Time Out Of Mind (v1.0), page 14
Laurie’s reaction was an incredulous laugh. “But everything we’ve told you has already been recorded!” “Why must you persist in underestimating me, Mr. Linton? Before you leave here you will have told me everything you know. Everything. Nor do I anticipate that your superiors will prove unduly obstructive, since you will both deny-all knowledge of this particular episode, even to the extent of reporting that you failed to gain admission.”
“Now just a minute,” muttered Laurie, rising to his feet. “You aren’t thinking of playing any of your Strtibe games with us, are you Colonel?”
“I do not play games, Mr. Linton. As I said before you have placed yourselves voluntarily under my jurisdiction. In the interests of National Security it is imperative that you forget .this interview has ever taken place.”
He had taken two steps toward the side of the room which held the monitor screens when Laurie moved sideways and blocked his path. “Not so fast, Colonel,” he murmured. “Caro, run and see if you can’t fix that door.”
Magobion’s blue eyes blazed angrily. “Stand aside, Mr. Linton!”
“All in good time, Colonel. I want you to understand that we have every intention of leaving here with our memories intact—even if it means taking you along with us. Now why don’t you just sit down quietly and tell us what it is you’re so afraid anyone will find out?”
Magobion measured the distance to’ the control panel with his eye but Laurie shook his head warningly. “Don’t try it, Colonel. I’d hate to have to chop down an old man.” •
“You realize, of course, that you are condemning yourselves to death.’L
“Is that what Manders did?” Without warning Laurie grabbed the Colonel by the arms, swung him off-balance, and thrust him down into an arm chair.
Carol came back into the room. “I think I’ve done it,” she said…
“Pass me that paper knife, Caro.”
She picked up a long sliver of polished obsidian from the desk and handed it to him.’
Without taking his eyes off the old man, Laurie tested the needle-sharp point against his spread palm. “While you were out, Caro, the Colonel decided to review his sentence on us. We’ve now. been condemned to death. What do you think of that?”
Carol’s lips tightened. She shook her head…
“Well, I think it was poor psychology,” said Laurie, “because we now have nothing left to lose.” He moved around behind the Colonel’s chair, leaned forward and touched the point of the knife against the soft flesh below the old man’s right ear. “So tell us what you’re up to, you murderous old rogue,” he murmured, “or I swear to God I’ll shove this right up into your scheming brain.” And to show that he meant what he said he prodded the point home.
Magobion’s face turned a sickly gray. A single dark bead of blood rose glistening upon the punctured skin. “This is treason,” he whispered.
“I wondered if it might be,” said Laurie. “So go ahead and tell us. We’ll start with K-12. What does it do?”
“Who are you?”
“Don’t change the subject, Colonel. Time’s precious.” And to emphasize his words Laurie gave the mottled flesh another painful prick. “What does K-12 do?”
“It releases psychokinetic energy,” gasped the old man and it was as though the words were being drawn out of him with pincers.
“Go on.” - ^
“It has enabled us to marshal those energies and to control them.”
“And what do you hope to achieve by that?”
This question produced an extraordinary metamorphosis in Magobion’s expression. Impotent fury gave place to something almost akin to serenity. “Hope to achieve?” he repeated. “I can assure you it is no longer a hope. I have achieved it.”
“Achieved what, for God’s sake?”
Somehow the old man contrived to draw himself upright in the chair. He gazed out past Carol to some point that only he could see. “The ultimate,” he murmured. “I have achieved the ultimate. At this very moment I effectively control the guidance system of every single orbital and ballistic missile in the Western hemisphere!”
Laurie felt the angel’s wing caress of that wholly instinctive fear that grips the sane in the presence of insanity. “You’re mad,” he said. “No one can do that.” And then he remembered Professor Martell.
Magobion did not deign to reply.
“Who else knows about this?”
Magobion remained silent.
“Speak up, man,” growled Laurie. “The War Office? The Prime Minister? Who?”
The only response was a glance of withering contempt.
“Well, who’s running this show?”
“My staff.”
“Where are they then?”
No response.
Laurie’s patience deserted him. He whipped the point of the stiletto around to the baggy flesh under the old man’s chin and jerked it upward an agonizing quarter of an inch. “Where are they?” he repeated.
The aquiline head strained backward; the sinews in the scrawny neck drew taut as bowstrings. “You fool, boy,” he whispered. “What can you know of power?” “Then tell me,” said Laurie and lowered the knife. Magobion licked his dry lips. “Power,” he said huskily, “true power, power such as I possess, cannot be shared! To delegate is to dilute. Direct control must be retained in the hands of one single person. That is the secret. Once the ultimate pinnacle has been reached, the ladder which enabled one to climb there must be dispensed with. All power is. holy: absolute power is divine.”
Laurie stared at him incredulously. “You really are insane.”
“Rubbish, boy! I have simply achieved what every other autocrat has only dreamt about. Why, if you were honest with yourself you would have to admit that you are savoring every moment of this situation.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “You know I can almost find it in myself to envy you.”
“What can we do with him, Caro? Kill him?”
“We’ve still got to get out of here somehow.”
“But without proof?” he said. “Who’s ever going to believe us?”
They glanced at one another and then back at the Colonel. “We’ll have to take him with us,” she said.
Laurie nodded. “He knows what’ll happen if he tries anything. You do, don’t you Colonel?”
Magobion, who seemed to be recovering his self-possession with every passing second, inclined his head submissively.
“Go and unlock the door, Caro. Right, Colonel, up on your feet. But try anything on and they’ll be blowing the Last Post over you. Got that?”
“You make yourself admirably plain, Mr. Linton.”
“I hope so for your sake,” said Laurie retrieving his cap and using it to conceal the knife. “Now lead the way.”
They passed through the anteroom and down the passage to the flow-way. “We’ll walk it,” said Laurie. “Stop at the first landing, Colonel. You’re giving us the conducted tour, remember. What’s in here?”
“The incubator unit.”
“What’s that?”
“See for yourselves.”
“All right. Open up.”
Magobion walked up to the double doors and placed his hand on the sensitized plate. As the panels slid apart Laurie and Carol found themselves gazing into a long dark tunnel. On either side were ranged some twenty or thirty transparent capsule cells, each dimly lit by a ruby glow-lamp. The atmosphere within the tunnel was warm, stifling and oppressive.
“I’m afraid we must close the door behind us,” said Magobion. “The light disturbs them.”
“Be very careful, Colonel,” Laurie warned him, prodding the muffled point into his back.
“Believe me I shall, Mr. Linton.”
As the doors whispered shut and their eyes adapted to the roseate gloom Laurie and Carol saw that each cell contained the naked body of a dark-skinned, adolescent girl curled up in the foetal position on a transparent hydro-mattress. All the bodies were connected by flexible umbilicas to a stave of pipes which ran the length of the building and passed .through the roof of each cell.
“But who are they?” whispered Carol.,
“They are my dreamers,” murmured Magobion, and, as he spoke, one half of each of the hydro-mattresses slowly swelled, rolling its sleeper gently over on to its other side. “Are they not beautiful, Miss Kennedy, my little devotees of Kállos? What unimaginable bliss is theirs? What exquisite nirvana? Can you conceive how cruelly distressed they will be when they learn that you intend to take it from them? See, the merest hint of such an enormity is sufficient to disturb them!” And, sure enough, as he spoke, the sleepers they were watching stirred restlessly, whereupon he began to murmur in some foreign tongue that neither Laurie nor Carol understood or even recognized.
“Shut up!” growled Laurie and made a wild grab for the old man’s arm. Next moment he was tossed backward like a straw in a whirlwind, to crash with stunning force against the closed doors. Carol screamed in terror. The knife was whisked from Laurie’s nerveless fingers and vanished in the crimson gloom. In a matter of seconds he had been rendered totally powerless.
From the shadows Magobion chuckled drily. “I told you they would be angry with you, Mr. Linton. Are you surprised?”
Laurie lunged forward only to find himself thrust back against the door, spreadeagled as though by some enormous, invisible hand. “I should have killed you while I had the chance,” he groaned.
“You certainly will not have another,” said Magobion. “I fully intend to give myself the pleasure of seeing you dismembered, Mr. Linton. They can do it, you know. Their concertedNpower really is utterly phenomenal. Which is strange when you consider that-they themselves are such gentle, fragile creatures. Do you not agree?”
“Caro? Are you all right?”
“Miss Kennedy is being temporarily restrained,” Magobion informed him. “If she behaves herself she will not be unduly harmed.”
Out of the corner of his eye Laurie could just distinguish the darker square on the wall which he knew must be the sensitized plate operating the doors. He guessed that it would have been set to reject all except those whose trace prints were coded to activate the mechanism, but it would still be worth a try if he could manage to reach it. The main thing was to keep this madman talking. “Where have all these kids come from?” he asked.
“Kerala for the most part,” replied Magobion. “Some from Madras and Pradesh.”
“Lynn wasn’t Indian.”
“Lynn?”
“The girl Manders called Catherine.”
“Mr. Linton, I confess that even now you still contrive to astonish me. How on earth did you discover her real name?”
“In the same way that I found out about Kállos. By asking questions.”
“And what else did you learn about her?”
Laurie began inching his way toward the plate. “Quite a lot of interesting things, actually,” he said. “Enough to lead us here, anyway.”
“That was indeed unfortunate,” agreed the Colonel. “Miss Scott had a very minor role in the research project and was simply the victim of her own insatiable appetite for sensation. As soon as I discovered what she was doing I took immediate steps to rectify the situation. Unfortunately she got wind of my suspicions and elected to take matters into her own hands. She prevailed upon one of the guards to ferry her to Tilbury during the course of which she apparently fell overboard from the hovercraft. At the time this seemed an eminently satisfactory conclusion to an otherwise wholly unsatisfactory episode but, as you will by now have realized, Kállos endows its devotees with quite exceptional powers. It was these, I now know, which enabled her ‘to survive what would otherwise have been death and, incidentally, to set in train the unfortunate series of events of which today has witnessed the culmination.”
Laurie’s left hand was now only inches from the plate. “What did you do with her when you got her back? Kill her?”
“On the contrary,” replied Magobion. “She is at present peacefully asleep in Module 32. I regret, however, that it will not be possible for me to introduce her. Come, Miss Kennedy, you will find that you are now free to move. I shall escort you personally to the guardroom. You, Mr. Linton, will remain here until I return.”
Laurie watched the two of them move away down the tunnel and vanish into a concealed exit. The moment they disappeared from his view his questing fingertips brushed the rim of the plate they had been seeking. Just as he was about to attempt the switch he found his outstretched arm being pressed down, gently but firmly against his side and himself sliding back to the point from which he had started out. At that moment he felt like a small child who had been rebuked for misbehavior. In different circumstances his impotent frustration would have seemed almost comical.
For some moments he just stood there with his back pressed to the door, gazing down the tunnel and wondering dismally what Magobion would do with him. He suspected that whatever it was it would be both painful and prolonged. The old man was obviously a quintessential megalomaniac. But what if the powers he claimed to control proved to be not fantasy but fact? Would he not feel compelled to unleash them on the world simply to prove his own omnipotence? The thought bathed Laurie in a sweat of panic. “He’s insane!” he cried out to the silent denizens of the womb-like cells. “Can’t you understand that?”
“Laurie?”
The hair rose bristling on Laurie’s scalp. The voice seemed to be coming from inside his own head. “C-Carol?” he stuttered.
“Don’t you remember me?” whispered the seashell voice. ‘You came to see me in the hospital.”
“Lynn?”
“You haven’t forgotten then. What are you doing here?”
The situation was infinitely more fantastic than any dream he had ever dreamed. Pinned to the wall like a lepidopterist’s. specimen by some unknown, invisible force, scarcely able to move hand or foot, and yet able to “talk” with a girl who was lying in a drug-induced coma fifty yards away. “I’m waiting to be killed!” he wailed. “By you!”
“That’s impossible,” came the faint reply. “We couldn’t kill you. You’re b’hoot.”
“B’hoot” repeated the voice patiently. “Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?” he pleaded.
“That you’re protected. You’re the first we’ve seen.”
Laurie closed his eyes and opened them. “He said you’d pull me to bits.”
“Oh, he doesn’t realize.” The voice was thin and tiny, clear and yet remote, like an insect singing in the throat of a flower. “You’re not really in our time at all. Not yet. You’re part of yesterday or tomorrow. You’re b’hoot.”
What she was saying was the purest nonsense, and yet, in a weird and impossible way, perhaps it wasn’t. Not altogether. “Can he kill me?” he said.
“We’re not sure. We think you’re each other’s threshold.”
“What does that mean?”
“Into our time,” she said. “And out of it.”
“Let me out of here, Lynn.”
“It’s not me, Laurie. It’s them. They’re afraid of you.”
“But I won’t hurt them! You know that. If Magobion isn’t stopped we’ll all be finished.”
“Then tell them so.”
“How can I?”
“Think it to them. In pictures. They’ll understand.” So began the most extraordinary experience of Laurie’s life—stranger even than the events of 1987—as, guided by Lynn’s spectral voice he attempted to visualize some sort of sinister scenario in which Magobion set out to prove his dominion over the world. What he lacked in skill he made up for in desperation, and as one crudely outlined episode succeeded another he found himself becoming enmeshed in the web of his own fantasy. Watching the imaginary missiles lancing down like shooting stars from the twinkling space-stations, he was overwhelmed by the conviction that he was doing more than simply projecting a vision of some future Armageddon—that it was, himself, inextricably involved in preventing it! He believed that he was where he was, doing what he was doing, because he had somehow chosen to be there; that he was, in truth, what Lynn. had called him—“Part of • tomorrow.” As the boiling, blood-colored clouds spewed upward and the radioactive gruel of death descended like gray snow upon the innocent and the guilty alike, he felt the restraining pressure on his body suddenly relax and he staggered forward down the aisle of the tunnel.
“Well?” he panted. “Now what?”
“They want to know ‘what will happen to them if they help you to escape. Will they be able to stay as they are? That’s all they ask, Laurie. To be left to dream in peace .”
Laurie moved along the cells hunting for Lynn. He found her at the far end of the right hand row. She was lying just as she had lain when he had first seen her in the Rehabilitation Center, except that this time she was naked and her eyes were closed. Once again he found himself recalling Manders phrase: “the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end.” “Is that what you want too?” he asked.’
The hydro-mattress slowly humped itself up and rolled her on to her other side. “What else have you to offer?”
“There’s life, Lynn. And other people. There’s love.” 0
“There’s death. And other people. And hate,” she sreplied with a ghostly chuckle. “And for these kids there’s slow starvation and grinding poverty and every sort of hideous illness too. Nothing you could offer them outside would compare with what we’ve got now. Don’t feel sorry for us, Laurie. Doctor Manders was right. We’re hooked on Paradise.” ‘
