The conflict smote him with the force of a physical blow. He had jumped - projected himself across half a mile of s.p.a.ce without intention and without knowing how. The trouble was that he knew the sensation was familiar to him. He had jumped before, many times, but where and how he could not quite recall. It was a part of those things his mind refused to admit, a dark shadow chained deep in the dungeons of the subconscious.
Only once, on the web, could he recall consciously breaking through into the realms of self-projection.
He could remember breaking free of the web, but after that all was confused nightmare and blankness.
He had woken in a hospital just as the doctor was signing his death certificate. Of his journey to that peculiar circ.u.mstance he had no knowledge at all.
I must have jumped ... Only ... His blood ran cold. Gormalu jumped too - and Gormalu"s not human!
I had his neck under my fingers and he jumped - clean out of existence. When I was trapped on the web - and just now - I also jumped. G.o.d! Don"t tell me I"m not human either: I"m Dalroi, I was born in Old Town ... my mother was a tramp and my father was an alcoholic ... and between them they hadn"t enough energy to roll out of bed, let alone jump.
The vibration died unwillingly. The dust behind him collapsed in ribbed patterns on the bedrock, and Dalroi searched carefully around the black terrain seeking the signs of his persecutors. He was naked and his skin was raw and inflamed and burned as though he Lad been bathed in vitriol, but he believed now what he had refused to believe before: he had an immunity to murder, a painful kind of ersatz immortality.
How or why was an academic point, but for the moment he clung to it with an animal belief. Nothing else could have brought him out of that h.e.l.l alive.But, he conceded grimly, it was not himself who needed to be convinced. Whatever was out there was not going to be as easily persuaded. They might never succeed in killing him - but he was having a h.e.l.l of a painful time while they tried. And then again, perhaps they knew precisely ... how to kill an immortal ...
What next? They must know that I escaped the trap. Perhaps that was just a softening-up process. They were dead right! Much softer and I"d go right through a jelly-sieve. But they didn"t go to all that trouble just to baste me turkey-red and then let me escape. I wish to h.e.l.l I knew what was coming next. I have a feeling this is the finale.
He saw the beam swinging towards him, its path detailed by dust motes in the air, and he flung himself on to the floor. The beam halted and locked over him, flooding the area with a D-line sodium yellow glare.
Another projector lashed out from behind, then another and another until he lay centrally in a circle of spotlights. Surprisingly, nothing hurt. He rose warily to his feet and, shielding his eyes, he walked experimentally along the floor. The projectors were locked on to him with elegant precision, for he moved no nearer to the edge of the brilliant circle.
"All right?" said Dalroi to the bright darkness. "So what do you want - a tap dance?"
The position was inconceivably bad. While he was bathed in that illumination anyone out in the darkness could hit him with almost anything without fail. A rifle, a revolver, a radiation pistol - a hand grenade even. It was a situation that needed to be rectified as soon as he could decide how to do it. After ten minutes it did not seem as though anyone was going to hit him at all, and the incongruity struck home.
Why a sodium light? These people must have progressed well past the stage of fluor-atomics, and a sodium discharge is not particularly efficient even by our own standards. h.e.l.l, have I made a mistake? I"ve been waiting for a brickbat from out of the darkness when maybe it"s something in the light that is the danger.
The idea grew to a certainty and the certainty to a rising panic. Dalroi was never one to underestimate his opponents" capabilities and the circle of light put him at a gross psychological disadvantage.
Experimentally he tried to jump, but without the crazing fury and desperation seething in his veins the effort was useless. Jumping was strictly a survival reaction and this particular peril was one in which the survival threat was carefully obscured. He needed to be teetering near to the essential brink of destruction before the trigger flung him clear in a burst of wild madness; he had to know the breath of death before he could evoke such superhuman talent.
My G.o.d! Suppose I don"t know how before it"s too late!
He concentrated, exploring the senses of his body, trying to detect the first impulse which would tell him how he was supposed to die. He was well aware that a heavy dose of hard radiation could damage him beyond recovery without his being able to detect it, but he felt in his bones it would be something more virulent, more painful and more swiftly effective than blood cancer. He primed his mind to react to the first microsecond of pain, knowing he would have no time to make a conscious decision.
He nearly did not make it.
The nature of the threat, the pain and the reaction were as near instantaneous as his senses could measure.
SODIUM! SODIUM!.
The words shrieked through his mind. The supposed lamps were ion projectors seeding his body withmolecules of metallic sodium. Sodium reacts with moisture in the body ... exothermally ... produces hydrogen ... spontaneous combustion ... produces sodium hydroxide ... eats flesh ... fatally toxic.
Simultaneously his flesh burst into flame and he jumped ...
No sudden transition, this. They were waiting for him with some fiendish understanding of transfinity. His progress was arrested by the slam of a wall of solid energy which he struck with a momentum that would have killed him outright had he been moving in a normal s.p.a.ce-time continuum. He jumped again. Again force slashed out and beat him back ... burning ... burning ...
He jumped once more. This time the whole megaton impulse of the fire in his mind flared with unbelievable intensity. Anger, hatred and desperation came together like triple components of sub-critical ma.s.s uniting to form the ultimate of chain reactions. Uncontrolled, uncontrollable, the power punched through his body and his brain. He was Dalroi ... the irresistible force ... and he had the power to destroy the universe! The irresistible force closed again with the immovable wall his antagonists had set around him. This time it was the wall that had to give.
Transfinity shuddered. Streamers of light speared away into the black depths and the wall of energy collapsed back on its creators like a sheet of mad lightning. Dalroi, spinning like a top, toppled into a pit of reined darkness, wondering how much more punishment he would have to take before his antagonists realised they were fighting a lost battle.
Even as he broke through into the next strata of transfinity he knew his persecutors had no intention of calling the battle lost. No matter how his body burned it was his mind which was to take the brunt of the shock. His eyes refused to focus on the kaleidoscope of impossibilities which pa.s.sed before his agonised gaze. Shapes and forces seethed before him, geometrical idiocies, non-Euclidian absurdities; an ebullient configuration of seven-dimensional images both living an inanimate.
The gross nightmare bore heavily or his powers of reason. Sound, too, held all the acoustic unreality of something which reason declares cannot possibly exist. Dalroi was the intruder, an object inflicting as much curiosity and fear as the sudden appearance of a one-dimensional man in a crowded shopping centre on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. He felt the waves of terror and consternation beating back at him as the unimaginable ent.i.ties skittered insanely in an inconceivable number of directions to leave him standing on an abstract and impossible plane.
I"M BURNING, said Dalroi. CAN"T YOU SEE I"M BURNING.
If they understood at all they gave no sign. Fear begat anger, and the atmosphere crackled with hostility.
Ent.i.ties approached, winging quickly on mind-splitting trajectories which would have driven a ballistics computer into screaming hysteria.
BURNING! BURNING! BURNING!.
The sweet smell of intended murder seeped into Dalroi"s nostrils.
CAN"T YOU SEE I"M BURNING!.
Encouraged by his pa.s.sive resistance the ent.i.ties wheeled to press an emboldened attack. Sounds stuttered and stammered and his mind groped for patterns of sound as the only possible subst.i.tute for intelligibility.
CUT! CUT! CUT! SPLITTER! CUT! said the sparkling chaos.
"Hate!" said Dalroi. "HATE!" His words were a blaze of gold on blue, hazed against the keen brilliance.His mind twisted between rejection of the seven-dimensional images and an attempt to resolve them in three-dimensional terms. In neither case was he successful. His position was that of a blind idiot without legs engaged in a rapier duel with a practised swordsman. He could neither see the enemy, follow his manoeuvres nor know where the next blow was to fall. The chaotic patterns seethed before his eyes, evoking impossible perspectives and mind-twisting matrices of things material, things immaterial and things which were different from either. Sanity teetered dangerously on an unstable pivot.
SPLITTER! SPLITTER! CUT.
His left arm drooped with a thousand agonies which were overlaid with a numbing dullness. The limb felt as if it had become encased with lead. He knew his arm had been hurt, but by what or how badly it was impossible to tell, for the multiple refractions of the media in which he moved distorted even his own image beyond recognition. More terribly, he sensed he was beaten. His eyes and brain had no way of interpreting or responding to a seven-dimensional configuration, yet he sensed from the waves of immortal panic which splintered and phased around him that he was more terrible than they.
BURNING! BURNING!.
His only chance was to fight them on their own ground. He had to learn how to manipulate a geometry which could tolerate seven lines each at right-angles to the rest; and this he had to do in the face of an attack as vehement as it was abstract. He forced his mind to grapple with the cascading irrationalities.
The violence with which his mind withdrew told him that he could never do it and remain sane enough to be objective.
p s e cut i r h e cut Triangles w d SPLITTER cut Yellow was acrid in his mouth. "Hate!" said Dalroi. "HATE!"
Fire sang like soft steel splitting over a piercing tool, tumbling into troughs of boiling light. Movement was an echo which had no origin; pain was a red dimensionless haze; att.i.tude was a concrete substance which rippled off the tongue like an ecstatic prayer.
Sound, SOUND that he could touch, taste, smell, eddied like small explosive clouds of coloured malice.
Time was a shrill wind, echoing isolation, discreet quanta, a string of numbered knives to be separated and re-aligned.
SPLITTER! SPLITTER! CUT!.
Madness seized him. Desperation more desperate than the mere laws of preservation charged him with an awful strength. Intelligences were all around him, moving in, trying each to press a separate hurt. In the face of Dalroi"s new burst of inspired spite they drew back in apparent consternation. Warmth wounded; light loitered loftily, shapes spun and shattered; sensations shivered. Time cut like a fine edge of a whetted blade. Entropy moaned with anguish.
TOOTH! NAIL! WILL! SPITE! HATE! FIGHT!.
Dalroi turned on his persecutors with a maniacal fury, the dark thing in his mind burning bright like athousand beacons. The furious furnace within him burst into his blood with a marvellous flood of intrinsic contempt and barbarism. With every ounce of his being vibrating he hurled at his alien adversaries a vast tide of corrosive, vitriolic hatred.
Something snapped.
There was a period of blindness which had nothing akin to lack of seeing, and a gulf of pain which had no correspondence with sensation. There was searing heat without warmth, pressure unfelt, a moment locked in trans-temporal stillness and a fold in time which would have ruptured the most carefully constructed clock.
When the bright darkness cleared he gazed aghast on the twisted discords which surrounded him. He took up a black triangle and counted the sides. Twenty-four now. G.o.d, what have I got myself into?
TWENTY.
The dilemma fazed him temporarily. Seven dimensions had been trial enough, but this - this was madness. The chaotic geometry had been smashed apart and replaced with chaos upon chaos upon chaos. Dimensionality was lost, criteria had run amok. The awesome blast of malicious fury which had burst from him had destroyed the tottering reference frame of this hideous universe, and no geometrical concept could begin to grasp the formless groping after new order which dominated the nightmare scene.
Atoms toyed in meaningless a.s.sociations; radiations strayed looking for finite laws of nature; raw energy abounded, harmless, having no anathema which to attack or repel, raw intelligence, alien and sans corpore coalesced into frightened spinning whirlpools of spluttering light. Dalroi stood trying to collect his mazed senses and to grasp the enormity of the havoc he had wrought. He had no doubt of what he had done. He had knocked a complete dimensional level straight into a transfinite loop, the absurd mathematical shriek from which no undistorted form had ever returned.
The quasi-universe fell apart. He fell like a part of the rainbow, blazed like the sun on a spring morning, howled like the wind through a million keyholes. He was spreadeagled across the realms of null, racked by the waves of a tideless sub-atomic sea. He was a loose coalition of atomic particles caught in transfinity"s deadliest trap, yet the raging thing in the dark side of his mind was a binding force which locked his molecules together and maintained a reasoning being in the midst of unchartable madness.
He knew now beyond doubt that the fabric of transfinite s.p.a.ce was amenable to control by thought. He had within him the power to create chaos or end it, to project himself through the transfinite lattices or to bend them to his will. It was all a question of ... formulation. One had to know what to manipulate, and how and when. Given that, some special act of resolution or despair was sufficient to catalyse the reaction.
Right now he wanted a particular destination for a particular purpose. Caught up in the maddening vortex of a transfinite loop he worked desperately to find the formula. Somewhere it was forgotten ...
deliberately repressed. He had to have that information even if he went through his mind with an atomic-hydrogen torch.
The secret yielded under the ruthless self-a.n.a.lysis. From the shadows he culled the coordinates he needed, a meaningless string of symbolism. With effortless, inhuman reaction he computed the unready mathematics and without the luxury of hesitation or wonder - he jumped.
BURNING!.
BURNING!BURNING!.
"Korch, what"s the present position at Failway?"
"Panic," said Korch dryly. "To give them their due they seem quite as baffled about all this as we are.
They"ve sent a boomerang shuttle into the Failway Six stratum. They haven"t developed all the photographs yet, but first indications are that the entire installation has been blasted flat. I"ve never seen anything like it. There"s a waste in there which looks as though it"s never been occupied since eternity."
"That checks," said the Monitor. "Whatever they did to Dalroi they"d have to do in a big way."
"You think they got him?"
"I don"t know what the h.e.l.l to think. This whole affair has more loose ends than the average sheep.
Somebody on the other side of nowhere wanted Dalroi"s head and I don"t think it was for a hunting trophy. As far as I can judge the whole reason for the existence of Failway was to act as a combined bait and execution block for Dalroi or somebody like him. Does that make sense to you?"
"Not a bit," said Korch.
"Nor to me. The more you look at it the more insane it becomes. Calculate the cost of putting in the Failway installation and figure how long it would take to get that investment back. Don"t bother. I"ll tell you the answer - it"s seventeen hundred years. Hardly an attraction for a get-rich-quick merchant, and if it"s merely the bait for a G.o.dallmighty trap then it adds up to an awful lot of wanting for somebody"s skin."
"Or an awful lot of fear."
"That seems to be the answer," said the Monitor, "but it still doesn"t make sense. I"ll swear Dalroi never knew of their existence before they started on him. We"re missing the whole point somewhere and it"s imperative we catch up fast."
"How can we do that?"
"Perhaps we can"t, but just supposing they don"t get Dalroi? Suppose he manages to get back ... What"s he liable to do?"
"Start looking for the ones who set all this up for him, I suppose. And a rare job he"d make of it too!"
"Precisely, so I"ve collected a group of prime suspects which we"ll invite him to find - on our own ground. I"ve put them in the cells below here and left enough clues so that Dalroi will know where to come looking. There"s Cronstadt, Hildebrand, Presley, and Ombudsman Rhodes, who asks all the wrong questions about all the right people."
"I don"t see how Rhodes fits in?"
"Neither do I, but Harry Dever was one of his men. You can take it from me that Rhodes is in the thick of this somewhere. Rhodes knows a lot more than he"s saying and I have a feeling that if Dalroi came back we"d start getting a few straight answers."
"But with Dalroi ... ! You"re taking a h.e.l.l of a risk. Remember Consedo?"
"I don"t think this would be another Consedo. I suspect Dalroi"s vengeance may be a little more personal.
There"s another point also. While I intend to let Dalroi in if he comes, I have no intention of letting him outagain."
Korch considered this for a moment then whistled softly through his teeth. "What makes you think you can hold Dalroi if Failway can"t?"
"A certain cylinder labelled X47 Neurogas which I saved from World War Three."
"X47"s banned under the Tel-Aviv Humanitarian Convention."
"You think I don"t know that? But I don"t think we"re dealing with humanitarians either. There are forces involved in this struggle which could wipe out the entire human race without so much as a sideways glance. Dalroi is one of them. Regardless of who or what he"s fighting I don"t think we can let a man with powers like that remain at large in our society?"
"A hypothetical point," said Korch, "since Dalroi has not and never may return. But supposing he did, you still can"t localise X47. Release one milligram of that in the vicinity of the cells and you"d affect everybody in the entire area."
"The fact had not escaped me, but you cannot have a trap without bait, and bait, is, almost by definition, expendable."
"My G.o.d!" said Korch. "You must want to get Dalroi badly."
"I do," said the Monitor, "I certainly do."
At one hour past midnight the brittle clatter of the alarm bell shattered the silence deep in the subterranean H.Q. of the Black Knights. The Monitor was activating his communicator b.u.t.ton even before it toned his personal summons.
"Korch here. Chief. I think you were right. The electrified fence just went down. The control board"s fused solid as though it got mixed with a thousand-KV power line."
The Monitor took a deep breath. "Nothing short of a direct strike by lightning could fuse that board solid."
"Uh! So we were struck by lightning out of a clear sky and clean through the ion-cloud umbrella. That sort of coincidence I don"t like. My money says Dalroi"s arrived and he"s not being too gentle about his means of entry."