Within were passageways and rooms cut out of the rock, and they were brightly lit, so large in area and lofty-ceilinged that they seemed more like the streets and open places of a city than anything else. One of the pilots of the aircraft, holding a small green box in his hand about the size of a pound of butter, started off down one of the passageways. Gaby had already been helped back into her personal vehicle. She slid along after him without a word, and Rafe also followed.
The pilot led them to a double suite of smaller rooms. Gaby went off, still without talking, into the right-hand cluster of rooms. The pilot followed her. Rafe went to the left and sought out the bathroom of that particular room-group.
He had not shaved for more than two days, or showered. The face that looked back at him out of the mirror above the washstand in the bathroom was as wild looking as the wolf mask of Lucas. He found depilatory, soap, and towels, and spent the best part of the next hour making himself human again.
There was not much he could do about his clothes. He checked the closets in the rooms of his half of the double suite, in hopes that perhaps something had been provided for him to wear. But the closets were almost sterile in their emptiness.
He went into the other set of rooms and found Gaby also cleaned up, out of her vehicle, and lying on top of the covers of her bed. She gave him a smile that was almost a grin as he entered.
“How do you feel?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. “Oh, I could use some sleep, but that’s a need I’m used to. How do you feel?”
For answer, she grinned again, reached under the small of her back—and pulled out the green box their guide had been carrying. A second grope beneath her produced a thick fold of cloth, which, when she opened it, revealed rows of small hand tools fitted through loops in the cloth.
She touched her ear, and pointed warningly at the ceiling of the room. Rafe nodded. Obviously, the room would be bugged with listening devices. But how had Gaby gotten her hands on the green control box?
“The man that brought us both here,” she went on, in a casual, conversational tone, taking something that looked like a small screw driver to the box, “was good enough to wait around until I got cleaned up, and then he helped me out of my cart onto the bed, here. I don’t think he realized how much of a load I am. He had to put down across the room there what he was carrying”—she pointed at the box in her hand—“to get me out of the cart and into the bed.”
So. Gaby had picked the man’s pocket as he lifted her into the bed. Before Rafe’s eyes the little screw-driverlike instrument found some invisible seam in the box. Its top popped off. Inside was a mass of circuits.
“I almost hated to ask him to carry me like that,” Gaby went on, reaching for something like a thin pick, with which she probed among the circuits of the box. “But I’d gotten so used to Ab helping me. Did you know I used to work with Ab in the lab until all hours of the night, and I’d be so tired I could hardly help when he lifted me out of my cart?”
“Is that so?” said Rafe. His eyes were on the tight mass of circuitry inside the box. It made no sense to him, but Gaby’s pick was moving expertly from point to point inside it.
“Yes,” she said, laying down the pick and putting the top of the box back on. “Ab felt guilty about working me like that. But he was really a pure theoretician. I was the mechanic around the place.”
She replaced the pick and the screw-driver-like tool in their loops and rolled up the cloth container. She handed it, together with the green box, to Rafe.
“Of course,” she said, pointing to her vehicle, “it helped that I had my cart fixed up to carry most of what I needed when I worked with him.” She pointed again to the vehicle.
Rafe stepped over to the vehicle and looked down inside it. Some little distance below the top rim, he saw a row of cloth pockets with button-down flaps. One flap was unbuttoned. He lifted the flap, found the pocket empty and slid the small package of tools into it, then buttoned it again. He turned to Gaby, hefting the green box in his hand, and raised his eyebrows, questioningly.
She pointed across the room to a small table near the entrance door. He took the box to the table.
“It would’ve been much easier if I could get around without my cart, of course,” she said. “Ab kept hoping he could get me back to walking again. But it was no use. I was helpless without my cart. I couldn’t even take a step or two on my own—let alone walk clear across the lab, which was the first goal he set for us.”
There was the unmistakable note of a hidden meaning in her last words. Rafe set the green box down on the small table. He looked back at the bed on which Gaby lay and measured the space with his eyes from the bed to the table that now held the box. She nodded vigorously. The distance was a good thirty feet. Clearly, Gaby was giving him some idea of the distance she could cover without her cart. Apparently she was able to walk a good deal more than he had realized. He nodded back—message understood.
“You’ve got to keep trying,” said Rafe, aloud. “You never know. It’s just a matter of understanding what makes things work.”
“I’ve got a pretty good idea already,” Gaby answered. Her eyes sparkled. “You’d be surprised at what I can do if I have to. Maybe you’d better go get some of that sleep you said you wanted. No telling when somebody may come to get us for something. For all we know, that man that brought us here could come back at any time.”
“I suppose you’re right,” said Rafe. “He might just remember he forgot to tuck you in. Or something.”
“Or something,” she said. Both their eyes went to the green box sitting on the table near the door, thirty feet from where a supposedly half-paralyzed girl lay unable to move from her bed. Rafe gave her a smile, a little salute, and went out.
He went back to the bed in his section of rooms and lay down. He was asleep instantly, and for some time there were fleeting intervals of unconnected, normal dreams—and then, without warning, he was back in the caverns at the center of the universe.
He was in the same cavern where the creature that called itself Satan lived. But this time it had a different shape. It was a tower of burnt-out combustibles, as if from a countless number of fires that had been built one on top of the ashes of the previous one, so that it, or the being that called itself Satan, was a structure tall and lightless, at the very top of which the small flames of a last fire flickered distantly, high above the dark floor.
“Did you think you had killed me?” the being said to Rafe. “Did you think you could get away? Nothing kills me, and every way you go will bring you back here—”
Rafe spoke to him in the calculus of the lower-brain language.
“You are counterprinciple,” he said, “and cannot endure.”
Satan—the structure—roared and came tumbling in great chunks down on Rafe. A hand seized Rafe’s arm to pull him back out of the way, and he woke to find his arm being shaken by a man he did not know.
“Get up,” the man said. “They’re waiting for you now.”
“Who’s waiting?” Rafe asked. But the other stood back, folded his arms and did not answer. He carried a small green box like the one their original guide had carried and Gaby had taken apart, and as Rafe stood up he felt the broadcast he had first encountered on the aircraft take control of his upper mind.
“This way,” said the man.
He led the way out of the rooms. They were joined by a man holding another green box who was conducting Gaby in her vehicle, and all four of them walked for some distance through a brilliantly lit, high-ceilinged corridor, until they came to a large circular room with one enormous window piercing the rock wall to look on sheer cliffs all around.
Beside the window was a low dais, on which were several men. In the center, cross-legged on a sort of backless chair, sat three plump-faced men in white dhotis, clean-shaven, middle-aged, and with a serenity of countenance that signaled years of self-examination and self-training. To their left, away from the window, stood a tall, hea
vy man of about fifty, wearing a business suit with puffed shoulders and a blue-striped waistcoat.
On the other side of the dhoti-clad men stood two familiar figures. One was Peer Wallace, the crewman on the Project shuttle that had brought Rafe to Earth. The other was Martin Pu-Li himself.
Martin looked bleakly at Rafe, as Rafe and Gaby were brought less than a dozen feet from the edge of the dais. There was a chair standing empty there and Gaby was assisted out of the vehicle into it, and the vehicle taken away out of sight, someplace behind them. Side by side, she sitting and Rafe standing, they faced the dhoti-clad men.
“If you think I’m at all happy to see you here like this,” said Martin bleakly to Rafe, “think again. I’m not.”
The central dhoti-clad man raised a square brown hand, calmly.
“Let us put aside emotions,” he said gently. “For it’s necessary now that we all arrive at the truth.”
* * *
9
“Why’d you have to do it, Rafe?” asked Martin Pu-Li. “You were perfectly all right, out of it, up on the Moon in the Project. Why did you have to go get yourself involved?”
Looking at the taller man, Rafe felt for a moment the old, gut-twisting sensation of sympathy.
“I told you before I put you in the locker in the gym,” Rafe said gently. “You can’t shut up people like me and expect them to do nothing.”
“Was that it?” asked the central dhoti-clad man, and Rafe turned back to see that individual looking keenly at him. “Was that the only reason you came back down to Earth, because you were hungry for something to do?”
“No,” said Rafe. “Things were wrong. The Project was at a standstill; it had been for three years. But Earth was still pumping trillions of dollars a year into it. Why? If there hadn’t been something wrong down here, how could that much cost and effort go on without someone questioning the needless expense of it? But there was never any question—for good reason.”
He looked back at Martin.
“Three men were running the world to suit themselves,” he said. “Martin, Pao, and Forebringer.”
“No,” said the central dhoti-clad one. “Only one man runs this world.”
Once more Rafe turned his eyes from Martin to the speaker.
“Who, then?” he asked.
The dhoti-clad man did not physically shiver, but something about him gave the impression of shivering.
“Shaitan,” he answered.
“Your friend,” broke in Martin harshly. “Abner Leesing.”
“Oh, no!” said Gaby, in a tone of utter disbelief.
“Some of us are inclined to agree with you, Miss Leesing,” said the dhoti-clad man. “Or, at least, we’re still unconvinced.”
“I’m not,” said the tall, heavy, middle-aged man in the business suit. His voice was hoarse and abrupt. “Leesing’s the one. And these two know it. Make them talk.”
The coarse edge to his voice was like the rough surface of a file, brushing all of Rafe’s nerves up on edge. He looked across at the heavy man and their eyes met. But there was nothing there behind the eyes of the other—no reason, no understanding; only self-concern.
“Something scare you, friend?” asked Rafe softly.
“Yes, something scares me,” said the other flatly. He looked to the central dhoti-clad man. “We’re taking a chance every minute we hold them here. So why hold them and not do anything?”
The man he looked at held up a square brown hand.
“We’re going through the motions of passing them on right now,” he answered. “There’s a five-place ship waiting at the entrance. Meanwhile, we’ve got a few minutes, perhaps half an hour. Not enough time to force information from people like this, but maybe enough time to convince them to trust us. Mr. Harald, have you any idea who we are?”
“I think so,” said Rafe. “You’re all part of the organization, whatever it is, that runs this world now that it’s half dead and dying a little faster each day. You’re part of an organization, but even part of it you don’t understand it much better than I do. Evidently you don’t even know who runs it.”
“The Old Man runs it,” said the central dhoti-clad man.
“No,” said Martin Pu-Li. “He’s a figment of the imagination, a scarecrow—this Old Man of the Mountain, this Shaitan. Rafe, listen to me—”
Rafe turned to him.
“I won’t say you’re completely wrong in what you’ve thought,” Martin said with difficulty, like someone pronouncing a death sentence against his own convictions. “Accident, just the accident of Pao, Bill Forebringer and myself being thrown together the way we were, put us in a position of responsibility we’d never planned on having. We almost did rule the world—maybe we could have. But someone—or some group—has beaten us to it.”
“And the daytime’s all you’ve got left,” said Rafe.
“We did our best,” Martin said. “We tried to organize the night people, the ones who could resist the power broadcasts. We had them going for a while.”
“You took in anyone you could get,” said Rafe. He was looking again at the heavy-bodied man, who stirred angrily.
“You looking for trouble?” he said to Rafe.
“Just remembering,” said Rafe. “I saw your picture in the news a few times. You were an underground broker for East-West opium shipments, weren’t you?”
“Take a leap,” said the heavy-bodied man. “Take a flying leap.”
“And that’s how you got into trouble,” Rafe said, turning back to Martin. “You took anybody you could get, anybody who could be useful—the underworld characters who could control the criminal element among the zombies, the people who were resistant on their own, the students of yoga and other sciences who had some control over their brainwave patterning. And because you took anybody and everybody, part of your organization’s got away from you. Hasn’t it?”
“You don’t understand,” said Martin.
“That’s right, Mr. Harald,” said the central dhoti-wearer. “It wasn’t a case of rebellious underlings getting out of control that afflicted the organization of the night. It was the discovery that from the beginning there was someone higher up than all of us, pulling strings.”
“Leesing,” said Martin Pu-Li.
“Someone—” said the dhoti-clad man, who had not yet taken his eyes off Rafe, “someone controls us all. Someone or something. He or it is master of the world, Mr. Harald—the real master. He can even operate by day if he has to, in spite of Mr. Pu-Li and Willet Forebringer and Pao Gallot.”
“At least,” said Rafe, who had been watching him closely as he talked, “whoever it is has made believers of you all.”
“He’ll make one of you, too, Mr. Harald—shortly.”
Rafe shook his head.
“No,” he said, smiling a little, “I’ve been self-trained too long. The concept of a better man than myself, doesn’t exist in my universe.”
The dhoti-clad speaker looked at him for another long moment before changing his gaze to Martin.
“Is this what we’ve risked ourselves for here?” he asked Martin. “An egocentric? Does he really think he’s that capable?”
Martin nodded.
“He does. He is,” Martin answered a little thickly. “If there’s a better brain in a better body, ten years of searching by the Project wasn’t able to find it. He was to be our commander on the first ship out.”
“Still . . .” the other turned back to Rafe. “We’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Harald. You say a concept like that isn’t in your universe. A Shaitan concept wasn’t in ours, either. People like myself, who’ve gone seeking an inner wisdom, weren’t designed or trained to fight a war. Events pushed us into this—the nighttime broadcasts that left us among the only people capable of staying awake in a sleeping world. We faced what was.”
“And now you’re ready to accept the idea of an Old Man of the Mountain?” asked Rafe. “You’re ready to believe in someone with supernatural power
s and authority?”
“Not supernatural.” The dhoti-clad man’s voice was gently instructive. “No powers are supernatural once they’re understood, and we understand such powers better than most.”
“Do you understand how they could be used for personal, selfish ends?”
“No.” The other stared with brilliant brown eyes at Rafe. “That we don’t understand. Do you?”
“I understand how a negative mind could grow wiser and stronger—given enough time,” said Rafe. Almost involuntarily, there drifted back across the stage of his mind the dream image of the underground caverns filled with empty and discarded things, where the enormous papery slug, or burnt-out fire pile, laired.
There was a faint sound that was not really a sound. Something like a mental ping, as the image formed in Rafe’s mind. Abruptly, the room darkened slightly—not as if the light were less, but as if there had been a certain thickening of the air that impeded the light’s passage.
At the same moment, the compulsion of the same broadcast power that had tranquilized him on the flight to his place flowed once more around Rafe. He made the mental effort to slip out of its grasp, and looked around him. Suddenly it had become hard to see—as if the air, in addition to having thickened, had become rippled and distorted. Up at one end of the room, the three dhoti-clad men had not moved or changed expression, but every other person in the room was caught in mid-movement to some new location.
The three dhoti-men were like Buddhas carved in light-brown wood. The tranquilizing effect scaled up in strength, then broke, disappeared. The heavy-bodied man stood with mouth open, jaw dropped. He began to yammer.