Meeting at Infinity Read online

  On this side, Lyken’s men were tired and too busy to be irritable. The mechanical nature of the processing got more and more marked. The chained groups were drawn through another room, past pugs who grabbed each captive in turn and presented him to a man in white wielding a high-pressure injector. A blast from the instrument stung the captive’s back. That was all. When Curdy got his dose, he judged that he had been given a wake-up shot and maybe some intravenous nourishment, because he felt suddenly more alert and vigorous. Probably there was a tranquilizer in the mixture as well—at any rate, the hysterical cries dropped off rapidly once the captives passed the injector.

  In another room, next door, they were presented to a second operator, and this one made them gape with astonishment, almost forgetting their plight. Curdy had never seen anyone like the woman presiding here. She was barely half-dressed, but not to show off her beauty, because she was middle-aged and skinny. She wore a kind of short wrap and a large number of bangles, necklaces and girdles of beaten copper and silver. Her hair was graying.

  Beside her, on a long bench, were arranged a number of boxes with handles on top, made of black wood. She held one of the boxes by its handle; when the responsible pugs grabbed a captive passing before her, she banged this box hard; the impact made Curdy’s head swim. When the last of a given group had been treated in this way, she handed the box to the pug in charge and took up another one for the next group. There were hundreds of boxes. Curdy tried to estimate how big a force Lyken was going to have while thinking to work out what the boxes were for. With the second problem, he got nowhere; with the first, he arrived at a number somewhere over ten thousand and had to whistle silently.

  But so much the better. The more kidnapped victims Lyken had to cope with, the better the chance that an individual might slip away without being noticed.

  After that, the rush stopped for a while, and the chained captives were led into a room lined with pew-like benches, each just long enough to hold one group on a chain if they squeezed up close. There were fifty or sixty benches altogether; all but a few were full. Around the walls, pugs carrying black boxes lounged and chatted, sometimes turning the boxes over idly in their hands.

  Suddenly, there was a commotion, and a man dressed in a fashion similar to the woman issuing the black boxes appeared in the center of the square of pews. Curdy hadn’t seen him enter the room. A gasp of astonishment to which he didn’t contribute implied that maybe other people hadn’t, either.

  The man held up an arm that jingled with a heavy load of metal ornaments, and spoke in a ringing voice.

  “You’ll have your chains taken off in a moment! You’ll be taken to the magazine and issued with energy guns, gas guns, or other weapons. And you’ll be taken outside and given a post to defend—maybe here in the neighborhood, maybe five or ten or twenty miles away.”

  Curdy began to sit up and take notice. This was better than he had hoped for.

  “But you’re still going to be chained!” said the speaker. He signaled to one of the pugs carrying a black box; his choice at random happened to be the one in charge of Curdy’s group. “You’ve seen these boxes. You’ve wondered what they are for. I’ll show you.”

  He took the box by its handle, and stared at it fixedly. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then Curdy was jolted to his feet by a sudden voiceless order that seemed to explode inside his skull.

  Turn to the right. A second explosion. Curdy turned, not wanting to, not knowing why he obeyed. He saw that his companions were doing the same.

  Turn to the front. Walk on the spot. Stop. Sit down.

  It was over, and his head was still ringing with the echo.

  “Try it.” The man in the center of the room handed back the box to the pug in charge, who grinned delightedly. In a moment, there were more explosions, this time shattering and dizzying.

  Stand up. Wave your arms. Stop. Hit the guy next to you. Sit down.

  The orders were coarse, violent, brutal, direct. They were the way the pug looked to be.

  “Enough,” said the man in the center. Curdy slumped into his seat again.

  “You’re chained,” the words hammered at his skull. “You will obey your orders because you have no choice. Go and collect your weapons now. And remember that you can use them only as you are ordered. Don’t even think of mutiny—it isn’t possible.”

  He folded his arms and stared around as though seeking a challenge from his audience. None came. Curdy felt a wave of sick dismay batter down the defenses raised by his tranks, and saw the hope of escape and desertion float away on top of that wave.

  In the chamber, hollowed from the heart of the pillar of rock on which he had placed his eyrie, where he had set up his operations room, Lyken sat with the fat, bald, jolly-voiced sage from Akkilmar who had been the first to come to the trading post and bring news of what Akkilmar was going to do to aid the defenders.

  Opposite them, feeling out of place because his responsibility—looking after the home base—was gone, Shane Malco sat scowling. Lyken cast a quizzical glance at him.

  “You don’t look happy, Shane.”

  “I’m not. I’m worried.”

  “You haven’t any reason to be.”

  Malco gave a distrustful look at the sage from Akkilmar, tossed a mental coin, and decided to speak regardless. He said, “I think you’re gambling recklessly, Ahmed. I don’t know what’s come over you.”

  The sage drew his eyebrows a little closer together, but said nothing. As Malco had done, Lyken glanced at him before speaking.

  He said, “You’ve never been through into the franchise before, have you, Shane?”

  “A few times, to look at merchandise and to attend conferences. That’s all.”

  “All right. Therefore it’s understandable that you should have doubted my faith in Akkilmar until now. Why do you still doubt it, when you’ve seen what these people can do?”

  The sage smiled like a sunrise, exposing perfect and very white teeth.

  “I don’t doubt that they can do it,” said Malco slowly. “I’ve seen these black boxes and how they can give control over even the most recalcitrant cultist, turning him into a useful amateur soldier. I’ve seen what can be done with the rho function field perceptor by people who properly understand its workings and don’t just relegate it to a sort of prosthetic for incapacitated cripples. No, I don’t doubt what the people of Akkilmar can do. I want to know why they’re doing it, that’s all.”

  The sage spoke for the first time. He said, “Are you suspicious of us?”

  “Frankly, yes,” said Malco with a weary sigh.

  “Your leader is not; why should you be? Malco, your leader has treated us well. He has not disturbed our traditional way of life, nor tried to rob us, but has always dealt with us courteously and kindly. If there are men who wish to take away his legal rights, they must by contrast be his opposite. And we do not want them in this world of ours.”

  “I want to know much more than that,” Malco answered. “You’ve got powers which I have to confess are amazing. You’ve got techniques we ourselves can only use, not understand properly. But up till now, you’ve kept them to yourselves. You’ve had no interest, or so you gave us to think, in anything except your ‘traditional culture’. You seem perfectly capable of defending it against anyone who comes—whether Lyken or Yorell or Lanchery or whoever of the Directors steals the franchise.”

  The smile on the sage’s face melted into a frown, and he got to his feet. “My people do not like to have their sincerity questioned,” he said boomingly. “If you wish, we will return to Akkilmar and leave you in peace. We attempt to aid you, and we are scorned. So be it!”

  Lyken got hastily up. “No, no!” he said in a voice that made Malco turn startled eyes on him, it was so uncharacteristically pleading and dependent. “Malco does not speak with authority. I will reprimand him and he won’t say anything of the sort again!”

  The sage appeared to relent; he shrugged, and sat down aga
in with a quick nod.

  “Shane, are you out of your mind?” Lyken demanded, swinging around. “I think you’d better apologize, right now!”

  Malco hesitated. “If I’m wrong, I apologize with all my heart,” he said eventually. “But—Ahmed, listen to me. I grant you that Akkilmar has turned out to be all you expected, with its mysterious powers and techniques, and I grant you that they’ve turned out to help us in force. Can I just remind you, though, that you were saying before that Akkilmar was a secret of this franchise, and that you assumed the secret to be well kept when you made your gamble?

  “Well, we don’t know if it’s been well kept, do we? Nevada knew about Akkilmar, because Erlking told him. And you didn’t catch up with Erlking before we blew up the base! The base gone, we haven’t a hope of getting at him now—and anyone else might!”

  “Your beloved home base—” began Lyken.

  “I know it had to go, in case someone found out that the portals were on the upper floors and guessed that the terrain in this franchise is mountainous.” Malco spoke wearily.

  “Damn it, then! I left instructions with the agents looking for Erlking to kill him if they found him too late to bring him through to the franchise. I couldn’t do more. And anyway, now that I’ve seen what our friends from Akkilmar can really do, I’m not at all sure that it makes any difference whether Akkilmar is a secret or not. They’re too powerful.”

  “That’s exactly what troubles me!” snapped Malco, and got up and walked away.

  The sage watched him go, his round face in a serious expression. He said after a pause, “I think your aide might well be subject to a black box?” And turned to Lyken with one eyebrow raised interrogatively.

  “No,” said Lyken curtly. “Malco’s a good and reliable man. He just worries more about me than he does about himself. He’s perfectly loyal, and the last person I’d want to be ‘black-boxed.’ ”

  “As you wish,” shrugged the sage, and managed to convey in the three words his opinion that Lyken was a foolhardy incompetent, unable to recognize danger when it stared him in the face. There was also a subtle suggestion that if it had not been for the aid he was getting from Akkilmar, he would have gone under long ago.

  That last suggestion left Lyken uncomfortable—because he himself was almost beginning to suspect it might be true.

  12

  THE SHOCK of the explosions at Lyken’s base seemed to act like the shock of cold water to the rioters. It seemed that for the first time it occurred to many of them what they were actually doing; they saw clearly the barricades in the avenues and the scars of the energy bolts, and heard the cries of the injured. Almost shamefacedly, the rioting died away.

  Nonetheless, it was a huge task that faced the police as they wiped up the mess, and as they came back in small groups of one or two cruiser loads at a time, to their headquarters, the rumors began to run.

  In the night watch room, surrounded by the flickering telltales which plotted—among other things—the location of the cruisers out on street patrol and the site of suspicious events reported by nosy officers, Technical Sergeant Lofty Ingle was one of the last that the rumors reached. He had been alone since the start of his shift. He was four inches under regulation height for general duties; it didn’t stop him from being a good forensic electronics man.

  He was staring absently at the huge grid-lined screen on which in theory illegal application of Tacket’s Principle anywhere in the Quarter would show up when it happened—it had not happened since he joined the force, and he thought gloomily that it never would—when Sergeant Carr came in, limping slightly and with dressings on his scratched face. Carr was the duty general service sergeant, Ingle’s partner for the night watch.

  Ingle glanced up at him and pursed his lips. “You look to have had it rough!” he said.

  “Rough!” Carr tried to curl his upper lip into a sneer, but it was puffy and the attempt made his face twist up in pain. He hooked his foot under a chair, dragged it towards him, and slumped into it. “Rough!” he repeated sarcastically. “You could say that, I guess. One day, one sweet day, someone’s going to loose off his gun, and just by accident that bastard Athlone is going to be in the way of the bolt. And I won’t be weeping at his funeral!”

  Ingle took a chair for himself. “Spit the string!” he invited. “I didn’t get a grip on it yet.”

  Carr looked disgusted. “Listen!” he said. “It’s one thing for him to cherish this pet hate of his and hound that number Luis Nevada. I’m not saying Nevada did it, I’m not saying he didn’t. That’s one thing, Lofty, and no one can say I’m not trying to be fair. But when he—”

  He almost choked with the violence of his rage, and put his hands up in the air before him, squeezing them together as though around a human throat.

  “That riot tonight!” he exploded. “We’d have had it canned and labeled inside a couple of hours—by nine at latest. But oh no! It seems that Luis Nevada managed to get himself invited into Lyken’s franchise, where Athlone can’t touch him. So what does Athlone do? He takes advantage of his rank, and he orders us to foul up Lyken’s ’cruiters and turn the cultists back on the street. Can you wonder that Lyken’s men got nasty when they saw what we were doing? Can you wonder they started shooting? So we get a mess swilling through the whole blasted Quarter and a casualty list longer’n my arm!”

  Ingle didn’t say anything. Carr ploughed on.

  “I don’t mind the fancy woman he keeps. I don’t mind him going after Nevada. But I mind like hell when he gets us poor bastards fouled up in his private quarrels!”

  And then, as suddenly as it had burst out, his rage drained away, and he sighed, passing his hand gingerly over the dressings on his face. He said, “Well, there’ll be an investigation, shouldn’t wonder. He went too far this time. Let his head roll.”

  Sightless and immobile within her cocoon, Allyn Vage had become so dependent on the rho function field perceptor that when the sound came to her without warning she tried at first to dismiss it. Everything in the exterior world—visits by Athlone, the comings and goings of Knard and the servant—was reflected in the weaving threads within the grey world of the perceptor. Heavy footsteps with nothing to foreshadow a visitor within the perceptor was wrong. Illogical.

  But she could not dismiss the click of the door latch when it snapped back. She could not dismiss the characteristic hissing of the room lights as they started up, and their sixty cycle hum once they were on. Her artificial hearing was extremely sensitive.

  Bewildered, she fired a harsh question through the voder that served her for speech.

  “Who is it? What are you doing here?”

  Frantically, she searched the perceptor; Knard lay in his room presumably asleep, the servant had gone home, Athlone was out clearing up the riot. Someone else had come into the room. Someone else was looking at her in her obscene shapeless cocoon. Someone whose coming had not been foreshadowed to her. It was as though he were worse than invisible.

  A vague stirring of fright began within her mind.

  The same heavy footsteps which she had heard in the foyer now advanced from the door; five paces, halt. The stranger would be facing her, looking at her, seeing her. Allyn felt suddenly terribly cut off without her eyes and hands. The isolation which the perceptor had staved off all these months began to etch its way into her like acid. For if this man did not show on the perceptor, was everything she had sensed and achieved through it no more than a fantasy of her lonely brain?

  There was a fat chuckle from in front of her—a masculine chuckle, not pleasant.

  “So that’s who you are!” said a thick voice on the verge of wheezing. “A solitary blind cripple! We were beginning to wonder.”

  “Who are you?” Allyn wished that the voder could reflect the violence of the emotion she felt; its breathy artificial voice, though, was capable of only a narrow range of changes. “What do you want?”

  “I came to take a look at you,” said the thick voice,
and dissolved into another chuckle. “As to the first question—why, yes, I’ll tell you. I’m one of the people you got your perceptor from, of course. Didn’t that occur to you? You’re all worked up because you didn’t sense that I was coming, with your perceptor. Why, then, what’s more logical than to conclude I must know more about its workings than you do?”

  Allyn started to activate the voder, and changed her mind. It gave a kind of grunting squawk as commands crossed in its circuits.

  “I have to admit,” the thick voice continued, “that you’ve acquired a good knowledge of the perceptor’s abilities. We called it a perceptor, of course, to mislead you. It does a great deal more than just perceive things!”

  “I know,” whispered Allyn.

  “You think you know,” corrected the thick voice. “So you thought you’d take a hand. And it’s true to say that we were concerned about you—so much concerned that I came to take a look, as I said. What do I find? I find a cripple! Well, we don’t have anything to worry about after all. Because all I need to do is kick in the sides of your perceptor, and the fields will be destroyed. Even if they give you another one, it’ll take you as long again to get adjusted to the new fields that come with it. Understand me?”

  “You wouldn’t!” The words were wrung from Allyn in a kind of moan.

  “Perhaps I won’t. Not this time. After all, you’re a helpless cripple. So this time I’m only going to tell you to remember that you’re a cripple, and act like a cripple, instead of trying to take a hand in things too big to concern you! You’re going to stop your meddling, and you’re going to stop it now. If I see any sign that you’ve started again, I shall come back—and I can come back whenever I want, without giving any warning—and I shall do just as I said. Do you understand?”

  Allyn was desperately twanging at the string which was Jome Knard, driving him to wake up, driving him to hear the thick voice in the room next to his. She said, “Yes! Yes, I understand!”