He was totally unprepared for Dineen’s heavy step behind him, for the smashing blow against his jaw that drove him down into blackness.
Chapter Six
The Endless Twilight
He stirred and shook his head. He was looking out through the tubing at Howard Dineen. Dineen stood like a man carved of stone, thumb and forefinger on the right-hand dial. Tears seemed to be frozen on his face.
In panic Sam Banth pushed against the front of the iron maiden. He could barely lift his arm. It was as though he were imbedded in sticky oil. His arm seemed to take interminable seconds to reach the tubing. He pushed hard and nothing happened. He leaned his whole weight against it. He could look down and see that it wasn’t latched, that the hinges seemed free. He pushed mightily, panting with the effort. It was enormously difficult to breathe. The air felt like a solid substance. Yet when he tried to breathe the hardest, the air seemed to scorch his lips and nostrils.
He pushed again and saw a tiny gap. No matter how hard he thrust he could not hasten the speed of its opening. Howard stood there, completely motionless. No man could stand like that for so long. Sam wondered if he were dead. There was no question about Linda’s being dead. He could see her on the floor. Her body was shrunken and cracked, swollen lips protruded. Her eyes were sunk back into her head.
Time after time he was forced to stop and rest. He had no idea how many hours passed before the door was opened wide enough for him to squirm through. The room was changeless and eternal. He tried to move toward the door, but it was a prolonged struggle to take each step. He tried harder and saw that both pants legs had split completely down the front. It was then that he realized the constriction of his clothes.
When he pulled at his Clothes the material came apart, with agonizing slowness, in his hands. Hunger and thirst began to torture him. He knew that he had been in that room for the passing of an entire day and a night. He began to grow weak. The shoes were the last. And finally he stood naked; he could move once more. He went to the door with quick steps and found that he couldn’t turn the knob. He gave a fearful look at Howard Dineen. During the past hours the position of his head had changed a bit. Sam went into the small bathroom. The window was open. He eeled through, knowing that public nakedness was preferable to the sure and certain charge of murder should he be captured in the room. He dropped twelve feet to the alley level, falling with a lightness that surprised him, as though something had cushioned his drop through the air.
He trotted cautiously down the alley with a half-made plan to grab someone and strip him of clothing. He came out and peered cautiously at the street. At that moment he realized, for the first time, the complete and utter soundlessness of the city. Pedestrian’s feet were frozen in mid-stride. All traffic was halted. An absurd pigeon hung motionless in the air. Across the street a woman had tripped. She was falling forward, her hands outstretched, a startled look on her face. Sam looked at her narrowly. He could detect no movement.
The fear of pursuit, of being captured and convicted of murder, faded and died in the face of this newer, greater fear. His sensations, except for the breathing difficulty and an odd heat against his body when he moved quickly, seemed normal to him. Yet the world had changed in some grotesque way. Howard Dineen had turned the dial...
Sam Banth was not an emotional man. He forced himself to stand very still despite thirst and hunger and weakness. He would have to weigh his own situation from the point of view of the outside normal world. If he could detect no movement then undoubtedly his own movements would be too fast to be detected by the naked eye.
He puzzled over the problem of the clothes. Evidently it had been inertia. He was capable of moving at a vastly greater speed than the clothes could be moved. Thus they would split and, while clinging, hinder every movement. And that explained why he could not force the door of the iron maiden open except with an agonizing slowness.
He looked back at the falling woman. He narrowed his eyes. Her angle of inclination seemed subtly different. The city was soundless, a vast tomb. The thing was to find something he could measure, some way he could find out just how far he had been speeded up, just how far he was out of phase. A falling woman seemed an inadequate yardstick. He stepped onto the sidewalk. No eye turned toward him. He realized how fortunate he was that it happened to be a warm day. A man was poised a few feet away, frozen in the process of taking a step. Sam walked up to him and hit him in the stomach with all his strength. It was like hitting marble. The painful shock ran up his arm. The inertia of the flesh prevented it from giving under the force of the blow. Yet Sam knew how terrible that blow had been. He went behind the man, bent and wedged his finger between the angle of shoe sole and sidewalk. In several long minutes he sensed that the pressure was increasing. Yes, the man was being driven backward by the force of the blow. It seemed likely that he would eventually end up a dozen feet from the point where he had been struck. Sam went around and looked into the man’s open eyes. There was a subtle change in the expression. He knew that the man was dead where he stood.
Suddenly Sam Banth had a wild sense of power. He turned and touched the bare arm of a girl. It was warm, yet marble-hard. He kissed her lips. They were like sun-wanned stone. He laughed wildly in the silent city and his voice soared shrill in the stone canyon and was gone.
He remembered his hunger. And with it came caution. If hours passed for him at the rate of seconds for the rest of the world, then it would be wise not to be trapped in any closed place. He trotted down the sidewalk to Park Avenue and turned south. In the second block he found a cafeteria with the door wedged open because of the heat of the day. Two men were emerging, fixed in stasis, one grinning back over his shoulder at the other. Just inside a fat woman was reaching for the punch slip. Sam ducked under her extended arm. Thirst was the most pressing need. A girl was filling a water glass from the fountain. The stream of water looked like ice. A few drops that had spattered were perfect spheres hanging in the air.
There were long moments of panic until he found a way that he could drink. It had to be done in precisely one way, and no other. He had to turn so that he was looking straight up and then force his cheek against the still column of water. By exerting a long steady pressure he could move his head through the column. Then, with the end of the broken column directly above his mouth he pushed upward, thrusting the column down to the back of his throat. He bit a length off and it was like biting through a stick of rubbery taffy. He swallowed, gagging at its solidity, but feeling it change in his throat to the fluid he needed so badly. He went to four other fountains and did the same. It seemed to him that an hour passed before his thirst was partially satisfied.
Eating was a simpler problem. At first the method gave him a moment of nausea. There were at least a hundred persons eating. The process was to find forks that were raised halfway to lips. He could fold his mouth over the food and taking what seemed to be a full three minutes in each case, pull it away from the fork. It came reluctantly as though it were frozen to the fork and his action melted it slowly. He found that attempting to chew the food was too prolonged a process, and thus he was forced to find those morsels that he could swallow whole.
It seemed to take hours. When he left he saw that the man who had been smiling over his shoulder had turned his head a full inch. The fat woman had pulled the slip almost free of the machine.
He was enormously weary, his body starved for sleep. Weariness drugged him so that he staggered as he walked. He found an alley, a small dim corner near a barred window. He curled up like a dog and went to sleep.