Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World

  “Wait, now,” he said, halting. “We’ve got to get a car, someplace.”

  “Down below,” said Lucas. “A lot of cars. I can smell them.”

  Some search turned up an elevator which dropped them to a parking garage under the building. The garage was filled with police cars, but there were a few civilian models. None of these had the keys in them. But Lucas, following his nose, found a board hanging in a small office at the back of the garage with a number of keys on it—and his nose identified the key belonging to the car Rafe picked. Next to the board was a row of lockers. The fifth one down yielded civilian clothes of about Rafe’s size. He put these on, and with the key returned to the car. The automatic doors of the garage unlocked and opened before them as they drove up to them, and minutes later they were on North Shore Drive, headed toward the Canadian border.

  The border was nothing but two dark, locked station buildings, one U.S., one Canadian, past which they traveled without even slowing down. They wheeled north past Fort William and Port Arthur and swung into the dark, still-small town of Nipigon as the control-board clock in their car showed a little less than two hours remaining before sunrise.

  As they reached the edge of the town, Rafe slowed precipitously. There was a small rustle from the back seat where they had laid Gaby, followed by Gaby’s voice saying, “Oh!”

  A second later she spoke again.

  “Where am I?”

  Rafe risked one quick glance back over his shoulder. She was sitting up. He pulled the car to a halt at the side of the street and then turned about. Lucas was already over the back of the front seat where he had ridden with Rafe, and beside Gaby, trying to lick her face.

  “Lucas, stop it!” She pushed the wolf back. “Where are we?”

  “How do you feel?” Rafe asked.

  “All right,” she said. “Why shouldn’t—oh, I remember. They were going to give me some kind of injection.”

  “Didn’t they?” Rafe asked.

  “I guess they did.” She felt the upper part of her left arm. “Yes, it’s sore. But that’s one of the things Ab was training me to handle as part of teaching me to use my legs again. In case of anything that might make me unconscious again while a broadcast was on, I immediately went into a special state of brainwave pattern in which the broadcast couldn’t affect me and all the natural defenses of my body were mobilized against whatever had made me unconscious. It seems to have handled whatever they shot me with.“

  He looked at her curiously.

  “How did Ab work with you?” he asked.

  “The same way he worked with Lucas and the other experimental animals,” she answered. “He did a lot of brain-mapping of each individual. Then he charted what he theorized were aberrations in that individual’s pattern. Then he blocked off the aberrant pattern if he could and tried to replace it—override it if he couldn’t block it out—by training the individual to use another pattern.”

  “How’d he do this ?” Rafe glanced at the odd shape of Lucas’s skull. “Electrodes into the brain at specific points?”

  “Not for the last few years,” she said. “He used a short-range—very short-range—transmitting device, something like the powerful ones that transmit the power broadcasts. Though, of course, the power broadcasts are just crude, massive spoutings of energy, and his little machine was highly selective and variable.”

  “In that case,” he said, “why does Lucas have—”

  “That device on his head?” she answered.

  “Lucas is a special case. A wolf hasn’t any natural speech center in his brain, like a human has. Ab had to build a mechanical one for him. That’s it on his skull. You can’t see it, but he’s also got an artificial larynx, and artificial vocal cords as well, with a special attachment to take the place of the work human lips and mouth do—otherwise he couldn’t make understandable sounds, even with the speech center.”

  Rafe whistled softly in admiration.

  “Actually,” Gaby went on, “Lucas still doesn’t speak in the sense that we do. He has a microcomputer surgically implanted at the base of his skull. What happens is that his brain’s electrical activities key off certain speech patterns, and these patterns select prerecorded speech impulses from the computer which are fed to the artificial voice mechanisms in his throat area. That’s why you can sometimes ask him something and get no answer at all. It’s because you’ve asked for something his computer section isn’t programmed to supply—even if he actually knows the answer himself.”

  Rafe frowned sharply.

  “You mean Lucas could know some things we need to know right now, and still not be able to tell us?” he demanded.

  “Why, yes. That’s what I was telling you—” Gaby broke off suddenly. “Of course! I’m so used to taking his not answering for granted I forgot how much difference it might make to us right now—”

  She interrupted herself again and turned to Lucas, who was sitting on the back seat of the car beside her.

  “Lucas,” she said, “do you really know where Ab is? Do you really know, but can’t tell us?”

  The wolf whined and tried to lick her face. She fended him off and then petted him.

  “We’ll find him,” said Lucas. “Then I can kill.”

  “Well?” asked Rafe from the front seat. “Do you think he knows?”

  “I’m . . . not sure,” she said. “There’s no reason I can think of he couldn’t give us a straight yes or no to that question. Unless Ab deliberately conditioned him not to say.”

  “That last night before he disappeared you said he had Lucas in the lab for several hours . . .”

  She nodded.

  “Yes, he could have done something like that then.”

  “Well,” Rafe turned back to the controls. “Whichever it is, we’ve only got a couple of hours left until daylight. Let’s see if we can locate this Crazian’s Corner before then.”

  “Crazian’s Corner?”

  “Don’t you remember?” he said, putting the car back into motion. “The service slip I found in the car with the Ontario license plates and the two zombies from the road repair spot.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember now—” Her voice took on a faintly worried note. “Rafe, you don’t think the broadcast damaged me after all, while I was lying there in the police station drugged?”

  “No,” he said. But, to himself, he was not so sure . . . .

  They found a roadside public telephone and looked up Crazian’s Corner in the local phone book. The address given was 4023 Manchester Drive, which turned out, when they reached it, to be a small complex of vehicle service center, restaurant, grocery, and disposable garment shop.

  Rafe broke the glass of the service center door. An alarm bell began to clang. Ignoring it, he opened the door and let them inside. More because it was annoying than for any other reason, he located the inside wires to the shouting alarm high on an outside wall of the building, and snapped them. The noise ceased.

  He turned up the lights inside the center and began to hunt for the sales-receipt file. By the time he had located it in a drawer of a desk in the center’s small office, Gaby and Lucas had found the door to the adjoining restaurant and gone through it. Rafe pawed through the receipts, which were arranged by date, and after a while discovered one that matched the flimsy slip he had taken from the car of the two zombies at the street repair in Grinnell. The customer’s signature on the seller’s copy was just barely legible. It was Darrell Hasken. He turned to the local phone book and found a Darrell Hasken listed.

  He went to get Gaby and Lucas, but as he stepped through into the restaurant, the delicious odor of frying bacon and eggs surrounded him.

  “Hungry?” called Gaby from behind the counter, upright in her vehicle.

  He was starved.

  They were all starved. It was another twenty minutes before they had finished eating. They went back through to the service center and out the door where he had broken in. Outside the sky was paling, but the shadows were st
ill thick on the ground—so that he did not see their attackers until they were actually upon them. There were more of them this time, full men, not shadows, and they moved with more facility and speed than the zombies he had yet encountered.

  He heard Gaby screaming and the snarl of Lucas rising over the shouts of the attackers. Then something like a heavy cloth was wrapped about him and stifled him into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  8

  The next thing Rafe knew, he was seated in an aircraft capable of holding perhaps twelve passengers, and with that awareness began a peculiar period in which he was not completely in control of himself.

  The aircraft was flying at a great height. The three times Rafe summoned up the energy to look out the window beside his seat, he saw first an endless expanse of water, then a landscape of ice and snow, and finally barren-looking plains, rising to a range of mountains dead ahead.

  He found he could not work up any immediate concern or alarm about his situation. It was not as if he had been drugged. It was rather as if he were mentally isolated in a warm cocoon of indifference. As long as he made no effort to move or think, he sat quite comfortably in something like a pleasantly absent-minded state. But even the desire to move his head and look out the window seemed to require a massive effort.

  He made that effort again, to look across the aisle of the aircraft at the seat opposite him. Gaby sat in it, gazing straight ahead with a placid expression. Lucas was nowhere to be seen.

  Rafe turned his head to look forward again himself—the return movement was easy, effortless—and withdrew back into his cocoon. With his gaze front, he could see his hands lying open on his knees. He was not tied or secured in any way except for this compulsion which made doing and thinking nothing infinitely easier than movement and thought.

  He sat, nonthinking.

  After a little while he became vaguely conscious of a faintly nagging sensation in the back of his mind—the same sort of nagging sensation that afflicts someone who has just left home and is vaguely troubled by the thought of something forgotten or not done.

  The feeling continued. It was like a small animal gnawing away at him below the platform level of the indifference that held him. Gradually, without realizing exactly how he had come to realize it, he woke to the fact that the small, gnawing uneasiness was a part of his mind which was somehow below, behind, or out of reach of whatever held the rest of him in a cocoon of indifference; and it was struggling against the effect of that indifference on the rest of his mind.

  He watched the activity of this small uneasiness for some while, as the aircraft bored silently through the upper atmosphere. As he continued to watch, its image sharpened. It was, he saw, that instinctive part of him which had never been able to admit that others could do something he could not. That element of him which was not capable of accepting defeat.

  It could not accept now the fact that he was being held physically and mentally inactive against his will. It insisted on trying to struggle. As his own feeling of it became clearer, there gradually seeped into his upper mind the concept that possibly he could carry on his thinking on his lower level where the nagging lived, without interference from what was holding him captive.

  He tried it.

  It was a strange way to think, he found. It required pure thought—thought without the color of emotion, without the concrete imagery of words or symbols.

  His own will and intent, considered this way, were a bundle of forces; against them, at the moment, another force was being applied to immobilize him. This other force was turning his own strength back upon himself. He recognized the outside force then, by an intuitive, spark-gaplike mental jump, as a broadcast similar to the power broadcasts that ei> forced slumber on the world during its dark hours. Only this was a broadcast that was more selective, inhibiting thought and movement without putting him to sleep.

  However—intuition sparked again in him below the level of conscious thought—if he could resist the ordinary power broadcasts, then this transmission also ought to be something he could resist—if he could only identify the pattern of its attack and work around it.

  Below the level of conscious thought, his mind began to wake and move about, feeling its strength on this lower level like a sleeping giant roused after a lifetime of slumber.

  Everything that could be done on a conscious level could be done here as well, he saw—but in different terms. It was as if the language of his thought had been forced to change from algebra to calculus. The two languages were apparently completely dissimilar, but they were joined together in the root that was himself.

  In fact, maybe he could do more with the calculus of thought than he had formerly been able to do with the algebra of it. He explored, feeling about like a blind man, with this lower level of his mind, and felt Gaby’s mind, close by, but unaware of his.

  He felt out for Lucas—and came up hard against the live and burning identity that was the wolf. Lucas, it seemed, thought more on this level than on the conscious, human level which was alien to him.

  Lucas was not with them on the aircraft.

  “Why not?” Silently, the lower mind of Rafe formed the question.

  “Ab told me to hide when the men came who took him away,” Lucas answered, at once from a great distance and from no distance at all. “You told me to run and hide from the motel in the city last night. When you and Gabrielle were both unconscious and I saw I could not win, I got away, instead, and hid.”

  “Where are you now?” asked Rafe mentally, meaning, Where is your physical body now? because all that was nonphysical of Lucas was right beside him on the aircraft at that moment.

  “Near where they caught us,” Lucas answered. “A little way from there is the edge of the town we were in, and beyond that edge are the woods—the north woods where I was whelped. In the woods I’m safe.”

  “Are you hurt, Lucas?”

  Amazingly, like an invisible whirlpool, the air just in front of Rafe’s eyes seemed to spin and thicken into an image of the wolf’s mask. Lucas looked into his eyes from a distance of less than a foot.

  “No,” said Lucas.

  “I can see you, Lucas.”

  “I can see you,” the mind of Lucas replied. “I can’t see Gabrielle, but I can feel she’s all right—only she’s something like sleeping.”

  “She’s all right,” Rafe thought. “Lucas, tell me. Can you see Ab?”

  “No.”

  “Can you feel Ab the same way you can feel Gabrielle?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where Ab is?”

  “Yes. No,” said Lucas. “I can feel Ab out there, somewhere, but where there is, I don’t know. But we will find him.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Ab promised me we would find him.”

  Rafe thought for a while, considering the situation with the unfamiliar calculus of his lower thoughts.

  “Can you tell me, Lucas,” he thought, “are we—Gaby and I and the rest of us on this plane—going toward where Ab is now?”

  “No,” said Lucas promptly. “Ab’s not the way you’re going. He’s off another way.”

  “How can I find him?”

  “A man knows a man knows a man knows.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rafe said.

  “A man who knows a man who knows a man who knows.”

  The last two statements of Lucas’s did not fit the calculus of Rafe’s lower mind. Rafe mentally tried them in several different patterns—and then suddenly realized what the difficulty was. Lucas was, like himself, thinking on the asymbolic lower level of the mind, but the question Rafe had asked had only been answerable in the symbolic words fed to the wolf by the implanted microcomputer of his artificial speech mechanism.

  It was as if Rafe had asked the chemical nature of a substance and the only way the answer could be given was in the terms of an inadequate and ancient alchemy.

  “It’s all right,” he said to Lucas. “Stay wh
ere you are now. We’ll come back for you.”

  “Yes,” said Lucas. “You’ll come back for me. Meanwhile, no one else can find me. I’ll wait.”

  The image of the wolf face faded from Rafe’s vision. He turned his attention back to the aircraft and those in it.

  He could feel the presence of the others aboard now, as he had felt the presence of Lucas. There were eight of them on the aircraft, and, surprisingly, all except the two men at the controls seemed to be under some variation of the same sort of transmitted pressure that was keeping him helpless in his seat. Or was he helpless in his seat? He had met the problem of the power broadcasts by retraining his mind and body to operate under an enforced pattern of electrical activity of his brain that normally accompanied deep sleep. If he could retrain himself to operate in spite of one type of transmission, he ought to be able to retrain himself to operate in spite of another—this present one. He relaxed, letting his body sag back in the chair, and reached for that calm of mind which would be solid ground on which to stand while he operated.

  Peace. Accept all; oppose nothing. Thus is victory invariably achieved over any and all opposing forces.

  I am who I am . . . who I am . . . who I am. I . . . I . . . I . . . and none other . . . I and none other . . . I . . .

  An hour or so later, the aircraft began to descend, halted in mid-air, and made the final stages of descent vertically. As it touched ground, Rafe felt his conscious control of his body slide like a hand out of one glove and into another—where he was suddenly free. He glanced about. No one was looking.

  Experimentally, he made an effort to rise from his seat. His muscles responded without struggle. There was no longer any effective opposition from the pressure of the pattern being transmitted to him.

  He sat back in his seat and waited. He was still aware of the pattern that had been controlling him. Shortly, he felt it pushing him to stand and leave the aircraft. He stood as if it still controlled him. The others about him were also standing. Together they left the plane.

  They stepped out into sunlight, but almost immediately, a shadow replaced the light. Glancing up, he saw it was the shadow of an almost vertical cliff of reddish granite, into which the metal pad where their aircraft had landed was being withdrawn like a tongue back into its mouth. A moment later, aircraft and passengers alike were inside the wall of rock, and a vertical door was sliding down to cover the massive slot, a hundred feet wide and thirty feet high, through which they had been carried.