The Long Sleep

by Dean R. Koontz

  But why was the computer lying? This was no mere malfunction. If it were not operating properly, it would either remain blank or would check its own circuits and tell him that something was wrong with it. This was not erroneous information; it was an outright deception!

  He thought he knew what was causing it.

  He touched a control spot labeled first gear — forward.

  Nothing happened.

  The engine continued to idle.

  “This damned stuff is intelligent,” Joel told Galing. “I don't know how… But it's taken control of the tank's computer. I can't fight against it.”

  Beside him, the lock lever popped out on the entrance hatch.

  “Oh, no you don't!” he said. He hit it hard and held his hand on it to keep it depressed.

  “Joel?”

  “It just tried to unlock the door,” he said. “Almost had me there.”

  “Listen,” Galing said, “there's a manual override for the weapons panel.”

  “I know,” Joel said.

  armor corroding.

  “Sure,” he told it. “Sure.” He sprung open a panel on his left and examined the two dozen toggle switches of the weapons override system. He pushed on a few of them.

  He felt the flamethrowers come on this time, and he heard the roar of the fire on all four sides. The temperature within the tank climbed almost at once and was recorded on a lighted circled overhead: temperature: 72,73,74,75,76,77,78…

  “Manual system's okay,” he told Gating.

  “What are you using?”

  “Flamethrowers.”

  “That's best”

  The battle was a silent one. The pulpy fungus flowed in and tried to put out the flames. It trembled as the fire ticked at it. Bursting like grenades in the intense heat, the pustules became pockmarks in the mother body. The gray-brown muck blackened, smoked, withered, and fell away from the four nozzles as well as from the view windows and the hologram cameras which were positioned near the flames. Yet it kept its grip on the tank, and it persisted, returning to the nozzles with more force than before.

  Joel was sweating like a horse at the end of the race. He wiped his face with his sleeve, glanced at Allison to see how she was making out. She seemed sound asleep; the heat had apparently complemented the drugs to put her under once more. Perspiration rolled from her face and dampened her long hair, but otherwise she seemed fine.

  temperature: 91,92,93,94…

  Joel had taken his hand from the door lock beside him. Now, it popped open with the noise of a gunshot, and he barely had time to slam it back into place.

  Five minutes later, the walls of the tank were too hot to touch. The view windows in front of him were steamed over. The temperature seemed to have stabilized at a hundred degrees, although it was many times higher than that outside.

  Then the computer display screen flashed a warning that was really — coming from the fungus, as it did — a nasty threat:

  AIR CONDITIONING

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  Joel could not find a manual switch that would override the computer's control of the air conditioning. He looked at the overhead temperature gauge which had begun to wink on and off once more: 101,102,103… 104… 105…

  “You can't sweat us out,” Joel said. “We're going to burn you first.”

  “What did you say?” Galing asked.

  “I'm not talking to you.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine!”

  “Joel—”

  “Don't bother me!”

  106… 107…

  The lock lever on the door was burning his hand. He unhooked his safety harness, swiveled on the seat, and held the lever down with the sole of his boot.

  108… 109… 110…

  He rolled his tongue around in his mouth, tried to make some saliva. He had no luck.

  111… 112…

  The display screen wiped itself clear and then flashed another message at him:

  AIR SUPPLY

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  MALFUNCTION.

  How much air would the cab contain? How long could the two of them survive on it if the computer had really sealed off the supply of fresh air? Allison was asleep, so she wouldn't be using as much as he was. And if he remained perfectly still, didn't move around and waste energy, kept his breathing shallow, maybe they could last ten minutes.

  113… 114…

  The perspiration ran from him like fat melting from a roasting fowl. His clothes were soaked through, and the leatherette seat around him glistened. His head ached. Behind his eyes two mules were kicking their way out. His mouth was as dry as dust, his lips cracked and bleeding. Each breath burned his throat and flared in his lungs like a torch.

  115… 116… 117…

  Allison moaned, turned in her harness. Her slender hands were curled like claws at her sides.

  How much more air?

  Five minutes worth?

  Less. Surely, they had been suffering more than five minutes since the air supply had been shut down. The air was thick, ammoniac, too hot to breathe. They must have been here ten minutes now. It must be near the end.

  118… 119… 120… 120… 120… 120.

  When he saw the temperature stabilize again, he knew that they were going to win. Their air supply was rapidly running out, and the heat was already too much to endure. Yet he knew that the battle was won now; the moral superiority was theirs and the physical challenge would be met as well.

  You're raving, he thought, as he realized that he was laughing and that he had vocalized most of those thoughts.

  120… 120… 120…

  Outside, the fungus shriveled in the fire. It writhed and pitched, rose up and fell down, formed and re-formed in what could only be called a fit of rage. Gradually, grudgingly, it drew back from the superheated tank.

  “I knew it,” Joel said weakly.

  The display screen went blank.

  The vents brought the sound of highspeed fans. Cool air rushed out into his face.

  120… 119… 119… 118…

  “We beat it,” he told Galing. But he realized that his voice was a faint croak, unintelligible. He cleared his throat, tried to make some saliva, had more luck this time. “We're free of it,” he said softly.

  He took his foot off the door lock, swung around, hooked into his harness again. Without switching off the flamethrowers, he put the machine in gear and accelerated toward the entrance to the pyramid.

  “We're coming back!” he told Galing. “Open up the gates!”

  Behind, the fungus rushed after him, keeping a safe distance from the flames but bulking higher and higher every second.

  Galing's voice crackled on the radio, but it was drowned out by the clatter of tank tread as the ground beneath them heaved again and the moss tried to overturn them.

  “Open up!”

  The tunnel door irised in front of them.

  Joel cut the flamethrowers at the last minute and glanced at the rearview screen.

  The fungus roared down on them like an express train.

  The door was opening so damned slowly!

  Joel tramped the accelerator all the way down and took the tank through the entrance even as it was growing wider. The tank made a clean pass. The tread struck the sloping concrete approach to the tunnel, then rumbled over shiny steel as the door irised all the way open.

  “Shut it! Shut it!” He was screaming. He didn't care.

  The fungus gushed through the entrance, but it was not able to jam the door open. The steel sphincter cycled shut with a loud clang! that reverberated hollowly down the metal tube, and the muck was sliced through cleanly.

  Two or three hundred pounds of the main growth was severed and isolated in the tunnel behind the tank. It curled and twisted, utterly shapeless but as if it were seekin
g a shape. It pressed at the door, trying to get out and rejoin the mother body. Frustrated, it pulled back, pulsed obscenely for a moment, and began to slither along the tunnel toward the tank and the inner door.

  Before Joel was halfway to the inner door, another barrier slammed out of the ceiling, sealing him in the first fifty yards of the passageway.

  “What's this. I have company out here, you know.”

  “We know,” Galing said. “This is decontamination.”

  “You can kill it?”

  “In airtight quarters like this, yes.”

  A thin white gas hissed out of the walls and filled the tube until the hologram cameras showed nothing but blank, white vapor.

  Joel looked at the temperature guage on the ceiling of the cab: 106… 106… 106… 105… It was cooling off much more slowly than it had heated. “How long?” he asked Galing.

  “Another minute.”

  105… 105… 105… 106…

  The gas began to clear around them. When it was gone altogether, he looked at the rearview screen. The hologram cameras were focused on a slimy patch on the tunnel floor, all that remained of the two-hundred-pound chunk of fungus.

  “The gas did all that?” he asked Galing.

  “The gas — and a mist of acid.”

  When the air was as clear as a spring day, the barrier went up in front of him.

  He drove down the last length of the tunnel toward the last door as it irised out of his way.

  XXV

  They were all in the top-level garage waiting for him when he drove the tank back and parked it: Henry Galing, Richard, Gina, Dr. Harttle, the faceless man named Brian the others who had not participated in the Disorientation Therapy. Seeing them now, his own creations, he wondered how he could ever have feared them or failed to recognize them even if he had been suffering from a temporary drug-induced amnesia.

  He recalled how, in such fine detail, they had planned his Disorientation Therapy Puzzle: the removal of every scrap of paper from every floor of the pyramid so that there was no clue to the real nature of the place; propping the skeleton in that office chair; re-programming the computer to misuse the nucleotide vats and form a faceless man who could nonetheless see and speak; the working out of the story he had been told about falling off a roof while rescuing a cat, and the story about sybocylacose-46 which he had been meant to see through; the building of that dungeon room, the honeymoon suite; even the little oddities like the dust in Harttle's hair and between Allison's breasts had been carefully planned. It had worked admirably well. He was cured of both his guilt and his prejudice — and the therapy had made Allison especially precious to him.

  He had difficulty remembering only one thing: the Overmaster. He thought that the term, which he had first heard from Galing, must refer to the moving fungus that had reacted more like an animal than a plant. To the best of his knowledge, no such entity had existed before his drug-induced amnesia; and he was certain that nothing like that could have been included as a part of this therapy.

  Henry Galing came forth to meet him when he stepped out of the tank, and to Joel's surprise the android was crying. He took Joel's hand and shook it vigorously. “Thank God you're back!” he said.

  “It was touch and go… I don't know what that stuff could have done to the tank if the flamethrowers hadn't kept it back. And I'm just as happy not to have to find out.”

  “Allison?” Galing asked anxiously, peering past Joel into the cab of the tank.

  “She's fine. Still sleeping.”

  The android was obviously relieved. When Joel saw how happy all of them were to know that Allison was in good shape, Joel couldn't understand how he could ever have looked upon their kind as little more than animals. They clearly had human emotions, attachments, relationships, and needs.

  “What did I get myself into when I went outside?” Joel asked. “What was that fungus, that damned gray—”

  “Just that,” Galing said. “Fungus, moss, lichens, hundreds of types of vegetation — and all of it under the control of the Overmaster.”

  “You've used that name before,” Joel said. “But it doesn't mean anything to me.”

  “It will in a moment.” Galing wiped a hand over his face, giving himself a moment to think about where he should begin. “During those thousand years that you slept, before you made the twelve of us in the images of your dead friends, the world's ecological systems changed a great deal more than we knew. These new, grotesque plantforms were bred, and they came to dominate the surface of the earth; they began slowly to function in harmony and then became rapidly interdependent. Finally, between them, they evolved a rudimentary intelligence.”

  “The Overmaster.”

  “Yes,” Galing said.

  Richard said: “You have to realize how incredibly polluted the earth was. Poisonous air. Poisonous water. The air was superheated because the particles of suspended pollutants magnified the effects of the sun… The whole world became a genetic pressure cooker that boiled up mutations faster than anyone would ever have thought possible/'

  “Exactly,” Galing said. “In surprisingly short order that rudimentary intelligence became a formidable mind equal to that of any man. Maybe even superior. In a couple of centuries it developed animal-like mobility in some of its components— which you witnessed a few minutes ago.”

  “Did I ever!” He was still soaked with perspiration. His stomach fluttered as if it had wings. “But when did you learn all of this?”

  “After you went through the Puzzle Therapy for the first time,” Galing said.

  He frowned. “I've been through it more than once?”

  “Five times,” the faceless man said.

  “You see,” Galing said, “when you were first given those amnesic drugs and placed in your pod, we were unwittingly consigning you to the Overmaster.”

  Joel leaned against the tank tread, closed his eyes, tried to find the switch that we shut off his merry-go-round mind. He couldn't find the switch, but he did manage to get on a brake that slowed the revolutions. “I don't understand.”

  Galing said: “Our mistake was in not monitoring developments in the outside world as closely as we should have. We knew things had changed, but we didn't know how much they had changed, and therefore we took inadequate precautions. The Overmaster, through various of its mobile components — mosses, fungi — infiltrated the lowest computer cell blocks and even the fusion power plant beneath the last public level of the pyramid. Taproots breached nearly every computer memory bank with access to all our records; it learned all there was to know about us — especially, you. The Overmaster could not get to the upper levels of the computer, because they were on floors that had no direct contact with the earth; therefore, it couldn't open the door and come in after us. Apparently, it decided we could live and not be a threat to it — but you must be given absolutely no quarter, no chance.”

  “Why did it think I was so much more dangerous to it than the rest of you?”

  “Because you'll play the most vital, maybe the only vital, role in any war against the Overmaster,” Gina said.

  “We need you if we're to restore the earth,” Galing said. “For one thing, only you can create more of us, because the operation of the vats requires a womb-born man whose fingerprints are on file in the installation's computer. Androids were never permitted to make more of their own. Certainly, we could mate and produce children… But in the decades that we would need to raise and educate a community opposed to the Overmaster, we would lose the battle. And only you can give Brian his face again. And only you have the first-hand, pre-disaster knowledge that we need to channel our energies in the proper research.”

  Joel stood away from the tank. “But when the Overmaster had control of me in the pod, why didn't it kill me?”

  “It couldn't,” Galing said. “All it could do was feed you subliminal data. And it did that with a vengeance. Prior to the start of that first Disorientation Therapy Puzzle, the Overmaster fed you hig
hly compressed subliminal propaganda which reinforced your neuroses. It turned your distaste for androids into active hatred, then ballooned that hatred into fanatical loathing. It made an eventual cure remote indeed. So… When you went through the first Disorientation Puzzle so differently than we'd anticipated, and when, at its conclusion, you were a great deal more bigoted than you had been before we'd put you in the pod, we knew something serious had gone wrong. Indeed, your neurosis was now a psychosis, so fierce that it would now have endangered the future of the entire installation. Therefore, we put you to sleep, and we began to search for an answer.”

  “And you discovered the Overmaster.”

  “Only after a full decade of probing,” Galing said. “But when we finally knew it existed, we were quick to find the breach in the pyramid, the computer tap, and the propaganda tape link to your pod. We purged the computers of contamination, used the Overmaster's propaganda tapes to structure pro-android propaganda to cure you. That was only a partial success, so we were forced to put you through the Disorientation Therapy Puzzle four more times to fully cure you.”

  Joel ran his fingers through his damp hair. “But now it's over at last.”

  “No,” Allison said, “it isn't over.”

  Both men turned and looked up at her. She had come awake while they were talking. She had slid to the edge of the seat and was gazing down at them from the open door of the tank's cab.

  “It isn't over?” Joel asked, perplexed.

  “She's right,” Galing said. “It's taken nearly a century and a half to undo what the Overmaster did to you.”

  One hundred and fifty years …

  “Meanwhile,” Allison said, “we've been besieged. We're constantly on guard, waiting for the Overmaster to breach the pyramid again.”

  “It wants to destroy us,” Richard said, “but it also wants to ruin all the things we've preserved of the Old World. It's made several attempts to open the freezers that contain the animal and plant samples, the Old World life tissues we'll one day use to clone new animals and plants. If those were destroyed, we'd never have a chance of restoring the Earth.”

  “Sooner or later,” Allison said, “if we can't go outside and take the initiative, if we can't put the Overmaster on the defensive, we'll be finished.”