Psychosphere

  Garrison smiled through his tears as an idea dawned. He and Suzy were close, closer than any other animal and master gone before them. She was almost a part of him. Why not make her a part of him? He prayed he still had the power, the ability.

  Gently he entered her mind, found a great love there and a great pain. Her tongue flopped loosely between bloodied jaws, licking his hand. SUZY, he said. STOP HURTING. GOOD! NOW, GIRL…COME INTO ME. COME INTO ME, SUZY…

  Her eyes looked at him and went dim. Her head rolled lifelessly back. Garrison struggled wearily to his feet, the tears drying on his pale cheeks. He had many miles to go and the day was growing older. Which way now?

  He knew the answer instinctively, with the instinct of a dog: along the road for a mile or two, then over the hill and…and that way, over there!

  He smiled, however wanly, and began to plod slowly along the road. And in the back of his mind something bounded and barked joyfully, and he was not alone.

  Behind him, the spot where the great black bitch had lain was vacant now. Bright motes of dust spiralled and shone in the yellow sunlight…

  FONG FOLLOWED AT A SAFE DISTANCE (WAS ANY DISTANCE SAFE?), keeping Garrison in sight but barely so, along the road and over the hills and for miles and miles across country rougher than any the Chinaman had ever known before. The man in front was weak and his pace had grown gradually slower, but still he pressed forward and never once looked back. Fong found himself trailing footprints in boggy peat, climbing steep inclines where shale slipped and slithered underfoot, digging his heels in down almost precipitous slopes and trudging weary miles through valleys of drear, boggy sedge. But while Garrison occasionally faltered, always he recovered and went on.

  He had to, for he knew now that he approached quest’s end. Somewhere to the west lay the picturesque Glen o’ Dunkillie, but not far ahead was the reality of his dream within the dream. He had started his quest in the strange world of the subconscious, but he would finish it here—or it would finish him.

  For a moment panic struck at Garrison. Night was coming on, true, but still it seemed darker to him, or gloomier, than the hour demanded. He knew the answer but dared not even dwell upon it, dared not admit of its existence. And yet he’d always known it: his eyes would be the first to go.

  Garrison would dearly have loved to lie down and go to sleep (a mental rather than a physical weariness, he suspected, despite the miles behind him and the ravaged state of his body) but the very thought was out of the question. He was not tired, could not allow himself to be tired. Too much—too many—depended upon him. But cresting a shaly rise onto a flat tableland, suddenly he knew that he would have to face up to the worst. Not even the clouds of a gathering summer storm would explain the darkness creeping gradually across his vision. The battery had almost run dry.

  At that very moment, fifty yards to his rear, Johnnie Fong made up his mind to act independently of Charon Gubwa. The albino wanted Garrison dead, Fong knew that, and he also knew that Garrison could die, almost had died. Very well, this could not go on. The man ahead was almost finished. He staggered, a silhouette against the gray, troubled sky. A perfect target. Fong lifted his pistol, took careful aim and squeezed the trigger.

  Garrison must have tripped at that very moment. His silhouette jerked out of sight simultaneously with the pistol’s report. Fong believed he had hit him but—

  He held his breath, waited, half-expected destruction in a white-hot fireball. That would be all right, nothing left of him to connect him with his beloved Charon; but nothing happened. An unseasonal chill was in the air and the clouds were turning in the sky, but that was all. The Chinaman began to breathe again, waited two more minutes before climbing to the crest.

  There was blood on the rocks where they leaned out of shallow soil, heather and lichen. Fresh, wet blood. As for Garrison: a shadow moved ahead, stumbling over the tableland arms pumping.

  Incredibly, he was running!

  IT WAS 9:00 P.M. BY STONE’S RECKONING WHEN VICKI SUFFERED HER relapse. For an hour or two he had dared hope that…but in Stone’s scheme of things hope had rarely been seen to spring eternal. He was a realist. For himself: he would take whatever chances came his way. He certainly didn’t intend to go out without a fight. But Vicki? She was a woman with one hell of a handicap; her lifeline had just snapped. Richard Garrison was dead and Vicki Maler must soon follow him.

  Stone didn’t know her, not really, but he felt he had known her better than most. She had turned her heart out to him and he had listened. And he had held her in his arms—just that, nothing more—but they had shared. Now?

  The thing lying on her bed wasn’t Vicki Maler. It had been her once more, for an hour or two, but wasn’t it of old renown that people brighten before they die? The flaring-up of the candle’s flame before it flickers out. Well, Vicki’s flame had flared up. The golden glow had not quite returned to her eyes, but some color had come back into her face and her flesh had seemed to firm out a little. She had even spoken a few words, telling Stone not to cry for her. Perceptive, yes. But he had also cried for himself, cried his frustration, his hatred. How very badly he wanted Gubwa, and how massive the odds against getting him.

  Talk of the devil!—or in Gubwa’s case think of him—for at that moment the albino’s face appeared at the barred window in the door.

  “Ah, Mr. Stone—and so distressed! You surprise me. I had thought you harder.” His pink eyes went from Stone, seated in his chair, to the bed where Vicki Maler’s bundle of living bones lay wrapped in her now voluminous clothing. Her chest rose and fell with a slow, jerky, shallow movement.

  Gubwa nodded, smiled at Stone. “She is fading. You may see the end, you may not. It depends how quickly she dies. You see, you only have forty minutes. When the night-shift comes on duty, Phillip Stone goes off duty—for good! I’ve promised Sir Harry that your body will be in the Thames in the morning, and it will be.”

  Stone stood up, moved to the barred window. His hands were huge white knots at his sides. “Some god, Gubwa, when you’re obliged to keep your promises to scum like that bastard!”

  “I shall do whatever is necessary, Mr. Stone, to maintain…a balance,” he shrugged, “until Psychomech is mine. After that…

  “Do you really think I have enjoyed my relationship with Sir Harry? Of course not. He shall be among the first to go.”

  Stone forced a laugh. “A god with a hit-list?” he sneered. “You get funnier by the minute!”

  Gubwa maintained his equanamity. “But you would agree,” he said slowly, “that gods do have the power of life and death, Mr. Stone. Why are they given such power, do you suppose, if not to use it?”

  “In your case?” Stone answered. “I would say for the same reason a dog is given rabies! And funny, isn’t it—but ‘God’ reversed is ‘dog!’ How far is a rabid dog removed from Christ, Gubwa? Well, that’s you, in my eyes—the Antichrist.”

  Gubwa scowled. He was tired of Stone now, but he could not leave without a parting shot. “I do not merely mouth words when I speak of life and death, Mr. Stone, though I will admit that my meaning is occasionally obscured—deliberately. But you see, what Garrison did I shall have the power to do one hundred times over. And there is one particular thing that he did which quite intrigues me.” His smile was monstrous.

  “Miss Maler was quite beautiful,” the albino went on. “Garrison chose her for his mate and I consider his taste impeccable. So console yourself with this thought: I shall be merciful with her. She dies now, but when next she wakes she shall sit upon the right hand of God! Hermaphro Sapiens, yes—and she shall be the mother of the race, the mother of my children. What a Goddess she shall make, don’t you agree, Mr. Stone? Why, even Jesus rose up only once!”

  “You mad, mad bastard!” Stone hissed through clenched teeth. But Gubwa was already striding away down the corridor. His booming laughter came echoing back…

  GARRISON RAN. For an endless time (it seemed to him) he ran and ran. He had lost a lot
of blood, was losing more even now, but no longer cared or gave it thought. All sense of feeling was absent from his right shoulder where Johnnie Fong’s bullet had passed through it, and his eyesight was three-quarters gone along with his physical strength, but still he ran. It was a race against time and he must run it to its end, even knowing that only willpower kept him going—and that even that was failing.

  And somewhere back there a killer, and Garrison powerless to strike back. He ran until the earth fell away beneath him and he crashed headlong down a steep slope. The wall of the valley went down in dips, and it was one of these in which he found himself when his head stopped spinning. Wearily he sat himself upright in sliding scree, grit and coarse grass. Distant lightning flickered, firing his sight in its split-second duration. Garrison gasped, sucked on air, prayed. In answer the far lightning flickered again.

  Dim as his sight was he could not mistake the vast bulk of the dam rising on his right, the dark mass of the solitary house where it squatted below. And now he knew. This was it, the valley of his dream within a dream. Only one thing was missing and for a moment it stumped him. Then he remembered.

  The dam was quiet, its waters pent, the merest trickle bubbling from six great vents in its face. It would remain so until the official opening tomorrow. But everything else was here; and behind him, up there, the shadowy, looming spires of marching pylons. Oh, yes, this was it.

  And with that knowledge, as the first stirring of hope tightened his guts and heightened his awareness, Garrison also became aware of his pain, his weakness. Blind instinct had driven him before, the will to live, to survive. There had been no time, no room for pain or exhaustion. And there must be none now, not when he was so close, not with a killer on his trail.

  Somehow he struggled on, and somehow, after endless ages of pain and weariness, he found himself at the foot of the path leading to the door of the lone house. Deserted, the place looked gloomy as its surroundings, as doomful as the great dam rising high above. Its roof had partly caved in, most of the windows were broken and the chimney stack was crumbling. These things Garrison could still see, but even seeing them his vision was blurring, the silhouette of the house merging with the dark valley and the darker horizon of valley-wall beyond.

  Fear drove him forward in a surge he had not believed he could muster. He reached the door and found it locked. Sight was almost gone, but he could not tell how much of that was due to the night, the gathering storm. He sobbed, threw up his arms against the stout timbers of the door. He leaned against it and felt the contours of metal letters pressed against his forehead. The place had a name.

  He traced the letters with his left hand, the hand with feeling: X-A-N-A…

  Xanadu!

  NO ONE WAS LATE. Gubwa hadn’t programmed his soldiers to be late. There were sixteen of them, double the normal requirement. Top ranker was Gardner, and he was in charge of the shift. Sixteen was the maximum the lift could take, else Gardner was sure there would have been even more of them. Something big was happening and the Castle’s master was taking no chances.

  The sixteen had arrived more or less individually, but at the hour appointed they had come together as a body in the underground car park at the access door to the lift. On their way here, on foot or in the city’s transport, they had been articulate, at their ease, completely “normal” citizens; but now they were a crowd of zombies. That was in their program; for now, out of sight of the crowds surging in the streets above, they rapidly reverted to the human machines Gubwa had caused them to be. And that was a condition which left them particularly vulnerable to Sir Harry’s attack.

  He had arrived all of an hour earlier, him and six highly-trained operatives from the branch’s Special Assignments Group. Killers all, they were utterly loyal to him; he had enough on each of them to guarantee their loyalty. Now, as Gardner counted heads, nodded and stepped up to the door, keys jangling, Sir Harry gave the agreed signal. This was simply his voice yelling “Now!” and the beam of his torch swathing the unsuspecting sixteen where they bunched in gloomy, concrete-cast shadows at the door. His agents did the rest.

  Gubwa’s soldiers didn’t know what hit them. They were trained and conditioned for possible action in the Castle, not outside of it. They went down like thistles under a scythe as the branch-men stepped out from cover and caught them in a withering, short burst of intense fire. For more than five seconds the machine-guns yammered, their insane chattering drowning the echoes of Sir Harry’s yell and bringing down rivulets of accumulated dust from the concrete ceiling. Then it was over, and in the stunned silence Sir Harry stepped forward and took Gardner’s keys from fingers that were still twitching. Moments later he was through the door, his men dragging the bodies of the sixteen in after them. Somebody outside threw down sand on the blood and someone else swept it away into darkness. Then they were all through the door and Sir Harry locked it behind them.

  He stepped forward and pressed the button for the lift. Far down below the empty cage jerked and began its slow climb upwards. All unaware the men of the shift coming off duty were beginning to convene, moving towards the foot of the shaft. Two of them had been assigned a special duty—one which concerned Phillip Stone…

  GARRISON GOT IN THROUGH A BROKEN WINDOW. In doing so he cut himself badly, but he was far beyond caring about pain or loss of blood now. Indeed his near-delirium sprang from these sources, so that even he did not know how close he was to death. But still he hung on.

  The darkness was his biggest immediate problem. Inside the house he felt literally buried in darkness, his near-blindness adding to his confusion. He found an open fireplace with crumpled newspapers already lying in the grate, brought out his cigarette lighter and struck flame. The paper, mercifully dry and crisp, blazed up. Garrison fuelled the fire with pieces ripped from an old, broken wicker chair—and sobbed his relief that he could still see, however dimly, the leaping flames.

  The fire warmed his chill flesh, bringing comfort on the one hand and on the other a sure recognition of his condition, the fact that the life-force within him was ebbing. And yet there was something here—right here in Xanadu—which could yet save the day. Else all had been pointless. But what was it?

  Stumbling about the room, one of three rooms on the ground floor, Garrison flopped into a chair and allowed himself to sprawl for a moment across a heavy wooden table. His hand came into contact with a table lamp, naked wires dangling from its flex. When the occupants, whoever they had been, left the house, they had taken the plugs with them. A pity, he could have used a little extra light…

  Why not?

  The thought spurred him on. The odds were all against there being any electricity, but he could at least try.

  He half-fell from the chair with the rotten flex in his hand, found a socket in the skirting-board, shoved the naked wires in with fingers that shook so badly they seemed to vibrate. Then they did vibrate. He was holding the bare cores!

  Even as the fact got through to his brain, Garrison was hurled across the room—but in that same instant of contact things had happened. Marvellous things!

  For one thing his sight had returned, fully restored, however briefly. For another, strength had seemed to flow, however fleetingly, in veins and muscles and bones hollow as empty vessels. And finally…finally Garrison had remembered a dream. That dream in which a monster—the Garrison/Schroeder/Koenig monster—had been galvanized into life on the bed of the ethereal MACHINE.

  Like the Frankenstein monster of youthful horror films, the Garrison-creature had been brought alive by Nature’s own raw energies. By lightning. By electricity!

  Now, blind again, he crawled back across the floor. The moment of contact had been too brief, had lasted for a single instant of time before his body reacted to the shock. This time it must be longer. It must be…as long as it took.

  Weaker than ever, he clawed his way across the floor. Blood still flowed freely from his fingers, lacerated hand, scalp, perforated shoulder. He used the cr
acked nails of his hands to strip the age-brittled plastic from copper wires, wound them round his wrists, held them in his hands, found the socket and plugged the wires in, first one and then the other.

  And where he had jammed himself between the heavy table and the wall, his body jerked and shook and fluttered—all of his limbs writhing, his hair standing out from his head, his eyes bulging—as his fingers smoked and blackened and the wires glowed red in his hands.

  For five, ten, fifteen seconds he sucked energy from the socket. He would have gone on, continuing until something fused, but that wasn’t to be. The vibration of his body increased in violence until, driving the huge wooden table before him, he flew once more across the room and the wires snapped.

  Ah!—but now the battery was charged again. Not fully, no, not yet. But quest’s end finally lay in sight and Garrison knew what he must do. He lifted his head from the naked floorboards and the entire room burned gold in the light from his eyes. A light which would suffer no barriers. A light which engulfed the entire house. A light which once, in a dream, Garrison had taken for the shining hemisphere of a stately pleasure-dome—or the temple of the Goddess of Immortality!

  At the foot of the garden path Johnnie Fong stopped dead in his tracks, drew back, finally fled as the wall of that golden dome seemed to advance upon him…

  Chapter 20

  The two soldiers detailed by Gubwa to take care of Stone arrived at his cell and opened the door. Inside the metal room Vicki Maler—or the thing she was now—lay sleeping or dead, completely hidden under a blanket Stone had thrown over her. The two men weren’t interested in her, however, but in him. Youngish men, they were no longer dressed in their Castle uniforms but in normal street clothes.

  Stone took them in at a glance. Smart and reasonably well-groomed, they would not look out of place as young executives in any of the city’s firms or businesses. It seemed somehow unreasonable that they should be trained killers, working for a creature like Charon Gubwa. It also seemed unreasonable that he would have to kill them—which he would, quite cheerfully if the opportunity presented itself.