"Don't bother," said Dalroi. "I hate plat.i.tudes."

The telephone rang and Madden listened impatiently. Then he slammed down the receiver, cast a critical eye over Dalroi's bonds and left the office by a rear door.

Minutes later the lights went out. Dalroi wondered about this but could attach no significance to the fact, nor did it offer him any advantage. The plastic thonging about his limbs gripped like bands of steel, leaving him helpless and immobile. Soon he thought he heard a sound in the darkness, as of a door opening and closing. He strained his eyes in the dim moonlight filtering through closed Venetian blinds and his flesh began to crawl as he made out a shadowy figure advancing across the room, something metallic glittering in his hand.

"Who are you?" asked Dalroi, quelling the fear which rose in his voice.

Abruptly a hand clamped over his mouth. "Malmud," hissed a voice in his ear. "Make no sound, Dalroi.

You're in a tight spot."

The steel instrument snickered in the darkness and he felt the pressure of the bonds relax. In a few seconds he was free and able to stand.

"Thanks!" breathed Dalroi. "Perhaps I can do the same for you one day."

"I'm counting on it," said Malmud softly. "Have you got a gun?"

"No, Madden took mine."

"Then take this." The broad b.u.t.t of a radiation pistol was thrust into his palm. "From now on you're on your own. Don't try to follow."

Then he was gone. With a slight click the door opened and closed. Dalroi checked the safety trip and thrust the radiation pistol into his pocket, counted ten, and then he too left the office.

From memory he knew he was in the broad corridor, one end of which led down to the reception area.

The corridor itself was dark, but where it joined the stairs an atomic safety-lamp gave forth a patch of dim blue fluorescence sufficient to give him orientation. Dalroi turned away from the light and headed into the unknown darkness, touching the walls and doors soundlessly with his fingertips to maintain direction.

At fifty yards or so another corridor ran at right-angles to the first, and this he also traversed, attracted by the deep power-hum conducted through the walls.

He guessed the direction in which he was heading was taking him deeper into Failway, and, at this level, he should soon strike the vast hall from which the transfinite shuttles started. His fingers contacted a heavy, insulated door which he reasoned must lead into the great hall. Then the lights came on and an alarm bell began ringing in the corridor behind him. Men were running up the corridor he had recently left.

Soon they would be at the corner ... He opened the insulated door quietly and slipped into the loud warmth beyond.

He found himself not at floor level as he had supposed, but on the great balcony surrounding the hall.

Huge lamps overhead flooded the whole area with a light as bright as day and the hall, nearly a mile in length and a quarter of a mile across, lost its far end in the blue mistiness of a light, smoky haze.Directly below, on the floor of the hall, was the network of narrow-gauge railway lines which guided the rapid bogies of the Failway shuttle capsules from the a.s.sembly bays into the gigantic polarising matrix-field a.s.sembly and then on down the gradient chute where the capsules left their bogies and pa.s.sed into transfinite s.p.a.ce. There were no pa.s.sengers at this hour, but a heavy traffic of service shuttles rocketed down the fine carrying stores and liquefied gases. Equally busy was the ins.p.a.ce route where the returning capsules leaped into existence above the slide and were synchronised deftly with electro-magnetic bogies and brought to a frantic halt to discharge the unwanted debris of six pleasure-hungry outworld levels. Above and behind him was the control room where the matrix programmers balanced the transfinite fields which deftly plucked a capsule out of one actuality and centred it on another.

At the balcony's edge, a flight of stairs led down the hundred-odd yards to the floor of the hall. Dalroi moved along the wall until he was in line with the stair head, then sauntered unconcernedly across the balcony ignoring any eyes watching his back. He was halfway down the seemingly interminable flights of stairs before he noticed the TV pickups on the under-side of every flight watching every move he made.

Somewhere a whistle shrilled, and a knot of men drew out from a further bay and ran towards his point of descent. Dalroi estimated speeds and positions silently, vaulted the rail and dropped the last twenty-two feet straight down the centre wall. He landed like a coiled spring and immediately made towards the rail-tracks, leaping the narrow-gauge lines and synchronising his movements to avoid the capsules speeding towards outs.p.a.ce. Then turning between the sets of lines and heedless of the hurtling traffic pa.s.sing close to either shoulder, he sped down the hall towards the matrix polariser and the chute.

EIGHT.

He began to doubt the wisdom of the action even as he started to run. The outs.p.a.ce capsules reached two hundred miles an hour on a carefully determined path through the matrix polariser. What would happen to a man who pa.s.sed through the polariser at a stumbling run? Nothing perhaps, or perhaps twisting electrocution? The gradient chute lay beyond, where the giant electrodes drained the potential out of the speeding capsules and dropped them into lower energy universes. Would a man burn-out without the shielding of a capsule or would he be fired unprotected into some airless, theoretical void?

The matrix polariser was a wide tunnel, the walls of which were composed of the counterpoised coils and edgewise laminations which induced the polarising fields to affect the molecular orientation of the capsules and their contents before they hit the potential gradient. Without pausing in his pace he threw himself into the tunnel and was mildly surprised to feel no difference in thought or activity. It struck him that the fields might not be activated unless programmed for the pa.s.sage of a capsule. If he could clear the tunnel before the next capsule came through he had a miniscule chance of staying alive.

A glance over his shoulder charged him with frenzied activity. Two capsules, borne by frantic, accelerating bogies, were speeding up behind him, one on either side. With the best of superhuman effort it was doubtful if he could clear the polarising coils before one capsule, at least, activated the field. He sprang wildly, almost s.n.a.t.c.hing at the air to help his progress. Five steps more ... now two ...

Foimp! Something caught him by the heels and hurled him into the air like a rag doll tossed by a puppy.

Foimp! A second twisting bolt of energy knocked the breath from his body and threw him outward over the chute. Then he was falling, tumbling and b.u.mping down a concrete gradient of one in three, brushing monstrous high-voltage insulator stacks and avoiding E.H.T. lines by a burst of blind, inspired hopelessness. He clutched at a metal stanchion to break his fall, missed a handhold by a fraction of an inch and fell sideways across the track. As he did so the speeding blur of a capsule topped the chute and began to descend upon him.He had no chance to move. Like some gigantic super-bullet the capsule fell, projected by its own inertia as the bogies checked magnetically on the slope. The fantastic projectile, travelling on unseen wings, weighed down to crush him where he sprawled. Then it was gone, s.n.a.t.c.hed into the realms of transfinity a few scant yards from his body. The implosion was the air rushing in to fill the void left by the disappearing capsule. It sucked the air from his lungs and threw him down again to sprawl among springs and buffers at the bottom of the chute. The bogies checked to a halt only half a yard behind him.

He lay for a full half minute exploring the b.u.mps and abrasions on his body. Surprisingly, nothing seemed to be broken and he limped painfully to his feet and explored his position. He was at the foot of the Failway gradient chute, in a concrete pit perhaps fifty feet below the level of the hall. The rear wall was a sheer height of concrete and in one corner a small, greasy service-door gave access to the s.p.a.ce beyond.

The door was locked, but this was no time for finesse. The radiation pistol was still in his pocket. He narrowed the beam to a hairline shaft and applied it round the lock, wincing as the moisture in the wood turned to superheated steam and threw out a blast of burning fibrous wood streamers into his face and eyes.

A savage kick and the door gave way. Above and behind him two more capsules burst into transfinity, but the pace was slowing as they cleared the hall for the security men to come in and get him. The little room he entered was full of lubricating equipment, pressure-greasing guns and tanks of hydraulic oil. He paused to open as many oil taps as he could find, and the room was filling with a light oil-fog from the sprays when he fired the radiation pistol and departed through the further door.

The result was more nearly an explosion than a fire. The burning oil gushed out into the corridor behind him, unhampered by the effects of the carbon-dioxide injection system which quickly smothered the fire at its original source. The free oil burning in the pa.s.sage was an unexpected bonus to his original intention to seal the route behind him.

Ahead a bell was ringing as a flame detector sensed the fire and prepared to close a fire-shutter across the corridor. Dalroi jammed the shutter with a fire axe and leaped clear of the advancing tide of fire which followed hungrily at his heels into the crowded emptiness of a sleeping toolroom.

Chaos is a weapon seldom employed to full advantage: to a professional trouble-maker like Dalroi it was a technique worthy of the fullest exploitation. The wings of panic could carry him out of his present predicament whereas an air of pervading calm would see him set in concrete at the bed of the river, one of the inverse statues of the men who didn't quite make out.

On the wall he found a telephone and dialled the emergency number, warily watching the flames spreading towards him through the machine-tool jungle. "Fire!" he screamed. "The whole d.a.m.n place is burning!"

"Don't panic!" said the operator. "Give me your location."

He left the receiver dangling on its cord and headed down the shop. A bolt from his radiation pistol cut another fire-alarm into action. In the welding section he opened the c.o.c.k of an oxygen bottle and savagely rolled the shrieking cylinder back into the advancing sea of fire.

Another door and he was out into one of the broad intersecting gangways which laced the Failway terminus. He propped the door open to encourage the inferno at his heels.

"Fire!" he shouted. "Fire!" and began to run like a madman. Somebody looked hastily out of a doorway ahead."Fire!" shouted Dalroi. "Get the h.e.l.l out of here but for Gossake don't panic!"

The man, who had no intention of panicking, was caught off balance by Dalroi's petulant semblance of fear. He shouted something to some others in the room and then rushed madly in Dalroi's wake. Others joined him, needing only the evidence of their noses to convince them of the wisest course of action. As if to verify their fears, a speaker cut in with directions for the a.s.sembly of a fire-fighting crew.

Dalroi let the others gain on him, deliberately inciting panic with a frenzied insistence to calm. Once, he stopped dead and caused a collision. Nothing disarms a frightened man like heavy physical contact. A violent scuffle ensued in which the fear rose to fever pitch and survival reactions reared an ugly head.

Then the fear-laden carnival met the fire crew doubling in the opposite direction.

"Too late!" screamed Dalroi. "Get the h.e.l.l out! n.o.body's paying you to burn!"

If the fire crew were unconvinced, the hysterical ma.s.s of humanity which hit them at running speed did much to affect the issue. The only man who stayed did so because the stampede had trampled him underfoot. Herd instinct replaced individual judgement and Dalroi was now riding a tide of terror which nothing could stop.

The mob s...o...b..lled. In a frenzy of screaming hysteria, the wild stampede swept down the gangway, crashed the unyielding panic-bolts and splintered the doors to fragments as it spilled out into the night.

"Don't move!" The command, urgent and imperative, was blasted across the intervening s.p.a.ce from a battery of hailers at the gate. At the same moment the floodlights came on, flooding the walls with light and blinding the bewildered men who fought their way out of the door.

The area between the building and the outer fence was swarming with cars deploying the black-uniformed men of Failway Security. Dalroi's heart sank. The enemy had divined his intention and ranged their forces across his path. This was battle.

"Don't move!" ordered the speaker again. "There is a murderer among you. Spread out along the wall with your hands on your heads. Security ... "

The hailers erupted fire as Dalroi cut into them with the radiation pistol and two flood-lamps spewed hot debris into the road. He dodged back into the doorway, seeking a way of escape. His luck faded. Six bodies. .h.i.t him simultaneously before he could turn. The radiation pistol went flying and he staggered backward as somebody took his feet from under him. As he crashed to the ground the others piled on top, battling furiously to pinion him while he was down. Frenziedly he kicked two of them off, fighting with the skill and strength of a demon. He might even have won free, but the holds relaxed suddenly and he climbed up to stare into the warm, blued muzzle of a radiation pistol.

"Now let's go back to the beginning and start again," said Peter Madden grimly. "This is getting to be a little wearing."

Dalroi spat. "One day I shall probably turn you inside out."

"I don't think so," said Madden. "Not where you're going. Now move!"

Dalroi went reluctantly in the direction indicated and Madden followed at a cautious distance with his pistol covering Dalroi's spine. They worked up to the floor of the main hall to where the shuttles started on the outs.p.a.ce route. A bogie was signalled to the ramp.

"Get on!" said Madden. "You're going on a trip.""Without a shuttle capsule. You're crazy!"

Madden shrugged. "Either you go that way or I'll burn you where you stand. And don't think I wouldn't."

His finger tightened on the pistol meaningly.

Dalroi looked at the vehicle: a bare cha.s.sis straddled with girders overhanging the four wickedly-powerful motors of the drive. A man could stay on that providing the acceleration was not too great and that he had rubber bones. He stood stock-still, his brain racing to find a way out of the situation. "Where to?" he asked at last.

Madden laughed shortly. "What the h.e.l.l do you want, an itinerary? We've scrambled the field-tuners and unbalanced the matrix coils. I can promise you a destination somewhere between here and infinity. More than that I don't care to think about. One thing's for certain: you're never going to return. Now do you ride or fry?"

This time Dalroi had no way out. Every trick in his repertoire was nullified by the pistol on his spine. He stepped on to the bogie, laid himself across the girders and secured a firm handhold.

"I'll see you in h.e.l.l," he said.

It wasn't only motion, it was murder. Cushioned in deep foam plastic, the pa.s.sengers in the capsules scarcely felt the raw acceleration. Dalroi felt it threaten to dislocate his arms as his body slid backward over the awkward steel. The minimal damping of the cha.s.sis transmitted a bruising vibration to every point of contact and the hypnotic effect of sweeping down the mile-long track at close to two hundred miles an hour, and a low angle of view, brought cold sweat to his brow.

But those were the least of his troubles. The nickel-copper laminated hulls of the pa.s.senger capsules had a very precise function - that of protecting the occupants against the physical and mental hostilities of the transfinite field. They were virtually s.p.a.ceships in miniature, with self-contained atmosphere, light and heat, and designed to withstand all of the multi-million changes of super-physical environment which transfinite travel involved. The twisting disproportionality of the area beyond physics was normally minimised to a vague nausea by the squirrel-cage electrodes in the hull and the careful use of anti-hallucinogen drugs. Dalroi had neither of these. He was heading unprotected into regions antagonistic to both body and sanity, to arrive, perhaps, at some unguessable destination from which he had no possible means of return.

Like a crude, iron arrow, the bogie hurtled down the track heading for the matrix polarising tunnel. In a fragmentary burst of anguish he considered throwing himself from the bogie, but that meant certain injury, if not death. Outs.p.a.ce there was one chance in infinity squared that he would not die. Then he hit the polarising field and the shattered circuits which once were nerves twisted his body into knots in the milliseconds before he was flung over the gradient chute. The bogie checked on the rim and dropped down the falling rails, but Dalroi, projected by his own momentum, flew like a wounded sparrow in a hideous, tortured arc between the grim electrodes. Despite his iron nerve a scream rose in his throat. It was still on his lips when he pa.s.sed in to the realms of transfinite s.p.a.ce.

NINE.

He was disintegrated, disunited, yet functioning, curiously, as a whole. He fell from level to level of the unendurable cosmos of transfinite s.p.a.ce, finding a brief cohesion of his individual molecules only to experience his own re-dissolution with an instantaneous pulse. Around him the h.e.l.lish suns and unbelievable vortexes of transfinity shifted and phased in a terrible kaleidoscope of new geometries and unknown colours.His dissembled senses were unequal to the task of handling the phenomena; they blocked, subst.i.tuted and mis-registered in an insane attempt to reduce the welter of unhandleable data to resolvable terms.

The effect was chaotic. The vacuum and pressure, tearing at his flesh, tasted of pure, sweet lemon, and excited, vibrant peals of sound burned like shafts of heated steel in his nostrils. Colours never known in the spectrum compressed their weird emotions into fantastic words throbbing with a new approach to rhythm.

DATADA DATADA CAMinorifum Sela-Sela-Selador oriFu SIC sic SICorIFUM datada NooooooRE ori-ori-FUM The taste of his cheek on his tongue was a couch of nettles and barbed talons of light raked his flesh with blunt, impressionless styli.

SIC orIFUM Nooore caminorieFUM ! ! dit dit dit He screamed, and the sound reverberated in patterns of purple and choking ammonia - DATADA did dit dit DATADA - leaving weals of pain across his soul.

Yet throughout his transposition something remained intact in the storm-driven hail of molecules which was Ivan Dalroi. More terrible than the hideous, shifting byplay of the dissolving levels of infinity was the terrifying cauldron which was deep-sealed in Dalroi's mind; a blast of raw energy, furious and fatal, which clung to his quivering body with an overriding possessiveness. It was the seed of the life-force, unquenchable fire, the indestructible thing which lived in the dark side of the mind, determined above all things to preserve its host. It took control of his mind and then his body, fighting the elements of transfinity which racked the hulk, and, though he took more punishment than his body was designed to take, it would not let him die.

He was drawn into a giant vortex, a swirling plasma-drift like a complex nebula of twisting luminosity; spiralling down an incredible cone with ever increasing rapidity, twisting and tumbling, caught helpless in the draught of some unseen, unfelt wind blowing from nowhere into nowhere. The nightmare speeded, pulsing with some vibrant waveform, spinning him endlessly, crushing his disjointed senses with senseless rhythms of light and pain.

DATATADA DATADADA DAT DAT DAT.

He was riding a broad wave-front through infinity, scattering galaxies of shrieking stars with a red-tinged shock wave. He was plunging into a hideous coal-sack, sc.r.a.ping perilous, constricting walls of sound, plummeting down a nightmare channel of heat and the green of soft spring gra.s.s. Into the coal-sack ...

nothingness ... nothingness raised to the infinite power of infinity ... nothingness so empty that even the quality of darkness was absent.

Time pa.s.sed. A whimper drew his mind out from the suffocating veils of absolute nil, the sound of a human voice. Only after a dozen such sounds did he realise the crying was his own. He opened his eyes, and the action spun him with nausea. The movement had stopped and he was at his destination. After a while he stood, surprised to find that his body still answered to the ragged nerve.

He was in the centre of an immense golden web. Under his feet a disc of golden luminescence, perhaps a metre in diameter, formed a precarious hub of some fantastic system of radial strands which were crossed at intervals by roughly concentric rings. But it was the scale of the thing which brought Dalroi back to his knees. Looking out in all directions across the surface of the slightly undulating web heestimated he could see for roughly twenty miles before his sense of perspective turned traitor. Above and below, tinged with eternally shifting colours - was nothing at all, vast unimaginable and unendurable nothing.

Not believing his senses Dalroi instinctively turned his concentration inward to himself, refusing to accept the evidence of his eyes. He worked outward from basics, knowing that his sanity depended upon the rationality of his answers. I think, therefore I am alive; I'm kneeling, therefore I have a body. Good, so far! Now where am I? Answer: in a giant web, nothing above, nothing below. Simply a web of gold stretched across a limitless s.p.a.ce. But a web must have a beginning, an end, and a purpose.

Or must it? Does everything have a purpose? What about the sphere with nothing inside and the inverse of nothing outside? When you jump outside of your own physics what do you use for reference points?

All right, use physics as a basis. There is light, because I can see. Ah, yes! And gravity also. Not much, but sufficient for orientation. Good! Now, a web that is subject to gravity must be restrained from falling. How? Obviously the radial beams must be tethered at the other end.

Dalroi shrugged off the mult.i.tude of imponderables which bludgeoned his mind, chose an arbitrary radial strand, and began to follow it. The easiest method of locomotion was to step from strand to strand of the circular component of the web, like sleeper-hopping on a railway. The web was slightly resilient and his motion caused dramatic undulations to spread out in complex waveforms across the luminescent, patterned waste. The light gravity conserved his energy, and with easy synchronised leaps he began to clear two or three strands at a stride.

Four hours later the pattern began to change. The radial strands had diverged until, apart from the one he was following, no others had been visible for nearly an hour. Now a new convergence was beginning, and despite the fact that he was tiring rapidly, hope quickened his efforts. He was stumbling now, occasionally missing strands, and plunging through the web up to his groin. Anxiously he strained his eyes ahead, but the shifting golden radiance deceived the eyes and he was reluctant to place too much faith on visual evidence. And all round him the great Featureless emptiness shifted strange coloured harmonies on a background of nothingness.

Then he reached the point where the radial strands converged. In the centre was a disc of golden luminescence perhaps a metre in diameter. No end, no way out; only the centre of another hideous web.

A cloud of bitterness and futility settled over him.

He was still trying to figure out the geometry by which divergent straight lines returned to a new point of focus when he noticed something on the surface of the central disc which threw him into near hysteria.

Faint footmarks, as from a dusty sole, started from the centre and went off in the opposite direction. He had no need to check to know they were his own. He was back where he started!

This took a little thought. Had the web been a sphere its curvature would have been obvious; but it was not, it was a plane. Either he was traversing some dimension the existence of which he was unable to comprehend, or else Euclidian geometry did not apply to this atrocious place.

But if the shortest distance between point A and point A is a straight line, how do you go from point A to point B? This sort of debate could take a long time, and time was growing scarce. Food he could do without for a while, but water - h.e.l.l! He could not go long without water. He had to get out fast or go quietly crazy with thirst, chasing mirages round a golden web like an insane spider after imaginary flies.

He had to get out fast or not get out at all.

If walking in a straight line fetches you back to your point of origin what happens if you walk in circles?He chose a circular strand a few yards out and walked round it experimentally, feeling rather foolish when his trip placed him back at the beginning of the circle. But was it the beginning of the same circle?

He inspected the golden hub and began to wonder. His slight footmarks were no longer visible.

Placing a coin on the hub he repeated the experiment, watching carefully. At the last step of the journey the penny disappeared. He was near a hub, but not the same hub! He could now traverse from point A to point B except that there was nothing to choose between them. A few more times round the perimeter convinced him that there never would be any difference between them. What else to try? A parabolic curve, perhaps, or a progressive spiral? Given a few years and enough paper he could construct a reasonable non-Euclidian geometry for this place. But he had not got a few years. His life expectancy on the web was measurable in days, and the last hours would be anything but happy.

Ombudsman Walter Rhodes kicked the stool until it smashed against the wall. Time was when the office of Ombudsman had been a straight fight between his small legal and administrative staff on the one hand and the forces of officialdom on the other; but the post had changed with the changing world and now he needed a private army of thirty-five dedicated men to challenge the organised graft and guile in high places and to penetrate the black wall of official secrecy. As of now his task-force had been reduced to thirty men. Of the other five, two were missing, two were in gaol, held incommunicado, and the other was dead. Officialdom, organised business, and plain malicious circ.u.mstance had taken a fatal swipe at the champions of the individual, and all that Walter Rhodes could do to relieve his anger was to smash the heavy, resinated pine-wood stool.

After a while his customary composure returned and he reached for the communicator.

"Get me the Chief Commissioner, person to person, visual as well."