Fear That Man

and the night… It continued at a maddening pace. Days became weeks; weeks turned to months. For years, he hung there. For centuries, he remained. Finally, all time was lost as the sun spun madly across the sky and night with its devils was barely a blink of an eye.

“Please!” he screamed. “Please!”

The last screams brought them out of sleep, breathing hard. Sam pushed himself up, looked about the ship to reassure himself. Then he turned to Hurkos. “What sort of dream was that?”

Gnossos looked curious.

“He’s a telepath,” Sam explained. “Irregular talent. But what the hell kind of dreams were those?”

“That’s what I’d like to know, Sam,” Hurkos said. “I was getting them from you!”

VI

“Me?”

“Well, not really from your mind. Through your mind. The generator of those thoughts is very distant. No one in this room. And the mind of that generator is horribly large. Immeasurable. This was only a fraction of the thoughts in it, a small corner of them. In this case, I picked up this trace of thoughts and for some reason my subconscious talent began boosting their vividness and re-broadcasting them.”

“But I wouldn’t have dreamed them without your help.”

Hurkos smiled sadly. “You would have dreamed them just the same and just as completely. You would not have been aware of dreaming them, is all.”

“But then what was it? It reminded me of the man on the cross you toppled after Belina’s death.”

“It’s the Christ legend,” Gnossos said. They turned to stare at him. “I make legends my business. Poets work in all sorts of mythologies. There have been a large number of them — and a large number of wild ones too. The Christ legend is not so ancient. There are still Christians, as you know, though damn few. Most of the religion, along with all the others, died out about a thousand years ago, shortly after the Permanent Peace and the immortality drugs. According to legend, the god-figure Christ was crucified on a dogwood cross. This dream seems to be a reenactment of that myth, though I do not recall that the man hung there that long or that there were administering angels and tempting demons.”

“This could be another clue,” Hurkos offered.

“How so?” Sam was ready to clutch at the smallest straw.

“Perhaps your mystery hypnotist is a neo-Christian, one of those who refuse the immortality drugs. That would certainly explain why he would want to overthrow the empire. He would want to convert the pagans, bring the savages into the fold. That’s us.”

“Good point,” Gnossos said. “But that doesn’t explain the blob.”

Hurkos lapsed into silence.

Bong-bong-bong!

PREPARE FOR NORMAL SPACE AND MANUAL CONTROL OF THIS VESSEL!

“We’re almost to Hope,” Gnossos said. “Perhaps we will soon be having more clues.”

The flight-control system of the planet-wide city locked them into its pattern and began bringing them down to a point of its own choosing since they had not requested any particular touchdown spot. Ships fluttered above, below, and to all sides of them. Bubble cars spun across the great elevated roadway, zipping between the buildings, sometimes slipping into tunnels in the skyscrapers from which they often emerged going another direction. They settled onto a gray pad where the flames of their descent were soaked up, cooled, dissipated.

Beyond the pad, on all sides, lay Hope. Super-city. The hope, literally, of a new way of life for billions. They stood at the open portal, waited while the attendant marked their checkslip so that they would have the proper ship to return to, tore it in half and gave them their portion.

“Well,” Gnossos said, “where to?”

“No orders yet,” Sam said.

“Let’s just wander around a bit.”—Hurkos.

“Okay, we will.”—Gnossos.

And they did.

He sat before the thick window that was not really a window at all, and he looked at the thing beyond. It raged, lashing, screaming, roaring like a thousand bulls with pins in their brains. How long? How long had it fought against the Shield, trying to get out? Breadloaf peered deeper into the Shield, clutched his chair and leaned farther back in it. The massive desk nearly concealed his slumped form. A thousand years and more. That was how long. His father had constructed the barrier and the chamber beyond, which dipped into the other dimension. No, not another dimension either — a higher dimension. Not another alternate scheme of things, just a different layer of this particular scheme. And when his father had died in a freak accident that the medics could not undo the damage of, he had come into possesssion of the family fortune, the family buildings, the family office structure here in the Center of Hope, the Shield and the tank beyond. The last two things were something one did not advertise. It was a family secret — a big, hoary skeleton in the family closet. The burden was his, and only his.

For six hundred years he had come here every week, sometimes for stretches that lasted days, most often for just a few hours. He came to look at the Shield. And what lay beyond, trapped by it. It was a weight that rested heavily on his shoulders at all times. It was insane to worry. He knew that. The Shield had held for over a thousand years; it would hold forever. It could not fail. It was maintained by machines, and machines had not been known to fail since his grandfather’s time. And these machines were tended, not by unreliable men, but by other machines that gained their power from still more machines. It was foolproof.

Still, Alexander Breadloaf III came once a week, sometimes staying a long time, sometimes just for a few hours. Still he worried. Still — he was afraid.

Crimson exploded across the screen, washed down and turned to ocher at the bottom. Explosions would not shatter the Shield, no matter how violent they might be. Didn’t it understand this by now? A thousand years of explosions, and it still did not understand. That thought left a sorry spot on his soul, but he reminded himself of what his father always said (said so often that it became the family motto): “There is no longer ignorance in men.” Maybe. Evidently. Although he feared that ignorance lurked just below the surface, waiting for a chance…

There was a lovely pattern of blue and silver as it applied certain stress pattern sequences to the Shield. But it had tried that before. It had tried everything before…

Breadloaf pushed himself out of the chair, walked toward the door that led into the hallway. He would get some simple foods, some coffee. And he would return. This was one of those times when a brief glance at it was not going to be enough. It was going to be one of those weeks. One of those long weeks.

VII

In their wandering, they came across many things that amazed Sam despite the fact that he wholly or partially remembered most of them. It was as if he had been told of these things but had never actually seen them. In the seeing lay the wonder. They had gone to the light shows, the toto-experience places. They had seen the parks, the avenues of art. Gnossos knew the city well, that being one of the qualifications of a true poet — to know the beating heart of the metropolis. Or megalopolis? No matter. He explained all things they did not understand, clarified things they thought they knew. It was a marvelous time, save for the constant awareness that another hypnotic trance and order could be on the way, minutes from them, ready to swallow Sam into noisy chaos and use him.

So it was, in the course of their aimless ramblings, they came upon the Christian. Sam noticed that Hurkos bristled at the sight of the man — not because of this individual, but because of the heedless god that supposedly stood behind him.