Part 6 (1/2)
The screen cleared slowly as the connection was made, and Van't Sellig's irritable, balding head came into view.
”Ah, yes! Ombudsman Rhodes. I was expecting you to call.”
”I'll bet you were, Fritz! I've received your file on Dalroi. I think you have some explaining to do.”
”Who tipped you off about Dalroi?”
”You know I can't reveal that,” said Rhodes. He glanced down at the file placed out of sight of the vision-scanner. The complaint had been unsigned but he had had enough dealings with Inspector Quentain to be reasonably certain of its author.
Sellig grimaced wearily. ”Never mind! I'll find out somehow. What do you want to know?”
”It says here that Dalroi was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by electrocution. A death warrant is appended. Also a release warrant dated a year after the supposed execution. Don't tell me that you're practising reincarnation at the police laboratories now?”
Van't Sellig sweated profusely. ”You're asking the wrong sort of questions, Walter.”
”d.a.m.n you, that's my job! You know I don't let go of a thing like this once I get my teeth into it.”
”Very well, you've asked for it. The execution wasn't successful. G.o.d! Three times I watched him burn in that chair and each time went into a coma and came out of it under the pathologist's knife.”
”I thought those days were over,” said Rhodes angrily.”It was far surer than the rope they used to use for hanging, Walter. For over two hundred years the electric chair didn't have a single failure - then came Dalroi. Why it didn't kill him we can never quite decide, but it's an experience I'll never forget.”
”So I should d.a.m.n well hope!” said Rhodes. ”What happened then?”
”Then the Black Knights stepped in and took Dalroi away under section two-nine-four of the National Secrecy Acts.”
”For what purpose?”
”I don't know.” Sellig mopped the perspiration from his brow. ”Two-nine-four covers the use of convicted murderers for experiments involving certain death. They use them as guinea-pigs in s.p.a.ce-flight experiments and chemical warfare techniques, you know.”
”No,” said Ombudsman Rhodes, ”I didn't know. Thanks for the tip. But what happened to Dalroi?”
”Even if I knew I couldn't tell you. From the legal point of view hand-over under two-nine-four is certified as death, and the case was closed as such. The pay-off was the shocker.”
”Keep going,” said Rhodes grimly.
”Dalroi wasn't guilty of murder. He killed all right, but later evidence proved he didn't have any option.
There's even a suspicion he was framed. We informed the Black Knights and they kicked like h.e.l.l.
Finally they released - somebody.”
”Somebody?”
Van't Sellig looked the epitome of misery. ”I met Dalroi after his release, and talked with him. I don't know what they did to him, but on his release he wasn't quite the same person. He had no memory of what he'd been through at the hands of the Black Knights. Somehow they'd blanked out a complete year's memories. At a rough guess I'd say Dalroi is still undergoing his execution.”
Rhodes drew a deep breath. ”If I were you, Fritz, I'd start looking for a new job. From where I'm sitting there doesn't seem to be much future for you as Chief Commissioner.”
”I'll take my chance,” said Van't Sellig. ”Not even you can move against the Black Knights.”
”No? With the muck I'm raking up I've enough material to bring down the government.”
”Look, Walter, you're out of your depth. Let Dalroi sink or swim in his own way. He'll reach h.e.l.l just as soon. You can't interfere with the Black Knights and come out of it alive.”
”I must!” said Rhodes. ”There's a sight more here than appears at the surface, and you know it! And you're still holding two of my a.s.sistants. Are you going to release them or do I let the newspapers have the story?”
”You won't get away with it. There's not a paper in the country which'd touch that story today.
Something big is in the air and its liable to break at any moment, but Central Security has clamped down a press censors.h.i.+p which is absolute. n.o.body would dare to touch Dalroi's story.”
”Then what the h.e.l.l is going on?”
Van't Sellig shook his head resignedly. ”You asked for this Walter. I'm going to tell you because you won't be satisfied until you know. If ever you breathe a word of it I'll crucify you so fast you'll comeunstuck right round the edges. The Black Knights are making a last-ditch stand against Failway. After the next election Failway will own the government and there'll be no stopping them from that point on. It's now or never. The Black Knights are pinning their faith on a secret weapon. Its name is Ivan Dalroi - the man who can't be killed!”
TEN.
Trapped on a web of crazy, discontinuous geometry, Dalroi cursed and wept like a mad thing. He could not die just yet! If a man could drink vengeance and subsist on hate then he would do so. If it took him a million years of weeping or a thousand reincarnations he would get back somehow and make Failway pay for every blistering tear and every second of agony. Parabola, hyperbola, vector and cosine, degrees of arc bisecting the minutest degrees of arc. Where the h.e.l.l was point C ... or is it D or E or even b.l.o.o.d.y omega?
He knew he should have died, but refused to accept the fact. Something, some part of his mind, was stronger even than the terrible cupped hands of death. There was a flame within him possessed of such thirsting for life that he knew his body would be dust long before the final spark flared out.
A pain was lancing through his head like the slow, rhythmic insertions of a hideous sewing machine forcing a carpet needle underneath the skull. A whisper played a fantastic memory in his ears, and he caught the sound and held it, using it as a focal point to grope for all the things he had been forced to forget. Not hallucination, no, this was memory. It was disembodied, unconnected with the pattern of his life, yet it was there!
Then he had it clear. Lissajous figures on oscilloscope screens banked before his eyes, changing patterns, responding to ... something. The air was reeking of ... ether, yes, that was it! And noises ... disconnected ... bells, unholy sounds, sounds never made nor heard in this life. Sounds that came from within the brain itself.
The shock hit him like a thousand volt discharge. Now he remembered. The terror, the stark horror of having his brain exposed. The saw on the skull, the surgeon cutting tissue and flesh to expose the naked brain; and himself, drugged but conscious, watching the writhing traces and trying desperately to concentrate lest the fear should drive him mad. The probes in the brain; no pain, but noise and sensation, a leg which moved without conscious volition and noises loud and clear which were never there to hear.
But when? A memory must have some origin, some time and place of access. How had these atrocious memories insinuated themselves into an apparently hole-free chain of experience? And why?
Why? Why? The question burned like a whiplash. G.o.d, there was a secret here! Something was burning in the back of his mind. He could not see or feel it yet he knew it to be there ... something he was not supposed to know. Yet he had to know! Suddenly it became of peculiar importance to him to find out.
It was more difficult than staying alive, more painful than dying. Only an effort of tremendous will enabled him to do it at all. Then, once he had started, it was easier. The same compulsion which had made him reject the thought of death gave him now a diabolical lever, a desperate means of entry into the forbidden depths of his own mind.
Down he went, ruthlessly stripping layer after layer of civilised repression; peeling back dread, abhorrence, disgust and the thousand darker things which fester in the unseen shadows. Grimly he cut down to the dark side of the mind, to the region where the censor, like the dull red doors of a furnace, scarcely insulating, masked the spiteful radiance which dwelt beyond. The censor was asleep or dead or worse. He demanded entry, and it was not denied him. The doors swung wide and he entered them indread and teetered on the edge of an unholy holocaust. At the fringes of the terrible fire which screamed and blistered in the awful chamber of the mind, he stood face to face with his own Id.
This was the seat of the elemental life-force, a molten maelstrom of unbridled instincts and terrible ambitions, stripped clear of the layers of insulation and repression which millions of years of evolution had laid over the frightful incandescent turmoil. He staggered blindly, seeking protection against the blistering fury and untamed malice which radiated like some dreadful alien sun. He was appalled by the h.e.l.lish ferocity, the unimaginable pressures and the seething, grinding ebullition which threatened to crack the universe by its unbounded intensity.
And with a courage somewhat more than human, he threw himself into the intolerable well of strife.
Raw emotions, millions upon millions of amperes of naked energy, stark, illiberal, completely blind, spat in excruciating arcs forming a continuous pulse of pure liquid fire. The will to live was a fiendish powerhouse suddenly ablaze through surfeit of the terrible powers it was no longer able to contain. Anger and hatred was sheet lightning, spitting flame from merciless heavens, pouring virulent fury on the Satanic inferno. s.e.x, like a thousand-headed snake, wound its dark coils and convulsed in agony, tightening upon the conflagration and concentrating its malevolence and potency, pulsing the h.e.l.lish plasma to new levels of atrocious ferocity.
Super-critical now, the hectic ferment knew no bounds. Steaming, spitting, searing, snarling, the flaming torrent burst through his mind like a million tons of exploding steel.