Hogan, James - Giant Series 04 - Entoverse (v1.1)

by Entoverse [lit]

  The manager zoomed to a close-up of the face, but there was already no doubt about it. The figure in the coupler was Hans Baumer.

  “How do we get him out?” Cullen asked. The manager was already saying something to Scirio.

  “They’ll go get him, and we leave, okay?” Murray said. “We forget where we got him from.” Hunt nodded. Illicit couplers into JEVEX weren’t his concern. The manager called toward a room at the back, from which another man emerged, wearing a dark suit. The man in the easy chair got up, and the three of them went out into the foyer, their footsteps heading in the direction of the double doors at the rear. A moment later they appeared on the first screen, crossing the room containing the people and the bar.

  In one of the booths off the corridors beyond, Baumer’s eyes opened suddenly. But the person looking out through those eyes was no longer completely Hans Baumer.

  The cell! Keyalo was inside the cell that he had glimpsed in the current. He sat up. A tomb! Sudden panic tore through him. Ethen­dor had lied. Keyalo had been consigned to a tomb. A living corpse interred to placate the underworld god. He looked about fearfully. Strange shapes, magical objects. . . Movement felt wrong, as if space itself had changed. An appendage of his body passed before him. Soft, squelchy, misshapen. He had been imprisoned in the corpse of a monster.

  He had a voice, harsh and grating, and screamed out loud in dismay and terror as the full magnitude of the deception engulfed him. The altar on which he lay was soft and yielding. He leapt up and staggered against the wall as the sensations of unfamiliar movement and balance escaped his control. He staggered back, tearing at the altar with his puny claws, but without effect. He raged around the walls, beating them and screaming. Then a panel opened and black-clad demons appeared. Keyalo backed into a corner. The demons jabbered at him in a strange tongue. He raised a hand and directed a bolt toward them with all his power. . . but with no effect. His power had been taken. He screamed, howled, and raged as he realized how he had been cheated. The demons assailed him.

  In the office Hunt and Cullen were on their feet, watching it all on the screen. “What the hell’s happening?” Hunt demanded. Mur­ray showed his hands helplessly and shook his head.

  Two more men came out of the back room and launched into a rapid exchange with Scirio, all of them sounding terse and excited. “Looks as if the kraut’s having some kinda fit in there,” Murray said.

  “Then let’s get him out,” Cullen snapped, turning toward the door.

  Scirio held up a hand and said something in a sharp voice. “Not this way,” Murray told them. “There’s a back door. They don’t want him upsetting the whole house.”

  Hunt and Cullen went with the others out through the foyer and the doors at the rear into the bar area that had appeared on the screen. They crossed at a smart pace, attracting curious looks, and went through another door into one of several corridors lined by doors on both sides. As they rounded a corner they met the manager and the two who had gone with him manhandling Baumer the other way, struggling, kicking, and emitting muffled screams behind the hand clamped across his mouth.

  “Christ,” Hunt breathed, shaking his head in bewilderment. “It

  looks as if he’s flipped. What do we do now?”

  “That machine must have scrambled his head,” Cullen said, staring numbly.

  Hunt stepped forward and peered into Baumer’s face as he was brought to a halt. It was wild and flushed, the eyes bulging maniacally.

  “Gina?” Hunt shouted desperately. “Can you understand me? It’s important. Do-you-know-where-Gina-is?”

  How, Keyalo didn’t know, but this demon’s speech was intelligible to him—although the name the demon had uttered meant nothing. He jerked his head back and tore his mouth away from the paw gagging him. “Unhand me, demons of the underworld who dwell in these tunnels of darkness! I shall not be enslaved by thy falsehoods, but swear allegiance to the true god of the spiral whom I renounced. For this is his punishment visited upon me! Oh woe! Now do I see the errors of—” A straight right to the jaw from Dreadnought put him out, and he fell limp in the arms supporting him. Scirio blasted a stream of invective at Murray.

  “Get him out of here,” Murray interpreted, although it was hardly necessary. “Compliments to the Ganymeans. If they stick around, he hopes they’ll remember their friends.”

  Hunt and Cullen each took one of Baumer’s arms and bore him along a side passage to where one of the staff was already unbolting a door. They came out into a rear yard, and two of the staff took them to the nearest street, where a cab called from the office picked them up a few minutes later.

  “Now what?” Hunt asked, when he had collected his wits to­gether again.

  “Shit, I don’t know. Another one for the rubber room, I guess,” Cullen replied.

  “I’ll tell you something else,” Murray said. He motioned with a thumb in the direction they had come from. “This wasn’t the first time it’s happened. Those guys back there have seen it before. Maybe that’s another reason they don’t like publicity.”

  They dropped Murray off, then continued on to PAC with their still unconscious charge. But when they finally arrived back at the UNSA labs, they found that the whole episode had been unnecessary. Gina had walked back in while they were gone, still in one piece and looking as well as ever.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Hunt stood with his back to one of the benches in the UNS/~ labs, his hands loosely gripping the edge on either side of him. Gina sat at the worktable in the middle of the room, chewing a chicken sand­wich from the store of good, tasty, Earth-style food that Duncan had accumulated. The one visible effect on Gina after her disappearance was that she was hungry. Sandy was sitting across from her, listening and saying strangely little.

  “Okay, let’s go over the main points again,” Hunt said. “You set out from PAC and saw some of the surrounding parts of Shiban center.”

  Gina nodded. “A kind of introductory tourist walkaround.”

  “You didn’t have any set agenda?”

  “No. It was just to help me get my bearings. . . and to get to know each other a little better, I guess.”

  Hunt threw a doubtful glance at Del Cullen, who was leaning with his shoulder against an equipment cabinet, his arms folded. “Weren’t you supposed to be meeting some people from these Jevlenese histor­ical societies, or something like that?” Cullen queried.

  Gina shook her head firmly. “That was going to be the day after.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes. You must have got the dates mixed.”

  Hunt frowned as he listened. That was not the way he remem­bered it, either. “Do you remember the names of any of these people?” Cullen asked, obviously with a view to checking it out. “Or the organizations they were with, maybe?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Baumer had it all in his head. There didn’t seem any reason for me to go writing it all down at the time.”

  Cullen nodded, letting it go at that. They weren’t going to get anything out of Baumer now.

  “Okay,” Hunt said. “Then what?”

  “We went through a kind of street market, underneath some huge, curving shapes going up into the sky—as if they were part of some­thing from way back that never got finished. It was full of junk, old clothes, secondhand stuff, that kind of thing. Seemed to be a freakout place for the local dropout culture.”

  “Kinchabira. I know the place,” Cullen interjected, nodding.

  “Baumer blamed it all on Thurien lack of discipline and control. He seemed to think a good dose of Nazism would work wonders.” Gina nibbled another piece of her sandwich and took a sip of cof­fee—real. “Then there was a deposit company that seemed to be turning itself into a bank. He didn’t approve of that, either.”

  “And we’re quite sure that his motivation wasn’t simply the obvi­ous?” Hunt asked. “I mean, here’s this guy, stuck out here on his own for a long time. Pretty girl from home shows up . .

>   Gina shook her head. “That was the first thing I thought, too. But there was never a hint of it. Anyhow, that isn’t how he gets off.”

  “Okay. Then you looked in some luxury-good stores. .

  “Right,” Gina said. “And he didn’t agree with that, because it doesn’t force everyone to be equal. I got a speech on why society ought to protect people like him from having to face up to why the world isn’t listening to them. Then we sat on a wall and watched some weirdos with eyeshadow and icicles for haircuts while we ate some Jevlenese pita—burgers.” Gina paused to recollect what they had talked about. “He seemed interested when I asked him if he’d gotten to know any other people here who thought the way he did. He was curious to know more about what you UNSA scientists were doing here.”

  “That’s his real reason coming out,” Cullen murmured.

  “The punks weren’t any trouble?” Hunt asked. There had been a report of some trouble in that area at around the same time, involving a group who sounded like the people Gina had described. But she shook her head again.

  “No. They went away,” Gina continued slowly, reciting the items one by one, as if anxious to be sure that she had everything straight. “We carried on to some kind of a bar somewhere. Baumer started talking about drugs and highs. He asked me what kind of things I use.

  He said it in a kind of. . . suggestive way. It was like a hint that there could be something more to it, but he wanted to see my reaction first.”

  Hunt nodded. Conceivably Baumer had been acting from purely personal motivations when he approached her. Maybe not. Nothing that Gina was saying clinched it either way. “Go on,” he said.

  “He told me there were places where you can still get a total connection into the residual core of JEVEX. He said it’s a trip that beats everything: the ultimate. Only Jevienese really understood it.” Gina made an open-handed gesture in the air. “That was interesting. It was the first definite proof I’d heard about JEVEX still being available. But when I tried to get more, he said there was no way you could describe it. You had to experience it for yourself. Obviously it was an invitation.”

  “Which you accepted,” Cullen said—needlessly, since they had been through the gist of her story once already.

  “Well, you know I’m the curious kind.”

  Sandy looked across the table at her oddly. “You, ah.. . you were curious to find out what this was all about?”

  “Yes,” Gina said. Her voice was light and matter-of-fact. She frowned, as if momentarily puzzled about something, then nodded. “Yes,” she said again.

  “You hadn’t seen enough with VISAR, on the Vishnu?” Sandy spoke with pronounced skepticism, as if she found the answer hard to believe and wanted Gina to reconsider. Hunt was scribbling a note just at that moment, and Cullen missed the implication.

  “We didn’t know if JEVEX was the same,” Gina said. She frowned to herself again. Then, as if not quite satisfied with that, added, “It was important to know what Baumer was up to, right?”

  Sandy stared for a moment longer; then, when no support was forthcoming from Hunt or Cullen, she let it go at that with a doubtful nod. “Okay.”

  Gina went on. “We went to a place that you entered down a passage off an alley. It was all dark, with everything done furtively— the way you imagine speakeasies to have been. Inside was a sort of lounge and bar. And then out back, there were all these neurocou­pling cubicles . .

  Hunt and the others had decided not to complicate the issue by saying anything about Nixie’s story. Gina went on to describe accu­rately what was almost certainly the Gondola, where they had found

  Baumer; and just as almost-certainly, there would be no point in trying to get confirmation since nobody there would know anything. As Hunt had seen for himself, the whole operation was set up to preserve anonymity. Not seeing things was part of the business.

  “And he was right,” Gina concluded. “There’s no way I could describe it. That machine can create total realities in your head, indistinguishable from the real thing, that are actually your own creations, except you don’t know it. It’s uncanny—totally compel­ling. I can see how it could become addictive. I guess I just got carried away and lost all track of time. I eventually came to, left, and came back here. The rest you know.”

  “Was Baumer still there when you left?” Cullen asked.

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t get anything across to the management. I don’t think they’d have told me anyway.”

  They all looked at each other. That seemed to be it. “Well, you probably need more rest than you realize,” Cullen said to Gina. “Don’t bother going back to Best West. We’ll find you a suite in the residential section here at PAC to freshen up and get your head down in. We’ll see you again later.”

  “I think you’re right,” Gina agreed. “My head feels as if it’s been through a blender.”

  She described some of JevEX’s capabilities while she finished her sandwich, reiterated the line they had already heard from Danchekker that this seemed to her a more than likely explanation of what had sent the Jevlenese off the rails. Then she departed for the residential sector. Sandy went with her.

  “What I don’t understand,” Hunt said to Cullen when they were alone, “is why they’d let Baumer reveal this JEVEX business to her when they must have known she was associating with us and the Ganymeans. If it’s such a big secret, with what sounds like big money involved, why show her it?”

  “I wondered the same thing.” Cullen eased himself down onto one of the lab stools and rubbed his chin. “Unless. . .“ He looked over at Hunt. “It depends who the ‘they’ you’re talking about are. The Ichena run the couplers. They’re the ones who’d stand to lose if the traffic was shut down. But suppose Baumer was also working for a political group tied up with the cults. They’re not the same people. See my point? Letting Baumer come across like just another junkie blabbing about where he gets his fixes would be a good way of obscuring his political connection.”

  Hunt took out a cigarette and thought while he lit it. “I think I see what you’re saying. A bit of a dirty trick, but it’s the other guys who’ll catch any comeback. But in the meantime it covers any tracks back to them.” He sat back and stared at the notes he had made. “Do you think it could be Eubeleus and the Axis?” he asked.

  “I guess it could be—although he seems more interested in collect­ing his wagon train together at Geerbaine so they can go out and found the new world. And his main sidekick’s there with him. You know something, Vic, I’m even starting to think this Uttan stunt of theirs might be genuine.” Cullen clasped his hands behind his head and swiveled the stool with a foot until he was looking at Hunt. “But one thing’s sure: Baumer isn’t gonna tell us.”

  “I guess not,” Hunt agreed with a sigh, pocketing his lighter.

  In a suite in the residential part of PAC, Gina dried herself off with the warm-air blower in the shower, combed out her hair, and tot­tered back into the bedroom to slide gratefully between smooth, clean-smelling sheets. It had been a lot more exhausting than her experiment with VISAR. Or maybe things in general were just catching up with her.

  After turning off the light, she went over the things that General Shaw had said in the room in another part of Shiban where she had been taken by the contact who had been waiting when she left the booths. She had said nothing to Hunt and Cullen that she shouldn’t have. Shaw must have come secretly aboard the Vishnu, too, she reflected. She hadn’t expected to see him again until her return to Earth—if at all—after meeting him in the briefing with Caldwell, when she had accepted the assignment. She remembered that quite vividly for some reason—as if it had happened’ yesterday.

  It seemed unnecessarily cautious that she should not be allowed to bring people like Hunt and Garuth into the picture about the Jev­lenese having a well-placed spy somewhere inside PAC; but the general had been adamant. She wondered if Baumer had been planted on Jevlen as an insider by whatever agency General Shaw was
a part of. Very likely the part of the total picture that Baumer possessed was no larger than her own.

  But certainly there was a lot more going on than she knew about, and it had interplanetary significance. The only wise thing was simply to forget the questions and follow orders.

  As for Baumer, there was no conclusion to be drawn other than that he was completely mad. His faculty for recognizing even the most basic of familiar things seemed to be completely gone. The walls and doors, fittings and furnishings of the room in the medical facility where he was being confined, all of which were unexceptional, seemed to confound him with awe. He spent hours exploring the surfaces with his fingers and mumbling to himself as he fiddled with such simple devices as the catch on a drawer, or a pen lying on a desktop. He showed no understanding of anything more advanced, such as the touchpad controls of a COM panel unit, and made no attempt at operating them in the ways they were designed to func­tion. And any kind of mechanism, however simple, seemed to bring on a mixture of wonder and terror. On one occasion he sat on the floor for almost an hour with a wastepaper bin that had a lid operated by a foot-pedal, working the lever over and over again. And it was nearly as long before he would even approach a set of scales standing on one side of the room.