David Galouye - Dark Universe

His lungs boiling in protest, he put on a burst of speed nevertheless and dragged the girl along. Desperately, he wondered how far they were from the top.

“I — I can’t go on!” she complained.

When she collapsed, the sudden resistance of her weight against his grip almost pulled him off balance. He helped her up and, with an arm around her waist, resumed his dash up the stairs.

Despite his help, she fell again and, when he tried to lift her, he dropped beside the girl. He would have lain there forever. But this was their last chance; if they failed now, there would never be a secure, secluded world for them.

He struggled erect, cradled the girl in his arms and forced his numb legs back into motion. Each step sent a new throb of pain through his side. Each frantically gulped lungful of air seemed like it would be his last.

Then, finally, he heard the opening above and drew a scant measure of encouragement from the nearness of his goal. Only vaguely did he wonder, however, where he would muster the strength to find concealment after they reached the Original World.

An eternity later he hauled himself and the girl up over the last step and crawled onto the floor of the shack. He gave Della a shove forward. “Hide in one of the other units — quick!”

She dragged herself ahead, staggering on through the entrance. Outside, she pitched forward and he heard only the violent rasping of her breath as she lay there motionless.

He managed to pull himself erect. But paralyzing exhaustion sent him reeling against an inner wall. He collided with a bulky object and his auditory impressions of the shack spun dizzily about him. He crashed into something else and collapsed, retaining his consciousness not even long enough to feel the impact of all the furnishings that tumbled down on top of him.

“Don’t lie there, Jared! Get up and save yourself!”

Distorted with anxiety, Leah’s thoughts spanned the distance from Radiation. And Jared was vaguely disturbed by the fact that he couldn’t even recall having entered a dream.

“The demons — they’re coming up the steps!”

He stirred against the pressure of all the things which, he remembered now, had tumbled down upon him in the shack. But somehow he couldn’t quite pull himself back to con sciousness.

“1 can’t talk and keep track of the monsters at the same time!” Leah went on frantically. “They don’t know you’re there, but they heard all that noise. They’ll find you and bring you back to Radiation!”

He was perplexed over his passive reaction to the warning. His stupor, he reasoned, must be the result of more than mere exhaustion.

Through the medium of Leah’s conscious, he strove for a composite of the physical things around her. And he sensed, from the audible impressions stored in her mind, that she lay on a slumber surface she had learned to call a “bed.” She was in some sort of a shack that was closed off by a rigid curtain (the unfamiliar word “door” was suggested). Her arms were bound to the sides of the bed. And her eyes were stubbornly closed because she knew that if she opened them they would be assailed by the incomprehensible stuff she had been told was “light.” It was seeping in around the edges of a flexible curtain that hung in front of the — “window.”

Then he caught a surge of pure terror as he heard the door of her grotto — “room,” rather — opening. And he listened in on an auditory impression of two of the human-inhuman creatures entering.

“How’s our telepath today?” he heard one of them ask.

“We’re going to spend a little time with our eyes open, aren’t we?” the other added.

Jared sensed the awful fright lapping at Leah’s self-control as she cringed from the creatures.

As though the experience were his own, he felt her arm being seized in a firm grip. Then a sharp pain erupted in the flesh just above the right elbow. At the same time, he intercepted the psychic and sonic counterparts of her scream.

“There,” said one of the monsters. “That’ll help keep you from coming down with something.”

From somewhere in Jared’s material background came a distant zip-hiss . But he was too absorbed in what was happening to Kind Survivoress to give it more than superficial attention.

It had been periods now since the monsters had seized Leah. And he could only wonder what inconceivable torture they had put her through.

“How’s she doing?” asked the nearer creature, taking her Wrist in a gentle grip between thumb and forefinger.

“We’re having a rough time bringing her around. Seems to be immune to facts and logic.”

“We’ll just have to stick with it. Thorndyke says there was another telepath in our own complex two or three generations back. She was pretty sensitive too, but she didn’t have to put up with what this one’s going through.”

Jared felt a hand come to rest on Leah’s forehead and heard one c, the creatures say, “All right, now — let’s open our eyes.”

At that instant the strand of communicative contact snapped as unrestrained fear choked the woman.

Jared pushed a stone bench off his chest and sat up, feeling his head. There was a clot of blood embedded in his hair and, above it, a swelling of lacerated scalp.

He cast off more of the shack’s furnishings and rose. Although he snapped his fingers intently, he received but indistinct composites of the objects that had pinned him down, of the square pit which lay between him and the entrance.

Then, recalling the zip-hiss he had heard while in contact with Leah, he bolted outside.

There was no audible trace of Della’s breathing or heartbeat. He banged his fist against the side of the shack and wrung impressions out of the returning echoes. The ground in front of him was utterly bare.

Eventually he caught the scent, several hundred beats old, of the monsters that had passed. He knelt and swept the ground with his hands, exploring the spot where the girl had collapsed. The soft dust clearly bore the imprint of her body. But she had lain there so long ago that the surface had already given up the warmth it had captured from her.

Stunned, he trudged toward the Original World entrance. Della was gone — recaptured by the monsters who must have assumed she was the one who had made all the noise in the shack. And they had reclaimed her so long ago that now there was no hope of overtaking them before they reached Radiation.

What a bungling fool he was! As though his fortune had been graced by some power greater than Light, he had received a second chance even after having lost Della the first time. Against inconceivable odds, he had wrested her from her captors. But, instead of fleeing to remote seclusion, he had dawdled in the meaningless depths below this world — until the demons had gotten another opportunity to carry her off.

Bitter with self-reproach and bowed by an oppressive sense of futility, he paused in the corridor outside the Original World. The silence that extended toward Radiation was as thick as any he had ever heard. He tried not to think of the torment Leah was being subjected to, of the possibility that by now Della herself might be undergoing the same brutal indignities.

He took an uncertain step in that direction, then checked himself and listened helplessly down at his empty hands. Without weapons he could do nothing against the vicious forces of infinity.

But he could arm himself! If the Lower Level was as desolate as he had been led to believe, then he would probably meet little opposition on returning there. Possibly no one left in that world would even remember he was supposed to be a Zivver.