World of Tiers 05 - The Lavalite World Read online

  So he'd put on his bike clothes and wheeled out on it, speeding along in the night, ready to outrun the pigs if they saw him. Callister was waiting for him. The other bodyguards weren't around. He didn't ask Callister where they were, since the boss didn't like questions. But Callister volunteered, anyway. The others were in a car which had been wrecked while chasing a man and a woman. They were not dead, but they were too injured to be of any use.

  Callister then had described the couple he was after, but he didn't say why he wanted them.

  Callister had stood for a moment, biting his lip. He was a big handsome honky, his curly hair yellow, his eyes a strange bright green, his face something like the movie actor's, Paul Newman.

  Abruptly, he went to a cabinet, pulled a little box about the size of a sugar cube from his pocket, held it over the lock, and the door swung open.

  Callister removed a strange-looking device from the cabinet. McKay had never seen anything like it before, but he knew it was a weapon. It had a gunstock to which was affixed a short thick barrel, like a sawed-off shotgun.

  "I've changed my mind," Callister said. "Use this, leave your .45 here. We may be where we won't want anybody to hear gunfire. Here, I'll show you how to use it."

  McKay, watching him demonstrate, began to feel a little numb. It was the first step into a series of events which made him feel as if he'd been magically transformed into an actor in a science-fiction movie. If he'd had any sense, he would have taken off then. But there wasn't one man on Earth that could have foreseen that five minutes later he wouldn't even be on Earth.

  He was still goggle-eyed when, demonstrating the "beamer", Callister had cut a chair in half. He was handed a metal vest. At least, it looked and felt like steel. But it was flexible.

  Callister put one on, too, and then he said something in a foreign language. A large circular area on the wall began glowing, then the glow disappeared, and he was staring into another world.

  "Step through the gate," Callister said. He was holding a hand weapon disguised as a revolver. It wasn't pointed at McKay, but McKay felt that it would be if he refused.

  Callister followed him in. McKay guessed that Callister was using him as a shield, but he didn't protest. If he did, he might be sliced in half. They went through another "gate" and were in still another world or dimension or whatever. And then things really began to happen. While Callister was sneaking up on their quarry, McKay circled around through the trees. All of a sudden, hell broke loose. There was this big red-haired guy with, believe it or not, a bow and arrows.

  He was behind a tree, and McKay sliced the branches of the tree off on one side. That was to scare the archer, since Callister had said that he wanted the guy-his name was Kickaha, crazy!-alive. But Kickaha had shot an arrow and McKay certainly knew where it had been aimed. Only a part of his body was not hidden by the tree behind which he was concealed. But the arrow had struck McKay on the only part showing, his shoulder.

  If he hadn't been wearing that vest, he'd have been skewered. Even as it was, the shock of the arrow knocked him down. His beamer flew away from his opening hands, and, its power still on, it rolled away.

  Then, the biggest wolf-a wolf!-McKay had ever seen had gotten caught in the ray, and it had died, cut into four different parts. McKay was lucky. If the beamer had fallen pointing the other way, it would have severed him. Though he was stunned, his shoulder and arm completely numb, he managed to get up and to run, crouching over, to another tree. He was cursing because Callister had made him leave his automatic behind. He sure as hell wasn't going into the clearing after the beamer. Not when Kickaha could shoot an arrow like that.

  Besides, he felt that he was in over his head about fifty fathoms.

  There was a hell of a lot of action after that, but McKay didn't see much of it. He climbed up on a house-sized boulder, using the projections and holes in it, hauling himself up with one hand. Later he wondered why he'd gone up where he could be trapped. But he had been in a complete panic, and it had seemed a logical thing to do. Maybe no one would think of looking for him up there. He could lie down flat and hide until things settled down. If the boss won, he'd come down. He could claim then that he'd gone up there to get a bird's-eye view of the terrain so he could call out to Callister the location of his enemies.

  Meanwhile, his beamer burned itself out, half-melting a large boulder fifty feet from it while doing so.

  He saw Callister running toward the couple and another man, and he thought Callister had control of the situation. Then the red-haired Kickaha, who was lying on the ground, had said something to the woman. And she'd lifted a funny-looking trumpet to her lips and started blowing some notes. Callister had suddenly stopped, yelled something, and then he'd run like a striped-ass ape away from them.

  And suddenly they were in another world. If things had been bad before, they were now about as bad as they could be. Well, maybe not quite as bad. At least, he was alive. But there had been times when he'd wished he wasn't.

  So here he was, twelve "days" later. Much had been explained to him, mostly by Kickaha. But he still couldn't believe that Callister, whose real name was Urthona, and Red Ore and Anana were thousands of years old. Nor that they had come from another world, what Kickaha called a pocket universe. That is, an artificial continuum, what the science-fiction movies called the fourth dimension, something like that.

  The Lords, as they called themselves, claimed to have made Earth. Not only that, the sun, the other planets, the stars-which weren't really stars, they just looked like they were-the whole damn universe.

  In fact, they claimed to have created the ancestors of all Earth people in laboratories.

  Not only that-it made his brain bob up and down, like a cork on an ocean wave-there were many artificial pocket universes. They'd been constructed to have different physical laws than those on Earth's universe.

  Apparently, some ten thousand or so years ago, the Lords had split. Each had gone off to his or her own little world to rule it. And they'd become enemies, out to get each other's ass.

  Which explained why Urthona and Ore, Anana's own uncles, had tried to kill her and each other.

  Then there was Kickaha. He'd been born Paul Janus Finnegan in 1918 in some small town in Indiana. After World War II he'd gone to the University of Indiana as a freshman, but before a year was up he was involved with the Lords. He'd first lived on a peculiar world he called the World of Tiers. There he'd gotten the name of Kickaha from a tribe of Indians that lived on one level of the planet, which seemed to be constructed like the tower of babel or the leaning tower of Pisa. Or whatever. Indians? Yes, because the Lord of that world, Jadawin, had populated various levels with people he'd abducted from Earth.

  It was very confusing. Jadawin hadn't always lived on the home planet of the Lords or in his own private cosmos. For a while he'd been a citizen of Earth, and he hadn't even known it because of amnesia. Then... to hell with it. It made McKay's head ache to think about it. But some day, when there was time enough, if he lived long enough, he'd get it all straightened out. If he wasn't completely nuts before then.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KlCKAHA SAID, "I'm a Hoosier appleknocker, Angus. So I'm going to get us some fresh fruit. But I need your help. We can't get close because of those tentacles. However, the tree has one weak point in its defense. Like a lot of people, it can't keep its mouth shut.

  "So, I'm going to shoot an arrow into its mouth. It may not kill it, but it's going to hurt it. Hopefully, the impact will knock it over. This bow packs a hell of a wallop. As soon as the thing's hit, you run up and throw this axe at a branch. Try to hit a cluster of apples if you can. Then I'll decoy it away from the apples on the ground."

  He handed Anana's light throwing axe to McKay.

  "What about those?" McKay said, pointing at three trees which were only twenty feet below their intended victim. They were coming slowly but steadily.

  "Maybe we can get their apples, too. We need that fruit, Angus. We
need the nourishment, and we need the water in them."

  "You don't have to explain that," McKay said.

  "I'm like the tree. I can't keep my mouth shut," Kickaha said, smiling.

  He fitted an arrow to the string, aimed, and released it. It shot true, plunging deep into the O-shaped orifice. The plant had just raised the two tentacles to take another step upward and then to fall slightly forward to catch itself on the rubbery extensions. Kickaha had loosed the shaft just as it was off balance. It fell backward, and it lay on its hinder part. The tentacles threshed, but it could not get up by itself. The branches extending from its side prevented its rolling over even if it had been capable, otherwise, of doing so.

  Kickaha gave a whoop and put a hand on McKay's shoulder.

  "Never mind throwing the axe. The apples are knocked off. Hot damn!"

  The three trees below it had stopped for a moment. They moved on up. There had not been a sound from their mouths, but to the two men the many rolling eyes seemed to indicate some sort of communication. According to Urthona, however, the creatures were incapable of thought. But they did cooperate on an instinctual level, as ants did. Now they were evidently coming to assist their fallen mate.

  Kickaha ran ahead of McKay, who had hesitated. He looked behind him. The two male Lords were standing about sixty feet above them. Anana, beamer in hand, was watching, her head moving back and forth to keep all within eye-range.

  Urthona had, of course, told McKay to kill Anana and Kickaha if he ever got a chance. But if he hit the redhead from behind with the axe, he'd be shot down by Anana. Besides, he was beginning to think that he had a better chance of survival if he joined up with Anana and Kickaha. Anyway, Kickaha was the only one who didn't treat him as if he was a nigger. Not that the Lords had any feeling for blacks as such. They regarded everybody but Lords as some sort of nigger. And they weren't friendly with their own kind.

  McKay ran forward and stopped just out of reach of a threshing tentacle. He picked up eight apples, stuffing four in the pockets of his levis and holding two in each hand.

  When he straightened up, he gasped. That crazy Kickaha had leaped onto the fallen tree and was now pulling the arrow from the hole. As he raised the shaft, its head dripping with a pale sticky fluid, he was enwrapped by a tentacle around his waist. Instead of fighting it, he rammed his right foot deep into the hole. And he twisted sideways.

  The next moment he was flying backward toward McKay, flung by a convulsive motion of the tentacle, no doubt caused by intense pain.

  McKay, instead of ducking, grabbed Kickaha and they both went down. The catcher suffered more punishment than the caught, but for a minute or more they both lay on the ground, Kickaha on top of McKay. Then the redhead rolled off and got to his feet.

  He looked down at McKay. "You okay?"

  McKay sat up and said, "I don't think I broke anything."

  "Thanks. If you hadn't softened my fall, I might have broken my back. Maybe. I'm pretty agile. Man, there's real power in those tentacles."

  Anana was with them by then. She cried, "Are you hurt, Kickaha?"

  "No. Black Angus here, he seems okay, too."

  McKay said, "Black Angus? Why, you son of a bitch!"

  Kickaha laughed. "It's an inevitable pun. Especially if you've been raised on a farm. No offense, McKay."

  Kickaha turned. The three advance scouts were no closer. The swelling hill had steepened its slopes, making it even more difficult for them to maintain their balance. The horde behind them was also stalled.

  "We don't have to retreat up the hill," Kickaha said. "It's withdrawing for us."

  However, the slope was becoming so steep that, if its rate of change continued, it would precipitate everybody to the bottom. The forty-five degree angle to the horizontal could become ninety degrees within fifteen minutes.

  "We're in a storm of matter-change," Kickaha said. "If it blows over quickly, we're all right, If not..."

  The tree's tentacles were moving feebly. Apparently, Kickaha's foot had injured it considerably. Pale fluid oozed out of its mouth.

  Kickaha picked up the axe that McKay had dropped. He went to the tree and began chopping at its branches. Two strokes per limb sufficed to sever them. He cut at the tentacles, which were tougher. Four chops each amputated these.

  He dropped the axe and lifted one end of the trunk and swung it around so that it could be rolled down the slope.

  Anana said,"You're wasting your energy."

  Kickaha said, "Waiting to see what's going to happen burns up more energy. At this moment, anyway. There's a time for patience and a time for energy."

  He placed himself at the middle of the trunk and pushed it. It began rolling slowly, picked up speed, and presently, flying off a slight hump, flew into a group of trees. These fell backward, some rolling, breaking their branches, others flying up and out as if shot out of a cannon.

  The effect was incremental and geometrical. When it was done, at least five hundred of the things lay in a tangled heap in the ravine at the foot of the slope. Not one could get up by itself. It looked like the results of a combination of avalanche and flood.

  "It's a logjam!" Kickaha said.

  No log jam, however, on Earth featured the wavings of innumerable octopus-tentacles. Nor had any forest ever hastened to the aid of its stricken members.

  "Birnam Wood on the march," Kickaha said.

  Neither Anana nor McKay understood the reference, but they were too tired and anxious to ask him to explain it.

  By now the humans were having a hard time keeping from falling down the slope. They clung to the grass while the three advance guards slid down on their "backs" toward the mess in the hollow at the base.

  "I'm getting down," Kickaha said. He turned and began sliding down on the seat of his pants. The others followed him. When the friction became too great on their buttocks, they dug in their heels to brake. Halfway down they had to halt and turn over so their bottoms could cool off. Their trouser seats were worn away in several spots.

  "Did you see that water?" Kickaha said. He pointed to his right.

  Anana said, "I thought I did. But I assumed it was a mirage of some sort."

  "No. Just before we started down, I saw a big body of water that way. It must be about fifteen miles away, at least. But you know how deceiving distances are here."

  Directly below them, about two hundred feet away, was the living logjam. The humans resumed their rolling but at an angle across the ever-steepening slope. McKay's helmet, Kickaha's bow and quiver, and Anana's beamer and axe, impeded their movements but they managed. They fell the last ten feet, landing on their feet or on all fours.

  The trees paid them no attention. Apparently, the instinct to save their fellows was dominating the need to kill and eat. However, the plants were so closely spaced that there was no room for the five people to get through the ranks.

  They looked up the hill. This side was vertical now and beginning to bulge at the top. Hot air radiated from the hill.

  "The roots of the grass will keep that overhang from falling right away," Kickaha said. "But for how long? When it does come down, we'll be wiped out."

  The plants moved toward the tangle, side by side, the tips of their branches touching. Those nearest the humans moved a little to their right to avoid bumping into them. But the outreaching tentacles made the humans nervous.

  After five minutes, the apex of the hill was beginning to look like a mushroom top. It wouldn't be long before a huge chunk tore loose and fell upon them.

  Anana said, "Like it or not, Kickaha, we have to use the beamer."

  "You're thinking the same thing I am? Maybe we won't have to cut through every one between us and open ground. Maybe those things burn?"

  Urthona said, "Are you crazy? We could get caught in the fire!"

  "You got a better suggestion?"

  "Yes. I think we should adjust the beamer to cutting and try to slice our way out."

  "I don't think there's enough ch
arge left to do that," Anana said. "We'd find ourselves in the middle of this mess. The plants might attack us then. We'd be helpless."

  "Burn a couple," Kickaha said. "But not too near us."

  Anana rotated the dial in the inset at the bottom of the grip. She aimed the weapon at the back of a tree five yards to her right. For a few seconds there was no result. Then the bark began smoking. Ten seconds later, it burst into flames. The plant did not seem immediately aware of what was happening. It continued waddling toward the tangle. But those just behind stopped. They must have smelled the smoke, and now their survival instinct-or program-was taking over.