"I see the way your thoughts are running," I said. "You're their
Ancient Foe, now, huh? Just let me get this straight: that means
that umpteen hundred years ago, you personally had a fight with the
Hunters--here at Stonehenge. You killed a batch of them and ran. You
hired some kind of Viking ship and crossed the Atlantic. Later on, you
lost your memory, and started being a guy named Foster. A few weeks ago
you lost it again. Is that the picture?"
"More or less."
"And now we're a couple of hundred feet under Stonehenge--after a brush
with a crowd of luminous stinkbombs--and you're telling me you'll be
nine hundred on your next birthday."
"Remember the entry in the journal, Legion? 'I came to the place of the
Hunters, and it was a place I knew of old, and there was no hive, but a
Pit built by men of the Two Worlds....'"
"Okay," I said. "So you're pushing a thousand."
I glanced at the screen, got out a scrap of paper, and scribbled a
rapid calculation. "Here's another big number for you. That object on
the screen is at an altitude--give or take a few percent--of thirty
thousand miles."
I tossed the pencil aside, swung around to frown at Foster. "What are
we mixed up in, Foster? Not that I really want to know. I'm ready to go
to a nice clean jail now, and pay my debt to society--"
"Calm down, Legion," Foster said. "You're raving."
"OK," I said, turning back to the screen. "You're the boss. Do what you
like. It's just my reflexes wanting to run. I've got no place to run
to. At least with you I've always got the wild hope that maybe you're
not completely nuts, and that somehow----"
I sat upright, eyes on the screen. "Look at this, Foster," I snapped. A
pattern of dots flashed across the screen, faded, flashed again....
"Some kind of IFF," I said. "A recognition signal. I wonder what we're
supposed to do now."
Foster watched the screen, saying nothing.
"I don't like that thing blinking at us," I said. "It makes me feel
conspicuous." I looked at the big red button beside the screen. "Maybe
if I pushed that...." Without waiting to think it over, I jabbed at it.
A yellow light blinked on the control panel. On the screen, the pattern
of dots vanished. The red blip separated, a smaller blip moving off at
right angles to the main mass.
"I'm not sure you should have done that," Foster said.
"There _is_ room for doubt," I said in a strained voice. "It looks like
I've launched a bomb from the ship overhead."
* * * * *
The climb back up the tunnel took three hours, and every foot of the
way I was listening to a refrain in my head: This may be it; this may
be it; this may be....
I crawled out of the tunnel mouth and lay on my back, breathing hard.
Foster groped his way out beside me.
"We'll have to get to the highway," I said, untying the ten-foot rope
of ripped garments that had linked us during the climb. "There's a
telephone at the pub; we'll notify the authorities...." I glanced up.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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