Part 7 (1/2)
”Come in, Seven.”
”Seven to Yard Control. Can't you do anything about this d.a.m.n weather?” Static lashed the loudspeaker.
”Take it up with the Union,” said the Yard-master morosely. ”That's one thing you can't blame on me.
Look, Pete, I'm re-routing you to the hump to take a load of empties across the main to the East yard.
Unless we get something out of here soon we're liable to choke the yard completely.”
”Right! Give me a time for crossing the main line. The gradient's slipperier than h.e.l.l and I'd not care to be out there when an express comes through.”
The Yard-master grunted. ”You worry about the gradient and move out fast when the signal clears. I doubt if I can get more than a minute's clearance across the main line at this hour of day.”
In fact, the main-line controller gave him only a fifty second clearance. It was little enough, but it would have to suffice if Failway yard was to start to clear the specials in the further sidings. He took his cue from the pa.s.sing of the Atlantic President and gunned the signals as soon as the way was clear, overriding the safety trips which rebelled against such hairs-breadth operation. With agonising slowness numberSeven crawled from the gradient and edged on to and then across the main tracks. The Yard-master watched its progress on the illuminated board where the blocks of light traversing tangentially exaggerated its slowness.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the entry of the fast-freight into the sector panel, and he s.n.a.t.c.hed up the handset.
”Speed it up, Pete. I've got twenty seconds to clear the line.”
Pete's reply was unprintable but indicated that his was the major stake in the race to clear the line before the hundred and fifty miles an hour freighter cut his entourage in two.
For a moment it did not look as though number Seven would make it, then the ”points cleared” indicator showed and the Yard-master thankfully thumbed home the levers to clear the main line, watching subconsciously for the repeater to confirm his action. The repeater stayed dead. At first the fact failed to register in his mind, and when it did he instantly slammed all signals to danger and leaped for the radio.
”Pete, are you clear?”
”Sure. Now on the down gradient pa.s.sing into the slipway.”
”Something's wrong with the b.l.o.o.d.y board. For Chris'sake see if you can see the main gantry and tell me what it's reading.”
Silence for a second, then: ”All the fast down-lines are at clear.”
”You sure? My board still gives the main-line routed to siding.”
”That's not what it says out here. Lord! If that fast freight goes down the gradient it'll either derail or go clean through the other end.”
His last words were swamped by the blare of a whistle. The fast-freight was speeding close.
A sudden squall hit the cabin, the pressure of the wind making it vibrate momentarily while the driving hail obscured all other sounds. The Yard-master jumped to his board to ascertain what was happening, and watched with unbelieving eyes as the lights winked out steadily, one by one, until the instrument was dead. In a corner of his shocked mind he had already ascertained the only possible explanation of how the board could fail in that particular way; somebody was below in the switching bay pulling out the fuses!
In the second he took to reach the door, catastrophe arrived. Like dark, solidified thunder, the fast-freight came off the main, down the gradient and thundered through the yard, its whistle sounding a mournful swan-song and its brakes burning uselessly in the face of its terrible momentum. The Yard-master forgot the switching bay and stumbled out into the storm, running with futile panic after the swiftly receding rear lamps as if he imagined he could catch them up and halt the unalterable. He was in time only to watch helplessly as the black thunderbolt disappeared into the solid bulk of Failway.
The freighter was doing over a hundred and thirty when it entered the loading platform. The brief horror of the loaders was pitifully short-lived. The locomotive ran the whole length of the bay and hit the end of the line with a driving crash which shook the whole building. It took away the hydraulic buffers, fifty feet of solid ramp and a considerable portion of the wall before the following rolling-stock hammered it together with a hail of debris into the river beyond. Had the rest of the train followed suit the damage would have been relatively slight, but the sudden check in momentum occasioned by the crash explosively telescoped the first wagons and made a convulsive caterpillar of those directly following.Eighty tons of girder left the sanctuary of a flat truck and took down three roof-supporting columns and a line of offices before it drove to rest. Another hurtling load twisted the huge gantry crane into a weeping, useless metal spider. A fifty-foot low-loader stood on end like a fantastic totem-pole and was shortly demolished by a cable truck whose monstrous drums, like cotton reels on a long jam, began a drunken route down from the moving mountain only to be swallowed by the grinding cataclysm.
The silence which followed was a terrible thing to hear.
The Yard-master overcame his fear. Running back into the signal cabin he paused momentarily at the switch-bay door. The door was open but the room was empty. The floor was littered with fuse cartridges torn from the boards, and much of the wiring had been broken as though with an axe. Only a few circuits still functioned. Long blue wires, which had no right to be there, looped across the interlock banks, feeding the fatal ”line clear” signal to the main line and setting the points to crus.h.i.+ng death. This was ingenious and planned destruction carried out with split-second timing and an uncanny knowledge of the working of the yard.
Upstairs, only one instrument still functioned - the telephone. Even as he was making the call the Yard-master imagined he saw the figure of a man running from shadow to shadow between the useless shunting lights, heading into Failway.
Dalroi followed hard on the heels of the disaster, intent on entering Failway before the security net had time to close. The grinding catastrophe had stamped its panic deep into the hearts of the Failway staff, and n.o.body was sure what had happened nor what, if anything, was still to follow. This was a situation Dalroi knew well how to play to advantage.
His objective was the bay where the immense cylinders of compressed and liquefied gases were loaded on goods-shuttles for transfer to the various transfinite levels. In the midst of the chaos he had no difficulty in pa.s.sing un.o.bserved. The goods shuttles were crude compared with their pa.s.senger-carrying counterparts, being simply laminated cylindrical hulls with elaborate vacuum-proof hatches. The loading process was automatic. A capsule on a bogie ran to location at the head of the loader, the prepared load was charged into the capsule and the hatches closed.
Dalroi estimated his chances and watched carefully the indicator which showed the programmed destination of the capsule. When Failway Two was signalled on the board he quelled a fleeting instinct to caution, and took the risk. Eight huge gas cylinders comprised the load, about half the capsule's capacity.
When the charge entered the capsule Dalroi was on top, fighting to prevent his limbs from being crushed as the cylinders settled to the form of the hold. He had scarcely settled when he felt the deadly acceleration as the bogie sped up the outworld track, but the conditions were luxurious compared with the last time he had ridden a Failway bogie. Then: Foimp! Star scatter ... s.h.i.+ver ... inconceivable twisting ...
The copper-nickel hull of the capsule shunted the transfinite field and attenuated the twisting disproportionality into something merely conducive to insanity. There were strange lights in the darkness of the capsule hold and movements where there was nothing there to move. Dalroi watched fascinated as the hold appeared to grow shorter as if to crush him, and then longer, seeming to extend for about a mile.
Yellow-green coruscations sprayed off the metal, and his limbs heaved and jumped as his body bucked the trans-dimensional tides. His legs would grow large and hideous then wither to diminutive stumps; his head would seem to float like a balloon or become so heavy that he feared his skull would crack against the angry iron. He prayed the capsule would not enter a transfinite loop, for such distortions would then a.s.sume a permanence which nothing could reverse.
Once the walls became a mirror, and he lay breathless and perplexed in something which reminded himof the interior of a giant vacuum flask, watching his eyes and chin dissolve into each other and occasionally to wander from his features altogether. Then it was over. There was a check in momentum which almost broke his bones, the gas cylinders s.h.i.+fted dangerously under him, and dark normality swam back. He had arrived. The problem resolved simply to getting out without getting killed.
The capsule canted at an angle and the hatches flew open on a ramp, the gas cylinders sliding out. He stayed with the cylinders until he had formed a split-second idea of the situation, then he kicked himself upward to break the killing momentum and grasped at the nearest stationary object. He was near the head of the ramp, and the cylinders plummeted on below him while the downward movement of his body caused friction burns on his hands as he desperately strove to prevent himself following the iron bottles fifty feet to the foot of the slide. Fortunately he stopped before the burns became intolerable. A swift look over the edge of the slide told him of its trestle construction. He moved over the side quickly and was on the trestles and into the shadowy complexity of the supports before any of the crew below looked in his direction.
Even as he descended he was a.s.sessing the possibilities of sabotage. He had no doubt of his ability to bring the whole installation to ruins in about seven minutes flat, but on a transfinite pleasure level there could be close on a million lives at stake and any acts of sabotage must be so directed that if possible the innocent were permitted to escape.
The problem was how to force the Failway controllers to allow the exodus of the very people whose lives Failway used as a veiled threat for its continued existence. In spite of the bitterness inside him, Dalroi had no intention of becoming a ma.s.s murderer - except in the last extreme.
He stepped cautiously out into the oriental splendour of Failway Two. Tropical sunlight from an artificial sun blazed golden radiance on sandy streets. On all sides splendid architecture rose: palaces and temples, spires, turrets and minarets, domes, towers and terraced walks. Slender oriental water-gardens vied with majestic, ornamented buildings for pride of vista and excellence of spectacle. The best of the entire, old Orient had been delicately blended into a fantastic wilderness of wonder.
The fragile sensitivity of old China and j.a.pan sat serenely side by side with the splendid and the picturesque from Ceylon and the India that was. Myth and marvel; flowers of fable, rare and exotic; orchids and incredible fruits - all conspired with the scents of chianan and aloeswood and spice to fire the imagination with longing for a lost age of adventure.
Dalroi was suitably impressed. This was the fatal attraction of Failway which kept the visitors coming through its doors. Here, with the trade-winds blowing on his face, and the calm warmth of teak and sandalwood and tea, even Dalroi found it hard to concentrate on the anger in his heart. He had to remember objectively that the air came here as a liquefied gas boiling from immense pressure spheres, that the trade-winds were derived from hidden electrostatic jets, and that the broad and wonderful sun was a stabilised tritium plasma furnace. Even the imitation sea, on which plied junk and sampan and catamaran, was but the work of marvellous craftsmen.
He could understand now why public opinion would never support the campaigns to close Failway. This was a place for dreaming, and men do not give up their dreams willingly. Only in the gutter, from which the Failway labour force was conscripted, or in high places, where the political pressures were extreme, was the corroding influence of Failway truly appreciated. It needed a connoisseur of human frailty like Dalroi to know the uttermost depths of human misery and degradation which Failway scattered in its wake.
Dalroi was troubled by a sense of wrongness, something out of phase between the method and the intention, something alien. It seemed almost that the corruption which ensued from Failway practice wasdeliberate, as if the whole facade of Failway existed only to corrupt. In such a completely artificial and controlled environment the individual was more than usually subject to the pressures of deliberate manipulation. Dalroi, to whom individuality was sacred, knew all too well how strong those pressures were.
TWELVE.
The notice board read: STRATEGIC DEFENCE RESERVE.
REHABILITATION CENTRE.
This was fiction, as any who dared attempt to penetrate the defences to a sufficient depth would soon discover. The soldiers were not a fiction. These were battle-trained men on permanent loan from a crack commando unit, and the small carbines which they carried had hair triggers and no safety catches.
Inside the military perimeter was the wire, a broad barrier of barbed malice relieved only by the occasional T.V. pickup and the red warnings of a minefield in the no-man's-land beyond. The electrified fence gave no such warnings. Only a very shrewd eye would read the green ceramic insulators on the posts as indicative of the violent, twisting electrocution which awaited the incautious hand. There were other devices too. Four towers covering the inner perimeter harboured the A.F.I. projectors, the mere scatter of whose radiation could reduce a brave man to a coward. In the path of the beam circuits the ground was baked to brick, and the blackened gra.s.s at the edge of the tracks sported curious growth mutations under the fierce irradiation. Over all, the pale-lilac ion cloud crackled with expectancy, guarding the reaches exposed only to the radar-watchful sky.
In the centre of the land enclosed by this fearful barricade stood one of the most secret installations in the world. All that was visible at the surface was a squat, white blockhouse giving entry to the many levels deep below the ground. In these deep chambers, shrouded with darkness and with mystery, was the home of the legendary Black Knights.
The emergency conference was convened in the briefing room six hundred feet below. The a.s.sembly at the table was about as varied as one could imagine: Baron Cronstadt, the man of power and authority, whose way of life was chiselled into his commanding features; Professor Hildebrand, whose lean asceticism but emphasised his intellectual prowess; Presley, whose staring eyes and unalterable piety proclaimed his fanaticism in the service of a deity whose name was Obedience and Self-Denial; lastly, the Monitor, whose appearance was deceptively youthful and whose pleasant mien gave little hint of the ruthlessness with which he shattered his enemies and which had carried him swiftly into the top echelon of the Black Knights. Only one man was missing from the group - Gormalu.
The atmosphere was tense. The dark guards around the periphery emphasised the fact that, this time, the members of the Cronstadt committee were not a.s.sembled of their own volition. The Monitor's eyes were grim.