Part 14 (1/2)
”I know,” said Zen quietly. ”And that's the pity. You're an attractive brute, Dalroi. Oh, I wish to G.o.d it didn't have to be in you.”
Dalroi's reaction was triggered by the minutest hardening of her eyes. As her fingers raised and the white fire flashed towards his temple so he jumped. Zen jumped also. Dalroi came out on the edge of the hollow; she only a yard away. Again the white fire flashed at his face. He jumped again and again, always emerging to find her just beside him.
Rapidly he weakened. The game was unfamiliar; for him it was a survival reaction almost unused, making great demands on his already hammered physique. She jumped with an expertise of long familiarity and control. He soon realised he must reach that microsecond of hesitation which would enable the fire to strike. The next time he emerged he stood stock still.
If he had expected triumph in her face he was disillusioned. She stood before him white faced and anguished and her eyes were filled with profound misery.
The fire struck and coalesced inside his brain, short-circuiting the neurones, robbing him of anger and resolve and consciousness and everything except the imponderable will to live. The last thing he remembered was falling, and as he lay, a white face pressed against his and hot tears fell on his cheek - tears which burned with greater heat than the fire which he had carried on his body out of transfinity.
TWENTY-TWO.
”Will he live?” asked the Monitor anxiously.
The doctor looked down at Rhodes' unconscious body swathed in white. ”What do you think?” he asked cynically. ”If I could revive a neurogas patient I'd go in for reincarnation in a big way.”
”But will he be able to talk?”
The doctor's disgust was unrestrained. ”Yes, he will be able to talk. With enough adrenalin and the use of the artificial heart-lung apparatus I can keep him alive just that long. I can only hope that he has enough mind left to employ his dying gasps calling down curses on the criminal idiot who left him as bait in a trap primed with neurogas.”
”When will he talk?”
The doctor exhaled heavily. ”The sooner the better, perhaps. His mind can't last long with continued oxygen starvation.” He adjusted his syringes carefully. ”I can give you about half an hour's conversation with the corpse of the man you murdered. See me when you've finished and I'll give you something to help you sleep tonight.”
”Rhodes,” said the Monitor, ”can you hear me?”
”I hear you,” said the Ombudsman, and the voice rattled dryly through the tube in his throat.
”Tell me about Dalroi? Who is Dalroi?”
Rhodes told him in a voice like a creaking ghost. The atmosphere grew tense and still as the words fell to a piping whisper then to a sigh like wind among reeds and finally to silence as the spirit fled away. TheMonitor saluted and paid his last respects, and felt, for the first time in his life, the meaning of humility.
Korch was waiting for him at the door. ”Any luck?”
”Yes.” The Monitor mopped his brow. ”He put more sense into those thirty minutes than the human race has into twenty thousand years of philosophy. I went into there as a man and I leave as an animal.”
”Are you all right, Chief?”
”All right!” The Monitor was quick with scorn. ”We shall none of us be all right again, ever. h.e.l.l, I feel dirty and sick and tired of it all. You'd better come with me. We have an appointment to keep with our keeper. How does it feel to be living in a zoo?”
At first Dalroi thought he was blind, so peculiar was the quality of the darkness. His eyes and head ached abominably. Only after, when he had lain staring at the blackness for many minutes, could he discern the dim outlines of the room. The shapes were unfamiliar, yet each detail his adjusting eyes revealed discharged a bolt of emotional shock. This was a place he did not know, yet every facet was painted with overtones of remembered fear. It was part of the sequence of things he could never quite remember.
He felt weak, terribly weak. It did not take him many seconds to realise the weakness was not natural.
Touching his face he found with something of a shock, that the flesh was clean and whole, but his left arm was immobile and covered with a heavy plastic dressing. But the weakness ... he could never remember feeling quite so drained and empty before. His metabolism was so low that his body scarcely ticked over.
They had found his Achilles' heel.
The surge of anger which welled up inside him leaked impotently away. Whatever drugs they had used on him had been remarkably effective. He no longer had the power to raise mountains - he scarcely had the power to move his limbs. He sagged back on the soft couch, trying to conserve a little energy, a reserve to meet whatever was to come. But even as he lay the weakness grew and cheated him of his last vitality. When death came, no matter what its form, he would be powerless to resist.
Footsteps sounded in a corridor somewhere, coming closer towards the dark shadow of the door. Dalroi propped himself on a leaden arm and looked out from under leaden eyelids. Despite a curious enervation his mind still boiled like a cauldron of vaporising lead, extraordinarily aware. He knew now with dreadful certainty that he had seen this room before. This was the antechamber ... to the other place, the place where things had been done to his brain ... where horror had ama.s.sed upon horror at the hands of someone whose ident.i.ty was a shadow. Only, it was not a shadow any more - it was the clear image of a man, a man of brilliant intensity and purpose who had worked on his brain with a dexterity slightly more than human.
Raw fear flared up as he began to gather the pieces of the puzzle and fit them into place. Even as the pattern became clearer and the door opened to reveal his executioner. Hildebrand was there, scowling while his eyes adjusted to the darkness, a weapon of unfamiliar pattern in his hand.
”Dalroi, are you awake?”
”Go to h.e.l.l!” said Dalroi with great difficulty. Every syllable a conscious effort.
Hildebrand came and stood over him silently. ”Don't try to move. The drug allows you only minimal reaction. Any sudden exertion would burst your heart. You'd be dead long before you could reach me.”
”But reach you I would,” promised Dalroi.”I don't doubt that at all. I have no illusions about the risk I'm taking. I should have destroyed you the last time I had you under the knife, but I thought I could repair something which is apparently irreparable.
This time I shall take no such chances. I've been waiting a long time to rectify that mistake.”
”Who are you?” asked Dalroi. Black shadows stirred in his brain. ”And what did you do in my mind?”
”I tried to drive a wedge between you and what you were in danger of discovering. I tried to set up a block between the subconscious and the deep brain. Only that could have saved your life. I did not succeed. You carry things in your head which are more terrible and enigmatic than the weapons of Creation.”
”Who are you?” repeated Dalroi wearily.
Hildebrand stood up straight. ”I am called Gar Carra na Leodat. My occupation is watching out for ones such as you. I come from a place you cannot imagine and from a level of civilisation you can only dimly understand. I am a custodian of humanity.”
”I hadn't noticed,” Dalroi said. ”Is that why you have to kill me?”
Hildebrand's eyes grew large and haunted with hidden sorrow. ”Let me ask you a question now. Have you any idea what h.e.l.l-fire inhabits you? Do you know who you are, Dalroi?”
Dalroi tried to nod, but his head seemed to weigh a ton and the movement was still born. ”Yes,” said Dalroi. ”I think I do. We are mutual enemies. One of us is going to have to die.”
Hildebrand sighted the weapon at Dalroi's head. ”Just so! You must by now realise that you are no match for us. What we lack in spite we make up for in persistence and sheer numbers.”
”And what I lack in numbers I make up for in sheer hatred,” Dalroi said. ”Nature built us as terrible opposites.”
”How much do you know about us?” asked Hildebrand.
”Little. I know that Gormalu is not human. I know that both you and Zen have no origin in the world I know. I sense that Failway has a function not only as a trap but as a brake on our kind of culture. It was set there like a cancer to eat the heart out of our species, to delay something in our evolution. h.o.m.o Sapiens is being engineered, manipulated by unseen forces which live far beyond our notions of the transfinite strata.”
”You think that is a terrible thing?”
”A man takes enough pus.h.i.+ng around from his own kind without other agencies having a poke,” said Dalroi bitterly.
”The two things are not unconnected. Don't judge until you know our reasons. I will tell you our story. It concerns a time and a place beyond even your imagination. Once, among the many civilisations of the multiple galaxies, there arose a race of upstart creatures more terrible than any who opposed them. The upstarts were a race of warriors and murderers who ravaged whatever worlds they reached. They were fanatical killers, who could tolerate the existence of no other species than their own and those on whom they lived. By any standards they were supermen.”
”I hate you,” said Dalroi.
”In self-defence the civilised species of the multiple galaxies joined forces against the Destroyers, and putthem down not once, but many times. Yet always the terrible ones arose and returned with hatreds and l.u.s.ts renewed. Whole universes were shaken with their thunder. The civilised ones, in anger and desperation, decided to end the matter once and for all, but having the humanity that goes with high culture they could not tolerate the complete destruction of a race.