They were suspended in frozen animation billions of years ago. Now the Searcher was looking for them, scattered across the universe. Would he find them before those set on destruction could?
Release date:
November 27, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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HE didn’t know whether he had been there days or hours or weeks. He couldn’t remember a time when there hadn’t been stabbing, searing pain of some kind … when there hadn’t been flashing lights or screeching, roaring, explosive noises … when there hadn’t been a voice, a grim, sharp, metallic, repetitive voice, rasping on and on and on at him. Kefler’s voice saying: “Talk. Tell us. Talk. Tell us,” until he had got to the point where he thought they were the only words in the language. Kefler was saying it right now, saying it loud and clear, in that hideous repetitive voice of his.
“You’d better tell us, Decca. We’re getting tired of waiting. We’ve been very patient. But you’ll have to go soon. You’ll have to die, Decca. You don’t want to die, do you? You want to tell us. You know you want to tell us.”
There wasn’t a lot of strength—physical strength—left in Decca. He’d been taxed a thousand times beyond the limits of endurance, then a thousand times beyond that, it seemed. A lot of men would have been dead. Somehow Decca wasn’t; he was that sort of man. He’d called on a last reserve from somewhere, switched on an emergency tank of endurance, and kept going.
“Go to hell,” he said through thick bruised lips. Kefler smiled.
“I shall eventually, no doubt, and hell will be a richer and more joyful place for my being there. But just at this moment I want some information, Decca, and I’m going to tear it out of you one way or another—if it takes me a thousand years.”
“It’ll take longer than that.” Decca’s bruised lips parted again.
“Get to work on him, boys,” said Kefler, and walked out. The underground chamber seemed less dark, less sinister when he had gone.
They were through at last.
Even the men in Kefler’s pay got tired of beating a man who was more like steel and concrete than flesh and blood. They got tired of injecting a man who didn’t react to their truth drugs. They got tired of shocking a man who had already received enough electric shocks to send ten murderers to the lime pit.
Decca kept on sticking it out. He was more unconscious than anything when they did leave him. In the quiet dark he tried to recollect his thoughts, tried to remember where he was, what he was doing there, and what it was all about. He began with the simple fact of his name. Decca—Mel Decca. Whatever else they had tried to pump into his mind, he had held onto that fact. He knew who he was. They were brain-washing experts right enough. But there were some things that they couldn’t wash clear; there were some things that they couldn’t twist and destroy. His name was one of those things. His name and some kind of voiceless, faceless faith; a faith in something bigger than himself and a sense of what he had to do. He was Mel Decca and he was the Searcher. He had always known that. Unfortunately, Kefler knew it as well. And Kefler wanted to get there first. But for a different reason. Decca had to find them … had to find the Sleepers. And he had to find them fast. That was all, he thought as he lay there helpless beneath the straps and chains with which they had secured him.
That was the biggest laugh of all.
He wondered if it was any good to transmit the signal, whether it was worth trying. One of them might be dreaming of him just then. It seemed strange to think that the Sleepers dreamed. But he knew that they did. And he knew that occasionally when they dreamed they could project their astral bodies for a certain distance. But the time and the distance were sadly limited. That was the snag. That was the pity of it all. He couldn’t see any other way out of the present situation, though. He didn’t like doing it. He was afraid to do it, in case something should go wrong with the process that kept the Sleepers safe. The other odd thing was, of course, that the Sleepers couldn’t tell him where they were. That astral journey didn’t help. One moment they were asleep and the next, if he sent out the call, they were awake beside him, to vanish again in a few seconds. Perhaps they were more like dreams than real people. Yet something deep down inside him told him they were real. This was crazy! This was getting him nowhere, and fast. Still, tough as he was, even he couldn’t stand much more of Kefler’s treatment. It would have killed nine men out of ten already. Kefler had promised him no relief but death, as it was … Kefler would have to be shown a lesson. Darn Kefler, blast Kefler! Darn his glittering eyes and his smug laugh and the power that he had temporarily gained. Temporary? Was it temporary? Decca was wondering, desperately wondering…. He had turned the tables on Lew Kefler before; he didn’t know whether he could do it this time.
Had they shaken his mind too much for him to send out the call? That was a possibility which he had to consider. It was more than a possibility; it was highly probable! What were those infernal drugs that they had been pumping into him?
The big man closed his eyes. It didn’t hurt so much when his eyes were closed. The stabbing pain didn’t come and light up the raw, tender back of his brain.
He closed his eyes and clenched his great strong hands into fists. That hurt, because his hands were bruised and cut. He drew a deep breath, and that hurt, too, because his ribs were in the same state as his hands.
Finally a picture, dim and faint and unfamiliar at first, began to crystallize in his mind. A tiny picture, but nonetheless a picture of hope. A picture of a woman, a beautiful woman, a magnificent woman, a luscious, full-figured brunette with the kind of dangerous curves that would send any man off the rails. But right now Decca wasn’t thinking about her as a woman; he was thinking about her as a Sleeper. He had managed to wake her; that mental image had gone out…. He had been desperate enough. The situation had been urgent enough. It was one of those once-in-a-lifetime episodes, and it had done the trick. The tiny picture in his mind began to grow, like a tiny cloud no bigger than a human hand that the prophet had seen after the three-year drought, in the days of Ahab the King, in far-distant Israel. He kept on concentrating on the tiny picture, and the more he concentrated the larger it grew, like an image projected onto a cinematographic screen. Then it wasn’t just a picture. There was a voice with it, a beautiful voice, deep and husky. Exciting, fascinating, flowing through his consciousness, it overrode the pain and the bewilderment that was Lew Kefler’s doing.
“I’m coming, Mel, I’m coming. It’s Delia.”
“Delia!” The bruised lips parted; he whispered her name. A thrill of anticipation replaced the pain and the fear and the dead apathy that were trying to overtake his mind.
The picture grew bigger and bigger in his mind, in his subconscious, in his experience, in his—whatever it was that was producing the picture, that was drawing her to him—a lovely girl in a delectable skin-tight costume that revealed rather than concealed every contour of her perfectly molded figure.
Those long dark tresses cascaded over ivory shoulders.
“Delia!” he whispered her name again. “Delia.” And then, like some three-dimensional trick photography, the picture of the girl seemed to burst out of the mental frame in which he had held it, and drew near. It was no longer a picture at all. He felt the touch of a dainty feminine hand on his arm, a hand that was moving toward the buckles of the strap….
THE image of the girl began to fade almost in the moment that she had arrived. There was the touch of a hand on his arm; there was the feel of straps being undone and chains being unlocked. He could feel something else too. From the dormant guard beside the door of Kefler’s underground chamber, Delia had adroitly removed the hand blaster. It was a powerful weapon and threw energy charges sufficiently powerful to knock a hole in a concrete wall. Several holes, in fact. She handed the gun to Decca. Even after the straps had gone, he lay very still for a moment watching as she faded. Was it in his mind that she faded, or in his vision?
He could never be sure which. There was a long, soft, sighing whisper … “Au revoir, Decca, au revoir … we shall meet again … pray the gods it may be soon.” Then Delia was gone. Had it all been a dream? Was it just a figment of his own overwrought imagination? On the rare occasions when the sleepers had visited him before, he had wondered whether it was a dream. Yet there had always been some evidence to show that their visit had been more than purely subjective experience. This had been more than a dream….
As he looked round, he saw the straps hanging. . .
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