To Rescue Tanelorn (26 page)

He leaned over and got a grip on a handrail, hauling himself aboard the hoverlaunch. He took out his needle gun and held it in his gloved right hand.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Cornelius,” said Miss Brunner, her legs astraddle, her hair blowing back from her head.

Jerry walked forward as the hoverlaunch knocked itself against the cliff. Behind him a mercenary jumped to the deck of his boat and made it fast.

Another mercenary—darkly tanned, with oiled, wavy hair—came forward holding a suction mine intended to destroy the door. The man steadied himself and bent to attach it to the spot Jerry indicated. They backed up the deck as the mine exploded, bits of wreckage pattering down.

The door was open.

Jerry led the way forward, put his foot on the handrail, and pushed himself into the opening. He began to walk down the short passage.

The main force of mercenaries, dressed in the lightweight khaki they were never without, followed him with their machine-guns ready. Behind them, not so swiftly, stepped Mr. Smiles, Miss Brunner and Dimitri, Mr. Crookshank, and Mr. Powys. They all carried their big machine pistols awkwardly.

An explosion rocked the cliff. They looked back as fire spread over the water.

“Let’s hope they don’t spend too much time on the boats,” Mr. Smiles said, speaking adenoidally because his nostrils were stuffed with the filters that Jerry had issued to them all.

Jerry reached the inner room and pointed at two places on the walls. The leading mercenary raised his gun and shot out the two cameras. From the control chamber above, the lights were switched off by way of retaliation.

“Frank’s found this entrance, anyway,” Jerry said. It was really only what he’d expected.

The mercenaries now unhooked heavy helmets from their belts and fitted them on their heads. The helmets were equipped with miners’ lamps. One mercenary had a long coil of nylon rope over his shoulder.

“Perhaps the lift’s still working?” Mr. Powys suggested as Jerry set foot on the ladder.

“Probably.” Jerry began to climb. “But we’d look great if they switched the power off when we were halfway up.”

They all started to climb. Miss Brunner went last. As she put her foot on the first rung, she said thoughtfully, “Silly. They forgot to electrify the ladder.”

Jerry heard some sounds above. He looked up as a light went on in the shaft, making him blink. A hard-faced German was looking down at him, sighting along his automatic rifle.

Jerry snapped up his needle gun and shot the German full of steel. He paused, arm curled around the ladder, to repressure the gun, shouting, “Look out!” as the guard rolled off the edge and fell down the shaft.

As the guard’s body thumped to the bottom, Jerry reached the top, his needle gun ready, but no-one was there. Frank had spared only one guard here, being sure that the maze would serve him best.

Everyone else scrambled up, and they all stood at the entrance to the maze while the soldier with the rope paid it out to them. They roped up.

Knotting her bit of the rope around her waist, Miss Brunner looked uncomfortable.

“I don’t like this sort of thing,” she said.

Jerry ignored her, leading them into the maze.

“Keep your mouths tightly shut,” he reminded them. “And whatever happens, keep your attention on following me.”

Their helmet lights lit the way as Jerry walked cautiously ahead, pointing out television cameras to the mercenaries, who shot them as they passed.

Then the first wave of gas hissed into the passageways. It was LSD gas, refined by old Cornelius. The nose filters, sophisticated by his son, could cope with it if they got through it fast enough. Old Cornelius had invented or modified all the hallucinatory protective devices in the house. Frank had added the guns and guards.

Hallucinogenic gases had been old Cornelius’s speciality, though an offshoot had been his hallucinomats such as the rooftop stroboscopic towers.

Old Cornelius had exhausted and killed himself searching for the ultimate hallucinogenic device (“total dissociation in under one second” had been his aim, his war-cry), just as his son Frank was destroying himself fairly slowly by looking for the ultimate kick in the veins.

Someone began to giggle, and Jerry looked back.

It was Mr. Powys.

Mr. Powys had his arms high and was shaking all over, just as if someone were tickling his armpits. Every so often he would stretch out his arms in front of him and make pushing motions at wisps of gas.

Then he began to skip about.

Mouths thin and firm now that they had seen the example of Mr. Powys, Mr. Smiles and Mr. Crookshank stepped in, striving to hold him still.

Jerry signed for the expedition to stop, unhooked the rope from his belt, and went back to hit Mr. Powys on the back of the neck with his pistol barrel.

Mr. Powys relaxed, and Mr. Smiles and Mr. Crookshank hefted him up between them.

In silence they walked on through the faintly yellowish gas that clouded the air of the maze. Those who had absorbed a little of it thought they saw shapes in the writhing stuff: malevolent faces, grotesque figures, beautiful designs. Everyone was sweating, particularly Mr. Smiles and Mr. Crookshank, who carried Mr. Powys who would soon have breathed enough LSD to kill him.

At a junction Jerry hesitated, his judgment slightly impaired. Then he was off again, taking the gang down the tunnel that branched off to the right.

They moved on, the silence sometimes interrupted by the sound of a rifle shooting out a camera.

It was a little ironic, he thought, that his father should have become so obsessed with the problem of increasing incidence of neurotic disorders in the world that he himself had gone round the bend towards the end.

Now Jerry rounded the last bend and the door of the control chamber was ahead of him. He was quite surprised that so far there had been only two casualties and only one of those actually dead.

About fifteen yards before they got to the door Jerry gave a signal, and a bazooka was passed down the line to him. Leaving Jerry and his loader, the remainder of the party retreated down the passage a short way and stood in a disorderly knot waiting.

Jerry got the bazooka comfortably onto his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The rocket bomb whooshed straight through the door and exploded in the control room itself.

A booted foot came sailing out and hit Jerry in the face. He kicked it to one side, his mouth still tightly shut, and waved the others on.

The explosion had wrecked the control panel, but the opposite door was still intact. Since it would open only to the thermal code of someone it knew, they could either blast through into the library or wait for someone to blast through to them. Jerry knew that armed men would definitely be waiting in the library.

The other members of the expedition were unhooking their ropes and dropping them to the floor. It was unlikely they would be leaving by the same route, and therefore they wouldn’t need the ropes again. Jerry pondered the problem as Miss Brunner squeezed into the room and studied the wreckage of the panel.

Her big eyes looked up at him quizzically. “A nice little board; and this is only a minor control panel?”

“Yes. There’s a large roomful in the cellars—the main console. That’s got to be our objective, as I told you.”

“You did. What now?”

Jerry smoothed the hair at the side of his face. “There’s an alternative to waiting for them. We could try the bazooka. But there’s another door behind this one, and I doubt if a rocket would go through them both. If it didn’t, we’d get the worst of the explosion. They must be waiting there—probably with a grenade thrower or a big Bren or something. It’s stalemate for the moment.”

“You should have anticipated this.” Miss Brunner frowned.

“I know.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t think of it,” Jerry said with a sigh.

“Someone else should have.” She turned to look accusingly at the others.

Dimitri was kneeling beside Mr. Powys, trying to revive him.

“Not for Mr. Powys,” said Mr. Crookshank, unable to restrain a slight smile. “The LSD always gets you in the end, eh?”

“You, too,” he said. “Looks as if poor old Mr. Powys has had it.”

“I thought it had been too easy,” said Mr. Smiles.

“I’ve got it.” Jerry looked up. Over the door was a metal panel, secured by wing nuts. He pointed to it. “Air conditioning. A grenade thrower, a single neurade and a good eye should do the trick if the grille at the other end isn’t closed.”

He put his hand on the arm of a big South African. “You’ll do. I’ll stand on your shoulders. Hang on to my legs when the recoil comes. Who’s got a grenade attachment?”

One of the Belgians handed him the attachment. He fitted it to the automatic rifle and detached the ammunition clip. The Belgian handed him a different clip. He fitted this to the rifle, too. Then he took a neurade out of his pocket and popped it into the thrower’s basket.

“Someone give me a hand up,” he said. One of the British mercenaries helped him climb onto the South African’s broad shoulders. He pushed back the metal panel and began to bash in the wire grille with the gun butt. He could see down the pipe to where the lights of the library shone. He heard muted voices.

Shoving the rifle into the pipe, he put it to his shoulder. The space between the fan blades was just big enough. Now if the neurade wasn’t deflected by the grille at the other end, which wasn’t likely, they’d have a chance of getting the guards there in silence and have time to blast open the doors with small charges of explosive before anyone realized that the detachment in the library was out of action.

He squeezed the trigger. The neurade shot down the pipe, was missed by the fan blades, and burst through the grille.

He smiled as voices at the other end shouted in surprise. He heard dull thumps and knew that the neurade had exploded. Then he started to lose his footing on the South African; half-jumped, half-fell to the ground; and handed the Belgian’s gun back to him.

“Okay, let’s get these doors open. Hurry. And keep your mouths closed again.”

The charges burst both locks, and they were through. On the floor of the library beside an overturned machine-gun three Germans jerked limply, mouths in rictus grins, eyes full of tears, muscles and limbs contorted as the gas worked on their nerves. It seemed a mercy to bayonet them; so they did.

They tumbled out of the library and into the ground-floor hall as the ceiling suddenly rose and the walls widened out, light glaring like magnesium, blinding them for a moment. Jerry fished goggles from his pocket and put them on, noticing that the others were doing the same.

They could now see shapes flickering around them, like a colour-film negative. Traceries of deep red and luminous blue veined the walls.

Then the lights went out and they were in pitch blackness.

One wall became transparent all at once. Behind it a huge black-and-white disc began to whirl, and a rhythmic boom swam up the decibel scale, almost to pain level. It seemed that the enlarged room swayed like a ship as they staggered after Jerry, who was none too steady on his pins himself, heading straight for the disc.

Jerry grabbed a gun from one of the dazed, mesmerized mercenaries, switched it to full automatic, and fired an entire magazine into the wall. Plastic cracked, but the disc continued to whirl. As he turned to take another gun, Jerry saw that all of them were now transfixed by the disc.

Another burst and the plastic shattered. The bullets struck the disc, and it began to slow down.

Behind them the far wall slid upwards, and half a dozen of Frank’s guards stood there.

Jerry ignored them as he kicked a larger hole in the wall and smashed at the big disc with his gun butt until it crumpled.

“Throw down your arms!” ordered the chief guard.

Jerry flung himself through the hole. Aiming between Miss Brunner and Dimitri, who were beginning to blink back into wakefulness, he killed the chief guard.

The shot seemed to be enough to bring the others round quickly. Almost before Jerry knew it Miss Brunner had jumped through the hole, her high heels catching him on his buttocks.

Firing broke out generally, but Mr. Smiles, Dimitri and Mr. Crookshank all got through safely, although several of the mercenaries, including the big South African, died.

They fought back until they had killed all Frank’s guards. It was fairly easy from their cover.

They were in a small room, now bathed in a soft red light, a sound like the swish of the sea in their ears.

Something dropped from the ceiling and bounced on the floor until its sides opened up.

“Nerve bomb!” Jerry yelled. “Cover your mouths!”

He knew there was an exit somewhere to the right of the smashed disc. He edged in that direction and found it, using his gun to prise it open. If they didn’t get out shortly, their nose filters wouldn’t help them.

He went through the doorway, and they followed him.

The next room was yellow, full of soothing murmurs. A remote-control camera panned around close to the ceiling. One of the mercenaries shot it. A normal door, unlocked, opened onto a flight of stairs leading upward.

There wasn’t another door. They ascended the stairs. At the top three men waited for them.

“Frank’s spreading his guards thin,” said Jerry.

Their first burst missed him but shot the head of one of the Belgians to bits. Feeling panicky, Jerry hugged the wall, raising his needle gun and shooting a guard in the throat.

Behind him the leading mercenaries opened up. One guard fell at once, blood spurting from his stomach. The second fired down the stairwell and got two more mercenaries, including one of the Britons.

Jerry, rapidly repressuring his gun, shot him, too.

On the first-floor landing everything was silent, and Jerry relaxed his pursed lips. The mercenaries, with the civilians behind them, moved up onto the landing and looked at him questioningly.

“My brother’s almost certainly in the main control room,” Jerry said. “That’s two floors down now, and there’ll be extra guards turning up at any moment.” Jerry pointed at a television camera near the ceiling. “Don’t shoot it. He isn’t using it at the moment for some reason, and if we put it out he’ll know we’re here.”