Chapter 79
In Old St. Pat's nearly a tenth of a gram of PyrE was exposed in Fourmyle's laboratory. The rest was sealed in its Inert Lead Isotope safe, protected from accidental and intentional psychokinetic ignition. The blinding blast of energy generated from that tenth of a gram blew out the walls and split the floors as though an internal earthquake had convulsed the building. The b.u.t.tresses held the pillars for a split second and then crumbled. Down came towers, spires, pillars, b.u.t.tresses, and roof in a thundering avalanche to hesitate above the yawning crater of the floor in a tangled, precarious equilibrium. A breath of wind, a distant vibration, and the collapse would continue until the crater was filled solid with pulverized rubble.
The star-like heat of the explosion ignited a hundred fires and melted the ancient thick copper of the collapsed roof. If a milligram more of PyrE had been exposed to detonation, the heat would have been intense enough to vaporize the metal immediately. Instead, it glowed white and began to flow. It streamed off the wreckage of the crumbled roof and began searching its way downward through the jumbled stone, iron, wood, and gla.s.s, like some monstrous molten mold creeping through a tangled web.
Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil arrived almost simultaneously. A moment later Robin Wednesbury appeared and then Jisbella McQueen. A dozen Intelligence operatives and six Dagenham couriers arrived along with Presteign's Jaunte Watch and the police. They formed a cordon around the blazing block, but there were very few spectators. After the shock of the New Year's Eve raid, that single explosion had frightened half New York into another wild jaunte for safety.
The uproar of the fire was frightful, and the ma.s.sive grind of tons of wreckage in uneasy balance was ominous. Everyone was forced to shout and yet was fearful of the vibrations. Y'ang-Yeovil bawled the news about Foyle and Sheffield into Dagenham's ear. Dagenham nodded and displayed his deadly smile."We'll have to go in," he shouted.
"Fire suits," Y'ang-Yeovil shouted.
He disappeared and reappeared with a pair of white Disaster Crew fire suits. At the sight of these, Robin and Jisbella began shouting hysterical objections. The two men ignored them, wriggled into the Inert Isomer armor and inched into the inferno.
Within Old St. Pat's it was as though a monstrous hand had churned a log jam of wood, stone, and metal. Through every interstice crawled tongues of molten copper, slowly working downward, igniting wood, crumbling stone, shattering gla.s.s. Where the copper flowed it merely glowed, but where it poured it spattered dazzling droplets of white hot metal.
Beneath the log jam yawned a black crater where formerly the floor of the cathedral had been. The explosion had split the flagstone asunder, revealing the cellars, subcellars, and vaults deep below the building. These too were filled with a snarl of stones, beams, pipes, wire, the remnants of the Four Mile circus tents; all fitfully lit small fires. Then the first of the copper dripped down into the crater and illuminated it with a brilliant molten splash.
Dagenham pounded Y'ang-Yeovil's shoulder to attract his attention and pointed. Halfway down the crater, in the midst of the tangle, lay the body of Regis Sheffield, drawn and quartered by the explosion.
Y'ang-Yeovil pounded Dagenham's shoulder and pointed. Almost at the bottom of the crater lay Gully Foyle, and as the blazing spatter of molten copper illuminated him, they saw him move. The two men at once turned and crawled out of the cathedral for a conference.
"He's alive."
"How's it possible?"
"I can guess. Did you see the shreds of tent wadded near him? It must have been a freak explosion up at the other end of the cathedral and the tents in between cus.h.i.+oned Foyle. Then he dropped through the floor before anything else could hit him."
"I'll buy that. We've got to get him out. He's the only man who knows where the PyrE is."
"Could it still be here... unexploded?"
"If it's in the ILI safe, yes. That stuff is inert to anything. Never mind, that now. How are we going to get him out?"
"Well we can't work down from above."
"Why not?"
"Isn't it obvious? One false step and the whole mess will collapse."
"Did you see that copper flowing down?"
"G.o.d, yes!"
"Well if we don't get him out in ten minutes, he'll be at the bottom of a pool of molten copper."
"What can we do?"
"I've got a long shot.""What?"
"The cellars of the old RCA buildings across the street are as deep as St. Pat's."
"And?"
"We'll go down and try to hole through. Maybe we can pull Foyle out from the bottom."
A squad broke into the ancient RCA buildings, abandoned and sealed up for two generations. They went down into the cellar arcades, crumbling museums of the retail stores of centuries past. They located the ancient elevator shafts and dropped through them into the subcellars filled with electric installations, heat plants and refrigeration systems. They went down into the sump cellars, waist deep in water from the streams of prehistoric Manhattan Island, streams that still flowed beneath the streets that covered them.
As they waded through the sump cellars, bearing east-northeast to bring up opposite the St. Pat's vaults, they suddenly discovered that the pitch dark was illuminated by a fiery flickering up ahead. Dagenham shouted and flung himself forward. The explosion that had opened the subcellars of St. Pat's had split the septum between its vaults and those of the RCA buildings. Through a jagged rent in stone and earth they could peer into the bottom of the inferno.
Fifty feet inside was Foyle, trapped in a labyrinth of twisted beams, stones, pipe, metal, and wire. He was illuminated by a roaring glow
"My G.o.d!" Y'ang-Yeovil exclaimed. "The Burning Man!"
"What?".
"The Burning Man I saw on the Spanish Stairs. Never mind that now. What can we do?"
"Go in, of course."
A brilliant white gob of copper suddenly oozed down close to Foyle and splashed ten feet below him. It was followed by a second, a third, a slow steady stream. A pool began to form. Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil sealed the face plates of their armor and crawled through the break in the septum. After three minutes of agonized struggling they realized that they could not get through the labyrinth to Foyle. It was locked to the outside but not from the inside. Dagenham and Y'ang-Yeovil backed up to confer.
"We can't get to him," Dagenham shouted, "But he can get out."
"How? He can't jaunte, obviously, or he wouldn't be there."
"No, he can climb. Look. He goes left, then up, reverses, makes a turn along that beam, slides under it and pushes through that tangle of wire. The wire can't be pushed in, which is why we can't get to him, but it can push out, which is how he can get out. It's a one-way door."
The pool of molten copper crept up toward Foyle.
"If he doesn't get out soon he'll be roasted alive."
"We'll have to talk him out... Tell him what to do."
The men began shouting: "Foyle! Foyle! Foyle!"
The Burning Man in the maze continued to move feebly. The downpour of sizzling copper increased."Foyle! Turn left. Can you hear me? Foyle! Turn left and climb up. You can get out if you'll listen to me.
Turn left and climb up. Then- Foylel"
"He's not listening. Foyle! Gully Foyle! Can you hear us?"
"Send for Jiz. Maybe he'll listen to her."
"No, Robin. She'll telesend. He'll have to listen.
"But will she do it? Save him of all people?"
"She'll have to. This is bigger than hatred. It's the biggest d.a.m.ned thing the world's ever encountered. I'll get her." Y'ang-Yeovil started to crawl out. Dagenham stopped him.
"Wait, Yeo. Look at him. He's flickering."
"Flickering?"
"Look! He's... blinking like a glow-worm. Watch! Now you see him and now you don't."
The figure of Foyle was appearing, disappearing, and reappearing in rapid succession, like a firefly caught in a flaming trap.
"What's he doing now? What's he trying to do? What's happening?"
He was trying to escape. Like a trapped firefly or some seabird caught in the blazing brazier of a naked beacon fire, he was beating about in a frenzy... a blackened, burning creature, das.h.i.+ng himself against the unknown.
Sound came as sight to him, as light in strange patterns. He saw the sound of his shouted name in vivid rhythms: FOYLE FOYLE FOYLE.
FOYLE FOYLE FOYLE.
FOYLE FOYLE FOYLE.
Motion came as sound to him. He heard the writhing of the flames, he heard the swirls of smoke, he heard the flickering, jeering shadows... all speaking deafeningly in strange tongues: "BURUU GYARR?" the steam asked.
"Asha. Asha, rit-kit-dit-zit m'gid," the quick shadows answered.
"Ohhh. Ahhh. Heee. Teee," the heat ripples clamored.
Even the flames smoldering on his own clothes roared gibberish in his ears. "MANTERGEISTMANN!"
they bellowed.
Color was pain to him... heat, cold, pressure; sensations of intolerable heights and plunging depths, of tremendous accelerations and crus.h.i.+ng compressions: Red receded from him...
Green light attacked...Indigo undulated with sickening speed like a shuddering snke...
Touch was taste to him... the feel of wood was acrid and chalky in his mouth, metal was salt, stone tasted sour-sweet to the touch of his fingers, and the feel of gla.s.s cloyed his palate like over-rich pastry.
Smell was touch... Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his cheek. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like blow hammering his heart, and the ioni-zation of the PyrE explosion filled the air with ozone that smelled like water trickling through his fingers.
He was not blind, not deaf, not senseless. Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and short-circuited by the shock 55.
of the PyrE concussion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another. So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste, and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno under Old St. Paf's; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.
Again desperate, on the ghastly verge of extinction, he abandoned all disciplines and habits of living; or, perhaps, they were stripped from him. He reverted from a conditioned product of environment and experience to an inchoate creature craving escape and survival and exercising every power it possessed.
And again the miracle of two years ago took place. The undivided energy of an entire human organism, of every cell, fiber, nerve, and muscle empowered that craving, and again Foyle s.p.a.ce-jaunted.
He went hurtling along the geodesical s.p.a.ce lines of the curving universe at the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light. His spatial velocity was so frightful that his time axis was twisted from the vertical line drawn from the Past through Now to the Future. He went flickering along the new near-horizontal axis, this new s.p.a.ce-time geodesic, driven by the miracle of a human mind no longer inhibited by concepts of the impossible.
Again he achieved what Helmut Grant and Enzio Dandridge and scores of other experimenters had failed to do, because his blind panic forced him to abandon the spatio-temporal inhibitions that had defeated previous attempts. He did not jaunte to Elsewhere, but to Elsewhen. But most important, the fourth dimensional awareness, the complete picture of the Arrow of Time and his position on it which is born in every man but deeply submerged by the trivia of living, was in Foyle close to the surface. He jaunted along the s.p.a.cetime geodesies to Elsewheres and Elsewhens, translating "i," the square root of minus one, from an imaginary number into reality by a magnificent act of imagination.
He jaunted.
He jaunted back through time to his past. He became the Burning Man who had inspired himself with terror and perplexity on the beach in Australia, in a quack's office in Shanghai, on the Spanish Stairs in Rome, on the Moon, in the Skoptsy Colony on Mars. He jaunted back through time, revisiting the savage battles that he himself had fought in Gully Foyle's tiger hunt for vengeance. His flaming appearances were sometimes noted; other times not.
He jaunted.
He was aboard "Nomad," drifting in the empty frost of s.p.a.ce.He stood in the door to nowhere.
The cold was the taste of lemons and the vacuum was a rake of talons on his skin. The sun and the stars were a shaking ague that racked his bones.
"GLOMMHA FREDNIS!" motion roared in his ears.
It was a figure with its back to him vanis.h.i.+ng down the corridor; a figure with a copper cauldron of provisions over its shoulder; a figure darting, floating, squirming through free fall. It was Gully Foyle.
"MEEHAT JESSROT," the sight of his motion bellowed.
"Aha! Oh-ho! M'git not to kak," the flicker of light and shade answered.
"Oooooooh? Soooooo?" the whirling raffle of debris in his wake murmured.
The lemon taste in his mouth became unbearable. The rake of talons on his skin was torture.
He jaunted.
He reappeared in the furnace beneath Old St. Pat's less then a second after he had disappeared from there. He was drawn, as the seabird is drawn, again and again to the flames from which it is struggling to escape. He endured the roaring torture for only another moment.
He jaunted.
He was in the depths of Gouffre Martel.
The velvet black darkness was bliss, paradise, euphoria.
"Ah!" he cried in relief.
"AH!" came the echo of his voice, and the sound was translated into a blinding pattern of light.
The Burning Man winced. "Stop!" he called, blinded by the noise. Again came the dazzling pattern of the echo.
A distant clatter of steps came to his eyes in soft patterns of vertical borealis streamers.
There came a shout like a zig-zag of lightening.
A beam of light attacked.
It was the search party from the Gouffre Martel hospital, tracking Foyle and Jisbella McQueen by geophone. The Burning Man disappeared, but not before he had unwittingly decoyed the searchers from the trail of the vanished fugitives.
He was back under Old St. Pat's, reappearing only an instant after his last disappearance. His wild beatings into the unknown sent him stumbling up geodesic s.p.a.ce-time lines that inevitably brought him back to the Now he was trying to escape, for in the inverted saddle curve of s.p.a.ce-time, his Now was the deepest depression in the curve.
508.
He could drive himself up, up, up the geodesic lines into the past or future, but inevitably he must fall back into his own Now, like a thrown ball hurled up the sloping walls of an infinite pit, to land, hangpoised for a moment, and then roll back into the depths.
But still he beat into the unknown in his desperation.