In that case, I should tell Roosevelt all I’d seen at Chateau Gaillard. Maybe there was a clue there for someone who knew how to use it. Or misuse it.
Bayard had known a lot more about the situation than I did, and he hadn’t trusted Renata, or Renata’s boss. I wished he could have heard Roosevelt’s pitch and given me the other side of the story.
What I needed now was information about Roosevelt, about Bayard, about what was going on and most of all, information about my place in all this—and the meaning of the old piece of steel with the magical property of pointing the other old pieces of steel.
I went to the door and eased it open; there was a guard in a white and gold uniform standing at a rigid parade rest at the far end of the passage. He looked my way and I gave him an offhand wave and he went back to eyes-front. I wasn’t exactly under arrest, but they were keeping an eye on me. I started to close the door—and heard a scream like a gutted horse from the room next to mine. The sentry yanked a shiny chrome-plated gun from a polished holster and came on at a run. I took two jumps to the door the yell had come from and jerked at the knob, then stepped back and kicked it open and was looking at a white worm the size of a fire hose looped like a boa constrictor around the crushed body of a man.
He was an old man with a purple face and white hair and popped-out eyes and tongue. I was holding the broken sword in my hand; I didn’t remember drawing it. It made a sound like an ax hitting a saddle when I brought it down on the worm. It cut through it like cheese, and the severed end whipped around, splattering foul-smelling juices. Something boomed like a cannon behind my ear, and a chunk of worm flew. A ten-foot piece was flapping across the floor and the gun boomed again and it flew up in the air, whipping, while I hacked at another loop that was weaving around on end like a charmed snake. There were four pieces of the thing now and more boiling out through the bathroom door. I heard a gun click on an empty chamber and the guard swore and ended on a gurgling note. I chopped my way through to him, but I was too late. He was wrapped like a mummy and his head was at an angle that meant he’d made his last formation. There were yells from the passage, and the sound of running feet and shots. I cut my way across and into the bathroom. The jade green marble tub was full of worm, writhing up through the drain. I hacked it off, grabbed up a long-handled bath brush and rammed it down the drain, then chopped my way back through the flopping sections and into the hall. What was there was worse than the worm. It looked like a mass of raw meat, bulging up from the stairwell halfway down the corridor. Two men were firing into it, but it didn’t seem to mind that much. I came up on it from the side and carved a slice off, and the mass of rubbery stuff recoiled, oozing pink blood. It didn’t like cold steel.
“Get knives and swords!” I yelled. “You’re wasting time firing slugs in it!”
The mass had bulged along the hall far enough to half cover a door. I burst inward, and I got a glimpse of a woman standing there before it welled through and blocked the opening. I caught just a faint echo of her scream. It took a half a dozen good chops to amputate the mass in the door, but I was too late again. All I could see of the girl was a pair of slippered feet sticking out from under the thing like a careless mechanic under a slipped jack.
Back in the hall I saw Roosevelt, in his shirt-sleeves, his teeth bared in what might have been a grin, hewing away at the thing with a two-handed sword. He saw me and yelled, “Curlon, to me!”
Uniformed men were doing what damage they could with ceremonial short-swords, but it was Roosevelt who was driving the thing back. It had bulged in to form a pocket, and he was wading into the pocket, while the rest of the thing bulged alongside, flanking him. I hit it on his left, hacked away a chunk the size of a Shetland pony just as the other side folded in, almost caught him. He stabbed at it, and I cut a swath through and got a stance back to back with him. He seemed to be trying to cut his way to a door that was two-thirds covered and starting to sag. We cleared it, and by then there were a dozen men working on the outer perimeter with swords they’d pulled off walls somewhere. We were ankle-deep in the thin pink blood that drained from every cut we made. I smelled smoke, and saw a pair of firemen in protective suits coming up the stair with oversized blowtorches. The thing flowed away ahead of them, turning black and shriveling. In another minute or two it was all over. I looked at Roosevelt through the smoke and the stink, past him along the corridor that was splashed to the ceiling and reeking like a slaughterhouse.
“Nice,” I said, and discovered I was as winded as if I’d just run the four-minute mile. “What was it?”
Roosevelt grinned at me. He was breathing hard, and there was blood on his face, but incredibly, he looked like a man having fun.
“A brisk hour and a quarter,” he said. “I congratulate you. Captain. You matched me blow for blow. Not many could have done it.” It was a brag, but somehow it didn’t sound arrogant. Just truthful.
“You didn’t answer the question, General,” I said.
His eyes went past me to the foul bulk spread across the blue Oriental carpeting.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “This was the worst attack so far. The periodicity has decayed to ninety-one hours and the intensity is increasing logarithmically. It doesn’t seem to be an animal, in the normal sense of the word—merely a mass of flesh, growing wild.”
“What kind of flesh?” I growled. It made my skin crawl to look at it.
His eyes met mine. “Human flesh, Mr. Curlon,” he said.
I nodded. “I’m still not sure about all this, General; but if this is what you’re fighting, I’m with you.”
He gave me the smile, reached out and caught my hand with a grip like a rock-crusher.
“With you behind me—”
“Beside you,’.’ I cut in.
He nodded, still smiling. “Beside me, then. Perhaps we can yet prevail.”
I didn’t get much sleep for the next couple of nights. When I wasn’t busy bone-bending with an unarmed combat master named Lind, I was listening to lectures on field operation, and doing my napping with a hypnotaper strapped to my skull, pumping me full of background data on the history of the Blight.
There were a few other trainees around. One was a beautiful Oriental-looking girl from an A-line where the Chinese had settled America back in the ninth century, and had met the Romans head-on along the Mississippi in 1776. She was headed for a place where a horde of backward, matriarchal Mongols were getting ready to sweep across a fuedal Europe. It seemed that she fitted the bill of particulars for the incarnation of the goddess Chiu-Ki, a sort of celestial Dragon Lady. And a big coal-black man with a fierce look—maybe because of the stainless steel peg through his nose—had been recruited from a Zulu-ruled African empire to help organize a grass-roots resistance to a murder-suicide cult that was decimating the enslaved blacks in a line where the Greeks had developed science in the pre-Christian era and used it to conquer the known world before stagnation set in. I met one fellow who was a classic example of the Australian Bushman—but in his line his tribe had made it big on the mainland. He had a hard time not wrinkling his flat nose at the strange odors, but he was a gentleman. He treated us like equals.
During the week, I tried several times to see Bayard, but Roosevelt always put me off. The colonel was a sick man, he said. Pneumonia had set in, as if often did after a taste of the neurac. He was in an oxygen tent, and no visitors allowed.