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  Further. Little more than several paces and he’s brought up sharp. Something indefinable. A sensor-grid. Little more than a haze of particles. A faint ionization of the air, invisible to most. But he detects it. He traces its limits. They’ve been lax There’s at least a metre of clear space between its highest point and the upper arch of the ceiling. More than enough. He retrieves the pitons and hawser from the ventilation duct. For a moment, once on the far side of the grid, he relaxes his tensed muscles, allowing the seep of feelings to scream back beneath his self­-discipline, allowing random sensations to flood him, the staleness of richly perfumed air, the dazzling color of wall frescoes covered with opulent tapestries to disguise their ‘volcanic’ origins, the nauseous backwash of vertigo. Such direct tactile impressions can be useful if correctly utilized and logically filtered.

  At last he re-applies mental control, and lopes soundlessly towards the interior, attempting to superimpose the remembered map-fragments onto what he sees around him. At seemingly irregular points the ducts converge into spacious galleries, smooth, featureless chambers and long white ceramic galleries that lie at the center of new radiations of corridors. Whispers of sound come closer. Whispers magnified by tricks of acoustics. He hears a disembodied wash of voices, and stiffens, but the voices fade, and he resumes. Then he waits, pressing himself into the wall ornamentation as two women pass along the concourse.

  They are deep in intimate conversation, talking animatedly in some gutturally obscure Asiatic dialect. Yet he recognizes their language. They are discussing a missing child, and they continue to do so until they are out of his hearing. Security is almost boringly lax. It will be concentrated lower, at the more obvious ground level access points. Or in the upper levels, in case of aerial assault. But here, deep within the wall, they are complacent in their supposed invulnerability.

  Soon it becomes apparent that despite their seeming randomness the corridors are regular, geometrically structured, and he’s able to slot their apparent vagaries into an understandable system, working his way towards the hub of the network.

  Eventually Sicarius finds himself confronting the great double doors heading to the inner labyrinth of Vhed Varah, admission barred by a single guard, armored in the fashion he’d witnessed in the city. Military discipline has lapsed, no attack expected in this most impregnable of fortresses.

  The assassin draws a long slender needle from his belt, approaches the lounging soldier from the rear, and with ice-cold accuracy inserts the point between overlapping plates of steel at the man’s neck. He jerks the needle with practiced ease upwards at a calculated angle, taking it into the underlayers of the brain, killing the man instantly.

  Leaving the corpse, Sicarius slides through the doors. Warmly peach-tinted light spills from the vestibule beyond. The newly glimpsed grotto is partitioned off into many separate sumptuous apartments decked out with the decadent luxury of conspicuous wealth. There are sleeping figures, male, female, and hermaphrodite, who ignore him as he purposefully makes his way towards his quarry.

  Vhed Varah, a squat but ridiculously corpulent man, wakes and starts up from his coverlets as the assassin enters the small enclosure. He can sense the intruder’s mission—almost expecting it.

  “You’ve come to…?” he squeals in terror, but his expression of horror freezes, the scream of panic dying in his throat as the laser punctures a neat hole through the center of his forehead, its heat cauterizing the wound even as it is made. The whites of his eyes flutter momentarily like moths trapped in their sockets. Then nothing.

  Sicarius lowers the weapon. The heady scented air now ionized and vibrantly charged by the needle-beams of energy, redolent of the imagined smell of adrenaline, and fear. There is no pleasure in death, just acceptance. For all men must die, even as they must breathe. He smiles at the thought.

  Sicarius waits for long moments, preparing himself psychologically for what is to come. For what has happened times without number. Vhed Varah lies half-naked across plush eiderdowns, the pale light catching and silvering the glisten of sweat along rolls of fat and near-black body hair. There is no blood. The murdered politician’s eyes are lifelessly fixed on the partitioning tapestries of heavy weave.

  An ugly and disgusting death. A contract fulfilled. The impulse to life. The impulse to destroy life.

  Now there is sound beyond the small enclosure of artificial intimacy, the raster of fear punctuated by raised strident voices, the thump of heels. And the assassin’s patience is eventually rewarded as the drapes are wrenched brutally aside and three masked soldiers break in. He spins to face them. They wear easily penetrable armor, his eyes professionally noting points of vulnerability. The first of the guards carries a trident. Calmly, the assassin thumbs the laser grid to minimum, raises the weapon to waist level and depresses the stud, hitting the fore­arm through its defensive plating, scorching the flesh. The soldier yells and lunges forward, a purely instinctive reaction. The center prong lodges in the assassin’s eye cavity, its tip on its way to the brain.

  Suddenly, the soldier is bracing the haft of the trident, aware of the solidity of impact on the interior of the other man’s splintering skull, the murdering intruder coiling down to sprawl at his feet, the closely scrutinized vinyl jerkin now unmoving. Only gradually does he become painfully conscious of the laser burn on his forearm where the muted beam has melded his armor, blistering skin. He can feel the curdling sickness at the base of his stomach. He lurches, the second soldier moving forward to support him, speaking reassuringly.

  * * * *

  A month later, Erason slouches across the low couch in his private room to the rear of the ‘ANDROGYNE CATHOUSE’. He rubs his slightly lacquered hand down the side of his face, feeling the perfect smoothness of his depilated skin. Smiling falsely at the soldier, he sucks in a breath and lets it out raggedly. “You have business with me?”

  “The encumbrance has been removed,” says the man, palming his perspex mask clear, the upward movement revealing a plassealed forearn. “Trade need no longer suffer.”

  Erason stands slowly. “I don’t quite understand fully.”

  “Understanding was never part of the agreement. Vhed Varah is dead. I’ve satisfied the accepted identification procedures, and now request only that your commitment for payment be fulfilled.”

  Erason can feel his neck muscles tightening involuntarily as he looks at the stranger. “Yes. You’re right. Of course you are. I was merely curious. The trade of assassin is one carrying a certain ancient mystique. The reek of lost sciences, perhaps even shape-shifting? Presumably you got out of the fortress due to your…ability?”

  The other man relaxes visibly, and nods.

  “And you intend leaving the city? It would be unhealthy, from my point of view, for you to remain.”

  Again the soldier nods, glancing about the room with no particular focus of interest. Intent only on escape.

  “Then I’ll detain you no further.” Erason reaches down to hoist twin panniers onto the couch that stands between them. “Reward for your services, as we agreed.” He loosens the clamp on the brocade leatherwork of the uppermost pouch.

  “Here, for your inspection.” He inserts his hand beneath the flap, and withdraws it clamped around a projectile pistol.

  The man’s eyes fix on the weapon even as the trigger goes in, the dart catching him soundlessly in the throat.

  “I’m sorry,” begins Erason. “Truly I am sorry, but it would be unsafe.…” His eyes widen, almost white, the correction lenses clouding them into colorlessness. Then he screams, drops the pistol, his hands clawing upwards at his hairless temples, long nails drawing blood. The room seems to fragment, small, juxtaposed sounds vorticing in from the void beyond. An aimless jumble of perceptions, slowly and painfully reorienting. Understanding comes at him tangentially as he watches the soldier/assassin die, and feels the correspondingly vampiric growth in his own head. A slithering insinuating evil, a blood-red darkness as old as time, undying, eternal, g
radually possessing him. Drowning him, as he sinks relentlessly beneath tides of alienness.

  The scream ceases. He listens to it dissolve in the low currents of air. There is no more pain. Erason is gone. Sicarius rubs his hands together self-consciously, then passes the palm of his right hand experimentally over his unnaturally high forehead, brushing the fringe of black beaded hair. He bends down to retrieve the projectile pistol, replacing it precisely in the uppermost pouch of the panniers. Then he moves towards the door, carrying the bags, raising the hem of his dark synthsilk robe to step over the soldier’s corpse. The body that, briefly, he had occupied.

  Erason/Sicarius closes the door behind him, the noise of the Cathouse shifting, the globular room with its atonal music to his left. But instead he paces evenly down the low arched corridor and out into the blinding daylight of the thruway.

  A carriage waits. Erason is important. He doesn’t walk the city street. As he climbs into the carriage, its upholstery settling, he chances a covetous glance at the kilometre-high wall rising monolithically above the sloping roofs of the squat cubist buildings. An instinctive reaction, a gut-wrenching vertigo, makes him clench his fists, the lacquered nails impaling the soft skin of his palms, drawing small half-moons of blood as he recalls every centimetre of the nightmare climb up the wall’s relentlessly vertical face.

  Then the eternal assassin relaxes.

  The treachery had been unexpected. He’d been taken unawares. But luckily the projectile pistol used against him caused a lingering death. Time enough for an induced transmigration of souls, the assassin’s ultimate, and most perfectly crafted weapon. Sicarius smiles. He’ll enjoy being Erason.

  At least for a while.

  PRISONER OF TIME, by John Russell Fearn

  CHAPTER ONE: AVENGING ENTROPY

  The game of bridge had been a long one—and for one member of the company at least a boring one. But now it was over. Two men stood in the cool of the summer evening thankful for escape from the warmth of the lounge. They smoked silently and disregarded each other until one of them spoke.

  “Been a long evening,” Reggie Denby said, rather haltingly. “Cards bore me—bridge especially so. Too much demand on the mind.”

  “Yes,” the other said, noncommittally.

  “Been worth it, though,” Reggie added. “I’d sit through a thousand hands of bridge just to be near Lucy. S’pose you would, too?”

  “One has to make concessions, even for Lucy.”

  Silence again and more smoking. The house at the back of the two men was not a big one but it was ablaze with light and the sound of voices. Nor was the garden in which they stood large. It was just one of those well-kept suburban patches shielded from the vulgar gaze by a high wooden fence upon which sprawled rambler roses.

  The situation that existed now for the two men was not unique. They were waiting for Lucy Grantham to come out and reveal upon which of them she had decided. For months now each young man had ardently pressed his suit—Reggie Denby with the fervor of genuine love, and Bryce Fairfield, with the laconic brevity of a scientist. Bryce believed in himself and his capabilities as an electronic scientist: Reggie, having no such brilliance and existing merely as a none-too-bright salesman made up for the deficiency by being generous-natured towards everybody. Two men utterly apart in ideals and outlook, yet both centered on one young woman.

  Then presently, Lucy Grantham came hurrying out to them. She was slim, in the early twenties, chestnut-haired and starry-eyed, at that time of her life when any young man would have been willing to confer his eternal devotion upon her.

  “Sorry boys to put you through it with that bridge game,” she apologized, laughing, as she came up. “But you know what dad is! Insists that bridge is the way to make friends.”

  “Or enemies,” Bryce Fairfield murmured.

  Lucy fell silent, studying each man in the reflected light from the house. There was Reggie—chubby, fair-haired, genial to the point of idiocy, his blue eyes fixed adoringly upon her; and then there was Bryce Fairfield, lean-jawed, sunken-eyed, with untidy hair sprawling across his broad forehead. He was unusually tall and always stooped. His flinty gray eyes analyzed everything upon which he gazed—even Lucy. Very rarely did he smile and certainly his associates had never heard him laugh.

  “This, I suppose, is the hour of decision?” Lucy asked solemnly, fastening her hands behind her like a mischievous schoolgirl.

  “If you wish to make it sound melodramatic, yes,” Bryce agreed. “Frankly, m’dear, I don’t see the reason for all these preliminaries—to say nothing of an evening wasted playing that damnable bridge. I could have spent my time to much more advantage down at the physics laboratory.”

  “Oh, you and your chemistry—or whatever it is!” Lucy made a gesture. “You keep your nose too close to the grindstone, Bryce. Anyway, you both asked for a definite answer, didn’t you?”

  “It didn’t have to be a personal one,” Bryce replied. “The mails are still functioning.”

  Lucy looked astonished. “Bryce, do you actually mean that my answer is of so little consequence it could have been sent through the post?”

  “Your answer,” Bryce responded, “means everything in the world to me, Lucy—but you know the kind of man I am. I cannot bear to waste time—playing bridge for instance.”

  “Not even if it keeps you near me?”

  Bryce was silent, his big, powerful mouth oddly twisted. Then the girl moved her gaze from him across to Reggie. “Reggie.…”

  “Yes, Lucy?” He moved with alacrity. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “I’ll have plenty of time to tell you that later.” Lucy hesitated as Reggie absorbed the significance of what she was saying; then she turned to Bryce. “Bryce, you do understand, don’t you?” she asked earnestly. “I think, now I’ve come to ponder it over, that there never was anybody else but Reggie.”

  “From your attitude at times I hardly formed the same opinion,” Bryce answered. “However, you’ve made the matter perfectly clear. You prefer Reggie— Very well then. I am not the kind of man to argue over a fact. No scientist ever does. All I can do is offer my sincere congratulations to both of you.”

  He caught at Lucy’s hand and shook it firmly, so much so that she nearly winced. Then Reggie grinned dazedly as he found his own arm being pumped up and down vigorously.

  “You—you know, I can’t half believe it, Bryce! I never thought I stood a chance. You’re so different to me—the masterful type. I thought that would impress Lucy quite a lot.”

  “To every girl her choice,” Bryce said, shrugging; then in a suddenly more genial tone: “I hope this is not going to interfere with our friendship, Lucy? I’d like to keep in touch, chiefly because I know so few women who’ll take the trouble to be interested in me.”

  “Why, of course!” Lucy laughed and patted his thin, muscular arms. “You’ll always be welcome, Bryce—always. What kind of a girl do you think I am?”

  Bryce did not answer that. Instead he looked at her in a way she could not quite understand, his relentless gray eyes probing her. Vaguely she wondered what he was trying to analyze about her. He made no comment, however, and presently relaxed.

  “Well, it’s been an interesting evening, even if a disappointing one for me,” he commented. “I don’t see much point in staying any longer, Lucy. I’ll go home I think and drown my sorrows in drink!”

  “In physics more likely,” Lucy smiled. “By tomorrow, Bryce, you’ll have forgotten all about asking me to marry you. You’re that kind of a fellow.”

  “Mebbe,” he said, musing—but Lucy would probably have thought differently had she seen his expression when he arrived at his bachelor flat towards eleven that night. It was hard, the mouth drawn down at the corners, a light of vindictive cunning in the rapier eyes.

  Without giving any heed to the necessity for sleep Bryce threw off his jacket, slipped on a dressing gown, and then made himself some coffee. Fifteen minutes after arriving in his flat he w
as in a deep armchair, black coffee at his side, and a stack of books within easy reach. Each book was an abstruse scientific treatise, but each treatise made sense to a mind like Bryce Fairfield’s. His genius in matters scientific was far beyond the average. He would not have been staff-supervisor for the Electronics Bureau had it not been.

  Chiefly, to judge from the notes he made and the books he studied, his interest seemed to lie in entropy and its effects. Not to any man did he breathe a word of his private investigations into science’s more mystical realms. To the staff at the Bureau—and also to Lucy and Reggie on those occasions when he joined them for an evening—he was still just taciturn Bryce Fairfield, making the best of having lost the girl he wanted.

  * * * *

  For two years after their marriage Bryce remained an apparently firm friend of Lucy and Reggie, even to the extent of becoming godfather to their son Robert. In fact, it was surprising how much interest Bryce took in the family and their habits. In his brusque, matter-of-fact way he managed to find out everything they were doing, and knew of their plans for the future. Not that Lucy or Reggie minded. Bryce seemed to have become part of the family and he never once stepped beyond the hounds of friendship.

  And, in the two years, his own fortunes seemed to take a decided turn for the better. From somewhere unknown he accumulated a vast amount of money, most of which he seemed to spend on scientific materials. He threw out vague hints concerning a machine he was building—and that was all. Then, one evening in the late summer, nearly two-and-a-half years after Lucy and Reggie had married matters swept up to a sudden and most unexpected climax.