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  ELUSON and CARTER

  A BELMONT /TOWER

  SCIENCE-FICTION DOUBLE

  BY TWO OF AMERICA'S

  MOST HONORED WRITERS

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  DOOMS MAN

  Harlan Ellison

  THE THIEF OF THOTH

  Lin Carter

  Belmont/Tower Books

  •

  New York City

  DOOMSMAN/THE THIEF OF THOTH

  A BELMONT/TOWER BOOK- July 1972

  Published by

  Belmont/Tower Books

  185 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Copyright: Thief of Thoth © MCMLXVIII by Lin Carter

  Copyright: Doomsman © MCMLVIII by Greenleaf

  Publishing Co.

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America

  HARLAN ELLISON:

  "His writing deserves nothing

  but praise for its power,

  originality of ideas and great

  sense of conviction and identity."

  -Los Angeles Free Press

  DOOMSMAN

  By Harlan Ellison

  WHEN THEY brought him to the School, from his home in

  the Pampas, Juanito Montoya was a thin, sallow-faced

  youth with a twitch to his eyelids and a feral stealthiness

  to his manner. He had lived-an orphan at the age of

  nine-off the land, with no one's help, but simply the

  fleetness of the young and the rapacity of the ever hun·

  gry. The Seekers had found him sleeping in the bombedout shell of a cathedral in a wasted little village deep in the heart of Argentina; and since he had killed two of their

  number with sling and dart in an effort to avoid capture,

  they refrained from burning him to ashes. He barely spoke,

  even during the struggle, but short, tiny animal sounds came

  through the layers of dirt that covered his face. So they

  kept him alive, they captured him with the evening twilight

  covering them, feeling he was a definite posSibility, that he

  would fit in to the ways of the School And they brought

  him in.

  Trussed, gagged, and impounded in a force mesh.

  There had been no trouble spiriting the boy out of Ar·

  gentina; not so much because it was merely another sec·

  tion of Am.ericaState, but because the Seekers were beyond petty boundaries and interests.

  They were the Seekers from the School.

  Without the School, who knew what might happen in

  the world?

  So they had had no difficulty bringing pipe-limbed and •

  furious Juanito Montoya to the School.

  All the way in the night-shrouded black jetcopter, the

  boy struggled in his invisible force bonds, struggled in his

  DOOMS MAN

  wrist-slicing wire trusses, struggled against the mask

  adhesive that covered his lower face. Impotently he

  seethed, and the fear mounted in him like a crazy red

  monkey, gibbering along his nerves till he felt faint with

  terror. Who were these black-hooded men who had come

  to the tiny village? He could see only their little scarlet

  eyes through the slits in the hoods, and the sight made

  him dizzy, fascinated with the dizziness. Who were

  they-and his eyes widened over the adhesive--where

  were they taking him?

  Juanito was not old enough to be a coward. Far from

  it; indeed, he had seen too much, lived too fast and too

  wildly to have even become one, had he known the way

  of going about it. But this was the unknown. This was a

  nightmare spawned from up North, where things always

  happened with evil ways.

  The jetcopter sped on silently through the night. And

  soon passed into dawn and later, the day.

  Juanito was a perceptive boy. At fifteen he could effectively disable a column of foot-soldiers while sniping from cover, with his sling and dart. He knew the best ways to

  skin a rabbit and eat it without getting sick. He knew

  what fire could do, and he knew what smoke could do.

  He knew the whys and bows and wheres of looting,

  skulking, hiding . . . surviving.

  In a country devoid of warmth or culture or freedom

  for nearly eighty years, Juanita had done remarkably well

  for himself. He had neither been caught nor killed. He

  did not even have a red flag on his dossier at America­

  State Records.

  In point of fact, he did not even have a dossier.

  He was a cipher to the great State. Thus, he was perfect fodder for the School. Young, quick-witted, fit to survive, able to murder without compunction, unknown and most important-in the grip of the Seekers. His trip to

  the School was a long one, but uneventful.

  High in the Rockies, the School stood grey and silent

  from without-if seen at all-while within it was light

  and efficiency and the sounds of training. It had been

  built to withstand the winds of time, thrust into the

  DOOMS MAN

  straight-walled neck of a volcanic chute. A tube of rock,

  thirty feet thick was the neck of the tube, and like a pencil stuck down inside a roll of notepaper, the School had been built within that chimney rock. Its walls were molybdenum steel, reinforced with cross-grained layers of duroplast and concrete blocks within. It was solid, and invisible from any angle, save above. But even from above it was protected, for a force bubble and a spy net had been

  erected over the mouth of the tube, and any foreign matter-as large as a bomber, as small as a gnat-passing over the tube without beamed permission, was automatically destroyed by the polarized energy force beams from a battery below. The School stood as solid as the Earth

  beneath it; quiet outside, anxious within, and constantly

  working, turning out its students with regularity and

  thoroughness.

  This was AmericaState's little-known, deeply feared

  School-for assassins.

  It had been erected shortly after the War, when the

  great AmericaState that stretched from one end of the

  continent to the other had discovered a million little

  dynasties founded and festering within its very bosom.

  The School had been founded and the men had been

  trained on sound principle: with that many small monarchies flourishing from Tierra del Fuego to Point Barrow, from Pernambuco to San Francisco, the thought of sending the worn and decimated AmericaState armies to

  grind them out and do away with their leaders, was beyond consideration. It was lions chasing shadows, tiring the lions till they lay easy prey for the shadows, who were

  truly maggots and hyenas and vultures.

  The jobs could be done by one man each, if they were

  the right kind of men. If they were killers, if th
ey knew

  every means of torture and murder ever conceived, and if

  they conceived a few of their own when they needed

  them. Then the State could be kept in its stability of

  power, and the War would not rage again. If the men

  were assassins.

  So the School had been founded and the men had been

  trained. Trained for their work with one philosophy hard

  as diamond, cold as snow, constant as life, final as death.

  Death was important to them; they lived with it, and their

  DOOMSMAN

  work was dedicated to it. Their philosophy: death is

  preferable to failure. Get in, kill, and get out fast!

  - The School had been built. It had been doing its work

  with unbelievable thoroughness for over seventy years. To

  the School for Assassins they brought fifteen year old

  Juanita Montoya. That was in 2179. Time went swiftly.

  2184.

  "Down on your stomach!"

  "Yo! Up on your feet!"

  "Run in place!"

  "Throw down on your stomach!"

  "Flip over!"

  "Up, without hands!"

  "Run in place!"

  "Cutaway! Drop damn you, I said cutaway!"

  "Up!"

  "Cutaway!"

  "Up!"

  "Cutaway, cutaway, cutaway, cutaway, break time!''

  Thirteen (who considered his name good luck, as com-

  pared to little Seven in the Apprentice Class who had an

  affinity for accidents despite his supposedly luck-filled

  name) met Twenty-two outside the gym.

  Thirteen was a tall, slim boy with wedge-shaped hands,

  so excellent for night work such as strangulation, bearwalking over hot coals on an approach route, underwater demolition and strangulation. That was important,

  strangulation. They had heard in the School only last

  week that a man who had been Fifty-five in Class 338

  had disposed of a Regent General in the ridiculous Court

  of Harper, somewhere in Oklahoma using his hands

  alone. Strangulation was important; hadn't the man received a posthumous plaque on the memory wall in the Chapel?

  Thirteen was proud of his hands. He flexed them

  constantly, while talking, and though he was inordinately

  vain about them, manicuring them and looking at them,

  and though he was a bit on the simpering side, occasionally speaking with a lisp, his abilities with his hands kept all laughter from his classmates' lips.

  DOOMSMAN

  Twenty-two was shorter, nearly a head shorter, with

  the dark, wavy hair and snapping ebony eyes of the

  Latin. Though he spoke with the soft lilt of the Latin,

  also, and made sharp, small, evocative gestures with his

  slim hands, he had nothing of the fragile gentleness of the

  inner Latin spirit. Nor did he have the fiery outer appearance. He seemed something quite set apart, with a twitch to his eyelids. A nervous flicker that was heat lightning on

  the horizon. Here and there and gone and only partially glimpsed.

  He was not well liked in his class, for his eyes were too

  hungry, his manner too brisk. He walked close to walls,

  and talked with his back to one,constantly. He walked as

  though he were about to be attacked, and his manner of

  speaking made it perfectly clear that he suspected you

  had just that in mind. But Thirteen was his friend, for

  they were nothing alike, and that will happen.

  Thirteen was a born clown who had been reeducated

  as a killer. Twenty-two was born to rip and tear, a natural instinctive killer.

  But now both were killers. In that they were alike, but

  otherwise they were opposites.

  "I wish to God they'd spread that gravel. on the gym

  floor without so damned many sharp rocks in it," Thirteen grumbled, picking tiny bits of stone from his palms.

  "Those cutaways are murder in a rock field."

  Twenty-two smiled quickly, thinly. "You beef too

  much, Jock."

  He caught himself, and turned white. Thirteen gripped

  him, hard. Thirteen angled him into the alcove, hand on

  bicep. The alcove was shallow, where the water cooler

  hung from the ceiling, but it was out of the way of the

  hordes of students, rushing down the corridor. "Juanita,

  you've got to remember! They're cracking down on using

  proper names. I know it's just a new idea they've started

  this year, but they want it that way, and you can't buck

  them. I thought you'd stopped using names months ago.

  What if a proctor heard you?

  "What the hell do you want to do, get us both sent to

  Isolate?"

  Twenty-two nudged the other off with impatient palms.

  "Okay, okay-sorry, I forgot. I forget sometimes� that's

  DOOMS MAN

  all; listen, I wasn't born in this lousy School you know? I

  lived outside once • • • not in a creche

  · ·

  like all the rest of

  you guys."

  "Yeah, and you weren't alive once," Thirteen jabbed

  back roughly. "Watch yourself or you'll be back in that

  condition. By way of the furnace room.."

  Twenty-two nodded firmly. "Okay, okay. No proper

  nam.es while we are within these hallowed walls. Two

  hundred and thirty-six more days, no names. You are

  Thirteen to me, sir."

  "You're the strangest cat I ever knew," Thirteen said,

  aiming a bolo punch at Twenty-two. It missed, for it was

  intended to miss, and they walked on toward the snack

  bar for a bite to eat before the next class-razors. They

  grinned at each other youthfully, arrogantly.

  In the snack bar, the sounds of the monolog for today

  rolled hypnotically from the wall speakers. It was a lecture on makeshift bludgeons for emergency occasions:

  ". • • across the bridge of the nose will smash the

  bone structure and send splinters into the brain, bringing

  instantaneous death, if the blow is sharp and inward.

  Should no such heavy weapon be at hand, a newspaper

  may be folded the long way four times, folded over across

  the front, and folded once more to make a tight wedge.

  This wedge, when held firmly in the hand, with the folded

  end protruding, has the effective impact power of an M-5

  blackjack. A stocking, filled with gravel, dirt-tightly

  packed--or coins, will serve approximately the same purpose, with the warning that such utensils are not reliable for more than a momentary stunning, if any point of impact but directly behind the right ear is used. In the event . • • "

  Twenty-two ignored the monolog as best he could; it

  was gauged on all mental bands to impress itself onto the

  core of memory in each student's mind. It was not necessary to be listening to the monolog, for it reached beyond mere awareness. This was one of the primary training aids used in the School. By day or night, sleeping or eating, at work or during proscribed play times-the

  monologs went on. A new one each day. Marksmanship,

  proper use of collodin for disguises, how to wire a jetcopter to time-explode, nine hundred and forty gases that can

  DOOMS MAN

  cripple without killing, the Maori methods of inducing a

  prisoner to speak his mind, native and abnormal

  psychology; the subjects were endless and with each new

  day a new spool was strung into the sono-box, and the


  monolog began, long before the students were out of their

  hammocks, long after they had retired to them again.

  So it was not precisely "ignoring" that Twenty-two

  managed. It was more nearly relegation to a sub-level of

  attention. While he shoved his way through the off-class

  crowds in the snack bar, he kept watch for Thirty-eight in

  class 401. That was one class further along than Juanita's

  own 402. Thirty-eight would be graduating day after

  tomorrow. Before that happened, Juanito knew he must

  worm the name from the student assassin.

  He had encountered Thirty-eight at a Combats Meet

  over a year ago; he had been teamed with the stout assassin in the lectro-whip event, and between bouts, when they had been getting their bodies greased with

  nonconducting swabbing oils, they had talked.

  Juanito remembered that discussion well. It had gone:

  "My name is Grice. John Grice from Rio Cuerto;

  that's in Argentina."

  It had been inevitable, actually. The Seekers covered a

  great deal of territory. They took many men from many

  parts of AmericaState. It was, in fact, a curious thing that

  Juanito had not met a fellow areaman sooner. But he had

  perked up, then. He had been in the School for slightly

  less than four years at that time. He had been miserable,

  and elated at the same time, all during those years. For

  he was a creature of freedom, and the restricted, martial

  life of the School gnawed at his sense of dignity and roving desires. Yet he was joyful to be in the School, for he was learning what he most wanted to learn. How to kill.

  He had lived in the ruins too long to think success and

  escape came with luck. It was stealth and skill. Here in

  the School, he was absorbing the most vital and electric

  ways of pouncing and preying. He had vowed when he

  was graduated he would take his first assignment, and the

  School would never hear of him again. With the School

  training he could surely elude or outfox or outfight any

  Seekers who came after him.

  But that had been years before, and now four years

  DOOMSMAN

  later, here was an areaman. An Argentinian, and from so

  close to JWmito's old environs.