"It just seemed like a warning," was all he would say. Though he had told no one, he actually had a pretty good idea what he would find under Cirocco's skull.
"Open it up," Cirocco said, and let her eyes close again.
Rocky did as he was told. He finished his last cut, and lifted the section of bone away. Beneath was the dura mater, just as Gray's had said it would be. He could see the outlines of the cerebrum beneath the membrane. In the middle, in the great longitudinal fissure between the two frontal lobes, there was a swelling that should not have been there. Cruciform, inverted, like some unholy devil's mark ...
The mark of the Demon, Rocky thought.
As he watched, the swelling moved.
He cut around it, lifted the membranes from the gray matter beneath, and looked down at a nightmare. The nightmare looked back, blinking.
It was pale white, translucent, except for its head. It looked like a tiny snake but it had two arms which ended in miniscule clawed hands. Its body nestled into the longitudinal fissure, and it had a tail that descended between the hemispheres.
Rocky saw all that in the first few seconds; what he kept coming back to was the thing's face. It had outsize, mobile, troglodyte eyes set in the face of a lizard. But the mouth moved, it had lips, and Rocky could see a tongue.
"Put that back!" the thing shrieked. It started to burrow between the lobes of Cirocco's brain.
"Tweezers," Rocky said, and they were slapped into his palm. He grabbed the demon by the neck and pulled it out. But its tail was longer than he had thought, and still was lodged firmly in the fissure.
"The light! The light!" the creature was piping; Rocky had it by the neck, so he squeezed harder and the thing began to gurgle.
"You're choking me!" it squealed.
Nothing would have pleased Rocky more than to twist its vile head off, but he was afraid what that might do to Cirocco. He called for another tool, and used it to gingerly separate the halves of the brain. He could see, down deep, that the monster's tail was embedded in the corpus callosum.
"Mother," Cirocco said, in an odd voice. She began to cry.
What to do, what to do? Rocky didn't know, but he did know one thing: he could not close her head until the creature was removed.
"Scissors," he said. When he had them, he inserted them between the halves of the brain, down as far as he could go, until he had the tip of the demon's tail between the blades. He hesitated.
"No, no, no-" the thing screamed when it saw what he was doing.
Rocky cut.
The thing screamed bloody hell, but Cirocco did not move. Rocky held his breath for a long time, let it out, then looked again. He could see the severed end of the tail down there. It writhed, then came free from its mooring, the nature of which Rocky did not know. But it was loose, anyway, and Rocky almost reached for it with the tweezers, then remembered his prisoner-who had turned quite blue. He handed it to Serpent, who popped the squalling obscenity into a jar and sealed the lid. Rocky removed the severed bit of tail.
"Captain, can you hear me?" he said.
"Gaby," Cirocco murmured. Then she opened her eyes. "Yes. I can hear you. I saw you get it."
"You did?"
"I did. I'm not sure how. And it's gone. It's all gone. I know."
"Gaea will not be happy this day," Valiha sang. "We have her spy." She held up the jar. Inside it, the creature writhed, sucking on the end of its amputated tail.
"Sorry about that," Conal said, as he sat beside Rocky. He looked at Cirocco a bit queasily, but he was in control. "That looks normal, doesn't it, Rocky? Didn't you find anything?"
Valiha held up the jar. Conal looked.
"Somebody help him," Rocky said. "It's time to close up."
Eleven revs after Rocky had sewn Cirocco's head back together, the Pandemonium Theater began another double feature: Rock Around the Clock, with Bill Haley and the Comets, and Donovan's Brain.
As usual, no one knew why Gaea had selected these particular movies from her vast library, but many people attending noticed she did not seem happy. She hardly watched the screen. She fidgeted and brooded. She got so agitated that at one point she accidentally stepped on two panaflexes and a human, killing all three.
The corpses were quickly eaten by Priests.
EPISODE TEN
No one dreamed the war could last for seven years, but it did.
Like any war, it had its ups and downs. There was one five-month period when no bombs fell and some dared hope it was over. Then Dallas was hit, and the exchanges were renewed. Four times huge flights of missiles arced from one area of the globe to another-massive "Sunday Punches" designed to end the conflict once and for all. None of them did so. Combatants fell by the wayside when they reached the point where no one survived capable of directing the attack. But a hard core of about two dozen nations were dug in so securely they could well be fighting for two centuries.
Fully seventy percent of the weapons malfunctioned in one way or another. "Dud" bombs fell in hundreds of cities, spewing plutonium, notifying the residents that another bomb would soon follow. Editorials were written deploring the greed of munitions makers who had cut corners on government contracts, thinking no one would ever know the bombs were defective. Company presidents were lynched; lynching became a world-wide mania, something to take one's mind off the war. Generals were skinned alive, diplomats drawn and quartered, premiers boiled in oil, but nothing seemed to help. The ones who mattered were in bunkers five miles deep.
There were peace efforts. The usual ending to a conference was the vaporization of the host city. Geneva took a beating, and so did Helsinki, and Djakarta, and Sapporo, and Juneau. Eventually, negotiators were shot on sight if they tried to enter a city.
After seven years the war no longer appeared on the evening news. All public news-gathering operations had been destroyed. All satellite time was used for encoded military messages, and no one had a television to receive a broadcast, anyway. About a hundredth of the Earth's nuclear arsenal had been expended, and another twentieth destroyed before it could be used. There was still a lot left.
There were not many people, though.
It had been three years since a crop of any consequence had been brought in. Those few who survived on the surface scrounged for canned food, hunted, and ate each other. But there was little game left, animal or human.
Since the beginning of the war messiahs had been proclaimed at the rate of three or four per hour. Most of them claimed to know how to stop the war, but none of them did. Most of them were dead, now, and soon the Earth would be, too.
For seven years the Outlanders had been walking on eggs. Quick to declare neutrality at the outset of the war, the Lunar and Martian cities and the orbital colonies hoped only to stay out of the way while civilization collapsed down on Earth. Opinion varied as to whether the three Lunar nations could survive without support from Earth. There were almost a million people living on the moon at the outbreak of the war. The Martians figured to hold out twenty years, but no more than that. Outnumbering these planet-bound settlements were the O'Neil colonies. There were hundreds of them, with populations ranging from five to a hundred thousand. Most were located at L4 and L5, points of gravitational stability sixty degrees in front of and behind Luna. There were also sizable clusters of L1 and L2, despite the perturbations that tended to make the structures drift out of the libration points; with a small thruster, even the largest colony could remain stable with minimum energy expenditure.