eyed man with a belly slung over his black leather belt. They are dressed in dark brown uniforms, wearing shiny, knee-length boots. The chief officer slaps the soles of your shoes with his billy club. The impact jars half your body. He asks you to confess, but when you ask to what, he just slaps your feet again. Well, that will not be too hard to take. Just so they don't go beyond that. But two hours later, your feet are swollen and aching. Your legs are on fire. Another hour, and your feet swell until the seams of your shoes split. You wet yourself. You know where the smells come from. You can feel the vomit in the back of your throat. Slap, slap, slap, slap?
There were ten scenes in all, propaganda most certainly, but propaganda at once so horrid and believable that there was no denying its persuasive effect, Salsbury had been willing to cooperate, but had he not been, this would have convinced him. Not only because the entire population (save a handful of dictators and their staffs) of the world was suffering, but because he and Lynda would suffer too if the vacii could break through into this probability line and establish another experimental outpost.
When it was over, they settled back from the computer, trembling, white, perspiring. Whatever future man had been building for himself, no matter what degree of stupidity, it could never match the nightmare of that fascist experiment, of that place where alien vacii maintained the psychotics in power. That was a society various nations had accepted before, eventually to reject it. But if Vic didn't continue with the plan, that insanity would be his own future.
?Well?? the 810-40.04 asked.
?Tell me what I have to do,? he said numbly.
After the explanations were given, questioned, and understood, there was a good deal of work to be done. It was not particularly difficult labor, though it was tedious. At the computer's directions, Salsbury brought the two other trunks down from the upstairs bedroom, into the cellar, pressed them down against the floor before the spot in the wall where the vacii had opened their portal. The computer opened the other two trunks with an electric impulse broadcast to their interior locks. The lids popped open, revealing a great many wires and tubes, machine parts. It was Salsbury's job to put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle, following the 810-40.04's directions. He was assembling, he found, a prober exactly like that of the vacii. When the aliens tuned in tonight, Salsbury would lock their beam with the vacii beam and open the bubble between probabilities to the passage of living tissue. This living tissue would be Victor.
The fact that their would-be mechanical assassins waited on the other side didn't help the slimy rollings of his stomach. If there were fifty robots however, he would be ready for them, for the 810-40.04 was equipping him for almost any eventuality.
But did a hero's knees knock together? Or did his breath come difficult?
No, he wasn't feeling much like a hero. He felt more like a little boy who has been playing a game with older kids and then abruptly discovers they're getting too rough for him and that there is no way he can graciously get out of the game. He was trained to fight. The chemical tape that had played itself the night of Harold Jacobi's murder had crammed thousands of pieces of commando combat techniques into his brain. But all the tricks of karate and judo and savate seemed weak when pitted against gray, scaled, sucker-mouthed things from somewhere a few million light-years and a few probability lines off.
By ten o'clock they finished rigging the probe machine. It was a rather rickety looking bunch of lightweight, sectioned beams supporting panels of intricate mechanisms. There was a chair for the operator. To operate the thing, Salsbury knew, one only needed to sit in that chair, flick a single switch, grip the handles on the sides of what looked like a spotlight, and aim the projector. There were little screws on each handle to work with your thumbs to change (ever so slightly) the flow pattern of the beam so that a good lock could be achieved.
They decided, with the computer's agreement, that things would move more quickly if Lynda were to operate the prober, lock beams, and open the probability doorway. Salsbury, meanwhile, could be standing next to where the portal would solidify, could leap through without having to first climb down from the prober.
At Lynda's suggestion, they left the computer to grab a bite to eat. Salsbury could only choke down half a sandwich and a cup of coffee. At a quarter after eleven, they went back into the cellar to wait. It was a nervous time. Vic paced, and Lynda bit her nails. The 810-40.04 went over and over the instructions until they were all ready to scream. At last, it was one-thirty. Lynda took her place at the chair; he stood alongside the wall, next to where the portal would open.
One-thirty came. And so did the vacii.
The blue spot began to glow on the wall, slowly clearing.
Lynda snapped on their own prober.
The two beams met. The window began to clear.
?Now!? the computer said.
And Salsbury leaped sideways and through into the other probability line, into the room where the vacii operated their own prober.
CHAPTER 13
The first thing he saw was the face of the vacii operator, its toothless, sucking mouth all drawn up, the thin gray lips writhing wildly as if someone were jabbing pins into them. The red eyes gleamed, eyes of a rat, of pigeons, eyes of bowery winos sleeping in doorways and greeting the sun crossly. When he had been in his basement, with the bubble separating him from the aliens, the eyes had seemed merely red. Here, close up, he could see the minute webbing of pulsing blood vessels that gave them their color. The operator started off his machine, his mouth suddenly wide as if to yell something. Salsbury brought up the new hand gun the computer had provided and fired it. The lizard-thing gasped; its face dissolved as it toppled from us perch on the heavy-duty model prober.
?Vic!? Lynda shouted from beyond the portal, then followed the calling of his name with a shrill, piercing scream.
He came around out of reflex, going down on one knee as he pivoted, hoping to avoid any blow that might have been aimed for his head. There was no one immediately behind him.
He was screened by the bulk of the vacii prober, and it was entirely possible that no one else in the room knew he had come through. No one but the operator, and his head was too scrambled to imagine he could warn anyone else. Then why had Lynda screamed? He turned, looked back at her, saw that one man-form robot had gone through the portal, coming towards her where she sat on her prober chair. Another of the things was halfway through the port, one foot on either side.
Victor raised his gun and shot the one halfway through, trying to bring him down and get a clear shot at the mechanical that posed a more immediate threat to Lynda. The back of its neck peeled open like an apple dropped out of a tree onto stones. It pitched forward, crashed down with a great deal of clatter. The thing closing on Lynda turned to search for the source of the uproar behind it and collected Salsbury's second shot square in the center of its stomach. Glass, steel, and plastic jell that had been posing as flesh erupted in all directions.
The floor in front of Salsbury burst, showered up fragments, and smoked heavy blue clouds that had an acrid, rancid meat odor. He rolled sideways, against the base of the vacii projector, and swung his head around to see where the vibrashot had come from.
The room behind was crawling with robots. On a quick sweep, he estimated there were twenty of them.
Less than a second after he pulled his head back behind the bulk of the prober, another beam sizzled into the metal work where his face had been, made little rivulets of molten steel dribble down and harden on the concrete floor. For a moment, he had a nauseatingly crystal picture of his head pocked with holes, each hole dribbling molten flesh. But flesh didn't melt, it burned. He squinted to keep the smoke out of his eyes and concentrated on getting out of there alive. While making sure none of the robot man-forms of the vacii inside enjoyed the same privilege.
One of the man-forms, without concern for itself, rushed across the floor, trying to get behind the machine for a try at Salsbury. He got the thing just as it moved over him. The impact of the gun's discharge knocked it backwards ten feet where it lay in pieces, humming slightly.
He thumbed the proper stud on the gun to convert it into a machine pistol a thousand times as deadly as it had been. He got off his knees, crouched, then darted into the room. The robots were clumped relatively close
