"I know," said Zen quietly. "And that's the pity. You're an attractive brute, Dalroi. Oh, I wish to G.o.d it didn't have to be in you."

Dalroi's reaction was triggered by the minutest hardening of her eyes. As her fingers raised and the white fire flashed towards his temple so he jumped. Zen jumped also. Dalroi came out on the edge of the hollow; she only a yard away. Again the white fire flashed at his face. He jumped again and again, always emerging to find her just beside him.

Rapidly he weakened. The game was unfamiliar; for him it was a survival reaction almost unused, making great demands on his already hammered physique. She jumped with an expertise of long familiarity and control. He soon realised he must reach that microsecond of hesitation which would enable the fire to strike. The next time he emerged he stood stock still.

If he had expected triumph in her face he was disillusioned. She stood before him white faced and anguished and her eyes were filled with profound misery.

The fire struck and coalesced inside his brain, short-circuiting the neurones, robbing him of anger and resolve and consciousness and everything except the imponderable will to live. The last thing he remembered was falling, and as he lay, a white face pressed against his and hot tears fell on his cheek - tears which burned with greater heat than the fire which he had carried on his body out of transfinity.

TWENTY-TWO.

"Will he live?" asked the Monitor anxiously.

The doctor looked down at Rhodes' unconscious body swathed in white. "What do you think?" he asked cynically. "If I could revive a neurogas patient I'd go in for reincarnation in a big way."

"But will he be able to talk?"

The doctor's disgust was unrestrained. "Yes, he will be able to talk. With enough adrenalin and the use of the artificial heart-lung apparatus I can keep him alive just that long. I can only hope that he has enough mind left to employ his dying gasps calling down curses on the criminal idiot who left him as bait in a trap primed with neurogas."

"When will he talk?"

The doctor exhaled heavily. "The sooner the better, perhaps. His mind can't last long with continued oxygen starvation." He adjusted his syringes carefully. "I can give you about half an hour's conversation with the corpse of the man you murdered. See me when you've finished and I'll give you something to help you sleep tonight."

"Rhodes," said the Monitor, "can you hear me?"

"I hear you," said the Ombudsman, and the voice rattled dryly through the tube in his throat.

"Tell me about Dalroi? Who is Dalroi?"

Rhodes told him in a voice like a creaking ghost. The atmosphere grew tense and still as the words fell to a piping whisper then to a sigh like wind among reeds and finally to silence as the spirit fled away. TheMonitor saluted and paid his last respects, and felt, for the first time in his life, the meaning of humility.

Korch was waiting for him at the door. "Any luck?"

"Yes." The Monitor mopped his brow. "He put more sense into those thirty minutes than the human race has into twenty thousand years of philosophy. I went into there as a man and I leave as an animal."

"Are you all right, Chief?"

"All right!" The Monitor was quick with scorn. "We shall none of us be all right again, ever. h.e.l.l, I feel dirty and sick and tired of it all. You'd better come with me. We have an appointment to keep with our keeper. How does it feel to be living in a zoo?"

At first Dalroi thought he was blind, so peculiar was the quality of the darkness. His eyes and head ached abominably. Only after, when he had lain staring at the blackness for many minutes, could he discern the dim outlines of the room. The shapes were unfamiliar, yet each detail his adjusting eyes revealed discharged a bolt of emotional shock. This was a place he did not know, yet every facet was painted with overtones of remembered fear. It was part of the sequence of things he could never quite remember.

He felt weak, terribly weak. It did not take him many seconds to realise the weakness was not natural.

Touching his face he found with something of a shock, that the flesh was clean and whole, but his left arm was immobile and covered with a heavy plastic dressing. But the weakness ... he could never remember feeling quite so drained and empty before. His metabolism was so low that his body scarcely ticked over.

They had found his Achilles' heel.

The surge of anger which welled up inside him leaked impotently away. Whatever drugs they had used on him had been remarkably effective. He no longer had the power to raise mountains - he scarcely had the power to move his limbs. He sagged back on the soft couch, trying to conserve a little energy, a reserve to meet whatever was to come. But even as he lay the weakness grew and cheated him of his last vitality. When death came, no matter what its form, he would be powerless to resist.

Footsteps sounded in a corridor somewhere, coming closer towards the dark shadow of the door. Dalroi propped himself on a leaden arm and looked out from under leaden eyelids. Despite a curious enervation his mind still boiled like a cauldron of vaporising lead, extraordinarily aware. He knew now with dreadful certainty that he had seen this room before. This was the antechamber ... to the other place, the place where things had been done to his brain ... where horror had ama.s.sed upon horror at the hands of someone whose ident.i.ty was a shadow. Only, it was not a shadow any more - it was the clear image of a man, a man of brilliant intensity and purpose who had worked on his brain with a dexterity slightly more than human.

Raw fear flared up as he began to gather the pieces of the puzzle and fit them into place. Even as the pattern became clearer and the door opened to reveal his executioner. Hildebrand was there, scowling while his eyes adjusted to the darkness, a weapon of unfamiliar pattern in his hand.

"Dalroi, are you awake?"

"Go to h.e.l.l!" said Dalroi with great difficulty. Every syllable a conscious effort.

Hildebrand came and stood over him silently. "Don't try to move. The drug allows you only minimal reaction. Any sudden exertion would burst your heart. You'd be dead long before you could reach me."

"But reach you I would," promised Dalroi."I don't doubt that at all. I have no illusions about the risk I'm taking. I should have destroyed you the last time I had you under the knife, but I thought I could repair something which is apparently irreparable.

This time I shall take no such chances. I've been waiting a long time to rectify that mistake."

"Who are you?" asked Dalroi. Black shadows stirred in his brain. "And what did you do in my mind?"

"I tried to drive a wedge between you and what you were in danger of discovering. I tried to set up a block between the subconscious and the deep brain. Only that could have saved your life. I did not succeed. You carry things in your head which are more terrible and enigmatic than the weapons of Creation."

"Who are you?" repeated Dalroi wearily.

Hildebrand stood up straight. "I am called Gar Carra na Leodat. My occupation is watching out for ones such as you. I come from a place you cannot imagine and from a level of civilisation you can only dimly understand. I am a custodian of humanity."

"I hadn't noticed," Dalroi said. "Is that why you have to kill me?"

Hildebrand's eyes grew large and haunted with hidden sorrow. "Let me ask you a question now. Have you any idea what h.e.l.l-fire inhabits you? Do you know who you are, Dalroi?"

Dalroi tried to nod, but his head seemed to weigh a ton and the movement was still born. "Yes," said Dalroi. "I think I do. We are mutual enemies. One of us is going to have to die."

Hildebrand sighted the weapon at Dalroi's head. "Just so! You must by now realise that you are no match for us. What we lack in spite we make up for in persistence and sheer numbers."

"And what I lack in numbers I make up for in sheer hatred," Dalroi said. "Nature built us as terrible opposites."

"How much do you know about us?" asked Hildebrand.

"Little. I know that Gormalu is not human. I know that both you and Zen have no origin in the world I know. I sense that Failway has a function not only as a trap but as a brake on our kind of culture. It was set there like a cancer to eat the heart out of our species, to delay something in our evolution. h.o.m.o Sapiens is being engineered, manipulated by unseen forces which live far beyond our notions of the transfinite strata."

"You think that is a terrible thing?"

"A man takes enough pushing around from his own kind without other agencies having a poke," said Dalroi bitterly.

"The two things are not unconnected. Don't judge until you know our reasons. I will tell you our story. It concerns a time and a place beyond even your imagination. Once, among the many civilisations of the multiple galaxies, there arose a race of upstart creatures more terrible than any who opposed them. The upstarts were a race of warriors and murderers who ravaged whatever worlds they reached. They were fanatical killers, who could tolerate the existence of no other species than their own and those on whom they lived. By any standards they were supermen."

"I hate you," said Dalroi.

"In self-defence the civilised species of the multiple galaxies joined forces against the Destroyers, and putthem down not once, but many times. Yet always the terrible ones arose and returned with hatreds and l.u.s.ts renewed. Whole universes were shaken with their thunder. The civilised ones, in anger and desperation, decided to end the matter once and for all, but having the humanity that goes with high culture they could not tolerate the complete destruction of a race.

"After crushing the Destroyers at terrible costs to themselves they took the remnants of the race and transferred them to a far exile in a corner of transfinity, and built by genetic engineering a blockage whereby all the inherited knowledge in the racial brain was locked down out of reach. But the blocks grow weaker as the millennia pa.s.s and we have to resort to selective weeding of individuals who penetrate their own minds too deeply, and arrange wars and diversions whereby we can can sap the vitality of the species as a whole."

"And that is the predicament of h.o.m.o Sapiens?"

"Just so. Your race is descended from those same Destroyers. You carry the ever-pregnant seeds of h.e.l.l in your souls. The truth of this is self-evident. If ever there was a race addicted to practising spite and vengeance one upon the other it is yours. Bloodshed, murder, rape, war, slavery, torture, persecution, genocide - you name the crime and you'll find it on your doorstep. From the thumbscrew through to neurogas you know it all."

"Then what am I?" asked Dalroi.

"You," said Hildebrand, smiling wearily, "you're the mutation, the one that didn't breed true. You're a throwback. In you the genetic chain grew thin and weak and the pressure of the pent-up life-force damaged the blocks which kept you from knowing the rest of yourself. Something snapped and gave you access to a little of the deep brain wherein lies all the old race memories and skills. It released to you a little of the flair for destructive science, the hyper-fast survival reactions, the amazing strength of the life force which refuses to accept death as a fact.

"In you, a split-hair's breadth beneath the surface is all the old corroding insanity, all the prowess, all the bitter refusal to submit or compromise. You are the potential killer it is so difficult to kill, the h.e.l.l-sp.a.w.n which has such a thirsting for life that it can twist the basic laws of the universe into a pattern for survival.

You are the virus which could infect the culture. Can you wonder we wish so desperately to see you dead?"

"Can you prove what you say?" asked Dalroi.

"I can do better than prove it. I'm going to show you for yourself. I'm going to remove the block completely, let you see fully all the things that lie in the dark side of your mind."

"Why should you?"

"Because I think the shock of all that h.e.l.l released at once will kill you. You don't have the old physique, Dalroi. You haven't been brought up to stand that sort of unrestrained barbarity. You've been softened by the taints of your so-called earthly civilisation. There's a certain poetic justice about the idea."

Dalroi tried to move, to force himself to fight. He actually managed to get halfway off the couch before the pressure in his chest doubled him up. He toppled and fell to the ground perilously short of breath and with his consciousness and will flickering dim under the tide of inhibitors that coalesced in his blood stream.

"I told you that was foolish," said Hildebrand quietly.He went away and shortly returned with a trolley on to which he lifted Dalroi with one trained movement.

Bands of steely hardness clamped on Dalroi's arms and legs and Dalroi's darkened senses were aware only that they were leaving the room, pa.s.sing now down a corridor with doors of surgical whiteness into an operating theatre pungent with the smell of ether and terrible with the sharp click of instruments being dropped on a tray.

Zen came up and looked down at him. Her face was white and troubled under the white cowl she wore on her head, and her hands worked at the instruments with a precision slightly more than human. He wondered idly if her tears always burned like they had in Petch Hollow or whether they were sometimes soft and warm and salty like tears of human kind. As she leaned over him a tear did fall on his lips and he moved his tongue with the last ounce of energy left in his body and tasted it, and knew what he wanted to know. He felt like crying also, except there was not enough life left in him even to raise a tear.

Hildebrand moved a gantry into sight and on it oscilloscopes phased and wrote with green fingers the stories told by the electrodes they were placing round Dalroi's head.

They shaved his scalp and isolated his mind from pain and feeling. Then came the part he was dreading.

The saw bit into the skull ...

Irrational fear ... the instinctive need to protect the sinister seed in his brain ... overwhelmed him. Dalroi was no coward and had it been merely life they were taking from him he could have borne the moment with drugged equanimity. But the panic spread not from his own psyche but from the deeper thing that flared and haunted in the dread, dark chambers of the brain. Here was splintering fright, shattering apprehension, harrowing dread ... and as yet they had only bared the brain.

Then came the probes, seeking down through the convolutions of the brain, triggering sights and sounds and fantasies which had nothing to do with experience. It was a mad kaleidoscope of sensory stimuli - a hand, a light, a scene, a voice, a bell tolling as it once had tolled across a mighty courtyard somewhere dimly past remembering.

Through it all came Hildebrand's voice.

"Know thyself, Dalroi. Know thyself!"

Searing lightning stabbed, and his mind took a wrench which should have pa.s.sed him into immortality.

The block was breaking down. His body stiffened as the maelstrom blasted out into his conscious mind.

Imagine that the world is made of thunder, that the rivers run with boiling yellow phosphorous ... that the rain is concentrated hydrofluoric acid slashed to fury by a bromine gale ... that all the birds are blind and venomous and desperately mad ... take this allegory and you can still only dimly visualise the terrain of Dalroi's mind as the bitter tide flowed out.

Dalroi stood again at the seat of the life-force, a force as fantastic as a million motor-generators over-loaded to simultaneous destruction on the hearths of h.e.l.l. Malice was a note on a gigantic organ thrust deep into the inner ear; hatred was a shaft of illumination so bright that it blinded through sixty feet of concrete. The urge to kill was a black, corroding jet of vapour of such velocity and scale that it could have countered the rotation of the Milky Way.

And then it died ... The pressures faded and fled, folded and dropped. Hildebrand sprang to his instruments and watched with unbelieving eyes as the writhing traces died on the faces of the 'scopes.

"You've killed it!" His voice was high with disbelief and wonder. "Dalroi, do you know what you've done? You've killed it!"But Dalroi was past making answer. The bitter war which raged through his mind had thrown him into a state of deep shock, and if he had any awareness left at all it was focused on the slight saltiness of a tear which had fallen on his lips.

The door burst open with a crash and the Monitor entered with Korch at his heels. Hildebrand signalled them back with a singular lack of curiosity, and drew the probes from Dalroi's brain and began repairing the skull. For a long time n.o.body spoke, and Hildebrand worked on with swift fingers of genius aided by advanced and unknown skills. When he had finished he turned and walked to the Monitor's side.

"I see you know who I am," he said.

The Monitor nodded briefly. "Yes, I know, and I know now what Dalroi meant to you. Rhodes told me before he died."

"I'm sorry he had to die," said Hildebrand, "but he began to know too much about us. He was a true humanitarian and a man of great intelligence. He even guessed the nature of Failway. That policeman Quentain proved his guess by kidnapping Zdenka and interrogating her under drugs. When they realised how sadly out of depth they were, Rhodes tried to cover by pretending he'd found her in the river. In his own way he endorsed Dalroi's execution because he realised we had no alternative. There are hopes yet for the race who can breed such a man."

"What are you going to do with us?" asked the Monitor.

"With h.o.m.o Sapiens? We shall continue to watch you as we have always done. You are the juvenile delinquents of the multiple galaxies. One day, perhaps, you will come of age and we shall welcome you home again. In the meantime ... "

" ... in the meantime," said the Monitor, "you will manipulate us and organise our wars and our disasters just to keep us out of mischief."

"Certainly. Can you think of a better control than letting you work off your spite on yourselves? As an exercise in Stellar ecology, Failway was an instrument not without merit. A pity you discovered it so soon. My comrade Gormalu provided the technical advice, but all the misery it evolved was purely of your own devising. What toys can we give you which you will not turn into weapons of oppression?

While creatures like Madden and Cronstadt and yourself continue to strut and threaten and coerce we have no alternative but to protect ourselves from your physchopathic rat-race by any means at our disposal. You would not do otherwise if the position was reversed."

"No," said the Monitor sadly. "I don't suppose we would."

"We're leaving now," said Hildebrand, nodding to Zen who had remained at Dalroi's side. "Our task of eliminating the danger of Dalroi is finished. Perhaps another field man like Gormalu will be with you shortly - perhaps he's already here. Look to the centres of war or disaster, or anywhere that a man controls the destiny of many, and there you may find him encouraging you to be b.e.s.t.i.a.l to yourselves.

Look to your tyrants and dictators, for he will be there somewhere. And one day, perhaps, you'll be too grown-up to listen to him - but oh, you've a h.e.l.l of a distance to travel yet!"

"I wonder," said the Monitor, "what our history would have been like without your hand forever pushing us over the precipice?"

"Short, sharp and brutish," said Hildebrand/Car Carra na Leodat. "We push the forces of destruction inward on themselves before any become too powerful. But we have nothing to gain and a great deal to lose by leniency, so don't push your luck. Remember we can deal you a new Dark Age at any time wechoose, and only another like Dalroi could stand against us."

Hildebrand/na Leodat nodded to Zen. "It is time we were going."

She looked at the form of Dalroi then back to him quickly, an unspoken question in her eyes, but na Leodat shook his head. Then the two of them stepped upward as though on an invisible stairway, and abruptly vanished from sight.

The Monitor gazed thoughtfully at the sudden emptiness for a few moments then walked to Dalroi's side and stood as if regarding a corpse. The slight throb of a vein in Dalroi's temple attracted his attention and he realised for the first time that Dalroi still lived.

"Korch, fetch me a heavy blaster."

"What you going to do, cremate him?"