The two-hundred pound señorita put a pot of black Cuban coffee and
a pitcher of salted milk down beside the two chipped cups, leered
at me in a way that might have been appealing thirty years before,
and waddled back to the kitchen. I poured a cup, gulped half of
it, and shuddered. In the street outside the cafe a guitar cried
_Estrellita_.
"Okay, Foster," I said. "Here's what I've got: The first half of the
book is in pot-hooks--I can't read that. But this middle section: the
part coded in regular letters--it's actually encrypted English. It's
a sort of resumé of what happened." I picked up the sheets of paper
on which I had transcribed my deciphering of the coded section of the
book, using the key that had been micro-engraved in the fake scratch
on the back cover.
I read:
"For the first time, I am afraid. My attempt to construct the
communicator called down the Hunters upon me. I made such a shield
as I could contrive, and sought their nesting place.
"I came there and it was in that place that I knew of old, and
it was no hive, but a pit in the ground, built by men of the Two
Worlds. And I would have come into it, but the Hunters swarmed in
their multitudes. I fought them and killed many, but at the last
I fled away. I came to the western shore, and there I hired bold
sailors and a poor craft, and set forth.
"In forty-nine days we came to shore in this wilderness, and here
were men as from the dawn of time, and I fought them, and when they
had learned fear, I lived among them in peace, and the Hunters have
not found this place. Now it may be that my saga ends here, but I
will do what I am able.
"The Change may soon come upon me; I must prepare for the stranger
who will come after me. All that he must know is in these pages.
And I say to him:
"Have patience, for the time of this race draws close. Venture not
again on the Eastern continent, but wait, for soon the Northern
sailors must come in numbers into this wilderness. Seek out their
cleverest metal-workers, and when it may be, devise a shield, and
only then return to the pit of the Hunters. It lies in the plain,
50/10,000-parts of the girth of this (?) to the west of the Great
Chalk Face, and 1470 parts north from the median line, as I reckon.
The stones mark it well with the sign of the Two Worlds."
* * * * *
I looked across at Foster. "It goes on then with a blow-by-blow account
of dealings with aborigines. He was trying to get them civilized in a
hurry. They figured he was a god and he set them to work building roads
and cutting stone and learning mathematics and so on. He was doing all
he could to set things up so this stranger who was to follow him would
know the score, and carry on the good work."
Foster's eyes were on my face. "What is the nature of the Change he
speaks of?"
"He never says--but I suppose he's talking about death," I said. "I
don't know where the stranger is supposed to come from."
"Listen to me, Legion," Foster said. There was a hint of the old
anxious look in his eyes. "I think I know what the Change was. I think
he knew he would forget--"
"You've got amnesia on the brain, old buddy," I said.
"--and the stranger is--himself. A man without a memory."
I sat frowning at Foster. "Yeah, maybe," I said. "Go on."
"And he says that all that the stranger needs to know is there--in the
book."
"Not in the part I decoded." I said. "He describes how they're coming
along with the road-building job, and how the new mine panned out--but
there's nothing about what the Hunters are, or what had gone on before
he tangled with them the first time."
"It must be there, Legion; but in the first section, the part written
in alien symbols."
"Maybe," I said. "But why the hell didn't he give us a key to that
part?"
"I think he assumed that the stranger--himself--would remember the old
writing," Foster said. "How could he know that it would be forgotten
with the rest?"
"Your guess is as good as any," I said. "Maybe better; you know how it
feels to lose your memory."
"But we've learned a few things," Foster said. "The pit of the
Hunters--we have the location."
"If you call this 'ten-thousand parts to the west of the chalk face' a
location," I said.
"We know more than that," Foster said. "He mentions a plain; and it
must lie on a continent to the east--"
"If you assume that he sailed from Europe to America, then the
continent to the east would be Europe," I said. "But maybe he went from
Africa to South America, or--"
"The mention of Northern sailors--that suggests the Vikings--"
"You seem to know a little history, Foster," I said. "You've got a lot
of odd facts tucked away."
"We need maps," Foster said. "We'll look for a plain near the sea--"
"Not necessarily."
"--and with a formation called a chalk face to the east."
"What's this 'median line' business mean?" I said. "And the bit about
ten thousand parts of something?"
"I don't know," Foster said. "But we must have maps."
"I bought some this afternoon," I said. "I also got a dime-store globe.
I thought we might need them. What the hell! let's get out of this and
back to the room, where we can spread out. I know it's a grim prospect,
but...." I got to my feet, dropped some coins on the table, and led the
way out.
* * * * *
It was a short half block to the flea trap we called home. The roaches
scurried as we passed up the dark stairway to our not much brighter
room. I crossed to the bureau and opened a drawer.
"The globe," Foster said, taking it in his hands. "I wonder if perhaps
he meant a ten-thousandth part of the circumference of the earth?"
"What would he know about--"
"Disregard the anachronistic aspect of it," Foster said. "The man
who wrote the book knew many things. We'll have to start with some
assumptions. Let's make the obvious ones: that we're looking for a
plain on the west coast of Europe, lying--" He pulled a chair up to
the scabrous table and riffled through to one of my scribbled sheets:
"50/10,000s of the circumference of the earth--that would be about 125
miles--west of a chalk formation, and 3675 miles north of a median
line...."
"Maybe," I said, "he means the Equator."
"Certainly," Foster said. "Why not? That would mean our plain lies on
a line through--" he studied the small globe. "Warsaw, and south of
Amsterdam."
"But this bit about a rock out-cropping," I said. "How do we find out
if there's any conspicuous chalk formation there?"
"We can consult a geology text," Foster said. "There may be a library
nearby."
"The only chalk deposits I ever heard about," I said, "are the white
cliffs of Dover."
"White cliffs...."
We both reached for the globe at once.
"125 miles west of the chalk cliffs," Foster said. He ran a finger over
the globe. "North of London, but south of Birmingham. That puts us
reasonably near the sea--"
"Where's that atlas?" I said. I rummaged, came up with a cheap
tourists' edition, flipped the pages.
"Here's England," I said. "Now we look for a plain."
Foster put a finger on the map. "Here," he said. "A large plain--called
Salisbury."
"Large is right," I said. "It would take years to find a stone cairn
on that. We're getting excited about nothing. We're looking for a hole
in the ground, hundreds of years old--if this lousy notebook means
anything--maybe marked with a few stones--in the middle of miles of
plain. And it's all guesswork anyway...." I took the atlas, turned the
page.
"I don't know what I expected to get out of decoding those pages," I
said. "But I was hoping for more than this."
"I think we should try, Legion," Foster said. "We can go there, search
over the ground. It would be costly, but not impossible. We can start
by gathering capital--"
"Wait a minute, Foster," I said. I was staring at a larger-scale map
showing southern England. Suddenly my heart was thudding. I put a
finger on a tiny dot in the center of Salisbury Plain.
"Six, two and even," I said. "There's your Pit of the Hunters...."
Foster leaned over, read the fine print.
"Stonehenge."
* * * * *
I read from the encyclopedia page:
"--this great stone structure, lying on the Plain of Salisbury,
Wiltshire, England, is pre-eminent among megalithic monuments of the
ancient world.
"Within a circular ditch 300' in diameter, stones up to 22' in height
are arranged in concentric circles. The central altar stone, over 16'
long, is approached from the north-east by a broad roadway called the
Avenue--"
"It is not an altar," Foster said.
"How do you know?"
"Because--" Foster frowned. "I know, that's all."
"The journal said the stones were arranged in the sign of the Two
Worlds," I said. "That means the concentric circles, I suppose; the
same thing that's stamped on the cover of the notebook."
"And the ring," Foster said.
"Let me read the rest," I said.
"A great sarsen stone stands upright in the Avenue; the axis through
the two stones, when erected, pointed directly to the rising of the sun
on Midsummer day. Calculations based on this observation indicate a
date of approximately 1600 B.C."
Foster took the book and I sat on the window sill and looked out at a
big Florida moon. I lit a cigarette, dragged on it, and thought about
a man who long ago had crossed the North Atlantic in a dragon boat to
be a god among the Indians. I wondered where he came from, and what it
was he was looking for, and what kept him going in spite of the hell
that showed in the spare lines of the journal he kept. If, I reminded
myself, he had ever existed....
* * * * *
Foster was poring over the book. "Look," I said. "Let's get back to
earth. We have things to think about, plans to make. The fairy tales
can wait until later."
"What do you suggest?" Foster said. "That we forget the things you've
told me, and the things we've read here, discard the journal, and
abandon the attempt to find the answers?"
"No," I said. "I'm no sorehead. Sure, there's some things here that
somebody ought to look into--some day. But right now what I want is the
cops off my neck. And I've been thinking. I'll dictate a letter; you
write it--your lawyers know your handwriting. Tell them you were on the
thin edge of a nervous breakdown--that's why all the artillery around
your house--and you made up your mind suddenly to get away from it all.
Tell them you don't want to be bothered, that's why you're travelling
incognito, and that the northern mobster that came to see you was just
stupid, not a killer. That ought to at least cool off the cops--"
Foster looked thoughtful. "That's an excellent suggestion," he said.
"Then we need merely to arrange for passage to England, and proceed
with the investigation."
"You don't get the idea," I said. "You can arrange things by mail so we
get our hands on that dough of yours--"
"Any such attempt would merely bring the police down on us," Foster
said. "You've already pointed out the unwisdom of attempting to pass
myself off as--myself."
"There ought to be a way...." I said.
"We have only one avenue of inquiry," Foster said. "We have no choice
but to explore it. We'll take passage on a ship to England--"
"What'll we use for money--and papers? It would cost hundreds.
Unless--" I added, "--we worked our way. But that's no good. We'd still
need passports--plus union cards and seamen's tickets."
"Your friend," Foster said. "The one who prepares passports. Can't he
produce the other papers as well?"
"Yeah," I said. "I guess so. But it will cost us."
"I'm sure we can find a way to pay," Foster said. "Will you see
him--early in the morning?"
I looked around the blowsy room. Hot night air stirred a geranium
wilting in a tin can on the window sill. An odor of bad cooking and
worse plumbing floated up from the street.
"At least," I said, "it would mean getting out of here."