A Company of Heroes Book Four: The Scientist Read online

  Was Thud looking so pensive, she wondered, because something about this hugely unexpected excavation was stirring sentimental recollections?

  “Too bad about the peanuts,” he finally said.

  “What?”

  “Too bad about the peanuts,” he repeated.

  “What peanuts?”

  “Ooly Spunkster’s peanuts. He made really good peanuts. I think I’ll miss them.”

  “Forget the peanuts. What about Ooly Spunkster?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Thud looked thoughtful.

  What about them all? she wondered, with a frisson of horror vibrating her spine like a plucked mandolin string. What about the acrobats and roustabouts and Mr. Dreedny the ticket-taker; what about the horses and the trained pigeons, especially Jumpy, and absolutely everything that Thud and I had to our names? She glanced up to where a black cloud of vaporized circus was smearing itself across the once-blue sky, like a water stain on a freshly-plastered ceiling, and realized that a whole world had been reduced to that greasy-looking cumulus.

  “Who’re they?” asked Thud, interrupting her incipient depression, pointing back toward the ruined town. Rykkla followed his gaze and saw that there was quite a disrespectable crowd approaching, about halfway between the ruined village and the raised rim of the crater. “I don’t know,” she replied, a certain foreboding tingeing her voice. Indeed, the temper of the mass of people was apparent even at this distance and it was unmistakably hostile.

  “We’d better get away from here,” she suggested, but Thud answered with an entirely reasonable and realistic “Where?” Rykkla had to submit to the unanswerability of that question. Where, indeed? Behind them was a steaming bowl-shaped depression half a mile wide, filled with treacherous-looking pulverized rocks and boulders, and hundreds of feet deep. Surrounding this was an apparently illimitable expanse of unattractively evil desert; the nearest other village was no doubt no more hospitable than this one. The nearest (and only) real city was the capital, Spondula, and that must be a hundred miles away. There was little else to do but remain and face the vanguard of the villagers, who were just then clambering up the rubbly slope immediately below. By the time they reached the crater rim, their robes and baggy trousers were torn and filthier than ever. The mass of men were sullen and stupid-looking. The ones in front, however, while looking only a little more intelligent, had a kind of wild-eyed cunning that once again plucked Rykkla’s spine.

  The first to speak was Thud. “Hello, there,” he greeted.

  “Infidel dogs!” answered the foremost of the villagers, succinctly confirming Rykkla’s premonitory qualmishness. “Profane blasphemer!” he continued in the same vein. “Deviate devil-mongering whore of the Weedking! Heathen allotheistic demon-fornicating pagan witch-slut!”

  The temper of the people who had gathered around the angry haranguer was clearly little better than his own, and his words were doing nothing to improve their mood. They shook their fists and grunted to express their solidarity.

  “What are you talking about?” Rykkla asked, in as reasonable tone as she could, as the man paused to take a breath.

  Her interlocutor seemed so taken aback, whether at the import of her question or that she had dared to speak at all, she couldn’t say, that he was unable to reply for a long moment. When he was able to regain his speech, his voice had risen an octave with indignity and outrage. Spittle mixed with the dust on his scraggly beard, making little balls of mud that were flung left and right.

  “Bestial defiler!” he shrieked, reduced to sentence fragments, “Degenerate! Desecrator! Harlot! Polluter! Canker! Abomination!Pervert!Befoulmentcorruptiontaintevilloathsome, aghaghagh . . . ”

  Reduced to incoherent spluttering, the man suddenly clutched at his chest, his face turning an attractive magenta. While he attempted to regain composure, breath and regular heartbeat, another stepped into the breech, pretty much picking up where the other had left off, but was, Rykkla was thankful, considerably more informative if no less abusive.

  “Musrum has wiped your unclean monstrosity from the face of the desert, as He would flick a booger from His great nostril! like a blackhead squeezed from the purity of his infinite cheek! Your odious, vile, squalid exhibition of unspeakable obscenities has been purged! Those abominations of nature! Those bestial freaks! Women who displayed their bodies and men who were not men!”

  “That may be so,” replied Rykkla, “But that’s really my problem, isn’t it, whatever your personal opinion may be? I mean, I’m the one left with the hole in the ground.”

  “Hussy! Slut! Whore! Libertine! Strumpet! Trollop! Bitch, drab, trull, quean, harridan, adventuress!” screamed the first man, who had recovered himself with the vigor that only the truly fanatic possesses. “See what you and your unholy monster have brought down upon us? See how Musrum has punished us for allowing your filthy exhibitions within our peaceful, beautiful, Musrum-fearing city?”

  “I don’t know what your problem is, you goat-eating blister. But it’s my circus that is gone and everything that I possessed with it. But your ‘beautiful city’, and if you insist upon calling it that, I’ll go along with you, but I can tell you that I’ve seen more attractive ant farms, your beautiful city is still there, more’s the pity. And so far as I can tell, it doesn’t look all that much worse than it did yesterday. In fact, if you’d like my personal opinion, it wasn’t my circus that Musrum was trying to cauterize. His aim was just a half-mile off.”

  The first man purpled beautifully, falling backward into the arms of those behind him, or would have if they had expected his sudden collapse. Instead he tobagganed headfirst on his back down the rubbly slope in a welter of flying pebbles and clouds of yellow dust. The others watched until he came to a halt against the flat surface of a shattered, house-sized boulder. Satisfied that their friend was safely inert, they turned their hostile eyes back to the ex-circus owners.

  “What do you want of us, anyway?” cried Rykkla, losing her patience, which allowed just a little too much of the rising fear beneath to show.

  “Musrum wants His vengeance! His wrath is yet to be paid out! The uncleanness is still affronting Him!”

  “So what?”

  Rather than answer the girl, the man instead turned to his companions and screeched, “You’ve seen how Musrum abominates this obscenity we’ve allowed in our midst! This may only be a warning! What will He do if we allow these pagan dogs to remain alive as much as another second?”

  The crowd shouted their agreement, as Rykkla had been afraid they would. “Thud?” she said, “Won’t you please get us out of here?”

  The giant immediately bent to pick up a rock, but at the very moment that he pointed the crown of his head at the mob a well-launched stone bounced off the perfect target it presented, making an almost musical twock! It did not seem to do more than daze him, but it did make him suddenly sit down, a surprised look on his face. It did not take the villagers, who might be zealots but were not slow, more than a heartbeat to overwhelm him, as half a dozen others caught Rykkla by her arms and legs. They pummeled the big man with the clubs they had brought with them, and those that had come unarmed used blocks of stone as large and as substantial as their own heads. Rykkla screamed and struggled, but with four strong men at each of her limbs she was helpless. Something horrified within her realized that Thud had become perhaps too human; he was a strong man now, not an invulnerable Kobold. Soon, the mob backed away from Thud, who remained on the ground, a shapeless mound as large as any four of the others, as inert as a poleaxed ox.

  “Come on!” cried the leader, “Get him up so we can get back to town!”

  “We can’t, ak-Sloon,” replied one of the others, looking down at the ex-Kobold’s enormous bulk. “He must weigh a ton!”

  “We can’t leave him here, not while he’s still alive!”

  “Well, we can’t move him, either, so what do you suggest?”

  “We could hold the trial here,” suggested one.

  “Can�
�t do that! That’d be entirely irregular!” said another.

  “So what?”

  “Look what’s happened already! I think we’d better do things right and not press our luck.”

  “He’s got a point, ak-Milf. Better get the priest here, I guess.”

  “Father Spranbran would never make it! He must be a thousand years old! He’d fly into a hundred pieces before he got halfway here.”

  “You’re treading pretty near the edge of blasphemy yourself, ak-Glool,” said ak-Sloon sternly. “You’d better watch your mouth, because if you don’t, there are others who will!”

  This threat cowed all of them into a sullen, frightened silence, not a few stealing furtive glances toward the otherwise peacefully bland and, had they but known it, disinterested sky. “Since Musrum obviously believes in overkill,” suggested Rykkla, “I hope that he doesn’t decide to drop a mountain on that man.”

  “Shut your feculent mouth, degenerate offal!” the ostensible leader cried, but with a fearful glance at the distant, still-quiet heavens. The others shuffled away from ak-Glool, who began to look frightened, as though he had suddenly discovered that he was nothing more than a gnat occupying the bulls-eye of a target belonging to transcendental superbeings accustomed to practicing their skills with whole lightning bolts.

  “Come on, fellows!” ak-Glool whined. “I was only thinking of the Father’s health! You’ve got to admit that he’s getting along!”

  “True enough,” admitted ak-Sloon. “But you better watch yourself, you’re getting a little outspoken of late. You’ve got to remember that there’s nothing to think of for yourself that Musrum hasn’t thought of for you already.”

  “Not another word!” And from that moment Rykkla never again heard the man called ak-Glool speak and, in fact, he did not open his mouth to utter an articulate syllable for more than seven months, not until he saw ak-Sloon, who was the local blacksmith, accidentally drop an anvil on his foot and utter a red-hot obscenity. Ak-Glool cried a single “Aha!” before collapsing into such fits of laughter that he had a seizure from which he never quite entirely recovered. He was forced to live on the charity of his fellow villagers after that, surviving, as a consequence, only three or four days.

  Rykkla was, of course, unaware of these forthcoming events and would have been disinterested in any case (though she certainly would have been amused to hear of ak-Sloon’s accident and was always keen to learn a fresh obscenity). Her own immediate future was sufficiently interesting to preoccupy her, especially in its present speculativeness. But what had they done to Thud? It wasn’t possible that they’d killed him, was it? Was it possible that Thud could be killed?

  “Leave him alone!” she cried, “He’s not done you any harm!”

  “I told you to shut up, vermin-spawn!” said ak-Sloon, striking her across the face. The back of his hand was horny and abraded her skin like coarse sandpaper. She worked up a gobbet of spit mixed with blood and spat it at him. He leaped as though an angry scorpion had landed on him. “Eeek!” he screamed shrilly, “Unclean! Unclean!” and began pulling at the sleeve of his costume, tearing away the place her spittle had spattered.

  “You’re mad!” she shouted at him. “All of you are mad!”

  “Get her into town!” ak-Sloon ordered, “We’ll deal with her there quickly enough!”

  “But what about this thing?”

  Ak-Sloon went over to where Thud lay motionless and cautiously prodded the inert body with his toe. When he got no reaction, he bravely gave Thud a hefty kick in the ribs. Little seismic waves rippled to and fro, as they might in a disturbed gelatine mold, but there was still no reaction. Rykkla screamed for them to let the big man alone, but she was ignored.

  “It’s practically dead, now,” Ak-Sloon pronounced. “Push it into the crater, back into the pit from which it came.”

  It took considerable effort, but the men managed to roll Thud to the edge of the precipice and, at a signal from ak-Sloon, pushed him over the brink. The last that Rykkla saw of Thud was a brief glimpse of a truncated pentagram of outstretched arms and legs pinwheeling out of sight.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROCKETS

  Professor Wittenoom explained to Princess Bronwyn that the imminent breakup of the lesser moon was perhaps the most delightfully auspicious event imaginable.

  He was alone with her in the loft that the Academy of Science had devoted to the vastly intricate machinery of its recomplicated calculating machine. A steam engine in the basement of the building drove the device via a complex system of belts which whipped and cracked inside their housings like a captive Wild West show. The calculating engine filled the vast room from floor to ceiling and almost from wall to wall with a dense coraline complexity of drive shafts and shimmering brass gears. An ivory-buttoned keyboard, something like that belonging to a linotype machine, allowed the operator to feed mathematical problems into the device. Answers appeared on a series of large circular dials and counters in the glass-fronted mahogany panel above the keyboard. If desired, the information on the dials could be printed on a long paper tape, like that of a stock market ticker or automatic telegraph. When the machine was functioning, a team of specialized engineers, stationed at strategic points around and within, oversaw the smoothness and continuity of its operation. It was much quieter than its size and complexity would lead one to expect, the only sounds were the rattling of the operator’s keys, the thrumming of the drive belts and a kind of deep, harmonic, metallic humming, such as might be produced by a hive of brass-plated bees. At the moment the machine was temporarily disengaged to allow Wittenoom to thread his cadaverously elongated body among the engine’s glimmering complexities. He was searching out an errant cog as a persevering cat pursues its dinner. The machine itself may have more aptly thought him a species of tapeworm hungrily exploring its brazen duodenum.

  “That’s terrible,” said the princess. “The little moon is my favorite; it’s the pretty one. Why does it have to be the one to break up?”

  “I have no idea,” shrugged the scientist, his head and shoulders appearing momentarily, protruding from the wall of gears like a mounted trophy. “But that’s really the whole point, don’t you see? The fact that we don’t know gives us reason to try and find out. Indeed, it impels us.”

  “So you find out. What good does that do anyone, short of depriving us of a moon? We’ve only got two, you know, which is none too many to spare.”

  “Oh, the knowledge in and of itself doesn’t really matter, I suppose; astronomy isn’t my field, as you know. Once the moon’s gone, what difference can it make to know what made it go? What does matter is that it gives us every impetus to finish The Project.”

  “The rocket?”

  “It’s been horribly expensive, and the government, that is, your Uncle Felix, has been increasingly reluctant to continue funding. I don’t think that he would have carried it this far if it hadn’t been for your interest in it. I think that after being forced to sell you out to the Church, however relunctantly, he has felt the need for reparations. In any case, whether the information is pertinent or not, everyone wants to know what’s happening to the small moon, and the only certain way to find out is to go there and see for ourselves.”

  The princess considered this. She had until this very conversation been certain of her place in the forthcoming lunar expedition, but was now silently reevaluating. A bizarre and alien landscape was one thing, but she had always been assured that both of the moons were dead, barren worlds, their tectonic timepieces long ago unwound. She did not know if she was quite so keen on visiting a place that might be disintegrating beneath her feet like an ice floe on a sunny spring day.

  The professor observed his young friend as she became lost in her doubtlessly ineffable thoughts, her elongated figure draped languidly over the arms of her chair like a six-foot length of rope. Not for the first time he wondered at what a strange girl she was. She always appeared to be so lonely . . . even in a crowded ballroom she made
those around her seem like ghosts. She had friends, of course, even close ones: Thud and Rykkla (though she had not seen either one for a very long time), himself and, of course, Gyven (though he too had not been seen around the Academy very often lately, now that Wittenoom thought about it). This was not a very extensive list, the professor concluded. He looked even more sympathetically at the hawkish profile silhouetted against the window. Bronwyn’s languid sinuosities were barely concealed by her light summer frock, a filmy, gossamer aura like the nacreous membrane of some pallid and introspective mollusk. This was a striking metaphor for the unpoetic professor and it caused him to look at the princess critically; no, he decided, not even the elegant Gluteus gelatinea, or Plimsoll’s Sea Pudding, could seriously rival her beauty.

  Poor Bronwyn; even Gyven, who could effortlessly bore a railway tunnel through the most adamantine massif, was incapable of chiseling so much as a brick from the wall that surrounded her. The princess was a master psychic mason. It saddened and frustrated the professor, who was very fond of the curious girl, to see her so unhappy. As a scientist he was something of a genius and for a scientist he was unusually empathetic, yet there was little that he had been able to do to improve her condition. It seemed that at one and the same time she desperately wanted to be content and yet could not allow herself to be so. There was something that stirred within the man, who was not quite so old as to be elderly; something unfamiliar, or once familiar and long forgotten; something small and vulnerable and warm and furry, as though a hedgehog had just stirred fitfully in a midwinter dream, had sighed a little satisfied breath and, forgetting its interruption, snuggled deeper into its earthy fantasies. The professor also sighed, perhaps echoing his hidden hibernator, and withdrew into the pristine, well-ordered mind of his machine.

  With the professor once again self-absorbed Bronwyn unwound from her chair and strolled over to one of the tall windows that overlooked the broad park that adjoined the Academy, to gaze at the stumpy, silvery tower that had been growing there for more than four months. It looked not unlike a truncated farm silo: a squat hexagonal prism, missing only its domed turret atop. Instead of innocent silage, however, the tower contained hundreds of individual rockets, enough to carry a nose cone all the way to the lesser moon and back, or blow a hole in the landscape large enough to make worthwhile the creation of an artificial lake which, she imagined immodestly, would no doubt be posthumously named for her. But then, Bronwyn always had possessed a macabre turn of mind.