The Wizards of Senchuria

by Kenneth Bulmer

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

Scobie Redfern was just a nice good-looking American young man who had never heard of such things as Portals, parallel worlds, and Trugs. So when someone materialized in his apartment with the Trugs in hot pursuit, it all seemed sort of a funny game. But there was nothing amusing about it once the monsters themselves arrived. For it wasn't long before Scobie was himself running for his life from world to world and from Portal to Portal just to keep one jump ahead of the Trugs, and hoping that the Wizards of Senchuria might, just might, be able to get him back home alive and whole!

Release date: July 2, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE VISION OF a thick and juicy steak on a well garnished blue-plate special and a cup of hot and steaming coffee brought Scobie Redfern hurriedly through the snow. Black snow razored down from a black sky between gaunt black buildings and Scobie Redfern, whose tastes ran to baking-hot beaches and palm trees and creaming surf, shivered and hunkered more deeply into his overcoat.

Traffic was light this time of a dark and dirty night in Lower Manhattan. He clasped his tennis racket and sneakers tightly under his arm and ran for the corner. He’d played a number of games and still felt flushed. Wind and snow blinded him.

The traffic light changed to red and the color glimmered across the snow like technicolor blood. A single cab hauled up for the light and Scobie Redfern sighted on it and pelted slushily, head-down.

He snapped the door open and felt the warmth inside and bundled in. As he did so the opposite door swung open and a bulky overcoated figure shouldered in.

They collided mid-seat.

Redfern was a husky, broad-shouldered young man with a mop of tow hair and usually a pleasant expression and an obliging manner. Now he said, “My cab, I think.”

The newcomer hadn’t budged from the shock of contact. Redfern had been the one to bounce. Big as Scobie was, this man was bigger, heavier. In the traffic light’s glow, changing back to green now, his profile showed craggy-jawed and tufty-eyebrowed. He somehow eased himself in the seat and looked back as he slammed his side door.

“We hit it at the same time,” he said pleasantly; but Redfern clearly heard the overtones in the voice and thought they indicated uncertainty. This big man was worried.

“I’ve been exercising and I’m hot and sticky.” Redfern was in no mood for argument. “I could catch double-pneumonia in that snow.”

The man didn’t answer. He was still looking out into the snow across the street. The tenseness in him was unmistakable now.

The cabby leaned back.

“If you guys want to slug it out, okay. Otherwise, share the cab and tell me where you wanna go.”

“It is a filthy night,” the man said, as though prodded. He moved his thick shoulders.

“Check,” said Redfern, a little less bellicose. “I’m heading for a restaurant that’s—”

“That’ll suit me,” the newcomer interrupted.

“Yeah,” said the cabby, shifting gear. “I’m not cut out for the refereeing bit.”

Redfern gave him the restaurant address and sat back. The warmth in the cab, the smell of snow melting from thick cloth, the quick reaction, made him shiver again. He’d had a few fights in his time and had not particularly enjoyed them. He looked out into the slanting snow. All his life he had been fighting authority, kicking against stupidities, and that took more out of a man than any physical brawl.

Something big and dark and somehow unholy moved out there. The snow impeded his vision. He leaned forward.

He heard the man draw in his breath sharply. Then he reached into the inside of his overcoat.

Something struck the side of the cab. Leaning forward, his mouth half open, Redfern saw a hand reach up to the window. Enough light broke through the falling snow to show him that hand in blasphemous detail.

He saw a hand glistening green and yellow with scales, a hand with two fingers and a stub thumb tipped with long, blood-red claws. The hand turned to clench into a fist and the scales caught the light; as though limned in radiation each scale burned with a violet edging. The fist drew back to strike. Then the cab lurched as the cabby let in the clutch, and the fist struck and vanished with a loud metallic gong note.

“What the jumping Jehoshaphat was that?” yelled the cabby, jerking his head around.

“Hail,” grunted the man.

He relaxed, sinking back into the seat.

“Hail!” The cabby eased up. “I’d better—”

“Keep going,” the man said in a voice that snapped like a chain-saw.

“Well, now…” But the cab still ran; it was warm inside and the snow outside was unpleasant, and, anyway, he didn’t own the cab, did he? The cabby kept on.

“What,” said Scobie Redfern in a voice like a rusty bucket coming up from the bottom of a well, “was that?”

“You saw?”

Redfern swallowed. “Yes. Some nut with a fancy-dress—”

“Sort of.”

Then Redfern saw the Colt forty-five the stranger was sliding back into the inside of his overcoat.

Redfern felt queasy.

“If you like,” the big man said slowly and with grave emphasis, “you can get off at the next corner.”

Scobie Redfern wasn’t fool enough to imagine all this was a trick to make him give up the cab. After all, cold and unpleasant as it was outside, there were other cabs on New York’s streets at night.

And that hand! It must have been a brightly colored papier-mache amusement arcade gimmick. Nothing human had a hand with claws like that.

“Well?”

Redfern looked back through the rear window. The falling snow absorbed light and warmth, in a diminishing perspective already coating tire marks and powdering a handful of snowmen-pedestrians, heads down, shuffling. There was no sign of that dark shadow Redfern thought he had glimpsed.

“It’s… cold out there.”

The man grunted and, although he didn’t relax, some of that tautness left him.

The cab slushed through snow and swirled around the next corner. Redfern knew he hadn’t dreamed that stupid monster hand. But why was this big tough character so het up about it? One thing, so Scobie Redfern told himself firmly, that hand wasn’t for real.

Scobie Redfern had had a wide variety of jobs in his short business career, most of them terminated by his habitual confrontation with established authority. The cab stopped outside the middle-priced restaurant he patronized after pay day, before the hamburger days immediately preceding pay day, and both men alighted.

From the yellow glowing windows a cheerful radiance fell across the snow-covered sidewalk. The rich aromas of cooking food brought saliva to the tongue. He hitched the racket and shoes under his arm and started for the glass door.

“I’ll join you, if I may,” said the stranger.

“Surely.”

An automobile came sliding through the falling snow along the street as the cab took off. Redfern heard it coming but did not look up, since his mind was tenaciously grappling with that envisioned steak.

A thrust like a butt from a maddened billy goat smacked into the small of his back—and the next moment he was sprawling into the snow with white soggy flakes packing into his nose and eyes and mouth. He spluttered and choked. A great roaring, ripping sound blasted the icy air. A showering crash of tinkling, shattering glass was followed at once by the vicious revving of a car engine and a bedlam of screams and shouts yammering insanely. Sluggishly, Redfern rolled over and sat up.

At his side the stranger was picking himself up. His face showed hard and bleak and yet a hint of a satisfied smile curved the corners of his wide mouth.

“You all right?”

“You just about pushed my backbone through my—”

“When the Contessa’s bully boys play rough you have to play it back to them, only rougher.”

“Yeah, sure.” Redfern spat snow and wiped his eyes and ears. He looked at the restaurant, where men and women showed scared faces.

The whole front had been ripped away as though peeled off by a can opener.

Before he had time to try to sort things out the stranger grabbed his arm—just above the elbow and most painfully—and dragged him across the sidewalk and into the alleyway at the side of the restaurant. Forced to run, Redfern stumbled over lumpy snow and nameless objects from tipped-over garbage pails. Packing cases and cardboard boxes, broken and soggy, littered the alley. They ran hard, the breath pumping in clouds of steam from their mouths and noses.

Halfway down the alley, Redfern pulled back.

“Hey!” he panted, gulping for breath. “What is this? What are you—some kind of nut?”

“No. Come on. They’ve seen your face. They’ll know you now.”

A sudden sick fear hit Redfern in the pit of the stomach.

The stranger dragged him on. “I feel responsible for you now. I should have pushed you out of the cab. You’ll be sorry I didn’t, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“Come on! Look, my name is Alec Macdonald. You’ve dropped right in the middle of a bit of a mess. As soon as I meet up with a buddy of mine—fellow called David Macklin—it’ll be all right. What do I call you?”

Shivering, Redfern told him.

“Right, then, Scobie. Until we can knock out the opposition, the Trugs and the others, we’re in the position of the fox, with the hounds nipping our rumps. Got it?”

Redfern didn’t want it. But he nodded, weakly, and ran on. He’d always fancied he’d be good if any adventures came his way; but he’d never envisioned them quite like this—in the snow, of all things.

This man, Alec, now: he didn’t have the cut of a gangster; more likely he was working for the forces of law and order.

Trying to cheer himself with the reflection, Redfern scampered after Alec. He remembered when he’d become briefly involved with criminals the time he’d worked for a few months in a Canadian logging camp. The experience had convinced him that law and order usually won out in the end, but it had also made it plain that the going in between could be awfully arduous. He’d been dragged in then without understanding. This time, he promised himself, he’d ask a lot more questions first.

The mouth of the alley showed ahead, a snow-filled rectangle of hazy light from the street beyond. A dark shadow fell across the close-packed snow from an automobile waiting. Alec skidded to a halt. His strong face showed stubbornness and anger.

“Is that them?” asked Redfern. He breathed normally now, getting his second wind, his athletic training adjusting to quick action.

Alec nodded. “Yes. They saw us duck into the alley.”

He pulled a small transistor radio from his pocket and hauled up the aerial. His powerful hands were gentle with the small controls.

“This thing is refusing to work. But it’s worth another try.”

Putting his mouth close to the tiny mouthpiece, he said crisply: “This is Roughneck. Come in, Knifestone.” He twiddled the controls. The radio sizzled like a hot dog. “Nothin. . .