Fear That Man

hypocrite.

“Why? Why can’t you?”

“It won’t let me.”

“It?”

Briefly, he recounted his story — the jelly-mass, the hypnotic commands. When he finished, the other man’s eyes were wide — too wide to contain anything but horror. “The Prisoner!” he croaked.

“What?”

“The Prisoner of the Shield. You’re under its direction!”

Sam turned instinctively toward the portal of wavering colors. “Then they are alive!”

Breadloaf was laughing, and Sam could not get him to stop. It was not the laughter of him and Hurkos and Gnossos in the Inferno. This was laughter at the inevitability of some unknown tragedy. He could sense that, but he could not stop the other man. Neither could he leave to get help. His feet would carry him toward the doorway but not through it. There was a mental block that kept him within the room. His memory began to clear slightly, and he could remember what else he had done in this building. He had planted some sort of bomb in the machinery below. And it must be the machinery that kept this… this Shield going.

“A thousand years,” Breadloaf shouted between whoops of laughter. “For a thousand years it tried the same things over and over, and we thought it was too dense to attempt anything different. Instead, it was pretending stupidity, making us lax. And it worked. Just when we were feeling secure, it takes you and breaks in with ridiculous ease. A thousand years to the Prisoner are like but a day to us.” He laughed again, harshly.

There was sweat on Sam’s upper lip. He wiped it off and became aware of perspiration all over him. He was frightened. A thousand years behind the Shield. And it had only been playing around, using the time as a diversion. A score of centuries had meant nothing to it. He watched it with a loathing that touched the deepest part of him. Were the colors its true appearance or merely the effects of it filtered by the Shield? He thought the colors were a front, not the true nature of it. The true nature could not be something so beautiful and vibrant, surely. A blue splotch rippled up from the bottom, seemed to form a question mark like one would find on a large tronicsign—

Tronicsign!

He remembered seeing the high tronicsign band that ran around all four sides of the Breadloaf Building, carrying letters twenty feet tall. Perhaps the control console was up here. If it was, he could spell out a message for Gnossos and Hurkos. Surely they would be looking for him. It was almost a certainty they could see the towering tronicsign from anywhere in this part of the city. If they were in this part of the city…

“The tronicsign controls,” he asked-said.

“What?” Breadloaf’s eyes slid back and forth in the sockets liked trapped animals.

“The advertising screen. The light letters. Where are the controls for the light letters?”

“Why?”

“Where are they?” There was a tone of command in his voice that he had not known he possessed.

“There’s a master set in the main lounge, but I have a secondary plug-in set in the wall cabinet — over there.”

He found it, plugged it in, began typing out a message that the big boards would hold in glowing — red? amber? blue? — letters. He decided on crimson words against a black background. GNOSSOS/HURKOS… “What floor is this?” he asked Breadloaf.

“Top.”

TOP FLOOR. EXECUTIVE OFFICE. COME QUICKLY. SAM.

There would be waiting then. He paced the carpet briskly, now and then trying to go out of the door but always discovering that the hypnotic suggestions prohibited that. Finally, they came. And they demanded explanations.

He gave them the few he could, told them about the bomb planted below, the bomb that would wreck the machinery, shut down the Shield, and set the Prisoner free — whatever the Prisoner might be. He gave them the location of it, told them how to remove it and how to handle it: gently. They ran to get it. It seemed like a very long time that they were gone — time enough to construct a thousand possible deaths that might result if the bomb exploded. Just when he was ready to count them as deserters, they returned with the bomb and the timer, carrying it as if it were a piece of delicate and expensive crystal.

Carefully, Sam disconnected the timer, lifted the halves of the casing apart, and poured the volatile liquid out of the single window behind Breadloaf’s massive desk. Four breaths were released simultaneously as he turned and said, “It’s okay.”

“Then this is it!” Gnossos said, the first to recover completely. He paced back and forth, looking at the Shield, stopping to touch it, to examine the point where it went flush with the wall. “This is the thing that has been directing you. But if it is trapped behind this Shield, how did it get to you to hypnotize you? And how did it whip up that jelly-cored ship?”

“I think I can… shed some light on that,” Breadloaf grunted. He was still paralyzed, but his fingers were tingling, and he could move his thumbs. The effects were beginning to wear away.

They turned to him. Gnossos crossed the room. “What light?”

“He—” Breadloaf began.

“Sam,” Sam identified himself.

Breadloaf blinked appreciation. “Yes. Sam. I think you are all operating under a false assumption. The Prisoner did not get Sam. He did not kidnap Sam. Sam is the Prisoner’s creation.”

“Creation?” Gnossos snorted.

“Yes. The Prisoner imagined Sam, built his imaginings into a concrete entity. It was probably done with a last big burst of the Prisoner’s energies.”

“That’s absurd!”

Breadloaf tried to shake his head, only succeeded in making his lips quiver and his eyes tremble. “No. The Prisoner concentrated, summed up all his resources, and shaped a man and a ship. The ship was not a machine, for machines are alien to the Prisoner’s mind. Some places, the dimensions are rather close, due to the warping of the higher dimension. Perhaps at one of these places he forced his thoughts through the thin barrier and made Sam and the ship.”

“But why not force himself through at one of those spots?” Hurkos asked.

“He could not do that with what energies he had left. You see, he is much, much larger than the ship and Sam put together, larger by an infinite degree. He is the entire higher dimension!”

Ocher birds flittered over green and blue oceans…

“One creature is an entire dimension?”

Breadloaf coughed. “If that creature is God, yes. And that is precisely who the Prisoner of the Shield is!”

X

“God!” Gnossos shouted.

Hurkos wandered next to the Shield, pressed his face to it, looking into the colors that swirled, folded upon themselves and became new colors, Here, brought to him through modern science, was the being that prayer could not yield. Technology had replaced faith and with far better results.

“The dreams,” Gnossos said, turning to the dazzling display on the screen. “The dreams Hurkos took from it were the dreams of a paranoid, then; they were the dreams of a being obsessed with demon-persecution.”

Sam’s mind whirled in a nighmare landscape of doubt and nearly unconquerable mountains of unbelief. “And the machines were not machines at all, for God is not the Father of the machine. God is the Father of life, the Father of man who makes the machines. God could imitate the exterior of a machine, but the only way He could make it work was to create a life form — the jelly-mass — to imitate the workings of one. He knows us, physically, but He doesn’t know what we have within us.”

“And God feared machines because they were something above His abilities. He feared the Mues and chose