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  "Are you mad?" Bradley repeated.

  "No," Conn said. "Look, Brad, I've got to recharge my batteries and get back in time before this landslip crushes the machine. Will you help me?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about."

  Conn said: "I explained all that to Rollins. Listen, Brad, this means life to me. I couldn't be happy in your world. I've got to get back to where I belong. Just help me for ten minutes. That's all I ask."

  Bradley said: "Ten minutes. That's all I can spare. Conn. We'll be needed in the cavern."

  "Fine." Conn pointed to the tractor. "Get her jacked up on boulders or something and smash off the treads—"

  He pressed the studs in combination. The disk of rubble sank down, carrying him with it. The walls of the shaft were ominously cracked, and as he neared the chamber entrance he could hear the steel squealing.

  He thrust open the door. The batteries were exhausted so he could get no light. Conn fumbled in the spare-parts cabinet and withdrew a coil of insulated wire. He made quick connections to the battery terminals, unreeled the wire and started the disk upward, playing out the wire as he arose.

  Bradley and his men had gotten the tractor up on boulders and were hammering off the treads. Conn removed his belt, squirmed under the machine, and belted the forward drive axle to the generator. This way, he figured, he'd get double the power in half the time. The generator might burn out. Then again it might not. This was a terrific tractor. Conn yanked the generator leads off the storage batteries and connected them to the wires from his own batteries.

  He threw in the clutch. The Diesel roared and set the axle into a spinning whine. Conn prayed the vibrations wouldn't throw the tractor over on her side before his batteries were charged. He leaped to the disk and sent it down.

  The accumulator needle had already drifted away from the red exhaustion point and was creeping along the dial. Overhead Conn heard Bradley shout. He stepped out on the disk and looked up. Bradley's head was a black dot in the shaft mouth.

  "Fire's almost reached us, Conn!" he shouted.

  Conn felt the earth rumble again. Suddenly he realized that Bradley had his own troubles, too.

  "O.K., Brad," he called. "Don't need you any more. Get about your own business. My regards to Rollins and the rest. Good luck—"

  "Good luck, Conn!" Yet Bradley lingered.

  "Go on," Conn laughed, "get out of this. Oh, and by the way—I left my sack of bombs up there. Fair exchange. Heave me down one of those lances, will you? Nineteen forty-one could use them—"

  The lance slithered down. Conn managed to cradle it in his arms. He looked up at Bradley and had a mighty desire to shake hands with the man—with his whole fighting generation. But there was a fifty-foot gap between them; a thousand-year gap between them.

  Conn said: "Will you get out of here!"

  "All right," Bradley said. "So long. I wish you'd stay with us. We could use your guts—"

  Then he was gone. Conn brought the lance inside and placed it on the platform. He set the controls for April, 1941. Then he looked at the accumulator dial. The needle had crept far up. It wouldn't take long now.

  Maybe a thousand watts or so were pouring into his batteries. Maybe more. Whether or not he got back to Hilda would depend on how long it took before the fire reached the tractor and fused everything, or how long it took before this hill settled down a few feet and washed him flat. He listened to the far-off drone of the Diesel and prayed. He listened to the creak and groan of rock on steel and prayed.

  A whiff of smoke reached his nostrils. Conn stood at the door, waiting until the last minute before he would be forced to send the disk up. He was quivering with fear. He tried to think of anything to distract himself. He thought: Those Readers. With Uranium 237 they've stumbled closer to atomic power than we did in all the glory of our mechanized society.

  He thought: America can use these blast lances. That'll be another factor added to the past from the future—and it'll create still another infinity of alternative futures.

  Conn coughed and realized that the shaft was heavy with smoke. Above him he heard a rumble, as though a heavy machine was starting to roll down the hill. As if by magic, the ends of the wire sputtered away from the terminals and whipped up the shaft, carried away by the tractor. He sent the disk up after them, thinking stupidly: That's the way a fishing line looks to a fish. He shut the door.

  Conn stepped up on the platform, afraid to look at the accumulator dial. He might have as much or twice as much power as he'd need, but he'd have to push back through Time, no matter what. If he fell short of '41 in this track, he'd come out into the Dark Ages again, and be stuck for eternity. There'd be neither electricity nor the chance to create any.

  He picked up the lance and reached for the knife switch. It was, he thought, like jumping blindfolded into an unknown vastly more terrifying than mere infinity.

  He yanked down the switch.

  VIII

  The silver-apple moon had slipped back toward the eastern horizon when Conn at last came to the surface. It was blood-red and vast. The sky around it was steel-blue. He leaned on the lance he had brought with him and felt sick and weary.

  The distant crack of a shot made him prick his ears, Conn stamped the thick turf carefully over the stud bank and went loping down the side of the hill. All this seemed like a bad dream he'd had once before—but he had an idea, a most peculiar idea.

  He pushed through the high weeds at the foot of the bill and found himself at the edge of a lush fairway. A hundred yards before him, Conn saw the slight mound of a green. A flag whipped above it. Far beyond the mound he saw a small group of figures. Seven figures. They split up and began to creep in his direction. Suddenly Conn understood.

  He got to all fours and began worming forward through the turf. A spike of red flame flared and cracked. From the sand pit, just before the green, came an answering shot. The seven figures poised and began to run. At the sand pit the dark form of a man clambered up. He fired twice and then dove back into the cover. The figures continued to sprint forward.

  Conn murmured: "Take it easy, Probable Conn. I'm with you—"

  He got to one knee, threw up the lance, and pressed the firing stud. There were five silent flares of light. Craters appeared in the grass—and only two of the Nazi attackers were left.

  Conn sighed and walked over to the edge of the green. He lay down easily and prepared to wait. It would only take a few minutes, he knew. The Probable Conn would lay out the two last Nazis, kiss Hilda, get slapped and say good-bye. He might even see him walking away through the gloom.

  He would walk up to the time machine, Conn thought, and surge forward into still another alternative future. Maybe he'd be happy there—maybe not. Maybe he'd try to come back, too. There was no telling. There was no sense wondering what he had in store for him because Time was too infinite for the human mind to comprehend. There would be a lot to explain to Hilda, Conn thought.

  Why he'd left her? Why he'd returned so quickly? How he came to have his clothes torn to shreds? Where he got this lance? All this and more. But it wasn't important. Hilda was the only thing that was important and she'd understand.

  A figure walked past him, trodding sadly through the moist turf; the figure of a Probable Conn with a rucksack on his shoulder. Conn wanted to get up and say: "Hi!" and maybe go over and shake hands; but the figure passed after a lingering look back, and, anyway, Conn heard Hilda cry: "David!"

  That was his cue. He got to his feet and ran toward her. When she saw him she cried out again in a joyous tone: "David!"

  Conn took Hilda in his arms and kissed her. He kept murmuring: "It's all right, darling, it's all right." And the thought came to him that this was the last paragraph for real. Nothing else came after this but "They lived happily ever after" and "The End." He nestled his bruised cheek against her silky hair and felt sorry for all the infinity of Probable Conns. He wondered how many of them knew what they were missing.

 
; Astounding, July 1941

  Hell Is Forever

  Round and round the shutter'd Square

  I stroll'd with the Devil's arm in mine,

  No sound but the scrape of his hoofs was there

  And the ring of his laughter and mine.

  We had drunk black wine.

  I screamed "I will race you, Master!"

  "What matter," he shrieked "tonight

  Which of us runs the faster?

  There is nothing to fear tonight

  In the foul moon's light!"

  Then I look'd him in the eyes,

  And I laughed full shrill at the lie he told

  And the gnawing fear he would fain disguise.

  It was true, what I'd time and again been told:

  He was old-old.

  —from "Fungoids," by Enoch Soames

  There were six of them and they had tried everything.

  They began with drinking and drank until they had exhausted the sense of taste. Wines—Amontillado, Beaune, Kirschwasser, Bordeaux, Hock, Burgundy, Medoc and Chambertin; whisky, Scotch, Irish, Usquebaugh and Schnapps; brandy, gin and rum. They drank them separately and together; they mixed the tan alcohols and flavors into stupendous punches, into a thousand symphonies of taste; they experimented, created, invented, destroyed—and finally they were bored.

  Drugs followed. The milder first, then the more potent. Crisp brown licorice-like opium, toasted and rolled into pellets for smoking in long ivory pipes; thick green absinthe sipped bitter and strong, without sugar or water; heroin and cocaine in rustling snow crystals; marijuana rolled loosely into brown-paper cigarettes; hashish in milk-white curds to be eaten, or tarry plugs of Bhang that were chewed and stained the lips a deep tan—and again they were bored.

  Their search for sensation became frantic with so much of their senses already dissipated. They enlarged their parties and turned them into festivals of horror. Exotic dancers and esoteric half-human creatures crowded the broad, low room and filled it with their incredible performances. Pain, fear, desire, love and hatred were torn apart and exhibited to the least quivering detail like so many laboratory specimens.

  The cloying odor of perfume mingled with the knife-sharp sweat of excited bodies; the anguished screams of tortured creatures merely interrupted their swift, never-ceasing talk and so in time this, too, palled. They reduced their parties to the original six and returned each week to sit, bored and still hungry for new sensations. Now, languidly and without enthusiasm, they were toying with the occult; turning the party room into a necromancer's chamber.

  Offhand you would not have thought it was a bomb shelter. The room was large and square, the walls paneled with imitation-grained soundproofing, the ceiling low-beamed. To the right was an inset door, heavy and bolted with an enormous wrought-iron lock. There were no windows, but the air-conditioning inlets were shaped like the arched slits of a Gothic monastery. Lady Sutton had paned them with stained glass and set small electric bulbs behind them. They threw showers of sullen color across the room.

  The flooring was of ancient walnut, high-polished and gleaming like metal. Across it were spread a score of lustrous Oriental scatter rugs. One enormous divan, covered with Indian batik, ran the width of the shelter against a wall. Above were tiers of bookshelves, and before it was a long trestle table piled with banquet remains. The rest of the shelter was furnished with deep, seductive chairs, soft, quilted, and inviting.

  Centuries ago this had been the deepest dungeon of Sutton Castle, hundreds of feet beneath the earth. Now—drained, warmed, air-conditioned and refurnished, it was the scene of Lady Sutton's sensation parties. More—it was the official meeting place of the Society of Six. The Six Decadents, they called themselves.

  "We are the last spiritual descendants of Nero—the last of the gloriously evil aristocrats," Lady Sutton would say. "We were born centuries too late, my friends. In a world that is no longer ours we have nothing to live for but ourselves. We are a race apart—we six."

  And when unprecedented bombings shook England so catastrophically that the shudders even penetrated to the Sutton shelter, she would glance up and laugh: "Let them slaughter each other, those pigs. This is no war of ours. We go our own way, always, eh? Think, my friends, what a joy it would be to emerge from our shelter one bright morning and find all London dead—all the world dead—" And then she laughed again with her deep, hoarse bellow.

  She was bellowing now, her enormous fat body sprawled half across the divan like a decorated toad, laughing at the program that Digby Finchley had just handed her. It had been etched by Finchley himself—an exquisite design of devils and angels in grotesque amorous combat encircling the cabalistic lettering that read:

  THE SIX PRESENT

  ASTAROTH WAS A LADY

  By Christian Braugh

  Cast

  (In order of appearance)

  A Necromancer

  Christian Braugh

  A Black Cat

  Merlin

  (By courtesy of Lady Sutton)

  Astaroth

  Theone Dubedat

  Nebiros, an Assistant Demon

  Costumes

  Digby Finchley

  Special Effects

  Robert Peel

  Music

  Sidra Peel

  Finchley said: "A little comedy is a change, isn't it?"

  Lady Sutton shook with uncontrolled laughter. "Astaroth was a lady! Are you sure you wrote it, Chris?"

  There was no answer from Braugh, only the buzz of preparations from the far end of the room, where a small stage had been erected and curtained off.

  She bellowed in her broken bass: "Hey, Chris! Hey, there—"

  The curtain split and Christian Braugh thrust his albino head through. His face was partially made up with red eyebrows and beard and dark-blue shadows around the eyes. He said: "Beg pardon, Lady Sutton?"

  At the sight of his face she rolled over the divan like a mountain of jelly. Across her helpless body, Finchley smiled to Braugh, his lips unfolding in a cat's grin. Braugh moved his white head in imperceptible answer.

  "I said, did you really write this, Chris . . . or have you hired a ghost again?"

  Braugh looked angry, then disappeared behind the curtain.

  "Oh, my hat!" gurgled Lady Sutton. "This is better than a gallon of champagne. And, speaking of same . . . who's nearest the bubbly? Bob? Pour some more. Bob! Bob Peel!"

  The man slumped in the chair alongside the ice buckets never moved. He was lying on the nape of his neck, feet thrust out in a V before him, his dress shirt buckled under his bearded chin. Finchley went across the room and looked down at him.

  "Passed out," he said.

  "So early? Well, no matter. Fetch me a glass, Dig, there's a good lad."

  Finchley filled a prismed champagne glass and brought it to Lady Sutton. From a small cameo-faced vial she added three drops of laudanum, swirled the sparkling mixture once and then sipped while she read the program.

  "A Necromancer . . . that's you, eh, Dig?"

  He nodded.

  "And what's a Necromancer?"

  "A kind of magician, Lady Sutton."

  "Magician? Oh, that's good . . . that's very good!" She spilled champagne on her vast blotchy bosom and dabbed ineffectually with the program.

  Finchley lifted a hand to restrain her and said, "You ought to be careful with that program, Lady Sutton. I made only one print and then destroyed the plate. It's unique and liable to be valuable."

  "Collector's item, eh? Your work, of course, Dig?"

  "Yes."

  "Not much of a change from the usual pornography, hey?" She burst into another thunder of laughter that degenerated into a fit of hacking coughs. She dropped the glass altogether. Finchley flushed, then retrieved the glass and returned it to the buffet, stepping carefully over Peel's legs.

  "And who's this Astaroth?" Lady Sutton went on.

  From behind the curtain, Theone Dubedat called: "Me! I! Ich! Moi!" Her voice was husk
y. It had a quality of gray smoke.

  "Darling, I know it's you, but what are you?"

  "A devil, I think."

  Finchley said: "Astaroth is some sort of legendary archdemon—a top-ranking devil, so to speak."

  "Theone a devil? No doubt of it—" Exhausted with rapture, Lady Sutton lay quiescent and musing on the patterned divan. At last she raised an enormous arm and examined her watch. The flesh hung from her elbows in elephantine creases, and at the gesture it shook and a little shower of torn sequins glittered down from her sleeve.

  "You'd best get on with it, Dig. I've got to leave at midnight."

  "Leave?"

  "You heard me."

  Finchley's face contorted. He bent over her, tense with suppressed emotion, his bleak eyes examining her. "What's up? What's wrong?"

  "Nothing."

  "Then—"

  "A few things have changed, that's all."

  "What's changed?"

  Her face turned harsh as she returned his stare. The bulging features seemed to stiffen into obsidian. "Too soon to tell you . . . but you'll find out quick enough. Now I don't want any more pestering from you, Dig, m'lad!"

  Finchley's scarecrow features regained a measure of control. He started to speak, but before he could utter a word Sidra Peel suddenly popped her head out of the alcove alongside the stage, where the organ had been placed. She called: "Ro-bert!"

  In a constricted voice, Finchley said, "Bob's passed, out again, Sidra."

  She emerged from the alcove, walked jerkily across the room and stood looking down in her husband's face. Sidra Peel was short, slender, and dark. Her body was like an electric high-tension wire, alive with too much current, yet coruscated, stained and rusted from too much exposure to passion. The deep black sockets of her eyes were frigid coals with gleaming white points. As she gazed at her husband, her long fingers writhed; then, suddenly, her hand lashed out and struck the inert face.

  "Swine!" she hissed.