Free Cycle of Nemesis by Kenneth Bulmer Page A

bullet explode on the feathers of a wing.
    The genie did not stop. It came on unnervingly. I fired again at the face. Where the bullet went I didn’t know, for the thing had reared up and turned about, screaming. Blood siphoned from one side where Pomfret, desperately jerking his gun hand down, had fired a snap shot. Another shearing blast removed a wing and more dark blood gushed out. Charred flesh hung in ribbons. The thing went mad. It thrashed about, lashing its tail, and opening its bearded lips to scream and hiss.
    Then Pomfret fired for the third time and the thing’s head, crown, eyes, beard, lips, vanished in a puff of incoherent positrons.
    The body slumped fatly to the floor.
    Then, clearly visible to us all, quite without the slightest margin for error, the body faded, thinned, became transparent, vanished. It disappeared before our very eyes.
    Only the pool of blood was left, joining the earlier blood in a canal of crimson across the carpet.
    We remained frozen in our positions for some time; then Phoebe said, “Whew I I wasn’t dreaming that—was I?”
    “I’m afraid not, Phoebe.”
    Brennan released her and stood up. I held out his gun to him. He took it, smiled ruefully. “Would you believe me if I told you it was like seeing a Sphinx in Trafalgar Square climb down off its pedestal?”
    “I’ll believe you, Hall. Whatever it was, it meant more to you in that way than to us. To me, it was just another menace, a personal peril to my life, similar to many other intriguing monsters we have in the deeps.”
    “Lions, stupid,” said Phoebe.
    “Sure, anything you say. Lions, tigers, sphinxes—but that was a real honest-to-God three thousand year and more old carving from the gates of Sargon of Akkad’s palace at Khorsabad. I’ve seen ’em—”
    “So have I, old boy,” said Pomfret, still holding his gun in his right hand and Lottie in his left arm. “But what’s concerning me more is they vanish when you shoot ’em!”
    The wad of chewing gum emitted a long shuddery gasp and then tried to heave itself to its feet, quaking.
    “Let me out of here ! ” yelled Paul Benenson when he could articulate. “Help ! ”
    “Sit down, Paul, and take it easy,” sagely counseled Pomfret. “I’ll fix you a drink.”
    “And me, too, darling boy?" cooed Lottie.
    Brennan, Phoebe and I looked at one another, then we laughed spontaneously together. Reaction it may have been, but we all knew exactly what the others were thinking.
    Still and all, she would be good for the old stick-in- the-mud.

VII
    “There’s a simple, solid, scientific explanation for it all,” said Phoebe Desmond firmly.
    “I’ll go along with you on the last two S’s,” Hall Brennan told her with a shake of his head. “But not the first. No sir. This just isn’t simple.”
    We sat in Pomfret’s study while the household robots cleared up the mess and repaired the window, sitting there and talking about it, having missed the twenty-three fifty-nine midnight from Hampden. We hadn’t asked Phoebe to look up the time of the next plane. Speaking for myself, I needed time to think.
    As Brennan had said, “Now you know what smashed up the rotor on my heli. Although it wasn’t quite like that human-headed winged bull. The one I tangled with was a winged griffin, potentially more dangerous but in my case a lot smaller than this last one.”
    “So that,” I said to clear up a point that had been p ullin g me, “is how Khamushkei the Undying has found out about us. He was following you, Hall, and now we re all in the same pitch-pot.”
    “ ’Fraid so, chum,” said Brennan. He smiled at me and I returned that smile; I, for one, did not blame him. As men who lived dangerously as part of our profession—I had automatically assumed Hall Brennan to be in a similar social position to myself—one more danger would just have to be figured into the odds.
    Although, in all honesty, this quality and kind of problem posed questions far