Cycle of Nemesis by Kenneth Bulmer Read Free Book Online

context—that the city we’d found had thrived at about the latter half of the fifth millennium. Pretty good long way back—and for the purposes of what happened, I, now, can stick my neck out and say with some degree of certainty that it would be something like three hundred years back into the fifth millennium.”
    “Very pretty,” I said. “From that date to now is exactly seven thousand years.”
    “Oh!” said Phoebe, on a breath. Her hands, which had tended to want to lead a life of their own, now clung with sudden renewed strength to mine.
    “Now?” said Pomfret. Then, as he added it up: “Oh! I get it—you mean Khamushkei the Undying is due to break out of his Time Vault now!”

V
    The relationship between Khamushkei’s beast-bearing comet and Ezekiel’s wheel and ancient myths of space travelers visiting this world had to fade now. The central fact lay in that simple and devastating statement that Khamushkei was due to break out of the bonds his children had cast about him, was due to emerge from the Time Vault, was ready to ravage the world again.
    George Pomfret stood up, putting his drink very carefully on the table. His face held a look at odd variance with the look one would have expected him to hold at this moment: a look of gimlet-eyed determination making him a caricature of a drunken owl. His face showed flat and taut, the lips firm, the complexion a shade paler than usual. He walked toward a cabinet built into the wall and heavily locked with the latest electronic brain-rhythm devices. He put the electrodes to his temples and the doors opened to the matching key sequences. He reached inside and came back to the table carrying a gun.
    The gun was a Farley Express, not their latest model, which I, among others, still did not trust, but a well-proven positronic incoherer. A weapon at once adaptable as a single or two-handed weapon, with telescopic sight and shoulder butt optional extras, it fitted snugly into a suit pocket. It could cut a hole through ten yards of tungsten steel and neatly atomize a man’s midriff without really trying.
    “If,” said Pomfret, “we are going to deal with this friend of yours, Hall, we’d better go prepared.”
    My opinion of George Pomfret underwent a drastic revision.
    “Now just a minute," said Phoebe, rearing back from the table. “What—”
    “Easy,” I said gently. Then, to Brennan: “Hadn’t you better finish? I mean—old George here might go off half-cocked right away.”
    Pomfret favored me with a look that meant, “I’d kick you downstairs if you weren’t my bosom pal.”
    “There’s little left to tell, at least from my end,” said Brennan. He kept looking at Pomfret’s Farley Express with, I thought, the look of a professional. “I, too, realized that someone has got to shut those seals on the Vault if everything we’ve built up over the past thousands of years isn’t all to go smash. So I began working on that.” He looked at me intently, finishing with, “That’s when my two archaeological pals were killed.”
    Phoebe asked the obvious.
    “That globe,” answered Brennan. “I’d been following up scattered ideas, references, clues—they scarcely merit the importance of that name—when I met—this was in Singapore in one of those back street underground dives —this fellow Northrop.”
    “Ah!” said Pomfret.
    “Not the chap you’d have known, who took over Gannets. This was his son. Just about dead of drugs, the stupid idiot—no one needs to do that anymore—but I gave him a helping hand—a helping hand to die decently. All I could do. But he mentioned this weird character, Vasil Stannard. And the globe. It meant nothing to Northrop, of course; but it did to me. So I came as fast as I could.”
    “Your heli?” I said, delicately.
    He made a face. “I crash-landed. A rotor blew. Lucky.” I cleared my throat. “Some rather—unlikely—events occurred while we were at Gannets. I brought you along here because