Collected Fiction, page 690
The double doors swung open. We marched in under the sweep of curtain. And just as we passed the agitated little group I caught a glimpse of a calm-dissipated-looking face among them regarding me with a rather smug grin.
It was Dio.
I would have said there wasn’t a square inch of my brain just then that wasn’t packed with worried thoughts but a small pinwheel of fresh alarm went off in an unused corner and began shooting out sparks.
How much did he know about my interview with Coriole? Did his presence here mean Falvi’s arrest for attempted murder? Obviously Dio wasn’t dead after all, but it occurred to me that I might be if he shot off his mouth at the wrong time and place.
He looked overwhelmingly complacent, like a man who has used great forethought, picked the winning side and settled comfortably back to watch the losers put up their vain but gallant fight.
I didn’t feel gallant. I was going to pick the winning side too. Coriole had been just a mite too clever, I thought, in maneuvering me into a spot where I practically had to promise the crowd to fight for them. But he’d forgotten one minor matter—maybe I wouldn’t hang around here to see the crowd demonstrate.
I had every intention of grabbing Lorna and making the plunge back through the wall between worlds as fast as was humanly possible. After that—well, let the two factions fight it out between them. It wasn’t my battle.
Inside the double doors was a waiting-room lined with nervous priests. Never losing a beat we marched on through. The nearer we got to the Hierarch the higher the tension mounted in everyone concerned.
The priests downstairs had been nervous enough. Those in the hall had been practically biting their nails. These in the anteroom almost twanged with tense nerves. I wasn’t feeling any too relaxed myself. The Hierarch had frightened me even on a video screen.
My guards flung open an inner door and stood back, deserting me. I went through alone.
The Hierarch sat at a big desk made out of solid gold. It was hideous. You couldn’t have crowded one more scrolled dragon or curly lion onto its carving if your life depended on it. Queen Victoria would have loved that desk.
The Hierarch stood up. His eyes met mine. And suddenly all confidence I had been able to retain so far vanished out of me between one breath and the next. I lost all desire to make smart-aleck cracks about Malesco. I was nothing but a second-string actor from a minor Broadway play, astray in the wrong world and deserted by the phenomenal luck that had brought me this far. The Hierarch was no joking matter.
HE wasn’t very tall. But he was broad and solid and his purple and gold robes didn’t add a thing to the immense dignity and confidence of the man. He’d have looked the same in sackcloth. His little expressionless eyes regarded me with cold dispassion under the fat lids.
There were three jittery priests in the room with us. One of them jumped to pull his chair back as he rose. He rolled forward with that bulldozer gait toward me. There was a chair in the way. He didn’t even glance at it. One of the priests almost dislocated an arm snatching it out of the way in time and the Hierarch surged forward.
I think he would have trampled it under rather than move around the obstacle. I was reminded again of Queen Victoria, and the legend that she never looked back at her chair before she sat down. She just sat, confident that someone would shove a chair under her in time. She had been born a queen, you see.
The Hierarch paused six feet away and breathed through his nose, loudly. His voice was thick and rich. He wasted few words on me.
“Talk,” he said.
I looked him in the eye. I thought of Dio hovering outside the door, undoubtedly waiting the right moment to do or say whatever would be best for Dio. I thought of the crowd seething around the Temple wall, waiting for me, and a little confidence flowed back into my mind. Not much. About a teaspoonful, perhaps. But it was more than welcome there. “You,” I said in my best hero’s voice, “are going to send me back to New York with Clia. Now.”
We important people don’t waste our words. I snapped my jaw shut and glared at him with a great show of confidence.
The Hierarch’s little eyes never swerved from mine but he made a soft snapping noise with one hand and a priest hurried up beside him and lifted a familiar weapon chest-high, facing me. It was another of those glowing milk-bottles and as I looked a warning flash blazed out of it, obliterating the whole room for a second.
I didn’t dare hesitate. Taking careful aim, I squinted my eyes nearly shut, stepped forward a pace and with one deft smack knocked the bottle out of the priest’s hands. It bounced softly in the carpet, its glow dying.
“That’s enough of that,” I told the Hierarch in a firm voice. “I’m no hired thug. I came here unarmed. You needn’t be afraid of me if you do as you’re told. But if I don’t walk out of here unharmed within an hour—well, have you looked out the window lately?”
The Hierarch pulled in his topmost chin over a descending series of subsidiaries and regarded me from under his brows. He had a thin mouth set between the flat slabs of his cheeks and now the mouth curved up slightly in a grim smile. “So that’s what you meant,” he said. “You said you’d explain when you saw me.”
I blinked stupidly at him. Then I got it. I’d promised to explain in person—and in person I’d led a mob to his door. Oh, I’d been a smart operator, all right. The world lost a military genius when I took up show business.
“Right,” I said crisply. “Now let’s not waste any more time. Suppose you send for Clia and start things moving. I want the two of us back in New York by the time that hour’s up.”
“And your—followers?” the Hierarch inquired.
I hesitated briefly. I could say I’d disperse them but would they disperse? They wanted me as a leader or at least a figurehead, not as a vanishing image on a screen headed back for Manhattan.
“I’ll manage them,” I told the Hierarch. “Send for Clia.”
He regarded me with his usual lack of expression for a painful thirty seconds. Then he snapped his fat fingers again. The priest responsible for finger-snaps hesitated uncertainly, not sure what the boss meant.
“Clia!” the Hierarch said venomously over his golden shoulder. The priest cringed and scuttled for the nearest door.
I let out a long breath unobtrusively, hoping nobody would notice. It didn’t seem possible that I was going to win. I had only been certain that when you deal with a human juggernaut like this one you’ve got to bully louder and faster than he does or you’ll be trampled under. It appeared to be working but I didn’t dare relax for a second and I had one insoluble problem still before me.
Suppose everything went fine up to the very point of my exit through the screen. The Hierarch was no fool. He would not allow himself to be left holding a bag containing a crowd that numbered some thousands. How could he explain my absence when they began to tear down the Temple wall to get at me? Did he simply mean to blast them out of existence with a miracle? If so, why wait? Why not do it now and then dispose of me by the same easy method?
If he had really given in to me, then it had to mean he was afraid of the crowd. Coriole had told me about the priesthood’s very real fear of the people when they were roused. Lorna wouldn’t have been allowed to survive if the voice of the people hadn’t demanded her, remembering Jimmerton. Now they demanded me and I thought the Hierarch didn’t dare refuse them or attack them. He could wipe out this mob, certainly, but Malesco was a big place and short of depopulating the planet it would seem he couldn’t control the people when they got their temper up.
It also occurred to me as a sort of paradox, that a miracle exercised to disperse the crowd now might have exactly the opposite effect. The survivors, in their present mood of intellectual curiosity, might become violently active to find out what made the miracle work. I pictured something like a large cannon pouring out miraculous death-rays, while indefatigably curious men and woman swarmed all over it poking, prying, peering into the muzzle, turning any available wheels and chattering excitedly about miracle-juice and the result of sparks.
It was at this point I experienced my first real twinge about the people of Malesco. Up to now they had been people in the abstract, a generalization that meant nothing. If Coriole told the truth, they were a downtrodden populace who had allowed a series of tyrants to dominate them for a long, long time.
I was facing the latest of the tyrants now, and I began to realize what it would be like to live as one of the common herd under a Hierarch. Maybe they did need help, at that. But, I told myself firmly, not from me. It wasn’t my problem. I was no Malescan.
I had troubles enough of my own. It was true, of course, that I’d inadvertently led them into something that might turn out dangerously for everybody concerned. That depended on how the Hierarch handled things.
CHAPTER XIV
Stalemate
I HAD used a simple machine and A produced a miracle on the street corner, but if the Hierarch tried to produce a miracle to disperse the crowd I thought he would find he had presented them with a mechanism instead. And they’d want to examine the thing and see how it worked.
I didn’t think he was a fool. It was hard to tell what he was.
At this stage I began to be aware that there was a distant, disagreeable noise coming rapidly closer, audible through one closed door and maybe two. By the look of wincing anticipation on the Hierarch’s face I knew he felt about the way I did. You could always hear Lorna Maxwell a good deal further than you could see her.
“What’s the idea?” her remote voice was demanding. “Stop shoving, will you? Stand aside, you—let an angel pass. Who do you think you are, anyhow? Oh, stop shoving. I’m coming, I’m coming. Just let me alone.”
All this was in mingled English and had Malescan and was as much a part of Lorna as her own skin. She didn’t mean most of it. She could contrive to get shoved in the politest company and the monologue of protest was simply her artless way of being sure people were looking at her when she went by.
The door behind me opened. The Hierarch sighed audibly and Lorna Maxwell swept in, heavily disguised as Clia, the transfigured Malescan.
While she kept her mouth shut, she was a dazzling spectacle. She wore a sort of cloth-of-silver robe, heavily encrusted with the images of lions, eagles and salamanders in jewels which I had no reason to think weren’t real. They had improved her figure somewhat—it hadn’t needed much. Seeing her clearly for the first time now, I realized how tremendously they had improved her face. She was unmistakably still Lorna but a glorified Lorna, not the commonplace cheaply-pretty little creature I had last seen on Earth. Her face was almost funny it was so beautiful. They’d made her into a collection of clichés.
Her eyes were luminously blue, slickly soulful. Her nose was a delicate masterpiece of modeling. Her mouth—if I had a copy of Bartlett’s Quotations handy I could tell you all about her mouth—shut. Open, it still looked and sounded just like Lorna’s.
She paused at the door, looking at me sharply. It took her a few seconds to identify me. It took a few more seconds for her to get her ideas about me sorted out. What was in this for Lorna Maxwell?
You could see her doing simple sums inside her head, very fast. Then she made up her mind. She flung both arms wide, the silver sleeves flailing. She tipped her lovely head back, gave a panting breath and cried out in a truly silvery lilt.
“Eddie! Eddie, darling!”
And with a rush of glittering robes and a sweep of shining perfumed hair she was all over me.
There was a confused moment after that. Lorna is heavier than she looks and she literally flung herself into my arms. It would have been more romantic if we’d rehearsed it better.
I tripped over the silver robe trying to get my balance and we almost sprawled at the Hierarch’s feet. Lorna had a tight grip around my neck and was sobbing in my ear some lines from a play I dimly remembered, something about love and reunion and bitter heartbreak.
When I got her at arms’ length so I could see her face I noticed she was keeping an eye on the Hierarch as she went through her act, just to make sure all this was being appreciated. Lorna is, of course, one of those persons who never really enjoys an emotion that isn’t fully public.
“All right, Clia,” the Hierarch rumbled patiently, after a moment. “I take it you know this man. He tells me he’s come to take you back to New York.”
Lorna eyed me without turning her head. I realized she had her better profile turned toward the Hierarch and didn’t want to spoil the pose though for all the good it did her she needn’t have bothered. The Hierarch at least was not entrapped by the fatal charms his priesthood had bestowed on the visitor from Paradise.
After a certain amount of thought had passed rapidly through her mind Lorna gave a sudden squeal and swung around to give me personally the benefit of a really dazzling three-quarter view. It was wasted on me too but I could see what an effect she might have on those who didn’t know her.
“Eddie, you didn’t!” she cried. “Really, did you come all this way just to take me home? Oh, Eddie, I’ve missed you terribly. I—”
I gave her a shake.
“This is Eddie Burton, remember?” I said. “I’m not a Hollywood scout. I’m just good old Eddie. Do you really want to go back?” I spoke in English and the Hierarch scowled at us.
“I certainly do,” Lorna assured me, smiling a glistening smile that revealed every tooth in her head. It was clear that they’d cured her of her phobia about the machine, at any rate.
“Tired of being an angel?” I inquired curiously.
“Bored to death. Oh, it’s been fun, but they never let me out of the Temple. I want to go back and show myself off. Oh Eddie, didn’t they make me beautiful?”
“They certainly did. You ought to get a Hollywood contract out of this, once you’re back. How does it feel to be beautiful?”
SHE smiled at me with sudden unexpected humility, a sudden look of clumsiness and uncertainty, like a girl dressed up in finery she knows isn’t her own. Dimly Lorna knew this face was too good for her, and she felt self-conscious about it.
I was sorry for her expectedly, seeing the old Lorna under this lovely facade, uncertain, noisy, burning with ambition, terrified of failure and starving for success. Well, this time she ought to get it.
“We’re on our way back right now,” I told her rather grandly, and in Malescan for the Hierarch’s benefit. I hoped it was the truth. It worried me that I seemed to be getting away so easily with my bluff but I didn’t dare relax for an instant.
it was ominous in a way that no questions had been asked about how I got through into Malesco, what I’d been doing in that room at the Baths, how it happened that I spoke Malescan intelligibly if not perfectly, above all how I’d managed to call up that crowd—and why.
The Hierarch stood there, looking at me, with Lorna striking attitudes in my arms. He puffed out his slablike cheeks a couple of times, sighed and said, “You think so, do you?”
There was the soft sound of fingersnapping and right then I stopped worrying about one thing—getting away with my bluff so easily.
I stopped worrying because there was a sudden downward blur past my eyes and a tight, silky noose closed violently around my chest and arms. I felt the slam against my spine of a fist tightening the knot at my back.
At the same moment something equally tight around my ankles almost threw me off my balance. My worry about getting away with anything ceased abruptly. I wasn’t getting away with a thing—not any more.
Lorna’s great luminous blue eyes grew very wide. I could see the whites all round them for a moment as she stared over my shoulder. I turned my head and found myself looking upward into a face about a foot above my own. An enormous priest was holding the rope around my arms.
Slightly behind him stood another giant with a rope-end in his hands. The other end trailed downward to my ankles. A slight pull would throw me flat.
I didn’t see the least point in putting up a struggle. Either of these Goliaths could have pulled my head off with a flick of the wrist.
I couldn’t do a thing except keep my face immobile and try not to irritate these giants into going any farther. I could only maintain dignity by being strong and silent. So I dropped my arms straight from the elbow, where the rope held them to my sides. I motioned the gaping Lorna away and regarded the Hierarch with a calm, heroic gaze.
He was permitting himself a slight smug twitch of the lips as he looked at me. “Search him,” he said briefly.
A swarm of priests descended on me from some region I could not see because my back was toward the door. I felt hands slapping cautiously all over me, searching for the unfamiliar pockets of my exotic tweeds. They were thorough.
On the hideous golden desk beside the Hierarch a little heap of my belongings grew like magic. Every item was regarded with deep suspicion and handled with extreme care, particularly the cigarette lighter with which I had kindled that Promethian fire on the street corner.
Finally I stood there with all my pockets hanging wrong-side-out and no further possessions on my person anywhere. I saw the Hierarch regarding Lorna with quiet satisfaction and I realized then why he’d waited until she came before he cracked down on me. He wanted her to observe his power. Nobody was going to bluff the Hierarch, not even a visitant from Paradise, and he wanted the other visitant to know it.
“Now,” the Hierarch said comfortably, “we can talk.” He moved with ponderous deliberation around the desk and sat down, stirring the pile of small change from my pocket with a forefinger. He looked at me with his impassive all-knowing stare.
“You have come here,” he said to me coldly, “without invitation. You cause a great deal of trouble out of motives I’m not really interested in. I know as much about you as I need to know Things in Malesco were going along very smoothly until you came and I intend you to leave them just as smooth before you go.”
I looked at him hopefully. So I was to go, was I? Where? I didn’t ask.
