Part 11 (1/2)

”You think you stand a chance?”

”They're afraid of me,” said Dalroi simply. ”There has to be some reason for that.”

Together they left the house. No security men were in the immediate vicinity and people were returning to the streets now that the search had pa.s.sed. Berina led the way and Dalroi followed at a discreet distance.

Near the outskirts of the golden city the oriental camouflage gave way to the functional lines of a service area. She motioned for him to loiter while she went inside.

Minutes later she returned and beckoned him to follow into what he rightly surmised to be a mortuary. A clammy chill hugged his skin as he followed between rows of surgical white slabs to the door where a man with a white ap.r.o.n and pallid skin waited with a metal casket. Dalroi looked into his eyes. The fellow was in an advanced state of cepi hypnosis, obeying Berina's instructions with a leaden dullness which branded him as nearer automaton than human.

Berina looked at Dalroi and at the coffin, and there was agony in her eyes.

”You have to do this, don't you?””Yes,” said Dalroi. ”You know me.”

She nodded. ”I thought that's what you'd say. I was a fool ever to come into Failway. You know that, don't you?”

”No,” Dalroi said. ”I don't think you had much choice. You see, they planned it that way, hoping I'd follow.”

”My G.o.d!”

”That's a sample of how they manipulate people. That's the reason I have to go through with this. It's them or me, and they aren't going to stop pus.h.i.+ng people around until either they've won or until I stop them.”

”Give them h.e.l.l, Dalroi. If ever you loved me, give them h.e.l.l!”

Dalroi climbed into the coffin. She placed one kiss on his forehead then arranged the lid. Darkness. He felt the rollers spin as the coffin moved along the track then the firm vibration as the load was picked up by a belt en-route for the graveyard shuttle and the unknowns of Failway Six.

The loading was automatic. The coffin hit the end of the capsule with a clang which made his ears ring.

Then the nerveless excitement of the speeding track and the dimensionless agony of shooting the matrix field. In his confinement, Dalroi screamed. Such was the nature of the stark fantasy and claustrophobia which the journey induced that he was still screaming when the coffin reached Failway Six.

From his nightmares he disentangled two stimuli which had direct reference to reality. The first was an overwhelming drowsiness caused by near asphyxiation, the second was a vibrant roar which shook the very fabric of his environment. He kicked open the lid and sat up to find himself suddenly at the mouth of h.e.l.l. He was nearing the hearth of a furnace the size of which made him gasp with amazement. The inexorable black steel belt seemed destined to deliver him into the incandescent chamber which rose like the nave of some small cathedral charged with blinding radiance.

Swinging out rapidly, he balanced for precious seconds while he tried to gauge the hazards of a jump, then kicked off into the darkness. It was a blind drop, for the intense light of the furnace robbed his eyes of the ability to differentiate things in the heated gloom below the hearth.

He landed some twenty feet below, one foot striking the casing of something which may have been an oil pump, and twisted himself clumsily. Agony burned into a sprained knee. He was in a world of pumps and boilers like the engine room of one of the wickedly powerful tugs he used to stow away on when, as a youth, home life became particularly intolerable.

For many minutes he stood in the darkness under the hearth and listened to the pulsing pipes and savoured the richness of heated oil while he rested his knee and recomposed his nerves. The drop had shaken him more than he had supposed; more, in fact, than had his pa.s.sage through transfinity.

Something about the environment was gnawing at his mind. My G.o.d it is! See now, oil feed compressor ... gauges ... feedlines ... balancer ... jets ... injectors ... Oh My G.o.d! Gear like this we used on the Vagrant Curlew ... only there we fed turbines and here they feed crematoria. n.o.body in their right senses would use this set-up as a meat fryer ... unless ... unless it was put here especially for me!

His senses reeled in the thick heat. Psychological warfare! Somebody had stolen a memory out of his mind and built it into a pit at the back of nowhere. The elements of madness built into the equipment.

These boys aren't missing any tricks! Dalroi, what the h.e.l.l is in you to make them go to this trouble? Only the black belt above his head with its occasional steel coffin destined for the fire kept himin touch with reality. There was an unbearable feeling of terrifying alien-ness about the whole idea which made his bones ache deep inside.

What the h.e.l.l have I got myself into?

He looked for a way out, and found it. A deserted corridor, dim and brown like that of a school he once had known, stretched away to a flight of concrete stairs. He didn't need to count the steps to remember their feel. Another part of life, another memory trapped in concrete, out of context, an idle snapshot turned to reality.

Insanity must be something like this!

EIGHTEEN.

A door gave on to a street, and as he stepped through the whole weight of his dismay and anguish fell upon him. It was night, damp and chill, and the street was a complex of all the wasted and crippled streets that ever had torn his soul under the dim lamplight.

If he had hoped to find himself alone, as he had so often been alone, he was disappointed. Figures moved, as figures always did, forlornly along the dark pavements calling or talking to others, or singing to themselves in consolation, or walking the roads unseeing while contending with some inner misery. If this was the place of his execution then his hopes of dying alone were not likely to be realised.

In the incredible fidelity of scene and atmosphere the wonder was horribly complete. The property-men of Failway possessed an artistry almost lost to the outside world.

Given a mood for a particular area they interpreted it into a reality of bricks and paint, light and shade, artifact and object, with a skill which was phenomenal.

No panorama was too large or detail too small for their attentions, and the whole scheme was blended by a diabolical understanding of the whims and foibles of human nature. As a work of three-dimensional art a Failway installation was incredible; as an interpretation of the human soul it was clever to the point of insane genius.

The Elysian-fields of Failway One drew the finest fancies from mythology, and the mind and body became transported to a miniature world of light and wonder, modelled on the grandeur and the dreams of ancient Greece and Rome, Failway Two took the splendours of everybody's dream of orient, and in a blaze of gold and contrast wove a new magic, such that the mightiest of eastern princes would have cried in awe and amazement.

So also with the turbulent wilderness and excitement of Failway Three, the soft, sweet seductive sensuality of Failway Four; and the brash, brazen pa.s.sions of Failway Five - complete, insanely accurate and believable dream-worlds of fantasy, pleasure and escape.

Only here, on Failway Six, did the unnatural cunning of the grand deception shock the mind into awareness of the inhuman genius which controlled the whole design. Just as Failway interpreted with quiet precision every element of gaiety, wonder, awe, excitement, and the thousand human emotions, so did they also interpret the dark and the sordid. Dalroi, with his quick appreciation of atmosphere and intent, was shattered by the impact of the world into which he stepped.

He stood almost blindly for a few moments, forcing his mind to accept the truth of what he saw. Failway Six was a close a.n.a.logy of all the scenes and places where, as a boy, he had known fright, anger, confusion, hate, hunger and uncontrollable dismay. It was a mirror held up to his soul. He felt as forlornand dirty as the streets on which he stood. Failway Six was a city of inhospitable streets, callous slum tenements and cruel, soul-destroying gloom. It was the environmental influence straight out of Dalroi's psyche.

It took him a few moments to convince himself that this unholy place was not the unfortunate byproduct of apathy, time and vicious economics, but had been deliberately constructed, brick by sorry, blackened brick, to some Satanic, detailed master plan. High-riding over the narrow streets and alleys an ancient electric locomotive hauled a train of filthy, dilapidated carriages in fine with the rooftops, shattering the brittle silence with an unkempt roar. Humidifiers, simulating rain, laid a fine carpet of condensation over the scarred and unwashed roads, and from scraggy curtained windows of a dozen lighted hulks of buildings flowed shafts of discordant jazz, or bawdy voices raised in alcoholic song or anger.

Dalroi savoured the atmosphere carefully. Being a connoisseur of the moods of men he could appreciate the faithful reproduction of the sordid and the desperate. The setting was perfect, he reflected sickly, down to the last dark puddle and the floating grains of dirty chaff therein. Anything could happen in such a hateful place.

He moved instinctively into the shadows, avoiding the illumination of the greenish gas flares, and carefully picking his way from door to door, exploring the mood and trying to understand the depth of the genius behind it. Everything fitted too neatly into place: from the worn steps and the dirty, blistered paint to the patched fanlights and the greasy halls, the effect exactly matched the credible.

He turned to an alley undercutting the railway and was not amazed to find it lined with cracked ceramic tiles and rotting bricks. Desolation was complete and accurate even to the slight stalact.i.te of a water drip through the concrete up above. This was the atmosphere of black despair that drove the humanity out of a man and led him down to the gutter by the shortest available route. Here were all the elements of crime and loneliness and violence brought to reality by the most vivid and ruthless piece of scene-setting that ever existed.

Dalroi moved warily ahead, uncertain now of his next move and still trying to capture the implications of this atrocious place. Breaking free of the damp, black tunnels, he moved out into a cobbled street where the lights shone through the windows of a bar and the hot breath of liquor and coa.r.s.e voices spilled out on to damp pavements. The subtlety of the scene closed round him like a dead hand clutching. He laughed mirthlessly as the trick unfolded in his mind. This place was inhuman, alien. It was tailored with minute precision to key into the memories and habit pattern of Ivan Dalroi! They had brought him home to die!

He felt the almost m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.tic lure to encounter the pangs of past hopelessness, to slip back into the mire of shades and secrets which had characterised his youth. He entered the bar and scanned the a.s.sembly, knowing before he looked that every sorry character would be in place. He ordered splitza laced with white spirit, as he always had in the Old Town, and savoured the colourless fire as it trickled down his throat.

The atmosphere was insidious, working its way down inside him, filling half-forgotten needs with an almost soporific exactness. Detail by detail, with exquisite finesse, the place seeped into the voids in the dark side of his soul. There was no doubt about it now - this was the place appointed for his execution.

Somebody had constructed it deliberately, with ruthless knowledge of the workings of his mind. These were the streets of h.e.l.l.

He studied the occupants of the bar carefully. Nearly all the men were Failway patrons, drawn by the inexplicable urge to spend their vacations in the squalid shadows of Failway Six. These were the haunted men, the men drawn inexorably back seeking to rediscover the fatal fascination of some dark hour in theirlives when they had acquired the taste for pa.s.sions which only the skillful demimonde of Failway could unfailingly supply. Here and there were sailors back from the vicious waterfronts of half a hundred ports, tainted with subtle vices from the orient and restless appet.i.tes from the tropics. This was the place where the cold-eyed thirsting could find its slaking and where the sleepless agonies of wanting found a little brief relief.

The women were painted with a lavish imprecision which stamped them for what they were. These were some of the legions of hostesses employed in hopeless bondage by Failway to cater for the patron's wants. Failway training and selection, ever meticulous, matched the women to the particular cla.s.s of clientele. From the naive nymphs of Failway One to the oriental coquettes of Failway Two, the pattern traced wearily down. Failway Three, with it sharp-eyed, sophisticated adventuresses was replaced by the skillful seductresses of Failway Four and in turn by the gilded, padded courtesans of Failway Five.

Failway Six dispensed with dreaming and smacked the hateful cast of cold reality over the souls of men.

The more he thought about it, the more the wrongness grew to a certainty and the certainty to a stifled panic born not of fear of death but the proximity of the completely unknown. The immaculate exactness of the environment betrayed the skeleton of alien intent by its very fidelity. No man, being mortal and therefore liable to error, could have designed Failway Six in all its wretchedness. The whole degrading work was of a higher order of art and perception than any human genius could attain - and its very existence denoted a level of skills and technology which left him gasping. He ordered more splitza and settled into a corner. There was nothing he could do but wait.

With the gradual drift of evening the bar slowly emptied as patrons and hostesses turned away into the night, singly or together, moving like shadows back into the enfolding shadows. n.o.body bothered Dalroi and he bothered no one, nor did he notice one curious glance nor any hint of the eyes which must surely be watching him. For half an hour he drank alone, becoming finally aware that even the staff had deserted to leave him in sole possession of the bar, lit and open and in every way credible except for the complete lack of life other than his own.