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“The silly man doesn’t matter. He is in the chamber above, at the apex of the tower. Do you not yet fathom my sheer and utter brilliance? Do you not see that I am the son of my father? For all of his murderous insanity, his was the greatest mind the world has ever known. The greatest, that is, until I was born! I will, this day, complete my work and become something...astonishing!”
“Now why,” Billy began, “would I let any incarnation of Jack the Ripper continue to draw breath?” He raised the Colt to point directly at Mort Prime’s face.
“Billy,” Avi said. “Leave him. He is crazy. Let us retrieve John Koothrappally and quit this place.”
“Go ahead,” Mort Prime said. “Shoot me.” Mort Prime tapped the floor with his metal cane and there was audible crack! A shimmering blue bubble appeared around him. A halo, of sorts.
Billy fired, but the bullet flattened six inches from the old mort’s face and fell to the stone floor.
Mort Prime held up his cane and moved a finger over a small button. He pressed it.
A rumble came from across the hall behind them.
“Billy,” Avi said. “I think—”
“What?” Billy snapped, and then fired again. The second bullet joined the first at his feet.
“I think...something not good is happening.”
Billy glanced over his shoulder at the flowering cracks and the pronounced bulge in the hallway a hundred feet away. “I think you’re right,” he said.
[ 95 ]
When the cavern entrance was mere yards ahead, Ekka and Bixie realized that there would be no time to stop and climb to the canal floor below. Ekka tried to recall the distance down from their previous entrance and exit from the cave, and realized she had no way of knowing. She had been aboard the Argent at the time, and hadn’t seen it.
She turned to Bixie and the two exchanged a knowing look. There was no stopping. In the next few moments they would either live or die, or at the worst have their bodies broken such that they would be unable to defend themselves from the mass of spiders when they boiled forth from the cave.
When they were scant yards away, the two women saw something that gave them hope beyond all possible hope. Something metallic was slowly rising from below.
Their hands found each other and they clasped down hard as they came to the lip of the cavern—and leapt.
They landed on the upper surface of the Argent and very nearly rolled off into space. Bixie, however, managed to keep from crushing the sack of eggs. They turned as the Argent backed away from the entrance out into open air. As they moved away the first of the spiders emerged from the cavern. They were hideous and they were angry. Some of them even bit at one another to have an outlet for their rage.
“You ladies all right?” Pat Garrett’s voice called to them.
They turned to see the upper hatchway open and the Sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico with his hat in place and a cheesy grin on his face.
“My God, Pat,” Ekka exclaimed. “I am so glad to see you.”
“What now?” Pat asked. “Whatever it is, we’d better do it while that vile nest of vipers has its blood up.”
The cavern echoed a boom from above.
“The battle’s begun up dere,” Bixie said. “Our friends be needin’ us.”
“Ekka,” Pat said. “You come over here and replace me. Let Bixie give the orders and you shout them down to Edgar and me. I’ll go man the guns.”
Ekka nodded and scrambled toward the hatchway. She turned to Bixie. “Command us, Bixie.”
“Rise,” Bixie said.
[ 96 ]
There was a resounding thump against the far wall. Mortar cracked and silted down. Avi backed away from Billy and Mort Prime. Billy, however, stood his ground. He broke down the cylinder of his Colt and fed bullets into the smoking chambers.
At the next thump, a set of bricks crumpled to the ground and through the hole beyond it Billy could see the immense torso of the Cyclops robot from Mort Prime’s diagrams. He remembered the death ray eyes of the original Cyclops—Judah Merkam’s crowning achievement in the science of robotics from ten years dead and gone—and his stomach lurched.
“Come on out, robot,” Billy said, but even as he did, he took a step backward.
