The Long Sleep

used to… You people may be vat-born, formed as complete adults… But you've each got a distinct personality. You're as human as I am. I mean it. I no longer have to be alone.”

“I'm glad to hear it,” Galing said. “But that's only half of it. Apparently, you don't know anything about what the Overmaster did to you.”

“What?”

“The Overmaster's relentless,” Galing said. “It won't give up and go away. We came damned close to being destroyed, the pyramid breached and ruined—”

“Overmaster? I'm not tracking very—”

The earth rumbled beneath the tank, trembled gently at first and then more violently, lifted up, tilted, slammed down again, and nearly overturned the elephantine vehicle.

“Joel? Is something wrong out there?”

The earth rose again. Fell again. Harder this time.

“Joel?”

“Something—”

Again the movement came, as if a bomb had exploded underneath the tank.

Joel looked up, startled, as he was thrown forward and then jerked back by his safety harness. He saw the towering fungoid forms. Very near. Too damned near. They'd moved in on him… Now, they rose above the tank like the many fingers of an alien hand, reaching down to crush him.

XXIV

Illusion?

He had been through so many illusions in the last few days that he could not help but doubt the reality of what he saw before him. Surely it was another of Galing's programs, no more real than the dungeon or the honeymoon suite. This was a fungus, nothing more than that, plant life. It could not possess the quick mobility of an animal!

The fungus flowed toward the tank in a many-fingered amoeboid mass. As it came nearer, it rose higher and higher until it seemed that the tips of those fingers must brush the polluted sky. A thin yellowish fluid oozed from it continually and sheeted down the columns of muck, was reabsorbed by the mother body before it spilled onto the ground. The hideous creature writhed and pulsed, roiled and churned within itself. It was gray the color of dead flesh and brown the color of feces. Pustules as large as basketballs punctuated it, split open and issued a disgusting, syrupy ichor.

Beneath the tank, the wriggling carpet of moss surged up for the fourth time, shook, tilted, fell back, rocking them violently from side to side.

“Joel! Galing said.

“We're under attack,” he said.

“We'll be out to help.”

“No! Stay there.”

“But—”

“You can't do anything. It's too damned big. It's the whole world!”

This was no Disorientation Therapy Puzzle, no clever illusion; this, by God, was real!

Joel touched the solid-state control spot label reverse and felt the machine change gears smoothly. He gripped the wheel with both sweat-slicked hands and, as the tread churned backwards, he turned the tank to the right as hard and fast as he could.

“Move, you big bastard!” he said, pulling harder than he had to pull, as if he could muscle it around faster than it would go on its own.

He had to get out from under the falling wave of amorphous fungus, had to get back to the tunnel that led into the subterranean pyramid from which they had “escaped” only minutes ago. This was no time to kid himself; if he didn't get into the pyramid, he and Allison were dead. Even in the tank they couldn't stand for long against the fungus.

One finger of the glistening, wet mass of vegetable matter fell noiselessly across the place where the tank had been only a moment ago. It curled back, bunched up on itself, was absorbed into the mother body. The rest of the creature, an endless hulking thing, came closer, forming a new finger to replace the old one.

Joel completed the turn and put the machine in top gear, stood on the wide accelerator plate and jammed it all the way down to the floorboards. The tank lurched, whined, and surged forward. “Come on baby,” he said, as if it could hear him. “Move your big steel ass!”

A mammoth pseudopod of fungus fell on his right, a ridge of muck that must have weighed thousands upon thousands of tons. It oozed towards him, and the tip of it curled out in front of the tank, blocking his escape route.

“Damn!”

He wheeled to the left.

Another pseudopod fell on that side. It was at least twenty feet high, glimmering with yellow fluid, pustules bursting as it pressed itself in his direction.

“Pincered,” he said.

He hit the brake pedal, brought the tank to a full stop. He could not go forward or backward or to either side without encountering the fungus.

“Whatever the hell you are,” he said as he watched it move in on him, “you're more than a little bit intelligent. Or you've got damned good instincts.”

The stuff lapped at the tank tread.

“It's got me surrounded,” he told Galing.

“Then we must come out.”

“Give me a chance to use some of the weaponry on this thing,” Joel said. “I think I can make it pull back.”

The fungus slapped over the knobby, armored hood and pushed against the hologram cameras which gave Joel a remote view of the ground behind him. It sheathed his foreward view windows, ebbed and flowed across the machine like a sea of dark gelatin tugging at a wrecked and sunken ship. It probed at the tank with what seemed like curiosity.

A light suddenly flashed on the control panel, and the tank's foot-square computer display screen in the middle of the dash was blinking an ominous, stark warning:

ARMOR CORRODING.

ARMOR CORRODING.

ARMOR CORRODING.

Glancing quickly at the weapons panel, Joel punched control spots and fought back.

Nothing happened.

FLAME THROWERS

OPERATIVE.

He stared at the words flashing on the display screen, and he knew that they were not true. And he suddenly realized that the first message had not been true either. The armor couldn't possibly be corroding. If the fungus could dissolve steel, it would have eaten through the entrance to the pyramid a long time ago.

But why was the computer lying? This was no mere malfunction. If it were not operating properly, it would either remain blank or would check its own circuits and tell him that something was wrong with it. This was not erroneous information; it was an outright deception!

He thought he knew what was causing it.