"You think you stand a chance?"
"They"re afraid of me," said Dalroi simply. "There has to be some reason for that."
Together they left the house. No security men were in the immediate vicinity and people were returning to the streets now that the search had pa.s.sed. Berina led the way and Dalroi followed at a discreet distance.
Near the outskirts of the golden city the oriental camouflage gave way to the functional lines of a service area. She motioned for him to loiter while she went inside.
Minutes later she returned and beckoned him to follow into what he rightly surmised to be a mortuary. A clammy chill hugged his skin as he followed between rows of surgical white slabs to the door where a man with a white ap.r.o.n and pallid skin waited with a metal casket. Dalroi looked into his eyes. The fellow was in an advanced state of cepi hypnosis, obeying Berina"s instructions with a leaden dullness which branded him as nearer automaton than human.
Berina looked at Dalroi and at the coffin, and there was agony in her eyes.
"You have to do this, don"t you?""Yes," said Dalroi. "You know me."
She nodded. "I thought that"s what you"d say. I was a fool ever to come into Failway. You know that, don"t you?"
"No," Dalroi said. "I don"t think you had much choice. You see, they planned it that way, hoping I"d follow."
"My G.o.d!"
"That"s a sample of how they manipulate people. That"s the reason I have to go through with this. It"s them or me, and they aren"t going to stop pushing people around until either they"ve won or until I stop them."
"Give them h.e.l.l, Dalroi. If ever you loved me, give them h.e.l.l!"
Dalroi climbed into the coffin. She placed one kiss on his forehead then arranged the lid. Darkness. He felt the rollers spin as the coffin moved along the track then the firm vibration as the load was picked up by a belt en-route for the graveyard shuttle and the unknowns of Failway Six.
The loading was automatic. The coffin hit the end of the capsule with a clang which made his ears ring.
Then the nerveless excitement of the speeding track and the dimensionless agony of shooting the matrix field. In his confinement, Dalroi screamed. Such was the nature of the stark fantasy and claustrophobia which the journey induced that he was still screaming when the coffin reached Failway Six.
From his nightmares he disentangled two stimuli which had direct reference to reality. The first was an overwhelming drowsiness caused by near asphyxiation, the second was a vibrant roar which shook the very fabric of his environment. He kicked open the lid and sat up to find himself suddenly at the mouth of h.e.l.l. He was nearing the hearth of a furnace the size of which made him gasp with amazement. The inexorable black steel belt seemed destined to deliver him into the incandescent chamber which rose like the nave of some small cathedral charged with blinding radiance.
Swinging out rapidly, he balanced for precious seconds while he tried to gauge the hazards of a jump, then kicked off into the darkness. It was a blind drop, for the intense light of the furnace robbed his eyes of the ability to differentiate things in the heated gloom below the hearth.
He landed some twenty feet below, one foot striking the casing of something which may have been an oil pump, and twisted himself clumsily. Agony burned into a sprained knee. He was in a world of pumps and boilers like the engine room of one of the wickedly powerful tugs he used to stow away on when, as a youth, home life became particularly intolerable.
For many minutes he stood in the darkness under the hearth and listened to the pulsing pipes and savoured the richness of heated oil while he rested his knee and recomposed his nerves. The drop had shaken him more than he had supposed; more, in fact, than had his pa.s.sage through transfinity.
Something about the environment was gnawing at his mind. My G.o.d it is! See now, oil feed compressor ... gauges ... feedlines ... balancer ... jets ... injectors ... Oh My G.o.d! Gear like this we used on the Vagrant Curlew ... only there we fed turbines and here they feed crematoria. n.o.body in their right senses would use this set-up as a meat fryer ... unless ... unless it was put here especially for me!
His senses reeled in the thick heat. Psychological warfare! Somebody had stolen a memory out of his mind and built it into a pit at the back of nowhere. The elements of madness built into the equipment.
These boys aren"t missing any tricks! Dalroi, what the h.e.l.l is in you to make them go to this trouble? Only the black belt above his head with its occasional steel coffin destined for the fire kept himin touch with reality. There was an unbearable feeling of terrifying alien-ness about the whole idea which made his bones ache deep inside.
What the h.e.l.l have I got myself into?
He looked for a way out, and found it. A deserted corridor, dim and brown like that of a school he once had known, stretched away to a flight of concrete stairs. He didn"t need to count the steps to remember their feel. Another part of life, another memory trapped in concrete, out of context, an idle snapshot turned to reality.
Insanity must be something like this!
EIGHTEEN.
A door gave on to a street, and as he stepped through the whole weight of his dismay and anguish fell upon him. It was night, damp and chill, and the street was a complex of all the wasted and crippled streets that ever had torn his soul under the dim lamplight.
If he had hoped to find himself alone, as he had so often been alone, he was disappointed. Figures moved, as figures always did, forlornly along the dark pavements calling or talking to others, or singing to themselves in consolation, or walking the roads unseeing while contending with some inner misery. If this was the place of his execution then his hopes of dying alone were not likely to be realised.
In the incredible fidelity of scene and atmosphere the wonder was horribly complete. The property-men of Failway possessed an artistry almost lost to the outside world.
Given a mood for a particular area they interpreted it into a reality of bricks and paint, light and shade, artifact and object, with a skill which was phenomenal.
No panorama was too large or detail too small for their attentions, and the whole scheme was blended by a diabolical understanding of the whims and foibles of human nature. As a work of three-dimensional art a Failway installation was incredible; as an interpretation of the human soul it was clever to the point of insane genius.
The Elysian-fields of Failway One drew the finest fancies from mythology, and the mind and body became transported to a miniature world of light and wonder, modelled on the grandeur and the dreams of ancient Greece and Rome, Failway Two took the splendours of everybody"s dream of orient, and in a blaze of gold and contrast wove a new magic, such that the mightiest of eastern princes would have cried in awe and amazement.
So also with the turbulent wilderness and excitement of Failway Three, the soft, sweet seductive sensuality of Failway Four; and the brash, brazen pa.s.sions of Failway Five - complete, insanely accurate and believable dream-worlds of fantasy, pleasure and escape.
Only here, on Failway Six, did the unnatural cunning of the grand deception shock the mind into awareness of the inhuman genius which controlled the whole design. Just as Failway interpreted with quiet precision every element of gaiety, wonder, awe, excitement, and the thousand human emotions, so did they also interpret the dark and the sordid. Dalroi, with his quick appreciation of atmosphere and intent, was shattered by the impact of the world into which he stepped.
He stood almost blindly for a few moments, forcing his mind to accept the truth of what he saw. Failway Six was a close a.n.a.logy of all the scenes and places where, as a boy, he had known fright, anger, confusion, hate, hunger and uncontrollable dismay. It was a mirror held up to his soul. He felt as forlornand dirty as the streets on which he stood. Failway Six was a city of inhospitable streets, callous slum tenements and cruel, soul-destroying gloom. It was the environmental influence straight out of Dalroi"s psyche.
It took him a few moments to convince himself that this unholy place was not the unfortunate byproduct of apathy, time and vicious economics, but had been deliberately constructed, brick by sorry, blackened brick, to some Satanic, detailed master plan. High-riding over the narrow streets and alleys an ancient electric locomotive hauled a train of filthy, dilapidated carriages in fine with the rooftops, shattering the brittle silence with an unkempt roar. Humidifiers, simulating rain, laid a fine carpet of condensation over the scarred and unwashed roads, and from scraggy curtained windows of a dozen lighted hulks of buildings flowed shafts of discordant jazz, or bawdy voices raised in alcoholic song or anger.
Dalroi savoured the atmosphere carefully. Being a connoisseur of the moods of men he could appreciate the faithful reproduction of the sordid and the desperate. The setting was perfect, he reflected sickly, down to the last dark puddle and the floating grains of dirty chaff therein. Anything could happen in such a hateful place.
He moved instinctively into the shadows, avoiding the illumination of the greenish gas flares, and carefully picking his way from door to door, exploring the mood and trying to understand the depth of the genius behind it. Everything fitted too neatly into place: from the worn steps and the dirty, blistered paint to the patched fanlights and the greasy halls, the effect exactly matched the credible.
He turned to an alley undercutting the railway and was not amazed to find it lined with cracked ceramic tiles and rotting bricks. Desolation was complete and accurate even to the slight stalact.i.te of a water drip through the concrete up above. This was the atmosphere of black despair that drove the humanity out of a man and led him down to the gutter by the shortest available route. Here were all the elements of crime and loneliness and violence brought to reality by the most vivid and ruthless piece of scene-setting that ever existed.
Dalroi moved warily ahead, uncertain now of his next move and still trying to capture the implications of this atrocious place. Breaking free of the damp, black tunnels, he moved out into a cobbled street where the lights shone through the windows of a bar and the hot breath of liquor and coa.r.s.e voices spilled out on to damp pavements. The subtlety of the scene closed round him like a dead hand clutching. He laughed mirthlessly as the trick unfolded in his mind. This place was inhuman, alien. It was tailored with minute precision to key into the memories and habit pattern of Ivan Dalroi! They had brought him home to die!
He felt the almost m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic lure to encounter the pangs of past hopelessness, to slip back into the mire of shades and secrets which had characterised his youth. He entered the bar and scanned the a.s.sembly, knowing before he looked that every sorry character would be in place. He ordered splitza laced with white spirit, as he always had in the Old Town, and savoured the colourless fire as it trickled down his throat.
The atmosphere was insidious, working its way down inside him, filling half-forgotten needs with an almost soporific exactness. Detail by detail, with exquisite finesse, the place seeped into the voids in the dark side of his soul. There was no doubt about it now - this was the place appointed for his execution.
Somebody had constructed it deliberately, with ruthless knowledge of the workings of his mind. These were the streets of h.e.l.l.
He studied the occupants of the bar carefully. Nearly all the men were Failway patrons, drawn by the inexplicable urge to spend their vacations in the squalid shadows of Failway Six. These were the haunted men, the men drawn inexorably back seeking to rediscover the fatal fascination of some dark hour in theirlives when they had acquired the taste for pa.s.sions which only the skillful demimonde of Failway could unfailingly supply. Here and there were sailors back from the vicious waterfronts of half a hundred ports, tainted with subtle vices from the orient and restless appet.i.tes from the tropics. This was the place where the cold-eyed thirsting could find its slaking and where the sleepless agonies of wanting found a little brief relief.
The women were painted with a lavish imprecision which stamped them for what they were. These were some of the legions of hostesses employed in hopeless bondage by Failway to cater for the patron"s wants. Failway training and selection, ever meticulous, matched the women to the particular cla.s.s of clientele. From the naive nymphs of Failway One to the oriental coquettes of Failway Two, the pattern traced wearily down. Failway Three, with it sharp-eyed, sophisticated adventuresses was replaced by the skillful seductresses of Failway Four and in turn by the gilded, padded courtesans of Failway Five.
Failway Six dispensed with dreaming and smacked the hateful cast of cold reality over the souls of men.
The more he thought about it, the more the wrongness grew to a certainty and the certainty to a stifled panic born not of fear of death but the proximity of the completely unknown. The immaculate exactness of the environment betrayed the skeleton of alien intent by its very fidelity. No man, being mortal and therefore liable to error, could have designed Failway Six in all its wretchedness. The whole degrading work was of a higher order of art and perception than any human genius could attain - and its very existence denoted a level of skills and technology which left him gasping. He ordered more splitza and settled into a corner. There was nothing he could do but wait.
With the gradual drift of evening the bar slowly emptied as patrons and hostesses turned away into the night, singly or together, moving like shadows back into the enfolding shadows. n.o.body bothered Dalroi and he bothered no one, nor did he notice one curious glance nor any hint of the eyes which must surely be watching him. For half an hour he drank alone, becoming finally aware that even the staff had deserted to leave him in sole possession of the bar, lit and open and in every way credible except for the complete lack of life other than his own.
If Dalroi experienced anything at all it was an ache of loneliness, the abhorrent vacuum of enforced solitude, the ant.i.thesis of security. He accepted the fury gathering above him as unalterable and unavoidable, and in his quiet fatalism he forgot even to be greatly afraid. A growing silence over the artificial city attracted his attention and puzzled him, for though it was long into the simulated night even a sleeping city normally has its slight aura of sound. Unable longer to restrain his curiosity he finally left the bar. At first he encountered only completely deserted places, but as he turned a corner the reason for the acc.u.mulating silence became apparent.
Dark vehicles, like those of a forbidden army, were traversing the streets. Everywhere a quiet and orderly evacuation was taking place. Teams of figures were entering the buildings and waking the occupants, conducting them to places on the trucks swiftly and without fuss. The essential urgency of the occasion was overruled by the imperative need to avoid panic. Dalroi mentally saluted the organisers of Failway. They were caterers for every need including the need to evacuate silently an entire city.
Carefully he moved through the streets towards the transfinite pa.s.senger shuttle installation. Again the precise bonds of organisation were apparent. The immense shuttles slid away at one-second intervals, programmed for Failway Terminal, and the fleet of vehicles kept coming with a steady stream of hastily awakened sleepers, many of whom were obviously under cepi hypnosis and had no idea of the nature of their nocturnal journey.
Later the Security men began to comb the streets, looking for stragglers, but the search was perfunctory.
Dalroi climbed to the roof of a group of deserted flats and lay out of sight while the search went past. The weight of exhaustion and sleepless hours bore down on him, and, unwillingly, he slept.When he awoke the whole city was empty and abandoned. He reconnoitred the silent streets and probed into the buildings without finding trace of any remaining soul. So far as he could tell he was the only living thing in the whole area of Failway Six. Although it was now time for the artificial morning the plasma-sun remained dark, and a sinister silence held deep over the unofficial night.
He grew uncomfortably aware that the sky was growing lighter, not with the stained greys of the artificial morning which would never come, but with a mercuric blueness only just out of ultra-violet. Checking the charge in the radiation pistol Dalroi climbed down from the high roof to the murky streets, dim creva.s.ses in the unlikely dawn.
The city had been abandoned with all services still running and as he touched the pavements he experienced a twinge of incredible loneliness that behind the dimly lighted windows no sleepers stirred or lovers moved or cried or sang or wept. Only his footsteps blunted the quick silence.
"Make no mistake," said Dalroi to his unseen persecutors. "If I survive I"ll hunt you to the far corners of infinity."
There was a white flash, brilliant, eclipsing vision with a dynamic blankness. It filled the whole atmosphere and coruscated and burned on corners and projections. Dalroi himself became the centre of a shaft of living white fire which ate at him with tongues of cold flame and then as rapidly was extinguished. The white fires flickered and died; nothing was burnt, or was scorched or showed any sign of difference.
Dalroi"s skin crawled. This was a new phenomenon, of unknown potency, but presumably it was designed to be deadly. In what way? His attention fastened on the radiation pistol in his hand, an incredible fear forming in his mind. In verification he squeezed the trigger. The gun mashed under his fingers and disintegrated into crumbling powder. Stupidly he watched the particles fall.
Metal! Fear flashed sharply. Something happened to the molecular binding forces in the metal. All metals? He turned to a lamp standard and smote it sharply with his hand. The blow catalysed some reaction and the standard broke crisply and fell in untidy, crumbling shards before his feet. Not only metal! Gla.s.s, ceramic, plastic - every substance the lamp had contained crumbled to sickening dust under his probing toes. My G.o.d! The whole d.a.m.n place is made of dust!
His shoes disintegrated with a sudden exotherm which made him jump. The fibres of his clothing shredded, unwillingly at first, then with growing impetus, and the particles dusted as they fell from his body, leaving him naked and unarmed. He looked in bewilderment at the tall empty buildings which surrounded him. Such lights as had shone were slowly going out as the filaments fatigued. How sound were these apparently solid walls and the hideous banks of masonry?
Somewhere in a clock a pivot broke, causing an escapement to jam. The pendulum swung with just sufficient momentum to jar the mechanism. The catalysis touched off, and the mechanism crumbled into powder. The pendulum fell through the bottom of the case on to a marble mantel-shelf, and a seven storey tenement crumbled into a heap of noisy dust. A bursting fuse shattered its cartridge and a line of tawdry shops became a pile of flowing particles; a cistern burst and two blocks disappeared.
The last of the lights collapsed and died, but in the artificial sky remained the weird blue fluorescence, an unG.o.dly aurora, and it was by this light that Dalroi moved. As his bare feet touched the ground the pavements crumbled into bowls of dust under the impact. Sewers collapsed like dusty deathtraps, and on either side the tall buildings began to totter and wave as some small impetus touched off a chain reaction which led to complete disintegration.
He was half afraid of choking in the dust, but it settled swiftly by some electrostatic charge, though several times he sank deeply into drifts of crumbled brick dust and nearly suffocated on that account. Ofthe unknown enemy he saw no sign, but they had in one incredible second robbed him of weapons, of cover, and of everything outside of his own body which a lifetime of fighting had taught him to use for self-preservation.
Somebody wants me dead! ... So badly they don"t measure the cost in ordinary terms. h.e.l.l! What"s so special about me? I"m Dalroi ... and I"ve got something burning at the back of my brain ... and sometimes I get almighty mad ... and do things I never quite remember. What is it a man can have which makes him so special they"d tear the universe apart to see him in his grave? And if he has it ... how does he recognise it and use it to survive?
Something blew up with a jet of fire, and a whole quarter of the artificial city slid into oblivion. Behind the dusty desolation the quick, trim lines of the transfinite pa.s.senger shuttle installation came into view. He waded through the dusting rubble, knowing what he would find yet unable to resist the faint hope that the installation was untouched. A bright shuttle capsule mashed like a rotten tin and turned to dusty driblets as he touched it with his hand. With eyes long past astonishment he watched the matrix coils powder to brown and copper and gold on the crumbling floor. On a tottering girder a solitary notice hanging over what had been the pa.s.senger bays crumbled its topical legend: NO WAY OUT.
"You can say that again!" said Dalroi sourly to n.o.body at all.
He was trapped on a transfinite level, and out there - out in the multiple darknesses all around - waited the something which so desperately wanted him dead; something whose power and malice was to be feared with more than ordinary dead.
Trapped! He had been trapped in transfinity before and managed to escape. How? No memory of that.
What happens when I touch the limit of endurance? What comes over me that"s all fire and fury and crazing bitterness and anger? Oh G.o.d! What untapped power becomes unleashed? What is it that lives in me in the dark side of the mind?
Nothing happened.
Why don"t they come out and get me? Are they biding their time before the final punch - or are they afraid? Afraid? That"s a laugh! I might just manage a good spit at them if the d.a.m.n dust hadn"t made my mouth so dry. Why should they be afraid of me? I"m Dalroi ... I was born in the Old Town precinct ... and a little bit of the Devil has got into my brain. Is that the sort of crime that shakes the Universe? Is that why they want me dead?
Something happened. The remnants of the city crumbled, not spasmodically but in a continuous stream, tumbling like dry water. Walls tottered and splintered and were dust long before they hit the ground. The whole dim landscape writhed and trembled and dissolved, striving to form one bare, flat waste of powder, like shifting, unclean snow.
Then he felt the tremor beneath his feet and knew, sickly, why the rest of the city was falling. Vibration, terrible and deep, of ever increasing amplitude, was shaking the terrain bodily. In a few moments no features were left; only a pale, shifting waste under the unG.o.dly blue radiance which dwelt above.
This is it! This is the moment they"ve been waiting for. How is it to come - this thing called death?
In the dim distance the black plain held its secrets. No lights, no movements; nothing but the harrowing certainty of eyes watching from the darkness, of unknown unknowable power being concentrated and focused on one solitary morsel of humanity called Dalroi.How is it to come? In a fire-flash ... heat, searing, scalding ... or as lightning, to cinders ... or radiation ... high velocity projectile ... by pressure, vacuum, gas ... starvation, paralysis ... or a new way of dying ... Watch it, Dalroi! Your paranoia"s showing! You"re on the wrong end of a war of nerves!
The vibration stepped up, tearing at his feet, creating warmth by frenzied friction. G.o.d, it hurts! Like a sea around him the livid dust rose in a hurling turbulence, shocked into such pitch of vibrant activity that it flowed and eddied like a tide of water. Fluidised by the pressure of colliding particles, it expanded up to his waist, then to his shoulder; a monstrous flood in seething flow; a drowning, bitter sea of heated dryness in which he had no hope of swimming to survival.
And it burned. He was immersed in a boiling shot-blast of hot grit. Where his feet touched down on the denser layers beneath, the vibration tore at his naked feet, trying to tear the skin off, and producing friction burns. He leaped, partly to draw clear breath above the swirling grit-storm and partly to ease the agony of standing; and each time he leaped the lower part of his body descended again into excruciating fire.
And the fire and the tearing vibration reached steadily higher and higher. He felt he was in a boiling bath that was trying to tear the flesh from his bones; he felt he was plunging into boiling lead, into vats of simmering steel ... into the sun ... Agony beyond endurance which had to be endured; pain so intense that it was no longer pain but a synaptic short-circuit which funnelled all his awareness into one vast pit illuminated by black lightning. Then something snapped within him.
Desperation piled on desperation, resolution on resolution; the megaton impulse of the unconquerable will to live pulsed in his brain. Fury more brilliant and more destructive than a nova charged his bloodstream with a fantastic plasma derived from the core of creation.
Somebody will pay for this! G.o.d, I"ll make them pay!
Anger burst over him like a storm but he could still recognise the diabolical nature of the trap. No matter what effort of will or desperation he achieved he could never hope to wade clear of the boiling maelstrom. Inflammable dust motes were bursting into spontaneous points of fire and it was only a matter of time before the whole ma.s.s became incandescent. His mind and his will might live, but it was a matter of minutes only before his body was burnt and torn to dust.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Not this way, thought Dalroi. Not this way and not now.
For a fragment of a second he blacked out, but the life impulse pounding in his brain reset the tripped circuit-breakers of his mind and forced him back to scalding consciousness.
There had to be some way out!
VIBRATION STRICTION RELAXATION.
AMPLITUDE FREQUENCY.
There had to be an answer!
There was an answer. The vibration was a standing wave, adjusted to place him at the anti-node so that the punishment would have full effect. If he could only reach the nodal point ...
He could see it now that he knew what to look for. The pattern of standing waves was traced by the activity of the dust, like sand on a vibrating tray. At the nodal points the lessened activity was marked by a valley in the whirling flood. Here a man could stand in the midst of the fury and escape all but theincidental effects. He thrust himself forward. Within seconds his feet touched down on cooler surfaces and the dust rose no higher than his waist. Before and behind him the barbarous dust rose higher and hotter like the waves of some monstrous time-locked sea.
NINETEEN.
His relief was of short duration. Whether it was deliberate or some quirk of the harmonics of the place he never knew, but suddenly there was a rapid mode-change which plunged him into an anguished wave now well above his head. He founded, and more by luck than judgement broke out to a new node point.
He pressed swiftly along the channel formed by the standing wave, intent on reaching the limits of the city material, beyond which there would be nothing in which to drown or burn.
Something else slammed into the fabric of the nightmare terrain, another frequency from another direction, beating with the first then locking into synchronisation an octave above. The node channel began to twist and dissolve, breaking into patterns and diamonds like a monstrous living quilted eiderdown. Progress became a matter of timing and placing, a wild dance through shifting red-hot quicksand with agony the reward for a misplaced foot or a misjudged tempo. Dalroi was dancing the Devil"s ballet, with death as the most critical of audiences.
The unknown enemy must have guessed what he was up to, for the vibration patterns changed again. The immense dunes began rolling, huge as houses, and the uncertain valleys shifted even as he trod. The synchronisation escaped him, and for a second he knew he was roasting alive, but suddenly he was on the edge of the city that had been, stumbling down a weak, vibrating incline on to a plain of cool black darkness. His eyes were wide with terror, not from the narrowness of his escape from death but with fear of the thing which burned in the dark side of his mind. The last half mile he had not walked ... he had jumped!