Gordon R Dickson - Sleepwalkers' World Page 3

  “If you’re an honest man, maybe you do,” said Rafe softly.

  They followed the road around past the tall buildings of the ordinary terminal, to a smaller building with glowing yellow letters spelling out POLICE in the air above it.

  “We’ll stay in the car,” Rafe said, “right up until we board the aircraft. Speak to them again, Forebringer.”

  Forebringer leaned forward and used the phone connection once more. They were told that a five-place ship was ready for them on the landing pad on the far side of the building, and they drove around to it.

  Five minutes later, with Rafe at the controls, but with his eyes focused on the mirror showing Pao and Forebringer seated behind him with their hands carefully in view in their laps, the VTL leaped directly skyward from the landing pad, and the foreshortened figure of Lee dwindled away below them.

  At an altitude of seven thousand feet, Rafe entered the traffic pattern above the field, and came out of it a minute or two later, headed due east. He lifted to eighty thousand feet, put the controls on auto, and swung his seat around on its gimbals to face Forebringer and Pao.

  “Is it too much to ask where you’re taking us?” Pao said.

  “I’m not sure,” Rafe said. “We’ll just head east until it gets dark or the two of you fall asleep.”

  Both the other men stiffened.

  “You damn fool!” Forebringer said. “Don’t you know any airfield we pass over on automatic pilot will try to pull us in unless there’s someone awake at the controls to cut us out of the traffic pattern? And a ship this size hasn’t the response mechs to get itself landed by airport control? You fly us into a broadcast area and we’ll end up a pile of junk on some landing pad—”

  He broke off abruptly. His eyes narrowed, staring at Rafe.

  “Or maybe you’re figuring on not going all the way asleep,” he said. “What are you? Some sort of zombie?”

  “You could say that,” answered Rafe.

  He expected one or the other of them to question him further after his saying that. But neither did. Pao sat as he was. Forebringer leaned back in his seat and folded his arms across his chest like a man who has come to a decision.

  * * *

  3

  “I don’t know what ability you think you have in resisting the soporific effect,” said Pao, some little while later. “But if you know anything about those who can resist it, you know that no two people react alike. Now, it’s over four years since you were on Earth, and at that time the first Core Tap hadn’t been set up to broadcast power to the food manufactories. In short, you haven’t had any actual experience with the way you’ll react to broadcast power—”

  “I visited one of the experimental stations two years before I went to the Moon,” said Rafe.

  Pao closed his mouth and sighed slightly. Below the steadily eastward-flying VTL, the ground was now reddened by the sun sinking to the horizon behind them. Underneath at this moment was the varicolored patchwork of old farmlands, but the lights of a city glowed on the horizon ahead.

  Somewhere up ahead there, a Core Tap power station with its massive broadcast antenna crouched over a shaft driven three hundred miles deep into the Earth’s hot interior; the heat and pressure at the deep end of that shaft would soon be used to power the heavy generators that would send radiant power from the antenna to the factories and power stations that lighted the city Rafe watched. When that happened, the alpha rhythms of human and animal brains within range of the antenna would be distorted by the power broadcast, and the bodies to which the brains belonged would sleep, whether they needed sleep or not. It was only now, this close to the sunset time at which the power broadcasts from the Core Taps to the food factories were begun, that one of the two other men had finally broken silence.

  “All right,” said Pao, “you had experience with how you reacted under power broadcast and found it didn’t put you as much asleep as it put others. You found out that even with your brain waves in the enforced alpha rhythm you could move about. Even better—maybe you could not only sleepwalk, you could control your sleepwalking to some extent. But do you realize how much more we know about the enforced alpha state now than we did back when the experimental models of the power broadcast units were being tested? We know now that it’s not only nervous responses that are affected—it’s judgment. In an alpha state induced by the broadcast, you could think you were doing quite well in controlling your actions, but a film taken of you at the time would show you stumbling around, being clumsy, slow, and uncertain in your movements—like someone under narcotics, or drunk if you like. But you wouldn’t have realized this. Just like a drunk, you’d have thought how well you were doing.”

  “That’s what the trouble is with people like Lee—and the rest of the world’s billions,” said Rafe. “They get drunk every night whether they want to or not, and it’s starting to pile up on them.”

  “You’re not listening to me,” Pao Gallo said.

  “No. It’s you who’re not listening to me,” replied Rafe. “Why don’t you go a week without using the broadcast station and see what effects show up in the world’s populace?”

  “Turn them off for a week?” snorted Fore-bringer. “We couldn’t turn them off a single night! We’re just barely meeting adequate calorie quotas now. A week with none of the food factories working would put us so far behind we’d have a famine on our hands before we could catch up again!”

  “How can you be so sure?” said Rafe.

  “Because he’s right,” said Pao Gallot. “Don’t you believe me? It’s my job to keep the people of the world fed.”

  “Not that we could go a week anyway,” muttered Forebringer. “The first night that word got out the factories weren’t producing we’d have full-scale revolution on our hands . . .”

  The last word from his lips trailed off oddly. His eyelids wavered and fell. His face slackened. Beside him, Pao was already, suddenly, asleep, round face resting on a roll of neck fat above his cravat.

  The interior of the VTL blurred about Rafe. Obviously, they had been inside an area of one of the broadcast stations when its power had just been turned on for the night, rather than having simply flown into a working broadcast area. The effect of any such broadcast fell off sharply after a specified distance, but its edge gradient was still gradual enough that Forebringer would not have dropped asleep in midsentence. Instinctively, Rafe tensed against the impulse smothering him into slumber.

  He made himself relax.

  Don’t fight, he told himself. Don’t fight. Slide with it . . . easy . . . easy . . .

  The “slide” was metaphorical. It was a matter of knowing what could be fought and what could not. He could not stop the power broadcast now filling the atmosphere about him from forcing the electrical activity of his brain into a specific—and soporific—alpha-wave pattern. He could, however, go along with the alpha patterning and find some accommodation with the rest of his body that avoided the soporific effect. It was that same effect that had undoubtedly put the circles under the eyes of the woman Lee and brought a cast of hopelessness to her face. It was the effect that immobilized half of Earth’s population during the dark hours—except for the “zombies,” those natural immunes, certain yoga-trained individuals, and a very few others who could control their brain-wave patterns consciously. Like Rafe himself?

  Slide . .. slide with the push.

  Good. Now start to take hold . . . take hold. Now turn .. . push . .. override the flow of the broadcast . . . divert it slightly . . . a little more . . . Now!

  Rafe sat up in the pilot’s seat with his eyes open. Except for a strange feeling, something like a wire thrumming inside him, sensed but not heard, he felt perfectly normal. But these would be only his subjective reactions.

  He brought his left wrist around in front of his eyes and focused on the dial of his watch. It looked as always—except that the second hand seemed to be whirling about the circular face at four or five times its normal speed, while the
longer minute hand crept perceptibly forward in matching time.

  Reflexes, he thought, and almost laughed. From someone with the world’s fastest to a man with some of the slowest.

  The humorous reaction threatened to upset his accommodation with the broadcast pattern. For a moment the aircraft cabin blurred around him again, and the heavy hand of drowsiness was laid upon him like the paw of a bear, pulling him down. He leaned back and rode it out.

  Easy . . . easy. The watch was only one aspect of the universe. Time was relative. The broadcast pattern was only another aspect. Space distorted still remained space. Time distorted remained time. In the perception was all . . . all. No aspect of space or time or universe had any hold on him. They were all relative, all peripheral to his being. I am the center of my universe . . .

  He was back, once more in control of himself. He looked again at the watch.

  Slow down, he told the second hand. Slow. . .

  For a little while it continued to whirl as if ignoring him. Then, gradually, it seemed to slow while he kept his gaze steady on it. Slower . . . slower . . . Still, not as slow as normal, but good enough.

  He turned his attention back to the VTL.

  They were already over the lighted city, and the aircraft had been caught up by ground control into what would have been the traffic pattern over the local landing field if there had been any other traffic in the air to make up a pattern. One conventional swing about the field and then the ground equipment would try to bring it in—and this VTL was not equipped to respond to the proper automatic signals from below.

  Rafe flicked the switch excusing the aircraft from ground control and signaling the automatic equipment below that he was coming in on manual.

  He brought the craft down lightly just beyond the main terminal building. Outside, everything was brightly lit, but there was nothing moving. Working against a heavy weight of inertia that invited him to give up all this effort, he got to his feet, went back past his two slumbering passengers, and stepped down onto the brilliantly lit concrete.

  The night breeze blew coolly on his face, but the refreshment it brought him was only to the surface of his skin. Even the feel of the moving air was somehow remote and lonely.

  He turned and plodded, rather than walked, in through the empty terminal building, past deserted restaurants and magazine booths and airline counters, and across a vast, clean stretch of imitation yellow-marble flooring. The sound of the heels of his high boots clacked loudly, echoing and re-echoing, back and forth in the emptiness between the floor and the high, concrete-ribbed ceiling of the building.

  He walked through a wide air-curtain door, feeling the draft of air remotely on his face, like the breeze outside. To his left were ranked dark shadows—the rental car stand. He ignored it, looking around. To his right and stretching away under bright flood lamps was a parking lot full of private vehicles. He turned and plodded toward them, and when he arrived at the first row, began methodically going down their rank, trying door handles to find one that was unlocked.

  He found a door that opened on the fourteenth or fifteenth two-wheeler he tried. But it was not until he had worked his way halfway down the second rank of parked vehicles that he found one not only with open doors, but with the motor lock-switch open.

  He climbed into the seat behind its control stick and tried the instruments. They showed the vehicle ready to roll except for two half-discharged cells. He wheeled it out of the parking lot and stopped at the service station at the edge of the field to smash a door lock with a jack handle and replace the two half-depleted cells with new ones. Then he drove on out to the highway and checked the car’s autolocator.

  The small dashboard map that lit up on the control-panel screen showed a green dot at an airfield just outside of El Dorado, Kansas. He had swung south in flying east from Oregon.

  He cut back to the northwest now to pick up a freeway with an unlimited-speed strip. There were no traffic police during the night hours any more, and he might have taken any roadway he wanted—but only unlimited strips were engineered for uncontrolled vehicles with speeds up to three hundred miles an hour, though this three- or four-year-old jalopy he had stolen seemed unlikely to be in tune to do more than two hundred.

  He joined the freeway at Newton and drove northeast at top speed through Emporia, past sleeping Kansas City and silent Independence, then swung north to St. Joseph and up into Iowa, turned east at Des Moines, and rolled into the brightly lit, utterly quiet suburb of Des Moines that was the college town of Grinnell, as the local time clock on his car’s instrument panel showed twenty-eight minutes past eleven.

  Approximately seven more hours of dark and broadcast power. A little more than seven hours before Forebringer would be able to get out a world-wide police bulletin on him.

  Warning lights blinked at him unexpectedly across the street ahead. He jerked the control stick back, throwing the motor sharply into retrograde. The tires squealed deafeningly in the silence, but he lost speed safely.

  Now, right up to the lights, he could see that there had been excavation in the street—some sort of work that had torn up the pavement. A narrow way seemed open next to the left curb where there was a gap in the line of flashers. He steered for it.

  As he entered the opening in the flasher line, he had a second in which to notice that the street light just beyond the torn-up area was out, so that the space beyond the warning lights was a pool of blackness. Then the nose of the car dropped, and the front wheel lurched down into something soft and stuck. The vehicle spun sideways and the motor died. He reached for his waistband, but the pill-gun was gone. It must have worked loose and dropped out earlier. Outside the windshield a shadow moved.

  It had barely stopped moving when he was out of the door at his left, moving instinctively. He had a momentary kaleidoscopic image of a black figure, arm upraised against the lighter dark of the sky; then as the arm came down, he had dived past and collided with another figure, a human body. Fury woke in him.

  For a moment the two of them tumbled together in the sand, or dirt, or whatever it was. Then Rafe got knee and fist home to soft parts of the body and rolled to one side, looking upward. Once more, the first figure—and now he recognized that it carried a club in its upraised hand—loomed above him.

  He rolled again. The club came down harmlessly to earth. He was on his feet before the club-wielder had begun to recover balance. Slowly, ponderously, like a shape in a dream, it was coming erect again, lifting its arm. Rafe struck out savagely at the point between head and shoulders, this time with the edge of his hand, and felt the impact of his blow against the neck of the figure. It sagged backward, fell, and lay in the light of the single head lamp of the stalled car, a heavy man in his early forties, a knife at his belt and the club fallen from his grasp, trying to breathe with both hands at his throat.

  “You’re lucky I couldn’t see better,” Rafe told him bitterly. “I’d have broken your neck.”

  He became aware suddenly that the thrumming feeling inside him had gone. But now that he thought of it, it began to be noticeable again. It grew once more inside him, an ugly, unnatural feeling of his body being used without his consent. He looked again at the man choking on the ground.

  “Yes, indeed,” he said softly to himself, “there are zombies.”

  He walked around, got back into the car, and directed the headlight over on the first man he had hit. That man lay without struggling, unconscious.

  Rafe turned his attention to the car itself. By sweeping the headlight around he could see that he was in a shallow, sandy excavation with firm pavement just a few feet to his right. The zombies had evidently moved the warning lights to leave unguarded the holes in the road they were meant to protect.

  Rafe triggered the car’s motor back to life and tried rocking it, cautiously. The wheels spun, digging into the sand, but after a few seconds, he built up enough momentum to lurch the front wheel onto the solid pavement.

  He switched a
ll power to that front wheel and pushed the stick forward. With a jerk and a surge, the car pulled itself up out of the hole.

  He wheeled on down the road, checking his memory for the address he wanted—5514 Busher Drive. He checked a map of Grinnell’s streets on the control-panel autolocator. He was not far from it. A few seconds later he swung into a curving street that bent off to the right of the one on which he was traveling. BUSHER Drive said the street sign, and he drove slowly along it, looking for house numbers that could be read in the light of his head lamp.

  On either side the houses were old and large. Houses like this had not been built for nearly fifty years. They sat back from the street, either fenced or hedged from the eyes of anyone passing. He searched several gates and entrances with his head lamp before he located the number 5504. Fifty-five fourteen should be close then . . .

  It was the house just beyond. It had a six-foot woven wire fence with a top bar and massed greenery thick within it. Both its walk and driveway entrances were gated and chained, but the number 5514 gleamed in some reflective substance from a post upholding one of the driveway gates.

  Rafe stopped the car and got out. He tried the driveway gates, but the chain chinked and held. He went down along the wall to the walk gate and found it as heavily secured by another chain. He looked up at the top of the wire fence, but projecting above the top bar were the sharp ends of cut wire. For a moment he thought of charging the driveway gate with the car.

  But there was no space for him to get up speed, and both gates and chain looked strong enough to stop him. He looked up and down the sidewalk below the fence. A large boulevard elm had heavy branches projecting in over the fence above the grounds of 5514.

  The elm was too big to get his arms around, and its lowest branches had been trimmed off to perhaps fifteen feet above the ground. He unbuckled the belt around his waist, pulled it out, and looped one end through the buckle around his left wrist. Throwing the tongue of the belt around the tree, he caught it in his other hand, and slowly, against the difficulties of the rough, spongy bark and the clumsiness of his slowed-down reflexes, he began to inchworm his way up the branchless lower trunk.