The Long Sleep (13 page)

Finally, he folded the paper, tucked it in his pocket, and went back to the middle of the street.

The discovery of the fifty-year-old message had contributed to his sense of urgency. He didn't have any time to waste.

He studied the gray wall where there had once been a long tree-lined avenue, houses, a redlight, a moving car. Now that the two hologram projectors had been smashed, the only thing of interest about the smooth cement was a door which the film clip had concealed. It was the same ugly gray shade as the walls. It had formidable stainless steel fittings and was devoid of warning signs, directions, and other labels.

Perhaps the very anonymity of it was what made it so intriguing. He went to it and tried the knob.

The door was unlocked, and it swung open silently.

He looked back along the street down which he'd just come. No sign of Galing.

He stepped out of the street into a corridor that was more than sixty feet long. Eight, closed elevators stood on each side, and the long hall ended in a set of bright yellow doors . . .

He let the gray door behind him close quietly on the artificial residential street. Since he now suspected that his adventures had all taken place within a single building, the elevators were of great interest to him. With those he could more fully explore this place and learn the nature of it.

Once that was done, it would be a simple matter to deduce the reasoning behind this program and his purpose in behind here.

Or at least he
hoped
it would be simple. In the last few days he had learned not to count on anything.

Although he was extremely pleased to find the elevators, he was more interested in those two yellow doors. Hesitantly, he walked down to them, pushed them open, and found the same long corridor into which he had first come when he had left the storm drains after escaping from that dungeon and from the murderous vegetation in the tunnels. At the far end was the six-foot pressure hatch that guarded the observation chamber. The computer display screen in the wall beside it was dark. He remembered the metal-walled room, the foot-thick glass window that looked out upon—

Upon what?

He had not actually forgotten what lay beyond that window; the memory had merely been suppressed, not erased. He had passed out in front of the deep glass, had been found and taken back to Henry Galing's mansion where he was fed that story about sybocylacose-46. He was aware now that the entire sybocylacose fantasy and—by logical extension—all the scenes that had come before it had been invented for a single purpose: to make him forget what lay beyond the observation room window.

He stepped on the metal grid in the corridor floor before the pressure hatch, and he looked at the display screen as it turned a restful blue.

CYCLE FOR ADMITTANCE.

He put both hands on the steel wheel in the center of the door and wrestled it clockwise as far as it would go. The door remained locked, but the message on the display screen changed.

WAIT FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF

COMPUTER DATA LINKAGES.

WAIT FOR VERIFICATION OF

VIEW CHAMBER'S SANCTITY.

What lay beyond that gargantuan slab of glass? What was it that would want to breach the view chamber and, having breached it, would pose such a danger that the pressure hatch was required to protect the rest of the building.

He waited.

The green light came on overhead.

LIGHT BURNING.

PROCEED SAFELY ON GREEN.

As soon as it popped its seal, he opened the enormous hatch and went into the room beyond.

Forty feet away, at the other end of the observation chamber, a muddy gray light pulsed dimly.

Regardless of its source, even the light itself was ugly, frightening. It carried death within its bleak rays.

He began to shake.

He took one step toward the window and stopped.

He felt sick on his stomach.

Gasping, he turned suddenly and ran out of that place without taking a look at the smoke veiled thing beyond the glass. He pushed the hatch shut, watched the wheel whirl automatically into position.

The green light flicked off.

The display screen went black.

Leaning against the hatch, Joel let his breath out in a long shudder of relief. He had nearly made a fatal error. If he had gone to that window again, he felt sure that he would have fainted just as he had done the last time. He was no more prepared for this thing, whatever the hell it was, than he had been previously. He would have suffered another trauma and fainted. Sooner or later Henry Galing would have found him, and then he'd have awakened in yet another lie, right back on square number one.

This the rat learned when it ran the maze: don't make the same mistake twice.

He went back through the yellow doors and studied the floor indicators above the elavtors, Fourteen of the lifts served only the fourth to the eighteenth floors. The other two went to the bottom of the building. One of these was not working. He summoned the functioning cage, stepped into it, punched the button for the bottom level, watched the door close, and went down.

He came out of the elevator into the familiar hallway that led to the pod chamber observation deck. The narrow room, where he stood in the center of it, was as he had first seen it: black command chairs, purple lightstrips, computer consoles, file cabinets, the lockers with names stenciled on them.

Only the age-lain blanket of dust had changed. Galing and his men had cleaned off the chairs and the computer consoles; and the dust on the floor was marred by many footprints, those made when they had tried to fool him with the aquamen.

He went to the nearest window and looked into the adjoining room where the life support pods stood, dust-filmed.

They were real!

When he was expelled from that pod, he was thrust into reality, no matter how bitter and inexplicable it seemed. The world was not hobbling hopelessly in a stream of universal chaos; it was im-mutable, waiting to be explored and understood. But from the moment the faceless man touched him, he had been living in Galing's illusions. Now, once again back to reality, he set out to explore this eighteen-level structure, anxious to learn all that he could.

He hurried, though he wanted to give himself a chance to notice every detail, to find anything that might enlighten him. He could not forget that Galing's crew still held Allison as a hostage.

XVIII

Two hours later Joel had a working knowledge of the building. It was an inverted pyramid lacking both windows and doors to the outside world. More likely than not, it was a subterranean installation—an enormous one with considerably more than a million square feet of space, perhaps two million. He hadn't been able to cover a fraction of it. Nine of the eighteen levels had been established as living quarters, while the other nine contained laboratories, offices, and storage rooms.

At one time the pyramid must have housed in excess of two thousand people, though now there was not a clue to their fate. The top floor, where Henry Galing maintained his “house” and where the fake streets had been built, was the garage. The corridors there were several times wider than those on lower levels, and two huge rooms were parked full of cars, buses, armored military jeeps, tanks, amphibious troop carriers, taxis, pleasure cars, as well as a wide variety of utilitarian shuttles. Only one small segment of the topmost level had been used for the phony streets, the telescoped forest, and Galing's private estate.

Yet, knowing all of this, Joel was still confused. He could find no reason for the existence of the strange building or for his own presence here. It was like the central puzzle of astronomy: man could learn countless facts about the universe without ever grasping the
why
of it.

Now, Joel lay on a bed of ferns at the edge of the impossible forest. He was watching the rear of the Galing mansion. Once he had learned the basic nature of the building, he knew that he was going to have to go out of it—even if there were danger in that—to get a good perspective on the events of the last couple days. But once he was out, Galing could keep him from getting in again.

Therefore, rather than be cut off from her, he had returned to get Allison before he left. And he intended to observe the stage before making his entrance: the house was dark and silent, the lawn dark and deserted. When he was finally convinced that no one had yet missed him, he got to his feet and brushed the leaves from his clothes.

A light came on in the kitchen.

Joel knelt down until he was hidden by the underbrush.

The kitchen door opened, and three men came out of the house: Galing, Richard, and the faceless man.

Joel stretched out flat, snuggling in the shadows.

The three men walked purposefully towards the forest. Each step they took gave them a sudden, impossible growth—one flaw of the illusion that made the lawn seem much larger than it was. In a moment they stood at the perimeter of the trees.

“He could be anywhere in the fortress,” the faceless man said. “That's a lot to cover. More than the three of us can manage. Hell, he could be right here in the woods, as far as that goes, and we could walk right over him without knowing it.”

“We should have foreseen it,” Galing said. He was angry with himself. He spat into the weeds.

“This wasn't part of the program,” Richard said. “There wasn't any way we could prepare for it.”

“His escape from the dungeon mock-up wasn't part of the program either,” Galing said. “When he went out through the drains instead of through the door, we should have know the program was breaking down. We should have taken precautions.”

They were silent for a minute, listening to the recorded calls of night birds in the trees. Then the faceless man said: Maybe this time he'll have convinced himself about the girl.”

Galing laughed bitterly. “Oh, wouldn't that be nice! No more of these damned charades! But you know something? I don't think it's going to be that easy.”

“Neither do I,” the faceless man said.

“It's a lovely thought, though,” Richard said. “No more time in the cold tanks. I dread it more each time he sends us back to those things.”

“At least
you
haven't been temporarily transformed into a monster!” the faceless man said. “Will you look at me? Just look at me!”

“But as you said,” Galing reminded him, “it's only temporary.”

“You think that makes it any more fun for me?” the faceless man asked.

“We know it isn't fun,” Richard said impatiently. “It isn't fun for any of us. You aren't the only one who's suffering, you know.”

Galing said: “Maybe he'll choose me for the faceless part next time around.”

“You?” the faceless man said sullenly. “Hardly. You're a major figure in this whole affair.

You're one of the primary symbols that his psyche can't do without. Not have Henry Galing in one of his charades? Hell, that would be tantamount to not giving
himself
a role!”

Lying in the dead leaves, his face pressed to the ground, a cloak of shadows pulled across him, Joel was astonished at what they were saying. Did they mean that
he
was the father of these lies, the master of the illusions? Preposterous! It could only be one more of their tricks. They were talking for his benefit, hoping to draw him out. If he stood up now, thinking he was the master, they'd have him back in the mansion in another illusion within minutes.

“Come on,” Galing said. “We've got to find him. We've got to see what he's learned and figure out how to remedy the situation.”

“I know what to do,” the faceless man said.

“You do, eh?”

“Stop the charade right now.”

“Too easy,” Richard said.

“Now and then, I like things easy.”

“Richard's right,” Galing said. “Besides, he wouldn't like it if we gave up now.”

“Why wouldn't he?” the faceless man asked.

“You know him as well as I do.”

“Sure, sure. But he must be ready to crack up. He must be nearly insane with doubt, confusion . .

.”

Galing sighed and spat again. “Of course he is. Cracking up. Nearly insane. Desperate. And that is precisely what he
wants
to be, Brian.”

So the faceless man had a name. Brian. It seemed funny that a monster should be given such an ordinary name.

“But it's all falling apart, Henry!” Brian said.

“Then let's see if we can put it back together again, at least for a little while.”

“Won't work.”

“We have to try.”

“Henry's right,” Richard said.

The specter sighed. “Yes, I suppose he is.”

“Or it's back to the cold tanks,” Richard said.

They pushed through the dense underbrush and disappeared along the narrow woodland path.