Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil arrived almost simultaneously. A moment later Robin Wednesbury appeared and then Jisbella McQueen. A dozen Intelligence operatives and six Dagenham couriers arrived along with Presteign's Jaunte-Watch and the police. They formed a cordon around the blazing block, but there were very few spectators. After the shock of the New Year's Eve raid, that single explosion had frightened half New York into another wild jaunte for safety.
The uproar of the fire was frightful, and the massive grind of tons of wreckage in uneasy balance was ominous. Everyone was forced to shout and yet was fearful of the vibrations. Y'ang-Yeovil bawled the news about Foyle and Sheffield into Dagenham's ear.
Dagenham nodded and displayed his deadly smile. 'We'll have to go in,' he shouted.
'Fire suits,' Y'ang Yeovil shouted.
He disappeared and reappeared with a pair of white Disaster Crew fire suits. At the sight of these, Robin and Jisbella began shouting hysterical objections. The two men ignored them, wriggled into the Inert Isomer armor and inched into the inferno.
Within Old St Pat's it was as though a monstrous hand had churned a log-jam of wood, stone and metal. Through every interstice crawled tongues of molten copper, slowly working downward, igniting wood, crumbling stone, shattering glass. Where the copper flowed it merely glowed, but where it poured it spattered dazzling droplets of white hot metal.
Beneath the log-jam yawned a black crater where formerly the floor of the cathedral had been. The explosion had split the flagstones asunder, revealing the cellars, sub-cellars and vaults deep below the building. These too were filled with a snarl of stones, beams, pipes, wire, the remnants of the Four Mile Circus tents; all fitfully lit small fires. Then the first of the copper dripped down into the crater and illuminated it with a brilliant molten splash.
Dagenham pounded Y'ang-Yeovil's shoulder to attract his attention and pointed. Half-way down the crater, in the midst of the tangle lay the body of Regis Sheffield, drawn and quartered by the explosion. Y'ang-Yeovil pounded Dagenham's shoulder and pointed. Almost at the bottom of the crater lay Gully Foyle, and as the blazing spatter of molten copper illuminated him, they saw him move. The two men at once turned and crawled out of the cathedral for a conference.
'He's alive.'
'How is it possible?'
'I can guess. Did you see the shreds of tent wadded near him? It must have been a freak explosion up at the other end of the cathedral and the tents in between cushioned Foyle. Then he dropped through the floor before anything else could hit him.'
'I'll buy that. We've got to get him out. He's the only man who knows where the PyrE is.'
'Could it still be here . . . unexploded?'
'If it's in the I.L.I. safe, yes. That stuff is inert to anything. Never mind that now. How are we going to get him out?'
'Well we can't work down from above.'
'Why not?'
'Isn't it obvious? One false step and the whole mess will collapse., 'Did you see that copper flowing down?'
'God yes!'
'Well if we don't get him out in ten minutes, he'll be at the bottom of a pool of molten copper.'
'What can we do?'
'I've got a long-shot.'
'What?'
'The cellars of the old R.C.A. buildings across the street are as deep as St Pat's.'
'And?'
'We'll go down and try to hole through. Maybe we can pull Foyle out from the bottom.'
A squad broke into the old R.C.A. buildings, abandoned and sealed up for two generations. They went down into the cellar arcades, crumbling museums of the retail stores of centuries past. They located the ancient elevator shafts and dropped through them into the sub-cellars filled with electric installations, heat plants and refrigeration systems. They went down into the sump-cellars, waist deep in water from the streams of pre-historic Manhattan Island, streams that still flowed beneath the streets that covered them.
As they waded through the sump-cellars, bearing east-northeast to bring up opposite the St Pat's vaults, they suddenly discovered that the pitch-dark was illuminated by a fiery flickering up ahead. Dagenham shouted and flung himself forward. The explosion that had opened the sub-cellars of St Pat's had split the septum between its vaults and those of the R.C.A. buildings. Through a jagged rent in stone and earth they could peer into the bottom of the inferno.
Fifty feet inside was Foyle, trapped in a labyrinth of twisted beams, stones, pipe, metal and wire. He was illuminated by a roaring glow from above him and fitful flames around him. His clothes were on fire and the tattooing was livid on his face. He moved feebly, like a bewildered animal in a maze.
'My God!'
Y'ang-Yeovil exclaimed. 'The burning man!'
'What?'
'The burning man I saw on the Spanish Stairs. Never mind that now. What can we do?'
'Go in, of course.'
A brilliant white gob of copper suddenly oozed down close to Foyle and splashed ten feet below him. It was followed by a second, a third, a slow steady stream. A pool began to form. Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil sealed the face-plates of their armor and crawled through the break in the septum. After three minutes of agonized struggling they realized that they could not get through the labyrinth to Foyle. It was locked to the outside but not from the inside. Dagenham and Y'ang Yeovil backed up to confer.
'We can't get to him,' Dagenham shouted, 'but he can get out.'
'How? He can't jaunte, obviously, or he wouldn't be here.'
'No. He can climb. Look. He goes left, then up, reverses, makes a turn along that beam, slides under it and pushes through that tangle of wire. The wire can't be pushed in, which is why we can't get to him, but it can push out, which is how he can get out. It's a one-way door.'
The pool of molten copper crept up towards Foyle.
'If he doesn't get out soon he'll be roasted alive.'
'We'll have to talk him out . . . Tell him what to do.'
The men began shouting: 'Foyle! Foyle! Foyle!'
The burning man in the maze continued to move feebly. The downpour of sizzling copper increased.
'Foyle! Turn left. Can you hear me? Foyle! Turn left and climb up. Then - Foyle!'
'He's not listening. Foyle! Gully Foyle! Can you hear us?'
'Send for Jiz. Maybe he'll listen to her.'
'No, Robin. She'll telesend. He'll have to listen.'
'But will she do it? Save him of all people?'
'She'll have to. This is bigger than hatred. It's the biggest damned thing the world's ever encountered. I'll get her.'
'Y'ang-Yeovil started to crawl out. Dagenham stopped him.
'Wait, Yeo. Look at him. He's flickering.'
'Flickering?'
'Look! He's . . . blinking like a glow-worm. Watch! Now you see him and now you don't.'
The figure of Foyle was appearing, disappearing and reappearing in rapid succession, like a firefly caught in a flaming gyp, 'What's he doing now? What's he trying to do? What's happening?'
He was trying to escape. Like a trapped firefly or some seabird caught in the blazing brazier of a naked beacon fire, he was beating about in a frenzy ... a blackened, burning creature, dashing himself against the unknown.
Sound came as sight to him, as light in strange pattern. He saw the sound of his shouted name in vivid rhythms
F OYL E F OYL E F OYL E
F OYL E F OYL E F OYL E
F OYL E F OYL E F OYL E
F OYL E F OYL E F OYL B
F OYL B F OYL E F OYL E
Motion came as sound to him. He heard the writhing of the flames, he heard the swirls of smoke, he heard the flickering, jeering shadows . . . all speaking deafeningly in strange tongues:
'BURUU GYARR RWAWW JERRMAKING?' the steam asked, 'Asha. Asha, rit-kit-dit-Zit. m'gid,' the quick shadows answered.
'Ohhh. Ahhh. Heee. Teee. Oooo. Ahhh,' the heat ripples clamored. 'Ahhh. Maaa. Paaa. Laaaaaaaasasa!'
Even the flames smoldering on his own clothes roared gibberish in his ears.
'MANTERGEISTMANN !' they bellowed,
'UNVERTRACKINSTEIGN GAN ZELSSFURSTINLASTENBRUGG!'
Color was pain to him . . . heat, cold, pressure; sensations of intolerable heights and plunging depths, of tremendous accelerations and crushing compressions:
RED RECEDED FROM HIM.
GREEN LIGHT ATTACKED.
INDIGO UNDULATED WITH SICKENING SPEED LIKE SHUDDERING SNAKE.
Touch was taste to him . . . the feel of wood was acrid and chalky in his mouth, metal was salt, stone tasted sour-sweet to the touch of his fingers, and the feel of glass cloyed his palate like over-rich pastry.
Smell was touch. .Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his cheek. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like blows hammering his heart, and the ionization of the PyrE explosion filled the air with ozone that smelled like water trickling through his fingers.
He was not blind, not deaf, not senseless. Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and short-circuited by the shock of the PyrE concussion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another. So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno under Old St Pat's; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.
Again desperate, on the ghastly verge of extinction, he abandoned all disciplines and habits of living; or perhaps, they were stripped from him. He reverted from a conditioned product of environment and experience to an inchoate creature craving escape and survival and exercising every power it possessed. And again the miracle of two years ago took place.
The undivided energy of an entire human organism, of every cell, fiber, nerve and muscle empowered that craving, and again Foyle space-jaunted.
He went hurtling along the geodesical space-lines of the curving universe at the speed of thought, which far exceeds that of light. His spatial velocity was so frightful that his time-axis was twisted from the vertical line drawn from the Past through Now to the Future. He went flickering along the new near-horizontal axis, this new space-time geodesic, driven by the miracle of a human mind no longer inhibited by concepts of the impossible.
Again he achieved what Helmut Grant and Enzio Dandridge and scores of other experimenters had failed to do, because his blind panic forced him to abandon the spatio-temporal inhibitions that had defeated previous attempts. He did not jaunte to Elsewhere, but to Elsewhen. But most important, the fourth dimensional awareness, the complete picture of the Arrow of Time and his position on it which is born in every man but deeply submerged by the trivia of living, was in Foyle close to the surface. He jaunted along the space-time goedesics to Elsewheres and Elsewhens, translating 'i', the square root of minus one, from an imaginary number into reality by a magnificent act of imagination.
He jaunted.
He was aboard Nomad, drifting in the empty frost of space.
He stood in the door to nowhere.
The cold was the taste of lemons and the vacuum was a rake of talons on his skin. The sun and the stars were a shaking ague that racked his bones.
'GLOMMHA FREDNIS THE CLOMOHAMAGENSIN!' motion roared in his ears.
It was a figure with its back to him vanishing down the corridor; a figure with a copper cauldron of provisions over its shoulder; a figure darting, floating, squirming through free fall. It was Gully Foyle.
-'MEEHAT JESSROT TO CRONAGAN BUT FLIMMCORK,' the sight of his motion bellowed.
'Aha! Oh-ho! M'git not to kak,' the flicker of light and shade answered.
'Oooooooh? Soooooo? Noooooo. Ahhhhhh!' the whirling rake of debris in his wake murmured.
The lemon taste in his mouth became unbearable. The rake of talons on his skin was torture.
He jaunted.
He reappeared in the furnace beneath Old St Pat's less that a second after he had disappeared from there. He was drawn, as the seabird is drawn again and again to the flames from which it is struggling to escape. He endured the roaring furnace for only another moment.
He jaunted.
He was in the depths of Gouffre Martel.
The velvet black darkness was bliss, paradise, euphoria 'Ah!' he cried in relief.
'AH!' came the echo of his voice, and the sound was translated into a blinding pattern of light.
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
The burning man winced. 'Stop!' he called, blinded by the noise. Again came the dazzling pattern of the echo
StOpStOpStOp
OpStOpStOpStOp
StOpStOpStOpStOp
OpStOpStOpStOpStOp
OpStOpStOpStOpSt
OpStOpStOpStOp
OpStOpStOpSt
A distant clatter of steps came to his eyes in soft patterns of vertical borealis streamers
c c c c c c
l l l l l l
a a a a a a
t t t t t t
t t t t t t
e e e e e e
r r r r r r
THERE CAME A SHOUT LIKE
A
Z I G Z A G
OF
L I G H T N I N G
A BEAM OF LIGHT ATTACKED
It was the search party from the Gouffre Martel hospital, tracking Foyle and Jisbella McQueen by Geophone. The burning man disappeared, but not before he had unwittingly decoyed the searchers from the trail of the vanished fugitives.
He was back under Old St Pat's, reappearing only an instant after his last disappearance. His wild beatings into the unknown sent him stumbling up geodesic space-time lines that inevitably brought him back to the Now he was trying to escape; for in the inverted saddle-curve of space-time, his Now was the deepest depression in the curve.
He could drive himself up, up, up the geodesic lines into the past or future, but inevitably he must fall back into his own Now, like a thrown ball hurled up the sloping walls of an infinite pit, to land, hang poised for a moment, and then roll back into the depths.
But still he beat into the unknown in his desperation.
Again he jaunted.
He was on Jervis beach on the Australian coast.
The motion of the surf was bawling: 'LOGGER-MIST CROTEHAVEN JALL. LOOGERMISK MOTESLAVEN DOOL.'
The churning of the surf blinded him with the lights of batteries of footlights: Gully Foyle and Robin Wednesbury stood before him. The body of a man lay on the sand, which felt like vinegar in the burning man's mouth. The wind brushing his face tasted like brown paper.
Foyle opened his mouth and exclaimed. The sound came out in burning star-bubbles: Foyle took a step. 'GRASH!' the motion blared.
The burning man jaunted.
He was in the office of Dr Sergei Orel in Shanghai.
Foyle was again before him, speaking in light patterns:
W A YW A Y W A Y
H R O H R OH R O
0 E U 0 E U 0 E U
He flickered back to the agony of Old St Pat's and jaunted again.
HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH
STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING
SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE
BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS
ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS.
HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH
STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE BRAWLING
SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS ON THE
BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS. HE WAS
ON THE BRAWLING SPANISH STAIRS.
The burning man jaunted.
It was cold again, with the taste of lemons, and vacuum raked his skin with unspeakable talons. He was peering through the porthole of a silvery yawl. The jagged
mountains of the Moon towered in the background. Through the porthole he could see the jangling racket of blood pumps and oxygen pumps and hear the uproar of the motion Gully Foyle made towards him. The clawing of the vacuum caught his throat in an agonizing grip.
The geodesic lines of space-time rolled him back to Now under Old St Pat's, where less than two seconds had elapsed since he first began his frenzied struggle. Once more, like a burning spear, he hurled himself into the unknown.
He was in the Sklotsky Catacomb on Mars. The white slug that was Lindsey Joyce was writhing before him.
'NO! NO! No!' her motion screamed. 'DON'T HURT ME.
DON'T KILL ME. NO PLEASE . . . PLEASE . . . PLEASE... .' The burning man opened his tiger mouth and laughed. 'She hurts,' he said. The sound of his voice burned his eyes.
S S S
H HH
E EE
H HH
U UU
R RR
T T T
S
H H H
E EE
H HH
U UU
R RR
T TT
S S S
'Who are you?' Foyle whispered.
WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
0000000000000000000000000
AREAREAREAREAREAREAREAREARE
AREAREAREAREAREAREAREAREARE
AREAREAREAREAREAREAREAREARE
YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
000000000000000000000000
UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
The burning man winced. ' Too bright,' he said. 'Less light.'
Foyle took a step forward. 'BLAA-GAA-DAA-MAWWFRAA-MISHINGLISTONVISTA!' the motion roared.
The burning man clapped his hands over his ears in agony. 'Too loud,' he cried. 'Don't move so loud.'
The writhing Sklotsky's motion was still screaming, beseeching: 'DON'T HURT ME. DON'T HURT ME.'
The burning man laughed again. 'Listen to her. She's screaming. Begging. She doesn't want to die. She doesn't want to be hurt. Listen to her.'
'IT WAS OLIVIA PRESTEIGN GAVE THE ORDER. OLIVIA PRESTEIGN. NOT ME. DON'T HURT ME. OLIVIA PRESTEIGN.'
'She's telling who gave the order. Can't you hear? Listen with your eyes. She says Olivia.'
The Stars My Destination Page 21
