Psychomech (35 page)

In his bedroom Wyatt set the alarm for three hours, laid back his head upon his pillow and was instantly asleep. His sleep was exhausted, dreamless.

Not so Garrison’s…

Garrison kicked the machine where it lay buried in hot, white desert sands and cursed. He did not really have the strength for cursing, but did it anyway, tiredly and automatically—and yet with the informed and vivid vocabulary of all of his Sergeant-majors rolled into one. Not that he remembered where he had learned these words, only that they seemed very appropriate.

Then, when his throat was too raw to go on cursing, he crept into Psychomech’s shade and lay there panting for air. He had known days as hot as this before (where and when he couldn’t have said), but then there had always been a bar close at hand where he could step out of the sun and order a cool, clean glass of Keo, or an icy can of Coca-Cola. He frowned, concentrated… Cyprus?

It seemed for a moment that he heard the wash of languid waves and he got to his hands and knees and peered out from the Machine’s shadow into the blistering, heat-hazed furnace of the desert. But… no blue Mediterranean out there. Just hot, white, dazzling sands. And mirages that hovered on the trembling far horizon.

Keo, Coca-Cola, bar, Cyprus, Mediterranean. Meaningless concepts all, and yet delicious—and agonizing—in his pseudo-memory.

Garrison was in trouble and he knew it. There was no moisture in him, no power in the Machine, no relief from the burning heat which must soon dry him down to dust and bones. He stared again at the distant mirages, frowned and narrowed his eyes.

One of the mirages seemed clearer than the rest. It was a face. The face of the man-God Schroeder.

Staring at that face in a sort of delirium, Garrison watched it expand and come speeding through the shimmering blue sky to hover over the sand, huge and seemingly omnipotent, close to where he lay beside the Machine.’ Water,’ he croaked. ‘Give me water, Thomas

ANYTHING, RICHARD. ONLY LET ME IN, AND I WILL GIVE YOU ANYTHING.

‘
Mexican stand-off,’ croaked Garrison, wondering how he knew the meaning of these strange words. ‘If I don’t drink I die—and you stay dead. No chance for you then, Thomas.’

AND IF YOU DO DRINK?

‘
A chance for you. At least a chance.’

BUT YOU WILL NOT WILLINGLY ACCEPT ME?

Garrison shook his head, sending dry white sand flying. ‘No.’

AND OUR PACT?

‘
Pact, pact, pact!’ Garrison snarled, his mouth an agony where skin peeled from puffed, cracked lips. ‘This is my body, my mind!’

Schroeder’s face pursed its lips. His disembodied head nodded. Sadly he said: SO WE HAVE COME TO THIS. AND WHAT OF THE MACHINE? IS THERE NO HELP FOR YOU THERE?

‘
The beast is dead.’

NO, NOT DEAD, Schroeder denied. CRIPPLED. IT MAY NO LONGER FEED YOU, NO LONGER SLAKE YOUR THIRST. BUT… WHAT OF YOUR OWN SKILLS? EVEN A DELIRIOUS MIND MAY STILL PERFORM STRANGE AND WONDERFUL DEEDS, RICHARD. HAVE YOU FORGOTTEN?

‘
ESP?’ the letters—the word—fell from Garrison’s crumbling lips like a piece of lead. But… for a single instant he knew its meaning. He strove to recall it. ESP.

He remembered.

SEEK AND FIND, said Schroeder’s face, receding into blurred and shimmering distances. SEEK AND FIND, AND USE YOUR POWERS. LIVE, RICHARD, THAT WE BOTH MAY LIVE!

…
Seek and find… Remote viewing… Telekinesis… Teleportation…

Garrison stared again at the horizon. He stared beyond it—with his mind, not his eyes. And beyond the shimmering horizon was another that did not shimmer. And it too had mirages. Or were they…?

Garrison’s mouth (which he had thought utterly dry) suddenly watered. One of his mind-images was the picture of the fridge. He looked inside. There was milk, food.

Telekinesis… Teleportation… Jo move something with the mind alone. To remove something from one place to another, instantaneously, without visible motion between…

Downstairs in the kitchen the catch on the door of Wyatt’s fridge clicked open and the door swung silently wide. No one was there in the kitchen, no hand touched the door. The level of the milk in one of the three pint bottles suddenly decreased, falling as if rapidly sucked out through a straw; and yet no straw was there. The bottle emptied, its silver top wrinkling as it was sucked down into an impossible vacuum.

Chicken sandwiches on a plate disappeared—snatched into hyperspace—vanished bit by bit. Or bite by bite? No,for the transition was immediate and direct: the food went straight from the fridge to Garrison’s stomach. It did not touch his lips.

Upstairs in his bedroom, Wyatt slept on; while, in the room of the machine, Garrison’s weight suddenly increased. At the same time his temperature began to fall, from a dangerous height to a mere degree or so above his norm; and his respiration slowed from an erratic panting to a well-paced, regular rhythm. The frown of concentration slowly faded from his glistening features and he sighed.

Then, after only a few moments, his breathing grew laboured again and the look of concentration returned to his face—concentration and determination—as his tightly balled fists began to tremble as in fever. Until, in a little while, the fear-stimulation controls suddenly turned themselves down.

After that, he slept…

3.00A.M.

Wyatt frenziedly worked with a screwdriver, removing the facia from Psychomech’s control panel, and then the panel itself. His aspect was feverish, hag-ridden.

Shocked from sleep by the clamour of his alarms, he had stumbled into the room of the machine only to have his senses stunned by what he found there. Then, when he was more fully awake and able to accept what he saw, he had flown into a rage. As a psychiatrist, however, he had known his own symptoms and had controlled them up to a point. That is to say that he knew he was hysterical, and that in his hysteria he might well wreck Psychomech totally and beyond repair—which would of course signal the end of everything. That was not the way.

So, still bubbling with fury—a controlled fury now—he worried loose the cover of the control panel and pried within. Five minutes sufficed to satisfy him that there was no malfunction. Which in turn meant—

Someone, some unknown but very real and physical one, had somehow been in here and turned down the fear-stimulation controls, releasing Garrison from his nightmares. Someone was here, in this very house, right now. It was crazy, ridiculous, but it was the only solution.

Not only had the control panel been interfered with but Garrison had been fed. Not by Psychomech, no, for the machine’s feeding was really recycling and more on the psychical than the physical side. How had he been fed?—that was anybody’s guess. It should be quite impossible. There were no scraps of food in his mouth, no spilled liquids, and he must certainly have choked if it were attempted.

And yet… it
had been
attempted! Most certainly. And it had succeeded. Garrison’s weight was up.

Which meant that there
must
be someone else in the house.

But who?

Koenig? The German manservant seemed most eligible, Wyatt had to admit. He could have gone to Germany, turned around and flown straight back. He could be here right now, looking after his master’s interests as always. But if he was here, and if he knew what was going on, why didn’t he just come right on out of the woodwork, free Garrison and make an accusation?

Or could it be Terri herself, half-crazy with guilt, perhaps even schizoid? Wyatt remembered thinking to himself that she was taking all of this very well. Perhaps this was her get-out, her escape route from actions she could neither control nor tolerate. No, no—a fool idea. He cursed himself for his mind’s illogical processing of data. How could it possibly be Terri? She had been right here with him when things started to go wrong. And so on, chasing his thoughts in a circle—but only for a few minutes, until common-sense took over.

One sure way to check for outside interference would be,quite simply, to search the house from top to bottom. And after that, if he found nothing and no one—which he suspected would be the case, for if there were a human adversary at work here he must be extremely clever and unlikely to let himself be discovered—then Wyatt must simply deny him access to the room of the machine, which he could do easily enough.

He searched everywhere. Up and downstairs, the cellar, the attic, all the larger cupboards. Not only was there no one there, there were no signs that anyone had been there…

Just after 4.00 A.M. Wyatt returned to the machine room, gave Garrison an opiate booster, turned up fear-stimulation to the full and jammed the controls firmly in that position. Then, leaving the room, he padlocked the door and pocketed the keys.

And that
, he told himself,
is that! Not even Harry Houdini himself could get out of that one—or anyone else in!

He went downstairs. Terri would be here in a little over four hours. By then everything must be under control; Garrison dead, all records completely up to date, and Wyatt’s own nerves steady once more. He had work to do. But first a wash and a shave, then coffee. Lots of strong, black coffee.

By 5.15 A.M. he was drinking coffee in his study. He had not noticed the missing milk or sandwiches.

At 6.00 A.M. he felt an almost irresistible urge to check Garrison’s condition, but somehow managed to fight it off. Psychomech would do the job, he was sure. And at 6.30, after a hot shower, he allowed himself to fall asleep for two hours, only waking up at Tern’s insistent ringing at the doorbell.

But between times, in the room of the machine…

Things had started to go wrong some time ago. Garrison had known it, had instinctively sensed it, that draining feeling which came whenever the Machine suffered a power loss; and he had been powerless to do anything about it. It seemed that Psychomech could only help him—and conversely that he could only help the Machine—in a real crisis.

The desert had been just such a crisis; an episode which, like the others before it, had now all but passed into the limbo of lost memories. Now Garrison could only remember the food and drink (though not the actual sensation of eating and drinking), and something of the feeling of well-being which had come afterwards. Also, something of Psychomech’s feeding on him: that is to say, he knew that the Machine had somehow drawn on his strength, or that he had applied his strength so as to ‘make repairs’ in the Machine.

After that he had climbed aboard the revitalized Machine to ride it out of the desert into a green and beautiful valley, and for some little time—though time as a real concept did not have a great deal of meaning here—he had followed a tinkling stream to where it cut a cleft through a range of high, domed hills. And as the machine had followed the stream through the great and rambling V of the deep cleft, so Garrison had once more slept upon its broad back.

And coming awake when once more the sun had fallen upon him, he had seen that they were through the pass and that the river’s bed was dry and cracked in places, and that the surrounding land was weathered into strange formations here, and the Machine moved more slowly under heavy, dark and oppressive skies.

Heavy skies, yes. They seemed to weigh on him with the weight of the Universe. They seemed almost to shut him in…

As a boy he had been shut in. He remembered it now, remembered how it frightened him. The cupboard under the stairs, the spiders which he had known inhabited that place, the unknown or forgotten sin (against what or whom he could not say) which had prompted his punishment. Oh, yes, he >remembered it. The sin itself might be forgotten, but the darkness, the stifling closeness, the Scuttlers in the Shadows—these things he remembered…

Not before that time and never since, until now, had Garrison suffered claustrophobia.

Claustrophobia?

The word came and went—

—And came back.

The skies pressed down. The leaden horizon of hills pressed in. Clouds boiled up from nowhere, shutting out the sun. And the Machine’s pace grew slower and slower along that cracked and crumbling river bed.

Abruptly, with shocking suddenness, Garrison’s horizons narrowed down. The sky seemed to fall in on him, becoming an opaque, writhing, near-solid ceiling of compressed and leaden cloud only feet above his head. The river bed jumped upward, so that the Machine’s belly slid for a moment through caked mud, dust and pebbles before all motion ceased. The banks of the river disappeared, lost behind dull walls of lead that went up to the contorted ceiling and down to the dried-out bed of the river. It was the same to front and rear.

Garrison climbed to his knees on the back of the Machine, thrust up a hand to touch the rapidly solidifying cloud-ceiling

—and met with resistance. He could not force his fist through. Even as he tried again the ceiling became solid, turned to lead. Beneath the Machine the dry river bed flattened itself out, turned from a muddy brown colour to a dull silver, then to lead. Garrison was encased in a cube of lead, imprisoned in a huge lead coffin.

Claustrophobia.

A nightmare he never would have acknowledged in the real, waking world. But here in his own subconscious…?

And worse by far, the cube was contracting, its walls, ceiling and floor closing in on him even as the horror of his situation gripped him in a tight fist of fear. He stared wildly all about in the dull glow which yet emanated from

Psychomech’s mechanical guts. No way out.

The ceiling touched his head and pressed upon it, causing him to cringe down and goose-flesh to break out all over his body. Galvanized into action, he slid from the Machine’s back, stood tremblingly beside it in the deepening gloom.

LET ME IN, RICHARD, came the man-God’s voice from somewhere outside, booming hollowly in the cube’s crushing confines. TOGETHER WE CAN BREAK OUT. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY.

And it seemed to Garrison that maybe the man-God Schroeder was right.

For a moment he succumbed to his panic, his fear. He weakened, opened his mouth… but the moment was past. Then—