In the cellar, with the lights out, they stood side-by-side, man and dog, equally scared. The circle was a lighter shade of blue, but that was not what frightened them. Beyond the circle, dim and indistinct, were gray, moving shadows. There were no features to be seen, nothing he could readily identify. There seemed to be a conglomeration of wires, struts, and tubes upon which one of the moving forms was perched. The other shadow stood beside this, legs quite skinny, feet abnormally broad, perhaps a foot wide. That and the shape of its head (narrow, half again as large as a human skull, with a high forehead) told Salsbury that the things beyond the blue glow were not men.
Intrepid sensed it too. He bounced around, snarling, the first ugly mood Salsbury had seen him in. He threw himself against the blue spot, bounced off the wall a few times. When he was sure there was no way to reach the gray forms, he contented himself with crouching against Victor's leg, teeth bared and eyes gleaming, spitting insults at the intruders.
Abruptly, the blue glow grew lighter, the shadows more distinct. There was a click, a sharp snapping sound like a dry twig breaking underfoot. The ringing ceased and was replaced by ghostly silence. The blue light disappeared altogether, leaving the circle which gave as clear a view as any window.
But the window was not looking out on Earth. Not on any Earth Victor had ever known.
The machine on the other side-apparently the one that had been establishing contact with this world, the one projecting the blue light-was an intricate jumble of condensers, sensors, wires, transistors. There was a chair atop it where the alien sat. The second demon stood beside the machine, looking through the window.
They were both looking directly at Salsbury.
Their heads were hairless, and, indeed, hinted at a rough gray cross-hatching of scales. The bony ridge of their foreheads shelved off as if on sudden impulse, leaving their eyes sunk two inches back in their heads. Their eyes fire leaping, crimson flushing, rouge, cinnabar, scarlet
Victor pulled his gaze from those burning eyes, quickly examined the rest of the face. For a nose, there were five vertical slits arranged evenly above a sunken, pulsing hole that seemed to serve as a mouth. All of this was on a withered, leathery body whose muscles were drawn long and tight and lacquered over with a hundred coatings of varnish to make them look brittle.
Unconsciously, Victor backed against an old workbench. He wished iron Victor would surge up and take command. But iron Victor was gone. There was no trace at all of his alter ego. The programming had-perhaps temporarily-come to an end. He was on his own.
Intrepid cringed against his legs, trying to find some way of crawling up his pantlegs where he could not see the demons and would not be tempted to look.
Salsbury looked to the steps, realized belatedly that he would have to go right by the window where the demons waited. Just as he felt his spirits scrape the bottom of his splintered soul barrel, the shadow monster standing beside the machine, the one in clear view, raised a long, bony arm with six three-jointed fingers on the end and made as if to reach out and grasp him.
His horror did not motivate him to flight, but paralyzed him completely. His vital organs had turned to cast iron. Someone had even pinned open his eyelids so that he could not blink out the alien vision.
Then the lighted portal fluttered brighter, dimmer, and was suddenly gone as if some delicate electronic link between alien world and basement wall had been severed. He stared stupidly at the blank tile which had been a window into hell only moments ago. His feet grew lighter. His organs turned back into flesh. Someone removed the pins from his eyelids. Still, he was emotionally incapable of acting. He was gasping frantically for breath.
Intrepid recovered faster, leaped and slammed against the wall. He took a second running lunge, hit with his feet in a flying leap, fell away and looked at Victor with glistening eyes that demanded his master do something about the things in the walls.
Victor recovered his wits under that gaze. He shrugged his shoulders at the dog, then crossed to the steps, went up them two at a time. There was a tremendous thumping and scraping as Intrepid tried desperately to keep up with his master. Salsbury went to the second floor bedroom where he had stowed the three trunks. He opened the door a bit hard, sent it banging back against the wall where it shivered and quaked as if it were alive. He went to the computer trunk, gave it a solid kick. The stinging pain leaped up his leg, but he did not much care. He kicked it again. Intrepid had joined him by this time and he set to snuffling and whuffing, dancing around the computer trunk with a look of expectancy.
Let's have a briefing, Victor said to the 810-40.04.
It wasn't in the mood for conversation.
Come on, damnit!
Nothing.
He remembered the tool bench in the cellar and went back down. Intrepid followed to the head of the stairs and watched him descend, but did not follow. In the cellar, Victor found the tools racked on a pegboard wall. He chose a medium weight crowbar and took it back to the bedroom, moving like a caveman with his favorite stone axe.
He squared off before the computer trunk and brandished the weapon. A briefing now, or I pry you up good! There was a great deal of adrenalin pumping through his system, and all his nerves seemed to grate against each other, alive, aware and excited. There was something going on that he did not understand, something involving shrunken, leathery lizardmen with sucking eel mouths. It was definitely going to get dangerous, for those were dangerous looking customers, those scaly freaks. If he was expected to play a role in it, then he damn well better be informed.
But the 810-40.04 was unresponsive.
He stepped forward, swung the bar, smashed it against the top of the trunk. It bounced off, ringing his arm like a bell. His bones screamed at him to stop acting like an idiot, to have more respect for the fragile parts of him. He dropped the bar and massaged his arm until it started to fed like flesh again. Carefully examining the top of the trunk, he could not find the smallest dent or scratch where the bar might have struck. Thus ended round one.
I'm getting mad, he told the computer. And he truly was. He realized, not without a start, that this was the most heated emotional moment he had experienced since he had wakened in the orchard with iron Victor in command of his body. He felt more human than ever.
But the computer was inscrutable.
He picked up the crowbar again.
Intrepid snuffled and chortled like a mare in heat.
Victor knelt beside the trunk and examined the thin line where the lid met the body. Gently, he inserted the thin edge of the crowbar tip into the crack, worked it in a bit, then brought his weight down on it. For a moment, the increasing pressure seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the box. Then the bar slipped, popped out of the seam, and snapped a sharp blow alongside his head. He wobbled there on his knees, managed to keep from passing out. He nibbed his head where the bar had struck, felt an egg already beginning to rise. As soon as everything ceased spinning, he gritted his teeth and slipped the pry bar into the seam again, wedging it even farther back before rising and applying his weight. He bore down, grunting and sweating, putting every ounce of his strength into what he was doing. Just when he thought the metal must surely buckle, the frame most certainly give, just when he should have achieved success, there was a blinding flash of blue-green light, and a fist full of needles thumped him solidly across the head while a second fist grabbed a black curtain and pulled it down all around him.
CHAPTER 6
As he came up out of velvet blackness, trying to push the curtain aside, he discovered one of the lizard-things was eating his head. He could feel its raspy tongue delicately licking his face, savouring his flavor preparatory to taking the first bite.
Victor shuddered, opened his eyes expecting a demon. Instead, Intrepid whuffed happily in his face as if he had no idea how bad his doggy halitosis was and flicked his tongue over his master's face. Salsbury shook his head to clear it, felt around with his hands to see if his b
ody was still connected to that head by a neck. Everything seemed in place, though he had a headache that was chewing up his brain. He sat up, looked around, and realized that the shock transmitted up the crowbar had knocked him six feet away from the trunk. He got to his feet, swaying slightly, and walked to the door,
You've won, he told the computer.
The computer said nothing.
Remembering something Lynda had discarded in the attic while routing through her uncle's possessions, he went up the narrow stairs, turned on the bare bulb and looked for it. He found it in the second box: a.22 pistol and ammunition. It seemed to be in good repair, well kept, perhaps a small game hunting pistol. He took it and the ammunition into the living room, dragged a big easy chair into a corner so his back was not to any windows, and loaded the weapon. Intrepid sat at his side, both curious, playful and tense.
From where Victor sat he could see the entrance to the cellar. If a skinny, sucker-mouth man-lizard so much as stuck a head out of the cellar door, he could blow it to bits with one shot well placed. The creatures did not look particularly sturdy.
But time crawled by with no major events, and his muscles began to uncramp, his nerves to loosen. In half an hour, he realized he was hungry and made himself two sandwiches. He was about to open a beer when he remembered his body's exaggerated reaction to the last one he had drunk. Beer was out. He needed to stay clear and alert tonight. Eating his sandwiches, he began to think. He had been reacting on a gut level up to this point, charging about like a wild boar with a peptic ulcer. He thought some unpleasant things, like: what if the lizard-things on the other side of the portal were the ones who had programmed him to kill Harold Jacobi? Perhaps he was their tool.
Such a thought was almost unbearable. If only the 810-40.04 would come out of its funk, he might have an answer that would make all this seem rosy, though he doubted it.
Then he had a second bad thought. Suppose, in trying to open the computer, he had cracked a casing, a power shell? Suppose he had ruined the computer? Would a briefing ever come now? Or had he stupidly, in a moment of fear and excitement, destroyed his only link with understanding?
He thought about those things until eight in the morning, showing not the faintest interest in sleep. At eight, he took his gun up to the bathroom and took a shower. He first posted Intrepid outside the door, then locked the door behind him. He tilted the white clothes hamper against the inside knob, the lid wedged to keep the knob from turning or the door from opening in the event someone or something found a way to by-pass the lock. He did not draw the shower curtain, and he kept his eyes on the door for a sign of movement, his ears attuned to pick up the first snufflings and whinnyings from the dog.
At 9:15, he put his canine into the luggage shelf behind the front seat of his MGB-GT. Intrepid had just enough room to turn around in and three windows to look out of. He seemed content. Salsbury judged he would be in Harrisburg a little after ten. The first thing on the agenda was to see if the police would let him look at the body of Victor Salsbury or whoever was dead.
* * *
The desk sergeant was a dour-faced, yellow-toothed creature who sat behind a scarred and littered desk, chewing a stub of a cigar that was not lit and shuffling papers back and forth to make himself look busy. He ran a heavy, thick-fingered hand through his thinning hair and reluctantly took the delicious cigar morsel from his mouth before he spoke. Yeah?
My name's Victor Salsbury, Salsbury said.
So? He blinked several times, put the cigar back in his mouth.
I'm the one you people think is dead.
What's that supposed to mean? He was immediately defensive. Salsbury realized he had made two mistakes, the first of which was not beginning the conversation logically. A mind like that of Sergeant Brower (that was the name on the plaque on his desk) required tangible, simple statements to work with; phrases that could be turned over in his mind again and again for examination. Secondly, he had not been servile enough with the good sergeant-especially when using the phrase you people.
He changed his tact. I read in yesterday's Evening News, that the body taken from the river was identified as Victor Salsbury. But, you see, I am Victor Salsbury.
Wait a minute, Brower said, paging an officer named Clinton from his desk intercom. Salsbury stood there, fiddling with his hands and trying not to look guilty. Iron Victor would have handled this well, without a nervous shiver of the smallest magnitude. But the unprogrammed Victor that was now in charge of his body could only think about having killed Harold Jacobi little more than two weeks ago and how those uniformed men would love to learn the facts on that one.
Detective Clinton approached the desk from the right, then stopped ten feet away from Salsbury as if he had been hit on the head with an eight-pound sledge. Recovering several long seconds later, he finished the walk to the desk. He was a tall, thin man with the features of a predatory bird. His eyes shifted from Brower to Salsbury; he paled again.
This fellow's here about that unidentified stiff case you were on, Brower said. Little things like mistaken identities for corpses or men coming back from the dead did not interest him. They were not logical thoughts; there was no use pursuing them. He turned back to his papers and began snuffling them assiduously.
I'm Detective Clinton, the hawk man said.
Victor Salsbury, Victor said, accepting the bony hand.
The detective's color drained completely, and he ceased trying to maintain his cool. This way, please. He led Salsbury back to his office, waited for him to enter, followed, and closed the door behind them. He directed Salsbury to a chair, sat in his own comfortable swivel model behind his desk. What can I do for you? he asked.
Victor could think of a dozen snappy rejoinders, but realized it was not the time or place for humor. I read the paper last night saw that piece about the body identified as me.
He was quiet a moment, then smiled. I'm sure there is a mistake, Mr. Salsbury. The names may be the same, but the body was identified correctly.
There are not likely to be two Victor L. Salsburys in a city this size-both artists. Besides, you recognized me out there.
There is a resemblance, he said. We found some pictures at the Salsbury residence. You match pretty well.
Did the corpse?
Somewhat. It was, you have to realize decomposed.
Why did you link the corpse to the name Salsbury?
Your landlady- He flushed. His landlady, a Mrs.-
Pritchard, Victor said, startling himself that he knew it.
Clinton was startled too. Yes. She reported that you had gone out for an evening and had been gone ten days. You were four days overdue on your rent. She was afraid something had happened. She reported you missing.
Identification on the body? Victor asked.
None. Except a note pinned to its shirt. It was inside a plastic window from a wallet and didn't get too wet.
The note said-?
'I'm creative, but they won't let me be. V.'
Not even signed with a full name?
No. But it fits. Victor Salsbury was a commercial artist trying to work creatively but unable to build a reputation.
But I am Salsbury, and I left home for ten days with a batch of work which I sold in New York.
Detective Clinton leaned forward in his chair. But the dental charts matched, he said. There had never been a record of Salsbury's fingerprints, but he had had regular dental care.
Dr. Broderick, Victor said.
Clinton looked even more unsettled. We checked Broderick's records with x-rays of the corpse. Perfect match, almost.
Almost?
Dental records never tell everything. His childhood dentist was someone other than Broderick. In compiling his records of Salsbury's teeth, Broderick could easily have overlooked something which showed up in more thorough crime-lab x
-rays.
I assure you I am Victor Salsbury.
Clinton shook his head, determined. It would be extremely coincidental to find two people whose dental records matched that closely. They are almost as distinctive as fingerprints. The corpse was Salsbury.
Victor gathered courage, cleared his throat. X-ray my teeth right now. Compare them with the others.
Clinton was reluctant, but there was little else he could do. This Salsbury looked like the Salsbury, had the same memories (although strangely second-hand), the same abilities. He had probably just finished twenty-foot stacks of forms and reports closing out the case, but the case would not die yet.
They went to the labs where a gray-haired man named Maurie took the x-rays, compared them. This Victor Salsbury's dental charts were almost a duplicate of Dr. Broderick's files.
Upstairs, Clinton shook Victor's hand, looking very depressed at the prospect of re-opening the investigation, and said, Sorry to cause you all this trouble, Mr. Sals-bury. But the resemblance was amazing in so many ways. I wonder who in the hell he'll turn out to be?
Victor shook Clinton's hand and left the station. He could have told the detective who the corpse was, even though the man would never discover it on his own. The corpse, most definitely, was Victor Salsbury.
* * *
For a while, he sat in the car, wondering if his secret masters, whoever had hypno-programmed him to kill Harold Jacobi, had also killed the real Victor Salsbury to solidify his cover. But that seemed illogical, for there was the fact of the suicide note and the overdose of barbituates Salsbury had taken before throwing himself in the river in his melodramatic method of ending it all. Somehow, Victor's masters had known that would happen, had known the real Salsbury's death would be unclear enough to allow for the imposition of an imposter.
But how did they know? They must have known far in advance of the suicide, for they had fed the real Salsbury's past into him like applesauce on a spoon.
And why did he look like Victor Salsbury? Enormous coincidence? He thought not.
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