Star Rogue, page 13
I staggered up the slope of another dune, wading through drifts of the loose powdery sand, and reached the crest … to see yet another dune ahead of me. And another. And another. And another… .
How many dunes had I crossed in the burning days and nights of this endless inferno? Hundreds? Thousands? And how many more must I conquer before I sink exhausted into the searing and smothering embrace of the parched sands … and leave my bones, crisp forever in the furnace of this devil-world of eternal noon?
I began to tremble from exhaustion. My knees folded and I sank to all fours like some worn and weary beast on the dune crest. Spasms of self-pity shook my body. I sobbed, great hoarse hacking sobs of defeat and hopelessness.
But I could not weep. There was no longer enough moisture in my flesh to make a single tear… .
The glare of the nebula, reflected from the cracked mirrors of the ice, blinded me.
It burned through my half-shut eyes, thrusting needles of exquisite agony deep into my brain.
I longed to rest here for awhile, to gather my strength, but I knew that to cease moving was to start dying. For the rips in my thermal suit were leaking warmth faster than the suit could replace it. I could no longer feel my feet. They were dead, numb lumps of insensitive matter.
How long ago had it been since my skimmer had cracked up in the swirling snow storm? How long now had the hunched, white-furred predators hunted me across the endless icefields? Weeks … or only days? I could no longer remember. I crouched there, resting against the numb cushion of the soft snow, feeling the weariness in my body bone deep.
Above me the colossal shining glory of the nebula filled the cold black sky with intolerable splendor.
It was like some vast, soundless explosion caught and fixed forever changeless in a split-second exposure. Intolerably beautiful and intolerably brilliant, that titanic flowering cloud of cold green fire that blossomed across two thirds of the sky. Oh, if only I could rest… .
The muffled baying of remorseless hounds awoke me.
The hunting things still tracked me through the glittering wastes of this frozen world. And they were near—near!
Danger sent adrenalin pumping through me. A surge of strength jolted me to my feet. I had sunk deep into the smothering blanket of soft thick snow. Now as I floundered free I discovered that my dead frozen feet would not support me. The slow heat-leakage had numbed my legs to the thigh. I staggered and fell down, and lay gasping and sobbing.
Again that eerie wail from the frozen plains behind me. The heavy, tireless predators were almost upon me … I must get up … must somehow find the strength to flee from them. Like obscene and cowardly jackals, they feared to attack me while I moved and lived. But what if I could not move, could not even rise? Would they ring me in—cold green eyes burning with the same icy fires as that vast frozen cloud of glory that filled the wintry skies—and pull me down with those horrible jaws, tearing through my thermal suit to rip out my throat, fierce fangs crunching through my flesh, drinking my hot blood?
Somehow I fought my way to my knees. They would support me, even though I could not feel them. But further than this I could not rise. I did not have the strength. And the cold, the black withering bitter cold, seeping through the rents in my suit, numbing my flesh … draining my small store of strength… .
Then I saw them. Hunched, heavy-shouldered things with mean cold eyes wherein blazed a maniacal hunger. Snarling black muzzles lifting to reveal sharp cruel fangs. Lean, powerful bodies all sinewy rippling strength under thick white fur. Ugly brutes they were, an uncanny mingling of panther and wolf, and terrible engines of ferocity and fighting strength, for all their cowardice.
And the Barringer at my hip was useless, its energy cell exhausted hours or days or eternities ago.
Hunched on my knees, dead legs helpless under me, I watched them gather and circle in for the kill… .
All I could think of was water. Water: cold, fresh, sparkling, pure. My thirst was like some devouring cancer, slowly spreading its fiery tendrils of pain through every nerve, every cell, every muscle, organ and tissue of my exhausted, desiccated body… .
The irony was that I was surrounded with water, all around me, everywhere, as far as the eye could see. Sliding wet glistening surfaces of limpid cool blue crystal water.
Water, water everywhere
And not a drop to drink.
The sky was a cloudless huge dome of hot acetylene blue and it burned like a sheet of flame. I had used the rags of my tunic to make a rude shelter against the blistering sun but even the shade was sweltering.
It was a week or more since the hovercar had ruptured a sponson, skewed about, lost the “plane” of the sea’s surface, and sunk like a stone.
And it was three days … three dry, roasting days of torture … since I had licked up the last lukewarm drop of fresh water in the container.
The heat and thirst were killing, me, I knew. Drop by drop the searing blue flame of the sky sucked the moisture out of my body. Another day … perhaps another hour … and I would go mad.
At first, while my water supply still lasted, I had relieved the fiery torments of the sun by sliding over the edge of the sponge-plastic raft and immersing my almost naked body up to the throat in the cool blue water. But no more. Now I endured the torture and waited for death. I did not dare tempt myself by lowering my weary sunburnt flesh into the chill wet embrace of the gliding sea.
With the sparkling waves only inches below my lips, I knew I could not for long control the longing to drink. Sooner or later I would weaken and duck my head and fill my throat with the horrible, burning stickiness of salt water.
Long ago, marooned on the planet-wide seas of Vanadis, I had watched a Citadel comrade die raving in convulsions from drinking seawater. And while I retained a grasp on my sanity, I would not go that road myself.
Strangely enough, I was no longer hungry. Two or three days ago, when I exhausted the last crumb of my emergency rations, it had been hunger that tormented me. Thoughts of food had filled every waking moment of the interminable hours. Torn by racking spasms of sheer hunger, I had chewed on the rags of my tunic, gnawed even on my fingers.
I had revolved a thousand feverish plans through my mind: fishing with a long thread unravelled from my tunic and a hook fashioned from a bent shoe fastener or playing dead until a sea bird settled on my supposed corpse to peck out my eyes, and strangling it and devouring it raw. Mad, wild schemes like these had seethed through my sun-baked brain during the long somnolent hours of day and the fitful, nightmare-torn hours of night.
But there were no birds and there were no fish. Only the swaying mocking waves, the hot blue sky, the narrow raft and me.
Now I hungered no longer. The lust for food had dimmed and faded from my mind, withdrawing by gradual indeterminate stages until it was only a memory of pain, like an old lost love whose fires have died to cold ash.
Nothing was left but thirst.
I was in agony from thirst night and day. My dreams were wild jumbled visions of dewy fruits, sparkling forest pools, tall frosted goblets, cold lashing rains.
Once I awoke suddenly to find that I had dragged myself to the edge of the bobbing raft in my sleep and had dipped both hands into the sea. I sprang awake just as I was lifting my cupped hands to my parted lips. The shock, the horror of what I had almost done thrilled through me. For one unbelieving moment I stared down yearningly, like Tantalus, at the cold wetness trickling through my fingers. Then with a shudder of self-disgust I flung the water from me. But I rubbed my wet hands over the dry shrunken skin of my face… .
There were voices. From a great distance, dim and half-heard. I drifted on the surface of my dreams, listening absently to them but not really understanding or caring what they were saying.
A woman’s voice, cold and reproving, “Even with the drug you haven’t managed to break down his resistance yet. Time is growing short. You said it would be easy!”
Another voice, answering with a whining, peevish rasp, “He is strong … stronger than I would have dreamed! His defensive mechanism is unconscious and instinctive. It will take time …”
“We cannot spare the time. Have you learned nothing at all? Why can’t you probe him? Surely his conscious mind is asleep.”
“It is turned off, yes, but the part of the mind that never sleeps is aware of my intrusion and resists it, drawing upon some source of strength that seems inexhaustible. But I have learned a little from surface thoughts. You wanted to know what ‘Citadel’ means, why they chose that particular noun as the name of the organization. It seems to have no particular meaning but was chosen at random. If anything, it refers to the organization as a fortress standing sentinel, guarding liberty … an unconquerable stronghold.”
“Anything else? You have been working on him for over an hour now.”
“A few hints and guesses. His name is not Saul Everest. I attempted a probe of his identity center but his shield went up by instinctive reflex and I only got a glimpse.”
“Everest is not his name then?”
“No, or rather … it is rather confused … it is only one of his names … perhaps the one he was born with, perhaps just a personal favorite among his pseudonyms. Oh, and something else. Although he is, or has until recently been, a Citadel agent and still identifies with the organization, I sense that he is on some sort of detached duty or extended leave, and not an active agent any longer.”
The arguing voices went away for a little while as I dipped below the surface of sleep. Then, after a time, they swam back into focus and I listened to them passively, not really paying any attention to what the words meant, just registering them.
“… No, not neoscopalomine derivatives, he has been already immunized to every variant in the pharmacopeia. I have been using a chemical derived from the ergot fungus group,” said the rasping, querulous voice.
Then the first voice, the woman’s voice, came again, “What does it do?”
“Chemically, it works in the bloodstream to block the body’s manufacturing of 5-hydroxytryptamine. 5HT, we call it. When the 5HT levels in the brain are altered, bizarre aberrational effects similar to those experienced by habitual users of hallucinogens are caused. In other words, he experiences horribly real nightmares. I am using a shallow surface probe to suggest the current of his hallucinations. In effect, I am manipulating his subjective reality, trying to break down his protective reflexes through induced exhaustion and despair. He thinks he has been tortured with hunger, thirst, heat and cold for weeks.”
“Can you get faster results through stronger dosages? Just so that he lives long enough to tell us what we want to know, after that he will be disposed of.”
“The amount of the dose really isn’t that significant. Once the 5HT level is altered the nightmarishly real hallucinations cannot be made more real.”
“But what would a really massive dose do? Kill him?”
“No. Repeated use of the chemical inflicts a certain degree of damage to the chromosomes, that is all. But a truly massive dose might drive him over the edge into protective insanity. You know, of course, Madame, that insanity is basically the mind’s last resort against a completely intolerable problem or situation. Any one of the several illusory subrealities I have subjected him to would drive him insane if carried on long enough. I have been careful to switch to a new situation just before any given problem reaches the tolerance threshold.”
“I should think that to drive him over the edge of madness would be the answer to our present dilemma. How can the mind of a catatonic, for example, resist the probe of an experienced telepath?” The suggestion was made in cool, clinical tones.
There was a shudder in the rasping voice as it answered this. “You would not think so, Madame, if you were a telepath. No one with T-powers would dare try to probe a mind driven totally insane. There is the danger of … infection.”
Then the voices died away again and I slept … to wake in a living hell.
The stars laughed at me. They hated me that I was not a cold burning brilliance such as they but a floundering helpless thing of flesh and blood, lost and drifting in their immensities.
The recirculator wheezed in my ears, blowing its perpetual breath against my cheek. The radiometer squeaked and chattered, counting gamma particles as they flashed through me. The helmet light glowed dimly, just above my brow. My breath frosted the faceplate with a temporary blur of mist.
Stars hung above me, to either side, to the front and rear and below my dangling feet. They ringed me in. I floated at the center of a hollow sphere of stars.
Or did I float? Was I falling—falling—down … down … ever down … through eternity to the black and starless bottom of the universe? For an instant vertigo seized me in its giddy grip and I yelled like a mindless animal, loud, deafeningly loud, in the confines of my helmet. Was I falling forever through the black and empty gulfs between the stars—
—Him the almighty Power
Hurl’d headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and Combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy th’ Omnipotent to arms.
Nine times the space that measures day and night
To mortal men …
The cold glitter of the mocking stars are unsleeping and sardonic eyes that stare and stare at me, as I flop and float and flounder here, tossed on the black and bitter winds that howl and sweep and blow forever in the gulfs between the worlds.
Nine times the space that measures day and night/ To mortal men … but men have lived nine days and nights in an airsuit before this, without going crazy. What is there to drive me crazy, just because I am lost and lonely, drifting between the stars in an airsuit that will be my bifurcated, air conditioned, centrally heated coffin until the great clock of entropy runs down and the universe collapses upon itself to expire, like Herodotus’ phoenix, on the blazing pyre that is the fiery womb of its rebirth. My God! I am going mad! Think! Remember! Use your mind! Floating like this, no gravity, no feeling, is like those old-time experiments in sensory deprivation back before the Sino-Soviet holocaust touched off the Twenty-Nine Minute War in which America, my lost and loved America, died. They would put a man in a rubber suit with scuba gear, immerse him in lukewarm water with his arms and legs spread apart so that he couldn’t touch himself. They would stop his ears, prop his mouth open, blind his eyes, anesthetize all his sensations … and let him float until his mind went off in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land--just like I am now—ever since that CT micrometeorite went through my screens and hit the power center. Christ! If it hadn’t been for the automatic ejection system that blew me clear I’d have gone up when the fusion core went up in one eye-searing fireball. Maybe it would have been best, that way—fast and clean, converted to a puff of protons before my nerve-endings even had time to send the first pain-impulse to my brain! Better than this living hell … O my God that I haven’t prayed to since I was a little child … O my sweet Christ in whose everlasting and infinite mercy I could never quite believe … O Jesus help me, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus… .
The stink of my body almost suffocating me. Plenum, how close we are to the animal inside us, to the beast we really are but pretend we are not. Nine days in an airsuit and a civilized man stinks like an open sewer or an animal’s cage in the zoo. Food and water to last for weeks, if you call reprocessed human piss water and concentrates food. By the Vuudh, what I wouldn’t give for an honest, old fashioned steak! Remember the places in old New York back before everything went bust? Remember the champagne cocktails and the English mutton-chops you used to get at the Cheshire Cheese, with Yorkshire pudding on the side and brandy with the coffee? Remember the inch-thick steaks served sizzling at O. Henry’s in the Village? For that matter, I’d sell what’s left of my soul for one of those cheapy $1.29 steak dinners I used to get at Tad’s on 42nd Street when I was low on the cash.
I’ll be crying like a baby in a minute. Think. Use the brain or you’ll end up in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land for sure. Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. “Nephelococcygia” in the original Greek, from The Birds, a comedy by Aristophones, a satirical caricature of Athenian politics—”4th century B.C. Athens in feathers,” as somebody once called it.
My chances of being discovered are one in a million. Sure, the powerpack that keeps my airsuit life-support systems running radiates all over the spectrum … sure, any passing ship would detect that power-source … but who gives a damn? Who would even notice that feeble flicker on the detectors before they were a quarter of a light year beyond me, traveling fast? If my emergency deleo beacon were operable somebody might catch and even pause to investigate the automatic mayday signal, repeated over and over and … naw, what’s the good of trying to fool myself? … I’m too far off the lanes for a rescue … and anything traveling way out here would be in paraspace anyway, with all detectors shut down …
I should just give up. Give up and die. Admit I’m beat, and face it like a man. My hand is on the release switch right now. One twist and my faceplate is open and I am dead. Nothing to fear … nothing to feel … I’ll be stone dead before my blood boils or my eyeballs rupture or my lungs explode … dead and drifting alone forever between the silent cold mocking glitter of the stars… .
SIXTEEN
Again my consciousness dimmed and I swam for a time through numb colorless mists, devoid of identity, without sensation or awareness or even thought.
Loud voices impinged upon my drifting consciousness.
The voices rang with urgency and alarm. But I was unmoved, placid, unresponding. The words merely registered on the surface of my mind as I rose slowly towards awareness.
First a girl’s voice, a young vibrant voice, but curiously flat and toneless, as if wrung tense under the pressure of some intolerable emotional strain …
