I know what’s happening to Albert, he thought, making an intuitive-cum-telepathic leap. He’s putting up a fight. He’s fighting my battle. He knows that time is running out, and he’s trying to help me—but what are we fighting?
Redpath rose slowly to his feet and addressed Betty with a frozen smile. “The bathroom’s just at the head of the stairs, isn’t it?”
“That’s right, love.” She eyed him soberly. “Don’t be too long.”
“I won’t.” He left the room and went out into the pitch darkness of the hall. It took him some time to locate a light switch and when he depressed it a small fitment glowed in the high ceiling, emitting a weak radiance the colour of moths’ wings. The kitchen door was visible a short distance away as a rectangle of sentient blackness. He turned away from it, went up the stairs and into the bathroom, pulled the cord of the ceiling switch and tried to bolt the door behind him. The paint-clogged shoot-bolt was so badly aligned with its keeper that he was unable to drive it home.
Abandoning the attempt, he went to the washbasin, turned on the cold tap and stooped to put his mouth under it. The water jetted out faster than he had expected, taking his breath away, but he swallowed it and kept on swallowing. Within seconds his stomach felt tight and swollen. He raised his head to snatch some air, almost gagged, and began to drink again.
Do you know, he could almost hear Dr Myall’s voice, that in the darker days of medicine one of the standard tests to determine if a person had epilepsy was to give him a few pints of water to drink?
A sudden spasm of nausea forced Redpath to straighten up. He gripped the rim of the basin with both hands, fighting to control the upward thrusts of his diaphragm, and knew there was less than no point in trying to go on, that taking another mouthful of water would result in a violent spewing of all that was in his stomach. It was time to watch some television.
And be careful when you’re near a faulty television set, Dr Hyall was saying, smiling benignly at him through a tunnel into another time. If something needs adjusting, specially the vertical hold—let somebody else do it. Never kneel in front of a TV set that has a rolling picture.
He opened the bathroom door, went out onto the landing and turned towards the front of the house. The main part of the landing and the stair to the upper floor were on his right; the stair leading back down to the hall was on his left. He was veering to the right when the living room door opened down below and Betty York came out into the hall. She was joined at once by Tennent and Miss Connie. All three eyed him intently.
“Are you all right, love?” Betty said.
“Couldn’t be…better,” Redpath replied, fighting to put words together, to think and not to think. “Jack Haley…television.”
He gestured in the general direction of his room and went towards the upper stair. There was the sound of footsteps on the stair below him. He quickened his pace, reached the top landing and stumbled through the dimness into his room. Closing the door and turning on the light in one movement, he saw that the lock was of the type that incorporated a small brass bolt. He stared blankly at the bolt for several seconds, then thumbed it into place just as somebody tried the handle.
“What are you doing in there, John boy?” Tennent pleaded. “Open the door.”
“You don’t understand,” Redpath mumbled. “Jack Haley…television.” He removed the television set from the bed, carried it across the room and knelt at a power point in the skirting board.
“Come on, John, you don’t know what you’re missing,“Tennent said in a wheedling voice and began to sing. “Keeee…pright on to the end of the road…” The words of the song were lost in a violent pounding on the door, a sound which could only have been produced by two or more pairs of fists beating on it at the same time. Women’s voices joined in the din.
Redpath shook his head, panic-stricken. “Favourite film. They don’t make them like that any…” He tried to ram the connector at the end of the television’s power lead into the socket, but the two components refused to mate. He tried twice more before realising what was wrong. The connector had modern rectangular pins and the socket was of the old-fashioned round-pin type.
“They don’t make them like that any more,” he repeated dully, staring at the useless plug.
The hammering on the door behind him ceased and was replaced by a measured and powerful thudding which signalled that Tennent was trying to break it open with his shoulder. Redpath glanced back and saw that the wooden jamb was curving inwards with every blow. The three on the landing no longer sounded like human beings, and at least one of them was making strange, wet, sucking noises.
“Slughhh, slughhh, slughhh.”
His face crumpling with despair, Redpath wrenched the connector from the end of the television flex, exposing the bare wires. He spread the wires with his fingers and crammed them into the holes of the socket, heedless of his skin touching metal. There was a sputtering crackle, a spiky blaze of purple, and he was hurled backwards into a gloating and greedy blackness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sadness preceded the enormous composite entity that was the ship, sadness over the preparations for death.
The emotion had nothing to do with the knowledge that a member of the First Race was soon to be dispersed—he was a renegade who had threatened the very foundations of his own society and there could be no place for him in an orderly continuum. Nor was there any concern that a considerable area of the seventh planet, counting inwards from the rim of the system, was to be rendered sterile. Its inhabitants belonged to that almost-universal class of beings, the simulacra. They did not possess the ability to commune with the Star-that-lives, and therefore could be regarded as accidental association of cells, pseudo-beings whose existence or annihilation was without relevance to the great scheme.
The sadness that affected the conglomerate entity of the ship was due to the fact that a part of its own structure would have to die, to be sacrificed in order to bring about the dispersal of the Once-born.
Remains of the outer portions of the fugitive ship had been detected through their lingering life-echoes, and the location pinpointed on an island close to one of the major land masses. A section of the living skin of the hunter ship had detached itself, painfully, from the main shell and had reformed in a shape suitable for high-speed atmospheric penetration. Within it, a portion of the ship’s body matter had already undergone voluntary degeneration to the viral state. In that condition, on exposure to oxygen, it would rapidly eliminate all life forms over a wide area before reaching the inactive phase.
Those losses to the ship’s corpus had been unwelcome enough, but the real tragedy was that a fragment of the Thrice-born, a member of the First Race, had been required to separate from the parent body and make ready to die. Lacking many of the primitive psi-powers of a Once-born, the hunter was unable to deliver or even control the pod by psychokinesis. It was necessary for him to sacrifice a portion of his own being to drive and guide the living bomb which was to be the instrument of justice. And the sense of bereavement was all the more keenly felt because the death it was to experience would be final—under the circumstances there could be no ingestion, purification and renascence.
The duty had been assigned and the responsibility accepted many years earlier, however, and there was to be no turning back.