There were tears in her eyes. For a moment, I did not realize that she was talking about the two old men.
“We washed off the blood as well as we could and covered up what wouldn’t come off. Some high muckamuck is supposed to fly up here and make a complete report for the government, but he hasn’t shown up yet. We’ll tell him that a gang of criminals tried to kidnap us so they could force the location of the gold, which is nonexistent, of course, from us. We’ll hint that the whole thing was a Communist plot.
The only bodies for him to look at will be those in the crashed copter and in the ashes of the hall.”
“What about the cars and the men on the road?” I said. “And the landing at Penrith, and so on?”
“We don’t know anything about that.”
She hesitated and then said, “We found out—we weren’t officially notified—that one of the Nine is coming, too. One of Doc’s friends dropped in—he’s important enough to get through the military cordon—and he told us we’re going to get a surprise visit.”
“What about it? Why so alarmed?”
Clio entered then. I said, “What’s so frightening about this visit from the Nine?”
“Who’s scared?” she said.
“I’ve lived with you long enough to know you,” I said. “Besides, I can smell the fear from both of you.”
“Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “We were going to wait until you were stronger before we told you! But there’s really not time now to put it off!”
Trish said, “Doc is alive!”
43
It was a shock, but I felt glad. Perhaps, now that he was alive, he would have felt the same sense of the madness drained off which I had experienced. The third time I awoke, even with the pain, I felt an exultation. This resulted, not from the inflooding of sensation but from the departure of a sensation. I knew that the physical linkage between my sexual behavior and killing was gone. It was as if I were a bottle uncorked and turned upside down and emptied of a black stinking decayed fluid.
The shock of being castrated by Caliban may have done it. And perhaps—I hoped it was so—the shock of what I had done to him had had a similar effect on him.
I would not be absolutely certain that I was back to normal until my testicles had regenerated. That should not take much longer than the month required after the ritual excision of one testes. And it should take much less time than the six months required to regrow my right leg below the knee. I had lost this when the RAF bomber of which I was pilot crashed after a mission over Hamburg.
Trish said that Doc was sleeping on a bed behind a screen at the other end of the room. He would live. That is, until the Nine found out he was not dead.
“Doctor Hengist could not believe that Doc was still breathing. He said that he would have to die soon. It was just as well, because the Nine would not let him live. Neither Clio nor I knew that the Nine had decreed you two must fight to the death.”
Trish began to cry. She said, “It’s wrong—evil—to have to murder each other. And it’s hideously evil that the Nine can now say that Doc will have to be put out of his misery. Or that you two should have to fight again after you get back on your feet.”
“I was weak once,” I said. “I accepted the gift of immortality because the price seemed worth it. Not now. I intend to fight the Nine. But we have to be cunning until we are able to run.”
“That’s what Doc said,” Trish cried, “when he was able to talk for a short time. Listen! Don’t worry too much about losing the elixir. Doc has been working for thirty years on it. He couldn’t get any samples of the elixir, of course, because the Nine controls it so rigorously. But he figured out that our tissues must be saturated with the elixir. Two years ago he cut off his own fingers and managed to isolate the elements of the elixir. He still hasn’t been able to synthesize them correctly, but he says that it’s only a matter of a short time until he will be able to do so.”
“Is Caliban in good enough shape so that he could dispense with Hengist’s services?” I said. “Could you and Trish take care of him, with remote-control advice from me? When I can get out of bed and take a look at him, I’ll take over the active doctoring.”
She nodded, and I said, “Very well. Wheel him into the room behind the fuel room. Hengist doesn’t know about that, does he?”
Trish said, “I didn’t know about it, either.”
“When Hengist next comes, you tell him that Caliban died. He’ll want to know where, because I am supposed to bring his head and genitals to the Nine.”
Trish and Clio winced.
I said, “The Nine will have to be satisfied with what they can get. You tell Hengist that you two sunk
Doc in the moat. If he insists that Doc be pulled out of the moat, then we’re in for it. Knowing the Nine as I do, I imagine that they’ll have to have positive evidence that he’s dead. We may have to buy some time with an accident for Hengist or whoever acts as agent for the Nine.”
“Oh, Jack!” Clio said. “More killings?”
“If we’re going to resign from the ranks of the immortals, we will do it now,” I said. “And we’ll have to drop out of sight swiftly. You know that’s increasingly difficult in this ever-narrowing world.”
Trish and Clio left to wheel the sleeping Doc into the hidden room. An hour later, Hengist entered.
He did not seem surprised that Caliban had died. Nor did he say anything about recovering the body. The next day, however, he notified us that the visit from one of the Nine had been cancelled. An agent, a Sir
Ronald Hawthorpe, would bring me instructions and also interrogate me.
After he left, I tried to walk into Doc’s room, but the pain between my legs discouraged this. I allowed Clio to wheel me in beside his bed. He was lying there with a stiff plastic collar around his neck.
Clio had done a professional job in doctoring his broken neck. He was flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling. Tears formed pools with a deep golden-green bottom in his eye sockets, and tears ran down his cheeks. Trish was crying also, but at the same time she was smiling.
“He hasn’t wept since he was a little child,” she said. “Not even when his mother died or his father died, did he weep. He must have an ocean down there, and I thought it would never come. Oh, I’m so happy!”
If he did not stop crying, she would not be so happy. He could be suffering a complete breakdown, or he could be on the road to a healthiness he had never had.
I said, “Doctor Caliban, why are you crying?”
He did not answer. I waited a while and then repeated my question. After another long period of silence, he said, in a choked voice, “I am crying for Jocko and Porky and for the other wonderful friends I had. I am crying for many people, for Trish especially, because she loves me and I gave her almost nothing back. And I am crying most of all, and I cannot help it, for me.”
Clio, always ready to be triggered with empathy, sniffled.
I said, “Then you must feel as I do, that you’ve suffered a strange sea-change, as it were?”
“I have,” he said.
“Perhaps,” I said, “we may be doing the Nine an injustice. Perhaps they knew that we would be all the better after having gotten through the effects of the elixir.”
“I doubt it very much,” Doc said. “They would not know exactly what the end-results would be. They must have gone through this themselves, though it’s been so long ago they may have forgotten. You must not forget that they put us through hell before we met and that they ordered us to kill each other afterwards. No, they are evil, evil!”