Psychosphere (11 page)

Garrison half-pushed, half-levered Vicki back into her own seat, said: “How bad is it?”

Before she could answer he had read her mind. Very bad. She was totally panicked, a mind full of chaos and thoughts of imminent death. And yet her training had brought her back here, an automaton working only to the book. “Your seat belts,” she gasped, and: “—life jackets…”

Garrison shot his probe past her into the cockpit. The co-pilot's mind was blank, unconscious. He must have banged his head. The pilot was fighting with the controls, knowing he must fail but still desperately trying to command some sort of response from the crippled aircraft. A frightened man who knew he was going to die. But brave.

Garrison probed deeper:

Abombabloodybombabloodybomb
, over and over again. And,
Nohopenohopenohopenohopenohope!
And,
Bombnohopebombnohopebombnohope!
And,
Shitshitshitshitshitshitshitshitshit!

Garrison spoke in the pilot's mind: THERE IS HOPE, and was at once denied:

Nononononononononono!

HAVE FAITH!

Faith?
It was as if the man had suddenly realized it was not his own voice he heard in his head but that of some other. Even above his fear and horror Garrison could now sense awe in him. The man was catholic, deeply religious, a believer.

FAITH! he repeated. FLY HER.

Can'tcan'tcan'tcan'tcan't! She'scrippledcrippledcrippledcrippledcrippled!

Garrison knew he could save himself. And he could probably save Vicki. Teleportation. He could get them out of the plane, set them down on terra firma somewhere, anywhere. But—

—What about these people?

And just how much power could he muster? What if he was wrong? And anyway—damn it to
hell!
—he couldn't just leave them to die. But if they were to be saved he needed the pilot's help, needed his faith.

IT IS NOT YOUR TIME, MY SON, he told him.

MyGodGodGodGodGod!
The pilot's hands worked at the controls. Garrison lifted with his mind. Levitation. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, gripped the plane, levelled out its plunge.

My God!
Adrenalin ebbed a little in the pilot's system. His hands shook—but the plane seemed to be answering the controls!
My great heavenly merciful…. God—!

CORRECT YOUR COURSE, said Garrison.

Yes, oh yes! Yes, yes, oh yes!

Garrison kept his eyes closed, his mind tightly in control, and spoke to the girl. “We seem to have levelled out. The pilot will need you. If only to make coffee.”

She blinked at him, gave him a silly grin, giggled hysterically, then spat, “Coffee!” Her sudden laughter was a cackle. “Fucking
coffee
!” she laughed. And again: “Holy fucking mother of…coffee!” Terror had almost robbed her of her senses. Tears were in her eyes, her face a mad white mask stained with blood from her still dripping nose.

“Coffee, yes,” said Vicki, standing up and slapping the girl's face, almost knocking her from her feet.

The blow stung some sense back into her. She held her face as hot tears gushed, more freely now, before turning and stumbling back towards the cockpit.

Vicki fastened Garrison's seat belt, half-collapsed into her seat and fastened her own. She knew Garrison was doing this—saving all their lives—knew it and dared do nothing which might interfere.

LIFT HER UP, Garrison told the pilot. TAKE HER UP TO HER NORMAL ALTITUDE.

No power! No engines! Impossible!
the pilot was crying, tears streaming down his face. He was talking to God!

FAITH!

The plane began to climb. Powerless, she flew higher, her wings slicing the wind.

“Vicki,” Garrison gasped from between clenched teeth. “I need your help.”

“Richard, what can—?”

“No, don't touch me!” he shrank back as she leaned across. “Just…
lift
! Will the plane to fly, to keep on flying. Repeat over and over to yourself these words: we'll make it, we'll make it, we'll make it. Repeat them and believe them.”

Vicki took a deep breath, sat back and closed her eyes. She clenched her fists.
We'll make it, we'll make it, we'll make it
…

The co-pilot was coming out of it. Garrison probed him. WAKE UP. WE NEED YOUR HELP. WE'RE GOING TO MAKE IT. WE'RE GOING TO MAKE IT!

Garrison cut the probe and groaned. He could feel his mind beginning to buckle. It wasn't strong enough. He needed help. Much more help. He felt himself beginning to slip, to slide, to fall.

It was as if he fell into a great hole in the earth, a chasm. But even as he rushed down into blackness, others were released to finish what he had started. His mind split. The Garrison facet receded, but the other facets surfaced, were free!

Garrison's body slumped in its seat, his face pale as death, his hands twitching. The body was useless now, except as a shell, a house for three minds. Two of these were now free to fly the plane, but Garrison himself—

—
HE FOUGHT A DIFFERENT BATTLE, FLEW A DIFFERENT
machine. The machine. Psychomech. Except Psychomech wasn't flying but plunging to destruction!

“Liar!” Garrison's yell drowned out Suzy's howling. “Liar, Schroeder, liar!” But Schroeder was gone and still the Machine plunged
.

Garrison hung on for dear life—or death?—and bared his teeth in the rush of frigid air from the depths below; and behind him the bitch clung to his back, her fear no less than his own. And suddenly, from nowhere—like a cold cloak thrown upon him by some unseen hand—there was a chilly calmness, a clearness of mind, a feeling which went beyond fear. A desire to know whose design this was, whose hand had brought him to this end
.

Who was it down there, down in the depths and the darkness, whose magnet mind drew him like a meteorite falling from the night sky? Oh, yes, for someone had engineered this, be sure of it! This was the work of some dire enemy—perhaps one of those enemies spied in the pit of the wizards! But which one? Garrison must find out. His magic was weak now, true, but not so weak he didn't feel the urge to fight back. He must at least try to fight back
.

Garrison sent his mind winging back, back to his dream within a dream. He sat once more in the circle of wizards, and he gazed once more upon them where they cast their strange runes and made their dark magics. And one he saw whose face he knew at once: a dark face and greedy, belonging to a swarthy wizard whose immaculate attire could not conceal the evil that lurked within
.

He shuffled cards and occasionally spun a small roulette wheel which he held between his crossed legs, this one, and his eyes smouldered with hatred where they stared unblinkingly at the tiny Garrison-figure in the crystal ball
.

And sure enough the Garrison in the shew-stone rode a tiny Psychomech, and man and Machine and dog all plunging to their doom in a lightless chasm. And now Garrison knew that this was the one!

Still falling and knowing the fall soon must end, Garrison quit his useless, ineffective levitating and drew his powers in. He wrapped them about himself as a man wraps a robe—or coils a whip! He reached out his mind into another world, another place—the pit of the wizards—and hurled his energies in one final blast full in the face of the wizard with the cards and the wheel
…

I
T WAS BUSINESS AS USUAL FOR
C
ARLO
V
ICENTI
,
AND AS USUAL HIS
business was dirty. A thoroughly dirty game. His Knightsbridge penthouse flat was the venue; two of his boys' were bit-part players; the star performer was one of Vicenti's girls, caught once too often taking too much of the ante. She had a lesson to learn, as all of them did at least once in their short working lives, and Vicenti was just the one to teach her.

Now she was held down in a straight-backed dining chair, Fatso Facello on one side and Toni Murelli on the other. They had torn her dress down the front and jerked up her brassiere, so that her normally proud breasts were forced down a little beneath the black material of the bra and made to bulge. Vicenti considered all women cows to be milked dry; and now, the way this little tramp's udders flopped there—swollen and bruised by the rough handling of his thugs, who'd taken turns with her on the thick pile carpet for a warmup—they only served to affirm his conviction.

“Mary,” said Vicenti almost genially, waving his thin cigar in the air in an expansive gesture as he drew up a second chair in front of her and hung his arms lazily over its back, “you have given me problems. Things to think about. Now this I don't like. Smooth operations I like. Girls doing as they're told I like. Whores making money and taking their cut, I like. But taking my cut, too—or not even telling me there's a cut to take—this I
really
do not like!” His voice had hardened. “Not one little bit do I like it…” He reached out, caught up her bra in one tight fist and wrenched it from her. Its elastic had left a horizontal groove in the flesh of her breasts two inches above her small nipples, just over the rim of her large, prominent areolas.

Scared to death, the girl panted. She was blonde, young—no more than twenty, twenty-one years old—and the perspiration of panic and terror gleamed on her face. She would normally be pretty, but now her eyes were bright darting pinpoints in the bloodless face of a trapped animal. Vicenti thought: why is it that when they're scared they always look so ugly?

Finally she gabbled out: “They were just a few spare tricks, Mr. Vicenti, honest! And in my own time…”

He gave a short, harshly barking laugh, which was echoed by amused grunts from the thugs holding her down. “Your own time? Hey—your time's my time, little woman. Didn't anyone ever tell you anything? And my time you've been wasting.”

“But I didn't—”

“But you
did
!” He leaned forward, tilting his chair. “Now listen and I'll tell you how it's going to be. You've maybe been working too hard and got kind of confused, forgot your loyalties. You know? So…see, I'm a nice guy really. What I'll do is this: I'll give you a couple of weeks off. A holiday. No work. Of course that also means no money, but you'll get by on what you got stashed. And just to make sure you don't work—” he drew deeply on his cigar, blew the white crust of ash from its glowing tip, reached it towards her breasts.

“No, Mr. Vicenti, no! Please don't mark me! Please!” She cowered down, then tried to surge upright. Facello and Murelli grunted as they tightened their grip, holding her rigidly immobile.

“See,” Vicenti said again, almost conversationally, “there's not too many guys will suck on scabby tits. You know, they get to wondering how they got that way. They think, you know, maybe she has a bad case, eh?” He reached out his free hand, pinched her left nipple until it stuck out between his thumb and forefinger, brought the hot tip of the cigar closer.

What happened then was too fast and too fantastic for Vicenti, Facello or Murelli to follow. The girl, half-fainting, her eyes shut in a face death-white and quaking, didn't even see it.

Vicenti seemed suddenly to squash down into himself, as if someone had placed a massive unseen weight upon his shoulders. He crashed through the debris of his splintering chair and slammed against the floor. He didn't cry out, had no air left in him for that; and even as his soldiers let go the girl and went to help him he was lifted up away from them and hurled against the wall. Fortunately for him the wall was of soft-board on thin timbers, more a fancy partition than a true wall, with tiny shelves for expensive knick-knacks and odds-and-ends. Fortunately because it gave beneath his weight, caving in on him as he went through it. Then—

—For a moment it was as if a howling wind filled the room. Curtains flapped angrily and magazines were scattered in the rush of frenzied air; pictures rocked crazily where they hung on the walls; doors and windows slammed and small ornaments fell from shelves. In all it lasted no longer than three or four seconds. Then the winds were gone, and in their place…silence!

Vicenti lay groaning, barely conscious, half-in, half-out of the wall's debris. His soldiers crept towards him, eyes wide, mouths agape, unable to take it in.

The girl, seeing her chances, bunched up the tatters of her dress in front of her chest and fled the room. Facello and Murelli may have heard her go but they made no move to stop her.

“Boss—?” Murelli croaked, shocked almost dumb where he kneeled beside his hoodlum master.

“Get me…
uh
!…a doctor,” Vicenti told him. “And…later…you can pick up those…
uh
!…sons of bitches, the Black brothers. Jesus, I want to see…
uh
!…those bastards! They were supposed to…
uh
!…kill the guy, not him kill me!”

“Guy?” Murelli turned bewildered eyes upon the gaping Facello and shrugged questioningly. Obviously Vicenti had banged his head. He wasn't making much sense. “What guy, Boss?”

Vicenti coughed and tried to lie still. He didn't know which part of him hurt the most. “What guy?” he managed to reply. “You have to be kidding! Are you…
uh
!…blind, you two? Didn't you even…
uh
!…see him?”

“Who, Boss, who?” Facello kneeled beside Murelli and stuck his fat, scarred pig's face close. “Who do you mean, eh?”

“
Uh
!…Garrison, that's who! You two…
uh
!…you didn't even
see
him? Idiots! I don't know…
uh
!…how he got in here or what he…
uh
!…hit me with. But—oh, God! Get me a fucking doctor, will you?—but it was…
uh
!…him OK. Yeah.”