“I knew it,” Joel said weakly.
The display screen went blank.
The vents brought the sound of highspeed fans. Cool air rushed out into his face.
120… 119… 119… 118…
“We beat it,” he told Galing. But he realized that his voice was a faint croak, unintelligible. He cleared his throat, tried to make some saliva, had more luck this time. “We're free of it,” he said softly.
He took his foot off the door lock, swung around, hooked into his harness again. Without switching off the flamethrowers, he put the machine in gear and accelerated toward the entrance to the pyramid.
“We're coming back!” he told Galing. “Open up the gates!”
Behind, the fungus rushed after him, keeping a safe distance from the flames but bulking higher and higher every second.
Galing's voice crackled on the radio, but it was drowned out by the clatter of tank tread as the ground beneath them heaved again and the moss tried to overturn them.
“Open up!”
The tunnel door irised in front of them.
Joel cut the flamethrowers at the last minute and glanced at the rearview screen.
The fungus roared down on them like an express train.
The door was opening so damned slowly!
Joel tramped the accelerator all the way down and took the tank through the entrance even as it was growing wider. The tank made a clean pass. The tread struck the sloping concrete approach to the tunnel, then rumbled over shiny steel as the door irised all the way open.
“Shut it! Shut it!” He was screaming. He didn't care.
The fungus gushed through the entrance, but it was not able to jam the door open. The steel sphincter cycled shut with a loud
Two or three hundred pounds of the main growth was severed and isolated in the tunnel behind the tank. It curled and twisted, utterly shapeless but as if it were seeking a shape. It pressed at the door, trying to get out and rejoin the mother body. Frustrated, it pulled back, pulsed obscenely for a moment, and began to slither along the tunnel toward the tank and the inner door.
Before Joel was halfway to the inner door, another barrier slammed out of the ceiling, sealing him in the first fifty yards of the passageway.
“What's this. I have company out here, you know.”
“We know,” Galing said. “This is decontamination.”
“You can kill it?”
“In airtight quarters like this, yes.”
A thin white gas hissed out of the walls and filled the tube until the hologram cameras showed nothing but blank, white vapor.
Joel looked at the temperature guage on the ceiling of the cab: 106… 106… 106… 105… It was cooling off much more slowly than it had heated. “How long?” he asked Galing.
“Another minute.”
105… 105… 105… 106…
The gas began to clear around them. When it was gone altogether, he looked at the rearview screen. The hologram cameras were focused on a slimy patch on the tunnel floor, all that remained of the two-hundred-pound chunk of fungus.
“The gas did all that?” he asked Galing.
“The gas — and a mist of acid.”
When the air was as clear as a spring day, the barrier went up in front of him.
He drove down the last length of the tunnel toward the last door as it irised out of his way.
XXV
They were all in the top-level garage waiting for him when he drove the tank back and parked it: Henry Galing, Richard, Gina, Dr. Harttle, the faceless man named Brian the others who had not participated in the Disorientation Therapy. Seeing them now, his own creations, he wondered how he could ever have feared them or failed to recognize them even if he
He recalled how, in such fine detail, they had planned his Disorientation Therapy Puzzle: the removal of every scrap of paper from every floor of the pyramid so that there was no clue to the real nature of the place; propping the skeleton in that office chair; re-programming the computer to misuse the nucleotide vats and form a faceless man who could nonetheless see and speak; the working out of the story he had been told about falling off a roof while rescuing a cat, and the story about sybocylacose-46 which he had been meant to see through; the building of that dungeon room, the honeymoon suite; even the little oddities like the dust in Harttle's hair and between Allison's breasts had been carefully planned. It had worked admirably well. He was cured of both his guilt and his prejudice — and the therapy had made Allison especially precious to him.
He had difficulty remembering only one thing: the Overmaster. He thought that the term, which he had first heard from Galing, must refer to the moving fungus that had reacted more like an animal than a plant. To the best of his knowledge, no such entity had existed before his drug-induced amnesia; and he was certain that nothing like that could have been included as a part of this therapy.
Henry Galing came forth to meet him when he stepped out of the tank, and to Joel's surprise the android was crying. He took Joel's hand and shook it vigorously. “Thank God you're back!” he said.
“It was touch and go… I don't know what that stuff could have done to the tank if the flamethrowers hadn't kept it back. And I'm just as happy not to have to find out.”
“Allison?” Galing asked anxiously, peering past Joel into the cab of the tank.
“She's fine. Still sleeping.”
The android was obviously relieved. When Joel saw how happy all of them were to know that Allison was in good shape, Joel couldn't understand how he could ever have looked upon their kind as little more than animals. They clearly had human emotions, attachments, relationships, and needs.
“What did I get myself into when I went outside?” Joel asked. “What was that fungus, that damned gray —”
“Just that,” Galing said. “Fungus, moss, lichens, hundreds of types of vegetation — and all of it under the control of the Overmaster.”
“You've used that name before,” Joel said. “But it doesn't mean anything to me.”
“It will in a moment.” Galing wiped a hand over his face, giving himself a moment to think about where he should begin. “During those thousand years that you slept, before you made the twelve of us in the images of your dead friends, the world's ecological systems changed a great deal more than we knew. These new, grotesque plantforms were bred, and they came to dominate the surface of the earth; they began slowly to function in harmony and then became rapidly interdependent. Finally, between them, they evolved a rudimentary intelligence.”
“The Overmaster.”
“Yes,” Galing said.
Richard said: “You have to realize how incredibly polluted the earth was. Poisonous air. Poisonous water. The air was superheated because the particles of suspended pollutants magnified the effects of the sun… The whole world became a genetic pressure cooker that boiled up mutations faster than anyone would ever have thought possible/'
“Exactly,” Galing said. “In surprisingly short order that rudimentary intelligence became a formidable mind equal to that of any man. Maybe even superior. In a couple of centuries it developed animal-like mobility in some of its components— which you witnessed a few minutes ago.”
