Free Catacombs by John Farris

indulgently at them and took his leave. Nikolaiev chuckled, mopping his face with a handkerchief.
    "Madmen," he said, leaning toward Morgan, tapping his forehead with a blunt finger. "So much craziness we're hearing. Mad, mad! What a situation for meeting you first time, my dear friend." The Russian held out both hands to the glittering bloodstones, an infatuated gesture partly redeemed by the curling of his lip. "What you think, who makes these writings? Ten thousand years ago? Civilizations, like ours? Such lies!"
    "There are strong occult and primitive traditions." This was translated for Nikolaiev. He chuckled again.
    "Fairy tales." He heaved himself up from his chair and hovered over the attaché case on the table, touching one of the bloodstones, then another. He put back the one which Jumbe had given him. Suddenly he scooped up a stone at random and turned. He tossed it casually to Morgan, who was startled as he snatched the stone out of the air.
    "Taking it. Why not? Some, what's the right word, suckers we are. Little reward for our long travels." He took a jeweler's cloth from the case, selected a diamond for himself, wrapped and stuffed it carelessly into a pocket of his coat. Then he picked up an untouched glass of wine, drank some, made a disbelieving face, and said, pointing to the glass, "Another hoax!"
    He came over to pump Morgan's hand. Outside an animal screamed in the night.
    "Terrible country," Nikolaiev complained. "Too much sweat. We should both go home before these chernomazy shooting and eating us."
    Morgan could still hear the Russian's laughter as he went outside with his interpreter to the car that waited to drive them to Kilimanjaro airport.
    And then Morgan was alone, faintly warmed by the dying fire, thinking about the diamond in his hand, with a market value (Damon Paul claimed) in the millions of dollars. He wondered if there actually had been a Chapman/Weller expedition. Easy to check it out. He wondered what Marshal V. K. Nikolaiev was really thinking when he pocketed the irresistible bloodstone.
    Jumbe's   story of FIREKILL was too fantastic to believe, but . .
    Morgan was disturbed by a chill of premonition, of despair, as if some vital exchange had taken place between the bloodstone and his own flesh. He was feeling, not thinking, with the innate arrogance of modern man.
    As recently as sixty years ago no one had believed the atom could be split, or that men would reach the moon. Or that the bones of humanlike creatures, three million years old, would be discovered in a gorge called Olduvai, located only a short distance from where he was sitting. Africa yielded its mysteries with numbing slowness. On the banks of the Nile the great pyramids crumbled, riddled by the sandy winds of two thousand years. Once the desert of Egypt had been rich farmland. Was theirs the highest civilization to evolve before Christ? Or could Egypt have been a colony, a satellite state that faltered and died when it lost touch with an even more advanced civilization? If the Hawaiian Islands were abruptly cut off from the rest of the world, their society would disintegrate, in an astonishingly short time, into a primitive archetype. Within two centuries there would be only vague race memories of television, airplanes, neon lights.
    He recalled other phenomena he had read about or seen: cave paintings of remote peoples in surprisingly contemporary modes of dress, dry cell batteries resurrected from the furnace-lands of ancient Mesopotamia, the interiors of Egyptian pyramids untainted by the smoke of torches: Either the builders had been able to see perfectly in pitch darkness, or they'd had some source of artificial light.
    Morgan went out under the stars to catch his breath, clear his head, scratch an itch of indecision. General Timbaroo was a silent, shadowy presence nearby. The darkness seethed with unseen life, primordial violence was all around. Morgan could make out Kilimanjaro surprisingly well, as a distant