American Science Fiction Five Classic Novels 1956-58 (49 page)

Touch was taste to him . . . the feel of wood was acrid and chalky in his mouth, metal was salt, stone tasted sour-sweet to the touch of his fingers, and the feel of glass cloyed his palate like over-rich pastry.

Smell was touch . . . Hot stone smelled like velvet caressing his cheek. Smoke and ash were harsh tweeds rasping his skin, almost the feel of wet canvas. Molten metal smelled like blow hammering his heart, and the ionization of the PyrE explosion filled the air with ozone that smelled like water trickling through his fingers.

He was not blind, not deaf, not senseless. Sensation came to him, but filtered through a nervous system twisted and shortcircuited by the shock of the PyrE concussion. He was suffering from Synaesthesia, that rare condition in which perception receives messages from the objective world and relays these messages to the brain, but there in the brain the sensory perceptions are confused with one another. So, in Foyle, sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain sensations, touch became taste, and smell became touch. He was not only trapped within the labyrinth of the inferno under Old St. Pat’s; he was trapped in the kaleidoscope of his own cross-senses.

Again desperate, on the ghastly verge of extinction, he abandoned all disciplines and habits of living; or, perhaps, they were stripped from him. He reverted from a conditioned product of environment and experience to an inchoate creature craving escape and survival and exercising every power it possessed. And again the miracle of two years ago took place. The undivided energy of an entire human organism, of every cell, fiber, nerve, and muscle empowered that craving, and again Foyle space-jaunted.

He went hurtling along the geodesical space lines of the curving universe at the speed of thought, far exceeding that of light. His spatial velocity was so frightful that his time axis was twisted from the vertical line drawn from the Past through Now to the Future. He went flickering along the new nearhorizontal axis, this new space-time geodesic, driven by the miracle of a human mind no longer inhibited by concepts of the impossible.

Again he achieved what Helmut Grant and Enzio Dandridge and scores of other experimenters had failed to do, because his blind panic forced him to abandon the spatio-temporal inhibitions that had defeated previous attempts. He did not jaunte to Elsewhere, but to Elsewhen. But most important, the fourth dimensional awareness, the complete picture of the Arrow of Time and his position on it which is born in every man but deeply submerged by the trivia of living, was in Foyle close to the surface. He jaunted along the space-time geodesics to Elsewheres and Elsewhens, translating “i,” the square root of minus one, from an imaginary number into reality by a magnificent act of imagination.

He jaunted.

He jaunted back through time to his past. He became the Burning Man who had inspired himself with terror and perplexity on the beach in Australia, in a quack’s office in Shanghai, on the Spanish Stairs in Rome, on the Moon, in the Skoptsy Colony on Mars. He jaunted back through time, revisiting the savage battles that he himself had fought in Gully Foyle’s tiger hunt for vengeance. His flaming appearances were sometimes noted; other times not.

He jaunted.

He was aboard “Nomad,” drifting in the empty frost of space.

He stood in the door to nowhere.

The cold was the taste of lemons and the vacuum was a rake of talons on his skin. The sun and the stars were a shaking ague that racked his bones.

“GLOMMHA FREDNIS!” motion roared in his ears.

It was a figure with its back to him vanishing down the corridor; a figure with a copper cauldron of provisions over its shoulder; a figure darting, floating, squirming through free fall. It was Gully Foyle.

“MEEHAT JESSROT,” the sight of his motion bellowed.

“Aha! Oh-ho! M’git not to kak,” the flicker of light and shade answered.

“Oooooooh? Soooooo?” the whirling raffle of debris in his wake murmured.

The lemon taste in his mouth became unbearable. The rake of talons on his skin was torture.

He jaunted.

He reappeared in the furnace beneath Old St. Pat’s less than a second after he had disappeared from there. He was drawn, as the seabird is drawn, again and again to the flames from which it is struggling to escape. He endured the roaring torture for only another moment.

He jaunted.

He was in the depths of Gouffre Martel.

The velvet black darkness was bliss, paradise, euphoria.

“Ah!” he cried in relief.

“AH!” came the echo of his voice, and the sound was translated into a blinding pattern of light.

A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA H
A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA H HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA A HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA H HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA

The Burning Man winced. “Stop!” he called, blinded by the noise. Again came the dazzling pattern of the echo:

StOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpStOp StOpStOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpStOpSt OpStOpStOpStOp OpStOpStOpSt

A distant clatter of steps came to his eyes in soft patterns of vertical borealis streamers:

c c c c c c

l l l l l l 

a a a a a a 

t t t t t t 

t t t t t t 

e e e e e e 

r r r r r r

It was the search party from the Gouffre Martel hospital, tracking Foyle and Jisbella McQueen by geophone. The Burning Man disappeared, but not before he had unwittingly decoyed the searchers from the trail of the vanished fugitives.

He was back under Old St. Pat’s, reappearing only an instant after his last disappearance. His wild beatings into the unknown sent him stumbling up geodesic space-time lines that inevitably brought him back to the Now he was trying to escape, for in the inverted saddle curve of space-time, his Now was the deepest depression in the curve.

He could drive himself up, up, up the geodesic lines into the past or future, but inevitably he must fall back into his own Now, like a thrown ball hurled up the sloping walls of an infinite pit, to land, hang poised for a moment, and then roll back into the depths.

But still he beat into the unknown in his desperation. Again he jaunted.

He was on Jervis beach on the Australian coast.

The motion of the surf was bawling: “LOGGERMIST CROTEHAVEN!”

The churning of the surf blinded him with the lights of batteries of footlights:

Gully Foyle and Robin Wednesbury stood before him. The body of a man lay on the sand which felt like vinegar in the Burning Man’s mouth. The wind brushing his face tasted like brown paper.

Foyle opened his mouth and exclaimed. The sound came out in burning star-bubbles.

Foyle took a step. “GRASH?” the motion blared.

The Burning Man jaunted.

He was in the office of Dr. Sergei Orel in Shanghai.

Foyle was again before him, speaking in light patterns:

He flickered back to the agony of Old St. Pat’s and jaunted again.

The Burning Man jaunted.

It was cold again, with the taste of lemons, and vacuum raked his skin with unspeakable talons. He was peering through the porthole of a silvery yawl. The jagged mountains of the Moon towered in the background. Through the porthole he could see the jangling racket of blood pumps and oxygen pumps and hear the uproar of the motion Gully Foyle made toward him. The clawing of the vacuum caught his throat in an agonizing grip.

The geodesic lines of space-time rolled him back to Now under Old St. Pat’s, where less than two seconds had elapsed since he first began his frenzied struggle. Once more, like a burning spear, he hurled himself into the unknown.

He was in the Skoptsy Catacomb on Mars. The white slug that was Lindsey Joyce was writhing before him.

“NO! NO! NO!” her motion screamed. “DON’T HURT ME. DON’T KILL ME. NO PLEASE . . . PLEASE . . . PLEASE . . .”

The Burning Man opened his tiger mouth and laughed. “She hurts,” he said. The sound of his voice burned his eyes.

“Who are you?” Foyle whispered.

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW

 HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

   OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

AREAREAREAREAREARE

   AREAREAREAREAREARE

       AREAREAREAREAREARE

 YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

  OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

   UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

The Burning Man winced. “Too bright,” he said. “Less light.”

Foyle took a step forward. “BLAA-GAA-DAA-MAWW!” the motion roared.

The Burning Man clapped his hands over his ears in agony. “Too loud,” he cried. “Don’t move so loud.”

The writhing Skoptsy’s motion was still screaming, beseeching: “DON’T HURT ME. DON’T HURT ME.”

The Burning Man laughed again. She was mute to normal men, but to his freak-crossed senses her meaning was clear. “Listen to her. She’s screaming. Begging. She doesn’t want to die. She doesn’t want to be hurt. Listen to her.”

“IT WAS OLIVIA PRESTEIGN GAVE THE ORDER. OLIVIA PRESTEIGN. NOT ME. DON’T HURT ME. OLIVIA PRESTEIGN.”

“She’s telling who gave the order. Can’t you hear? Listen with your eyes. She says Olivia.”

WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?

WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?

WHAT? WHAT? WHAT?

The checkerboard glitter of Foyle’s question was too much for him. The Burning Man interpreted the Skoptsy’s agony again.

“She says Olivia. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign. Olivia Presteign.”