The Key to Irunium

IV

The Chrysler V-8 engine began to howl a little under the hood, like a cradle of kittens mewling. Those kittens would turn into tiger cats if you opened the hood now. Prestin noticed that Margie’d had an all-synchromesh four-speed gearbox installed instead of the automatic transmission system—a decision with which he agreed. “I’ve had the engine tuned and monkeyed with no end. The Chrysler boys wouldn’t recognize it now,” she said lightly.

“You just leave that Lancia behind, my girl,” said Macklin. He did not appear worried. Prestin sweated.

Alec began to assemble his express rifle, screwing the oiled blue steel together methodically and squarely, obviously enjoying what he was doing as thread ran sweetly on thread.

Prestin swallowed and wiped his forehead with his handkerchief. He turned back again to follow Macklin’s glance through the rear window.

The Lancia hung on, if anything a little larger, a little nearer.

“Perdita has a Lancia Flavia now, hasn’t she?” asked Margie of no one in particular. “Such peculiar tastes for one who is so noisy about her culture and her quality.”

Prestin recognized the symptoms—the use of the Contessa’s name, the comparison of cars—and he gently said, “Hasn’t the old Flavia got a Kugelfischer fuel injection system to boost b.h.p. output? I’m not too hot on cars, planes are more my line.”

“Yes.” Margie spoke shortly. “But she’ll have done things to her Lancia like I have to my Jensen. The cat!” she finished with a fine feline sparkle.

Macklin chuckled dryly. “You’ll do, Margie.”

Alec said heavily, “Has anyone checked the maps? We want to do this thing right. The Contessa will never fall for that tired old oil on the road gag.”

The air of conspiracy in the car deepened. Macklin reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a map which was folded open to show an unwinding road system heading south. “Hum,” he said thoughtfully. He put a finger down on the map, and Prestin leaned forward sideways to peer over his shoulder. “That’s where we are, folks. Any ideas?”

“The next one, Dave,” said Margie shortly. For the first time, Prestin saw her face fully; it was tanned and young, altogether lovely. She wore her brown-gold hair long and it sheened with a clean healthy sparkle. Beneath the emerald green cloak, she wore a white woolen evening gown, demure and somehow enticingly pure. A diamond bracelet glittered on her wrist above the short gauntlet of her driving glove.

Looking at her, a memory of Fritzy flashed unbidden into Prestin’s mind; perhaps Fritzy, one day, would attain the clear goddess-like maturity of Margie.

“They’re gaining on us,” Alec said. He leaned forward, the rifle between his knees. “Can’t you burn a few more miles an hour out of this old jalopy, Margie?”

“You want to stay in one piece, don’t you, apeneck?”

Margie held the car steadily and the speed only came into consciousness in the flickering passage of wayside constructions, trees, and cars traveling in the opposite direction. “I’m holding a little in reserve for the bend.”

“Good girl.” Macklin stubbed his finger forward on the mapped road. “Here’s the place. About four miles, Margie.” He chuckled. “It’s a good sharp bend.”

“Check.”

Alec sat back but Prestin kept looking at the map. Scattered over widely spaced intervals, a number of neat red crosses had been inked in.

“What are they, then?” he asked.

“The crosses? They’re all the nodal points we know of so far. Here’s the one where Fritzy went through—”

He pointed to a red cross just northwest of Rome.

“I suppose you were, what, ten thousand at the time?”

“Nothing like that. We were lowering down. I dunno. We could find out. But—but you mean people have disappeared through all those red crosses?”

Macklin laughed sourly. “No. Of course not. Some won’t be large enough. But any Porteur could put through whatever the nodal point would accept. You could. You could put a whole lot through, and you could make the nodal point accept a lot more than most, I’d guess.”

A shivery thought ghosted unpleasantly. “Suppose,” Prestin said, and swallowed, “suppose we hit a nodal point now?”

Margie laughed shortly.

Alec said, “I’m holding onto my gun, man!”

“If we do, Bob, then whoever you have selected may be Porteured through to Irunium,” said Macklin.

“Oh, no!”

Something hard and sharp went pinnngg! against the back of the car. Alec grunted and half lifted his rifle.

“Save it, Alec.” Macklin looked ahead through the windscreen. “If they’re using ordinary bullets they won’t hurt us at this distance—providing they don’t sneak one under the flaps and hit a tire.”

“There’s the bend ahead.” Margie sounded cool and calm.

“Make your play now, Margie—”

Prestin jerked his thoughts back from the red crosses representing nodal points—he wondered how Macklin had obtained that information—to the smooth flow of action about him. The Jensen accelerated smoothly, and dived full throttle for the approaching bend.

“You’re going too fast—” Preston began, panicky.

“Quiet, laddie!”

“Hold on, troops.” Margie spoke with deceptive ease. Prestin caught hold of the door handle strapping. From the corner of his eye he saw Alec turn and crouch on the floor, the rifle raised. His hand pressed a lever beneath the armrest and a hole abruptly appeared between the rest and the side of the car. Alec thrust the rifle through and peered carefully down the telescopic sight.

“All set, Margie,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Margie put the anchors on.

In a chaotic bewilderment of jumbled sensations, Prestin was rapidly aware of being flung forward, wrenching his arm; of seeing Macklin cradled in the front seat straps; of Margie stiff-armed like a Grand Prix driver at the wheel; of Alec pressing the rifle trigger again and again, and hissing between his teeth in time to the soft coughing of the rifle.

He flung a glimpse back through the rear window as the Jensen hurtled around the bend. Just before the road shoulder came between him and the scene, he saw the blood-red Lancia sprawling forward in reaction to the viciousness of Margie’s braking. He saw the side of the car as the bend took them, saw the side windows shattering, saw the tires blowing, saw the car veering and lurching. It swayed across the lines between the lanes, staggering into the northbound lanes, smoke belching from the engine.

“That clobbered her!” said Alec with deep satisfaction.

“She’ll come out alive, the cat; she has nine times nine lives.” Margie spoke, Prestin guessed with a hysterical reaction, as one expert of another.

“That’ll hold her up for an hour or so, at the least.”

A bunched group of cars fled past going north.

“If those cars—” began Prestin.

“They’ll see her in time, if she’s still on the road.” Macklin chuckled. “She’s probably right over in the far ditch.”

“Hoo, boy!” said Alec, as though speaking of a football match. “Did you see the way she spun! There was a mite of smoke about, too. With any luck the Lancia’s a complete write-off.”

“Next time she’ll armor-plate the side of her new car.” Margie laughed shortly, a sardonic bark of sound in the speeding car.

“But this time the old bend trick worked again.” Alec began to take his express rifle to pieces, cleaning out the bore with loving care. His strong down-bent face carried deeply-engraved pleasure-lines. This was a man who could channel his mind onto one objective at a time, Prestin realized; a useful man to have around.

Margie raised the flaps over the rear tires. She settled back, letting the car drift along. “I’m still thirsty and peckish.”

“Yes, Margie. But we’d better keep going for a spell. Then we can all relax.” Macklin carried that casual habit of command well. “I don’t give the Contessa more than an hour before she’s after us again. They must have been monitoring the roads out of Rome—”

“I didn’t see any signs that they were,” said Margie.

“Nor me. They could have picked up my radio call to you. Yes, that could be it. Was the party a success?” he finished, apparently at random.

“So, so.” Margie shrugged her shoulders and the emerald green cloak slipped down a little. “Fabrizzi was there. Such a bore.”

“Now, just a minute!” Prestin said heatedly. He still felt keyed up—you’d have to be a cod’s head on a slab not to be shaken, he supposed—but he’d been in tight situations before where he’d felt calm, collected and able to plan his next moves. This situation had thundered along and tumbled him willy-nilly like a chip in a raging sea, so that he had to keep trying to grasp a hint of reality here, a fragment of normalcy there. With nodal points existing all over, how could he know when anything—anyone—would abruptly vanish? He couldn’t. He said, “I thought back there, at the bend, that we were coming up to a nodal point. I thought that’s what you meant.”

“No, laddie. We aren’t that desperate yet.”

“But I am! You sit calmly talking of parties and here I am—”

Margie laughed. “Doesn’t he know anything, Dave?”

“Not much.” Macklin laughed too, a gentle sound of friendly mirth. “The story is very simple, Bob. But The Montevarchi rather fouls it all up.”

“The cat!” put in Margie Lipton characteristically.

“She and we want the same thing—”

“Oh, yes,” Prestin said with some scorn. “I gathered that. You both want me.”

Alec clicked a metal part of the rifle and chuckled.

“Hole in one, son.”

“So?” demanded Prestin, wondering why he did not feel righteous indignation at their treatment of him. He wasn’t a side of beef, was he? “Suppose I don’t want to be had?”

“Remember the Trug, that’s what I say.” And Alec went back to his polishing and oiling.

The car murmured smoothly along the road. The sun shone. The air-conditioners freshened the interior and dissipated the last of the gunfire smoke. Macklin found a roll of mints and offered them around. They all sucked solemnly. Finally Prestin couldn’t stand it any longer.

“If you’re not going to tell me—”

“There isn’t much to tell. There’s this place Irunium.” Macklin’s face suddenly lost the laugh-lines; it grew grave and a little remote. “I’ve never been there. It is a wonderful country—wonderful and terrible. There is vast wealth there, so vast the old pot of gold at the end of the rainbow dreams would come true a millionfold.”

“Fairy tales yet.”

“And Trugs, son.”

“You must be familiar with the theory of the dimensions? That our dimension is paralleled by an infinitude of other dimensions, other universes, all existing continuously with us and able to be interpenetrated, provided one has the right key? It’s an old theory now, and one that has excited the imaginations of man ever since the possibilities of dimensional travel became feasible—”

“Feasible!”

“Everything has been kept very hush-hush, as you would expect. We here on this Earth are at a nexus of other worlds which do not approach us in idealogy, culture, scientific or technical attainment, or in many of the everyday devices we take for granted.”

“What’s all that supposed to mean?” Prestin said. He had heard of the dimensional theory, of course—any intelligent man who kept up with the literature had. There had been a case in the papers, a few years back, of a gang of skylarkers being arrested on the steps of an Underground station in London, all dressed up for a safari. Nothing came of it, though. At first they’d said they were going to another dimension; afterwards they produced the bottles. They were fined for being drunk and disorderly and told to go cool off. He’d remembered it, though. He’d thought, at the time, what fun it would have been…

Macklin went on. “It means this: unless there are other dimensions lying near us, peopled by advanced or very advanced races who—for their own reasons—do not wish to allow us to communicate with them, we can go across through the nodal points into other worlds. Irunium is the nearest at the moment.”

“At the moment?”

“They change, laddie, they change. We hear stories of other races and other people trying to cross, some in fact even crossing. We’ve been trying to communicate with other dimensions. But the Contessa needs money and jewels and they are to be found in profusion in Irunium. Consequently, she wants Porteurs to work for her—”

“She wants me to slave for her, is that it?”

“Slave? Well, I suppose you could call it that. You wouldn’t like it, that I can guarantee.”

“She,” said Margie, “is a cat whose father and mother were only nodding acquaintances.”

“We’d better pull in at the next cafe,” said Macklin. “A coffee will do us all good.”

Prestin held onto his calm rationality under this barrage. If Fritzy hadn’t disappeared, and if he hadn’t seen with his own eyes a Trug—he hadn’t imagined that, surely?—he wouldn’t believe a word of this farrago of dimensions and treasures that he was being handed. But they all took it so matter-of-factly—no tremendous drama, no heroics, no hysteria. These were three people coolly doing a job and getting on with it. That made him say, “Where do you come into all this?”

“We thought, at first, that the Montevarchi was a normal person, like anyone else. But she isn’t. She fooled us for a time; then we found out about her—and what she had been doing.” Macklin stopped talking and sat for a moment with a face gray and drawn, like granite chipped from a quarry and left to radiate blocky hate beneath ice.

“What—?” began Prestin.

“Hold it a minute, Bob.” Margie spoke sharply and with force, but compassionately, without malice.

Then, “I’m all right, Margie, you old fuss-pot,” said Macklin. “Young Mike—it always gets to me—hell, girl, you and he—it—”

“We’ll find him.” She spoke briskly. “And there’s a cafe or ristorante or what have you ahead. You need the coffee, Dave. That’s for sure.”

“Listen, Bob.” Macklin turned and laid a hand on Prestin’s arm, leaning on the back of the seat. “Mike is my son. The story, very shortly, is that he was the finest, truest, best lad—anyway, the Montevarchi has him. She has him and all the others in Irunium slaving, yes, slaving for her. That’s how she remains rich. She throws her money away on this side. And Mike and the others work to make more for her—”

“Coffee,” said Margie loudly and cheerfully, swinging the Jensen off the road. They bumped up over a concrete ramp and headed into a parking area. Prestin had not looked out since Macklin started speaking of his son Mike.

“Tell me,” he said as Margie cut the engine. “Why are we heading for Foggia? I mean, I know we’re escaping from the consequences of what happened in Rome, but why run to Foggia?”

“Fellow there I know, name of Gerstein, he knows as much about the dimensions as anyone does who’s never been through. He lost his son during the war—Fifteenth Air Force, B-17—and we’ve been collaborating. When he hears about you sending Fritzy he’ll—”

“That’s not fair! You don’t know I—I sent her!”

“How else did she disappear, then?” Macklin opened the car door. He turned to look back at Prestin, glaring angrily after him. “We hear rumors, stories of other people finding keys to the dimensions. There was a man called Crane, an Englishman, he had a map—but he won’t talk about it.”

“You told me,” Prestin said, sliding across after Alec and getting out that side. “You said it was feasible. That means there must be some other way—”

“Sure. But that wasn’t operating in this instance. A fellow called Alan Watkins dreamed up a formula for crossing the dimensions. Unfortunately, they found they had to work a new formula for each dimension, more or less. Guy called Phil Brandon told me. Said he had more information but wasn’t at liberty to divulge it. No, Bob. We’re on our own.”

They walked toward the ristorante, four people caught up together in a tragicomedy hanging between worlds, one of them hardly believing and yet forced to accept the evidence of his own senses. Prestin said, “All those red crosses. You can’t know they’re all nodal points. There must be another system besides me, or others you claim are like me. There must!”

“Maybe.” Macklin held the door open for them to enter. “One thing this guy Brandon did say kind of got to me. ‘Look out for the Porvone,’ he said. Porvone. The way he said it—kind of scary, hushed-voice. Porvone. A whole lot worse than Trugs.”

They went through without speaking for a moment after that, found a table and sat down. Alec, licking his lips, said, “I fancy everything on the menu, plus all the trimmings. I am—as they say—peckish.”

Prestin realized afresh how famished he was. Margie asked the fatly smiling proprietor if he had risotto with mushrooms and saffron available, giving him the necessary fifteen minutes to add the mushrooms and the saffron, pinch by pinch. Prestin followed her lead. Alec settled for a highly colored and spiced pasta dish and Macklin, abstemiously, for a little whitefish and cauliflower, with Genoese fish sauce.

When they had eaten, Prestin, for one, felt replete.

“I’ll drive if you like, Margie,” offered Alec, pushing his empty glass to one side and smiling as Macklin offered to refill it with the excellent local Vesuviana wine.

“I’m as sober as a circuit judge on Monday,” said Margie without offence. “And I’m not tired. And I prefer to drive my own car. And I’m not—”

“You have made,” interrupted Alec, giving in, “your point.”

The fat and smiling wife of the fatly smiling proprietor brought good coffee, not espresso, with cream circling galactically on its rich brownness. Prestin could almost imagine that nothing catastrophic had happened in the last twenty-four hours. This short interlude in the white-painted, flower-boxed little ristorante house, with small, friendly noises creeping in the open window, good food inside him, the wine and the coffee—he sat back in his chair, thinking—was how life should really be.

A buzzing sound drifted in through the window. The blue sky showed no clouds and the southern half of Italy promised a whole summer of heat. They had talked during the meal in a desultory fashion about the dimensions; the proprietor spoke a little Chicago English, however, and they had been discreet.

The buzzing sound grew louder.

“More coffee?”

“No, thank you, Margie.” Alec turned his blocky face toward the window.

“Well, we’d better be making a move. The Montevarchi will probably have found another car by now.” Macklin rose.

The buzzing sound interrupted itself with a regular chopping beat. Alec stood up, listening. “Helicopter,” he said. He held Margie’s chair for her.

After Macklin had paid, stilling Prestin’s instinctive reach for his wallet, the four went outside. The sun shone down gloriously, the sky ached with blueness, scrubbed into an intense paleness after dinner, and the road glimmered with heat. The helicopter had circled back.

“I suppose—?” Margie said, one hand hesitantly going to her lips.

“Could be.” Alec squinted up as he put his hand into his jacket pocket. Prestin thought that pocket had bulged a little too much for any casual contents.

Prestin looked up, shading his eyes. Splinters of sunshine glinted from the helicopter’s rotors. The domed perspex bubble and side windows blazed down eyes of fire. “That’s an Agusta 105. Probably the four seat B. Nifty little chopper.”

Macklin said, very gently, “You are all, indubitably, right. So—Run!”

He started for the Jensen as though his pants were on fire. The others followed. Prestin felt a quick jolt of fear, a sour taste in his mouth, a churning in his stomach—sensations which he had gotten too familiar with and whose acquaintance, nowadays, he had no desire whatsoever to resume.

He ran like hell.

The helicopter swung back. The chop-chop-chopping of the rotors whined a little and was then cut into by a more staccato, harsher, more brutal whick-whick-whick.

The automatic rifle’s bullets skittered across the concrete parking area.

Alec flung an arm up and fired off a full clip from his Luger.

Of course, as Preston saw, the bullets went nowhere.

The ‘copter circled around for another pass.

Margie fumbled with her purse, getting the car keys out. Alec shouted, “Hurry up, Margie! He’s got us cold!”

Looking up against the scraped white sun glare, Prestin saw the black vulture shadow chopping back across the ristorante. The proprietor and his wife had bolted inside and slammed the door; there had been no other customers. The chopper chugged down closer. Prestin could clearly see the snout of an automatic rifle protruding through the open window behind the pilot.

“Is it the Contessa?” he asked, his mouth feeling as though it were full of horse chestnuts.

“One of her henchmen—an Earthman, not a Trug.” Macklin stood by the car as Margie flung the door open and Alec dived in. The speed with which he assembled his express rifle astounded Prestin. Macklin dragged him back to the other side of the car.

“Margie paid over five thousand pounds for a bullet proof shield for us.” He sounded as though he thought the joke a good one.

Crouched down beside Macklin, with Margie tumbling out the near door to join them, and with Alec snouting his rifle up as the helicopter bored in wickedly, Prestin wondered where the joke lay.

The automatic rifle snickered through the vane noise and Alec cracked off six crisp rounds in reply.

The ‘copter veered above them sharply. Prestin could see no damage. He heard the loud and angry clamor of bullets striking the car. The ‘copter bucked. As it came toward them Alec fired again and this time Prestin saw the perspex screech shatter into shredded fragments. He saw the pilot lurch up and double over. He saw the helicopter falter in mid-air.

He heard Margie scream. “It’s coming down right on top of us!”

“Get out of the way!” yelled Macklin.

Somehow Prestin was springing up, feeling Margie’s arm beneath his fingers, hauling her to her feet. He felt a tight metal band encircle his head, an imaginary bond of steel to crush his skull and pulp his brains. He started to run, feeling Margie’s weight dragging on him. He caught a crazy glimpse of Macklin’s shoes, the soles dusty with concrete, of Alec snarling and firing still, as the great black shadow above them whickered down remorselessly.

He ran.

He was still running.

The concrete beneath his feet gave out and he was fighting his way through yellowish sand and stringy fronds of some dark green bloated weed. His feet hurt. The sand struck back with a heat out of proportion to the southern Italian sunshine, even through his own tough English leather hand-tooled shoes. He could not hear the chopper. He couldn’t hear Alec firing nor Macklin yelling at them to run; he couldn’t hear Margie—nor feel her arm beneath his gripping fingers that constricted on empty air.

Then he understood.