“Get Cyrus here,” shouted Dalreay. “Whoever he is,” he added.
“Let’s find a quieter nook,” said Nodger. “I feel the strongest desire to sit down and rest these weary old bones.” He belched most artistically.
His Falstaffian act had thinned out as soon as the fighting had begun: he hadn’t pretended to fight; he fought.
They found a cubicle room looking out onto the area where the big growth began, walled from the city by yards of thick concrete. Men and women reported to Dalreay, who with his own elders and other leaders began to sort out problems. Dalreay, after all, was not King Clinton.
Cyrus was found, brought out and thrust down on trembling knees. He tried to make a joke until someone kicked him.
“Yes, yes,” he babbled when the problem had been presented to him. “I know what he will do and where he will go. Enrico, too—”
“Enrico,” said Nodger around a chicken bone he had picked up somewhere, “was last seen wearing six inches of steel in his guts. Very becoming.”
Cyrus smiled weakly and turned even more green.
“Was he the one telling you to use the impetus machine, Cyrus, at the nodal point?” Prestin demanded.
“No! Oh, no! I do not know who that was. Some say he is the Contessa’s son, some her lover. He could be anything at all, for all I know.” Cyrus shook. “We never saw him.”
“Since you know where Cino will go, Cyrus,” Dalreay told him, inspecting the edge of his sword with extreme care, “you will not only tell us. You will take us.”
Cyrus quaked. “No! No! I cannot go into the Growth! Think of me… It is impossible—”
“If Cino can go, we can go and so can you! Get ready.”
Prestin glanced at Dalreay. More than ever now, he realized that Dalreay’s pose of beaten savage had been just that—a pose, a clever ruse to minimize attention. There must have been correspondence between the slaves and the free men, although Prestin couldn’t guess how it was done. Now Dalreay talked of going into the Cabbage Patch, and he wasn’t shaking all over. Then Prestin looked more closely and was immensely cheered—and, paradoxically, more scared. For he saw that although Dalreay was just as frightened of the rain forest, he now felt obligations to Prestin and was prepared to fulfill them.
Urging Cyrus on, they went up in the elevator to the top of a Sorba tree. From its flat roof where a helicopter stood waiting, they surveyed the Big Green. With them had come an Italian helicopter pilot, a tough, swarthy man with a cheerful smile and the marks of the manacles still on his wrists. They all looked out over the green carpet of the main mass of foliage while they listened to Cyrus.
“The Contessa must have her alter egos ready. Cino knew that; he thought he could bargain with them. You killed one, but this Upjohn girl, with others, was in reserve. She—”
Horrified, Prestin blurted out, “What do you mean? Fritzy an alter ego? Explain yourself, man!”
“I cannot! No one can!” Cyrus cringed from an expected blow. “There are dark stories. Tales of necromancy. I do not understand. But the Contessa is ages old, and yet she can appear as a young woman. I do not know how!”
“If Cino took a helicopter, we can find him.” Prestin looked at the pilot. “Are you game, Pietro?”
“And willing to find that devil. I owe him a score.”
They loaded the helicopter with weapons and a hamper of provisions—opened at once by Prestin—and they took off. Besides Pietro, Prestin and Dalreay, Cyrus and Nodger were aboard.
The machine whirred up and over the great forest.
“He will make for the northern end. There are rescue facilities there.” Cyrus had accepted his fate by then.
“Rescue facilities?”
“Caches of food in case anyone was forced down. He could live there until the Contessa comes for him. That is one reason he took an alter ego for her. Without one of those mysterious beings, she would be unable to travel the dimensions.”
“Just find the devil,” said Dalreay grimly. “Forget all the mystical nonsense. My sword will settle that problem.”
But Prestin, thinking of the Montevarchi, was not so sure.
Over the northern sections now, they could see great arms and branches of the forest and a river the size of three Amazons. And they saw Cino’s helicopter settling onto the golf-ball-like head of a Sorba tree. At once they went full-bore for it.
They landed with a swirl alongside Cino’s ‘copter on the flat roof of a tree house. Prestin snatched up an automatic rifle and leaped out of the machine. He felt icy cold and yet burning with heat; he couldn’t remember having felt like this before. It wasn’t even that he loved Fritzy—if anything he was more attracted to Margie—but he felt that Cino had it coming to him, and he wanted to be there personally.
They plunged down the staircase. This tree house looked very much like the others. A girl’s scream, abruptly cut off, bounced up. Prestin went clattering down, followed by Dalreay and Pietro. Nodger took his own time.
They trampled down into an open railed-in space where they halted suddenly, weapons raised but useless. Their faces paled as the meaning of the tableau hit them.
Cino lay on the floor with a parachute pack half ripped off his back. Fritzy crouched near him dressed in the remains of a glamorous flame-colored negligee. A Trug held her arms, pinioning them, and one of its clawed feet pressed Cino down savagely.
Cino was demented by fear, and kept babbling something in his own language. Prestin could not understand it, but Nodger leered. “He’s got it at last,” the oldster said. Prestin lifted his rifle. He aimed it at the Trug.
“Careful,” warned Pietro. “You have to hit those things square the first time. You don’t get second chances.”
“You’ll hit the girl!” warned Dalreay.
“Fritzy!” called Prestin. “Keep still. As soon as I fire, get down flat. Got it?”
She saw him. “I’ve got it, alf. Aim straight, that’s all.”
Prestin held his arms as loosely as he could to aim the rifle, but the shaking worried him. He gripped his teeth together and blinked, trying to steady the picture down. Sunlight bounced in harshly. Sweat dripped from his forehead. He aimed for the Trug’s throat, intending to catch the area of head and chest in the spread.
His finger touched the trigger—and the Trug bellowed madly and charged.
Prestin fired and then the automatic rifle was knocked from his hands like a peashooter from a child. He fell heavily sideways and hit the floor. The Trug was screaming like a herd of bull elephants gone rogue. He heard Dalreay shout, and heard the staccato of rifle fire. He flung himself at Fritzy who surged up to meet him and they collided. They slid together to the brink of the drop next to Cino. His wide, crazy face leered at them, but with none of the vicious, cynical cruelty of the old Cino; he drooled. Prestin saw the drop coming up and grabbed for a handhold, catching the parachute harness.
Fritzy was clinging to his legs now. Through the haze he could see the Trug flailing madly and knocking Nodger headlong. Pietro fired in a brown cloud of gunsmoke. Dalreay held his sword up, ready to dart in if he got the opportunity…
Fritzy gasped, “So it’s you! You came to this mad world, too!”
“Yes—I’ll tell you all about it later—right now I’ve got to get in there and kill that Trug.”
“This is where I was,” Fritzy said, still holding onto Prestin with a drowning grip. She was nowhere near as calm as she appeared, “Cino brought me back here—where I landed after falling out of the airplane. He was not a nice person.”
“You’re—you’re all right, Fritzy?”
“Of course. The Contessa looked after me. She wouldn’t let anything happen to me.” She laughed shrilly and then gulped it off. “Violet was killed. I saw it. Poor Violet.”