The Key to Irunium

VII

Preston rubbed an unsteady hand over his unshaven chin. He could see with his own eyes the truth of Dalreay’s impassioned cry. The man knew enough about interdimensional traffic to be well aware of Earthside weapons—he felt wry disgust at his own delicacy on the subject.

If Alec had been here, now…

He wondered in that fleeting moment as the armored cars raced on, the wicked snouts of their guns aimed and poised, if, in the turmoil of fear, he could Porteur himself out of this world and back to his own.

He had not done it in those previous times of trouble so he doubted that he would now. The enormous unfairness of it struck him. The Montevarchi took jewels from this world (and other treasures besides, no doubt) and in return she would Porteur through weapons to enable her Valcini bully-boys and their Honshi cohorts to get slaves to work for her. As a system it would look marvelous on paper.

A flash spurted from the lead car. The Galumpher four over staggered sideways like a schooner hit by a cyclone. Great gobbets of red meat flew. Red blood rained. The Galumpher emitted a squeal like the siren of the Queen Elizabeth. Again the gun fired—a ninety mm job, Prestin judged—and again a shell smashed into a Galumpher. Women screamed. Children cried. A machine gun opened up, sweeping along the line of Galumphers.

Dalreay, his face ghastly, started to run out toward the armored cars. Other men followed him.

Prestin found himself running with Dalreay, expecting every moment a bullet to finish him. The noise shocked ears accustomed to normal city sounds. His glasses steamed up. But he kept on running, waving the two silly swords.

What price now the long-argued gun versus sword controversy?

Red bedlam battered at his brain. He could see the armored cars as they raced nearer, see the sand spurting disdainfully from their tires, see the evil wink of gunfire from their turrets. He thought they were Hispano-Suiza jobs but could not be sure. A spouting line of bullet pocks swathed down the string of running men. Swords and javelins flew into the air as relaxing fingers lost their grip. Prestin felt something excruciatingly hard hit him in the chest. Shouting, he dropped both swords, feeling ill, feeling the earth reeling up to smash into his face and mouth. Then, before he felt nothing at all, he felt the ice freezing from the center of pain in his chest.

Then—then came the nothing.

When he opened his eyes the first thing he felt was the numbness in his chest. It felt as though he had sent it to be dry-cleaned and it was late coming back. He could not feel his hands or feet, either. He didn’t think he had been sick but his mouth tasted like Hogmanay aftermath. He groaned.

Someone else, breathing heavily near him, groaned back.

“Where the blue-blazes are we?” asked the fierce, petulant voice of Todor Dalreay.

“Judging by what those guns did to us,” croaked Prestin, “we’re dead, buried and in hell!”

“No—” Dalreay made movements, then he relaxed, his back shoving into Prestin. “I’ve just checked. The Honshi haven’t pubicked me. So they won’t have you, I suppose.”

“Pubicked?” Then Prestin remembered and in a panic-stricken series of vigorous movements wriggled around and checked himself. He relaxed, shakily. “Nor me—thank Amra!”

“Thank Amra,” said Dalreay. “May Amra be praised.”

Now he could see the white-painted room in which they lay on the floor. There were two barred windows high up. The floor was made from a matted compost, judging by its smell, sketchily covered by a scrap of canvas. The door, made from laminated wood and bound in bronze, showed a small spy-hole, at the moment blocked by a bronze flap.

“Bronze,” said Dalreay. “Honshi.”

“But—”

“They use iron for weapons, bronze and copper for armor. The Valcini keep them geared to their own technology. There must be a reason.”

“Yes,” said Prestin, understanding only too well that reason and the Contessa’s reasoning behind it. “Oh, yes.”

The bronze flap lifted and a Honshi turned his head sideways so he could look in with one round eye, blank and horribly emotionless.

“Get lost,” growled Dalreay.

The guard hissed. Prestin didn’t know if the things could understand English, or if they could speak. Dalreay pushed himself up on his hands, his body lank on the floor. His clothes had been torn away from his chest, as had Prestin’s. Prestin looked quickly down at his own body. A sticking plaster covered the point where the numbness still persisted, and then he understood what had happened.

“We’ve been knocked out by a needle-bullet carrying an injection of sleeping sand-man drops, Todor! They weren’t shooting to kill—only to take us captive, as though we were wild animals!”

Dalreay laughed unpleasantly. “We are—to them!”

Prestin felt the shame of it, the reduction, of his own stature as a man. These Valcini held the pride, a dark lonely pride that would stand against Dalreay’s impatient honor as the smoke against the flame.

A fear of meeting the Valcini took Prestin then, threatening to unman him before the eyes of his comrade.

The door grated open and Honshi guards with pointed swords stalked in, the shriveled wisps of hair fleering from each helmet point. They moved warily.

Dalreay laughed theatrically and the Honshi stiffened. The swords quivered and they backed off. Prestin stared and took a deep joy from the impact of Dalreay’s power, futile though the gesture might be.

“We are special prisoners, friend Bob,” he said in his quick eager voice. “Just we two in this cell. Oh, yes, the Valcini intend to have sport with us before we die.”

“I thought,” said Prestin, appalled and suddenly much more frightened, “I thought they wanted us as slaves!”

“The Contessa gives the Valcini a number of slaves to play with from time to time. So we of Dargai hear.”

The Honshi guards moved forward and started to poke their swords at Prestin and Dalreay. The men staggered up, the stiffness not fully worn off, and stumbled out into the corridor. Each time the Honshi stuck their swords forward they said, “Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” The sound echoed with a terrible menace.

Slipping and stumbling, the two men somehow labored along the corridor, passing door after door of the cell block. The guards were quite evidently terrified of them.

Panting, Dalreay said, “Don’t let the guards fool you, Bob. They’re scared, but you have rats on Earth—King Clinton used the analogy”—exhausted though he was, when Dalreay spoke of King Clinton he made that small secret sign—”he said the Honshi always fought like cornered rats. They’re deadly dangerous.”

“What—what about the Trugs?”

“Just pray you never have to stand up to one in a hand-to-hand fight. Even I am not sure of that outcome.”

Prestin saw the first outside window as the corridor turned and the cell block finished. A green light shone through it. The Honshi pushed forward with their swords—each one red at the tip now—and a loud “Hoshoo!” The cuts and fang-wounds from the Ulloa still itched Prestin from time to time, but they had not been deep or serious; now he felt a vicious hatred for these mindless Honshi and their biting, stabbing swords.

“Don’t try to grab ‘em!” warned Dalreay.

Prestin saw the wisdom of that. Endurance had come to mean a great deal in this world of Irunium. With men and women of his own time riding in automobiles and mechanisms at their beck and call, endurance was being bred out. Irunium unmercifully exposed the chinks in the self-esteem of other-worlders. All the morale and strength-sapping artifacts of life back home added together to make a man unfit for life almost anywhere, let alone Irunium. Irunium demanded more than the home world, more than mere physical toughness, and Prestin had to face up to the next ordeal. He must endure.

All Prestin could see past the window was a green wall going up out of view. Dalreay, also looking out as they went by, looked sick.

“What is it, Todor?”

“They’ve brought us to the Big Growth—we’re right in the Cabbage Patch!”

“So,” said Prestin, thinking of what this meant to him. “We came north!”

“Fat lot of good that will do you! You just don’t know what the Big Green is like!”

“Hoshoo! Hoshoo!” shooed the guards and the two men stumbled on. The impatient tug of Honshi clawed-hands opened large double doors to reveal a wide amphitheater ringed by tiers of seats. In those comfortably upholstered seats reclined men and women—ordinary looking men and women. They were clad in bright, loose clothes, all gold, crimson, emerald and electric blue, ringed and roped and scintillant with jewels. Gold ornaments flashed from piled hair, white throats raised naked, and laughing faces, flushed and painted, stared down quizzically on the two ragged bloody men staggering into the center of the small ring. A silence fell.

“Let the vine be brought,” said a commanding voice from a box a few feet above ground level. Prestin stared. A man and woman sat there, smiling contemptuously, popping chocolates into their painted mouths, flashing their beringed fingers. The man looked to be a would-be-virile sixty; the sagging folds of flesh under his eyes and chin spoiled his anyone-for-tennis effect. He looked snakelike, very nasty, very dangerous. The girl could be classified with equal ease. Dalreay said, “Melnone and his strumpet! They run the Valcini for the Contessa. Filth.”

The spectators had resumed their talking and laughing, smoking and gossiping. They waited for the vine. “What the hell’s the vine, Todor?” Prestin whispered.

“You will see soon enough. I fear it—but if we are to die, then we die bravely, facing our foes. I die like a Dargan of Dargai!”

Prestin looked up. The roof curved over them as a shell of perspex or some other tough transparent building material. Thick lines pressed against the arch, as though somewhere outside trees were casting a shadow.

Beneath his feet was concrete, not sand as he would have imagined. An arena without sand to be bloodied did not seem quite right. Aggrieved, Prestin felt that if he was going to die here and now, at least he deserved the proper obsequies.

He was over being afraid. Like the man who fell from a tall building, he had reached an understanding with his fate before he struck the ground. He might yell blue bloody murder when the time came, but that would be from pain, not fear. Not any more.

An expectant hush slowly broke over the sightseers in their comfortable seats. A small electric handcart appeared, driven by a cowed looking man wearing stained dungarees.

“Hard luck, friends,” he said in colloquial Italian. “But don’t blame me. I only work here.”

On the truck stood a large plastic bell jar, surmounting an oversize flower pot. From the pot grew a bright green shoot which stood perhaps three feet high. Dalreay stared, fascinated.

“Part of the Big Green,” he said, swallowing.

The dungaree-clad menial struggled the pot off the trolley, handling it as though it were nitroglycerine. He placed it on the concrete, wiped his forehead, blew his nose and, whirring along with his trolley, departed.

Prestin realized that he stood now in the position of the man who kept calm because he did not understand the situation about him. He also knew that Dalreay stood so limply, so spinelessly, so like a husk of a man because he was face to face with a bogey he had heard about and feared all of his life, but had never felt existed in relation to himself. Now Dalreay had to face the hard fact that his nightmares, his childish fantasies, his secret terrors, were all out in the open. He, Todor Dalreay of Dargai, had to face the Big Green, the Cabbage Patch, alone.

“It’s only a part, you say, Todor. Well—”

“You do not understand.”

Honshi guards approached behind oval bronze shields. Others leveled javelins. Two very gingerly tendered their swords, hilt first. Prestin took his and at once the Honshi who had offered it leaped back, “Hoshooing” like a punctured steam boiler.

Dalreay took his own sword but he did not whirl it about to test the balance, or try a cut or two. He just held it down by his side, and his face looked green.

Prestin, in the middle of swishing the blade through the air, looked at Dalreay, and felt the blood drain from his own face. If so tough a campaigner as Dalreay looked like that…

A hook on the end of a jib swung out over their heads, manipulated, they saw, by the doleful, dungaree-clad menial from a caged-in box, descended and latched into the ring at the top. The Honshi guards left the arena very quickly, very smartly, stationing themselves in a phalanx at the entrance tunnel, just visible through heavy plastic partitions.

Now Prestin and Dalreay stood alone in the arena. Large plastic screens rose from slots in front of the first line of seats, forming a circular barrier.

The flower pot stood in the exact center of the arena.

“Back off,” said Dalreay thickly. Then he straightened his shoulders. “No.” He put his left hand on his right wrist and held it there, ironing out the shaking. “No, friend Bob. I will attack at the very first moment. There is a chance. I will go in straight away. You must do what you can.”

“Very well.” Prestin didn’t understand, yet he agreed anyway, sensing that Dalreay didn’t want to explain what was going to happen—didn’t want to think about it.

Melnone, guffawing and fondling his woman, shouted loudly, “Lift the cover, Tony!” His chuckle sounded like an over-ripe peach being squashed. “Eyes down looking! Now for the fun!”

Excitement vibrated all around the arena. Prestin heard bets being placed, times for the hunter and the other one—he was used to being the other one in life by now. He felt dizzy and shook his head. The hook snapped shut and lifted the swaying bell jar cover into the air. Men and women shouted. Dalreay leaped forward with his sword held high.

And the plant moved.

It writhed around like a tentacle. It rubbered back and avoided Dalreay’s great blow. A huge gasp of effort and dismay burst from the hunter. The plant whipped back and lashed Dalreay’s body like a cat-of-nine-tails—for in that short instant the tip had grown and branched. As Prestin watched, horrified, the tip grew and grew again, branched and re-branched. The vine slashed back at Dalreay. He lifted the sword and severed stems flew but he was down. Sobbing with effort, he rose on a knee as the vine looped him. Prestin, shaken by repugnance, forced himself to leap forward. He hacked as though he swung an axe. He slashed through three of the constricting loops holding Dalreay and jerked at the man’s arm. Dalreay swung his sword at Prestin’s head and chopped through the vine settling about his neck, the sword missing an ear by less than an inch.

“Thanks, Bob!” gasped Dalreay. “Back off now!”

Together the two men scrambled away, half on hands and knees, and half slithering over the concrete; they kept flailing behind them with panicky strokes that littered the ground with writhing green tendrils.

“The damned thing’s mobile!” panted Prestin, drawing gushing draughts of air, sweat drenching him.

“No, Bob. Not mobile. Just quick growing and vicious. It’s a small Lombok Liana, baby brother to some of them in the Big Green.” The two men backed away to the opposite end of the arena to watch the vine squirming from its pot, undulating over the concrete, blindly seeking them.

“Small! But look at the way it’s growing! It’ll fill the arena at this rate.” Prestin breathed heavily. “But how can it—there can’t be enough cellular building material in the pot, let alone nutriments—”

“The Valcini know all about the Cabbage Patch, Bob. They can compress nutriments. If there is the slightest sign of weakening through lack of material they just put more in. They aren’t as stupid as that.”

“But what can we do?”

“I bungled our best chance. When the Liana is young you can sometimes cut it down, but it would just grow again. I wanted to get it out of its pot—”

“Can’t we try that?” Prestin eyed a long tendril that wormed over the concrete searching for them, thrashing around like a super-speeded bindweed. “We can’t just stand here and let it strangle us to death!”

“You felt the strength of the stems—these swords will cut the smaller tendrils, but the big ones…” Dalreay shook his head.

Slowly then he said, “I know the story of King Clinton, of how he killed a Narwhal Liana—that’s five times as tough and vicious as a Lombok. We learn that story during English classes; it’s always a favorite, and the kids scramble to read it and show-off their English—but—but—we’re not King Clinton,” he finished depressingly.

Now the flower pot was lost among writhing vines that divided and spread, creeping to snuff out their lives. The Liana was a killer, Prestin knew, for he had clearly seen the immature mouth nestled at earth level in the pot. If that mouth grew with the same ferocious fecundity as the rest of the plant, it would be able to digest an entire man.

“King Clinton explained the parasite and the vine systems of your earth,” Dalreay said, speaking a shade too fast, but speaking, Prestin guessed, to keep his mind occupied and to stop from screaming. “This isn’t quite the same as Rafflesia, which is pretty rare by all accounts. This is more like the more common Nepenthes, which is used to poor soil. But the spines in the mouth, and the sheer muscular strength of the lid, are truly frightening in the Lombok…”

“If we get in too close, and that mouth snaps shut—”

“Precisely.”

Prestin hefted his sword. The nearest tendril crawled over the concrete three feet away. The continuous shouting from the stands during their brief engagement with the vine had ebbed to a spatter of shouts, jeers, catcalls and cries of encouragement: “Get in there with your swords, cowards,” and the like.

“I figure we can settle this another way.” Prestin moved slowly around the arena. “Are you game to chance everything on a gamble, Dalreay?” He laughed. “We haven’t any other choice, really.”

“I’m ready to chance anything.”

“We’ll jump the fat toad, that Melnone. If they want him alive, they’ll talk terms.”

“But the barrier, Bob!”

“I’ll go up on your back. I can haul you over by my belt and together well hold that slug at sword point. They might not like him, but if he’s the boss—”

“I’ll go up, Bob. I’m the hunter.”

Prestin, sensibly, did not answer. They circled, slashing if the vine came too close, watching with revulsion and awe as the thing grew like a genie from its pot.

Opposite Melnone, they became aware of his hoarse laughter, his jeering advice.

“It’s no use running, my fine friends!” His Italian was as bad or worse than Dalreay’s; he was no native Italian born. “Why don’t you stand and fight like men?” He gurgled coarsely, hugely enjoying the joke.

Prestin bent down. Dalreay put his sword between white teeth and went up Prestin’s back and over the top of the plastic anti-vine screen like an Olympic hurdler. As Prestin caught the dangling belt and began to punch and kick his way up, he heard the arena erupt into a bedlam of yells and screams. Dalreay leaped down on the seats, slashed into two cringing Valcini, kicked the woman out of the way and wrapped his left arm around Melnone’s fat throat—all in one smooth motion. He poised the sword dramatically at Melnone’s ear.

Tumbling after him, Prestin kicked a man in the stomach and ducked as another swung wildly at him. He did not realize that his sword had gone in and out until he ran on, staring stupidly at the bright red blood smearing the tip. He didn’t think he would feel like this when he killed his first man—he had never thought there’d be a first. He was far too busy to worry over the implications now.

The woman screamed shrilly, “He’s got the chief! He’s going to kill Melnone! Help! Help!”

The uproar became intense. Prestin shoved up alongside Dalreay and smelled Melnone’s foul odor. He wrinkled his nose.

“It’s working so far, Bob.” Dalreay shoved the sword tip closer to Melnone’s ear. “Tell ‘em!”

“If you harm us” shouted Prestin in his strongest Italian, “Melnone dies!”

A tendril of the vine looped up to the screen. A Honshi guard stood near it with drawn sword, too petrified to lop it off as was his obvious duty. Prestin laughed. “Here!” he shouted, and slashed. The vine fell away and the tip dropped into the seating. The guard ran.

“You fool!” gobbled Melnone. “Don’t let it lie in here! Throw it back on the concrete! For Anna’s sake, throw it back!”

Dalreay leaned down and backhanded the sword pommel across Melnone’s face. The fat man winced and groaned.

“By Amra! Don’t ever speak that foul name again! By Amra, I’ll edge your guts out!”

Obviously opposing religions, Prestin noted, and then forgot it as a second vine sprang up, inside the seat!

“The Lombok Vine is free!” screamed a man nearby. A rush ensued, an ugly rush as men and women screamed and fought to get away. The vine rose and at once Prestin saw the difference in size and ferocity. The Lombok in the arena had been controlled by the size of its flower pot. This new one, growing with unbelievable speed from that severed tip, had no restraints. Feeding on the muck and broken concrete shielding beneath each tier, it grew and looped around. One Honshi guard who ran too slow was caught and dragged neck first into the base of the plant under the seats. He screamed until his screams ended in a loud and squashy crunching.

“Get—away—” grunted Melnone past the arm around his neck.

“We’d better get out, Todor! Bring Melnone! He’s our hostage.”

They ran down the rows with Melnone dragging between them and the vine writhing and swaying behind them. The first vine was now over the barrier at a dozen places and sending down fresh roots. Soon the whole arena right up to the transparent roof would be one solid mass of liana.

Prestin had no idea where to go. He headed for an arched doorway where a crazed mass of Valcini struggled to get out. He could see no other exit. No one paid them the slightest attention when they went through at the end. The vine lashed at their heels. No one stopped to slam the door.

“That shows you what the Valcini are, Bob. They don’t try to rescue their chief, they don’t even shut the door!” Dalreay slammed it back with his foot. Prestin hit Melnone as he tried to run. They glared at all the corridors.

“Anyway, I suppose that if we keep this fat slug we can dicker with them when they get their senses back.”

“Yes.”

They had gone about ten yards, down the first corridor when Melnone gave a loud, harsh laugh. Six men appeared from a side turning directly in front of them. Each man carried a weapon, five of them had modern automatic rifles, Belgian FN’s by the look of them, and the sixth, obviously the leader had a Mauser nine mm automatic pistol. He dangled the pistol negligently, affectedly, and the immediate impression he conveyed was of decadence and vice. His too-smart fawn slacks and tunic, his thin face, thin black hair, thin moustache, and thin rat-trap lips, all repelled Prestin.

Melnone suddenly thrashed back against Dalreay’s arm.

“Please,” Melnone said. “Talk—” He tugged with frenzied helplessness against Dalreay’s arm. “Please, Cino. Talk.”

Cino said, “Are you Robert Infamy Prestin?”

Prestin, accustomed to astounding events, nodded.

“You will not, I think,” said Cino carelessly, “need your hostage. You are an important man, Prestin, in your own right.” Cino lifted the Mauser. Melnone screamed. Dalreay pushed him away, baffled.

Cino shot Melnone neatly through the head, splattering Dalreay with blood and brains.

“Come with me, Prestin. And bring your friend with you.” The Mauser waved with an authority Prestin could not disobey.