Vertigo

ten

Nothing is happening. I’m still on the ground — safe and secure. Nothing is happening.

Hasson watched the underside of the Chinook Hotel blossom and unfurl like a carnivorous flower. As the circular building expanded to the limits of his field of view he began to see details of its structure — the spray of radial cantilevers, the spiderweb pattern of ribs and intercostals, the twin circular apertures of the elevator shafts, one of which glowed with a shifting ruddy light which made it a back door to hell.

It’s quite simple, you see. The foundation for the supporting column was positioned over a geological fault, or a swamp, and now the whole thing is sinking into it like a piston. I’m still on the ground — safe and secure — watching the hotel drop down to my level.

His flight brought him close to the hotel’s lower rim and for the first time he was able to hear the fire at work. It was making little downward progress for the time being — only a few gleaming razor slashes revealed that beams and slabs were being tortured by heat and heat-induced stresses — but flames and hot gases were pouring up through stairwells and ventilation shafts to reach other floors, and their advance was signalled by ragged explosions of timbers, glass and paint containers. Clouds of smoke interspersed with streamers of long-lived sparks were being carried away an the wind.

It’s quite fascinating — almost a privilege, really, though rather a ghoulish one — to be able to stand here on the ground and get such a good view of what is happening to the hotel. One can’t help being reminded of the destruction of the Hindenburg. All the same, even though I’m safe and secure on the ground, that second floor window is getting very close, and if I’m to pop inside, casually, just for a quick look around I’d better think about how I’m going to…

Hasson hit the window frame hard, his ballistic-style ascent carrying him through the field interference phase with virtually no loss of speed. He gripped the alloy which trimmed the aperture where six panes had been cut out, his feet found slithering purchase on the edge of nothingness, and suddenly he was inside the hotel, breathing deeply, standing on a litter-strewn composition floor. The noise of the fire was much louder here and he could feel its heat striking up through the soles of his shoes. It occurred to him that the floor structure in that area could not survive for many more minutes.

He scanned his surroundings — peripherally aware of the television cameraman hovering in the airy asylum beyond the windows — and made out the sawtooth silhouette of a nearby staircase. Only major load-bearing walls had been completed throughout the hotel, and Hasson received a powerful impression of vastness, of being on a battlefield at night, where dozens of minor skirmishes were marked by transient glows and glimmers among forests of columns. He ran to the staircase and sprinted up it.

The thermal cutter he had tucked into his belt felt secure at his left side, but the pistol began to loosen due to the action of his . body and he took it into his right hand. It was almost certain that Lutze and Theo Werry had preceded him on the same route, and therefore he felt safe from booby traps and their proximity fuses, but the time had come to prepare for an encounter with Lutze himself. He had been on the fourth floor when he shot Al Werry, but his climb to the roof of the hotel would have been hampered by his own injuries and, presumably, by the fact that Theo would be moving slowly in the lead. Hasson estimated that he could catch up on the pair as early as the eighth floor. He made sure the pistol’s safety catch was off and began to count the floors as he pounded his way upwards through the Vulcanian dimness.

Four flights of steps to each floor, which means I’m on… Or is it only three flights? Perhaps I’m further up than I…

Hasson and Barry Lutze saw each other in the same instant.

Lutze was standing on a broad expanse of landing, looking upwards to where the stooped figure of Theo Werry was feeling his way to the top of a flight of bare steps which were made hideously dangerous by the absence of an outer banister. As soon as Lutze became aware of Hasson he dropped on one knee and began firing with the police weapon he had taken from Henry Corzyn. Hasson, still sliding to a halt, had no place to hide, no time to cry out or plan tactics. There could be nothing but the basic survival reaction. He raised his own pistol and worked the trigger as rapidly as its mechanism would permit, filled with the sick realisation that he had blundered into what some would describe as a fair fight, a classic stand-off whose result would be determined as much by the blindly spinning cylinders of chance as by personal attributes of the contenders. The pistol recoiled against his hand again and again, but never quickly enough, with a seeming aeon between each silent propulsive shock.

Two things occurred at once. A bomb detonated on a lower floor, sending a sheet of amber and red flame billowing up through a central well; and in the same instant — as though he had been caught in the blast — Lutze was flicked on to his back. Stress waves raced through the building, rippling the floor slabs and initiating a train of lesser explosions, but Lutze did not move. Hasson ran up to the landing, gun self-consciously at the ready. Lutze was lying with both hands clapped to his forehead, eyes glazed and unseeing, mouth locked open in an expression of frozen surprise.

Hasson turned away from him and saw that Theo Werry had fallen to his knees. The boy was only centimetres from the naked rim of a manmade abyss which terminated many floors below, and he was unsteadily rising to his feet. Hasson opened his mouth to shout a warning, but a vision of what might happen if he startled Theo sprang into his mind. He bounded up the stairs, threw an arm around Theo and dragged him away from the edge. The boy began to fight against him.

“It’s all right, Theo,” Hasson said firmly. “This is Rob Hasson.”

Theo ceased to struggle. “Mr Haldane?”

“That’s what I meant to say. Come on — we’re getting out of here.” Hasson gripped a strap of the boy’s harness and began drawing him down to the landing he had just quit. He guided him past Lutze’s body, and away from the yawning mouth of the stairwell, to a window in the outer wall. The dark world beyond looked peaceful, sane and inviting. Hasson shoved the pistol into a pocket, took the thermal cutter from his belt and set its controls.

“I don’t get it,” Theo said, his face turning from side to side. “How did you get here?”

Same way as you did, son.”

“But I thought you couldn’t fly.”

1’ve done a bit in my time.” Hasson activated the cutter, turning it into a sorcerer’s sword of white fire.

Its light showed up the strain on Theo’s dirt-streaked face. “What happened to Barry?”

“He had a gun. He started shooting at me, and I had to shoot back.” Praying that Theo would not pursue the line of questioning, Hasson turned to the Window and slid the tip of the cutter through the nearest pane. It went into the glass with scarcely any resistance, causing roseate glowing drops to course down the surface.

“I heard my father shouting something at me a few minutes ago,” Theo said, raising his voice above the background noises in the building. “Where is he flow?”

“We’ll talk about that later, Theo — the main thing to worry about right now is…

“Did Barry shoot him?”

“I… I’m afraid that’s what happened.” Hasson moved the blade of the cutter sideways and sliced through a bar of alloy. “Listen, Theo, I’m cutting us an escape door in a window and we’re going to be out of here in a minute or two. I want you to get yourself ready to fly.”

Theo felt for his arm and gripped it. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

“I’m sorry — yes.” Unable to look at the boy, Hasson concentrated all his attention on the window and felt a dull puzzlement when he saw that a small circular hole had appeared in one of the panes close to his face. The turmoil of his thoughts — about Al Werry and his son and the need to get away from the burning hotel — was so great that the sudden presence of the hole in the glass was an irrelevancy, or at most a fringe phenomenon of little importance. Was the heat from the cutter distorting the window frame and causing…?

A second hole appeared in the glass, and an incredible thought was born in Hasson’s mind.

He spun round and saw Barry Lutze on his feet on the landing. Lutze still had one hand pressed to his forehead, his face was a fearsome bloody mask, and he was using the gun — the gun Hasson had neglected to kick clear of his body. In the act of turning Hasson, driven by pure instinct, hurled the thermal cutter. It flew in a series of eccentric whirls like a binary sun spinning around an invisible companion, touched Lutze’s side, clattered down on to the floor in a fountain of sparks and disappeared into the open pit of the stairwell. Lutze, who had already been lurching unsteadily, fell to the floor. A single convulsive twitch flailed his four limbs simultaneously, then he was motionless, converted in an instant from a human being into something that could have no connection with life.

Hasson, who had been under the impression that the cutter had practically missed Lutze, ran to the body. The fleeting contact, the casual feather-flick from the sun-blade, had gouged a diagonal, smoking, ruinous furrow through Lutze’s chest. This time, it was obvious, there was no need to deprive him of weaponry. Suppressing his natural reactions, Hasson strode to the stairwell and looked down, searching for the cutter, but was unable to see it. There was nothing but a complex tunnel of descending perspectives, obscured by smoke and patchily lit by shafts of hellish light. Swearing hopelessly, he ran back to Theo, who was still standing by the window looking stunned and frightened.

“We’ve lost the cutter,” Hasson said, trying to keep the panic out of his voice. “Do you know the way out of here?”

Theo shook his head. “There’s a door in the roof somewhere, but I couldn’t find it. Somebody always led me in and out.”

Hasson weighed the odds, balancing one vision of dread against another, and came to a decision. “Come on, son, we’re going down and we’ve got to go fast.”

He took Theo’s hand and dragged him towards the stairs. The boy tried to hang back, but Hasson was too strong for him and in a few seconds they were committed to a perilous plunge into the noisome lower regions of the hotel. Having surrendered himself, Theo did his best to match strides with Hasson, but the task was an impossible one for a blind person and their descent became a sequence of mutual collisions, near-falls and extended ankle- twisting slides. Only the fact that the banisters had been installed on those flights saved them from disastrous spills into the central well.

With each successive landing the heat, fumes and noise grew more intense, and when they finally reached the second floor Hasson was appalled to find that it had begun to disintegrate. Some of the slabs were humped like sand dunes and beginning to glow at the edges. Violent tremors coursed through the structure, accompanied by awesome low-frequency groans which suggested that the floor would fall through at any second.

Hasson pushed Theo towards the aperture in the large window. lie gripped the boy by the shoulders and turned him round to face him, at the same time activating his CG unit. The function light on the control panel at Theo’s waist remained dead. Hasson’s gaze traced a practised line over Theo’s flight equipment, and came to a foundering halt at the dips which should have held the power pack. He felt his face contort with shock.

“Theo!” he shouted, thunderstruck by the magnitude of the discovery. “Your power pack I Where’s your power pack?”

Theo’s hand groped around the empty clips. “Barry took it… Mexico… I forgot.”

“It’s all right — there’s no harm done.” Hasson found his lips dragging themselves into the wan semblance of a smile at the inappropriateness of his words as he disconnected his own power pack and fastened it to Theo’s harness.

“I just forgot,” Theo said. “When I heard about Dad… What are we going to do?”

“We’re getting out of here, as planned,” Hasson told him. “You’re going first and I’ll come after you when I grab another pack.”

Theo’s face turned towards the blazing interior of the hotel, blind but cognisant. “How can you…?”

“Don’t argue,” Hasson ordered, completing the electrical connections and bringing the vital pea-sized dome of radiance into being at Theo’s waist.

“We could try it together,” Theo said. “I’ve heard about people going piggyback.”

“Kids.” Hasson pushed him into the rectangular aperture. “Not grown men like us, Theo. Together we’d be way outside basic modular mass. And anybody’s who’s as keen on flying as you are ought to know all about BMM and field collapse.” “But…”

“Outside! I’ve set you at what ought to be just under height maintenance power for your weight, so when you get out there just let yourself float away and sink. Now …gol” Hasson shoved Theo as hard as he could, sending the boy tumbling into the cool black sanctuary of the night sky. Theo, feeling himself topple, added the impulsion of his own legs, turning his exit into a kind of sprawling dive which carried him well beyond the field interference radius, out above the jewelled geometries of the city. He swam in a soft sea of air.

Hasson watched him curve away out of sight, then became aware that the floor slab under his feet had begun to shudder and stir like something possessed of life. He moved off it towards the stairs, feeling curious rather than immediately threatened, and in that instant the slab exploded into fragments. Some pieces fell to the floor below, others were carried upwards in a roaring gout of fire which made the landing as bright as day and seared the moisture from Hasson’s eyes. He threw himself on to the staircase and ran for the upper floors, expecting at any second to find himself treading empty space. Other ominous rumbles coupled with an increase in the general brightness told him that the structure of the hotel was beginning to succumb to the onslaught on an increasing scale.

He tried to increase his speed, forcing his thighs to reach high with every stride, and his breath began to come in raucous, throat-tearing gasps. When he had been running for what felt like a very long time a new fear began to manifest itself, a fear that he might unwittingly have passed the level on which Lutze’s body lay. Or, or, supposing that Lutze had managed to survive a second apparently mortal wound, even for a short time, and was no longer on the landing? Looking upwards, Hasson saw that he was reaching the point where the metal banister ceased to skirt the edge of the stair and he was able to establish his position. He stiff-armed himself away from the wall on to the next expanse of floor and experienced a moment of profound relief when he picked out the inert form of Lutze lying exactly where he had last seen it.

Crossing to the body, he dropped on to his knees and cast about him, expecting to locate the oblong mass of Theo’s power pack either in Lutze’s clothing or on the floor nearby. He was unable to find it. He raised his head and extended the scope of his search, only to discover that in the fitful and uncertain light every piece of litter and builder’s rubble promised to be a power pack and almost immediately revealed itself to be something else. A bomb exploded on one of the floors he had passed seconds earlier, producing the now familiar upsurges of flame and horizontal billowings of dust and smoke. Accompanying the blizzard of paper and plastic scraps there came a heaving of the floor, an uneasy sense of loosening.

Hasson realized that even in the period of dire extremity he had been indulging one part of his nature, claiming the luxury of fastidiousness. He rolled Lutze’s body on to its side, exposing the black-lipped obscenity of the fatal wound, and unclipped the power pack from the dead man’s harness. The unit itself and the electrical connectors were slimed with dark blood. Hasson stood up, clutching the unit to his chest, and loped wearily towards the stairs.

His upward progress was now complicated by the absence of a banister. The prolonged and punishing exertion was robbing his legs of both strength and control. There was an increasing tendency for his knees to buckle and for his feet to come down some distance from their point of aim — but with no balustrade at his side the slightest stumble could have resulted in a one-way trip to the inferno of the first floor. Into the bargain, he was now in a section of the hotel which, for all he knew, had not been traversed since Morlacher had planted his over-powered booby traps, which meant there was a new risk of being swatted into oblivion by an unseen hand. The remnants of his powers of thought told him it was a hazard that would have to be accepted — to get out of the hotel he would have to go all the way to the roof and find the exit used by Barry Lutze and the other aerial trespassers. It was a dismal and dangerous prospect, but the only one open to him.

Having managed to project his thoughts a short distance into the future, Hasson — above the agonised pumping of his thighs and the bellows-sound of his breathing — began to speculate about whether the stair he was climbing would terminate in a doorway to the roof. There had been plans for roof gardens and swimming pools, so it was likely that there would be provision for public access by stair as well as by the elevator service. Spurred on by the hope of perhaps suddenly and easily finding himself outside in the clean starry air, Hasson turned his gaze upward, wondering if he would be able to identify the top landing when it came into view.

In the event there was no difficulty. The entire top storey of the hotel was filled with an impenetrable, rolling layer of smoke and fumes which extended almost from floor level up to the invisible ceiling.

Hasson sank down, winded, on the flight of steps which slanted on to the uppermost floor, feeling like a man under siege as he took stock of his surroundings. The underside of the metres- thick blanket of smoke was defined with surprising sharpness. It shifted and heaved and puckered like the surface of a slow-boiling soup which was being seen through an inverting lens, and there was a thin stratum of clear air between it and the floor. Peering horizontally through the translucent sandwich, Hasson was able to discern the beginnings of yet another flight of steps at the opposite side of the landing. The treads were narrower than those upon which he sat, and the conviction grew in him that they led directly to a door which opened on to the hotel roof.

He forced himself to remain at rest for the space of a few more breaths, gathering oxygen into his system, then he stood up, locked his chest muscles, and ran for the ascending stairway. His feet found the steps seemingly without his guidance, and he hurled himself blindly upwards, going as fast as he could, aware that even one inhalation of the reeking blackness surrounding him could result in calamity. Almost at once a new thought occurred — how could he be sure that the stairs he was now on followed the same layout as those below? How did he know he was not about to plunge over an unguarded edge? Fending the thought off he kept running, trailing a hand along a roughcast wall, until he reached a small landing and a metal door. The door was bolted, padlocked, immovable.

Almost grateful that the door, because of its patent solidity, had not tempted him to waste time in trying to force it, Hasson turned and ran back the way he had come. He reached his starting point just as his lungs were giving out and hunkered down on the steps. Tatters of acrid smoke clinging about him flayed his nostrils and throat, triggering a bout of coughing. He clung to the steps until the convulsions ended, a part of his mind disdaining involvement, using the moments of astral detachment to analyse the situation.

From the moment he had entered the Chinook Hotel his life had depended on interplays of forces. Some of the factors he had contended with had been human, others had been purely physical — and not all of them had worked entirely to his disadvantage. The design and topography of the building, for example, had conspired to give him some respite, some time to manoeuvre. A fire was like a primeval jet engine, needing air intakes and an efficient exhaust before it could attain its full deadly splendour. The fact that the roof of the hotel remained unvented and intact — as evidenced by the trapped pall of smoke — had denied the fire the upward exhaust it craved, slowing its progress, cramping its natural style. Had the layer of smoke and fumes not been able to form, he, Rob Hasson, would no longer be alive, having been engulfed and incinerated at a much earlier stage. It was unfortunate-though no indication of malice on the part of the physical world — that the same toxic cloud was now making it impossible for him to search for the only escape route to the outside universe…

Far below Hasson a cataclysm overtook part of the edifice of sloping stair beams upon which he was poised. There was a gargantuan shuddering and thundering which suggested that whole flights of stairs were breaking free of their supports and dropping like carelessly released playing cards. Currents of hot gas geysered up through the central well beside him, churning the overhanging canopy of smoke.

Hasson uttered an involuntary moan as the staircase on which he was perched gave a tentative lurch. He crawled forward on to the floor proper, pressing himself downwards to stay within the wafer of lucid air, holding his breath each time a disturbance enveloped him in the smothering lower reaches of the cloud. Even at floor level the air was now so polluted as to abrade the tissue of his lungs, and he began a slow steady coughing. A lurid redness began to pulse in his vision.

Hasson blinked his eyes, squinting ahead through his two-dimensional continuum, making the belated discovery that the shifting red light was not a subjective phenomenon, but something that had its origins in the external world. Driven by impulses beyond his understanding, he squirmed forward, towards the source of the intermittent radiance. Eventually, an incalculable time later, he found himself lying on the shore of a circular lake.

He shook his head, trying to restore a sense of scale, the ability to relate to his environment.

What he was seeing was not a lake, not a pond, not a pool. It was… an elevator shaft.

Hasson looked down into the shaft — narrowing his eyes into slits to combat a hot upward draught — into its dwindling, receding telescopic sections, the alternating concentric rings of darkness and orange fire which had at their distant hub a small, black, unwinking eye.

The eye hypnotised him, beguiled him, seduced him.

Hasson broke free of it with an effort and turned his attention to the massy oblong block of the power pack still clutched in his left hand. He rolled on to his side and, working with the languid precision of a man in a trance, fitted the unit into the vacant retaining clips, noting as he did so that the metal case had a heat scar which meant it could have been grazed by the thermal cutter which had ended Barry Lutze’s life. He wiped a dark and tacky residue off the two electrical connectors and locked them into the adjoining counter-gravity generator on his belt. Nothing remained for him to do now but to rotate the master control, thus energising the flight system, and step into the waiting elevator shaft and fall to safety. Hasson mused briefly, making himself ready.

It was, of course, an unorthodox means of taking to the air — one not recommended by any of the numerous manuals on techniques of personal flight. The CG field would be disrupted and unable to take effect within the confines of the elevator shaft, which meant he would fall fourteen storeys and more, passing well clear of the underside of the hotel, before any lift would be generated. The total free drop would be something like sixty metres, a distance he would cover in approximately four seconds, making a small allowance for air resistance. It was, granted, an unpleasant and uncomfortable way to embark on a flight, the sort of thing which might upset a nervous person or a raw beginner, but it was nothing, nothing at all, to an experienced air cop who in the course of an arrest had once plunged three thousand metres…

Hasson rotated the master control on his belt panel — and smiled a tremulous, disbelieving smile when he saw that the function light had not begun to glow. The message, if he accepted it, was that his counter-gravity harness was inoperative, that he had no chance of escape.

I’ll tell you three things this might mean, he said to himself, dulling his reactions with textbook pedantry. Then I’ll tell you the one thing it DOES mean.

It might mean you’re getting no power, but that isn’t definite. Current could be coming through, but the microprocessor in the monitor circuits may have decided that the power pack is not in the peak of condition. The microprocessor doesn’t seem to know what an emergency is — it treats every take-off as the beginning of an eight- hour demonstration flight.

It might mean that you damaged the CG generator when you hit that window frame down on the second floor, but that isn’t too likely — those units are built to withstand a fair amount of abuse.

It might mean that the function light itself is broken — that’s been known to happen, though not very often.

There was a louder, more immediate and more threatening rumble not far away, in the direction of the staircase he had recently vacated, and the ceiling of smoke became agitated, pushing down on him like a diaphragm. Still lying on his side, he drew his knees up and closed his eyes.

And the one thing it DOES mean — Rob, Mr Hasson, sir — is that you would stay up here and suffocate rather than take that drop. Who could blame you? Who in his right mind would choose to fall fourteen stories through a blazing building… and came out of it into thin air higher than the Empire State Building … with all that distance still below him, still to drop… without knowing whether his CG harness was going to work or not? It’s impossible. Beyond reason. And yet… And yet . .

Hasson stirred, moved closer to the grinning edge, and looked down into the descending and receding fiery circlets of the shaft. He looked into the black central disk — at the far side of which the world lay waiting — and understood that it was not an eye at all, that his father was not watching him, that nobody was watching him. He was alone. It was entirely up to him whether he chose to die, or to be born again.

He made the decision by relaxing his muscles, allowing himself to fall forward, giving himself up to a lazy dream-like tumble into the unknown, Four seconds.

Measured by normal human time scales, four seconds is a very brief interval — but Hasson was receiving incomparably vivid sense impressions at a cinematic rate, and for him all clocks stopped and the heavens ceased to spin. He had ample time in which to glimpse the flaming battlefields of successive floors, to feel himself breast the battering sound waves of their passing, to endure the growing emptiness in his stomach which told him he was gathering speed in response to the earth’s silent and deadly summons, to experience the alternation of light and shade, heat and comparative coolness, to think, to scheme, to dream, to scream…

And when, finally, in the murmurous, wind-rushing darkness — with the hotel receding above him like a black sun — he felt the counter-gravity harness begin to gather lift, to bring order into . howling chaos, he truly had been born again.