A Feast Unknown (33 page)

She nodded, and I said, “Very well. Wheel him into the
room behind the fuel room. Hengist doesn’t know about that, does he?”

Trish said, “I didn’t know about it, either.”

“When Hengist next comes, you tell him that Caliban died. He’ll want to know where, because I am supposed to bring his head and genitals to the Nine.”

Trish and Clio winced.

I said, “The Nine will have to be satisfied with what they can get. You tell Hengist that you two sunk Doc in the moat. If he insists that Doc be pulled out of the moat, then we’re in for it. Knowing the Nine as I do, I imagine that they’ll have to have positive evidence that he’s dead. We may have to buy some time with an accident for Hengist or whoever acts as agent for the Nine.”

“Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “More killings?”

“If we’re going to resign from the ranks of the immortals, we will do it now,” I said. “And we’ll have to drop out of sight swiftly. You know that’s increasingly difficult in this ever-narrowing world.”

Trish and Clio left to wheel the sleeping Doc into the hidden room. An hour later, Hengist entered. He did not seem surprised that Caliban had died. Nor did he say anything about recovering the body. The next day, however, he notified us that the visit from one of the Nine had been cancelled. An agent, a Sir Ronald Hawthorpe, would bring me instructions and also interrogate me.

After he left, I tried to walk into Doc’s room, but the pain between my legs discouraged this. I allowed Clio to wheel me in beside his bed. He was lying there with a stiff plastic collar
around his neck Clio had done a professional job in doctoring his broken neck He was flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling. Tears formed pools with a deep golden-green bottom in his eye sockets, and tears ran down his cheeks. Trish was crying also, but at the same time she was smiling.

“He hasn’t wept since he was a little child,” she said. “Not even when his mother died or his father died, did he weep. He must have an ocean down there, and I thought it would never come. Oh, I’m so happy!”

If he did not stop crying, she would not be so happy. He could be suffering a complete breakdown, or he could be on the road to a healthiness he had never had.

I said, “Doctor Caliban, why are you crying?”

He did not answer. I waited a while and then repeated my question. After another long period of silence, he said, in a choked voice, “I am crying for Jocko and Porky and for the other wonderful friends I had. I am crying for many people, for Trish especially, because she loves me and I gave her almost nothing back. And I am crying most of all, and I cannot help it, for me.”

Clio, always ready to be triggered with empathy, sniffled.

I said, “Then you must feel as I do, that you’ve suffered a strange sea-change, as it were?”

“I have,” he said.

“Perhaps,” I said, “we may be doing the Nine an injustice. Perhaps they knew that we would be all the better after having gotten through the effects of the elixir.”

“I doubt it very much,” Doc said. “They would not know exactly what the end-results would be. They must have gone
through this themselves, though it’s been so long ago they may have forgotten. You must not forget that they put us through hell before we met and that they ordered us to kill each other afterwards. No, they are evil, evil!”

Clio said, “But won’t we go through something like that, too?”

“Nobody can say, except the Nine,” I replied. “And they’re not talking, of course. It may be that only those descended from the Old Stone Age people, those who have the genes for it, react to the elixir in this fashion. But we’ll never find out. The question now, Doc, is something only you can answer, though I can predict what your answer will be, I believe. Are you prepared to give up the elixir and fight the Nine?”

“Trish said she told you about my experiments. I think we’ll have the elixir ourselves some day. But whether we do or don’t, I am no longer obeying the Nine. And he who disobeys, you know, is their deadly enemy.”

I wheeled closer and took his hand. “They divided us, brother,” I said. “But united …”

I did not feel brotherly, as yet, and I suppose he did not. But this was a man I could admire and respect and the best ally anyone could want. The odds were greatly against us, but if any two could put up a better fight, I did not know them.

Clio gave him another shot, and he was soon asleep. Trish stayed behind to watch him adoringly for a while. Clio and I returned to the room, where I slowly and painfully got back into bed.

Clio sat down and looked at me for a long time. Then she said, “Trish told me about you two.”

“Oh?” I said.

My heart was beating faster than if I’d heard a leopard prowling in the African bush.

“When you two made love,” she said.

“We weren’t making love,” I said. “We were loving each other. Fucking passionately and lovingly.”

She reddened slightly. No matter how uninhibited her behavior, she still reacts to certain words.

“She said that nothing might have happened if you hadn’t been so concerned about being crippled by your aberration.”

“I did not explain to her why I was doing that,” I said. “But she was essentially correct. Although I think the same thing would have happened even if I was not concerned about my aberration.”

She did not go into a furious tirade or start weeping, as I had expected. She said, “The trouble with retaining complete youthfulness and its vigor is that a couple cannot grow old and fade away together. We’re eighty and so should be weak and set in our ways and thoroughly accustomed to each, like a wheel in a rut. A wheel that doesn’t want to leave the rut. But we know each other to the last atom, and, while we love each other very much, we are youthful and we are beginning to want some variety. So …”

“So?” I said.

“So I think we’ll have to have some variety now and then. The little vacations in the caverns provided that, but those are gone.”

Suddenly, she stood up and bent over and threw her arms around me.

“What am I saying?” she cried. “I love you and only you! I really want no other man!”

She was sincere, and I loved her very much at that moment. I always love her, although there are some moments when the intensity is less. And, certainly, when I was in Trish, I was not thinking about Clio. Fairness is fairness.

She really did not want another man—as her permanent mate. But she was right. Immortality has its prices, and it is impossible to confine yourself to one mate forever if you have the vigor of youth.

This problem would have to work itself out whichever way it would go. At the moment, we had more vital business to attend to. Hawthorpe arrived that afternoon and, after some formalities, got to the instructions.

First, we must get Calibans body up and remove the head and send it off to the Nine. Usually, the victor took the head himself, but since I would not be able to move for some time, that just could not be done. Hawthorpe would carry it to the Nine.

Second, I was to come to London as soon as I was able and not one second later. I would then be flown to Uganda and taken through the secret routes of the caverns. This time, I would not be blindfolded. After going through the ceremony of seating me, the Nine would hold a conference. This was the most serious meeting since 1945. Hawthorpe could not tell me much, but the discussion would be about the means used for solving the population problem.

The Nine did not intend to let the over-crowding and the pollution go on any longer. The only question was not when but how.

The Nine have a way with temptation.

For a minute, I visualized a world something like that into which I had been born but much better. The jungles and the savannas could return, and Africa would again have its millions upon millions of zebras, antelope, hippos, elephants, and its thousands upon thousands of leopards and lions. The human population would be few and scattered and living naked in thatched huts and fighting each other with spears. I would have vast areas to roam in. Perhaps, the gorilla could be saved from extinction, and if I could find just a few of The Folk left, their numbers could be increased to the point where they might become as numerous as they were fifty thousand years ago.

It was a beautiful vision.

And, of course, it would have to be paid for, one way or another.

I might not like the payment.

In fact, I didn’t like it.

Moreover, I would have to buy an entrance ticket with Doc’s head.

I said, “It may take a few days before we can get Caliban’s body up.”

“Oh, no,” he said quickly. “I have two men fishing for it now. I’ll take care of everything.”

“That’s decent of you,” I said.

“Not at all, just carrying out orders,” he said.

If I tried to convert him to our side, I would be warning the Nine. It would be of no use anyway.

I said, “Come here, Hawthorpe,” and when he was close enough I grabbed his throat with one hand and the top of his
head with the other. He was a big bull-necked man but squeaked like a mouse before I twisted his neck. I then sent Clio and Trish out after the other two. They called them inside and shot them, and then dropped the weighted bodies into the moat.

Both were shaken. Though they were old veterans and cool enough in defending themselves or attacking enemies on the alert, killing in cold blood was new. I told them that they’d have more of that before we were finished, one way or the other.

An hour later, after some difficulty in getting Doc into the back of a station wagon, we drove off. I stopped once before entering the woods to say farewell to the estate. I doubted that I would ever be able to return. I looked at the castle, the ashes of the Hall, the barns, garages, servants’ quarters, the broad meadows and the question-shaped tarn, the woods beyond, and at the great boulder on the hill, beside which rested the first Randgrith.
The old man would sit when the two ravens returned,
the local saying went. I knew now what that meant. The old man, our grandfather, would never sit because he was forever dead, and the two ravens would not return.

Neither would I. Not for many years, anyway.

We drove away as the sun dropped behind the High Chair. The soldiers on sentinel duty let us through without delay. It would not be long before the Nine knew that the three of us had gone, however. Doc was hidden under some blankets and luggage. As soon as Hawthorpe failed to report in as scheduled, the Nine would investigate, and they would know that Caliban was still alive and with us.

Then the hunt would be on.

Hunter, beware the prey!

Before this is over, there may be more than one empty seat at the table of the Nine, and the world may be aware of its secret masters.

POSTSCRIPT

BY THEODORE STURGEON

Do you know who they are?

Since Homer and Beowulf—and doubtlessly before— storytellers have found for themselves a hero-figure, and have, with their audiences, discovered that just one story won’t do, and a saga is born. The parallel between Homer and a long-running comic strip like
Gasoline Alley
is not often drawn, but it is a valid one. The hold of the continuing epic on its public is a firm one. People used to queue up to await delivery of the weekly papers in which they could find the latest chapter of a Charles Dickens novel. Ma and Pa Kettle had their countless thousands of faithful followers, and of course the success of a television series is based on this and nothing else.

The secret of the success of a saga lies in its reference to life—the very specific day-to-day, inside-the-skin life of the members of its audience. This is a matter of harmony or contrast; the narrative concerns itself meticulously with current and familiar events, like the Lanny Budd stories or the Forsyte Saga,
or with events calculated to be exotic, like the legends of Bifrost or the Ring trilogy. (Dickens had the joyful genius of being able to do both at once.) Always, the most fascinating of all have been the stories which injected the superhuman into human events. This was the strength and magic of Homer—and also of The Shadow. Batmans adventures in Gotham City are nothing less.

Which bring us, of course, to the marvelous (one wishes, sometimes, that a word had never been overused to the point of total dilution: marvelous they were, marvelous they are) pulp-magazine heroes and the almost endless sword-and-sorcery serial novels and their unforgettable, unconquerable protagonists. With all my heart I pity those who have lived their lives without having been injected with the enchantment of Northwest Smith or Hawk Carse, Tarzan, John Carter, Doc Savage, Conan the Conqueror or any of their swashbuckling colleagues.

Almost without exception, however, the serial epics of the last couple of centuries have been bowdlerized to an extreme, and almost inexplicable, degree. To explain my use of that word, I must digress and tell you about the Man from Mars who follows me around.

I’ve never gotten a good look at him, so I can’t describe him accurately. What he is, however, is not as significant as what he does. He asks me questions. He asks me the
damnedest
questions. There’s no special penalty involved in giving him wrong answers or no answers—except the pressure of the question itself. He’s not selling anything in particular, and what he asks may or may not reveal what he thinks is a right answer: I just don’t know. But he keeps on asking questions that nobody else seems to ask, about all kinds of common-place things and ideas. Why are our ground
vehicles streamlined only where we can see them? Why is it I can walk, say, two miles down the boulevard howling curses, and/or punching a woman, but if I wear nothing but three yards of blue silk tied to my left forearm and carry a peacock feather, even if I walk sedately, I would be picked up in the first hundred and fifty yards? Why is it that most of our power plants are that category of machine called “heat engines,” yet nobody seems to have designed one which can operate without a cooling system—that is, a device designed to dissipate heat? Why does society go to such extremes to protect the sacred life of an unborn child, and then send him off when he is seventeen to get his hear blown off? Why, when the Health Department of a sophisticated modern city discovers an epidemic, and makes plans for a publicity campaign to stop it, does it find its funds cut in two? (The epidemic is venereal disease, but that isn’t an answer—is it?) Anyway, he keeps on asking me these questions, and all too often I have to wag my head and say, well, sir, you see … uh.