Psychosphere (26 page)

And as if the storm itself knew Garrison's bizarre thirst, it added its own energies to that awesome, fearsome funeral pyre, sending down bolt after bolt from the madly wheeling clouds, each bolt absorbed at once into the crumbling skeleton thing which was Garrison.

Witless, tingling, himself glowing with the excess energies that filled the air and plucked at the hair of his face and head, Johnnie Fong kneeled with jaws agape and rain streaming from his chin. The very elements seemed crazed now, and the undersides of the clouds were awash with St. Elmo's fire as the bolts continued to rain down. And all of this raw power focussing upon Garrison or what had been Garrison—and his megamind thirsting for more still!

More still—more energy to power the ultimate quest—more physical fuel for the psychic fire.

The megamind reached out, sought, discovered…

More than one hundred miles away at Dounreay the pile went crazy. Rods of uranium which would have lighted entire cities for weeks were consumed in seconds…and nothing to show for it. Throughout the length and breadth of Scotland lights dimmed as the power was drawn off.

A magnificent aurora filled the skies. A shaft of fire split the heavens and lanced down, down, down, to Garrison, removing every last physical vestige of him from the world of men. Removing, too, Johnnie Fong.

But while the physical Garrison was dead the mental Garrison was newborn and borne up to penetrate, to become one with the Psychosphere…

A
S THE LIFT SLOWED TO AN ALMOST IMPERCEPTIBLE HALT
, C
HARON
Gubwa tensed himself. In fact Stone had done him a great favor by ordering him to keep his hypnotic eyes closed. Despite the apparent failure of so many of his plans, still there was the chance that he might yet achieve a final victory. With the Castle destroyed—which by now it surely was, beyond recovery, by plastic explosives and fire bombs which would have turned the entire interior to a raging inferno—Gubwa also would be thought to have perished, if or when the matter was looked into. But there were other places ready and waiting to receive him, and a car in the underground car park to take him to one of them. There would always be men he could buy or bend to his will, and Psychomech would still become a reality.

Moreover, Gubwa knew something that Stone didn't know: namely that one last bomb remained, located at the bottom of the liftshaft, and that its detonation would be triggered when the cage's doors were opened up here. Which was why the albino had ignored Stone's warning not to mind-read, an idle threat at best for Gubwa was a master of covert telepathy. Another telepath might have sensed him, but he had been in Stone's mind for all of five minutes without the slightest fear of detection. And he was still there when the lift cage slowed to a halt and Stone yanked the doors open. With his great arms held rigidly over his head, and with Stone's gun in his back, Gubwa was the first out of the lift—a split second before the bomb went off down below and its blast, channelled up the shaft, shook the cage like a terrier shakes a rat.

With his mind taking off at a tangent, and Vicki Maler in her blanket still balanced on his shoulder, Stone stumbled and went to one knee. Before he could recover, Gubwa's right arm came down at lightning speed and his great gray hand clamped like a vice on the stock of the machine-gun, wrenching it from Stone's grasp.

Demented but triumphant in his madness, the albino laughed as he turned the gun on Stone and ordered him out of the cage.

“It would appear, Mr. Stone,” he said, “that even a god can err. I said you were intelligent—but even an idiot would have killed me when he had the chance!” He made a motion with the gun. “Put her down,” he ordered, indicating an empty space amongst the stiffening bodies of his former soldiers. “Put her there with the rest of these corpses. Then we shall play a little game, you and I. I shall close my eyes and stand quite still, and you shall prepare yourself. Then, when you are ready; you shall attempt to take the gun back from me—or perhaps to take that pistol from your pocket and shoot me.”

“Gubwa, you blackhearted bastard, I—”

“Of course you can't win,” Gubwa cut him off, “because I shall know your move even as you make it. But surely it's worth a try? And to make the game more interesting, we'll limit its duration to fifteen seconds, after which I really must be on my way.”

“In a hurry, eh, Gubwa?” Stone ground the words out.

“Oh yes, indeed! The Psychosphere is astir, Mr. Stone. It prepares to welcome a new Messiah. I feel its excitement, its psychic concentration. It beckons, and I must go.”

He very deliberately closed his eyes and began to count: “One…two…three…four…”

I
N THE MATTERLESS FLUX OF THE PSYCHOSPHERE THREE ENTITIES
conversed
. “Well?”
said Garrison
. “And are you satisfied?”

“I'm not sure,”
Thomas Schroeder answered
. “It is, I suppose, equality of sorts. Not quite what I had in mind.”

“You could hardly be my equal while you were part of me,”
said Garrison
. “And so I have expelled you. Yes, and Willy too. How about you, Willy? Are you satisfied?”

Koenig's answer contained a shrug
. “I think,”
he said
, “therefore I am—I think!”
And he laughed
. “I'll get used to it.”

“But what does one do?”
Schroeder asked
, “when one is unbodied, all-powerful and…immortal?”

“You do what you want to do,”
Garrison answered
. “Do you want to go back to that blob of mud that spawned us? So go, make yourself a body—make yourself mortal! You can do it. You can do almost anything you can imagine.”

“You're right, of course,”
said Schroeder
. “So why don't we?”

“We?”
Garrison chuckled
. “You, maybe, but not me. I can always do that later, if I get bored. But I doubt it.”

“Bored?”
Koenig queried
.

“Let me show you something,”
Garrison answered
.

He showed them
THE ALL—
or rather, he showed them something of it. To show them all of
THE ALL
would take forever
.

“You see?”
he said
. “Unbodied, all-powerful and immortal you may well be, but never omniscient. How can you ever know all of space, which goes inwards and outwards forever? Or all of time, which goes infinitely back and inexorably forward? Look again.”

And they saw a sight whose beauty would be unbearable, blinding, blasting to mortal men. A sight which, in a dream, only Garrison had ever seen before them
.

“That cosmic mote Earth?”
he laughed
. “Oh, no! If there's a place I would be, it's out there. Who would drink the waters of Earth when he can drink the wine of the universe? The ultimate quest, my friends—and the ultimate destiny! Make up your minds, for Suzy and I can't wait.”

“Your battery ran dry once,”
Schroeder cautioned
. “Remember?”

Again Garrison laughed, a ripple in the Psychosphere
. “And who could thirst for energy in a great sea of suns?”

For a millimoment Schroeder was silent
. “Very well,”
he finally conceded
, “let the ayes have it.”

And
“Aye!”
they all three cried in unison
.

Then, soberly:
“One moment,”
said Garrison
.

“First…there are several wrongs to right.”
He let the Psychosphere wash over and through him, making small adjustments in its matterless structure. And, “There,” he finally said
…

“…E
LEVEN
…
TWELVE
…
THIRTEEN
,”
SAID
G
UBWA
,
HIS EYES
tightly shut, his smile a nightmare. Stone was reaching for his pistol, and the albino knew it.

“Oh!” Vicki moaned where she lay, throwing back her blanket as she came awake.

“Fourteen!” cried Gubwa, his eyes popping open as he turned to stare at her, then bugging in his leprous-gray face. His jaw fell open as the girl sat up, young, beautiful, green-eyed—fully alive.

Gubwa's face screwed up in an agony of terror. Someone else was inside his head with him. A terrible someone. “
Garrison!
” he screamed.

The machine-gun turned white hot in his hands, melting even as he dropped it from blistering fingers. Foaming at the mouth, his pink eyes seeming to stand out almost from his head, the albino floated free of the floor. He flew forward towards the steel doors, which opened before him. He passed through them out of sight, his last scream echoing back to Stone and Vicki where they hugged each other in that subterranean room of the dead:

“
G-a-r-r-i-s-o-n!
”

And up the spiralling concrete ramps went Charon Gubwa, doors crashing open at his approach and barriers lifting. Up and out into the night. Up and over the city. Up, up and ever up. His rate of ascent accelerating, his dressing gown leaping into flames along with his hair—only to be extinguished a moment later in airless space, where his friction-cindered shell popped open like a fried grape.

And then, because Garrison had named him for an abhorrence, the Psychosphere simply erased all trace of him.

Several things were erased, changed, rebuilt. For Garrison had been both right and wrong about time. Time is infinite, yes—but nothing is impossible in infinity.

Joseph Maestro and his gangsters were no more, had never been.

Likewise the less savory members of a certain branch of the Secret Service. They had never existed.

Oh, and several other things.

Several millions of things.

And when they were done the Earth became a better place to live.

P
HILLIP AND
V
ICKI
S
TONE CERTAINLY THOUGHT SO
,
THOUGH THEY
could not remember it ever having been different.

She looked out of the window of their Sussex home into the starry night sky and found a name on her lips. “Richard,” she sighed—which was strange because she did not know, had never known, a Richard.

“What?” her wealthy, loving husband looked up from his book. “Did you say something, darling?”

But already she had forgotten. “I…I thought I saw a shooting star,” she answered, feeling foolish.

“Then make a wish!” he smiled.

She stepped to his chair, leaned over and kissed him. “I believe I already have,” she said…

One month later…

James Christopher Craig tossed and turned in his sleep. The weird dream was back, bothering his subconscious mind as always. The dream about a man he had never known—a man called Richard Garrison—and about an impossible, insane machine. A dream overshadowed by a commanding voice, the voice of a man dead now thirty days, whose every vestige had been erased with the sole exception of this one psychic echo. A voice like the voice of some strange, sinister god, demanding that Craig
remember
—and that he build the machine of his dream.

Craig's agitation increased. The dream was not frightening in itself; the source of his torment lay deep, deep down in forgotten recesses of his psyche. It lay in the darkest vaults of his subconscious mind, which should remain forever locked—vaults which now, at the post-hypnotic insistence of a dead man, were slowly but surely re-opening their doors to him.

And at last Craig stood before the final door, the
Sanctum Sanctorum
, the Room of Innermost Secrets. And even as he stood there, so the massive doors swung silently open. Within—

Craig saw a machine.
The
Machine…

He saw it—
and he knew its name!

“Jimmy!” his wife, Marion, shook him awake. “Are you all right? What is it? Are you dreaming again?”

Craig sat up in bed, brushed cold sweat from his brow, trembled as he stared about the shadowy room. The luminous hand of his watch told him it was 2:00
A.M
. The night was a cool, silent, blanket all about the house. And the dream receding, fading, crawling back down and disappearing in deepest caverns of mind.

“You were shouting something,” Marion told him, drawing him back down into the bed beside her. “One word, over and over again.”

“Was I?” he sleepily mumbled, his mouth furry and tasting foul. “What was it? Do you remember?”

She told him what it had sounded like, then snuggled close and hugged him.

He lay in the darkness of their room thinking about it. He thought about it a long time before he finally went back to sleep. A strange word that, and yet it seemed to ring certain bells…

And drifting back into sleep, Jimmy Craig shuddered. Ominous, cracked, discordant bells were ringing in the back of his mind. They tolled a knell of horror and madness.

A strange, strange word.

A word to haunt him forever.

A word to haunt the whole wide world.

Psychomech.