I tried to project a test hallucination, but I wasn’t ready yet. I wished Little Micky’d run a test. I decided against suggesting it — he’d doubtless want an explanation, and I didn’t feel up to it.
“Twenty.”
Nothing happening yet. No more gigglers, either, but that might not signify: some heads never giggle. I, for instance, never giggle. But…
“Fifteen.”
Nothing, not even a breeze in the willows.
“Ten. Get ready.”
I hate countdowns. Always have. Michael, on the other hand, is passionately fond of countdowns. You never can tell.
“Five. Four. Three.” Nothing on the beach. “Two. One. Zero!”
Nothing continued happening. Mike’s face expressed innocence betrayed in exhaustive detail.
“Is it kosher to use negative numbers?” I inquired.
“Sloppy, that’s what they are,” said Michael. “Sloppy.” He was really burned. “How do they expect to…”
Something was happening! The willows were shaking. Something was pushing its way through the willows. Something was…
It was a lobster in a silver blanket. Maybe even Ktch. He pushed the last layer of willow wands aside with his huge claws and stared out at us for maybe half a minute, making good and sure we were still there. Then he backed away into the thicket and we started breathing again.
“I hate an unpunctual lobster,” Michael said, still peeved.
And the willows were rustling again, more vigorously, as though something larger than a lobster were forcing a way through them. They went on rustling for a painfully long time. Whatever was coming wasn’t in a hurry. The willows’ agitation mounted to frenzy. The last curtain of leaves was hurled aside as though by a gale.
Somebody moaned.
The black shadow moved slowly toward us down the beach.
26
LITTLE MICKY bracketed the shadow with odd-shaped, rapid-fire cannons, but the shells passed through it like nothing at all, not bothering it a bit. I got the impression that the shadow didn’t even notice the cannons and shells, that it was aware of nothing on this whole green planet but our shaggy selves. This was not an impression to treasure.
Little Micky switched to explosive shells. They revised the landscape pretty drastically, but failed to inconvenience the shadow.
The shadow, meanwhile, was projecting gross despair and future pain much more intensely than before, inconveniencing us no end.
Little Micky poised two flamethrowers above the shadow and smothered it in fire. The shadow noticed this. It absorbed the flames, and then the flamethrowers, doubled its height, and kept coming.
I was now officially up tight. This wasn’t going according to the script at all. Of course, I hadn’t expected the first assault to be the shadow, but there it was, and Little Micky didn’t seem to be able to cope with it, and it didn’t seem especially stoppable, and I didn’t like anything that was happening.
Micky dropped bombs on the shadow — good, fat, healthy bombs — and the shadow didn’t notice.
“No!” Micky yelled. He was losing his temper.
The shadow reached the water while Micky was working out his next move. The water drew away from the shadow, as though refusing to touch such a thing. Spooky. The water wouldn’t come within a foot of the shadow, nor could I blame it. So the shadow moved toward us in the center of an absence of water. If I were superstitious…
“All right, you mother!” Micky had worked something out. “Take that!”
High-pressure hoses surrounded the shadow and shot iron-hard jets of water at it. The thought was good, but it didn’t work. The twelve-inch limit still applied, and the jets were shattered and deflected upward in a spectacular fifty-foot-high fountain that soundly drenched us and accomplished nothing else.
“No!” Oh, but Micky was bugged. “You mother, you! Dig it: I’m gonna put a flippin’ A-bomb right inside of you, you dig?”
Mike and I yelled, “Stop! Don’t do that!” and similar phrases intended to stop Little Micky from setting off an A-bomb in our laps, but he ignored us. He was POed at that shadow.
There was a muffled, almost subsonic Whump! The shadow bulged out at the middle, then grew another twenty feet, changed from a black shadow to a black flame, and kept on coming.
Little Micky went berserk. He started jumping up and down and screaming unbelievable polyglot invective and abuse at the flame. He was extravagantly out of his mind.
I was nearly out of mine. The flame was thirty feet away and coming strong, and the only member of our team who wasn’t helpless was throwing a temper tantrum. We were in trouble. I tried another test projection, and nothing happened again. I wasn’t properly high yet, but I could tell it was only a matter of minutes now. So, unfortunately, was that black flame.
But Little Micky stopped screaming and jumping, stood trembling still, and whispered in the tone that panthers use for hissing, “You mother! I am digging you a Pit!”
A moment later the approaching darkness abruptly fell out of sight and was gone. The whole world suddenly felt better.
Little Micky laughed forever in the space of two minutes and was glorious.
“How did you do it?” I wanted to know.
“Easy, baby, easy. I just made this like Pit underneath that mother an’, dig it, he fell right into some other dimension. Ain’t that a bitch?”
Ktch hadn’t expected to need a second act for us, so we enjoyed a ten-minute intermission while he assembled our next entertainment.
We needed those ten minutes. They gave the pills time to take general effect, giving us all a good jolt of euphoria, which always comes in handy, and curing our helplessness.
Ktch’s unplanned intermission gave our dozen neophytes some time to get more or less used to the techniques of projection, and it gave Mike and me a chance to better our working conditions.
The darkness bothered me, so I scattered a dozen nuclear flood lamps around at 500 feet and put on my shades. I tried to throw a spherical force field around the bus, too, but that didn’t happen. So the pill wasn’t unlimited after all. Force fields (I hoped) were probably too abstract for it.
(I also hoped I wasn’t going to learn any more of the pill’s limits under fire. That could be expensive.)
Our rooftop position was too vulnerable to suit Mike, so he hung an acre of wire netting twenty feet above our heads and clogged the water around us with barbed-wire emplacements. Our toothy guards had disappeared while we weren’t looking.
And then it started.
Nameless things were charging us from all directions, screeching, mewling, roaring, howling, piping, yelping, making sounds inside our heads, and all with grossly malicious intent.
My particular concern at the beginning was a transparent flying thing built like a loose heap of dry-cleaners’ plastic bags. It had taken a fancy to me for reasons I couldn’t imagine and didn’t care to learn. I broke it up with a well-conceived grenade, but the fragments were just as lively as the whole and shared the same fondness for me. They were too small to shoot at and too scattered to burn, so I gathered them up in a vacuum cleaner and burned it.
Then, there being nothing specifically after me at the moment, I took a brisk look around.
Andrew Blake and Karen, working together were coping with a swarm of what looked at first like long-tailed bees but turned out to be tiny flying serpents, no doubt ingeniously venomous. Being Andy and Karen, they were scooping the snapping beasties up in electrified butterfly nets. Each of them had on his shoulder a birdly creature with green angora fur and a huge appetite for such of the pests as managed to sneak past the nets.
Michael was being proficiently menaced by the front end of an orange and silver-striped centipedish horror, three feet thick and apparently quite long, overequipped with quick-moving needle claws and topped with a red and black face that was mostly mouth, and that mostly teeth. Naturally, Mike was using a sword to quell this monster. In fact, they were actually dueling — lunging and thrusting and parrying and all. The beast was down on points when I looked, with lots of open cuts oozing yellow and several arms lopped off. The thing made great soughing noises as it moved, like a very fat lady sinking into an armchair, and Mike was reciting something from Cyrano. Show-off!