At the touch of a button, these sank away, and the top of the camper rose and split and folded to two sides. A pedestal with a bazooka-like tube rose up from the floor, and then the tube telescoped outwards.
At the same time, a section of the floor opened, and a replica of the tiny missile that had destroyed the jet appeared. This was about two feet long, was rocket-shaped, silvery, and weighed about 40 pounds.
Wilfred adjusted the controls of an instrument with a cathode-ray screen. A section of the mountainside to the west sprang onto it.
A generator under the truck floor hummed.
The antenna turned southwards as Wilfred rotated a dial. It stopped when it pointed almost south, and I saw part of the Kenyan army camp as if I were looking from the mountainside from a distance. In the daylight.
The picture was wavy and broken with jagged streaks, and almost immediately became so pale that I could see it only with difficulty.
Yet I should not have been able to see anything at all. The Kenyans were behind a tall hill about a mile and a half from us.
Wilfred explained that the antenna shot a beam against the mountainside. This bounced down over the Kenyans and then bounced up and against the ionosphere and back to the antenna. Unfortunately, the dark green of the mountain vegetation absorbed much of the energy, and the many irregularities of the tree-tops made for a broken picture.
I noticed that his attitude seemed to have changed, though he was unconscious of the change. He acted as if he actually respected me, and in addition, was in awe of me. He had become so interested in his explanations of the devices, he had forgotten to act as if he hated me because I was a “honky.”
“Doc said he invented this beamer back in 1943, believe it or not,” Wilfred said. “Hey, we need another transceiver!”
He opened a cabinet while I watched him closely for a trick. He brought out a deflated sausageshaped balloon about a foot long and attached the open end to a nozzle. The balloon filled up and became a blimp about four feet long. He fastened a small blue cigar shape to four eyelets along the blimp to make a tiny gondola. He released the airship, and it rose swiftly, carried eastward by the wind. Wilfred adjusted controls on a board, and the airship, visible in the light streaming from the open top of the camper, turned southwards.
I watched the picture on the screen. It was a bird’s eye of the country beneath the balloon, as seen in the moonlight.
I asked how Caliban got such a bright picture in the dark.
Wilfred shrugged and said, “I don’t know. He might use heat-radiation to help develop the images, but I don’t know just how an ultra high-frequency beam could pick up heat images. I just don’t know. I do know that the CIA and the Commies, Chinese and Russians, got wind of this device, and Doc was fighting his own people as well as the Commies. For some reason, he didn’t want the U.S. to get it.”
Apparently, Wilfred did not know about the Nine.
I watched the screen. Presently, the Kenyan camp was in view.
The balloon must have been directly over it.
“You mean it when you say you’ll kill me if I don’t show you how the missile-launcher works?” he said.
I did not reply, and he said, “You mean it.” He grinned. “Doc doesn’t care, anyway, if I get rid of a few
Kenyans. He says they’re interfering.”
I said nothing. I had expected him to object because the Kenyans were blacks, but he seemed to regard them an enemies, which, indeed, they were, if Caliban did not want interference with his hunt.
Wilfred loaded the missile into the tube. Another appeared in the opening in the floor.
The tube rotated and elevated in response to Wilfred’s adjustments of the controls. A grid appeared on the screen. A white dot danced out and went past the intersection of the X and Y axes and then shot back to it.
Wilfred straightened up. “It’s all automatic now. If you want Little Miss Annihilator to land dead smack in the middle of their camp, press that button there.”
“What about the hot jets from the missile?” I said.
He grinned. He had been standing in one corner, as far away as possible from the flames which would issue. Undoubtedly, he had hoped I would be caught and burned. Moreover, I did not put it past the doctor to have a dummy button with a poisoned or drug-coated needle to pierce the thumb that pressed the button. I suspected that there were many traps which Wilfred was aching to use.
I picked up a pair of pliers with insulated handles—watch out for electrical shock, too—and pushed the button with the nose of the pliers. The missile flamed and whooshed away. The truck did not even rock with the take-off. The heat from the jet warmed my skin as I stood beside Wilfred. If I had been unwary enough to be closer, I might have gotten a bad burn and been off balance enough for him to attack me.
I was watching the screen but also flicking glances at Wilfred. He was staring wide-eyed at my penis, which had been rising as the rocket rose.
The missile shot up in a high arc which the eye might not have been able to follow if the jets were not burning so brightly. It curved over and behind the hill. I looked back at the screen. The missile appeared suddenly, and whiteness gouted and smoke roiled out and up. Bodies, pieces of bodies, a truck, a jeep, and pieces of vehicles and equipment flew out of the cloud.
I kept hold of my knife and my eye on Wilfred as I shook and groaned with the ecstasy. He moved away from me, his eyes on my spouting penis.
“Man, you got a beautiful setup!” he whispered. “But you’re sure weird!”
I said, “Load another!”
He obeyed, while a third missile rose from the floor. He crouched beneath the tube, and I punched, the button. The third missile completely destroyed the Kenyans.
Three times, I jetted. I writhed in powerful orgasms and waved my knife at Wilfred to keep him away. He stared with bulging eyes, and, after the third ejaculation had ceased, and my penis had drooped somewhat, shook his head.
“You’re sick, man, real sick,” he mumbled.
I came towards him. He backed away, hands out, and said, “You don’t want to fuck me with that knobkerrie, do you? Don’t, man! It’d split me wide open! Doc didn’t say anything about you being queer!”
“Quit talking and scan that mountainside now,” I said.
Since he could get a direct beam against the mountain, he switched off the balloon’s transceiver but left the balloon cruising around in a circle. At that moment, we heard the distant but unmistakable noise of a helicopter. It became louder in a minute. Wilfred switched the transceiver back on, loaded another rocket in the tube, and this time, at my order, punched the button. I felt nothing then. Apparently, only killings directly done by me brought on the aberrated reaction.
The Kenyan, helicopter went up in a great bloom of fire.
15
The beam probed the mountainside. The slope looked like solid vegetation, but the view could be squeezed down with the beam so that we could see a square of two feet from a seeming height of ten feet.
Thus, we could look between the trees. It took an hour before we located Doctor Caliban and his party. I could see the dark bronze head of the doctor near a tree. He was holding a metallic box with an antenna.
“All right,” I said to Wilfred. “Blow the good doctor and his colleagues to kingdom come or wherever they’re going after death.”
Wilfred howled and leaped at me. He tried a karate hand chop. Again, I grabbed the hand. I clamped down on it and jerked him past me and slammed him into a bank of instruments. He fell unconscious.