Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World

  After a few minutes, he came within grasping distance of the lowest branch, and hung onto it, gratefully, getting his breath back. After a few seconds, he pulled himself up until he was seated on the branch, and replaced the belt in its trouser loops.

  The branch he was on was not one of those which extended out over the fence, above the grounds of 5514. He had to climb another four feet to find one that did. He straddled this limb and began inching his way out along its length.

  For the first dozen feet or so, it bore him firmly. But then as the branch narrowed, it began to bend downward under his weight. This was all to the good—this was what he had counted on, since the point where branch met tree trunk was twenty feet off the ground and he had hoped to get a good deal closer to the lawn inside the fence before jumping.

  But then as the branch creaked behind him and began to dip dangerously toward the breaking point, he paused and looked below. He was a good fifteen feet inside the fence and its tall hedge, and the ground was barely ten feet below him. There was nothing in sight to alarm him. So why had he hesitated?

  Then he heard it again—and recognized it as the sound that had triggered his inner alarm without his consciously identifying it. It was a low-pitched, growling whine.

  His eyes searched for the maker of the sound below him in the darkness—and this time he found it.

  It was a wolf, a male timber wolf, fully adult, weighing perhaps a hundred and forty pounds. It stood just below him on the lawn, tail half curved and motionless behind it, the jaws a little open, broad brow and eyes that were catching and reflecting the distant glint of the street light. The wolf gazed steadily up at him. There was a glint as of something metal above its brow, between the upheld, pointed ears.

  The whining growl broke off. It became all whine and shaped itself into chewed, barely recognizable words.

  “I am Lucas,” the wolf said. “And I have been told to kill.”

  * * *

  4

  Instinctively, Rafe tried to back up. But the branch dipped under him at the movement, and without visibly setting himself for the effort, the wolf shot into the air toward him. Rafe jerked his dangling feet up level with the branch, and white teeth clicked shut only inches below them as the branch lifted again. Rafe clung to it, not moving.

  Slowed by the broadcast power as he was, he had no intention of taking his chances on the ground with a beast like the one below. There had to be other ways of handling this situation than fencing a timber wolf with his bare hands.

  Lucas was still singing below him in a wavering combination of growl and whine. Feet hooked on the branch now, Rafe leaned forward a little—the branch trembled beneath him—and spoke to the wolf.

  “Lucas,” he said. “I’m here to see someone you know. Gabrielle. Can Gabrielle hear me if I talk to you?”

  The growling whine broke off for a moment, then picked up again.

  “Gabrielle?” said Rafe, raising his voice slightly. “This is Rafe Harald. I talked to you on the phone yesterday—or maybe it was the day before yesterday, now—from the Moon, about Ab. I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to get here, but Lucas has me trapped on a branch above your front lawn and I can’t go backward or forward.”

  He waited. There was no response but the steady, throaty warning of the wolf.

  “Gabrielle,” said Rafe loudly. “If you’re Ab’s sister, you know about his work. So do I. That ought to prove I’m no zombie. I know that Ab probably found some way of shielding people against the broadcast influence—or some way of counteracting it. The fact that Lucas here is moving around when the power’s on, in the middle of the night, shows Ab did something like that. If he did, that means that you can probably move around when the power’s on, too. You ought to be able to come out here and keep Lucas off me long enough for me to prove who I am. Gabrielle, can you hear me?”

  Still no answer but the sound of the wolf. Rafe looked down.

  “All right, Lucas,” he said. “I want to talk to Gabrielle. Gabrielle. Where’s Gabrielle?”

  The whine broke into a word.

  “No,” said Lucas.

  “You’re not the one to judge,” said Rafe. “Gabrielle will decide. Gabrielle wouldn’t want you to hurt me. I can’t seem to call her, but you can, I know. Call Gabrielle.”

  “No,” said Lucas.

  “Why not? Did Gabrielle tell you never to call her?”

  “No.” The wolf licked his jaws and whined, his eyes bright and steady on Rafe.

  “Then call her. Gabrielle would want you to call her when I come.”

  “No. You’re lying to me,” said Lucas. “Gabrielle would have told me if I was to call her.”

  “She didn’t know I was coming this soon,” said Rafe. “Look, you go get her. I’ll stay right here.”

  “No. But you stay.”

  “Lucas—” Rafe shifted the grip of his aching fingers on the branch. His balance on it with his feet up was precarious, sustained only by muscle power. Soon, before he lost his grip entirely, he would have to let himself drop and take his chances with Lucas if he could not talk the wolf into contacting Gabrielle. “Lucas, listen. Ab’s gone, isn’t he?”

  Whine and growl from below. No answer.

  “That’s right. Ab’s gone,” said Rafe. “And someone’s keeping him prisoner somewhere—” Rafe wondered for a second, fleetingly, how much of this Lucas could understand. “Any moment now, the same people who took Ab may come to take Gabrielle—”

  The whine and growl in Lucas’s throat rose to pure growl, to a snarl like thunder on the horizon.

  “Unless I can get to Gabrielle and help her, first,” said Rafe. “They’ll take Gabrielle away from you unless you call her for me, right now. Think, Lucas. It’s up to you. You want to do what’s right. You want to call Gabrielle and save her. Call Gabrielle, or they’ll come and take her away . . .”

  Rafe let his words trail off. Lucas was slowly backing up along the ground, moving backward from below the branch.

  “Good, Lucas,” said Rafe. “Very good. Call Gabrielle.”

  Rumbling in his throat, brilliant-eyed with reflected street light, shoulders hunched and tail low, Lucas continued to back away. Suddenly, with an abrupt howl, he turned and raced off into the darkness. For a long second there was silence, and Rafe hastily tried to release his cramped fingers from around the branch so that he could at least retreat to the tree before Lucas came back. Then the deafening clangor of an alarm bell erupted into life, and the exterior of a two-story, half-timbered house burst into appearance a hundred feet from him as floodlights went on all around it.

  Gratefully, Rafe let go of his branch and dropped. He hardly felt his landing on the turf and rolled over on his back, stretching his aching arms and numb fingers. He started to lift his head—

  And froze. The deep, throaty rumbling of a growl was just beside him. He turned his head slowly, and looked into Lucas’s face, inches from his own. The wolf was crouched beside him, his partly open jaws almost touching Rafe’s throat.

  “I won’t move,” whispered Rafe. “Easy, Lucas. Easy . ..”

  The rumbling growl went on. Wolf breath blew into Rafe’s nostrils, and saliva dripped from the open jaws onto Rafe’s neck. He felt its coolness through the cloth of his cravat.

  “I won’t move,” Rafe said. “Don’t worry, Lucas. I won’t move.”

  They stayed together without change for several more minutes. Then, abruptly, the clanging alarm bell shut off in mid-ring, but Rafe’s ears continued to echo the sound of it. There was what seemed like a long time of waiting before Lucas’s growl broke abruptly into a whine again, and his head shifted slightly to look beyond and behind the top of Rafe’s head.

  “Gabrielle?” said Rafe. He was careful to continue to lie still. “Are you there? I’m Rafe Harald, from the Far-Star Project on the Moon. I talked to you on the phone about Ab’s being gone, yesterday or the day before.”

  The whisper of something like a little breeze approached t
he top of his head. Lucas’s jaws were still at his throat, and Rafe did not dare turn his head to see.

  “Gabrielle?” he said.

  “What’s your middle name?” The feminine was young, but unyielding.

  “Arnoul,” said Rafe. “Rafael Arnoul Harald. When I called you the other day, I reminded you that Ab and I used to drink beer in a little three-two joint just off campus. But I didn’t tell you its name. It was the Blue Jug. You’d just gotten into high school then. Ab was eight years older than I was—and looked younger. Your mother and dad had just died two or three years before. Ask me anything else you want to know.”

  “You can get up,” her voice said, “in a minute. Lucas will bring you to me in the house. If you’ve got any weapons, leave them outside.”

  “I haven’t,” he said.

  There was again that strange whisper like a breeze on the grass, going away from him. He looked at Lucas. After a moment, the wolf rose, backed off slightly, and sat down, now making no sound at all.

  Rafe got slowly to his feet. Lucas rose again and moved off. Rafe turned and began to walk toward the brilliantly lit house. A glance back over his shoulder showed Lucas following, head low.

  They reached the front of the house.

  “Which way, Lucas?” asked Rafe. “The front steps?”

  “Yes,” said Lucas.

  They went toward the front steps and up them. The front door was not only unlocked but ajar. Rafe stepped in through it, and Lucas pushed through at his heels. Rafe turned to close the door and saw Lucas watching him.

  “That’s right, isn’t it?” Rafe said. “Should I close the door?”

  “I’ll do it,” said Lucas.

  He rose on his legs, putting his front paws against the door and pushing it closed with his weight. The latch clicked. There was a heavy metal bolt above the doorknob. Lucas took the fingerknob of the bolt in his teeth and pulled it closed. Then he dropped back onto four legs, once more facing Rafe.

  “Now where, Lucas?”

  “Back.” The wolf herded him down a central passageway to a door which let them into a room that seemed half a physical laboratory, half an electrical repair shop. At the far end of the room was a high bench or worktable with a solid front. Visible behind the bench from the waist up, facing him, was a brown-haired, long-boned, and startlingly pretty young woman who at first glance seemed to show no resemblance to the thirteen- or fourteen-year-old girl Rafe barely remembered from his university days. Only the rather wide mouth, which he remembered as capable of flashing sudden, all-encompassing smiles, was familiar. It was not smiling now.

  Lucas whined.

  “That’s all right, Lucas,” she said. “You don’t have to come in. Wait just outside the door—but leave the door open.”

  With something close to a single wag of his tail Lucas turned and went back through the doorway he and Rafe had just entered. He lay down just outside.

  “He’s not afraid of anything in here, Mr. Harald—if that’s really who you are,” Gabrielle said. “So don’t think he isn’t guarding you this minute. It’s just that something about this place makes him unhappy.”

  “It’s where Ab did the work on him, I suppose?” said Rafe.

  She shot a suddenly suspicious glance at him.

  “Work?” she said. “What work?”

  “There’s something on his skull between the ears,” answered Rafe. “I can’t see it here in the light, but I caught a glint from it, outside. And he does talk. That would be Ab’s sort of work, tying in somehow to the electrical responses of the brain in certain situations and using that tie-in to trigger sets of vocal responses. Something like that?”

  She gazed at him for a long moment.

  “You’re doing a lot of guessing, aren’t you?” Her voice was dry.

  “Am I?” Rafe answered. “But there’s the evidence—the talking and whatever there is on his skull. Although, come to think of it, I don’t suppose most people know enough about a timber wolf’s skull to recognize a change in its shape.”

  “Most people,” she said, and her voice was warmer now, “don’t know enough to know a timber wolf from a dog.”

  “They do if they’ve got dogs of their own along when they get close to the wolf,” said Rafe. “Haven’t any of your neighbors complained?”

  “None of the neighbors close around here have dogs,” she said. “Besides, I keep Lucas indoors during the day and only let him out at night. But I know what you mean. Any of the dogs around here that’ve seen Lucas, or smelled him, seem scared silly.”

  The initial suspicion was fading from her voice.

  “With reason,” said Rafe.

  “Probably.” She looked at him. “You certainly sound like Rafe the way I remember him. It was only once I saw you—when you dropped by the house to pick up Ab—and that was all.”

  “There were also the graduation ceremonies when Ab got his doctorate,” said Rafe.

  Gabrielle sighed suddenly like someone putting down a loaded weapon that was no longer needed.

  “All right,” she said, “You’re Rafe.”

  “Thanks,” said Rafe. “Can I call you Gaby?”

  “I never liked the name—” Suddenly she laughed. “But all right. Why not? Somehow, the way you say it, I don’t mind.” Her face sobered. “How did you get here so fast? And traveling at night? How did you know you could move around when the broadcast was on?”

  He laughed, a little shakily because of the exhaustion possessing him.

  “Is there some place we can go and sit down?” he said. “Then I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’ve been on the run since I left the Moon.”

  “Of course,” she said.

  She came around the end of the bench with the same small sound of a breeze blowing he had heard before—and she was traveling in an upright cylinder that fitted her to the waist and slid along on innumerable tiny jets of air.

  “That’s right,” she said, meeting his eyes, “I’ve been paralyzed from the waist down for three years. But Ab was helping me get over it. I was one of the first night’s accidents.”

  “First night’s accidents?” He followed her as she glided ahead of him, leading the way out into the central passageway and from there through another door into what was obviously a living room—a green-wallpapered room with heavy couches and armchairs. Lucas followed them in and curled up beside one of the chairs as she rode her vehicle to the very edge of the chair, then tilted its cylinder backward, and slid out into the chair. Relieved of her weight, the cylinder returned to upright position again, and the two rested like sentinels on either side of her—the whispering vehicle and the wolf.

  Rafe dropped into a chair opposite her. The thrumming inside him was wearing him down, like a nagging pain. He had to fight consciously against the urge to close his eyes and give in to the soporific effect.

  “Have you got any stimulants?” he asked.

  She looked at him sharply.

  “Dexedrine,” she said. “But it won’t help you against the broadcast.”

  He grimaced, running a hand over his neck as if to clamp down on the top end of the thrumming feeling within him.

  “Let me try some, anyway.”

  She turned to the wolf.

  “Lucas,” she said. “In the doughnut-to-fennel drawer of the lab. Package egg/potato.”

  Lucas rose and went out.

  “He’s an amazing animal,” said Rafe, looking after him. “The talking’s complicated enough. How’d you get him to memorize codes?”

  “It’s an easy code for him,” she said. “We’ve got an alphabet of kitchen odors—A for apple, B for bread, and E for egg and P for potato, in this case. I file things alphabetically and rub each filed item with one to three of the coded substances. His nose does the rest.”

  Lucas came back in with a heavy brown bottle in his jaws.

  “Take it to Rafe,” she said. Lucas brought the bottle and dropped it on Rafe’s knees. He opened it and took out a
couple of heart-shaped orange pills, looking at them distastefully. All but one of them, after a second, he put back in the bottle.

  “Come to think of it, you’ll want some water—”

  “No need.” He interrupted her, and hastily gulped down the single pill he held.

  “One’s not enough to do you any good, anyway,” she said.

  “Don’t be too sure—” he broke off, interrupting himself. “How long until daylight?”

  “This time of year?” she said. “Maybe four hours, now.”

  “And the broadcast goes off at daylight?”

  “Soon after that.” She looked at him curiously. “Why?”

  “Because by daylight, you and I are going to have to be far away from here. Never mind that now, though,” he said. “You were telling me you were one of the first night’s accidents? What first night?”

  “Didn’t you read about it even up on the Moon?” she said. “The first night they turned on the power broadcasts, everybody had been warned to be safely tucked away at home before sunset when the power would go on. I was one of the ones who shaved my time too thin getting home. I was driving back to the house here when the broadcast came on. When I woke up next morning, I was still pinned in the wreck of the car I’d crashed twelve hours before. They got me out a couple of hours later, and they patched me up. But my legs didn’t work.”

  “Nerve damage?” he said.

  “Nothing physiological they could find,” she answered. “They told Ab it had to be psychological. He didn’t believe them, bless him!” She blinked rapidly a couple of times. “His theory was that while I was unconscious the continuous power broadcast had conditioned my normal brain-wave pattern—held it distorted long enough so that it couldn’t snap back to normal again.”

  “Well,” said Rafe. “That was his field—brain-wave patterns.”