The Long Twilight (46 page)

"So all we have to do is reduce to idiocy half a billion people who still trust in us, and destroy the station they entrusted us with, and we're home free."

"Well—those are rather emotional terms—but essentially, yes."

"I can't help wondering, Bardell, why you're letting me in on the deal."

He spread his hands and smiled benignly. "Why not? After all, we're friends, associates; I've always respected you . . ." His smile widened, became self-indulgent. "Your talents, that is, if not always your judgment."

"Help me up," I said.

He jumped forward and put a hand under my elbow and I came up fast and drove a straight right-hand punch to his solar plexus with all the power in my body behind it. He made an ugly sound and jackknifed past me and hit on his face.

"My judgment is still off," I said. "I'm staying."

Just then the alarm went off. Even through his agony, Bardell heard it. He rolled to his side, still curled like a worm on a griddle, and gasped out: "Florin . . . quickly . . . it's our . . . last chance . . ." He was still talking as I turned back to the battle board to do what I could before the end.

The knowledge was all there, crowding into the forefront of my mind; all I had to do was let my body respond automatically: my hands going out to touch the coding keys, punching in the sequences that summoned up the power of the grid; then walking to the chair, seating myself, strapping in, tripping the action station sequence. The chair rose swiftly to its position at the focal point. I felt the first preliminary vibrations strike the grid and saw the lights flash across it in response, felt the energies pouring into my brain, filling it, felt my mind reaching out for contact, while around me the curving bone-white walls faded and dissolved. I had one last fleeting image of the tiny mote that was the station, alone in interstellar space—and myself, alone inside it. Then it was gone, lost in the immensity behind me. And out of the darkness ahead, Diss appeared. I saw him at a great distance, a gigantic figure striding toward me, dinosaurian, magnificent, irresistible, light glinting from his polished purple scale-armor, from his flashing violet eyes. He halted, towering against a backdrop of stars.

"Florin!" his voice boomed out, filling all space the way an organ fills a cathedral. "We meet again, then! I thought last time you'd had your fill of dueling."

I didn't answer him. I picked a spot on the pale curve of his exposed belly and thought a hole in it, or tried to. Diss didn't seem to notice.

"It's still not too late for an accommodation," he thundered. "I can, of course, wipe you out of existence, as Bardell so rightly warned you. But I have no vindictiveness toward you, no wish to injure you. Bardell lied when he painted me as a villain, determined to eat away the minds of your kind." He laughed, a gargantuan laugh. "Why would I wish to commit any such atrocity? What would I gain from that?"

I narrowed down the scope of my target, concentrated everything I had at it. Diss raised a Herculean hand and scratched idly at the spot.

"I admire your spirit, of course—standing alone, defending your forlorn cause. You see, I am not without emotion. But I can't allow such sentimental considerations to stand in the way of my duty. I asked you once, on a gentlemanly basis, to destroy the dream machine. Well, you didn't do it. Instead you've persisting in your prying, turned up a few small facts—but to what end? Very well, the machine is not quite so innocent as I painted it; your role not quite so minor as that of a delegate representing a trivial planet in your Galactic Parliament. But is anything changed—except in scale? The Galactic Consensus is old, Florin—older than your infant race. It can no more tolerate your chaos-producing expansionism than a human body can tolerate cancer cells. As the body marshals its defenses to destroy the malignancy, so we marshal whatever force is needed to contain you. That's all we intend, Florin: to restrict you to your own sector of space, put an end to your disturbments. Surely you see the wisdom now of bowing to the inevitable?"

I didn't answer, concentrating on my attack. He fingered the spot absently and frowned.

"Withdraw from the grid, Florin. Use the method Bardell proposed to destroy the apparatus; I have no objection if you skip nimbly across the Galaxy with whatever loot you choose; I assure you, you'll be allowed to dwell in peaceful obscurity thereafter—" He broke off and put a hand over his belly. "Florin," he bellowed. "What are you—" He screeched suddenly and clawed at himself.

"Treacher! Under cover of parley, you attacked me—" He broke off to beat at the bright purple flames that were licking up around him, curling and blackening the bright scales. Suddenly he looked a lot smaller, as if my whole perspective on him had changed. He wasn't a giant across the plain now, just a man-sized reptile capering in front of me, squealing in fury more than pain, I thought.

"Whee," I said. "This is easy—and a lot more fun than having it done to me."

"Stop," he cried, in a tone that was half an octave higher than the one he'd been using. "I confess I've been misleading you! I'll tell you the truth now—but stop, before it's too late for all of us!"

I lowered the heat. "Start talking, Diss," I said.

"What I told you before was true, in the main," he yelped. "I merely distorted certain elements. I see now that was a mistake. My only intention was to avoid complicating matters, settle the affair as quickly and simply as possible. But I misjudged you." He gave me a wild-eyed reptilian look, while the smoke from the damped-down blaze curled about his narrow head. "You are not an easy being to manipulate, Florin.

"As I told you, you voluntarily entered the environment simulator—the dream machine—but not for the purpose of testing as I said. It was for treatment. You're an important human, Florin. They needed you, you see. You were hypnoed, your superficial memories suppressed, new conditioning taped into your brain—conditioning matching your imagined role. The intention was to manipulate your hallucinations in such a way as to render them an untenable escape, and thus to force you back to rationality."

"It sounds kind of familiar," I said. "Except it was the Senator who was off the rails."

Diss looked disconcerted. "But haven't you understood yet?" he said. "You are the Senator."

"It's really quite amusing," Diss said. "You escaped into the
persona
of the legendary Florin, whereupon Van Wouk arranged for you to be engaged—as Florin, the Man of Steel—as bodyguard to the Senator. He set you to guard yourself, thereby presenting you with an insoluble paradox."

"That sounds like a dirty trick. Why didn't it work?"

"With commendable ingenuity, your beleaguered imagination produced a Senator who was yourself, and who was yet not yourself. In due course, as the pressure to recognize yourself mounted, you explained him away by calling him an actor. This was, however, merely begging the question. It left unanswered the more threatening mystery of the identity of the real Senator—yourself. You became obsessed with the need to find and confront him. Van Wouk and his group, monitoring your fantasy, attempted, without success, to remove Bardell from the scene. In the end they presented you with his corpse—a measure of desperation. But you—or your subconscious—were equal to the challenge. You could not, of course, accept your own removal from the board. You transformed the dead impostor into a lifeless puppet, and went on to confront your bugaboo yet again—whereupon you promptly drove him to apparently destroy himself. But even then you were dissatisfied; you saw through the deception, and persevered—to the discomfiture of the Galactic Community."

"So you stepped in and gave me pieces of the story and sent me back to wreck the gizmo you call the dream machine."

"Which you failed to do. I hope that now you realize you can never rid yourself of yourself, Florin; your nemesis whom you pursue, and who pursues you—whom you've sworn to protect, but must attack—or is it the other way round?" He glittered his eyes at me, regaining his confidence.

"Try as you will, Florin, you're doomed forever to walk where you would have flown, to crawl where you would have run—dragging always the intolerable but inescapable burden of yourself."

"Very poetic," I said. "Why didn't you tell me I was the Senator to begin with? Why the story about an experiment?"

"I was unsure how you'd accept the news that you had been declared insane," he said, rather tartly. "Now, having seen your monumental ego in action, I'm not so inhibited."

"Just that, huh? You make it all so simple and sweet. And I don't remember any of it because part of the treatment was to blank out my memory, eh? And the joker in the deck was that we were playing with a loaded gun, and you're the nice policeman who came along to take it away. You know what, Diss? You're a nice fellow, and I like you, but I think you're lying."

"What, me lie? That's preposterous. Now, I mean. Before, of course, when I hadn't yet fully assessed your capabilities—"

"Don't bother, Diss. You've developed what they used to call a credibility gap. As polite a way as they could think up for calling a man a damned liar. Why do you want the dream machine smashed?"

"I've already explained—"

"I know. And I didn't believe you. Try again."

"That's absurd! What I've told you is absolutely factual!"

"You don't like me playing around with this substitute reality we're making do with, do you, Diss?" I pictured us boxed in by walls. We were. I turned the walls into backdrops painted to represent the green-tiled lab. Then I made the pictures real. Diss hissed and backed against the big console, where every light in sight was lit up now. I could see the lettering on them:
Emergency Overload
. Somehow, the lizard man looked smaller in this context; a rather pathetic little lizard in an out-of-style stiff collar and string tie.

"What do you want, Florin?" he whispered. "
What do you want?
"

"I don't know," I said, and put a pale blue Persian carpet on the floor. It clashed with the walls. I changed it to pale green. Diss screeched and danced as if the floor had gotten hot under him.

"No more!
No more!
" he hissed.

"Ready to give up?" I said. "Before I change this dump into a Playboy club, complete with cold-blooded bunnies with armor-plated bosoms?"

"Y-you can't!" His voice had now developed a quaver to go with the soprano pitch.

"I'm getting reckless, Diss. I don't care if school keeps or not. I want to see something give at the seams." I took away the green tiles and put flowered wallpaper in their place. I added a window with a view across a landscape that, somewhat to my surprise, was a yellow desert, stretching farther than any desert had a right to stretch. I looked at Diss and he was dressed in a skin-tight, golden uniform, with sparkling insignias and silver braid and rainbow-colored medals and polished boots and sharp-looking spurs and he held a quirt in his right hand that he
whap!
ped against his armored shin in a gesture of impatience. Somehow the outfit made him look smaller than ever.

"Very well, Florin, since you leave me no choice, I now inform you that I am a Chief-Inspector of Galactic Security Forces and that you are under arrest." He yanked a large and elaborate handgun from the bejeweled holster at his lean hip and pointed it at me, left-handed.

"Will you come quietly?" he chirped, "or will I be forced to place you in ambulatory coma?"

"I've already been there," I said, and shot the gun out of his hand with a nickel-plated double-action .44 caliber revolver. He whipped a saber out of a sheath I hadn't noticed and aimed a vicious cut at my head. I got my cutlass up in time, and metal clanged on metal and Diss staggered back, whipped out a bamboo tube and propelled a curare-tipped dart in my direction. I ducked under it and he produced a flame-thrower and flame bellowed and spurted at me, licking harmlessly off my asbestos suit until I hosed it out, sputtering and smoking, with a big brass nozzle.

Diss was scarcely two feet high now; he lobbed a grenade at me, and I bounced it back off a garbage-can lid; the detonation knocked him back against the control panel. All the red lights went to green, and a strident alarm bell began to clang. Diss jumped up and on the chart-table, no longer wearing his natty gold threads. His hide was a dull purplish-gray. He chattered like an enraged squirrel and threw a thunderbolt that exploded harmlessly, with a crash like a falling cliff, filling the air with the reek of ozone and scorched plastic. A foot high now, Diss danced in fury, shook his fist, and launched a nuclear rocket. I watched it come across the room toward me, and leaned aside, gave it a nudge as it passed; it flipped end-for-end and streaked back toward its owner. He dove over the side—he was about six inches long now—and the whole room blew up in my face. Luckily, I was wearing my full-spectrum invulnerable armor, so no harm came to me. I waded through the ruins and out into yellow sunlight filled with boiling dust. The dust settled and a small pale-violet lizard coiled on a rock just before me uttered a supersonic hiss and spat a stream of venom at my eyes. That annoyed me. I raised my gigantic flyswatter to crush the grasshopper-sized lizard, and he uttered a piercing miniature shriek and ducked into a crack in the rock, and I jammed my crowbar in after him and levered and cracks opened all across the stone.

"Florin! I surrender! I yield utterly! Only stop now!" His eyes glittered like red sparks from the depths of the cleft. I laughed at him and jammed the pry-bar in deeper.

"Florin, I confess I tampered with the dream machine! Van Wouk and the others had nothing to do with it! They're unwitting dupes, nothing more. When I came upon you in a vulnerable state— your mind open to me like a broached mollusk—I couldn't resist the temptation to meddle! I thought to frighten you, make you amenable to my wishes—but instead you seized on my own sources of energy and added them to your own. As a result, you've acquired powers I never dreamed of—fantastic powers! You'll rend the very fabric of the Cosmos if you go on!"

"Swell; it could stand a little rending." I heaved hard on the bar and felt something give, deep inside the rock, as if the planetary crust was readjusting along a fault line. I heard Diss screech.