This Fortress World (5 page)

Out of the air coins streamed into being, hurtling showers of metal pieces flung with great force, mysterious missiles aimed at their faces, striking cruel, stunning blows. Before they could throw up their arms for protection, all were bleeding from cuts and one had lost an eye. Cursing defiantly, he stood there, one hand clasped over the bleeding socket until a new shower forced him to seek cover, like the others, behind the kneeling benches.

Starkly, suddenly, I was sane again. Sane and shaking. Seeing that empty socket and the blood and jelly upon his cheek. I was sane and empty, and I longed for the divine madness that would not return.

I tried to think. This couldn't last. Just as the madness couldn't last. Even if I could hold off the four in the Cathedral or even—God pity me!—kill them, sooner or later some of the monks would come to investigate. I couldn't use my weapons against them. The end must come.

One thing I had to make sure of. I had to see that they didn't get the pebble. They wanted it badly. They would search for it endlessly. As long as the pebble was missing, ruthless men could not rest.

I fished the pebble out and placed it on the control panel in front of me. It winked at me like a crystal eye, all-knowing, mute. My hand crept out toward it. I couldn't bear to part with it. What would I be when the pebble was gone? Nothing. Worse than nothing. I had been nothing before this afternoon, I realized now; from this day on—however short that time might be—I would know it. And yet—

I pulled my hand back. I had to get rid of it. Something whispered to me, and I knew that—cowardice or logic—the whisper was right. I couldn't protect it, I couldn't riddle its mystery. I couldn't—I picked it up with the beam and knew in that instant where I would hide it in a world that had no hiding places.

Inside the Cathedral walls would be a cavity, placed there by the Cathedral builders as a receptacle for the past. Almost every public building had one. The Archives had benefited richly from all such wrecked or excavated buildings. Surely the Church had put such a dedication to the future in the Cathedral.

I probed through the murky darkness of the walls, slid within them, searching for a lesser darkness. And I found it, and the pebble flickered momentarily as it dropped and disappeared, and I felt suddenly hollow, empty of meaning. There, in the cornerstone, was the reason for my present hopelessness. There it would rest long after I had returned to the soil and the air and the water. Some future historian would pick it up in his fingers and wonder how it had come there. He would puzzle over it. He would try to decipher it, and in the end he would toss it aside as an accident or a prank.

When I looked back at the screen, I realized I had been preoccupied too long. The end of the shower of missiles had let the killers split up. They would be harder to hit now, but that was meaningless because my supply of coins had run out. There was nothing left to throw, and the beam was incapable of lifting anything heavy—anything as heavy as a man, say—at this distance.

From the corner where the dark one crouched, there close to the Portal, came a flash of movement. Something exploded close by. The room rocked around me. The dark one had thrown a bomb, with uncanny skill, picking out the location of the control room. The blast had torn a huge hole in the forward wall of the Cathedral. They were willing to destroy the Cathedral to blast me out!

My teeth grated. There was something I could do if they were unwary enough. The beam flashed out to the man who had lost an eye. Before he realized what was happening, his gun was soaring through the air like an ugly black bird. It came to rest in the shadow hand of the monk standing at the front of the Cathedral, unshaken by the explosion.

I searched frantically for the trigger with my pseudo-hands as blue bolts streaked through my image below. They were trying to shoot the gun out of the air before I could fire it. The lever below, in the proper position for the, forefinger, must be the trigger. I pulled it. Nothing happened. There was a small button on the barrel of the gun? No. Accidentally, then, I pressed the back of the handle at the same time I pulled the trigger. A blue flash sped back toward the killers, aimless.

Aimless, but not futile. Nausea gripped my throat. I clenched my teeth on sour stomach acids as I realized the unimportance of the fact that one man had lost an eye. For a shockingly long heartbeat, the smoking trunk of a man stood upright before it collapsed in the aisle.

They were three now, and they were cautious, not recognizing the sheer, blind, deadly luck of that first shot. Now nothing showed above the level of the kneeling benches. While my eyes searched the screen, I wondered if I could force myself to fire again. A man was dead down there in the Cathedral, a worthless man, a gunman, a torturer, a killer.…It made no difference. He had been alive and now he was dead, and I was sick.

There!—an arm flung back. Automatically, my hand twitched. The bolt was feet wide. It smashed a kneeling bench into smoking ruin, but the arm jerked. Something slipped from the hand, something small, cylindrical, gleaming as it fell…A whole section exploded in a gout of flesh and blood and wood.

I turned my eyes away from the screen, grimacing.
Death! Death! I was death
! Those who lived by violence were dying by violence, but death should be cold and hard and bloodless. And I was weak and afraid.

The Portal flickered. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. The gun swiveled below in the hand of the shadow monk, but I could not force the hand to close. There had been enough killing. And the gun remained dark and silent as the dark killer dived fearlessly through the Portal. He had been helped by someone inside the monastery, helped again, and as I wondered again who it was, I realized that now I would have to watch for an attack from behind. For the first time in long minutes I remembered that I could be killed as easily as they could be killed, and I would be as dead as they were. And it was likely that I would be.

Quickly I got up and stepped to the doorway. The hallway panel below was still closed, and the steps were empty. Seated back at the control, I eyed the mirror placed high on the wall. It gave a clear view of the long stairway behind. I tried to think. If I had another gun…

I grabbed with the beam for the gun of the killer still in the Cathedral, but he clung to it grimly, fighting off unseen hands. My eyes switched back to the mirror; the panel below was still closed. I triggered off a quick bolt toward the one in the Cathedral. It wasn't even close; benches smoldered behind him. It had been a warning:
Keep your head down
! My mind raced…

Trapped. Hopelessly, finally trapped. There were two ways out of the Cathedral, the Barrier and the Portal, but there was only one way out of the control room, down the stairs and into the corridor, and that way was blocked by the dark one. It would be a quick ending. I promised myself that. They would want to capture me alive. They would want to torture out of me the location of the pebble. I wouldn't give them the chance.

There were only two exits
…I clutched at the thought like a dying man at the last strands of life…
But I had wondered before—if there was not a third
…

I needed clothes. I needed money. Without these escape was impossible, and an exit is worthless if it leads back to the same deadly room. With them—Here there was no hope for life—nothing. But outside, violent as it was…

The headless killer's clothes were almost unharmed. Luckily, the closures were magnetic; they yielded easily to the tug of the beam. The jacket, at least, was easy. The shirt gave more trouble. I fought with the body's dead weight, rolling it from side to side to shake the lifeless arms loose from the sleeves. Dead, he resisted even more stubbornly than he had alive.

When the jacket and shirt were lying beside me, I glanced at the mirror and knew I had been reckless. The hall panel was open, but no one was on the stairs. All I needed was a few minutes, just a few minutes more. I brought the gun to the control room. I stepped quickly to the doorway, triggering a wash of blue flame down the stairs. That would make the dark one hesitate before he risked a suicidal dash up the stairs. But he could afford to wait.

A thunderous explosion shook the room for a second time. I staggered as I tried to reach the controls and the room sagged beneath my feet. I grabbed for the back of the chair to keep from falling. I pulled myself to the panel. I needed too many eyes, too many hands. The killer left in the Cathedral had thrown another of those tiny, fantastically powerful bombs.

I sent the gun back to the Cathedral and I tried to ferret the gunman out. The only result was a waste of shots—and time. I went back to the headless body. The torso glimmered whitely in the darkness. My eyes darted back and forth between screen and mirror as I tried to skin the pants from the corpse, and I swore at them and at the body and at the fashion of tight pants. Finally I grabbed the waistband firmly and lifted. Something slipped.

A blue beam seared into the wall above my head. I dropped the pants and looked up, startled. A mirrored arm and gun were pulled back around the corner. But he couldn't do any real damage that way. The danger lay in my becoming so busy with other problems that I might give him a chance to make a dash up the stairs. Then the chances would be all with the dark one and his experience.

An arm upraised in the Cathedral! I threw a shot that missed, but the arm was pulled down hastily. I watched the mirror and struggled with the pants. And they gave, they slipped, they peeled off like skin off a grape, and they were beside me. I had the clothes, if I could hide my trail.

I raised my gun above the trunk of the naked killer. There was a dark band across the whiteness, a wide belt. I pulled it loose with a single jerk, and fired. The body jerked and smoldered and was a black, unrecognizable mass. Nausea rose in my throat; I choked it back.

The flash surprised the remaining gunman. Incautiously he raised his head above the kneeling bench to peer at the flame and acrid smoke. My gun twisted, spat, and he sagged limply to the floor between the benches. And I was truly sick—sick of killing, sick of blood, sick of death, and almost sick of life.

Again blue flame licked over my head. My self-revulsion vanished. I looked up to find the mirror gone; where it had been was a white rectangle in a blackened circle. I discovered then that survival is an instinct. I wanted to live, and it all depended on the dark one, whether he would let me have the few moments I needed. Was he on the stairs? I could not trust my feeling that the final rush had not come. I brought the gun from the Cathedral; I would not need it there any more. I got up, holding the gun high above my head, pointing down the stairs as I approached, pulling the trigger. The gun jerked in my hand. The stairs were empty of everything except flame.

No time now for thought. I jumped back to the pile of clothing on the floor. My robe slipped off. I picked up the belt, wrapped it around my waist, and pressed the ends together. It sagged loosely, but there was no time for adjustments. The pants were large, too. I was thankful for that as I struggled with them awkwardly.

I sent two more shots down the steps before I tackled the shirt and jacket. The shirt went on. A hand stroked down the front, sealing the closure. It was tight; so was the jacket. The jacket would have been tighter if I had slipped the gun into the tailored pocket inside, but I kept it in my hand.

Once more I swept the steps with blue fire. Then I sprang to the controls and worked at them hastily. They had to be adjusted finely. The timing had to be perfect. Maximum power had to be channeled through the machine in the shortest time. And it had to be automatic. A final check took a long moment. I marked a spot on the floor with my eye, forced the gun into its inside pocket, and reached over to press a button.

I heard the sound of running feet on the stairs.

The lights dimmed. The last thing I remembered was the dark killer, flickering strangely, dodging aside at the doorway behind a gun spitting blue fire, the incredulous look on his face, and a flame that wrapped around me and shut out the light.

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It was the first time I had the dream of the running and the dark and the silence and the fear, of being chased by feet that were too horribly light, and the burning of my hand—except now my face was burning, too—and the dropping of the coal, and the shame and the emptiness…

That part was always the same, but the endings were different.…

The thought came to me that I was blind or dead, or both. Then a light was born into the darkness, a blue light from above and a green light from below, and I discovered that I was lying in a peaceful meadow. My face didn't hurt so much because a four-legged, grazing animal was licking it with its soothing tongue. In spite of the way my head ached, I stood up to find out where I was, and the place was familiar, although I couldn't name it somehow, but that was all right because it was peace, and peace really doesn't need a name.

Around the edge of a low hill came the girl who didn't have a name either, and that was all right, too. She walked on air because she hadn't any feet. But her lips were smiling, and she held out her hand as she came closer, and I reached out to take her hand. A burning sensation streaked up my arm and circled through my body in ever-widening arcs until I felt intensely alive. And when she took her hand away at last, a crystal pebble rested in my palm, innocent, transparent, inscrutable.

Her lips moved, but I heard no sound.

"What is it?" I asked.

She looked puzzled. She shrugged her shoulders impatiently and pointed to her ears. Her lips moved silently again.

There was a question I had to ask. I had to know the answer, but I couldn't remember the question. "Is it life?" I asked instead, so that she wouldn't go away. "Is it hope or freedom? Is it love?"