Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (25 page)

Tunnels that led to… what? The mind faltered as it attempted to guess what cities of wonder or abysses of terror lay at the end of this passageway or that.

"Are we still beneath London?" Clive inquired.

"Just a bit longer, sah," Horace Smythe called over his shoulder.

"And then, Sergeant Smythe?"

"We're doing what the Major said he wanted, sah. We're headed for the den of the Gennine."

But despite Horace Smythe's words, the car continued to plummet through tunnels as black as pitch, illuminated only periodically by luminous points and patches.

Once Clive caught a clear glimpse down a side tunnel and sprang upright with startlement. "Sergeant! Sidi Bombay! I could swear I saw a railroad tunnel, complete with London transportation cars and well-dressed travelers!"

"The Major is correct," Sidi Bombay announced laconically. "Not so very long ago, the London Underground was being constructed. I myself earned my shillings and pence by the sweat of my brow and the strength of my muscles, wielding a pickaxe in that enterprise," he added with a laugh.

"That project had barely begun when last I left the metropolis."

"And it is not finished yet, Clive Folliot."

"Did the workmen never break into this—this
other
network of tunnels—by error?"

"Several times."

"Then all of London must know of the Universal Neighborhood Improvement Association—and of the Chaffri and the Ren!"

"By no means, Major. We spoke before of bitterest enemies cooperating in what they find to be their mutual interest. So it is with this network of tunnels, and the concealment of these tunnels from the mundane world. Methods were used to… convince those who discovered our tunnels that they had accidentally penetrated ancient peat mines, burial barrows, or natural air pockets. They closed the passages and proceeded with their business. The few places where we can see into their tunnels, they cannot see into ours—or, if they do, they become convinced that they are seeing something altogether ordinary and workaday. They look, and they turn away uninterested, and they go about their business."

Clive shook his head. He peered through the forward panel of the car, over Sergeant Smythe's shoulder. Smythe, having abandoned the identity of Count Splitofsky, had resumed the costume of the nearsighted Maurice Carstairs the Younger. His walking stick lay on a cushioned seat at his side. His spectacles had been placed in a pocket of his frock coat, but he peered clear-eyed through the front of the car.

Looking ahead, Clive started. A shape! It looked vaguely human, suggestive of the armored warriors he and Annabelle had encountered near Tewkesbury. Clive began to sound the warning, but before he could utter more than half a syllable, the car had borne down upon the white form.

It shattered and splashed like a great oversized blob of sleet, spattering the angular sides of the car, flowing over the glass and past it.

Clive turned to peer behind the car. The form had regathered itself and was gesturing angrily after the car and its occupants. "That—what was that?"

"An ordolite ghoster, Major."

"It was unharmed by our impact upon it?"

"And we by its impact upon us."

"But Annabelle and I shot several of the armed troopers."

"You were using ordolite weapons, then, Major. You must have been. We've a stock of them in the car here!"

As if in response to a cue, Sidi Bombay lifted a cushioned seat and revealed a miniature arsenal. After passing weapons the size of carbines to Clive and Horace, he slung another such over his own shoulder.

Horace patted his weapon with one hand. "So much for universal peace and brotherhood, eh, Sidi?"

"War is an evil thing, Horace, and imperfect men commit evil deeds. I am neither proud nor eager to kill any being, but what one must do, one does. And one accepts the responsibility for one's acts."

A trio of luminous blobs appeared far ahead of the car.

"These… ordolite weapons… will work against the ghosters? The weapons will kill these creatures?" Clive asked.

"In effect they will, Major. Since the ghoster is not truly alive, of course, it is not exactly true to say that it is killed. But it is destroyed."

"And the ghosters have similar weapons, that will work against us—against solid, mortal, material beings?"

"Indeed. And since we are alive, we can truly be killed!"

"Then look ahead, Sidi Bombay!"

The three blobs—ordolite ghosters—were fleeing along the tunnel. Their speed was less than that of the car, and as a consequence the car was gradually overtaking them—but it was doing so at a snail-like pace. It seemed altogether possible that the car might strike them without shattering them as it had the previous ghoster.

Horace Hamilton Smythe pressed the car to its maximum speed.

The ghosters accelerated as well, using some principle of movement unknown to Clive. They had limbs and extremities, but they did not run along the tunnel floor so much as they floated above it. Floated and…
flowed
.

The car overtook them and the ghosters passed through its transparent forward panels.

Sidi Bombay had unslung his weapon and fired it at a ghoster. As had happened when Clive and Annabelle fought the troopers near Tewkesbury, no projectile sped from the ordolite weapon. Instead a beam of pure energy, pulsating and emitting light of a lurid, unnameable shade, shot from the muzzle of the weapon.

One of the ghosters faded from being.

Another of them was upon Clive. Rather than firing its weapon at him, the creation chose to envelope Clive, swarming over him and covering him like a thin layer of icy mist. It grew colder and more dense. Clive felt that he was simultaneously smothering and freezing.

Through the translucent ghoster he could see Horace Hamilton Smythe confronting the third visitant. Even as Clive watched, both Horace and the ordolite creature struck gnarled studs on the stocks of their weapons and knifelike projections sprang bayonetlike from the tips of the weapons.

Before Clive's helpless eyes, Horace and the ghoster engaged in a deadly alternation of parry and thrust.

One lunged forward.

The other dodged inside, striking with the butt of his weapon.

The first whirled, lowering his head, butting at the other's face.

The second blocked the blow, brought his piece down stock-first to strike the other on the back of his skull.

Sidi Bombay stood watching, nearly as helpless as Clive.

Horace Smythe and the ordolite ghoster tumbled to the floor. Their impact shook the car and knocked them apart.

For a moment only, the ghoster was separated from Horace Hamilton Smythe. But in that moment Sidi Bombay brought his own ordolite carbine to bear, sending a bolt of glowing energy into the ghoster.

With a single grunt of pain and an audible sigh of despair, the ghoster faded from visibility.

Sidi Bombay reached for the disheveled Horace Hamilton Smythe, tugging him to his feet. The ghoster's carbine had faded along with its owner. Horace's lay harmless on the floor. Together, Sidi Bombay and Horace Smythe faced Clive Folliot.

Clive's field of vision was turning red. Through it he caught a last glimpse of the horror that marked the visages of his two sworn blood brothers. There was a ringing in Clive's ears, and he could feel himself beginning to lose consciousness.

He tumbled to the floor. He could see no more. But even through the rubbery clamminess of the ghoster he could feel the sharp blade of Horace Hamilton Smythe's ordolite bayonet.

At the risk of his flesh Clive seized the blade. It slid through the rubbery material of the ghoster and penetrated Clive's palm. He felt a moment of pain and then the hot pulsation of his own blood. He dropped the bayonet.

But it was as if his entire being were bathed in flame—a flame that produced an agony unimaginable in all Clive's previous life, yet one that cleansed and purified and restored him. A scream filled his ears and he was unable to tell whether it was his own voice shouting in triumph or that of the despairing ordolite ghoster which had until this moment covered every inch of his being.

For a fraction of an instant he caught sight of himself in the glasslike wall of the car. He had staggered to his feet and now his reflection blazed at him like a human torch.

The ordolite ghoster was gone.

It was Clive's blood, he realized, that had destroyed the ghoster. Folliot blood, he remembered, was the powering principle of the ordolite ghoster machines—but it had to be blood willingly given. Blood taken without the consent of the donor was fatal to these strange, unliving creatures. It was Clive's blood that had destroyed the ghoster and saved his own life.

Clive leaned his head against the forward wall of the car. A shudder passed through his torso. With each gasped breath his body was regaining control.

"Will we encounter more of those?" he managed to ask his companions.

"We will encounter far worse than those," Sidi Bombay declaimed solemnly. "We will encounter creatures that will make the Major recall these ordolite ghosters with fondness."

Clive retrieved his carbine. He seated himself and began to study the weapon. It was a fascinating device, its stock smooth, and formed in a manner he had never before encountered. He held it to his shoulder and sighted along it. It was possessed of an aiming device such as he had never seen before. Even when he and Annie had faced the troopers near Tewkesbury, the battle had been so frantically fought and so quickly ended that he had lacked the time to examine his weapon.

And on this occasion, his scrutiny of the ordolite carbine was interrupted by the voice of Horace Hamilton Smythe.

"Better hold on, sah. We're about to leave the Earth."

Clive slung the carbine over his shoulder and clung with both hands to a nearby railing, preparing for the car to rise precipitously and plunge from the mouth of the tunnel, up into the sky.

Instead, with a stomach-sickening
whoosh
, it tipped forward. The tunnel in which they had been traveling took by far the steepest dip it had yet done. In less than a second it seemed that they were plunging straight toward the center of the Earth.

"Are we not headed for the spiral of stars?" Clive shouted at Horace.

"That we are, sah!" the sergeant hollered back over his shoulder.

"Then why are we headed downward instead of upward?"

"Things are not what they seem, Major!"

That was all Smythe had to say, and further questions from Clive brought no response from either him or Sidi Bombay.

Air screamed around the car, and the patches and points of light—nebular galaxies or luminous fungoids, blazing stars or glowing sparks—flashed past at dizzying speed.

Without warning the screaming ceased.

But the lights did not disappear.

Instead, a breathtaking panorama spread before Clive's eyes. He saw—or thought he saw—the sun itself, blazing and flaring in solitary majesty. But this was not the sun as seen at noonday, a ball of brilliant white against a field of sparkling blue. Nor was it the pallid disk of a watery English afternoon, nor the glorious orange flare of a midsummer's dawn.

This was the naked sun, a seething globe of white-hot gases standing against the blackness of the void. At first, Clive's eyes were unable to cope with its brilliance. Clive looked away, the afterimage of the sun still roiling, it seemed, against the insides of his eyelids.

Then he saw the worlds, and their moons, and the asteroidal worldlets and soaring comets, and the distant suns and nebulae in brilliant white and yellow and cream. And somehow he imagined that he could sense still more planets and suns and nebulae, black worlds and black stars whose radiance lay far outside the normal band of human vision, but whose reality he could not deny.

Perhaps Q'oorna was such a world, and perhaps he was gazing even now upon the Dungeon.

He scanned the sky for the telltale spiral of points of glimmering white. Somewhere, he knew, they glittered and whirled. Somehow, he knew, he had to go there.

 

"Look ahead there, sah!"

It was the voice of Horace Hamilton Smythe, breaking in as it had done so many times upon Clive Folliot's reverie. The sergeant was pointing at a region of space ahead of the car and somewhat above it.

"Is it the world of the Gennine?"

"Not nearly, sah! It's the belt of asteroids, or planetoids to give 'em their proper name. Not little stars, they are, sah, but little worlds. Little worlds! Hundreds of 'em! Thousands!"

"I never knew such existed, Smythe! What distant star are we circling?"

"Our own star, sah. Our own! The asteroids circle the sun forever, fragments of a planet that may once have existed or that may never have come into being. No one knows the answer to that one, sah, but here they are nevertheless."

Sidi Bombay stepped past Clive and touched Horace Smythe on the shoulder. "Look thither, O brother. Thy lecture may impart knowledge more precious than pearl, but peril, not pearl, is our fate!"

He pointed, and both Horace and Clive gazed through the transparent roof of the car. Clive could feel his hand throbbing where the ordolite bayonet had punctured his skin. He was grateful for the semi-accident that had destroyed the enveloping ghoster and saved his own life, but he worried now that his wound would become infected. What strange effect might result from the cut he had incurred!

He peered at the wound. It was a small one, coinciding with the lifeline on the palm of his hand. It was no longer bleeding, nor had serious swelling developed. Still, he was not pleased with the color of the wound, nor with the throbbing, pulsing sensation that radiated up his arm from it.

"Sidi, Horace," he began, "does either of you know—"

But he got no further. A distant something glinted in the light of the even more distant sun. "What was that?" Clive gasped.

"Looks like a Ren ship!" Horace snapped back.

"Ren ship? You mean a space-train? Or a separate car like this one?"