Special Deliverance (14 page)

“There’s no way of knowing,” said Jurgens, “until you step through the door. Then it could be too late.”

“How right,” said the Brigadier. “But no one is going to try.”

He held out a hand to Mary, and she handed him the wrench.

“Hold the light on me,” he said, “so I can see what I’m doing.”

H
E ESCAPED,“ SAID THE Brigadier. ”Lansing, when he talked with you last night did he mention escape?”

“No, I’m sure he didn’t, but apparently he was hopeless. He said this place was Hell and he meant that it was Hell, the actual biblical Hell. He wasn’t simply swearing.”

“He was a weak man,” said the Brigadier. “He took the coward’s way out. He was the first of us to go.”

“You sound,” said Sandra, still tearful, “as if you expect others of us to go.”

“There are always casualties,” said the Brigadier. “One must count on casualties. Of course, you do your best to hold them down to an acceptable percentage.”

Lansing grimaced. “If you think of this as humor, let me say that it’s repugnant humor. You’ll get no laughs from us.”

“And now you’re going to tell us,” Mary said, “that we must carry on. Even with the Parson gone, we must carry on.”

“Of course we must,” said the Brigadier. “It’s our only chance. If we don’t find something here—”

“If we find something here, you’ll think it is a trap,” said Sandra. “You’ll be scared to use it. We can’t use the doors because they may be traps.”

“I’m sure they are,” said the Brigadier. “I don’t want to catch any of you trying to find out.”

“I looked through the peephole,” said Jurgens, “and there was no sign of him.”

“What did you expect to see?” asked the Brigadier. “Him standing there, thumbing his nose at us? As soon as he stepped through the door, he lit a shuck. He got out as fast as he could manage. He didn’t want to take a chance.”

“Maybe it was for the best,” said Mary. “He may be happy there. I remember his face when he first looked through the peephole. He looked happy, the only time I ever saw him happy. There was something in that world that appealed to him. To all of us, perhaps, but especially to him.”

“I remember,” said Lansing. “He was happy. It was the first time I ever saw him without the corners of his mouth pulled down.”

“So what do the two of you want us to do?” asked the Brigadier. “Line up in front of that door and all go marching through?”

“No,” said Mary. “It wouldn’t be right for us. But it was right for the Parson. It was the one way out for him. I hope that he is happy.”

“Happiness should not be our sole goal,” said the Brigadier.

“Nor is a death wish,” said Mary, “and that is what you have. I’m convinced this precious city of yours will kill us one by one. Edward and I are not about to stay and have that happen to us. Come morning, we are leaving.”

Lansing looked across the fire at her and for a moment felt the impulse to walk around the circle and take her in his arms. He did not do so; instead he stayed sitting where he was.

“The party can’t split up,” said the Brigadier, in a desperate tone. “The only strength we have lies in our staying together. You are giving way to panic.”

Sandra screamed, “It is all my fault! If I’d stayed and watched him.”

“It makes no matter,” said Jurgens, trying to comfort her. “He would have waited for his chance. If not today, then another day. He would not have rested until he tried that other world.”

“I think that’s right,” said Lansing. “He was a desperate man, at the end of his tether. I never realized how far gone he was until we talked last night. I honestly don’t think any of us can blame ourselves for what took place.”

“Then what about this leaving business?” asked the Brigadier. “How about it, Lansing?”

“It is my judgment that all of us should get out of here,” said Lansing. “There is something sinister about the city. Certainly you have sensed it. It’s dead, but even dead, there is something watching us. Watching all the time. Every move we make. You can forget it for a time and then you feel the watching once again, between your shoulder blades.”

“And if we stay, if the rest of us stay?”

“Then you stay alone. I’m leaving and Mary’s going with me.” Thinking as he said it that not until Mary had spoken earlier had he known they would be leaving. How had she known? he wondered. What unknown, unconscious communication lay between them?

“A few more days,” pleaded the Brigadier. “A few more days. That is all I’ll ask. If nothing turns up in the next few days, then all of us will leave.”

No one answered.

“Three days,” he said. “Only three days…”

“I’m not one to push a man to his limit in a bargain,” Lansing said. “Mary willing, I’ll make a deal with you and give you the benefit. Two days and that is all. There’ll be no extension.”

The Brigadier threw a puzzled look at Mary. “All right,” she said. “Two days.” Outside, night had fallen. Later the moon would rise, but now, with the sun gone, full night had fallen on the city.

Jurgens rose awkwardly. “I’ll get supper started.”

“No, let me,” Sandra said. “It helps if I keep busy.” From far off came a terrible crying. They stiffened where they were, sitting starkly, listening. Again, as had been the case the night before, on a hilltop above the city a lonely creature was sobbing out its anguish.

L
ATE IN THE AFTERNOON of the second day, Mary and Lansing made the discovery.

Between two buildings, at the end of a narrow alley, they saw the gaping hole. Lansing turned the beam of his flashlight into the darkness. The beam revealed a narrow flight of stairs, a more substantial flight than might have been expected leading from an alley.

“You stay here,” he said. “I’ll go down and look. It’ll probably turn out nothing.”

“No,” she said, “I’m going with you. I don’t want to be left alone.”

Carefully he lowered himself into the opening and gingerly descended the steep flight. Behind him clicks and scuffings told him that Mary was very close behind. There was more than one flight of stairs. He came to a landing and a quarter of the way around it another flight plunged down. It was not until he had taken the first few steps down the second flight that he heard the muttering. When he stopped dead in his tracks to listen, Mary bumped into him.

The muttering was soft. Nor was it quite a mutter, which was what he first had thought it was. Rather a throaty singing, as if someone were singing softly to himself. Masculine, not feminine, singing.

“Someone’s singing,” Mary whispered.

“We’ll have to go and see,” he said. He didn’t want to go on. If he had done what he wanted, he would have turned about and fled. For while the singing (if it was singing) sounded human, there still was about the whole experience an eerie alienness that set his teeth on edge.

The second flight ended on yet another landing and as he went down the third flight, the singing gained some strength, while downward and ahead of him he saw softly glowing lights—cat eyes staring at him out of darkness. Reaching the foot of the stairs, he moved out a few steps on a metal walkway and Mary came to stand beside him.

“Machinery,” she said. “Or a machine.”

“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “An installation of some sort.”

“And operating,” she said. “Do you realize this is the first live thing we’ve found.”

The machinery, Lansing saw, was not massive. Not overpowering. The many glowing eyes scattered all through it furnished enough light so that the machinery could be seen—guessed rather than seen, he told himself, for the light from the eyes was faint. The whole assembly was a spindly, spidery mass. It seemed to have no moving parts. And it was singing to itself.

When he trained his light ahead, he saw that the metal walkway on which they stood ran straight ahead, forming a narrow path between two conglomerations of machinery. The path ran a long way, well beyond the strength of the flashlight’s beam, and as far as he could see, the spindly forms flanked it on either side.

Walking slowly and carefully, he started down the walkway, with Mary close beside him. When they reached the beginning of the machinery they halted and he trained the light on the nearest segments of the installation.

The machines were not only spindly; they were delicate. The polished metal, if it was metal, gleamed brightly; there was no dust or grease upon it. It didn’t, in fact, look like any machinery he had ever seen. It looked like a piece of metal sculpture that a slap-happy artist had assembled with a pair of pliers, chortling all the while. But, despite the lack of moving parts, despite any indication of actual operation, it seemed to be brimming with a sense of life and purpose. And all the time it sang, crooning to itself.

“It’s strange,” said Mary. “As an engineer, I should have some inkling as to what this could be. But there’s not a single component that I recognize.”

“No notion what it’s doing?”

“None at all,” she said.

“We’ve been calling it machinery.”

“For lack of a better term,” she said.

Lansing found his body unconsciously responding to the rhythm of the song the machines were singing, as if his body, all of his body, was responding to its beat. It seeped into him, formed a background for his life.

It’s taking over, he thought, but the thought came from very far away and did not seem to be a part of him, as if another person might be thinking it. He recognized the danger of being taken over and tried to call out a warning to Mary, but the warning took some little time and before he could cry out, he was another kind of life.

He was light-years tall and each step he took spanned many trillion miles. He loomed in the universe, his body wispy and tenuous, a body that flashed like spangles in the glare of flaring suns that swirled and spun about him. Planets were no more than grating gravel underneath his feet. When a black hole blocked his way, he kicked it to one side. He put out his hand to pluck half a dozen quasars and strung them on a strand of starlight to hang about his neck.

He climbed a hill made of piled-up stars. The hill was high and steep and required a lot of scrabbling to get up it; in the process of climbing he dislodged a number of the stars that made up the hill and, once dislodged, they went clattering down, rolling and bouncing to the bottom of the hill, except that it had no bottom.

He reached the summit and stood upon it, straddle-legged to hold himself secure, and all the universe lay spread out before him, to its farthest edge. He raised a fist and shook it, bellowing out a challenge to eternity, and the echoes of his shouting came back to him from infinity’s farthest curve.

From where he stood he saw the end of time and space and remembered how once he had wondered what lay beyond the end of time and space. Now he saw and recoiled upon himself. He lost his footing and went tumbling down the hill, and when he reached the bottom (but not the bottom, for there was no bottom), he lay spread-eagled in a drift of interstellar dust and gas that surged all about him and tossed him mercilessly, as if he were in the clutches of an angry sea.

Remembering what he had seen beyond the end of time and space, he groaned. And groaning, he came back to where he was, standing on a metal walkway, flanked by spidery machines that were crooning to themselves.

Mary had him by the arm and was tugging to get him turned around. Stupidly, not too sure as yet of where he was, he went along with the tugging and got turned around. The lighted torch, he saw, was lying on the floor and he stooped to pick it up. He did pick it up, but in doing so almost fell upon his face. Mary tugged at him again. “We can stop now. How are you?”

“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I seem to be confused. I saw the universe—”

“So that is what you saw.”

“You mean that you saw something, too.”

“When I came back,” she said, “you were standing frozen. At first I was afraid to touch you. I thought that you might break into a million pieces.”

“Let’s sit down,” said Lansing. “For a minute, let’s sit down.”

“There’s no place for us to sit.”

“On the floor,” he said. “We can sit on the floor.”

They sat upon the hard surface of the walkway, facing one another.

“So now we know,” she said.

“Know what?” He shook his head as if to clear his mind. The haze was clearing slightly, but he was still muddled.

“Know what the machines are supposed to do. Edward, we can’t tell the Brigadier about this place. He’d go hog-wild.”

“We’ve got to tell him,” Lansing said. “We made a deal with him. We must be fair with him.”

“Once again,” she said, “something we don’t know how to handle. Like the doors.”

He looked back over his shoulder at the spidery machines. He could see them more clearly now. The fuzziness was going.

“You said you saw the universe. What do you mean by that?”

“Mary, Mary, Mary! Will you, please, wait a minute.”

“It hit you hard,” she said.

“I think perhaps it did.”

“I came out of it easy.”

“That’s your strong sense of self-perception.”

“Don’t joke,” she said. “Don’t try to make a joke of it. This is serious.”

“I know that. I’m sorry. You want to know. I’ll try to tell you. I visited the universe. I was tall and big. I had a body of shining starlight, maybe a puff of comet tail. It was like a dream, but not really like a dream. I was there. It was all ridiculous, but I was there. I climbed a hill made up of shoveled-together stars and, standing on top of it, I saw the universe, all of the universe, out to the end of time and space, where time and space pinched out. I saw what lay beyond time/space, and I don’t now remember exactly what I saw. Chaos. Maybe that’s the name for it. A churning nothingness, a raging, angry nothingness. I’d never thought of nothing as a raging anger. That’s what shook me. When I say raging I don’t mean hot. It was cold. Not just cold by temperature, for there was no way to know the temperature. Cold in a deadly, venomous way. Uncaring. Worse than uncaring. Angry against everything that exists or ever existed. Raging to get at anything that is not nothingness and put an end to it.”

She made a sympathetic motion with her hands. “I shouldn’t have asked you. I shouldn’t have insisted. I’m sorry I forced you into telling me. It wasn’t easy for you.”

“I wanted to tell you. I would have told you, but maybe not right yet. But now it’s over with and I feel easier about it. Telling you, I gave some of it away. What they did to me—to us. You said you saw it, too.”

“Not what you saw. Not as devastating. I’m sure the machine did it to us. It takes your mind, your ego, the life force, the personality, and rips it out of you and sends it somewhere else. You said it was like a dream and still it was not a dream. I think it’s actuality, not a dream. A machine would not have a dream concept. If it were possible for someone to go where you went, in all actuality, of course, they’d see what you saw. There were absurdities, of course…”

“I kicked a black hole out of the path. I climbed a starry mountain. Planets crunched like gravel when I stepped on them.”

“Those are the absurdities, Edward. The reaction, rebellion of your mind. A defense mechanism meant to keep you sane. The laughter element. The big guffaw to show you didn’t mind.”

“You mean you think I was really there? That my mind was really there?”

“Look,” she said, “we have to face it. The people who lived in this city were sophisticated scientists, uncanny technicians. They had to be to produce this apparatus and the doors and the Brigadier’s graphics tank. Their minds, their aims, canted in a different direction than yours or mine. They performed chores, sought out answers we’d never think about. Absurd as they may be, the doors are understandable. But what we have here is not understandable. In certain ways, it may be scientific heresy.”

“If you talk that way long enough, you’ll talk me into it.”

“We have to face facts. We’re dealing with a kind of world we do not understand. We’re dealing with what is left of it. God knows what you would have found here at the height of their culture. These may be human concepts. I think they are. They are the kind of heady projects the human race might do. But because of the very fact that they are so far-out human, they may seem more alien to us than something put together by a race on some distant solar system.”

“But their culture failed. Despite all they did or could do, it all came down to nothing. They’re gone and their city’s dead.”

“They might have gone elsewhere. To a world they found.”

“Or they may have overreached themselves. Have you thought of that? They lost their souls—is that what the Parson said?”

“It sounds like him,” said Mary.

“And now yourself. Where did they send you?”

“I caught just a glimpse of it. You must have stayed longer than I did. Just a glimpse was all. Another culture, I think. I really saw no one. I talked with no one. I was like a ghost that no one saw. A shadow that walked in and then went out again. But I sensed the people, the sort of lives they lived, the thoughts they thought. It was beautiful.

“They were godlike. Truly godlike. There is no doubt of that. Stay there long enough, sensing them, seeing how far they stood above you and you would have been reduced to a crawling worm. Gentle gods, I think. Although they were sophisticated. Civilized. Entirely civilized. They have no government. There is no need of one. And no economic sense, no need of economics. It would take a true civilization, the highest concept of civilization, to need no government and no economic system. No money, no buying or selling, no borrowing or loaning, therefore no interest rates, no grubby bankers, no attorneys. There may even have been no such a thing as law.”

“How do you know all that?”

“It soaked into me. All of it was there for one to know. Not to see, of course. To know.”

“Instead of telescopes,” said Lansing. “Telescopes?”

“I was just thinking aloud. Back in my world, and I suppose in yours as well, men use telescopes in an attempt to ferret out the secrets of space. But these people—they had no use of telescopes. Instead of looking out, they went out. They could go out there themselves. I suppose wherever they might wish. Having built the sort of installation that is here, they certainly would have known how to use it and control it, so they could go to specific targets. But now the machines—what else can I call them?”

“Machines is good enough.”

“Now they are running wild. They sent us out at random.”