Dream Thief (15 page)

“It's an interesting story. I'm sure your parents are very proud of you.”

Adjani shrugged. “Yes and no. They realize that I am what I am, but they do not deny they had greater plans for me.”

The remark struck Spence as absurd. Adjani was possibly the highest man in his discipline. “What could be greater than what you're doing right now?”

“They had hoped I would become their
purohit
—the family priest.”

“You are Hindu?” asked Spence, thinking his first impression had been correct.

“Oh, no!” laughed Adjani. “I use the word in a general sense. We are Christians. My family hoped I would be a minister, like my grandfather.”

This admission made Adjani seem even more foreign and mysterious. For Spence, religion was merely a holdover from a superstitious age in man's history. No true scientist held to dogma.

“Does this surprise you, Spence?” Adjani's black eyes glittered intently as he leaned forward on his couch.

“A little, I guess. People don't take that stuff seriously anymore.”

“Ah, that's where you're wrong. Religion is elemental to man's being. True religion ennobles; it never debases.”

“I guess I haven't thought much about it one way or the other.” Spence shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Don't worry.” Adjani smiled broadly. “I did not invite you here to preach to you.”

Spence relaxed and leaned back in his chair. “I was beginning to wonder. Why
did
you ask me here?”

“A selfish reason. I would like to know you better.” Adjani clasped his hands beneath his chin and rested his elbows on his knees. He weighed his next words before saying them.

“And?”

“And—I do not wish to offend you—I thought you looked like someone who could use a friend.”

Spence did not speak right away. The comment seemed charged with implications he could not fathom at once. His eyes became wary and his tone guarded. “That's very kind of you. I appreciate that,” he said slowly. The suspicion in his voice leaked through.

Adjani pounced on it as if it were a snake. “Is that so unusual?”

“Why, no. Of course not. I have lots of friends.” Spence hoped he would not be asked to name them.

“Good. I would like you to consider me among them.”

Spence did not know what to say; he was embarrassed, but could not think why he should be. “I'd be glad to have you as a friend, Adjani. I mean it.” The words were genuine.

No one spoke for a few moments. Adjani sat gazing at Spence as if he were reading his future in his face. Spence felt a strange excitement stir within him and the room grew fuzzy and indistinct. At the same time he was aware of a heightened sensitivity to his situation. An unseen presence had entered the room. He could feel it—a force which charged the atmosphere of the tiny room with electricity.

When Adjani spoke, his words cut through to Spence's heart. “I see a darkness around you like a cloud. Would you like to tell me what is troubling you?”

S
PENCE HEARD THE FADING
echo of a roar like thunder. He could not decide if he had indeed heard the sound or only imagined it, for it shrank away to become the sound of his own blood pounding in his ears. He dropped like a stone through an infinite darkness, falling and falling, turning over and over, spinning slowly through the void.

How long he had fallen he could not determine. Time had no meaning in this formless space. But presently he glimpsed—far ahead as in a tunnel a long way off—a single beam of white light. The light grew stronger and larger as he spun closer, growing until it filled his eyes with a gentle radiance. He could see it quite clearly—a large luminous disk, moonlike against the forever-darkness all around.

As he watched, the disk changed slightly. He noticed that it had features which resembled human features. The disk swept closer to him, or he to it, and he realized that it was not a moon at all, but a human skull.

The skull's black, vacant eye sockets rotated slowly toward him to fix him with their hideous blank gaze. He could see it clearly now, looming ever closer, filling the void with its wan, ghostly light. He saw that the skull was rushing upon him and at the same time that he was shrinking.

Great wrenching spasms of fear shook his body—he imagined he could hear his teeth rattle in his head. His heart hammered against his ribs and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he fought to cry out.

Spence diminished as the skull swept toward him, growing larger as it came. Now it filled his field of vision—its eyes were huge black pits opening before him. He put his hands out as if to stop the terrible collision, but when he parted them he saw that he was spinning into one of the empty eye sockets.

The gleaming white teeth in the skull's bony jaw flashed as the mouth opened and began to wag. He heard a thin, cold laughter emanating from between the skull's bare teeth—the horrible fleshless sound of ghostly laughter. He clamped his hands over his ears, but it was too late; the sound had gotten inside his head where it reverberated endlessly.

Now he could see the scaly, pitted ridge of bone which formed the brow, and the triangular hole of the nose with its jutting sliver of bone slashing out from it. The eye hole seemed instantly to expand as he toppled through its yawning, craterlike aperture.

At the moment he fell into the monstrous eye socket, Spence's world flashed red—as if he had plunged beneath the surface of a sea of blood. His falling, shrinking, plunging motion abruptly stopped and he felt suspended in the weird crimson glow.

Slowly he became aware of the fact that he lay on a solid shelf of rock, his cheek flat against smooth, cool stone. The deep red color emanated from the stone itself. His terrible fear subsided.

Spence raised his head slowly. He looked at his hands, bringing them before his face in the blood-red glare as if they might belong to someone else. But they were his hands, and seeing them unaltered calmed his fluttering pulse. He stood uncertainly and gazed around him.

He took one step and his legs gave way beneath him; he was still too shaken and dizzy to walk. He pushed himself up on his hands and knees and waited until his head cleared. In this position, staring down at the stone beneath him, he saw something which caused his jaw to drop in amazement. He rubbed his eyes.

When he worked up his nerve to look again it still remained. He bent to examine it once more to make sure his eyes had not tricked him in the strange light. His breath came in long, shaky gasps of excitement as he brought his face closer to it.

Yes, there was no mistake. Before him in the red dust of the rock floor was a single naked human footprint.

Spence heard a shout echoing from the high, vaulted roof of the cavern, and realized with a shock that it was his own voice, crying out over and over: “It can't be! It can't be!”

THE DAY DRAGGED AWAY
like a wounded snake pulling its injured length painfully along. Spence felt every slow tick ebbing away as if it were wrung from his own flesh.

He had been in a sour mood upon waking and knew that he had dreamed again. This depressed him thoroughly. Somehow he imagined that, in light of his resolve to deal squarely with the problems besetting him, the dreams would not affect him any longer.

He was wrong. If anything, they troubled him more deeply than ever.

He worked the shift away in a silent, smoldering rage. Tickler felt the heat of his anger and kept well out of range. The meticulous little man watched his every move from a distance as if Spence were a lab specimen that might at any moment show signs of blossoming another head; his bright, beady eyes followed his master around with keen, if secretive, interest.

Spence waded through a magcart of neglected administrative work and hoped that Tickler had no intention of lingering after the shift ended. He had to bite his tongue on several occasions when he felt inclined to suggest that Tickler leave for the day.
No,
an inner voice cautioned,
act as if nothing is amiss, nothing out of the ordinary. Business as usual.

There was a reason for Spence's reluctance to open himself to Tickler's fussy scrutiny: he wanted the next two days to go especially smoothly. He wanted to maintain the appearance of stability and order right up to the moment of his departure. He wanted his leaving on the Mars trip to come as a complete surprise to anyone who might have reason to be interested in such an event—especially Tickler.

If he had been asked, Spence could not have given an explanation for adopting this course of action. Very likely he did not know why himself. He told himself it was because he distrusted Tickler, but he never stopped to consider why that was, or what Tickler had done to earn such ill will. In Spence's mind he represented a vague uneasiness which sent out vibrations of veiled suspicion like certain nettlesome vines sent out creeping tendrils.

At last the shift ended and Tickler approached his chair quietly, with his hands held limply in front of him as if they were wet gloves he had just hung out to dry. “Is there anything else today, Dr. Reston?”

Spence did not bother to consult the digiton above the console; he knew Tickler would not have approached one nanosecond before the specified time. He pushed back his chair and rubbed his eyes in a show of fatigue. “Oh, is it time to quit already?”

“I don't mind putting in an extra shift—”

"Thanks, but it isn't necessary. We've done a good day's work. Call it quits and we'll hit it again tomorrow. We can ready

the equipment for the session tomorrow evening then. Good day, Tickler."

Tickler peered back as if he were trying to read a message that was written on Spence's face in a foreign language. “Are you sure there's nothing else?”

Spence shook his head and smiled as broadly as he could. “You sure are a workhorse. No, I can't think of a thing that can't be done tomorrow. You're free. I'll see you tomorrow.”

Tickler did not reply; he only dipped his head in a smarmy little bow and then hurried away like a rat heading back to his burrow after a night in the pantry. Spence watched him go and then went to the portal himself. He cleared the access code on the doorplate and reset it with a new code so that he would not be disturbed.

“Now to business!” he muttered to himself as he sank back into his cav chair behind the console. Throughout the day as he worked, the thought kept nagging him that he should check out the riddle of the identical scan more thoroughly. Actually, the urge was not a new one—it had nagged him before, but he simply had not had time to do anything about it until now.

He fell to with a will. He retraced in his mind the steps he had followed to discover the similarity of the two scans in the first place. As to what the significance of the supposed similarity could mean, he was still at a loss for an answer. But deep inside he believed it to be important in some way. What he proposed to accomplish next was to establish that it had been no glitch, no momentary foul-up in the electronic circuitry or in the program which had fed him spurious information.

Spence picked up at the point where he had made his strange discovery three days before.

“MIRA, Spence Reston here. Ready for command.”

“Ready, Dr. Reston,” said MIRA's feminine voice.

“Compare all PSG Seven Series LTST entries. Display entries with similarities with less than one per cent variability.”

He sat back to wait, tapping his fingers on the table before him while MIRA worked. MIRA—the initials stood for Multiple Integrated Rational something or other which he could not at the moment remember—was the largest of a breed of biotic computers whose circuitry was in part derived from organic molecules— protein grids which had been integrated with electronics. She was faster, smarter, and more creative in a dozen ways than any computer before her.

Within seconds the wafer screen spelled out the message, which to Spence's grim satisfaction matched the previous one: PSG Seven Series scans 3/20 and 5/15.

There it was again. The chance that it was a computer error ceased to be a possibility. Glitches did not repeat themselves. The chance that it was a kink in his program was also remote. The command was well within the program's range of flexibility.

Retracing his steps completely, he opened the yellow log book and matched the two disputed scans. They were, as he had previously discovered, quite different.

Next he pushed the inquiry a step further and went to the cabinet, getting out the tray of spools for the week of 5/15 and the tray for the week of 3/20. He set the trays down on his nearby desk and fished out the spools in question. He snapped the seal on each of them and rolled out a portion of the scan. The four red wavy lines undulated evenly across his desk. He matched up two intervals and placed one tape over the other and held them to the light.

The two scans, viewed one through the other as they overlapped one another, were clearly different. He could see peaks in one where there were valleys in the other. Laid one on top of the other all similarities between them ceased to exist. He checked the interval again and even tried to force the comparison by matching peaks and valleys, but could not. The scans were simply quite different one from the other. MIRA had apparently goofed after all.