Gaining the roof, he crossed it and searched along the further wall. He found the steps, and moments later, the ironwork of the service catwalk. Now he was surer of his ground. In his mind"s eye he had a fair plan of the catwalks, simpler than the streets and alleys below, with less obstacles and a surer guide in the darkness. He turned in the direction of the Failway service bays.
An unexpected obstruction on the catwalk brought him down swearing, and something metallic skittered along in the darkness. Something about the weight of the unseen object caught his attention and he searched for it urgently. As his hand found one, his foot contacted another and he drew them to him for examination. They were curiously-shaped boxes with well rounded corners. A short rod or antenna protruded from each and they both had fixing straps. They suggested something he vaguely remembered.But what? Two boxes, two antennae ... walkie-talkies, perhaps? No, n.o.body makes walkie-talkies like that. Bottom curved almost as though to fit ... on a shoulder!
The memory came. In his hands he held Gormalu"s bats"-eye radar boxes, the electronic eyes which normally perched like vultures on the blind doctor"s shoulders. It fitted the circ.u.mstances so well that he had no doubt of his identification. What troubled him was why they had been abandoned. It did not make sense. In the country of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Gormalu had relinquished his most valuable a.s.set - the ability to move freely in darkness.
Or had he? Suddenly Dalroi knew the answer. In the darkness Gormalu was not blind!
The sightless eyes were not sightless any more; eyes that were dead in the daylight were living and useful in the absolute darkness. Infra-red vision! It fitted perfectly. Dalroi took the notion further. Infra-red and VHF radio bands overlap. That would explain Gormalu"s uncanny accuracy with the bat"s-eye boxes.
The man could see using wavelengths into the broadcast-radio part of the spectrum. The thought was chilling. What manner of creature was Gormalu?
He considered this silently. Suddenly the tables were reversed and it was Gormalu who was sighted and he who was blind. He moved on with new urgency. He had to find Gormalu before Gormalu found him.
THIRTEEN.
Misjudging the course of the catwalk in the darkness he lost his bearings and plunged headlong down a short flight of stairs on to a rooftop, landing with a bone-jarring impact. He was about to regain his route when he stopped and pulled himself in under the stair. Somebody was coming along the catwalk, not cautiously like a man walking in the darkness, but with the swift tread of one who could see in his environment. Not Gormalu for sure, for this was the step of a tall and agile man. Dalroi worked tighter against the stair. The footsteps came nearer and pa.s.sed.
Dalroi moved like a tiger, swiftly, ferociously, leaping up the steps in the pa.s.ser"s wake, with no illusions about the chances he was taking. He was in the position of a blind man attempting an a.s.sault on an armed man in daylight. With cat-tread he measured the pace of the one in front. Only as he closed in did the dark footsteps falter. Dalroi sprang blindly.
He found a neck and it broke even as the other attempted to react. Following the body to the ground he explored it rapidly with his hands. The soft garments suggested it was one of Gormalu"s henchmen, either Timoshu or Matshee, and a short knife completed the suggestion. He then found what he at first thought was a weapon, but which proved to be a small but powerful dark-lamp. His heart leaped. This was the break he had been looking for. He followed the distorted neck to the head and his fingers closed thankfully on a pair of infra-red goggles. He donned them swiftly and dull vision swam back to his eyes.
He was in a world of black and white and grey, like a grotesque monochrome film-set. The major illumination on the scene came from the banks of concealed heaters which supplemented the warmth of the now absent artificial sun. In the valleys of wrongness which were streets and terraces below him, blind men fought with blind, or hid or collapsed or blundered aimlessly.
Dalroi could see no sign of the figure he was seeking, but the body of Timoshu confirmed his suspicions.
Gormalu was here! He had to find Gormalu fast, for he sensed the devilry in the darkness. The blind bewilderment of Failway"s own staff pointed up the fact that the situation was both unforeseen and quite beyond control.
The screaming began in a further sector well beyond his range of vision, a mammoth shriek of frenzy andanguish. Swiftly he traversed the catwalks, knowing that this must be the start of what he feared. Even as he neared the spot he could sense the fear rising out of the bewildered crowd. His blood ran cold.
In the square a group of people had gone berserk. With staring eyes and idiot expressions they had reached the mad abandonment born of fear. Naked panic probed with intolerable fingers into the crowd; terror upon crazing terror touched with icy fingers, plucking the senses from their brains. Caustic, cutting, corroding frenzy mazed the intellect. Most inhumanly they fought. They fought in the darkness; they fought themselves; they fought each other. Insane with fear, demented under the grip of some power they could neither avoid nor understand, they reverted to the status of cornered rats, and everything in the helpless darkness was their enemy.
Dalroi was sick. He had seen it all before. During the abortive rebellion which had risen during his youth the police had produced a weapon from the secret stock-piles dedicated to civil obedience. This was the dreaded "shredder", based on A.F.I., the artificial-fear-induction process ... It was well named. It literally shredded the nervous system of those in its path. Of course the rebellion had fallen to pieces, but fourteen new hospitals had to be established to tend those permanently crazed. Dalroi remembered. The children had been most susceptible to the barbarous radiation. For a long time there had been a shortage of schoolmates in Old Town.
The same memory made him lay aside the radiation pistol. The cartridge-charge of the pistol had a resonant frequency roughly the same as that of a shredder, and he had no wish to become part of the conflagration which resulted from an exploding radiation cartridge at resonance. There was enough murder in his heart now to make Timoshu"s short knife adequate for his purpose. His directive was simple: find Gormalu and kill him.
Bitterly he recognised the trap. Somehow Gormalu knew that he was on this level, and this was his own twisted method of bringing Dalroi into the open. He had no doubt that when he appeared Gormalu would hit him with everything available. Dalroi was past caring. If it was true that he was immune to ordinary murder then he had nothing to fear; if not, he was going on anyway. If Gormalu wanted to fight he had picked on the right adversary.
The problem of locating Gormalu was answered for him. His nerves twisted with a sudden convulsion which nearly brought him to his knees. Gormalu must have seen him and brought the shredder to bear in his direction. Far away on a further catwalk he could see the bright i-r halo hovering about the muzzle of the shredder, although the instrument and its operator were too indistinct to be seen. He wondered whether Gormalu realised his ident.i.ty or if he was merely playing safe. With the second bolt he threw himself on to the cold metal of the walk and writhed with not entirely spurious agony. With an angry gout of fire the radiation pistol burst on the handrail where he had left it.
Ten seconds later the beam shifted and Dalroi breathed a sigh of relief. What was to follow would be difficult enough without having his nerves skinned in advance. Moving now with the utmost caution he inched along the catwalk to where the walkway intercepted the one occupied by Gormalu.
Even as he rose to his feet he held a suspicion in his mind that he could not possibly make it. As the beam swung back hastily in response to his foolhardy frontal attack, the suspicion deepened into a certainty.
The first bolt caught him in mid-air and so convulsed his body that he almost missed the guard rail. He checked himself in time, and with a fort.i.tude not completely his own he walked in a cloud of desperate pain straight along the beam-path of the shredder. Something within him snapped. His mind was choked with ascending pressures, and the fierce determination to succeed clamped over his shrieking nerves and forced him to ignore their agonised messages.
Willpower was no use; no creature was gifted with the will to overcome the racking fire which so crazedthe nibbling nerve. Only the intolerably fearful thing which roosted in the dark side of his mind could give the orders to force his muscles to move into mounting and uncontrollable waves of pain and fear.
Deliberately he walked. The excruciating agony mounted with each triggered burst; fire upon fire, inconceivable agony, corroding torment eating his nerves. Only the blind hate and desperation within him beat back the protective darkness from his mind, kept him conscious, forced him cruelly on.
He could see Gormalu now, crouched behind the shredder: two bright and dreadful eyes set in the death"s head where always before dark gla.s.ses had obscured the face. Gormalu was frightened, and with good reason. n.o.body could walk along the beam-path of a shredder - n.o.body except Dalroi! n.o.body would attempt it unless driven by more than ordinary motives. Such endurance needed something more than mortal motivation.
Dalroi kept going, the nerves of his whole body vibrating with hideous discharges and his brain seemingly on the verge of collapse from the conflict of pressures. The knife was in his fingers and Gormalu was only yards ahead. He took the full blast of the shredder in his temple and blood-red images trampled along his optic nerves until he thought his eyeb.a.l.l.s would burst. A brush of pure flame traversed his spinal cord. He hit the shredder and it canted wildly on its gimbals.
Gormalu, paralysed with fear, lay before him on the catwalk. Dalroi seized the scraggy shoulder and struck down with the knife, a vicious, murderous stroke.
It never connected. There was an implosion of air into the s.p.a.ce where the devilish doctor had lain, and the speed of his removal dragged patches of skin from Dalroi"s fingers. The knife plunged through emptiness and clattered uselessly against the steel of the walkway. Dalroi knelt, stupefied with shock, and wept with a blind and futile rage at the unholy trick which had thwarted his revenge.
A welt of scarlet lightning split the black sky. Fearing new devilry Dalroi looked around for cover, but stopped as he realised the flash came from the dead sun. Another flash, and a final pinpoint of lavender showed that the re-ignition had been successful. Power was coming back into Failway Two, and the crisis was over.
But Dalroi recognised the lull before the sickening storm. His encounter with Gormalu had awakened something dormant in his mind. Gormalu, or somebody like Gormalu, was already in among his deep perceptions; the age-old enemy, the bat-blind bogey which lurks in man"s subconscious, was not a myth but a reality. Deep laid in the well of impossible recollections was this ant.i.thesis of man. Instinctively he now knew what type of creature Gormalu was. His fingers curled with hate.
Picking up the shredder he bent it over the guardrail with a savage swing and threw the debris away. The act of destruction came so naturally to him that he paused and looked at his hands and wondered what eons of repet.i.tion had given his fingers such inborn familiarity. He was treading on the threshold of unknown h.e.l.l, but the things that he needed to know would not come back to him.
ACTION! REACTION! ACTION! REACTION! ACT!.
He had anger without opportunity. Impotently he was forced to wait for the gathering fury. He pressed the infrared goggles into his pocket and moved along the catwalks in the weird dawn glare of the re-lit sun, choosing his direction more by instinct than by design. Lights were coming on in the buildings below, block by block, and people were staring upward, drinking in the welcome light.
He felt like a scene-shifter in the flies of some incredible stage, looking down on the end of a drama such as no theatre could ever know. Grimly he realised the simile was exact. Failway Two was a stage, a grotesque, soulless collection of props and effects, with innocent bystanders as unsuspecting actors playing out a melodrama with real tears and real blood.Anger slashed through him like a knife. He had to get off of the stage, away from the make-believe. He had to reach the wings where they operated the lights and the strings which kept the puppets dancing. He had to come to grips with the author and the producer and, perhaps, the impresario. Somebody had wantonly written Berina into the script, and with the same scratch of the pen had scored an indelible mark on Dalroi"s soul.
He went as far in one direction as he could. He was no longer awed by the scenery, he was looking for the fact behind the fiction. At last the catwalks angled and he was up against a wall, apparently no different from a thousand other walls, yet when he studied it in perspective it seemed to form no part of any other structure. Following its contours he became convinced that this was one of the limits of Failway Two. With an ear to the wall he could just detect the thump of mighty pistons beating a subsonic rhythm which needed to be felt rather than heard.
Hidden in the alcove a small metal door, slightly ajar, invited his attention. He pa.s.sed into a dark pa.s.sage where acrid smoke lay in a horizontal plane on a current of rising warmth. He hurried through, guessing that chance had played into his hands, arriving in a mammoth powerhouse where generators and a myriad giant devices were staggered over a vast and awesome floor. The air reeked with ozone and the smell of burning insulation, doubtless the result of Gormalu"s work to sabotage the sun. Machines were starting up, winding upward with throaty screams, pa.s.sing resonance with shattering intensity, coming back to life.
One, quite the largest engine that Dalroi had ever seen, was black and broken, with tubes split, bearings torn, castings fractured and fused. It had evidently been the centre of a high temperature explosion. At a rough guess it had once been a liquid hydrogen alternator and somebody had switched the pump input to oxygen. The t.i.tanium-tungstate stalact.i.tes would need a solar furnace to recast the pattern.
Dalroi was disappointed. It was not here that he could find the answers to his questions, nor any way to ward-off the blow he knew was about to fall. There must be something more!
n.o.body noticed that he pa.s.sed. Overhead cranes above the smoke-haze carried beams and crates with a controlled frenzy. A narrow-gauge railway scattered furious electric trucks on unknown electronic errands. Something, a riveter probably, screamed and thumped in the distance, overlaying its own noise with a pattern of explosive echoes.
Dalroi continued the way he was going. After nearly half a mile of the machinery jungle he came up against another wall. This rose so high that it pa.s.sed out of sight above the tangles of pipe and girder-work. Its thickness was measurable by the fact that the single door which he could find was recessed nearly thirty feet into the concrete.
FOURTEEN.
Six hundred feet below the ground the concrete caves snapped back quick echoes of iron-tipped heels on unyielding stone and the occasional snicker of a carbine b.u.t.t on a black steel buckle. The bolts on the heavy door broke back with the sharp, certain action of powerful solenoids, and the Monitor entered.
In the cell Cronstadt rose warily, blinking at the light. "How much longer are you going to keep me here?"
The Monitor bowed slightly. "Until you rot if necessary. It appears you and your friends have conspired to turn a serious situation into something verging on the catastrophic"
"I swear to G.o.d I"m on your side. I had no idea about Gormalu."
"The singular thing about this case is that there is quite a deal that you don"t seem to know. How a man ofyour ac.u.men could have come this far in total ignorance of what you were attempting, is something I shall never understand. I can only a.s.sume that your overwhelming avarice completely blinded you to the real issues."
"d.a.m.n you! I was not in this alone. You, too, were involved."
"For the very good reason," said the Monitor, "that I knew there had to be something more in the scheme than appeared on the surface. There was a h.e.l.l of an undercurrent at work and I was just waiting for one of you to show your hand. I must confess to being misled in thinking that the operation was directed against Failway. Only recently did I realise that it was not Failway but Dalroi who was the target."
"What the h.e.l.l do you mean?"
The Monitor smiled grimly. "That"s right, Baron! Continue to proclaim your innocence. Frankly, your life depends on it. Let me ask you, do you know what Failway is?"
"Yes, it"s a big business proposition - dirty but highly profitable."
"No," said the Monitor. "Failway is not what it seems. What you see is only the facade. But a facade for what? That"s what I needed to know. And suddenly ... it"s all clear to me. Failway is a trap - a G.o.dallmighty trap laid with terrible jaws set to catch a few certain gifted individuals. It is baited with the most irresistible of lures - power, corruption and oppression; who set it up and who designed it is something I have yet to learn. But its intended victim I do know. They were after Dalroi. And with the connivance of your committee we"ve thrown him to the wolves."
"This is madness!"
"I wish it were. Did you never ask yourself about Dalroi, how he came by that immunity to murder? Did you never think any further than that?"
Before Cronstadt could answer, the communicator on the Monitor"s lapel sounded briefly.
"Monitor."
"Communications Lab, Sir. We have the radio receiver down here which was removed from Gormalu"s laboratory. It"s similar to a sub-etheric set but it won"t tune over the usual bands. There"s a shoal of stations on it the like of which we"ve never heard before."
"d.a.m.n!" said the Monitor. "I"m coming down to have a look."
"Trouble?" asked Cronstadt.
"I don"t know yet. You"d better come too. We"ve had a team stripping Gormalu"s place. There"s stuff in there which will take all of twenty years to understand. Gormalu got out of there so fast he didn"t even bother to arm the mines he"d left in the bas.e.m.e.nt. That seems to be a measure of the panic which Dalroi had induced into everyone connected with Failway. Gormalu must have been a very frightened man."
"I still can"t understand how we let him take us in so completely."
"My dear Cronstadt," said the Monitor, "none of us is beyond suspicion. I don"t think Gormalu is the only traitor. You yourself are on record as once having bid for the Failway monopoly. Presley is firmly convinced that it"s an antechamber to h.e.l.l, and Hildebrand ... "
"What are you going to do about Hildebrand?""I don"t know yet. Shoot him probably ... and how many others also? I"ve had to place my trust in some very imperfect material. It would only take me about an hour with any of you to come to the real truth in your hearts - but I fear you"d be very little use to me by the time I was finished. You"d be incurably insane."
"You"re a strange cuss yourself," said Cronstadt, unabashed. "You don"t even have a name. What do we know of you and your ambitions?"
The Monitor laughed lightly, almost boyishly, and pushed back the lank hair which disturbed his brow.
"Count yourself lucky you know neither. It doesn"t pay to be too curious about the hierarchy of the Black Knights. It is an estate which is entered through a very small doorway."
"So I"ve heard," said Cronstadt dryly.
When he came out again through the door of the Communications Laboratory, the Monitor"s smile was gone and his confidence was ripped to shreds.
"My G.o.d! Cronstadt! What have we got ourselves into? At a rough guess there"s around half a billion stations broadcasting on bands covered by that receiver and not one of them comes from Earthside. It"s like a window into another sort of universe, a little keyhole where you can listen in on something which cannot possibly exist. It"s unholy, and I don"t mind admitting I"m frightened."
"There must be some rational explanation."
"There is. That receiver is picking up transmissions originating from somewhere in transfinite s.p.a.ce."
"That"s impossible!"
"You think I don"t know that!" said the Monitor. "Ask any scientist and he"ll tell you that there are only seven even remotely habitable transition levels in transfinite s.p.a.ce, and Failway has them all. There are a series of equations which prove quite simply by means of progressive variables that no other levels through to infinity can ever contain anything which we can construe as life. I tell you now that those sub-radio transmissions represent not only life, but life on a scale such as we can only dimly conceive.
There must be whole galaxies populated and jabbering at each other on sub-radio channels which we don"t even know how to tap."
"Is that so shocking? We"ve never doubted the possibility of intelligent life in our own cosmos. Is it so terrible that thinking beings should exist in some other continuum?"
"Only," said the Monitor, sickly, "when you hear one of them speaking in English, issuing orders that the destruction of Ivan Dalroi must be accomplished absolutely regardless of the cost."
"Fiends in Hall!" said Cronstadt. "And this apparatus belonged to Gormalu?"
"Yes. I just wonder how many more there are around, how many other people I sometimes have to trust, sit at home at nights and receive their orders from the other side of nowhere. You know, Cronstadt, there are times when I hate the whole b.l.o.o.d.y human race. There isn"t one of them who wouldn"t sell his soul for money or revenge or martyrdom or whatever their petty spirits crave. The whole race is rotten with the pursuit of cheap excitement."
"I"ve never doubted it," said Cronstadt. "May I hear these transmissions?"
"Help yourself," said the Monitor wearily. "For all I know they may be intended for your ears anyway."When Cronstadt turned from the apparatus his face was the colour of putty. "You"re right," he said.
"We"re in trouble. Dalroi versus Failway was odds enough to shake the Devil: but Dalroi versus whatever lives in the transfinite irrational planes could be sheer disaster. What the h.e.l.l will he have to contend with now?"
"I don"t know," said the Monitor, "but whoever engineered this played a masterful hand. The whole set-up was designed to get Dalroi where they wanted him - and like b.l.o.o.d.y fools we played along.
h.e.l.l, if Dalroi really cuts loose they"re going to have to settle him in a big way."
"But if that happens in Failway it"ll be the biggest catastrophe of the age."
"And if it happens out of Failway it won"t be a catastrophe, it"ll be extinction. I"m going to war: I don"t have any option any more. The pogrom we sought to avoid is being thrust upon us, so I don"t have any alternative. I"m going to take a task-force and seal off Failway Terminus so tight a mouse won"t be able to get his whiskers in or out unless I say so. And if you don"t know any prayers, Cronstadt, you"d better learn some fast because unless I miss my guess we"re so far out of our depth that we"d better become amphibious fast if we"re going to survive."
It was a heavy metal door, gas but not pressure tight, and fitted with a flux lock. There were ways of tricking the magnetic tumblers of such locks if the sensitivity of the reading-heads had fallen sufficiently low. Dalroi had a magnetic pick-lock in his wallet. He inserted it into the lock and tapped the end with a small magnet. Once. Twice. The ferrite rod of the pick-lock read the residual magnetism in the tumblers and the magnet cycled the magnetic flux to produce the characteristic hysteresis.
He pressed the rod into the reading position and waited. The relay went over with a reluctant click.
Kicking the door to upset the tumblers, he pulled sharply, broke the seals, and seconds later was through into the terrain beyond.
Under a pale, blue, artificial moon lay a field of black mutation poppy, a vast sea of broad-petalled poisonous blossoms upturned to an impossible sky - the source of the cepi on which the Failway slave empire was based. Dalroi swore.
The cepi was at once more potent and more degrading than the opium from which it had been mutated. If this was a sample of the almost legendary cepi fields of Failway, then its masters could easily produce enough narcotics to bring the civilised world to its knees. With this ample source of raw material Failway could afford the multiple essential distillations to produce the rarer drugs which, once experienced, were impossible to withdraw without madness intervening.
He moved into the field and examined the broad black petals without touching them. The rare fullness of the growth was surprising, for cepi does not take kindly to cultivation; in this he realised the significance of the ultraviolet moon hanging on a tracery of girders perhaps two miles above his head. These were unnatural plants growing in unnatural conditions under an unbelievable moon. All the shifting madness of transfinite s.p.a.ce had seemed more natural than the alien deliberateness of this one field of terrible flowers.