The Rituals of Infinity Read online

  'That's nonsense,' said Faustaff, finishing his drink. 'All the experiments tried in that direction have proved disastrous. Remember the experiments at Malmo in '91 on E-l? Remember the scandal?'

  'I would not remember, of course,' Orelli pointed out, 'since I am not a native of E-1. But I read about it. However, this seems to be suspended animation. They live, and yet they are dead. All our attempts to wake them have been useless. I was hoping that you, professor, might help.'

  'How can I help?'

  'Perhaps you will know when you have inspected the pair.'

  As they talked, Steifflomeis had bent down and was examining one of the prone D-squaders. The man was of medium height and seemed, through his black overalls, to be a good physical specimen. The thing that was remarkable was that the two prone figures strongly resembled one another, both in features and in size. They had close-cropped, light brown hair, square faces and pale skins that were unblemished but had an unhealthy texture, particularly about the upper face.

  Steifflomeis pushed back the man's eyelid and Faustaff had an unpleasant shock as a glazed blue eye appeared to stare straight at him. It seemed for a second that the man was actually awake, but unable to move. Steifflomeis let the eyelid close again.

  He stood up, folding his arms across his chest.

  'Remarkable,' he said. 'What do you intend to do with them, Cardinal Orelli?'

  'I am undecided. My interest is at present scientific—I wish to learn more about them. They are the first D-squaders we have ever managed to capture, eh, professor?'

  Faustaff nodded. He felt strongly that the D-squaders should have fallen into any hands other than Orelli's. He did not dare consider the uses which Orelli's twisted mind could think of for the disrupter alone. With it he would be able to blackmail whole worlds. Faustaff resolved to destroy the disrupter as soon as he received a reasonable opportunity.

  Orelli took his empty glass from his hand and returned to the metal chest, pouring fresh drinks. Faustaff accepted the second glass of wine automatically, although he had not eaten for a long time. Normally he could hold a lot of liquor, but already the wine had gone slightly to his head.

  'I think we should return to my headquarters on E-4,' Orelli said. 'There are better facilities for the necessary research. I hope you will accept my invitation, professor, and help me in this matter.'

  'I assume you will kill me if I refuse,' Faustaff replied tiredly.

  'I would certainly not take it kindly,' smiled Orelli, sharklike.

  Faustaff said nothing to this. He decided that it was in his interest to return to E-4 with Orelli since once there he would stand a much better chance of contacting his organisation once he had escaped.

  'And what brought you to this barren world, Mr. Steifflomeis?' Orelli asked, with apparent heartiness.

  'I had word that Professor Faustaff was here. I wanted to talk to him.'

  'To talk? It appeared to me that you and the professor were engaged in some sort of scuffle as I came on the scene. You are friends? I should have thought not.'

  'The argument was "temporarily settled by your appear-

  ance, cardinal,' said Steifflomeis, his eyes matching Orelli's for cynical guile. 'We were discussing certain philosophical matters.'

  'Philosophy? Of what kind? I myself have an interest in metaphysics. Not surprising, I suppose, considering my old calling.'

  'Oh, we talked of the relative merits of living or dying,' Steifflomeis said lightly.

  'Interesting. I did not know you were philosophically inclined, Professor Faustaff,' Orelli murmured to the professor. Faustaff shrugged and moved closer to the prone D-squaders until his back was to Steifflomeis and Orelli.

  He bent and touched the face of one of the D-squaders. It was faintly warm, like plastic at room-temperature. It didn't feel like a human skin at all.

  He had become bored with Orelli's and Steifflomeis's silly duelling. They evidently enjoyed it sufficiently to carry on with it for some time until Orelli theatrically interrupted Steifflomeis in the middle of a statement and apologised that time was running short and he must make preparations for a tunnel to be made through subspace to his headquarters on E-4. As he left the tent a guard entered, covering the two men with his gun. Steifflomeis darted Faustaff a sardonic look but Faustaff didn't feel like taking Orelli's place in the game. Although the guard would not let him approach too closely to the disrupter he contented himself with studying it from where he was until Orelli returned to say that a tunnel was ready.

  8

  The D-squaders

  Even more tired and very hungry, Faustaff stepped through the tunnel to find himself in what appeared to be the vault of a church, judging by the Gothic style of the stonework. The stone looked old but freshly cleaned. The air was cold and a trifle damp. Various stacks of the salvagers' field equipment lay around and the room was lighted by a malfunctioning neon tube. Orelli and Steifflomeis had already arrived and were murmuring to one another. They stopped as Faustaff came up.

  The D-squaders and the disrupter arrived soon after Faustaff, the prone D-squaders carried by Orelli's men. Orelli went ahead of them, opening a door at the far end of the vault and leading the way up worn, stone stairs into the magnificent interior of a large church, alive with sunshine pouring through stained glass. The only obvious change in the interior was the absence of pews. This gave the whole church an impression of being even larger than it was. It was a place that Faustaff could see easily compared to the finest Gothic cathedrals of Britain or France, an inspiring tribute to the creativeness of mankind. The church furniture remained, with a central altar and pulpit, an organ, and small chapels to left and right, indicating that the church had

  probably been Catholic. The wine was still affecting Faustaff slightly and he let his eyes travel up the columns, carved with fourteenth-century saints, animals and plants, until he was looking directly up at the high, vaulted roof, crossed by a series of intricate stone cobwebs, just visible in the cool gloom.

  When he looked down again he saw Steifflomeis staring at him, a light smile on his lips.

  Drunk with the beauty of the church Faustaff waved his hand around at it. 'These are the works of those you would have destroyed, Steifflomeis,' he said, somewhat grandiosely.

  Steifflomeis shrugged. 'I have seen finer work elsewhere. This is pitifully limited architecture by my standards, professor—clumsy. Wood, stone, steel or glass, it doesn't matter what materials you use, it is always clumsy.'

  'This doesn't inspire you, then?' Faustaff asked rather incredulously.

  Steifflomeis laughed. 'No. You are naive, professor.'

  Unable to describe the emotions which the church raised in him, Faustaff felt at a loss, wondering to what heights of feeling the architecture with which Steifflomeis was familiar would raise him if he ever had the chance to experience it.

  'Where is this architecture of yours?' he asked.

  'In no place that you are familiar with, professor,' Steifflomeis continued to be evasive and Faustaff once again wondered if he could have any connection with the D-squads.

  Orelli had been supervising his men. Now he approached them. 'What do you think of my headquarters?

  'Very impressive,' said Faustaff for want of something better to say. 'Is there more?'

  'A monastery is attached to the cathedral. Those who live there follow somewhat different disciplines to those followed by the earlier occupants. Shall we go there now? I have a laboratory being prepared.'

  i should like to eat before I do anything,' Faustaff said. 'I hope your cuisine is as excellent as your surroundings.'

  'If anything it is better,' said Orelli. 'Of course we shall eat first.'

  Later the three of them sat in a large room that had once been the abbot's private study. The alcoves were still lined with books, primarily religious works of various kinds; there were reproductions framed on the walls. Most of them showed various versions of The Temptation of St Anthony— Bosch, Brueghel, Grunewal
d, Schongauer, Huys, Ernst and Dali were represented, as well as some others whom Faustaff did not recognise.

  The food was almost as good as Orelli had boasted and the wine was excellent, from the monastery's cellar. Faustaff pointed at the reproductions. 'Your taste, Orelli, or your predecessor's?'

  'His and mine, professor. That is why I left them there. His interest was perhaps a little more obsessive than mine. He went mad in the end, I hear. Some thought it possession, others ...' he smiled his cruel smile and raised his glass somewhat mockingly to the Bosch—'delirium tremens.'

  'And what caused the monastery to become deserted— why isn't the cathedral used now?' Faustaff asked.

  'Perhaps it will be obvious if I tell you our geographical location on E-4, professor. We are in the area once occupied by North Western Europe. More precisely we are near where the town of Le Havre once stood, although there is no sign of the town and none of the sea, either, for that matter. Do you remember the U.M.S. that you managed to control in this area, professor?'

  Faustaff was puzzled. He had not yet seen outside the monastery walls and where, logically, windows should look beyond the cathedral or the monastery, they were heavily curtained. He had assumed he was in some rural town. Now he got up and went to the window, pulling back the heavy

  velvet curtain. It was dark, but the gleam of ice was unmistakable. Beneath the moon, and stretching to the horizon, was a vast plain of ice. Faustaff knew that it extended through Scandinavia, parts of Russia, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and parts of Austria and Hungary, covering, in the other direction, half of Britain as far as Hull.

  'But there is ice for hundreds of miles about,' he said, turning back to where Orelli sat, sipping his wine and smiling still. 'How on earth can this place have got here?'

  'It was here already. It has been my headquarters since I discovered it three years ago. Somehow it escaped the U.M.S. and survived. The monks fled before the U.M.S. developed into anything really spectacular. I found it later.'

  'But I've never heard of anything quite like this,' Faustaff said. 'A cathedral and a monastery in the middle of a waste of ice. How did it survive?'

  Orelli raised his eyes to the ceiling and smirked. 'Divine influence, perhaps?'

  'A freak, I suppose,' Faustaff said sitting down again. 'I've seen similar things—but nothing so spectacular.'

  'It took my fancy,' Orelli said. 'It is remote, roomy and, since I installed some* heating, quite comfortable. It suits me.'

  Next morning, in Orelli's makeshift laboratory, Faustaff looked at the two now naked D-squaders lying on a bench in front of him. He had decided that either Orelli was playing with him, or else Orelli believed his knowledge to extend to biology. There was very little he could do except what he was doing now, having electroencephalographic tests made on the subjects. It was not expedient to disabuse Orelli altogether, for he was well aware that, if there was no likelihood of his coming up with something, Orelli would probably kill him.

  The skins still had the quality of slightly warm plastic. There was no apparent breathing, the limbs were limp and the eyes glazed. When the assistants had placed the

  electrodes on the heads of the two subjects he went over to the electroencephalograph and studied the charts that began to rustle from the machine. They indicated only a single wave—a constant wave, as if the brain were alive but totally dormant. The test only proved what was already obvious.

  Faustaff took a hypodermic and injected a stimulant into the first D-squader. Into the second he injected a depressant.

  The electroencephalographic charts were exactly the same as the previous ones.

  Faustaff was forced to agree with Orelli's suggestion that the men were in a total state of suspended animation.

  The assistants Orelli had assigned to him were expressionless men with as little apparent character as the subjects they were studying. He turned to one of them and asked him to set up the X-ray machine.

  The machine was wheeled forward and took a series of X-ray plates of both men. The assistant handed the plates to Faustaff.

  A couple of quick glances at the plates were sufficient to show that, though the men on the table seemed to be ordinary human beings, they were not. Their organs were simplified, as was their bone structure.

  Faustaff put the plates beside the D-squaders and sat down. The implications of the discovery swam through his mind but he felt unable to concentrate on any one of them. These creatures could have come from outer space, they could be a race produced on one of the parallel earths.

  Faustaff clung to this last thought. The D-squaders did not function according to any of the normal laws applied to animals. Perhaps they were artificial; robots of some kind. Yet the science needed to create such robots would be far more advanced than Earth One's.

  Who had created them? Where did they come from? The extra data had only succeeded in making everything more confusing than it had been.

  Faustaff lit a cigarette and made himself relax, wondering

  whether to mention any of this to Orelli. He would discover the truth for himself soon enough anyway.

  He got up and asked for surgical instruments. With the aid of the X-ray plates he would be able to carry out some simple surgery on the D-squaders without endangering them. He cut through to the wrist of one of them. No blood flowed from the cut. He took a bone sample and a sample of the flesh and the skin. He tried to reseal the incision with the normal agents, but they refused to take. Finally he had to cover the incisions with ordinary tape.

  He took his samples to a microscope, hoping he had enough basic biology to be able to recognise any differences they might have to normal skin, bone and flesh.

  The microscope revealed some very essential differences which didn't require any specialised knowledge for him to recognise. The normal cell structure was apparently totally absent. The bone seemed composed of a metal alloy and the flesh of a dead, cellular material that resembled foam plastic, although the cells were much more numerous than on any plastic he was used to.

  The only conclusion he could draw from this evidence was that the D-squaders were not living creatures in the true sense and that they were, in fact, robots—artificially created men.

  The appearance of the materials that had gone into their construction was not familiar to Faustaff. The alloy and the plastic again indicated a superior technology to his own.

  He began to feel perturbed for it was certain that the creatures had not been manufactured on any Earth that he knew. Yet they were capable of travelling through subspace and had obviously been designed for the sole purpose of manipulating the disrupters. That indicated the only strong possibility—that the D-squaders were the creation of some race operating outside subspace and probably from a base in normal space, beyond the solar system. The attack, then, probably did not come from a human source, as Faustaff

  had always believed. This was the reason for his uneasiness. Would it be possible to think out the motives of an unhuman race? It was unlikely. And without an indication of why they were trying to destroy the worlds of subspace, it seemed impossible to invent ways of stopping them for any real length of time.

  He came to a decision then. He must destroy the disrupter, at least. It lay in one corner of the laboratory, ready for investigation.

  To destroy it would at least stop Orelli using it, or threatening to use it in some attempt at blackmail. That would get rid of one of the factors bothering him.

  He walked towards it.

  At that moment he felt a tingling sensation on his wrist and the room seemed to fade. He felt sick and his head began to ache. He found it impossible to draw air into his lungs. He recognised the sensations.

  He was being invoked.

  9

  E-Zero

  Doctor May looked relieved. He stood wiping his glasses in the bare concrete room which Faustaff recognised as being in Earth One's headquarters at Haifa.

  Faustaff waited for his head to clear before advancin
g towards May.

  'We never thought we'd get you back,' said May. 'We've been trying for the last day, ever since you disappeared in the break-up of E-15. I heard our adjustor was destroyed.'

  'I'm sorry,' said Faustaff.

  May shrugged and replaced his glasses. His pudgy face looked unusually haggard. 'That's nothing compared to what's going on. I've got some news for you.'

  'And I for you.' Faustaff reflected that May's invocation had come at exactly the wrong time. But it was no use mentioning it. At least he was back at his own base and could perhaps conceive a plan that would permanently put Orelli out of action.

  May walked towards the door. Technicians were disconnecting the big invoker which had been used to pull Faustaff through subspace once they had picked up the signal from the invocation disc on his wrist.

  Faustaff followed May out into the corridor and May led

  the way to the lift. On the fourth floor of the building they came to May's office.

  Several other men were waiting there. Faustaff recognised some of them as heads of Central Headquarters departments and others he knew as communications specialists.

  'Have you something to tell us before we begin?' May said, picking up a phone after introductions and greetings. He ordered coffee and replaced the phone.

  'It won't take me long to fill you in,' Faustaff said. He settled himself into a chair. He told them of Steifflomeis's attempt to kill him and how it was plain that Steifflomeis knew much more about the worlds of subspace than he had admitted, that he had referred to his 'powerful principals' and indicated that the Faustaff organisation couldn't stand a big attack—and neither could the worlds of subspace. He then went on to describe Orelli's 'specimens' and what he had discovered about them.

  The reaction to this wasn't as startled as he had expected. May simply nodded, his lips set tightly.

  'This fits in with our discovery, professor,' he said. 'We have just contacted a new alternate Earth. Or I should say part of one. It is at this moment being formed.'