The Long Twilight (41 page)

"We should have brought a flashlight," Miss Regis said.

"Or a squad car full of cops," I said. "Look—or maybe you'd better not." But she was beside me, staring at what I was staring at. It was the Senator, lying on his back, with his head smashed like an egg. I felt the girl go rigid, and then relax and laugh, a shaky laugh, but a laugh for all that.

"You frightened me," she said, and went past me and looked down at the body sprawled on its back in its dusty tuxedo.

"It's only a dummy," she said.

I looked closer and saw the paint peeling from the wooden face.

"It looks . . ." Miss Regis gave me a troubled look. "It looks like you, Mr. Florin."

"Not me; the Senator," I said. "Maybe they're trying to tell me something."

"Who is the senator?"

"The man I was hired to protect. I did my usual swell job, as you can see."

"Was he . . . part of the experiment?"

"Or it was part of him. Who knows?" I stepped over the imitation corpse and went on along the passage. It seemed too long to fit inside the building. There were no doors or intersecting corridors for a hundred yards, but there was one at the end, with a line of light under it.

"Always another door," I said. The knob turned, the door opened on a room I had seen before. Behind me Miss Regis gasped. Dim moonlight shone through tall windows on damask walls, oriental carpets. I went across the deep pile to the long mahogany table and pulled out a chair. It felt heavy and smooth, the way a heavy, smooth chair ought to feel. The chandelier caught my eye. For some reason it was hard to look at. The lines of cut-crystal facets spiraled up and up and around in a pattern that wove and rewove itself endlessly.

"Mr. Florin—why would such a room as this be here—in this derelict building?"

"It's not."

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you remember your last visit?"

"Is it really the same room? Is all this really just a dream?"

"It wasn't a dream then and it isn't a dream now. I don't know what it is, but at some level it's
happening
."

Miss Regis had paused, her head tilted alertly.

"There's someone near," she whispered. "I can hear them talking."

I got up and soft-footed it over and put my ear to the door. There were two voices, both familiar, one high-pitched, one as resonant as a commercial for a funeral parlor.

". . . getting out now," the latter was saying. "I want no part of the responsibility. You've all lost whatever sense you had."

"You can't," Trait's voice said, sounding like a cop turning down a speeder's alibi. "We'll recover him, never fear. It's only a matter of time."

"What if he dies?"

"He won't. And if he should—we're covered. You've been given assurances on that point."

"I don't believe them."

"You're not going anywhere, Bardell."

"Get out of my way, Len."

"Put the bag down, Bardell."

"I'm warning you—"

Someone hit a cast-iron stove with a ball-peen hammer. Someone made a gargling sound. Someone dropped a hundred-pound bag of potatoes on the floor. I threw the door open and slammed through into my old original bedroom and almost collided with the Senator, standing over Trait's body with a smoking gun in his hand.

He looked at me and his mouth came open but no words came out. I lifted the gun from his hand and sniffed it, just to be doing something. It smelled like a gun.

"I never liked him either," I said. "Where are you off to?"

"I didn't mean to kill him," he said. "It was an accident."

"Don't sweat it, Senator. Maybe this one doesn't count."

I squatted beside Trait and went through his pockets. I didn't like doing it but I did it anyway. I could have saved myself the trouble. They were empty. I looked at his face, gray-green now, not pretty.

"Tell me about it," I said to the Senator—the ex-Senator— Bardell: whoever he was.

"I thought he had a gun. He's crazy enough to use it. I shot first."

"Skip on to who you are and who Trait is and what you were doing here, and where here is. And, oh yeah—what it's got to do with me."

He gave me a sharp glance with something that might have been hope in it.

"You don't remember?"

I cocked his gun and aimed it at his vest. "There seem to be a few blanks. Start filling them."

"I hardly know where to begin. What
do
you remember?"

"Tell me about the Lastrian Concord."

He shook his head and frowned. "Look here, I swear to you—"

"Skip it. What about Eridani?"

"Oh." He licked his lips and looked disappointed. "Very well. You know what I was up against there. It wasn't as though I had a great deal of choice—"

"What were you up against?"

"He threatened to wipe me. Otherwise, I'd never have—"

"Start further back."

"Well—Eridani approached me on the seventeenth. His story was that my services were needed in a professional capacity. I needed the work, frankly. Once I'd seen the situation, they couldn't afford to let me go—or so they said."

I turned to Miss Regis. "Has he said anything yet?"

She shook her head. "I think he's playing for time. Who is he?"

"An actor named Bardell."

"My God," Bardell said. "If you know that, you know—" He cut himself off. "How did you find out?"

"You told me."

"Never."

"In the park," I said, "on Grayfell."

His face fell apart like a dropped pie. "But you're not supposed—" he said in a strangled voice, and turned and lunged for the window. I put a round past him without slowing him; he hit the opening like a runaway egg truck and went through in a cloud of smashed mullion and glass splinters. I got there in time to hear his fading scream and the impact far, far below.

Miss Regis made a shocked sound. I felt over the metal frame, touched a spot that clicked. The whole window, dribbling glass chips, swung into the room like a gate. Behind it was a plain gray wall.

"If a phony man jumps out a phony window," I said, "is it suicide or just a harmless prank?"

"It's a nightmare," the girl said. "But I can't wake up." Her eyes were wide and frightened.

I wet my lips, which felt like blotting paper, and thought of two or three smart remarks, and said, "I've got a hunch this wasn't part of their plan. I don't know what the plan is, or who planned it, or why, but things aren't going just the way they were supposed to. That means they aren't as smart as they think they are—or that we're smarter. That gives us a kind of edge, maybe. Check?"

"We're going in circles," she said. "We're like blind people in a maze. We stumble on, deeper and deeper—"

"Sometimes when you're going in circles you're skirting the edge of something. If we get deep enough we'll break through, maybe."

"Into what?"

"Funny—I would have said '
out of what
'." I stuck my head inside the gray-walled passage, scarcely eighteen inches deep. It might have been the one the Senator and I had used for our fake escape from the fake Senatorial mansion, or its twin.

"Call it, Miss Regis," I said. "Shall we go on—or go back?"

"Back—to what?"

"Not losing faith in Wolfton, Kansas, are you?"

"Did I ever really live there?" she whispered. "A mousy little woman in a drab little town, working in an insurance office with varnished doors and creaky floors and wooden filing cabinets, typing up reports on an old open-frame LC Smith, going home at night to a dreary little room, dreaming impossible dreams—"

"And waking up and living them. I wish I could answer that, Miss Regis. Maybe the answer's in there." I nodded toward the dark and narrow way behind the dummy window.

"Are we probing into dark tunnels in a fantastic building?" she said. "Or are the tunnels in our minds?"

"Maybe our minds are the tunnels. Maybe we're thoughts in the minds of the gods, burrowing our way through the infinite solidity of the Universe. And maybe we're a couple of cuckoos chirping in the dark to cheer each other up. If so, we're doing a bad job of it. Come on, girl. Let's go exploring. We might stumble out the other end into the pink sunshine on the white sugar beach beside the popcorn sea." I stepped through and turned to give her a hand, but there was something in the way, something invisible and hard, like clean plate glass. She spoke, but no sound came through the barrier. I hit it with my shoulder and something splintered, maybe my shoulder, but I plowed on through the enveloping folds of darkness and stumbled out into noise and a blaze of light.

I was in a vast, high-ceilinged hall that went on and on into the misty distance. On one side was a formal garden beyond a high glass wall, on the other huge panels like airline arrivals boards covered with lines of luminous print that winked and changed as I looked at them. Down the center of the hall white plastic desks were ranked, and behind each desk was a man, or almost a man, in a white uniform and a pillbox cap with a chin strap, and soft brown hair covering every square inch of exposed skin except the pink palms of the long-fingered hands, and the face from eyebrows to receding chin. There were lines of men and women in assorted costumes queued up in front of each desk, and I was in one of the lines.

The customer in front of me—a dazzling female in a tiny jeweled sarong and a lot of smooth, golden suntan—picked up her papers and disappeared behind a white screen. That made me number one.

"Right; Florin, Florin . . . yes, here we are," the monkey man said in clipped Oxonian tones, and gave me a bright-eyed look that included a row of big square yellow teeth. "Welcome back. How did it go this trip?"

"Like Halloween in the bughouse," I said. "Don't bother telling me who you are, or what. I wouldn't believe a word of it. Just tell me what this is."

"Oh—oh, a nine-oh-two," he said, and poked a button and white walls sprang up on all four sides of us, making a cozy cubicle with just him and me inside.

"What did you do with the girl?" I said, and tried to watch all four walls at once.

"All right, Florin, just take it easy, lad. You're an IDMS operative just returning from an official mission into Locus C 992A4." He pursed his wide, thin monkey-lips at me, frowning. "Frankly, I'm surprised to encounter an amnesiacal fugue syndrome cropping up in a field agent of your experience. How far back have you blanked?"

I felt in my pocket for the Senator's gun. It wasn't there. Neither was the 2-mm. needler. I found a ball-point pen that I didn't remember owning. On impulse I pointed it at the ape-man behind the desk. He looked startled and one hand stole toward the row of buttons on his desktop. It stopped when I jabbed the pen at him.

"Talk it up, Slim," I said. "Don't bother with the rehearsed pitch. I want her and then I want out—all the way out."

"Be calm, Florin," he said steadily. "Nothing's to be gained by hasty action, no matter what you imagine the situation to be. Won't you take a seat so that we can get to the bottom of this?"

"I'm tired of the game," I said. "I've been flim-flammed, gulled, hookwinked, and had; no hard feelings, but I want the girl back. Now."

"I can't help you there, Florin. As you see, there's no girl here."

"On the count of three, I fire. One . . . two . . ." I paused to take a new breath, but someone had pumped all the air out of the room and substituted chalk dust. It hung as a white haze between me and the monkey-man. My fingers dropped the pen and my knees folded without any help from me and I was sitting on the edge of a chair like a nervous interviewee for a secretarial job, listening to him talk through a filter from his position on the other side of the desk, half a mile away across unexplored country.

"What's happening to you is a recognized hazard of the profession," he was telling me. "You've been well briefed on the symptoms, but of course if the fugue becomes well advanced before you notice something's amiss, you can of course slip too far; hence, no doubt, your auto-recaller returned you here to HQ. Let me assure you you're perfectly safe now, and in a very short time will again be in full command of your faculties—"

"Where's Miss Regis, damn you, Monkey-puss?" I snarled, but it came out sounding like a drunk trying to order his tenth martini.

"You were dispatched on assignment to observe an experimental machine detected in operation at the Locus," he went on calmly. "A primitive apparatus, but it was causing certain minor probability anomalies in the Net. Apparently you were caught up in the field of the device and overwhelmed. Naturally, this created a rather nasty stress system, ego-gestalt-wise; a confusing experience, I don't doubt. I want you now to make an effort to recognize that what you've been through was entirely subjective, with no real-world referential basis."

"Oh, yeah?" I managed to say well enough to cut into his rhetoric. "Then where'd I get the gun?"

"It's IDMS issue, of course."

"Wrong, chum. It's a ball-point pen. Where's the girl?"

"There is no girl."

"You're a liar, Hairy-face," I tried to get my legs under me and succeeded and lunged across the desk and hit sheet ice that shattered into a fiery cascade that tinkled down around me like a shower of cut gems that rose higher and higher, and I drew a breath to yell and smelled pipe smoke, the kind that's half orange peel and soaked in honey. I snorted it out of my nose and blinked and the air cleared and Big Nose was sitting across the desk from me, smiling comfortably.

"Now, now, lad, don't panic," he said soothingly. "You're a bit confused, coming out of the ether, nothing more."

I looked down at myself. I was wearing a long-sleeved sweater, corduroy knickers, argyle stockings and worn sneakers, and my shanks were thin, skinny adolescent teen-age shanks. I stood and he jerked the pipe out of his mouth and pointed the stem at me and said, "You behave, boy, or I'll report this entire matter to your mother!"

There was a window behind him. I ran around his desk and ducked under his grab and pulled the Venetian blind aside and was looking out at wide campus lawns and trees and walks under a yellow summer sun.

"I'll see you expelled from this institution!" Big Nose yelled.