Transmaniacon (28 page)

“How far south is he?” Bolton asked.

“About a hundred fifty miles. In the hills. Mostly wilderness down there. But at this rate it shouldn't take long for it to reach us here. It'll rip the ground out from under the city in a day or so. And who knows how much power he has in there? He could rip up half the continent, for all we know. And in his present mood, he'd do it.”

“Rackey!” It was Kibo's voice from the vidphone speaker between the couches.

Ben stepped to the console and pressed the transmit button. “We see it, Kibo.”

“It's tearing up the ground! It's spreading out under the topsoil, like a hundred feet down! What are you going to do? It's—it's ripping up the earth! The hills are wrinkling up and falling! There's a village over there—there
was
a village—” A high panic filled Kibo's voice. Uncharacteristic. Sweat from Ben's forehead dripped onto the console speaker.

“Kibo, get back, but try to keep the thing on camera. I need to see it.” He spoke rapidly, to himself more than to Kibo. “I was afraid he might do this. The thing is so dense now I don't think we can crack it with the beam at full intensity. But if we exert equal force over its whole surface we might be able to push it back, crush the cylinder inside. I don't know how else we're going to do it. We don't have time to find the power source and destroy it. It
has
to be the Coordinating Center. Kibo, move the car to a point opposite, so the Barrier is between you and. the city, I want to make sure we don't hit you. It'll take a while to readjust the Fist so its energies are fanned out, and it'll take even longer to get it pointed at the Coordinator. I don't know for sure if we can hit it directly. We may have to bounce it from the ozone layer to avoid hills and buildings. And if we do try to hit it directly, everything depends on the geography being with us—”

“He's
changing
the geography.”

“Yes. Well, stay calm, Kibo. We'll get to it as fast as we can. Now, change your position.”

Ben signed off and went to adjust the projection setting. He worked alone, feverishly, feeling worn again. The confrontation with the Barrier had been short-lived but intense. The force of his will, tangible and expendable, had been at the crux of the confrontation. It occurred to him that Fuller's control of the Barrier would now be on manual; it would respond directly to his mental commands. It might come down to a contest of Ben's will against Fuller's. Mental Sumo wrestling.

Twenty minutes later the Fist was ready; the arm drawn back, flexed to strike.

Again, they took their places on the couches.

“Rackey,” said Bunn, voice cracking, “I have a bad feeling about this. Fuller is a madman and that thing is dense. I mean, it encompassed thousands of square miles and now it's condensed into perhaps fifty miles. It must be incredibly resistant—”

“Just keep your focus steady. Don't waver. If you waver, if you let the beam go awry, the Barrier could spring loose in reaction, and tear up the city, us with it. It's come here anyway. No turning back.”

He lowered the helmet over his head.

“Ben?” Gloria stood over him, the vial of stimulant in her hand.

Ben vacillated. The stimulant might provide him with the energy to overcome Fuller, if it came down to a battle of wills. But...

“No,” he said firmly. “No, it would put me too much on his frequency. He's probably stoned now, and if we're too much in rapport he might influence me. I've got to do it with my own energy. He's got his drug and his madness, and I've got thirty years' training in self-control. And my monomania. We'll see.”

Ben lay back and said, “Gloria, attend the equalizers. The rest of you,
release
.” He flipped the toggle and closed his eyes.

Four wavering white lines now arranged cruciform to one another.

As the four focusers concentrated, the crossed lines stabilized and grew brighter. Then, as Ben's settings had directed, they widened and curved, like four fans unfolding, to become a disk of white light. The disk wavered. “Stabilize it!” Ben shouted. The others firmed their sections of the disk. It became a brilliant white sun. Ben looked at the screen.

The blue, shimmering hemisphere that was the expanding Barrier was fifty miles across. The earth it excavated, the vegetation it uprooted were piled against its curved edges like foam around a prow, rolling outward, boiling, cascading down. On the surrounding hilly land a black mass dilated outward—animals fleeing in terror. The Barrier was obscured by a rising cloud of dust and smoke, but Ben could barely make out the cylinder, now tiny within. Friction-sparked fires were flaring up around the blister's fringes as it swelled. Multi-colored gritty chaos preceding the expansion of a geometrically perfect hemisphere.

Blister of Fuller's hate,
Ben thought. And he remembered the translation of the Order's Latin motto, inscribed beneath its Sign on the cover of its Black Book:
What is Chaos to mankind is Order to Lucifer.

The Fist shot out, angled sixty degrees from the axis of the pyramid, bounced off the ozone layer, and rebounded straight downward, as if marking the course of a billiard ball, striking the Barrier from above.

The Fist was now fifty miles square, matching the sphere inch for inch, exerting an equal amount of pressure on its face.

As it struck, Ben recoiled on the couch, stifling a groan. Bunn whimpered. Ben felt as if he'd butted his head into a stone wall. His temples throbbed with pain. He wanted to give up. He wanted to go to sleep. But he shouted, “
Maintain!
” The Barrier was momentarily checked. They had stopped its expansion. But it hurt.

Bolton was choking. Bunn was whimpering. Remm was cursing. Ben was gripping the arms of his chair till he felt fingernails break and bleed. He could feel the veins standing out at his temples.

He closed his eyes and looked at the image of the disk, the representation of the energy distribution in the Fist.

The disk was uneven. Bunn's side was quaking, Bolton's was wavering. Opening his eyes, Ben saw the result: the Barrier had expanded ten more feet.

In the Fist's cupola, the white light lanced from below like a nova; Ben could barely make out the figures on the screen through the glare.

Thunder and shrieks assailed his ears by turn. He was soaked in sweat, his teeth squeaked, their edges powdering as he ground them together. “Hold!” he growled at Bunn and Bolton. The white disk solidified, the Barrier stopped expanding. But he realized it couldn't last. His will was the binding force for those of the other three. Ben Rackey's will, fired by monomania, at loggerheads with Fuller's will, fueled by insane malice. Rackey struggled with Fuller, Fist, and Barrier. He seemed to see Fuller's narrowed eyes, his gritting teeth, his purpling brow. Ben held and held. But it couldn't last.

And knowing it couldn't last, he was left with one choice.

Rapidly, he awakened the exciter. The metal oval planted in his chest began to throb. He advanced it instantly to full and undiluted output and hurled it at Bolton, Bunn, and Remm.

The exciter molded them all into a four-component unit of radiant antipathy.

The white disk went rigid, solidified, and became the blinding white of an exploding sun.

Broadened, tumescent, the Fist clamped down with an almost audible grunt.

Ben had a flashing image from Fuller's mind:

Fuller was lying on his back, his head encased in a helmet. His eyes were big and intense. Trapped. He was a divided man. He didn't altogether want to do what he was doing. But—Ben had a split-second glimpse of a monstrous blue figure, a scarlet visage, its hollow eye sockets like white beacons.

Bolton, Bunn and Remm, and Rackey concentrated. Their projection nodes merged into a single intense down-thrust of power, a surge of resentment, spontaneous as a lashing fist.

Fuller's face appeared to Ben. His eyes asked mercy.

The Fist compressed the Barrier like a man compressing a snail in his fingers. The shell collapsed inward with an earth-shaking
crack.
Fuller was crushed within it like a slug beneath a sledgehammer.

Ben looked away from the sudden explosion of white light on the screen.

In Detroit, the ground beneath the pyramid trembled. And was still.

Outside, the public decapitations of aristocrats were momentarily interrupted as the mob turned to gawk at the dull glow on the horizon.

Ben awoke to see Kibo glowering down at him. Not a cheering sight.

“The outcome?” Ben croaked.

“Fuller and Barrier crushed. The patriarchs of Detroit dead. The mob is headed here. I suggest we leave.”

Ben removed his helmet and sat up.

Gloria arrived, carrying a cup of water. It looked beautiful and tasted even better. His head was still pounding, but he felt strong enough to get around on his own. He and Gloria embraced.

He turned to speak to the others. “Well, erstwhile Patriarchs of the Insulation Committee, you are welcome to accompany—” He stopped.

Bolton was gone. Remm and Bunn were lying, arms askew, glazed eyes gazing at nothing, blood trickling from noses and open mouths.

“They died in that last surge,” Gloria whispered. “I think their hearts burst. Bolton ran out of here screaming, pounding his head, kicking at empty air, frothing at the mouth. He looked—”

“Insane.” Ben muttered. They walked slowly, arm in arm, out toward the nulgrav car. Silently, Kibo followed.

“Things worked for us in Astor because we surrendered to those people,” Gloria murmured. “And we came out on top here because we refused to surrender. Makes you wonder. Which is the best course to take? Like, at any time, any given moment, maybe there is always a choice that's more useful. You know? Either surrender or resist. Sometimes one, sometimes the other. I guess the trick is knowing which is right for a certain time. I guess. I don't know. How could you tell?”

Ben's head hurt. He didn't feel much like thinking. But unthinkingly he said, “In Astor we surrendered to a force we trusted. It's like sailing, I guess. You hoist your sails or haul them down depending on whether the wind is blowing the way you know you should go.” He grimaced. “I don't want to think about it. The only thing it doesn't hurt me to contemplate is sleep.”

It was dark outside, lights reflected in the sheen of the Fist's polished metal. The blue-black sky was cloudless; the stars looked brittle and about as friendly as the Devil's teeth.

The skyline of Detroit was unusually dark, except for red flares here and there where fires consumed whole sections of the city. “Yeah. Time to split,” Gloria said.

“How much longer do you work for me?” Ben asked Kibo.

“Another three days, according to contract.”

“Good. Then you can fly us to New York. It ought to be safe there for a while. I've got an account there—my last one. I'll give you a bonus. And I intend to see a shipbuilder and a surgeon.”

“In that order?” Gloria asked, climbing after him into the car.

“No. The surgeon first. As soon as we land,” said Ben, tapping his chest over the place where the exciter waited, dormant.

“You aren't really serious about this,” said Gloria flatly, looking at him askance.

“Perfectly serious. Did you think I was joking when I paid to have this ship built?” Ben replied.

“No, but I guess I never thought you'd go through with it. I thought maybe you'd cruise around some and then come into port.”

“I don't much blame you for thinking that. I can see where it might look a bit mad.”

“I know. I know,” she said, wrapping her long arms around his waist.

They were standing on the aft deck of his newly built thirty-five foot teakwood sailboat, the
Joseph Conrad.
No engine, only a few instruments for navigation and for keeping the boat on course while he slept. “I know what I'm doing.” he said.

The boat was moored to a crumbling wharf that extended like a mandarin's fingernail from a long spit of rocky land reaching from the southern hook of what once had been Boston's harbor. The wreck of a half-sunk destroyer thrust a rusted, pitted gray-orange bow from the white-capped seas a quarter of a mile offshore. No other ships were visible. The mercury-gray sea was choppy but not impudent. The tide was going and a cold, fair wind blew northeast. Ben was eager to be off.

With Gloria giving him periodic nervous looks, Ben cranked up the anchor and cast off, instructing her in unfurling the proper sails, and went to the helm, tacking southeast to catch the full brunt of the gust.

The ship sliced cleanly into the waves, tossing its prow like the snout of an eager horse. Ben could feel the wind in the sails; he felt it in the vibrations of the vessel's wood as surely as if the ship were an organic extension of his own person.

“I'll be damned,” Gloria muttered. “You're
grinning.
I've never seen you grin. I don't know as I like it.”

In fact, Ben's chest filled with singing as the wind filled the sails. One thing only dragged him back, laid its weight on him. He reached into the pocket of his heavy black peajacket and withdrew the small, shiny metal oval.

He strapped the wheel to keep the ship on course and went to the taffrail, looking at the bristling white wake, the light bringing out the emerald depth of the water. Then he looked at the focus of transmaniac energies, the exciter, glinting in his right hand. He reached out, turned his hand palm-down over the water, and opened his fingers.

For five seconds, the metal disk clung to his hand, though he did nothing to hold it back. As if it were magnetized there. Clinging like a snail. Then, reluctantly, it dropped away, plunked into the sea, vanished into the waters like a fading leer.

He turned and smiled at Gloria. Her right hand went into his pea jacket, her slender fingers probing beneath his shirt, tracing the ridges of scar-tissue on his chest. “That's a big, unfriendly ocean, Ben.”