Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (17 page)

Suddenly, without any warning, an unspeakable, unearthly wail arose, and in the terrible moment before I comprehended that it came from one of the dogs, the thought swept through my mind that I had died after all and been consigned to the inferno and that this terrible sound was an indication of the eternal torment to come. The other dog joined in. For several long minutes we all stood there, incapacitated by the sound, until finally the Colonel made a sign and Tyler removed the dogs to the lawn.

Ten minutes later Gomez arrived at the edge of the rim, unrolling what looked like electrical cable from a heavy metal spool as he went. Morrissey and Tyler then took over the spool and threaded the cable through an invisible window, across one of the offices, and into the central corridor. There they attached a power drill to it, and Morrissey began laboriously drilling holes in thin air. He was cutting open the door to the laboratory. I walked carefully down the corridor and stood almost next to him, waiting for him to admit me.

I could see that Morrissey was having trouble. The drill was heavy and difficult to hold in place with the massive gloves. Intermittently he would stop drilling and push a small power saw against the door. I was unable to understand exactly what he was doing, but I remembered that it was a metal door and I could see that it must be thick. He worked for over half an hour at it, sweating inside his diving suit and unable to manipulate the tools properly or even to feel exactly what he had accomplished. He had stopped speaking, and when Clellan would ask him for a progress report, his answers were curt.

I waited patiently beside Morrissey the entire time. I would have liked to offer some suggestions on how to attack the door, but despite our shared interest I did not think that he and I would be able to work together successfully. He pulled a large screwdriver from his toolbox and twisted it violently about in front of himself. He was using his entire weight to prize something — presumably the lock mechanism — free, but as only he and the screwdriver were visible, it made a particularly odd pantomime. Then the screwdriver twisted abruptly in his hand, he gave a little push with his shoulder and another push with his hands, and announced, “I got it. It’s open.”

He paused, listening to whatever Clellan was telling him over the radio, and then bent down to pick up the radiation detector. As he straightened himself again, he turned back and looked straight through me. It disconcerted me for an instant. I turned too and saw that he was looking at Tyler, who was coming down the corridor to join us now that the laboratory was open.

Morrissey did not wait for him. Holding the detector in his right hand, he used the left hand to push back the door. The long wait had heightened my irrational eagerness to get into the laboratory, and I decided to follow Morrissey straight in, ahead of Tyler. As Morrissey stepped past the door and let the hand that had pushed it open drop down to his side, something slammed violently against the entire length of my body. I was aware of taking the impact particularly against my forehead, nose, left cheek, and the toes of my left foot, but I was stunned as much by the surprise as by the actual force of the blow. Even though I had begun, over the course of the day, to be accustomed to the invisibility of my surroundings, that impact with no warning and no visual explanation overwhelmed me, and I stood there in a daze for many seconds before I comprehended that the heavy metal door had been pushed into me automatically by a closing spring. I reached dully up to feel my nose and cheek, which were throbbing with pain. Tender, but nothing broken. No sign of blood.

Although I was looking straight at Morrissey the entire time and saw him abruptly freeze at the sound of the door hitting me, I stopped thinking about him entirely until I heard him speaking sharply into his radio in a near whisper.

“He’s right behind me. The doorway!”

Tyler, for the few steps that remained, charged up the corridor and through the doorway toward Morrissey. It was hard going for him in his suit, but he managed a ponderous run with his arms extended to seize me. At the same instant Morrissey wheeled about, dropping his detector, and lunged at me. They both had their hands on me, and if they had not been wearing those suits and those clumsy gloves, they would have held me easily. In total panic I pulled loose from them, shoving and hitting them at random to get free. At some point I took a blow to the head. I staggered away from them along the wall inside the laboratory. I felt my heart pounding as if I were a rabbit in a trap. When I tried to check my face again for damage, I found that my hands were trembling. I stood and watched to see what they would do next. Once they lost contact with me, they straightened themselves. Tyler stepped a little to one side, and I heard the door swing shut next to him. He took a step back and stood there barring the exit.

“We got him,” Tyler said into his headset. “We got him in the lab… No, he’s loose in here, but I’m blocking the door. It’s the only one, right? He won’t get out of here… I’m not moving. Look, what kind of readings you getting in here? … Nothing? Morrissey has a point, sir. We’d be better off without these suits… Yes, sir… Yes, sir.”

Then Tyler looked up at the middle of the room and spoke in a loud self-conscious voice. I did not realize at first that he was addressing me.

“Listen, fella, we know you’re there. We want to help you.”

There was a pause. I said nothing.

“Listen, you got to let us know where you are.”

There was another long pause. None of us had anything to say.

Tyler remained with his back pressed against the closed door, watching apprehensively for some sign of me. But Morrissey bent down, picked up his detector again, and set out toward the center of the room, waving the detector slowly back and forth in front of himself. I watched with great interest: he would be heading straight for Wachs’s extraordinary device — whatever it was that had created this grotesque situation. The way seemed to be clear: he was not encountering any furniture or equipment; and he had become quite skillful at walking on the invisible surface, so that it was with considerable confidence that he stepped forward and plunged into the void. Or at least it must have felt to Morrissey as if he had plunged into the void. In fact, he pitched quite abruptly into a nasty heap about ten feet below me and Tyler, and then slid gently down and forward another five feet as if he were on a playground slide. The detector, which he had lost hold of in the fall, slid down beside him.

For what may have been half a minute, he lay there motionless. Then he began moving his limbs, slowly unfolding himself until he lay sprawled on his back, suspended a little less than halfway between where Tyler and I stood and the bottom of the apparent crater. He began speaking.

“Yeah, I’m all right. I don’t know… There’s a hole here,” he explained — rather superfluously, I thought.

He tried to stand. He seemed to be having trouble with one leg.

“Ankle. Goddamn, it hurts!”

Favoring one foot, he began to step carefully forward toward us. After the first few steps he found himself on a steep incline. His feet slid out from under him, and he fell forward, sliding back down on his face, feet first, to where he had started.

“Shit!”

He slowly picked himself up, turned around to face the opposite way, and set out again, with the same result. He got up again. This time he limped around the bottom in a little circle. He bent over and felt the surface. He straightened and looked up.

“I’m in a hole,” he explained again. His voice had an aggrieved, almost whining overtone. “It seems to be round. It feels smooth. I’m slipping on it. There’s no way I can get out of here alone. Someone’s gonna have to get me out.”

I concluded at first that there had been an explosion or fire at the center of the laboratory which had opened up a hole in the floor and that Morrissey had fallen into some sort of cellar. But I could not remember a cellar on the plans. I went down on all fours and crawled toward the edge, feeling my way carefully with my hands so that I would be sure not to join Morrissey. When I reached the edge, I ran my hand down along the surface of the cavity. It was perfectly smooth. I ran my fingertips over it and scratched at it with my fingernails. It seemed to me to be a perfectly smooth cross section of floorboard, followed by concrete, followed by hard-packed dirt. In shape it seemed to be as flawlessly spherical as the apparent crater surface that surrounded us. I crawled about a third of the way around the edge of the cavity to verify this hypothesis. The rim seemed indeed to be perfectly circular. Apparently the invisible sphere in which we found ourselves had a hollow core, perhaps thirty feet in diameter. Whatever piece of equipment had caused all this must have somehow exploded or imploded or otherwise disintegrated itself, leaving nothing but the cavity into which Morrissey had fallen.

I decided to stand up and walk. I had lost interest in the laboratory. I wanted to get out.

Tyler, I noted, was not moving from the door. He was doing nothing whatever to help Morrissey or to make it any easier for me to leave the room. For some reason he had raised his arms and was holding them bent in front of himself, as if he were being attacked. I realized with a little surge of pleasure that I was the attacker against whom he was defending himself: with Morrissey trapped in the hole he had no one to help him if I went after him. It was not at all clear that he could hold the door against an invisible adversary. Still, I was reluctant to assault him. I might find a chair or some other sort of club, but even then he would be hard to hurt in his heavy suit, and I was above all afraid of any struggle that might end with me being dragged into the cavity.

Clellan, I saw with dismay, was walking across the lawn towards us. There had been no indication of any radioactivity, and he might be about to walk right into the building to support Tyler. I felt my chances contracting rapidly around me. There was no time for deliberation. I would have to make my decision and act. I reached into my pocket and fit my hand around the gun.

“Tyler?”

At the sound of my voice, Tyler stiffened. Although he knew well enough that I was there, the disembodied voice must have seemed uncanny. He didn’t answer.

“Tyler? Do you hear me?”

“I hear you, fella. What can we do for you?”

“Tyler, I want you to move away from that door.”

“I can’t do that, fella. Listen, we—”

“Tyler, I have a gun in my hand. Now I know you can’t see it, so I’m going to fire it once, just so you can hear how it sounds.” I fired it at the wall beside him. Tyler flinched instinctively at the noise and began to speak.

“Listen—”

“Now, Tyler, if you don’t move away from that door right now I’m going to kill you.”

At the report of my gun, Morrissey had immediately begun to tear off his suit, and Clellan had started running into the building. Clellan was holding a gun in his right hand. This was his first attempt at moving on the invisible surface and he couldn’t run at full speed, but he was coming quickly all the same, holding his left hand out in front to avoid running into closed doors and watching the pieces of string and wire that marked the walls and furniture. He was through the building entrance and into the reception room: he would be down the corridor in a moment. My choices were running out.

I pointed the gun at Tyler’s legs, or tried to — it was difficult to be sure exactly where it was pointing — and pulled the trigger. There was an instant’s delay after the shot and then blood began to ooze out of a little hole in Tyler’s suit at about the level of his waist. Horrible. I had wanted to shoot him in the thigh. The other horrible thing was that he remained standing against the door, staring blankly ahead.

“Move!” I shouted.

Perhaps he was stunned by the shot. Perhaps he didn’t even understand that he had been hit. Clellan was into the corridor. I found myself lowering the gun and pulling the trigger again. This time Tyler let out a little shriek and hunched forward, clutching at his left knee. I dropped the gun back into my pocket and stepped quickly up to him. Before he could straighten up again, I pushed in behind him so that my back was against the door, put my hands against his back, and pushed him as hard as I could. He pitched forward onto his face. I got my arms around his lower legs and lifted them, still pushing him forward, until he toppled head first into the cavity and shot down to the bottom, knocking over Morrissey. Behind him he left a little arc of blood in the air.

I turned to face Clellan just as he reached the entrance to the laboratory. I reached out, got hold of the door by the hole that Morrissey had made in it, and pulled it open just as Clellan reached out with his left hand to feel whether it was closed. In his right hand he still held a gun. Finding no door, he stepped uncertainly forward, looking down at Tyler and Morrissey below and then looking hopelessly around for some sign of me. He took another apprehensive step forward past the door I was holding open for him. Tyler, struggling painfully below, managed to raise himself to his feet momentarily, before his leg gave way and he collapsed to the floor of the pit again. He tilted his head up and looked at Clellan.

“Get back!” Tyler shouted hoarsely.

Too late. I had slid my left leg in front of Clellan, and now I clamped my right hand hard onto the back of his neck and shoved him forward, so that he tripped over my leg and plunged into the cavity with the others. His gun discharged as he went in. When he reached the bottom, he capsized Morrissey and slammed into Tyler, and the three of them tumbled into a heap.

As I turned to leave the building, I realized that I was trembling with horror and relief. I had never shot anyone before, never harmed anyone physically. No time to think about that now. I looked across the lawn and saw the Colonel, immobile and expressionless, staring toward me.

I would, I decided, have to speak to him. He was the one person who could arrange to let me through the gate. The only alternative was to assault the fence somehow, and I had a brief vision of my bullet-shredded remains hanging from the barbed wire. “Vision,” is of course the wrong word, and it occurred to me then that they would experience my remains only by sense of touch. Unpleasant for everyone. Much better to try to talk to the Colonel. I had, I reasoned, some momentum and some credibility, having just shot Tyler and trapped all three men in that hole. I felt a wave of revulsion at the thought of the blood appearing at Tyler’s midriff; I had not wanted to shoot him that way. No choice. Can’t think about it now. And now I had only three bullets left. Anyway, if I could not find any other way to persuade the Colonel to let me out, I could make a very convincing threat to shoot him.