The Dark Mind - The Transfinite Man Part 6

The screen cleared slowly as the connection was made, and Van't Sellig's irritable, balding head came into view.

"Ah, yes! Ombudsman Rhodes. I was expecting you to call."

"I'll bet you were, Fritz! I've received your file on Dalroi. I think you have some explaining to do."

"Who tipped you off about Dalroi?"

"You know I can't reveal that," said Rhodes. He glanced down at the file placed out of sight of the vision-scanner. The complaint had been unsigned but he had had enough dealings with Inspector Quentain to be reasonably certain of its author.

Sellig grimaced wearily. "Never mind! I'll find out somehow. What do you want to know?"

"It says here that Dalroi was convicted of murder and sentenced to death by electrocution. A death warrant is appended. Also a release warrant dated a year after the supposed execution. Don't tell me that you're practising reincarnation at the police laboratories now?"

Van't Sellig sweated profusely. "You're asking the wrong sort of questions, Walter."

"d.a.m.n you, that's my job! You know I don't let go of a thing like this once I get my teeth into it."

"Very well, you've asked for it. The execution wasn't successful. G.o.d! Three times I watched him burn in that chair and each time went into a coma and came out of it under the pathologist's knife."

"I thought those days were over," said Rhodes angrily."It was far surer than the rope they used to use for hanging, Walter. For over two hundred years the electric chair didn't have a single failure - then came Dalroi. Why it didn't kill him we can never quite decide, but it's an experience I'll never forget."

"So I should d.a.m.n well hope!" said Rhodes. "What happened then?"

"Then the Black Knights stepped in and took Dalroi away under section two-nine-four of the National Secrecy Acts."

"For what purpose?"

"I don't know." Sellig mopped the perspiration from his brow. "Two-nine-four covers the use of convicted murderers for experiments involving certain death. They use them as guinea-pigs in s.p.a.ce-flight experiments and chemical warfare techniques, you know."

"No," said Ombudsman Rhodes, "I didn't know. Thanks for the tip. But what happened to Dalroi?"

"Even if I knew I couldn't tell you. From the legal point of view hand-over under two-nine-four is certified as death, and the case was closed as such. The pay-off was the shocker."

"Keep going," said Rhodes grimly.

"Dalroi wasn't guilty of murder. He killed all right, but later evidence proved he didn't have any option.

There's even a suspicion he was framed. We informed the Black Knights and they kicked like h.e.l.l.

Finally they released - somebody."

"Somebody?"

Van't Sellig looked the epitome of misery. "I met Dalroi after his release, and talked with him. I don't know what they did to him, but on his release he wasn't quite the same person. He had no memory of what he'd been through at the hands of the Black Knights. Somehow they'd blanked out a complete year's memories. At a rough guess I'd say Dalroi is still undergoing his execution."

Rhodes drew a deep breath. "If I were you, Fritz, I'd start looking for a new job. From where I'm sitting there doesn't seem to be much future for you as Chief Commissioner."

"I'll take my chance," said Van't Sellig. "Not even you can move against the Black Knights."

"No? With the muck I'm raking up I've enough material to bring down the government."

"Look, Walter, you're out of your depth. Let Dalroi sink or swim in his own way. He'll reach h.e.l.l just as soon. You can't interfere with the Black Knights and come out of it alive."

"I must!" said Rhodes. "There's a sight more here than appears at the surface, and you know it! And you're still holding two of my a.s.sistants. Are you going to release them or do I let the newspapers have the story?"

"You won't get away with it. There's not a paper in the country which'd touch that story today.

Something big is in the air and its liable to break at any moment, but Central Security has clamped down a press censorship which is absolute. n.o.body would dare to touch Dalroi's story."

"Then what the h.e.l.l is going on?"

Van't Sellig shook his head resignedly. "You asked for this Walter. I'm going to tell you because you won't be satisfied until you know. If ever you breathe a word of it I'll crucify you so fast you'll comeunstuck right round the edges. The Black Knights are making a last-ditch stand against Failway. After the next election Failway will own the government and there'll be no stopping them from that point on. It's now or never. The Black Knights are pinning their faith on a secret weapon. Its name is Ivan Dalroi - the man who can't be killed!"

TEN.

Trapped on a web of crazy, discontinuous geometry, Dalroi cursed and wept like a mad thing. He could not die just yet! If a man could drink vengeance and subsist on hate then he would do so. If it took him a million years of weeping or a thousand reincarnations he would get back somehow and make Failway pay for every blistering tear and every second of agony. Parabola, hyperbola, vector and cosine, degrees of arc bisecting the minutest degrees of arc. Where the h.e.l.l was point C ... or is it D or E or even b.l.o.o.d.y omega?

He knew he should have died, but refused to accept the fact. Something, some part of his mind, was stronger even than the terrible cupped hands of death. There was a flame within him possessed of such thirsting for life that he knew his body would be dust long before the final spark flared out.

A pain was lancing through his head like the slow, rhythmic insertions of a hideous sewing machine forcing a carpet needle underneath the skull. A whisper played a fantastic memory in his ears, and he caught the sound and held it, using it as a focal point to grope for all the things he had been forced to forget. Not hallucination, no, this was memory. It was disembodied, unconnected with the pattern of his life, yet it was there!

Then he had it clear. Lissajous figures on oscilloscope screens banked before his eyes, changing patterns, responding to ... something. The air was reeking of ... ether, yes, that was it! And noises ... disconnected ... bells, unholy sounds, sounds never made nor heard in this life. Sounds that came from within the brain itself.

The shock hit him like a thousand volt discharge. Now he remembered. The terror, the stark horror of having his brain exposed. The saw on the skull, the surgeon cutting tissue and flesh to expose the naked brain; and himself, drugged but conscious, watching the writhing traces and trying desperately to concentrate lest the fear should drive him mad. The probes in the brain; no pain, but noise and sensation, a leg which moved without conscious volition and noises loud and clear which were never there to hear.

But when? A memory must have some origin, some time and place of access. How had these atrocious memories insinuated themselves into an apparently hole-free chain of experience? And why?

Why? Why? The question burned like a whiplash. G.o.d, there was a secret here! Something was burning in the back of his mind. He could not see or feel it yet he knew it to be there ... something he was not supposed to know. Yet he had to know! Suddenly it became of peculiar importance to him to find out.

It was more difficult than staying alive, more painful than dying. Only an effort of tremendous will enabled him to do it at all. Then, once he had started, it was easier. The same compulsion which had made him reject the thought of death gave him now a diabolical lever, a desperate means of entry into the forbidden depths of his own mind.

Down he went, ruthlessly stripping layer after layer of civilised repression; peeling back dread, abhorrence, disgust and the thousand darker things which fester in the unseen shadows. Grimly he cut down to the dark side of the mind, to the region where the censor, like the dull red doors of a furnace, scarcely insulating, masked the spiteful radiance which dwelt beyond. The censor was asleep or dead or worse. He demanded entry, and it was not denied him. The doors swung wide and he entered them indread and teetered on the edge of an unholy holocaust. At the fringes of the terrible fire which screamed and blistered in the awful chamber of the mind, he stood face to face with his own Id.

This was the seat of the elemental life-force, a molten maelstrom of unbridled instincts and terrible ambitions, stripped clear of the layers of insulation and repression which millions of years of evolution had laid over the frightful incandescent turmoil. He staggered blindly, seeking protection against the blistering fury and untamed malice which radiated like some dreadful alien sun. He was appalled by the h.e.l.lish ferocity, the unimaginable pressures and the seething, grinding ebullition which threatened to crack the universe by its unbounded intensity.

And with a courage somewhat more than human, he threw himself into the intolerable well of strife.

Raw emotions, millions upon millions of amperes of naked energy, stark, illiberal, completely blind, spat in excruciating arcs forming a continuous pulse of pure liquid fire. The will to live was a fiendish powerhouse suddenly ablaze through surfeit of the terrible powers it was no longer able to contain. Anger and hatred was sheet lightning, spitting flame from merciless heavens, pouring virulent fury on the Satanic inferno. s.e.x, like a thousand-headed snake, wound its dark coils and convulsed in agony, tightening upon the conflagration and concentrating its malevolence and potency, pulsing the h.e.l.lish plasma to new levels of atrocious ferocity.

Super-critical now, the hectic ferment knew no bounds. Steaming, spitting, searing, snarling, the flaming torrent burst through his mind like a million tons of exploding steel.

SURVIVE! HATE! SURVIVE!.

It coursed through his veins, a vaporising mercurial pressure.

ACTION! REACTION! ACTION! REACTION! ACT!.

Faster. Faster. Aurical, ventrical artery, vein, nerve, nose, knee. It pounded in his ears like a drop-hammer forging some cosmological crankshaft.

TOOTH! NAIL! WILL! SPITE! HATE! FIGHT!.

He was lost, drowned in the furious frenzy, engulfed in the widening tide of naked vengeance, floundering in the hideous incandescent sea whose pulse was the terrible will to live.

ACTION! REACTION! ACTION! REACTION!.

His body convulsed on the web, and the web pulsed and whimpered in response. He refused to die! He seized the power and mastered it. He was G.o.d, no, not G.o.d - Nemesis perhaps. He was bitter scorn, fighting fury, terrible revenge, irresistible force, absolute crushing evil. He was Dalroi! He had the power to smash the universe.

HATE! HATE! HATE!.

He took hold of the web in solemn fury and burst the strands asunder. He tore loose the mocking nucleus and hurled the discus far over the seething plain. With a surge of superhuman malice he gathered the broken ends of the heavy strands and pulled, distorting the alien geometry, twisting the configuration of the once-stable dimension into something which teetered on the brink of self-destruction. Then he rose up, and by sheer indomitable force, he smashed the dimension back into the miniscule quanta of energy from which all things are made.

Transfinity shuddered. Strange new nebulae leaped into existence, and others paled and wereextinguished. Like the ripple of a depth-charge in a lake, the eddying tide of disturbance spread outward from the centre, carrying a wash that was felt even at the furthest ends of infinity and rebounded in complex criss-cross patterns of subtle rise and fall among the strange continua.

And through the flotsam of discontinued strata there floated the body of a man cursing in curious colours and complex harmonies; a thing of power, dreadful yet afraid of the strange new galleries of knowledge which had opened in his mind.

Somebody destroyed the Consedo International bank. There were several theories as to how this was achieved, but none one hundredth as ingenious as the fact. Consedo, subsidiary of Failway Holdings, was not the sort of place that one destroyed out of hand. But then, this was no ordinary disaster.

The thunder split the heavy darkness of the old town with a bruising shock that shattered windows for a two-mile radius and crumpled a street of slum houses on the river's bank. The steel and molybdenum caves of Consedo had tried to contain a star. The blinding blast of energy, which originated in a private safe-deposit box far down in the grim, grey vaults, opened the skysc.r.a.per building from top to bottom like a hatchet through a toothpaste tube. Thousands upon thousands of tons of the finest ferro-concrete shattered and peeled in banana-like submission to fall in a calamitous avalanche across the neighbouring streets and buildings.

But that was only the beginning. Deep under the earth the terrible fire still raged. A mere nutsh.e.l.l of star-stuff, its heat was more than sufficient to turn the alloy-steel jungle into sparkling rivulets of molten metal. The night sky flared with reflected light as girders and crumbling masonry spattered into the h.e.l.lish pool. The deep vaults were linked under the road and under the foundations of neighbouring buildings, and these too began to crumble and smoke and finally collapse. Down came walls and pavements, pillars, shop-fronts, cars and roofs in a grinding cascade of steel, wood, gla.s.s and concrete, intermixed with crackling fire; all sliding with tantalising slowness into the widening h.e.l.l-pit which once was Consedo.

On the edge of the uproar the fire and rescue teams stood in impotent horror watching the crumbling wastes with a helplessness as psychological as it was actual. Nothing like this had ever occurred before.

The shattered gla.s.s had torn the curtains into shreds and ploughed great furrows across the desk top.

The gaunt oak panels were peppered with gla.s.sy spines, and the tri-di murals had imploded to reveal their shattered mysteries. As he rose from the floor, handkerchief blood-red through stopping the cut above his eyes, Cronstadt's face was ashen not so much from his narrow escape as from the implications of the angry blow-hole seven blocks away.

"G.o.d! What was that?" he asked.

His companion was still absorbing the shock and moved to the shattered window frames to stare stupidly at the enigmatic chaos. There were no lights, for the power had died with the first shattering blast, but the flicker and flare of the ruins of what minutes ago had seemed indestructible lit the room with a radiance like a foretaste of h.e.l.l. For several minutes then neither spoke, not trusting their voices to conceal the hysteria.

"Dalroi?" asked Cronstadt, at last voicing the unspoken question.

"Dalroi's dead," said Hildebrand. "They fired him into transfinity, unprotected. Of all the possible methods of execution, they used the only one which stood any chance of success."

"I know," said Cronstadt, "but what if even we have underrated Dalroi's potential. Suppose not even that could kill him?""I don't want to think about it. Transfinite s.p.a.ce is a h.e.l.l to end all h.e.l.ls. a.s.suming that physical survival was possible, which it isn't, the psychological impact alone would burn out the brain. Even if he survived, there still isn't any way back."

"We can't be sure," said Cronstadt. "Surely the return of Dalroi is less improbable than the chances of Consedo breaking into an unprovoked chain-reaction? In one fabulous micro-second Failway has lost perhaps one tenth of its hold on the commercial world. That is a coincidence which can't be overlooked."

Hildebrand gripped the sill with such pressure that white showed through the flesh of his knuckles.

"You're right, of course. But in this way ... Lord! ... what did he use? Consedo fell like a pack of playing cards and burns like a Roman-candle. A piece of the sun in a paper bag would have the same effect."

There was a knock on the door. Cronstadt opened it with difficulty, kicking the misplaced jamb savagely to release the reluctant wood.

"Parcel for you, Mr. Cronstadt. Delivered by special messenger."

Cronstadt took the parcel from the watchman, with a frown. Wrapped in the paper was a case of wood.

It was very cold to the touch. Inside a thick layer of thermal insulating fibre cradled a small black orb. He examined it curiously, without touching it, puzzled by the wrongness in the way the sphere accepted light and absorbed it complete without reflection. It absorbed heat, too, and wisps of cool vapour from the air formed inside the open box.

"What the devil?" asked Cronstadt.

Hildebrand looked up, his eyes suddenly filled with hideous comprehension.

"Run!" he said. "Run for your b.l.o.o.d.y life!"

Cronstadt did not wait for explanations, fear scrabbled with grasping fingers at the back of his skull, and controlled panic threw his feet down known corridors to the nearest emergency exit. Suddenly he too had divined the purpose of the uninvited parcel and he had a rough idea of the nature of the gift and its potency. They were fortunate. They were two blocks away when the headquarters of the Cronstadt Steel Corporation split wide and joined Consedo as a second flaming warning of the vengeful power that walked the land in anger. Dalroi was certainly back.

For a few minutes the two men stood sweating on the roadside, unable to speak. Around them confusion seethed and boiled as the fire and rescue teams redeployed their inadequate equipment and found new locations from which to stare stupidly at the new holocaust which had struck out of the night. Police strove to cordon-off roads and alleys in the area to stem the tides of the curious, who, twice shaken from their beds, flocked to the area in excited crowds. Where the tall towers of Cronstadt Steel had been, a new waste of boiling slag was rising.

"Fiends in h.e.l.l!" Cronstadt said. "We should have expected something like this. When you twist the Devil's tail ... "

Hildebrand was watching the surging crowd uneasily.

"Let's get out of here. I think we're being watched."

"Dalroi?"

"Not Dalroi. Somebody else."They began to walk. Dark figures, moving out of the leaping shadows, purposefully closed in. In the comparative darkness of a canyon, where tall commercial buildings raked the red-flushed sky, the net closed down. With dark hoods, shadowed faces, incredible precision and timing, the Black Knights pounced.

ELEVEN.

The night was wild and black as pitch. A strong wind sweeping up-river in driving gusts beat the rain against the signal cabin like buckets of grape-shot, and the tide of water sweeping the windows made direct observation impossible. The Yard-master at Failway goods-yard was having a bad night. Goods traffic pouring into the hungry maw of Failway was steadily increasing. Several special-goods had already been diverted into sidings to await clearance of the sheds, and an intolerable line of empty wagons was waiting the return of one of the seven diesels working the yard. With visibility at times down to twenty yards, the stage was all set for chaos.

Failway yard had long since outgrown its original s.p.a.ce allocation and now sprawled crazy sections and branches back across the busy main lines where the great expresses touched two-hundred on the iron road to the sea. It was difficult enough to marshal the busy and complex yard with good visibility; this particular night, with the squalling rain and the wind howling like a hundred banshees, the Yard-master could scarcely detect an engine whistle or see the nearer signals. He was forced to rely on repeaters and the illuminated track-circuit diagram which included only the older sections of the yard. The situation was rapidly slipping beyond him.

The pressures applied by Failway to get more goods and a faster turnaround had forced the Failway authorities to throw overboard the elements of good practice and inst.i.tute many hasty improvisations which were not interlocked to the main system. The Yard-master was sweating, not from the cold humidity, but from the anxiety-stress of the work he was trying to perform; painfully aware that the crawling traces of coloured light across his board represented in actuality the lives of men and the fate of hundreds of tons of moving steel and goods drawn by the tall diesels across a sea of dark and mud.

The empty wagons were still piling up below the hump, and there was danger of a complete stoppage unless they were cleared immediately. At midnight he opened up the radio and called the nearest diesel shunter.