Mindwarp

by James Follett

  “So you assumed that Solant and the girl ran away from you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The sunken eyes turned their icy gaze on the army officer. “You were warned that Solant was clever? A brilliant schemer? Yes?”

  “Yes, sir. But-”

  “Look at the shadows!” Inman snapped, waving a gnarled hand in both directions. “Huge patches of darkness everywhere. Every time you fired, you were partially blinded by fogged optics. You suspected that Solant knew that and yet it didn’t occur to you that he and the girl might have run towards you?”

  The battery commander’s faltering expression answered Inman’s question. “Well… No, sir. But there was no way they could have got passed us.”

  “Did you search the passenger capsule before the wrecker hauled it away? Did you look under the seats? Under the chassis? Well?”

  The army officer looked stunned and shook his head. “No, sir,” he admitted miserably.

  2.

  The angry voices of the soldiers on the far side of door were muffled, too indistinct to make out what they were saying. There were some dull thumps on the door, the sound of debris being cleared away, and then the voices faded. Ewen and Jenine sat in silence in the darkness, not daring to use a discharge tube in case light showed around the door. They waited, arms around each other, braced for an onslaught by the fearsome plasma discharge cannon at point blank range.

  But nothing happened.

  “They think we escaped,” Ewen whispered. Jenine put a cautionary fingers to his lips.

  An hour passed. A series of thumps and crashes and then a heavy wheeled machine rumbled past.

  “Sounds like a wrecker to collect the passenger capsule,” Ewen commented.

  It was the last they spoke for some time because they could still hear faint noises. Ewen pressed his ear to the door. As he did so, he became uncomfortably aware of a malignant, brooding presence on the far side of the door. Ewen didn’t know how or why he knew who it was, but he knew. Maybe the ice of the man’s personality reached through the steel itself. Ewen stayed in that position, not daring to move, keeping his breathing shallow, until he sensed that the man had gone away.

  “What’s the matter?” Jenine whispered. Even in the darkness she could feel Ewen’s sudden chill of fear.

  “Inman was here. On the other side of the door.”

  “How do you know it was him?”

  “I don’t know. But it was. I know it was.”

  “Why are we so important?” Jenine wondered.

  “Perhaps we’re a danger to him.”

  “How?”

  Ewen risked turning on the tube at low level so that it was little more than a glowing point of light. He moved silently around their prison, examining the walls. It seemed that the only way out of the room was through the door. He turned up the brightness and held the tube above his head to throw light on the ceiling. It appeared to be made of the same black bricks as the walls. They both saw the rectangle at the same time. It was in the centre of the ceiling and looked like a large slab, the same colour as the surrounding bricks. Ewen dragged the contactor box under the curious rectangle. He stood on it and used the length of steel conduit pipe to tap the ceiling while Jenine held the light. The rectangle had a slight hollow sound when he rapped it. More out of desperation than expectation, he placed the pipe in the centre of the rectangle and pushed upwards. To his astonishment and jubilation, the rectangle lifted slightly.

  It was a hinged trapdoor.

  He shifted his grip so that the end of pipe was pressed against the heel of his palm and gave a powerful shove. The hatch lifted and dropped down again. A harder push. This time it fell open with a resounding crash. Jenine quickly doused the light. They waited, hearts pumping, listening for the return of the soldiers.

  “Well,” said Jenine cryptically when she switched the tube on again. “We have an escape route, but no way of getting to it.”

  Ewen grinned at her. “Do you reckon your pyramid-climbing talents would be any use at climbing a pole?”

  “No.”

  “Good. Let’s try it.”

  With Ewen holding the length of pipe firmly while standing on the contactor, Jenine managed to shin up it, but the pipe was too short by a body’s length for her outstretched fingers to reach the hatch, and Ewen lacked the strength to lift her weight and pole while standing on the wobbly contactor.

  They turned out the contents of the holdall, looking for inspiration, but they had nothing that would be of any use in solving this problem. It frustrated Ewen that he could reach the edge of the open hatch with the pipe if he stood on the contactor. He banged the edge of the hatch in frustration with the pipe.

  “If only we could make some sort of hook on the end of this,” he said, examining the length of conduit.

  “Could we bend a crank on the end?” Jenine wondered.

  “It’s strong but it’s worth a try.”

  They stood the contactor on the end of the pipe. Ewen levered up while Jenine sat on the contractor, but the pipe was too rigid. The door’s lever locking mechanism gave Ewen an idea. He jammed the end of the conduit under the strongest lever and heaved. The entire length of pipe bowed. Jenine supported the pipe in the middle and added her weight to Ewen’s exertions. It gave quite suddenly where the lever forced the pipe’s wall to buckle and collapse. They wriggled the cranked end from under the lever and looked at their handiwork in triumph. The pipe now had a 90 degree bend on the end.

  The rest was relatively easy. Ewen stood on the contactor and hooked the pipe onto the rim of the ceiling hatch. Jenine held the bottom of the pipe steady, and braced herself so that Ewen could climb onto her shoulders. He hauled himself up the pipe and pulled himself through the hatch. He caught the holdall when Jenine threw it up.

  “What’s up there?” she asked.

  “Too dark to see. We’ll worry about it when you’re up.”

  Jenine’s climb was more difficult because she had no shoulders to stand on to give her a start, and the pipe swung alarmingly, but Ewen was able to grab her wrist as soon as it was within reach and pull her through the hatch. Her foot dislodged the pipe but he caught it before it fell. They might need it for a return journey should this route prove fruitless.

  They sat on the floor and hugged each other briefly before inspecting their new surroundings. They were in a narrow room whose walls, floor and ceiling consisted of rusting steel plates. Like the smaller room below, there were brackets fixed to the walls suggesting that the room had once served an important purpose. There was no GoD receptor and no picture of the emperor.

  Ewen closed the hatch and placed the length of pipe against the wall. With the discharge tube held high, they approached the conventional-looking door at the far end of the room.

  They paused before it and looked questioningly at each other. Ewen shrugged and reached for the handle. The door opened easily.

  Jenine gave a little gasp of astonishment at what confronted them. They stood perfectly still for some seconds, their arms protectively around each other as they stared. Beyond the door was something that was totally outside their experience.

  A flight of stairs.

  3.

  Jenine grasped the handrail and gingerly mounted the first two steps. “Clever,” she said. “A method of changing levels without an elevator.” She turned around and stepped down beside Ewen, smiling mischievously. “And it works in reverse.”

  Ewen frowned. “Nothing to wear out. Strange though. Why not use a ladder? Less material and less space taken up. You can’t move this thing. It’s fixed.”

  “You could go up and down these without using your hands,” Jenine pointed out. “You could carry things. It’s clever. And saving space doesn’t seem important here.”

  At first they tried mounting the steps side-by-side and decided that it would be easier if Ewen led the way. He found the rhythm of having to take short, upward walking steps decidedly odd, but the system seemed to work. Breaking
the rhythm at the top of the stair was also very strange; his feet tried to climb a step that was no longer there. When he turned around and looked down the steps, the precipitous slope gave him a moment of vertigo. Jenine was less affected, being used to such slopes on the glass pyramid.

  Ewen increased the discharge tube’s brightness and held it up. They had emerged into a long corridor with doors leading off on both sides. The first door was marked:

  DNS C Room L20-10.

  What intrigued them was that the numbers in the notice employed normal digits as used by the Centre, and not the dot notation system that was used for the ordinary citizens of Arama.

  Ewen tried the door. It was unlocked. He looked questioning at Jenine. “What do you think?”

  “I think, in a triumph of logical thinking over lateral thinking, that opening it might be the best way of finding out what’s on the other side.”

  He pushed the door. It opened into what they assumed was a conference room. There was a long table finished in a brown substance with random stripe patterning that neither Ewen or Jenine could identify. Around the table were ten swivel chairs. In one corner was a simple overhead projection device on a trolley. In the centre of the table were two glass jugs standing on a metal plate whose purpose they could only guess at.

  “One thing,” said Ewen. “We’re no longer in Arama.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A triumph of perception over your total lack of observation, dearest one. No picture of the emperor.”

  The concept of somewhere that wasn’t Arama was difficult to grasp, but the evidence, or rather, lack of it, was irrefutable.

  Ewen stood the discharge tube on the table and turned down the brilliance. Used economically they could provide light for fifty-hours. There were two more tubes in the holdall but once they were exhausted, they would be in total darkness.

  “Let’s explore the next room,” Jenine suggested.

  “No - we’re got to do this scientifically,” said Ewen. “We have to map this place one step at a time, otherwise we’ll get hopelessly lost.”

  He sat in one of the swivel chairs, and unpacked his datapad and the seismographs from the holdall. Jenine sat beside him. From the maps of Arama they worked out roughly where they were, but they were too far from Keltro for this strange area they were in to show up on their seismographs. He cleared the datapad’s screen and began making a sketch plan of the switch room, drawing it in relation to the chord-metro tunnel. He added rough dimensions. Once satisfied with his handiwork, he reduced the plan to a small area in the corner of the screen so that the drawing could be updated.

  Jenine watched while he worked, offering an occasional suggestion. Her fingertips slid idly back and forth over the table’s surface as they talked. She liked the warm touch of the strange material. It seemed to be hard but was in fact quite soft because she could make faint marks on it with her thumbnail. She was used to furniture that was impossible to mark. She mentioned the fact to Ewen, but he was now intent on a side elevation sketch that showed heights. He dimensioned the height of the switch room and the estimated height of the stairs while Jenine’s fingers toyed with a touch control at the side of the metal plate in the centre of the table. The touch control glowed softly. She said nothing, wondering what would happen.

  “Right,” said Ewen, checking his measurements against the seismographs. “We’re ten percent nearer the nothingness than we were in the tunnel.”

  Jenine chuckled. “We can’t go on calling it the nothingness, Ewen. Let’s call it the blue dome.”

  Ewen looked doubtful and grinned. “Why not? Okay - the blue dome it is.” He went back to work on his drawing.

  Jenine’s calf brushed against something on the floor. At first she thought it was a leg of the table. She glanced down. A waste bin. She was about to mention her find to Ewen when he suddenly froze.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?”

  “Shhh!”

  They both heard the creaking noise. It was coming from the metal plate. Ewen reached out a hand, touched the plate, and snatched it away. “Ouch! It’s hot!” He sucked his fingertips and glared at the plate.

  Jenine touched the control and the light went out. “My fault. I switched it on.”

  “Well you should leave things alone until we know what they’re for!”

  “If we leave things alone, we’ll never discover what they’re for!” Jenine retorted.

  “So what is it for then?”

  Jenine lifted up one of the jugs. There was a circle etched into the plate’s surface, obviously to indicate the position the jug should occupy. She held her hand above the circle, palm down, and looked at Ewen in surprise. “It’s not just hot, it’s very hot.”

  “I know that,” Ewen snapped, aggrieved, still sucking his fingers. “But what’s it for?”

  “For heating whatever goes in the jug, of course. I would’ve thought that was obvious, but I’m not the lateral thinker.”

  Ewen glanced around the room. “This is obviously some sort of conference or meeting room. So why carry out industrial work in here?”

  “Perhaps it’s for making drinks?”

  Ewen knew from his 4th year studies that Arama’s soft drink production plant boiled water as part of the manufacturing process, but the idea of making drink in a small office was patently absurd and he said so.

  Jenine’s answer was to place the waste bin on the table. She fished out the used plastic cups one by one, and placed them in a row in front of Ewen. He fell silent, picked up one of the cups and inspected the mould-covered dried dregs.

  “Doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “Why make the drinks in here?”

  “Perhaps they drank them hot?” Jenine suggested.

  Ewen scoffed at that. He gestured to the hotplate. “Would you be able to drink anything that hot?”

  “Perhaps they let them cool down first?”

  “Then why make them so hot in the first place?”

  Jenine thought about that and admitted that Ewen had a point. She scraped some of the mould from a cup, sniffed it, and wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Why haven’t they been dumped down a recycling chute? Maybe they carry out tests in here?”

  “Who?”

  The question annoyed her. “Oh, I don’t know.” A dreadful thought occurred to her. “You don’t think we’re in the Revelation Centre do you?”

  Ewen sighed and started packing the holdall. “I don’t know what to think, Jenine. Let’s do some more exploring… Cautious exploring.”

  There wasn’t much mystery about the next room. The sign on the double doors proclaimed:

  DNS C. AIR-CONDITIONING PLANT

  Ewen cautiously pushed the doors open and turned up the discharge tube to maximum brightness. The rows of giant filter housings, heat-exchangers and heat pumps extended into the darkness. All the machinery was still and silent.

  “It’s weird,” Ewen commented. “It all looks old-fashioned and yet it doesn’t look as if it’s ever been used.” To prove his point, he crossed to a pump motor and peeled off a strip of thin, clear protective plastic. Everything was covered in the stuff, even manually-operated switches. He showed it to Jenine. “Sprayed on and allowed to harden. You’d have to do a lot of preparation work in here before you could get anything started. It looks like this plant is meant to last hundreds of years before it’s used.”

  “And maybe it’s been here for hundreds of years?” Jenine ventured.

  “Well it certainly looks like it,” Ewen agreed. “It’s all so old-fashioned. Look at those air-ducts. Welded steel. Why bother when they could be made of extruded plastic?”

  The next room was identified by the legend on the door as a water purification plant. Like the previous room, all the machinery was hermetically sealed under a protective coat of spray-on plastic. Ewen added the location and contents of the rooms to his sketch maps, and they continued exploring.

  Set into the wall halfway along the corridor
were the closed concertina-like doors of what they assumed was a large freight elevator. Ewen reasoned that because there was a lot of machinery down here, a large elevator would be essential for carrying spare motors and the like. A sign on the wall near the folding doors solved one mystery but provided several more:

  DEEP NOVA SHELTER C. LEVEL 20. Ancillary Guardian Environment and Life (A.N.G.E.L.) FACILITIES.

  “Well now we know what DNS stands for,” Jenine commented. “But what does nova mean?”

  Ewen consulted the datapad’s dictionary. “It’s a religious term. It says here that a nova is a new light in heaven.”

  “Nothing more?”

  “No.”

  She pointed to the sign. “And that word looks like angel.”

  “Not quite. Let’s press on.”

  The double doors at the end of the corridor opened onto another ascending flight of stairs which they climbed without hesitation.

  DEEP NOVA SHELTER C. LEVEL 19. RESTAURANT.

  Restaurant wasn’t in the dictionary.

  The pair of sliding doors opened automatically as Ewen moved towards them. He crossed the threshold and stepped back hastily when the lights came on. They promptly went out again. In the brief explosion of brilliance they caught a glimpse of rows of tables and chairs.

  “This place seems in working order,” Ewen muttered uneasily. He was about to suggest that they leave it when Jenine walked into the room. The lights came on again. They stared at rows of bare tables and chairs. The design of the furniture was starkly functional: tubular steel frames with plastic seats and tabletops in pleasing pastel shades.

  “Why would so many people sit so close together and at such small tables?” Ewen wondered. “There’s too many tables for this to be a study area. Think of the noise levels with all these hard surfaces.”

  “It’s just like our communal meal room for our first three years,” said Jenine. “But the size of it!”

  They counted the number of seating places in each row and multiplied that by the number of rows. There were 400 seats.