As if to confirm that insight, Coltrane influenced the glass screen of the VDT to relinquish the convex plane of its surface and adapt to the contours of his face. The glass became as flexible as gelatin, thrusting outward, as if Coltrane actually existed within the machine, physically, and was now pushing his face Out of it.
This was impossible. Yet it was happening. Harley Coltrane seemed to be controlling matter with the power of his mind, a mind not even any longer linked to a human body.
Sam was mesmerized by fear, frozen, paralyzed. His finger lay immovable against the trigger.
Reality had been ripped, and through that tear a nightmare world of infinite malign possibilities seemed to be rushing into the world that Sam knew and—suddenly—loved.
One of the snakelike cables had reached his chest and found its way under his sweater to bare skin. He felt as if he’d been touched by a white-hot brand, and the pain broke his trance.
He fired two rounds into the computer, shattering the screen first, which was the second face of Coltrane’s into which he’d pumped a .38 slug. Though Sam half expected it to absorb the bullet without effect, the cathode-ray tube imploded as if still made of glass. The other round scrambled the guts of the data-processing unit, at last finishing off the thing that Coltrane had become.
The pale, oily tentacles fell away from him. They blistered, began to bubble, and seemed to be putrefying before his eyes.
Eerie electronic beeps, crackles, and oscillations, not ear—torturingly loud but uncannily piercing, still filled the room.
When Sam looked toward the woman who had been seated at the other computer, against the east wall, he saw that the mucus-like cables between her and the machine had lengthened, allowing her to turn in her chair to face him. Aside from those semiorganic connections and her nakedness, she was in a different but no less hideous condition from her husband. Her eyes were gone, but her sockets did not bristle with a host of sensors. Rather, two reddish orbs, three times the size of ordinary eyes, filled enlarged sockets in a face redesigned to accommodate them; they were less eyes than eye-shaped receptors, no doubt designed to see in many spectrums of light, and in fact Sam became aware of an image of himself in each red lens, reversed. Her legs, belly, breasts, arms, throat, and face were heavily patterned with swollen blood vessels that lay just beneath her skin and that seemed to stretch it to the breaking point, so she looked as if she were a design board for branch-pattern circuitry. Some of those vessels might, indeed, have carried blood, but some of them throbbed with waves of radium-like illumination, some green and some sulfurous yellow.
A segmented, wormlike probe, the diameter of a pencil, erupted from her forehead, as if shot from a gun, and streaked toward Sam, closing the ten feet between them in a split second, striking him above the right eye before he could duck. The tip bit into his skin on contact. He heard a whirring sound, as of fan blades spinning at maybe a thousand revolutions a minute. Blood ran down his brow and along the side of his nose. But he was squeezing off the last two rounds in his gun even as the probe came at him. Both shots found their mark. One slammed into the woman’s upper body, and one took out the computer behind her in a blaze of sparks and crackling electrical bolts that jumped to the ceiling and snaked briefly across the plaster before dissipating. The probe went limp and fell away from him before it could link his brain to hers, which evidently had been its intention.
Except for gray daylight that entered through the paper-thin cracks between the slats of the shutters, the room was dark.
Crazily, Sam remembered something a computer specialist had said at a seminar for agents, when explaining how the Bureau’s new system worked: “Computers can perform more effectively when linked, allowing parallel processing of data.”
Bleeding from the forehead and the right wrist, he stumbled backward to the door and flicked the light switch, turning on a floor lamp) He stood there —as far as he could get from the two grotesque corpses and still see them—while he began to reload the revolver with rounds he dug out of the pockets of his jacket.
The room was preternaturally silent.
Nothing moved.
Sam’s heart was hammering with such force that his chest ached dully with each blow.
Twice he dropped cartridges because his hands were shaking. He didn’t stoop to retrieve them. He was half convinced that the moment he wasn’t in a position to fire with accuracy or to run, one of the dead creatures would prove not to be dead, after all, and like a flash would come at him, spitting sparks, and would seize him before he could rise and scramble out of its way.
Gradually he became aware of the sound of rain. After losing half of its force during the morning, it was now falling harder than at any time since the storm had first broken the previous night. No thunder shook the day, but the furious drumming of the rain itself—and the insulated walls of the house—had probably muffled the gunfire enough to prevent it being heard by neighbors. He hoped to God that was the case. Otherwise, they were coming even now to investigate, and they would prevent his escape.
Blood continued to trickle down from the wound on his forehead, and some of it got into his right eye. It stung. He wiped at his eye with his sleeve and blinked away the tears as best he could.
His wrist hurt like hell. But if he had to, he could hold the revolver with his left hand and shoot well enough in close quarters…
When the .38 was reloaded, Sam edged back into the room, to the smoking computer on the worktable along the west wall, where Harley Coltrane’s mutated body was slumped in a chair, trailing its bone-metal arms. Keeping one eye on the dead man-machine, he took the phone off the modem and hung it up. Then he lifted the receiver and was relieved to hear a dial tone.
His mouth was so dry that he wasn’t sure he’d be able to speak clearly when his call got through.
He punched out the number of the Bureau office in Los Angeles.
The line clicked.
A pause.
A recording came on “We are sorry that we are unable to complete your call at this time.”
He hung up, then tried again.
“We are sorry that we are unable to complete—”
He slammed the phone down.
Not all of the telephones in Moonlight Cove were operable. And evidently, even from those in service, calls could be placed only to certain numbers. Approved numbers. The local phone company had been reduced to an elaborate intercom to serve the converted.
As he turned away from the phone, he heard something move, behind him. Stealthy and quick.
He swung around, and the woman was three feet away. She, was no longer connected to the ruined computer, but one of those organic-looking cables trailed across the floor from the base of her spine and into an electrical socket.
Free-associating in his terror, Sam thought: So much for your flimsy kites, Dr. Frankenstein, so much for the need for storms andd lightning; these days we just plug the monsters into the wall, them a jolt of the juice direct, courtesy of Pacific Power & Light.
A reptilian hiss issued from her, and she reached for him. Instead of fingers, her hand had three multiple-pronged plugs similar to the couplings with which the elements of a home computer were joined, though these prongs were as sharp as nails.
Sam dodged to the side, colliding with the chair in which Harley Coltrane still slumped, and nearly fell, firing at the woman-thing as he went. He emptied the five-round .38.
The first three shots knocked her backward and down. The other two tore through vacant air and punched chunks of plaster out of the walls because he was too panicked to stop pulling the trigger when she fell out of his line of fire.
She was trying to get up.
Like a goddamn vampire, he thought.
He needed the high-tech equivalent of a wooden stake, a cross, a silver bullet.
The artery-circuits that webbed her naked body were still pulsing with light, although in places she was sparking, just as the computers themselves had done when he ha
d pumped a couple of slugs into them.
No rounds were left in the revolver.
He searched his pockets for cartridges.
He had none.
Get out.
An electronic wail, not deafening but more nerve-splintering than a thousand sharp fingernails scraped simultaneously down a blackboard, shrilled from her.
Two segmented, wormlike probes burst from her face and flew straight at him. Both fell inches short of him—perhaps a sign of her waning energy—and returned to her like splashes of quicksilver streaming back into the mother mass.
But she was getting up.
Sam scrambled to the doorway, stooped, and snatched up the ‘two cartridges he had dropped when he had reloaded the gun. He broke open the cylinder, shook out the empty brass casings, Jammed in the last two rounds.
“… neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed … neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed …”
She was on her feet, coming toward him.
This time he held the Smith & Wesson in both hands, aimed carefully, and shot her in the head.
Take out the data processor, he thought with a flash of black humor. Only way to stop a determined machine. Take out its data processor, and it’s nothing but a tangle of junk.
She crumpled to the floor. The red light went out of the unhuman eyes; they were black now. She was perfectly still.
Suddenly flames erupted from her bullet-cracked skull, spurting from the wound, from her eyes, nostrils, and gaping mouth.
He moved quickly to the socket to which she was still tethered, and he kicked at the semiorganic plug that she had extruded from her body, knocking it loose.
The flames still leaped from her.
He could not afford a house fire. The bodies would be found and the neighborhood, Harry’s house included, would be searched door-to-door. He looked around for something to throw over her to smother the flames, but already the blaze within the skull was subsiding. In a moment it burned itself out.
The air reeked of a dozen foul odors, some of which did not bear contemplation.
He was mildly dizzy. Nausea stole over him. He gagged clenched his teeth, and forced back his gorge.
Though he wanted desperately to get out of there, he took time to unplug both computers. They were inoperable and dammaged beyond repair, but he was irrationally afraid that, like Frankenstein’s homebuilt man in movie sequel after sequel, they would somehow come to life if exposed to electricity.
He hesitated at the doorway, leaned against the jamb to take some of the weight off his weak and trembling legs, looked at the computers and the strange corpses. He had expected them to revert to normal appearance when they were dead, the way they were in the movies, upon taking a silver bullet in the heart or beaten with a silver-headed cane, always metamorphosed for the last time, becoming their tortured, too-human selves, finally released from the curse. Unfortunately this was not Lycanthropy. This was not a supernatural affliction, but something worse that men had brought upon themselves with no help from demonic spirits or other things that went bump in the night. The Coltranes as they had been, monstrous half-breeds of flesh and blood and silicon—human and machine.
He could not comprehend how they had become what they had become, but he half remembered that a word existed for them, and in a moment he recalled it. Cyborg: a person whose biological functioning was aided by or dependent on a mechanical or electronic device. People wearing pacemakers to regulate arrhythmic hearts were cyborgs, and that was a good thing. Those whose kidneys had both failed—and who received dialysis on a regular basis—were cyborgs, and that was good too. But with the Coltranes the concept had been carried to extremes. They were the nightmare side of advanced cybernetics, in whom not merely physiological but mental function had become aided by and almost certainly dependent on a machine.
Sam began to gag again. He turned quickly away from the smoke-hazed den and backtracked through the house to the kitchen door, by which he had entered.
Every step of the way, he was certain that he would hear a voice behind him, half human and half electronic—“neeeeeeeeeeed”—and would look back to see one of the Coltranes lumbering toward him, reanimated by a last small supply of current stored in battery cells.
25
At the main gate of New Wave Microtechnology, on the highlands along the northern perimeter of Moonlight Cove, the guard, wearing a black rain slicker with the corporate logo on the breast, squinted at the oncoming police cruiser. When he recognized Loman, he waved him through without stopping him. Loman had been well known there even before he and they had become new People.
New Wave power, prestige, and profitability were not hidden in an unassuming corporate headquarters. The place had been designed by a leading architect who favored rounded corners, gentle angles, and the interesting juxtaposition of curved walls—some concave, some convex. The two large three-story buildings—one erected four years after the other—were faced with buff-colored stone, had huge tinted windows, and blended well with the landscape.
Of the fourteen hundred people employed there, nearly a thousand lived in Moonlight Cove. The rest resided in other communities elsewhere in the county. All of them, of course, lived within the effective reach of the microwave broadcasting dish on the roof of the main structure.
As he followed the entrance road around the big buildings toward the parking area behind, Loman thought: Sure as hell Shaddack’s our very own Reverend Jim Jones. Needs to be sure he can take every last one of his devoted followers with him any time he wants. A modern pharaoh. When he dies, those attending him die, too, as if he expects them to continue to attend him in the next world. Shit. Do we even believe in a next world any more?
No. Religious faith was akin to hope, and it required emotional commitment.
New People did not believe in God any more than they believed in Santa Claus. The only thing they believed in was the power of the machine and the cybernetic destiny of humanity.
Maybe some of them didn’t even believe in that.
Loman didn’t. He no longer believed in anything at all—which scared him because he had once believed in so many things.
The ratio of New Wave’s gross sales and profits to its number of employees was high even for the microtechnology industry, its ability to pay for the best talent in its field was reflected in the percentage of high-ticket cars in the two enormous lots. Mercedes. BMW. Porsche. Corvette. Cadillac Seville. Jaguar. high end Japanese imports with every bell and whistle.
Only half the usual number of cars were in the lot. It looked as if a high percentage of the staff was at home, working through the modem. How many were already like Denny?
Side by side on the rainswept macadam, those cars reminded Loman of the orderly ranks of tombstones in a cemetery. Those quiescent engines, all that cold metal, all those hundreds of wet windshields reflecting the flat gray autumn sky, suddenly poemed a presentiment of death. To Loman, that parking lot represented the future of the entire town silence, stillness, the terrible eternal peace of the graveyard.
If the authorities outside of Moonlight Cove tumbled to what was happening there, or if it turned out that virtually every one of the New People was a regressive—or worse—and the Moonhawk Project was a disaster, the remedy would not be poisoned koolaid this time, like Reverend Jim Jones used down there in Jonestown, but lethal commands broadcast in bursts of microwaves, received by microsphere computers inside the New People, instantly translated into the language of the governing program, and acted upon. Thousands of hearts would stop as one, The New People would fall, as one, and Moonlight Cove would in an instant become a graveyard of the unburied.
Loman drove through the first parking lot, into the second, and headed toward the row of spaces reserved for the top executives.
If I wait for Shaddack to see that Moonhawk’s gone bad and to take us with him, Loman thought, he won’t be doing it because he cares about cleaning up the messes he makes, not that damn albino-spider-of-a-man. He’ll take us with him just for the blo
ody hell of it, just so he can go out with a big bang, so the world will stand in awe of his power, a man of such incredible power that he could command thousands to die simultaneously with him.
More than a few sickos would see him as a hero, idolize him. Some budding young genius might want to emulate him. That was no doubt what Shaddack had in mind. At best, if Moonhawk succeeded and all of mankind was eventually converted, Shaddack literally would be master of his world. At worst, if it all went bad and he had to kill himself to avoid falling into the hands of the authorities, he would become a nearly mythical figure of dark inspiration, whose malign legend would encourage legions of the mad and power-mad, a Hitler for the silicon age.
Loman braked at the end of the row of cars.
He wiped at his greasy face. His hand was shaking.
He was filled with a longing to abandon this responsibility and seek the Pressure-free existence of the regressive.
But he resisted.
If Loman killed Shaddack first, before Shaddack had a chance to kill himself, the legend would be finished. Loman would die a few seconds after Shaddack died, as would all the New People, but at least the legend would have to incorporate the fact that this high-tech Jim Jones had perished at the hands of one of the creatures he’d created. His power would be shown to be finite; he would be seen as clever but not clever enough, a flawed god, sharing both the hubris and the fate of Wells’s Moreau, and his work more universally would be viewed as folly.
Loman turned right, drove to the row of executive parking spaces, and was disappointed to see that neither Shaddack’s Mercedes nor his charcoal-gray van was in his reserved slot. He might still be there. He could have been driven to the office by someone else or could have parked elsewhere.
Loman swung his cruiser into Shaddack’s reserved space. He cut the engine.
He was carrying his revolver in a hip holster. He had checked twice before to be sure it was fully loaded. He checked again.
Between Shaddack’s house and New Wave, Loman had parked along the road to write a note, which he would leave on Shaddack’s body, clearly explaining that he had killed his maker. When authorities entered Moonlight Cove from the unconverted world beyond, they would find the note and know.
He would execute Shaddack not because he was motivated by noble purpose. Such high-minded self-sacrifice required a depth of feeling he could no longer achieve. He would murder Shaddack strictly because he was terrified that Shaddack would learn about Denny, or would discover that others had become what Denny had become, and would find a way to make all of them enter into an unholy union with machines.
Molten silver eyes …
Drool spilling from the gaping mouth …
The segmented probe bursting from the boy’s forehead and seeking the vaginal heat of the computer …
Those blood-freezing images, and others, played through, Loman’s mind on an endless loop of memory.
He’d kill Shaddack to save himself from being forced to become what Denny had become, and the destruction of Shaddack’s legend would just be a beneficial side-effect.
He holstered his gun and got out of the car. He hurried through the rain to the main entrance, pushed through the etched-glass doors into the marble-floored lobby, turned right, away from the elavators, and approached the main reception desk. In corporate luxury, the place rivaled the most elaborate headquarters of high-tech companies in the more famous Silicon Valley, farther south. Detailed marble moldings, polished brass trim, fine crystal sconces, and modernistic crystal chandeliers were testament to New Wave’s success.
The woman on duty was Dora Hankins. He had known her all of his life. She was a year older than he. In high school he had dated her sister a couple of times.
She looked up as he approached, said nothing.
“Shaddack?” he said.
“Not in.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“When’s he due?”
“His secretary will know.”
“I’ll go up.”
“Fine.”
As he boarded an elevator and pushed the 3 on the control board, Loman reflected on the small talk in which he and Dora Hankins would have engaged in the days before they had been put through the Change. They would have bantered with each other, exchanged news about their families, and commented on the weather. Not now. Small talk was a pleasure of their former world. Converted, they had no use for it. In fact, though he recalled that small talk had once been a part of civilized life, Loman could no longer quite remember why he ever had found it worthwhile or what kind of pleasure it had given him.
Shaddack’s office suite was on the northwest corner of the third floor. The first room off the hall was the reception lounge, Plushly carpeted in beige Edward Fields originals, impressively furnished in plump Roche-Bobois leather couches and brass tables with inch-thick glass tops. The single piece of art was a Painting by Jasper Johns—an original, not a print.
What happens to artists in the new word coming? Loman wondered.
But he knew the answer. There would be none. Art was emotion embodied in paint on a canvas, words on a page, music in a symphony hall. There would be no art in the new world. And if there was, it would be the art of fear. The writer’s most frequently used words would all be synonyms of darkness. The musician would write dirges of one form or another. The painter’s most used pigment would be black.
Vicky Lanardo, Shaddack’s executive secretary, was at her desk. She said, “He’s not in.”