Psychomech (43 page)

His thought was like some demonic invocation, or so it seemed to him. For with a pneumatic hiss and a crackling of ice a cryo-unit in a nearby niche suddenly slid from its bed and stood itself on end, one-third of a ton of metal and dead, frozen contents suspended in thin air inches above the floor of the ice corridor.

‘Lord—!’ the mechanic gasped out loud,’— forgive me my blasphemy…’ He fell over backwards, sliding down the bonnet of the abandoned car as the cryo-unit split its sealed seams, the two halves clanging to the floor in a cloud of cryo-vapour and ice crystals. His eyes had rolled up and his senses fled him by the time his head thumped against the floor, so that he missed what happened next. Which, for his sanity’s sake, was probably just as well.

For perhaps two seconds the lumpy, black, frozen
contents
of the discarded unit remained in a hovering, standing position, suspended above the floor and issuing hissing cryo-vapours. Then, turning on end once more and speeding head-first down the tunnel, the rigid mummy-shape sought its exit.

Half-way down the tunnel a balcony looked out over a valley nestling high in the mountains, where a cable car descended towards a village of snow-covered houses, smoke from their chimneys spiralling in grey-blue streamers. The balcony’s windows were of thick, triple-glazed glass—which shattered explosively as the frozen corpse of Vicki Maler crashed through them, accelerating as it sped upwards and traced a curve westward, disappearing in a moment across the farthest mountain peaks…

Once again Willy Koenig was witness to an impossible phenomenon, and once again he felt himself in awe of the fantastic powers his young master now wielded. For who else but Richard Garrison could be responsible for this—this blackened, plummeting, smouldering meteorite which shot out of the sky to stab like a lance, soundlessly
through
the grey dome covering Wyatt’s house, leaving no hole behind it to tell of its entry?

Inside, golden-eyed, Garrison/Schroeder brought the smoking corpse to a halt in the centre of the bedroom, standing it upright an inch above the wood-splinter and glass-littered floor. Slowly he lowered the mummy until its feet touched the carpet. And—

‘Be as you were before you died,’ he commanded, his outstretched hand like some primordial magician’s wand. , The mummy-figure coruscated, gave off lancing multicoloured beams of light, turned incandescent-white for a single second and metamorphosed into Vicki Maler—
as she had been before she died!

Vicki Maler tiny and ravaged. An emaciated, screaming Vicki Maler. A Vicki in agony. A Vicki full of the living cancer that killed her!

Garrison/Schroeder saw his error at once. ‘Come out of her!’ he commanded, his finger pointing. She collapsed in a heap on the floor, her limbs writhing, visibly shrinking smaller yet as a leprous grey mass of foaming, spawning cells
issued
from her body. She lay in a pool of heaving, living cancerous tissue. And as her screaming subsided Garrison/Schroeder’s golden eyes fell upon the naked, cringing, slow-motion figures of Terri and Wyatt—and the Schroeder part knew what must be done.

Again the pointed finger, and the voice, emotionless now, more Schroeder than Garrison, saying: ‘Your vitality, your energy—into her!’

They cringed down, shrank, seemed to grow old in a second—and in that same second Vicki swelled out, firmed, blossomed, grew pink and healthy where she lay amongst the living, lapping diseased slime. And before the Garrison facet could interfere: ‘Now suffer as she suffered, as I have suffered, as you made Richard Garrison suffer!’ And the finger, trembling a little but resolute, pointing at the cancerous mass.’
Go into them!’

And the booming, gonging, yawning horror of their slowed down screams as the cancer flowed across the floor like some vast amoeba, splitting into two equal parts and foaming up and around their legs, their thighs and into their slowly writhing, shuddering bodies. And the two of them bloating, filling out, their eyes bulging, their mouths full of froth. And their screams choked off as they rose up, stumbled, fell, floated to the floor and lay there in the deceptively languorous contortions of certain, lingering death.

Then the Garrison facet—his common humanity—took command. ‘Die!’ he quickly ordered. ‘Let it be finished. Be as dust.’

The grey wall went down like a light switched on, letting the sun strike through the windows once more. A summer breeze blew in across broken panes, scattering the dull powders which were all that remained of Terri Garrison and Gareth Wyatt.

Garrison/Schroeder stepped forward, lifted up the swooning, softly moaning Vicki Maler from the floor. ‘Know none of this,’ he commanded. ‘Know only that you are mine. And let your blind eyes know the light. See, Vicki, see!’

She opened eyes golden as his own and gazed at him in confusion. Then, knowing him—knowing, too, the miracle of sight—she fell against his chest. ‘Oh, Richard!’ she cried. ‘I had much a strange dream. But… I always knew you would find me again. And I knew that I would see you—really
see you
—someday, somehow…’ She closed her eyes and snuggled close, seeming half asleep…

When Garrison/Schroeder left the house Koenig was waiting for him. The German gaped for a moment at the sight of Vicki Maler… of her, her presence, not her nakedness—gaped again at their gleaming golden eyes, but then Garrison/Schroeder caused him to understand. He reeled for a moment under the barrage of telepathically implanted knowledge from the other’s supermind, then stood rock steady, a slow smile forming on his face.

‘Richard,’ he finally, simply said. And, ‘Thomas!’

‘Suzy?’ Garrison/Schroeder questioned.

Koenig’s smile faded. He shook his head, though that was not necessary.

Garrison/Schroeder blinked his golden eyes, searched for and found the faithful Doberman’s shattered hulk. ‘Suzy,’ he said, ‘be as you were.’ And to himself:
Come, girl, come!

In a moment she appeared round the corner of the house, barking joyfully, bounding, throwing herself flat at his feet. He stooped and fondled her ears.

He straightened, turned to Vicki. ‘Vicki, Willy is the most faithful of men. He is to be rewarded. It will be strange, but—don’t be afraid. It is simply—a change.’ And to Koenig: ‘Are you ready, Willy?’ He held out his arms.

They embraced like brothers, Koenig smiling. His clothes fell to the ground at the other’s feet. No physical trace of him remained. Vicki gasped and again her man turned to her. ‘I told you not to be afraid,’ he said. And he made her to understand.

They walked down the drive together towards, their destiny. Man and woman, hand in hand, with Suzy taking up a position to the rear. Only once did they pause, when the Koenig facet thought one of his bad thoughts. They paused—for the merest moment—and then walked on.

Garrison/Schroeder/Koenig, and Vicki, and Suzy.

And behind them in an upstairs room of the now empty house, in the room of the machine, Psychomech turned white hot and melted into slag. And the house itself crumbled, falling in upon its own foundations and puddling like lava, or a sandcastle touched by the sea. And in another moment it was as if the house had never stood there at all, and the grass closed over its scar, and the house of Wyatt was gone forever from the world of men.

And nothing was ever quite the same again…