Grimes stared at the intrusive being. So this was what lay in the nothingness between the time tracks. It was hell, the old-fashioned hell of the fundamentalist faiths at which he had always sneered, a hell peopled by horrendous, horned and tailed demons. . . .
"Sir! Sir! Come back, please!"
Come back? What the hell was this stupid devil yapping about? How could he come back when he was only just getting there?
"Sir! Earthquake. Bad one!"
"Go away . . . go away. . . ."
The scaled, clawed hands were at his face, were forcing something over his head. Grimes drew in a panicky breath, and the sudden inhalation of almost pure oxygen nearly choked him. He put up his hands to try to tear off the respirator, but there were devils all around him, restraining him. He was aware that the floor was heaving underfoot, and he was fighting as much to retain his balance as to throw off his assailants.
His assailants?
His saviors.
The floor was like a calm sea over which a long, low swell was rolling, and the walls of the dome were bellying inwards. But only Grimes and his attendant demons were aware of this—and he still wondered if this were actuality or some drug-induced vision. Billinghurst squatted there like a Buddha, and beside him young Pahvani was staring into—or at—nothingness, a supernaturally sweet smile on his thin face. Williams was muttering, "The Outback. The last Outback. . ." And Sally Clavering . . . was that a halo faint-gleaming about her head, or was it merely a wreathing streamer of dreamy weed smoke?
And were Billinghurst and Williams and the others as insubstantial as the guru and his people? They were all fading, fading fast, as they swayed in time to the waves that swept across the floor in regular undulations. They were fading—and again, through rents in the very fabric of space-time, that ultimate, horrifying nothingness was increasingly evident.
If only the simple, three dimensional fabric of the dome would rend, to release the hallucinogenic fumes. . . .
What was hallucination, and what was not?
"Sir, sir!" It was the devil who had first pulled Grimes back to reality, or to what passed for reality. "Sir, sir! Do something, please! We are frightened."
You aren't the only one, thought Grimes.
He looked at the native. He must have been a kitchen helper of some kind. He was wearing an incongruous white apron, and a belt with a pouch into which were thrust various tools.
"Give me your knife," ordered the Commodore.
He grabbed the implement, used it to tear away the black hangings shrouding the interior wall of the dome. Behind these the plastic was tough, too tough, even though the knife was razor-sharp. And then . . . and then the wall bellied inwards as there was a particularly severe tremor and the skin was stretched almost to bursting.
The knife penetrated, and tore the outer skin as well. There was a great whoosh as the air rushed out, and Grimes and his helpers were blown through the opening into the night, into the night that was blessedly normal despite the earthquake shocks that continued, with increasing severity. He stood there, keeping his balance somehow, and watched in fascination as the fantastic bubble structure that was the Lucifer Arms collapsed upon itself, as balloon after glowing balloon deflated, some with explosive suddenness, some slowly. The generators kept working until the very end, and the darkness—the real darkness, the natural darkness—did not sweep in until the last bubble had burst.
Grimes had battery powered emergency lights brought from Rim Malemute, and then the rescue work began.
XXXIV
"I've just heard from Clavering," said Grimes to Sonya. "He and Sally didn't come out of it too badly. The Lucifer Arms was insured against earthquake damage, and Lloyd's paid up."
"Earthquake damage!" she scoffed. "Earthquake damage! When you were running amok with a long knife!"
"It wasn't all that long. And there was an earthquake, after all."
"Joking apart, John, what do you make of it all?"
"You've read my report."
"Yes. But I sort of gained the impression that you were too scared, still, to write what you really thought."
"Could be. Could be. You know, I keep thinking of the Lucifer Arms as a microcosm of the universe in which we live, our space-time continuum. What would have happened if the Guru William had succeeded in bursting the bubble of what we think of as reality, just as I burst that bubble of inflated plastic?"
"I can't see us all going whooshing out into nothingness."
"Can't you? The guru's body was never found, you know, or the bodies of about a hundred of his disciples. Or that of young Pahvani. They could have fallen into one of the fissures that opened and closed again—but it's odd that, apart from the utterly missing people, there were no casualties." He slowly filled and lit his pipe. "An unfortunate business. Clavering and his people will have to leave the Rim, of course. Billinghurst's a vindictive bastard. Drongo Kane'll get away scot free. He broke no Federation laws, and I doubt very much if we could get him extradited to any of our worlds."
"And the Confederacy," she said, "will be confirmed in its archaic puritanism insofar as the permissive practices of the Federated planets are concerned."
"I hope that you're right," he said. T sincerely hope that you're right." She looked at him in some amazement. He laughed. "No, I'm not becoming a wowser in my old age. It's just that I've been made to realize that even if what you do doesn't much matter, where you do it does.
"To use the so-called mind-expanding drugs out here, on the Rim, is like smoking over a powder barrel!"
"The sort of thing you'd do," she jeered, but without malice.
"But only tobacco," he told her, puffing away contentedly on his pipe. "But only tobacco."
THE END
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