Stairway to Forever (8 page)

After Gus had departed for the drive back to the city, Fitz fretted and tossed and turned for some hours on his bed before he finally gave over trying to sleep. He arose, showered, dressed, burdened him-

self with another weighty, bulky load and made his way into the sand world. In the relatively commodius, rearmost cabin-cum-bedroom-cum-workshop, he spent the next couple of sand world hours in first assembling, then in fitting onto the bigger, more powerful, faster, more rugged and longer-ranging trail bike he had bought and brought in three weeks before, the steel and fiberglass cargo sidecar he had had custom-made for it. Then, exhausted, he got some sleep.

A half day was required to reach the near edge of the coarse-grassed, sandy-soiled plain. To cross it and continue on inland would necessitate an overnight trip and probably several days, was he to even approach a full exploration of those dark, mysterious, but ever beckoning hills beyond.

He had discovered in a hard, painful way that a full pack, a sleeping bag, air mattress and weapons not only made his bike top-heavy, but dangerously hampered his general agility on it . . . and a broken leg or worse, here in the sand world, could only presage a certain death by way of loss of blood, shock, thirst or all three in a deadly combination.

Not until he had sufficiently mastered the attachment and disattachment procedures to quickly accomplish both blindfolded, on the bike and off, did he finally disassemble the arrangement and stow it all away in the side cabin.

Bone-weary by then, he sacked out on the cot and drifted quickly into sleep, despite a very strong return of that tingly sense of some unseen presence, some something there in the cabin with him, regarding him.

At some time during that night, Fitz thought he awoke and opened his eyes. Silvery moonbeams, slanting down through a break in the high, surrounding dunes, thence through the centermost of the trio

of stern openings, made the cabin of the ancient, beached warship almost as bright as would one of the now-extinguished gas lanterns, though the moonlight was softer, easier on the eyes.

The sensation of a warm, once-familiar weight and of a soft, also once-familiar sound brought his wandering, sleepy gaze from the wooden beams that supported the deck above, down to his own supine body as it lay on the folding cot. There, on his chest and abdomen, lay a very large, grey, domestic cat The cat's broad head rested on his big forepaws, around which paws and his chin was wrapped the last few inches of his thick tail. His notched and somewhat tattered ears were cocked forward and his eyes regarded Fitz's face, returning his startled look with an unwinking, but obviously nonmalignant stare.

"Tom?" Fitz thought that he then croaked, aloud. But then he thought that he thought, "But . . . but Tom is dead. I know, I buried him.

"Puss . . .? Good puss."

But just how the hell had a cat gotten into the cabin, anyway? A quick, sidelong glance showed him that the wire-mesh screen across the stern ports were all intact and screwed solidly in place. Both of the inner doors were locked and barred, as too were the outer doors and the trapdoor in the ceiling that let onto the quarter-deck, above.

At the sound of his voice, his spoken words, the cat's deep-throated purring became louder and, lifting his head and twitching aside his tail, he extended his left, black-padded forepaw to lightly stroke Fitz's bristly chin, then let the paw just rest on the cleft of the chin, while he slowly extended and retracted the claws in obvious contentment.

And Fitz felt a cold prickling along his spine, felt gooseflesh rising on his forearms. Of all the many

cats with whom he had shared his life and his fortunes over the years, only Tom—old, now dead and months-buried Tom—had had that particular, very peculiar habit of displaying his affection for his human companions. Fitz had accepted, more or less blindly, many a certain and patent impossibility from the very beginning, from the first time he ever had entered—rather, had quite literally fallen into—this sand world, but this last, now, here, tonight—this was just too much. This was the one impossible thing that he simply could not credit, could not blind himself into believing. His cat, Tom, was dead, dead and buried and moldering in the black earth of the old mound, high above this place, and that was that.

Or was it . . . ? If it was, then how . . . ? A dream, that was it. That had to be it, was he to retain any shred of his sanity. It was all just an especially vivid, real-seeming dream.

He raised one trembling hand and very hesitantly touched the warm, furry feline head just behind the ragged-edged ears, his fingertips feeling the bumps and hard ridges of scar tissue that lay thickly all over that head under the covering fur. And, arching up to meet the petting hand, just as old Tom always had done, the strange but familiar blue-grey cat pushed its head up into Fitzs cold-sweaty palm.

Then, for a long while, Fitz just lay there and stroked the cat's head and back, feeling beneath the short, but dense and velvety fur the bumpy line of vertebrae and the twin banks of hard muscle flanking the spine, feeling the movements of the highly mobile scapulae as the big cat treaded in a transport of feline pleasure.

Nor was the cat the only one enjoying the contact. To Fitz, it felt so very, very good to once more stroke a warm, gentle, loving and furry creature. In

the months since Tom's murder, he had forgotten until now, consciously, at least, just how soothing and relaxing and deeply satisfying it was to him just to lie or sit and stroke a cat.

"Such a good dream," thought Fitz, aloud. "Such a pleasant dream."

Pushing farther up onto the man's chest, the big cat, careful to keep his claws sheathed, placed one big paw low on either cheek and began to lave the stubbly chin with his wide, deep-pink tongue.

"Tom!" croaked Fitz from a throat suddenly constricted tight. "Oh, Tom, good old Tom, boy. God, how I've missed you, Tom."

And then . . . and then, he knew for certain that he was only dreaming. He knew because then the cat, always much loved, but still only a dumb beast for all of that, because then the cat spoke to him.

"And I have missed you, too, my good old friend. I often have been very lonely without you, missing the loving touch of your hands upon me. Why do you not leave this hot, dry, shadeless place and come to where I now live, among wooded hills and cool valleys and sparkling little streams of fresh, cold water, all filled with tasty fish and frogs?"

Fitz sat up then, violently, with a strangled scream bubbling from between his cold, numb lips. The moon was long since set, the first rays of the rising sun were illuming this strange world and his body was sticky, tacky with the sweat of ... of fear? No, he could never fear old Tom, alive or dead. No, fear that he might be losing his sanity, more likely. Might be going mad, as the woman he had known as "mother" had, shortly before her death.

Preoccupied with his chaotic jumble of thoughts and half-thoughts and suppositions, he did not take out either of the bikes to bear him down to the sea

for his regular morning swim, but simply walked, barefoot and naked, over the dunes and down the beach to where the gentle surf broke lazily upon the shore. He did not really fully awaken until he felt the shock of the night-chilled water. Then he swam about for as long as he could tolerate the cold, at which point he allowed the roller to bear him with it and deposit him in a place shallow enough to stand with the returning sea water swirling and tugging at his legs, even while the ever-constant, warm, dry beach breeze began to dry his body. It was while he stood there, some mile up the coast from the spot at which he had entered the water, that he noticed the strange large tracks leading from the surf-line mark off inland, toward the nearer range of dunes.

They were not bird tracks; even at the distance he could tell that immediately, or if they were, he had no faintest desire to meet the bird that had impressed them so deeply in the damp sand. Nor did they look at all like the tracks or trails of the occasional pinnipeds of various species or the huge sea turtles that came ashore on rarer visits.

No, the beast that had made these particular tracks had feet like wide, long, five-fingered hands with no discernible thumbs and marks that looked to have been left by long, broad nails or claws out beyond each "fingertip." There looked to be the marks of two pairs of the handlike feet and a scuffing between the digits that could have been left by webbing. There also was a wide, rather deep furrow inscribed between the right and the left sets of tracks. He faintly recalled having, at some time and place in his past, seen tracks very much akin to these, though he remembered those as being quite a good bit smaller.

Most sagaciously, as it later transpired, he resisted his initial impulse to trail the thing, whatever it was,

on foot. He returned, rather, to the ship at a tast trot. There he dressed, got out the old, lighter, short-range bike, and armed himself with the carbine and the heavy-caliber revolver. Nor did he have the slightest cause to regret the elapsed time when, from the crest of a dune, he spotted just what a monster he had been blithely trailing.

Half at the least as long as the wrecked ship looked the thick-bodied, armor-plated, dragon-like beast, which had earlier scooped out a hole in the sand between the dunes and now was depositing in it a profusion of slimy-looking, yellow-brown eggs, each as big as the egg of a turkey, but more round than truly oval in shape.

It was then, as he sat the bike on the crest of that seaward dune, scrutinizing this newcomer to the stretch of coast he was already beginning to consider his, that he finally recalled where and when he had seen similar tracks. It had been on a beach on one of the Solomon Islands, early in World War Two. The tracks had been those of what were called estaurine or saltwater crocodiles.

Superficially, the leviathan he was studying through his binoculars did resemble to a large extent an alligator or a crocodile of his other world, but Fitz knew that he had never before seen or even heard of a crocodilian of that other world that was—at a very conservative estimate—between thirty and forty feet in overall length, stood between four and five feet at the shoulders and mounted four parallel rows of two-to-three-inch, yellow-white teeth in the ten-foot jaws of a head that had to be at least twelve feet long.

All at once, one of the vertically slitted, moss-green eyes detected the watching man atop the low dune and, with a loud explosion of sound that was half roar and half hiss, it began what appeared at first

to be a lumbering shuffle in his direction. But the creature's progress was deceptive. She abruptly raised her weighty body up onto legs that were much longer than they had seemed to be when she had been crouched, laying her eggs, and in fleeting moments was at the very foot of the dune—close enough for Fitz to whiff her rank, fetid, squamous stench as she started up the inland face of the dune, headed directly for him and hissing like the safety valve of an overheated steam boiler.

Briefly, very briefly indeed, Fitz considered un-slinging his carbine, drawing his magnum revolver, but quickly thought better of such notions. For unless he were lucky enough to hit an eye, the nightmarish beast would most likely absorb the entire magazine and cylinder of cartridges and never even slow down. So he wheeled the light bike about . . . and then, the stuttering little engine died.

smith or somebody make some more ammunition for it, too, then keep it all at the ship. It was either that or try to track down someone who would sell him a bazooka or a recoilless rifle, he felt.

He did bring down the cased Holland and Holland express rifle and he did obtain—at a truly horrendous price—twenty more brand-new, custom-made and -loaded rounds for the piece. But that was not all he bought or brought down to the sand world in the wake of his near miss with becoming a snack for an outsize monster.

A friend of Gus Tolliver, in the city, sold him in a transaction that he swore was completely legal and aboveboard a thirty-odd-year-old antitank rifle—designed by Lahti, in Finland, manufactured by Sweden and used, so the dealer attested, by Germans on the Russian Front during World War Two, before the invention and introduction of the German version of the antitank rocket launcher, the Panzerfaust.

The gold coins were selling most briskly just about then, and it was a good thing, for the one hundred or so pounds of anti-tank rifle and about twice that weight again in related equipment and two boxes of the 20mm ammunition for it cost Fitz more than ten dollars the pound, including sales taxes. Fortunately, the manual that came with the old piece was illustrated with pictures and diagrams, for Fitz could not speak, write or read the German language and, in order to get the long, heavy weapon down the stone stairs, he found it necessary to strip it down to component parts, carry it down a little at a time and reassemble it on the beach.

Once on the beach and back together, however, it was less of a problem than were the cases of parts and ammunition. The foot-long skids on the bipod which had been designed for snow worked equally

well, he quickly discovered, to his delight, on sand, so he just towed it to the wrecked ship behind his bike, with all of the other cases and similar paraphernalia stowed in the cargo sidecar.

With the piece set up on the quarterdeck above the cabins, tightly shrouded against the seeping, abrasive sand and the corrosive sea air by its original canvas-and-leather case and some plastic film to reinforce it, Fitz felt about as safe from giant, reptilian predators as he could be.

The Lahti was semiautomatic, took a twenty-round box magazine, and would spew out one 20mm solid-steel round after another just as fast as a man could aim and squeeze the trigger, or so he had learned from some familiarization shooting of the piece. The sights were calibrated out to fifteen hundred meters, though the range of the inch-thick, cylindrical, sharp-pointed steel slugs must be considerably more than just that, the maximum range, the calibrations probably denoting only the effective accurate range. The Lahti and its old breed might have been superseded on the battlefields by new generations of more powerful weapons for use against more thickly armored tanks, but no way was one of those steel bullets likely to bounce off the scales or scutes of a damned crocodile, no matter how big and fast and vicious said beast might be.