"Lumley, Brian - Psychomech 02 - Psychosphere UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

so not immediately available, which was why just one week ago he had chartered a private plane and crew to fly them out to Rhodes airport. There was a second route he once might have taken—a rather more esoteric route—but in the world of passport controls, a world where "miracles" would doubtless attract attention, he had chosen the much more cumbersome and, in his own words, "mechanical flight" method.
The house they had hired in Lindos consisted in fact of a nest of three holiday villas or apartments with their own secluded courtyard. They occupied only the largest room, leaving the other two standing empty. They had eaten out with only one exception, when Garrison had cooked a pair of large gray mullet, self-caught on the trident of a rubber-powered spear-gun purchased in Rhodes. Garrison was an excellent swimmer and spear-fisherman, his prowess in the latter deriving from three sun-drenched years in Cyprus as a Corporal in the Royal Military Police. Here in Lindos, however, he had quickly lost interest in the "sport." He had soon realized that there was little skill involved and no thrill whatsoever when one might simply command the fishes to impale themselves upon the tines of one's harpoon.
And so in a matter of days they had settled down to an existence of hot, idle days and balmy nights, of not unreasonable wines and cheap island brandy (another legacy of Garrison's soldiering), and of good local meats and fruits in the village tavernas. And yet even in this near-exotic, idyllic setting of Lindos—with its narrow
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white labyrinthine streets, church towers, elaborate archways, its drain-dwelling, night-venturing frogs and tumult of cats—even here they had not felt totally at ease. The problem, as most of their problems, had its roots in Garrison's multi-personality.
Usually the Schroeder and Koenig facets took a back seat or were subsumed in Garrison's far stronger seat of consciousness—but on occasion they would come bursting to the forefront. Often, Vicki thought, unnecessarily and far too forcefully. Her thoughts took her back to an incident as recent as yesterday, one which perfectly illustrated her point . . .
After their open-air, patio breakfast, Garrison had suggested they walk. They had taken the path that led out of the village to a quiet, sheltered bay of yellow sand between white flanking rocks and looming perpendicular cliffs. Feeling the heat of a suddenly breathless midday, they had wandered from the path to seat themselves on tumbled boulders beneath the overhang of scree-shod cliffs that reached up to the mightier, precipitously concave Rock of the Acropolis itself. At their feet where they sat lay a large bed of cabbage-leaved plants sporadically decorated with small yellow flowers much similar to the English primrose; with many green, oval fruit-pods some two inches long, each pod hanging heavily from its own individual stem.
As they had sat down, so Garrison's leg had brushed against one of these fruits which, with a quite audible squelching or popping sound, had at once jet-propelled itself from its stem to
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go bounding about amidst the thick leaves until it found a gap and fell through to the shaded earth beneath. At the moment of the explosion Garrison had jerked away from the plant, but not before feeling a splash of liquid on his hand and forearm.
"You should wipe your hand," Vicki had been a little concerned. "That juice is mildly caustic—or poisonous, I can't remember which. But I've read about it somewhere or other."
Garrison had sniffed at his wrist, wrinkled his nose and grinned. "Catspissl" he snorted—but he had nevertheless used his handkerchief to clean the affected areas. And Vicki had laughed at his exclamation, for of course this had been Garrison pure and simple. Garrison himself, the man she had loved in that earlier world. A natural man and unself-conscious.
A couple of Greek youths had taken the same well-trodden route to the beach, walking a little to their rear, neither Vicki nor Garrison had attached any significance to this; it was a free world. In any case the youths seemed little more than kids, fifteen or sixteen at most and brothers by their looks. And by far the great majority of Lindos people were kindly and utterly charming.
There had been few people about—one or two couples slowly negotiating a rough ramp cut in the cliff's face down to the beach, and a scattered handful on the beach itself—but that was just exactly how Garrison had wanted it. This had been his prime purpose in coming out to Rhodes in the first place: an escape from the
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rush and bustle and pressures of a life which, for the last year at l^ast, had seemed to catch him up like an insect in the cogs of some vast machine. But an insect of carbon steel, which could not be crushed and without which the machine itself could not function.
For Garrison controlled—no, he was—that machine. Not quite self-made but certainly self-sustaining, self-servicing. Even the finest machine needs a little oil, however, and this holiday was to have been just that: light lubrication for the gears of a life suddenly grown vastly complicated. More than that, it was to give him time to consider his future. To ponder what best to do with the powers his multimind controlled—those powers which, with each passing day, he felt weakening in him, draining from him like the slow trickle of sand from the glass globe of an hourglass.
Vicki had been silent, dwelling a little Sntro-spectively on her life with Garrison, happy just to sit beside the calm, apparently greatly relaxed and benign figure of her companion—at least until she heard the clatter of pebbles and the indolent slap, slap of sandals which announced the arrival of the two Greek boys. At that she sighed.
She had known then why they had been followed, taking little pride in the knowledge that her own brown and beautifully proportioned body was the magnet which had drawn these adolescent islanders after her. She felt only a niggling annoyance. She was skimpily dressed, true, in a tiny green halter, green figure-hugging
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shorts and white sandals—but surely these lads could find themselves a pair of girls more their own age to ogle? While it was still fairly early in the tourist season, still the village was full of just such apparently unattended young ladies: English, German, Italian, Scandinavian. Or perhaps the youths had mistakenly suspected that Vicki and Garrison had something other in mind than merely sitting in silent contemplation in the shade of the rocks?
Garrison, too, had noticed the approach of the boys and for a moment he had grinned good-naturedly. He had of course immediately guessed their motive, and a glance—the merest peep—inside their minds had confirmed it. Well, boys are boys and Greek boys are Greek boys, and no complaints there. But then, as the youths had taken seats upon rocks in the middle of the pod-bearing plants and openly stared at Garrison and his lovely companion—particularly and pointedly at Vicki—the grin had quickly slipped from Garrison's face.
One of the minds his own had touched upon was a distinctly unpleasant one, whose strong sexual overtones were warped and vicious. He was full of animal lust. In Garrison's brief glimpse inside the youth's head he had found him savagely assaulting Vicki. Slimy with sweat and sex, the attack was unnatural as it was murderous. Nor were these mind-scenes mere fantasies but repeats of an earlier assault, a real assault, but with Vicki's face and figure superimposed. The youth was, or had been, the author of a rabidly cruel rape!
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And. as Garrison's face had hardened and taken on a grimmer aspect, so he had slowly risen to his feet. Drawing Vicki up with him, he had hissed in her ear: "That older boy's a rapist!"
"What? But how could you possibly—" she began—and paused. For of course she knew that if anyone in the world could know such a thing, that someone was Garrison.
"And when he can't do it he likes to think about doing it," Garrison's voice had turned to a snarl. "Doing it to you!" His face had twisted in rage, its color rapidly draining away.
Vicki knew that behind Garrison's heavy sunglasses with their built-up sides, his golden eyes were burning bright. "Come," he said. "Wir gehen!"
He half-dragged her from beneath the shade of the rock, hurriedly picking a way through boulders and coarse shrubs and grasses back to the path. Stumbling behind him, she had known fear. His being was in flux, its change betrayed by a voice which retained very little of Richard Garrison's true nature. There was a certain harshness about that voice, and those words he had spoken in German—
He paused to fill his lungs, drew her up alongside him. His fingers tightened on her side, digging into the flesh of her waist. He glanced back—and his face was no longer Garrison's. Not quite.
"Thomas!" Vicki whispered.
Her companion's eyebrows formed a frown, drew together, dipped down in the center be-
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hind his special glasses. His gaze was upon the pair of youths where they stood now amidst the patch of pod-bearing plants. For their part they stared back, the face of the older one wearing a contemptuous grin.
"Swine!" Garrison/Schroeder said, but the word had sounded more like Schwein to Vicki. She had known instinctively that he scanned the youth's mind. More deeply now.
"Richard," Vicki had clutched his arm. "It's not your business."
"But it has to be somebody's!" he told her harshly. "And you are my business—and that bastard's thinking things about you! He needs a lesson." And again his eyebrows had drawn together.
At that very moment Vicki had heard the sudden yelping of the youths. She had followed Gar-rison/Schroeder's gaze—and behind her own special sunglasses her golden eyes had gone very wide. She gasped at what she saw.
The younger Greek was stumbling jerkily out of the patch of pod-plants, backing away from the other youth until he came up against the white rock of the cliff. The older boy, the unwitting subject of Garrison's manipulation, stood as if rooted to the spot—while all around him the sprawling bed of vegetation went totally insane!
It was a scene of madness, an alien scene, or one perhaps from Earth's prime, when the flora could more ably match the fauna in ferocity. The plants tossed and churned, each leaf violently flapping, pods straining, swelling and bursting
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from their stems with sounds like muted machine-gun fire. And their juices—concerted, directed—fell upon the Greek youth where he stood wildly windmilling his arms, his feet apparently mired in the now sodden earth. Then, in a final frenzy, a last burst of vegetable violence, the entire patch ejaculated into his eyes.
The youth screamed and clapped his hands to his face. His hair, the skin of his face, his entire upper torso was drenched in plant fluid—but at last he could move, and now he commenced a grim, hopping dance of agony.