"Anything on the screens?"
"There"s enough mush to write a love lyric but nothing which is identifiable with Dalroi. There"s some extremely broad-band interference chewing into our circuits somewhere. Effectively we"re blind. If that"s Dalroi he"s got some rare tricks up his sleeve."
"That"s Dalroi all right, and I don"t imagine we"ve seen all of his tricks yet. Upgrade the alert to yellow imperative, and be prepared for anything. The next half hour could be decidedly rough."
"What about the A.F.I. projectors?"
"Turn them off. We don"t want to burn him on the way in. Only if he tries to go out again."
Silence for long seconds. "Too late," said Korch, just a hint of hysteria in his voice. "The A.F.I."s just fused. Load resistance died somehow. The magnetrons went up like fireworks. h.e.l.l, are you sure you know what you"re doing, letting Dalroi in here?""I don"t think I could stop him even if I wanted to. You"re sure that everyone knows what to do?"
"Positive. I"ve checked them through it half a hundred times. Dalroi comes in but he doesn"t go out again.
If he does it"ll be over a big pile of dead bodies."
"Don"t joke," said the Monitor. "It could even happen that way. Give me the full range of video pick-ups in the cells, I want to ... h.e.l.l!"
"What"s the matter?"
"The girl, Zen, she"s still in the cells with the others. There"s no sense in her getting a dose of X47 too.
How much time do you reckon I"ve got?"
"If Dalroi"s only just through the A.F.I. range I"d say about four minutes. The Devil take all blind personnel-detecting instruments!"
"I"m going down to get the girl out," said the Monitor. "Signal me if he gets too close before I"m through.
I"ll leave my communicator open so we can compare notes."
"Check!" Korch closed his eyes. He did not like last minute rearrangements.
By the time the Monitor arrived the doors of the individual cells had been opened and the prisoners had congregated in the wide pa.s.sage that led through the cell area. There was no doubt that they took this as a sign of their impending release and they came forward eagerly when the main doors broke open to admit the Monitor. But when the great doors sealed behind him the atmosphere grew electric.
"Something"s happening," said Cronstadt. His face was a shade of grey from the contagious fear. "You"re expecting some sort of trouble."
"I"m expecting Dalroi," said the Monitor tonelessly, "and that tends to have the same effect. I don"t know what he wants, but I suspect it"s a little spectacular vengeance. If anyone here has anything on his conscience he"d better figure out a few good explanations. Dalroi in a vengeful mood doesn"t bear thinking about."
"You"re letting him come in?" asked Cronstadt. Fear and disbelief stood high on his face.
"Frankly I don"t have any way to stop him."
"Speed it up!" Korch"s urgent voice came over the communicator. "I guess he"s nearly here by now.
Things are too d.a.m.n silent."
The Monitor started to say something then thought better of it. He caught Zen by the arm.
"You"d better come out of here. For the next half an hour anything goes. Dalroi"s after the blood of one of these idiots and I"d sooner watch it on the screen than in person. You"re not involved. We"d better get out of here before that rampant boy friend of yours starts tearing the whole b.l.o.o.d.y place apart."
Zen stood her ground. "Take your hands off me! I"ll take my own chances. You"re as much involved as anyone in what"s happened to Dalroi. Suppose he starts looking for you?"
"Speed it up," said Korch. "Something"s starting to happen."
The Monitor had no use for finesse. He chopped Zen savagely with his hand and swung the sagging body over his shoulder. As they pa.s.sed through the door the solenoids clamped down, locking the slab with anominous finality, leaving Cronstadt, Presley, the Ombudsman and Hildebrand looking at each other with mutual unquiet.
The Monitor signalled the guards to abandon the cell area. He set the trips in the recess wherein lay the cylinder of X47 neurogas and its attendant controllers, then turned to go up the stairs. As he did so pandemonium broke out. The speaker system cut in with a string of conflicting orders which terminated in a shout. In the background somebody was screaming with hysteria. The Monitor"s face paled. The men who were breaking down were seasoned Black Knights, conditioned to the toughest deeds and scenes.
Whatever they had contacted had broken mind and spirit with singularly shattering effect. Nothing had any right to be as horrific as that.
"Korch! For Christ"s sake what"s going on up there?"
Korch was almost incoherent. "My G.o.d! Oh my G.o.d! He suddenly appeared ... and he"s burning ... My G.o.d! He"s all on fire."
"h.e.l.l!" said the Monitor. "Don"t you crack up on me."
"I tell you he"s burning. I never saw a living man on fire before. G.o.d, I feel giddy!"
The Monitor cut the connection impatiently and pressed on up the stairs. As he reached the landing a wave of giddiness. .h.i.t him too. He threw it off with a puzzled frown and continued for five more paces before his sense of balance went haywire and the floor rushed up to meet him. He fell heavily, instinctively cushioning Zen"s head as they hit the ground.
Cursing wildly he sat up and nearly overbalanced until his fingers contacted the wall. He gripped tightly to the corner of a panel and tried to a.n.a.lyse the situation. The corridor appeared to be revolving wildly. He felt he was on a mad merry-go-round with himself at the centre point. He knew that something was affecting both his eye muscles and his sense of balance. The swinging, shifting disorientation tied his stomach into knots and filled him with a profound nausea. He tried crawling, but the floor seemed to buck and twist beneath him so alarmingly that he had to rest every few seconds to rea.s.sure himself that he was in no danger of being spun helplessly down the corridor by centrifugal force.
The communicator fell from his pocket and clattered to the floor. In recovering it he thumbed the b.u.t.ton and Korch"s voice came in chanting: "Burning ... Burning ... Burning!"
TWENTY-ONE.
It said much for the discipline of his training that the Monitor was still capable of logical thought.
Something was affecting them all, and, with Dalroi in the vicinity, it was certainly no casual misfortune.
The question was, how was it done. Carving arcs above his head was a ventilator louvre. That made sense! He moved himself giddily out of the immediate air-stream and the whirl-around grew slightly less.
He even climbed to his knees without falling, though the gyrations still spun the usefulness from his eyes and limbs. Whatever it was, then, it was coming in through the ventilator shafts. A logical move where one wished to paralyse an entire underground installation. Only ...
This revealed the strength of Dalroi"s hand with a shattering clarity. The air conditioning plant was equipped with batteries of filters, electro-static precipitators, scrubbers, charcoal beds, UV sterilisers, low-temperature condensers and every device that science could provide to ensure that what was happening could not possibly occur. In some way Dalroi had contrived a method to make molecules, indistinguishable from those of normal air, which would carry the seeds of this gross disorientation through the most critical of treatment plants. The hair p.r.i.c.kled on the back of the Monitor"s neck. He hadgrossly underestimated Dalroi"s capabilities.
"How can a man burn?" asked Korch plaintively through the communications set. "All going round!"
"Shut up!" said the Monitor. "I have to think. Do you suppose there"s a fit man anywhere in the place?"
Korch said nothing so the Monitor drew his own conclusions. Things were working out all wrong, catastrophically wrong. He tried the communicator again.
"Where"s Dalroi now?"
"He"s coming down and ... G.o.d, you should see the way he"s burning!"
"Keep him in view on the screens," said the Monitor. "Use a camera. I want to have a record of whatever it is he does."
He leaned back and tried to think. When he closed his eyes the nausea overwhelmed him with such violence that he felt he was being drawn inside-out; with his eyes open the spinning environment charged him with such insecurity that panic and self-preservation destroyed objective thinking. The disorientation was growing worse. There was nothing to do but wait.
Shortly the expected began to happen. From the centre of his own particular vortex the Monitor heard the whine of the elevator descending. Dalroi was on his way. Sickly the Monitor tried to roll himself out of the fairway, but the giddying whirl defeated his muscle coordination and he merely rocked backward and forward on his back crying with frustration. The elevator doors snarled slightly and something entered the corridor. The Monitor, impelled by fear and fascination, strove to focus his eyes on Dalroi as he appeared.
"Oh, My G.o.d! Oh, My G.o.d! He"s all on fire! Dalroi"s burning!"
The apparition was dimly recognisable as Dalroi, but the face was the face of a soul fire-tormented through eternity. Satan"s kingdom had opened and vomited one of the luckless sp.a.w.n of h.e.l.l. Lines of agony were etched more deeply than they had any right to be in a face that once had been human. One arm hung limply by his side and the fire flowed from the naked body like flames from a burning brand.
But it was the eyes which dominated; eyes which held a flame of their own, far brighter and more consuming than the fire which racked the body. It was fire against fire, spirit against combustion, limitless power against inconsequential flame.
The figure moved towards him, and the Monitor nearly blacked-out trying to force his eyes and his mind to follow its progress. It came close and stopped before the blur which was the prostrate Zen, paused for a brief examination then lifted her body like a babe, one handed, and came on to the Monitor"s side. The words, when they came, were more than words: garlanded in flame like the p.r.o.nouncements of some ancient G.o.d of war.
"I had to come back for her. Revenge will be so very very sweet," was all that Dalroi said.
The Monitor strove to sit up, his mind protesting at the wrongness of the statement, but something gave way inside him and blackness that closed around spun him sickeningly downward into oblivion.
When the Monitor awoke he was feeling sick and empty and Korch was standing over him dashing water into his face.
"What happened to Dalroi?" asked the Monitor wanly."Gone," said Korch. "It was unholy. I was watching through the screens. Dalroi took the girl and walked towards the video pickup in the corridor. My G.o.d! That face - it haunts me. Do you suppose a martyr would look like that when he was being crucified?"
"Stick to the point!" said the Monitor quickly.
"Dalroi walked up the corridor, then he went."
"Went where?"
"Nowhere. He stepped a little way into the air and vanished. He and the girl both vanished ... like the flame going out on a candle."
"Jesus!" said the Monitor. "I might have known there"d be days like this! Then Dalroi didn"t go into the cells?"
"No, he didn"t even try. I got the impression he only came for the girl."
"He did," said the Monitor grimly. "He even told me as much. But why the h.e.l.l? She had no part in this."
"We slipped up," said Korch. "I put through a call to Census when I was sure Dalroi was gone. There"s no record of that girl."
"What?"
"Just that. She never was born and she never existed anywhere. Officially she never even existed. h.e.l.l, I think she was one of them!"
"Get the prisoners back to their cells," said the Monitor ominously. "Somebody"s got to be made to answer these riddles and I think I"ll start with them." He moved downstairs to the panel to disarm the cylinder of X47. As he opened the case he swore sharply.
"Korch!"
"Sir?"
"Don"t go near the cells. There"s five milligrams of X47 down there. Did Dalroi get anywhere near that panel?"
"Nowhere near."
"Then somebody else did - somebody who wanted to stop the others talking. Give me a view of the cells on the screen. Ah yes! I rather thought as much."
"Give it to me straight," said Korch. "After all that, I guess I can take anything."
"Cronstadt, Presley and Rhodes are obviously under neurogas. We may yet get them out in time to save them. But Hildebrand - now there"s a mystery for you! He"s completely disappeared."
Petch Hollow was a damp and mouldering bowl of leaves overhung by tall, dark trees. n.o.body went there now save those, perhaps, with murder on their conscience and the need to find a few days"
undisturbed repose for the corpse under the raincoat in the back of the car. Even the hill surrounding was desperate and uninspired, and in the trees around the hollow no birds sang. It was one of Nature"s forlorn places with an inbuilt atmosphere of causes lost and unrelieved despair.It was here that Dalroi stopped. He dropped the girl"s body to the ground and paced away a short distance waiting for her to wake. By now the fire in his flesh was burning low but he still dared not look at himself lest the horror broke the block he had set up in his mind to reject the pain which would otherwise have crazed him. Instead he had to listen to a noise, the throbbing in his skull, a pain he had no power to reject because it was built too deeply into him. He had to listen, because there was no way to wrench it out of his mind.
Finally the girl awoke. At first she sat up, bewildered by the dawn and the trees and the dampness of the ground on which she lay. Then, turning, she saw Dalroi and instantly her eyes were full of fear and hideous comprehension.
"Dalroi!"
"Yes," said Dalroi. "You"ll never know what it cost me to arrange this meeting. You know what its purpose is."
"Revenge!" She struggled to her feet, facing him, her face pale and shining in the wan sunlight and suddenly possessed of a certain otherworldliness. "You came back to kill me."
"You set me up for all this, Zen. Throughout everything you were the one person I never doubted. You did a good job, too. It was no fault of yours that I came through it. Had Gormalu served you better I should not be here now. Now you"re going to tell me why I have to die. Why the h.e.l.l does it have to be me? What is this thing that"s inside of me?"
Mixed with the fear in her eyes was a tinge of compa.s.sion.
"Don"t hate me, Dalroi. If you knew as much about yourself as we know about you then you"d see we have no option. We didn"t choose to play this game. Self-preservation forced us into it. We have known bitterness such as even your heart could never start to comprehend."
"h.e.l.l," said Dalroi. "What harm did I ever do to you?"
"You really don"t know, do you, Dalroi? G.o.d! After all this and you still don"t know who or what you are. Deep down inside you"re still the same old Dalroi. It hurts me even to think of it. You were the baby with the power to crack the universe, the youth who could ravage the cosmos, the man who had the most unspeakable talent for destruction in all the transfinite strata - and yet you never wanted or tried to claim your powers. You still have no idea what a terrible creature you are."
"I"m learning," said Dalroi. "Some friends of yours have been giving me some lessons on how to live dangerously."
"The pain?" she asked. "Is it terrible? You weren"t intended to survive it."
"I had the same impression," said Dalroi dryly. "But you still have not told me why. What is it about me that you so much want to see me dead?"
"It isn"t you, Dalroi, but the thing inside of you in the dark side of the mind. We can"t tolerate it, and we can"t kill it except by killing you. Under no circ.u.mstances can we permit it to live, and itself it will not suffer you to die."
"What is this thing of which you"re so afraid?"
"It"s the power that brutally ravished a million island universes; an insane dominance of spirit which conquers and kills, abuses, breaks, lays waste and despoils everything it touches. In you is the seed ofh.e.l.l itself."
"Whatever it is," said Dalroi, "it belongs there. I was born with it."