Psychosphere

  They ordered him out of the cell at gunpoint and into a wheelchair. Then, as one of them held a pistol to his temple, the other prepared to strap him into the chair.

  “Hurry it up,” said the one with the gun, his tone urgent. “The cage will be down. They’ll be waiting for us.”

  The other looked up as if to answer—but at the precise moment there came the loud rattle of automatic gunfire and whine of ricocheting bullets interspersed with shouting and screams. It was exactly the chance Stone had been looking for. What was going on he couldn’t say, but whatever it was he wanted to be part of it.

  His two guards were momentarily startled; Stone didn’t give them the least opportunity to recover. His arms shot up like pistons and he got a two-handed grip on the wrist of the one with the gun, deflecting it. At the same time he came to his feet like a coiled spring, his head smashing into the face of the man crouching over him. To complete the job on that one and without releasing his grip on the gun-hand of the other, he lashed out with a kick that pulverized the man’s groin. The one with the gun had meanwhile started yelling and driving his free fist repeatedly into the side of Stone’s head. Stone ignored the sticky, pulpy feel of a torn ear and brought his knee up and the soldier’s wrist down in one sharp movement. The wrist snapped across his knee…the man screamed…the gun flew across the corridor and bounced off the wall. Before it could clatter to the floor Stone had whirled his agonized victim in a half-circle, crashing him headlong into the steel wall.

  In the next moment the pistol was in Stone’s hand and he fell into a crouch as a pair of combat-suited, woollen-helmeted men, armed to the teeth, came round a far corner. They could have been from MI5 or 6, could be more of Gubwa’s soldiers, he had no way of knowing—until they began to sprint towards him, their weapons spitting fire. After that it didn’t matter who they were.

  Stone snapped off a shot and saw one man stopped in his tracks, spinning like a top as he fell. The other slowed down a little, then came on at a charge. Stone took cover behind the wheelchair, took careful aim, fired. As the chair was torn from his grasp by a spray of bullets, so Stone saw the muzzle of the machine-gun floating towards his face. Floating, yes, in a sort of slow motion. But the gun was in free-fall, its owner already sailing past with a neat red and black hole between his staring, dead eyes. Then things speeded up.

  Stone snatched the machine-gun from mid-air, pocketed the pistol, stepped to the dead man’s body and glanced at him. He’d seen him before, he was sure. Sir Harry’s branch. Just like that treacherous, lousy, wonderful bastard! Stone snatched a magazine of ammunition from the man’s belt, a couple of grenades, turned to the door of what had been his cell and shot the lock off. He went to snatch Vicki Maler from her bed and was surprised at her weight. Throwing back the blanket he saw her and his jaw dropped. She had firmed out again. She wasn’t quite the youthful, beautiful girl he had briefly known, but she wasn’t a hag either.

  He thought to try and waken her, changed his mind and simply wrapped her in the blanket. Then she went over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift, and a moment later he was back out in the corridor. Things were still chaotic in the Castle, but in the main Sir Harry’s crowd had taken Gubwa by surprise. Grenades detonated somewhere as the invaders commenced a methodical destruction of the place, and there were still occasional bursts of fire and screams of agony and death.

  Having no idea yet where he was going, Stone simply ran with Vicki bouncing on his shoulder.

  Somewhere someone was shouting: “I want Gubwa, the big fat albino! I want him dead! I want all of these freaks dead! Wreck the place as you go but make sure you get every last one of them!” Stone recognized Sir Harry’s voice. A long time since that pig had seen active service. Gubwa must have angered him mightily!

  He reached a right-hand bend in the corridor at the same time as a member of Gubwa’s harem came staggering round it. The transsexual’s face was covered with blood which dripped from his chin. His heavy woman’s breasts were scarlet with it. He carried no weapon.

  “Don’t shoot!” he cried in a falsetto voice. “Don’t shoot…” But he was already crumpling to his knees, collapsing face-down on the floor’s rubber coating.

  More gunfire and screams, from close at hand. Stone took a deep breath, threw himself round the corner with his machine-gun spurting lead. A combat-suited man took off in mid-air along the corridor as Stone’s bullets chewed into him. He had been standing guard over a lift cage. Bodies littered the area, all of them dressed for the street. Gubwa’s men, about to go off duty. Stone felt nothing for them.

  He yanked the cage’s latticed doors open stepped through them—and as he did so heard the hiss of a door opening behind him. He whirled…and across the corridor stood Gubwa. The albino saw Stone, saw his gun, and he skidded to a halt in the middle of the corridor. His hair was wild, his pink eyes wide.

  “In!” Stone snapped. “Now, before I change my mind!”

  “Yes, yes, I’m coming. Please don’t shoot, Mr. Stone.”

  “Shoot? Kill you? You have to be joking! If I shoot you who’ll explain all this? And believe me you’ve got some explaining to do. And while you’re doing it I’m going to sit there and grin. And I’m going to be able to tell them the right questions to ask!”

  The cage was a big one. Gubwa got as far away as he could from the muzzle of Stone’s machine gun. His arms were in the air, trembling uncontrollably; his entire frame wobbled like jelly. “The button, Mr. Stone,” he babbled. “Please press it. We have to get out of here—now!”

  Stone became suspiciously aware of the other’s urgency. It was understandable, of course, but…he hovered his finger over the lift’s button, his shoulder supporting Vicki. “What have you done, Gubwa?”

  “Press it, for God’s sake!” the hermaphrodite gibbered, his hands fluttering. “The Castle is mined! I’ve set the detonation sequence in motion!”

  “For ‘God’s sake,’ eh?” said Stone mockingly—but he pressed the button. As the cage jerked and started upward, a tremendous explosion blew the debris of bodies along the corridor beyond the latticed doors. Then they were out of it, but beneath their feet they could still feel the concussions of further explosions. As the thunders receded, so Gubwa began to relax, his hands starting to fall towards his sides.

  “Keep ’em up, fat thing!” Stone snarled. He took two paces forward, stuck his gun in Gubwa’s belly, shoving hard through the towelling of the albino’s robe. “Also, you can close your eyes—close ’em! And keep ’em closed. And let me tell you now: I only have to feel the tiniest tickle of an alien thought in my head, just one, and a second later you’re going to weigh at least a pound heavier. And I’ll love it!”

  Through all of this a speaker in the ceiling had been droning Gubwa’s recorded hypnotic orders, accompaniment to the pulsing of a blue strobe light. Stone, however, had not been conditioned to receive such orders. His lips twisted into a mirthless grin as he stepped back from the albino, lifted up the snout of his gun and fired off a burst at the speaker and strobe.

  “There,” he said as Gubwa’s recorded voice squawked into silence and the light went out, leaving them in near-darkness. Once more he prodded Gubwa’s belly with the smoking muzzle of the machine-gun. “That writes finis on that shit! And that only leaves you, mister. It only leaves you. And if you’ve any sense at all, you’ll just stand perfectly still and do absolutely nothing…”

  GARRISON HAD LAIN QUITE STILL FOR SOME MINUTES, BUT WHILE HIS ravaged body had rested his mind had been intensely active. First he had stilled the incredible pain in his limbs, trunk and head; which had required the merest effort of will, a simple command that the pain would stop. Then he had soaked up the essence of the house, the valley outside, the dam and surrounding countryside, over which a freakish summer storm was about to break in unprecedented fury. In doing so—in this systematic mental examination of his whereabouts—he had once more triggered memories of his prophetic dreams, stripping them of their mysticis
m until all that remained of them was the fact that they had been prophetic. Through them he had seen the future, a future inalienable and unchangeable as the past.

  The past was gone, but the future, as any future, began here and now. And however obscurely, the way into that future had been delineated. Garrison was powerful now but not nearly powerful enough to go that way, not yet. But how close the analogy had been, when he had likened himself to a battery leaking its power. And how easy and how terrible the solution. He had dreamed of a great MACHINE and knew now that this valley, this place, was that MACHINE. As for its power source—

  Garrison reached out his mind to the dam and explored its mechanisms…

  JOHNNIE FONG SAT ONE-THIRD OF THE WAY UP THE WALL OF THE valley and stared at the golden glow of the dome. It had stopped growing, stood taller than the pines, enclosed what had been the entire garden of the house. Fong didn’t know if it had substance and he wasn’t ready to find out. But it was, must be, a manifestation of Garrison. About that the Chinaman had no doubt. If only Charon would contact him now, perhaps the albino would be able to tell him how to deal with things. Always his beloved Charon had the answers to such—

  Fong jerked to his feet. The first warm raindrops were beginning to fall and the clouds were boiling madly overhead, but even the moaning of the wind could not drown out the new sound—the sudden, rapidly increasing roar of power unleashed. Fong’s eyes went to the face of the dam, took in the spectacle of the six silvery trickles that ran down its concrete face erupting into gigantic spouts; and his ears heard the thunder of waters in chaos.

  He backed away, turned and scrambled higher, not looking back until he no longer dared ignore what was happening behind and below him. Full fifteen minutes that climb, and Fong’s limbs trembling with his exertion when finally he did stop and turn. But now he knew why he had fled, that it had been instinct which drove him up from the house and away from the dam. Instinct and fear.

  Not fear of the rushing waters, no, for already his elevation had been such that they could not possibly reach him. Fear of the power which had caused those waters to rush, the Gigantic Unstoppable Power whose heart throbbed at the center of the golden dome!

  Throbbed, yes, for the dome was unstable now. It pulsed with an irregular expansion and contraction like some vast alien beacon. It struggled with itself, or within itself, like molten lava in a volcano’s cone, tossed by the turmoil below. And finally—it broke!

  A figure—upright, manlike, golden, glowing, like some sort of anthropomorphic fragment of the dome itself—came through its wall and stood for a moment on the night wind, then rose up the slope of the valley directly towards the Chinaman where he trembled and gasped.

  No part of that figure of golden fire touched the slope itself. Utterly suspended on air, it levitated itself a full two feet above the whipping grass and stunted shrubs; and as it passed close by Fong the truth of its nature, which of course he had known, made itself apparent. Namely that this was Richard Garrison, but shrunken, dried out, almost desiccated. It was Garrison, but devoid of life, or life as Fong understood it. Garrison, and yet less than Garrison, and yet greater, far greater.

  He lifted his pistol as the figure passed, fired off shot after shot and knew that he struck the target each time; but the figure made no pause, showed no interest, paid no head at all. And when Fong’s weapon was empty, then it fell from his nerveless fingers; and still the mummied figure of Garrison sailed on, its eyes blazing, its skin a mass of golden wrinkles, its arms blackened stumps whose frayed threads hung in sticky tatters just below the elbows.

  And behind it, down in the valley, the agonized fluctuations of the psychic plasma about the deserted house came to an abrupt end, the glow blinked out, and in the next moment the house went down in dust and ruin and the frenzied spume of the flood that rushed and roared down the old bed of the river.

  Then, like an automaton, almost without knowing that his hands and feet bore him up, Johnnie Fong clawed his way to the crest of the valley wall, following the floating figure of Garrison as a moth follows a bright light. He had to know, had to see—even if it blasted him…

  But even before reaching the crest Fong could hear the humming of the heavy-duty cables where they draped their loops between the pylons. They were drawing off power from the dam, power which Garrison required. And as Fong crawled exhaustedly up those last few yards of slope and emerged above the valley, so he became witness to the most awesome scene of all.

  It was Garrison, a living cross of golden fire, the blackened stumps of his arms outstretched, floating in air between and beneath two of the pylons. And it was Garrison who, a moment later, received the tribute of the pylons—a massive, crackling bolt that smashed down, was sucked down from blazing cables, enveloping him and hurling him down to the ground. Nor did it stop there. The smell of ozone filled the air, and of burning flesh, as that lashing, living, weirdly snarling and snapping pulse of raw energy spent itself in Garrison…who now, impossibly, stood up and held himself erect, welcoming the very fires that consumed him!

  And as if the storm itself knew Garrison’s bizarre thirst, it added its own energies to that awesome, fearsome funeral pyre, sending down bolt after bolt from the madly wheeling clouds, each bolt absorbed at once into the crumbling skeleton thing which was Garrison.

  Witless, tingling, himself glowing with the excess energies that filled the air and plucked at the hair of his face and head, Johnnie Fong kneeled with jaws agape and rain streaming from his chin. The very elements seemed crazed now, and the undersides of the clouds were awash with St. Elmo’s fire as the bolts continued to rain down. And all of this raw power focussing upon Garrison or what had been Garrison—and his megamind thirsting for more still!

  More still—more energy to power the ultimate quest—more physical fuel for the psychic fire.

  The megamind reached out, sought, discovered…

  More than one hundred miles away at Dounreay the pile went crazy. Rods of uranium which would have lighted entire cities for weeks were consumed in seconds…and nothing to show for it. Throughout the length and breadth of Scotland lights dimmed as the power was drawn off.

  A magnificent aurora filled the skies. A shaft of fire split the heavens and lanced down, down, down, to Garrison, removing every last physical vestige of him from the world of men. Removing, too, Johnnie Fong.

  But while the physical Garrison was dead the mental Garrison was newborn and borne up to penetrate, to become one with the Psychosphere…

  AS THE LIFT SLOWED TO AN ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE HALT, CHARON Gubwa tensed himself. In fact Stone had done him a great favor by ordering him to keep his hypnotic eyes closed. Despite the apparent failure of so many of his plans, still there was the chance that he might yet achieve a final victory. With the Castle destroyed—which by now it surely was, beyond recovery, by plastic explosives and fire bombs which would have turned the entire interior to a raging inferno—Gubwa also would be thought to have perished, if or when the matter was looked into. But there were other places ready and waiting to receive him, and a car in the underground car park to take him to one of them. There would always be men he could buy or bend to his will, and Psychomech would still become a reality.

  Moreover, Gubwa knew something that Stone didn’t know: namely that one last bomb remained, located at the bottom of the liftshaft, and that its detonation would be triggered when the cage’s doors were opened up here. Which was why the albino had ignored Stone’s warning not to mind-read, an idle threat at best for Gubwa was a master of covert telepathy. Another telepath might have sensed him, but he had been in Stone’s mind for all of five minutes without the slightest fear of detection. And he was still there when the lift cage slowed to a halt and Stone yanked the doors open. With his great arms held rigidly over his head, and with Stone’s gun in his back, Gubwa was the first out of the lift—a split second before the bomb went off down below and its blast, channelled up the shaft, shook the cage like a terrier shakes a rat
.

  With his mind taking off at a tangent, and Vicki Maler in her blanket still balanced on his shoulder, Stone stumbled and went to one knee. Before he could recover, Gubwa’s right arm came down at lightning speed and his great gray hand clamped like a vice on the stock of the machine-gun, wrenching it from Stone’s grasp.

  Demented but triumphant in his madness, the albino laughed as he turned the gun on Stone and ordered him out of the cage.

  “It would appear, Mr. Stone,” he said, “that even a god can err. I said you were intelligent—but even an idiot would have killed me when he had the chance!” He made a motion with the gun. “Put her down,” he ordered, indicating an empty space amongst the stiffening bodies of his former soldiers. “Put her there with the rest of these corpses. Then we shall play a little game, you and I. I shall close my eyes and stand quite still, and you shall prepare yourself. Then, when you are ready; you shall attempt to take the gun back from me—or perhaps to take that pistol from your pocket and shoot me.”

  “Gubwa, you blackhearted bastard, I—”

  “Of course you can’t win,” Gubwa cut him off, “because I shall know your move even as you make it. But surely it’s worth a try? And to make the game more interesting, we’ll limit its duration to fifteen seconds, after which I really must be on my way.”

  “In a hurry, eh, Gubwa?” Stone ground the words out.

  “Oh yes, indeed! The Psychosphere is astir, Mr. Stone. It prepares to welcome a new Messiah. I feel its excitement, its psychic concentration. It beckons, and I must go.”

  He very deliberately closed his eyes and began to count: “One…two…three…four…”

  IN THE MATTERLESS FLUX OF THE PSYCHOSPHERE THREE ENTITIES conversed. “Well?” said Garrison. “And are you satisfied?”