Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World

  “He said . . . ‘yes,’” she answered. “As if he had to tell me the truth whether he wanted to or not. But when I tried to talk to him some more about it, he wouldn’t say a word. That night, he put that bolt lock on the front door and locked himself up for nearly four hours in the lab with Lucas.”

  “With Lucas?” Rafe looked back at the wolf.

  “Lucas,” he said. “What happened that night just before Ab left that Gabby’s talking about? What did Ab do when you were in the lab with him?”

  Lucas looked back at him without answering.

  “Rafe, it’s no use your asking,” Gaby said. “Do you think I haven’t asked Lucas? And if he won’t tell me, he certainly won’t tell you.”

  “I have to guard,” said Lucas unexpectedly. He yawned, his long, wicked-looking carnassials glinting yellowly in the little light from the instrument panel. “Ab and Gabrielle. And I can kill.”

  He closed his jaws again and sat, as quietly inoffensive-looking as any bushy-furred domestic dog.

  “Lucas,” said Rafe. “Where’s Ab now? Do you know?”

  “No,” said the wolf. “But we’ll find him.”

  Rafe turned back to Gaby.

  “I hope so,” he said.

  “That’s what you came down from the Moon for, isn’t it?” Gaby asked. “To find Ab.”

  He nodded, thinking to himself, only half hearing her.

  “Why?” Gaby asked. “Why after all these years? You were part of Project Far-Star—you were one of the cosmonauts yourself—you didn’t need to get mixed up in our troubles.”

  “Your troubles are the world’s troubles,” said Rafe. “They’re also the troubles of the Project.”

  “Of the Project? The Project to put men out to Alpha Centauri and beyond?” There was disbelief in her voice.

  “The Project’s been hung up for nearly three years,” said Rafe bluntly. “Going no place. The plan depends on an adaptation of cryonics—near-freezing the cosmonauts so as to slow down their life processes and extend their shipboard lifetimes. We’d have one on duty and three cooled at all times—that was the idea. But keeping the human body at low temperatures that long has turned out to cause nerve damage.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Gaby was watching him. They sped along in silence for a moment through the still-moonlit farm country.

  “It’s very top secret,” Rafe said dryly.

  “But what’s it got to do with me—and Ab?”

  “Ab’s work has been pointing the way to literal, artificially induced hibernation for humans—without any freezing or drugs—for some time. I suggested him to the Project three years ago, but a screening committee turned down the idea of trying to hire him. Three days ago I got at the files of that committee’s action, and it was a washout.”

  “Washout?”

  “They decided against Ab for no good reason,” said Rafe. “They talked around the subject of what he could do for the Project, instead of ever really discussing it, then registered a vote of five to one against hiring him, on the basis that there was no clear evidence he could be useful—a nice, vague turndown.”

  “I still don’t understand,” said Gabby.

  “Someone rigged that committee result,” said Rafe. “Someone wanted Ab turned down—didn’t want him on the Project. And the only reason for that could be that someone was afraid that if he joined the Project, we’d actually get a ship off to one of the far stars. In not too pretty a word—sabotage.”

  Gaby shook her head.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Who has anything to gain by keeping an interstellar ship from being launched?”

  “Martin Pu-Li, perhaps,” said Rafe. “The Project Head, for one. Once interstellar ships start going out, the research and development end of the Project, which is his baby, would stop being the most important and would become secondary to the actual cosmonaut and launching programs. Only, it doesn’t have to be him. Someone else, people from Earth, could have got at that committee, too, through letters, phone calls—even through VIP visits, which we get every so often.”

  “But who on Earth—”

  “Like Martin,” Rafe said. “The men interested in maintaining the status quo. Pao Gallot. Bill Forebringer.”

  “Pao Gallot?” Gaby frowned. “Ab always talked about him as a completely dedicated man.”

  “Too dedicated, maybe,” said Rafe. “As long as his Core Tap power stations run the factories that barely keep Earth from starving to death, he’s the most important man in the world. Open up star routes so that even a few people have a hope of escaping the situation here and his importance is bound to be cut down somewhat.”

  “Not much.”

  “No. Not much,” admitted Rafe. “But Pao, Martin, and Forebringer are as close as fingers on the same hand. And Forebringer, of course, only has the police powers he has as an emergency measure until the food problem is licked some way. For my money—and I’ve had more than a year now to watch things and think about them—it could be any or all of them who don’t want anything changed and are ready to sabotage the Project or kidnap people like Ab to prevent it—”

  He broke off suddenly.

  “You never did tell me exactly how Ab was taken,” he said to her.

  “I don’t really know if he was—actually taken, that is,” Gaby said. “I mean, he may have gone voluntarily, but that’s hard to believe. I told you how he spent hours the night before with Lucas, and you saw how Lucas can’t or won’t tell us what happened then. But, Lucas—tell Rafe what happened the next morning, when I was asleep and the men came for Ab.”

  “Ab told me to hide,” said Lucas. “He said to stay out of sight of the men who came, so I did. I stayed in the kitchen when they came to the door.”

  “How many men were there?” Rafe asked.

  “Two,” said Lucas.

  “Ordinary men? Not shadows like we fought earlier tonight at the house?”

  “Two men with smell.”

  “They came to the door,” Rafe said. “Ab answered the door?”

  “Yes,” said Gaby. “It was early morning—you remember I told you on the phone. I was still upstairs. I heard the door and voices, but I didn’t think anything of it because it was daylight.”

  “Then what, Lucas?” Rafe asked the wolf.

  “Ab talked. They talked. At the front door.”

  “What did they talk about?”

  For a moment it did not seem that Lucas was going to answer. Then he spoke.

  “Forever,” he said.

  Rafe turned, leaving the car to the autopilot alone. He looked at Lucas.

  “Forever?” he echoed.

  “Forever,” answered Lucas. “Other things, but several times the two men said ‘forever.’ Once Ab said it. Then he went away with them, and closed the door behind them. I heard them drive away.”

  Rafe looked once more at Gaby.

  “Maybe it wasn’t an actual kidnaping, after all,” he said. “Maybe Ab wanted to go, for some reason.”

  “No,” said Lucas from the back. “He was sad to go. He hated the men who came. I smelled that on him.”

  “Hm-m,” said Rafe. He thought for a moment and then turned to Gaby. “And no message? He didn’t leave any word for you to find after he was gone?”

  “Just that we were to go with you if you came,” said Gaby. “To trust you.”

  Rafe did not start. But he looked slowly and searchingly at her.

  “You don’t think we’d have gone off with you just like that,” Gaby said, “if Ab hadn’t said something?”

  “I guess not,” said Rafe. “So, not only the six other men—Ab knew I was coming too?” He shot the word at her. “How?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” she said. She was sitting back against the far door of the two-wheeler as far from him as possible. From the back seat came the faint, throaty warning of a growl. Rafe made himself relax, in body and voice.

  “Maybe,” said Gaby, “the Old Man told him.” r />
  He considered her closely.

  “You really believe in this Old Man business, do you?” he said.

  “Not really . . . or at least not before Ab said he’d talked to him.” Her eyes were bright. “I didn’t even hear the name until about a year or so ago. You know we’ve lived awfully quietly here. Four years ago Ab got this continuing grant from the Basic Science Foundation for his research, with the only condition being he teach one class a week at the college. We hardly knew anyone to talk to, so probably we were the last to hear about the Old Man. Of course, we knew about zombies right from the beginning—”

  She laughed suddenly.

  “Naturally, come to think of it,” she said. “We were zombies ourselves—thanks to Ab. He and I and Lucas.”

  “Thanks to Ab?” Rafe asked. “None of you had natural immunity to the broadcasts?”

  “I”—she frowned—“don’t think so. I don’t exactly remember. I think Ab started working on me as soon as I came home from the hospital after my accident. Of course, Lucas was one of Ab’s experimental animals to begin with. Ab got him when he was only a few weeks old—you should have seen him as a cub!”

  “So Ab began work on you after you came back from the hospital?” echoed Rafe thoughtfully. “Do you remember anything about the broadcasts while you were still in the hospital?”

  She sat for a second, saying nothing. Suddenly she shuddered.

  “Yes,” she said. “I remember now. Nightmares.”

  “What kind of nightmares?”

  “I—” She did not finish the sentence. “I don’t remember exactly. But it wasn’t what was in the nightmares, it was the difference. The difference between here and there—between the real world and what it was like while dreaming.”

  She shook herself slightly, as if to shrug off the memory.

  “After I was home, Ab told me always to sleep in the daytime. Never to try to sleep while the broadcasts were on,” she said. “And he trained us to resist the broadcast and stay awake.”

  “Did he say why you shouldn’t sleep?”

  “It was something—” She frowned. “Yes, that was it. It was something to do with vulnerability. Just as he thought my individual brain-wave pattern had been heavily damaged by the broadcasts while I was unconscious in the wreck, he thought anyone could be slightly damaged if he was in natural sleep during the broadcasts. So, I gave up sleeping nights. So did he. And Lucas.”

  “What did Ab say about the zombies?” Rafe asked. “Did he have any idea how they got their natural immunity?”

  “He didn’t think there was any such thing as a natural immunity,” she said. “He pointed out that there was no such thing as zombie animals or birds who showed an immunity to the broadcast. He believed everyone, from the basic sleepwalker type on up to a zombie who could drive a car and get around and do purposeful things during the broadcast hours, was either a person who had been consciously trained to control the alpha-wave pattern of his brain or a person who had unconsciously trained himself to it.”

  Suddenly she turned her head to look full in his face.

  “How about you?” she said. “You show a real immunity, and Ab hadn’t worked on you. What makes you immune?”

  “Ab’s probably right,” Rafe said. “I read up on the zombies and the broadcast effect on the brain-wave patterns as soon as I heard about it—and I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder when it came to someone else seeming to do something I couldn’t. What I read led me to yoga, and I worked with that for a while. So you could say I’m both consciously and un consciously self-trained, in Ab’s terms.”

  “Pretty effectively self-trained, I’d say,” she said. “You get around as if it were easy.”

  “Don’t fool yourself,” he said. “When I move, it’s like wading through a heavy surf; and if I let myself go, I’d be asleep in ten seconds.”

  “But the way you fought back at the house, when you and Lucas fought those shadows or whatever I couldn’t see,” said Gabby. “You didn’t look then like you were wading through heavy surf.”

  “Remember, our perceptions are slowed too,” said Rafe. But he frowned. “Still, come to think of it, there’s more to it than just that. For some reason, twice now, when I thought I was fighting for my life, I seemed to get free of the effect of the broadcasts . . .”

  He described the fight with the two zombies at the street repair site, and the thrumming that had been inside him since he had come into the broadcast area, except during the two violent moments at the repair site and at the house.

  “It could be body adrenalin has something to do with counteracting the influence,” he said. “But that doesn’t make much sense, because adrenalin’s a stimulant and you saw how I reacted to the dexedrine. On the other hand, the Scotch, which is a depressant because of the alcohol in it, seems to help this thrumming feeling . . .”

  He felt worse the minute he mentioned it. They had been driving for some time now, and the padding effect of the Scotch he had drunk before leaving the house was almost gone. He had been ignoring the thrumming, but now that he mentioned it, he seemed to feel it shaking him apart inside.

  “I should have thought to bring some along,” he said through teeth set against the interior discomfort. “It’s like the old aspirin and hot-toddy cure for an asthmatic attack. No reason it should help, but it does. You don’t feel the thrumming—like that?”

  “No,” said Gaby, turning to the back seat. “Lucas, pass me my bag.”

  Lucas dipped his head and a second later slid the small overnight bag into the front seat. Gaby opened it up and took out a laboratory bottle filled with colorless liquid, its glass top secured with white adhesive tape.

  “I didn’t have much room, so I brought lab alcohol instead of a bottle of liquor,” she said. “I thought you could cut it with water and make it go that much farther.” She hesitated. “It’s been around for some weeks and picked up some water from the air. But it still must be about a hundred and eighty proof. You can’t drink it the way it is. We’ll have to find something to mix it with.”

  He consulted the map of the car’s auto-locator.

  “There’s a rest stop about ten miles ahead at the side of the road,” he said.

  They pulled off the unlimited-speed strip and slowed down to coast at last off the road at the rest stop—a rustic area by the roadside with tight-locked doors on log-cabinlike buildings and a white-basined water fountain.

  There were no cups. Rafe found a street map of Des Moines in the glove compartment of the car and folded it into a paper cup. He half-filled it from the fountain and took a gulp of the icy, iron-tasting water to moisten his mouth and throat first. Then he mixed another half-cup of the water with the lab alcohol.

  Even diluted, it exploded like a bomb inside him when he tossed it down. For a minute he stood breathing heavily through mouth and nose, and then they all got back into the two-wheeler. Five minutes later they were once more on the unlimited-speed strip, headed north, and the thrumming was being muffled within him.

  Twenty minutes after that they passed the Iowa-Minnesota border, but the sky to the east was graying.

  “We’re not going to make the Canadian border by daylight,” Rafe said. “And we don’t dare cross except when the broadcast’s on. We’ll try for Duluth and hole up for the day.”

  With the easing of the thrumming, Rafe’s mind began to wake and work again, slowly—because of the combined effects of the alcohol and the power broadcast—but certainly.

  He lost himself in thought as they hummed around the Twin Cities and headed north along the Lake Superior-Mississippi canal toward Duluth. Overhead the sky was growing steadily brighter. About ten miles short of Duluth they slowed, moved over across the lower-speed strips, and pulled off at last at the side of the road.

  “We’ll wait until a little after sunrise,” he said, “then go on in, find a motel, and say we had to spend the night by the side of the road when the broadcast time caught up with us.”
br />   They found a minor motel on North Shore Drive of the harbor city. Lucas lay quietly under a blanket on the floor of the rear seat of the two-wheeler while Rafe signed Gaby and himself in as Mr. and Mrs. Albert Nyisem from Ames, Iowa.

  “The broadcast time caught up with us, just twenty miles south of town,” said Rafe, yawning. “It’s no fun sleeping in a car.”

  “I guess not,” said the motel manager, a thick, fifty-year-old man with a tight smile and sharp eyes. “Every so often I see people like you come in who got caught. I suppose you want to get some decent sleep now in real beds?”

  “How right you are,” said Rafe.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, then,” said the manager. “Just hang the don’t disturb sign out on your doorknob, and I’ll tell the maid not to bother you. Sleep as late as you like and don’t worry about a thing.”

  “Thanks,” said Rafe.

  He drove the car around the motel to the cottage with the number matching that of the key he had been given. A couple of cottages down, another couple was just pulling out. As soon as they were gone, Rafe smuggled Lucas into their own cottage. Gaby had already carried in her bag and drawn the various drapes and blinds over the windows.

  “What now?” she asked, as Rafe put the Do Not Disturb sign on the outside of the door, closed it, and shot the bolt inside.

  “Now we get some rest,” he said. “I’ll pay for a second night, but we’ll take off again and get out of sight of anyone by the time dark comes and the local broadcast starts. Tonight we ought to make Nipigon. Then it’s a case of tracing those zombies who were waiting for me at the street repair spot. If we can make a connection there, it shouldn’t take long to find out who sent them, and who’s got Ab. There aren’t that many zombies in the world to make a long chain of command from whoever’s in charge to the men who were waiting for me at your place.”

  She nodded, took her bag, and went into the bathroom of the motel. Rafe lay down, still fully clothed, on one of the twin beds in the room and pulled over him a blanket that was lying folded at the bottom of the bed. He was instantly asleep. . . .

  He awoke, abruptly, to a hammering on the door. Gaby, wearing a white nightgown, was sitting up in the other bed with the sheets and blankets half covering her. Lucas stood silent, but rigid, on the carpet in the center of the room, facing the door.