Dream Thief (22 page)

Once he came to himself as he felt the floor drop away beneath him, his feet kicking out from under him. He landed heavily on his back and glimpsed the shaft falling away in a near-vertical drop.

He had stepped over the brink without knowing it.

The tube was smooth beneath him, and the light-emitting algae cushioned his slide somewhat as he picked up momentum, sliding faster and faster, riding the curving conduit deeper into the Red Planet's heart.

The exhilaration of this wild ride burned the clouds from his mind. He felt adrenaline pumping into his bloodstream, rousing him from his torpor as the shaft raced by him, blurring his vision.

It seemed to him that he was falling into a gleaming green infinity, hurtling faster and faster, whizzing into a radiant unknown.

The luminous algae tore away in flashing streamers from his hands and feet to splatter over him like foaming light, covering his faceplate, blinding him. He wiped at the visor and cleared a small area just in time to see the shaft bottom out.

He braced himself for the impact and felt the tube curve and level out as he hit the bottom with a bone-cracking thump. He skidded out, arms and legs flailing, rolling over himself as if he'd been tossed from a speeding vehicle.

When at last he raised his head to look around he saw that he was in an enormous cavern. He pushed himself up on elbows and knees and winced from shooting pains in his head and back.

The cave was a vast bubble-shaped dome flattened on the bottom. Its roof arched at least a hundred meters above the floor; the walls, curved and smooth, lifted upward gracefully.

He rose stiffly and, feeling as if every bone in his body had been rearranged, began walking the length of the domed vault. The dim bluish-green light bathed him in the illusion of walking on the bottom of the sea; he fully expected schools of fish to swim by at any moment.

He reached the further wall and discovered that the cave had several smaller conduits leading out of it, and large drainlike holes in the floor. These smaller tubes were squat, roughly half his height; if he were to continue his journey it would have to be on hands and knees.

He quaked at the thought. His muscles already drooped with exhaustion and strain. He sank to the floor and lay down in front of one of the drain tubes. In moments he was sound asleep.

T
WO DOORS STOOD AT
the end of a long, dark passage, shimmering with a cool blue light. Spence approached the doors and as he came nearer his heart began to race, pounding in his chest. Sweat rolled off his forehead and burned in his eyes. He wiped his face with his sleeve and walked on.

Now he stood before the two doors and it came to him that behind one of the doors Ari waited to embrace him, to soothe his troubled spirit and heal his wasted body.

Behind the other door a monster with large yellow eyes hulked ready to pounce and devour him.

He wept with anguish over the decision he must make, and cried out for someone to help him, but his voice rang hollow in his ears.

He stepped forward, placed his hand on the old-fashioned doorknob, and turned. The door creaked open on ancient hinges and he peered apprehensively into the room. It was empty.

Spence crept into the room and as he crossed the threshold the door closed behind him. A mist came boiling out of the walls and floor, rising in a cloud before him.

Within the cloud, lightning flashed in red streaks and he could see a shape dimly emerging as if it were being knit together out of the stuff of the vapors. He watched as the shape took on human form.

Then the clouds receded, falling away in curling tendrils to reveal a creature remarkably manlike, but born of a separate creation, the child of an alien god.

He trembled in its presence as the thing, motionless, towered over him head and shoulders, its smooth, golden skin gleaming with beads of moisture. He felt a tremor pass through him as the man-being drew its first breath deep into its lungs. Spence sank to his knees before it, transfixed with awe and fear.

Then as he gazed through trembling fingers up at the stern, spare features, the eyelids flickered and raised slowly. Two great yellow eyes glared down at him and he shrank away from their terrible gaze. He threw his arms over his head and tried to hide himself from their sight.

But the being saw him, saw through him, weighed his soul with its piercing sight and found it sadly wanting. It raised one long, multijointed arm toward him and opened its wide mouth to pronounce judgment.

Spence screamed, clamping his hands over his ears …

THE TREMOR SEEPED THROUGH
the rock floor of the cavern, accompanied by a strange sighing roar. Spence, still groggy from his exhausted sleep, lay for some moments trying to remember where he was.

The rumble increased and the roar grew louder, banishing the last traces of sleep from his brain. The floor beneath him vibrated steadily. He had never stood on the slope of an active volcano, but that was the image that came to mind as he rolled up to kneel quivering with fear and uncertainty.

The thin air inside the cave convulsed as tremendous jets of water, rushing out of the sinkholes in the floor, erupted in gushers fifty meters high. The explosion knocked Spence sprawling as the floor rocked with the aftershock and tons of water rained down.

Instantly he was swept into the narrow opening of the conduit, kicking feebly against the swirling flood and slamming full force into every curve of the pipeline until he learned to relax and let the water take him.

On and on it carried him. Eventually it no longer filled the conduit; he could see a bubble forming on the roof of the tunnel. The bubble expanded until it covered a quarter of the pipe, and then half, and then it left him stranded on his stomach as it dwindled away.

He slipped off his helmet and cupped his hands to get a decent drink, but succeeded only in wetting his gloves. That, he reasoned, was better than nothing, so he held up his hands and let the water drip off his fingers into his mouth. He repeated the process several times, managing only to arouse his thirst the more for whetting it.

On hands and knees he continued his trek and arrived at the junction of a larger tunnel just as his muscles, every fiber screaming for relief, threatened to give out. This larger passageway stretched away on either hand into dark shadowy distance, slanting upward on the right and downward on the left.

He tried the upward course, but it proved too slippery, and each attempt brought him sliding unceremoniously down again before he got a dozen paces. He decided to stop before he lost his footing altogether and went skittering into the dark corridor behind him.

He was just about to resign himself to having to take that course in any event when he spied, higher up in the tunnel wail, a small aperture he had not noticed before. This opening suggested itself to him as an acceptable alternative and he decided to give it a try.

The decision nearly killed him.

Twice he reached the edge of the opening and failed to get a proper handhold, sliding back onto the floor both times. The third time he managed to tear away some of the algae around the rim of the opening for a better grip. He dug in and held on while he brought his feet beneath him, hoping to use them to drive himself up and into the opening. It nearly worked.

He gathered himself for the push and then let fly. His head rose to the level of the bottom of the opening and he thrust an arm forward while his feet kicked against the smooth, slick stone wall. Then he brought his other hand around and grasped the lip of stone. It was then he felt himself falling backwards to the tunnel floor below.

The fall progressed in slow motion. His hands raked the stone and then empty air as he twisted catlike in mid-fall, sank backward, and dropped in a heap to the floor.

The impact knocked the wind out of him. For one horrible moment he could not breathe, and then air rushed in in great windy gasps. His ribs felt as if they had been staved in, and his shoulder throbbed where he landed on it.

What he failed to accomplish with strength and dexterity he achieved with patience and cunning.

Using every inch of body surface to increase the amount of available traction, he imagined himself a slug and oozed up the curving side of the tunnel toward the opening. He felt his handhold and pulled himself up centimeter by painful centimeter until he could lean into the opening and squirm in on his belly.

This new tubule also rose at a slight upward grade which forced him to concentrate on every step—one misstep would send him sliding out into the main tunnel like something expelled from a cannon. He doggedly placed one foot in front of the other and, arms outspread like a man walking a tightrope, labored up the passageway.

This tedious method of locomotion wore on him, taxing already tired muscles to the limit. He longed to sit and rest, but the incline offered no advantage there. He lowered his head and pressed on, ignoring the pain shooting through his thighs like fire.

A kind of benumbed melancholy overtook him, which he recognized as the sum of a number of factors—stress, fatigue, hunger, and pain not the least of them. Each step was a struggle against creeping despair; he longed to just sit down and let his fate roll over him like breakers upon a desolate shore. But he did not give in.

HE SLEPT AGAIN AND
awoke, still exhausted but clearheaded and with a gnawing emptiness in his stomach. He was fiercely hungry, but the prospects of doing anything significant about it appeared depressingly slim. He resolved to push all thoughts of food and eating out of his mind.

The attempt proved largely unsuccessful. Like the tongue that has just discovered the still tender gap where a tooth used to be, his mind returned again and again to probe the subject despite the pain it caused him.

Under such extreme conditions hallucinations were perhaps to be expected. Still, despite this knowledge and his training in the ways of the human brain, the hallucination stopped him dead in his tracks.

Unremarkable as hallucinations go, it nevertheless hit him with a wounding impact, as if the thing had exploded in his face. He tottered on his heels for a moment and then stepped backwards into the wall behind him where he slid slowly to the floor, eyes starting from his skull in shock and disbelief.

There before him, glimmering faintly across the corridor, stood a door.

No snarling, hydra-headed monster could have alarmed him more than this simple architectural object. At first he thought it must be an optical illusion, a trick played by overtired eyes. Then he knew he was experiencing a hallucination—seeing doors where he desperately wanted them to be.

Following this observation, it dawned on him that persons undergoing hallucinations did not perceive them as such while in the very grip of them.

A door! His mind reeled. What could it mean? Indeed, what else
could
it mean?

Feverishly Spence began tearing away the algae by handfuls, digging it out with his gloved fingers from around the imagined threshold. What emerged was an object of stone, cut, from the same stuff as the surrounding walls, with no external markings of any kind. He would have considered it a novelty of nature except its smoothness, roundness, and perfect symmetry argued against a natural artifact. But he could not be sure.

He lifted off his helmet and smacked it into the slab. He listened to the echo pinging away to the dim recess of the tunnel. He also heard a hollow sound beyond the barrier; it was not a dead end.

Overcome by a burning curiosity to see what lay beyond the supposed door, he leapt at the slab and began pushing with all his might, succeeding only in shoving his feet out from under him. Then he knelt before the door and tried to worm his fingers into the cracks at the sides. He arched his back and strained until he thought his heart would burst—and the slab began to move.

It slid a few centimeters, and he felt a gush of warm air from behind the door. The algae on the floor around him flushed brightly. He smelled the stale dry air flowing out; it had an odd taste which he could not place—sweet, yet rancid. The air of a tomb.

Once more he attacked the door with a fury. He was rewarded for his labors when at last the stone rolled back another few centimeters and he was able to squeeze his shoulders through.

He forced himself through the narrow opening, dizzy from the lack of oxygen and gasping for breath. He collapsed on the floor and lay down, panting while waves of nausea from his overexertion slammed into him.

A faint, reddish-gold radiance fell over him as he lay gazing upward, though where this might come from he could not readily tell. The walls around him were smooth stone and dull red in the ruddy twilight of the mysterious light.

After a while the wracking nausea subsided and he was able to raise his head and look around. There was not much to see. The passage, bone dry and dusty, continued upward at a steep angle directly ahead of him. In order to find out more about his new surroundings, he would have to haul himself back onto his weary legs and climb that incline.

Shaking with fatigue he squirmed onto his side and made to push himself up. His hand brushed something in the dust—a small ridge of stone. He looked down and saw between his hands the faintly outlined depression of a footprint.