Cycle of Nemesis Read Online Free PDF Page A

at some time a flag had been stuck there.”
    “Well, I don’t think any of us here will be likely to be going there just yet!” jocularly remarked the fat sweaty man whose eyes seldom left the Bernini Aphrodite. Each time George Pomfret saw this fat man—his name, I had been told, was Simon Rackley—George would purse up his lips and narrow his eyes and take on the look of a sleuth.
    Bidding began desultorily. Little artistic merit could lie assigned a globe of the world. That the world portrayed was not the world these men and women would visit in their jet aircraft merely reinforced their lack of interest. Just yet, at any rate, geographical worlds—even physical representations, as this was, and not the ephemeral political globes of yesteryear—were not in fashion.
    With a strange feeling of command and buoyancy foreign to me on dryland, I spoke the bid I felt certain would secure the globe for me. The shaky old lady against whom I had been bidding turned laboriously in her chair to see her competitor, her silks and nylons and strings of beads hampering her movements, her yellow old face like that of a bird inquiring of the bird table in the garden, and before she could make up her mind whether to go on or not the hammer fell in sonorous sealment.
    She smiled at me, revealing a perfect set of superwhite dentures, and ducked her head in token of defeat.
    I bowed.
    The man who had entered during this exchange of politenesses took my arm. I stared at him, off balance.
    “You have just gained that globe?”
    “I have.”
    “I want it—”
    He wore a decent dark suit and pigskin shoes. His hands were broad and powerful, with square cut nails shining with attention and health. His shirt showed in the currently fashionable lavender hue, set off by a maroon tie figured in purple arabesques. These facts of his person I ascertained immediately, and as immediately passed them by in an absorbed study of his face.
    Used as I am to the immediate judgment of a man and to the arrival in a snap flash of the mind to a considered appraisal of character and personality, well-versed in the arts of concealment, I had to look twice at this man who so importunely grasped my arm.
    The way in which I would have assessed him belowsea would have been simple: I would have trusted him with the last oxy cylinder and the last harpoon in a frothing sea of killer whales. Square-faced, strong-jawed, keen-eyed, beak-nosed, wide-mouthed, all the descriptions of strong men and heroes fitted him; but in the very essence of himself he transcended all these purely physical attributes. He was a man.
    “Why do you want it?” I said, not bothering to wonder why I spoke as though I had known him for years.
    “I cannot tell you that. I would have been here earlier but my heli was—was damaged. I beg of you—”
    Evidently, he did not feel for me any of the strange sense of comradeship I felt for him. I sensed this as a loss to myself.
    “I particularly want that globe. I have bid for it and—”
    “Money? Is that your problem? I’ll give you double what you gave—”
    I smiled at him. Headless naked girls, naked girls pursued by ghastly parodies of monsters of nightmare, men who looked like me, vanishing, and now a man who would pay me two hundred percent for an old but normal globe of the world, all these happenings had occurred to me at what should have been a perfectly respectable country house auction.
    I could not get to grips with the vanishing man who looked like me. The girl and the monster had also vanished. And the first headless girl was dead.
    But this man stood before me, smiling his strong silent smile, and holding my arm, and offering to pay me over and above for this globe . . . Oh yes, there was no doubt in my mind.
    “I think,” I said with exquisite politeness, “you had better come with me. You and I have a few things to say to each other. Oh, yes—and we’ll bring the globe with us, too.”
    And I took his hand from my