The Deadly Sky

by Doris Piserchia

  “It won’t work,” I said. “You can all give academy award performances but I’m not that gullible. I don’t know where he is now but he was in there potting me with pellets.” I held out an arm, pointed to a spot of blood above the elbow. “You made a mistake, or I should say you made another in a whole legion of mistakes. You ought to have provided him with something that wouldn’t leave any marks on me.”

  I turned to go.

  “Where are you going?” he said. “You have to go back in the weapon.”

  Not bothering to turn around, I spoke over my shoulder. “I’ll go when I feel like it. Since we’re playing games, the terms are going to be mine, not yours.”

  Leece was in the game room playing cards with Conray and two people I scarcely knew. He kept his head down as I approached the table. I spoke to the biggest man at the table, a heavily muscled Nordic type who still had all his limbs.

  “I don’t suppose he left the table, did he?” I said, indicating Leece. “In the last thirty minutes?”

  “That’s what I thought.” I tipped Leece’s chair back so that he pitched onto the floor. Waiting until he got to his feet, I hit him in the face. He didn’t say anything after he fell, just lay looking up at me.

  “Nobody is going to mess around in the weapon,” I said to the room in general. “If you follow me in there I’ll get you afterward.” I was hoping the big blond would get hostile but he only sat silently and watchful. No one said anything. None of them were my friends, or at least I hadn’t had an opportunity to get close to any of them. All my friends were gone. Sargoth had dismissed them. Except for Grena.

  “I hope you’re imagining it,” she said later. We sat in our favorite place outside in the sun. The rock at my back was warm and so was she.

  “This place is mad. It gives me a paranoid complex. Did you know that Mills Suttler lived in my house from the time I was a little kid?”

  “You’ve told me that. It seems incredible. He’s been working steadily up here all those years, at least some of the time.

  “Why did he do it?”

  She shook her head. “My entire life has been strange and full of questions I can’t answer. Still I had my father. I don’t know why Mills did it. He must have had a reason. I’ve studied your profile but I can’t see anything outstanding in it. I mean, you’re intelligent and healthy and you can ride the jinga, but that’s a description of everyone up here.”

  That night while I sat out on the peak using my mind to help keep the crack in the sky from splitting open, a swarm of termites came through. Almost before I knew it the alarm in the barracks was jangling and I was jumping to my feet to see what was invading us this time.

  At least they weren’t carnivorous or they would have taken me along with my clothes. They came down on me like an avenging cloud, blocking out stray moonbeams, fanning away the cloying heat, settling on me like a thousand munching mouths. All they took was what I was wearing.

  They were the only invaders I had ever seen before I came up to the peaks. Down in Emera we had been told that the tiny creatures came from the desert. They couldn’t eat vorite but they seemed to enjoy stripping people of their coverings. Other than that they didn’t do much damage. Here on Timbrini they were another matter. Straight for the nearest building they headed and I was about to follow them when someone on the roof shot off a torch gun. For a few seconds the sky was hot and yellow, just long enough to incinerate the swarm. It was over so quickly I never had time to get down off the peak onto the plateau. Whoever it was on the roof, he went about his business as if it were a commonplace happening to cook flying enemies. As for me, I gathered the tatters left to me and settled back down to my duty.

  The next day Jolanne came up to me in the cafeteria.

  “Don’t go in the weapon unless Mills Suttler or I am in the control room. Don’t go in at all if no one is present.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “So we can protect you.”

  “What will you do, keep the weapon from attacking me?”

  “Don’t be wise. Just take some good advice.”

  I had seldom done that in my life, mostly because I scarcely ever received any advice that I thought was good. That evening I went quietly into the machine room, turned on the crossover field and prepared to make a lone assault. Some sound behind me caused me to back out of the tunnel and give the room another close scrutiny. There was no one that I could see and the noise must have been due to creaking walls or my imagination.

  It was the same in the weapon, no matter what time it was behind me. Not that I was optimistic, but I knew that if I could succeed in blazing a blue trail all the way through the maze to the control panel on the far side someone else could run in and plant a bomb. The structure would be blasted to kingdom come and I could go home with my arms and legs.

  The idea had already occurred to me that the area by the control panel on the weapon might change into fractured space. Maybe a bomb wouldn’t go off even if it did get planted. I had checked that possibility. According to the readers in the machine room, the area east of the maze was more normal. Though not exactly like Earth’s atmosphere, the air contaitied enough of the proper ingredients to feed an explosion. Now all I had to do was get through the obstacle course to it.

  The blue line came to an end well within the maze and about one hundred feet from the controls. Soundlessly, I set out along uncharted territory, minding my business, watching out for cold red fog, listening for the whistling of dropping blades.

  I couldn’t believe it when nothing happened; no illusions, no sounds, but it was miserably hot, enough to make my feet slippery on the girder. Unable to resist looking down, I saw black waves forming high points of froth. Was it ordinary water down there? I doubted it. It was probably acid or sludge that would take a sinking body and pick it clean of flesh before it touched bottom.

  Slowly but surely I found myself edging out the other side of the contraption. Blue and red lights obscured the sky while cold fog drifted everywhere about me. Numbly I let go of the last girder to step onto a metal platform. Ahead of me was a banked panel of knobs, buttons, and dials while behind me the huge weapon swayed and bucked.

  I could see the blue line through the darkness like a shining path that beckoned to me. The feeling of danger filled my mouth, my throat, my chest. I might have been stalked from all sides, so great was the tension and pressure building inside me. Without knowing how, I knew I had made a mistake, not just, in crossing the entire weapon but in even coming near it at this particular time.

  Crouching on one knee, I blinked sweat from my eyes and cursed in a low voice. Why hadn’t I been pulled out on the retriever beam? As soon as I entered the crossover, every alarm in the complex had sounded. I knew this. Sargoth, Jolanne and all the other drells were in the machine room. They knew I was where I was, knew I had to be brought out. I had done their filthy job for them. Why didn’t they yank me?

  Were my eyes deceiving me or did the blue line jump like a scared snake? There was atmosphere here so that I was able to catch my breath. Dumbly I knelt on the platform and watched while the safety path broke up. In glittering pieces it darted or drifted around and between girders, disrupted, destroyed, done away with. It meant the space inside the weapon had altered. The maze had shifted. There was no more trail of safety leading from my world to this one. I was on the alien side.

  The platform’ began to pitch like a raft on rough water. Up and down it went until my stomach went into an endless spin. Desperately I clung to the banked panel, wondering if I should dive forward to grasp one of the girders of the maze, knowing full well that if I did so I was likely to lose both hands.

  Had any human ever been here before? I didn’t think so. No matter how frantically Sargoth and the others worked in the machine room to try to save me it would do no good. I was beyond their help.

  I hung on while my strength gradually ebbed. Somehow I managed to wedge myself between the panel and the first girder so that the
pitching couldn’t dislodge me. It went on and on until my brain threatened to close down. Perspiration formed a pool between me and the metal, dangerous, threatening. The more I perspired the more precarious my position became. The muscles in my legs cramped with the exertion, my back went taut with spasms. Then my arms locked in cramps. I was done. There was no way I could keep from being thrown into the black ocean.

  I lay on my back wondering how long I had been fighting the motion. It had been quite some time. An hour. No, more. All night? I didn’t know. Whether I had concussion or brain fever, I wasn’t functioning in a normal manner. Blood poured from my nose and had I been able I would have felt to see if it was also coming from my ears.

  Sliding about on the metal, I looked up at the sky which was curiously blank. I seemed to fall partially asleep and for some reason I remembered the time when Sargoth kidnaped me from my bed and brought me to the peaks of Timbrini.

  How peculiar that I should think of that or anything when I was about to take a fatal dunking. Still, I did. I remembered how drowsy I felt when I opened my eyes and looked up at the fog. It was gray and warm, not red and cold as it was on the dark side.

  Either it was raining or I was sweating up a shower. Groaning, I rolled a bit and tried to feel the platform under my fingers. It wasn’t there, which meant I must have fallen off. I couldn’t see so I was unable to say what lay about me.

  Again I groaned and this time I heard myself. It surprised me so that my eyes flew open. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the falling rain, decided it was illusion that spattered on my face.

  Gradually I felt the rain on the rest of my body, but only on one side. The other side, my back, lay on something hard that pressed and gouged in a cruel manner. Sore as a boil, I tried to raise my head. It made no sense but I seemed to be lying on one of the peaks of Timbrini, whole and substantial. For an illusion, it was disturbingly real.

  I must have passed out, because when I opened my eyes again the dawn was breaking over the mountain. Above my head the crack in the sky glared like a purple wound while behind it the weapon huffed and puffed as it tried to breach through.

  It took me a while to realize that I was all right. My head hurt, as did all of me, but the fear and despair were gone. Something or someone had delivered me from the platform and back on to my own dimension.

  It required all my willpower but I made myself get up. Like a creaky old man I walked across the flat floor of the mountain to the entrance of the last building. It took me awhile because I kept losing my bearings. I felt as if I had run back-to-back marathons.

  I was in better shape by the time I got halfway through the place. People stopped to stare at me as I went by but no one spoke or tried to interfere. I had one goal in mind, which was to get to the machine room before Hallistair could get away. I knew he was there clucking over the fact that the nasty weapon had upended itself and destroyed the safety path while I was in it.

  He was there along with Sargoth and Jolanne.

  He saw me first so that I was the only one who noted the expression of disbelief and pain that grew on his face as I staggered down an aisle.

  Then Sargoth spotted me. “Ashlin!” he said.

  Somehow I maneuvered down the aisle between two sections of spectator seats. Small and agile, Hallistair could be quick when it was to his advantage, which it was now. He left his post at the machine and leaped into a seat section where I couldn’t reach him so easily. One by one he hopped seats until he was near enough to an exit to make a dash for it.

  He got away from me by darting down the hall and taking a left at the nearest intersection. Exhaustion returned to me so that I forgot everything except the need to get to my room. There I bolted the door and fell into bed, filthy and full of pain.

  A few minutes later Sargoth came banging at the panel to let me know he was there wanting in. When I didn’t get up he knocked the door down.

  “Not now,” I said as he tried to roll me over. “Go away.”

  “You’ll come to see me as soon as you’ve rested?”

  “Yes,” I said. Then I drifted into one of the deepest, most dream-filled slumbers I think I ever had.

  It was late afternoon when I awakened. I showered and dressed. Then I stepped across the broken door and went outside to the grassy plateau. It wasn’t often that my movements on Timbrini went unobserved but this was one of those times. I even had sufficient to grow enraged at the jinga who were in the mood, as usual, to play coy. My mental commands must not have been direct enough to send them hastening to do my bidding, but they cavorted over my head until I reached up to yank on a leg. I let go right away, else the owner would have loved lifting me and dumping me into the mile-deep hole only a few yards away.

  At last one of them dropped low enough for me to climb aboard, after which we had a rickety, chopety, loopy ride to the foothills. An hour later I was in Falloway’s genealogical library. If he had been there I wouldn’t have gone in, knowing him for the liar he was, but I sneaked peeks in a window until I ascertained that Shiri Karl was in charge of business today.

  “Why don’t you discuss your profile with one of the drells on the mountain?” she said to me. She didn’t especially like me, I could tell, but neither did she dislike me, so I went into my spiel about bow I couldn’t relate to people made of glass.

  “Me, either,” she said when I was done. “They give me cold chills. Between you and me, I don’t expect to ever, execute their dumb crossover. Cloak and dagger enterprises aren’t for me. Neither are axes and guillotines.”

  I nodded to show that I at least didn’t disagree with her. There were no customers in the place, which meant that she could give me all her attention..

  “Mr. Suttler hides most of the profiles in the computer. Mr. Falloway showed me how to find them.”

  She consulted a machine and pretty soon she had a sheet of paper bearing my invisible statistics.

  “It looks ordinary to me, but then they all do,” she said. “I’ll stick this in the analyzer and see what I come up with.”

  I watched while she fit the sheet behind a glass panel covered with lines. An indicator painted little dots over it.

  “You have a couple of unusuals,” she said at last. “High inquisitiveness, a flair of invention, really good health.”

  I waited. “That’s it?”

  “Except for a lot of variables. They’re only maybes.”

  “What are some of them?”

  “Riding jinga, psi potential that all normal people have, defensiveness, leadership, decisiveness, things like that.”

  I tried not to scowl. “If you tossed them all in a bowl which one would float?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Can you grade them or evaluate them in degrees?”

  She fit the sheet in the machine again. In a minute she took it out. “The strongest potential is . . . how odd! Unbalanced, I should say. Your score for inventiveness is topped only by your drive to stay alive.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Your defense mechanisms. Of course you don’t really have them at this level. Nobody does. But if you did, no one could hurt you.”

  “Why not?”

  Regarding me somewhat pityingly, she said, “Any danger to you would trigger your defense mechanisms even before it was imminent. Don’t worry about it. It’s a potential everyone has. It certainly can’t hurt you.”

  Unless someone tried very hard. “But my score is high?”

  “Highest I’ve ever seen.”

  “That’s the only unusual thing about my profile?”

  “I’d say so. Of course you were chosen for Timbrini because you can ride jinga, not for anything else. It means you probably have enough psi to execute the crossover, which it turns out that you have. These items are all characteristics that will be scattered throughout your progeny. We actually have the potential to be omnipotent but nobody ever is. It’s like a final destiny for the species and we individuals are working toward i
t.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate your help.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll see you later up on Devil Mountain.”

  I thought the name was appropriate as I worked my way out of the city to the prairie. It didn’t take me long to attract a jinga near enough to grab it. Perhaps I was tuning into their wavelength or it could have been that they were merely growing accustomed to me.

  There was no one in the wooden complex who seemed interested in my welfare, other than the drells, but I had no wish to talk to them so I locked myself away in a room that had a solid door. As soon as Sargoth learned that I was back, he parked himself beyond the keyhole and tried to get me to come out. I had transferred my few personal belongings from my old room, which meant that I could remain here as long as I pleased without having to go out for something.

  Sargoth finally went away and sent Jolanne in his stead. I wouldn’t open to her but at least we did have a few words.

  I stood with my face against the cold panel and thought of warm, pulsing glass.

  “I came back through the crack,” I said in a muffled voice.

  “But that’s marvelous! Mills had no idea you could levitate!”

  “Whatever you call it. But he ought to know because he drugged me and brought me up here one night. Just as I was coming out of it I raised up and floated through the crack. I didn’t see anything but darkness.”

  “I know about that night, but Mills wasn’t aware that you levitated.”

  “How do you know?” I said with bitterness.

  “He would have told us. We don’t keep secrets up here. We can’t afford it.”

  “Did you ever consider that he might lie?”

  “He doesn’t do that except to you. I’m sorry. He has to. There’s no other way.”

  “One last thing,” I said. “The levitating bit won’t do you any good. I can’t control it. I can’t do it at will. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “Not to worry. About that or anything.”