Kenneth Bulmer - Keys to the Dimensions 03, page 6
When they had eaten, the woman returned for the cart and left. The door irised shut after her and then, unusually, paused before fully closing the central circle.
At once, Redfern raced to the door, bent down, thrust the knife he had secreted from the food tray into the central opening.
“Can you open it?” breathed Val, her face by his shoulder, her hair brushing his back.
He grunted with the effort.
“It’s—tough—”
Then the irised circle snapped open and the knife tinkled out to drop onto the floor. He snatched it up at once and then glared into the long room. It was empty.
Morning sunlight falling acutely from the tall windows struck sparks from the glass of the annex. “Come on !” he snapped at Val and started across.
Their friends were not in the annex. The quick dismay he killed at source—hell! He didn’t expect miracles, did he?
Just let them get out of this madhouse.
Through the annex glass he could see the large door, still irised-open, between the two tall windows.
“There’s our exit,” he said, urging Val to run faster.
She halted, pointing.
“Look! In the annex—it’s Mother Haapan!”
At first Redfern didn’t believe. He changed his stride and headed for the annex. Through the glass walls he could see a girl combing long black hair. He burst inside and stared.
“You’re right, Val.” He still didn’t really believe. “It is Mother Haapan—but—!”
The girl turned. He could clearly make out the features of the old woman in this fresh young face. In place of the white frizz-bob this glorious hair shone ravens’ wing black in the morning sun.
“Hurry, Val,” Mother Haapan said. “You don’t have much time left before they shut the doors.”
Bewilderment struck viciously at Redfern. “You’d better come with us.”
She laughed tinkingly. “What! Look what they’ve done to me! I’m young and prettier than I ever was. And I’ve a lover! A wonderful man—no, thank you. I have no wish to leave here.”
“She was changing when I saw her last, after they took you away, Scobie,” whispered Val. “But this is incredible!”
“I can see why a person would want to stay here.” Redfern felt the sweat of indecision on him. He felt like a man teetering over an abyss, knowing that whichever foot he put down first would be the wrong one.
“Do you want to stay, Val?”
She touched the apparatus on her head.
“No! This isn’t here for fun.”
“It’s to make me—make us—pay! Come on, Val—”
He stopped speaking as he strode for the corner of the annex. Loosely flung down were the old clothes, the packs, the shoes, of the travelers—and the rifles!
He felt like uttering a sob of gratitude as he snatched up a Springfield. Rapidly he dressed in the gray shirt and trousers and the good U.S. shoes with their strong soles. Val hesitated. Then, defiantly, she kicked the gray slave tunic.
“I won’t wear slave gear again!”
Mother Haapan chuckled. She was wearing a shirt of some white nylon material that shone silkily; the tails of the. shirt came down midway between her waist and knees.
“Don’t be silly, Val,” snapped Redfern. “Time is running out. You’ll need clothes outside!”
She shook her head mutinously. Looking at her, Redfern realized just what a gorgeous creature she was. She was no figment of a dream-world made incarnate; she was all flesh and blood, with a turned-up nose and a round fresh face and long brown gleaming hair, a woman who was real.
Mother Haapan took her shirt off and handed it to Val. “I’ll go along to the market and get another,” she said, smiling. Redfern had to take his eyes off her—forcing himself to remember the white-haired fragility he had escaped with across the snow and the prairie.
“Grab a rifle,” he told Val.
He loaded himself with cartridges, made sure the bayonet was still in its sheath and the sheath frogged to the belt, checked Val’s.
Together they left the glass-walled annex and headed out the large open door between the windows. Beyond lay all the forest, beckoning with green and brown and silver welcoming arms. Redfern swallowed. Had he been a colossal fool?
VII
They were not running through a jungle.
Neither, decided Scobie Redfern with some abruptly realized regret, were they running through the forest of Myrcinus where he might expect to see Moke come brachiating along the aerial terraces of the trees, his pug face split in a devilish grin and the dice all set for a quick game of craps.
Around them stretched temperate forest with familiar trees: oaks, beeches and maples, deciduous trees that now showed in full greeneiy of leaf. They ran fleetingly between the trunks, leaping protruding roots, skirting brakes where thorns and ferns grew fiercely around the decomposing detritus of a fallen giant. And yet… and yet…
Scobie Redfern sensed the unease in the forest. The waiting suspense was heavy on his skin with the weight of pennies on his eyelids.
They ran swiftly along the aisles of the trees where the filtered sunlight was soft and green. So Val—he didn’t even know yet if she owned another name—had seen the others after he, Redfern, had been carted off. Redfern knew with frightening clarity that he had to think the problem through; he had the answers in his brain; the trick was digging them out.
“What happened to Tony and Gait and the others?”
She flashed him a cryptic look, hurdling a fallen trunk. The smell of violets suddenly floated all the glade about them. “They opted to stay. They’d been rejuvenated, they were in love, they each had a partner. Why shouldn’t they stay? They were shown the city—”
“The city?”
“Yes. It lies beyond the big room we were in. It spraddles the line between grassland and forest. It is a very wonderful place.”
“We’ll have to give it a wide berth, then—”
“A what?”
He explained. She laughed. “Your Earth must be a funny old place, Scobie.”
“You’ll see it one day, Val.” Abrupt strength and confidence filled him. “I’ll see Montrado, too. Life is going to be all right, Val, once we get away from here and find a Portal for you to—”
She interrupted sharply: “No!”
“What?”
“I can’t leave Tony and Gait and Mina! They belong to Montrado, too!”
“Well, of course,” he shouted, annoyed.
“You mean… you’d go back for them?”
“I’m going back, but in my own way. We’ve got to get these filthy things off our heads first, haven’t we?”
Her cry as she slipped and fell between two logs halted him and he turned back to help her. He pulled her up and for a moment she clung to him, her chest heaving, her breasts warm and fluttery on his cheek. He forced himself to remain indifferent to her, looking over her shoulder back the way they had run.
Looking like that, keeping his wits about him, paid dividends. He caught the furtive flash of movement just where the trunks blended into an apparently solid forest-horizon. He reacted at once.
“Quiet, Val! This way…”
She reacted too, instantly controlling herself.
Just what Redfern expected he could not have said. He had bumped into so many unexpectednesses that the next ones would be dealt with strictly on their merits as antagonistic or friendly agents. He would kiss or kill now, having been pushed as far as he would be pushed.
The Springfield thunked into his hand with a solid grip of comfort.
From the shelter of a treetrunk and a fallen log he stared narrowly down their backtrail. He had not expected pursuit quite so quickly. Movement flickered down there, low, furtive, feral movement. He sweated.
How many times had he had that old dream where he was being pursued by something, anything, a grizzly bear, a lion, a homicidal maniac, and he had aimed the gun in his hands with desperate care? How many times had he been unable to pull back the bolt? How many times had he pressed the trigger as though pressing an entire world-mass? How many times had he actually pulled the trigger all the way—and the rifle still had not fired? How many times? Probably the same number as anyone else…
He lifted the obsolete rifle now and saw without surprise that the foresight trembled in a tight little circle.
Movement scurried again in the lower rambling growths of the forest that choked up some of the aisles. Redfern caught a glimpse of hard-edged, black and yellow banded fur—or skin or clothing; he could not be sure. He brought the rifle quickly around. Movement broke and vanished again as he stared out onto an empty forest.
Val squirmed, lying on the rough ground.
“I’m scared!” she said.
As she spoke, the aerials sprouting from the rod attached to the crown of her head began to glow.
Blue flames nimbused the aerials, so that it seemed she wore a slanted blue halo. Her round brown face looked drawn and miserable. And the blue glow sparked from the aerials on her head.
The panic pressures of the moment bore down mercilessly on Redfern then and, for a lunatic moment, he let the fear in him bubble over. He felt the grip of obsessional horror engulf him.
Val screamed.
She writhed back, pointing at Redfern’s head.
He knew she was pointing at his own aerial, most likely at a blue glow issuing from it. The fear flowed in him, dark and black like a tide of night.
“Calm down, Val!” He tried to fight his way up through this miasma. “I think I understand. I’m not sure—”
Somewhere out in the forest a twig snapped. He swallowed and tried to keep the rifle still.
“The people of Senchuria overcame us with a radiation of pure hatred from those crystals. Then they pressured us into loving one another. Now you and I, Val, are frightened.”
“Yes…” She leaned across to touch his arm.
“So I think they deal in emotions! They manipulate people and their feelings. Those cables under the pallets, these aerials on our heads—they serve the same purpose: the inhabitants of Senchuria drain off emotions from other people! Maybe they can store them—I don’t know—but I’m convinced that they let us escape and fixed up that half-closed door, the clothes, the rifles—”
“They let us escape? But, Scobie, that means—!”
He nodded savagely. He still felt fear; but his anger bolstered a tiny returning core of courage.
“They said we had to pay—and we wouldn’t pay with love as an emotion, so they’re taking fear instead. They let us escape, and now they are hunting us. They’re hunting us to make us frightened and the more frightened we are the better for them; the more fear we feel the more fear they collect in their damned emotion accumulators!”
She surged up, angry now too.
“You must be right, Scobie. This is nothing to do with Arlan! Gait was wrong! These people are not good—they are fiends!”
Redfern got her meaning although her expression was old-fashioned. They were to be hunted: not for sport but to provide a supply of fear emotion!
“I’d like to smash the aerial off!” he said viciously.
She shook her head quickly. “No, Scobie! They said that could kill me!”
“All right. We’ll have to accept that, then. It’s not worth a try, just yet. But whatever they’ve let loose on us is closing in. Just how well do you shoot a rifle, Val?”
“I aim and pull the trigger. I haven’t had much practice. On Montrado we use crossbows.”
“Well, there’s no time to give you a lesson now. Just point the thing at—at whatever is out there—and press the trigger gently. You’ll make ‘em keep their heads down, if nothing else.”
“What about that zigzag burst of emerald fire that knocked the rifle from Nyllee’s hands?”
“That was fired by a crystal. If they do that to us, I’ll assume the hunt is over. Those aren’t crystals out there now.”
Whoever was regulating the supply of fear emotion taken from Scobie Redfern was working overtime right now. He must be getting in a full quota. Redfern had to force himself to steady the rifle and look for the black and yellow horrors that chased him. Movement stalked in the forest.
He caught a scathing glimpse of black and yellow fur and a lick of glistening fang; and then the creature had disappeared once more beyond a tree bole. Redfern paused. He reasoned that if his seemingly crazy guesses were true, as he very firmly believed them to be true, then the people of Senchuria wouldn’t be hunting in the usual way. They wouldn’t bother too much if their hunters were seen and they wouldn’t try to kill the quarry; they’d faze it, encircle it, worry it, do everything to make the quarry go through the whole gamut of fear emotions.
Then, if he was right, that fear, raw and smoking, would be channeled into accumulators and stored.
A fearsome thing bounded into the open about twenty yards off, clicked its jaws at him, and then scuttled into the underbrush. Redfern felt the sickening jolt of his heart. Val choked off a scream.
“What was it?”
“Dangerous.”
The thing had looked like nothing so much as a cockroach—but a cockroach banded in black and yellow fur and fully six feet long from tip of snouted jaw to tip of short spiked tail. Its enormous jaws and the serrated crunching power of its mandibles offended Redfern with his own puniness. Truly, the wizards of Senchuria were drawing their fullest supply of fear emotion from him!
The rustlings in the thickets between the trees crescendoed and grew nearer. Val twisted around.
“They’re all around us, Scobie!”
“If what I think is right they’re not out to kill us. They want to scare us! All right! We’ll bluff them, make their own weakness our strength.” He surged up, bitter, angry, hating, scared. “Come on!”
With his left hand he caught her wrist, pulled her up.
He blundered out past the tree trunk into the glade. A cockroach skittered toward him. Instead of running, Redfern charged at the thing, swinging the rifle in his right hand. He butt-thwacked alongside the thing’s snout and it toppled over sideways, its short legs kicking like broken pistons.
A release of tension broke through Redfern. He ran on. “If they want to scare us they’ve got to do better than this!” he exulted.
Another cockroach charged. This time it was a black and white banded horror, of the same species but with a different line to its back and with even larger and more powerful jaws, giving its head the look of a mechanical scoop.
Redfern let go of Val and gripped the rifle in both sweating fists. He swung with an access of rage and terror. The thing bounced back, its jaws clashing. Again Redfern flailed the rifle at it and heard a sharp cracking snap and saw the buttplate sink through white fur. The thing screeched. It darted past him and raced crookedly up the tree aisle. Val stared after it with sick horror in her eyes.
More cockroaches appeared ahead, their jaws clicking, their feet carrying them inexorably on toward the humans.
Redfern’s terror and exultation and horror, all jumbled up chaotically, burst in berserker anger. He lifted the rifle and charged.
“Scobie!” screamed Val behind him.
He swung the rifle in maniacal heaves, smashing the butt down left and right, hearing snappings and soggy thunkings, seeing a dark purple ichor flowing from gashes and split bruises. Black and white and black and yellow fur clotted with alien blood.
He broke through the ring.
“This way!” he panted. Val followed him, leaping the upturned wriggling body of a fallen cockroach. As he looked at her Redfern saw the aerials sprouting from the rod fixed to her skull. The blue glow had changed into a sullen amber color, the sparks iron-red and spitting.
“My aerials, Val—the thing on my head—what color?”
She gasped.
“It’s all red, Scobie! Red like blood!”
“Hah!” He felt the strength in him then. “They’re not drawing off fear from us now! That’s anger! That’s defiance and pride ousting the fear! We’ll turn their fear on them. I’m still scared; but I’m too angry and worked up to let that get in the way!”
They ran on through the forest.
“But how do you know, Scobie? How can you be sure?”
“I don’t know how I know. But I am sure!”
Around them the forest stretched its leafy greenery, reassuring, friendly, a normal forest. Redfern cleaned off the purple ichor from his rifle with broad-leaved foliage. The strength still boiled in him.
“I can imagine the wizards of Senchuria right now, fuming that they’re not getting the right reaction from us. We’ve not cooperated all the way along the line. When you wanted me to make love to you and I refused I wondered if I was being a fool. I wanted to—but—but not in so cold and programmed a way. Now I know I was right.”
“But I love you, Scobie!”
That checked him. He looked at her, seeing the white shirt as ripped and torn and ichor-splashed as his own gray shirt and trousers. She was very lovely. “Question is, Val, is that a genuine emotion or one implanted in you for the delight of others?”
“Oh, Scobie!”
He wanted to laugh, to roar at the enormous irony of it. “When the time is right—in a private place—that is normal on my world. Right now we’ve got to go on being unpredictable. If we let ourselves be dragooned by this remote authority, then we’re done for. They have riots and demonstrations in my world, Val, when they don’t like what’s happening. The streets have become public places of protest. You and I are protesting the wizards of Senchuria!”
He had the glimmerings of a plan now, a crazy, harebrained scheme; but he saw that it offered their only chance of remaining true to themselves. And however old-fashioned such a concept might be, Scobie Redfern prized it above, rubies. He wanted to remain true to himself. He’d always been that, so far. It had got him into trouble and out of jobs; but he wouldn’t renege on his own principles.
