Time Travel Omnibus, page 279
Rusty colored, and the smug smirk left his face for a minute.
“Maybe so,” he conceded. “I wouldn’t know how many there was. Maybe there was thirty.”
“There were only two,” I repeated.
“Anyhow,” said Rusty, “I was ambushed. They jumped down on me from them trees and—” suddenly he stopped, really flushing this time, as he realized his slip.
“Ahhh,” I said icily, “down from the trees, eh? I didn’t know there were any trees in our clearing. You couldn’t have gone just a little bit into the jungle to snoop around, could you, Rusty?”
RUSTY looked stricken. “Hell, just thought I’d try a little hunting, Burt. I was keeping my eye on our camp-site alla time, of course, and—”
“Of course,” I said frigidly. “Sure. You were standing your watch duty and hunting, too. One eye for each.”
“Do you wanta know what happened or don’t you?” Rusty demanded, mopping his brow with his sleeve.
“Sure,” I said. “Sure, I want to know. And it seems I’m finding out a lot.”
“Well,” Rusty put in hastily, “it was like I said. Bam, I was knocked out like a light. Then I didn’t know no more until I come to in this cave here,” he waved his hand. “I wasn’t tied up at all. I was just stretched out flat, and some dame was rubbing my forehead gentle-like, bringing me around.”
“Some dame?” I demanded.
“Yeah,” Rusty said. “Wearing one of them skins they all wear around here, only she had an extra skin.” He said the last words in disappointment.
“You mean one of the gruesome, hairy old bags, beef-fisted Amazons they have here?” I demanded incredulously.
Rusty echoed my surprise. “Old bags?” Rusty demanded. “I ain’t seen any old muscle bound bags around here. This here dame I’m telling you about was the only woman I’ve seen so far.”
I spied an aboriginal female in the crowd of flatheads behind Rusty and pointed to one.
“What do you think she is,” I demanded, “a he?”
Rusty’s eyes followed my pointing finger. He gulped.
“You mean,” he choked, “that the bulgier brutes around here is women, actually?”
“Elemental, my dear Rusty,” I said acidly.
The wench at whom I’d pointed bared thick lips in a gruesomely coy smile, and I shuddered, turning back to Rusty.
“You mean to say it wasn’t a dame of that type who was stroking your fevered brow when you regained consciousness?” I demanded.
Rusty raised his right hand. “Honest to God, Burt. This wench I tell you about was a looker, a queen!”
I shook my head pityingly. “You must have been delirious,” I scoffed.
“Honest!” Rusty protested.
I frowned. “You certain?” I demanded.
“I’m getting to the point I wanta tell you,” Rusty answered. “This dame, this queen-bee, this looker, seemed to be the Boss over all these flat-skulled apes around here.”
“They aren’t apes,” I said. “They’re primitives, aboriginals.”
“Anyway,” Rusty declared, “they look like apes.” Rusty had a one-track mind. “And this dame was their Boss, what I mean.”
“But why weren’t you tied up?” I demanded. “Especially since they took the trouble to knock you out and tie you up in the first place?”
Rusty spread his hands wide. “That’s what I’m getting at,” he said plaintively. “Doncha see what I mean? The dame fell for me like a load of bricks!”
I could only stand there and gape at the egocentric redheaded mug. Gape, and shake my head slowly from side to side.
“And so that’s why you’re up and around,” I said. “And is that why I’ve been freed?”
“Why else?” demanded Rusty. “These baboons,” he waved his hand to indicate the aboriginals who gaped curiously at us, “were told off by the knockout babe when they tried to push me around. They’re scared as hell of her, and have been plenty nice to me, ever since she showed ’em that she wanted nothing but the best for Rusty Harrigan.”
Everything was coming too fast and furious now for anything to register definitely. I put a hand to my forehead, and held another up to Rusty to quiet him a few minutes.
MAYBE Rusty hadn’t been delirious. Maybe everything he’d just told me was true. Certainly, the aboriginals around us were definitely no longer hostile. Certainly, too, Rusty’s explanation was as reasonable as anything else that had happened in the last fifteen hours or so.
“Where in the hell is Leeds?” I demanded, switching the tack.
Rusty looked blank. “Isn’t he out there, tied up somewhere like you?” he demanded.
I shook my head. And then, briefly, I told him all I knew about what might have happened to Leeds.
Rusty gulped. “Jeeudas,” he muttered. “When they brought you in, I felt sure as hell they’d been bringing Leeds in here pretty soon after.”
“Unless,” I said grimly, “his brains were bashed out in the tank.”
Rusty looked sick. He gulped again, as if fighting for breath that had been knocked from him.
“I know what you’re thinking, Burt,” he said quietly. “If I hadnta been such a damned fool—if I hadn’t gone prowling around looking for something to shoot at, none of us would be in this place, and Leeds would be al—” he choked off, unable to finish.
I jarred his shoulder sharply with my palm, and there was a mumbling grunt of interest from the primitives massed behind Rusty.
“Take it easy, redhead,” I ordered. “We don’t know that Leeds is done for. I’ve a hunch he’s still very much alive somewhere. And, besides, we don’t know if this situation is good or bad, yet. Tell me more about the beautiful dame in the animal skins.”
Rusty shrugged. “That’s about all I know,” he said.
“All? Where is she? Where did she go?” I demanded.
Rusty spread his hands, he pointed over my shoulder then.
I turned, looking at the end of the cave to which he pointed for the first time. I’d been facing in that direction when I’d scrambled to my feet, but I hadn’t even noticed it when Rusty’s voice had boomed in my ear so suddenly.
Now I got my first clear view of the rock-hewn throne dais.
For it was a throne. It couldn’t have been anything else. Primitive, crude, yet nakedly majestic, it towered about six feet from the stone base of the dais.
And yet it was small. Small, that is, compared to the size it would have had to be to fit comfortably any creature of the oversized bulk of the aboriginals.
Gaudy colored feather plumage was the crest which haloed the peak behind the throne chair itself, and rich fur skins formed a thick carpet all around the dais.
There was, however, no one occupying the throne at the moment.
I saw the side exit, a cave mouth leading to a smaller cavern corridor, toward which Rusty was now pointing.
“She went out there?” I demanded.
Rusty nodded.
I started forward, and Rusty grabbed my arm just as an ominous snarling mutter rose from the aboriginals behind us.
“Not so fast,” Rusty exclaimed.
“Getting too close to that throne business is something these baboons don’t seem to like—I know,” he concluded, explaining, “I started to follow her.”
I shrugged. “Okay. We’ll oblige,” I said.
Rusty’s hand had suddenly tightened roughly on my arm and he drew in his breath sharply.
“Look!” he said hoarsely. “There she is!”
But it wouldn’t have been necessary for him to have said a word. For the incredibly gorgeous female creature who had just stepped onto the dais at the end of the cave announced her entrance by the very electrifying savage splendor of her presence!
CHAPTER VII
Ordered to Kill
EVEN the primitives behind us seemed to be holding the breath in their wide nostrils. And for some reason beyond explanation, my heart was beating at three times its normal quota.
The girl—her very suppleness and grace of action, not to mention her slender, beautifully molded body, proclaimed her as a girl—moved across the dais with such serene assurance, that it was fully half a minute before I was aware she had ascended the steps to the throne chair and was now seated regally there.
“That,” choked Rusty, “is the broad!”
But even his Main and Broadway remark couldn’t break the spell that had suddenly taken hold of the cave and everyone in it including yours truly.
My jaw must have been fully an inch slack, my eyes ready to be knocked off by sticks.
And then I saw that she was crooking a delicate finger at Rusty and me, beckoning us toward her throne, smilingly.
Somehow my legs found locomotion, and I was but vaguely aware that Rusty moved along beside me as we advanced toward the stone dais and the throne in which the regally savage beauty sat.
I was able to see her face more clearly as we drew closer. The color of her hair, which from a distance had seemed to be burnished copper, now appeared to be rich gold.
Her lips were ripe, and red, and sensuously full. Half-parted as they were in an inscrutable smile, they took on still richer crimson from the milk white purity of her even teeth. Those lips moved then, making sounds that were her words.
But the sounds were nothing like the guttural gratings I’d heard from the thick lips of the flatheaded savages behind us. They were soft and purring. God knows I had no manner of telling what those sounds meant, but nonetheless, you could almost subconsciously sense their meaning.
Her eyes were luminously commanding, twin ovals of flashing brown passion; her cheekbones high, and ivory cheeks delicately tinted crimson in the almost imperceptible hollows.
And then I was half stumbling on the first steps leading to the dais. Half-stumbling, unaware of anything save the incredible fascination of the girl in the throne chair.
She raised her hand high, then, and I found myself—without thinking—dropping to my knees some five feet before the steps that led to her chair. I remember noticing Rusty imitating my obeisance, his features also transfixed in fascination on the girl.
She dropped her hand, then, and the inscrutable smile left her features. A moment later, and she raised her hand ever so slightly, palm upward. I found myself rising. Rusty similarly climbing to his feet again.
The girl turned her head briefly toward the side corridor from which she had made her entrance. Then she looked down at us again, the smile returning to her incredibly beautiful face.
And from the side corridor there suddenly entered a visibly frightened aboriginal. He looked like one of the two cave creatures who had captured us in the clearing, but I couldn’t be certain.
And then, in utter amazement, I stared at what he was carrying in his thick arms.
A pair of tommy guns from the tank!
“Jeeudas!” Rusty exclaimed. “What in the—”
But the purring sounds made by the girl’s voice then cut him off. She spoke to the terrified primitive, who advanced to within three feet of us, deposited the weapons, and backed frightenedly out of the picture.
I stared at the tommy guns, grateful for the link they’d established with reality. There seemed suddenly to be less commanding fascination in the presence of the girl on the throne dais. It was as if symbolically, those weapons had taken us, mentally at least, thousands of years up through the future, back into the time era to which we belonged.
I licked lips gone suddenly dry, thinking how grateful I’d have been for the presence of those guns when the aboriginals had captured me sleeping in the tank.
THEN I found my glance returning to the beautiful features of the girl, and found myself wondering if she knew the power that lay in those strangely shaped clubs three feet from us. It occurred to me, instantly, as if somehow she had mentally answered my question, that she did know; that perhaps Leeds, Rusty, and I had been watched by hidden eyes not many hours before, when Rusty had brought down the weird, nine-legged, giant frog at the fringe of the clearing. Perhaps her eyes too had seen Rusty’s shooting.
She smiled, as if at me, and waved her hand toward the tommy guns in a gesture that could only mean, “Get them.”
I stepped over to the guns, picked them up, turned and handed one to Rusty, who had been right behind me.
“What the hell is this all about?” Rusty muttered.
I shrugged, fondling the gun in my hands.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ve got a temptation to use these.”
Rusty was shocked. “You wouldn’t!” he protested.
“I have a hunch that tells me it’d be a smart thing to do. Right this minute,” I concluded.
“On the girl?” Rusty gasped.
I shrugged again, trying to keep my glance from returning to those incredibly beautiful features.
“Why not?” I demanded.
“Why, why she saved us from them baboons!” Rusty protested again.
“For what reason?”
Rusty took his turn at shrugging. “Maybe because we’re like her more’n we’re like these baboons.”
“There’s no more than a standard clip of ammunition with either of these guns,” I reminded Rusty. “Did it ever occur to you that she’s trusted us with ’em because she knows we could only kill a few dozen flatheads before we’d be through?”
Rusty thought this over. Then he glanced up at the girl on the throne. She was still smiling. She held out her hand, as if it had a pistol in it, and pointed it at the stone wall of the cave to her right. I knew, then, that she had watched while Rusty brought down the strange frog-like monster not so many hours ago.
“She wants us to try these things,” Rusty gasped.
“On the wall,” I agreed. “Can you find a target there?”
Rusty squinted. “There’s a little, round hollow about six feet up from the floor,” he finally announced. “It’s about three inches in diameter. See it?”
I strained my eyes for a minute. “Yeah,” I said finally.
“I’ll make it about six inches in diameter,” Rusty announced calmly.
“At this distance?” I protested.
Rusty grinned, raising the tommy gun to firing position. He lined his sights briefly, then triggered the gun in a short, staccato burst which reverberated in the cave like cannon fire.
The aboriginals shrank back in awe. And glancing swiftly at the girl on the throne chair I saw that she was still smiling. From her very expression I could tell that she knew the target Rusty had selected, and had a pretty good idea of what he’d boasted he could do to it.
“Take a look,” Rusty told me.
I crossed over to the wall, finding the hollow Rusty had selected as his target. It was almost exactly six inches in diameter, now, and deeper than before!
I didn’t have to look further to see that not a single bullet had scarred the smooth wall surface anywhere but in the exact center of Rusty’s target.
“As called?” Rusty asked.
I nodded. “As called.”
Returning to Rusty’s side I had another chance to study the expression of the incredibly beautiful girl on the throne chair. Her smile was even more delighted, now, and her eyes glowed with satisfaction.
“You’ve pleased Her Majesty, at any rate,” I told Rusty.
“But what’s the pitch?” Rusty demanded. “Why did she order this exhibition?”
UNABLE to answer him, I glanced again at the girl on the throne chair. The smile had left her face, and her sensuously full red lips were now fixed in what seemed to be savage anticipation. She was looking past us, down toward the mouth of the cave, where we could hear sudden sounds of commotion.
Rusty and I turned in that direction immediately. The aboriginals between the throne dais and the cave mouth were parting in an avenue down which four of their compatriots dragged two inert, bound bodies.
“I’m beginning to get an idea, Rusty,” I whispered quickly. “I think lovely golden locks on the throne intends to make us into a two man execution squad.”
The four aboriginals dragging their two captives were drawing closer now. Closer, so that it was possible, now, to make something of the appearance of their captives.
And suddenly I gasped.
For one of those bound captives was Leeds McAndrews!
Rusty saw as much at the same moment I did. He grabbed my arm.
“Good god, Burt!” he choked.
“Take it easy,” I warned him through set teeth. “We’ve got these tommy guns in our hands yet. Let’s see what’s what.”
And then the Neanderthal men were dragging Leeds and the other trussed body past us and up to within two feet of the throne on which the girl sat.
Leeds was out cold, body limp in the thongs that bound him, shirt and coveralls torn, head cut from cheek to temple.
And then I noticed the other captive. Noticed and sucked in my breath in sharp surprise. For the bound victim besides Leeds McAndrews was not another shaggy Neanderthal, even though he was clad in typical loin skin attire and his black hair was matted and shaggy.
“Look at that other guy,” Rusty whispered. “He ain’t no baboon. Even if he’s dressed like one!”
I was trying to figure out this new and very rapid twist to things. Who was the blackhaired young guy in the loin cloth? Had he been captured simultaneously with Leeds, or was he just a captive they’d had around here on ice somewhere?
It was apparent, now, that all the peoples of this past civilization weren’t the thick, aboriginal swine that we had first encountered and who now were the majority crowding this cave. The entrance of the sensuously beautiful girl on the throne chair had been the first indication of that. And now the appearance of another less primeval species of human being added confirmation to my first guess.
The girl was speaking now, purring of course. But there was a savage venom in the sound words she directed at the four primeval apes who stood over the captives they’d just dragged in before her.
The four turned then, frightenedly, and left the dais with stumbling haste. And then the girl’s gaze was fixed on Rusty and me.
