Psychomech (33 page)

… But in the shadow of Psychomech’s bulk, Wyatt suddenly felt small and afraid.

Garrison strained and jerked upon his padded couch. Sweat streamed from the blind man’s contorted face and body. A crisis? Already? As secondary systems hummed into activity, Wyatt turned to the controls.

A crisis, yes. Garrison’s fear-centres had responded to the machine’s electronic probing. He was now in the throes of a nightmare and Psychomech in turn was responding to his needs; was beginning to feed him raw power, the energies he needed to help him overcome his personal demons.

Wyatt reached out a hand that barely trembled. It was easier this time. Much easier than it had been with Maas-Krippner. There was the form of indemnity; and there was Terri; and there was all that money. And of course there was Psychomech itself. Wyatt hesitated no longer but quickly and deliberately set the controls to manual and turned down the three knurled knobs which controlled the feeder systems. The recently introduced humming sound declined in pitch, faded, was gone.

Garrison was stranded now, marooned in one of his own worst nightmares…

The Da-das sprang at him.

They sprang at the man-baby Garrison across the morass, which miraculously held them up while he continued to sink. ‘Ma-ma? Ma-ma?” they cried, their identical faces dark with rage. They grasped the rim of the crib and thrust it down into quicksand, then stood over his naked, cringing, sinking figure, their hands uplifted as one. ‘She’s out. Out, do you hear?” and their hands came slicing down, slapping Garrison’s face, his arms, back and chest.

‘
No, not’ cried the twelve sluts, their breasts awobble as they crouched on the rickety beds, knuckles to their mouths.

‘
Don’t hit the poor wee thing! He’s frightened.’

‘
Frightened? Frightened?’ roared the Da-das. ‘So he bleedin’ should be, the little—’ And they lifted their hands again.

The ooze was up to Garrison’s waist now, and the single remaining adult spark on the rim of his mind finally saw and recognized his danger.

LEAVE HIM BE! said a Voice.

The Da-das stumbled back from the almost sunken crib, their raised arms falling limp as rags as their mouths fell open and their eyes turned up to the sky. And there, a face—

The face of the man-God Schroeder!

Garrison saw that face in the dirty sky, that awesome visage, and the baby side of him screamed in terror. But the tiny man-spark knew!

Now, while the Da-das and their women huddled on their rickety beds in fear, Schroeder’s face approached, huge and awful and staring. I HAVE’ COME, RICHARD. NOW HONOUR OUR PACT. LET ME IN.

The upper rim of the crib was sucked gurglingly out of sight, leaving Garrison up to his chest in mire. He forced his untrained baby’s mouth to speak yet again. ‘N-n-no!’

THEN YOU DIE, HERE AND NOW!

‘
Th-th-then we both die!’

As the mud crept up to his neck and the sluts and Da-das began a weird wailing, the man-God pondered the situation. VERY WELL, he said. The slime began to lap just beneath Garrison’s chin. THEN YOU MUST CALL ON THE MACHINE, RICHARD—AND QUICKLY!

The Machine!

Garrison remembered, reached out with desperate ESP fingers. He scanned, searched, saw—

Called.

‘
Machine!’ he called with both mind and child-voice. ‘Psychomech, come to me!’

The Machine came—in a loud crackling of electrical energies and a mechanical thunder—came and hovered over the quicksand, then sank down out of sight in gulping mud that swallowed it without trace. A heart-stopping moment later… and Garrison felt Psychomech’s bulk beneath him, lifting him, thrusting up and out of the sucking slime.

THE MACHINE IS YOURS NOW, RICHARD, the man-God’s face swiftly shrank and receded into distance,—IF YOU CAN CONTROL IT. ONLY USE IT WELL!

Garrison sprawled across the Machine. Both he and Psychomech dripped filth as they rose up clear of the bubbling, sucking surface. ‘Machine,’ the ESP-endowed man-spark in his child’s mind reached out once more. ‘Machine, please help me. Help me!’

And Psychomech responded…

In its room Psychomech gently purred, squatting down like a great well-satisfied cat, with Garrison a drenched mouse that quivered and sweated and played dead between powerful paws. A mouse with a mind of its own. A mouse who could not defeat and therefore must befriend the tormentor.

With his mind, Garrison stroked the beast.

Uncertainly at first, then more surely, three knurled knobs on the machine’s control panel began to turn. Nothing visible touched them, no hand was near then, and yet they turned. The hum increased marginally, steadying into a rhythmic throb as the knobs came to a halt…

Less than two dozen paces away, oblivious in their resurgent lust, Terri and Wyatt licked and teased and bit, inverted and sinuously twining, white against black where the bed covers and top sheet had been brushed aside by their love-play. As their excitement reached fever-pitch they hurriedly righted themselves and he mounted her. Moments later, spent and freely perspiring, they collapsed together. And as the oblivion receded—as the dark red roaring of their simultaneous climax faded from their minds and bodies—so the other thoughts came flooding back.

Eventually Terri asked: ‘When will it be? The… accident, I mean.’

He lit a cigarette. ‘It may have already been.’

She breathed in deeply and held it for a moment, and he felt her already racing heartbeat pick up fractionally against his own pounding chest. Then the tension went out of her and she softened against him. She reached up, took his cigarette from him and drew heavily upon it, then sighed and in a low voice said, ‘While we’re in here making love?’

‘Yes. What better way to obliterate it, wipe it from our minds? At least for a little while…’

She trembled a little as the sweat of passion dried on her skin. ‘He once told me that the French call orgasm the Little Death.’

‘Stop it, Terri!’ Wyatt’s voice was harsh. ‘No good being morbid about it now.’

‘I wasn’t being morbid.’ She pulled back and stared at him, then smiled a half-smile. ‘I think it’s very beautiful, that moment. It’s what life is all about. And it is a sort of Little Death. You said so yourself: an obliteration, a wiping clean.’

He nodded, took the cigarette from her fingers and stubbed it out, drew her back to him, thinking:
A Little Death, yes—but right now he’s in there with Psychomech, and he is suffering! No Little Death for Richard Garrison, Terri my love. It’s the Big One for him, the biggest one of all…

3.30 P.M.

Wyatt sat on the edge of the bed and made up a fictional log of the experiment, the events leading up to Garrison’s death. He meticulously falsified times, checks, bio-function levels, physical responses and brain activity readings, ticking off each entry to show no abnormality.

Obviously Garrison’s heart had not been up to the experiment. The explanation would be simple as that. It would be the work of less than one hour to dummy lip the machine’s automatic record to agree with his log.

Behind him, wrapped in black and pale as death in her exhausted repose, Terri slept. Wyatt, too, was tired, but there was still work to be done. By now Garrison was most likely dead. Obviously dead. Without Psychomech’s backup, no subject could suffer indefinitely the horrors of his own blackest nightmares. If he was not dead, however… then Wyatt would simply increase the degree of fear stimulation.

He shuddered.
What a hell of a way to go!
—then caught himself tight and forced the thought from his head. Too late now for pity.

Leaving Terri asleep (a troubled sleep despite her exhaustion, for she rolled this way and that) he went to the room of the machine. There, staring at Garrison upon his couch, Wyatt broke out in a cold sweat. His panic was momentary before common-sense took over. He had made a mistake, bungled it. There was no other explanation.

For while Garrison had lost a little weight in perspiration, still he was alive. Incredibly, the monitors showed all of his bodily functions to be in order and working normally. The figure on Psychomech’s couch seemed relaxed, even appeared to have a grim sort of smile upon its waxen face.

Feeling goose-flesh rising on his back and arms, Wyatt stepped to the control panel. He turned up fear-stimulation, turned down the backup systems—and froze. He cursed himself for a fool. Too late now to check, but he had thought for a moment that the backup knobs were set too high. And it had seemed that Psychomech’s electronic guts hummed a fraction too loudly. Impossible, for of course he himself had turned the backups down a little over two hours ago.

He shook his head and frowned. So what had gone wrong?

Somehow Psychomech had leaked aid to Garrison, obviously, else he were now dead. Very well, this time there would be no mistake; he would leave no margin for error. He turned the backup knobs all the way down until they clicked into the
off
position. At least it would be quick now…

Terri was awake. She glanced at her wrist-watch where it lay on a bedside table. ‘Oh!’ Her hand flew to her mouth. She saw the strained look on Wyatt’s face. ‘Is he…?’

‘No,’ Wyatt answered, his throat dry. ‘But it shouldn’t be long.’

She propped herself up with pillows. ‘Does it… I mean, will it—’

‘Will he feel it? Is that what you’re asking? Does it hurt? No,’ he lied. ‘It’s just that he’s asleep and he won’t wake up again, that’s all.’

‘Sometimes,’ her breathing quickened, ‘I feel so sorry for him. But—’

‘But? Are there any buts?’

‘Only one: but I love you.’

‘Love and murder,’ he answered after a while, his mind miles away. ‘Strange bedfellows.’

‘Don’t say that!’ she gasped.

‘What, murder? Well, it’s true. And we’re in it together. I hope you realize that, Terri—that however it goes from now on, we’re in it together all the way?’

She nodded, then squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head, and finally drew back the sheet that covered her, exposing her beautiful body to him. She opened her eyes and moved voluptuously, as she knew he liked to see her move. ‘I don’t want to think any more,’ she said. ‘Thinking only hurts. I want to feel you inside me again.’

Wyatt threw off his dressing gown and got into bed with her. She reached for him, warm against his chill, and in a matter of moments all else was driven from his mind.

Sweet obliteration…

Garrison’s ride had been easy so far.

The quicksand episode, ephemeral as the dream it was, had almost faded from his memory now. Now he remembered only the conclusion and that too was quickly, mercifully fading. Mercifully, yes, for it had not been pleasant.

Psychomech’s strength had flowed into him and increased his man-Garrison awareness, driving fear from him and healing the infancy-spawned and until now long-forgotten mental lesion. Then he had known anger, and almost as a reflex action had struck back at the Da-das and their sluts—lashing out with his mind, through Psychomech.

Twelve rickety beds had gone down into the mire, carrying twelve screaming, still frantically coupling couples with them. Then there had remained only the bursting of greasy bubbles, following which even the tatty bed linen had been sucked down out of sight.

After that the infant Garrison had quickly dissolved back into dim and terrible times of infancy; and Garrison the man, not once looking back, had ridden Psychomech out of the swamplands to follow a falling sun…

Now the swamp lay far behind and he travelled at a leisurely pace low over a land of rolling hills and grassy plains, a land looking like nothing so much as the downs of Sussex remembered from his days as a fledgling Military Policeman. Not that he actually remembered those days, no (it seemed to him perfectly natural that he should now be here, where his real past no longer mattered or even existed for him), it was just that he felt he knew this place from some strange and dreamy former time.

But now he goaded the Machine to greater speed. The sun was sinking fast over the distant hills, and shadows and darkness crept apace. If he did not hurry they must soon overtake him, those shadows, and he had yet to find sanctuary for the night.

Sanctuary. A warm and friendly place. A place where he would not be rejected.

Rejected. The word came into and went out of Garrison’s mind in a single instant. But its echo remained. Rejection. That had been a hangup, too, unrecognized until now.

Rejection…

He was startled by the sudden chill breeze which struck at his flesh through his clothing as the sun’s last ray threw the hills into silhouette. Strange that he had not noticed his clothing before; but now he saw that he wore an open-necked, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of light brown cord trousers. And his feet were clad in track-shoes. He had liked to run when he was younger. He seemed to remember that. There had been tremendous freedom in it. But—

—
How does one run from rejection?

Rejection…

The sun had deserted him now. No, not deserted, rejected; had turned her face from him. Only her afterglow remained, a pink-purple stain on the tops of the hills. He had almost reached those hills, flogging the Machine on like a wild man, urging more speed from the metal and plastic flyer whose broad back he rode across the face of this strange world.

Yes, and this world was strange now, and ominous with shadows and cold, un-stirring air. He glanced down at the terrain that hurtled beneath him, and he saw how strange and terrible it had grown.

Where there had been rolling plains of grass, now spiky ridges of white rock reared up menacingly like rows of serrated needle-teeth, threatening to snap shut on Garrison and the Machine. And long, furtive night creatures darted from shadow to shadow, showing only their burning eyes and sinuous, leathery outlines as they moved.

Garrison shuddered. If he should fall here… he might survive the rocks, but never those darting night scavengers.

Gratefully he hugged his body to the Machine—and yet even as he did so it seemed to him that perhaps the beast’s flight was a little less speedy and its elevation somewhat lower above the jagged spires of rock. He breathed deeply of the chilly air, held his breath, concentrated all his attention upon the Machine and its flight.