Psychomech (26 page)

Wyatt’s chance came a week later on the 26
^th
of the month. It had been a week of frantic activity on the part of Maas, when from morning till night he had worked unceasingly on Psychomech, preparing the machine for… for what? Wyatt, feigning a mildly bored curiosity, had nevertheless kept a keen eye on the German’s activities, and he had not failed to notice that the bulk of the ex-Nazi’s time was consumed in the re-wiring of those previously mentioned ‘superfluous’ circuits and components. Moreover, there had been an addition to the Psychomech’s bulk in the shape of a controlling computer; the machine could now be programmed to the subject’s specific physical and mental requirements.

Finally, time pressing and his actual curiosity getting the better of him, Wyatt had asked what it all meant, what new experiment did Maas intend to conduct? For there had been several so-called experiments since that night when Hammond had sweated and writhed out his nightmares strapped to Psychomech’s bed, and all of them had seemed successful enough to Wyatt; but always Maas had insisted that there were bugs in the machine which must be ironed out before it could be put into commercial use, before its existence could be announced to a sick world in general. Understanding so little of the working of the machine,

Wyatt had had no choice but to agree; since when he had determined to master Psychomech’s intricacies.

At first Maas was evasive, but when Wyatt pressed him, finally he answered: ‘I think Psychomech is ready for one last test. And if this one is successful, then we can put the machine into full-time use.’

‘A test run?’ Wyatt repeated him. ‘When? And who have you in mind for a subject?’

‘Tonight,’ Maas answered, ‘as soon as I finish here. As for a subject—who better than myself? It will give me firsthand knowledge of the machine’s effect.’

‘You? But you know I don’t fully understand the damned thing! How am I to—’

‘Wait.’ Maas held up a hand. ‘It is precisely because you do not understand the machine that I have now incorporated a programmer. I merely require you to administer the drug and to strap me down. And of course, in the event of any unforeseen mechanical failure, to shut Psychomech down before the critical stage is reached. Surely you are capable of that?’

And Wyatt at once saw and seized upon his chance. ‘Of course. But why use yourself as a subject? We could use someone else. I still have patients. Are you really so sure that the machine is ready?”

Maas nodded. ‘And surely the supreme proof—proof positive—of the machine’s efficacy, would be for it to effect my own cure.’

‘You?’ Wyatt was astonished. ‘Neurotic? I had thought you almost completely emotionless, nerveless!—until recently, anyway.’ He smiled caustically. ‘The great Hans Maas—or should I say Otto Krippner?—himself a case for psychiatric treatment? What is it you fear, Otto? What is it torments you enough to make you risk your own neck on Psychomech, a machine which could so easily kill you? And you the one who has for so long held me back from exploiting the machine.’

‘The machine was not ready!’ Maas protested. ‘Not until now. As for my own fears,’ he shrugged unconvincingly, ‘there are certain nightmares I would exorcise, yes.’

Wyatt moved closer and stared into the German’s hard, un-blinking eyes. ‘The screams of a thousand dying Jews, perhaps?’

Maas slowly grinned, his teeth unusually healthy in glistening pink gums. The grin of a shark. ‘Ah, no, my friend. Those are not nightmares but my favourite dreams!’

Wyatt turned away half in disgust, half in fear. ‘Have it your own way.’ He shuddered. ‘Call me when you’re ready. I’ll be downstairs.’

And the experiment commenced at 11.45 that night…

He was no longer Hans Maas but Otto Krippner, pride of the Third Reich’s Experimental Science and Psychology Division. Herr Doktor Krippner, who had most successfully murdered more than a thousand Jews and personally driven mad two hundred more.

But… his days of dubious glory were over and now he walked in a valley of bones. Something gnawed at him inside, a task uncompleted, something left undone. The bones crumbled and crunched beneath his booted feet, causing him to stumble. He paused, brushed the white dust of the dead from his immaculate uniform and adjusted the monocle in his right eye. The monocle was pure affectation, Krippner knew that—but he also knew it inspired terror in the hearts of his enemies. Rather, in those passive, sheeplike enemies of the Third Reich.

Slowly his surroundings impressed themselves upon his mind. The valley was not a valley but a huge trench whose sides were steep, white with burning salts, brown with earth and rust red with blood. The smell was that of a charnel house, or perhaps an abattoir. On the horizon square black towers smoked, sending up concentric rings of stinking steam, their reek drifting like vile mist across the vast trench, cloying to the nostrils and sickening to the taste. It was an odour a man might actually taste; but Krippner was used to such smells. He had been the cause of them…

The gnawing inside grew stronger, became acid eating at his guts. Work incomplete. Things still to be done.

Gold gleamed in the white fragments beneath his shiny leather boots. A skull stared at him blindly, mouth agape. A tooth, full of gold, seemed to leer singly at him. A ring glinted, loose on its bony finger. Krippner stooped, broke the tooth from the skull, reached for the skeletal hand with the ring—

—And it reached for him!

Krippner gagged, jerked away from the twitching skeleton, stumbled and staggered in osseous debris. His monocle fell out of an astonished orbit, his hands went down to cushion his fall. Fleshless jaws clamped shut on his wrists; clattering arms encircled his thighs; bony feet tripped him as he tried to rise, his throat convulsing in a useless attempt to scream.

The bones—the heaped bones beneath him—gave way, pitching him down into white caves of more fretted bones. And even as he landed in shards that powdered under his weight, so he saw that the walls were closing in on him, that they too were formed of bone—the fleshless skulls of the miserable dead!

Except that now flames seemed to flicker in those hollow orbits, deathly blue balefires of hell; and as he began to scream in earnest and stumble along bone-dusty rib-cage and thigh bone corridors, so the pallidly lambent eyes of the dead seemed to follow him in his flailing panic flight…

Wyatt stood and sweated and watched Maas-Krippner writhe on the machine’s bed. The psychiatrist’s almost effeminate hands fluttered no less than the limbs of the German, the flesh of his handsome face twitching with each tremor that passed through his victim’s body. His victim? No, Maas was not that yet—not just yet. But soon. With each creak of the old house’s timbers, with each muffled crackle of electrical discharge or
beep
of the monitoring systems, Wyatt would tremble afresh and wipe at his clammy brow. Oh, he must murder Maas and he knew it; but as the time drew closer to the moment of the act so he sweated more freely, his mind skittery about the actual contemplation of the thing.

Half-a-dozen times in the last thirty minutes he had told himself what he must do, had even rehearsed the action, but when the time came… would he be able to do it? But he must, he
must!

Maas moaned, causing Wyatt to start, his eyes jerking round to stare at the manacled man, his hair rising on his head as the German’s eyes bulged open and foam began to fleck the corners of his mouth. Psychomech had commenced feeding him now, trickling the impulses and energies which he needed to overcome his nightmares, those monsters of his id released by the stimulation of his brain’s fear-centres. But Wyatt must not act until the trickle became a flood.

His eyes went again, as they had done so often in the last half-hour, to the switches which activated—or de-activated—Psychomech’s feeders. With those switches depressed, Maas would have no back-up, no assistance or sustenance from Psychomech. Naked and alone and trapped in his own personal hell, he would be at the mercy of its denizens. And Wyatt was absolutely certain that those denizens would be far stronger than the mind which spawned them…

It had grown darker and the walls of bone seemed to press in on Otto Krippner that much closer. Dangling skeleton fingers had brushed his peaked SS cap from his head, sharp edges of bone had cut his uniform to ribbons. Now he ran in tatters, blood flowing down his calves from the gashes of a hundred jawbones which had sprung into life as he passed, attacking him in his nightmare careering down the calcium corridor. But now the whiteness was a more grey uniformity and the

shadows were acreep, and the floor as its crackling components shattered beneath his ragged no longer shiny boots seemed soft as snow and yet thick as mud, dragging him inexorably to a halt. If that happened he knew that the tunnel would collapse upon him, would bury him under tons of bone, and that then he too would soon be chalk and bone and choking dust.

Then—

—
A light ahead! A pinpoint of light gleaming in the surrounding darkness. Krippner fell to all fours, crawling through his own blood, his knees and elbows torn by brittle, broken bones and bitten by jagged stumps of teeth in vacantly chomping jaws. The walls, ceiling and floor all seemed to converge, driving him along an ever-narrowing funnel of bone towards the light, the blessed light.

The light—bright-shining, beckoning him on—a glowing star, silvery dazzling—six-pointed…

Six-pointed?

The Star of David!

Its brightness was a fire that burned his torn flesh., He recoiled from it, cried out, burst upwards, clawed through bones, bones, bones, fought for air in the fall of carrion dust, the crumbling of once-living calcium, death’s powdery disintegration.

He emerged, his bleeding head and shoulders coming out upon a plain of bleached white. His horizon was the wall of the pit. On all four sides the walls rose, like the dry lips of a toothless square mouth—and him the morsel being sucked in. Beneath him the bones shifted like quicksand. He would go down again, down into darkness, and this time there would be no fight left in him. He must struggle on!

As the bones heaved and shuddered and settled like sieved bits of broken porcelain. Otto Krippner dragged himself away from the quake’s epicentre, crawled like a limp and bloody rag towards the side of the pit closest to him. He reached it, managed to stand upright, stretched up his arms and sank his fingers deep in bloody soil and hauled himself up until his head drew level with the pit’s rim. With his last ounce of strength he drew his aching, bleeding, ragged body up and out of the great grave, collapsing on the rim—Where THEY were waiting for him!

Wyatt saw the sudden wild fluctuations in the dials and graphs of the monitors, saw them and knew their meaning. Maas was approaching his climax of terror. He was face to face now with his own wildest nightmares, the terrors inside his skull. The moment of truth was fast approaching.

As for the physical man: he whined now like a rabid dog, whined and keened like a thin wind blowing through a crack in a wall, his teeth bared and grating together like rasps, his eyes bulging in his thrashing head. Saliva frothed from the distended corners of his mouth and ran down his straining jaws like so much shaving cream.

Pretty soon now the whining would become screaming, and when that moment came Wyatt knew what he must do. For the screams—or rather the mental torment producing them—would trigger Psychomech’s back-up systems to greater productivity and Maas would wax stronger than his nightmare. Unless, as had happened once before (by accident on that occasion) unless there was no back-up. The rest would be simply: hyper-stimulation of the fear-centres, producing insanity and eventually death.

Wyatt’s hand trembled over the switches of Psychomech’s feeder system, and the sweat ran almost as freely from him as from Maas…

THEY were waiting for him.

THEM: the Patient Trackers, with long thin noses that sniffed—the Singleminded Bloodhounds whose red tongues lolled—the Accusers whose trembling fingers twitched and pointed, twitched and pointed as they came closer, with hands like divining rods and fingers like hazel twigs scenting water.

Except that they did not scent water but blood. Nazi blood!

From the holster on the now scuffed black leather belt at his ragged waist Krippner drew out his luger. The pistol gave him strength, a capacity for anger. He grew taller as his anger swelled into rage. He aimed the pistol, pulled the trigger. He emptied it into them—and watched them fall, their sniffing noses deflating, their lolling tongues stilled, their pointing fingers flopping limply on suddenly flaccid hands and arms—and watched others step up to take their places! He couldn’t kill them all! His pistol fell from nerveless fingers.

Krippner found his voice, screamed into their horrified, wide-eyed accusing faces. ‘Why me? What of Gerber, who’s now a banker in the Germany we loved?’

But they only shook their heads and kept right on pointing, and all the time they shuffled closer. No, for Gerber had never been a butcher. He had followed orders, but even his worst enemies knew he had resisted wherever he could, and that he had never enjoyed it. Otto Krippner had exceeded his orders, and he had always enjoyed it.

‘What of Fledermann?’ he screamed. ‘He’s a chemist in Paderborn! And Stock, the Steel Man of the Ruhr? What of them?

But still they shook their heads, and still their fingers pointed. Until one of them—a small man, a little Jew with a wrinkled face and hollow cheeks—stepped forward, reached out and touched Otto Krippner. Touched him as if he touched ordure or dabbled his hand in sulfuric acid. As if he touched the devil himself. And Krippner remembered him. Oh, yes, the others he might have forgotten, but this one he remembered. Not his name—neither that nor his number, no—for what is one more name or number amongst many? But his haunted face, his agony, which must surely have gone with him from this world into the next—these things Krippner remembered. For of course he had murdered him, personally and in the cruellest way imaginable.

By now the ring of Accusers had closed in on Krippner and their shuddering fingers were touching him; and now he saw that those fingers were not true fingers at all and that their shuddering was produced through vibration. They were rotating half-inch drill bits—and where they touched they bored into him. His blood turned to ice—which immediately commenced to spurt out of his body as the finger-drills entered his flesh.