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Yet a thought daunted Major Dennison, as he looked down the steel crevasse.
Could some alien beast have survived the axeblow and loss of air and still he
alive somewhere down there?
The pit yawned darkly. They said, didn't they, that a spaceman was only a
deepsea diver keeping the pressure in, instead of out? What octopus tentacles
might reach for him out of the injured darkness? Pip shivered in his well-
heated suit as he undipped his tether and clamped it magnetically to the metal
rind. Elsewhere on the ruptured surface, half a dozen Americans and Russians
belayed their tethers too . . .
Pip angled his light down and snapped a holograph of the chasm with fat
buckled tubing gleaming at the bottom of it. He let the camera hang loose and
checked for a second time the handiness of the improvised weapon they had all
been issued with an explosive pellet thrower powered by compressed gas.
"Dennison about to descend," Pip told his throat mike.
"Good luck, Pip," a voice buzzed in his ear. "Good hunting."
Pip swung his body round and started climbing upward. The change of
orientation put Earth's soda fountain a thousand miles below his feet, blue
oceans whipped with cream.
Sole's intentions were as ice-sharp as the winter day, as he pushed the main
door open and walked into the heat inside.
The Christmas tree was gone. Balloons gone. Streamers gone.
No one saw him as he fitted his key into the first security door and passed
through to the rear wing.
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He took the lift down and stepped out into the corridor, hurried to the first
window.
Inside the Embedding World the wall screen was dead and the four children lay
sleeping on the floor in a neat row.
Gulshen's leg was encased in plaster. Rama's hand was wrapped in bandages.
Vasilki's brow was bandaged and her face badly bruised.
Vidya was the only unblemished one. Yet he did not sleep quietly. Even through
the tranquillizers and barbiturates his lips moved. Muscular tics twisted
them.
Sole barely registered the peculiar circumstances. A glance showed him that
Vidya was safe and that was all
he cared about. He walked through the airlock ignoring the speech mask hanging
up, dropped the carrier bag beside the boy and bent over him.
"Vidya!" he called tentatively.
The boy moved fitfully and his lips twitched but he didn't open his eyes.
Drugged, Sole noted with distaste. He glanced at the video pickups. Possibly
they weren't switched on, and if they were switched on nobody would be
watching, as there was nothing to record.
He emptied the clothes out of the carrier bag and began dressing Vidya.
Amusing to think of the boy waking up fully dressed for the very first
time maybe feeling bound up in a bit of a strait jacket at first then the huge
enlargement of his vistas dawning on him . . .
Pierre's footsteps crumpled the gravel as he skirted the blue Volkswagen and
went round the side of the house.
He looked in through a window, saw a boy wriggling about in an armchair before
the TV set crossing and uncrossing his white matchstick legs under him
restlessly. The boy's face shocked him. The soft foxy features. His own
childhood face, from a green buckram photograph album.
But Chris had never said anything. Hadn't even hinted. How long was it since
that time in Paris? It was possible.
His own child? It might explain Chris's ambivalent attitude the sense Pierre
had ever since he become conscious of
Chris there in the jungle, that Chris had been thrashing out some private
dilemma that had nothing to do with Indians or
Aliens or even his experiments at the Hospital.
Another window brought him face to face with Eileen.
For a moment she failed to recognize him, he looked so thin and worn, then she
flew to the kitchen door.
"Pierre! But Chris said nothing on the phone "
"No?"
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They kissed lightly. Pierre held her by the shoulders to look into her
eyes which seemed older and cooler now.
He gestured uncertainly at the other room, where the TV was playing
hurdy-gurdy music.
"I never knew Chris didn't mention anything. I I am right, aren't I?"
"Yes his name's Peter. My Chris doesn't seem to have said much "
"Ah Chris has gone up to the Hospital for something. Maybe to give us a moment
together?"
Pip floated into a corridor which carried cable-bearing pipes around the inner
skin of the Globe now they were buckled and ruptured. Further along, the
corridor was pinched together by the shock wave of the explosion and its roof
scraped the floor like a coalmine gallery squashed flat by subsidence.
Nearby, a hatch had sprung open. A ladder with metre-wide spaces between the
separate rungs led down to a lower level. Blocking the view drifted the body
of one of the angular aliens, surrounded by a frozen pink haze.
Pip bounced himself cautiously upward from rung to rung till he reached the
dead unhuman floating in the nebula of its blood. He hauled the corpse aside.
Its grey clothes or was that stuff skin? tore away from the chilled metal
leaving a frozen layer behind.
Pip pushed himself into a high, vaulted corridor more spacious than the first
corridor had been. He shone his light around. The corridor led off in one
direction along a buckled curve, vanishing out of sight. In the other
direction it opened into a hallway of idle, dead machines. A second alien body
hung midway between them, turning very slowly end over end. Fingers splayed
out like tree twigs. Ears had burst open into grey streamers from its skull.
Pip swung his body round so that the roof became the floor again, then pushed
his way by gentle shoves towards the machinery.
Ambassador from the world of whipped cream, he inspected these first pickings
of the meal of Mind. He snapped holograms, checked his Roentgen counter.
After ten minutes, when he couldn't make out the function of the machines, he
drifted down a long rumpled ramp to a lower level still . . .
Sole carried the sleeping Vidya up in the lift and along the corridor. Outside
the hairmesh security glass, the green barbed woods pressed a corset round the
building. It was quiet.
He unlocked the first door.
In the interface between the two doors, Lionel Rosson stood waking for him. He
didn't seem surprised to see him, or the boy in his arms.
"What are you up to, Chris? Sabotage? Or is it sentimentality? I suppose I
ought to say welcome home to Haddon.
But let's get that boy back to his proper place first, hmm? Oh, I would have
wanted you back here so desperately, a week ago! But now . . . well it's
different, isn't it?"
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Sole whispered furiously: [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]