Man of Two Worlds Page 25

  It was that day that he heard the first signs of his guards outside. There was a shuffling beyond the doorway and then the door opened abruptly. He stared at the figure that blocked it.

  “Varano!”

  The Serviceman stood erect and majestic before him, seemingly a head taller. Behind him were other Servicemen.

  “So you recognize me,” Varano smiled. “Perhaps you would even suggest we speak as equals again— and have me share your cell? And perhaps you would like to knock me unconscious again and put me in suspended life for an eternity this time. I—”

  He stepped forward to strike Ketan, but his companions behind him seized his arms.

  “None of that,” they warned. “Your instructions are plain. Carry them out.”

  “What are you going to do?’* Ketan said haltingly.

  Varano laughed. “Me? I’m going to eat first.” He strode to the panel and pressed the secret combination. The other men stared as a tray of food slid out and Varano began eating with gusto.

  “This is why lie was so durable” Varano said between bites.

  “Come on, this is no time for that,” one of the others urged. “Take him and be gone so that we can leave this hole.”

  “It will be a great pleasure. Come along, Seeker Ketan. I have a place prepared for you*”

  “Where are you taking me? What orders do you have from the Council ?”

  “Since you cannot be persuaded to die here, you are to be taken to a more fitting locality. You shall be chained at the Place of Dying and remain until you are dead.”

  All reason went out of Ketan then. He lashed out at the Serviceman. He felt the pleasurable crash of his fist into the leering face and the surprised grunt of pain from Varano.

  Then they were on top of him, pinning him tight at the center of a milling mass of enraged Servicemen.

  “Take him!” one exclaimed.

  His arms were securely tied behind him. The circle backed away and he stood in the center with the glowering, bruised face Varano.

  “March! - I’ll attend to you more fully when we’re alone,” the Serviceman added in a low tone.

  Ketan preceded the man out of the room, through the house, and out to a waiting car. Slowly, as if in a nightmare, he walked. The innumerable Servicemen he saw standing about made thought of flight foolish.

  His mind burned with the memory of the horrors he had heard of the Place of Dying. He had once talked to a man who had been there.

  It had been described as a great room where sick and injured lay helplessly, groaning and shrieking in pain and terror, placed there and forgotten because they had become helpless and there was nothing that any man could do for them.

  The customs and religious laws of Kronweld did not permit them to be killed quickly and painlessly any more than they permitted surgery. The bonds of love and friendship that were created by the families of Earth were of feeble strength in Kronweld because there was no such word as family. Mercy and sorrow over the dying were, therefore, short lived.

  Varano prodded him into the car and took the driver’s seat beside him. They drove off in silence.

  They passed quickly through the streets, flanked with the clean white buildings of woven patterns of glistening marble. How different from the ruin and decay of Earth, thought Ketan. There must surely be something in Kronweld that could lift its men to the heights that Richard Simons had dreamed for them.

  They came to the outskirts of the city where the buildings gave way to the intensely tilled farm lands. Then these merged into the barren Outlands and the glow of Fire Land blazed in the sky and burned upon their faces. They turned towards the west, following the smooth road that led nearly to the intersection of the curving ring of Fire Land and the black curtain of the Edge— where titanic, impossible forces met in withering fury that no mail had ever approached.

  Varano suddenly stopped the car. He looked around for an instant and then stepped out. “This is it. Get out,” he ordered. He cut the bonds on Ketan’s arms.

  Ketan looked about in puzzlement. “This is not the Place of Dying. Where are you taking me ?”

  Varano was no longer sneering and bitter, but he was stern and tight-lipped. “To Hametli,” he said cryptically.

  “What—?”

  But Ketan got no other word out. The Serviceman gripped him by the arm and shoved him along. They stumbled through warm lava dust and passed between great mounded dunes of sand and dust blown about by the hot winds that fanned out from Fire Land.

  Varano’s eyes were intent upon their path as if looking for a definite spot.

  “There, over behind that dune,” he suddenly announced.

  They plodded through the stuff that rose in stifling clouds about their heads. They came around the curve of the dune that Varano had indicated.

  Ketan uttered a cry of exclamation. “A shielded car!”

  “Get in,” said Varano.

  In blind and total bewilderment, Ketan climbed into the shining, massive car. Never had he seen one quite like it. It could hold at least six men and a great amount of equipment. Its shields were smooth massive sheets of lead and aluminum —quadruple layers of it, separated by spaces filled with argon under tremendous pressure.

  There was only one use for such a car—transport through Fire Land.

  Varano took his seat beside Ketan and started the silent atomic motors. Slowly the ponderous vehicle moved forward through the soft dust, its twelve wide wheels pressing heavily upon the uncertain footing.

  The machine gathered speed and drove through the valleys between the towering dunes. They turned south again and straight into the blinding fires of the forbidding land ahead of them.

  The dust and wind rose about the car in a spewing fury. A sand blast sprayed upon it, wheeling it about and spinning it crazily in the loose dust.

  Vision was almost impossible. Varano turned on the infrared visor that allowed a good penetration of the cloud. Through it, they could see the rising curtains of flame and sheet lightning that tore incessantly through the air and spurted from the very ground.

  Far ahead, a volcano was erupting, cascading molten rock down its sides, rock that gleamed with the fire of disrupting atoms and sparked ion streams into the air. The radioactive and electrical display gathered about them and inclosed them in a solid blossom of fire as they rode on.

  The volcanic dust gave way shortly before the irresistible winds that blew it back from Fire Land towards Dark Land, and the path became a tumbled, rocky surface. Hovering now on the edge of a vast chasm in whose depths burned hell-fires, now climbing through steep hills of crushed and burned stone, ,the path was hardly distinguishable.

  Then abruptly, they came to the end. They were at the edge, peering down into burning vastness of red molten rock. A hundred feet below them it shot darts of lightning up from the chasm. Streams of frantic ions gathered on any available point of metal or rock that offered momentary haven, then tore on into space. The car, they knew, was glowing outside like a flaming meteor. Ozone filled their nostrils.

  On either side of them, the chasm appeared to extend for miles. Varano seemed to slump in weary exhaustion.

  “Can you take over, now?” he asked.

  Ketan nodded. “Just tell me where we’re going. I know the way through this blindfolded.”

  “Just get through—anywhere you can. All our old trails arc burned out.”

  “All this doesn’t make sense,” said Ketan.

  “It will. Let’s see if you can take it through.”

  The Serviceman had abandoned all pretense of captor and captive. Ketan knew that he was being taken to some strange freedom, yet the actions of the Servicemen were incomprehensible. Ketan determined to see it through, whatever was being thrust upon him. This was escape. Of that, he was certain.

  He slipped into the control seat of the shielded car and spun the wheel about. He backed away from the flowing, molten river and retraced their former path.

  The day had nearly gone
. Darkness was settling over the land, but there was hardly a change in their surroundings in Fire Land. The glow that engulfed them only took on a more yellow tinge.

  The car slid perilously down the ramp of broken rocks and returned almost to the edge of the powdery desert. Then Ketan swung sharply east. He bore steadily through winding valleys between burning mountain masses that sped by the windows of the car, testifying to his reckless speed. Varano clutched the side of the car, but he let Ketan have freedom at the wheel.

  Dust and broken rocks of the terrain gave way to a solid black mass that half glowed with an inner light and heat of its own.

  “Ketan—you can’t travel on this stuff!” Varano cried. “It’s half molten!”

  They could feel the twelve wheels sinking in shallow impressions in the black rock as the car roared on. In Earth terms, that Ketan had become so used to, they were traveling nearly two hundred and fifty miles an hour over the plastic rock.

  “We can make it if we go fast enough,” shouted Ketan above the now whining motors. “This is the only way through the place if the old trails arc burned out. I used this once before.”

  Varano made no reply. He merely sat as if hypnotized, watching the smooth shaped mounds and valleys flow past the window. The heat within the car was growing in fearful proportions. Both men dripped unnoticed beads of sweat.

  “This is the toughest part,” Ketan said quietly. “Tell me, quick, is it worth it to go where we are going ?”

  Varano stared ahead of the speeding vehicle and gasped. The black rolling surface of the endless rock upon which they traveled became orange, then gradually blazed through blinding reds until it vanished in a molten lake of shining fire that stretched more than the width of the city of Kronweld. On either side, it stretched as far as they could see, slowly narrowing to deep chasms at either end.

  The car was rushing towards the molten lake with the full speed of its motors. Nearly three hundred’ miles an hour now. Before Varano could answer Ketan’s question he saw that he had only one answer possible. They could not stop now.

  Before them stretched a narrow path of dully glowing red rock. A tiny strip of half solid mass that crossed the lake of fire. It formed a long, rising arc across. Varano saw that at one point it had beeij completely undermined, forming a bridge. Only a thin shell arched over the lava.

  Ketan saw it, too. And sweat burst anew on his forehead. That undermining had not been there before. The last time he crossed, the strip had been solid.

  But it was too late to turn back now. The car would be upon the arch before it could be stopped. He added the last fraction of power that the motors would turn out.

  The sheet of black rock vanished from before them and on either side all that was visible in their universe was the lake of boiling, surging fire that leaped at them with fingers of radioactive beams. The solid arch itself was scarcely visible in the intensity of its heat. Slowly but surely they could sense the wheels of the great car sinking into the half fluid mass.

  Behind them stretched a quarter of the causeway. Ketan was nearly blinded by the incandescence of the patli and blinked fiercely to keep the plunging machine from careening into the lake.

  They thundered up the slight incline and could no longer see the apex of the causeway. The undermined portion was beneath them.

  There was a lurch and the crash of breaking rock as the surface gave way. They got one terrible glimpse of the great cracks that suddenly spread from beneath their wheels to the substance before and behind them. They literally saw the causeway fall away below them. Yet they viewed it as impersonally as two quiet Seekers in a laboratory. They had no time to react emotionally.

  They never knew whether death was upon them or not. The thundering momentum of the car flung it for a space through the air as it rose up the incline. It hurtled the free arc and landed with a jar that dug its wheels into deep ruts in the soft surface beyond.

  The motors whined and groaned as the wheels slowed. But they held. They poured the energy of disrupting atoms into the wheels and bore the car steadily forward at a rising pace.

  “Aren’t we nearly there?’’ Ketan raised from his hard bed on the rear floor of the car and peered over Varano’s shoulder. Ahead of them stretched the endless bleak plains of Dark Land. Overhead the perpetual clouds of volcanic ash and fog screened the light of the twin suns down to the eternal twilight of the Land.

  Scraps of wild brush growth were whipping in the fierce wind, and an occasional spare tree raised naked arms to the sky. In the far distance there was a low ridge of hills.

  Ketan recognized no aspect of their surroundings.

  “How long have we been traveling?” He asked his two questions in a single breath.

  “Another half day and we’ll be there,” said Varano. “We’ve been traveling a day and a half now.”

  Ketan made a mental calculation. If they had maintained speed, they had penetrated farther than any previous explorer into Dark Land. “They had long ago passed the steaming swamplands that was thought to be the border of Dark Land.

  “Want me to take over again?” Ketan offered.

  “If you will, please.”

  Varano moved over and allowed Ketan to take the controls. “You may as well get some sleep,” Ketan said.

  “Couldn’t take any more. There are too many things to think about after being away so long”

  “Where are we going, anyway?” Ketan asked for the hundredth time.

  And for the hundredth time Varano shook his head. “I can’t tell you. Orders. You’ll get all the information Hameth wants you to have when you arrive. I was ordered merely to bring you in.”

  The afternoon reached its peak of feeble illumination and began to fade. Hour after hour, Ketan kept the car rolling over the level plains at nearly three hundred miles an hour.

  The monotonous whine of the motors lulled him and he tried to grapple with the problem of why they were speeding so aimlessly into the wastes of Dark Land. And who was Varano?

  This factor tormented him as much as any other. The once subservient Serviceman had lost all the humility and deference that had characterized him when Ketan first knew him. He was bold S.nd sure of himself now. There was a light in his eyes and a strength in his carriage that baffled Ketan.

  “What will the Council do when they find you have let me escape?” Ketan asked.

  “It doesn’t matter much because they will never see me again. I can’t go back. My usefulness to the Restoration in Kronweld has ended.”

  “The Restoration—?”

  “I have said too much. Please forget that word until you hear it from Hameth.”

  The air grew cold with the coming of night and the desert gave way to low hills that grew slowly into towering masses -of piled and shattered rock that lumbered towards the sky. Their tips grew white with snow. Ketan had not known that it existed in his world.

  The depths of the snow increased and flurries began to swirl lightly about them. In the lights that stabbed out ahead of the car, a million dancing flakes of white began to fall.

  Varano was fully roused and peering anxiously ahead. “Take it easy,” he warned. “The road gets narrow through the mountains here.”

  The warning was superfluous. Already the car had begun to slide and skid dangerously. The journey lengthened into the night, slowed by the howling blizzard that shortly raged about them. They had to slow to less than forty miles an hour.

  Exit shortly after midnight of the first sun they reached the top of the mountain pass and looked into the depths of a tiny valley below. Lights glinted weirdly amid the swirling snow.

  “That’s it!” Varano cried. A flush of happy excitement was on his face. Ketan realized that, curiously, Varano loved this place, that Kronweld was nothing to him. All his loyalty and affection were for this hidden valley in the mountains of Dark Land.

  They had stopped at the top of the pass. Now Varano took the wheel and eased the massive car slowly forward, down the long slope
that led to the valley.

  Silently, they slid down the ghostly lane through the white shroud of snow. Only the ill-defined path ahead of them was visible until they came suddenly to a blockade in the midst of it.

  Varano pressed a button that slid a panel of the window down, and stopped the car. Two men, carrying what looked to be overgrown Dark Land weapons, appeared out of the night and halted beside them.

  Varano spoke to them. “Instigator Varano reporting—with A-A Probable, Ketan.”

  “Proceed to Operations Center. You will be relieved of responsibility and Hameth will receive Ketan. We’ll call ahead.”

  They drove on, but Ketan did not try to question Varano further. He knew that it was useless to do so. But all questions seemed close to being answered as they neared the city in the valley—and the mysterious Hameth.

  The dark outlines of buildings appeared beside snow-covered streets as they came slowly into the outskirts of the city. Ketan could not make out any detail of shapes, but a strange nostalgia struck him as he thought of Earth and Elta and the Illegitimates.

  The street opened into a large, lighted thoroughfare and great buildings loomed about a central square. In the center of the square rose the most magnificent structure of them all.

  It was brilliantly lighted and shed radiance upon the snow for a great distance around. Atop the building a thin tower of metal needled towards the heavens.

  Skillfully, Varano swung the great car into the square and along a pathway that led to an opening in the building. For a short distance they crept through a narrow passage, then ended in a room where there were a dozen other cars of assorted sizes and shapes, none so large and powerful as their own.

  “This is it,” said Varano. His mouth parted in a friendly grin for the first time during the treacherous journey. “I’ll show you to your chambers.”

  They emerged from the car, walking with cramp stiffened legs up an incline that led into the upper levels, and came out into a large, deep-carpeted corridor. Numerous doors opened from it. They paused before one. Varano opened the door and they entered.

  “This will be yours. You’ll find everything you need. Hameth will come to you when he’s ready. Then you will know everything—or at least what he wants you to know for the time being.”