Hell's Gate

CHAPTER 14

As before, Salsbury heard them coming before he saw them. Their screeching voices grated on his nerves so harshly that, in seconds, he felt like raw, quivering meat. He had planted the second explosives package on that floor, and was making for the stairs like a cockroach on his way to a crack in the baseboard when he heard them coming up the stairs. He skittered backwards, out of the stairs and into the hall, up against the cool white wall, trying to look like an irregular hunk of plaster.

He could wait there in hopes the vacii would pass this floor by, but what if their destination was this floor? A rather nasty scene would ensue, surely, if they found their temple had been violated by a human being with a gas pellet pistol in his hand and a rucksack full of microminiaturized bombs on his back.

The seconds sped past while he fought his own terror to reach a course of action. He wondered, caustically, where the speed of mental processes the 810-40.04 had spoke so much about was. Finally, when the voices were so loud they seemed to be coming from inside his head, he back pedaled to a door on his left, slipped his hand in the groove and waited. If the vacii continued up the stairs, there was no problem. He would be in the clear, free. But if they got off at this floor, he could be into this room before they saw him. But he didn't want to open the door and risk finding out what was on the other side unless he had to. He had to.

He caught a glimpse of a blue robe and the darker, overlaid harness of a vacii costume. One withered lizardy leg appeared at the edge of the door from the stairs. They were coming to this floor despite his prayers. Sliding the door open, he went into a lighted room that was much like other rooms he had seen thus far, and slid the portal shut behind.

“Zee gee' sa tiss ga',” a vacii said, coming from behind a desklike piece of furniture.

Salsbury decided the words did not require an answer, but were some sort of exclamation. “Just come to check the air conditioning,” he said.

“Scee-ga-tag!” the vacii said, alarmed.

But Salsbury had taken its attention away from the hand that held the pistol at his side, gained a moment to bring the gun up unnoticed. He fired, forgetting the weapon was still on a machine gun basis, and scattered the beast into a dozen, hideous pieces.

Just then there was a noise behind, the door slid open on its runners.

He danced across the floor, came against the desk, crouched and ready, perspiration flooding down his neck, soaking his clothes. But the two vacii that entered the room had not heard anything. They were talking to each other, and one of them had just begun to hiss what must have been the alien equivalent of a laugh. It was letting air out through its toothless mouth, puckering that obscene hole until the escaping air sounded like a leak in a steam pipe. Salsbury wondered, briefly, what a theater full of these clowns would sound like. Then he had no time for divergent thoughts. The laughing vacii stopped laughing abruptly, sucked air in when it saw Salsbury, grabbed the shoulder of the first vacii

Salsbury fired, caught the first alien in the side, kicking it backwards toward the door jamb. Before he could get a second clear shot to finish that one, the second vacii was gone into the hall, keening a sound that must have carried halfway around this world. There was no doubt it was calling for help.

No doubt it would get what it called for.

Even as he stood there listening to the ugly sound the thing made, Salsbury began to hear other voices shouting in the vacii tongue from points up and down the main hall.

He stepped over the body of the vacii with the weeping, fatal wound in its side and slid the door shut. He looked but could find no means of locking it. Had it had a knob, he could have stuffed a chair under that to keep the thing braced shut, but there was only the recessed handle for fingers to grasp.

With his back to the door, he surveyed the room just as a rat examines its cage in the first few minutes of its imprisonment. The walls were discouragingly featureless but for the crude unfinished nature of them. There were no doors into other rooms, no exits except that which he could not use. He had a sudden gory vision of the vacii pumping slugs through the door from the other side, into his back. He moved quickly away, behind the desk where he could at least make some sort of stand with a minimum of protection. As his eyes finished the scan of the chamber, they stopped on a small, black square set high in the wall, near the ceiling. His heart pounded like a twelve ton piston, and he stepped gingerly over the shattered vacii until he was standing direcdy beneath the hole. Cool air wafted out. A ventilation shaft.

The noise from the corridor grew louder. He could tell there was a group of vacii standing beyond the door, not prepared to open it and face his gun yet, but building up the courage and the fire power to take the chance any moment.

He brought the dead vacii's chair over to the wall, stood on it, bringing the ventilator hole even with his face. He stood on tip-toe, reached into the shaft and levered himself up until his feet were off the chair. He scrabbled with his knees and feet against the wall, tried to drag himself forward with his arms. But he needed something more for purchase. He felt around, stretched his hands and fingers until he found a rugged one-inch shelf in the plaster floor of the shaft. He hooked his fingers over that and pulled, managing to get into the opening to his chest; the ragged edge of the wall cut across his belly, making breathing painful. The way ahead was Stygian and smelled vaguely like the inside of a crypt. He tried to shut off his nose, wriggled forward, kicked with his feet on the edge of the outlet, and sprawled full length in the shaft

The passage was so narrow that he could not kneel to crawl, but could only stretch out flat and belly forward like an infantryman nervously making his way up an enemy-held beach, expecting a barrage of mortars at any time. Ten feet farther along, the light from the other room behind completely blocked by the bulk of his body, he heard the booming of a gun and the door shredding under the vicious cover of fragmenting slugs. They weren't going to enter that room until they were positive nothing could be alive in it. That was just as well, for that gave him more time to make his get-away. If he could. After all, there was no guarantee this shaft led anywhere. It might even narrow to a little pipe far too small for him to squeeze through. Then they could come in at their leisure. Or gas him and drag him out. There were all sorts of unpleasant possibilities,

It didn't narrow, though, and struck inward another fifty feet before ending where two other tunnels branched off, one to either side at ninety-degree angles off the main run. There was also a drop shaft from the floor here to the ceiling of the ventilation level below.

He looked to the left and right, his eyes conditioned somewhat to the darkness so that the tunnels were a dim gray gloom rather than impenetrable pitch. Either way looked equally appealing. Or, rather, equally unappealing. If he went left or right, he would still be on the eleventh floor when the building-wide search was initiated, as it surely would be. But if he went down, he could work closer and closer to the projection room and the portal that linked this probability with his own. True, the plan had developed hitches, but he was not as concerned with the mission now as with saving his own skin. Thank heavens iron Victor was no longer in a position to control him! He left two of the micro-bombs behind and went down the drop shaft, using his knees and hips and shoulders to brace against injury.

One floor after another, tearing skin off his fingers on the rough surface of the tunnel and shredding the knees of his jeans and the shoulders of his shirt, he went down, leaving a trail of bombs behind. It was not as good as distributing them evenly throughout the building, but it was the best he could manage under the circumstances. When he had counted off ten floors and knew he was downstairs, down where the projection room waited, he scrambled back along the main tunnel, looking for an outlet into an empty room.

He found three. Behind the first, in a small, dimly lit room, half a dozen vacii slept in hammock-like affairs slung at varying heights between the rough, alabaster walls. Getting through there would be like trying to plod through a field of porcupines without touching a quill. Sooner or later he would wake one of them, and they would pull the roof in on him. The second and third rooms were both working chambers and had two vacii each. Perhaps he could have aimed his weapon from his hiding hole and killed both of them before they could make a sound, but he did not. Killing vacii was not as physically disturbing as killing a human being; he would not have the traumas from murdering aliens as he had from murdering Harold Jacobi. Perhaps that was a mistaken philosophy, an outgrowth of xenophobia implanted in him by his makers. However, he felt that it was morally the same. He knew his future creators had not meant him to be a wanton killer, otherwise they would have made it easy for him to murder.

The fourth outlet was into a dark room. He looked out of the ventilation outlet, surveying the gray and brown and purple shadows until he was certain the place was empty. Then, moving as quietly as he could manage in his agitated state, he clambered from the shaft and dropped to the floor of the chamber. His feet made slapping sounds on the rock.

There was silence.

Now he had to try to decide how much the vacii knew. Did they realize where he had come from? Or did they think he was a trespassing human from this probability line? He could hope they had not yet realized the enormity of the situation, for if they hadn't there was yet a chance he could reach the projection room and get across to the basement where Lynda and the 810-40.04 waited.

But if they figured it out… Well, there would be a heavy detachment waiting inside the projection room, none too happy about what he had done to the vacii prober operator and the twenty robots lined up for the invasion of his probability line. None too happy at all

Cautiously, he opened the door and looked up and down the corridor. It was mysteriously empty. He located the projection room and debated making a run for it. There was something about the hallway, though, that made the calm, the emptiness seem artificial.

After five minutes of intense staring which made his eyeballs feel as if they had been marinated in lighter fluid, he shrugged his shoulders and walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind in the event he had to make a quick break for cover. He walked along the hall, keeping against the wall, his pellet gas pistol ready. As he passed the opening to the stairwell, he was aware of motion out of the corner of his eye. He turned. It was a vacii.

No. Not a vacii. Two of them.

The first was raising a pistol. Salsbury fired from the hip and caught the alien in the chest. It slammed back against the steps and went down with a terribly vacant gaze in its red eyes. Then something connected with Salsbury's hand and knocked his gun arm above his head. The gas pellet pistol clattered across the corridor, out of reach. The second vacii, who had kicked it from Salsbury's hand, was keening loudly for aid.

Salsbury swung a roundhouse right with every ounce of strength he had in his specially crafted body, caught the vacii on its skinny neck and sent it tumbling loosely onto its dead companion. It gagged, shook its head, and tried to stand, its bony left hand pawing desperately at a black holster for a pistol much like that the first alien had aimed at Salsbury seconds earlier.

Salsbury raised his foot, kicked the alien's hand away from its gun butt. He could hear the wrist bones crunching under the impact and felt somewhat ill. The vacii screamed, fell against the wall and slid to the floor, sobbing and making wet noises with its sucker mouth, holding the limp wrist as if it were a dead friend.

As he turned back to the projection room, Salsbury saw a second detail of vacii-which had obviously been stationed at the far end of the corridor, hidden in the en-tranceway to a room-coming at a dead run, leaning forward as if a gale were blowing in the hall, hands either full of lethal looking hardware or groping wildly at holsters to obtain them. While he watched, almost frozen to the spot, the lead lizard fired. A burst of tiny needles studded the plaster of the archway next to which he stood. Something wet and yellow dripped from them.

Poison?

But that seemed a stupidly primitive weapon for such an advanced species. While he was searching for something to do, to get him out of the present mess, something struck a glancing, ringing blow against the back of his skull.

He weaved, almost went down, but fought against the sudden blackness. He turned to find the vacii whose wrist he had broken. While his attention had been diverted toward the oncoming guards, the alien had unholstered its weapon, had stood up despite the smashed wrist, had used the gun as a club in its good hand. Why it had not merely shot him, Salsbury could not guess. Perhaps the alien was still dazed by its wound. Now, as Salsbury watched, it thought of that and tried to change the gun around to a firing position. Salsbury hated to have to do something like this to such a spunky character, but he kicked out, snapping his shoe into the creature's good wrist. The gun flew, cracked against the wall, came apart in three pieces.

Salsbury leaped over him and started up the stairs in hopes he could find another room unused on the second floor and get back into the less dangerous grounds of the ventilation shafts.

When he reached the first landing and started up the second flight toward the floor above, he collided with another guard detail coming down. The vacii in the lead rounded the landing, looked surprised to see its quarry coming up, lurched and shouted something to those behind him. Salsbury reached forward, lifted the withered thing by the black, silver-studded harness it wore, and pitched it backwards, over his head, down the stairs he had just climbed.

The second vacii in the group fired its pistol.

Salsbury heard needles rain against the plaster behind him.

Then he had this creature by the harness too, lifted, turned, and threw it downward.

There was a group rising from below. The falling vacii struck their leader, knocked him down. Salsbury looked back to those above him, saw two more vacii prepared to shoot. He rushed forward, coming under their barrels, and tackled them, an arm around each pair of skinny legs. They went down like new-planted saplings in a hurricane.

The group below was recovering.

The vacii on Salsbury's right bounced its skull on the floor, moaned and was still. The other one, however, was going to be trouble. It got a leg between itself and Salsbury, kicked out and caught the man on the chin. Salsbury saw stars, rainbows, and pretty multicolored snow-flakes, then cleared his head with a monumental effort. He swung a fist, felt it jar against the sucker mouth, knew he was in the clear.

He clambered up the steps on his hands and knees, trying to gain his feet. On the next landing, he stood, looked backwards, and was just in time to see a spray of needles spinning lazily toward him.

They bit into his side, arm, and leg.

He turned, wheezing, and started up the steps again.

But someone above was pouring a thick brown fluid (maple syrup?) down onto him. He could hardly move his legs in the stuff. He could hardly breathe. Or think

The brown syrup grew darker… and darker still.

Then it was black, speckled with thousands of stars of blue and white. Someone reached up and flicked off the switch. The stars faded like pinpoints of light on a thousand television screens, were gone. He let the nothingness envelop him.