It was the figure in the retort all over again, but this time the creature was life-size — and undeniably real! His face was of a dark colour, almost black, which was offset dazzlingly by the crimson of his tunic and the whites of his eyes. His gaze lit on us and he began to walk towards us.
For a moment he seemed to rush towards me, growing bigger. Then he vanished, to be replaced by another figure between the electrodes, this time a woman dressed in simpler, green garments.
“Ignore them,” Harmen murmured. “They are merely momentary creatures, produced spontaneously from the primitive Tincture by the field of stress.”
The woman vanished and in her turn was replaced. The creatures began to stream off faster; then they came no more. The whine of power rose to a howl as Harmen poured in the energy from the control board. I felt myself sweating.
“We are approaching the threshold,” Harmen said, his voice louder. “Now, Klein — behold!”
As he said that it was as if I had been sucked into some kind of vortex. I ceased to become aware of my surroundings. Momentarily I got a vivid sense of blackness, of being surrounded by stars and galaxies. I felt so stunned I could make no kind of reaction to it but merely let myself be carried along.
Then the impression of outer space vanished and I was looking down on the surface of Killibol. The advancing army was rumbling across the bare, level surface, sending a flood of light ahead of it.
All at once I seemed to see not just that one scene but the whole of Killibol together: the whole dead, slate-grey planet, with scores of cities like termite heaps none of which suspected what was to come upon them. At the same time images of Earth and Merame began to get jumbled up in it. And then my vision seemed to expand to include hosts of strange dramas on countless planets across the universe; Bec’s saga was just one of them. I began to see what the alchemist had tried to tell me: that you can’t always separate cause and effect. When the alchemists of ancient times had made that gateway between Earth and Killibol they had created more than a physical bridge; they had linked the two planets in other ways as well. Becmath, it seemed to me then, had been predestined to change the world he lived on since the moment he was born; he had been instinctively drawn towards the means of effecting that change as surely as, in some desert parts of Earth, certain animals are drawn to sources of water by some sense that cannot be explained.
There was a humming in my ears. The feverish visions passed. I was standing in Harmen’s chamber amid the dying whine of power. Gasping, I wiped the film of sweat off my face.
“Is it real?” I breathed, “Or an hallucination?”
Harmen shrugged. “There may not be so much difference between the two. I prefer to say that it is real.”
He opened the big wooden doors. Thankfully I staggered out. I didn’t think I cared for the experience he had forced on me.
“And is that the Tincture you talk about?”
“No,” he said, frowning. “It comes close to the reality of the Tincture — but in an extremely attenuated form that cannot be maintained. It is an ephemeral, partial manifestation of the Tincture brought about by extreme stress. Hence, like the corrupted Tincture of the gateway, it confers some of its properties — in this case visions of far-away events, and glimpses into the operations of matter in all its forms. To try to grasp it is like trying to grasp at air. Fully manifested Tincture is a palpable solid; it can be handled and made into an object.”
Still breathing deeply, I glared around the bubbling laboratory. “That certainly must be something,” I said. “You reckon you’re going to make this stuff?”
“I believe I am close. The electric tension method I have just employed is not able to cross the final threshold … but we have other, more traditional processes under way.” Harmen ran his fingers through his untidy hair with a hint of weariness. “To be frank, there is no reliable record that the final aim has been achieved by any man, except for the notable Hermes Trismegistus who became as a god. But no one doubts that the goal is attainable. And I am closer than anyone for many centuries.”
He steered me between his watching apprentices and back towards his study. “There is something else of which I should in fairness warn you. You now possess a doppelganger.”
“A what?”
“You remember the transient beings who came into existence as the field built up? You have been in contact, however remotely, with an attenuated Tincture field. I have found from experience that transient creatures fall away easily from such a field. There is now a phantasmal duplicate of yourself which will show itself in moments of extreme stress and for a short time after your death.”
“I don’t seem to remember asking for that!” I yelled angrily. All the bad stories I had heard about alks came flooding to my mind. I was ready to believe them, now.
But Harmen was unperturbed. “It will do you no harm, You won’t even know about it, in all probability. I mention it only to forewarn you that Becmath also has a doppelganger.”
“Bec?”
“Of course. He has always taken a close interest in my work. He also has gone through your recent experience. He drew great confidence from it.”
In a strange way the visions I had been given, hallucinatory or not, had also given me confidence. Something had jelled in my mind. I felt more clear now about what was worth doing and what was not.
I flew back to Parkland and decided to rejoin Bec straight away. Ordering an aircraft to be readied to take me to the gateway, I went back to my private tower to clean up and get a change of clothes.
As soon as I stepped out of the elevator I stopped short. Grale was there. He was holding a handgun. Backing him up were two Rheattites of the League of Rheatt.
Grale grinned in his most unpleasant way.
“Hello, Klein. I’ve been waiting for you.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, going cold. “You’re supposed to be on Killibol.”
“I’m pretty annoyed about that,” he admitted, raising his eyebrows. “I wanted to be there when the fun started. But don’t worry. There’ll be plenty of laughs left when I finally walk in on dear old Klittmann.”
“Does Bec know you’re here?” I asked, measuring the distance between us.
Grale sniggered. His face looked even more greasy than I had ever seen it. “Bec sent me here, Klein. He figures you’re getting soft. He wants you out of the way till the job’s over”
So it was a bum steer after all. Bec had realised my indecision. Maybe he had thought I would foul things up for him.
“And you’re the guy to do it, eh, Grale?” The old hatred between us flared in the air until it was almost red.
“Who else? I’ve waited twelve years for Bec finally to wise up to you. It’s a real pleasure to see the roles reversed.” Suddenly he snarled at the Rheattites: “O.K., you klugs, I’ll handle it. Beat it.” Then, remembering they didn’t understand Klittmann, he repeated his instructions in faltering Rheattic.
As they left I edged along the wall. Grale was a pent-up spring, a frustrated killing machine. He was dangerous.
Alone with me, his grin became even wider. “You know something, Klein? Bec just wants me to keep you here cosy for a few days. So you can’t go giving orders he doesn’t like to those Rheattites you’ve nursed all these years. But why should I? Bec would understand if you raised objections. I might even have to kill you in self-defence. Then I could get back to the invasion.”
I could hardly expect Grale to pass up this golden opportunity to get rid of me. He raised his handgun, his eyes shining and the lips drawn back from his white teeth. The knuckle of his index finger whitened.
Now I was opposite the blind covering the hole that, uniquely among the mobsters, I had included in the wall of my living quarters. I yanked back the blind, stepping aside.
Grale gave a yell as the sunlight flashed into his uncovered eyes. His bullet slammed into the wall beside me. He fired again, blindly. I was blind, too, but I wasn’t dazzled. My eyes were cl
osed. My gun was in my hand and I loosed off all fifteen shots in quick succession. Groping, I closed the blind.
Not all my shots had found their mark, but there were more than enough red stains on Grale’s black jacket. He was as dead as he deserved to be.
I took a repeater from the arms cupboard, picking up a spare clip. The two Rheattites down below found the gun staring them in the midriff when I left the tower.
They backed away, consternation in their eyes. Very likely they had heard the gunfire and it unnerved them to see the white masters fighting among themselves.
“What were your orders?” I barked.
One shook his head. “We had no particular orders. We were to act as guards. The situation was not explained to us.”
“Well, I’ll explain it to you. The man upstairs is dead. He was trying to settle a private score, but I beat him to it. Does he mean anything to you?”
They shook their heads again. Grale was almost a stranger to them. I was the boss they were used to.
“All right,” I said curtly. “Let’s get back to Headquarters.”
A few hours later I had flown to the gateway. The experience Harmen had given me was like a vivid dream overhanging everything, and I decided I was going to be near Bec for the next part of the proceedings, whether he wanted me there or not.
Fourteen
There were no aircraft at the base camp, and no pilots who knew the course. They were all outside Klittmann. The engineers had been putting down a landline so there would very shortly be television communication between Rheatt and Bec’s army, but I didn’t want to announce I was coming in case Bec got any more ideas about delaying me. So I hitched a ride on one of the supply wagons.
We took about eight days getting there. Already I was too late for the big fight.
The plain outside Klittmann was strewn with our wagons and a few parked aircraft, but evidently the sloops and the fighting men were already inside the city. The great grey pile of Klittmann was quite a sight: they’d bombed it heavily and one whole side of it was blasted open, masses of concrete having tumbled to the ground and the inside of the city being revealed in all its layer-upon-layer complexity.
I found my way inside the city, grabbed a Rheattite officer and went looking for Bec. The destruction inside Klittmann was unbelievable. Heavy explosives had been let off with criminal disregard for the buttresses that kept the whole place standing up. Prowling black sloops patrolled the dusty streets. The usual background noise of activity was absent, and in the silence I heard firing going on elsewhere in the city. It seemed that for the most part Klittmann was already in our hands. Many of the elevators had ceased working and we rumbled tortuously up ramps in one of the sloops, making for the upper levels where Bec had his headquarters.
Compared with the Basement where I had lived for so long before leaving Klittmann, the upper reaches we were now moving in were classy; but nearly ten years on Earth had dulled my appreciation of fine differences. Now it all looked sordid, monotonous and claustrophobic. Nothing but metal and concrete and stale, cold-smelling air.
There had been an awful lot of killing. At first I thought the Rotrox were the cause of that; but shortly before we reached Bec’s hang-out we crossed a big plaza where I saw that Bec’s revenge had been complete and vicious.
I made the driver stop the sloop and I got out to have a closer look. Piled in the plaza were bodies, their hands tied, riddled with bullet holes. Their fine dress told me they were high class: probably government members and tank owners.
More bodies hung by the neck from the overhead longerons. Dimly I realised that everybody whom Bec had looked on as an enemy in the past was here. I caught sight of Blind Bissey, the owner whose tank we had appropriated, swinging listlessly with eyes bulging, blind in death as they had been in life.
Bec had even killed Bissey’s dog.
Wearily I climbed back in the sloop and signalled the driver to carry on.
When I walked in on Bec he was sitting in a fairly small, untidy office, a nearby table piled with papers. He was smoking a tube of weed meditatively. It was like old times.
If he was surprised to see me, he hid it. He scarcely moved.
“Hello, Klein. Didn’t expect you so soon.”
“So I believe,” I said stonily.
I took a good look at him; as if seeing him for the first time: much smaller than me, a stocky, dapper body, the squared-off shoulders and dark, conservative Klittmann-style clothes; the square face and plastered-down black hair. The only big difference from ten years ago was that there was more jowl beneath the jaw.
He glanced up at me. “What happened to Grale?”
“He’s dead. He tried to kill me, Bec. You should have sent another man to do the job. Or is that the way you wanted it?”
His gaze became speculative and distantly angry. “Whaddya mean he’s dead? Who gives you the O.K. to go and wipe out Grale?”
“I’ve told you,” I said evenly, “his idea was to wipe me out and tell you he was defending himself.”
Bec listened while I told him the story of how I had tricked Grale with the blind. Finally he chuckled.
“Well, it looks like I had to lose one of you. Frankly, I’m glad it wasn’t you. Care for a smoke?”
I took the tube he offered. It was the first in a long time.
“It looks like you have it all sewn up,” I said, drawing the smoke into my lungs.
“That’s right. It sure felt good to get even with some of the klugs running this place.”
I wondered what had happened to all the philosophy Bec used to talk. Right now he seemed to be motivated by nothing but revenge. It gave me a bad feeling to see him gloat.
“Yes,” I said, “I saw them on my way in. What happens next, Bec?”
“Things are going to move fast from now on. Very fast. I’ll be needing your help, Klein. Right now we have Klittmann. We have very little time to knock it into shape. Because by the time a year is out we’ll have damn near the whole of Killibol.”
I held the smoke in my lungs for an astonished few seconds.
“But how?” It wasn’t possible to conquer all the planet’s cities, besieging them one by one, in anything like so short a time.
Bec’s face became sardonic. “Technique, Klein, technique. It beats brute force every time.”
“I don’t see how any kind of technique is going to do what you’re saying.”
“Tank plague.”
I couldn’t have heard him right. I stared at him, puzzled and frightened. Ice began to congeal in my insides.
Tank and plague, when said together, are the two most terrible words on Killibol. More than one city had wasted away and died, destroyed by a famine nothing can relieve. Nobody ever visits the empty shell of such a city, not even centuries after.
But Bec was sitting here talking about it without batting an eyelid. “In Rheatt I had one or two projects going that I didn’t tell you about,” he said. “Maybe you heard about them indirectly. Anyway, while you were building up the League I got a few Rheattite scientists to work for me.” He paused, lighting up another tube. “It’s a funny thing. They’re clever that way. But they never used any weapons like this against the Rotrox. I guess they were scared it might get back to them. Anyway, they bred a special strain of tank plague, a disease that attacks the nutrient in the tanks but leaves protein and all animal life unharmed. I’m pretty sure there’s no defence against it.”
“So within a year there won’t be a productive tank anywhere.”
Bec nodded, giving me another glance with his glittering eyes. “It’s beautiful. A virus. I’ve got agents flying out now to a dozen cities. They’re wearing skin dyes so they won’t look too strange. They’ve got orders to penetrate the cities — that’s not too difficult for a man on his own — and release the virus. Once it gets into the air it has to get through to the tanks before long: there’s no known filter that can keep it out. You realise what that means, Klein?”
“Sure.” My throat was dry. “It means you’re the master.”
He was watching me carefully. “That’s right. For some years I’ve been building up enormous stockpiles of food in Rheatt. The only food available on Killibol will have to come from Earth, through the gateway, which we control. Anybody who wants to eat will have to come to us. Things are going to have to be run as we say, and no other way.”
But did Bec have enough food to feed everybody? I doubted it. Even granted that he couldn’t get round to infecting every city in Killibol straight away, the population would still run into tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. Perhaps he would set up tanks on Earth to produce protein faster than soil-grown food; but taking care of everybody he robbed of sustenance didn’t seem to be uppermost in his mind right now.
“No,” I said softly.
Something indefinable happened in his hard black eyes.
“What do you mean, Klein, no?”
I threw down the tube I was smoking. There was a feeling in my chest that seemed to be bursting. “That isn’t the new state we talked of creating, Bec. You talked about freeing people from the slavery of the tanks. About breaking the stasis. Now you’re putting a stranglehold on the cities that the tank owners could never even have dreamed of. How do you square that with everything you said, Bec?”
His right hand, resting on the table, shifted uneasily. “Don’t be a klug. You have to be an iron man, a king, to achieve anything.”
Bec was always a faster thinker than me. I could see I would have to get this over with quick. “I can’t let you do it, Bec.” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come so far with you for this.”
He glared at me, his face raging.
“You punk! You trying to tell me how to run my own outfit?”
Keeping his glittering eyes on me, he got to his feet. Suddenly he lunged for his holster which was hanging on a hook on the wall. My gun was already in my hand. I fired once. The heavy slug caught him in the chest and knocked him sideways. He fell sprawling, face down, and didn’t move.
I stood there, the gun still held stupidly in my hand, the blast still sounding in my ears. I felt lost, overpowered, like a son who has killed his father, or a dog that has killed its master. It was the first time I could remember that I had wanted to cry.
Empire of Two Worlds Page 15
