Part 12 (1/2)

The conflict smote him with the force of a physical blow. He had jumped - projected himself across half a mile of s.p.a.ce without intention and without knowing how. The trouble was that he knew the sensation was familiar to him. He had jumped before, many times, but where and how he could not quite recall. It was a part of those things his mind refused to admit, a dark shadow chained deep in the dungeons of the subconscious.

Only once, on the web, could he recall consciously breaking through into the realms of self-projection.

He could remember breaking free of the web, but after that all was confused nightmare and blankness.

He had woken in a hospital just as the doctor was signing his death certificate. Of his journey to that peculiar circ.u.mstance he had no knowledge at all.

I must have jumped ... Only ... His blood ran cold. Gormalu jumped too - and Gormalu's not human!

I had his neck under my fingers and he jumped - clean out of existence. When I was trapped on the web - and just now - I also jumped. G.o.d! Don't tell me I'm not human either: I'm Dalroi, I was born in Old Town ... my mother was a tramp and my father was an alcoholic ... and between them they hadn't enough energy to roll out of bed, let alone jump.

The vibration died unwillingly. The dust behind him collapsed in ribbed patterns on the bedrock, and Dalroi searched carefully around the black terrain seeking the signs of his persecutors. He was naked and his skin was raw and inflamed and burned as though he Lad been bathed in vitriol, but he believed now what he had refused to believe before: he had an immunity to murder, a painful kind of ersatz immortality.

How or why was an academic point, but for the moment he clung to it with an animal belief. Nothing else could have brought him out of that h.e.l.l alive.But, he conceded grimly, it was not himself who needed to be convinced. Whatever was out there was not going to be as easily persuaded. They might never succeed in killing him - but he was having a h.e.l.l of a painful time while they tried. And then again, perhaps they knew precisely ... how to kill an immortal ...

What next? They must know that I escaped the trap. Perhaps that was just a softening-up process. They were dead right! Much softer and I'd go right through a jelly-sieve. But they didn't go to all that trouble just to baste me turkey-red and then let me escape. I wish to h.e.l.l I knew what was coming next. I have a feeling this is the finale.

He saw the beam swinging towards him, its path detailed by dust motes in the air, and he flung himself on to the floor. The beam halted and locked over him, flooding the area with a D-line sodium yellow glare.

Another projector lashed out from behind, then another and another until he lay centrally in a circle of spotlights. Surprisingly, nothing hurt. He rose warily to his feet and, s.h.i.+elding his eyes, he walked experimentally along the floor. The projectors were locked on to him with elegant precision, for he moved no nearer to the edge of the brilliant circle.

”All right?” said Dalroi to the bright darkness. ”So what do you want - a tap dance?”

The position was inconceivably bad. While he was bathed in that illumination anyone out in the darkness could hit him with almost anything without fail. A rifle, a revolver, a radiation pistol - a hand grenade even. It was a situation that needed to be rectified as soon as he could decide how to do it. After ten minutes it did not seem as though anyone was going to hit him at all, and the incongruity struck home.

Why a sodium light? These people must have progressed well past the stage of fluor-atomics, and a sodium discharge is not particularly efficient even by our own standards. h.e.l.l, have I made a mistake? I've been waiting for a brickbat from out of the darkness when maybe it's something in the light that is the danger.

The idea grew to a certainty and the certainty to a rising panic. Dalroi was never one to underestimate his opponents' capabilities and the circle of light put him at a gross psychological disadvantage.

Experimentally he tried to jump, but without the crazing fury and desperation seething in his veins the effort was useless. Jumping was strictly a survival reaction and this particular peril was one in which the survival threat was carefully obscured. He needed to be teetering near to the essential brink of destruction before the trigger flung him clear in a burst of wild madness; he had to know the breath of death before he could evoke such superhuman talent.

My G.o.d! Suppose I don't know how before it's too late!

He concentrated, exploring the senses of his body, trying to detect the first impulse which would tell him how he was supposed to die. He was well aware that a heavy dose of hard radiation could damage him beyond recovery without his being able to detect it, but he felt in his bones it would be something more virulent, more painful and more swiftly effective than blood cancer. He primed his mind to react to the first microsecond of pain, knowing he would have no time to make a conscious decision.

He nearly did not make it.

The nature of the threat, the pain and the reaction were as near instantaneous as his senses could measure.

SODIUM! SODIUM!.

The words shrieked through his mind. The supposed lamps were ion projectors seeding his body withmolecules of metallic sodium. Sodium reacts with moisture in the body ... exothermally ... produces hydrogen ... spontaneous combustion ... produces sodium hydroxide ... eats flesh ... fatally toxic.

Simultaneously his flesh burst into flame and he jumped ...

No sudden transition, this. They were waiting for him with some fiendish understanding of transfinity. His progress was arrested by the slam of a wall of solid energy which he struck with a momentum that would have killed him outright had he been moving in a normal s.p.a.ce-time continuum. He jumped again. Again force slashed out and beat him back ... burning ... burning ...

He jumped once more. This time the whole megaton impulse of the fire in his mind flared with unbelievable intensity. Anger, hatred and desperation came together like triple components of sub-critical ma.s.s uniting to form the ultimate of chain reactions. Uncontrolled, uncontrollable, the power punched through his body and his brain. He was Dalroi ... the irresistible force ... and he had the power to destroy the universe! The irresistible force closed again with the immovable wall his antagonists had set around him. This time it was the wall that had to give.

Transfinity shuddered. Streamers of light speared away into the black depths and the wall of energy collapsed back on its creators like a sheet of mad lightning. Dalroi, spinning like a top, toppled into a pit of reined darkness, wondering how much more punishment he would have to take before his antagonists realised they were fighting a lost battle.

Even as he broke through into the next strata of transfinity he knew his persecutors had no intention of calling the battle lost. No matter how his body burned it was his mind which was to take the brunt of the shock. His eyes refused to focus on the kaleidoscope of impossibilities which pa.s.sed before his agonised gaze. Shapes and forces seethed before him, geometrical idiocies, non-Euclidian absurdities; an ebullient configuration of seven-dimensional images both living an inanimate.

The gross nightmare bore heavily or his powers of reason. Sound, too, held all the acoustic unreality of something which reason declares cannot possibly exist. Dalroi was the intruder, an object inflicting as much curiosity and fear as the sudden appearance of a one-dimensional man in a crowded shopping centre on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. He felt the waves of terror and consternation beating back at him as the unimaginable ent.i.ties skittered insanely in an inconceivable number of directions to leave him standing on an abstract and impossible plane.

I'M BURNING, said Dalroi. CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BURNING.

If they understood at all they gave no sign. Fear begat anger, and the atmosphere crackled with hostility.

Ent.i.ties approached, winging quickly on mind-splitting trajectories which would have driven a ballistics computer into screaming hysteria.

BURNING! BURNING! BURNING!.

The sweet smell of intended murder seeped into Dalroi's nostrils.

CAN'T YOU SEE I'M BURNING!.

Encouraged by his pa.s.sive resistance the ent.i.ties wheeled to press an emboldened attack. Sounds stuttered and stammered and his mind groped for patterns of sound as the only possible subst.i.tute for intelligibility.

CUT! CUT! CUT! SPLITTER! CUT! said the sparkling chaos.

”Hate!” said Dalroi. ”HATE!” His words were a blaze of gold on blue, hazed against the keen brilliance.His mind twisted between rejection of the seven-dimensional images and an attempt to resolve them in three-dimensional terms. In neither case was he successful. His position was that of a blind idiot without legs engaged in a rapier duel with a practised swordsman. He could neither see the enemy, follow his manoeuvres nor know where the next blow was to fall. The chaotic patterns seethed before his eyes, evoking impossible perspectives and mind-twisting matrices of things material, things immaterial and things which were different from either. Sanity teetered dangerously on an unstable pivot.

SPLITTER! SPLITTER! CUT.

His left arm drooped with a thousand agonies which were overlaid with a numbing dullness. The limb felt as if it had become encased with lead. He knew his arm had been hurt, but by what or how badly it was impossible to tell, for the multiple refractions of the media in which he moved distorted even his own image beyond recognition. More terribly, he sensed he was beaten. His eyes and brain had no way of interpreting or responding to a seven-dimensional configuration, yet he sensed from the waves of immortal panic which splintered and phased around him that he was more terrible than they.

BURNING! BURNING!.

His only chance was to fight them on their own ground. He had to learn how to manipulate a geometry which could tolerate seven lines each at right-angles to the rest; and this he had to do in the face of an attack as vehement as it was abstract. He forced his mind to grapple with the cascading irrationalities.

The violence with which his mind withdrew told him that he could never do it and remain sane enough to be objective.

p s e cut i r h e cut Triangles w d SPLITTER cut Yellow was acrid in his mouth. ”Hate!” said Dalroi. ”HATE!”

Fire sang like soft steel splitting over a piercing tool, tumbling into troughs of boiling light. Movement was an echo which had no origin; pain was a red dimensionless haze; att.i.tude was a concrete substance which rippled off the tongue like an ecstatic prayer.

Sound, SOUND that he could touch, taste, smell, eddied like small explosive clouds of coloured malice.

Time was a shrill wind, echoing isolation, discreet quanta, a string of numbered knives to be separated and re-aligned.

SPLITTER! SPLITTER! CUT!.

Madness seized him. Desperation more desperate than the mere laws of preservation charged him with an awful strength. Intelligences were all around him, moving in, trying each to press a separate hurt. In the face of Dalroi's new burst of inspired spite they drew back in apparent consternation. Warmth wounded; light loitered loftily, shapes spun and shattered; sensations s.h.i.+vered. Time cut like a fine edge of a whetted blade. Entropy moaned with anguish.