21. INFECTION SPREADING
And that was when the last defense of all went down. There was a blazing flash of crimson that seemed to lick every corner of the room. It died and the white-lit air trembled a little in its wake. But only for an instant.
Then, from somewhere outside, a spear of red light drove at us and, almost concurrently, a steel piston, ten feet thick, shot out like a battering-ram after it. I had a single glimpse of that blank solid-steel muzzle rushing forward like a Titan's fist – then it crashed through the wall of the building, with a thunderous impact and a shriek of torn and twisted metal, and ripped an irresistible path through the great girders.
It halted.
That cylinder of metal must have been more than half a mile long. Thirty feet of it extended through the riven wall into the chamber where we stood.
The blank muzzle opened like a shutter. Through a transparent wall I saw a little room banked with intricate control boards, and Paynter in a bucket-seat, his eyes shielded by darkened lenses, his mouth drawn down in a grimace as his hands moved swiftly across the panel before him.
A section of the cylinder dropped away. From its interior came leaping men, hooded and armored 'by light-colored suits of webbing. Each carried one of the basket-hilted paralysis-weapons.
I risked a look behind me. Far away, down a long vista of arched girders, I could see the Mechandroids gathered in a little group about the floating platform on which the second-stage Mechandroid lay and I thought that quick flashes of light were moving there – the same knife-like stabs of brightness I had seen when Belem divided his experimental sphere.
But the soldiers of Paynter were getting dangerously close – more than a score of them, inhuman and frightening in their hoods and protective suits.
Deliberately Belem turned his back on the soldiers running toward us and looked at me.
Twice before I had had this experience. But it wasn't a trick you could get used to – the quicksilver eyes expanding, rushing forward, slipping, inside your head – and, impossibly, moving into place like supplementary lenses so that Belem was looking out through my own eyes, from within my mind.
I felt his will grip mine with paralyzing strength. Perhaps he thought I might resist. Certainly I would have, had I known what he intended.
Then he had control of my brain as well as my body. Belem's thought? But they were my own thoughts – superimposed, directing –
He was using my mind, as he might use a telegraph-key, to send out a message – a summons.
I had time only to realize what it was Belem was calling. There was no time to react, to fight the summons – for the answer came almost upon the heels of the call.
From high above the great room I could see that answering shadow sweep into sight. It came out of nowhere, literally out of nowhere, springing into being and moving for- ward with a speed so blinding I could not focus upon it. I had again that instant of recognition, of revulsion – that knowledge of its burning speed.
And then the nova of pure energy exploded outward, as it had done so many times before, from somewhere in the center of my consciousness.
But this time it was different. Never before had the thing been deliberately summoned. Whatever it was, from wherever it came, it had always before struck of its own will. Now it struck through mine – through Belem's, speaking with my mind. And that gave it a significance and a quality of culmination which its coming had never had before. This time it meant something. This time, perhaps, I would know. The shock of energy blinded me. I waited for the fading to begin.
There was no fading. Instead a second shock followed close upon the first, then another and another – wave after rising wave, tide upon tide of devouring violence. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I was too sick and shaken with the overloading of my nerves, the staggering blows of sensation that battered me. I could not think or reason. I only knew that this time I was lost, drowned in the bursting violence.
It would not cease. It would never cease. It would go on forever ...
I saw the shadow of violence fade from a face. Across what seemed to be wide distances I saw the reflection of unimaginable violence ebb. Yes – the mind behind that face had known the staggering onrush of inhuman tides as deeply as my own.
In the control room of the great steel cylinder Paynter met my gaze – and I read sick horror in his eyes.
I could not move. Every nerve in my body felt burned out, short-circuited. I could see and hear a little; that was all. I saw Belem clambering up into the hollow side of the huge piston.
In a moment he appeared behind Paynter. Paynter, I thought, tried to move. His stare broke away from mine. But the Mechandroid's hands darted out, touching Paynter's neck, his head, his spine. Belem spoke a word and took Paynter's shoulder as the latter rose.
Belem's quicksilver eyes were no longer within my mind, I realized.
But I wasn't thinking clearly. I had forgotten the armored soldiers.
Now I saw them. They were quite dead, all of them. I saw how they had died. I remembered the chain of bursting explosions as the killing shadow had swept down from above.
It was gone now – but it had fed well.
Belem and the silent obedient figure of Paynter came toward me. I felt the Mechandroid's fingers reach out and probe deeply into my flesh. There was brief pain, then I could move again. But I still could not think very clearly. Belem seemed to be listening to a voice I couldn't hear, He said, as if to himself, "There isn't much time – " and urged both of us forward. Now that I turned, I could see that the matter-transmission chamber at the other end of the room was empty. The crowding Mechandroids with their slowly waking Sleeper had gone. They had stepped, in so many instants, from this place to some other planet that might be anywhere at all in the immeasurable vastness of the Galaxy.
"Come," Belem said and we moved toward the matter-transmitter.
The rusted metal walls shimmered around us, faded, vanished.
Across the depths of space the atoms that made us up dispersed, drew out, reintegrated again. Bright alloy plates shimmered into being. We had stepped again from one world to another.
Belem pushed the panel open. We stepped out – into a cavern of dusty rock.
On the floor at our feet a little glittering tree stood motionless, beside it a flat metal sheet with wire bars. Belem sighed with satisfaction.
"I didn't think they could do it," he said. "Word went out to one of us in the laboratories to get these things replaced but I didn't really think – well, there just isn't much time. Cortland, bring Paynter here, please."
I obeyed, moving in a curious dreamlike state, the aftermath perhaps of that monstrous rapport with the slaying shadow. Belem was kneeling beside the barred device dial Dr. Essen had used to create the vibratory matrix that had isolated us from space.
"Useless," he said. "As I half suspected." I looked up at the enclosing walls of stone, beyond which my own home planet stretched. It was curiously comforting to know that the rock overhead and the rock underfoot were the native structure of Earth. Here, on this uneven floor, my own body had fallen to dust.
I wondered if the drifts in which our feet left prints had once been –
"This is the cave of the time-axis, then," I said slowly. "And it's no good. Not if you can't work the machine Dr. Essen used. Is it too complicated even for you, Belem? I should have thought – "
"That isn't the problem. It's comparatively simple, really. The trouble amounts to personalized mental mutation. We could understand how a thing as simple as a Neanderthaler's battle hammer worked but we couldn't use it – we don't have the same muscular training and balance. And mental habits are far more subtle.