Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  No, it is only that nameless hospodar that I have to contend with, only he who has taken up arms against me. His master believes, or at least hopes, that this deputy devil will be enough to thwart me in doing God’s work. But it is my firm belief that, with God’s help, and in His gleaming Light, I will be enabled to perform His work, obey His commands, accomplish His desires, amen.

  And for now, it is time to separate that avatar of the demon, Brother Rush (a name rich in association), from my quintet. Leaving Andy Harbinger seated quiedy beside Susan Carrigan in Quad Theater #3 on West 13th Street, watching Night Fall (a film noir of current popularity), I made my way to Stockbridge and assumed corporate form in the darkness of a church parking lot not far from Maria Elena Auston’s house.

  The shape I had chosen to take was that of the man who had helped Kwan escape the police in Hong Kong, and who later rode the plane with Pami; an early version of Andy Harbinger, really. Two of my five people already have reason to trust me. It would be preferable to have their confidence, while I am ridding them of Rush. As Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence, as the documents in my wallet testified, I would already have the presumption of authority, so it should be possible to perform the extraction of Rush from the group without the necessity of doing anything gaudy. Or at least I certainly hoped so.

  I walked the two and a half blocks of curving suburban street—an early sign of sophistication in humans, I have noticed, is a distaste for straight lines—and as I approached the Auston house I saw that the drapes were open at the large dining room window, presenting my quintet at meal as though Hogarth had done a cover for some supermarket family magazine.

  But where was Rush? The others sat and ate and talked and brooded—Kwan occasionally took tiny painful sips from a glass of pale orange liquid—and a partially eaten meal waited at a sixth place, but Rush was not to be seen.

  I sought him with my mind, but couldn’t find him. He had to be present, because of that meal in front of that empty chair. Had his rustling claque in the air above my head warned him of my presence?

  I didn’t want to declare myself to the others until I had fixed the position of Rush. I partially crossed the lawn, to its darkest segment, away from the light-spill out that dining room window and also clear of streetlamp illumination, and there I stood and watched, and waited.

  Why were they so cheerful? By now, bitterness and sorrow should have made those five much more silent and introspective. It must be their companionship that was raising their spirits, but unfortunately I couldn’t give them a properly disheartening solitude; they had to work together. Would they do the right thing when the time came? Yes, they would, they would, there was no real question. I would turn the screw until they did do what I wanted. Of their own free will, of course.

  I was careless, I admit it. My attention had become too fixed on my five operatives, and insufficiently on my current metempsychosis, Brad Wilson of U.S. Naval Intelligence, and on the whereabouts of Rushl Before I knew it, the attack was well under way.

  Damn him! I tried to take a step, to see another portion of the dining room, but my feet wouldn’t move. Only then did I realize what he was up to. The Brad Wilson toes had become roots, digging down through his shoes into the soil of the lawn, burrowing down and down, clutching at rocks, entwining with the roots of other trees, luxuriating in the groundwater—

  Other trees! Already the flesh of my ankles and shins was bark, already an irresistible pull drew my arms upward, already my joints were stiffening. In alarm, I tried to flee this body, but the chittering of the thousand thousand tiny counter-cherubs all around my leafing head imprisoned me. They couldn’t hold me in, not by themselves, but with the power of Rush as well I might be defeated.

  Defeated! This corporeal form was merely a temporary shape, but it was the permanent me, made up of my own atoms. (We do not inhabit and possess Earthly creatures, as the fiends do, as Rush was doing now, but make our shapes from ourselves.) If the demon and its million squeaking parasites could hold me, the essence of me, inside this terrestrial vessel until they completed the transformation, until they turned me into a vegetable, with a vegetable’s brain, I would never break free, never be Ananayel again, never have power to be anything but what they would have made me: an inexplicable tree on a suburban lawn.

  Failure was possible. And if I failed, what? There was no doubt, not the slightest doubt, that I would be abandoned to the effects of my failure. I would be encased here, lost here, shut up mindless inside this woody crypt for as long as it took Him to send another effectuator, a worthier deputy, to succeed where I had faltered, and at last to end this world.

  And then? I would end with it, of course.

  But now, now, what of now? Soon, in that theater in New York City, Night Fall would come to its expected end—the girl is innocent, it’s obvious—and Susan would rise, but what would happen to Andy Harbinger? There isn’t enough animation in him to get him on his feet and out of the theater, much less to take him through the complications of the rest of the evening. There would be confusion, then shock, then an ambulance. To the hospital Andy Harbinger’s apparently living corpus would be taken, and I had not bothered to be meticulous about that corpus. It doesn’t contain everything a human body would be expected to contain. Here and there, I did short circuits, took the easy way out. And now? Expose that body to emergency room staff? Confine myself to a severely abbreviated life span as a tree ? Fail my God?

  I still had teeth. I ground them as I forced this head to turn on its stiffening neck. Where was Rush? Where was Rush?

  At the curb was parked Frank’s Toyota. Its exterior left-side mirror was angled so that I could just get a glimpse into it. Among other things reflected in that mirror was not Rush but a Buick parked on a driveway down the block, on the other side of the street. Narrowing my focus, peering through the Toyota’s exterior mirror into that Buick, into the interior rearview mirror of the Buick, my view included the plate-glass living room window of the house next door to the Auston house. The room behind that window was dark; the window was not a perfect mirror, but it would do, and in it was reflected the Toyota again. And from that angle, in the driver’s window of the Toyota, very dimly, very darkly, hunched low in shrubbery around the side of the Auston house, there was Rush! Gibbering with glee.

  My arms were almost vertical. My legs had been joined into one trunk, encased in bark. My sight was dimming, but I focused it, I focused it, and then I opened my eyes. The Toyota and Buick mirrors, the plate-glass window, the driver’s window of the Toyota, all cracked with sounds like pistol shots. But as they went, the beam of my fury reached Rush where he hid, sliced into him like a harpoon, yanked him into the air, and flung him to the ground at my feet.

  How they howled, that skyful of gnats! How their faint cries rose into the night, crackling like static electricity across the surface of high thin cloud layers. How they fled, fading into wisps of gas. And how their master squirmed inside his borrowed husk, trying to escape the agonized body of Rush.

  Oh, no, not this time. I couldn’t kill him, I knew that, not unless I was fast enough or lucky enough to convert all his matter to energy at once, which would be just about impossible, but I could give him a memory so searing he would never dare to confront me again. Pain so violent that the very thought of me, eons from now, would make him curl up like a shrimp.

  He was Rush now, he would feel what Rush felt, and he would stay Rush until I had taught him his lesson.

  I boiled the blood within his veins. I turned his eyebrows to needles and embedded them in his eyes. I knotted his intestines, placed a living ferret in his stomach, turned his tongue into a piranha with its tail still attached to his pharynx.

  He squirmed, that devil, he snarled, he shrieked in a range inaudible to any ear on Earth. He tried everything, tried to counterattack, to resist, to fight off the plagues I put upon him, strangling the ferret with his own guts, burning the piranha as it ate his mouth, but always and ever distract
ed by the pain I kept on inflicting and by the new horrors I thrust into his mouth and his nose and his ass and his eyes. Humans escape such torment by fainting or dying, but neither avenue was available to him. And he knew better than to beg for mercy. Mercy? To a foul fiend?

  He first tried to escape as a worm, out Rush’s ear, but I charred that worm to ash and less than ash, and he barely got back inside before I did for him completely. Feel my punishment, demon!

  Then he tried, frantically, repeatedly, to kill Rush, to end the onslaught by robbing me of the field of play, but I resuscitated the body every time, and every time I blessed it with more plagues, more stabs, more clenchings, twistings, rippings, rendings.

  Then I stopped. It cowered, still in the burning center of all the anguish of the Brother Rush persona, afraid to make another run for it, while I undid the damage it had done, severing the roots beyond my feet, reverting back to flesh, sap to blood, fiber to sinew.

  When I could move I did so, stepping away from that thing that shivered and keened on the lawn. I looked into the dining room, where my five remained as before, and they had noticed nothing of the events outside. Good.

  I directed my attention back to the former Rush. He would never be Rush again. He would never trouble me again. “I’m finished with you,” I told him. “You may go.”

  At once, the body ceased to tremble, and grew slack. After a brief interval, a cockroach crept cautiously from its dead nostril.

  I broke one of the creature’s legs, just as a reminder, but otherwise left it alone, and it hobbled away through the grass.

  So there was no need for Brad Wilson here after all, no need to look in on my people. Rush was dealt with. I permitted Brad to discorporate, then carried the body of Brother Rush back with me to New York, leaving it in a neighborhood where it wouldn’t excite particular comment, and made it back to Andy Harbinger just before the end of the movie.

  “That was really good,” Susan said, as we shuffled out of the theater with the rest of the audience.

  “Yes, it was.”

  X

  Oh, no, no, no, no more, no more...

  No more, no more, no more...

  Hate hate hate hate hate hate—

  No more!

  No, no, not even thoughts, can’t— Brain doesn’t work, can’t think, can’t stop running, can’t stop—

  No more, no more...

  Have to do it. Have to do it! But—

  No more, no more...

  But—

  I must.

  34

  By the end of the newscast at eleven-thirty, it seemed pretty clear that Rush wouldn’t be coming back, but no one wanted to go to bed just yet, in case something happened after all. Had Rush seen the police, and were they after him, and had he fled? Something like that, probably, which meant he still might come back when the coast was clear. In any event, everybody felt wide awake.

  And besides, there was a program about to come on that interested at least two of the people in the house. Both Grigor and Maria Elena wanted to watch Nightline, on which Ted Koppel’s guests would be a Dr. Marlon Philpott, the physicist who was conducting the experiments at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant that had caused all the demonstrations and more recendy the strike by better than two-thirds of the plant’s workers, and in opposition to him another physicist, Dr. Robert Delantero.

  “Our program might be considered somewhat strange tonight,” Ted Koppel told his audience, with his small smile, “because the matter is strange. Our subject is a peculiar kind of thing known to physicists as strange matter. Some scientists, like Unitronic Laboratories’ Dr. Marlon Philpott, believe that strange matter, once harnessed in the laboratory, can become the cleanest, safest, and cheapest power source in the history of the world. Other physicists of equal standing in the scientific world, such as Harvard’s Dr. Robert Delantero, believe that strange matter, if found, and if carelessly handled, could be more destructive than anything we’ve ever imagined. Still other scientists believe that no such thing as strange matter exists at all. Dr. Philpott, have you ever seen strange matter? And could you describe it?”

  Dr. Philpott was a heavy man with a spade goatee and dark-rimmed glasses. He looked more like a restaurant critic than a scientist, as though he’d be more interested in the ingredients of a French sauce than the contents of a Leyden jar. His manner was avuncular in a heavily condescending way. He said, “If we ever got enough strange matter together to see it, Ted, a chunk that big, why, we’d be in business right now. But I can describe it, all right, because we know it’s there. It has to be there, the math says so.”

  “And what does this math say strange matter is?”

  “A different way of combining the building blocks of matter,” Dr. Philpott told him, forgetting to call him “Ted.” “As we now know, the basic building block of matter is the quark.”

  “Not the atom.”

  “No, Ted, the atom is composed of protons and neutrons. If you imagine protons and neutrons as litde bags, what each bag contains is quarks, two up quarks and one down quark in each proton, two down and one up in each neutron. These bags are surrounded by a cloud of electrons, and the whole package goes to make up one atom.”

  “And what would be the difference in strange matter? Would there be such a thing as a strange atom?”

  ‘That's precisely what we’re looking for, Ted. And the difference would be, no bags. A strange atom consists of a cloud of electrons around a large collection of up quarks, down quarks, and some new quarks, known as strange quarks.”

  “I’m not surprised. Dr. Delantero, you agree these strange quarks, strange atoms, strange matter, exist?”

  “I’m afraid they exist,” Dr. Delantero snapped. He was a bony no-nonsense nearly bald man wearing a bright red bow tie. “The essential question,” he said, staring sternly into the camera, “is which kind of matter is the most stable. There’s every reason to believe that we are the more strange matter, and that matter composed of atoms containing strange quarks is more stable than the matter we know. If that’s true, and if Dr. Philpott does manage to isolate strange matter, then God help us all.”

  “You’ll have to forgive me, Dr. Delantero, but I’m afraid I didn’t follow that. Dr. Philpott seems to think strange matter would make a fine energy source, safer and cheaper than conventional nuclear power. You don’t think the stuff is safe at all, but I just can’t seem to understand why.”

  Dr. Philpott horned in to say, “You’re right not to understand, Ted, because it’s nonsense. He’s taking a worst-case- possible scenario and acting as though it’s the only possible case.” “Yes, Doctor,” Koppel said, “but let’s just let Dr. Delantero try to clear this up. Dr. Delantero, assuming that you and Dr. Philpott are both right, and that strange matter does exist, or can be made to exist, why does he think it’s safe and you think it’s unsafe?”

  Dr. Delantero looked more and more like a hanging judge. He said, “I can only presume Dr. Philpott turns a blind eye to the dangers here because he and Unitronic Laboratories see profit in it. That’s why he’s—”

  “Profit for all mankind.”

  “Yes, Dr. Philpott, but let’s give Dr. Delantero a chance.” ‘They threw his lab out of Grayling University,” Dr. Delantero suddenly shouted, “because he kept blowing things up! So some idiot decided he’d be better off at a nuclear plant!” ‘That’s the most outrageous, most outrageous—” Dr. Philpott now looked like a restaurant critic who’d been served a bad shrimp; he was so offended he could barely speak.

  Which gave his host an opportunity to say, ‘That is a question I’d been meaning to get to, thank you, Doctor. Dr. Philpott, would you like to reply to this rumor about explosions?” “I certainly would.” Dr. Philpott smoothed his shirt front with a shaking hand, stopped hyperventilating, and said, “Clearly, no one has been blowing up strange matter because we haven’t found it yet. Nor, since my move to Green Meadow, not because I was thrown out of Grayling, I’m still tenured at Grayl
ing, Dr. Delantero, thank you very much, but because the facilities at Green Meadow are better suited to my researchers, there has not been one incident, nor shall there be. Some very minor explosive incidents, causing no damage whatsoever, did take place in the early stages, when we were experimenting with various receptacles, pieces of equipment, gaseous elements for storage, but not one since, and I defy Dr. Delantero to dispute that.”

  Dr. Delantero too had grown somewhat calmer by now. “All I’m saying,” he replied, “is that we’re babies with a loaded gun in this situation, and we shouldn’t be taking the risks Dr. Philpott is taking up there at Green Meadow. The people out on strike are the sensible ones.”

  Koppel said, “As I understand it, and I freely admit I don’t understand the entire matter all that well, but as I understand it, there are two distinct theories as to the effect of strange matter when it comes into contact with regular matter, and that’s what the dispute is all about. Dr. Philpott, if I had a drop of strange matter here, and I spilled it onto the floor, what would happen?”

  “Nothing. It would lie there, and slowly evaporate away into harmless alpha particles. But if we put it into a reactor, and fed it— The point with strange matter is, it’s so much more dense than regular matter, it’s the closest thing we can create on this planet to a black hole. A chunk the size of a BB would weigh more than five million tons. The energy in that dense mass—” “Yes, thank you, Dr. Philpott, but we’re running low on time here, and I’d like to ask the same question of Dr. Delantero. You subscribe to a different theory, and at this point there’s no way to prove which theory is correct, but in the scientific world both theories are equally plausible, is that so?”