Looking up against the scraped white sun glare, Prestin saw the black vulture shadow chopping back across the ristorante. The proprietor and his wife had bolted inside and slammed the door; there had been no other customers. The chopper chugged down closer. Prestin could clearly see the snout of an automatic rifle protruding through the open window behind the pilot.
“Is it the Contessa?” he asked, his mouth feeling as though it were full of horse chestnuts.
“One of her henchmen—an Earthman, not a Trug.” Macklin stood by the car as Margie flung the door open and Alec dived in. The speed with which he assembled his express rifle astounded Prestin. Macklin dragged him back to the other side of the car.
“Margie paid over five thousand pounds for a bullet proof shield for us.” He sounded as though he thought the joke a good one.
Crouched down beside Macklin, with Margie tumbling out the near door to join them, and with Alec snouting his rifle up as the helicopter bored in wickedly, Prestin wondered where the joke lay.
The automatic rifle snickered through the vane noise and Alec cracked off six crisp rounds in reply.
The ‘copter veered above them sharply. Prestin could see no damage. He heard the loud and angry clamor of bullets striking the car. The ‘copter bucked. As it came toward them Alec fired again and this time Prestin saw the perspex screech shatter into shredded fragments. He saw the pilot lurch up and double over. He saw the helicopter falter in mid-air.
He heard Margie scream. “It’s coming down right on top of us!”
“Get out of the way!” yelled Macklin.
Somehow Prestin was springing up, feeling Margie’s arm beneath his fingers, hauling her to her feet. He felt a tight metal band encircle his head, an imaginary bond of steel to crush his skull and pulp his brains. He started to run, feeling Margie’s weight dragging on him. He caught a crazy glimpse of Macklin’s shoes, the soles dusty with concrete, of Alec snarling and firing still, as the great black shadow above them whickered down remorselessly.
He ran.
He was still running.
The concrete beneath his feet gave out and he was fighting his way through yellowish sand and stringy fronds of some dark green bloated weed. His feet hurt. The sand struck back with a heat out of proportion to the southern Italian sunshine, even through his own tough English leather hand-tooled shoes. He could not hear the chopper. He couldn’t hear Alec firing nor Macklin yelling at them to run; he couldn’t hear Margie—nor feel her arm beneath his gripping fingers that constricted on empty air.
Then he understood.
V
So they hadn’t been fairy stories, after all.
So here he was, in Irunium.
Great.
So how did he get back?
His whole attention had been directed on getting away from the falling Agusta helicopter and dragging Margie to safety with him. He must, he supposed with a dull headache as a memory of that imaginary steel band encircling his skull, have catapulted himself into this place through sheer cowardice.
The sun still shone. The sand gritted under his shoes. The sky possessed a bluer blue and the grass growing a few hundred feet from where the sand stopped grew a greener green. A clump of orangey trees shaped like tenpins sprouted straight up out of the grass and, looking around him, he saw numbers of these isolated growths dotting the landscape. Some clumps had ocher and jade trees, but most shone with that deep orangey tint. He thought he glimpsed a bird sailing off against a level wash of cloud, but he could not be sure. Judging his position by the sun, he thought that due north of him a dark band stretched across the horizon; again his eyes jumped as he tried to focus, so he wasn’t certain.
As far as he could see, the land alternated in that strange unpredictable way between patches of barren coarse red sand, patches of fine golden sand, and stretches of the blue-green grass that grew in luxuriant profusion, its greenness spotted and set off by the heads of myriad poppy-red flowers. Prestin noticed that there seemed to be no wind; at least, he could feel none and the grasses did not sway—and yet he felt there ought to be wind, and could not define why.
He told himself, I’m here. Bud—I’m here. So I have to get back. But how?
He supposed there must have been a nodal point through which, instead of pushing one of the others, he had himself jumped, willy-nilly. If he could find the same place again—he hadn’t moved more than a pace or two since he’d stopped running—he could… He could—what?
How could he return himself to the familiar world?
What mechanism did he employ? What abracadabra mumbojumbo? What psychological conundrums of mental agility?
He admitted that he did not have the slightest idea of how to get back other than just thinking hard and hoping.
He was damned thirsty, too.
The heat of the sand at last became too obnoxious and he walked across to stand on the grass. He felt he was desecrating it somehow, but his feet could not wait.
A spirit of zealous inquiry possessed him to the partial exclusion of fear—he was badly frightened and guessed dully that he might be frightened worse in the future—but right now he felt inclined to explore. If he was to make his way back to Italy he must work on the problem. Standing still worrying would be no help but exploring might turn up any number of answers.
The dryness in his throat emphasized his thirst and, he supposed with a quick stab of anger, his fear, too.
What to do? He turned around again to look. He saw only the bland otherness of the landscape, the strange bottle-shaped trees, the tall grasses, the sand, the alien emptiness of it all, the faint tantalizing bar of darkness all along the northern horizon.
Well? That strange bar of shadow must be something, even if only a range of mountains. So? Yes. He could not find a way back from here, that was perfectly obvious, and he could not go on living here, without food and water and shelter. At least at the foot of mountains there should be water and food and he could rig up a shelter. What else could he do? Short of break down into madness?
He began to walk.
Just how long he had walked before he saw the dark spot darting over the ground ahead of him he could not say.
He halted, wiping sweat from his forehead, and screwed up his eyes. Then he took off his glasses and wiped the sweat and fogginess from them. By the time he put them back on again the dot had resolved into an animal. At least, Prestin looked again, startled out of the lethargy that had been creeping over him during the monotonous tramp, he supposed it was an animal.
The body of the thing rounded out into a bulbous squab about two feet in diameter, a dark metallic blue. From this a yellow neck, some three feet long, swayed up to support a small cat-like head, oddly intelligent-looking and wise in its bewhiskered furriness. But what shocked Prestin into standing stock-still, frightened to move, were the thing’s legs. It ran on two long dragonfly jointed stalks, with another two projecting straight behind and held clasped together; still two more waved menacingly before it, like pseudo-arms, each ending in a wide-taloned claw. Out of shock Prestin counted the talons, and was relieved, somehow, to find that the thing had four claws, not three like the Trugs.
The thing shrieked a garbled string of invective at him as it came swiftly on.
The danger suddenly shook him out of his shocked stance. But before he could run, a talon struck solidly, sprawling him forward onto the sand; another talon swooped and closed around the back of his neck. He could feel the harsh scraping of bone. He could hear the shrill whistle of the thing breathing through its flattened cat’s nose and he could smell the rank odor of feathers and skin.