Sitting in the center of the room, with one massive leg thrown casu-ally over the arm of a chair big enough to be a throne, was a man who looked like a cross between a Viking warrior and a giant from a child’s fairy-tale. His heavily muscled upper body was naked except for a silver band around one bicep, a knife-scabbard looped over one shoulder, and a strange charm about his neck. His lower body was clad in soft, tight-fitting leather breeches which were tucked into high boots. He wore a yellow scarf tied around one of these. His hair, a dirty gray-blonde, cas-caded almost to the middle of his broad back; his eyes were as green and curious as the eyes of a tomcat who is old enough to be wise but not old enough to have lost that refined sense of cruelty which passes for fun in feline circles. Hung by its strap from the back of the chair was what looked like a very old machine-gun.
Jake looked more closely at the ornament on the Viking’s chest and saw that it was a coffin-shaped glass box hung on a silver chain. Inside it, a tiny gold clock-face marked the time at five minutes past three. Below the face, a tiny gold pendulum went back and forth, and despite the soft whoosh of circulating air from above and below, he could hear the tick-tock sound it made. The hands of the clock were moving faster than they should have done, and Jake was not very surprised to see that they were moving backward. He thought of the crocodile in Peter Pan, the one that was always chasing after Captain Hook, and a little smile touched his lips. Gasher saw it, and raised his hand. Jake cringed away, putting his own hands to his face. The Tick-Tock Man shook his finger at Gasher in an amusing school-marmish gesture. “Now, now … no need of that, Gasher,” he said. Gasher lowered his hand at once. His face had changed completely. Before, it had alternated between stupid rage and a species of cunning, almost existential humor. Now he only looked servile and adoring. Like the others in the room (and Jake himself), the Gasherman could not look away from Tick-Tock for long; his eyes were drawn inexorably back. And Jake could understand why. The Tick-Tock Man was the only person here who seemed wholly vital, wholly healthy, and wholly alive.
“If you say there’s no need, there ain’t,” Gasher said, but he favored Jake with a dark look before shifting his eyes back to the blonde giant on the throne. “Still, he’s wery pert, Ticky. Wery pert, Ticky. Wery pert indeed, so he is, and if you want my opinion, he’ll take a deal of training!”
“When I want your opinion, I’ll ask for it, the Tick-Tock Man said. “Now close the door, Cash—was yon lx>re in a barn?” A dark-haired woman laughed shrilly, a sound like the caw of a crow. Tick-Tock flicked his eyes toward her; she quieted at once and cast her eyes down to the grilled floor.
The door through which Gasher had dragged him was actually two doors. The arrangement reminded Jake of the way spaceship airlocks looked in the more intelligent science fiction movies. Gasher shut them both and turned to Tick-Tock, giving him a thumbs-up gesture. The Tick-Tock Man nodded and reached languidly up to press a button set into a piece of furniture that looked like a speaker’s podium. A pump began to cycle wheezily within the wall, and the neon tubes dimmed perceptibly. There was a faint hiss of air and the valve-wheel of the inside door spun shut. Jake supposed the one in the outer door was doing the same. This was some sort of bomb-shelter, all right; no doubt of that. When the pump died, the long neon tubes resumed their former muted brilliance. “There,” Tick-Tock said pleasantly. His eyes began to look Jake up and down. Jake had a clear and very uncomfortable sense of being expertly catalogued and filed. “All safe and sound, we are. Snug as bugs in a rug. Right, Hoots?” “Yar!” a tall, skinny man in a black suit replied promptly. His face was covered with some sort of rash which he scratched obsessively. “I brung him,” Gasher said. “I told yer you could trust me to do it, and didn’t I?”
“You did,” Tick-Tock said. “Bang on. I had some doubts about your ability to remember the password at the end, there, but—” The dark-haired woman uttered another shrill caw. The Tick-Tock Man half-turned in her direction, that lazy smile dimpling the corners of his mouth, and before Jake was able to grasp what was happening—what had already happened—she was staggering backward, her eyes bulging in surprise and pain, her hands groping at some strange tumor in the middle of her chest which hadn’t been there a second before.