As I suspected, my companion had no trouble executing the transition from one plane to another but stumbled ahead of me, cursing me over his shoulder.
Somehow he managed to squeeze behind me as we entered the weapon, but by then I didn’t care. It was obvious that he was terrified and had no intention of going off on his own, not even to retracing the short distance to the mouth of the tunnel.
“Let’s go back!” he said in a hoarse voice. His eyes were sick and his hands clutched at me as he sought safety.
It meant that the movements or operation of the weapon were mostly automatic except when he communicated with the dark side.
“How do you talk to them?” I said, turning to face him. Somewhere behind me a coldness gathered.
“I don’t know what you mean!” he said. Suddenly he yelped as a blade dropped to his right. I wondered if fear would make him bolt but he stuck to me like glue and made no moves that I didn’t make. His hair was plastered across his forehead and his lips were gray.
I turned and walked on, avoiding cold spots, hesitating now and then to get my bearings. How did I do it? By not really thinking about it. This was a blind experiment, wasn’t it? I tried to use my subconscious, tried to allow my instincts to dictate my movements. Over there to my left was something that crouched with its serrated edge up and ready. I went the other way. Ahead was a jaw that waited to slice me to shreds. I diverted, circled around it, sneaked past slavering blades, thought with the shadowy parts of my brain.
I led Hallistair all the way through to the metal platform, where he got down on his knees and stared at the black sea.
“I’m going to leave you here if you don’t tell me how you communicate with them,” I said.
He raised his head, bared his teeth. “I’ll be coming here anyway! What do I care?”
Reaching out, I took hold of the object hanging from a chain on his neck. I yanked and it came loose. He howled like a dog and leaped up to grab it back.
“This is the way you do it, isn’t it?” I said, holding it away from him. “You talk to them through this thing. They pushed you through to our side when you were little and kept in touch with you.”
“Grena and I!” he said, his eyes flashing with inner glee. “They’ll call us back together. She belongs to me. She’s the price I’ll exact from them.”
“Will they call you without this?” I said, indicating the instrument.
Again he howled and leaped at me.
Without saying anything more, I walked back through the weapon while b1ades dropped on every side. He was too frightened to stay behind. All he knew about the dark side was what he had been told. The platform and the forbidden sea unnerved him sufficiently to make him dash through the maze after me. I didn’t care whether he made it or not. I was too absorbed in thinking about a great many of my countrymen who had sacrificed all they had because of him and his kind.
“I’ll get you for this!” he shouted at me once we were in the tunnel. “Those other things were cute compared to what I’m going to send after you!”
I was tempted to go back and smack him but Grena and Shiri were there in the machine room, watching us and waiting for us to come out. He had to be lying, I knew. The creatures were being sent over to harrass me without his requesting them. One way or another, I would soon find out.
I didn’t stop to talk to Grena but merely nodded and continued on through to the outside corridor.
For several minutes I sat in the computer room staring at the shiny machine. Going over to the keyboard, I sat before it and typed, “Sargoth.”
Nothing happened. I typed, “Mills Suttler,” “Ashlin,” “Secret Project,” “Dark Side;” still the computer gave forth with no unusual response.
Giving up, I sat back and thought. Finally I touched the keys again and typed, “One Million Dollars.” Immediately a tape began to play.
“Hello, Ashlin,” said Sargoth. “You always said you wanted to make a million dollars. I hope you do. I’m sorry we dumped everything on you but we’ve been waiting for you for a long time. Your defensive ability is something we can’t afford to ignore, no matter what we may think of you personally. We knew before you were born that you might follow Falloway’s prediction, and it wasn’t long after that that we knew you had. I came to live with you and your father mainly to see that nothing happened to you, which might sound incongruous, but we didn’t want to lose sight of you. All I can say to you now is that you have to do things to save yourself if you expect to come out of this in one piece. What things? If we could answer that we might not need you in the first place. By now you must have determined that at least Hallistair is from the dark side. Watch out for him. Remember to be active. Don’t sit around wondering what to do. Just do it and let that special talent of yours carry you along. Good luck.”
That was it. That was all, and I was so angry and disgusted that I erased the tape. Then I was angered at myself for doing it. There might have been some hidden clue . . . but then whom did I think I was kidding? Special talent, spies, idiotic actions—those were parts of my own personal maze and I had been stranded in it by a glass man I had learned to trust.
I nearly had my head ripped off as I walked from the room. The only thing that saved me was that I thought I heard a sound behind me and turned to see. In the same instant a heavy claw flashed past the space I had been occupying. As I felt the breeze against my cheek, I kicked out and sprang away.
The thing outside the room was from the dark side, for humanity had never produced anything like him, not even in our excessively experimental periods. He was naked and fortunately not too large, about Hallistair’s size, for that matter. Human in body, he had the head and hands of a feline animal. His skin was yellow and hairless, his feet were four-toed and half as long as a man’s.
The claws on his paws extended more than an inch, seven or eight of them, thick, sharp and dangerous. His head was too large for the rest of him, round and black-furred, ears thick and sharply tipped. Eyes of feral green glared at me from beneath bushy brows while the wide mouth gaped to reveal rows of vicious-looking teeth.
I thought his feet might not be effective, but that was before he raked a long furrow in my pants legs. He was frightening and potentially lethal, but I was in good condition and much larger than he. He thought to simply lunge at me and sink his teeth in my throat but I dissuaded him by slamming him on the back of his head with both fists.
In the beginning I was reluctant to really make a fight of it. He was so small, so unusual. However, it wasn’t long before I knew he was out to kill or maim me. His claws were everywhere, ripping at me, tearing long gouges in my arms and my chest. He managed to bite a piece out of my back and it was then that I began giving him back in kind and more. I couldn’t stand around feeling sorry for him because his people had made a freak out of him and I didn’t have time to wonder if he was predominantly man or animal. Whatever he was, he was chewing me to pieces.
My legs were muscular and powerful and I used them and my feet to keep him off me. Then I used some guided kicks to convince him that I intended to knock his head off.
He finally went sprawling onto his face with his arms flung wide, wearied at last, covered with bruises and contusions. I thought he might make a fight-to-the-death of it—his death—but instead of continuing his assault he leaped erect and ran down the hall toward the control room. I chased him to make certain he didn’t detour from his course to locate Grena or Shiri.
He didn’t. Straight into the tunnel he plunged with me at his heels. I expected to overtake him in the maze but he never exited from the crossover. Over and over again I executed the transition, trying to find him, wondering where he had gone.
At last I gave up and went home, this time much subdued. I didn’t like having lost him, particularly that way, but I had supposed he would run through the weapon to the metal platform and either fly to safety or be picked up by a vehicle. Instead, he had done something inside the crossover that I couldn
’t do. He had used its unusual properties to transport himself elsewhere.
After I treated my wounds I examined the communicator I had lifted from Hallistair. It was very much like a flute, with a bore dotted with minute openings. I could hear distant murmurings coming from it when I placed it against my ear.
“Hello,” I said into it, but nothing happened. I tried blowing into the holes, whistling, murmuring, but could not make contact with the dark world. No doubt there was a strict code or series of air signals that activated it.
In a way I felt sorry for Hallistair. Introduced into my dimension in his infancy, he must have been lonely and felt abandoned until someone from home spoke to him. I wondered how they had done that. Not through the communicator because he might not understand. There was the possibility of telepathy; perhaps a little preconditioning before he came, followed by an initial lesson via the instrument, gradually bringing him along and explaining what was expected of him.
Was a person’s loyalty always dictated by where he was born? I didn’t think so. Why had Hallistair never become humanized? Somewhere along the way he had been forced to make a choice. As it turned out, he became an enemy agent for an unseen and unimaginable society.
Slipping the communicator into my pocket, I made my way to the armory where I tried to make a bomb. Or rather I made one but it turned out to be a dud, which at least proved that Sargoth told the truth some of the time. I was certain that I could set the bomb off on my side of space so I carried it through the tunnel into the weapon and wired it to one of the girders. Setting the timer for two minutes, I returned to the machine room to wait for an explosion that never occurred.
The entire package was gone when I went back in to see, ripped away by a saw and thrown into the black sea. Remembering my crazy antenna that had made rain in Emera by interfering with the operation of a satellite, I retrieved it from my room. This time I didn’t wire it to the outside of a girder but searched for and found an inner, protecting ridge against which I taped it.
I didn’t know if it would have any effect on anything. In fact I doubted it. Though it needed no power source of its own but could draw on almost anything including the red fog, I wasn’t convinced that it would operate at all in this warped reality. Come to think of it, though, it was a warped invention. I only did it because Sargoth had said to do something, anything.
There were no jinga outside nor anything but gray sky, clammy air and the ugly gash in the sky between the peaks. This was the source of the aliens who had been coming through, not the tunnel and the crossover but from the opening between dimensions.
For a while I sat in the mist and told the crack to close. Not for a minute did I believe I had much effect on it, just as I didn’t think Sargoth and the others had totally abandoned the area. Someone besides the four of us was concentrating on that dangerous cleft in the sky and of course it was Sargoth and his associates. I thought I knew where they were. There was only one place they could be.
Nearly soaked through, I went inside and got a towel from a closet. Drying off, I walked to the machine room and turned on the energy. Instead of executing the crossover, I merely entered it.
It wasn’t a pleasant place, being full of gyrating space and ear-splitting noise. Feeling as if I were standing on my head, I tried to use my brain like a direction finder or a compass.
“I know you’re in here!” I yelled, spinning like a top.
“The man’s a maniac,” said a voice I recognized as Dr. Colsan’s.
“You should talk!” I said. “How many glass people have you made?”
From out of careening thought and hurtling atoms came Sargoth’s voice. “I thought you would figure out where we were, Ashlin, but we can’t help you. For nearly three hundred years we’ve waited for you to get us out of this mess.”
“But I can’t!” I said. “I don’t know how!”
“We weren’t certain before but we are now. You can do it. You’ve repelled every attack Hallistair has aimed at you.”
“You’re making a mistake! I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“Of course you don’t. That’s the secret of your talent. Purely subconscious. You have something in your brain that the rest of us don’t.”
“You’re crazy! You lost more than your body! Your good sense is gone too!”
“Go back,” Colsan said sternly. “You’ve been commissioned by everyone who has ever lived to defeat the invaders. The ability is in you. It’s a gift from the species. Now go and do it.”
They gathered forces to blow me all the way out of the field and back into the machine room.
Mostly I wanted to go back in and do some more yelling but I knew they wouldn’t permit it. All they would let me do was penetrate the crossover, one way or another, but they wouldn’t let me linger for conversation.
I wished I could waylay them when night came and they emerged to put the mental whammy on the crack outside. Perhaps not all of them would come out but some of them would.
That was the way I sometimes thought these days. It wasn’t always easy or even possible to remember whose side I was on.
Chapter 13
As long as I had Grena to talk to and be near once in a while I was more or less all right, but now I couldn’t find her. Nor was Shiri anywhere to be seen. Assuming that Hallistair had also disappeared, I wasn’t cautious about running through the complex and yelling as loudly as I could. I had a towel under my arm because I had worked up a sweat and stopped at a linen closet to mop off.
Hallistair came around a corner and threw something at me which I caught in the towel. It writhed and buzzed and it screeched when I crushed it under my heel. Again I was careless as I chased him down the hall. Rounding a bend, I saw him standing in the middle of the corridor with a ball bat in his hands.
He was too agile for me. I lunged at him but he faded out of the way and cracked me a good one over the head.
“What have you done?” he said, bending over me. Threatening with the bat, he said, “Answer me. What did you do to the weapon?”
On the verge of passing into unconsciousness, I could only lie there shaking my head. I didn’t really understand the questions anyway.
He reached down and slapped me hard across the face. “Your stupid meddling has accomplished something after all. I want to know what you did.” He hit me again.
That was his mistake because he had inadvertently revived me to some extent. The blow on the head that I had received still reverberated all the way down to my feet while the smacks stung and irritated. Before he could raise the club I gave him a kick that sent him flying over me.
I dragged him down the hall by his shirt collar, asking him over and over again where the women were, but he wouldn’t tell me. It didn’t matter to me that there was anyone else in the crossover. No matter how many big-brained drells there were in it, they didn’t plan to render me any assistance. Half-baked by the knock on the skull that I had sustained, I supposed that the drells and Colsan were enjoying the spectacle of me hauling Hallistair the Dark into the weapon.
As soon as I entered the maze I was conscious of something vastly wrong but I couldn’t put my finger on it. A strange yellow glow made me look up at the sky, which seemed to be raining minuscule drops of fire.
“Let me go!” said Hallistair. He stopped writhing in my grasp long enough to stare upward. “Do you see what I mean? What have you done?”
I jerked backward as a blade dropped close enough in front of me to fan my face. Blinking and rubbing my eyes, I staggered, caught my balance, tried to think clearly.
“You can’t go through now!” said my companion, trying to hold me still. “You’ve probably got a concussion. Idiot! Go back! You’ll get us both killed!”
I was alert enough to realize that he hadn’t the nerve to retreat without me, nor could he go ahead alone. Feeling strangely secure, I sank to my knees and leaned my aching head against a girder. Somewhere to my right a blade fell with a resounding crash. For a few
moments I remained stationary and gradually my head began to clear, or at least the pain wasn’t so intense that I couldn’t think.
Reaching out I took Hallistair by the throat. “I’m tired of your trying to kill me; from that first day when you dumped a boulder down the mountain after me until this very moment, I’m tired.”
His voice was faint and hoarse. “Forget all that! It isn’t important now. Look about you. Can’t you see what’s happening?”
Something hot landed on my shoulder. It was a tiny live coal. I brushed it away. “This is it, you know,” I said. “This is where you and I settle our differences.”
“Don’t be a moron! We can’t stay here! Why don’t we go back to the complex and talk it over? What do you think of that?”
My hand tightened on his throat. “No.”
He tried to kick me away, scooted a foot or more along the girder, shrieked as a blade fell to snip a shred from his shirt sleeve. “Okay, okay, don’t . . . don’t push me. Don’t move.”
Dragging him to his feet, I shoved him against another girder and then let go an instant before a blade came down between us. It fell away out of sight, either into the sea or along a rolling counter. I didn’t know if it would end up somewhere in the weapon to be used again, and at the moment I didn’t care.
Hallistair’s face was gray as he stared upward. A live ash fell on his cheek to leave a smudge after he brushed it away. He grabbed the girder behind him as the weapon suddenly pitched and swayed.
“They must have changed their plans,” he said. “They aren’t going to wait any longer. They’re going to burn their way through.”
“I don’t think so,” I said, snickering. “They must have some pretty strange storms over there. I think I locked onto one of them.”
He didn’t believe me, or he didn’t want to believe me. “What are you talking about?”
“A bit of an invention of mine. An antenna for attracting storms. It interferes with satellites.”
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