* * * * *
Greg didn't have time to be surprised at his own actions. He pulled
Drakeson's hands away from the controls. Drakeson was trying to stop
him from bringing the cruiser down.
Drakeson gasped. "Even with the heat-blasters, we'll never get a
hundred meters away from where we land. I figured on landing directly
over the place--"
"So will the Controllers," Greg said. He hurled Drakeson back, heard
him sprawl on the mesh flooring where he lay, half sobbing.
Greg angled the ship down abruptly. "As soon as we land, I'm running
for it," he called back. "The Controllers will be down there swarming
all over us, and I don't want to lead them to where Pat is."
Drakeson crawled over to the bunk and sat on it. "All right," he said.
"I'm with you. It's too late to get out of it now. For a carton of
premature dreams, I've gotten myself stuck with a psycho tag. I'm
stuck with it anyway, now. Might as well go on, and stay out of the
brain-probers as long as possible."
Greg felt a tingling crawl up his wrists as they dropped down above
the gigantic, semi-organic forest. Mutated cells in the process of
change had played havoc with the pre-Chain life forms. According to
what little he had gotten from info-tapes, there was no longer any
distinction or at least very little, between organic and inorganic
life, outside the Cowls.
Psycho. He'd still argue with Drakeson about that, but he didn't have
time. He wasn't psycho. As soon as he persuaded Pat to abandon the
flight, they'd give themselves up, return to the Cowl, and things would
return to normal, to anesthesia, Stage Five, then Six, then Seven, on
to the final eternal dream.
That's the way it was going to be.
And if they had to suffer the hells of brain-probing and the awful
ego-loss of re-conditioning, then they would do that too. It was
for the good of the Cowls, the preservation of the Codes. A noble
sacrifice. Must be no change. No menace to stability. Any suggestion of
change made one suspect.
Greg's eyes misted as he brought the cruiser to a half-crash landing.
Even as he tried to bring his blurred vision into focus, he was running
to the exit. He had the sliding panel open. He was up to his knees in
writhing tendrils. He was running through a crimson twilight.
Behind him, he heard Drakeson tearing through the tendrils, and
clutching vines. Overhead he could hear the drone of the sky-car's
atomurbinic motors. Whether they would land and continue the search on
foot through the deadly forest, Greg couldn't know.
He didn't know anything about the Controllers' methods. "How far,
Drake," he yelled through the inter-person audio. Drakeson came running
up beside Greg. Severed strings of torn, still living life-stuff
writhed from his shoulders and legs.
"I'd say about half a mile straight ahead. That's a long way through
this nightmare."
Greg screamed. A broad mushroom-like growth had opened a mouth. A
gigantic, sickeningly gray mouth full of deadly, flesh-eating acid.
A flower-bright vine with great tensile strength raked Drakeson in
toward that gaping maw.
Drakeson's arms were held tight against his sides. He was
straining--helpless. Through the glassine mask of his helmet, Greg saw
Drakeson's face turning red with constriction.
His voice came to Greg in a burst of fear. "The gun, Greg! The
heat-blaster--quick--"
Greg leaned forward, staring in rigid fascination. Fleshy stocks swayed
toward him. Other mouths opened, petal mouths. Gigantic floral traps,
and cannibal blooms.
"Greg! Greg!" Drakeson was framed now by that great cannibal maw.
Greg had the heat-blaster up. He had it leveled. But he couldn't
depress the firing stud.
"Drake! I can't! I can't!"
How could any integrated man be deliberately destructive? How could any
sane person--kill?
"I can't--Drake--" The awful conflict seemed to rip through his
body. He felt the sweat, hot and profuse, rolling down his face. He
concentrated on that gun, on his finger, on the firing stud.
The cannibal blossom was closing. Sticky juices dripped over Drakeson.
He was screaming. Greg's finger lifted. He could not fire.
The Codes said no destruction. No killing. The Codes had been
established after the great Chain disaster. Violence begets violence,
the Codes said. And once begun, it was accumulative, like the snowball
rolling down hill.
Greg sagged. His knees buckled. He sprawled out in the slippery muck.
Tendrils swished softly and hungrily around him. He heard a shout. He
tried to twist his head. Figures blurred before his eyes, and he heard
the deadly _chehowwwwww_ of a terrific blast.
The last thing he remembered before the dark wrapped him up softly and
warmly, was the cannibal plant exploding in a million fragments of
stringy tissue, and Drakeson falling free.
_I didn't fire_, he was thinking. _Someone else saved Drakeson. But I
think I might have done it. My finger--it was moving--bending--or was
it? No. I couldn't have been destructive. Couldn't have killed._
* * * * *
Consciousness came back to Greg. Painfully. It came back slowly and it
took a long time. He lifted his eyelids. He raised himself to a sitting
position. He stared down a gloomy, phosphorescent corridor. It was
obviously subterranean. It was damp, chill. Cold luciferin light glowed
from lichen on walls and low ragged ceiling.
It was long and it finally curved, he decided. But he could look back
into a long slow curve of corridor and ahead into the same. Here and
there, the mouths of branch corridors came in.
He looked at his hand. It still clutched the butt of the heat-blaster.
He felt strange. The surroundings were very real, yet they seemed
somehow not real. The shock of trying to fire that blaster when the
sanity in him shrieked "No!" had been too much for him. The shock had
blanked him out.
He breathed a deep sigh of temporary relief and triumph. He hadn't
killed. He thought of Drakeson. Somebody had saved him. Someone had
killed. Not the Controllers. They could employ only the neuro-guns to
paralyze. So he decided that Colonists had probably saved Drakeson.
Terror gripped Greg then. He remembered Drakeson yelling at him, the
distended eyes, the straining face. And how he himself had almost given
in, had almost killed.
_Had almost gone psycho._
But he hadn't. That was the important thing. He was still a sane,
integrated part of the Cowls and the Codes. And after a test like
that, he figured that nothing could break him. Let them send him to
psychometry. Let them clamp on the brain-probers and leave them on for
months. They'd not find any psycho tendencies in Greg Dalson.
Greg tried to reason. But he had no place, no foundation, for a
beginning. He didn't know where he was, or why he had been left here.
He knew that someone, the Colonists probably, had saved Drakeson from
that plant thing. Some mental pressure had blacked him out, he thought,
and then what? He didn't know.
Which way? It didn't seem to matter. He started walking.
He was bone-weary. His head throbbed. His eyes burned. And he was
afraid. He had gotten himself into a completely un-Codified situation.
He was lost, helpless, outside the protection of the Cowls, the Codes,
and anesthesia.
He was surrounded by reality. Reality in all its essential horror.
Conflict. Physical danger. Uncertainties. Materialistic barriers. All
the old shibboleths that the Cowls and the Codes and the anesthetic
dreams had protected him from.
And all because of Pat Nichols.
But he'd stood a big test. And he'd won. He hadn't killed. He wasn't
destructive. He--
The cry touched his ears and died. It was too violent and filled with
pain and terror to make any definite impression the first time. He
crouched. His eyes distended. The scream came again, and this time it
chopped through him. His nerves seemed to shrivel and curl beneath the
repeated onslaughts of the screams.
Then he was running. He didn't know why, except that he had to run. He
ran with fearful, gasping desperation. But he didn't know why.
* * * * *
He ran past the mouth opening into the main corridor. Then came back
and ran into the darker, strangely-lighted artery. He ran harder. And
yet he wasn't running. Not all of him. As he ran, he was conscious of
some undefinable, but terrific conflict.
Beneath the suit, his skin burned with sweat. He felt the rigid pattern
of tensed neck and jaw muscles.
_I don't feel at all familiar. Something's very wrong. Everything's
wrong. I'm displaced, like something that has slipped into an alien
dimension._
He stopped, quickly. His heart seemed to swell, burst with terror.
Terror and something else. The something else came, and with it came
horror of itself. The emotion, and then horror of the emotion. He stood
shivering, his teeth clacking like an ancient abacus.
"Pat!" He screamed her name. The cry pounded back into his ears inside
the helmet.
This wasn't Drakeson. This was Pat. Pat was going to die now. Not
Drakeson.
The walls were--_alive_. They were not like the walls of the corridors.
This was a circular chamber, and the walls were sagging and undulating
like part of a giant's flesh. He heard heavy sluggish sounds.
Masses of the gray viscous stuff sagged, changed form, remolded itself
into monstrous shapes.
Pat! Only her face and part of her upper body were visible now. The
shielding of her suit had been cracked wide open by pressure as the
semi-organic thing, whatever it was, had closed around her.
The walls rushed in as Greg stumbled drunkenly. The ceiling sagged
lower. Long knobs fell, like globules of paste, then lengthened into
shapeless tendrils that snapped out at Greg.
He fell back.
Pat's scream penetrated again. No beauty remained in her face now. Her
eyes were sick. Her lips were loose and trembling.
"Greg--help me--help me--see what it does--the others--"
He saw the others then. Maybe he hadn't noticed before, because his
mind didn't want him to see.
Husks. Pallid wrinkled husks, sucked dry and shriveled. Several figures
not recognizable anymore, hardly recognizable as human. Just vaguely
human, broken, sucked dry.
His mind seemed covered by a grotesque shadow. His flesh crawled and
his throat turned dry, and perspiration made a stream down his throat.
He felt his eyes looking down at his right hand.
It held the heat-blaster. The skin felt tight as though it would split
as he gripped the heavy butt of the coiled weapon.
He concentrated on the finger that was frozen on the firing stud. If he
could destroy, then he was insane. His experience with Drakeson, that
had been no test at all compared with this. This was Pat. Pat, and she
was dying--dying unspeakably.
This was the great test of his sanity. He concentrated on the finger.
He must keep it frozen. He must back out of here. Get away, get back to
the Cowl, back to anesthesia and sleep.
The finger raised slowly from the stud. His feet lifted as his body
moved fitfully back, back, back--
"Greg--help me, Greg--"
Her eyes stopped him. They tumbled into terrible clarity. She whispered
starkly.
"Greg--help me--kill it, Greg. For me--Kill it."
He felt his lips part in a great and terrible cry of torture. His
shoulders began to twitch slightly. His arms and fingers took up the
jerky rhythm. Horror and a violent crimson flood of unfamiliar emotions
mushroomed like a volcano of madness. Something began crumbling away.
He lurched forward. He felt the heat-blaster heaving, throwing out its
deadly load. The gun had weight and power in his hand as he crouched
lower and moved in.
The power load swathed in long slicing arcs. Steam and sickening stench
fell around him. He moved in. He stumbled forward kicking out to right
and left at the quivering slices of stuff that were falling around him.
Destruction. Kill. Death. This was all three, and in a giant, almost
inconceivable quantity.
Her face through the steaming cloud. Her throat moving as she
swallowed. Brightness, the brightness of disbelief and impossibility
coming into her eyes.
He kept moving in until the monstrous mutated gray thing was thoroughly
dead. Until every separate tendril and patch was blasted to smoke. Then
he lifted her broken body in his arms.
Tears fell on the opaqueness of his helmet. "I'm sorry, Pat," he
choked. "I'm sorry it didn't happen sooner. I'm sorry I waited too
long--but it isn't easy--to let yourself go insane."
Something was wrong. Pat! Pat! She seemed to be fading away from
him, drifting away, melting into tattered veils of cloud. Her face
became only two bright glad eyes, then they also melted together into
a radiant pool. He toppled into the pool. He sank down, a wonderful
lifelessness spreading through him.
He closed his eyes. Something was beginning to be very funny. In the
thickening dark, he laughed a little. And in that laugh was a crazy,
climbing note of--triumph.
* * * * *
He opened his eyes. He was laughing, in a kind of soft hysteria. He was
on a couch. Not a dream couch, but just a plain hard bed. He sat up
stiffly. Pain tingled down his legs. He saw Pat Nichols. And another. A
man. He remembered him vaguely, one of the first who had escaped from
the Cowl. His name--yes--he remembered now. Merrol.
Pat Nichols, alive, and smiling. Very beautiful too in a brief aerosilk
bra and shorts and sandals. Her hair was a dark lovely cloud flowing
down over bare shoulders.
"Hello, Greg," she said softly. "Welcome to--the Colonists."
"What?" He swung his legs around. "I don't understand. Not entirely."
Merrol, a gaunt elderly man, nodded from behind a desk. Merrol's hair
was gray and sparse. Strange, seeing a man who showed age. Within the
Cowls, one never grew physically old.
Pat said, "This is Ralph Merrol, Personnel Director of Venusian
Colonization Enterprises."
Greg's numbness was filtering away beneath Pat's warm glad eyes. He
raised his hand. The heat-blaster was still gripped in his fingers. It
evidently hadn't been fired.
"It was all illusion," he said. "The scene in the cavern. It never
happened?"
Merrol's care-lined face nodded. "It happened, but in your mind, Greg.
We rescued you and Drakeson from the cannibal plant. We brought you
here. You had lost consciousness. We put you under the hypnosene rays,
and put you through an experience that was quite real to you. We proved
something to ourselves, and to you. Greg--you're sane now."
Greg tried to understand. The thing didn't make sense yet, but the
glimmerings of the truth were beginning to solidify in his aching brain.
"Sane? But I killed. I wanted to kill. I wanted to destroy, and I did.
That's hardly the actions of a--sane man."
Merrol smiled thinly. "From our point of view it is, Greg. We consider
ourselves sane. We consider the Cowled Cities, and the Codes insane.
It's relative I supposed, but I think we can convince you, if we
haven't already."
Greg looked at Pat. She smiled. He smiled back. "Justified or not,"
he whispered. "I'm here. Sane or insane, I'm one of the Colonists
now I guess. Unless I want to return to the Cowls, be probed and
re-conditioned."