by Brian Lumley
“Out of my … ?” Then Sith understood. “You want me at my most vulnerable,” he said. “I shall come out, if you wish it—but there ends our conversation: I speak through the construct’s system. My own has neither the articulation nor the volume. The Thone do not converse in that manner:”
Gill nodded. “Then since I need to talk to you, you’d better stay where you are. First I want to know about Clayborne, Anderson, Denholm, Varre and Haggie. Where are they?”
Turnbull and Angela had found their feet; averting their eyes from the flowing, liquid-colour walls, they looked at each other. Angela was plainly mystified by the question Gill had asked of the captive alien; Turnbull, equally at a loss, could only shrug.
“Clayborne, Anderson and Varre—I can show them to you,” Sith Bannerman answered. “Or I could have, before you took away my mobility. Now I can only direct you.”
“Liar!” Gill snapped at once. “Your antigrav is working. I can feel it like my own pulse. You’re only waiting for a chance to use it, that’s all. You could lift yourself and that wreck up off the floor and be gone out of here in a moment—but not before I’d cut your construct and you in half a dozen pieces!”
Turnbull said, “What the hell’s going on? He can show us Clayborne and the others? Is there something I’ve missed?”
“Something we’ve missed,” Angela corrected him. “What’s happening here, Spencer?”
Gill said, “You’re in for a shock, you two. And so am I—probably. I mean, I know what’s coming, but I’m not sure how I’ll take it. Anyway, if my butchering of this thing offends you, look away for a moment. I can’t trust him while he has hands.”
Angela saw Gill’s intention and quickly looked away; she heard Turnbull’s sharp intake of breath; when she looked back Gill didn’t have to worry about trusting Sith-Bannerman. With certain exceptions, there wouldn’t be a great deal that he could do anymore.
Gill looked a little pale but his voice was as hard as ever. “Very well, and now maybe you’ll show us the others.”
“And yourselves,” said Sith-Bannerman, causing the construct to grin its soulless grin. He floated up from the floor and Gill took a firm hold on his left elbow.
“No higher than that,” Gill warned. “And no tricks. The first inclination I get that you’re up to something … you won’t be up to anything. Understand?”
“Oh, yes, I quite understand,” Sith-Bannerman answered. He pointed the stump of his right hand into the kaleidoscoping colours and led Gill and the others a short distance into the control centre’s mazy interior. They passed between banks of living screens and around several “corners”—until finally they were there.
“I told you it would be a shock,” said Gill, his voice very small.
Standing upright against a backdrop of coloured motion, suspended there with their arms crossed on their chests and apparently asleep, were six fully clothed people. Their chests rose and fell; their flesh was a natural, healthy pink; pulses were visible and they were quite clearly alive. Three of them were Miles Clayborne, David Anderson, and Jean-Pierre Varre. And the other three were Spencer Gill, Jack Turnbull and Angela Denholm!
“Clones!” Turnbull gasped.
Gill shook his head. “Sorry to keep contradicting you,” he said, “but they’re the real thing—we’re the clones! You—” he held his weapon close to the floating alien, “—you’re responsible, so you explain it to them.”
“You are not clones,” the alien said. “Nor are you constructs as such, for you are governed by your own brains. That is to say, your memories are true memories and not created artificially, and apart from the fact that your recent experiences are yours and yours alone, you are the beings you see here in repose. In short you are duplicates, synthetically copied to resemble in almost every respect the original pattern or creature.”
“We’re not … creatures!” Turnbull scowled. “Not the way you use the word, anyway.”
“On that point we beg to differ,” said Sith-Bannerman. “Should I continue?”
“Get on with it,” said Gill.
“Indeed you are superior to the original specimens … will you allow me the use of that term, specimens? Good. Several microsystems were introduced into you at the moment of duplication to assist with your primitive healing processes, to change your metabolisms, to remove many of the weaknesses inherent in your race. The Thone cannot abide physical handicaps or abnormalities: ‘illnesses’, as you term such disorders. But your psyches, your mentalities, were left quite alone. For it was these that I was testing. But physically? When a Thone invigilator examines a specimen group, he is bound to ensure that they have every possible advantage. Most of the worlds you have seen were poisonous to you in one way or another: their atmospheres, pollens, species, some or all of these things could well have proved fatal to you. Without the alterations I have mentioned, the examination would be invalid. You could all very well be ‘dead’ by now.”
“Like that runt Haggie?” Turnbull again interrupted. “Is he ‘dead’? Why isn’t he here?”
“And Rod—what about him?” Angela wanted to know.
“Alas,” said Sith-Bannerman, “Haggie came here by error. He was not synthesised. The man you know is the true man. And a remarkable man! Somehow he has avoided the more poisonous places, found sustenance for himself, kept one jump ahead of his pursuer, the machine I sent to find him so that I could expel him.”
“But it did catch up with him once,” Gill said. “You could have expelled him then—but instead you tossed him back into the game. Which was murder pure and simple. He will die out there, somewhere, eventually.”
“Presumably.” There was a shrug in Sith-Bannerman’s response.
“And Rod?” Angela had to know.
“I introduced your husband into this in order to … add flavour,” Sith answered. “But please, do not accuse me of his murder! No, for I believe that was your doing … .”
Suddenly it was all too much for Angela. Her knees wobbled; she swayed and sat down at the feet of her likeness—no, at her own feet! Gill and Turnbull turned instinctively towards her—and Sith took his chance. He used his antigrav to its full, jerked upwards toward the ceiling haze and out of Gill’s grasp. Gill made a wild leap, his weapon buzzing angrily, and missed by all of twelve inches.
Sith drifted away into the high haze of soft light and was gone … .
For a few moments Gill raged, but silently. At first furious beyond words, he hurled down the Thone weapon and shook his fists, then finally commenced cursing himself for a fumbling, bumbling clown. All of his frustration poured out of him in seconds, leaving him pale, limp and trembling.
“My fault!” Angela was aghast. “I’m sorry, Spencer. But when he—”
“No,” he rasped, shaking his head. “Nobody’s fault. Or mine, if anyone’s to blame. He would have escaped sooner or later. This is his place, not ours. And we aren’t up to his sort of trickery. Not even in the same league.”
“He wouldn’t have escaped if you’d killed him,” said Turnbull matter-of-factly, but without accusation.
“I couldn’t, Jack,” Gill told him helplessly. “Not because I didn’t want to or he didn’t deserve it, but because it wasn’t my place to kill him. I wanted—I don’t know—to bring him to trial? Yes, I think so. But trial by his own kind. You see, I’m pretty sure that they’d consider him a criminal, too. There were rules to this game and he broke every one of them. But to kill him out of hand … that would simply be to invite their wrath.”
“So what now? Do we hunt him down?”
“In this place? We’re the ones who’d be hunted! We don’t know what he has here, what he can do.” Suddenly Gill felt trapped—even more so than when he’d been a true prisoner of the House of Doors, in worlds utterly beyond his control. “Jesus,” he panted, throwing up his hands, “there’ll be stuff here he can use against us! And …” He paused, chewed his lip and gradually fell silent, became thoughtful.
“And?” Angela prompted him.
“And … stuff I might be able to use against him!” Gill’s smile was grim when finally it came. “The synthesizer—the House of Doors-is just a machine after all. Think of it as a car, and the alien as the driver. But I’m an unwilling passenger and I can give him real problems.”
“Like fiddling with the knobs on the dashboard?” said Turnbull. “Stamping on the brakes, and so forth?”
“Maybe even the accelerator,” Gill answered.
And as the big man helped Angela to her feet, Gill in his turn sat down. He offered them one last hot and harassed glance—and even managed the ghost of a smile—then closed his eyes and put his head in his hands. And all around them the House of Doors was a great maze of eerie, multihued mobility, and very, very quiet … .
But in Gill’s mind—within the world of his machine mentality—it was not quiet. Sith was already at work, mobilising the synthesizer to the attack. And Gill could feel the alien’s agile “fingers” at work as surely as the hand of some careless thief in his pocket. Careless because he thought he had Gill’s measure, and that this merely “human” being was more or less helpless. Gill knew this and was determined to prove him wrong.
Poisonous gases were in the process of being produced; which Gill channelled from their target—his area of the control room—into an unspecified but long-dead world many light-years away in the synthesizer’s memory. Frustrated, Sith answered by “dimming” the lights and other life-support systems; and Gill at once cancelled his command and “switched” them on again. Sith located his grotesque correction construct (even now pursuing Haggie across a frozen, alien ocean, where now and then great whale things would crash upwards through the ice to spout) and ordered it back to the House of Doors. Gill countermanded the instruction, told the hunter to bring Haggie to the control room with all possible speed—and then to pursue Sith! An order which Sith at once cancelled.
And so it went: with the alien on the offensive and Gill in defence, it was stalemate. But as Gill’s base of experience widened and his skill improved, he began to take the initiative. And soon Sith began to discover what a two-edged sword the synthesizer was.
Gill had two big advantages, and when the opportunity came he used them in concert. As Sith sensed his opponent’s growing strength and felt the changes taking place in the House of Doors, finally he knew that there was no alternative but flight.
In an antigrav harness made unreliable through Gill’s interference, and feeling the temperature of the control area plummeting, Sith made his way to the transmat. He had no option now but to abandon the House of Doors to the three human beings. He could not simply “take ofi” in the synthesizer, for that required both concentration of attention and complete mastery of the necessary manoeuvres, which were things that Gill would deny him; and anyway, he was aware of something which his enemies knew nothing about.
Gill did know, however, the precise moment when Sith departed: he felt the surge of alien machinery and immediately asked the synthesizer for an explanation. The answer came back as quickly as his request, and:
“Gone!” he said then, opening his eyes and climbing wearily to his feet. “Gone back to his own kind, to the seat and centre of all Thone power.”
“Gone?” Turnbull echoed him, no longer doubting anything that Gill said, but still questioning the meaning of it. “He abandoned all of this as easily as that?”
Gill laughed, however shakily. “Easy for you!” he said. And then he frowned. “But he does seem to have been a bit hasty, yes. And I can’t help wondering why.”
He turned to the ephemeral “walls” and called the whirling, unformed scenes to order, focusing the screens on Ben Lawers outside the Castle, and others upon the nearby towns of Kenmore, Killin, and Lochearnhead. It was midday out there, with grey skies and fine, soft snow falling to coat the mountain slopes. But as the pictures came clearer Gill and the others were at first puzzled, then shocked to their roots.
“What the hell … ?” Turnbull gasped. Men in radiation suits moved on the slopes of Ben Lawers, all around the Castle. A tower of scaffolding stood almost as tall as the Castle itself, with a platform bearing the weight of an ominous grey-metal mass. Scientists in white smocks stood on the tarmac of the lakeside road, binoculars to their eyes, gazing at the Castle and the tower both. Apart from which the place seemed deserted.
And even as Gill, Turnbull and Angela watched, the handful of scientists and technicians began to take their departure, going down to the road and driving off in their various vehicles. TV cameras mounted on poles turned this way and that, televising the whole scene. As for the towns around the loch—and isolated farms and settlements nearby, and other towns even farther out from the centre—they were quite empty.
“Oh my God!” Turnbull finally croaked, the very look on his face causing Angela to fly into Gill’s arms.
“Spencer,” she said breathlessly, “surely they don’t intend to … ?”
“I think they do,” said Gill, “unless we can stop them. They’re going to blow the Castle right off the face of the Earth!”
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
“Doors,” said Gill, starting off through the weird maze of the place, wanting to run but feeling the floor sucking at his feet like so many giant sponges. “We have to find the doors. Some of these walls are locator screens and storehouses and God knows what else, but others are doors. I don’t know the layout of the place or I could find them. And the synthesizer’s idea of ‘direction’ is different from mine. So it’s trial and error; we search until we stumble across them. Or we try to backtrack along the route that alien bastard took to bring us here, and I use the synthesizer to tell me when I’m warm.”
“We believe you,” said Turnbull, “just keep going. It’s a good job I got an A in gibberish!” The big man was right behind Gill, almost tripping on his heels. “But shouldn’t it be easy? The Castle isn’t that big, surely?”
Gill didn’t even bother to look back. “Don’t you remember what Haggie said? About seeming to walk for miles in this place? This is synthesised space, Jack—space within space. And it’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. Christ, it’s a projection room for entire galaxies!”
“Shit!” Turnbull laughed, his hysteria very real. “The House of Doors! And you can never find one when you want one!”
“If Barney was here, he’d sniff me one out,” said Gill, directing his machine awareness ahead of him.
“Barney?” said Angela. And: “Barney!” she gasped. “But where is he?”
“Last we saw of him was in Clayborrie’s world,” said Gill. “But if I know Barney he’ll be okay. Those horrors on Clayborne’s world were for our ‘amusement,’ not his.”
Turnbull caught Gill’s elbow. “Spencer, how long will it take those boffins to get clear of ground zero? I mean—”
“How much time do we have? How should I know? It could be days or only hours. It just depends when she’s scheduled to blow.”
“Or … minutes?” said Angela.
But Gill made no answer … .
In fact it was half an hour.
The thermonuclear device was a small one (a “tactical” weapon and relatively clean) which would take the Castle, most of that face of Ben Lawers’s scanty topsoil, and a deal of the mountain’s rock with it to hell. But the scar wouldn’t be permanent, and within a week people would be able to move back into their homes inside the twenty-five-mile zone.
The decision had been taken to destroy the Castle utterly following the disappearance of Anderson, Gill, and the others—but especially Anderson. A Minister from the MOD—in the hands of alien aggressors? Not only did Anderson have knowledge of Britain’s defence systems but all of NATO’s and most of the world’s as well! When word of his abduction had leaked, then the outcry had been international and the demands undeniable, however undesirable. Martial law had been declared in the area, the tower built, the people moved out.
At Strike Command H
Q in a commandeered hotel in Pitlochry, the countdown was into its last minute when a technician glanced at the bank of TV monitors and gasped, “What the … will someone tell me I’m seeing things?”
In the background, over a tinny Tannoy system, an unemotional voice continued the countdown: “Zero minus forty-eight … zero minus forty-five … zero minus forty-two …”
All eyes were now turned to the screens, all mouths falling open in shock. “Turnbull!” someone shouted. “Jack Tumbull—one of the group of people who were taken. He was Anderson’s minder.”
“Minus thirty-six … minus thirty-four … minus thirty-two …”
“Are you sure?” the four-star General I/C Operation was on his feet, staring.
Someone yanked out a drawer and its contents went flying; magazines and newspapers were tipped in a pile on the floor; a copy of The Observer was snatched up, thrust under the General’s nose. It had pictures of the Castle’s victims.
“Twenty-six … twenty-five … twenty-four … twenty-three …”
On the screen, Turnbull waved his arms frantically, shouted at the top of his voice without making any sense or sound. For while the site was wired for sound, all electricity had been switched off—except for power for the TV monitors, and of course the main cable to the tower. Turnbull couldn’t know that and he danced and screamed like a madman in the thin snow on the slopes of Ben Lawers. He was a mess: dishevelled, dirty, a tramp in a handful of soiled rags. But he was unquestionably Jack Turnbull.
“Nineteen … eighteen … seventeen …”
Turnbull climbed a pole, pushed his face right up to the TV screen and mouthed: Shut—the—fucking—thing—off!
“Jesus!” said the General.
And someone took the initiative, and pressed the abort button when the count was down to twelve.
On Ben Lawers, Turnbull got down from the pole but continued to dance and rave until a speaker finally came crackling alive and boomed, “Okay, Mr. Turnbull, we see you. The operation has been aborted. Stay right where you are and someone will come and get you … .”
