Upon what?
He had not actually forgotten what lay beyond that window; the memory had merely been suppressed, not erased. He had passed out in front of the deep glass, had been found and taken back to Henry Galing's mansion where he was fed that story about sybocylacose-46. He was aware now that the entire sybocylacose fantasy and — by logical extension — all the scenes that had come before it had been invented for a single purpose: to make him forget what lay beyond the observation room window.
He stepped on the metal grid in the corridor floor before the pressure hatch, and he looked at the display screen as it turned a restful blue.
CYCLE FOR ADMITTANCE.
He put both hands on the steel wheel in the center of the door and wrestled it clockwise as far as it would go. The door remained locked, but the message on the display screen changed.
WAIT FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
COMPUTER DATA LINKAGES.
WAIT FOR VERIFICATION OF
VIEW CHAMBER'S SANCTITY.
What lay beyond that gargantuan slab of glass? What was it that would want to breach the view chamber and, having breached it, would pose such a danger that the pressure hatch was required to protect the rest of the building.
He waited.
The green light came on overhead.
LIGHT BURNING.
PROCEED SAFELY ON GREEN.
As soon as it popped its seal, he opened the enormous hatch and went into the room beyond.
Forty feet away, at the other end of the observation chamber, a muddy gray light pulsed dimly. Regardless of its source, even the light itself was ugly, frightening. It carried death within its bleak rays.
He began to shake.
He took one step toward the window and stopped.
He felt sick on his stomach.
Gasping, he turned suddenly and ran out of that place without taking a look at the smoke veiled thing beyond the glass. He pushed the hatch shut, watched the wheel whirl automatically into position.
The green light flicked off.
The display screen went black.
Leaning against the hatch, Joel let his breath out in a long shudder of relief. He had nearly made a fatal error. If he had gone to that window again, he felt sure that he would have fainted just as he had done the last time. He was no more prepared for this thing, whatever the hell it was, than he had been previously. He would have suffered another trauma and fainted. Sooner or later Henry Galing would have found him, and then he'd have awakened in yet another lie, right back on square number one.
This the rat learned when it ran the maze: don't make the same mistake twice.
He went back through the yellow doors and studied the floor indicators above the elavtors, Fourteen of the lifts served only the fourth to the eighteenth floors. The other two went to the bottom of the building. One of these was not working. He summoned the functioning cage, stepped into it, punched the button for the bottom level, watched the door close, and went down.
He came out of the elevator into the familiar hallway that led to the pod chamber observation deck. The narrow room, where he stood in the center of it, was as he had first seen it: black command chairs, purple lightstrips, computer consoles, file cabinets, the lockers with names stenciled on them.
Only the age-lain blanket of dust had changed. Galing and his men had cleaned off the chairs and the computer consoles; and the dust on the floor was marred by many footprints, those made when they had tried to fool him with the aquamen.
He went to the nearest window and looked into the adjoining room where the life support pods stood, dust-filmed.
They were real!
When he was expelled from that pod, he was thrust into reality, no matter how bitter and inexplicable it seemed. The world was not hobbling hopelessly in a stream of universal chaos; it was immutable, waiting to be explored and understood. But from the moment the faceless man touched him, he had been living in Galing's illusions. Now, once again back to reality, he set out to explore this eighteen-level structure, anxious to learn all that he could.
He hurried, though he wanted to give himself a chance to notice every detail, to find anything that might enlighten him. He could not forget that Galing's crew still held Allison as a hostage.
XVIII
Two hours later Joel had a working knowledge of the building. It was an inverted pyramid lacking both windows and doors to the outside world. More likely than not, it was a subterranean installation — an enormous one with considerably more than a million square feet of space, perhaps two million. He hadn't been able to cover a fraction of it. Nine of the eighteen levels had been established as living quarters, while the other nine contained laboratories, offices, and storage rooms. At one time the pyramid must have housed in excess of two thousand people, though now there was not a clue to their fate. The top floor, where Henry Galing maintained his “house” and where the fake streets had been built, was the garage. The corridors there were several times wider than those on lower levels, and two huge rooms were parked full of cars, buses, armored military jeeps, tanks, amphibious troop carriers, taxis, pleasure cars, as well as a wide variety of utilitarian shuttles. Only one small segment of the topmost level had been used for the phony streets, the telescoped forest, and Galing's private estate.
Yet, knowing all of this, Joel was still confused. He could find no reason for the existence of the strange building or for his own presence here. It was like the central puzzle of astronomy: man could learn countless facts about the universe without ever grasping the why of it.
Now, Joel lay on a bed of ferns at the edge of the impossible forest. He was watching the rear of the Galing mansion. Once he had learned the basic nature of the building, he knew that he was going to have to go out of it — even if there were danger in that — to get a good perspective on the events of the last couple days. But once he was out, Galing could keep him from getting in again. Therefore, rather than be cut off from her, he had returned to get Allison before he left. And he intended to observe the stage before making his entrance: the house was dark and silent, the lawn dark and deserted. When he was finally convinced that no one had yet missed him, he got to his feet and brushed the leaves from his clothes.
A light came on in the kitchen.
Joel knelt down until he was hidden by the underbrush.
The kitchen door opened, and three men came out of the house: Galing, Richard, and the faceless man.
Joel stretched out flat, snuggling in the shadows.
The three men walked purposefully towards the forest. Each step they took gave them a sudden, impossible growth — one flaw of the illusion that made the lawn seem much larger than it was. In a moment they stood at the perimeter of the trees.
“He could be anywhere in the fortress,” the faceless man said. “That's a lot to cover. More than the three of us can manage. Hell, he could be right here in the woods, as far as that goes, and we could walk right over him without knowing it.”
“We should have foreseen it,” Galing said. He was angry with himself. He spat into the weeds.
“This wasn't part of the program,” Richard said. “There wasn't any way we could prepare for it.”