The House of Doors - 01 (37 page)

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Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: The House of Doors - 01
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And so it went: with the alien on the offensive and Gill in defence, it was stalemate. But as Gill’s base of experience widened and his skill improved, he began to take the initiative. And soon Sith began to discover what a two-edged sword the synthesizer was.
Gill had two big advantages, and when the opportunity came he used them in concert. As Sith sensed his opponent’s growing strength and felt the changes taking place in the House of Doors, finally he knew that there was no alternative but flight.
In an antigrav harness made unreliable through Gill’s interference, and feeling the temperature of the control area plummeting, Sith made his way to the transmat. He had no option now but to abandon the House of Doors to the three human beings. He could not simply “take ofi” in the synthesizer, for that required both concentration of attention and complete mastery of the necessary manoeuvres, which were things that Gill would deny him; and anyway, he was aware of something which his enemies knew nothing about.
Gill did know, however, the precise moment when Sith departed: he felt the surge of alien machinery and immediately asked the synthesizer for an explanation. The answer came back as quickly as his request, and:
“Gone!” he said then, opening his eyes and climbing wearily to his feet. “Gone back to his own kind, to the seat and centre of all Thone power.”
“Gone?” Turnbull echoed him, no longer doubting anything that Gill said, but still questioning the meaning of it. “He abandoned all of this as easily as that?”
Gill laughed, however shakily. “Easy for you!” he said. And then he frowned. “But he does seem to have been a bit hasty, yes. And I can’t help wondering why.”
He turned to the ephemeral “walls” and called the whirling, unformed scenes to order, focusing the screens on Ben Lawers outside the Castle, and others upon the nearby towns of Kenmore, Killin, and Lochearnhead. It was midday out there, with grey skies and fine, soft snow falling to coat the mountain slopes. But as the pictures came clearer Gill and the others were at first puzzled, then shocked to their roots.
“What the hell … ?” Turnbull gasped. Men in radiation suits moved on the slopes of Ben Lawers, all around the Castle. A tower of scaffolding stood almost as tall as the Castle itself, with a platform bearing the weight of an ominous grey-metal mass. Scientists in white smocks stood on the tarmac of the lakeside road, binoculars to their eyes, gazing at the Castle and the tower both. Apart from which the place seemed deserted.
And even as Gill, Turnbull and Angela watched, the handful of scientists and technicians began to take their departure, going down to the road and driving off in their various vehicles. TV cameras mounted on poles turned this way and that, televising the whole scene. As for the towns around the loch—and isolated farms and settlements nearby, and other towns even farther out from the centre—they were quite empty.
“Oh my God!” Turnbull finally croaked, the very look on his face causing Angela to fly into Gill’s arms.
“Spencer,” she said breathlessly, “surely they don’t intend to … ?”
“I think they do,” said Gill, “unless we can stop them. They’re going to blow the Castle right off the face of the Earth!”
 
“D
oors,” said Gill, starting off through the weird maze of the place, wanting to run but feeling the floor sucking at his feet like so many giant sponges. “We have to find the doors. Some of these walls are locator screens and storehouses and God knows what else, but others are doors. I don’t know the layout of the place or I could find them. And the synthesizer’s idea of ‘direction’ is different from mine. So it’s trial and error; we search until we stumble across them. Or we try to backtrack along the route that alien bastard took to bring us here, and I use the synthesizer to tell me when I’m warm.”
“We believe you,” said Turnbull, “just keep going. It’s a good job I got an
A
in gibberish!” The big man was right behind Gill, almost tripping on his heels. “But shouldn’t it be easy? The Castle isn’t that big, surely?”
Gill didn’t even bother to look back. “Don’t you remember what Haggie said? About seeming to walk for miles in this place? This is
synthesised
space, Jack—space within space. And it’s bigger on the inside than on the outside. Christ, it’s a projection room for entire galaxies!”
“Shit!” Turnbull laughed, his hysteria very real. “The House of Doors! And you can never find one when you want one!”
“If Barney was here, he’d sniff me one out,” said Gill, directing his machine awareness ahead of him.
“Barney?” said Angela. And:
“Barney!”
she gasped. “But where is he?”
“Last we saw of him was in Clayborrie’s world,” said Gill. “But if I know Barney he’ll be okay. Those horrors on Clayborne’s world were for our ‘amusement,’ not his.”
Turnbull caught Gill’s elbow. “Spencer, how long will it take those boffins to get clear of ground zero? I mean—”
“How much time do we have? How should I know? It could be days or only hours. It just depends when she’s scheduled to blow.”
“Or … minutes?” said Angela.
But Gill made no answer … .
 
In fact it was half an hour.
The thermonuclear device was a small one (a “tactical” weapon and relatively clean) which would take the Castle, most of that face of Ben Lawers’s scanty topsoil, and a deal of the mountain’s rock with it to hell. But the scar wouldn’t be permanent, and within a week people would be able to move back into their homes inside the twenty-five-mile zone.
The decision had been taken to destroy the Castle utterly following the disappearance of Anderson, Gill, and the others—but especially Anderson. A Minister from the MOD—in the hands of alien aggressors? Not only did Anderson have knowledge of Britain’s defence systems but all of NATO’s and most of the world’s as well! When word of his abduction had leaked, then the outcry had been international and the demands undeniable, however undesirable. Martial law had been declared in the area, the tower built, the people moved out.
At Strike Command HQ in a commandeered hotel in Pitlochry, the countdown was into its last minute when a technician glanced at the bank of TV monitors and gasped, “What the … will someone tell me I’m seeing things?”
In the background, over a tinny Tannoy system, an unemotional voice continued the countdown: “Zero minus forty-eight … zero minus forty-five … zero minus forty-two …”
All eyes were now turned to the screens, all mouths falling open in shock. “Turnbull!” someone shouted. “Jack Tumbull—one of the group of people who were taken. He was Anderson’s minder.”
“Minus thirty-six … minus thirty-four … minus thirty-two …”
“Are you sure?” the four-star General I/C Operation was on his feet, staring.
Someone yanked out a drawer and its contents went flying; magazines and newspapers were tipped in a pile on the floor; a copy of
The Observer
was snatched up, thrust under the General’s nose. It had pictures of the Castle’s victims.
“Twenty-six … twenty-five … twenty-four … twenty-three …”
On the screen, Turnbull waved his arms frantically, shouted at the top of his voice without making any sense or sound. For while the site was wired for sound, all electricity had been switched off—except for power for the TV monitors, and of course the main cable to the tower. Turnbull couldn’t know that and he danced and screamed like a madman in the thin snow on the slopes of Ben Lawers. He was a mess: dishevelled, dirty, a tramp in a handful of soiled rags. But he was unquestionably Jack Turnbull.
“Nineteen … eighteen … seventeen …”
Turnbull climbed a pole, pushed his face right up to the TV screen and mouthed:
Shut
—
the
—
fucking—thing—off!
“Jesus!” said the General.
And someone took the initiative, and pressed the abort button when the count was down to twelve.
On Ben Lawers, Turnbull got down from the pole but continued to dance and rave until a speaker finally came crackling alive and boomed, “Okay, Mr. Turnbull, we see you. The operation has been aborted. Stay right where you are and someone will come and get you … .”
 
“You should have gone with him,” Gill told Angela. They had watched the cars come back, and Jack go down to the road to meet them. But he had not left the area of the Castle, and wouldn’t until he got the word from Gill. If that word didn’t come … at least he’d be able to tell them what it was all about. And perhaps help them a little with their preparations …
“Why?” she asked; and immediately nodded, answering herself: “Because I’d be safer out there. But no, I think I’d prefer to know that you’re safe, too. So when you leave, I leave.”
“When I leave,” said Gill, “it may not be to go out there, with Jack. I might be going … out
there,
instead. What I have in mind—I don’t even know if it’s possible. But I have to try it. You see, this place—this spaceship, synthesizer, House of Doors—it’s like an examination room at a university, where the students take their final exams. And I do mean final! The Thone use it to decide which races live and which die. That’s the long and short of it. Whole planets are judged right here. If their races are found worthy—if they have intelligence, wit, the will to survive—then they’re okay. Now as far as I’m concerned we’ve passed all our tests with flying colour. But—
“The Thone need room. They’re expanding through the universe. If they find a world they can take and mold and change into something which to them is home, then they’ll take it
—if
its peoples don’t come up to scratch. But this invigilator we’ve been dealing with, he broke the old rules and made some new ones of his own. And right now he’s back home, lying his head off about what a bad bunch we human beings are.
“So …”
“You’re going after him,” said Angela, “to put the picture straight.”
“If I can, yes.” Gill nodded.
“And I’m coming with you.”
Gill shook his head. “We don’t know what’s out there. And anyway, you really don’t want to waste your time with me. Spencer Gill’s a lost cause. In this body of mine—no, in
that
body of mine”—he nodded towards the sleeping figures—“I have maybe a couple of years left. And that’s it. Lights out.”
“And what about the body you’re using now?”
“This body?” Gill looked down at himself. “I’ve thought about it and … it isn’t me.” He shook his head. “And that isn’t you. Later, when I’ve found out how to put our minds back where they belong … I mean, I want to be me again.”
“I know what you mean.” She sighed. “And anyway, we really don’t know how long we’re … well, built for, do we? But in any case, I still want to come with you.”
He shrugged and sighed. “We can argue about it later. And right now no one is going anywhere until I find out just exactly what the synthesizer can do, and how it does it. Now I’m going to programme the thing, and then I’m going to sleep. While I’m asleep it will teach me all I need to know—I hope. I think it’s possible because I know the synthesizer can beam energy, create solids, send messages, ideas.” He shrugged again. “And when I wake up, maybe I’ll know what else it can do. So … why don’t you get some sleep, too?”
She smiled, not coyly, not seductively—perhaps a little nervously—and answered, “I thought you’d never ask!” And before that could sink in: “But Spencer, can we sleep on my world? Just one night? It was—will be—a paradise without those clones of Rod. I’d like to swim in that warm sea with you, watch the sun go down with you, and then sleep with you. Is that possible?”
And from the look on his face she knew that it was … .
 
They woke up to a beautiful alien dawn in the cup of the biggest palm they’d been able to find. Climbing down to the sand, cool where the sea had crept in overnight to cover the beach with its gleaming ripples, Gill felt completely alive; a feeling he’d not known since he was a boy, and one he’d thought was gone forever. Angela was his, for however short a time, and whatever the future would bring, somehow he felt it had all been worth it.
While they had slept, the synthesizer had filled in the blank areas of his new knowledge; he was now
aware
as no man had ever been before him, the source of a science which—if it was to be—would eventually take men to the stars. Not in Gill’s lifetime, for his expectations were short, but eventually. If things went according to plan. The ifs were still there … .
The first intimation he had that things were not going to plan came as he and Angela started out along the beach. He could sense the locations of several nodes in his near vicinity, but the idea of a giant clam as a door fascinated him and he wanted to see it for himself. And there on the beach, that was where Gill’s so recently acquired mental alarm system first began clamouring.
She felt his hand stiffen where it held hers, glanced at his face. “Spencer?”
“The House of Doors has visitors,” he said. “Several!”
She clutched at his arm. “Visitors?”
He nodded. “And we’ve been summoned.” His gaze went beyond her, in the direction they’d been heading.
She looked where he was looking, along the beach, and saw something forming there: a shimmering oblong figure, like a doorway made of air, hovering over the sand. It moved towards them: a mirage of heat haze in the shape of a door. They could see the sand underneath it, the sea to one side of it and the jungle to the other, and the blue sky overhead—but within the shimmering oblong itself there was nothing. Light entering it struck on nothing and made no reflection.
Gill drew Angela close as the door dipped down towards them, flowed forward and enveloped them … .
 
Frozen, immobilised—held in a temporary stasis which allowed thought but denied physical movement, and which neither Gill nor Sith before him had known the synthesizer possessed—the human couple were drawn into the control centre and the travelling door collapsed around them. With their backs to the same wall of coloured motion where stood the six sleeping people of the original test group, Gill and Angela came face-to-sensors with the Grand Thone himself, and with several senior members of the Thone Council. Calming thoughts washed over them, easing their troubled minds, as the Principal Power of Thonedom communicated through the synthesizer.
“Sith is confined, and I have come to see for myself what damage has been done, and what reparation may be made. The synthesizer has told me all. There has been loss of worthy, sentient life, and other atrocities for which I am sorry. Never in Thone history was any machine put to such perverted use!”
“Never?” Gill found his thoughts flowing from him like speech; they conveyed his feelings, his meanings, but more lucidly than words or actions might ever have done. For any and all sorts of reasons, a man may hold back words he might like to use, but he may not hold back his thoughts. “But you don’t know that. How many Thone invigilators are loose in the universe, seeking new worlds for you? And how many of them, like—Sith?—are misusing their power, for the glorification of the Thone? For
your
glory? We have a saying: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
“We, too, have a saying,” the Grand Thone countered. “Before a teacher may instruct, first he must be instructed. Upon a time, I was an invigilator. And I was tempted, and instructed in my temptation. But like the Thone majority, I did not succumb. From that time to this there have been safeguards. As the invigilators test, so are they tested.”
“Really?” said Gill. “But I, too, have communicated with the synthesizer. And I know that Sith was short-listed for absolute power, that he was in fact a candidate for your own position as the Ultimate Thone Authority! That is why he broke the rules: to impress you with a stolen world—
my
world—and so improve his chances.”
If a mind may smile without a face, that was when the Grand Thone smiled. “That,” he said, “was the test—and he failed it! I have no inclination, just yet, to abdicate the crystal pedestal … .”

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