And the Devil Will Drag You Under Read online

  The other two gasped.

  "A true blueblood, as you can see," Mogart said lightly. And it was true. Unless there were some kind of trick involved, his blood was blue-and not a dark blue, either. A nice, pretty sky-blue.

  He reached up and pushed back his long gray hair, revealing his ears. They were small, and back flush against the side of his head. They were basically rec­tangular, except that the outer edge of the top of the rectangle had a sort of S-shaped curve. They were not human ears, anyway-more like those seen on gar­goyles and demons.

  Mac Walters edged a little away from the strange man, almost pressing himself against the wall of the booth. Jill could only stare at the little man, or whatever he was, in horrid fascination.

  "I have a tail, too," the little man told them. "But pardon me if I do not disrobe. It is enough to show you that I am not human. I trust you are convinced of that?"

  "Who-what-are you, then?" Jill demanded.

  The little man sucked on the thumb he'd penetrated. "I told you-Asmodeus Mogart. At least this week, anyway." He looked sadly at the crushed glass. "I am, as you might have guessed, an alcoholic. Things tend to blur a bit when you have that problem." He sighed, considered calling for another double, discarded the idea for the moment, and continued.

  "As to what I am, well, you might think of me as a University professor on leave. A behavioral scientist, you might say, studying the charming little civilization you have-ah, had here."

  "But not from any University on this world," Wal­ters responded. "Are you here to study us at the end or something?" That thought suddenly became the most important thing to both of the humans, far more so than what the little fellow was.

  Mogart shrugged, a wistful look on his face. "No, no. I was-ah, terminated, you see. Drinking. There was a scandal. Since I was on the project that created this research run, they decided to stick me here."

  "Research run?" Jill prodded.

  He nodded. "Oh, yes. Probabilities Department, you know. Get yourself a nice hypothesis, and they con­struct a working model. This universe of yours, for example. One of hundreds they've done. Maybe still do. I'm out of touch after so long, you see."

  Mac Walters was horrified. "Construct? Universe?"

  "Oh, yes," Mogart replied casually. "Easy to do, they tell me. Lots of machines and data and all that, but not really difficult. Just expensive." He gave a mournful sigh. "That's the problem, you see. It's the whole universe they've built, not just this little planet. I actually took pride in hand and tried to talk them into saving it. Actually made the trip-first time in I can't remember how many centuries. They didn't care." He looked at each of their faces in turn. "Face it. If you had a rat colony, observing how it worked, and one of the rats died, wouldn't that be part of the ex­periment?"

  Jill McCulloch shook her head disbelievingly. "I can't accept all this. Here it is the end of the world and I'm sitting in a bar talking to a madman."

  The little man heard her comment but ignored it.

  "You see, this thing has caused me a problem. Stay here and die with you all, or go home."

  "That's a problem?" Mac asked him, thinking there'd be no choice.

  He nodded sadly. "They'll put me out to pasture in some nice little place, but it's a cold little world and there's no booze. None." His tone was sad and tinged with self-pity, and there seemed to be tears in his dark, slanted eyes. "I couldn't stand it. So, you see, I must go for the third alternative, try it, anyway."

  They looked at hint curiously, expectantly. In other circumstances they would have beaten hasty exits, dismissing him as an imaginative drunk or a drunken madman-which, in fact, they still really thought he was, deep down. But in other circumstances they wouldn't be there, not now, and they certainly would not have invited him to sit down with them. When the end of the world was nigh, and you had exhausted all hope, you sat in a bar and listened to a drunken madman and took him seriously. It didn't hurt in the least, and they were getting more than slightly tipsy themselves.

  "What alternative?" Jill McCulloch wanted to know.

  The little man seemed to forget himself for a mo­ment, then suddenly animation gripped him again.

  "Oh, yes, yes," he mumbled apologetically. "But, you see, that's why I didn't do this sooner. Too many drinks, too much lost time. Now I can no longer pick and choose the best people to send. Now I must feed the broadest possible requirements into my, ah, computer, let's call it, and take what I can get. I sent out the call, and here you both are. See?"

  They didn't see at all.

  He looked at Jill McCulloch. "How old are you? Tell me a little about yourself." His hand went into his pocket, and he seemed to be touching or rubbing something inside that pocket. Neither Jill nor Mac could see him doing it.

  Jill suddenly found herself wanting to talk. "I'm twenty-five. I was born in Encino, California, and lived most of my life in Los Angeles. My father was a former Olympic team member, and from the start he decided I was going to be a star, too. Bigger than he was, since he never won a medal. I was put into gymnastics training before I can even remember. When Mom died-I was only seven-that only increased my father's determination. I got special treatment, special schools, coaches, all that. I barely missed the Olympic team when I was fourteen, but made the U.S. meet. I did it at eighteen and won a bronze medal. But shortly after that, the drive started to go. I just didn't seem as sure of myself as I was. I knew I'd had it, and Dad seemed to accept it. I went to USC, taking a phys. ed. major-after all, it was all I knew how to do. Maybe become a coach, find the next gold medal­ist. I got bored, though. After all, I'd had all that stuff since I was born. I dropped out when I was twenty and got a job doing some disco dancing, got a little place near the ocean, and spent my time swimming, surfing, hang-gliding, and generally drifting."

  Mogart nodded. "But you have kept yourself in excellent physical condition, I see."

  She nodded back. "Oh, yes. When you do it for your whole life, it just becomes second nature to you."

  Mogart sat back in the booth for a moment,, thinking. The pattern had been youth, athletics, bright mind, and guts. This one looked all right. He turned to Mac, his hand still in his pocket. "You?"

  Now it was Walters' turn to feel talkative.

  "Ever since I was small, I wanted to be a football player," he told them. "I worked at it, trained for it, did everything I could to make the grade. Hell, my father was a West Virginia coal miner-I saw what that life did to him and Ma. No way. And I did it, I really did. Big high-school play got me scouted by Nebraska, and they signed me as a running back. I was good-real good. But after a friend of mine was hurt on the field and they told him he'd never play again, I got smart in other ways, too. I took my degree in business. I was signed by the Eagles and played almost five years with them and the Broncos, until my knee really started in on me. They told me there was a risk of permanent damage if I kept playing, and I started looking around. Kerricott Corp.-the big restaurant­and-hotel chain-made me an offer. I'd been working with them in the off season after I got my M.B.A. from Colorado. I took it. Junior executive. I was on the way up when this stuff happened. Me and a few of the others were going to take a plane to New Zealand, but somehow I wound up here."

  Mogart seemed extraordinarily pleased. Another good fit. "You would never have made it to New Zea­land," he consoled. "No fuel stops, most of the islands gone or the volcanoes erupting. Same with New Zea­land. It's gone." He shifted. "How's your knee now?"

  "Fine," Walters responded unhesitatingly. "I think I got out in time."

  "Either of you married?" Mogart prodded. "Fam­ily?"

  "I was married once," Walters told him. "We busted up a year and a half ago. I guess she's dead now. I don't know about West Virginia-I haven't been able to get a line east of the Rockies. I guess they're all gone, too.

  Mogart turned his head to look at Jill McCulloch. "You?"

  She shook her head slowly from side to side. "Dad wouldn't move out. We tried, but by the
time he de­cided to do anything it was too late. The tidal waves, you know. He was all I had-close, anyway. Gone now." That last was said so softly it could hardly be heard, as if for the first time she was suddenly facing up to what "gone" really meant.

  "Do either of you have any experience with wea­pons?" Mogart continued his questioning.

  "I'm pretty good with a rifle and did some deer hunting with a bow and arrow when I was a teen-ager, but nothing else," Walters told him.

  "I-this might seem silly," Jill said hesitantly. "I'm a pretty good fencer. It was one of the secondary sports I took up that helped build up my reflexes and timing."

  "Ever kill anyone, either of you?" Mogart pressed.

  They both looked startled. "Of course not!" Jill huffed. Mac treated it like a joke; he smiled and shook his head negatively.

  "Do you think you could do so? Could you kill if, by doing so, you could stop that thing up there from hitting the Earth, maybe even reverse a lot of what has happened here?" Mogart's tone grew serious, almost anxious, and there was no doubt in either of the others' minds that the question was not being asked from a purely theoretical point of view.

  "I-I'm not sure," the woman replied.

  "Depends," was Walters' response. "If somebody was trying to kill me, maybe I could."

  The little man sighed and lit another cigarette. He needed a drink, but didn't dare right now. "Well, that's not exactly what we have here. But some killing might be necessary-and, in fact, you might be killed instead." He paused, lapsing again into that daze, but only for a moment.

  "Look," he continued earnestly. "Here's the situa­tion. I told you how the University sets up these uni­verses. The processes used and the equipment required would seem like black magic to you. I should know-I think I'm the model for most of the devils and de­mons on this world. So let's think of it as magic, com­plete magic. Your science is devoted to finding the laws by which things work, and it's a comfortable wayto do things-but all of it, necessarily, is simply de-fining the laws established artificially for this universe by the Department of Probabilities. Those laws don't apply everywhere. So let's take nothing for granted, and just accept it as magic. It works about the same way, anyway."

  He reached into his tattered coat pocket and pulled out something, placing it on the vinyl tabletop for them to see. It was a huge stone, like a perfect giant ruby, multifaceted and shining, almost as if it were on fire with a life source of its own.

  "A device-an amplifier-no, check that, a magic stone," Mogart explained. "A link with my own world, and with all the others, too. A vessel of great power during the setup stages, drawing power from outside your universe. With it I have enormous power by your standards. I make people do things against their will, change minds, put on funny shows, transport myself where I will. It's still not very powerful comparatively speaking. Its limits are -too great-it cannot handle enough power to do a big job."

  "It does pretty well against the laws of probabili­ties," Walters noted, nodding toward the slot machines.

  Mogart smiled. "Oh, dear me! No! You presuppose that the machines are random. Most people do. Actu­ally, they have a system of weights and pins in them, governed mechanically by the coins put in. That's how they set the payoffs. The more coins in, the more weights depressed, the more pins go out longer to catch the elusive payoffs. I merely increase the weight so that the pins come out all the way. I win nine out of ten times that way."

  "Psychokinesis," Jill guessed. "I saw a TV show on it once."

  Mogart nodded. "If you will. I've been using the power to try and slow our unfriendly asteroid out there. There has been some effect, but it's very slight on an object of such mass."

  "Perhaps you could add more mind power by add­ing more people," Walters suggested, not even con­sidering the fact that he was taking all that the little man had said at face value.

  Mogart shook his head from side to side. "No, no. The number of inputs actually decreases the output power. More drain. You'd need matched minds, and that would be impossible unless there were more exact duplicates of me-and one of me is too much for most people. No, it's not more input, but more amplification that's needed. The stone just doesn't have sufficient power to do what it's being asked to do."

  "Then you need more stones," Jill put in, thinking aloud. "How many?"

  "Five," Mogart replied. "Five more, that is. The progression is exponential. Two stones joined together have ten times the power of one; three, ten times two, and so on. It's a neat solution. Nobody in the field has enough power to change the rules of the world, let alone the universe, he or she is in-but a lot of us can get together if something monstrous goes wrong and fix it."

  "And the end of the world isn't monstrous?" Wal­ters asked incredulously.

  The little man sighed. "The end of your world, of this planet, yes. One world in a vast universe, and only one of many universes. Planets and suns die all the time. No, you wouldn't comprehend the nature of a catastrophe enormous enough to cause a bunch of us getting together. So we have a problem. How do we get enough of the stones and get them into my hands in time to stop this crash? I can't get them from the University; Probabilities has them too well guarded for that. That means we have to get them from others of my own kind in the field."

  "Steal them, you mean," Jill put in.

  He nodded. "If you will."

  "Any more of your kind on Earth?" Mac asked.

  "No, there's usually only one per civilization, and this one in particular is not highly thought of, which is why they chose me for the job. And we can't get the stones from legitimate research personnel, either. They would be more than willing to destroy their little worlds rather than give up their stones, and may have University security helping them. No, we'll have to pluck them from the rogues like me."

  "Rogues?" Jill echoed questioningly.

  He nodded. "Ones who, like myself, got into trouble and were exiled to various little-used and unimpor­tant places where they could cause no real harm out-side their own prison. Most choose it, like myself, rather than face the alternatives of an eternally dull retire­ment or a mindwipe." He looked at them both seri­ously. "We can't die, you see. We reached that point and passed it eons ago. We neither die nor reproduce. And that, of course, brings up the other problem-the ones you must steal the stones from, they are immortal, too. They can kill you, but you can't kill them."

  "Then how . . . ?" both of the humans asked to­gether, letting the question trail off.

  "We must find the agent, then somehow steal the magic jewel. Not once, which is hard enough, but five times. And we haven't any room for failure, either. Time isn't consistent on the various levels-some run at this time rate, some run much faster than we, some run much slower. Which is good, for otherwise we'd never have the time to do the job. So, with time press­ing, we are limited to universes running at a much faster clip than here-say an hour here equals a day there, or even faster rates. That narrows us down to only a couple of dozen. Now, add to that problem the fact that we must use only rogues, not anyplace with a project going on where security could be around. When I put all those requirements together, I come up with only five possibilities. Five! Thus, we must enter each of those worlds and steal the magic jewel-and we cannot fail even once, or we won't have enough power to knock that damned rock out of reality. And, with time so short here, we alone must do it. I can help, but the two of you must do the real work. There is no one else, nor is there likely to be."

  Mac Walters gulped, and Jill McCulloch again ex­perienced that sense of total unreality about the con­versation.

  "Do you both agree to try?" Mogart pressed. Walters nodded dully.

  McCulloch sighed, not believing a word of what she was hearing. "Why not?"

  The little man nodded. "Now, indulge me here. I know you both think this is end-of-the-world madness, so this little bit extra will not hurt, either. Just believe me that, for various reasons, it's necessary."

  He reached out and picked
up the jewel, holding it in his outstretched right hand, palm open and up in the center of the table.

  "You first, young woman. Just place your hand over mine and the jewel-no, palm down, on top of mine. That's it." His tone grew strange; even his voice started to take on a hollow, echoey quality.

  "Repeat after me," he instructed. She nodded, and he said, "I, Jill McCulloch, freely and of my own will, accept the geas and all others which shall be placed upon me." Then he stopped. She repeated it, forgetting the word "geas" until prompted. "And I accept this one as my liege lord in service, and accept his mark and bondage."

  She frowned slightly. The language sounded like something out of Dracula; she had the odd feeling that she was selling her soul. Still, she repeated the man's strange words.

  "What is done is done and cannot be undone," Mogart intoned, "under the Seal of Blood."

  Suddenly there was a burning feeling in the center of her palm, as if someone had just stuck a lot of needles in it. She started in surprise and tried to pull her hand away, but it seemed frozen there.

  "It is finished," Mogart proclaimed, and her hand came free. She withdrew it and stared at her palm. On it, like some sort of tattoo, was a small pentagram inside of which were two stylized strokes, like goat's horns. There were little flecks of blood around it, in-side the pentagram, but they soon dried and the pain quickly faded.

  "Now you, Mr. Walters," Mogart said, turning to the man, who was staring at the woman's palm in mixed wonder and apprehension.

  "What's happening there?" he asked nervously.

  "A necessary process," Mogart responded coolly. "Binds you to the jewel, and so will allow you to pass into other planes at my direction and also will alwayskeep you in touch with me. Come! Come! What have you to lose? And time is of the essence!"

  Walters put his hand over the jewel in Mogart's palm a little hesitantly. But he did it, going through the same ritual, and, despite forewarning, experiencing the same burning and etched design on his palm as the woman had.'