A Plague of Demons

by Keith Laumer

  I slammed the phone down, cold sweat popping out across my face. Two minutes… too late for anything. The men in the War Room would never know how close I had come to beating the Gool-and them.

  But I could still save the Master Tape. I wrestled the yellow plastic case that housed the tape onto the table, into the machine.

  And the world vanished in a blaze of darkness, a clamor of silence.

  NOW, MASTERS! NOW! LINK UP! LINE UP!

  Like a bad dream coming back in daylight, I felt the obscene presence of massed Gool minds, attenuated by distance but terrible in their power, probing, thrusting. I fought back, struggling against paralysis, trying to gather my strength, use what I had learned…

  SEE, MASTERS, HOW IT WOULD ELUDE US. BLANK IT OFF, TOGETHER NOW…

  The paths closed before me. My mind writhed, twisted, darted here and there-and met only the impenetrable shield of the Gool defenses.

  IT TIRES, MASTERS. WORK SWIFTLY NOW. LET US IMPRESS ON THE SUBJECT THE CO-ORDINATES OF THE BRAIN PIT. The conceptualization drifted into my mind. HERE, MAN. TRANSMIT THE TAPE HERE!

  As from a distance, the monitor personality fraction watched the struggle. Kayle had been right. The Gool had waited-and now their moment had come. Even my last impulse of defiance-to place the tape in the machine-had been at the Gool command. They had looked into my mind. They understand psychology as no human analyst ever could; and they had led me in the most effective way possible, by letting me believe I was the master. They had made use of my human ingenuity to carry out their wishes-and Kayle had made it easy for them by evacuating a twenty-mile radius around me, leaving the field clear for the Gool.

  HERE- The Gool voice rang like a bell in my mind: TRANSMIT THE TAPE HERE!

  Even as I fought against the impulse to comply, I felt my arm twitch toward the machine.

  THROW THE SWITCH! the voice thundered.

  I struggled, willed my arm to stay at my side. Only a minute longer, I thought. Only a minute more, and the bomb would save me…

  LINK UP, MASTERS!

  I WILL NOT LINK. YOU PLOT TO FEED AT MY EXPENSE.

  NO! BY THE MOTHER WORM, I PLEDGE MY GROOVE AT THE EATING TROUGH. FOR US THE MAN WILL GUT THE GREAT VAULT OF HIS NEST WORLD!

  ALREADY YOU BLOAT AT OUR EXPENSE!

  FOOL!! WOULD YOU BICKER NOW? LINK UP!

  ***

  The Gool raged-and I grasped for an elusive thought and held it. The bomb, only a few feet away. The waiting machine. And the Gool had given me the co-ordinates of their cavern…

  With infinite sluggishness, I moved.

  LINK UP, MASTERS: THEN ALL WILL FEED…

  IT IS A TRICK, I WILL NOT LINK.

  I found the bomb, fumbled for a grip.

  DISASTER, MASTERS! NOW IS THE PRIZE LOST TO US, UNLESS YOU JOIN WITH ME!

  My breath choked off in my throat; a hideous pain coiled outward from my chest. But it was unimportant. Only the bomb mattered. I tottered, groping. There was the table; the transmitter…

  I lifted the bomb, felt the half-healed skin of my burned arm crackle as I strained…

  I thrust the case containing the Master Tape out of the field of the transmitter, then pushed, half-rolled the bomb into position. I groped for the switch, found it. I tried to draw breath, felt only a surge of agony. Blackness was closing in…

  The co-ordinates…

  From the whirling fog of pain and darkness, I brought the target concept of the Gool cavern into view, clarified it, held it…

  MASTERS! HOLD THE MAN! DISASTER!

  Then I felt the Gool, their suspicions yielding to the panic in the mind of the Prime Overlord, link their power against me. I stood paralyzed, felt my identity dissolving like water pouring from a smashed pot. I tried to remember-but it was too faint, too far away.

  Then from somewhere a voice seemed to cut in, the calm voice of an emergency reserve personality fraction. "You are under attack. Activate the reserve plan. Level Five. Use Level Five. Act now. Use Level Five…"

  Through the miasma of Gool pressure, I felt the hairs stiffen on the back of my neck. All around me the Gool voices raged, a swelling symphony of discord. But they were nothing. Level Five…

  There was no turning back. The compulsions were there, acting even as I drew in a breath to howl my terror Level Five. Down past the shapes of dreams, the intense faces of hallucination; Level Three; Level Four and the silent ranked memories… And deeper still Into a region of looming gibbering horror, of shadowy moving shapes of evil, of dreaded presences that lurked at the edge of vision…

  Down amid the clamor of voiceless fears, the mounting hungers, the reaching claws of all that man had feared since the first tailless primate screamed out his terror in a tree-top: the fear of falling, the fear of heights.

  Down to Level Five. Nightmare level.

  ***

  I groped outward, found the plane of contact-and hurled the weight of man's ancient fears at the waiting Gool-and in their black confining caves deep in the rock of a far world, they felt the roaring tide of fear-fear of the dark, and of living burial. The horrors in man's secret mind confronted the horrors of the Gool Brain Pit. And I felt them break, retreat in blind panic from me All but one. The Prime Overlord reeled back with the rest, but his was a mind of terrible power. I sensed for a moment his bloated immense form, the seething gnawing hungers, insatiable, never to be appeased. Then he rallied-but he was alone now.

  LINK UP, MASTERS! THE PRIZE IS LOST. KILL THE MAN! KILL THE MAN!

  I felt a knife at my heart. It fluttered-and stopped. And in that instant, I broke past his control, threw the switch. There was the sharp crack of imploding air. Then I was floating down, ever down, and all sensation was far away.

  MASTERS! KILL TH

  The pain cut off in an instant of profound silence and utter dark.

  Then sound roared in my ears, and I felt the harsh grate of the floor against my face as I fell, and then I knew nothing more.

  8

  "I hope," General Titus was saying, "that you'll accept the decoration now, Mr. Granthan. It will be the first time in history that a civilian has been accorded this honor-and you deserve it."

  I was lying in a clean white bed, propped up by big soft pillows, with a couple of good-looking nurses hovering a few feet away. I was in a mood to tolerate even Titus.

  "Thanks, General," I said. "I suggest you give the medal to the volunteer who came in to gas me. He knew what he was going up against; I didn't."

  "It's over, now, Granthan," Kayle said. He attempted to beam, settled for a frosty smile. "You surely understand-"

  "Understanding," I said. "That's all we need to turn this planet-and a lot of other ones-into the kind of worlds the human mind needs to expand into."

  "You're tired, Granthan," Kayle said. "You get some rest. In a few weeks you'll be back on the job, as good as new."

  "That's where the key is," I said. "In our minds; there's so much there, and we haven't even scratched the surface. To the mind nothing is impossible. Matter is an illusion, space and time are just convenient fictions-"

  "I'll leave the medal here, Mr. Granthan. When you feel equal to it, we'll make the official presentation. Television…"

  He faded off as I closed my eyes and thought about things that had been clamoring for attention ever since I'd met the Gool, but hadn't had time to explore. My arm…

  I felt my way along it-from inside-tracing the area of damage, watching as the bodily defenses worked away, toiling to renew, replace. It was a slow, mindless process. But if I helped a little…

  It was easy. The pattern was there. I felt the tissues renew themselves, the skin regenerate.

  The bone was more difficult. I searched out the necessary minerals, diverted blood; the broken ends knit…

  The nurse was bending over me, a bowl of soup in her hand.

  ***

  "You've been asleep for a long time, sir," she said, smiling. "How about some nice chicken broth now?"

  I ate
the soup and asked for more. A doctor came and peeled back my bandages, did a double-take, and rushed away. I looked. The skin was new and pink, like a baby's-but it was all there. I flexed my right leg; there was no twinge of pain.

  I listened for a while as the doctors gabbled, clucked, probed and made pronouncements. Then I closed my eyes again. I thought about the matter transmitter. The government was sitting on it, of course. A military secret of the greatest importance, Titus called it. Maybe someday the public would hear about it; in the meantime "How about letting me out of here?" I said suddenly. A pop-eyed doctor with a fringe of gray hair blinked at me, went back to fingering my arm. Kayle hove into view.

  "I want out," I said. "I'm recovered, right? So now just give me my clothes."

  "Now, now, just relax, Granthan. You know it's not as simple as that. There are a lot of matters we must go over."

  "The war's over," I said. "You admitted that. I want out."

  "Sorry." Kayle shook his head. "That's out of the question."

  "Doc," I said. "Am I well?"

  "Yes," he said. "Amazing case. You're as fit as you'll ever be; I've never-"

  "I'm afraid you'll have to resign yourself to being here for a while longer, Granthan," Kayle said. "After all, we can't-"

  "Can't let the secret of matter transmission run around loose, hey? So until you figure out the angles, I'm a prisoner, right?"

  "I'd hardly call it that, Granthan. Still…"

  I closed my eyes. The matter transmitter-a strange device. A field, not distorting space, but accentuating certain characteristics of a matter field in space-time, subtly shifting relationships…

  Just as the mind could compare unrelated data, draw from them new concepts, new parallels…

  The circuits of the matter transmitter… and the patterns of the mind…

  The exocosm and the endocosm, like the skin and the orange, everywhere in contact…

  Somewhere there was a beach of white sand, and dunes with graceful sea-oats that leaned in a gentle wind. There was blue water to the far horizon, and a blue sky, and nowhere were there any generals with medals and television cameras, or flint-eyed bureaucrats with long schemes…

  And with this gentle folding… thus…

  And a pressure here… so…

  I opened my eyes, raised myself on one elbow-and saw the sea. The sun was hot on my body, but not too hot, and the sand was white as sugar. Far away, a seagull tilted, circling.

  A wave rolled in, washed my foot in cool water.

  I lay on my back, and looked up at white clouds in a blue sky, and smiled-and then laughed aloud.

  Distantly the seagull's cry echoed my laughter.

  DOORSTEP

  Steadying his elbow on the kitchen table serving as a desk, Brigadier General W. F. Straut leveled his binoculars and stared out through the second-floor window of the farmhouse at the bulky object lying canted at the edge of the wood lot. He watched the figures moving over and around the gray mass, then flipped the lever on the field telephone.

  "Bill, how are your boys doing?"

  "General, since that box this morning-"

  "I know all about the box, Bill. It's in Washington by now. What have you got that's new?"

  "Sir, I haven't got anything to report yet. I've got four crews on it, and she still looks impervious as hell."

  "Still getting the sounds from inside?"

  "Intermittently, General."

  "I'm giving you one more hour, Major. I want that thing cracked."

  The General dropped the phone back on its cradle, and absently peeled the cellophane from a cigar. He had moved fast, he reflected, after the State Police notified him at 9:41 last night. He had his men on the spot, the area evacuated of civilians, and a preliminary report on the way to Washington by midnight. At 2:36, they had discovered the four inch cube lying on the ground fifteen feet from the object-ship, capsule, bomb, whatever it was. But now-four hours later-nothing new.

  The field phone jangled. He grabbed it up.

  "General, we've discovered a thin spot up on the top surface; all we can tell so far is that the wall thickness falls off there."

  "All right. Keep after it, Bill."

  This was more like it. If he could have this thing wrapped up by the time Washington woke up to the fact that it was something big-well, he'd been waiting a long time for that second star. This was his chance, and he would damn well make the most of it.

  Straut looked across the field at the thing. It was half in and half out of the woods, flat-sided, round-ended, featureless. Maybe he should go over and give it a closer look personally. He might spot something the others were missing. It might blow them all to kingdom come any second; but what the hell. He had earned his star on sheer guts in Granada. He still had 'em.

  He keyed the phone. "I'm coming down, Bill." On impulse, he strapped a pistol belt on. Not much use against a house-sized bomb, but the heft of it felt good.

  The thing looked bigger than ever as the jeep approached it, bumping across the muck of the freshly plowed field. From here he could see a faint line running around, just below the juncture of side and top. Greer hadn't mentioned that. The line was quite obvious; in fact, it was more of a crack.

  With a sound like a baseball smacking the catcher's mitt, the crack opened; the upper half tilted, men sliding-then impossibly it stood open, vibrating, like the roof of a house suddenly lifted. The driver gunned the jeep. There were cries, and a ragged shrilling that set Straut's teeth on edge. The men were running back now, two of them dragging a third. Major Greer emerged from behind the object, looked about, ran toward him, shouting.

  "… a man dead. It snapped; we weren't expecting it…"

  Straut jumped out beside the men, who had stopped now and were looking back. The underside of the gaping lid was an iridescent black. The shrill noise sounded thinly across the field. Greer arrived, panting.

  "What happened?" Straut snapped.

  "I was… checking over that thin spot, General. The first thing I knew it was… coming up under me. I fell; Tate was at the other side. He held on and it snapped him loose, against a tree. His skull…"

  "What the devil's that racket?"

  "That's the sound we were getting from inside, before, General. There's something in there, alive-"

  "All right; pull yourself together, Major. We're not unprepared. Bring your halftracks into position. The tanks will be here in another half-hour."

  Straut glanced at the men standing about. He would show them what leadership meant.

  "You men keep back," he said. He puffed his cigar calmly as he walked toward the looming object. The noise stopped suddenly; that was a relief. There was a faint and curious odor in the air, something like chlorine… or seaweed… or iodine.

  There were no marks in the ground surrounding the thing. It had apparently dropped straight in to its present position. It was heavy, too. The soft soil was displaced in a mound a foot high all along the side.

  Behind him, Straut heard a shout go up. He whirled. The men were pointing; the jeep started up, churned toward him, wheels spinning. He looked up. Over the edge of the gray wall, six feet above his head, a great reddish protrusion, like the claw of a crab, moved, groping.

  In automatic response, Straut yanked his.45 from its holster, jacked the action, and fired. Soft matter spattered, and the claw jerked back. The screeching started up again angrily, then was drowned in the engine roar as the jeep slid to a stop. Straut stooped, grabbed up a leaf to which a quivering lump adhered, jumped into the vehicle as it leaped forward; then a shock and they were turning, too fast, going over…

  ***

  "… lucky it was soft ground."

  "What about the driver?"

  Silence. Straut opened his eyes. "What… about…"

  A stranger was looking down at him, an ordinary-looking fellow of about thirty-five.

  "Easy, now, General Straut. You've had a bad spill. Everything is all right. I'm Paul Lieberman, from the Uni
versity."

  "The driver," Straut said with an effort.

  "He was killed when the jeep went over."

  "Went… over?"

  "The creature lashed out with a member resembling a scorpion's stinger; it struck the jeep and flipped it; you were thrown clear. The driver jumped and the jeep rolled on him."

  Straut pushed himself up. "Where's Greer?"

  "I'm right here, sir," Major Greer stepped up, stood attentively.

  "Those tanks here yet, Greer?"

  "No, sir. I had a call from General Margrave; there's some sort of holdup. Something about not destroying scientific material. I did get the mortars over from the base…"

  Straut got to his feet. The stranger took his arm. "You ought to lie down, General-"

  "Who the hell are you? Greer, get those mortars in place, spaced between your tracks."

  The telephone rang. Straut seized it.

  "General Straut."

  "Straut? General Margrave here. I'm glad you're back on your feet. There'll be some scientists from the State University coming over; cooperate with them. You're going to have to hold things together at least until I can get another man in there-"

  "Another man? General, I'm not incapacitated. The situation is under complete control-"

  "I'll decide that, Straut. I understand you've got another casualty. What's happened to your defensive capabilities?"