Psychosphere (3 page)

NUCAC 10, said Gubwa.

“It's all yours, Captain,” said Arnott, feeding the final code into the computer. A tiny panel snapped open in the table's surface beside Foster's right hand. In the recess, a large red firing-button blinked on—off—on—off—on—

“Captain?” said Arnott.

NUCAC 10!
Gubwa snapped.

For a moment Foster's right hand hovered over the button—then shot across the table and grabbed Arnott's throat. “Dream!” he was babbling. “Dream—nightmare—it has to be—!”

NUCAC 10!
Gubwa squeezed Foster's mind.

But Arnott was dissolving away in Foster's grasp, the outline of his face and form melting down. And the NUCAC cell's lights and fittings were blurring, shifting like melting wax. Foster was waking up!

Despite Gubwa's every effort to restrain him, the man was breaking free. His situation had been
too
nightmarish, the ultimate nightmare, and he must—

—“Wake up!” Foster gasped.

NO!

“
Must!
”

Failure! Gubwa was furious. There must be a fault in his scenario. He hadn't built it carefully enough.

Foster was almost awake. And his mind was agitated, a whirlpool, crowded with terror, confused and yet resolute. Grimly determined to…
to wake up!
Useless in this condition. Useless to Charon Gubwa.

The exercise was over. The Castle's master withdrew from Foster's mind.

At which precise moment, in Lindos, Rhodes, Richard Allan Garrison was fantasizing about the great mottled mind-shark…

“C
APTAIN
! C
APTAIN
F
OSTER
!
GARY
!”
SOMEONE WAS YELLING
. The voice was Arnott's, but choked, strangled. Foster felt his grip broken, was hurled back. The slender thread which remained, linking him to the world of dreams, snapped. The last revenant of Gubwa's hypnotic scenario vaporized as Foster felt the pain of slamming backwards into a bulkhead…but hands were there to grab him and hold him up. He shook his head, stared about through eyes which refused to focus, shrugged off the two crew members who stood gaping at him.

“What in hell—?” Then he looked down at himself where he stood trembling in shock, dressed in loose, sweat-soaked issue pajamas! He remembered now: he had intended to sleep for an hour, maybe a little longer.

Across the ops area Mike Arnott was perched on a table, massaging his throat. Foster moved unsteadily towards his 2IC. “Mike, what—?”

“You tell me, sir,” said the other hoarsely. “You floated in here like a ghost just a minute ago. You were gabbling something—don't ask me what. I only caught one word, NUCAC—then you grabbed me by the throat!”

Foster wasn't yet oriented. “I grabbed you? You're on watch?”

“Of course.”

“And nothing…unusual? No incoming signals?” Foster's eyes were wide now, staring.

“Only…well, this!” Arnott answered. “The rest was routine.” He grabbed the other's trembling arms, held him steady. “Gary, what is it?”

“Where are we?” the Captain's breathing was slowing down, regulating itself. He peered at location charts, sighed his relief. “An hour from turnabout. Thank God!”

“Where did you think we were?” Arnott was incredulous. “Were you asleep, dreaming?”

Foster nodded. “Only explanation. Sleepwalking, too, apparently.” He almost fell into a chair, reaction catching up with him. “It was the Big One—NUCAC 10!”

Arnott's eyebrows went up. He nodded to the crewmen. “You two wait outside a minute.” They left. “Sir, that's a funny sort of dream you've had.” He shrugged. “Understandable, considering our job, but…been pushing it too hard, perhaps?”

Foster looked at him, narrowed his eyes. “That could be the answer, I suppose. Don't concern yourself, I'll have a checkup. But…I'd like it if this didn't go any further. Speak to those two, will you?” He nodded towards the hatchway.

“Of course.”

“Good. Now I'd better get some clothes on.” Foster turned away, glad that his cabin was close by. As for the checkup: he would speak to the ship's doctor. And he'd see another doctor later—just as soon as Moth got back to Rosyth…

T
HWARTED
,
ON LEAVING
F
OSTER'S MIND
G
UBWA SHOULD HAVE SOARED
instantaneously back to his own seat of consciousness in the Castle, but something intervened
.

Another mind moved in the Psychosphere, was close, almost on a collision course. There was no real contact but an awareness—from which Gubwa recoiled no less sharply than the other. Two wary forces facing each other, drawing back, finally fleeing in mutual panic
—

—And Gubwa snapped open his eyes in the Castle, starting at once to his feet. If he had been furious before, now he was doubly so—and not a little worried. Now what had
that
been?
Who?

Of course there were other minds in the Psychosphere: the Psychosphere was the essence of all sentience, of mental intelligence. But the vast majority of minds were no more aware of the Psychosphere than a bird is aware of air.
This
mind had been aware, or had seemed so. And Gubwa had sensed…fear? Perhaps. In which case the close brush had probably been accidental.

The Castle's master knew that the Russians had their own telepaths, as did the Americans. They had a certain raw talent, these ESPers, but they were amateurs compared with Gubwa. Fifty percent of what they learned was guesswork, none of it could ever be trusted. Polaris submarines were almost impossible to detect through technology, so it could have been a Russian mind Gubwa had come up against—even an American for that matter. And because it had been unexpected, Gubwa had panicked.

He snorted. Obviously the USA and USSR—one of them, at least—was making some progress in the training and use of ESP-endowed surveillance agents, telepathic spies. It was something which would bear looking into.

But meanwhile, there was the other problem, the fact that Foster had broken free of Gubwa's control, had refused to press the NUCAC button. Oh, in a genuine crisis he would respond to training, of course he would—but even then he would have to be absolutely certain of the nature of the situation. This
was
his training, had to be; the world could not afford that kind of mistake. Given the smallest loophole or blind spot in even the most perfect scenario, Foster would reject it. Gubwa couldn't win!

The Castle's master cursed vividly. It was a problem. If he could not control Foster's single mind, how could he hope to control both his and his 2IC's simultaneously? Trust Great Britain to build these sort of dual-control, failsafe systems into its hardware!

Well, facts must be faced up to. Moth was out of the question. The other Polaris subs, too—

—Unless.

Slowly a poisonous transformation took place in Gubwa's gross features. Suddenly smiling, he cursed again—cursed himself for a fool. The easy way is always the simplest way. Why even attempt to control two minds simultaneously—or four, or six—when you can control the mind
which controls those minds?

After all, Moth got her orders by radio, didn't she? And the operator who sent them was only one man, wasn't he? One mind! And if there was trouble there, why, Gubwa could always take it higher! He laughed out loud. Of course he could…

…Right to the Admiralty itself!

Vicki Maler, red-haired and marvellously golden-eyed (her eyes had once been green and blind), her slim elfin face cocked a little to one side—Vicki Maler, once-dead and cryogenically suspended at Schloss Zonigen in the Swiss Alps, returned to life through the will of her lover, Richard Allan Garrison—stood now beside the bed where Garrison tossed and turned in the throes of nightmare. She did not wish to wake him, despite the occasional spastic twitching of his limbs and the starting of salty droplets from his neck and the hollow between his shoulder blades; no, for one could never be certain of his mood when first roused from sleep. Not these days. Not any longer.

Vicki's thoughts were her own; they were as private, vital and original as any she had conjured in her previous life (or, as she thought of it now, in that “earlier” time), before the final, hideous acceleration of the creeping cancer which had ravaged her body to its painful death. And because she was intelligent, because she knew Garrison to be the instrument of her revival, her reincarnation, the fact that her mind retained its individuality vaguely surprised her. For not only had Garrison replenished her body and driven out the killing cancer, but also her mind; he had revitalized it intact, inquiring and unique as any mind, and not at all a product or substructure of his own expanded multimind.

She was, in short, her own person. No, she corrected herself, she was Garrison's person; for he had left her in no doubt as to her fate should any accident befall him, when she must surely return to her previous state, whose clay shell, however vital now, must crumble as a centuried mummy exposed to air and light. Oh, yes, for if Vicki seemed bright and unflickering, an electrical glow in life's filament, then Garrison himself was the light switch. And if he were switched off…

As a girl in her teens Vicki had read Poe, Lovecraft and Wilde. She well remembered the horrific demise of M. Valdemar and that of Dr. Munoz:
her
fate, too, should Garrison die. But she was more inclined to associate Garrison himself with the terrible fate of Dorian Gray. Not that Garrison had ever been a man of great vices, he had not. But…things had happened to him. Things…

Vicki supposed she should be grateful for those things, but still she preferred to remember Garrison as he had been in that “earlier” time. Then he had been, well, just Garrison. But that had been before the changes, before her rebirth.

Odd, but despite the fact that she was the same girl she had been “earlier,” Vicki nevertheless felt…yes, reincarnated. After all, eight years had gone by without her active, physical presence in the world, when she had lain—dormant?—in her cryogenic crypt at Schloss Zonigen; but for Garrison they had been real, waking years. And strange ones. Moreover, Vicki's body had all the vitality and strength of her pre-cancer years, or at least of those years before the disease had commenced to drain her. So that in a sense she had been born again into a younger body than the one she last remembered.

She shuddered at the thought: the body she remembered.

The husk The pain-riven shell. The bewildered flesh whose contamination had bloated and burned and filled her veins with the fire of stricken cells in ravenous, monstrous mutation. A body full of cancer. Livid with pain. No, with agony!

Vicki shuddered again. She not only remembered the cause of her death (for she
had
died) but Death Itself—or Himself. She had actually known His touch, the cruelly constricting fingers of the Grim Reaper; and not merely His touch but His iron grasp. And in her case those bony fingers had been of fire—or of acid.

Death. The Old Man. The oldest man in the world, who could not die Himself until He had snuffed out the very last life.

Immortal, therefore. Immortal, and…cruel.

Certainly in the worst of her pain-racked days Vicki had felt that someone enjoyed her agony, else why should she suffer it? If all were to balance, then there must be an enjoyment equal to her suffering. Well, finally she had the last laugh, for Death the One Immortal now had a second immortal to contend with. The Old Man must now wait on the demise of one Richard Allan Garrison, and Garrison did not intend to die—not ever.

Garrison stirred and mumbled something in his sleep, then flopped over on to his back. He was through the worst of his nightmare and the sweat was drying on him. Vicki listened to his near-inarticulate mouthings. He mentioned Schroeder, she thought, and Koenig, the sounds coming out in a jumble. Vicki allowed herself a third, this time quite deliberate shudder and peered intently into his face. It seemed calm now, resigned almost. But beneath those closed eyelids…

She straightened and stepped silently to the room's gilt-framed mirror. The gold of her eyes matched the yellow glow of the frame, burning in the reflected fire of the day's last ray of sunlight. She marvelled at her own eyes—those golden eyes which had been blind in that earlier time, blind for many years—their sight now restored through the will of Garrison. His own eyes, too, blinded by fire and blast, repaired miraculously in glowing, uniformly golden orbs. Eyes which saw more, much more, than those of other men.

Miraculous, yes. Garrison performed miracles. His powers were very nearly…infinite? They had seemed so at one time, but…he himself did not know—had never fully explored—the extent or limitations of his powers. In fact of late he had kept an uneasy silence on the subject.

She turned to him again where he lay, her movements edgy, nervous. And silently she repeated to herself.
Miracles
…

But wasn't that a God-given gift? The power to work miracles? And if there really was a God (Vicki had always doubted it) why should He so reward Garrison? Or any human being for that matter. Or perhaps there actually
was
a God—now.

Had there been others with Garrison's powers, Vicki wondered? What of the old legends? What of Merlin and the great wizards of immemorial myth? Her thoughts became blasphemous. What of Jesus Christ? He too had restored sight to the blind, raised up the dead, walked on the water. Hadn't He?

But no, cases were different.
His
miracles were generally accepted as having been all to the good. Garrison's were sometimes…other than that.

Her thoughts turned abruptly to their whereabouts…

The decision to go to the Aegean had been made, as were most of Garrison's decisions, on the spur of the moment. His pilot (he owned an executive jet aircraft) had been on holiday and so not immediately available, which was why just one week ago he had chartered a private plane and crew to fly them out to Rhodes airport. There was a second route he once might have taken—a rather more esoteric route—but in the world of passport controls, a world where “miracles” would doubtless attract attention, he had chosen the much more cumbersome and, in his own words, “mechanical flight” method.

The house they had hired in Lindos consisted in fact of a nest of three holiday villas or apartments with their own secluded courtyard. They occupied only the largest room, leaving the other two standing empty. They had eaten out with only one exception, when Garrison had cooked a pair of large gray mullet, self-caught on the trident of a rubber-powered spear-gun purchased in Rhodes. Garrison was an excellent swimmer and spear-fisherman, his prowess in the latter deriving from three sun-drenched years in Cyprus as a Corporal in the Royal Military Police. Here in Lindos, however, he had quickly lost interest in the “sport.” He had soon realized that there was little skill involved and no thrill whatsoever when one might simply command the fishes to impale themselves upon the tines of one's harpoon.

And so in a matter of days they had settled down to an existence of hot, idle days and balmy nights, of not unreasonable wines and cheap island brandy (another legacy of Garrison's soldiering), and of good local meats and fruits in the village tavernas. And yet even in this near-exotic, idyllic setting of Lindos—with its narrow white labyrinthine streets, church towers, elaborate archways, its drain-dwelling, night-venturing frogs and tumult of cats—even here they had not felt totally at ease. The problem, as most of their problems, had its roots in Garrison's multi-personality.

Usually the Schroeder and Koenig facets took a back seat or were subsumed in Garrison's far stronger seat of consciousness—but on occasion they would come bursting to the forefront. Often, Vicki thought, unnecessarily and far too forcefully. Her thoughts took her back to an incident as recent as yesterday, one which perfectly illustrated her point…

After their open-air, patio breakfast, Garrison had suggested they walk. They had taken the path that led out of the village to a quiet, sheltered bay of yellow sand between white flanking rocks and looming perpendicular cliffs. Feeling the heat of a suddenly breathless midday, they had wandered from the path to seat themselves on tumbled boulders beneath the overhang of scree-shod cliffs that reached up to the mightier, precipitously concave Rock of the Acropolis itself. At their feet where they sat lay a large bed of cabbage-leaved plants sporadically decorated with small yellow flowers much similar to the English primrose; with many green, oval fruit-pods some two inches long, each pod hanging heavily from its own individual stem.

As they had sat down, so Garrison's leg had brushed against one of these fruits which, with a quite audible squelching or popping sound, had at once jet-propelled itself from its stem to go bounding about amidst the thick leaves until it found a gap and fell through to the shaded earth beneath. At the moment of the explosion Garrison had jerked away from the plant, but not before feeling a splash of liquid on his hand and forearm.

“You should wipe your hand,” Vicki had been a little concerned. “That juice is mildly caustic—or poisonous, I can't remember which. But I've read about it somewhere or other.”

Garrison had sniffed at his wrist, wrinkled his nose and grinned. “Catspiss!” he snorted—but he had nevertheless used his handkerchief to clean the affected areas. And Vicki had laughed at his exclamation, for of course this had been Garrison pure and simple. Garrison himself, the man she had loved in that earlier world. A natural man and unselfconscious.

A couple of Greek youths had taken the same well-trodden route to the beach, walking a little to their rear. Neither Vicki nor Garrison had attached any significance to this; it was a free world. In any case the youths seemed little more than kids, fifteen or sixteen at most and brothers by their looks. And by far the great majority of Lindos people were kindly and utterly charming.

There had been few people about—one or two couples slowly negotiating a rough ramp cut in the cliff's face down to the beach, and a scattered handful on the beach itself—but that was just exactly how Garrison had wanted it. This had been his prime purpose in coming out to Rhodes in the first place: an escape from the rush and bustle and pressures of a life which, for the last year at least, had seemed to catch him up like an insect in the cogs of some vast machine. But an insect of carbon steel, which could not be crushed and without which the machine itself could not function.

For Garrison controlled—no, he
was
—that machine. Not quite self-made but certainly self-sustaining, self-servicing. Even the finest machine needs a little oil, however, and this holiday was to have been just that: light lubrication for the gears of a life suddenly grown vastly complicated. More than that, it was to give him time to consider his future. To ponder what best to do with the powers his multimind controlled—those powers which, with each passing day, he felt weakening in him, draining from him like the slow trickle of sand from the glass globe of an hourglass.

Vicki had been silent, dwelling a little introspectively on her life with Garrison, happy just to sit beside the calm, apparently greatly relaxed and benign figure of her companion—at least until she heard the clatter of pebbles and the indolent
slap, slap
of sandals which announced the arrival of the two Greek boys. At that she sighed.

She had known then why they had been followed, taking little pride in the knowledge that her own brown and beautifully proportioned body was the magnet which had drawn these adolescent islanders after her. She felt only a niggling annoyance. She was skimpily dressed, true, in a tiny green halter, green figure-hugging shorts and white sandals—but surely these lads could find themselves a pair of girls more their own age to ogle? While it was still fairly early in the tourist season, still the village was full of just such apparently unattended young ladies: English, German, Italian, Scandinavian. Or perhaps the youths had mistakenly suspected that Vicki and Garrison had something other in mind than merely sitting in silent contemplation in the shade of the rocks?

Garrison, too, had noticed the approach of the boys and for a moment he had grinned good-naturedly. He had of course immediately guessed their motive, and a glance—the merest peep—inside their minds had confirmed it. Well, boys are boys and Greek boys are Greek boys, and no complaints there. But then, as the youths had taken seats upon rocks in the middle of the pod-bearing plants and openly stared at Garrison and his lovely companion—particularly and pointedly at Vicki—the grin had quickly slipped from Garrison's face.

One of the minds his own had touched upon was a distinctly unpleasant one, whose strong sexual overtones were warped and vicious. He was full of animal lust. In Garrison's brief glimpse inside the youth's head he had found him savagely assaulting Vicki. Slimy with sweat and sex, the attack was unnatural as it was murderous. Nor were these mind-scenes mere fantasies but repeats of an earlier assault, a real assault, but with Vicki's face and figure superimposed. The youth was, or had been, the author of a rabidly cruel rape!

And as Garrison's face had hardened and taken on a grimmer aspect, so he had slowly risen to his feet. Drawing Vicki up with him, he had hissed in her ear: “That older boy's a rapist!”