Collected Fiction, page 489
Haft let out his breath. A board creaked under him. Simultaneously he heard a—a sound, a susurrus of faint wind, and felt a sense of inexplicable motion.
Startled, he hurried forward. The passage lay blankly empty before him. Nothing could have left the laboratory without his knowledge. But when he stood on the threshold he faced Craddock, and Craddock alone, staring in blank, astounded paralysis at nothing.
Quickly Raft searched the room with his eyes. It was empty. The window screens were still in place, and, moreover, were so rusted that they could not be removed without considerable noise.
“Where’s Pereira?” he asked curtly.
Craddock turned to face him, jaw slack. “Who?”
“The man you were just talking to.”
“I—I—there was nobody here.”
“Yeah,” Haft said. “So I’m crazy. That wouldn’t surprise me, after what’s happened already tonight.” He noticed a booklet in Craddock’s hand, a ring-bound notebook with its leather cover moulded and discolored by age. The Welshman hastily stuffed it into his pocket. Avoiding Raft’s probing eyes, he nodded toward the microscope.
“There’s the blood. I must have bungled it somehow. It’s all wrong.” Yet he didn’t seem unduly surprised.
Raft put his eye to the lens. His lips tightened.
“So I am crazy,” he said.
“It is funny, isn’t it?” Craddock said, inadequately.
It was more than funny. It was appalling. The vascular system has certain types of blood cells floating free, of course; they have a definite form and purpose, and intruding organisms may affect them in various ways.
But this specimen on the slide showed something Raft had never seen before. The red cells were oval instead of disc-shaped, and in place of the whites there were ciliated organisms that moved with a writhing, erratic motion.
And moving fast—too fast!
“They’ve slowed down a lot since I first looked,” Craddock said. “In the beginning they were spinning so quickly I couldn’t even see them.”
“But what sort of bug would do that? It’s destroyed the phagocytes. Pereira ought to be dead, if he hasn’t a white blood cell in his body. No, there’s a mistake somewhere. We’d better run some reagent tests.”
They did, going through the routine, but found nothing. To every test they could devise, the reaction was that of apparently normal blood. Furthermore, the writhing ciliate things seemed not to be malignant. When toxic matter was introduced the dilates formed a barrier of their own hairy bodies, just as phagocytes should have done, but three times as effective.
A specimen slide glittered and trembled in Craddock’s mutilated hand.
“It’s an improvement,” he said. “Those bugs are better than whites.”
“But where are the whiter?”
“Deus, how should I know?” Craddock’s fingers slid into the pocket where he had placed that discolored notebook. “I’m not in charge here—you are. This is your problem.”
“I wonder if it is,” Raft said slowly. “Just what was there about the—sun and the waters?”
Craddock hesitated. Then a wry, crooked smile twisted his mouth.
“They appeared quite normal to me,” he said. And, turning on his heel, was gone.
RAFT stared after him. What was bell; hind this? Craddock obviously knew Pereira. Though how that interview had been held, Raft did not know. Ventriloquism? He snorted at the thought. No, Pereira had been in the laboratory with Craddock, and then he had, seemingly, walked through solid walls.
Which meant—what?
Raft turned to the microscope again. There was no help there. In the sane, modem world of 1954 there was simply no place for such irrationalities. Incidentally, where was Pereira now?
He wasn’t in the office where Raft had left him. And as Raft hesitated on the doorway, he heard a sound that brought blood pumping into his temples. He felt as though the subtle, half-sensed hints of wrongness had suddenly exploded into action.
It was merely the faint pop-popping of exhaust, but there was no reason for the motor launch to be going out at this hour.
Raft headed for the river. He paused to seize a flashlight. There were faint shouts. Others had caught the sound of the engine too. Merriday’s bulky form loomed on the bank.
Raft leveled the light and sent the beam flashing out into that pit of shadows. The smooth surface of the river glinted like a stream of diamonds. He swung the beam.
There was the motor launch, ploughing a black furrow in the shining water as it melted away into the gloom where the flashlight’s rays could not penetrate.
But just as it vanished the light caught one full gleam upon a face—Pereira’s face, laughing back across his shoulder, white teeth glittering in the velvety beard. Triumph was arrogant in his laughter, the elation Raft had sensed before.
There was someone with him; Raft found it impossible to make out who that someone was. The Indios were running along the cleared bank, and a couple of them had put out in a canoa, but that wouldn’t help. Raft drew the pistol he always carried in the jungle. The thought of sending a bullet after that arrogant, laughing face was very pleasant.
“No, Brian!” Merriday said, and pulled down his arm.
“But he’s getting away with our boat!”
“Dan Craddock’s with him,” Merriday said. “Didn’t you see?”
The pop-popping of the motor was fainter now, dying into the dim murmur of the Jutahy drums. Raft stood motionless, feeling bewildered and helpless.
“Nothing we can do till morning, anyway,” he said presently. “Let’s go back inside.”
Then a voice he did not know jabbered something In Portuguese.
“He has gone back to his own land—and he has taken something with him.”
Raft flashed the light up into the face of the aviator, da Fonseca, his flyer’s cap gripped in one hand as he fumbled at his throat, groping, searching. The pupils of his eyes were no longer tiny. They were huge.
“Taken what?” Merriday said.
“My soul,” da Fonseca said quite simply.
There was a moment of stillness. And in that pause da Fonseca’s words fell with nightmare clarity.
“I had it in a little mirror around my neck. He put it there. It gave him the power to—to—” The thin, breathless voice faded.
“To do what?” Raft asked.
“To make men slaves,” the aviator whispered. “As he did with the doutor.”
Craddock! Raft had a sudden insane relief that the Welshman had not, then, gone off willingly with Pereira, in some mysterious unfathomed partnership. Then he was furious with himself for instantly accepting such a fantastic an explanation from a man so obviously mad.
Yet it was an explanation. There seemed to be no other.
“Let me down,” da Fonseca said, stirring against the hands that held him upright. “Without my soul I cannot stay here long.”
“Carry him inside,” Raft said. “Bill, get a hypo. Adrenalin.”
DA FONSECA had collapsed completely by the time he was laid gently on a cot. His heart had stopped. Merriday came running with a syringe.
He had put on a long needle, guessing Raft’s intention.
Raft made the injection directly into the heart muscle. Then he waited, stethoscope ready. He was conscious of something—different. Something changed.
Abruptly he knew what it was. The drums. They were louder, shouting, triumphant. Their beat was like the throbbing of a monster heart—of the jungle’s heart, dark and immense.
Da Fonseca responded. Raft heard the soft pounding through the instrument, and those heart-beats were timed exactly to the rhythm of the Jutahy drums. His lids lifted slowly. His voice was hollow, chanting.
“He goes back now—and the gate of Doirada opens to his coming—He goes back—to the sleeping Flame. By the unseen road, where the devils of Paititi watch at the gate of Doirada . . .”
Louder roared the drums. Louder beat da Fonseca’s heart. His voice grew stronger.
“The sun was wrong. And the river was slow—too slow. There was a devil there, under the ice. It was—was—”
He tore again at his throat, gasping for breath. His eyes held madness.
“Curupuri!” he screamed, and the drums crashed an echo.
And were still.
There was silence, blank and empty. As though at a signal, the Jutahy drums had stopped.
Da Fonseca fell back like a dead man on the cot. Raft, sweat cold on his skin, leaned forward, searching with his stethoscope at the bared chest.
He heard nothing.
Then, far out in the jungle, a drum muttered once and was still.
Da Fonseca’s dead heart stirred with it. And fell silent.
CHAPTER III
Gate to Paititi
WITH five Indios Dr. Brian Raft went up the Jutahy after Craddock and Pereira. He went with his lips thinned grimly, and a deep doubt in his mind. Merriday he left at the base hospital, to wind up the experiment and send the records back to the Institute.
“You can’t go alone,” Merriday had said. “You’re crazy, Brian.”
Raft nodded.
“Maybe. But we worked with Dan for nearly a year, and he’s a white man. As for Pereira, sometimes I’m not entirely sure that he was a—man.”
Stolid Merriday blinked.
“Oh, but that’s nonsense.”
“I told you what happened. He had no heartbeat. His temperature was crazy. And the way he walked through the laboratory wall wasn’t strictly normal, was it?”
“Da Fonseca said some queer things before he died, too. You’re not starting to believe them, are you?”
“No,” Raft said. “Not yet. Not without a devil of a lot of proof. Just the same, I wish I’d got a chance at that notebook of Craddock’s. Pereira said he was returning it. And that stuff about the sun and the river being too slow. Two people mentioned that, you know; da Fonseca and Pereira. Moreover, Dan seemed to understand what it meant.”
“More than I do,” Merriday grunted. “It’s dangerous for you to go up-river alone.”
“I’ve got a hunch Craddock went upriver, a long time ago. What he found there is a mystery.” Raft shook his head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know, Bill. Anyway, they didn’t have much fuel aboard, and I think I can catch up with them.”
“I wish you’d let me go with you.”
But Raft wouldn’t agree to that. In the end, he went out alone, the Indios paddling the big canoa untiringly up against the current. He had supplies—what he could get hastily together—and guns and ammunition. The natives helped him find Pereira’s track. For, all too soon, the diamond-hunter left the river.
“Two men walking,” Luiz said, eyeing the underbrush.
Walking. That meant either that Craddock was going willingly now, or else there was force being employed. Hypnosis, perhaps, Raft thought, remembering the lens-mirror. More and more often now he recalled the exotic, paradoxical face of the girl. How she tied into the mystery he could not guess, but remembrance of her made him more willing to seek out the solution.
So they went westward toward the Ecuadorian border, where a thousand little rivers rise to pour into the great Solimoes that feeds the Amazon itself. Ten days and ten nights they traveled . . .
On the eleventh morning the Indios were gone, even the faithful Luiz. No sound, no alarm—but Raft was alone when he woke.
Perhaps they had deserted. Perhaps the jaguars had got them. The beasts had been holding a devil’s sabbath in the forest during the night. Raft didn’t find any traces.
His lips drew down more grimly, and he went on, slower because tracking was hard work, for another ten days. He pushed on doggedly through the green breathing walls of the silent jungle, which pulsated with invisible life—never sure that the next turn of the way might not bring him face to face with the deadly giboya, or one of the omnipresent jaguars, or Pereira himself.
He could not have done it at all except for the years of rigorous outdoor life and tropical experience. But he kept on his quarry’s track.
Then, in the end, he found what the dying da Fonseca had called the unseen road.
The day before, from the height of a crest—he was getting into mountains—he had seen the great valley, an immense horizon-reaching bowl of fertile forest stretching further than his eye could follow. It was an ocean of moving green. But the track led down into it.
There was a roughly circular space down there where the shade of green was different. It must be very large, for it was far away—miles in diameter. Partly it seemed to be cupped between mountains, and Raft caught the flash of a river far off circling around the nearer curve of it. Perhaps fifty miles in diameter, the place was, but distances are deceptive in the forest. He followed the trail, and it led him directly toward that oasis of green within the green.
RAFT had stood the trip well. His face was more deeply seamed, his eyes were red-rimmed, yet he felt little weakness. A sound medical knowledge helped him there. Fevers were rife in this country. Fevers, but no Indios. Animals only, and chiefly the jaguars.
Animals! The place swarmed with life, Raft thought wearily. Everywhere around him was movement, the bright flutter of insects and brilliant birds, the watery gliding of a snake rippling to cover, the smooth, furtive motion of the big cats, the erratic hysteria of tapir or peccary. All about him was the jungle itself, like a vast composite animal, terribly alive.
Then, in a clearing, he saw plainly the tracks he had been following. Craddock’s, and the diamond-hunter’s. Pereira had been leading. A rare blaze of sunlight glanced down from overhead, picking out the colors of leaf and flower.
At one spot in the green wall Raft saw something curious—an oval tunnel curving away into the matted jungle as if some gigantic serpent had passed this way, pressing the vines and trees aside, flattening the floor, leaving its own shape carved out of the living vegetation. The footprints led across the clearing toward that green tunnel of gloom.
The footprints stopped halfway across the open space.
Instinctively Raft looked up. But there were no trees close enough. With a long sigh he let the pack slide from his shoulder, but he didn’t let go of the rifle.
There was a path, he saw now, beginning where the footprints stopped, six feet wide, depressed a little below the surface of the ground.
Odd!
He went forward—and jerked back, startled. Something had touched him. An invisible, cool tangibility that stood unseen here in the quiet air of the glade.
Raft put his hand out cautiously. It was halted in midair. A smooth, glassy, invisible surface. He explored the surface by touch, since sight could not help him. The thing seemed to be a hollow tube, nine or ten feet high—he threw pebbles to test that—and it was made of some perfectly transparent substance, on which not even dust could settle.
As Raft glanced along its unseeable winding length into the jungle he could observe how it pressed the trees aside to make way for it, supporting hanging orchids in midair, stopping the flight of a humming-bird that dashed itself in bewilderment against the solid air.
As he stood there, wondering, the first deep roar of the jaguar echoed through the clearing. Raft whirled, lifting his rifle. He could see the leaves vibrate to that deep-throated sound, but of the jaguar itself he could see nothing.
Yet it must be very near—it must be very large—and it must be on the verge of a charge, Raft decided, listening to the coughing breathing of the great cat.
He was in the open here. Coming to a quick decision, he bent, seized his rucksack, and tossed it behind him into the invisible tunnel. Rifle at the ready, he backed after it, and under his feet the yielding earth gave place to something hard and smooth. The great, echoing yell came once more, reverberating strangely from the tunnel walls.
Then something soughed past him. A whispering—dim, distant, fainter than a breath. Before him, like heat-waves in the air, a shimmer swept across the tunnel-mouth.
Instantly all sound ceased. Raft’s ears rang with the dead, intense silence. He reached out into empty air, and it was not empty.
Across the mouth of the tube stretched the same glass-smooth barrier that were walls and roof and floor to him. The doorway was closed. The gate—the Gate to Paitita?
A trap? Had Pereira set this snare?
Raft patted the stock of his rifle. All right, a trap, then. But he wasn’t exactly unarmed. He’d go ahead, since that had been his intention anyway. Only he would not go it blind. He would be ready.
THERE was no sign of the jaguar. He put the pack on his shoulders and started walking. The footing was smooth, but not slippery. Something seemed to hold his feet down. This wasn’t glass. It was, perhaps, a force-field, an invisible screen of pure energy. Da Fonseca had spoken of the unseen road.
Check.
He hiked on, across the clearing, into the forest, not letting himself wonder too much yet. There was plenty to think about. Raft had long ago learned the trick of shutting his mind to thoughts which he was not yet ready to entertain.
He had closed his mind time after time in these twenty days to one recurring vision—the gay, solemn, radiant face of the girl in the mirror, seen impossibly in one glance, and never to be forgotten.
It was not exactly a path. Had Raft not known that he walked in a tunnel, and had it not been for the utter, dead stillness, there would have seemed no reason for alarm. The jungle still rose solid and shadowy about him.
Butterflies fluttered brilliantly past. Birds trailed their fantastic plumage through the leaves. Now and then a cloud of tiny stinging puims blew past outside the stuff that was not glass.
Magellan, very long ago, had written of Brazilian trees that gave soap and glass, distorted versions of the hevea that flows rich latex. There was often truth in legends. The Seven Cities of Cibola—they were real, even though they had never been paved with gold.
Vespucci, Raft recalled from some dark cranny of memory, had mentioned a Lake Doirada, somewhere in the sertao, with shining cities on its banks. And the kingdom of Paititi, that da Fonseca had spoken of. In the old days bands of mafnelucos had gone out on more than one expedition to find Paititi.
