“Primitive,” McArdle said explosively. “Cheap internal combustion engine spewing filthy fumes, burning up gasoline, the precious heritage of a planet, in extravagant ignorance— not that I care about the way you run your world.” A slow, vicious smile curved his thin lips. He had thought of something that pleased him. “But you’re going into my world, aren’t you, Crane? You’re never going to see your own world again. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“You just keep your mind on driving this primitive conveyance, McArdle. If you tip us over into the ditch I’m likely to let go of this grenade…”
“I’m doing my best,” McArdle fairly snarled back. “How would you make out driving a Roman chariot? Hey?”
“You have a point there.” Crane could clinically recognize the reasons behind this fresh attitude he had fallen into. And not so fresh either, really. He had at last faced up to the unpleasant realization that he had to act as his instincts had once dictated, as he had acted habitually, the old Roland Crane, the one he thought he had buried when he’d shucked off the uniform and the three pips and the submachine gun and the parade-ground voice. And, of course, he was enjoying it all. He was luxuriating in this enforced return to violence. He enjoyed it and he loathed himself for enjoying it, and he thought of Polly and the clanking monster tanks and the lozenges of light and of McArdle and he felt grimly that, unpleasant though it may be, he had a damn good right to enjoy it.
“You seem to know a good bit about the Map Country, McArdle. Suppose you tell me—”
“The Map Country?”
“Oh. You probably don’t call it that. But you know what I mean. What’s your big interest in the place?”
“My business. I tried to warn you, Crane. I told you no good would come if you meddled and went after the map—”
“What are you after, McArdle? Money? Loot? Power?”
McArdle did not exactly laugh; the sound was a harsh, grating, surging of his voice, a serrated bubble of sound in the car. “I belong in what you call the Map Country, Crane. I know it. I understand it. And — / can tame it!”
Fog wreathed outside now, breaking up the silver pre-dawn light, speeding past the windows, floating in streaks up the windshield, gradually shutting down. McArdle slowed the car. “We’re going in, Crane. Sure you don’t want to get out?”
“You can mock till you burst a blood-vessel, McArdle. What’s this about belonging in the Map Country?”
The car crawled through the fog and with half an eye Crane peered ahead, waiting for that coiling chiaroscuro of rippling color to reveal the entrance to the Map Country. The last time he had sat like this Polly had been driving.
McArdle’s ripsaw voice grated: “What happened to your girl friend, Crane? Lose her, did you? Leave her behind in the Map Country? Tasty offering to the Wardens?”
“Shut your filthy mouth!” blazed Crane. Then: “Wardens? What are they?”
“If you went through the veil you’d meet them. They keep the road clean of vermin.”
“You mean the tanks. Well, I figured that’s what they were for. If you know so much tell me what this Amullieh is.”
“You carried it with you and you came out. You’re not carrying it now and you won’t come out. You’ll be taken up by the Loti—” Sadistic satisfaction purred in McArdle’s voice and a sliver of light from the sunshine ahead breaking through fog glanced from the line of his jaw.
“An amulet against the Loti, huh?” said Crane. “Well, if nothing else we’re learning a few brand names. So that’s why they dropped me as though I was poisoned bait. I’d like to know how you came by that golden chain…”
“I made it.” Light from ahead aureoled McArdle’s head and shoulders hunched in the driving seat; to Crane that halo personified the devil, gave a tangible form to McArdle’s impression of supernatural evil. For McArdle was evil. And all the cozy chats in a car in the world — or in the Map Country — wouldn’t change that.
“So you made it. Bully for you.” Light punched in through the car windows and Crane saw the tooled red leather case with the gilt locks lying on the floor at his feet. With his left hand he snapped the locks, lifted the lid. He whistled.
“They’re pretty, McArdle. Make those, too?”
“Yes. I had to use terrestrial techniques to contain my knowledge and the result is clumsy—”
“Don’t do yourself dirt, McArdle. Let me do it for you.”
Crane bent watchfully and lifted one of the guns from the case. He could see what McArdle meant about alien knowledge and Earthly techniques of manufacture; the gun looked like a high-velocity express rifle, but the magazine and breech area bulked more heavily and the telescopic sights squatted integrally, giving the rifle a hard, alien look of power.
“Careful how you handle that!” McArdle spoke sharply and his eyes flicked back to the grenade clutched in Crane’s right hand. But he meant the rifle.
Examination over, Crane put the rifle on the seat. “I think I could use it,” he said quietly.
“But you’ve no conception of its power! A shell from that rifle holds twenty times the explosive force of that grenade in your hand!”
“And you had to make it and bring it along — for the Wardens. Thoughtful.”
Around them lay the Map Country, shining and tranquil under the sun. The white road curved dustily away into the gentle folds of grass and the black wrecks of Colla’s truck and the Austin looked like intruders. The two wrecked tanks were gone.
“Tidy around here,” said Crane, “with their own rubbish. But they leave outsiders’ junk lying where it falls.” This time the tension in him drained at once as he went through into the Map Country. This time he was the old Roland Crane he had tried so hard to bury — and, with the need of the moment making its demands, had so signally failed to dispose of. He could relish using McArdle’s rifle on a clanking monster.
The road lurched. A trembling ripple ran through the solid earth. Trees swayed in a breathless hush.
McArdle proved he was no driver — the car skittered to the offside of the road, the wheel was flung over far too hard in panic correction, and the car flipped neatly off the road and into a line of marching bushes fleeing from the earthly convulsions.
Silver needles tapped the body. The car groaned on its springs and moved again — sideways.
“Hold on to that grenade, Crane! For pity’s sake!”
“What do you know of pity?” grunted Crane; but he picked up the pin and shoved it back. At that, McArdle’s rifle would be more handy. He picked it up and put the muzzle to McArdle’s neck, under the ear.
“Get this heap back on the road. Surely you’re not scared of a rolling road and a moving bush? Get with it!”
As the car pursued its erratic way along the road Crane was acutely conscious of where he was and who he was with. This recurrence of events seemed to him a nightmare repetition of normalcy; he half-expected any moment to awake and find Polly sitting at the wheel.
The road dipped and soon they were driving through a narrow gorge with beetle-browed cliffs glowering down on them. Strange animal shapes hopped and skittered about the rocks. Unspoken between the two men lay the compact that they were driving to the distant city — that fiery Gehenna of ice and flame Crane -had only partially scrutinized from his hilltop. There, if anywhere in this chaotic other-place, lay the answers and Polly and Allan Gould.
“You claim to be able to tame this place,” Crane said, nodding through the screen. “You’re not doing much of a job. Look.” In molten rock the cliffs fell away, pouring in liquid cascades of fire away into bottomless depths. Fumes rose and stank in the air. And the car drove forward into a wide plain that might have been plucked straight from Central Africa. “The place changes so fast that if you had to dress for climate you’d be forever in your underwear.”