“But I can’t complain. Look what we got out of the deal!” Jack pointed out the front window of the vehicle. All Whiteslaw could see through the black-tinted glass was the glimmer of frantic bolts of electricity. How did the kid see where he was going?
Maybe visiting Fastbinder wasn’t a good idea.
You couldn’t have lured Senator Herbert Whiteslaw into a cave for love nor money. But that old man Fastbinder and his punk kid had something even better. They bad the power to make Whiteslaw into the President of the United States of America, and they had the power—he hoped—to get rid of the one threat that might strike him down before he achieved the office.
So when Fastbinder summoned him to his coronation ceremony, Whiteslaw agreed to take a ride down into the earth’s crust.
It should have been an adventure, but Whiteslaw didn’t feel adventurous when they reached their destination.
“How far down are we, anyway?”
“Three-point-six miles,” said Jack Fast with a grin. “You’ll be safe. Chill, Herbie.”
“Chill?” Whiteslaw didn’t think it was funny, but the Fast kid was showing every tooth he had. “How can I chill when it’s more than a hundred degrees?”
“Aw, you’re exaggerating.” Fast looked at his watch, which seemed to be some sort of a superhero utility watch with all sorts of gizmos built in. “It’s ninety-three and the humidity’s only thirty percent.”
“I don’t care! I’m uncomfortable as hell.”
“Yeah, it’s always hot at this end of the cavern. It’s farthest from the water. At the other end is where two of the rivers come in and they keep it at exactly sixty-four degrees. But this is the only place where we can gather all the mole people for a proper ceremony.”
That’s what the kid called the cavemen, mole people. Whiteslaw wasn’t looking forward to encountering them. He pictured savages, monsters. Whiteslaw liked to keep his world civilized. He fidgeted nervously on his too-hot stone seat. “Yeah, okay.”
Senator Whiteslaw was still not sure what the purpose of this crowning ceremony was. It was ludicrous, silly, even. It was out of character for Fastbinder and Fast. Why were they doing it?
“Stay put, Herbie. We’re about to begin.” With that, Jack Fast left the senator alone in the vast cavern.
The albinos arrived.
They were hideous, putrid creatures, as pale as walking cadavers. They were nude and filthy, and worst of all were their bulging heads where the eyelids had grown over their eyeballs.
They had weapons. There were spears with worked metal points, and swords of scrap metal with edges made deadly by pounding them into jagged saw teeth. Crude but doubtless effective.
The albinos came in small family groups, then in larger tribes. Whiteslaw was on a seat of honor in the center of the cavern on a carved bench atop a large stalagmite, where he was soon surrounded on all sides by the mole people.
He was helpless. Any one of them could ascend the steps behind him and rip his throat out with one of those saw-toothed swords. Even if he heard them coming he couldn’t run away—he could barely walk on his sensitive feet with their fresh new skin.
Would the albinos never stop coming? How many were there? How could there be so many? Whiteslaw tried estimating their numbers and came up with something like a thousand.
And more poured in every second.
They were haggard, road weary. Fastbinder had summoned his mole people to attend the event from miles away, and for some reason they had heeded his call, despite the danger of the journey. After all, this was a once-in-a-lifetime event: the crowning of the new king.
Jack Fast appeared on the stage, a flat slab of limestone at the opposite end of the cavern.
“Silence.”
The grunts and growls, the arguments and bickering, continued. Jack Fast gave Whiteslaw a wink across the sea of blind faces, then lifted a megaphone to his lips. “Silence!”
The sound was deafening in the chamber and the albinos quailed, some collapsing under the weight of the sound.
“You shall obey,” Fast thundered.
The albinos trembled, and Whiteslaw was fascinated by the performance. He had to remind himself again that the kid with the idiot grin was no idiot. Jack Fast knew how to work things.
So what was Fast doing now? Whiteslaw wondered. Fast had a Peavey amplifier sitting on the stone stage next to him. He spoke into his microphone, loud, but less abrasive than the megaphone. “Meet your new king.”
Fastbinder walked on stage. From the hips down he was encased in a steel framework of anodized, steel tubes and pneumatic cylinders. It was some sort of bionic thing, like the loader robots that people used in science fiction movies. But without the mechanical arms, what good was it?
Then Whiteslaw felt the footsteps vibrating the ground under his rump, and he understood. The albinos were blind—or as good as blind, according to Jack Fast. A light show or a fancy uniform wouldn’t impress the cave people since they couldn’t see it, but footsteps that shook the very rock—now that was something an ignorant mole person could understand.
