A Yuletide Universe Read online

  I don’t know if Nackles exists, or will exist. All I know for sure is that there’s suddenly a new level of meaning in the lyric of that popular Christmas song. You know the one I mean:

  You’d better watch out.

  Santa Claus vs. S.P.I.D.E.R.

  Harlan Ellison®

  * * *

  I

  It was half-past September when the red phone rang. Kris moved away from the warm and pliant form into which he had been folded, belly to back, and rubbed a hand across sticky eyes. The phone rang again. He could not make out the time on the luminous dial of his wrist watch. “What is it, honey?” mumbled the blond woman beside him. The phone rang a third time. “Nothing, baby . . . go back to sleep,” he soothed her. She burrowed deeper under the covers as he reached for the receiver, plucking it out of the cradle in the middle of a fourth imperative.

  “Yeah?” His mouth tasted unhappy.

  A voice on the other end said, “The King of Canaan needs your service.”

  Kris sat up. “Wait a minute, I’ll take it on the extension.” He thumbed the HOLD button, slipped out of the bed even as he racked the receiver and, naked, padded across the immense bedroom in the dark. He found his way through the hall and into the front office, guiding his passage only by the barest touch of fingertips to walls. He pulled the bronze testimonial plaque from the little people away from the wall, spun the dial on the wall safe, and pulled it open. The red phone with its complex scrambler attachment lurked in the circular opening.

  He punched out code on the scrambler, lifted the receiver and said, “The king fears the devil, and the devil fears the Cross.” Code and counter-code.

  “Kris, it’s S.P.I.D.E.R.,” said the voice on the other end.

  “Shit!” he hissed. “Where?”

  “The States. Alabama, California, D.C., Texas . . .”

  “Serious?”

  “Serious enough to wake you.”

  “Right, right. Sorry. I’m still half-asleep. What time is it?”

  “Half-past September.”

  Kris ran a hand through his thick hair. “Nobody any closer for this one?”

  “Belly Button was handling it.”

  “Yeah . . . and . . . ?”

  “He floated to the top off the coast of Galveston. He must have been in the Gulf for almost a week. They packed plastic charges on his inner thighs . . .”

  “Okay, don’t describe it. I’m mad enough at being shook out of sleep. Is there a dossier?”

  “Waiting for you at Hilltop.”

  “I’ll be there in six hours.”

  He racked the receiver, slammed the safe port and spun the dial. He shoved the plaque back in place on the wall and stood with his balled fist lying against the bronze. Faint light from a fluorescent, left burning over one of the little people’s drafting tables, caught his tensed features. The hard, mirthless lines of his face were the work of a Giacometti. The eyes were gun-metal blue, and flat, as though unseeing. The faintly cruel mouth was thinned to an incision. He drew a deep breath and the muscle-corded body drew up with purpose.

  Then, reaching over to his desk, he opened a drawer and rang three times, sharply, on a concealed button set into the underside of the drawer. Down below, in the labyrinth, PoPo would be plunging out of his cocoon, pulling on his loincloth and earrings, tapping out the code to fill the egress chamber with water.

  “Peace on Earth . . .” Kris murmured, starting back for the bedroom and his wet suit.

  II

  PoPo was waiting in the grotto, standing on a let-down shell beside the air tanks. Kris nodded to the little one and turned his back. PoPo helped him into his rig and, when Kris had cleared the mouthpiece, adjusted the oxygen mixture. “Keeble keeble?” PoPo inquired.

  “Sounds like it,” Kris replied. He wanted to be on his way.

  “Dill-dill neat peemee,” PoPo said.

  “Thanks. I’ll need it.” He moved quickly to the egress chamber which had been filled and emptied. He undogged the wheel and swung the port open. A few trickles of Arctic water hit the basalt floor. He turned. “Keep the toy plant going. And look into that problem on tier 9 with CorLo. I’ll be back in time for the holidays.”

  He put one foot over the sill, then turned and added, “If everything goes okay.”

  “Weeble zexfunt,” said PoPo.

  “Yeah, no war toys to you, too.” He stepped inside the egress chamber, spun the wheel hard to dog it, and signaled through the lucite port. PoPo filled the chamber and Kris blew himself out.

  The water was black and sub-zero. The homing light on the sub was his only comfort. He made it to the steel fish quickly, and within minutes was on his way. Once he had passed the outer extreme of the floe, he surfaced, converted to airborne, blew the tanks that extruded the pontoons, and taxied for a takeoff. Aloft, he made ramjet velocity and converted again.

  Three hundred miles behind him, somewhere below the Arctic Ocean, PoPo was rousing CorLo from his cocoon and chiding the hell out of him for putting European threading on all the roller skates, thereby making all the American keys useless.

  III

  Hilltop was inside a mountain in Colorado. The peak of the mountain swung open, allowing Kris’s VTOL (the sub, in its third conversion) to drop down onto the target pad.

  He went quickly to the secret place.

  The Taskmaster was waiting for him with the dossier. Kris flipped it rapidly: eidetic memory.

  “S.P.I.D.E.R. again,” he said softly. Then, with an inquiring tone, “It means

  SOCIETY FOR

  POLLUTION,

  INFECTION AND

  DESTRUCTION OF

  EARTHMEN’S

  RESOURCES

  is that it?” The Taskmaster shook his head. Kris mmmm’ed. “Well, what are they up to this time? I thought we’d put them out of commission after that anthrax business in The Valley of The Winds.”

  The Taskmaster tilted back in his plastic chair. The multi-faceted eyeball-globes around the room picked up pinpoints of brilliance from the chair and cast them over the walls in a subtle light-show. “It’s as you read there. They’ve taken over the minds of those eight. What they intend to do with them, as puppets, we have no idea.”

  Kris scanned the list again. “Reagan, Johnson, Nixon, Humphrey, Daley, Wallace, Maddox, and—who’s this last one?—Spiro Agnew?”

  “Doesn’t matter. We can usually keep them out of trouble, keep them from hurting themselves . . . but since S.P.I.D.E.R. got into them, they’ve been running amuck.”

  “I’ve never even heard of most of these.”

  “How the hell could you, up there, making toys.”

  “It’s the best cover I’ve ever had.”

  “So don’t get crabby, just because you never see a newspaper. Take my word for it: these are the names this season.”

  “Whatever happened to that whatwashisname . . . Willkie?”

  “Didn’t pan out.”

  “S.P.I.D.E.R.,” Kris said again. “Does it stand for

  SPECIAL

  POLITBURO

  INTENT ON

  DESTROYING

  EVERYBODY’S

  RACE

  ?” The Taskmaster shook his head again, a bit wearily.

  Kris rose and pumped the Taskmaster’s hand. “From the dossier, I suggest the best place to start is with this Daley, in Chicago.”

  The Taskmaster nodded. “That’s what COMPgod said, too. You’d better stop down and see the Armorer before you leave. He’s cobbled up a few swell new surprises for you.”

  “Will I be working that dumb red suit again?”

  “As a spare, probably. It’s a little early for the red suit.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Half-past September.”

  IV

  When Kris emerged from the dropshaft, Miss Seven-Seventeen’s eyes grew round. He came toward her, with the easy, muscled stride that set him so far apart from the rest of the agents. (Most of them were little more than pudg
y file-clerks; where had she ever gotten the idea that espionage was a line of work best suited to Adonises? Surely from the endless stream of bad spy novels that had glutted the newsstands; what a shock when she had discovered that pinching the trigeminal nerve to cause excruciating pain, or overpowering an enemy by cupping both hands and slapping both of his ears simultaneously were tactics as easily employed by men who resembled auks, as by beefcake contest winners. Tactics equally as effective when struck by gobbets of mud as by Rodin statues.) But Kris . . .

  He came up to her desk, and stared down silently until she dropped her eyes. Then, “Hello, Chan.”

  She could not look at him. It was too painful. The Bahamas. That night. The gibbous moon hanging above them like an all-watching eye as the night winds played a wild accompaniment counterpoint to their insensate passion, the lunatic surf breaking around them on the silver sands. The goodbye. The waiting. The report from upstairs that he had been lost in Tibet. She could handle none of it . . . now . . . with him standing there . . . a thick, white scar across the breastbone, now hidden by his shirt, but known to her nonetheless, a scar made by Tibor Kaszlov’s saber . . . she knew every inch of his flesh . . . and she could not answer. “Well, answer, stupid!” he said.

  He seemed to understand.

  She spoke into the intercom, “Kris is here, sir.” The red light flashed on her board, and without looking up she said, “The Armorer will see you now.”

  He strode past her, seemingly intent on walking into the stone wall. At the last possible instant it slid back smoothly and he disappeared into the Armorer’s workshop. The wall slid back and Seven-Seventeen suddenly realized she had been fisting so tightly that her lacquered nails had drawn blood from her palm.

  The Armorer was a thickset, bluff man given to tweeds and pipes. His jackets were made specially for him on Savile Row, with many pockets, to hold the infinitude of gadgets and pipe tools he constantly carried.

  “Kris, good to see you.” He took the agent’s hand and pumped it effusively. “Mmm. Harris tweed?”

  “No, as a matter of fact it’s one of those miracle fibers,” Kris replied, turning smoothly to show the center-vent, depressed-waist, Edwardian-styled, patch-pocket jacket. “Something my man in Hong Kong whipped up. Like it?”

  “Elegant,” the Armorer said. “But we aren’t here to discuss each other’s sartorial elegance, are we?”

  They had a small mutual laugh at that. Divided evenly, it took less than ten seconds. “Step over here,” the Armorer said, moving toward a wall-rack where several gadgets were displayed on pegboard. “I think you’ll find these most intriguing.”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to use the red suit this time,” Kris said tartly. The red suit was hung neatly on a teakwood valet near the wall.

  The Armorer turned and gave him a surprised look. “Oh? Who told you that?”

  Kris touched the suit, fingered it absently. “The Taskmaster.”

  The Armorer’s mouth drew down in a frown. He pulled a pipe from a jacket pocket and thrust it between his lips. It was a Sasieni Fantail with an apple bowl shape, seriously in need of a carbon-cake scraping. “Well, let us just say the Taskmaster occasionally fails to follow his own lines of communication.” He was obviously distressed, but Kris was in no mood to become embroiled in inter-office politics.

  “Show me what you’ve got.”

  The Armorer pulled a small penlight-shaped gadget off one of the pegboards. There was a clip on its upper end for attaching to a shirt pocket. “Proud of this one. I call it my deadly nightshade.” He lit the pipe with a Consul butane lighter, turning up the flame till it was blue, just right for soldering.

  Kris took the penlight-shaped gadget and turned it over and over. “Neat. Very compact.”

  The Armorer looked like a man who has just bought a new car, about to ask a neighbor to guess how much he had paid for it. “Ask me what it does.”

  “What does it do?”

  “Spreads darkness for a radius of two miles.”

  “Great.”

  “No, really. I mean it. Just twist the clip to the right—no, no, don’t do it now, for Christ’s sake! you’ll blot out all of Hilltop—when you get in a spot, and you need an escape, just twist that clip and pfizzzz you’ve got all the cover you need for an escape.” The Armorer blew a dense cloud of pipe smoke: It was Murray’s Erinmore Mixture, very aromatic.

  Kris kept looking at the suit. “What’s new with that?”

  The Armorer pointed with the stem of the pipe. It was a mannerism. “Well, you’ve got the usual stuff: the rockets, the jet-pack, the napalm, the mace and the Mace, the throwing knives, the high- pressure hoses, the boot-spikes, the .30 caliber machine guns, the acid, the flammable beard, the stomach still inflates into a raft, the flamethrower, the plastic explosives, the red rubber nose grenade, the belt tool-kit, the boomerang, the bolo, the bolas, the machete, the derringer, the belt-buckle time bomb, the lockpick equipment, the scuba gear, the camera and Xerox attachment in the hips, the steel mittens with the extensible hooks, the gas mask, the poison gas, the shark repellent, the Sterno stove, the survival rations and the microfilm library of one hundred great books.”

  Kris fingered the suit again. “Heavy.”

  “But in addition,” the Armorer said happily, “this time we’ve really extended ourselves down here in Armor—”

  “You’re doing a helluva job.”

  “Thanks, sincerely, Kris.”

  “No, I mean really!”

  “Yes, well. In addition, this time the suit has been fully automated, and when you depress this third button on the jacket, the entire suit becomes inflatable, airborne, and seals for high-level flight.”

  Kris pulled a sour face. “If I ever fall over I’ll be like a turtle on its back.”

  The Armorer gave Kris a jab of camaraderie, high on the left biceps. “You’re a great kidder, Kris.” He pointed to the boots. “Gyroscopes. Keep you level at all times. You can’t fall over.”

  “I’m a great kidder. What else have you got for me?”

  The Armorer stepped to the pegboard and pulled off an automatic pistol. “Try this.”

  He depressed a button on the control console and the east wall of the Armory dropped, revealing a concealed firing range behind it. Silhouette targets were lined up at the far end of the tunnel.

  “What happened to my Webley?” Kris asked.

  “Too bulky. Too unreliable. Latest thing, you’re holding: a Lassiter- Krupp laser explosive. Sensational!”

  Kris turned, showing his thinnest side to the mute silhouettes. He extended and locked his right arm, bracing it with left hand around right wrist, and squeezed the trigger. A beam of light and a sibilant hiss erupted from the muzzle of the weapon. At the same instant, down the tunnel, all ten of the silhouettes vanished in a burst of blinding light. Shrapnel and bits of stone wall ricocheted back and forth in the tunnel. The sound of their destruction was deafening.

  “Jesus God in Heaven,” Kris murmured, turning back to the Armorer, who was only now removing the glare-blast goggles. “Why didn’t you warn me about this stupid thing! I can’t use one of these . . . I have to be surreptitious, circumspect, unnoticed. This bloody thing would be fine to level Gibraltar, but it’s ridiculous for hand-to-hand combat. Here, take it!”

  He thrust the weapon at the Armorer.

  “Ingrate!”

  “Give me my Webley, you lunatic!”

  “Take it, it’s there on the wall, you short-sighted slave of the Establishment!”

  Kris grabbed the automatic, and the deadly nightshade. “Send the suit care of my contact in Montgomery, Alabama,” he said, hurrying toward the door.

  “Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t, you moron!”

  Kris stopped and turned. “Listen, man, dammit, I can’t stand here and argue with you about firepower. I’ve got to save the world!”

  “Melodrama! Lout! Reactionary!”

  “Cranky bastard! And I hate your damned blund
erbuss, that’s what . . . I hate the stupid loud thing!”

  He reached the wall, which slid back, and dashed through. Just before it closed completely, the Armorer threw down his pipe, smashed it with his foot and screamed, “And I hate that faggy jacket of yours!”

  V

  Daley: Chicago, Illinois

  Chicago, from the Shore Drive, looked like one immense burning garbage dump. They were rioting again on the South Side. And from the direction of Evanston and Skokie could be seen twin spiraling arms of thick, black smoke. In Evanston the D.A.R. was looting and burning; in Skokie the D.A.R. had joined with the women of the W.C.T.U. from Evanston, and the offices of a paperback pornographer were being razed. The city was going insane.

  Kris drove the rental birdcage Maserati into Ohio Street, turned right onto the underground ramp of the motel, and let the attendant take it. Carrying only his attaché case, he made for the fire exit leading up to the first floor of the motel. Once inside the stairwell, however, he turned to the blank wall, used his sonic signaler, and the wall pivoted open. He hurried inside, closed the wall, and threw the attaché case onto the double bed. The

  WAITING

  light was glowing on the closed-circuit television. He flicked the set on, stood in front of the camera, and was pleased to see that his Chicago contact, Freya, was wearing her hair long again.

  “Hello, Ten-Nineteen,” he said.

  “Hello, Kris. Welcome to the Windy City.”

  “You’ve got big troubles.”

  “How soon do you want to start? I’ve got Daley pinpointed.”

  “How soon can I get to him?”

  “Tonight.”

  “Soon enough. What are you doing at the moment?”