"Yes, sir." The words seemed to come out with a slight jerk. The technician who was speaking hesitated. "Have you got a foot lock on him, sir." Again the words of deference had been spoken with a faint reluctance: Was it possible that the scientists within the SSP, for all their subservience to the organization's aims, had managed to retain some autonomy?
"Yes, he's in partial stasis," Mulciber answered.
"Please remove it. It would interfere with our meter readings."
Mulciber motioned to the blue-suited guards to come nearer. He touched a switch. Don felt the weight lift from around his feet.
One of the technicians stooped and adjusted a loop of wire around Don's right ankle. The other was busy putting a similar loop around his opposite upper arm, just above the red birthmark. They tightened clips and checked connections. Then they went back to their machine.
The taller technician said, "Seventy-six." He spoke in a low voice.
"Check. To three."
"And three."
The murmured responses continued. Don waited in anguished silence. His whole being was concentrated on the doll in his pocket. But he felt nothing at all.
At last the shorter technician frowned. "We're not getting it," he observed. He drew a note pad from the pocket and consulted it. At last he said, "Let's try the upper sequence, what do you say?"
"Sure. You never can tell."
Once more there came the murmur of reading and response. Mulciber had deserted his paper work and was watching silently. Suddenly Don felt an almost unbearable wrench.
He did not know what had happened. It was as if a part of his body, hitherto invisible and unrecognized, was being violently subtracted from him. What was it? Had he an invisible arm, a hand he didn't know about? He felt a horrified astonishment.
At the same time, the attack was more than physical. Don—Don Haig—his memories, his feelings, his personality, all that he meant when he said "I"—was under assault. Something vital, something whose loss would be irreparable, was being taken from him.
He had not been able to repress a groan. Now the technicians looked at each other and nodded. "Getting it," the taller man said softly. "Let's run through those combinations again."
Don was panting. He had broken into a sweat. He licked his lips. Once more there came the wrench. It was very bad.
He was tempted for a moment to stop resisting. He wanted to co-operate with the technicians, to help them sever the agonizing, straining tie. But he wouldn't, couldn't, wouldn't. He wouldn't do it. He mustn't let them have the doll.
The taller man was bending over, reading a dial. "Sixty-eight," he said. He made a motion with his fingers. "Let's have a lot more power."
This time the wrench was quite unbearable. Don knew that he would begin to shriek in a moment. He had never thought he could resist so much.
"Start dissipating," the short man said. "Two plus."
"Two minus. Right."
There was a puff of light like a round rainbow from the machine. "Harmless," the short man said absently to Mulciber. "Doesn't mean anything. Now!"
There was a final, imperious wrench, a wrench that appeared to slide off into nothingness and light. Don felt a great wind of force beside him. It seemed to flatten him. He staggered back from it.
"Hold him up," Mulciber said in his muffled voice to one of the guards.
The tall technician turned a switch. The machine stopped its faint humming. The room was perfectly still.
The technician took a glove with a long cuff from his smock. He drew it on over his hand. He glanced at a dial. Then, with an air of residual caution, he approached Don.
The guards had moved in to hold Haig by either shoulder. The restraint was hardly necessary: Haig was almost unconscious. The technician slipped his hand into Don's pocket. And nothing happened. Nothing at all.
Mulciber had risen from his desk and was standing erect. There was no expression on his face, but his eyes seemed to burn. The technician moved over the carpet toward him. He reached across the desk and presented the doll to Mulciber with a slight bow.
Mulciber accepted the little weeping image in silence. The other technician had been busy taking the wire loops from Don's ankle and arm. They left the room, pulling the machine on runners after them.
Mulciber was balancing the doll on the palm of his hand. At last he said, "The tie is severed, Mr. Haig." Dimly, Don perceived how much Mulciber hated him. "And the doll—the doll is mine."
Chapter Fourteen — The Shadow on the Wall
Mulciber was talking to the doll. Don could hear his voice, a loving, muted murmur, remotely. It seemed to reach him through a whitish drizzle of semi-consciousness. Mulciber was saying, "Beautiful ... beautiful ..." over and over again.
Don made a great effort and turned his head. The big room was empty except for him and Mulciber. The guards were gone, though he had no recollection of Mulciber's dismissing them. He and Don were alone.
The chains between Don's wrists must have made a faint noise; Mulciber raised his head and looked at him. The unstable brilliance of his eyes grew fixed. "I see you've come back to yourself, Haig," he said. "I had them leave you here because ... I wanted you to see ..."
His voice trailed away. He had forgotten Don even while he was addressing him. Now his eyes returned to the doll. Once more he began speaking to her in the intimate, tender lover's voice.
"Little beauty, little darling, little wonder. You're mine now. Beautiful, and mine. By the best of rights, I think. Haven't I earned you? Oh, yes."
"And I have another right to you. I helped make you. Have you forgotten? Don't be forgetful, little beauty. Part of your beauty you owe to these hands." He held out shaking fingers in front of him.
"Even then you were dangerous, weren't you? Dangerous even in the making." Mulciber laughed softly and indulgently. "I owe the stigmata that will always mark me to you. There's an eating, corrosive life in my darling. It's to you I owe my body, my tongue, my hands."
Don listened. There was nothing else he could do. His feet had been placed back in partial stasis, and there were the chains on his hands. For the moment he felt not so much hate and bitterness as incredulity. The doll was his, not Mulciber's. Even after the violence of the severing of the tie between them, he could not believe that he was not still linked to her. And yet Mulciber stood there holding her. And nothing happened. She was Mulciber's. Don had failed. Phyllis was dead. Mulciber had the doll. Don had failed in everything.
"Little wonder, little darling, little beauty. If you knew how much you have cost me! Perhaps that's why you weep."
His tone roughened and grew more deep. "Oh, yes. Darling, I had to walk through blood to get you. Do you know how many people have died so that I could stand here on top of the Mountain, holding you between my fingers? Blood enough, blood enough. And now you, you little weeping wonder—why, you too have got to die."
How do you kill a doll? Don wondered. A doll alive with the strange half-life Vulcan was master of? But Mulciber no doubt could find a way, as he had found a way to sever the tie between Don and the doll.
"Oh, yes. You'll have to go," Mulciber continued. "The wings"—his hand moved toward his breast pocket—"I will keep. For that you must blame the vanity of the artificer. I'm proud of them. And I believe they're harmless. But you'll have to die."
His voice had lost the loverlike note and become almost casual. It seemed to hold a faint relish. He couldn't, Don thought, be greatly concerned for long about killing anything, even Vulcan's doll. As the head of the SSP, he had grown too used to disposing casually of life. That was how Phyllis had died. Casually.
So many others, too, but they didn't matter. It was Phyllis Don cared about. Phyllis. At the name, something blazed up in him.
All that had happened—his loss, his misery, his defeat—seemed to cohere, to focus into a deadly, uncontrollable hate. It burned through his body like fire, the stronger because he knew its impotence. He had never felt anything in his life
like this surge of hatred. He was blinded by it.
And in that same moment Vulcan's doll flared up with a sudden, blinding, incandescent light.
Mulciber gave a cry. He dropped the doll. He staggered back from it, his hands over his eyes.
Before he acted, Don knew his own next action. It was something slaves and the helpless have always known. He raised his manacled hands high above him. With all his strength he brought the length of heavy, flexible metal down on Mulciber's head.
Mulciber fell without a cry. The chain had gone almost through his skull. He was dead before he had time to groan.
The room, now that he had stopped talking, was extremely quiet. Don could hear the beating of his own heart. He looked at the mess on the chain between his handcuffs, and at the greater mess on the floor. There were even pieces of hair in it. The sight made him feel a compulsive wish to laugh. He dared not yield to it. He knew that once he started he would never be able to stop.
Mulciber had dropped the doll close enough that Don, despite the foot lock, could reach her. He bent over and picked her up. She was unhurt.
She was still weeping, still beautiful. Don looked at her without emotion. He had experienced too much in the last minutes to have anything left for her. He put her carefully away in his pocket. He bent over again and began to search Mulciber's body for the wings.
They were not in the breast pocket where he had expected to find them. He located them at last in a transparent packet glued flat with siskin tape to Mulciber's lean chest.
They were faintly pinkish, each tiny feather perfect and distinct. In the bright light from the ceiling they seemed to be stirring a little, moving with Vulcan's odd half-life. They were, Don supposed, almost as wonderful as the doll itself.
He put the wings in his other pocket. And now, what was there left for him to do? He had finished. There was no other possible task.
For the first time, though as from a distance, a realization of the hopelessness of his position came to him. He was alone, unarmed, helpless, in the very heart of the SSP's great hostile citadel. His hands were chained together. He could not even move his feet.
It didn't seem to matter. He was at the end of his strength; exhaustion had dazed him. When he turned his head, the room swam around him giddily. He could not grasp—he did not want to grasp—the measure of his helplessness. It was too much, too much.
He must have slept briefly, the quick sleep of profound exhaustion. What woke him was a noise outside the door.
The guards, he thought dimly, it must be the guards who are getting worried about Mulciber. They're beginning to wonder what's happened to him.
At the thought, his heart began to pound. He resented it. What was the good of fright now, at this point of utter helplessness? All they had to do was to open the door, come in, and take him. He wished he could have stayed buried in his exhausted sleep.
He looked around the room, shivering and blinking. Nothing had changed. The room was still brightly lighted from its glowing ceiling. Mulciber still lay sprawled where he had fallen after the blow. There was still the bloody mess on the floor.
And yet, wasn't there a difference? Something had been moved, was out of place. No, had been added, rather. Something ... The noise at the door was repeated. Now Don saw what the difference was. There was a gigantic shadow on the floor.
It lay across his feet and extended halfway across the wall opposite, a jet-black, tremendous shadow. Where was it coming from? What objects in the room could be casting it?
He must be imagining it. No, it was too real for that. The blackness of the shadow seemed almost to have substance, to be tangible. And now, as he looked at it, feeling wonder mix with the first faint prickling of an emotion which he would not identify to himself, he saw what the shadow was. It was the shadow of a gigantic man with a blacksmith's hammer in his upraised hand.
There was a discreet knock at the door. The guards had decided to take a chance on angering Mulciber by knocking. They'd be coming in in a minute or so ... But the shadow. What could be casting it? In the empty room there was nothing which could ... There was no such man ...
The knock was repeated, this time more loudly. Don scarcely noticed it. He was leaning forward, looking at the shadow anxiously. He knew now what the emotion was he had felt a moment before. It was hope.
The shadow was motionless. But Don felt that it was sinking into the floor, extending backward away from him, penetrating. And now it was extending out through the wall of the room into space. A breath seemed to touch him and withdraw. He knew what it had meant when the weight around his ankles lifted. Now he could move his feet.
The knocking at the door had grown furious. There were loud voices, shouting. The handle turned. A pause, and then a thud. A heavy impact, and another thud.
Don hesitated no longer. Vulcan's shadow on the wall before him was like an open gate. Wherever it led to, it meant escape. He walked into it.
Chapter Fifteen — Back on the Beach
Don sat up, blinking sleepily. He looked around him, and yawned. It was not long after dawn; the sky was still red, The sand was warm under him, but the air had a morning chill.
He must have been very drunk last night. He had a confused recollection of restless sleep and wild, restless, troubled dreams. What had he been drinking? Who on Fyon would have given him that much to drink? It was a wonder he wasn't sick.
He got to his feet and tried to stretch. Something was wrong; he couldn't move freely. His hands—how strange. There was a chain between his hands.
For a moment he stood quite still, a little hunched over, thinking. Yes, he remembered. His mind raced over all that had happened, from the time he had found the doll half buried in the pink sand of the beach to when he had killed Mulciber. That had been real, too, as real as anything; the blood and grayish clots on his chain bore eloquent witness to the death. And after that ...
He had killed Mulciber; he had been alone and helpless in the heart of the SSP's citadel. He had walked into Vulcan's tremendous shadow. And now he was back on the beach at Fyon again.
What had happened in between? He shook his head, baffled. All that he had was an impression of swirling blackness. But in that blackness he felt that much time had passed.
He sat down on the sand again and got the doll from his pocket. She was as beautiful as ever. He looked at her a little sadly. Yes, she was beautiful still, but his no longer, not his in the old way. He felt alienated from her. Mulciber's forcible severing of the tie between them had changed things—changed him, at least. She was Vulcan's doll now.
But there was one thing he must do for her. It was something no other person had ever done—could, perhaps, have been able to do. Was the service an honor, a privilege? He did not know. But it had been reserved for Don Haig.
He took the doll in his left hand. With his right—his movements were a little awkward, because of the chain between his hands—he got out the packet he had taken from Mulciber. He opened it.
For a moment he sat marveling at the workmanship of the wings. If Mulciber had told the truth when he said he made them, he must have been very nearly the equal in craftsmanship of the Vulcan who had made the doll. Then, moving carefully and delicately, Don picked up the wings. He held his breath so his hand might be steady. He fitted the wings on the roughened places on the back of the doll.
They adhered. Don, looking at her closely, could see no line of division, no sign that the wings had not always been there.
It was over. He had finished. The sky was the same, the water. Only the doll had changed. Or—now—but—
For a moment Don felt an oppressive and horrible sense of strain and tension. It was easier for him than for the others, because he was at the center. There were also other reasons why he should feel it less. Then like an earthquake shock the sense of some vast and present change began to spread outward. It was like ripples from a stone cast in a pool of molten glass.
It touched all Fyon, and Payne, who wa
s in the kitchen ladling a mess of dakdak pods onto a platter, stopped in mid-motion. He gulped and swallowed. He couldn't get any air; his heart felt funny. He had the wild impression that it had begun to beat on the other side.
It reached earth, and the woman who had been looking with rapt concentration into her little "communion" mirror shuddered and then began laughing. She couldn't help it—the idea of the mirror was so ludicrous. She picked up the mirror and tossed it into the disposer. Still laughing, she watched it as it grew thinner and dissolved into a silvery mist. She pressed her hands to her temples lightly. The mirror? She smiled. Oh, she could do better than that.
It reached Venus, and the girl who was at breakfast with her husband said to him casually, "It's going to be a girl." She had just become pregnant. "And—do you know, Hal?—she's going to be quite a lot different from either of us."
It impinged on Mars, and Chou-Ettdra told his lab assistant to prepare the experiment with the lizards again, varying the temperature a little. "For," he said thoughtfully, "I think that this time we shall get some highly interesting results."
The impulse spread on out, a flexible knife edge of change and shock, subtle and thin and quick. And everywhere human beings, each in his degree, some trivially, some profoundly, responded to it. The impulse spread on out.
At the center, the instant of impact had been a short one. Don, looking at the doll, saw, as he had known he would, that she had ceased to weep. The sadness and compassion had passed from her face like a withdrawing shadow, and now it wore a look of inexpressible triumph and delight.
For a moment she was quiet, poised on his fingers. For a moment he held Victory herself, helmed with power and radiant, on his fingers. Then she beat her wings together twice, as if in rapture at her completion. She seemed to laugh with delight. Don watched her breathlessly, expecting he did not know what new miracle. Her outlines blurred and wavered. Then she disappeared.
She was gone, she had left him. He turned his head from side to side, unbelieving. The sands were vacant. Everything was empty. She was nowhere.
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