The House of Doors - 01

  Liquid!

  He lifted the thigh, poured out the contents of the tube-metal “bone,” watched it splash onto a rusted iron surface. It was inert; it seeped into the rust, darkening it; it reacted with the ferrous oxide and began to evaporate.

  Liquid? Gill wondered. The blood of an alien—or his flesh? Just how alien is the bastard, anyway? Then, disgusted, he kicked the stump aside.

  Barney was still wagging furiously. He barked, growled, yelped, skittered here and there. “It’s okay,” Gill told him, trying to calm him down. “And don’t worry, this time I’m not going to leave you. We’ll stick together.” Maybe Turnbull had been right in the first place. What was it he’d said, about the dog being more valuable than Varre?

  “He’s stayed alive a couple of years longer than we’re likely to last,” the big man had said. “We might be able to learn a few things from this dog … .”

  And Angela: hadn’t she thought that Barney had wanted them to follow him? Gill knew he was on the track of something, and he probed at something else—a loose connection—wriggling there in the back of his mind. Then he had it. When they’d opened that door on the as-yet-unexplored world of mists, out of which Haggie had staggered like a ghost into their arms, they had heard in the distance the howling of a dog. Not the sound a predatory wolf makes but a perfectly acceptable howling; the mournful voice of a lost, miserable animal. Barney’s voice? And if so, then how had he made his way from that place to this one?

  Just how had Barney survived? What secrets were locked in his dog’s brain? Gill fondled his ears and thought, God, how I wish you could talk! Well, he couldn’t—but talking wasn’t the only means of communication. Old Hamish Grieve had been a gillie, hadn’t he? And if Barney’s master had been a gamekeeper, then the dog could well be a tracker, sniffer, finder, all manner of things. Gill wished he knew more about dogs and their specialist abilities. But certainly Barney must be of above-average intelligence.

  Gill yawned and his mind suddenly felt quite light, detached almost, incapable of concentration. Knackered, he told himself, nodding. Not physically but mentally. He went to the iron cave’s mouth and looked out. The atomic sun was still setting, with maybe an hour left to darkness. That had to be wrong but Gill didn’t question it. It was his belief that these worlds were made to order, by the House of Doors or whatever controlled the House of Doors. Whether one arrived in daylight or darkness was a matter of chance. The worlds were freshly created each time, for each visit. They were … projections on a 3-D screen? Where that idea came from Gill couldn’t say.

  He shook his head and blinked rapidly; but it was no good, he couldn’t think straight. “Barney,” he said, “we’re going to rest, you and I. Or I am, anyway.” He looked at the rust-scabbed metal junk lying all around, and at the unmetal debris of Bannerman and Varre. Dismembered machines and men. “Sleep,” he said, “yes—but not here.”

  Some little distance from the cave they found a large bin with a curved bottom. It had circular portholes in its sides, a hinged, galvanized lid, and as a bonus it wasn’t attached to any other piece of machinery. Shivering a little as the atomic sun set, Gill climbed in and Barney joined him. And through the rest of the night they shared each other’s warmth … .

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Gill dreamed, and in his dreams tried to resolve certain problems. Bannerman’s empty face smiled his unsmile as he drifted aloft. He had only one leg, and his stump dripped blood and steaming, alien fluids, but he smiled his unsmile. Under the flesh—the synthetic flesh—of his guise, he wore a harness which defied gravity, sustaining his liquid body. And he passed unsmiling into the heart of a many-faceted sphere, through a door formed of one of the facets.

  Then the dream changed. A projector whirred and Gill was part of the huge screen that flickered into being. He lay flickering on the side of a flickering dune in a flickering rust desert. A door opened in the dune and Varre’s flickering hand came crawling out of it, crawling towards Gill. The unseen projector settled down; the whirring and flickering ceased; Varre’s hand formed itself into a fist and shook itself at Gill—then opened into slavering wolf jaws that lunged at his face!

  Gill started awake in a cold sweat, and snatched back his face out of the beam of faint coloured lights which crawled into his refuge through a porthole. Then, cautiously, shivering, he looked out and saw that it was night in his machine world. Barney was sitting watching him, yellow-eyed in the galvanized steel bucket’s gloom. Gill propped himself up on one elbow, looked out again through the porthole and saw that there was life here—mechanical life—even at night. But so weird that it was almost a continuation of his dream.

  Against an indigo-turning-black horizon, a distant skyline of rusting rods, corkscrew spires and slumped scaffolding was lit by red- and orange-pulsing fires, like a row of coke ovens or blast furnaces roaring in the darkness. Their fire bellows voices reached to him faintly across miles of silence: Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh! Closer at hand but deep down in the bowels of the junk, a great hammer gonged dully like a subterranean pile driver: ker-thump! Ker-thump! Ker-thump! Its vibrations came up through the bottom of the bucket like blood pounding in a sleeper’s ear.

  Shifting his position, Gill looked out from a porthole on the other side of the bucket; in that direction the machine city’s silhouette had a scattering of lights, white and yellow and green. Set against a great patch of darkness, something gigantic nodded twin, shining hammerheads monotonously over a revolving yellow light. Chains rattled rustily, clanked into silence, then rattled again—and so on. Some strange wheeled thing on a gantry trundled to and fro, with lights fore and aft that changed colour with each change of direction.

  In the sky the stars were bright silver ball bearings, all the same size, radiating their light in faint, aurora waves … .

  Nothing made any sense, not now that Gill was awake. But he remembered his dream, and part of that at least had made some kind of sense. Dreams, he told himself, are the junkyards of the mind, where subconscious vacuum cleaners suck up and dispose of the wrack and rubble of the waking world. But occasionally there may be nuggets in the junk, diamonds in the dust and the cobwebs.

  Gill’s mind was clean and fresh now. His body might be dirty, bruised, pitted, but he was brand new. He took out the silver-cylinder weapon and looked at it in the faint beam of coloured light weaving in through the porthole. Why, compared with the machines out there—those utterly worthless, aimless, futile machines of his nightmares—the tool in his hand seemed hardly enigmatic at all! They were the fractions which wouldn’t convert into decimals. They were the aliens. At least this tool had a purpose. In this world, it was the only tool with a purpose.

  The weapon seemed suddenly alive in Gill’s hand; his mind touched it … he understood it. He let it lie across the palms of both hands, rolled it in his fingers, felt of its essence. And like the links of a Chinese puzzle it fell into two perfect halves, one in each hand!

  Gill looked at one of the halves: three inches long by three-quarters of an inch in diameter, blunt-tipped. The business end. This is where the power is focused. He touched a fingertip to the freshly exposed metal, which indented like mercury. But when he tilted the tube it didn’t run, and when he flicked it with his fingernail it was hard as steel. Each molecule knows its task: to intensify and pass on the current to the point of application, the cutting edge.

  He looked at the other half of the cylinder. This is the power source, the battery. A ten-sided crystal as big as the last joint of his little finger, so green that Gill must shutter his eyes against the intensity of its colour, floated to the surface of the now fluid metal. It lay there exposed for a moment, and Gill checked that it was fully charged. He “knew” that it was fully charged; and once he had checked it, it sank back out of sight again.

  And when power is beamed to it, this is its receiver. Gill touched the end of the rod in a certain way, as simple as pressing the stud on an electric cigarette lighter, and a tiny mesh of fi
laments composed of the liquid metal rose up from the metal for inspection. Gill saw that it was perfect, that the weapon—the tool—was in proper working order. He had completed his inspection. Hardly daring to breathe, he put the two halves together and they fused into one.

  Then he went through the entire process again, but faster, with a new dexterity. He applied an alien touch to an alien machine and it responded. There were no nuts and bolts here to be coaxed or forced, no screws to be unscrewed; to know how was the whole trick; to understand was to master. Now Gill could visualise the line of threes marching to infinity. He felt that if he were a mathematician, he could square the circle, could realise pi to its last decimal place. Uncluttered by mundane machine preconceptions, his machine mind had learned, had acted, instinctively.

  Even a newborn baby, who knows nothing, knows enough to breathe. All he needs is a pat on the backside to start him off, and after that it’s a question of survival. And Gill knew that he’d just received his pat on the backside.

  “Barney,” he said out loud, but softly, wonderingly, “go back to sleep, boy. Tomorrow’s another day—with any luck.” Barney did sleep, but for Gill it was much harder. The word “projection” had stuck in his brain like a tomato seed in his teeth: it had been there all the time without his knowing it. But his dream had brought it back to mind, and now he remembered how and where and who had used it.

  Angela, when she’d said that the House of Doors was a projection, and that each materialisation was just another cross section through the same basic structure. She’d also said that each door was like a beam switched off the moment they used it; and that the lamp—the projector—was still there but pointing in another direction. Obviously these things she’d said had made an impression on Gill, which had finally crystalised in his dream.

  But … a projection needs a projector—a lamp—and it also needs a screen. Gill tried to picture it: a 3-D projector, projecting solids, using entire synthesised worlds for its screens? But why not? Gill was after all contemplating a science which could replicate flesh into facsimile human beings, and motorise them, and use them as the transports or vehicular appendages of the alien creature inside!

  And so, with these things and one other on his mind, Gill found it hard to sleep. The other thing was Angela herself: he kept wondering about her—where she was now—and hoping that she wasn’t where he thought she might be. For if it was that place … he could (but refused to) imagine what it must be like. In their worlds it had killed Varre and Clayborne. They had died from their own worst nightmares. Which was why Gill found it hard to sleep, because he knew that when he did, this time he’d probably dream of Angela dying of hers. And right now, and for as long as it took before they were together again, Gill knew that this would be his worst nightmare, too … .

  Sith of the Thone was furious, outraged, injured. Not only had he been damaged in a physical sense, but also in a place where it hurt almost as badly—in his pride. Twice now the ingenuity of men, their savage instinct for survival, had undone him and made a mockery of his planning—and that was twice too often.

  So far the game had been played more or less in accordance with the rules. Oh, there had been unforeseen circumstances (such as the criminal Haggie, and Barney the dog, which were not properly part of the scenario) but given that the combinations were almost infinite, the rest of it had gone fairly well to schedule—for the most part. Two members of the test group had reached their personal breaking points and allowed themselves to be forced out of play: they had “died”. But instead of weakening the resolve of the survivors, this had seemed to serve only to intensify it. Occasionally their logic moved dangerously close to truth, their extrapolations furnished glimpses of fact.

  By now, all of them should have been eliminated; by surviving they had in effect passed the tests. Individuals had fallen but as a group—and more importantly as a race—they had proved themselves worthy. At least according to the book of rules. But Sith was gamesmaster here, and the rules no longer applied. He could bend them any way he liked, even break them entirely. Which was precisely what he intended to do.

  Adding to his fury—heaping fuel on the fire of his frustration—was the sure knowledge of his own fallibility, the irrefutable evidence of his errors. To have lost a Thone tool was bad enough, and that the man Gill should have found it, kept and learned how to use it was worse, but that it had now been used on Sith himself … unthinkable! And yet Sith could only blame himself, in that he had failed to appreciate the full potential of Gill’s talent, failed to consider all of the possibilities.

  And yet who could have foreseen it? If a human being accidentally allowed a machine gun to fall into the hands of a chimpanzee, would he really fear that the creature might of its own accord learn how to load, aim and fire the thing? But Gill had learned, and was presumably still learning. And that was a process which must be terminated just as soon as possible,

  Except … it would seem a very impersonal sort of revenge, to let the synthesizer do all the work. And this was now a very personal thing—indeed, a vendetta. Sith not only desired to be there when the end came, he wanted Gill and Turnbull—yes, and the others, too—to know that he was there, and that he was the author of their destruction.

  Rules? There could be no more rules. It was time now to apply real pressure, to set the grinder working that much faster and rapidly reduce these “survivors” to so much mindless refuse—as he himself might easily have been reduced to a stain! It was a terrible thought, that last: that the future Grand Thone had almost fallen prey to a primitive! But if Gill had cut the Bannerman construct higher, if he’d sliced through the nerve chain between brain and motor system …

  Well, it had not come to that; Sith had lost only the lower half of one of his three mobilizers—a tentacle tip. But even that had been sufficient to destabilise his system and cause him the human equivalent of great pain. If it had been the other leg, then that were even worse. That limb had housed both of Sith’s remaining tentacles, and his pain and outrage would be that much greater.

  As it was he’d been obliged to synthesise the missing portion of the mobilizer, which would be shed when his mainly liquid body replaced it. A matter of days. Thus the physical pain no longer existed, but the damage to his pride remained.

  In the synthesizer’s control room, Sith commanded the master locator to seek out the individual members of the test group. The search was made at random and with reflex rapidity, and Sith viewed with keen interest the plight of Angela Denholm on one of his screens.

  Her own, personal nightmare was being enacted on a world of oceans and beaches, blue skies and seas, grassy plains and flowering forests. The world’s creatures, which variously walked, flew and swam, were in the main small, pretty, and fairly unintelligent things. With some small changes the planet would have made a perfect Thone habitat; alas, its parent sun was rapidly evolving and showing signs of that process which must soon—in some several thousands of years—destroy it. Recorded long ago and now reproduced by the synthesizer, it might well have been the girl’s idea of paradise—with a certain exception. And that was the very essence of her nightmare: to have her beautiful world, her existence, marred and brutalised by her husband, Rod Denholm.

  Now she fled from him—fled indeed from a great many Rod Denholms—through the forests and waterways of that world. The world was real enough, but her pursuers had never lived there; they were the product of the synthesizer, enhanced and given loathsome sentience only by Angela’s own conception of Denholm’s mind. But as long as she fought and fled she would overcome, win, survive the test. For she was a strong one, stronger far than Varre and Clayborne had proved to be, and Sith had no doubt but that she would survive it—or would have, according to the rules. But not according to his rules. For now he contemplated the introduction of a new element into the game, over which the synthesizer would have no control whatsoever.

  Towards that end he now graphed one of Angela’s pursuers and fed the
resultant profile to a secondary locator. Scanning externally, the locator radiated its beam sweepingly outwards from the Castle on Ben Lawers and found the real Rod Denholm awaiting trial in his cell in a Perth police station … .

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  David Andersen—who, for a high-ranking MOD minister, was now as disreputable a sight as anyone could ever wish to see—had felt the sudden rush of air as the coffin-shaped door sucked him in; he’d closed his eyes and heard the door’s sepulchral clang as it slammed shut behind him, and a moment later had gone sprawling to his hands and knees. Then—

  There was noise all around him, tumultuous noise, which at first served only to further alarm him. His confused brain had not known what to expect; but whatever it might have expected, it was certainly not this. Still clutching his cigarette lighter in a palsied hand, finally Anderson wincingly, cringingly opened his eyes.

  Sight and sound coordinated, and the resultant revelation was almost too much for him. He looked out into a street, one of the world’s most famous streets, and could scarcely believe his eyes.

  “Oxford Street?” he said then, his jaw hanging slack and his eyes starting out. “Oxford bloody Street?” He drew air in a huge gasp, and let it out in a shout of joy. “Bloody wonderful for-God’s-sake Oxford Street!”