A Feast Unknown

42

The awakening was partial and blurred. I felt some pain, though it was everywhere, but so little that I realized—later—that I was drugged. The lights overhead were high and hexagonal. Dimly, I knew I was in bed in the atom-bomb shelter.

“Clio,” I said but could not hear myself say it.

A head, framed in a bronze halo, blacked out the lights. It was smiling and weeping at the same time.

“Trish,” I said. “Where’s Clio?”

Another head, haloed in gold, appeared beside the bronze.

It leaned down and kissed me.

“Go back to sleep, dear.”

I obeyed.

When I awoke again, I was still drugged. The pain had increased, however. It was wired throughout my body but centered from beneath my penis.

I turned my head. I was in the shelter. It was 80 feet wide, 60 long, and 30 high. Portable screens divided it into rooms, with the exception of a cement-block cube which housed the fuel cells and the converters. The air system was based on that used in ma

I had many questions, but I asked first, in a weak voice, if she was all right. She told me to keep quiet and eat. She spoon fed me, and then I felt strong enough to put some questions to her. She began a lengthy account, during which, despite my intense curiosity, I fell asleep again.

On awakening the third time, I found Clio gone and Trish taking care of me. She said my wife had left the shelter to talk to the contractors about rebuilding Catstarn Hall.

I said, “I’m sorry, Trish. I tried to talk some sense into him. You heard me.”

“I heard,” she said. She shuddered. “I hope I never have to go through anything like that again if I live to ten thousand.”

“Have you been contacted by the Nine yet?” I said.

She started and then said, slowly, “Yes. In the first place, we would have had worldwide publicity about this if the Nine hadn’t pulled the strings of some highly placed puppets in the government. They clamped down on all reporters and police investigations, claimed security demanded it, and that was that.

Oh, yes, the servants were told to be quiet, and threatened with severe penalties if they talked.”

“The bodies?”

“We took care of ... you ... set up the intravenous and the blood. I didn’t know Clio had had some medical training. Without her I’d have been lost. Then I drove like hell to Keswick and got Doctor

Hengist, who is one of us. He’d already phoned to Whitehall before I got there. I’d phoned him I was coming. There were soldiers up here on the heels of the people from Cloamby and Greystoke.”

“All those bodies,” I said.

“The three of us worked like mules. We dragged every one of the bodies, except for those in the hall, of course, every one of the bodies outside and in here into a room in the castle and shut it up. That included dear old Jocko and Porky, too, but we’ll give them a decent burial later, out on the hill by that big boulder. They’d like that.”

There were tears in her eyes. For a moment, I did not realize that she was talking about the two old men.

“We washed off the blood as well as we could and covered up what wouldn’t come off. Some high muckamuck is supposed to fly up here and make a complete report for the government, but he hasn’t shown up yet. We’ll tell him that a gang of criminals tried to kidnap us so they could force the location of the gold, which is nonexistent, of course, from us. We’ll hint that the whole thing was a Communist plot.

The only bodies for him to look at will be those in the crashed copter and in the ashes of the hall.”

“What about the cars and the men on the road?” I said. “And the landing at Penrith, and so on?”

“We don’t know anything about that.”

She hesitated and then said, “We found out—we weren’t officially notified—that one of the Nine is coming, too. One of Doc’s friends dropped in—he’s important enough to get through the military cordon—and he told us we’re going to get a surprise visit.”

“What about it? Why so alarmed?”

Clio entered then. I said, “What’s so frightening about this visit from the Nine?”

“Who’s scared?” she said.

“I’ve lived with you long enough to know you,” I said. “Besides, I can smell the fear from both of you.”

“Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “We were going to wait until you were stronger before we told you! But there’s really not time now to put it off!”

Trish said, “Doc is alive!”

43

It was a shock, but I felt glad. Perhaps, now that he was alive, he would have felt the same sense of the madness drained off which I had experienced. The third time I awoke, even with the pain, I felt an exultation. This resulted, not from the inflooding of sensation but from the departure of a sensation. I knew that the physical linkage between my sexual behavior and killing was gone. It was as if I were a bottle uncorked and turned upside down and emptied of a black stinking decayed fluid.

The shock of being castrated by Caliban may have done it. And perhaps—I hoped it was so—the shock of what I had done to him had had a similar effect on him.

I would not be absolutely certain that I was back to normal until my testicles had regenerated. That should not take much longer than the month required after the ritual excision of one testes. And it should take much less time than the six months required to regrow my right leg below the knee. I had lost this when the RAF bomber of which I was pilot crashed after a mission over Hamburg.

Trish said that Doc was sleeping on a bed behind a screen at the other end of the room. He would live. That is, until the Nine found out he was not dead.

“Doctor Hengist could not believe that Doc was still breathing. He said that he would have to die soon. It was just as well, because the Nine would not let him live. Neither Clio nor I knew that the Nine had decreed you two must fight to the death.”

Trish began to cry. She said, “It’s wrong—evil—to have to murder each other. And it’s hideously evil that the Nine can now say that Doc will have to be put out of his misery. Or that you two should have to fight again after you get back on your feet.”

“I was weak once,” I said. “I accepted the gift of immortality because the price seemed worth it. Not now. I intend to fight the Nine. But we have to be cu

“That’s what Doc said,” Trish cried, “when he was able to talk for a short time. Listen! Don’t worry too much about losing the elixir. Doc has been working for thirty years on it. He couldn’t get any samples of the elixir, of course, because the Nine controls it so rigorously. But he figured out that our tissues must be saturated with the elixir. Two years ago he cut off his own fingers and managed to isolate the elements of the elixir. He still hasn’t been able to synthesize them correctly, but he says that it’s only a matter of a short time until he will be able to do so.”

“Is Caliban in good enough shape so that he could dispense with Hengist’s services?” I said. “Could you and Trish take care of him, with remote-control advice from me? When I can get out of bed and take a look at him, I’ll take over the active doctoring.”

She nodded, and I said, “Very well. Wheel him into the room behind the fuel room. Hengist doesn’t know about that, does he?”

Trish said, “I didn’t know about it, either.”

“When Hengist next comes, you tell him that Caliban died. He’ll want to know where, because I am supposed to bring his head and genitals to the Nine.”

Trish and Clio winced.