Part 11 (2/2)

If Dalroi experienced anything at all it was an ache of loneliness, the abhorrent vacuum of enforced solitude, the ant.i.thesis of security. He accepted the fury gathering above him as unalterable and unavoidable, and in his quiet fatalism he forgot even to be greatly afraid. A growing silence over the artificial city attracted his attention and puzzled him, for though it was long into the simulated night even a sleeping city normally has its slight aura of sound. Unable longer to restrain his curiosity he finally left the bar. At first he encountered only completely deserted places, but as he turned a corner the reason for the acc.u.mulating silence became apparent.

Dark vehicles, like those of a forbidden army, were traversing the streets. Everywhere a quiet and orderly evacuation was taking place. Teams of figures were entering the buildings and waking the occupants, conducting them to places on the trucks swiftly and without fuss. The essential urgency of the occasion was overruled by the imperative need to avoid panic. Dalroi mentally saluted the organisers of Failway. They were caterers for every need including the need to evacuate silently an entire city.

Carefully he moved through the streets towards the transfinite pa.s.senger shuttle installation. Again the precise bonds of organisation were apparent. The immense shuttles slid away at one-second intervals, programmed for Failway Terminal, and the fleet of vehicles kept coming with a steady stream of hastily awakened sleepers, many of whom were obviously under cepi hypnosis and had no idea of the nature of their nocturnal journey.

Later the Security men began to comb the streets, looking for stragglers, but the search was perfunctory.

Dalroi climbed to the roof of a group of deserted flats and lay out of sight while the search went past. The weight of exhaustion and sleepless hours bore down on him, and, unwillingly, he slept.When he awoke the whole city was empty and abandoned. He reconnoitred the silent streets and probed into the buildings without finding trace of any remaining soul. So far as he could tell he was the only living thing in the whole area of Failway Six. Although it was now time for the artificial morning the plasma-sun remained dark, and a sinister silence held deep over the unofficial night.

He grew uncomfortably aware that the sky was growing lighter, not with the stained greys of the artificial morning which would never come, but with a mercuric blueness only just out of ultra-violet. Checking the charge in the radiation pistol Dalroi climbed down from the high roof to the murky streets, dim creva.s.ses in the unlikely dawn.

The city had been abandoned with all services still running and as he touched the pavements he experienced a twinge of incredible loneliness that behind the dimly lighted windows no sleepers stirred or lovers moved or cried or sang or wept. Only his footsteps blunted the quick silence.

”Make no mistake,” said Dalroi to his unseen persecutors. ”If I survive I'll hunt you to the far corners of infinity.”

There was a white flash, brilliant, eclipsing vision with a dynamic blankness. It filled the whole atmosphere and coruscated and burned on corners and projections. Dalroi himself became the centre of a shaft of living white fire which ate at him with tongues of cold flame and then as rapidly was extinguished. The white fires flickered and died; nothing was burnt, or was scorched or showed any sign of difference.

Dalroi's skin crawled. This was a new phenomenon, of unknown potency, but presumably it was designed to be deadly. In what way? His attention fastened on the radiation pistol in his hand, an incredible fear forming in his mind. In verification he squeezed the trigger. The gun mashed under his fingers and disintegrated into crumbling powder. Stupidly he watched the particles fall.

Metal! Fear flashed sharply. Something happened to the molecular binding forces in the metal. All metals? He turned to a lamp standard and smote it sharply with his hand. The blow catalysed some reaction and the standard broke crisply and fell in untidy, crumbling shards before his feet. Not only metal! Gla.s.s, ceramic, plastic - every substance the lamp had contained crumbled to sickening dust under his probing toes. My G.o.d! The whole d.a.m.n place is made of dust!

His shoes disintegrated with a sudden exotherm which made him jump. The fibres of his clothing shredded, unwillingly at first, then with growing impetus, and the particles dusted as they fell from his body, leaving him naked and unarmed. He looked in bewilderment at the tall empty buildings which surrounded him. Such lights as had shone were slowly going out as the filaments fatigued. How sound were these apparently solid walls and the hideous banks of masonry?

Somewhere in a clock a pivot broke, causing an escapement to jam. The pendulum swung with just sufficient momentum to jar the mechanism. The catalysis touched off, and the mechanism crumbled into powder. The pendulum fell through the bottom of the case on to a marble mantel-shelf, and a seven storey tenement crumbled into a heap of noisy dust. A bursting fuse shattered its cartridge and a line of tawdry shops became a pile of flowing particles; a cistern burst and two blocks disappeared.

The last of the lights collapsed and died, but in the artificial sky remained the weird blue fluorescence, an unG.o.dly aurora, and it was by this light that Dalroi moved. As his bare feet touched the ground the pavements crumbled into bowls of dust under the impact. Sewers collapsed like dusty deathtraps, and on either side the tall buildings began to totter and wave as some small impetus touched off a chain reaction which led to complete disintegration.

He was half afraid of choking in the dust, but it settled swiftly by some electrostatic charge, though several times he sank deeply into drifts of crumbled brick dust and nearly suffocated on that account. Ofthe unknown enemy he saw no sign, but they had in one incredible second robbed him of weapons, of cover, and of everything outside of his own body which a lifetime of fighting had taught him to use for self-preservation.

Somebody wants me dead! ... So badly they don't measure the cost in ordinary terms. h.e.l.l! What's so special about me? I'm Dalroi ... and I've got something burning at the back of my brain ... and sometimes I get almighty mad ... and do things I never quite remember. What is it a man can have which makes him so special they'd tear the universe apart to see him in his grave? And if he has it ... how does he recognise it and use it to survive?

Something blew up with a jet of fire, and a whole quarter of the artificial city slid into oblivion. Behind the dusty desolation the quick, trim lines of the transfinite pa.s.senger shuttle installation came into view. He waded through the dusting rubble, knowing what he would find yet unable to resist the faint hope that the installation was untouched. A bright shuttle capsule mashed like a rotten tin and turned to dusty driblets as he touched it with his hand. With eyes long past astonishment he watched the matrix coils powder to brown and copper and gold on the crumbling floor. On a tottering girder a solitary notice hanging over what had been the pa.s.senger bays crumbled its topical legend: NO WAY OUT.

”You can say that again!” said Dalroi sourly to n.o.body at all.

He was trapped on a transfinite level, and out there - out in the multiple darknesses all around - waited the something which so desperately wanted him dead; something whose power and malice was to be feared with more than ordinary dead.

Trapped! He had been trapped in transfinity before and managed to escape. How? No memory of that.

What happens when I touch the limit of endurance? What comes over me that's all fire and fury and crazing bitterness and anger? Oh G.o.d! What untapped power becomes unleashed? What is it that lives in me in the dark side of the mind?

Nothing happened.

Why don't they come out and get me? Are they biding their time before the final punch - or are they afraid? Afraid? That's a laugh! I might just manage a good spit at them if the d.a.m.n dust hadn't made my mouth so dry. Why should they be afraid of me? I'm Dalroi ... I was born in the Old Town precinct ... and a little bit of the Devil has got into my brain. Is that the sort of crime that shakes the Universe? Is that why they want me dead?

Something happened. The remnants of the city crumbled, not spasmodically but in a continuous stream, tumbling like dry water. Walls tottered and splintered and were dust long before they hit the ground. The whole dim landscape writhed and trembled and dissolved, striving to form one bare, flat waste of powder, like s.h.i.+fting, unclean snow.

Then he felt the tremor beneath his feet and knew, sickly, why the rest of the city was falling. Vibration, terrible and deep, of ever increasing amplitude, was shaking the terrain bodily. In a few moments no features were left; only a pale, s.h.i.+fting waste under the unG.o.dly blue radiance which dwelt above.

This is it! This is the moment they've been waiting for. How is it to come - this thing called death?

In the dim distance the black plain held its secrets. No lights, no movements; nothing but the harrowing certainty of eyes watching from the darkness, of unknown unknowable power being concentrated and focused on one solitary morsel of humanity called Dalroi.How is it to come? In a fire-flash ... heat, searing, scalding ... or as lightning, to cinders ... or radiation ... high velocity projectile ... by pressure, vacuum, gas ... starvation, paralysis ... or a new way of dying ... Watch it, Dalroi! Your paranoia's showing! You're on the wrong end of a war of nerves!

The vibration stepped up, tearing at his feet, creating warmth by frenzied friction. G.o.d, it hurts! Like a sea around him the livid dust rose in a hurling turbulence, shocked into such pitch of vibrant activity that it flowed and eddied like a tide of water. Fluidised by the pressure of colliding particles, it expanded up to his waist, then to his shoulder; a monstrous flood in seething flow; a drowning, bitter sea of heated dryness in which he had no hope of swimming to survival.

And it burned. He was immersed in a boiling shot-blast of hot grit. Where his feet touched down on the denser layers beneath, the vibration tore at his naked feet, trying to tear the skin off, and producing friction burns. He leaped, partly to draw clear breath above the swirling grit-storm and partly to ease the agony of standing; and each time he leaped the lower part of his body descended again into excruciating fire.

And the fire and the tearing vibration reached steadily higher and higher. He felt he was in a boiling bath that was trying to tear the flesh from his bones; he felt he was plunging into boiling lead, into vats of simmering steel ... into the sun ... Agony beyond endurance which had to be endured; pain so intense that it was no longer pain but a synaptic short-circuit which funnelled all his awareness into one vast pit illuminated by black lightning. Then something snapped within him.

Desperation piled on desperation, resolution on resolution; the megaton impulse of the unconquerable will to live pulsed in his brain. Fury more brilliant and more destructive than a nova charged his bloodstream with a fantastic plasma derived from the core of creation.

Somebody will pay for this! G.o.d, I'll make them pay!

Anger burst over him like a storm but he could still recognise the diabolical nature of the trap. No matter what effort of will or desperation he achieved he could never hope to wade clear of the boiling maelstrom. Inflammable dust motes were bursting into spontaneous points of fire and it was only a matter of time before the whole ma.s.s became incandescent. His mind and his will might live, but it was a matter of minutes only before his body was burnt and torn to dust.

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Not this way, thought Dalroi. Not this way and not now.

For a fragment of a second he blacked out, but the life impulse pounding in his brain reset the tripped circuit-breakers of his mind and forced him back to scalding consciousness.

There had to be some way out!

VIBRATION STRICTION RELAXATION.

AMPLITUDE FREQUENCY.

There had to be an answer!

There was an answer. The vibration was a standing wave, adjusted to place him at the anti-node so that the punishment would have full effect. If he could only reach the nodal point ...

He could see it now that he knew what to look for. The pattern of standing waves was traced by the activity of the dust, like sand on a vibrating tray. At the nodal points the lessened activity was marked by a valley in the whirling flood. Here a man could stand in the midst of the fury and escape all but theincidental effects. He thrust himself forward. Within seconds his feet touched down on cooler surfaces and the dust rose no higher than his waist. Before and behind him the barbarous dust rose higher and hotter like the waves of some monstrous time-locked sea.

NINETEEN.

His relief was of short duration. Whether it was deliberate or some quirk of the harmonics of the place he never knew, but suddenly there was a rapid mode-change which plunged him into an anguished wave now well above his head. He founded, and more by luck than judgement broke out to a new node point.

He pressed swiftly along the channel formed by the standing wave, intent on reaching the limits of the city material, beyond which there would be nothing in which to drown or burn.

Something else slammed into the fabric of the nightmare terrain, another frequency from another direction, beating with the first then locking into synchronisation an octave above. The node channel began to twist and dissolve, breaking into patterns and diamonds like a monstrous living quilted eiderdown. Progress became a matter of timing and placing, a wild dance through s.h.i.+fting red-hot quicksand with agony the reward for a misplaced foot or a misjudged tempo. Dalroi was dancing the Devil's ballet, with death as the most critical of audiences.

The unknown enemy must have guessed what he was up to, for the vibration patterns changed again. The immense dunes began rolling, huge as houses, and the uncertain valleys s.h.i.+fted even as he trod. The synchronisation escaped him, and for a second he knew he was roasting alive, but suddenly he was on the edge of the city that had been, stumbling down a weak, vibrating incline on to a plain of cool black darkness. His eyes were wide with terror, not from the narrowness of his escape from death but with fear of the thing which burned in the dark side of his mind. The last half mile he had not walked ... he had jumped!

<script>