Ready to jump sideways and run if it should begin it move, he closed in on the rat. It remained still, silent, dark-eyed. He knelt beside it, touched it, picked it up, turned it over, and saw that it was a machine.
Well, he thought, why not"? A mechanical rat…
Thus far, every one of Galing's stage settings had been especially well detailed and realistically drawn. At the beginning of each new act in this senseless drama, Joel had been convinced, to one degree or another, that it was perfectly real. If Galing could go to the trouble of setting up that scene with the aquamen, why not a robot rat to nibble at his shoe and throw a bit of fear into him?
At least they had not put him in a place where genuine rats could come to dine on him. The mechanical rodent was a little extra insurance for them, a nasty deterrent that would keep him from going down into the storm drains. They had evidently put some thought into it… They had sent the rat to chew on his sole; they had caused it to escape down the drain; and they thought that, knowing the tunnel contained rats, Joel would certainly choose to leave his cell through the front door, according to the program. Anyway, if they hadn't really endangered him, it must mean that they didn't actually want to kill or maim him.
Or maybe that wasn't it at all. Maybe they hadn't used a real rat simply because they couldn't get hold of one.
Whatever the case, they had underestimated his anger and frustration. When he had a choice between twelve-pound rats and Galing's program, he had gladly chosen the rats.
Joel threw the machine to the floor of the tunnel. Transistors and circuit boards broke inside of it.
He held the candle pan high and continued down the drain, no longer worried about rats.
What he did have to worry about was the moss. He was afraid it was going to block his escape.
The deeper he went into the subterranean passageway, the thicker the moss became. It grew on the curved walls of the drain, above his head, below his feet, on both sides of him. When he first noticed it, the moss only flourished in widely scattered patches. But the farther he walked the larger those patches became and the closer they were to one another — until the stuff finally sheathed every inch of the inside walls of the corrugated steel pipe. It was spongy, damp and blue-green, and it shimmered prettily in the candlelight. Once it had claimed all the metal surface, it stopped growing laterally and began to thrust tendrils into the air space; it was as thick and often as long as a young girl's hair. It was cold to the touch, unnaturally cold for plant life. In places it thrived so well that he was forced to squeeze through a narrowed tunnel, sometimes on his hands and knees, the wet moss dragging over him like the hands of a corpse.
Moss slapped across his eyes.
He pushed it aside.
It got in his mouth.
He spat it out.
Once when he stopped to rest, he made the mistake of examining the growth too closely. He saw that the hair-thin filaments which constituted the mother-plant were in a constant sate of agitation. They twisted through one another, abraded one another, braided one another… They slithered like snakes, writhed, wrapped together and pulsed as if fornicating, extricated themselves only to form new entanglements. The moss appeared to have the life energy and some of the mobility of an animal, as if some crude intelligence were at the core of it.
He didn't like to speculate about that. He was certain that the moss was not just another illusion, not some clever prop that had been built by Henry Galing and his gang. But if it were real… Hell, in that case he was not in any reality that he had ever known before. The earth he'd come from harbored no creature that was half plant and half animal.
The Twenty-third Century?
Impossible.
To think as much was to entertain insanity.
He got up and continued his journey, although the storm drains no longer seemed a safe and reasonable alternative to the escape that Galing had offered him. When the moss dangled from the ceiling, he felt as if long tentacles were reaching for him. When it swelled up from all sides and narrowed the passageway, he saw it as a stomach that was closing around him, digesting him.
Eventually, he came to five human skeletons that dangled from the wall. The bones were startlingly white against the blue-green vegetation. The moss had grown through the rib cages, into the bony mouths and out of the empty eye sockets; it held them in suspension, as if it were displaying them. Side by side, the five macabre figures looked like the victims of an unearthly crucifixion. Without proof, without needing proof, he knew that the damned moss had somehow murdered them…
XII
He began to look for a way out of the tunnels.
Although he supposed it could have been his imagination, as overwrought as he was, Joel swore that the damned moss sensed his fear. It knew. It also knew that he wanted out — and it wanted him. The spongy tendrils, as thick as spaghetti now, writhed much faster and more violently than they had done before. And when he squeezed through a tight passage, he had considerable difficulty escaping from the moist, clinging vegetation — as if it were trying to grip and hold him…
Ten minutes later, after he had taken several turns in the drainage network, he found an exit. The wall ladder was hidden beneath the moss, and he saw it only when the light from his dying candle was reflected by a pitted metal rung, the only bit of the ladder that the moss had not claimed. A glint of orange caught his eye, then the sheen of machined steel, and there it was.
The moss writhed so fast now that it made a soft whispering noise like the hissing of a snake.
He put the candle on the floor and sought the other rungs. He ripped the moss away from them. Thousands of icy tendrils curled and wriggled wormlike in his hands. They lashed around his fingers and encircled his wrists, struggling to save themselves. But he was stronger. He tore the moss away in huge handfuls, tossed it to the floor behind him. In five minutes he had cleared the lower, half of the ladder.
He started to climb.
Below, the moss closed over the candle and snuffed it out. The tunnel was as black as the inside of a sealed coffin.
On the rungs above him, the moss fought back, whipped his face, seeking a hold on him.
He tore it loose and pitched it to the floor.
Pulpy, disgusting strands slid into his nostrils, pressed insistently at his tightly closed lips, and slithered into his ears as if striking for the ear drum and, eventually, the brain.
Cursing, he freed himself and continued the climb, holding tightly to the ladder with his right hand and fighting the vegetation with his left.
The moss hissed in the darkness.
The hoary strands that grew from the ceiling groped at his back, clutched his neck…
Fifteen minutes after he'd started up, Joel reached the top of the ladder. Gasping for breath as the moss roiled about his head, he found the access plate, prized it away, and levered himself into the corridor overhead.
Strands of moss lapped out of the hole, examined the hall floor, and strained to touch him.
He dropped the access plate back over the opening, then lay on the floor in the dim purple light and listened to his heartbeat gradually slow down.
He recognized this place. Behind him the hallway went on for a hundred yards until it came to a set of bright yellow doors. The doors were closed. No other rooms or corridors opened from the hall. The walls were gray and undecorated. The ceiling was low, gray, and contained one central lightstrip. In front of him the hallway ran another hundred yards and ended at a pressure hatch and a four-foot-square computer display screen which was built into the wall. He knew — intuitively or perhaps because he had been here before — that the room beyond that hatch held all the answers to this puzzle.
Getting up, he wiped his hands on his slacks, and he walked down to the pressure hatch.
When he stepped on the metal grid in front of the hatch, the computer screen lit up, a restful shade of blue. Stark white letters began to move across the face of the unit.
cycle for
admittance.
He hesitated for a moment, then realized that he had no choice. This was the quickest way to learn the truth. He grasped the steel lock wheel in the center of the door and turned it.
WAIT FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
COMPUTER DATA LINKAGES.
WAIT FOR VERIFICATION OF
VIEW CHAMBER'S SANCTITY.
He wasn't exactly sure what that meant, but he did as he was told. In two minutes the hatch sighed and popped loose of its heavy rubber seal. A green light winked on overhead, and the display screen confirmed the light:
LIGHT BURNING.
PROCEED SAFELY ON GREEN.
He swung open the door and stepped into the room beyond. It was perhaps forty feet long and thirty wide, completely unfurnished. The walls were plated with steel, as was the ceiling; it looked like a room in which treasure was stored — or from which one might defend a treasure. It was illuminated by a curious gray screen in the far wall, and it was the dreariest place he had seen yet, worse in its way than the storm drains. But when he saw that the fuzzy gray screen was actually a giant window at least six-foot-square, he was elated. He walked towards it, hesitantly, much as a religious man would approach the altar of his god.
I've been here, he thought. Many times.
His footsteps echoed on the metal floor.
It's a bad place, he thought, suddenly.
When he reached the glass he found that it was extremely thick, perhaps a foot deep. Beyond it, shifting mists the color of rotten meat formed hideous cloud-images: insubstantial dragons, towers that broke apart as if shaken by earthquakes, piles of corpses, slavering things … Of course, there was no intent behind the smoke, no plan or program. The images were what he made of them; and because past association with this place had evidently left him full of terror, the images had the quality of nightmare for him. The mist eddied, roiled, formed and re-formed itself, pressed against the glass. It was, he sensed, more an oily smoke than water vapor.
Panic rose in him.
He told himself to take it easy. This was the answer. This was the first thing he had to learn before he could figure Galing and his crew. This was where it had all started.
His stomach tightened. A pressure built behind his eyes, and he was breathing raggedly.
Easy now…
He took the last two steps to the window and pressed his forehead to the cool glass, squinting to see through the dense, shifting smog.
He knew there was more out there than smoke. He was sure that he had seen the — other thing, whatever it was, but he could not recall the nature of it.
Then the smoke parted.
He closed his eyes. “No,” he said. When he opened them again, the smoke was still drawn back.
It's just another illusion, he thought.
But he knew it was not. He choked and staggered backwards as if he'd been struck.
How could he have forgotten this? No man could ever forget that inhuman, maniacal spectacle. He was unable to look away; he was mesmerized by horror.
Finally, as if the evil had filled him up and overflowed from him, he swam forward into darkness, finding peace for at least a few brief minutes.
XIII
When he woke, Allison was sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed. She was wearing tight red slacks, a pearl gray blouse, and a red choker at her neck. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and curled around the undersides of her heavy breasts. She was prettier than he remembered. She smiled and leaned toward him, and she said, “How do you feel?”
He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
“Water?” she asked.
He nodded.
She went to the dresser and filled a crystal glass from a silver carafe. When she brought it to him, she held his head up while he swallowed. He finished the entire glass. “Well,” she asked again, “how do you feel?”
He looked around and saw that he was in the guest bedroom of Henry Galing's house where he had first met Allison after waking with amnesia. “As if I'm going mad,” he said.
Sitting on the bed, she leaned down and kissed him once, chastely. “Darling, it's all over now!”
“It is?” He didn't believe her.
“You're out of it!” she said. “You've come back.”
“Out of what? Back from where?” Joel asked warily.
Instead of answering him, she went to the bedroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. “Uncle Henry! Come quick! He's awake, and he knows where he is!” Then she returned to the bed, smiling.
He didn't smile back at her.
Henry Galing entered the room a moment later. He looked the same as before: tall, broad-shouldered, authoritarian, with that mane of white hair. At least their physical appearances were not mutable. Otherwise, though, Henry Galing had changed: he was downright pleasant. He hurried over and stood by Joel's bed and grabbed his shoulder and beamed down at him. “My God, we've been so worried about you! We didn't know if you'd ever come out of it!”
“You didn't?”
Galing squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Dr. Harttle's on his way up,” Galing said.
“With dust in his hair?”
Allison and Galing exchanged a quick look of concern. “What do you mean?” Galing asked.
Joel sighed. “Nothing.”
“Dust?”
“Nothing, Henry.”
To Allison, Gating said: “He's lost that terrible yellow color — and his eyes aren't bloodshot anymore.”
“I can't remember what I'm doing here,” Joel said. “What's going on?” He had decided against leveling charges and demanding explanations, apologies… He didn't know if this were another act or whether it was reality, at last.
“You don't know where you are?” Galing asked.
“No,” Joel said. “Well… This is your house. Somewhere in New England. Allison's my wife. But beyond that…”
“Amnesia?” Galing asked.
“I guess so.”
“That's a side-effect we hadn't foreseen.” The old man looked frightened, as if he wondered what else they hadn't foreseen.
“Side-effect?” Joel asked. He felt like the straight man in an old-time comedy act — although this scene seemed more real than those which had preceded it. He could smell pork roasting in the downstairs kitchen. A telephone sounded in another part of the house and was answered on the fourth ring. The wind sighed against the bedroom window, and outside a bird called, strident but cheerful.
“Do you remember sybocylacose-46?” Galing asked.
“That horrible stuff,” Allison said, shivering, taking Joel's right hand.
“It doesn't sound familiar,” Joel said.
“We dubbed it Sy,” Galing said by way of prodding his memory.
“It's a blank,” Joel said.
Allison patted Joel's hand. The expression on her usually animated face was so sober that she might have been in shock. “It's a drug,” she said. “A particularly nasty drug.”
“Tell me more.” He sat up now, surprised that he should feel as clear-headed and healthy as he did. When he had awakened from all of the other illusions, he'd been dizzy and exhausted.
“A very special drug,” Henry Galing said. “Originally it was intended for use as an inhibitor of cardiac arrhythmias and to stimulate the myocardium to increase contractility. But it simply didn't develop as we intended it to. The chemists could make a batch of it in third-stage complexity and watch it mutate into something else again. Inside of twenty minutes, it was an entirely new compound, quite different than what they'd made.”
“Chemical compounds can't mutate,” Joel said.
“This one did,” Galing said.
“It's our own little Frankenstein monster,” Allison said. She wasn't trying to be light; she meant it.
“Allison thinks it's sinister,” Galing said. “Actually, it's just something new, intere
sting. It's no more dangerous than—”
“It almost killed Joel,” she said.
Galing stopped smiling, nodded gravely. “Sybocylacose-46 is like a living organism evolving with blinding speed. At a certain point in the research we were unable to develop a mean-strain. So… We just let a batch of it go to see what would happen. It went through forty-five temporary states before settling into its finalized form.”
“I don't remember,” Joel said. “Anyway, it sounds senseless.”
“It does, doesn't it?” Galing said. “We racked our brains, I'll tell you. We thought of everything: that we'd created a living cell in the new compound and that was changing the nature of the compound itself; that we had created a whole living creature, more than just a cell, a liquid being the likes of which the earth had never seen; that a strain of bacteria had contaminated the drug each time we made a batch, and the bacteria was what was mutating. But none of these checked out.”
“Then?” Joel asked. If this were another act, it was quite an interesting one. He hadn't made up his mind yet.
“Then,” Galing said, “we began testing Sy-46 on lab animals — with odd results.”
Allison traced the line of Joel's jaw with her fingertips. “You don't remember any of this, darling?”
“None of it,” he said. “I'm sorry to bore you, but I'd like it all repeated.”
Galing sat down in the rocking chair and crossed his legs, as if he were settling in to tell a long ghost story. “The lab animals seemed to sink into, well, it wasn't a trance exactly. Call it a semi-trance. They stared about as if they were seeing things for the first time, numbed by the sight, awe-stricken. They reacted to stimuli in a confused manner. Some of them even seemed to welcome pain as if it were pleasure; and others reacted to a tickling finger as if it were a honed blade. Mice ran repeatedly into walls when we put them to maze tests. All in all, we felt these indices pointed to the discovery of a new hallucinogen.”
The Long Sleep Page 7
