And the giants had the look of men who had labored and found the work agreeable. Their enormous hands held torches, some of them; others grasped implements of bronze—something between a lance and a lash. Deadly, dull-gleaming weapons.

  Fires crackled with more than the heat and stench of burning wood. There was a thick, sulphurous stench in the air, together with the sweet and sickening odor of burning flesh. The place stank of ritual, sacrifice, and death. From a discarded memory thousands of years away in time and a universe away in space came a vaguely similar scene: one of the mid-third millennium Frames, the time of the sense-wizards. They had indulged in human sacrifice too. Spingarn caught himself, realizing that he could be reading too much into that errant memory. It was possible that the giants had no thought of the particularly disgusting procedures of another kind of reenactment of reality; they could be a benign race, Spingarn told himself. A gentle people. Anxious to welcome chance travelers.

  “Captain, sir,” said Hawk, removing the clay pipe which had somehow remained in position during the descent from the eerie road. “Captain Devil, sir—are these friends of yourn?”

  The giants regarded Hawk with interest.

  “I wish I knew, Sergeant.”

  Ethel’s wings were sheathed about her whole body; the tendrils and filaments of the translucent membranes had stretched so that she appeared sheathed in some gorgeous pod like an insect before the beginnings of its aerial life. She trembled and shook, and if Spingarn had not put an arm about the delicate wings she would have fallen.

  “Spingarn, what will they do to us!”

  Her teeth chattered and her big eyes were wide with fear.

  “Nothing,” said Spingarn, knowing he was wrong as he spoke, for the ring was closing and bulbous feet carried grotesque bodies nearer, inch by inch; he knew it was a foolish fancy to take refuge in equating size with placidity, in thinking that because the giants were physically so overwhelming they would have a tender regard for creatures so vulnerable as themselves: no. The giants expected them. They had prepared for them. They were the object of that sinister stage.

  The giants inched forward again, a terrible eagerness overcoming them. Younger and slimmer males moved out from the ring till they were pulled back by their hairy, fatter elders. The ground shook. Spingarn noticed that it was bitterly cold, in spite of the heat from the many fires. The giants stank. Sweat rolled from greasy chests. Runnels of perspiration dripped to the stamped earth of the amphitheater. Beneath his feet, Spingarn felt the creeping tread of the monsters. And still they had not spoken.

  “Permission to retire, Captain, sir?” squawked Hawk through fear-choked tubes. “Thought—put it to you, sir—we’d be better out of this?”

  “Go if you can, Hawk,” said Spingarn quietly.

  The giants noted the exchange. A muted whisper was heaved from pendulous lips. Eyes mad with eagerness glared redly at them. Then Hawk made his move. He upended himself with a shove of powerful arms and immediately began the crazy gyration that served to turn him into a human excavating machine; soil flew. Bits of rock spurted. The giants took one breath and roared in unison.

  “Baaaaa——loooooo——aaaaaaaa——dddd!!!”

  They repeated the incantation, feet stamping forward, closing the ring, rocking the world, creating their own local air disturbances with the power of their lungs, forcing Spingarn to cling to the girl in case she hurtled away into the ranks behind him, making Hawk’s actions those of a drunken gyroscope, threatening and promising vileness: Hawk only increased his efforts.

  Then the giants were only yards away.

  A big-bellied ancient, one bellowing more loudly than his bawling neighbors, shot out a huge hand toward the girl and Spingarn.

  “Follow!” called Hawk above the roaring. “I’ll make a gallery—follow, Captain!”

  Already his chest was deep in the pit he was digging.

  “Spingarn!” shrieked Ethel, who saw the menacing hand.

  Spingarn acted intuitively. Still with both hands about the girl, he oscillated the base of his spine and swept the long powerful tail through a short arc to tear the arm of the giant. Blood sprang out in a fountain. A terrible long wound showed ripped arteries and white bone; the blood jetted over the ancient’s neighbors. All bellowings ceased. Only the sound of Hawk’s busy whirling and the snapping of twigs in the fires came to the two transformed humans. Spingarn allowed the slender coils of the deadly, barbed tail to remain in view of the crazed eyes.

  “Aaaaaaarughhhh!” screamed the monster, holding up the jetting arm.

  “AAAAAAAAARUGHHHHHH!!!!” answered the others, increasing the noise by a huge factor. “Baaaaa——looooo——aaa——ddd!!”

  Spingarn saw the next actions in a terrible cycle of slow events: Ethel shrieking and trying to spread wide wings. Himself, weaponless except for the strange appendage which had slashed the leader’s arm, lashing out again and again as he dodged slow-moving bodies. And Hawk dragged bawling and yellow with rage by his head from the tunnel. Himself caught at last and held up by his tail. The screaming agony of the pull on his spi
ne as he swung over a fire, held by a vengeful giant. Ethel picked up and pushed into one part of the wickerwork frame. Hawk similarly seized. Himself, fur burning and hair completely singed away, thrown into a rough cage of branches. Hawk slung like so much offal into another.

  And more action. More slow-dreaming violence.

  Impatience from the thyroid monsters. That was a part of the pattern of events which he could only see dimly through the oceans of pain zittering through his skull, through the cosmic universes of agony radiating from the torn ligaments of his spine. The giants were disputing among themselves. They had left the incautious older giant to die slowly on the hard ground; he watched his life ebb away, still in shock, with no assistance from his frightful comrades. They were too busy roaring at one another, gesturing toward the three trapped beings on the raised platform of stones, to go to his aid.

  “Spingarn!!” came to him through his agony. “Spingarn—what are they going to do?”

  Spingarn knew. The gestures were unmistakable.

  Hawk had a good idea, for, when the giants were busy in argument, Spingarn saw him launch himself at the thick boughs at the far side of his cage. Within seconds, he was through and attacking the soft earth beneath. But the giants had seen him. Spingarn clawed his way to an upright position in spite of the unending flow of pain which made time pass in jerky clouds, each cloud a rhythmic pattern of pure, distilled torture; he saw Hawk again picked up by his grizzled head and then the frightful thing they did to him.

  Two giants regarded the erstwhile Sergeant of Pioneers with malice. One grinned, its huge blackened teeth an insult in the red firelight. The other humped a block of iron onto the platform. Both called in savage happiness to the others; Spingarn saw through his personal universe of torment what they intended. Hawk knew by this time too.

  “Don’t let them, Spingarn—Spingarn!”

  Ethel was wailing and sobbing hysterically.

  “Spingarn—get up—stop them!”