I decided I would do it that way. I also decided that I would keep it to myself until the last minute. After all, Green Green was a telepath, and for all I knew, the story he'd given me could be a line of _rouke_ manure. He and Shandon could be working together, and for that matter there might not even be a Shandon. I wouldn't have trusted him worth a plugged nickel, back when they still had nickels to plug.
"Come on," I said, rising and flipping my cigarette into the cesspool my lake. "Show me where you left the boat."
So we made our way to the left, along the shoreline, to the place where he remembered beaching the thing. Only it was not there.
"Are you sure this is the place?"
"Yes."
"Well, where is it?"
"Perhaps it was loosened by one of the shocks and drifted away."
"Could you swim as far as the isle, bad shoulder and all?"
"I am a Pei'an," he replied, which meant he could damn well swim the English Channel with two bum shoulders, then turn around and go back again. I'd only said it to irritate him.
"... But we won't be able to swim to the isle," he added.
"Why not?"
"There are hot currents from the volcano. They are worse farther out."
"Then we are going to build a raft," I said. "I'll cut the wood with my pistol while you locate something suitable for binding it together."
"Such as?" he inquired.
"You're the one who screwed up this forest," I told him, "so you know it better than I do now. I've seen some tough-looking vines, though."
"They are somewhat abrasive," he said. "I will need your knife."
I hesitated a moment.
"All right. Here."
"Waters can come over the edges of a raft. They may be very warm."
"Then the waters must be cooled."
"How?"
"Soon it will begin to rain."
"The volcanos--"
"There won't be that much water."
He shrugged, nodded and went off to cut vines. I felled and stripped trees, perhaps six inches in diameter, ten feet in length, paying as much attention as possible to my back.
Soon it began to rain.
For the next several hours, a steady, cold drizzle descended from the heavens, drenching us to the skin, poking holes in Acherori, washing some of the filth from the shrubbery. I shaped two broad paddles and cut us a pair of long poles while I waited for Green Green to harvest sufficient cordage to bind things. While I was still waiting, the ground heaved violently and a terrific eruption split the near side of the cone halfway up. A river the color of sunsets poured from the gap. My ears rang for minutes after the explosion. Then the surface of the lake picked itself up and rushed toward me--a baby tidal wave. I ran like hell and climbed the highest tree in sight.
The water reached the base of the tree, but did not get much higher than a foot. There were three such waves in twenty minutes; then the waters began to recede, trading me a lot of mud for the timber I'd cut, plus both oars.
I grew angry. I knew my rain could not put out his bloody volcano, might even exacerbate things a bit.
But I was mad as hell, seeing all that work washed away.
I began to speak the words.
From somewhere, I heard the Pei'an calling. I ignored him.
After all, I wasn't exactly Francis Sandow at that point.
I dropped to the ground and felt the tug of a powerpull from several hundred yards to my left. I moved in that direction, climbing a small rise to reach its nexus. From that point, I had a clear line of vision across the bothered waters out to the isle itself. Perhaps my visual acuity had increased. I saw the chalet quite clearly. I fancied that I also detected a movement of sorts at the place where the rail guarded the end of the courtyard that overlooked the waters. Human eyes are not as acute as a Pei'an's. Green Green had said he'd seen Shandon clearly after crossing over the waters.
I felt her pulse as I stood there above one of Illyria's larger veins or smaller arteries, and the power came into me and I sent it upward.
Soon the drizzle became a heavy downpour, and when I lowered my upraised hand the lightning flashed and the thunders skated round and round in the tin drum of the sky. A wind, sudden as a springing cat and cold as the Arctic's halations, struck me in the back and shaved my cheeks as it passed.
Green Green cried out again. From somewhere off to my right, I think.
Then the heavens began to sizzle, and they sent down rains so heavily that the chalet vanished from sight and the isle itself faded to a gray outline. The volcano was the faintest of sparks above the water. Soon the wind raced by like a freight train and its howling joined with the thunders to create a perpetual din. The shores of Acheron lengthened and the waters were buffeted until they moved, in waves like the ones we had received, back in that direction from which they had come. If Green Green called out again, I could not hear him.
The water ran in rivers through my hair, down my face and neck. But I did not need my eyes to see. The power enfolded me and the temperature plummeted; the rain came in sheets that cracked like whips now; the day grew dark as night. I laughed, and the waters rose up in spouts and swayed like genies, and the lightflings ran their gauntlets again and again, but the machine never said "Tilt."
_Stop it, Frank! He will know you are here!_ came the thoughts, addressed to that part of me which Green Green wished to address.
_He does already, doesn't he?_ I might have replied. _Take cover till this is over. Wait!_
And as the waters came down and the winds went forth, the ground began to rock beneath me once again. The spark that hovered before me grew and glowed like a buried sun. Then the lightnings walked about it; they tickled the top of the isle; they wrote names upon the chaos, and one of them was mine.
I was thrown to my knees by another shock, but I stood again and raised both arms.
... And then I stood in a place that was neither solid, liquid nor gaseous. There was no light, nor was there darkness. It was neither hot nor cold. Perhaps it lay within my own mind, and perhaps not.
We stared at one another, and in my pale green hands I held a thunderbolt at port arms.
He was built like a wide, gray pillar, was covered with scales. He'd a snout like a crocodile, and his eyes were fiery. His three pairs of arms assumed various attitudes as we spoke. Otherwise he, also, did not move from where he stood.
_Old enemy, old comrade_ ... he addressed me.
_Yes, Belion. I am here_.
... _Your cycle has ended. Save yourself the ignominy of ruin at my hands. Withdraw new, Shimbo, and preserve a world you made_.
_I doubt the world shall be lost, Belion_.
Silence.
Then, _Then there must be a confrontation_.
... _Unless you yourself choose to withdraw_.
_I will not_.
_Then there will be a confrontation_.
He sighed a flame.
_So be it_.
And he was gone.
... And I stood atop the small hill and lowered my arms slowly, for the power had gone out of me.
It was a strange experience, unlike anything I had known before. A waking dream, if you would. A fantasy born of tension and anger, if you wouldn't.
The rain was still descending, though not with its previous force. The winds had lost something of their intensity. The lightnings had ceased, as had the trembling of the ground. The fiery activity had diminished, shrinking the orange nest atop the cone, stopping the wound in its side.
I stared at all this, feeling once again the wetness and. the coldness and the firmness of the ground beneath my feet. Our long-distance battle had been cut short, our powers canceled. This was fine with me, though; the waters looked cooler and the slick, gray isle less forbidding.
Ha!
In fact, as I watched, the sun broke through the clouds for a moment and a rainbow unrolled itself amidst sparkling droplets, arcing through the air now clean and framing Acheron, the isle, the smoldering cone like a picture within a gleaming paperweight, miniature, contained and more than slightly unreal.