Plague Of Demons by Keith Laumer

Author:Keith Laumer [Laumer, Keith]
Format: epub
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T17:33:07+00:00

Chapter Ten

I was in a small, softly-lit room with a polished floor, warm to the touch, and walls that were a jumble of ancient, varnished oak cabinet-work, gray-painted equipment housings, instrument panels, indicator lights, and controls resembling those of a Tri-D starship. Exposed wiring and conduit crisscrossed the panels; a vast wall clock with fanciful roman numerals and elaborate hands said ten minutes past ten. There was a faint hum of recycling air. I groped my way to a high-backed padded chair, moaned a few times just to let my arm know that it had my sympathy. I looked around at the fantastic room. It was like nothing I had ever seen-except for a remote resemblance to Felix's underground laboratory in Tamboula. I felt an urge to laugh hysterically as I thought of the things up above, prowling the ground now, converging on the spot from which I had miraculously disappeared. How long would it be before they started to dig? The urge to laugh died. I closed my eyes, gathered my forces, such as they were, and keened my hearing.

Rustling sounds in the earth all about me; the slow grind of the earthworm, the frantic scrabble, pause, scrabble of the burrowing mole, the soft, tentative creak of the questing root . . .

I tuned, reaching out.

Wind moaned in the trees, and their branches creaked, complaining; dry stalks rustled, clashing dead stems; soft footfalls thump-thumped, crossing the field above me. There was the growl of a turbine, coming closer, the grate of tires in soft earth. A door slammed, feet clumped.

"It did not come this way," a flat voice said. Something gibbered-a sound that turned my spine to ice.

"It is sick and weak," the first voice said. "It is only a man. It did not come this way. It is not here."

More of the breathy gobbling; I could almost see the skull-face, the grinning mouth, the rag-tongue moving as it commanded the man-shaped slave standing before it . . .

"It is not here," the humanoid said. "I will return to my post in the village." Now the gabble was angry, insistent.

"It is not logical," the toneless voice said. "It went another way. The other units will find it."

Other footsteps had come close. Someone walked across my grave . . .

"There is no man here," another dull voice stated. "I am going back now." Two beast-things gibbered together.

"You let it escape you at the village," a lifeless voice replied. "That was not in accordance with logic."

The argument went on, twenty feet above my hidden sanctuary.

" . . . a factor that we cannot compute," a dead voice stated. "To remain here is unintelligent." Footsteps tramped away. The car door clattered open, slammed; a turbine growled into life; tires crunched the hard earth, going away.

Soft feet paced above me. Two of the creatures, possibly three, crossed and recrossed the area. I could hear them as they conferred. Then two stalked away, while the third settled down heavily to wait.

* * *

I took out my talking plastic rectangle and put it to my ear.

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