Philip José Farmer's The Dungeon 06] - The Final Battle (3 page)

If not—well, at least it might provide temporary respite from the chill and the wind that swept the ice floe. It might provide a few more hours of survival for Clive Folliot, hours that he and Chang Guafe could apply to trying to figure out a means of escape from this terrible place. If Clive and Chang Guafe could survive their present chilling dilemma, they might make contact with Annabelle Leigh—Clive's great-great-granddaughter—and with Horace Hamilton Smythe, with Sidi Bombay, with whoever of their beleaguered party still survived.

But Annabelle Leigh had already made contact with them! The sun-glittering aeroplane that she had obtained from the Imperial Marines at New Kwajalein—what had happened to it? Where, now, were the Nakajima and Annie?

"Come along then, Chang Guafe! You point the way, and let's get us to that wonderful iceberg of yours!"

Chang Guafe settled down between twin rows of long, metallic limbs and clattered in a direction that coincided with that of the glowing blob of the sun.

Clive fell in beside the alien cyborg. The pace that the cyborg set was a rapid one, but Clive was able to keep up and was grateful for the exercise that warmed his limbs. He knew that the cold was sapping his reservoirs of strength, and that the same exercise that provided warmth simultaneously served to drive his reserves of energy toward exhaustion. But there was nothing to be gained by remaining behind and passively awaiting the end.

Rage at destiny! Fight to the end! Then, if death must come, he would at least have lived his life to the full, to the last breath of his lungs and the last beat of his heart.

 

Clive staggered and reached one hand to clutch at Chang Guafe. The cyborg had detected Clive's growing weakness and had offered once to carry him, but Clive had recognized in Chang Guafe's manner the fact that the alien, too, was growing weak. His power was immense, but so also were his needs for energy. And with neither food nor fuel, struggling across the face of this ice floe, both of them were approaching exhaustion.

"Being Clive," Chang Guafe said.

Clive clutched one of Chang Guafe's metal-sheathed limbs near the point where it met his body. He knew that the metal would be devastatingly cold, but his own hands were by now so numb that he was unable to feel it.

"Being Clive," Chang Guafe repeated. "Battle onward! Our goal is within reach!"

Clive raised a hand to shade his eyes. They were walking straight into the blobby sun. The bright, fuzzy circle had hardly moved in all the time they had walked toward it. It seemed neither to be rising nor setting, but merely to be waiting for them, a quarter of the way up the sky, perpetually at late afternoon or early morning, nor had Clive Folliot any way of telling which.

Could he use mental telegraphy to reach his friend George du Maurier or any of his other acquaintances in London, from his sweetheart Annabella Leighton to his editor, Maurice Carstairs of the
London Illustrated Recorder and Dispatch
? He lacked the mental energy and power of concentration needed even to make the attempt.

He could only struggle onward, placing one foot in front of the other, holding his hand against Chang Guafe's metal carapace for guidance, hoping to reach the iceberg. He blinked, and could not be certain whether he saw the sun 'and the sky and the ice that surrounded him and his alien companion. There was so much whiteness, so much cold and whiteness. Was he seeing it all, or had be become blinded by the glare, a victim of snow-blindness?

He held his free hand before his eyes and was able to distinguish his spread fingers as black silhouettes against the gray-white glare of the ice. At least he was not blind! At least, not yet!

"Courage, Being Clive!"

"You can say that, Chang Guafe! You're as much machine as—"

"This is not mere bravado," the cyborg interrupted. "Look ahead, Being Clive!"

Clive Folliot halted for a moment and raised his eyes from the ice beneath his feet. Towering above him, silhouetted a darker gray-white against the glaring gray-white of the sky, loomed the iceberg.

Together, Clive Folliot and Chang Guafe managed to cover the final few rods of their trek. Clive stood, staring up at the iceberg. From this distance, he could see that it was as tall as a small tenement. If only he could enter its confines and climb the stair to Annabella Leighton's cozy flat!

But that was out of the question.

With a new burst of energy he began edging sideways, circling the iceberg. Within it he could make out vague and shadowy forms.

"Here!" he heard himself shouting hoarsely. "Here, Chang Guafe! A doorway! A doorway! We are saved, Chang Guafe! It is a doorway!"

Without waiting for the alien to catch up to him, Clive staggered through the man-high opening in the iceberg. He found himself standing in a room-shaped vacuity within the ice. It appeared to be featureless, filled with a weirdly shifting gloom, the feeble light filtering in part through the opening through which Clive had entered and in part through the living ice itself.

As far as Clive Folliot could tell, there was nothing in the room save himself. No furnishing, no chair or table or couch, no stove—oh, what he would have given for the warmth of a merrily flaming oven or hearth!—nor closet nor bed nor any other furnishing or sign of habitation.

He circled the walls, peering as best he could into the shadowy world of the living ice until he came to… a figure that suggested the human form! He strode forward and pounded his fists on the ice, forgetting all his cold and fatigue, his mind filled suddenly with the excitement of his discovery.

"A man! A man! Come out! Tell us your story! Tell us—" He stopped. How far was it into the ice, to reach this man? And was he indeed alive?

He did not speak, he did not move. Had he been frozen into the ice when a ship was blown off course and its passengers and crew died on the polar cap? Worse yet, had he survived the shipwreck and then been trapped by some horrid happenstance, in the ice, and frozen there alive?

Clive shuddered, half from his own coldness, half from terror at the thought of what might have happened to this mute, anonymous, unmoving stranger who seemed to gaze unblinkingly at Clive from his place deep within the ice, even as Clive gawked at him.

From behind Clive came the clicking and scrabbling sounds that meant Chang Guafe had followed him into the opening.

"Chang Guafe," Clive grunted, "come and see this." He spoke the words without so much as turning away from the terrible sight that held him mesmerized. The longer, he stood before the frozen figure, the more details could he make out.

The man—for he seemed clearly to be a man—loomed well above Clive's own height, and Clive was himself a person of goodly size. The frozen one's shoulders were broad, his head tall and hatless, but surmounted by a generous mane of black, unkempt hair. His face was of an unmatched pallor; whether due to a natural lack of pigment or to the cold, Clive could not tell.

The figure wore an outfit of matching jacket and trousers, tattered and threadbare and of a dull black material. His collarless and uncravated shirt was of the same color. So huge was the man that neither the sleeves of his coat nor the cuffs of his trousers reached their normal place, but rode high above wrist and ankle. His shoes were thick-soled and heavy.

"You have made a discovery, Being Folliot," Chang Guafe's voice grated.

"Indeed I have," Clive replied. "Indeed I have!"

"Have you a plan to propose?" the cyborg asked.

"Chang Guafe!" At last Clive turned so as to face the alien. "In all your repertoire of tools and organs, do you think you could find something that will permit us to free this fellow from the ice?"

"Free him?" Chang Guafe asked. He scuttered forward to stand close to the wall of ice, peering into it with an extruded sensor that looked for all the world like a sea-captain's telescope. "Free him?" Chang Guafe asked again. "How do you know he lives, Being Folliot? And if he does live, how do you know that he will do us good rather than ill?"

"I don't know that he lives. I merely suspect it. And as for doing us harm, how can our plight be made worse than it is? As things stand now, we shall both perish. If we free this prisoner, who knows what favors he may perform for us, out of sheer gratitude? I think, Chang Guafe, that this strange pale fellow is our last, best hope. But the way to find out whether he lives, and whether he is benevolent or malign, is to liberate him from his icy prison. The question, Chang Guafe, is, can you do it?"

Chang Guafe emitted the shuddering, grating sound that reminded Clive Folliot of a piece of chalk vibrating shrilly against a polished slate, that he knew passed with Chang Guafe for laughter. "Can I do it, Being Folliot? Of course I can do it!"

"Then in the name of all that is holy, Chang Guafe, do not stand there dithering!"

Clive stepped aside to give the alien better access to the wall of ice that contained the towering human figure. He watched in awe as the alien shifted and strained. He seemed not merely to be rearranging the metal parts that made up the mechanical portions of his body, but in some miniature machine shop contained within a cavity of his body to be fabricating the very parts and mechanisms that he would shortly call into play.

At last, Chang Guafe extended toward the wall an instrument that resembled a rotary saw blade.

The blade spun.

Chang Guafe pressed it against the ice.

An ear-splitting scream rent the air, a scream that came from no throat of human or beast or alien but from the living ice itself as the saw blade marked its path against the wall. Chang Guafe guided the blade first in a vertical path, cutting a line so straight and true that Clive Folliot was unable to distinguish it from the perfection of a plumb bob.

Extending one of his telescoping organs, Chang Guafe drew the line he had scored as high as the top of the frozen man's head, and then a bit higher, as if allowing for good measure. Then he rotated the blade so that it spun in a horizontal plane and continued to cut the ice until it was time to turn the blade once again and draw it downward toward the icy floor of the cave.

In due course Chang Guafe had carved from the living wall a gigantic ice cube in which the frozen form of the giant was embedded like a fly in amber. Chang Guafe hefted the cube out of its niche in the wall and laid it on the floor so that the giant's frozen eyes glared ceaselessly at the roof of the ice cave.

While Clive Folliot gazed in awe, Chang Guafe fabricated from his internal machine-shop a weblike metallic filament that he strung about the gigantic ice cube. There was a humming sound. The filament glowed first rose, then red, then white-orange.

With perceptible speed, the ice block began to melt.

Water dripped from the block of ice, puddling and then refreezing on the icy floor of the cave. Soon a cloud of steam formed around the block, obscuring the figure that lay within. But at the last moment before the immobile giant disappeared, Clive felt a bolt of psychic energy pass through his body.

He had caught the eye of the frozen man—or the frozen man's glance had caught Clive—and the glare of pure malice that passed from the giant to Folliot was the source of that psychic jolt.

 

"Stop, Chang Guafe! Stop!"

The cyborg revolved a telescoping eyestalk toward Clive. "Why should I stop, Being Clive? You yourself indicated that this being is our best hope of survival and escape from this place."

"I did, I know. But there's something about it—about him—that is chillingly familiar to me. I feel almost as though I have met this giant before."

"You would leave him, then, frozen here?"

"Yes!"

"But if that seals our own doom, Being Clive? If it means our own death?"

"There are worse things than death, Chang Guafe!"

"And you would abandon all our companions, Annabelle Leigh, Sidi Bombay, Shriek, Horace Hamilton Smythe? Your musical companion, Finnbogg? Your own brother, Neville?"

"They can fend for themselves. They have as great a chance at survival as we, Chang Guafe—or as poor a one! For all we know, they have made good their escape and are happily pursuing their lives at home. Or, for all we know, by now they are dead. In any case, Chang Guafe, I beseech you, stop what you are doing!"

The cyborg raised metal-covered shoulders in a shrug. "As you wish, Being Clive."

The glowing filament dulled to a cool metallic gray. Like an alien Izaak Walton reeling in his trout line, Chang Guafe drew the thread-thin filament back into his metal machinery.

The last of the steam swirling about the block of ice rose like a puff of fairy-smoke. There lay now revealed the form of the frozen giant, covered by a coating of ice little thicker than the glaze of ice left on the trees of a Staffordshire forest after a freezing February rain.

The ice disintegrated into a million glittering crystals and fell from the form it had so long imprisoned as the giant raised first one mighty arm, then the other, then pushed himself upright. For a moment the giant sat like a child on the floor of its playroom, his feet stretched before him, his palms pressed to the icy cave bottom.

Then with a mighty effort he heaved himself to his feet and stood with his head almost brushing the roof of the cave. He cast his glance down at Clive and at Chang Guafe.

"Too late," Chang Guafe grated in an undertone, "too late, Being Clive. Shall I attempt to recapture him?"

Clive shook his head. "We're in it now, Chang Guafe. It's sink or swim. Let's do our best to swim!"

Chang Guafe swiveled a compound eye at Clive Folliot. "Your expressions sometimes puzzle me, Being Clive, but this one I believe I comprehend. Yes, let us see if we can swim."

"Vile insects!" The giant's voice boomed out, sounding to Clive like the bass notes of the pipe organ in St. Paul's Cathedral. "What peace I had ever found, I found here in the quiet and solitude of this ice. And you have stolen from me even that pale solace. Vengeance shall I wreak upon you for the sins committed by your kind from the day of Creation! O, despicable insects! Miserable creatures that you are, not satisfied with the degradation you have visited upon yourselves and the victimization of Heaven's innocents, yet you have chosen to bring into being a new race of blameless things only that they may suffer and weep."