Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (12 page)

Advancing toward them on the opposite side of the tracks came a squad of beings that bore a distant resemblance to humans. They were helmeted, and garbed in black uniforms with green insignia and piping on them.

Their metal fittings—Clive assumed they were metal—were all of the same glowing green that was almost impossible to look at. Clive's eyes stung and watered and he had to look away to avoid unbearable pain.

Even so, the soldiers seemed to fade and waver as Clive looked at them. Now and again one of them disappeared altogether, only to reappear as a vague, ghostly image of himself, yards away from the point of his disappearance.

"What—what are they?"

"Chaffri," Annie whispered. "This is as close to them as a true human normally gets. And if you bring yourself to their attention, you're not likely to survive the meeting! Stay down, Clive! Be wary!"

"I cannot see them clearly. Something here is not right."

"They can't see us either. Not any better than we can see them. Probably not that well, even."

The Chaffri had reached the wreckage of the car in which Clive and Annie had been riding. The apparent leader of the squad bent and picked up a piece of twisted metal tubing. He held it close to his face, then opened a pouch in his uniform and dropped it in.

Even as the Chaffri advanced and Clive and Annie watched, the wrecked car seemed to waver and run like a melting ice cube. In minutes it had soaked into the ground—or so it appeared to Clive.

The Chaffri were speaking in a language that bore no resemblance to anything Clive had ever heard before—emphatically including the patois that was common in most regions of the Dungeon. The Chaffri squad had divided in two, and half its members advanced along either side of the track.

Annie was right. The Chaffri gave no evidence of even being able to see the erstwhile passengers. Annie rolled away from the tracks as the Chaffri soldiers advanced, signaling for silence and tugging Clive to get him to move with her, out of the path of the advancing troopers.

But it was too late. The last of the Chaffri stepped squarely on Clive's chest.

To Clive's astonishment, the Chaffri's foot sank into his body, like a boot sinking into thin mud. The sensation was one of the most vivid and unpleasant that Clive had felt in his lifetime. It wasn't exactly pain—it was more a sense of wrongness, a revulsion and disgust, as if he had been touched by, violated by, something not only ineffably alien but utterly perverted and disgusting.

The Chaffri leaped back, as if his response to contact with Clive was similar to Clive's reaction to him. He began gesticulating and shouting to his fellows. He already held a weapon at the ready and he swept it over the ground at his feet, obviously intending to blast Clive out of existence.

But he was fated for disappointment. Clive had already rolled away, and he and Annie were sprinting toward a nearby field.

Seedlings and earth spurted around Clive's feet. His military instincts asserting themselves, he threw himself to the ground, rolled twice, and sighted back at the Chaffri. The Chaffri's weapon fired again. More accurately, it sizzled, emitting something that looked like a bolt of lightning. Even though no tangible projectile was involved, Clive was convinced that a hit from that bolt of electricity—or whatever it was—would prove no less damaging to its victim than would a lead bullet.

He could see Annie nearby, crouched on the earth. She was moving, but there seemed to be something wrong with her. Perhaps she had taken a hit from one of the Chaffri weapons.

Clive called to her to get lower to the, ground, but she gave no indication that she heard his words.

He sighted his weapon at the nearest Chaffri. Its sights almost had a life of their own, drawing his aim onto the target with uncanny sureness. He squeezed the weapon's not-unfamiliar trigger and it made a sound that seemed almost to be a sigh. Its sight dropped away from the Chaffri and Clive lowered the weapon and looked at his target:

The Chaffri wavered and faded in the fashion Clive had previously observed, but this time he did not reappear.

Clive aimed at a second Chaffri trooper. Again his weapon assisted him as if it had a life and a will. He squeezed the trigger, the weapon sighed and dipped like an athlete relaxing at the termination of a contest. The second trooper wavered and threw his arms into the air, his own weapon clattering to earth. As the Chaffri faded into nothingness, his abandoned weapon did the same.

Clive scuttled sideways across the grassy earth. He reached Annie's side, dividing his attention between her and the remaining Chaffri. He was still severely outnumbered, especially as Annie, although showing no visible wound, had been clearly rendered
hors de combat
.

A Chaffri trouper pointed his weapon at Clive and Annie. Clive raised his own weapon and they fired simultaneously. Clive felt the bolt of energy that flew past him, making the very air quiver and drawing Clive like an iron filing suddenly exposed to a magnet. But close as it was, the Chaffri's shot failed to harm Clive or Annie.

Not so the answering shot from Clive's weapon. The third Chaffri followed his two predecessors, wavering in air, fading, and disappearing. At this the apparent commander of the Chaffri detachment shouted an incomprehensible order to his troopers.

The commander ran along the railroad bed. He brought down a booted foot that did not quite reach the level of the earth. His next step terminated a short distance higher in the air. With each successive stride he rose higher and higher, his troopers following him not only along the railbed but into the air, until the Chaffri had all disappeared.

Clive shook his head. He turned to Annie. She had curled into a ball and was quivering visibly. He tried desperately to determine the cause of her distress. "Annie! Can you answer me? What is the matter? How can I help you?"

She turned panic-stricken eyes upon him. "Baalbec. Baalbec. Circuits scrambled. Software—catastrophic error—master reset. Here! Here! Here!"

She jerked away from him spasmodically. Her hands were balled into fists, pounding futilely at the earth. She managed to bring one to her bodice. "Here! Clive! Master system reset! Here! Only hope!"

His face flaming the very scarlet of his tunic, Clive followed Annie's frantic commands, tearing at her costume, reaching toward her sternum. He felt a blow from her fist but it was not designed to drive him off, but to encourage his assistance. He pressed frantic fingertips to her sternum, at first feeling only soft flesh, but then a switch.

"Left! Left!" Annie cried. "Master reset to left!"

His own left? he wondered. His mind raced. Clearly this was no time for calm dialogue. He had to think fast. No—Annie would think of this operation in terms of her own perspective. His own left, as he faced her, was equivalent to her right, and vice versa. They were like mirror images of each other.

His left—her right.

Her left—his right.

"Yes! Quick, Clive! Reset! Master reset! Switch left!" Her heels were kicking at the earth and her fists beating at her sides. Her face was turning a horrid shade and her breathing was coming in desperate, irregular gasps. Clive thought he could hear her very heart pounding, desperately pounding, as if about to burst. Perhaps it was. The Baalbec was a device of unknown capabilities as far as Clive was concerned. He had seen it used as a weapon, as an aid to navigation, as a device for storing and manipulating information, and on one occasion as a power source for a flying machine brought to the Dungeon from a South Seas island in the course of a future war between European and Japanese forces. Where was the Nakajima 97? There was no time to worry about that now!

What was the Baalbec doing to Annie now?

Clive. studied Annie's body for a moment, desperate that he not make an erroneous—and potentially disastrous—move. But he must act quickly, for it was obvious that if he did not do so, Annie would die. His own great-great-granddaughter, this child-woman who in some odd way had become the most precious person in the world to him… if he did not act quickly, and correctly, Annie would surely die.

The lives of others had been in Clive Folliot's hands before now. Some he had saved, some he had spared, some he had failed to save, and some he had taken by means of his own, conscious, deliberate act. Some would call such conduct a usurpation of a function belonging rightly to God alone. But this was not a power that Clive had sought, and it was not one that he wished. It was one that had been forced upon him—more times than he cared to remember.

Now it was forced upon him again. And this time the person whose destiny he would decide was neither enemy nor stranger nor friend, but his own flesh and blood, his own descendant, his own darling girl Annie. Not a religious man in normal times—in fact a doubter at times of the very existence of the Divine—now Clive closed his eyes and, under his breath, yielded up a brief, silent prayer.

Feeling Annie's flesh soft and warm and yielding beneath his hand, he managed a momentary grip on the switch and swung it to… the right!

 

Annie quivered and toppled onto the greensward.

Clive drew her bodice back into place, covering her tender bosom. He held her hand, peered into her precious face. Her hand was relaxed, no longer balled into a fist. Her legs lay still on the earth, no longer pounding out . their desperate tarantella.

The scarlet coloration was fading from her features. Would it be replaced by a normal rosy shade, or by the pallor of death? Her frantic, ragged gasps had ceased. Would they be replaced by calm, normal breathing, or by stillness?

Clive pressed his ear against her bosom. He heard her heart's beating, her lungs' breathing. Both were steady, unlabored.

Annie would recover!

He had moved the switch on the Baalbec in the proper direction!

Hard on the heels of his prayer of supplication, he sent up a second prayer: this one, of thanks. He slid a hand beneath Annie's shoulders and assisted her to a sitting position.

"Clive—grandfather—what happened to me?"

"You were struck by a bolt from the Chaffri's weapon. I feared for your survival, Annie." .

She clung to him. "You must have—It's coming back to me now. You—you saved my life, Clive. The energy from the Chaffri's weapon scrambled my Baalbec. You reset the Baalbec for me, didn't you?"

Blushing, Clive admitted that he had done so.

"Thank you, Clive. Thank you."

"Annie, you told me to switch the device to the left for the master reset."

"Yes."

"What would have happened if I had switched it the right?"

She frowned. "Under normal conditions, nothing. The Baalbec's SD unit is interlocked so it can't be activated by misadventure—say, by an accidental elbow in a crowded elevator or a mistake by some overamorous groper."

"And under abnormal conditions?"

"If the interlock is disabled, you mean?"

"I don't know what an interlock is, but I suppose so. You said that the Chaffri weapon scrambled your device. Would that, ah, disable the interlock?"

"Absolutely!"

"Well, then—what would have happened if I'd set the switch the wrong way?"

"Why, the SD unit would have been activated." She smiled. "I thought I'd made that clear."

"But what is the SD unit, Annie?"

"Self-destruct. It would be too dangerous to let a Baalbec A-9 get into unauthorized hands. So anyone who tries to tamper with it, say, by removing it surgically from my body, or by scrambling the circuits and not hitting the master reset correctly—It just destroys itself."

"And what happens to you, Annie? Are you harmed by this?"

"Oh, I wouldn't be there anymore. If the Baalbec SD's, I'm gone. So is everybody and everything for about a mile in any direction. There's just a big hole in the ground."

She got to her feet, drawing Clive with her. She still had the weapon she had removed from the seat of the now-destroyed car, as Clive had his, also.

"Let's get out of here, Clive."

"Perhaps there will be a train along soon," he suggested.

"We'd do better on the road, I think." She took him by the hand and led him away from the railbed, toward the rural dirt road that paralleled the metal rails.

Before they had walked for an hour the sound of a creaking wagon, its iron-rimmed wheels jouncing when it struck a rut, could be heard. They turned and waited while the wagon hove into sight. It carried a load of vegetables. The driver sat alone on the box, reins in his hands, as two horses plodded docilely along.

Clive and Annie planted themselves in the center of the track and flagged down the slow-moving vehicle. The driver peered at them from beneath the broad brim of his hat. His hands and face showed the calloused roughness of an outdoorsman; his clothing, the dust of the dry dirt road.

The man sat peering down at Clive and at Annie. His face strained with deep thought. At length he spoke. "Young Master Folliot, is't?"

"I am Clive Folliot." Clive peered up into the other's face. "Farmer Cawder? Old Mr. Cawder, are you? Old Jim Cawder?"

"Nay, old Jim be dead these full score years, sir. I be young Jamie."

"Jamie! I remember you! Your dad was one of my father's finest men."

"Aye! A good and loyal fellow was me dad! And I'm as loyal to the Folliots as any Cawder has been for a thousand year! Can I give you and the missus a lift anywhere, Master Folliot?"

"She isn't the missus, Jamie. But we'd be most obliged for transportation to Tewkesbury Manor."

"Well, I hope that the young lady don't mind ridin' on a farm wagon, then, sir. But it's all I've got."

"I don't mind, Jamie," Annie said.

They climbed aboard. Jamie whistled up the patient horses and they resumed their slow pace.

All the way to Tewkesbury Manor, Jamie maintained a slow, droning delivery of Gloucestershire activities in recent years. Most of the news concerned marriages, births, and deaths. There was the occasional scandal, the occasional oddity. Farmer Mayhew's wife had given birth to triplets, the first set on record hereabouts. Yes, all were well and the children were now toddling about and speaking a few baby words. Farmer Morgan's cow had given birth to a two-headed calf, which had not fared as well as Missus Mayhew's triplets. Fanner Horder's son Pauly had run off with Fanner Johnson's daughter Alice, setting all the shire abuzz not once but twice, both when they ran off and then again when they came back and Alice returned home looking angry as a hornet and not willing to talk about the matter at all while Pauly looked chagrined but equally unwilling to talk.