Hell's Gate

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 together, for they had been planning on marching single file into Salsbury's probability. He fanned the barrel of the heavy weapon, holding down on the trigger, and watched the gray gas pellets sink silently into them, expand from the friction, and explode from within.

The effect was not as dramatic on robots as it had been on the living tissue of the vacii, but it was adequate. If one pellet met too tough an area to penetrate far enough, another in that heavy barrage he was putting down, would surely turn the trick. Inside of thirty frantic seconds, the floor was littered with the parts of robot man-forms, some of the tubes still lit

Then there was quiet. Except for a strange, heavy noise like sandpaper on sandpaper. He looked around, trying to locate the source of the noise, wondering whether it was friendly or hostile. His heart began beating faster when he realized the sound was coming from some place quite close. Then he realized it was the sound of his own breath that he had begun to fear. It came raggedly, heavily into his lungs, burning them.

“Victor,” the computer said from beyond the portal, from the safety of the basement.

He walked across the man-form strewn chamber and peered through to where the trunk floated beside Lynda. “Yeah?”

“The pack.”

Lynda held out the rucksack that bulged with the things he would require. He took it, startled by the lines in her face, the deep etchings of tension and terror. He could almost summon a hate for those men of the future who had sent him back, had put him and Lynda through all this. Yet, without those same men to create him, he would never have existed to meet the girl. “Be careful,” she said.

He nodded.

“Remember,” the 810-40.04 said, “with both beams locked we can keep the portal open forever if we want. But if a vacii technician happens to come into that room over there and sees what has happened, they'll overwhelm us in seconds.”

“I'll try to handle it as quickly as possible,” he said, feeling as if he were trapped in some fantasy.

“I have instructed Lynda on the dismantling of a robot and the securing of its vibratube weapon. She will take care of that when you leave and arm herself.”

It was Salsbury's turn to say, “Be careful.”

“Don't worry,” she said.

He slipped the rucksack on, shifted it until it rested easily between his shoulders. It wasn't bad. It only weighed eighteen-thousand pounds. All he had to do was tap some of that marvelous adrenalin-like juice that his special little liver-encased mechanism produced, and he could tote that pack around without a single twitch of a muscle.

The only thing that kept him going now was the knowledge that his actions to this point must already have had an effect on the future of their probability line.

He turned and made his way back across the room to the door. He held the gas pistol tightly in his right hand. The 810-40.04 had reminded him, earlier in the night, that he was ambidextrous; in the event he had a hand shot off, the computer wanted him to remember to shift the gun to his other paw. Somehow, such a suggestion had not raised his spirits any. At the door, he sucked in a hot breath, hooked fingers in the handle to slide the thing open.

“I love you,” Lynda said from the basement.

He couldn't answer her. If he did, if he turned to say something, his courage might snap and go tumbling down around his feet. He was working on sheer grit at this point, his sense of reason momentarily suspended. He could not risk a glance at those green eyes or that crooked tooth.

He slid the door open, looked into the corridor beyond, stepped through, and slid the door shut on the messy scene in the projection room.

The vacii, being an alien race with alien heritage and with, certainly, alien patterns of thought which would not be ever totally conceivable to a man, did not build in any way similar to human architectural concepts. Salsbury had noticed, while in the prober room, that there were no straight walls here, no perfectly angled corners. That room had been like the inside of a very large igloo, white, slightly rough like pebbled ice, and domed. The walls were not regular, but cut with nooks and crannies, tiny blind ends where things were stored, where equipment was built in, or where, oddly, there was nothing but emptiness. It was as if the place had been hacked out of stone; it had the feeling or a cave, not a room. No, more than that. It was the kind of building one might expect man-sized insects to build.

The hallway was no different. It was much like a tunnel, large enough for three people to walk abreast and still leave a foot on each side, boring straight away in both directions. The light was dim and yellow and came from glowing stones set at regular intervals in the rounded ceiling. He hesitated only a moment, then turned and walked left in search of a stairwell. If vacii had stairwells.

Thirty feet from the projection room, he came to an abrupt halt and listened intently; he picked up the screeching, giggling noise he had caught a sliver of moments before. It was loud and clear now. He judged it was coming from somewhere just ahead, off to one side, probably from a connecting passageway. It continued, a keening babble. Two separate babbles; vacii speaking in their native tongue. The sound of it chilled him, and he thought of them more as lizards than ever. Their tone, the syllables of their native language spoke of claws and caves, of scaly love-making and slimy burrows of antiquity. It was so unhuman, so much more unhuman than their appearance, that it nearly unnerved him, almost froze him to the spot.

Which would have been disastrous.

Then they were so close he could hear their broad, splayed feet slapping against the cold floor. Any moment, they would appear ahead of him, would look up, perhaps gasp, then spread the alarm… Unless he killed them. But if he had to start stashing bodies in closets this soon, he would be discovered by some janitor before he had finished with the operation. He looked around anxiously, caught sight of a closed door five feet ahead. He bounded to it, trying to land silently on his toes, and slid it open, his gun still in his hand.

Luckily, the place was empty and dark. He stood against the wall, slid the door shut and waited. A few moments later, the voices passed the door, heading back the way he had come. He stood sweating, trembling, waiting until he could not hear them before returning to the corridor.

Then he had a bad thought.

What if they were going to the projection room? And found the bodies. And found Lynda. And

He slid the door part way open and peered after them. They came to the prober room, passed it without slowing. A hundred feet beyond that, they turned into a side corridor on their right. Their voices faded, faded and were gone at last, letting the oily quiet of the place slide back over the walls.

Acting the part of the cat burglar, slinking, eyes slippery inside his sockets, ears primed, gun hand nervous, Salsbury went into the corridor and hurried along, looking for stairs. Fifty feet from the room in which he had hidden, he found a stairwell, looked both ways down the hall to be certain he was still unobserved, then started up the steps.

He found he could not look up the well to see if there was anyone above him, but the construction also made his own position safe from anyone higher on the stairs. The steps themselves seemed to be hacked from the wall, rugged, white, worn slightly yellow-brown in the center with the tread of vacii feet. There was a landing fifteen steps up, another and another. Thirty flights and fifteen stories later, he came to the end of the stairs.

He looked into the top floor's corridor. There was no traffic. He stepped out and ran lightly and, he hoped, silently, to the extreme right end of the corridor. The building seemed about two blocks long, so the run was a feat performed not totally without damaged nerves. He expected any moment to run head on into a group of vacii, to be carried down by their long arms and splayed feet But he reached the end and stopped, panting. Quickly, he removed his rucksack from his back, took out one of the many finger-sized bombs the computer had supplied.

The plan called for the planting of dozens of these weapons in various parts of the structure, each a thing of nuclear capacity. The vacii built to withstand a nuclear blast, but dozens erupting in their midst would be more than the building could absorb. This would more than likely not stop the vacii invasion of their worldline, only delay it. But if the vacii managed to push through again, the men of the future who had sent Salsbury back to destroy the installation would send back yet another android to bring down the next installation. It would be tit-for-tat for a while, though the men of Salsbury's probability's future hoped to discourage the vacii in the end. It was a small hope, but the only one.

He kept hoping he could think of something better.

He jammed the pronged end of the white bomb into the plaster-like material of the wall. It blended almost perfectly. As hastily as possible, he planted a second one at the other end of the top floor. Then he ran back to the stairwell and went down a floor. Only fourteen more levels to go.

He knew he could not hope to accomplish all that without meeting a vacii.

Unfortunately, the trouble came early. On the eleventh floor, with eight bombs planted, he encountered his first opposition.