Koontz, Dean - The Fall of the Dream Machine

by The Fall Of The Dream Machine(Lit)

  "Why, Mr. Malone, you look awful," the man said.

  "Slipped and fell on the street."

  "You walked?" the guard asked, his muscled jaws writhing with each word.

  "I said I slipped, didn't I? You don't slip and fall in a floater!"

  "Sorry, Mr. Malone. Sure. You want any help getting upstairs?"

  "Only my clothes were damaged," he growled.

  The big man stared after him as he crossed the lobby, punched for the elevator. There was a different boy on duty. He was quiet, gloomy, gnawing on a wad of gum. There was no conversation this time, only the sideways glances from the oiled eyes of the boy as he pondered Mike's dirtied, rent garments. He stepped out at Lisa's floor, walked down the dimly lighted corridor to the door that was hers.

  She had left it very slightly open.

  Inside, the living room was dark, as was the hallway.

  There was a faint odor of jasmine in the air, her perfume. He could imagine the faint and noxious odor of something else—of Cockley. Hate seethed into his head, into every inch of his body, his fingertips full of as much loathing as the very cells of his brain. Pierre had told him that it was best to develop a hatred of the enemy, making it that much easier to kill when necessary. But this hatred was not an application of one of Pierre's lessons. It was natural; it was the pure product of his own mind. He hated Cockley for the years he had been trapped in Show, for the first beating years ago, for the attempted murder in the incinerator, and—most awful and most of all—for what he had done to Lisa, for what he had made of her. He had taken the only thing that really meant anything to Mike and had used it in whatever manner he chose, deflowering it literally and figuratively. Mike stood before the bedroom door, letting this hatred boil. It mounted from a fog into a cloud— into a cloud sculpture of many eyes, fangs, and wicked claws.

  Gently, when the time had come, he slid back the bedroom door, which also stood slightly open. It moved noiselessly on lubricated runners, disappearing into the wall. He stood very still, hardly daring to breathe. And he listened.

  A rustling of sheets, very faint and very light.

  Breathing . . .

  Two kinds of breathing: one light and one heavy; one easy, one rattling in and out of large lungs. . . .

  He stood and allowed the sculpture to gain in feature and stature, waiting as it filled his mind with its own hateful form.

  Finally, he reached around the corner of the half-open doorway and flipped on the lights. Brilliance seeped into every corner of the room, washed back on him like a rising sun. Cockley had jumped from the bed, naked and snarling. Lisa was crying, holding the sheets tightly to herself. Hatred frothed wildly through Mike's mind, tinting all things a blood red, making all things foreign to him. His gun was in his hand, and it was the one thing that seemed real. He raised it and aimed at the unreality that was Cockley rushing toward him. Something told him to shoot, to depress the stud and wait for the spilling of blood and the burning of flesh. But before he could do this thing, there was a great weight striking his shoulders. He and Cockley were crashing into the wall, bouncing away and onto the floor. He cursed himself for delaying, for allowing the shock of seeing what he had expected to see throw him so completely off balance.

  The gun was gone. He looked about for it, but nowhere could he see it. A fist smashed across his face, tore open the corner of his nose. He looked up into Cockley's face, saw eyes wide with terror and determination. He heaved himself. Cockley was too surprised to follow up his initial, instinctive attack with careful fighting. He fell off Mike, scrambled to beat the other man to his feet. But Mike was first, and he drop-kicked Cockley in the chest. Cockley rolled with the blow, however, and came up fast, clamping one hand around the wrist of the other arm to make a deadly, vicious club of his flesh. He brought it down on Mike's shoulder. The blow hurt like all hell. Mike fell, saw the old man raising his arms for a second blow.

  Then Cockley froze. There was a moment of utter, tomb silence, and then the ancient's left arm went spinning madly across the room, collided with the wall and fell down. Blood showered out of Cockley's shoulder. The old man looked at it rather oddly, as if the gore-filled cave in this shoulder was not part of him, as if this was someone else's body that had been ripped open and violated. Then, almost theatrically, he swiveled slightly on his feet and fell sideways onto the carpet, his blood rippling out to form a brilliant pool about him.

  Mike looked up. Lisa was standing, naked, beside the bed, the pistol clamped tightly in her hands. She looked at him, back to the corpse. "I—I had to."

  He strained, stood up, rubbing his shoulder and neck. "Of course you did. He deserved it; he deserved worse." He took the gun from her hand, tucked it back into the leather pouch in his shirt sleeve.

  She began to cry.

  "There's no time for that," he said as gently as he could, walking to the closet. "Get dressed quickly. It is almost midnight."

  She pulled a red one-piece jumper from the closet, began wriggling into it. "Cockley was supposed to leave at midnight," she said. "I hoped you'd get here in time. We better hurry. If he doesn't show up where he's supposed to, they'll come here looking for him."

  That was all they needed.

  He darkened the room and closed the door behind them. In the elevator, the boy asked no questions. They fell like stones, jerking to a halt just feet from the ground floor and coasting into stop position. The door opened onto the lobby—and four of Cockley's bodyguards.

  "We wanted the garage!" Mike almost shouted at the boy.

  "You didn't say so," the boy said, whining.

  "Hey!" one of the guards shouted. "Lisa Monvasa, She's supposed to be—"

  "Down!" Mike did shout this time, slamming his finger into the control panel.

  The door whirred shut just seconds before the guard collided with it. Then they were dropping, jerking to another halt, tensing as the doors slid open again. There was nothing beyond the portals this time but gray concrete and floaters. "They'll have to use the stairway," he told Lisa. "We still have a few moments' head start."

  He turned to the boy. "If you go back up there and bring them down, I'll kill you!" The boy was cowering in the corner, obviously wishing he had stayed home with his aura and forgotten about prestige and wealth. "Understand?" Mike roared.

  "Yes, sir."

  He grabbed Lisa and ran. It was supposed to be a red floater, white air system. He saw it as the bodyguards reached the bottom of the stairs and fired at them. The first shot caught the fender of the car next to theirs, shattering it like so much expensive and delicate glass.

  "Here!" He pulled her to the car.

  There was a man in the driver's seat, waiting. Lisa climbed in. Mike turned, fired at the guards with the gas pistol. As fast as he depressed the stud, another pellet sped away, cool and soon to grow hotter and larger. He did not wait to see if any of the first shots were successful, but seconds later he heard a mad scream and a burbling sound followed by a pause in their firing.

  "Let's go!" the driver shouted. His window was down. He too was shooting.

  Mike crawled the rest of the way into the vehicle, pulled the door shut behind. "Roger Nimron!"

  "Observant, aren't you."

  A shot struck the hood, glanced off. "Vibra-proof," Mike said to Lisa, taking her hand, squeezing it.

  Another shot burst across the rear window, was gone without doing damage.

  Nimron started the air system, raised the floater. Rolling up his window, he slammed a foot to the accelerator and shot out and upward, winding around the spiraled exit ramp, crossing the line that would automatically open the huge doors. But when they were only yards from the massive alloy portal, they realized it was not going to open for them. The guards had evidently turned off the power to it. It rushed them, growing, growing, growing. . . .

  VI

  Charging an elephant with a slingshot. That was what he thought as the giant door loomed ahead, growing larger, and there was no hope of their
stopping in time to avoid a collision. They would smash against its flank, flatten themselves, compress the floater into an irregular ball of steel and copper, aluminum and plastic—and flesh. "The vibra-beams!" Lisa shouted.

  It was taking place in distorted time now, fragments of seconds almost eternities for Mike. The door swam at them, though their speed was great. He had no vibra-beam, but the gas pistol was in his hand the moment she mouthed the suggestion. He shoved his arm out of the window, fired. Fired again and again. The door was whining like a living thing, an animal caught in a trap. Then a rent appeared in the middle. Another pellet expanded, shredded the alloy further. The third popped outward, blistering the semi-steel, peeling it back from the hole like orange skin. Then there was a bump, a thump, the shredding of the right rear fender on a jagged projection of the door, and they were through into the night, fluttering across the lawn like a manufactured butterfly.

  "Why, Nimmy?" Mike asked when they were certain they were in the clear. "Why risk an important neck like yours?" He looked at Lisa. "This is the President of the United States."

  "It was fun," Nimron said in way of an explanation.

  "You must have a better reason than that," Mike said, shaking his head. "You could have been killed."

  "Exactly," Nimron said, swerving onto a main artery and accelerating to a hundred and thirty in the high speed lane. "I could have been killed. Remember, Mike, that I said there were some things that bothered me about the past as we know it—about the pre-Show world? One was the fact that the President could have such a lavish nuclear shelter while the rest of the world and the rest of his people were dying in a fiery holocaust. Well, I think it is because, in those last years of the pre-Show world, the rulers never fought the wars they started. They did not care who died or how, because they were always safe, always too far removed from the bloodshed and the violence. They could not really conceive of the effects of a war or the plight of the masses except in a vague, very general sense. Only a few rulers in those last decades had ever fought in a war. There was one who had his ship rammed from under him, one who had been a general in battle (and it is not the generals who are the sufferers of a war, the mangled and wounded and maimed). There was a Latin American who had led his people in a revolution. Aside from those, there were no enlisted men who became rulers. I won't make that mistake. I'm going to plunge myself into the front lines of our Revolution, Mike. I'm going to make myself a part of it. In fact, I'm making that mandatory for all our leaders. Even Andrew is going to lead one of the raids tonight. It is the only way to insure a peace-loving leadership."

  "It sounds reasonable."

  The car swung off the road onto a more primitive highway. "You should know," Mike said, "that Cockley has a computer searching for the entrance to the Appalachian shelter. I stopped it, but I could not erase it. They'll have our location tomorrow morning—no later than tomorrow afternoon."

  "If things go right," Nimron answered, "tomorrow morning will be too late for them anyway." Nevertheless, there was a mask of worry over his face, a film of anxiety.

  Death: I never thought I would see you!

  The Dying: Neither did I.

  Death: Shall we wrestle?

  The Dying: Not just yet, please.

  Death (anger seeping into his voice, anger touched by wariness): What is this thing you have said? Do you not see my claws? Is it that my fangs are not plain to you? Do not your eyes revolt at the sight of clotted blood in my transparent veins? Do you dare deny me?

  The Dying: Your claws and fangs are very sharp and very clear. And, yes, I do deny you. I am not yours this time either.

  Skilled mechanical hands worked over the body, worked in the body. Arteries were replaced with plastic arteries, the arm with a dead man's arm. There was new blood in the new vessels.

  Somebody else's blood. . . .

  Mike was not blindfolded this time, and he saw the impressive entrance to the great shelter. The doors were concealed behind primary portals of artificial rock that swung out like the jaws of the mountain. They moved through the jaws and were once again in the cavernous main chamber. Technicians worked overhead, recording data, scuttling about in their three-wheeled carts, preparing for the action to come in the short hours of the night. It was two-thirty in the morning; the revolt was scheduled to begin at three o'clock.

  Lisa held to his arm, tightly. He could feel her quivering. Smiling to reassure her, to make her sudden upheaval easier to take, he held her with one arm closely, as they walked.

  Nimron led them to the elevators, past the guards who spoke words of cheer and encouragement and congratulations in having accomplished phase one of the plan. It struck Mike that even the lowest of those working in the complex were aware of the secret plans and able to talk conversationally to Nimron. There were no hidden plans, nothing that was not in the open for all of them to see and understand. Mike had the feeling that this was another departure from the pre-Show world. Somehow, he could not imagine a society that had participated this freely in their own government wanting to slip into the semi-death of Show and the aura.

  They left the familiar hallways and entered a corridor unfamiliar to Mike. The walls were gray concrete here, nothing lavish, not even the hint of ornament. There were crates of parts and stacks of building supplies lining the walkway, narrowing it so that they had to proceed in single file in some places. "Where are we going?" he asked Nimron.

  "To the studios," the other man called over his shoulder.

  Lisa looked up at Mike.

  He explained to her briefly, as they walked, what was going to happen. They were going to jam Show broadcasts with transmissions of their own. Only this broadcast was going to disillusion the viewer rather than give him more and better dreams. It was going to make the viewer hate himself. It was going to wreck Show, or at least throw them off balance enough so that the squads of trained fighters could wreck Show.

  She trembled even more.

  He held her even tighter.

  They entered, at last, a large room with a giant, nearly living wall of machines that leaned slightly over a small, round stage where they would stand to overthrow the world. Mike felt a wave of power sweep through him, a river of pride. The change he would make in history tonight might be the greatest change ever. He fought down the pride and the feeling of power, remembering what Nimron had said.

  A little man in a white smock rushed to Nimron's side, stood fiddling with his tiny beard, tugging his lips open as he pulled at the little peak of black whiskers. "We're almost prepared."

  And Lisa said: "I'm frightened."

  VII

  They found him in time, found his shattered body.

  Anaxemander Cockley was swallowed by a rubber mouth and gulped into a metal stomach. He felt himself being pulled apart, shuffled together, stacked and dealt out. He felt the little forces tugging at parts of his outsides, the big forces stretching, shaping, hacking, destroying and rebuilding his insides. He felt his heart burst and felt a new one being slipped in so quickly that he had no time to faint—even if the machine had allowed him to faint.

  He liked it in the Womb.

  He felt his brain being touched, important points etched in it more clearly, trivia erased. Throbbing, his kidneys were replaced, his liver strengthened. Part of his stomach had been shattered by a fragment of the gas pellet. He received a new stomach.

  Painlessly, his eyes were gouged out, for he had meant to have new eyes anyway. Though he was in darkness within the Womb, and though this had happened before, he was very glad indeed when the new orbs were inserted, nerved up, and he could blink eyelids over something besides empty holes.

  It was time for a running through of the new facilities. A testing. The machine would see if he was all right. After all the physical things, it would run a second—and perhaps more important—test to see whether he still matched up, after all the tampering, to be the same Anaxemander Cockley, psychologically, as he had been: it would be no good to come out yo
ung if one were not the same man.

  The machine stuck ice fingers into his brain, stirred around in the pudding to see if anything looked out of place, to see if any traumas needed to be erased—or replaced.

  And the machine made dreams: dreams of fights wherein he rammed fingers into eyeballs, struck viciously at women as well as men, responded in all the ways he had always thought were wisest and best.

  The machine checked the results and found that the new Anaxemander Cockley was exactly like the old Anaxemander Cockley except for an error of .000000023. Which could be expected, of course. It was nothing that could change him significantly, nothing that anyone else or himself would notice. He was still a deadly man.

  The machine pulled out the ice fingers and began the speedheal process that would leave no scars—visible or otherwise. It must leave a perfect, flawless body, for the old man was vain.

  In time, the door opened and his cot slid out. He opened his eyes; he stood.

  There was a mirror which held his naked figure for inspection: eyes like nut skins, brown; a Roman nose; thin lips; white and even teeth, very carnivorous teeth; a strong chin; a lean but muscular body very virile and very agile.

  He patted the Womb goodbye, dressed, and made his way to his office. His bodyguards followed silently. Everywhere else, there was commotion. The computer had been put on top speed, and clerks were manually arranging its facts to recheck it. Even a computer could be overworked.

  Cockley plopped into the chair behind his desk, leaned to the grid that would carry his words to the computer. "Give me all information collected to the moment!"