“I'll ask her,” Galing said. He looked past Joel, down the row of black command chairs. “Anita! Supper tonight? Fine!” He turned back to Joel. “It's all set, then.”
Joel turned and looked at Anita, his raven-haired wife. She was sitting in the fifth chair down from his; she wore a white smock and worked the controls in front of her. She gave him a quick smile, a wink, then returned to her monitors. That was when it all fell apart fast…
He had seen nothing particularly unusual in the rest of it, nothing that seemed false. He had accepted Galing as a genetic scientist instead of a researcher in the paranormal sciences. But he could not fit the woman in the illusion. Delusion? Whatever this was, her name was not Anita. It was… Allison. Or was it? Yes. Oh, yes, Allison Amslow. His wife, Galing's niece. And all the rest of this was wrong too, he now saw. Henry Galing wasn't so friendly as this…
He stood up.
“Joel?” Galing said.
“Bastards!”
“Hey, Joel, what's gotten into you?”
He stepped away from his chair and ran to the door which opened on the “pool” beyond the wall, the door through which he had come after leaving the pod a long, long time ago. It wasn't precisely the same door as it had been; now, it was a heavy steel pressure hatch of the sort you found in submarines. However, when he tugged on it, the door opened without admitting water to the observation room.
No pool existed.
No aquamen.
The “pool” was actually that white-walled, dust-filmed chamber in the basement of the building. Sixteen life support pods stood in neat rows.
Stepping into the room, he looked at the observation windows from the end. A back-projecting hologram machine — just like the projector at his bedroom window in Galing's mansion — had been attached to the inside of each window; the underwater scene which he had been monitoring was a fake.
He started toward the pods, not sure what he intended to do when he reached them. Touching them would be enough. Rapping his knuckles on them would satisfy him. If he could climb up the side of one of them and peer in at the corpse, he would be delighted. Just knowing they were real and not a part of some dream—
“Joel!”
He turned and looked at Henry Galing.
The old man was standing in the doorway between the two rooms. “Come here,” he said.
“Go to hell.”
A second figure appeared in the doorway, crowding Galing. “Do what he tells you,” the faceless man said. He raised one hand and beckoned as if he were talking to a child. “Come here.”
Joel turned away from them and walked over to the cylinders. He rapped his knuckles against them, listened to the hollow echoes. They were real enough.
“You can't escape,” the faceless man said.
Turning, Joel saw the specter immediately behind him, four short steps away. It was dressed in a one-piece black suit as before, hands sheathed in black leather. It took another step and raised one needle-filled palm.
Joel retreated, bumped into the huge cylinder, fell down, and rolled across the concrete floor. He scrambled desperately to his feet again and put one of the life support pods between himself and his unearthly adversary.
“You can play tag with me if you want,” the creature said, placing both hands flat on the pod and leaning toward Joel who was on the other side of it. “But you can't win. Do you see? You have no chance.”
They circled the pod warily.
“Who are you?” Joel asked.
“I'm the sandman.”
“What are you?”
“I'm the sandman.”
“That's no answer.”
“It's all the answer you'll get.”
The faceless man suddenly dropped to his knees and scuttled under the cylinder, making a pass at Joel's legs.
Joel swung out of the way and ran to another pod, took refuge behind it, more watchful than ever.
“Where are we?” he asked the specter when it followed him and took up the game once more.
“Nowhere.”
Without eyes but evidently not without sight, the incredible specter watched him, moved as he moved, gave him no advantage whatsoever.
“Is this really the Twenty-third Century?” Joel asked.
“Who told you that?” The voice seemed to emanate from the lower third of the featureless face, from the spot where a mouth ought to have been. Joel thought he saw the smooth flesh vibrate slightly, like the head of a snare drum trembling with a staccato rhythm.
“Harttle,” Joel said. “He told me.”
“Why should you care what year it is?'
“Tell me.”
“Time doesn't matter,” the sandman said.
“It matters to me.”
At the far end of the room, Henry Galing and the manservant Richard, walked out of the doorway from the observation chamber and started toward the pods. Joel saw them, and he knew that the man without a face was one hundred percent right: he had no chance at all, not even a slender thread of hope.
“You don't have anything to gain by resisting us,” the faceless man said.
“Self-respect,” Joel said.
“Not even that.”
Galing and Richard reached the pod and started around one end of it.
The specter came around the other end.
“You stay back. All of you.”
Richard was grinning.
“I'll kill one of you if I get the chance.”
“You won't,” Galing said.
The old man held up his right hand and showed Joel the needled glove. Richard was wearing one of them too.
They descended on him in a rush. He didn't know which of them touched him first. Darkness came quickly, in a roar of silence.
IX
He woke and found that a rat was worrying at his shoe. It was a big sonofabitch, maybe ten or twelve pounds, long, wide, low to the ground. The long, black, pebbled tail trailed from it, motionless on the floor. The fur on its haunches was dark gray, the color of summer thunderheads; but it grew progressively lighter on up the body until it was a washed out and indefinable dirty color around the neck and head. The ears were thin, pointed, laid flat: listening. The quick red eyes were intent on the shoe, and the sharp yellow teeth shaved the shoe leather like razors stropping a bar of soap. Joel watched it until, sensing that he was awake, it peered up at him. For a moment they stared hard at each other, testing each other, gauging possibilities… When he moved to strike it, the rat turned and ran into the shadows on the other side of the room.
Had it been real — or part of some new illusion?
He sat up, stretched, and groaned. He was sore all over. His neck was stiff, his shoulders knotted with pain, his back filled with a dull ache where it had come into contact with the hard mattress of the floor.
When he finally looked carefully at the room, he was surprised to find himself in a cell. The walls were made from huge blocks of stone, granite or perhaps lava rock. The mortar between the blocks was brown, thin, perfectly spread, the work of a master mason who relied more on the fitting of stone than on the glue that lay between them. The ceiling was also stone. He could see no light fixtures except for the sputtering candle propped in a shallow baking pan by the door. He had been allowed no furniture, not even a straw sleeping mat. The only door was a massive slab of oak with three iron hinges; the eight-inch-square window in the center of it was fitted with four thick iron bars which were welded into an iron frame.
He got to his feet, leaned against the wall until a brief but intense fit of vertigo passed. Circumspectly, afraid that someone might be listening for him at the other side of the oak, he went to the door and peered through the bars. Beyond lay a musty, candle-lit concrete-walled hallway. In the flickering orange light, he saw that the corridor ceiling contained lightstrips which were no longer functioning.