Getting up, he wiped his hands on his slacks, and he walked down to the pressure hatch.
When he stepped on the metal grid in front of the hatch, the computer screen lit up, a restful shade of blue. Stark white letters began to move across the face of the unit.
cycle for admittance.
He hesitated for a moment, then realized that he had no choice. This was the quickest way to learn the truth. He grasped the steel lock wheel in the center of the door and turned it.
WAIT FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT OF
COMPUTER DATA LINKAGES.
WAIT FOR VERIFICATION OF
VIEW CHAMBER'S SANCTITY.
He wasn't exactly sure what that meant, but he did as he was told. In two minutes the hatch sighed and popped loose of its heavy rubber seal. A green light winked on overhead, and the display screen confirmed the light:
LIGHT BURNING.
PROCEED SAFELY ON GREEN.
He swung open the door and stepped into the room beyond. It was perhaps forty feet long and thirty wide, completely unfurnished. The walls were plated with steel, as was the ceiling; it looked like a room in which treasure was stored — or from which one might defend a treasure. It was illuminated by a curious gray screen in the far wall, and it was the dreariest place he had seen yet, worse in its way than the storm drains. But when he saw that the fuzzy gray screen was actually a giant window at least six-foot-square, he was elated. He walked towards it, hesitantly, much as a religious man would approach the altar of his god.
I've been here, he thought. Many times.
His footsteps echoed on the metal floor.
It's a bad place, he thought, suddenly.
When he reached the glass he found that it was extremely thick, perhaps a foot deep. Beyond it, shifting mists the color of rotten meat formed hideous cloud-images: insubstantial dragons, towers that broke apart as if shaken by earthquakes, piles of corpses, slavering things … Of course, there was no intent behind the smoke, no plan or program. The images were what he made of them; and because past association with this place had evidently left him full of terror, the images had the quality of nightmare for him. The mist eddied, roiled, formed and re-formed itself, pressed against the glass. It was, he sensed, more an oily smoke than water vapor.
Panic rose in him.
He told himself to take it easy. This was the answer. This was the first thing he had to learn before he could figure Galing and his crew. This was where it had all started.
His stomach tightened. A pressure built behind his eyes, and he was breathing raggedly.
Easy now…
He took the last two steps to the window and pressed his forehead to the cool glass, squinting to see through the dense, shifting smog.
He knew there was more out there than smoke. He was sure that he had seen the — other thing, whatever it was, but he could not recall the nature of it.
Then the smoke parted.
He closed his eyes. “No,” he said. When he opened them again, the smoke was still drawn back.
It's just another illusion, he thought.
But he knew it was not. He choked and staggered backwards as if he'd been struck.
How could he have forgotten this? No man could ever forget that inhuman, maniacal spectacle. He was unable to look away; he was mesmerized by horror.
Finally, as if the evil had filled him up and overflowed from him, he swam forward into darkness, finding peace for at least a few brief minutes.
XIII
When he woke, Allison was sitting in a rocking chair beside the bed. She was wearing tight red slacks, a pearl gray blouse, and a red choker at her neck. Her black hair fell over her shoulders and curled around the undersides of her heavy breasts. She was prettier than he remembered. She smiled and leaned toward him, and she said, “How do you feel?”
He tried to speak, but his mouth was dry. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
“Water?” she asked.
He nodded.
She went to the dresser and filled a crystal glass from a silver carafe. When she brought it to him, she held his head up while he swallowed. He finished the entire glass. “Well,” she asked again, “how do you feel?”
He looked around and saw that he was in the guest bedroom of Henry Galing's house where he had first met Allison after waking with amnesia. “As if I'm going mad,” he said.
Sitting on the bed, she leaned down and kissed him once, chastely. “Darling, it's all over now!”
“It is?” He didn't believe her.
“You're out of it!” she said. “You've come back.”
“Out of what? Back from where?” Joel asked warily.
Instead of answering him, she went to the bedroom door and stepped into the upstairs hall. “Uncle Henry! Come quick! He's awake, and he knows where he is!” Then she returned to the bed, smiling.
He didn't smile back at her.
Henry Galing entered the room a moment later. He looked the same as before: tall, broad-shouldered, authoritarian, with that mane of white hair. At least their physical appearances were not mutable. Otherwise, though, Henry Galing had changed: he was downright pleasant. He hurried over and stood by Joel's bed and grabbed his shoulder and beamed down at him. “My God, we've been so worried about you! We didn't know if you'd ever come out of it!”
“You didn't?”
Galing squeezed his shoulder affectionately. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Dr. Harttle's on his way up,” Galing said.
“With dust in his hair?”
Allison and Galing exchanged a quick look of concern. “What do you mean?” Galing asked.
Joel sighed. “Nothing.”
“Dust?”
“Nothing, Henry.”
To Allison, Gating said: “He's lost that terrible yellow color — and his eyes aren't bloodshot anymore.”
“I can't remember what I'm doing here,” Joel said. “What's going on?” He had decided against leveling charges and demanding explanations, apologies… He didn't know if this were another act or whether it was reality, at last.
“You don't know where you are?” Galing asked.
“No,” Joel said. “Well… This is your house. Somewhere in New England. Allison's my wife. But beyond that…”
“Amnesia?” Galing asked.
“I guess so.”
“That's a side-effect we hadn't foreseen.” The old man looked frightened, as if he wondered what else they hadn't foreseen.
“Side-effect?” Joel asked. He felt like the straight man in an old-time comedy act — although this scene seemed more real than those which had preceded it. He could smell pork roasting in the downstairs kitchen. A telephone sounded in another part of the house and was answered on the fourth ring. The wind sighed against the bedroom window, and outside a bird called, strident but cheerful.
“Do you remember sybocylacose-46?” Galing asked.
“That horrible stuff,” Allison said, shivering, taking Joel's right hand.
“It doesn't sound familiar,” Joel said.
“We dubbed it Sy,” Galing said by way of prodding his memory.
“It's a blank,” Joel said.
Allison patted Joel's hand. The expression on her usually animated face was so sober that she might have been in shock. “It's a drug,” she said. “A particularly nasty drug.”
“Tell me more.” He sat up now, surprised that he should feel as clear-headed and healthy as he did. When he had awakened from all of the other illusions, he'd been dizzy and exhausted.
“A very special drug,” Henry Galing said. “Originally it was intended for use as an inhibitor of cardiac arrhythmias and to stimulate the myocardium to increase contractility. But it simply didn't develop as we intended it to. The chemists could make a batch of it in third-stage complexity and watch it mutate into something else again. Inside of twenty minutes, it was an entirely new compound, quite different than what they'd made.”