Part 5 (2/2)

The hailers erupted fire as Dalroi cut into them with the radiation pistol and two flood-lamps spewed hot debris into the road. He dodged back into the doorway, seeking a way of escape. His luck faded. Six bodies. .h.i.t him simultaneously before he could turn. The radiation pistol went flying and he staggered backward as somebody took his feet from under him. As he crashed to the ground the others piled on top, battling furiously to pinion him while he was down. Frenziedly he kicked two of them off, fighting with the skill and strength of a demon. He might even have won free, but the holds relaxed suddenly and he climbed up to stare into the warm, blued muzzle of a radiation pistol.

”Now let's go back to the beginning and start again,” said Peter Madden grimly. ”This is getting to be a little wearing.”

Dalroi spat. ”One day I shall probably turn you inside out.”

”I don't think so,” said Madden. ”Not where you're going. Now move!”

Dalroi went reluctantly in the direction indicated and Madden followed at a cautious distance with his pistol covering Dalroi's spine. They worked up to the floor of the main hall to where the shuttles started on the outs.p.a.ce route. A bogie was signalled to the ramp.

”Get on!” said Madden. ”You're going on a trip.””Without a shuttle capsule. You're crazy!”

Madden shrugged. ”Either you go that way or I'll burn you where you stand. And don't think I wouldn't.”

His finger tightened on the pistol meaningly.

Dalroi looked at the vehicle: a bare cha.s.sis straddled with girders overhanging the four wickedly-powerful motors of the drive. A man could stay on that providing the acceleration was not too great and that he had rubber bones. He stood stock-still, his brain racing to find a way out of the situation. ”Where to?” he asked at last.

Madden laughed shortly. ”What the h.e.l.l do you want, an itinerary? We've scrambled the field-tuners and unbalanced the matrix coils. I can promise you a destination somewhere between here and infinity. More than that I don't care to think about. One thing's for certain: you're never going to return. Now do you ride or fry?”

This time Dalroi had no way out. Every trick in his repertoire was nullified by the pistol on his spine. He stepped on to the bogie, laid himself across the girders and secured a firm handhold.

”I'll see you in h.e.l.l,” he said.

It wasn't only motion, it was murder. Cus.h.i.+oned in deep foam plastic, the pa.s.sengers in the capsules scarcely felt the raw acceleration. Dalroi felt it threaten to dislocate his arms as his body slid backward over the awkward steel. The minimal damping of the cha.s.sis transmitted a bruising vibration to every point of contact and the hypnotic effect of sweeping down the mile-long track at close to two hundred miles an hour, and a low angle of view, brought cold sweat to his brow.

But those were the least of his troubles. The nickel-copper laminated hulls of the pa.s.senger capsules had a very precise function - that of protecting the occupants against the physical and mental hostilities of the transfinite field. They were virtually s.p.a.ces.h.i.+ps in miniature, with self-contained atmosphere, light and heat, and designed to withstand all of the multi-million changes of super-physical environment which transfinite travel involved. The twisting disproportionality of the area beyond physics was normally minimised to a vague nausea by the squirrel-cage electrodes in the hull and the careful use of anti-hallucinogen drugs. Dalroi had neither of these. He was heading unprotected into regions antagonistic to both body and sanity, to arrive, perhaps, at some unguessable destination from which he had no possible means of return.

Like a crude, iron arrow, the bogie hurtled down the track heading for the matrix polarising tunnel. In a fragmentary burst of anguish he considered throwing himself from the bogie, but that meant certain injury, if not death. Outs.p.a.ce there was one chance in infinity squared that he would not die. Then he hit the polarising field and the shattered circuits which once were nerves twisted his body into knots in the milliseconds before he was flung over the gradient chute. The bogie checked on the rim and dropped down the falling rails, but Dalroi, projected by his own momentum, flew like a wounded sparrow in a hideous, tortured arc between the grim electrodes. Despite his iron nerve a scream rose in his throat. It was still on his lips when he pa.s.sed in to the realms of transfinite s.p.a.ce.

NINE.

He was disintegrated, disunited, yet functioning, curiously, as a whole. He fell from level to level of the unendurable cosmos of transfinite s.p.a.ce, finding a brief cohesion of his individual molecules only to experience his own re-dissolution with an instantaneous pulse. Around him the h.e.l.lish suns and unbelievable vortexes of transfinity s.h.i.+fted and phased in a terrible kaleidoscope of new geometries and unknown colours.His dissembled senses were unequal to the task of handling the phenomena; they blocked, subst.i.tuted and mis-registered in an insane attempt to reduce the welter of unhandleable data to resolvable terms.

The effect was chaotic. The vacuum and pressure, tearing at his flesh, tasted of pure, sweet lemon, and excited, vibrant peals of sound burned like shafts of heated steel in his nostrils. Colours never known in the spectrum compressed their weird emotions into fantastic words throbbing with a new approach to rhythm.

DATADA DATADA CAMinorifum Sela-Sela-Selador oriFu SIC sic SICorIFUM datada NooooooRE ori-ori-FUM The taste of his cheek on his tongue was a couch of nettles and barbed talons of light raked his flesh with blunt, impressionless styli.

SIC orIFUM Nooore caminorieFUM ! ! dit dit dit He screamed, and the sound reverberated in patterns of purple and choking ammonia - DATADA did dit dit DATADA - leaving weals of pain across his soul.

Yet throughout his transposition something remained intact in the storm-driven hail of molecules which was Ivan Dalroi. More terrible than the hideous, s.h.i.+fting byplay of the dissolving levels of infinity was the terrifying cauldron which was deep-sealed in Dalroi's mind; a blast of raw energy, furious and fatal, which clung to his quivering body with an overriding possessiveness. It was the seed of the life-force, unquenchable fire, the indestructible thing which lived in the dark side of the mind, determined above all things to preserve its host. It took control of his mind and then his body, fighting the elements of transfinity which racked the hulk, and, though he took more punishment than his body was designed to take, it would not let him die.

He was drawn into a giant vortex, a swirling plasma-drift like a complex nebula of twisting luminosity; spiralling down an incredible cone with ever increasing rapidity, twisting and tumbling, caught helpless in the draught of some unseen, unfelt wind blowing from nowhere into nowhere. The nightmare speeded, pulsing with some vibrant waveform, spinning him endlessly, crus.h.i.+ng his disjointed senses with senseless rhythms of light and pain.

DATATADA DATADADA DAT DAT DAT.

He was riding a broad wave-front through infinity, scattering galaxies of shrieking stars with a red-tinged shock wave. He was plunging into a hideous coal-sack, sc.r.a.ping perilous, constricting walls of sound, plummeting down a nightmare channel of heat and the green of soft spring gra.s.s. Into the coal-sack ...

nothingness ... nothingness raised to the infinite power of infinity ... nothingness so empty that even the quality of darkness was absent.

Time pa.s.sed. A whimper drew his mind out from the suffocating veils of absolute nil, the sound of a human voice. Only after a dozen such sounds did he realise the crying was his own. He opened his eyes, and the action spun him with nausea. The movement had stopped and he was at his destination. After a while he stood, surprised to find that his body still answered to the ragged nerve.

He was in the centre of an immense golden web. Under his feet a disc of golden luminescence, perhaps a metre in diameter, formed a precarious hub of some fantastic system of radial strands which were crossed at intervals by roughly concentric rings. But it was the scale of the thing which brought Dalroi back to his knees. Looking out in all directions across the surface of the slightly undulating web heestimated he could see for roughly twenty miles before his sense of perspective turned traitor. Above and below, tinged with eternally s.h.i.+fting colours - was nothing at all, vast unimaginable and unendurable nothing.

Not believing his senses Dalroi instinctively turned his concentration inward to himself, refusing to accept the evidence of his eyes. He worked outward from basics, knowing that his sanity depended upon the rationality of his answers. I think, therefore I am alive; I'm kneeling, therefore I have a body. Good, so far! Now where am I? Answer: in a giant web, nothing above, nothing below. Simply a web of gold stretched across a limitless s.p.a.ce. But a web must have a beginning, an end, and a purpose.

Or must it? Does everything have a purpose? What about the sphere with nothing inside and the inverse of nothing outside? When you jump outside of your own physics what do you use for reference points?

All right, use physics as a basis. There is light, because I can see. Ah, yes! And gravity also. Not much, but sufficient for orientation. Good! Now, a web that is subject to gravity must be restrained from falling. How? Obviously the radial beams must be tethered at the other end.

Dalroi shrugged off the mult.i.tude of imponderables which bludgeoned his mind, chose an arbitrary radial strand, and began to follow it. The easiest method of locomotion was to step from strand to strand of the circular component of the web, like sleeper-hopping on a railway. The web was slightly resilient and his motion caused dramatic undulations to spread out in complex waveforms across the luminescent, patterned waste. The light gravity conserved his energy, and with easy synchronised leaps he began to clear two or three strands at a stride.

Four hours later the pattern began to change. The radial strands had diverged until, apart from the one he was following, no others had been visible for nearly an hour. Now a new convergence was beginning, and despite the fact that he was tiring rapidly, hope quickened his efforts. He was stumbling now, occasionally missing strands, and plunging through the web up to his groin. Anxiously he strained his eyes ahead, but the s.h.i.+fting golden radiance deceived the eyes and he was reluctant to place too much faith on visual evidence. And all round him the great Featureless emptiness s.h.i.+fted strange coloured harmonies on a background of nothingness.

Then he reached the point where the radial strands converged. In the centre was a disc of golden luminescence perhaps a metre in diameter. No end, no way out; only the centre of another hideous web.

A cloud of bitterness and futility settled over him.

He was still trying to figure out the geometry by which divergent straight lines returned to a new point of focus when he noticed something on the surface of the central disc which threw him into near hysteria.

Faint footmarks, as from a dusty sole, started from the centre and went off in the opposite direction. He had no need to check to know they were his own. He was back where he started!

This took a little thought. Had the web been a sphere its curvature would have been obvious; but it was not, it was a plane. Either he was traversing some dimension the existence of which he was unable to comprehend, or else Euclidian geometry did not apply to this atrocious place.

But if the shortest distance between point A and point A is a straight line, how do you go from point A to point B? This sort of debate could take a long time, and time was growing scarce. Food he could do without for a while, but water - h.e.l.l! He could not go long without water. He had to get out fast or go quietly crazy with thirst, chasing mirages round a golden web like an insane spider after imaginary flies.

He had to get out fast or not get out at all.

If walking in a straight line fetches you back to your point of origin what happens if you walk in circles?He chose a circular strand a few yards out and walked round it experimentally, feeling rather foolish when his trip placed him back at the beginning of the circle. But was it the beginning of the same circle?

He inspected the golden hub and began to wonder. His slight footmarks were no longer visible.

Placing a coin on the hub he repeated the experiment, watching carefully. At the last step of the journey the penny disappeared. He was near a hub, but not the same hub! He could now traverse from point A to point B except that there was nothing to choose between them. A few more times round the perimeter convinced him that there never would be any difference between them. What else to try? A parabolic curve, perhaps, or a progressive spiral? Given a few years and enough paper he could construct a reasonable non-Euclidian geometry for this place. But he had not got a few years. His life expectancy on the web was measurable in days, and the last hours would be anything but happy.

Ombudsman Walter Rhodes kicked the stool until it smashed against the wall. Time was when the office of Ombudsman had been a straight fight between his small legal and administrative staff on the one hand and the forces of officialdom on the other; but the post had changed with the changing world and now he needed a private army of thirty-five dedicated men to challenge the organised graft and guile in high places and to penetrate the black wall of official secrecy. As of now his task-force had been reduced to thirty men. Of the other five, two were missing, two were in gaol, held incommunicado, and the other was dead. Officialdom, organised business, and plain malicious circ.u.mstance had taken a fatal swipe at the champions of the individual, and all that Walter Rhodes could do to relieve his anger was to smash the heavy, resinated pine-wood stool.

After a while his customary composure returned and he reached for the communicator.

”Get me the Chief Commissioner, person to person, visual as well.”

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