that I feared I might drop my only weapon.
The head reared up as she tried to throw me off. I struck for the eye as Lotus had done earlier, pulled back the blade, was rewarded with gushing blood. She screamed even louder than the impossibly loud screams already filling the cavern, rolled about in fury. I was tossed free, thrown against the wall where I found a large boulder to crawl behind.
The spider did her death dance, flashing legs awkwardly akimbo.
I remained hidden in the rocks, holding tight to an aching arm as if the pressure of my hold would drive the pain off, afraid to look at my wound until I saw the Beast was dead and would never again be rushing me. It took her some time to die, but when she did expire it was with a great deal of thrashing and frothing. When I finally looked at my arm, I could see the reason for the pain: a small piece of white bone sticking through the flesh, white and spotted with blood. Head spinning roller-coaster mad, I felt more than a thousand years old — older, indeed, than the universe itself.
Above, from the tunnel that the spider and I had fallen through, came a noisy scuffling. My head spun even faster, my flesh burned with fever, and visions of the Beast’s mate swam through my head to magnify my fears. I got to my feet with a bit of difficulty and felt as if I were walking on a thin cushion of air instead of the rock floor. My eyes were flaming coals someone had dropped into raw sockets, while my head was made of ice — and melting. I staggered out of the large cavern, moving to a tunnel that glittered with light at its end, hoping that this — in some way — would lead me out. Light meant goodness, did it not? Light meant freedom — or is there a brilliant light at the end of death?
The stones seemed to melt and re-form around me. My teeth chattered in my ice head; I perspired.
The end of the tunnel was a branching-off place where the walls became glass and wound erratically under the floor of the vast Harrisburg Crater. Turquoise and crimson ceilings flashed over me, reflecting me as colored mirrors might. The walls threw my image back at me in various shades and sizes, shapes and textures. It was much like a mirror hall at a carnival. Reality was pushed even further from my mind, and delusion and fever grew stronger. I moved to the right with a thousand copies of myself, a shabby army in the corridors of eternity.
My arm had become a flaming tree, its roots grown deep into my chest, constricting my lungs. Panting, I moved on through the winding glass hallways, sane enough to know who I was and that I must get out, but just delirious enough not to think of turning back and retracing my steps. In this manner, I came across the Beast in its lair.
The tunnel ended in a room where grasses had been dragged in, where bits of rotting flesh from past meals littered the floor grotesquely. There was a natural stairway, uneven, sharply edged, but usable, breaking one wall. It led to the ceiling where a half-moon aperture offered escape to the crater floor overhead. I felt like a man trapped beneath an ice-covered river who finally sees a thin patch overhead. But lying between that escape route and me was the Beast. And, though dying, it was not yet dead.
I stopped, swayed crazily. For a moment, I thought I would fall over onto the mutant and lay immovable while he mauled me. With a great deal of effort, I forced away an almost imperceptible fraction of the fogginess, just enough to keep tenuous control of my body. The Beast watched me from where it lay, its massive head raised from the floor, its single red eye a hideous lantern, bright even in this sparkling room of fantasy walls. It grunted, tried to move, howled. Its leg was a mess. That was the work of my vibra-pistol. It shoved its other leg under itself, pulled to a sitting position, all its weight on the good arm and good leg. It snarled. I saw that, even in its weakness, the Beast was going to attempt to leap.
I looked about for a chunk of loose glass, found one the size of my fist. I bent, growing dangerously dizzy with the effort, picked it up, weighed it in my palm. I brought my healthy arm back, heaved the glass at the Beast’s head. It struck its chest instead, knocking it onto its behind. The Beast struggled to a sitting position while I searched for another chunk of glass: the battle of the invalids, nonetheless deadly for its absurdity.
The walls shone, seemed to quickly approach and recede when I moved too much…
I found a sharp-edged piece, brought it back to throw.
And the Beast spoke. “Make Caesar shut up!” it said. “Make him shut up!”
I almost dropped the rock. The walls wiggled crazily. The Beast kept repeating the blasphemy over and over. Then it leaped.
The force of its impact was not as great as it would have been had the Beast been able to use both feet to propel itself. Still, it bowled me over, raked claws down the side of my face as we rolled. I kicked free, rolled across the floor to the far wall. Above was the exit.
“Andy!” Lotus and Crazy appeared at the entrance to the room. It had been they, not the spider’s mate, who had been scrambling down that inclined tunnel!
“Make Caesar shut up!” the Beast recited. “Make him shut up!”
The two of them froze. Crazy had his gun drawn and was about to fire. Now he left the weapon dangling from his fingers, unable to fire upon something that seemed human.
“Kill it!” I shouted.
“It’s intelligent,” Lotus said, rubbing her tiny hands together.
“It is like hell!”
“It’s more than an animal,” Crazy said, the gun useless in his hand.
“It got that phrase from me!” I shouted hoarsely, and I suppose a little insanely. “I said that when I shot it in the woods. It must have been speaking then — something it picked up from a previous bounty hunter — and I thought it was intelligent. That’s why I couldn’t shoot it again. Man does not kill man. But this isn’t a man in any way! This is a myna bird!”
“It got that phrase from me!” the Beast shouted, struggling across the floor toward me, throwing a few cautious glances behind it at Crazy and Lotus. But its old trick was working. It was immobilizing the enemy. Crazy and Lotus couldn’t wipe out all those centuries of pacifism against other humans in one short moment. It talked; that might make it human. And they could not shoot it. “It got that phrase from me!” it said again.
“See!”
“See!” it echoed.
Lotus grabbed the gun from Crazy, aimed. But she could not fire. “Here, Andy!” And she tossed it over the Beast. It clattered against the wall five feet away. Wearily, I started after it, every inch a mile to me.
And the Beast was on me.
I kicked out with a last ounce of strength, caught it on the chin, stunned it. But it recovered and lunged again, thrusting claws deep into my hips and twisting them. I howled and found another ounce of strength despite what my body told me about this being the end. I kicked it again, pushed myself ahead a few more inches. My fingers slipped over the gun. It was a hard and reassuring feeling. I seemed to draw strength from the cold metal. Bringing it around, the barrel centered on the brutish face, I choked as my finger wrapped the trigger.
“See!” he shouted, reaching a long, hairy arm out for me.
Myna bird? Could I be certain?
The arm brushed my chest.
Strange scenes of a house afire, of a woman burning, of people turning into animals flashed through my mind. Noses became snouts everywhere I looked… I pulled the trigger, saw his face go up in a red fountain, and collapsed backward into darkness.
When I came to, it was to see a blue sky overhead, trees flashing by on both banks, and blue water underneath. Crazy had broken the top from one of the glass bubbles, had used it as a boat, placing it in the small river that drifted through Congressman Horner’s ranch. This would be a much swifter route than the one by which we had come.
“How are you feeling?” Lotus asked, rubbing my forehead.
“Relieved,” I croaked.
“I know,” she said, running a tiny hand over my cheeks.
“No. No, you don’t,” I said, turning my face to the glass bottom where the water was revealed in depth.
THREE: DIMENSIONAL LADDER
