Neither the man before him nor the woman across the room seemed remotely aware of him. Apparently he was in no imminent danger.
Rivers of data — words, numbers, charts and graphs of myriad types — flowed in a flood-like rampage across the amber screen, while Harley Coltrane stared unwaveringly at that darkly flickering display. He could not have seen it as an ordinary man would have, for he had no eyes. They'd been torn from his sockets and replaced by a cluster of other sensors tiny beads of ruby glass, small knots of wire, waffle-surfaced chips of some ceramic material, all bristling and slightly recessed in the deep black holes in his scull.
Sam was holding the revolver in only one hand now. He kept his finger on the trigger guard rather than on the trigger itself, for he was shaking so badly that he might unintentionally let off a shot.
The man-machine's chest rose and fell. His mouth hung open, and bitterly foul breath rushed from him in rhythmic waves.
A rapid pulse was visible in his temples and in the gruesomely swollen arteries in his neck. But other pulses throbbed where none should have been in the center of his forehead; along each jawline; at four places in his chest and belly; in his upper arms, where dark ropy vessels had thickened and risen above subcutaneous fat, sheathed now only by his skin. His circulatory system seemed to have been redesigned and augmented to assist new functions that his body was being called upon to perform. Worse Yet, those pulses beat in a strange syncopation, as if at least two hearts pounded within him.
A shriek erupted from the thing's gaping mouth, and Sam twitched and cried out in surprise. This was akin to the unearthly sounds that he had heard while in the living room, that had drawn him here, but he had thought they'd come from the computer.
Grimacing as the electronic wail spiraled higher and swelled into painful decibels, Sam let his gaze rise from the man-machine's open mouth to its 'eyes.' The sensors still bristled in the sockets. The beads of ruby glass glowed with inner light, and Sam wondered if they registered him on the infrared spectrum or by some other means. Did Coltrane see him at all? Perhaps the man-machine had traded the human world for a different reality, moving from this physical plane to another level, and perhaps Sam was an irrelevancy to him, unnoticed.
The shriek began to fade, then cut off abruptly.
Without realizing what he'd done, Sam had raised his revolver and, from a distance of about eighteen inches, pointed it at Harley Coltrane's face. He was startled to discover that he also had slipped his finger off the guard and onto the trigger itself and that he was going to destroy this thing.
He hesitated. Coltrane was, after all, still a man — at least to some extent. Who was to say that he didn't desire his current state more than life as an ordinary human being? Who was to say that he was not happy like this? Sam was uneasy in the role of judge, but an even uneasier executioner. As a man who believed that life was hell on earth, he had to consider the possibility that Coltrane's condition was an improvement, an escape.
Between man and computer, the glistening, semiorganic cables
Coltrane's rank breath was redolent with both the stench of rotting meat and overheated electronic components.
Sensors glistened and moved within the lidless eye sockets.
Tinted gold by the light from the screen, Coltrane's face seemed to be frozen in a perpetual scream. The vessels pulsing in his jaws and temples looked less like reflections of his own heartbeat than like parasites squirming under his skin.
With a shudder of revulsion, Sam squeezed the trigger. The blast was thunderous in that confined space.
Coltrane's head snapped back with the impact of the point-blank shot, then dropped forward, chin on his chest, smoking and bleeding.
The repulsive cables continued to swell and shrink and swell as if with the rhythmic passage of inner fluid.
Sam sensed that the man was not entirely dead. He turned the gun on the computer screen.
One of Coltrane's skeletal hands released the cable around which it had been firmly clamped. With a
Sam cried out.
The room filled with electronic clicks and snaps and beeps and warblings.
The hellish hand held him fast and with such tremendous strength that the bony fingers pinched his flesh, then began to cut through it. He felt warm blood trickle down his arm, under his shirt sleeve. With a flash of panic he realized that the unhuman power of the man-machine was ultimately sufficient to crush his wrist and leave him crippled. At best his hand would swiftly go numb from lack of circulation, and the revolver would drop from his grasp.
Coltrane was struggling to raise his half-shattered head.
Sam thought of his mother in the wreckage of the car, face torn open, grinning at him, grinning, silent and unmoving but, grinning….
Frantically he kicked at Coltrane's chair, hoping to send it rolling and spinning away. The wheels had been locked.
The bony hand squeezed tighter, and Sam screamed. His vision blurred.
Still, he saw that Coltrane's head was coming up slowly. slowly.
With his right foot, putting everything he had into the kick, Sam struck once, twice, three times at the cables between Coltrane and the computer. They tore loose from Coltrane, popping out of his flesh with a hideous sound, and the man slumped in, his chair. Simultaneously the skeletal hand opened and fell away from Sam's wrist. With a cold rattle it struck the hard plastic mat under the chair.
Bass electronic pulses thumped like soft drumbeats and echoed off the walls, while under them a thin bleat wavered continuously through three notes.
Gasping and half in shock, Sam clamped his left hand around his bleeding wrist, as if that would still the stinging pain.
Something brushed against his leg.
He looked down and saw the semiorganic cables, like pale headless snakes, still attached to the computer and full of malevolent life. They seemed to have grown, as well, until they were twice the length they had been when linking Coltrane to the machine. One snared his left ankle, and the other curled sinuously around his right calf.
He tried to tear loose.
They held him fast.
They twined up his legs.
Instinctively he knew they were seeking bare flesh on the upper half of his body, and that upon contact they would burrow into him and make him part of the system.
He was still holding the revolver in his blood-slicked right hand. He aimed at the screen.
Data was no longer flowing across that amber field. Instead, Coltrane's face looked out from the display. His eyes had been restored, and it seemed as if he could see Sam, for he was looking directly at him and speaking to him:
Without understanding a damned thing about it, Sam knew Coltrane was still alive. He had not died — or at least not all of him had perished — with his body. He was there, in the machine somehow.
As if to confirm that insight, Coltrane influenced the glass screen of the VDT to relinquish the convex plane of its surface and adapt to the contours of his face. The glass became as flexible as gelatin, thrusting outward, as if Coltrane actually existed within the machine, physically, and was now pushing his face Out of it.
This was impossible. Yet it was happening. Harley Coltrane seemed to be controlling matter with the power of his mind, a mind not even any longer linked to a human body.
Sam was mesmerized by fear, frozen, paralyzed. His finger lay immovable against the trigger.
Reality had been ripped, and through that tear a nightmare world of infinite malign possibilities seemed to be
