Gateway to Elsewhere

Chapter 15

And he felt himself shooting skyward with breath-taking velocity! There was one instant when a huge, feathered body was directly below him—a body so huge that it gave him a queer sensation of being an insect chased by an infuriated hen. Then he was clear and rising. There were great, veined wings beating on either side, there was a scaly body below him, doubtlessly a serpentine tail behind him, and a long, snaky neck in front with a head he could not see clearly.

That neck twisted and a specifically indefinite face appeared—or rather, did not appear. It looked like mist, yet there were eyes in it, and Abdul’s plaintive voice came to Tony above the beat of mighty wings.

“Lord,” said Abdul miserably, “if you have some weapon to use against Es-Souk, if you tell me how you wish to use it, I will try to give you the opportunity. If you do not win this fight, lord, I am ruined!”

“I’ve got a weapon, all right,” said Tony. “I’d intended to use it on the ground, away from you and Nasim. It’s pretty deadly to any djinn anywhere near by.”

Abdul make a moaning sound.

“But if anything happens to you,” said Tony, “I’ll have a nasty fall. So—hm… get us some height, and then if you can let Es-Souk dive at me from behind, I think I can use my weapon so you won’t be affected.”

The desert shrank as the unnamed creature into which Abdul had transformed himself strove desperately for height. Tony found a strap hitched to the saddle, intended to make the rider secure in his place. He fastened it and felt better. He saw the roc, far below, beginning to beat upward with furious strokes of its long pinions.

He tucked away his cigarette case and got out his two stones and the handkerchief and the full phial of lasf. He rearranged the stones and the phial in the handkerchief. He tied the whole together, tugging at the corners of the handkerchief with his teeth. The combination made a fairly handy if eccentric hand grenade. But of course it could not possibly explode.

Then he watched with an unnatural calm. Just as in an airplane one has no sensation of height, so on this peculiar mount he felt as if he were in some sensational illusory ride in an amusement park. He even examined the creature he rode, while the mountain tops grew level with him and then sank a thousand feet or more below.

“Abdul,” he said. “What on earth are you, anyhow? I’ve never seen anything like this!”

Abdul said miserably:

“I had indigestion one night, lord, and dreamed this. So I practiced making myself into it. It has been much admired. The touch of having the creature possess no actual, visible face is considered very effective, and I—I thought at one time that Nasim was much impressed by it. But she became betrothed to Es-Souk. I think, lord, that the form I wear might be called a chimaera.”

Tony said:

“Nasim liked it, eh?… here comes Es-Souk! Level off, Abdul, and let him get on our tail. When he comes diving in I’ll do my stuff, and when I yell you put on the heat. Get away from there fast! Understand?”

“Aye, lord.” And then Abdul wailed from that misty emptiness which was the chimaera’s face, “If I ever get out of this, I will never speak so soon again! I will never offer allegiance to any other—”

The very mountains seemed like toadstools below them. Tony could see over uncountable square miles of desert and foothills. He even thought he saw a dark smudge against the horizon which might be the oasis and the city of Barkut—

Tony felt a shadow fall upon him—the shadow of the roc, a thousand feet above. It screamed at him.

“Get set now,” said Tony, between his teeth. “Ready—let’s go! He’s diving, Abdul!”

The roc flattened its wings, partly folding them, and came rushing down in a deadly plunge. Actually, Es-Souk was still at least partly bluffed. Tony had been too confident, and Es-Souk was a cagey djinn. He’d had one experience of hand-to-hand fighting with Tony, and he had sneezed so horribly that—knowing what he knew—he had been scared to the very last atom of his fissionable being. But since Tony was now some twelve thousand feet above ground-level, on chimaera-back, it would be possible to kill him even more surely than by tearing him limb from limb. A furious assault upon Abdul, in some tender member, should make the djinn-chimaera react in typical djinn fashion—by metamorphosis. Abdul could definitely be forced to change to something else. And if he failed of absolute presence of mind, he would forget to include Tony’s saddle and safety belt in his new shape, and Tony would thump into the desert below in a completely conclusive finish to the duel.

So the roc plunged savagely—seemingly for Tony, but intending a last-second swerve and the chewing-up of one of Abdul’s chimaera-wings. In sheer self-defense Abdul must repair the damage by changing form, and—

“Brakes, Abdul!” commanded Tony. “He’s not gaining fast enough!”

Abdul slowed—and the roc gained. Closer—closer—its great beak gaping. It was almost time for the swerve and the slashing attack which would send Tony plunging some two miles and more to death.

Tony shouted, “Now, Abdul! Brake hard! That’ll make him overshoot—”

Abdul braked. Chimaeras are extraordinarily maneuverable creatures. Abdul seemed practically to stop short in mid-air. The roe almost crashed into him, its cavernous beak widening in awful menace.

Actually, the roc’s beak was no more than twenty feet away when Tony squeezed hard on his improvised bomb, felt the glass crunch—and heaved the cloth-wrapped missile into the gaping throat. It was an excellent shot. He saw the little object go flying down the two-yard, open gullet to its maw.

“Roger!” roared Tony. “Step on it! Move!”

Then he felt as if his neck would snap off. Abdul took evasive action. It began with an outside loop that made the safety belt creak hideously, was followed by a wing-over at the bottom, and then continued as a power dive in which the wind went pouring into Tony’s open mouth until he felt as if he were being forcibly inflated.

But even then he looked back.

The roc was motionless, as if paralyzed by some awful shock. But the paralysis lasted only for seconds. Suddenly the already huge form expanded still more. It struggled convulsively. It sneezed. In its struggling it had not stayed on an even keel. The sneeze had all the propulsive effect of a high-temperature jet. It kicked the suddenly shapeless object violently higher. It writhed. It struggled again, very horribly. It ceased to be a bird, it was impossible to say what it was! Another convulsion even more violent than the first. The almost amoeboid object shot higher—it had pseudopods now, which appeared at random and flailed aimlessly but with terrific force. A second convulsive sneeze ejected so huge a volume of air with such violence that the djinn was shot up a good five thousand feet.

Es-Souk was maddened, now, with the knowledge of his doom. He went into lunatic gyrations which turned into flight straight upward. But he flew now not by wings or any motion of any members, but by the lightning-swift protrusion of a threadlike pseudopod far ahead and the equally lightning-like flowing of all his substance up to and into it, and the instant repetition of the process.

Even huge as he now was, he rose so swiftly as to dwindle as Tony watched. At ten miles altitude there was a convulsive sidewise jerking of the climbing thing. Another sneeze. He continued to shoot frantically skyward. Twenty miles up… he was probably a quarter-mile across, but he became a speck which could barely be distinguished.

Then he blew up. He must have been fifty miles high, at least. He was in the upper troposphere. And he must have weighed several hundred pounds. Perhaps not all his substance disintegrated. Even human atomic bombs do not detonate with one hundred percent conversion of their mass into free energy. Es-Souk’s efficiency as a bomb was probably less than that of purified U235 or plutonium. But the flare was colossal. There was a sensation of momentary, terrific heat. No sound, of course. The explosion took place where the air was too thin to carry sound. For the same reason there was no concussion wave. But the flash of Es-Souk’s detonation was several times brighter than the sun and a dozen times the sun’s diameter.

Minutes later, Abdul came rather heavily to a landing on the desert. Tony dismounted. Abdul seemed to dissolve suddenly and run together, without any intermediate state, to restore the djinn to his short, swart, human form, with the turban atop his head. He was trembling.

“Lord!” he said in a shaking voice. “I did not know how terrible was your weapon! I did not know that you were so much more powerful than the most powerful of djinns. Indeed, lord, I apologize for regretting that I offered my allegiance. I did not speak too soon, lord! I did not speak soon enough! And by the beard of the Prophet, I swear that you are my king and my ruler for always!”

Tony swallowed. That flare in the midday sky had been unnerving.

“All right, Abdul,” he said. “We’ll let it go at that. You’ve been worried about protection. As far as I can, I’ll give it to you—”

“Protection, lord?” said Abdul, beaming. “It is I who will be begged for protection now! My friends who have seen Es-Souk destroyed will come to me begging me to intercede that you do not destroy them also! You will let me boast before them, lord? After all, I was the chimaera on which you rode when you destroyed Es-Souk in such a manner that no others of the djinn were harmed! I did help you, to the best of my poor ability!”

“Naturally—” began Tony. Then Nasim’s voice came to him.

“You carried him, Abdul,” said Nasim proudly, “which is what a djinn should do for his king. But I played the part of a proper djinnee, too! I held his coat!”

Tony turned to her. He accepted the belted-in-the-back camel’s-hair coat. Then he said politely:

“That was very nice of you, Nasim. I appreciate it a lot. But won’t you please put on some clothes?”