A Feast Unknown Page 6

The truck was going west and on a level. The fireball was going east and at a steep angle. I drove at full speed ahead; I could do nothing else. The light roared overhead. Heat struck in through the open windows and the broken windshield, and then the ball smashed into the ground behind me with a great noise, many in one. The heat intensified. I smelled paint and wood burning. There was light inside my head. The skin on my right arm and shoulder reddened with the sudden sear. I was already holding my breath and hoping my skin would not crisp and curl off me. And then I was out of the blast.

  Some distance away, I stopped the truck and got out onto the top of the cab for a better look.

  The wreckage was scattered over a half-mile square area. A hole in the midst of the flames could have been ten feet deep. Bushes and trees burned, and the grass was beginning to blaze in a fire that would sweep the savanna.

  Far to the east, two clouds of dust rose. They were approximately the same distance from me but separated from each other by three or more miles.

  One cloud would be rising from either the Albanian-Arabic party or Kenyan Army vehicles. The other would be from Doctor Caliban’s group. I was sure that it was he who had fired that tiny but deadly missile. One of the trucks carried a camper that was more than a camper. It concealed a missile launcher and only Caliban knew what else.

  I felt no gratitude. Instead, I burned as brightly inside as the wreckage outside. I burned with fury and frustration.

  After a while I cooled off, helped by the fact that the fire behind me would be frustrating my pursuers. It was racing across the savanna towards them, and they would be forced to run away from the flames—and so away from me. In the meantime, I would go ahead in as straight a line as the topography permitted. I would travel at 30 mph until the gas gave out or I reached the foothills.

  I laughed. Caliban, momentarily at least, had checked himself when he had saved my life. A minute later, one of the worn old tires blew. I replaced it with an exhausted looking spare, and ten minutes afterwards a stone went through that.

  I continued on foot. Behind me, the world seemed to be going up in flames.

  13

  Six hours later, I was on the first of the foothills. Two hours later, I was on the top of the third large hill. The sunset was only two hours away. I felt tired and hungry, but first I had to survey the country behind me. The plains looked smooth from my altitude and distance, but I knew that they were very rocky for the last ten miles and crossed by a grid of wadis. Three dust clouds separated from each by about three miles, were slowly converging in the east. Dusk would fall before they got near each other, however.

  I continued climbing through forest which was largely deciduous: oaks and maples. Though the savanna was dry, there was enough moisture here, mostly from underground sources, to supply a very thick growth. In fact, at many places, the trees were so close to each other that I could travel occasionally from tree to tree. Not in the fashion my biographer describes or as those lying movies portray. But adequately enough. My speed was faster in the trees, even though I went no faster than a slow walk, because I could avoid the almost impenetrable undergrowth. I could have made even better time if I had abandoned the rifle.

  On the broad branch of a great oak which grew on an almost vertical slope, I waited for the dusk. I was tearing at the delicious meat of a scaly anteater and watching the dying dust from the three parties after me. They had gone as far as they could in their vehicles, and besides they had to camp for the night. Each was only about a mile apart from the next, but the hills barred their views. This did not mean that they were not aware of each other.

  The Kenyan army personnel would stop where they were, if they observed national boundaries. I was now in Uganda. The Albanian-Arab party paid no attention to it, of course. Thirty tiny figures walked down a hill and then were lost. As nearly as I could determine, they carried no weapons heavier than rifles.

  Doctor Caliban’s party threaded down a narrow ravine. I counted them. Two blacks were missing. They had stayed behind, probably to operate equipment in the camper. It was then that I decided to go back down the mountainside. This took into account the strong possibility that Caliban anticipated just such a move and had taken measures against it. He was the most dangerous man I had ever encountered, and I’ve run up against scores of the most cunning and vicious of killers. Although I knew little about him, I felt that he was by far the most intelligent and the best equipped, technologically, teleologically, and physically (in a neuromuscular sense).

  The shadows had flooded that side of the mountain and stretched out to cover the smaller hills and some of the plains. Despite the growing dark, I saw a party leave the Kenyan camp. They did not intend to stop at the border.

  I passed them on the way down. They were struggling through the undergrowth in a very narrow path which then enlarged with machetes. An officer said something about stopping soon, and they went on by me. We were separated by a few feet. I was tempted to approach the single file from the rear and cut a few throats before disappearing, but I resisted. To harass them for my own amusement would spoil my plans.

  In the darkness, I watched the Kenyans that had stayed behind. They were busy. Evidently others were going to follow the first party in the morning. And from what I could hear of the radio operator’s conversation, planes—transports and helicopters were bringing in other men and supplies. I did not know what they were after. Surely they would not be going to this trouble and expense, and risking unpleasantness with Uganda, just to kill me. No, it had to be the gold. And they were acting as if they knew where they were going.

  I went on to the camp of Doctor Caliban. The trucks and jeeps were parked to form a square in a clearing inside the woods. No men were in sight, and the camper shed no light. A small dish-shaped antenna on top of the camper turned around and around. This was probably only one of the devices for detecting intruders.

  I waited. The night stretched out and blackened. Clouds were covering the stars. The moon was a dim irregular shape, like the just-beginning-to-form body of a chick in the yolk.

  The door in the rear of the camper opened and shut. No light shone. Undoubtedly the door was connected to an off-switch so that the light would not give them away when they passed through.

  Only one man had come out. He walked around the inside of the rectangle formed by the vehicles. He was smoking but took care to shield the fire in his palm. It would have been easy to get him with the rifle, but I did not want to alarm the other man or attract the Kenyans. He was pacing back and forth in the square, stopping short of one jeep and turning and striding back to the other and turning. He carried a submachine gun in his hand, as nearly as I could tell in the dark.

  I timed him for a while and then leaped over the hood of the jeep, without touching it, as he turned away from it. He heard me and whirled, but I crashed down on him. Before he could cry out or trigger the gun, he was dead with my knife in his throat.

  While I was waiting to launch myself, my penis had risen up, and as the man’s blood spurted out, I spurted over him.

  For a moment, I crouched, trying to recover my breath and also to listen for sounds within the camper. The orgasm had taken such violent possession of me, it had made me drop my knife and writhe as if I had been electrically shocked.

  The aberration was getting more dangerous. How could I kill more than one person in a fight if the first kill made me momentarily helpless?

  The submachine gun was of a make unknown to me. It was very compact, and the slender muzzle could eject nothing larger than .22 caliber, if that. It was probably custom-made for Caliban, and probably shot explosive bullets. I took the gun, felt it, inspected it as best I could in the dark, found out how to operate it, and then approached the camper. The antenna was still rotating.

  I placed my ear against the metal of the camper but could hear nothing. Its walls were well insulated. I left the camper and explored the other truck. It was locked, but the keys were on the body of the black. I unlocked it a
nd went into the supply camper, and came out with several grenades. I pulled the pin on one and tossed it as far away as I could. I had decided I wanted to get the other man out as swiftly as possible, and I was not going to worry about the Kenyans. I hoped that the man in the camper would run out to see what the noise was. He could stay within and warn Caliban, of course, since I was sure he was in radio contact with him.

  Immediately after the explosion, the camper door flew open and a big figure shot through. It landed on the ground crouching, a submachine gun in its hands. It called, “Hey, Ali! What’s going on? Man, where you at?”

  He may have sensed me. He whirled around. I chopped his neck as he was halfway around, and he kept on spinning but his knees were buckling and his body folding. I had not struck him with full force, however, because I wanted a prisoner. He was very strong; his neck was pyloned with muscles. He must have been partially stunned, but his fighting reflexes brought him back up and at me. I caught his wrist and turned it. His scream cut the night. Far off, a leopard coughed, but it may have been a coincidence, not a reply.

  He dropped to his knees, his trunk bent backwards, teeth white in the darkness. I brought my knee up against his chin, not too hard. He fell back on the ground.

  Afterwards, I noticed that I had a slight erection. Evidently my penis knew when I intended to kill and when I did not.

  14

  The man was the Negro I had thought was American. He was as tall as I and perhaps fifty pounds heavier. His shoulders were broad; his waist, narrow. His haircut was “natural,” and he had a thick moustache and goatee. His skin was so light and his features so Caucasian, I suspected he was one-quarter white.

  Tchaka Wilfred was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He had been a professional football player until he had been caught after holding up a bank to finance a militant black organization. He escaped from prison and joined another organization in Harlem. There he had run afoul of Doctor Caliban, who had taken Wilfred prisoner but had not turned him over to the police. Instead, he had sent Wilfred to the private sanatorium, where Caliban rehabilitated his criminals. By surgery.

  This confirmed what the two old men had said.

  I had little time for talk, but this information intrigued me. I have an M.D. and though my only practice has been among the Bandili, I read a certain amount of medical journals every year.

  “What kind of surgery?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, honky,” Wilfred said sullenly. “A cat under ether isn’t too observant, you know.”

  “Obviously, he didn’t tell you anything about his illegal tamperings with your brain. Didn’t you ask him what he did?”

  “Man, I asked till I was blue in the face, if you can imagine that!” Wilfred said. “Old Doc said it was a trade secret, and he wasn’t about to let it out. Unscrupulous men might get hold of it and do great evil! Especially the Communists! Doc’s really uptight on the Reds the last couple of years. He thinks they’re out to take over and just about got it sewed up!”

  That did not sound like a man who served the Nine. Loyalty to the Nine comes first, and the servant will get along no matter what the government. However, they do not care what a man’s political beliefs are, as long as he obeys the Nine.

  Wilfred laughed and said, “I thought maybe the bronze cat performed a prefrontal lobotomy, but I’m no zombie. And those old honkies, Rivers and Simmons, they say no. They think the Big Bwana Honky maybe installed a micro-miniature circuit board—one running off the electricity of my nerves—inside my head. Man, that’s spooky! But . . .”

  “Caliban threw me weaponless against that hungry lion,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a man of irreproachable virtue to me.”

  “If the doc says you’re evil, you’re no fucking good! A-1 rotten. Essence of putridity. Evil as Lucifer after the Fall. Evil as the soul of an Alabaman Ku Kluxer!”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  Wilfred grinned, though the grin was nervous.

  “Yeah. Doc told me. And I said, ‘I hear you, Doc, but you just hung up my sense of credibility.’ Doc didn’t answer. He seldom does. And he could care less if I believe or not. Doc don’t lie. Only honky I ever saw who don’t. But I still didn’t believe. He had to be putting me on. Then we came to Africa and caught that lion and let him loose at you, and there you were, big as life, and bigger. I saw you break that big cat’s neck! But I still couldn’t believe that, and I couldn’t believe that you were really you. But I guess you really are. Man, you’re something else!”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I wonder why he hired you? For your muscle?”

  He rubbed his wrist and winced.

  “Yeah, partly for my muscle. But I’m an electronic technician and a damn good one, honky.”

  “But Doc is still, as you put it, a honky?”

  “He’s the only honky I wouldn’t dare call honky to his face. That bronze cat was what Nietzsche was dreaming of before he flipped. A genuine Sooperdooperman! Sure a shame he isn’t black!”

  He was leaning with his back against the rear of the truck. I said, “I can see you’re thinking about rushing me again. Here.”

  I held out my right hand.

  He said, “What do you want?”

  “Take it,” I said. “Do whatever you want with it.”

  Instead, he advanced swiftly and tried to thrust his knuckles into my solar plexus. I seized the hand and squeezed on it. He screamed and fell to his knees.

  “Do I make myself clear?” I said.

  He moaned while he held the injured fist with the other hand. He said, “You’re still a big donkey-pricked dirty stinking honky.”

  I admired his spirit but deplored his lack of intelligence in this situation. Obviously, he could gain nothing by antagonizing me.

  And there was no use trying to tell him that I was outside his conflict of white and black any more than there had been in telling Zabu. I was probably the only white in the world entirely free of prejudice towards men because of their color. Even if I could have convinced him of my attitude, I would not have bothered. What did I care what he thought?

  “You will show me everything I want to see,” I said. “Otherwise, I kill you.”

  We went inside the camper. It was crammed with equipment and instruments, most of it electronic. At the touch of a button, these sank away, and the top of the camper rose and split and folded to two sides. A pedestal with a bazooka-like tube rose up from the floor, and then the tube telescoped outwards. At the same time, a section of the floor opened, and a replica of the tiny missile that had destroyed the jet appeared. This was about two feet long, was rocket-shaped, silvery, and weighed about 40 pounds.

  Wilfred adjusted the controls of an instrument with a cathode-ray screen. A section of the mountainside to the west sprang onto it.

  A generator under the truck floor hummed.

  The antenna turned southwards as Wilfred rotated a dial. It stopped when it pointed almost south, and I saw part of the Kenyan army camp as if I were looking from the mountainside from a distance. In the daylight.

  The picture was wavy and broken with jagged streaks, and almost immediately became so pale that I could see it only with difficulty.

  Yet I should not have been able to see anything at all. The Kenyans were behind a tall hill about a mile and a half from us.

  Wilfred explained that the antenna shot a beam against the mountainside. This bounced down over the Kenyans and then bounced up and against the ionosphere and back to the antenna. Unfortunately, the dark green of the mountain vegetation absorbed much of the energy, and the many irregularities of the tree-tops made for a broken picture.

  I noticed that his attitude seemed to have changed, though he was unconscious of the change. He acted as if he actually respected me, and in addition, was in awe of me. He had become so interested in his explanations of the devices, he had forgotten to act as if he hated me because I was a “honky.”

  “Doc said he invented this beamer back in 1943, believ
e it or not,” Wilfred said. “Hey, we need another transceiver!”

  He opened a cabinet while I watched him closely for a trick. He brought out a deflated sausage-shaped balloon about a foot long and attached the open end to a nozzle. The balloon filled up and became a blimp about four feet long. He fastened a small blue cigar shape to four eyelets along the blimp to make a tiny gondola. He released the airship, and it rose swiftly, carried eastward by the wind. Wilfred adjusted controls on a board, and the airship, visible in the light streaming from the open top of the camper, turned southwards.

  I watched the picture on the screen. It was a bird’s eye of the country beneath the balloon, as seen in the moonlight.

  I asked how Caliban got such a bright picture in the dark.

  Wilfred shrugged and said, “I don’t know. He might use heat-radiation to help develop the images, but I don’t know just how an ultra high-frequency beam could pick up heat images. I just don’t know. I do know that the CIA and the Commies, Chinese and Russians, got wind of this device, and Doc was fighting his own people as well as the Commies. For some reason, he didn’t want the U.S. to get it.”

  Apparently, Wilfred did not know about the Nine.

  I watched the screen. Presently, the Kenyan camp was in view.

  The balloon must have been directly over it.

  “You mean it when you say you’ll kill me if I don’t show you how the missile-launcher works?” he said.

  I did not reply, and he said, “You mean it.” He grinned. “Doc doesn’t care, anyway, if I get rid of a few Kenyans. He says they’re interfering.”

  I said nothing. I had expected him to object because the Kenyans were blacks, but he seemed to regard them an enemies, which, indeed, they were, if Caliban did not want interference with his hunt.

  Wilfred loaded the missile into the tube. Another appeared in the opening in the floor.

  The tube rotated and elevated in response to Wilfred’s adjustments of the controls. A grid appeared on the screen. A white dot danced out and went past the intersection of the X and Y axes and then shot back to it.