Delos 2 - Futureworld

by John Ryder Hall

  Then he stopped and grinned.

  He backed down. “Very nice, Chuck!” he shouted, gazing around shrewdly. “Good idea, man! It makes a fella proud to be you.”

  He looked at the down staircase for a moment, then moved off in another direction, through an arch at the side of the tunnel.

  Chuck, hidden below behind plastic barrels, had regained his breath but his face was still gleaming with sweat.

  “Hey, Chuck!” the clone called out once more.

  The tall reporter whirled about in panic.

  The voice had come from almost behind him, along a passage stacked with empty containers. The duplicate must be behind him, grinning wickedly and aiming his gun. Chuck threw himself into the barrels and fired wildly down the passage just as his duplicate fired. Then he kicked more barrels into the passage, scrambled to his hands and knees, and slipped into a damp niche in the wall. He stood trembling, clutching desperately at his weapon.

  The clone-Chuck called out from his place of concealment down the passage. “Hey, man?” Chuck didn’t answer and the duplicate continued, conversationally: “You know, Chuck, we’re not gonna get anywhere this way.” He chuckled. “We’re both lousy shots. Hey, remember Sergeant Rucker in Basic?” The clone’s voice deepened and barked, snappish, in an imitation of the drill sergeant, “ ‘Browning, you couldn’t hit an elephant in the ass with a bazooka at five paces.’ ”

  As the clone chuckled again, Chuck made a run for the up staircase.

  The clone fired, exploding some flammable residue in one of the barrels—which blocked him for an instant. Then he ran after the reporter, leaping over the fallen containers with a deft, athletic ease. But Chuck had disappeared.

  The duplicate paused, heard the pounding feet on the iron steps above him, and grinned. He began climbing the staircase, his usual unhurried air returned.

  The stairs both Chucks were climbing ran alongside the huge, white, corrugated-iron mass of the rocket chamber, whose massive circular hinged door had swung slowly outward to admit Chuck and Tracy and Ron Thurlow and Mrs. Reed, among others, to their voyage in Futureworld how many hours? days? before. Chuck was jumping the steps that ran alongside the curving hulk two at a time, and looking eagerly each way for shelter as he passed the various landings. At the first landing he saw no hiding place. He was breathing hard again by the time he gained the second landing.

  He had to leave the staircase, he knew; it was too exposed. And he must do it now!

  Leaping a two-foot gap that separated the second landing from a wide, semi-circular metal entranceway at the side of the huge room itself, and across from the rocket chamber and its accompanying staircase, Chuck pushed open the entranceway door, FIREDOOR, it said. Blinking the sweat out of his eyes, he stared around through a confusing maze of pipes, cables, and pieces of equipment, including multiple fire extingushers. But there was no exit from the small room.

  He hadn’t much time. He looked around and saw a coil of heavy black cable on the floor of the room. Its end had red and black clip-on leads attached to it. The cable extended from what appeared to be an electric-power panel on the room’s wall. Staggering over to the cable, he looped it around his arm—transferring his gun to the other hand.

  The steps of the clone-Chuck still sounded, but far below, and slowly.

  Chuck stood in the shadowy entranceway, undecided as to how to rig his trick. Suddenly he noticed, for the first time, that the metal stairway leading up from the second landing was not joined to the stairs below, but was attached only to the huge rocket chamber itself. Looking up, along the chamber, he saw that the stairs above the third landing were identical, disjoined from the stairway below them.

  Quickly, he fastened the clips to the iron steps leading up from the second landing but unattached to it. Then he walked back into the small room and pulled down the switch in the power panel. Locating a small piece of metal on the floor of the room, he tossed it across and up onto one of the steps above the second landing. It glowed quickly, then melted into a pool of liquid silver.

  Chuck was satisfied. He half closed the firedoor, and took up a position just inside it, his gun at the ready.

  Looking around, he gulped and threw a switch.

  • • •

  The duplicate Chuck had, meanwhile, halted his climb at the first level and pushed open a similar fire-door. He looked in, then shook his head. “No. I don’t think we’d hide here. A little too soon for our taste.”

  Ambling back to the stairs, he began his climb to the next floor. He had a faint smile of anticipation. “Suicide . . . without death,” he said to himself and laughed softly.

  After a few moments, the clone-Chuck reached the second landing and glanced about. “Now this looks like us!” he murmured.

  Above him rose the new metal stairway.

  “Of course, you’ve tried to lay another trap!” he called loudly, to the Chuck he knew was hidden. “But what kind? We have a very complicated mind, you and I . . .”

  The clone-Chuck leaned back against the stair railing and looked around carefully, a quizzical expression on his face. “Hey, man? Remember that time in Cambodia? When we laid an ambush for that Viet Cong patrol? That was clever! Something out of character. Something new,” the clone said, grinning, “that’s what we’d try. Well, we were always very bad with scientific things, but here we are in the middle of all these gadgets. You might say because of these gadgets,” he added with a laugh.

  He raised his foot and was about to step upward. To Chuck, hidden in the shadows, time seemed to slow and stretch out immeasurably. He saw the foot flex and rise, the movement of the trousers, the leaning forward—

  Then the foot stopped.

  “Oh! Damn good!”

  The foot came back. The duplicate Chuck stood on the landing and searched the staircase above. He noticed, now, the leads attached to the railing and traced them across to the metal entranceway and through the firedoor. Smiling, he lifted his gun and fired one of the rocket-propelled explosives into the half-hidden power panel. The panel burst in a shower of sparks and a gush of flame. Several lights went out between the second and third landings and a throbbing motor whined to a halt somewhere.

  Desperately, Chuck zigzagged from his hiding place and leveled his gun at the duplicate, not thinking about the killing of “self”—even the duplicated “self”—but only about survival. He pulled the trigger.

  There was a dry click.

  Chuck had no recourse but to throw the empty gun at the clone-Chuck, who was bringing his own weapon to bear. The clone winced and the flaming sword of his shot went wild, splashing fire along the wall of the room.

  The real Chuck wheeled and leaped outward for a complex of pipes, valves, cables, steel beams, and other protuberances that made a fast escape ladder upward against the wall. The clone fired again and the explosion ruptured a steam pipe, sending a hissing cloud of hot white fog into the room, luckily concealing the frantically climbing reporter.

  The duplicate Chuck now put a hand to his mouth and shouted into the roaring steam. “Be careful, brother! Don’t forget, we’re afraid of heights.”

  The tall, impeccably dressed clone then turned and started walking up the iron stairs after the human. He was in no hurry.

  • • •

  Chuck had discovered an entranceway, far above his pursuer, that led into the rocket chamber itself. He braked himself now on a platform that jutted from the inner chamber wall across toward the gleaming-white simulated rocket on which he had “traveled” earlier in his visit to Delos. Far below he saw robot technicians moving about, going through the preparations for another “launch.”

  He looked around desperately for a way down. It was at least five stories to the chamber floor and there seemed to be nowhere to hide, only the corrugated metal façade of the inner rocket chamber itself, curving away around the rocket that faked flight to a space station.

  The reporter took a deep breath, looked back the way he had come, shut t
he entranceway door, and made up his mind.

  Stepping decisively up to the platform railing, he climbed over it and edged his way out onto the metal edge of the chamber façade. He was like a mountain climber going across the sheer rock face of a vertical cliff.

  He made the classic mistake of looking down.

  Freezing, he clung to the small metal edgings with his eyes closed. “They do look like ants!” he muttered, the vertigo making his head swim and his stomach lurch. He fought against the scream of terror that was forcing itself up into his throat.

  Phobias are not things you can dismiss with rational thoughts. They are the hardest of all fears to combat, because they are often, if not always, emotional, usually based on some childhood incident buried so deep that it is beyond recall. Almost every human being has one or more phobias, some looming large and sometimes even controlling a life. What is sickeningly frightening to one person is nothing to another. It did Chuck Browning no good at all to remember this, to try to rationalize his fears away. It just didn’t work. The only thing he had to combat the fear of heights was his willpower. Nothing else—nothing else—would work against his acrophobia. Only desperation had driven him out onto the corrugated metal face of the chamber . . . and only that same desperation would make him move.

  Eyes closed, he felt for the next metal indentation with his foot. Finding it, he then reached out a hand to grasp the following one, four feet higher, a modular unit. He sidled along, eyes tightly closed, feeling for every inch of the narrow strips of metal that formed the flanged fittings between the corrugated units.

  He reached out once again—and found nothing.

  He did not move. Then he waved his hand.

  Nothing.

  Bending his wrist and arm, he at last found the cool metal. The wall had turned.

  He opened one eye, squinting at the wall, and found the niche inset into it. Gratefully he moved to it, then into it, resting for a moment. He caught his breath. With two walls close in, and two places to rest his feet, he felt safer.

  Then he heard footsteps on the metal platform he had recently left. Glancing around, he deftly ducked back. His duplicate was on the metal catwalk, smiling softly, looking around him as casually as a stag arriving at a college dance.

  But there was a gun in his hand.

  Below, the huge rocket-chamber door was swinging open and guest “astronauts” were being led inside.

  Chuck’s clone carefully gazed around the chamber, then bent over and looked down, obviously trying to see if Chuck was below the platform somewhere, perhaps hiding on another. His eyes searched the corrugated metal façade below; then he turned slowly away, making another quick survey, and started to leave the platform.

  Then stopped.

  His eyes swung again to the curving chamber face, and he grinned—very faintly, but with satisfaction.

  Quickly, he wheeled and trotted along the platform to a catwalk that ran out to the huge crane which extended across the open space above the rocket. Jumping up on the crane itself, he moved it surely along until he could look into the niche against which Chuck had flattened himself.

  The reporter blinked, helpless to move, unable to hide. There was nowhere to go, no time to go, and nothing to be done.

  The duplicate raised his gun. His grin had faded. He was ready to kill his double. “Suicide without death,” he muttered once again. “Ironic . . . Too bad no one will know!”

  Chuck stared back. His duplicate was so close to him that a blind man could hardly have missed.

  Looking over the gun’s sights, the clone-Chuck spoke. “Well, Chuck, it’s been a lot of fun. But I’ve got a plane to catch and a story to write. Anyway, don’t feel too bad. You’re not going to die, exactly. You’re just going to be . . . um . . . replaced.”

  Chuck saw his finger tightening on the trigger . . . squeezing—

  Click!

  Neither of the Chucks could believe it: the gun was empty.

  They stared for a moment at each other. Then a surge of hope crossed Chuck’s face. He exploded from the niche, recklessly swinging around its edge and scrambling along the chamber façade to the platform once more.

  The clone ran back along the crane, down the catwalk, and turned onto the far end of the platform. But all his confidence had evaporated.

  By this time, however, Chuck had climbed over the platform railing and had run back through the door into the area outside the rocket chamber, and was climbing the staircases again. He glanced back from the sixth or seventh landing and saw that the clone was racing after him.

  Pounding on upward, he spotted another firedoor. Leaping the gap to land on its metal entranceway, he opened the door and discovered that it led outward into the rocket chamber! It was no dead end, as before! Pausing a moment inside the doorway to orient himself, he heard his duplicate rattling up the staircase not far behind him.

  At this point in the rocket chamber, a scaffolding ran around the side of the huge room; below, the gleaming rocket pointed up; the chamber floor was seven or eight stories below. Chuck blinked in a sudden reoccurrence of his acrophobia, then threw himself inside the entranceway and banged shut the door.

  Standing to one side of the door, he waited.

  Seconds later, the duplicate ran through and caught himself on the platform railing.

  Chuck launched himself at the clone with a terrifying scream. The reporter missed a neck hold, but got in several kidney punches before the duplicate broke away. The two men—evenly matched—threw themselves at each other in a primitive burst of combat. They punched, gouged, and kicked, then fell to the floor of the platform in a biting, viciously tearing battle.

  The clone-Chuck now drove his knee into the reporter’s stomach and Chuck thought he was going to retch, but he backhanded the duplicate, smashing him across the eyes. They rolled apart, each to a precipitous edge of the platform. Then the clone rolled back and kicked out, bruising Chuck’s side. In an instant, they were on their knees, fists flying.

  Chuck swung and connected; but before he could recover, the duplicate hit him with an almost identical blow. They staggered apart, grasping the railing, to pull themselves erect. Chuck’s arms felt like lead but the duplicate seemed still fresh, only a serious grimace showing his effort. The duplicate kicked out once more, but Chuck dodged the knee strike and used the railing to hold on to as he lashed out with both his feet.

  The clone jumped back, however, and Chuck’s feet only fell to the metal platform with a booming clang. The clone then leaped at Chuck and they grappled, almost motionless, their hands around each other’s throat. They fought for breath, soon banging against the railing and using their feet to kick and trip. But they clung together, face to identical face, eyes bulging, mouths contorted—

  One of them suddenly fell backward, pulling the other over him by the throat and using his feet to kick out and up. One Chuck flew through the air, his hands reaching for the life-saving railing.

  He grabbed at it, his fingers closing around the metal and a scream building in his throat as he felt the weakening of the railing.

  With a screech the loose bolts ripped loose.

  The railing swung out, raining bolts.

  Chuck—one Chuck—screamed as he fell.

  Six stories.

  He screamed all the way.

  The sound of his impact with the rocket chamber floor was sickening, and the remaining figure clung to the railing, gazing down, sucking air into his bruised throat . . .

  The rocket now began its “takeoff,” its engine spouting vapor and vibrating. A great roaring filled the chamber.

  The figure looked down, watching its exact counterpart as it became obscured by the billowing rocket smoke. Then he turned and walked back through the rocket-chamber wall to the staircases beyond.

  • • •

  A Tracy figure emerged from a tunnel into the power-plant room, her gun in her hand, her face hard and determined, and nervous, too. Crossing the floor of the room unseen
by the four hundreds, she jumped abruptly at a scratching sound.

  Chuck Browning—or what looked very much like Chuck—jumped out of concealment and grabbed her from behind. She let out a wordless exclamation, then fought him for control of the weapon. She lost, and Chuck held the gun away from her.

  They stared at each other in both fear and suspicion.

  He slowly swung the gun around until it was pointed up at her, just under her chin. She blinked and gulped, but held his gaze. They stared at each other for another long moment. Then he leaned forward, his head bending down, but still holding the gun under her chin.

  Their lips came together tentatively, then harder, until they were kissing without restraint.

  • • •

  Mort Schneider stood in a quiet spot on the second level and looked down into the Delos reception area. Departing passengers were breaking up into smaller and smaller groups, surging this way and that, exchanging farewells with other guests. But their longest and most ardent good-byes were with the beautiful and handsome Delos robots.

  Ron Thurlow had his arm around two beautiful females from Futureworld, grinning and looking woeful alternately as he contemplated what had happened and his approaching departure. Mrs. Reed stood in close company with a handsome space robot, but looking carefully over her shoulder at her husband, who was saying farewell to a young woman in medieval garb. Robots Eric and Erica moved from guest to guest, smiling and wishing them all well.

  General Karnovsky and his wife now appeared, smiling with cool dignity, and beaming happiness. Immediately afterward, the Japanese businessman, Takaguchi, entered the reception area, flanked by his two Nipponese companions and grinning and chatting with them. One carried a camera and was using up the last of his film shooting Takaguchi’s exit from Delos.

  Al and Ed, their arms around four beautiful girls, looked exhausted; and they almost needed the support given them by their lovely companions.

  “Good-bye, honey,” Al said. “What did you say your name was?”

  “Marcella, master.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. You’re the one with the string tied in knots, right?”