Psychosphere

  “What took so long, Mr. Gardner?” Gubwa’s voice was cold.

  Gardner was dressed in the Castle’s gray T-shirt and slacks uniform, his left breast emblazoned with a silver “G.” He stood himself at ease before answering. “Guard on duty was showering, sir. It’s his right, a shower before knocking off, as you well know, sir. I chivvied him up, sent him to check the mind-guards. He checked this one last, couldn’t get any readings. He unlocked the cell, entered, checked, found she was dead, contacted me. I contacted you at once.”

  Gubwa nodded. “Who is this guard and where is he now?”

  Gardner inclined his head towards the heavy metal door of the cell. “Inside with the girl.”

  Gubwa pushed by him and entered the cell. The girl lay upon her bed dressed in the attire of the mind-guard: a short, sleeveless shift that reached halfway down her thighs. She was—had been—quite pretty. Her breasts were small beneath the material of the shift, but firm; her legs were long and shapely; her mouth was full in a young/old face which showed all too well the stresses and strains of her addiction. Gubwa looked at her, laid his great hand upon her breast, drew his forest of white eyebrows together in a grim frown. Then he looked at the guard.

  His glance this time was cursory, apparently disinterested, flickering from the features of a nervous young black to Gardner’s own impassive face. “Gardner, I want to speak to you in private. You—” again he glanced at the young Negro, “—go and fetch one of your fellows—for disposal duties. And a stretcher.”

  “I’ll call one up, sir,” the guard answered, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He unclipped a tiny walkie-talkie from his waist-belt.

  “I said fetch,” Gubwa stopped him, his thick voice suddenly icy. “Now go and fetch!”

  The young man nodded, gulped, turned on his heel and went out. His footsteps echoed away down the corridor. “Close the door, Gardner,” said Gubwa, his voice now soft. “And now—help me get her shift up.”

  Gardner lifted the dead girl’s hips while Gubwa hoisted her single garment. Then the two stood back. “Ah!” said Gubwa, a word which carried all the menace in the world.

  Gardner glanced again between the girl’s legs. “It could only have been him,” he said. “Jackson.”

  “Or you,” Gubwa told him.

  Gardner shrugged, knew better than to argue. “Or me, yes, sir.”

  Gubwa probed his mind, discovered no fear. At least, not in connection with this. “But it wasn’t you who attacked this girl, no—it was Jackson. Or…what about the others on duty?”

  “Seven of them, all sleeping—but I was awake, of course. And they’d have to get past me. They’d all done their stint. Jackson’s was the last. He’d finished, was getting ready to knock off for the day, showering when you called. He’s not usually so particular, but this explains it. It was Jackson, all right.”

  Together they pulled down the girl’s shift.

  “My orders are clear enough, wouldn’t you say?” Gubwa’s voice had grown softer, more dangerous yet.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “The mind-guards are not to be disturbed in any way, isn’t that so?”

  Again: “Yes, sir.”

  “And I pay enough, that my orders should be obeyed?”

  “More than generous, sir,” Gardner nodded.

  “Yes,” Gubwa mused, “and I also keep the men well supplied, with all of their personal little needs. So—why?”

  “A bit of illicit crumpet,” Gardner shrugged. “You know what they say, sir: stolen apples are always the sweetest? Even the sour ones…?”

  Gubwa smiled grimly, nodding his agreement. He pursed flabby lips. “I shall…dismiss him, of course. Today, personally. Will you be able to recruit a replacement?”

  “Of course, sir. Any time. As many as you like, within reason.”

  “Good!” Gubwa answered as footsteps sounded in the corridor. “Then recruit…two.” He turned away from the bed. “I shall attend to the, er, disposal arrangements myself. As for you, Gardner: as soon as your shift is relieved you may fall out. No need to wait for these two…”

  “I understand, sir.”

  THE LIFT CAGE DESCENDED FROM THE CASTLE INTO BLACK BOWELS of rock and earth. At its lowest extremity the shaft bottomed out on to a ledge over a natural chasm. A single red fluorescent tube flickered into life, illuminating the shelf and, as it came down the shaft, the cage. The doors folded back and Gubwa stepped out, followed by the stretcher-bearers, Jackson and Smith.

  “Put her down,” said Gubwa, his voice echoing in the unseen but felt subterranean vastness, where the dim red light of the fluorescent tube covered and colored them with its ruddy wash. He stood on one side of the stretcher, facing across it and out over the rim of the fissure. “Stand there,” he pointed, “and there.”

  Smith was white, a little older than his colored colleague. With nothing on his conscience, nothing to fear, he was quick to obey; Jackson moved a little slower. They positioned themselves, as indicated, opposite Gubwa and facing him, their backs to the chasm. Gubwa steepled his fingers, forearms horizontal in front of him. He lowered his head and its great round bush of white hair until his forehead rested upon the tips of his fingers. Jackson and Smith glanced at each other, their eyes puzzled, questioning.

  “We have come,” Gubwa kept his head bowed, his voice deliberately sepulchral, “to send this poor girl to her last resting place. It is her due. She was a faithful servant.” He put down his hands, lifted his head, straightened up. He nodded, then:

  “Put your hands between her body and the stretcher and lift her up,” he commanded. They did as they were instructed, holding the girl’s corpse before them like some grisly offering. She was surprisingly light.

  “Good!” said Gubwa, towering over the men and the dead girl they supported in their arms. He lowered his head again, reached out across the empty stretcher and laid one great hand on the girl’s thigh, the other on her shoulder. It was as if he were about to bless her.

  Perhaps in that last moment Jackson and Smith—especially Jackson—sensed Doom’s rushing approach; but they were much too late to avoid it.

  “Go to your rest, my children!” said Gubwa, his sepulchral tone sharpening on the last word. And with that last word he pushed with all the weight of his great body.

  The two men shouted their alarm, were forced back, off balance. They flailed their arms, their cries turning to screams. The rim crumbled beneath their feet…

  They were gone, the body of the girl, too. Only their echoing screams remained, fading.

  Seconds later there came a clattering of dislodged rocks and stony rubble, followed by three distinct splashes and the sounds of lesser debris striking deep water. Then silence.

  Gubwa stood for a moment at the rim, then bent down and dragged the stretcher into the lift. His face was without expression. The cage doors closed on him and the lift climbed its shaft. The red fluorescent light flickered out…

  AS CHARON GUBWA ROSE UP THROUGH THE STRATA OF CENTURIES, so a second lift moved in another shaft, carrying Gardner and the six remaining members of his team. Gardner’s cage moved slowly, would take all of fifteen minutes to pass through two hundred and seventy feet of shaft; but this was not inefficiency. On the contrary, the slow-running cage was necessary to the complete efficiency of Charon Gubwa’s operation, his organization. For these fifteen minutes were the minimum required for the “debriefing” which occurred whenever his people left the Castle; and that debriefing was in progress now, perfectly synchronized with the monotonous creep of the cage.

  The cage itself was in near-darkness, its gloom barely relieved by the regular pulsing of a single electric-blue ceiling light. And in that strangely ethereal atmosphere the seven men leaned against the walls and listened to Gubwa’s deep, even, sonorously hypnotic voice. Although it was only a recording, still that voice was not one to be ignored, denied or in any way defied, for Gubwa was a hypnotist without peer and his words merely reiterated and reinforced previous or
ders.

  This was the third and last time that the seven men would hear those orders on this occasion, for the lift was slowing more yet as it approached its terminal. This was what the voice of Gubwa said to them:

  “Your work is done,” (the monologue began) “and you are now free of duty. You will next report for work at the time shown on your duty roster. Only genuine sickness will prevent such reporting, in which case your immediate superior will be informed in advance. Of the work you have performed and the things you have seen you will remember nothing. You will take nothing, neither material nor memory of the Castle with you. When you return you will bring nothing, neither material nor intent with you into the Castle. Your only intent will be to do my service.

  “You will know only those things I require you to know, and your answers to questions concerning myself, my organization, the nature of the Castle itself or anything at all concerning the work you perform for me will be the prepared answers I have ordered you to learn.

  “You will keep your minds open and receptive to mine at all times. You will obey without question or hesitation any and all commands I care to issue, spoken or telepathic, except the occasion arises when to do so would not be to my benefit. At any such time you will offer explanation and I will decide the outcome.

  “You will do no deliberate wrong outside the Castle but obey the common laws of the land, causing no unwanted attentions to be focussed upon yourselves; neither will you proceed furtively or in any manner likely to arouse suspicion. You will in short live your lives normally within the periphery of my beneficence, and you will be satisfied.

  “In the event that you are compromised and that any enemy of mine seeks to subvert you or extract from you information whose divulgence I have forbidden, and further that you are in any way made incapable of refusing such information—then you will simply cease to function. You will die.

  “These are the words of Charon Gubwa. I have spoken, so let it be…”

  The lift came to an almost unnoticeable standstill and the pulsing blue light went out. The doors opened and Gubwa’s zombies stepped out. They were in a dim basement room. Behind them the doors closed and the lift sank from sight.

  Gardner took out keys, went to the room’s single metal door, unlocked its twin locks. He and the others passed through and he locked the door behind them. Now they were in what looked like an underground car park, thick with dust, in which no cars were parked. From somewhere overhead came the dull rumble of traffic.

  Footsteps echoing, the seven crossed the concrete floor and entered another lift, and Gardner thumbed its single button. Three levels up they walked out into sunlight, crowds and a street full of heavy traffic. The lift’s doors closed automatically behind them. An outer door closed over the inner doors. A sign above the outer door said:

  Not for Public Use.

  And down below, more than seven hundred feet straight down, the Castle lay hidden, mysterious and…forgotten. For them, at least.

  Silent until now, Gubwa’s men yawned, blinked their eyes in the light of day, nodded farewells and went their own ways. To all intents and purposes they were ordinary citizens about their business, clad in the ordinary clothes and wearing the ordinary expressions of common, everyday life.

  Gardner’s way took him a couple of streets to where he would catch his bus. Waiting at the stop he lit a cigarette and engaged himself in conversation with a sweaty fat lady in a feathery hat. Just across the road, a sign on the corner of a building said:

  Oxford St W1

  Chapter 8

  Ninety minutes earlier in Lindos, Vicki Maler had awakened, stretched, and checked the time: 10:30 A.M.

  10:30 A.M. local, and the sun was high in the sky and blazing over the great Rock of the Acropolis. Vicki yawned and stretched again. She had had, oh, maybe six, six-and-a-half hours’ sleep? The same for Richard. It was almost time to wake him up. While he didn’t particularly like being awakened, neither did he care to sleep too long. He had begun lately to complain that things “passed him by” while he was asleep.

  In any case, now would be a good and sensible time. He was night-maring again and had started to moan. She had heard him mention Schroeder and Koenig, and he had cursed once or twice. His temperature was up, too; sweat gleamed on his brow and in the hollow of his collar bones; he shook his head from side to side as if seeking a way out of some terrible predicament. Yes, she should wake him. After all, he had awakened her, with his tossing and turning.

  “Liar!” the word suddenly gurgled from between his clenched teeth, seemingly in denial of Vicki’s last thought. And: “Falling! Falling!”

  She went quickly to his side and laid a hand upon his shoulder. But as his frantic jerking and tossing grew still more pronounced, she shouted, “Richard! Richard, wake up! It’s all right!”

  He came awake in a moment, his golden eyes flashing open, his body jerking upright from the waist, back ramrod straight on the raised wooden bed. As his hands flew into a defensive position in front of his face and chest, so Vicki stepped quickly back out of range. Then…his wide, molten golden eyes blinked, focussed, and he saw her.

  He licked bone-dry lips, lay back trembling. “God, a bad one!” He angled his head to stare at her, managed a shaky laugh. “A beauty!”

  “It must have been,” she told him. “You were shouting.”

  “Oh? What was I shouting?”

  “Something about a liar—and falling?” She deliberately left out the other bits of mouthing, about Schroeder and Koenig.

  “Falling? Oh, yes,” he frowned. “I remember that. Something of it anyway. But a liar?” He shook his head.

  “Do you remember anything else?” she asked.

  He got up, still shaky, and put his arms around her. Then he released her, tugged open her robe and hugged her again. She held him tightly, feeling something of her old love for him flooding her veins, her body.

  Her “old” love for him? Had something changed, then?

  With her face buried in his shoulder, she bit her lips, controlled her thinking. Occasionally (unconsciously, she liked to believe) Richard eavesdropped on her mind. He was not doing so now, but he nevertheless felt the tension in her body. “Something wrong, Vicki?”

  “Only that I worry about you. What we talked about last night, and these dreams of yours…”

  He released her and began to pull on his clothes. “I know,” he said. “But you know they’re not entirely my own. I mean, I am dreaming for three of us. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. “Yes, I do. And surely you understand why I worry.”

  He returned her nod. “Of course—” he paused, frowned, then pulled on a T-shirt. “Only this time—with this dream—”

  “Yes?”

  He shrugged. “This time I believe I was dreaming for myself. I only wish I could remember more about it. I feel it was special, important.”

  “Important? A dream?”

  “I’ve had dreams before, Vicki, and some of them were damned important. But—” and again he shrugged. “—Maybe it’ll come back to me later.”

  But for all his shrug, as he finished dressing and slipped his feet into his sandals, she could see that the dream continued to preoccupy him. She tried to drive it from his mind, asking: “Aren’t you going to wash?”

  “Eh?” he looked up, half-smiling. “Oh! No—I won’t bother now. A dip in the sea, a shower on the beach—it’s today we’re to visit the Acropolis, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes!” she was enthusiastic. “We’ll have a wonderful view from up there. As long as you promise not to go too close to the edge…”

  His smile disappeared completely and she bit her lip again, knowing she had erred. “I only dreamed I was falling, Vicki,” he reminded her. “Awake…it simply can’t happen. You know that.”

  Oh, yes, she knew it. “Of course. I only—”

  “Get dressed now, won’t you?” He turned away from her, gazed out of the window into the vine-shaded, black and wh
ite cobbled courtyard. “We can have brunch in the village on our way down to the beach.”

  SOME NINE HOURS LATER, RIGHT ON CUE, PAULO PALAZZI’S FAT Frenchman departed Lindos. He and his much younger mistress—a nymphet with big loose breasts which she loved to bounce about all over the lesser of the village’s two beaches—left town in a local taxi, their faces glowing shiny-red from too much sun. The girl wore a loose evening gown, presumably for the sake of her sunburn. Palazzi was pleased to note that she didn’t seem to be wearing too much jewelry; doubtless the weight of gold and stones would constitute a great irritation against rapidly roughening skin. How then, he wondered with a grin, could she possibly cope with the far greater weight of her lover? The poor, rich fat slob! But, where there’s a will…

  Then, a nervous twenty minutes later, he saw the Swiss party appear from the doorway of their spacious high-priced villa, laughingly making for the village center where already the tavernas were growing boisterously raucous. Happily the pair left an upper window hanging ajar. True, it was unseasonably warm even for the Aegean, but…there would be more than the breeze off the sea and a couple of mosquitoes going in through that window tonight! Palazzi grinned again, this time at his joke and at the thought of the mosquitoes. The buzzing little vampires would have to wait their turn for rich Swiss blood tonight. He, Paulo Palazzi, would be taking first fruits—and his sting was far more painful.

  And then there was Garrison. At the thought of the so-called “blind” man Palazzi’s eyes narrowed. This one was more problematic, erratic, less likely to adhere to any sort of regular schedule. He might not even go out tonight, which would be bad news but not necessarily an insurmountable problem. The man probably slept quite heavily, certainly would sleep heavily if the amount of local brandy he consumed was anything to go by. Or perhaps he drank the brandy because he slept badly? Whichever, only time would tell. And time, for the next few hours anyway, was on the side of the thief.