Psychosphere (25 page)

And somewhere back there a killer, and Garrison powerless to strike back. He ran until the earth fell away beneath him and he crashed headlong down a steep slope. The wall of the valley went down in dips, and it was one of these in which he found himself when his head stopped spinning. Wearily he sat himself upright in sliding scree, grit and coarse grass. Distant lightning flickered, firing his sight in its split-second duration. Garrison gasped, sucked on air, prayed. In answer the far lightning flickered again.

Dim as his sight was he could not mistake the vast bulk of the dam rising on his right, the dark mass of the solitary house where it squatted below. And now he knew. This was it, the valley of his dream within a dream. Only one thing was missing and for a moment it stumped him. Then he remembered.

The dam was quiet, its waters pent, the merest trickle bubbling from six great vents in its face. It would remain so until the official opening tomorrow. But everything else was here; and behind him, up there, the shadowy, looming spires of marching pylons. Oh, yes, this was it.

And with that knowledge, as the first stirring of hope tightened his guts and heightened his awareness, Garrison also became aware of his pain, his weakness. Blind instinct had driven him before, the will to live, to survive. There had been no time, no room for pain or exhaustion. And there must be none now, not when he was so close, not with a killer on his trail.

Somehow he struggled on, and somehow, after endless ages of pain and weariness, he found himself at the foot of the path leading to the door of the lone house. Deserted, the place looked gloomy as its surroundings, as doomful as the great dam rising high above. Its roof had partly caved in, most of the windows were broken and the chimney stack was crumbling. These things Garrison could still see, but even seeing them his vision was blurring, the silhouette of the house merging with the dark valley and the darker horizon of valley-wall beyond.

Fear drove him forward in a surge he had not believed he could muster. He reached the door and found it locked. Sight was almost gone, but he could not tell how much of that was due to the night, the gathering storm. He sobbed, threw up his arms against the stout timbers of the door. He leaned against it and felt the contours of metal letters pressed against his forehead. The place had a name.

He traced the letters with his left hand, the hand with feeling: X-A-N-A…

Xanadu!

N
O ONE WAS LATE
. Gubwa hadn't programmed his soldiers to be late. There were sixteen of them, double the normal requirement. Top ranker was Gardner, and he was in charge of the shift. Sixteen was the maximum the lift could take, else Gardner was sure there would have been even more of them. Something big was happening and the Castle's master was taking no chances.

The sixteen had arrived more or less individually, but at the hour appointed they had come together as a body in the underground car park at the access door to the lift. On their way here, on foot or in the city's transport, they had been articulate, at their ease, completely “normal” citizens; but now they were a crowd of zombies. That
was
in their program; for now, out of sight of the crowds surging in the streets above, they rapidly reverted to the human machines Gubwa had caused them to be. And that was a condition which left them particularly vulnerable to Sir Harry's attack.

He had arrived all of an hour earlier, him and six highly-trained operatives from the branch's Special Assignments Group. Killers all, they were utterly loyal to him; he had enough on each of them to guarantee their loyalty. Now, as Gardner counted heads, nodded and stepped up to the door, keys jangling, Sir Harry gave the agreed signal. This was simply his voice yelling “
Now!
” and the beam of his torch swathing the unsuspecting sixteen where they bunched in gloomy, concrete-cast shadows at the door. His agents did the rest.

Gubwa's soldiers didn't know what hit them. They were trained and conditioned for possible action
in
the Castle, not outside of it. They went down like thistles under a scythe as the branch-men stepped out from cover and caught them in a withering, short burst of intense fire. For more than five seconds the machine-guns yammered, their insane chattering drowning the echoes of Sir Harry's yell and bringing down rivulets of accumulated dust from the concrete ceiling. Then it was over, and in the stunned silence Sir Harry stepped forward and took Gardner's keys from fingers that were still twitching. Moments later he was through the door, his men dragging the bodies of the sixteen in after them. Somebody outside threw down sand on the blood and someone else swept it away into darkness. Then they were all through the door and Sir Harry locked it behind them.

He stepped forward and pressed the button for the lift. Far down below the empty cage jerked and began its slow climb upwards. All unaware the men of the shift coming off duty were beginning to convene, moving towards the foot of the shaft. Two of them had been assigned a special duty—one which concerned Phillip Stone…

G
ARRISON GOT IN THROUGH A BROKEN WINDOW
. In doing so he cut himself badly, but he was far beyond caring about pain or loss of blood now. Indeed his near-delirium sprang from these sources, so that even he did not know how close he was to death. But still he hung on.

The darkness was his biggest immediate problem. Inside the house he felt literally buried in darkness, his near-blindness adding to his confusion. He found an open fireplace with crumpled newspapers already lying in the grate, brought out his cigarette lighter and struck flame. The paper, mercifully dry and crisp, blazed up. Garrison fuelled the fire with pieces ripped from an old, broken wicker chair—and sobbed his relief that he could still see, however dimly, the leaping flames.

The fire warmed his chill flesh, bringing comfort on the one hand and on the other a sure recognition of his condition, the fact that the life-force within him was ebbing. And yet there was something here—right here in Xanadu—which could yet save the day. Else all had been pointless. But what was it?

Stumbling about the room, one of three rooms on the ground floor, Garrison flopped into a chair and allowed himself to sprawl for a moment across a heavy wooden table. His hand came into contact with a table lamp, naked wires dangling from its flex. When the occupants, whoever they had been, left the house, they had taken the plugs with them. A pity, he could have used a little extra light…

Why not?

The thought spurred him on. The odds were all against there being any electricity, but he could at least try.

He half-fell from the chair with the rotten flex in his hand, found a socket in the skirting-board, shoved the naked wires in with fingers that shook so badly they seemed to vibrate. Then they
did
vibrate. He was holding the bare cores!

Even as the fact got through to his brain, Garrison was hurled across the room—but in that same instant of contact things had happened. Marvellous things!

For one thing his sight had returned, fully restored, however briefly. For another, strength had seemed to flow, however fleetingly, in veins and muscles and bones hollow as empty vessels. And finally…finally Garrison had remembered a dream. That dream in which a monster—the Garrison/Schroeder/Koenig monster—had been galvanized into life on the bed of the ethereal MACHINE.

Like the Frankenstein monster of youthful horror films, the Garrison-creature had been brought alive by Nature's own raw energies. By lightning. By electricity!

Now, blind again, he crawled back across the floor. The moment of contact had been too brief, had lasted for a single instant of time before his body reacted to the shock. This time it must be longer. It must be…as long as it took.

Weaker than ever, he clawed his way across the floor. Blood still flowed freely from his fingers, lacerated hand, scalp, perforated shoulder. He used the cracked nails of his hands to strip the age-brittled plastic from copper wires, wound them round his wrists, held them in his hands, found the socket and plugged the wires in, first one and then the other.

And where he had jammed himself between the heavy table and the wall, his body jerked and shook and fluttered—all of his limbs writhing, his hair standing out from his head, his eyes bulging—as his fingers smoked and blackened and the wires glowed red in his hands.

For five, ten, fifteen seconds he
sucked
energy from the socket. He would have gone on, continuing until something fused, but that wasn't to be. The vibration of his body increased in violence until, driving the huge wooden table before him, he flew once more across the room and the wires snapped.

Ah!—but now the battery was charged again. Not fully, no, not yet. But quest's end finally lay in sight and Garrison knew what he must do. He lifted his head from the naked floorboards and the entire room burned gold in the light from his eyes. A light which would suffer no barriers. A light which engulfed the entire house. A light which once, in a dream, Garrison had taken for the shining hemisphere of a stately pleasure-dome—or the temple of the Goddess of Immortality!

At the foot of the garden path Johnnie Fong stopped dead in his tracks, drew back, finally fled as the wall of that golden dome seemed to advance upon him…

The two soldiers detailed by Gubwa to take care of Stone arrived at his cell and opened the door. Inside the metal room Vicki Maler—or the thing she was now—lay sleeping or dead, completely hidden under a blanket Stone had thrown over her. The two men weren't interested in her, however, but in him. Youngish men, they were no longer dressed in their Castle uniforms but in normal street clothes.

Stone took them in at a glance. Smart and reasonably well-groomed, they would not look out of place as young executives in any of the city's firms or businesses. It seemed somehow unreasonable that they should be trained killers, working for a creature like Charon Gubwa. It also seemed unreasonable that he would have to kill them—which he would, quite cheerfully if the opportunity presented itself.

They ordered him out of the cell at gunpoint and into a wheelchair. Then, as one of them held a pistol to his temple, the other prepared to strap him into the chair.

“Hurry it up,” said the one with the gun, his tone urgent. “The cage will be down. They'll be waiting for us.”

The other looked up as if to answer—but at the precise moment there came the loud rattle of automatic gunfire and whine of ricocheting bullets interspersed with shouting and screams. It was exactly the chance Stone had been looking for. What was going on he couldn't say, but whatever it was he wanted to be part of it.

His two guards were momentarily startled; Stone didn't give them the least opportunity to recover. His arms shot up like pistons and he got a two-handed grip on the wrist of the one with the gun, deflecting it. At the same time he came to his feet like a coiled spring, his head smashing into the face of the man crouching over him. To complete the job on that one and without releasing his grip on the gun-hand of the other, he lashed out with a kick that pulverized the man's groin. The one with the gun had meanwhile started yelling and driving his free fist repeatedly into the side of Stone's head. Stone ignored the sticky, pulpy feel of a torn ear and brought his knee up and the soldier's wrist down in one sharp movement. The wrist snapped across his knee…the man screamed…the gun flew across the corridor and bounced off the wall. Before it could clatter to the floor Stone had whirled his agonized victim in a half-circle, crashing him headlong into the steel wall.

In the next moment the pistol was in Stone's hand and he fell into a crouch as a pair of combat-suited, woollen-helmeted men, armed to the teeth, came round a far corner. They could have been from MI5 or 6, could be more of Gubwa's soldiers, he had no way of knowing—until they began to sprint towards him, their weapons spitting fire. After that it didn't matter who they were.

Stone snapped off a shot and saw one man stopped in his tracks, spinning like a top as he fell. The other slowed down a little, then came on at a charge. Stone took cover behind the wheelchair, took careful aim, fired. As the chair was torn from his grasp by a spray of bullets, so Stone saw the muzzle of the machine-gun floating towards his face. Floating, yes, in a sort of slow motion. But the gun was in free-fall, its owner already sailing past with a neat red and black hole between his staring, dead eyes. Then things speeded up.

Stone snatched the machine-gun from mid-air, pocketed the pistol, stepped to the dead man's body and glanced at him. He'd seen him before, he was sure. Sir Harry's branch. Just like that treacherous, lousy, wonderful bastard! Stone snatched a magazine of ammunition from the man's belt, a couple of grenades, turned to the door of what had been his cell and shot the lock off. He went to snatch Vicki Maler from her bed and was surprised at her weight. Throwing back the blanket he saw her and his jaw dropped. She had firmed out again. She wasn't quite the youthful, beautiful girl he had briefly known, but she wasn't a hag either.

He thought to try and waken her, changed his mind and simply wrapped her in the blanket. Then she went over his shoulder in a fireman's lift, and a moment later he was back out in the corridor. Things were still chaotic in the Castle, but in the main Sir Harry's crowd had taken Gubwa by surprise. Grenades detonated somewhere as the invaders commenced a methodical destruction of the place, and there were still occasional bursts of fire and screams of agony and death.

Having no idea yet where he was going, Stone simply ran with Vicki bouncing on his shoulder.

Somewhere someone was shouting: “I want Gubwa, the big fat albino! I want him dead! I want all of these freaks dead! Wreck the place as you go but make sure you get every last one of them!” Stone recognized Sir Harry's voice. A long time since that pig had seen active service. Gubwa must have angered him mightily!

He reached a right-hand bend in the corridor at the same time as a member of Gubwa's harem came staggering round it. The transsexual's face was covered with blood which dripped from his chin. His heavy woman's breasts were scarlet with it. He carried no weapon.

“Don't shoot!” he cried in a falsetto voice. “Don't shoot…” But he was already crumpling to his knees, collapsing face-down on the floor's rubber coating.

More gunfire and screams, from close at hand. Stone took a deep breath, threw himself round the corner with his machine-gun spurting lead. A combat-suited man took off in mid-air along the corridor as Stone's bullets chewed into him. He had been standing guard over a lift cage. Bodies littered the area, all of them dressed for the street. Gubwa's men, about to go off duty. Stone felt nothing for them.

He yanked the cage's latticed doors open stepped through them—and as he did so heard the hiss of a door opening behind him. He whirled…and across the corridor stood Gubwa. The albino saw Stone, saw his gun, and he skidded to a halt in the middle of the corridor. His hair was wild, his pink eyes wide.

“In!” Stone snapped. “Now, before I change my mind!”

“Yes, yes, I'm coming. Please don't shoot, Mr. Stone.”

“Shoot? Kill you? You have to be joking! If I shoot you who'll explain all this? And believe me you've got some explaining to do. And while you're doing it I'm going to sit there and grin.
And
I'm going to be able to tell them the right questions to ask!”

The cage was a big one. Gubwa got as far away as he could from the muzzle of Stone's machine gun. His arms were in the air, trembling uncontrollably; his entire frame wobbled like jelly. “The button, Mr. Stone,” he babbled. “Please press it. We have to get out of here—now!”

Stone became suspiciously aware of the other's urgency. It was understandable, of course, but…he hovered his finger over the lift's button, his shoulder supporting Vicki. “What have you done, Gubwa?”

“Press it, for God's sake!” the hermaphrodite gibbered, his hands fluttering. “The Castle is mined! I've set the detonation sequence in motion!”

“For ‘God's sake,' eh?” said Stone mockingly—but he pressed the button. As the cage jerked and started upward, a tremendous explosion blew the debris of bodies along the corridor beyond the latticed doors. Then they were out of it, but beneath their feet they could still feel the concussions of further explosions. As the thunders receded, so Gubwa began to relax, his hands starting to fall towards his sides.

“Keep 'em up, fat thing!” Stone snarled. He took two paces forward, stuck his gun in Gubwa's belly, shoving hard through the towelling of the albino's robe. “Also, you can close your eyes—
close 'em
! And keep 'em closed. And let me tell you now: I only have to feel the tiniest tickle of an alien thought in my head, just one, and a second later you're going to weigh at least a pound heavier. And I'll love it!”

Through all of this a speaker in the ceiling had been droning Gubwa's recorded hypnotic orders, accompaniment to the pulsing of a blue strobe light. Stone, however, had not been conditioned to receive such orders. His lips twisted into a mirthless grin as he stepped back from the albino, lifted up the snout of his gun and fired off a burst at the speaker and strobe.

“There,” he said as Gubwa's recorded voice squawked into silence and the light went out, leaving them in near-darkness. Once more he prodded Gubwa's belly with the smoking muzzle of the machine-gun. “That writes finis on that shit! And that only leaves you, mister. It only leaves you. And if you've any sense at all, you'll just stand perfectly still and do absolutely nothing…”

G
ARRISON HAD LAIN QUITE STILL FOR SOME MINUTES
,
BUT WHILE HIS
ravaged body had rested his mind had been intensely active. First he had stilled the incredible pain in his limbs, trunk and head; which had required the merest effort of will, a simple command that the pain
would
stop. Then he had soaked up the essence of the house, the valley outside, the dam and surrounding countryside, over which a freakish summer storm was about to break in unprecedented fury. In doing so—in this systematic mental examination of his whereabouts—he had once more triggered memories of his prophetic dreams, stripping them of their mysticism until all that remained of them was the fact that they had been prophetic. Through them he had seen the future, a future inalienable and unchangeable as the past.

The past was gone, but the future, as any future, began here and now. And however obscurely, the way into that future had been delineated. Garrison was powerful now but not nearly powerful enough to go that way, not yet. But how close the analogy had been, when he had likened himself to a battery leaking its power. And how easy and how terrible the solution. He had dreamed of a great MACHINE and knew now that this valley, this place,
was
that MACHINE. As for its power source—

Garrison reached out his mind to the dam and explored its mechanisms…

J
OHNNIE
F
ONG SAT ONE-THIRD OF THE WAY UP THE WALL OF THE
valley and stared at the golden glow of the dome. It had stopped growing, stood taller than the pines, enclosed what had been the entire garden of the house. Fong didn't know if it had substance and he wasn't ready to find out. But it was, must be, a manifestation of Garrison. About that the Chinaman had no doubt. If only Charon would contact him now, perhaps the albino would be able to tell him how to deal with things. Always his beloved Charon had the answers to such—

Fong jerked to his feet. The first warm raindrops were beginning to fall and the clouds were boiling madly overhead, but even the moaning of the wind could not drown out the new sound—the sudden, rapidly increasing roar of power unleashed. Fong's eyes went to the face of the dam, took in the spectacle of the six silvery trickles that ran down its concrete face erupting into gigantic spouts; and his ears heard the thunder of waters in chaos.

He backed away, turned and scrambled higher, not looking back until he no longer dared ignore what was happening behind and below him. Full fifteen minutes that climb, and Fong's limbs trembling with his exertion when finally he did stop and turn. But now he knew why he had fled, that it had been instinct which drove him up from the house and away from the dam. Instinct and fear.

Not fear of the rushing waters, no, for already his elevation had been such that they could not possibly reach him. Fear of the power which had
caused
those waters to rush, the Gigantic Unstoppable Power whose heart throbbed at the center of the golden dome!

Throbbed, yes, for the dome was unstable now. It pulsed with an irregular expansion and contraction like some vast alien beacon. It struggled with itself, or within itself, like molten lava in a volcano's cone, tossed by the turmoil below. And finally—it broke!

A figure—upright, manlike, golden, glowing, like some sort of anthropomorphic fragment of the dome itself—came through its wall and stood for a moment on the night wind, then rose up the slope of the valley directly towards the Chinaman where he trembled and gasped.

No part of that figure of golden fire touched the slope itself. Utterly suspended on air, it levitated itself a full two feet above the whipping grass and stunted shrubs; and as it passed close by Fong the truth of its nature, which of course he had known, made itself apparent. Namely that this was Richard Garrison, but shrunken, dried out, almost desiccated. It was Garrison, but devoid of life, or life as Fong understood it. Garrison, and yet less than Garrison, and yet greater, far greater.

He lifted his pistol as the figure passed, fired off shot after shot and knew that he struck the target each time; but the figure made no pause, showed no interest, paid no head at all. And when Fong's weapon was empty, then it fell from his nerveless fingers; and still the mummied figure of Garrison sailed on, its eyes blazing, its skin a mass of golden wrinkles, its arms blackened stumps whose frayed threads hung in sticky tatters just below the elbows.

And behind it, down in the valley, the agonized fluctuations of the psychic plasma about the deserted house came to an abrupt end, the glow blinked out, and in the next moment the house went down in dust and ruin and the frenzied spume of the flood that rushed and roared down the old bed of the river.

Then, like an automaton, almost without knowing that his hands and feet bore him up, Johnnie Fong clawed his way to the crest of the valley wall, following the floating figure of Garrison as a moth follows a bright light. He had to know, had to see—even if it blasted him…

But even before reaching the crest Fong could hear the humming of the heavy-duty cables where they draped their loops between the pylons. They were drawing off power from the dam, power which Garrison required. And as Fong crawled exhaustedly up those last few yards of slope and emerged above the valley, so he became witness to the most awesome scene of all.

It was Garrison, a living cross of golden fire, the blackened stumps of his arms outstretched, floating in air between and beneath two of the pylons. And it was Garrison who, a moment later, received the tribute of the pylons—a massive, crackling bolt that smashed down,
was sucked down
from blazing cables, enveloping him and hurling him down to the ground. Nor did it stop there. The smell of ozone filled the air, and of burning flesh, as that lashing, living, weirdly snarling and snapping pulse of raw energy spent itself in Garrison…who now, impossibly, stood up and held himself erect, welcoming the very fires that consumed him!