Psychosphere

  Vicki hung her head, sobbed.

  “You’re a bastard, Gubwa, you know that?” Stone grated the words out, his face twisted with hatred. “A gray, sluglike, murderous, slimy freak bastard!”

  “But tomorrow I shall be alive!” Gubwa cried, his eyes suddenly blazing. “And very soon I shall be a god!”

  “You?” Stone sneered his derision. “A god? A freak god of a nuclear wasteland?”

  “What?” Gubwa was raving now, strutting to and fro. “Don’t you ever learn anything, man? What nuclear wasteland? Hasn’t the girl told you by now all she told me?”

  “I don’t follow you at all, Gubwa,” Stone spat disgustedly. “What the hell are you getting at?”

  Vicki Maler was less slow. She had seen more, understood more than Stone possibly could from his short acquaintance with matters paranormal. “Psychomech!” she gasped.

  “Aha! The girl knows!” Gubwa cried. “Explain to him, if you please, Miss Maler. Tell him my meaning.”

  She shook her head, not knowing where to begin.

  Gubwa read her whirling mind. “Begin with Garrison,” he laughed. “Before Psychomech.”

  “He was…just a man,” she sobbed. “Oh, he was strange—he saw things, knew things others couldn’t see or know—but he was a man. In a way he was little more than a boy, and a blind boy at that! Then…then the machine.” She paused.

  “Yes, yes!” Gubwa cried. “Go on, Miss Maler—you’re doing so well.”

  “His powers were increased a thousandfold almost infinitely. At first he was like…like a god! For a year or more. Then—”

  “Then his powers began to fail him, and no way to replenish them,” Gubwa cut in. “He had destroyed Psychomech, and the fool didn’t know what was wrong! Only now, too late, has he recognized the truth. Now, as his ESP-talents ebb and he himself fails, he flees from enemies he would once destroy with a glance, with a thought! He will die—all three of you will die, and Garrison’s alter-facets, too, tonight—but Psychomech shall live on. I have made arrangements. The man who built the machine for Garrison will be here tomorrow, and—”

  “Jimmy Craig?” Vicki blurted. “You have him, too?”

  Gubwa smiled delightedly. “Indeed! Mr. James Christopher Craig himself. I have him, yes—or will have him. Already I have visited him in his dreams and made certain…suggestions? Ah!—and how susceptible, our Mr. Craig.”

  “But Jimmy wasn’t the builder,” Vicki said desperately. “Psychomech was built by a man dead now or disappeared. Jimmy only improved on what was already there. He stripped away outmoded parts and replaced them. He—”

  “I know all of that, Miss Maler,” Gubwa cut her off. “You told me, remember? Well, perhaps you can’t,” he shrugged. “Anyway, I have been in Craig’s mind. I told him he has a mission, a great Mission, which is to build Psychomech again—a mightier, more powerful Psychomech—and this time to build it for me. I told him that with the completion of this marvel, this Oracle, he himself will become a wondrous power in the world. I told him that he had erred in working for Garrison, and that Garrison was a great sinner! But I also said that I would strike Garrison down, and then that Craig—through his work for me—would be redeemed. And I told him that through Psychomech, one day he would communicate with the One True God himself. Yes, and I shall be that God!”

  Gubwa chuckled and folds of fat heaved. “Do you see, Miss Maler, do you see?”

  “Yes,” she bowed her head. “Yes, I see. What psychomech did for Richard, it will do a hundred times over for you.”

  “There!” Gubwa turned triumphantly to Stone. “And now do you understand?”

  “You’re mad!” Stone struggled with his bonds.

  “And you are a fool!” Gubwa snapped. “Or utterly stupid. Man, you’ve seen what I can do without Psychomech. Just think what I shall do with it! Neutron bombs? Holocaust? No more, Mr. Stone. Genetic engineering? Unnecessary. With Psychomech’s aid I shall simply command the things I desire—and they shall be!”

  Gubwa’s eyes gave him away. He was quite mad now, really mad. “Homo Sapiens? Oh, yes, indeed, Mr. Stone—but in a month’s time, or maybe less, when Psychomech has made me God—Hermaphro Sapiens! Every man, woman and child, in the twinkling of an eye, at my command, in my own image, and I shall simply will it! Emperor of Earth? Of this one miserable planet? No, no! No longer, Mr. Stone, Miss Maler. My new plan is mightier than that. Why rule a mere world when the entire universe can be, will be mine? My titles? I shall tell you my titles:

  “God of Earth and all the stars, Master of the Universe, and Lord of the Psychosphere! These shall be my titles!”

  As Gubwa grew more and more animated, striding about the Command Center like some nightmarish, leprous windmill, gesticulating and gabbling, Stone turned his head to Vicki and whispered: “He’s right over the edge. Just look at him.”

  “You are wrong, Phillip,” she shook her head, and followed up quickly with, “Oh, he’s insane in himself—but his reasoning is sound enough.”

  Stone’s jaw dropped. “Sound reasoning? He thinks this machine, this Psychomech, can make him into a god!”

  “The God,” said Vicki simply. “Yes, it can.”

  “Vicki, I’m no believer, but that’s a real blasphemy!”

  “Oh, yes—yes, it is,” she nodded.

  “Out!” Gubwa suddenly shouted. “Out, out! Insane? Blasphemy? We shall see, we shall see. He pressed a button on his intercom. “Guards, in here now.” The doors hissed open and a pair of Gubwa’s soldiers entered. “Take them out. Let them wait in the corridor. I have something I must do now. I shall call when I want them back. Quickly, quickly! I have much to do.”

  Vicki and Stone were wheeled out into the corridor and the doors hissed shut behind them…

  JOHNNIE FONG HAD DRIVEN THROUGH THE TOWN AND UP INTO THE Grampians. The road was narrower there and uneven, and the way not so easy for driving. There were steep slopes on the one hand and gorges on the other, with dark streams rushing below. At the end of the year, when the snows came, these would be among the first roads to go; villages like this one would be shut off from the outside world for weeks at a time. That was the kind of country it was: wild and beautiful. And dangerous. Fong knew that this was perfect ambush country.

  The Chinaman had parked off the road up a narrow track where he could hide the car in thickly-grown pines. Then he’d climbed to a saddle between bald hills and seated himself upon a flat stone. From this vantage point he could once more train his binoculars on the village and see all that transpired. His timing was perfect; no sooner had he found the garage and the silver Mercedes than he saw a matchstick Garrison get into the car and turn its nose towards the mountains. Soon the car would be lost to his sight as it climbed into the pass, and then he would have to wait until it came round the contour of the mountain and onto the road directly below him, close to where he’d parked his gray Jaguar.

  Charon Gubwa’s timing was also perfect. He had said one hour and the hour was up.

  Johnnie, the voice was the merest whisper in Fong’s head, is it safe?

  “Oh, yes, Charon!” the Chinaman never failed to be awed by his master’s telepathy.

  GOOD! NOW BE QUIET, LET YOUR MIND DWELL ON WHATEVER HAS OCCURRED SINCE WE LAST SPOKE. LET ME SEE IT. EXCELLENT! AND NOW LET ME SEE WHAT IS HAPPENING AT THIS VERY MOMENT—RIGHT NOW—THROUGH YOUR EYES.

  Fong put his binoculars to his eyes and found the Mercedes where already it had climbed up along the winding road and into the foothills. Then he followed the road back where it ribboned along behind Garrison’s car, finally focusing on the black saloon about a mile to the rear. Speed was dangerous down there, Fong could testify to that, but the saloon was leaving a trail of dust billowing in the summer air. The Mercedes was moving much more slowly and it would not be long before the saloon caught up. In a few more minutes the silver car passed out of sight; shortly after that the saloon, too.

  WHERE DO THEY COME BACK INTO VIEW?

  “
Here, Charon,” Fong trained his binocular on the spot.

  GOOD. I FANCY THIS RACE IS ALMOST RUN. WE SHALL WAIT AND SEE.

  The road was steep round the mountain and through the pass. Very few cars were visible with empty miles between them. It was almost twenty-five minutes before the Mercedes came into view, by which time the saloon should have been hard up behind it. But it was not. It was all of five more minutes before the shiny-black hearselike car put in its appearance, and by then Garrison/Koenig had had all the time he needed.

  Where the road made a sharp bend round a jagged outcrop of rock, hidden by the slate-gray mass and facing the road, there the silver Mercedes waited, its motor running and Garrison/Koenig at the wheel. Coming out of the pass and onto the straight, the occupants of the saloon couldn’t possibly see the Merc until it was upon them.

  But Fong and Gubwa saw it all.

  FOOLS! the albino’s mind cried out at the last moment. THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY’RE DEALING WITH!

  The silver Mercedes hit the saloon from the side, sending it skidding clean off the narrow road and into the shallow gorge. The black car bounced, hit bottom and burst into flames. In moments the car was a blazing inferno. Garrison/Koenig got out of the Mercedes and stepped to the edge of the gorge. He looked down.

  Then—

  WHAT? Gubwa’s mental cry was one of astonishment.

  Garrison/Koenig threw up his arms and staggered forward, propelled by some invisible force. He went flailing over the edge and out of sight.

  And in that same instant the sharp crack of a rifle echoed up to an astounded Johnnie Fong where he stood in the saddle between rounded peaks.

  The Chinaman traversed his binoculars right, scanning the road, found what he was looking for. It was Ramon de Medici, emerging from behind a cluster of boulders, walking forward. He carried a rifle. For the first time in the Koenig facet’s life he had come up against someone whose capacity for bad thoughts was equal to his own.

  As Fong and Gubwa watched, de Medici broke into a run. A moment later he stood looking down over the edge of the gorge. Down there the fire still blazed. De Medici was satisfied, he turned away.

  Gubwa, too, had seen enough. His mental voice rang in Fong’s head, full of elation. JOHNNIE, IT IS OVER! STAY HERE. WHEN THAT ONE LEAVES, GO DOWN AND TAKE A QUICK LOOK—BUT TOUCH NOTHING. CONTACT ME LATER IF YOU CAN, AND IF THERE’S ANYTHING YOU THINK I SHOULD KNOW.

  “Wait!” said Fong. “Look…” But Gubwa was already looking. De Medici had left the edge and was now examining the Mercedes. After a moment he seemed satisfied, opened the door and reached inside. With something of an effort he dragged out the limp black mass of—

  GARRISON’S DOG, said Gubwa. DEAD! BUT OF COURSE SHE WOULD BE. SHE TOO ONLY LIVED BY COURTESY OF GARRISON. He was reminded of Vicki Maler. NOW I MUST GO. YOU ARE A GOOD AND FAITHFUL MAN, JOHNNIE FONG, AND YOU SHALL BE THE PRIEST OF THE TEMPLE.

  “Thank you, Charon,” said Fong, aware of the other’s swift departure. Then, carefully, so as not to attract the attention of the man below, he began to make his way down the steep side of the hill.

  GUBWA JERKED ALERT WHERE HE SAT BEFORE THE SUSPENDED GLOBE. “Sir!” an urgent voice was repeating. “Sir, sir?” Gubwa stood up, drew breath, swelled huge. The guard’s voice, now worried, came once more over the intercom. “Sir, sir!”

  Gubwa strode to the desk, said: “Bring them in.

  The doors hissed open and Stone and Vicki were wheeled in. Stone was in tears, sobbing uncontrollably. The reason was Vicki. The faces of the guards were white, drawn. Something had seemed to age them. It was that same something which had “aged” Vicki Maler, but in her case the effect would be far more permanent.

  She sat in her wheelchair like a wrinkled old mummy, her hair white and the yellow flesh loose on her bones. Senile, she mumbled and coughed; even as Gubwa watched she pushed out her tongue and a blackened tooth fell out of her mouth on a thread of yellow spittle. As Stone continued to sob she lifted an ancient hand from straps which were too loose now to contain the withered flesh and clawed at her face. Contact lenses fell to the floor. The eyes behind were fish-white, totally blind. She mewled like a kitten, beginning to drool. The smell of age and infirmity wafted from her…

  “To see is to believe, Mr. Stone,” said Gubwa, unmoved. “Garrison is dead and she, too, is dying—but it will get worse before the end. Soon she will begin to rot! Since you got on so well, you two, I would not deprive you of her company in these her final moments.” He looked at the guards. “Take them back to their cell.”

  When they were gone he picked up his telephone and dialled Sir Harry’s number…

  Chapter 19

  Johnnie Fong got down the hillside without being seen. As he had climbed down, so Ramon de Medici had jacked up the front of the Mercedes and had been at work with a crowbar, forcing the front-right fender and wing back from the wheel. Now he had the job finished and was climbing into the driver’s seat. A moment later the big engine roared into life.

  Fong stood in the pines, peering out through their branches. As de Medici backed the big car away from the edge of the gorge and aimed it back along the road south, a wheel went over the body of the dog. Fong saw blood gush from her jaws. But as the car pulled away he saw more than that.

  An arm came clawing up over the rim of the shallow gorge…

  Fong gasped his amazement, jerked his binoculars to his eyes. The distance was not great but he had to be sure. The arm stretched itself through dust and pebbles, its hand and fingers bloody and scrabbling. The hand found a hold and drew up a shoulder, a head and a face. Garrison’s face, pale as a sheet, the red burn of a bullet scarring his temple into vivid contrast.

  Fong blinked his eyes, quickly rubbed at the eyepieces of his binoculars and looked through them again. The top half of Garrison’s body was now visible, face-down, and even as Fong watched the man somehow managed to drag his trunk and lower limbs up from the gorge. But it was Garrison’s face which chiefly interested Fong, that white face which chiefly interested Fong, that white face with its red blaze…and its eyes.

  Something about those eyes.

  Now Garrison lifted his head and looked along the road at the cloud of dust which half-obscured the receding Mercedes, and again Fong saw that phenomenon which had caused him to doubt his own eyesight: that flickering golden glow, like a stirring of strange energies, flowing out from Garrison’s eyes.

  Garrison lifted an arm, pointed after the car. His lips formed silent words and for a single instant of time the golden glow suffused his whole face.

  Then a brighter glow intruded, a white brilliance originating in the incandescent fireball which had been the Mercedes! Even at this distance the flash burned Fong’s face. He dropped his binoculars, gasped his utter disbelief. He had been with Charon Gubwa many years, but never in all those years had he seen anything like this. Then the blast hit him.

  As a red-blooming mushroom formed over the spot where the car had been, the Chinaman was snatched from his feet in a great fist of wind and tossed into the branches of suddenly whipping pines. For long moments the hot wind blew like the breath of some fire-elemental, then died away as quickly as it had come. Echoes of the blast came rumbling down from the hills, gradually receding. And finally Fong fell to the earth in a hail of pine needles and tangled, broken branches. Beneath him where he lay half-stunned, slowly the ground stopped trembling.

  Fong climbed shakily to his feet. His Jaguar lay on its back. Several pines had been snapped off close to the ground and lay pointing away from the scene of the blast. The mushroom rose higher, white and writhing, like the cloud that forms above a nuclear explosion. The cliff face was coming down in great slabs of rock, filling the massive crater in the road. Automatically, all of his senses numb, Fong found his binoculars and looped their strap round his neck. But for the pines he might well have been whirled away and killed.

  And now he understood something of his albino master’s unusual caution where Richard Ga
rrison was concerned. The man’s powers were…Fong shook his head. Gubwa was awesome, but Richard Garrison was awful!

  WHEN GARRISON/KOENIG HAD FALLEN AFTER BEING SHOT AT, HIS unconscious body had thudded down onto a stony ledge some nine or ten feet below the level of the road. A small avalanche of dust and pebbles, falling on him, had hidden him from view from above, and the ledge had protected him from the heat of the car blazing below. He had only been out for a minute or two following which consciousness had slowly, achingly returned. Another man might have taken hours to recover—might not have recovered at all—but there was that in Garrison which drove him on.

  It was that same drive which had brought him through all the trials of his dream-quest, even the final trial of the burning desert. For such had been his dream—of the furnace wastes, of dragging Psychomech inch by agonized inch behind him, and of a desiccated, dying Suzy—when there had come that titan blast, that stunning physical agony of a searing, scarring bullet which had ripped Koenig’s mind from its ascendancy into unconscious oblivion and roused Garrison’s mind up from nightmare.

  And it was Garrison who had come awake and clawed his way back to the road above the gorge; not his alter-facets but Richard Garrison himself. It was Garrison now, picking himself up to stumble raggedly over to where Suzy’s crushed body lay, sliding his hand under her faithful head. Life flickered in those black eyes of hers even now, but its light was quickly dimming.

  Garrison cried. Cried burning tears from eyes already dim and robbed of most of their golden glow. His anger had robbed him—that anger expended in rending the Psychosphere in that great blast of vengeance—and power must pay for the waste. Useless now to attempt Suzy’s resurrection. Once it would have been the very simplest business, but no longer. What psychic power remained in him would not run to that, not now. Even in the Psychosphere it was far easier to destroy than to create. But he must do something.