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she'd never been away. For a moment she was frozen, as if she
were a three-dimensional color still photograph, but, quite suddenly, she
was filled with animation and turned to face him.
"I have it!" she shouted proudly, and tossed him the jewel.
Mogart was stunned.
So many random factors, he thought, yet here it is!
His good fortune was almost beyond belief.
"Anybody chasing you for this?" he asked worriedly.
She shook her head. Nope. Nobody. I got it fair, square, and clean, which is
about the only
"
thing you can do in Zolkar."
Hope suddenly flickered again inside him. "But its only the second," he
pointed out, as much
'
to himself as to the woman. "Four more must be acquired before there is enough
power. Even three will not do."
Almost as one, Mogart and Jill McCulloch looked at the clock behind the bar.
It was seven forty-five on the evening of the last day.
He sighed and pocketed the gem. "Let's be off-we have no time to lose," he
said, and walked unsteadily toward the pentagram she had never left. He
staggered a bit as he entered it, and she had to catch him.
"You sure you're all right?" she asked worriedly.
He brushed it off. "Never better! he announced a bit too loudly. "Let's
away!" Both vanished
"
from the bar.
Their world had nine hours and fifteen minutes to live.
Main Line + 1502 "Here"
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1
MAC WALTERS FELT THE SHOVE AND WAS SUDDENLY thrust forward from the void in
which he had been seemingly suspended into bright sunlight. He felt slightly
dizzy and fell to the hard, claylike ground. It took him several seconds to
get hold of himself and stand up.
Wherever this place was, it wasn't the world's most appetizing. It was hilly,
hard, dry, and the only vegeta-tion of note was a lot of scraggly desert grass
and sage-brush. It was terribly hot, and there were no clouds in the sky
to block the rays of the sun. He was also nude, which was
unexpected. He felt totally alone, exposed, unarmed, and uninformed
in a hostile and alien environment.
Now what the hell do I do?
he wondered silently.
He looked up and around. Some birds or something, over just beyond the next
rocky hill, were circling around and occasionally dipping below his line of
sight. He cocked an ear and listened carefully.
Nothing. Nothing but the sound of birds occasionally screeching far
off and a very slight sound, almost a hissing noise, that he
couldnt make out.
'
Not snakes, he decided. Something natural-more like the wind, although
there was certainly none on this dry, parched landscape.
Mogart should have told me more about what to expect, he growled to himself.
How was he supposed to find the jewel, let alone get it from the little man's
counterpart here? There didn't even seem to be any people.
He decided to see where the birds were coming from, got up, and started off.
The ground felt oddly springy, not at all like the hard clay it appeared to
be. Sala-manders raced to and fro from sparse grassy plot to grassy plot,
paying him no notice at all.
There's something wrong here, he told himself as he tried to think, to figure
out what it was.
He was halfway to the rocky hill beyond which the birds still
occasionally flittered when he realized the discontinuity:
I have no shadow!
he thought, startled.
Idly he kicked a small pebble with his bare feet. The pebble didn't move-or if
it did, it didn't move much. His foot seemed to pass right through it.
What the hell is going on here?
he wondered, confused and a little anxious.
He made his way up the hill toward the birds. He felt gravity, and he felt the
hill in that slightly soft, unreal way, but he disturbed nothing in his climb.
It was an easy grade, anyway; he was at the top in a few minutes.
The hissing noise was the sound of a small river twisting and bending through
the parched land.
It was an old river, meandering all over the place, yet slow and shallow. It
emerged from a great red-rock cleft in a hill to his left, ambled
past in a canyon perhaps ten meters below the surrounding land, and
vanished into the land in the distance, its twists and turns making it nearly
impossible to follow.
Still, hidden in the canyon was a thick line of trees and almost swamplike
vegetation. In a dry land where there was water, life clung to the
moisture and thrived in abnormally crowded conditions.
He made his way down the hillside to the bank just above the river. The
water itself looked about a hun-dred meters across and was muddy, but
judging from the occasional rocks in the middle, it appeared to be no
more than thigh-deep at its worst. He decided not to chance it unless he had
to-no telling what was under that muddy coating.
.
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There appeared to be a trail of sorts partially over-grown with weeds from the
riverbank, and he followed it, noting that he neither disturbed the vegetation
nor found it substantial to his touch.
The trail led past pools of stagnant water buzzing with dragonflies and other
insects; the birds that swept to and fro from sky to river seemed to nest in
the small but thick trees that lined the banks.
Neither the insects nor the birds seemed able to see him.
The trail, if in fact it was such, seemed to lead back up toward
the red-rock canyon. He stopped a mo-ment, trying to decide what to do. He
felt lost, helpless.
This is no way to go into something you don't know or understand, he
decided. But what, then, to do?
He was still standing there, uncertain and disgusted, when he heard a voice
call his name.
"Walters! Mac Walters! Where are you?"
There was no mistaking the reedy tenor-it was Mogart.
"Here! Down here!" he shouted back, a corner of his mind noting that even his
shout did not disturb the surrounding wildlife.
"Just stay there! I'm coming to you!" Mogart re sponded. Walters shrugged and
waited. At least
-
this was something.
It took the ungainly Mogart quite a bit longer to negotiate the hill than it
had Walters, and when the demon was within sight it was clear that Mogart was
definitely not human. "Demon" was, in fact, the most accurate descriptive term
for the strange little man. But he was a demon in very poor condition,
Walters decided as Mogart approached huffing and puffing from the little bit
of exertion.
"Sorry I couldn't be here immediately," the demon apologized. "It took a bit [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]