Vertigo

by Bob Shaw

  “That was another bomb,” he announced, already an expert. “Watch out for glass!”

  Hasson ran with the others and pressed into the lee of a fire appliance, and a surprisingly long time later there was a brief irregular pattering and whispering in the grass all around. As soon as it felt safe he returned to the television unit. The pyrotechnics which had accompanied the blast indicated that it had occurred on the blazing first floor — but he wanted to be sure that Al Werry had ascended safely through the wind-scattered hail of glass fragments.

  Cec, the chief technician, switched on a microphone circuit. Terry, look out for Al Werry arriving up there. He’s got a cutter with him, and he’s about to try going in one of the upper windows. We’re gonna get some good network footage out of this, so stick with him. Right?”

  “Right, Cec,” came Terry Franz’s reply and the image in the monitor well swung giddily. It centred on the figure of Werry who was silhouetted for an instant against the inferno on the hotel’s first floor before reaching the darker background of the levels above. Hasson felt an absurd constriction in his throat as he noticed that Werry, contravening police flight regulations, was wearing his ornate cap in place of a helmet.

  Werry brought himself into the hovering mode about five metres out from a fourth-floor window and drew his pistol. He aimed it and fired, and the camera — with its superb low-light vision — showed a hole appearing in one of the square panes. Werry kept on firing always hitting the same small rectangle, until it had been cleared of glass. He put the gun back in its holster and worked at the controls of the thermal cutter, bringing a dagger of diamond-sharp brilliance into being at its tip. Without hesitation, Werry moved further out from the wall of the hotel, gaining a little extra height as he went. The headlights of the cars on the ground far below slid into view under his feet, tiny out-of- focus candle flames.

  Werry altered a belt control and swooped in towards the window. As soon as he got within field interference radius he began to fall, but he had accurately compensated for the drop and he was able to thrust his left arm through the aperture he had created. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the horizontal divisions between tiles. He obtained a foothold, steadied himself and brought the cutter in his right hand into contact with the window frame. Its sun-white tip slid easily through metal and glass, tracing an orange-glowing line. Werry, clinging tightly to the sheer surface, began to extend the incision. The winds of altitude rugged at his uniform, producing a cold, welling nausea in Hasson’s stomach.

  Hasson turned away, wondering if he was actually going to vomit, but checked himself as he noticed a flurry of movement in the dimness beyond Werry’s spread-eagled figure. A man in an unmarked flying suit was briefly seen, face a pale triangular blur, right arm extended. Hasson gave an involuntary shout as Al Werry tumbled backwards away from the window, the thermal cutter flying from his grasp and plunging out of sight. Werry fell a short distance, but his lateral impetus carried him out of interference range and his body began to float away on the night wind, limbs making feeble and uncoordinated movements. His cap fluttered down into the waiting darkness, like an escaping bird.

  The menacing rectangular cavern of the window was empty once more.

  For Hasson, there followed an agonised period of confusion in which he was only dimly aware of Victor Quigg leaping skywards, already paying out a plasteel line from the dispenser at his waist. Men shouted near him, but their voices were strangely distant. Myriad specks of brilliance wheeled in the overhanging night. Quigg reappeared, looking like an old man, towing an inert shape which many hands reached for as it neared the ground and became heavy, sagging down on to the grass.

  Suddenly Hasson was kneeling beside Werry, staring in heart- thundering dismay at the bullet hole in the policeman’s left shoulder. The location of the wound — just above the armpit — made it look relatively harmless, the sort of injury which would have drawn scarcely a wince from a character in a holoplay, but the entire left side of Werry’s tunic was sodden with blood, glistening like a mass of fresh liver. Werry’s face was almost luminescent in its pallor. His drifting gaze triangulated on Hasson and his lips began to move. Hasson bent lower in response to the inaudible plea.

  “It all piles up on you,” Werry whispered. It’s funny how it all…,”

  “Don’t talk,” Hasson urged. “Don’t try to say anything.”

  Werry took his hand in a fragile grip. “You’re not going to believe this, Rob, but I’m not even… I’m not even worried about…” A silence and a stillness descended over him, and his fingers relaxed their grip on Hasson’s hand.

  Hasson stood up and looked about him with burning, tear-prismed eyes. A man waiting nearby handed him Werry’s cap, which had somehow terminated its descent in the immediate area. Victor Quigg rose from his kneeling position, snatched the cap and placed it on Werry’s chest. He stood over the body for a few seconds, then turned and walked away in the direction of the nearest police car, trailing leaden feet through the long grass. Hasson ran after him and caught his arm.

  “Where are you going, Victor?” he said.

  want my shotgun,” Quigg replied woodenly. “I’m going up on the roof of the hotel, and I’m going to wait there with my shotgun. ”

  “Lutze mightn’t even reach the roof.”

  “If he does, I’ll be there with my shotgun.”

  “It’s young Theo I’m thinking about now,” Hasson said, hear-. ing his own words across bleak interstellar distances. “Give me a gun and a spare harness.”

  ten

  Nothing is happening. I’m still on the ground — safe and secure. Nothing is happening.

  Hasson watched the underside of the Chinook Hotel blossom and unfurl like a carnivorous flower. As the circular building expanded to the limits of his field of view he began to see details of its structure — the spray of radial cantilevers, the spiderweb pattern of ribs and intercostals, the twin circular apertures of the elevator shafts, one of which glowed with a shifting ruddy light which made it a back door to hell.

  It’s quite simple, you see. The foundation for the supporting column was positioned over a geological fault, or a swamp, and now the whole thing is sinking into it like a piston. I’m still on the ground — safe and secure — watching the hotel drop down to my level.

  His flight brought him close to the hotel’s lower rim and for the first time he was able to hear the fire at work. It was making little downward progress for the time being — only a few gleaming razor slashes revealed that beams and slabs were being tortured by heat and heat-induced stresses — but flames and hot gases were pouring up through stairwells and ventilation shafts to reach other floors, and their advance was signalled by ragged explosions of timbers, glass and paint containers. Clouds of smoke interspersed with streamers of long-lived sparks were being carried away an the wind.

  It’s quite fascinating — almost a privilege, really, though rather a ghoulish one — to be able to stand here on the ground and get such a good view of what is happening to the hotel. One can’t help being reminded of the destruction of the Hindenburg. All the same, even though I’m safe and secure on the ground, that second floor window is getting very close, and if I’m to pop inside, casually, just for a quick look around I’d better think about how I’m going to…

  Hasson hit the window frame hard, his ballistic-style ascent carrying him through the field interference phase with virtually no loss of speed. He gripped the alloy which trimmed the aperture where six panes had been cut out, his feet found slithering purchase on the edge of nothingness, and suddenly he was inside the hotel, breathing deeply, standing on a litter-strewn composition floor. The noise of the fire was much louder here and he could feel its heat striking up through the soles of his shoes. It occurred to him that the floor structure in that area could not survive for many more minutes.

  He scanned his surroundings — peripherally aware of the television cameraman hovering in the airy asylum beyond the windows — and m
ade out the sawtooth silhouette of a nearby staircase. Only major load-bearing walls had been completed throughout the hotel, and Hasson received a powerful impression of vastness, of being on a battlefield at night, where dozens of minor skirmishes were marked by transient glows and glimmers among forests of columns. He ran to the staircase and sprinted up it.

  The thermal cutter he had tucked into his belt felt secure at his left side, but the pistol began to loosen due to the action of his . body and he took it into his right hand. It was almost certain that Lutze and Theo Werry had preceded him on the same route, and therefore he felt safe from booby traps and their proximity fuses, but the time had come to prepare for an encounter with Lutze himself. He had been on the fourth floor when he shot Al Werry, but his climb to the roof of the hotel would have been hampered by his own injuries and, presumably, by the fact that Theo would be moving slowly in the lead. Hasson estimated that he could catch up on the pair as early as the eighth floor. He made sure the pistol’s safety catch was off and began to count the floors as he pounded his way upwards through the Vulcanian dimness.

  Four flights of steps to each floor, which means I’m on… Or is it only three flights? Perhaps I’m further up than I…

  Hasson and Barry Lutze saw each other in the same instant.

  Lutze was standing on a broad expanse of landing, looking upwards to where the stooped figure of Theo Werry was feeling his way to the top of a flight of bare steps which were made hideously dangerous by the absence of an outer banister. As soon as Lutze became aware of Hasson he dropped on one knee and began firing with the police weapon he had taken from Henry Corzyn. Hasson, still sliding to a halt, had no place to hide, no time to cry out or plan tactics. There could be nothing but the basic survival reaction. He raised his own pistol and worked the trigger as rapidly as its mechanism would permit, filled with the sick realisation that he had blundered into what some would describe as a fair fight, a classic stand-off whose result would be determined as much by the blindly spinning cylinders of chance as by personal attributes of the contenders. The pistol recoiled against his hand again and again, but never quickly enough, with a seeming aeon between each silent propulsive shock.

  Two things occurred at once. A bomb detonated on a lower floor, sending a sheet of amber and red flame billowing up through a central well; and in the same instant — as though he had been caught in the blast — Lutze was flicked on to his back. Stress waves raced through the building, rippling the floor slabs and initiating a train of lesser explosions, but Lutze did not move. Hasson ran up to the landing, gun self-consciously at the ready. Lutze was lying with both hands clapped to his forehead, eyes glazed and unseeing, mouth locked open in an expression of frozen surprise.

  Hasson turned away from him and saw that Theo Werry had fallen to his knees. The boy was only centimetres from the naked rim of a manmade abyss which terminated many floors below, and he was unsteadily rising to his feet. Hasson opened his mouth to shout a warning, but a vision of what might happen if he startled Theo sprang into his mind. He bounded up the stairs, threw an arm around Theo and dragged him away from the edge. The boy began to fight against him.

  “It’s all right, Theo,” Hasson said firmly. “This is Rob Hasson.”

  Theo ceased to struggle. “Mr Haldane?”

  “That’s what I meant to say. Come on — we’re getting out of here.” Hasson gripped a strap of the boy’s harness and began drawing him down to the landing he had just quit. He guided him past Lutze’s body, and away from the yawning mouth of the stairwell, to a window in the outer wall. The dark world beyond looked peaceful, sane and inviting. Hasson shoved the pistol into a pocket, took the thermal cutter from his belt and set its controls.

  “I don’t get it,” Theo said, his face turning from side to side. “How did you get here?”

  Same way as you did, son.”

  “But I thought you couldn’t fly.”

  1’ve done a bit in my time.” Hasson activated the cutter, turning it into a sorcerer’s sword of white fire.

  Its light showed up the strain on Theo’s dirt-streaked face. “What happened to Barry?”

  “He had a gun. He started shooting at me, and I had to shoot back.” Praying that Theo would not pursue the line of questioning, Hasson turned to the Window and slid the tip of the cutter through the nearest pane. It went into the glass with scarcely any resistance, causing roseate glowing drops to course down the surface.

  “I heard my father shouting something at me a few minutes ago,” Theo said, raising his voice above the background noises in the building. “Where is he flow?”

  “We’ll talk about that later, Theo — the main thing to worry about right now is…

  “Did Barry shoot him?”

  “I… I’m afraid that’s what happened.” Hasson moved the blade of the cutter sideways and sliced through a bar of alloy. “Listen, Theo, I’m cutting us an escape door in a window and we’re going to be out of here in a minute or two. I want you to get yourself ready to fly.”

  Theo felt for his arm and gripped it. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “I’m sorry — yes.” Unable to look at the boy, Hasson concentrated all his attention on the window and felt a dull puzzlement when he saw that a small circular hole had appeared in one of the panes close to his face. The turmoil of his thoughts — about Al Werry and his son and the need to get away from the burning hotel — was so great that the sudden presence of the hole in the glass was an irrelevancy, or at most a fringe phenomenon of little importance. Was the heat from the cutter distorting the window frame and causing…?

  A second hole appeared in the glass, and an incredible thought was born in Hasson’s mind.

  He spun round and saw Barry Lutze on his feet on the landing. Lutze still had one hand pressed to his forehead, his face was a fearsome bloody mask, and he was using the gun — the gun Hasson had neglected to kick clear of his body. In the act of turning Hasson, driven by pure instinct, hurled the thermal cutter. It flew in a series of eccentric whirls like a binary sun spinning around an invisible companion, touched Lutze’s side, clattered down on to the floor in a fountain of sparks and disappeared into the open pit of the stairwell. Lutze, who had already been lurching unsteadily, fell to the floor. A single convulsive twitch flailed his four limbs simultaneously, then he was motionless, converted in an instant from a human being into something that could have no connection with life.

  Hasson, who had been under the impression that the cutter had practically missed Lutze, ran to the body. The fleeting contact, the casual feather-flick from the sun-blade, had gouged a diagonal, smoking, ruinous furrow through Lutze’s chest. This time, it was obvious, there was no need to deprive him of weaponry. Suppressing his natural reactions, Hasson strode to the stairwell and looked down, searching for the cutter, but was unable to see it. There was nothing but a complex tunnel of descending perspectives, obscured by smoke and patchily lit by shafts of hellish light. Swearing hopelessly, he ran back to Theo, who was still standing by the window looking stunned and frightened.

  “We’ve lost the cutter,” Hasson said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “Do you know the way out of here?”

  Theo shook his head. “There’s a door in the roof somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. Somebody always led me in and out.”

  Hasson weighed the odds, balancing one vision of dread against another, and came to a decision. “Come on, son, we’re going down and we’ve got to go fast.”

  He took Theo’s hand and dragged him towards the stairs. The boy tried to hang back, but Hasson was too strong for him and in a few seconds they were committed to a perilous plunge into the noisome lower regions of the hotel. Having surrendered himself, Theo did his best to match strides with Hasson, but the task was an impossible one for a blind person and their descent became a sequence of mutual collisions, near-falls and extended ankle- twisting slides. Only the fact that the banisters had been installed on those flights saved them from disastrous spill
s into the central well.

  With each successive landing the heat, fumes and noise grew more intense, and when they finally reached the second floor Hasson was appalled to find that it had begun to disintegrate. Some of the slabs were humped like sand dunes and beginning to glow at the edges. Violent tremors coursed through the structure, accompanied by awesome low-frequency groans which suggested that the floor would fall through at any second.

  Hasson pushed Theo towards the aperture in the large window. lie gripped the boy by the shoulders and turned him round to face him, at the same time activating his CG unit. The function light on the control panel at Theo’s waist remained dead. Hasson’s gaze traced a practised line over Theo’s flight equipment, and came to a foundering halt at the dips which should have held the power pack. He felt his face contort with shock.

  “Theo!” he shouted, thunderstruck by the magnitude of the discovery. “Your power pack I Where’s your power pack?”

  Theo’s hand groped around the empty clips. “Barry took it… Mexico… I forgot.”

  “It’s all right — there’s no harm done.” Hasson found his lips dragging themselves into the wan semblance of a smile at the inappropriateness of his words as he disconnected his own power pack and fastened it to Theo’s harness.

  “I just forgot,” Theo said. “When I heard about Dad… What are we going to do?”

  “We’re getting out of here, as planned,” Hasson told him. “You’re going first and I’ll come after you when I grab another pack.”

  Theo’s face turned towards the blazing interior of the hotel, blind but cognisant. “How can you…?”