Oliver’s eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me there’s a bear or something loose on this well?”
“Not an ordinary animal.” I hesitated, aware of how ridiculous I was going to sound, but with no alternative but to press on with the story. “It’s some kind of alien thing the warp has sucked in from space. It killed Dresch and the others, and… Look, I’ve got to go.” I reached for the Moke’s ignition key.
“Don’t move!” Oliver stepped in front of the vehicle. “I think you’re drunk, Hillman. Falling-down drunk, by the look of you, and I’ll bet Dresch is worse.” He raised his wrist communicator to his lips. “Pilgrim and Dubois! Forget about checking out the galleries – go straight to the duty room. Pilgrim? Answer me, Pilgrim.”
“If you’ve sent them down the well, they’re dead. I can’t explain any more now, but you’d better grab yourself a power boat and get the hell off the island, and that’s the truth.” I switched on the Moke’s engine and in the same instant Oliver snapped his rifle up to point at my chest.
“Switch off and get out of the vehicle,” he ordered, moving around to my side.
I clenched and unclenched my fingers on the wheel, afraid of getting myself shot, but even more alarmed about this fresh delay in reaching Field Control. Vital seconds were flitting past – and the Taker was on its way.
“I’m warning you, Hillman,” Oliver said, drawing level with me, reaching a position from which he could get an unimpeded shot. “If you don’t switch off that eng…’ His voice faded out as he saw what lay on the Moke’s rear seat.
“It’s Charlotte Railton’s body,” I heard myself explain. ’I found it down in the bilges.”
“And you carried it up here! What’s the matter with you, Hillman?” Oliver moved closer to the inert body, apparently repelled and fascinated. “Nobody in his right mind carries a thing like…’
Somehow I knew what was coming next and was completely prepared for it. Oliver wasn’t. When Sharly snatched the rifle out of his hands he made a sound that was both a whimper and a moan, and which was drowned in the snarl of the Moke’s exhaust as I gunned the engine. The wheels spun for a moment on the plastic mesh which covered the working areas of the island, then we were accelerating down the vee-shaped perspective of lights which terminated in Field Control. I watched the mirror to see if Oliver would come after us in one of the remaining vehicles, but he simply stood there until I lost sight of him.
The ramp to the old trawler’s main deck usually had a guard on it, but I could see from quite a long way off that it was deserted, and it occurred to me that reaching the actual warp control room might be easier than I had anticipated. Oliver could have taken all available security men to the well with him, and as it was weekend there was a good chance that all the engineering staff had flown off to Alaska. If one or two had stayed behind, I had Oliver’s carbine with which to keep them in line while Sharly-Plus did whatever it was she needed to do.
I have to admit that I had no real understanding of what her plans were. Even if I had been able to hear her properly down in the bottom of the well, even had I been in any condition for absorbing abstruse ideas, I still wouldn’t have been able to understand. Sharly alone had always been able to think and talk rings around me – and now she was Sharly-Plus. There was another mind there, an alien mind accustomed to dealing with alien concepts, and in company with it my Sharly had travelled far beyond the bounds of contemporary human knowledge.
All I knew for sure was that the Taker was squirming through into my part of the continuum, and the only way to stop it was to get the dismaying object that was Sharly’s body into the field control room without any delay. I broadsided the Moke up to the base of the ramp on locked wheels, jumped out and gathered the body up in my arms. Again it slid one arm around my neck, but I was too far gone to notice much. I struggled up the ramp, crossed an area of deck and opened a door in the superstructure and got inside. The companionways in the trawler were narrow, certainly not designed for the carrying of awkward loads, but I caromed my way along them, bursting doors open with my shoulder until we were in the rebuilt part of the ship, the area which housed the warp controls. In contrast to the spartan conditions elsewhere, this was a region of thick carpet and indirect lighting, with one large window giving a longitudinal view of the island.
“Over there,” Sharly burbled in my ear, pointing at a long console before which were three swivel chairs. I lowered her into the nearest chair, only then becoming aware of a disturbing new facet of the situation. Until that moment I had been under the impression that my plunge from Level Three had left me with nothing but a selection of bruises and perhaps a fractured rib, but all at once there came the queasy suspicion that something inside me was ruptured and leaking. I had always purposely avoided medical knowledge and so was unable to make any kind of diagnosis, but there was a definite wrongness at the centre of my being, and its effects seemed to be spreading. Holding a stanchion for support, I examined my surroundings and found them curiously distant and unreal. Horizontal surfaces appeared to slope, and solid objects tended to shimmy.
This must be what it’s like to faint, I thought, bemused. Or perhaps this is the way you die!
There followed a period of blurry confusion. I clung to the stanchion, internally preoccupied, and was only dimly aware of what Sharly-Plus was doing. It meant nothing to me that she was moving herself from chair to chair by the strength of her arms, or that she was using the same physical power to strip cover plates from equipment banks and doors from cabinets. Other forces were at work too, because I know I saw drawers slide in and out by themselves, saw looms of wiring change shape like live creatures, heard the crackle of high-voltage current, smelt the ozone and the hot metal. I was in the presence of things far beyond my understanding. For a time Sharly-Plus was superhuman, perhaps supernatural, and she was imposing her unearthly will on artefacts of this Earth, changing their relationships and functions, moulding them to suit her own purpose. Stray currents of psychokinetic energy rippled the carpet, sent papers skywards like flocks of startled birds, tugged at my clothing. The very air hummed and crooned and was disturbed by strange flitting shadows. All I could do was stand there and try to endure.
The lull, the onset of silence, took me by surprise.
Fighting for a clearer picture of what was going on, I noted that Sharly-Plus, her head flung back at an unnatural angle, had ceased her labours and was staring at the window. I looked in the same direction and, in spite of all that had happened within and around me, I quailed.
The night-time scene was basically a familiar one – multiple rows of lights, flanking the helicopter pad and the STOL runway, converged on the accretion of greenish illuminated rectangles and points of brilliance which marked the head of the well shaft. The moon was too high to be visible from inside the control centre, but it sketched in a silver-grey background of ocean and cloud-vaulted sky pierced by stars.
And against that background something was moving. Something incredibly huge, and black, and with too many legs.
“Breakthrough… too soon,” Sharly-Plus breathed. She reached towards a tilted and displaced keyboard on the console and began to tap instructions into it at high speed. At the far end of the island the Taker loomed high above the cranes and machinery houses, its legs slowly windmilling across the sky, quivering, questing…
“Get away from here, Jack,” Sharly-Plus said, or it may even have been Sharly, for in that moment her voice was almost human. “Take a boat and go fast.”
I gaped at her back, nodded without speaking, then pushed myself away from the stanchion and ran, partially doubled over, for the ship’s entrance ramp. Whatever it was that was damaged inside me reacted by producing spasms of pain, nausea and weakness, and by the time I reached the bottom of the ramp I was sobbing aloud with every breath. It was only thirty yards to the jetty, but the crossing seemed to take a long time and all the while, at one corner of my vision, the night was hideously turbulent and alive.