IV
Revanche, who was seeing for the first time the Messinan’s work, scrutinized with cynical elation the creature who had landed closest to him. Awed despite himself, he saw that a fast-whirling halo hovered perhaps a foot above the noble head. Every five seconds the luminous ring changed color.
Even as he watched it, it changed color. From gold it dissolved into a bloody red, and then into a gangrenous green. Next it became a bruise purple, a witching hour black and finally shifted back to gold.
The aspect that startled Revanche most, however, was the face. The false flesh-mask stretched over the metal skull was a grotesque representation of the features of X as seen in the paintings of the Spanish and Italian masters.
There was the somewhat narrow and bearded face with the “sensitive” full-lipped mouth and the gentle nose that poised between straightness and aquilinity. There were the same eyes—flowing and compassionate.
But on the mask those conventional features had been slightly altered, or, as it were, “pulled.” Though the lips had been cast with meekness and love on their curves, the smile had been lengthened, and subtly twisted until it had passed over the boundary of a smile and became a snarl.
Whatever fearsome hand had fashioned that mask had known that a snarl is an elongated smile, just as a smile is a modified snarl. The hand had perceived that it was the snarl of the ape that had become the smile of the man, perceived too that, the process of evolution continuing, the smile of the man had passed into the ultra-tender mouth-curving of X.
And now, that smile which was the apex of Nature’s efforts, had been remolded, recast, rehammered, and returned into a caricature of itself.
Da Vincelleo was not only a scientist, he was an artist supreme. In that mask he had shown the people of Dafess a reflection of themselves. And he made them see what they had done to X, how they had twisted the face of universal love into an inverted image of their true nature—that of self-love.
The mask was the face of X—reductio ad absurdum.
The gentle curve of nostrils had been expanded into derision, and an almost savage fierceness. The glowing compassion of the eyes had become intense with a flame so hot it made the onlookers wonder how the lashes and brows resisted melting, and running into the cavernous eyesockets.
Yet, though fiery, the lineaments combined into a chilling sight. And as there were thousands of the masks, they contributed to a geometrical progression of terror.
Revanche, though he was safe, felt struck with fear and guilt that had been instilled into him when he was a child.
At that moment an Elder who had been eyeing the nearest X, afraid to go into the ritualistic embrace with it because of its fearsome aspect, suddenly ran to it. He threw himself at its feet, clasped its legs, and howled: “Mercy!”
A deep powerful voice that sounded more like the roar of a motor than anything else answered, “Justice!”
Justice was what the Elder had prayed for all of his life. Now he got it.
The automaton lifted the sword, and brought it down with great violence on the Elder’s chicken-skinny neck.
“Chuck!” rasped the blade.
“Bump!” replied the head.
The white-bearded ball rolled on the pavement until it stopped against the curb. Upside down, it looked at everything from a new and possibly revelatory viewpoint, for its expression was not only bewildered and hurt but, for the first time, educated.
Dafess City became bedlam, pandemonium, terror on a cataclysmic scale. The white body of the Truncated broke into fifty thousand fragments that fled here and there, circled, whirled, zig-zagged, leaped, crawled, bounded, darted, and lunged.
The legion of X stalked after them. They moved jerkily but swiftly. Above all, they moved relentlessly.
When a cornered person could not get by the awesome figure, he or she would go down on his or her knees and clasp his hands and howl, “Mercy! Mercy!”
“Justice!” roared the immobile lips of the mask.
“Slush!” smacked the lips of the blade.
“Thud!” echoed the head.
Though many skulls rolled, a more or less objective observer, such as Revanche, would have noticed that many more were spared.
They were unharmed for a reason, however, for always the flailing swords forced the mob in a general direction.
They were being herded towards the Temple of the Righteous, a truncated pyramid not far off the square and one which also housed the First Dafess Sacred-Secular Bank and Finance Corporation. Peculiarly enough, the latter institution had grown to such proportions that it had crowded out the former and now occupied the center of the building. The Dafesses had accepted what seemed to them to be the will of X and had moved the holy section to one corner.
Through the huge marble doors the multitude was forced. They had no place else to go, for, wherever they turned, the blazing eye and the flashing sword headed them off.
B. T. Revanche allowed himself to be borne along with the current. Once inside the pyramid, however, he separated himself from the crowd, and ran down a side-passage. The main body was being forced into the open door of the vault. He did not wish to go with them. He had persuaded Da Vincelleo to prepare a private entrance for him.
He ran with all the speed his short legs could muster, puffing hard. When he rounded a corner, he stopped short. His heart, which had been pounding only moderately now suddenly went into the Walpurgisnacht terror music of Moussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain. A Bioid X was stationed down the hall, exactly in front of the mural that concealed the secret door!
He paused, sucked in oxygen and courage, and then walked briskly up to the thing, confident that the electronic “interferer” he wore strapped to his belt would neutralize it.
But when he got up to it his suppressed doubt and suspicion were translated into action. The flame-eyed X lifted its sword, and lashed out at him.
“You have been chosen!” the frozen lips roared.
The keen tip missed by a spiderweb taking Revanche’s Adam’s apple out in one neat chunk.
Appalled, the financier turned and fled.
While he ran, he turned his head and shrilled back, “You are making a mistake!” It was a futile thing to scream out, for the plastiskin ears were deaf to meaning, if not to noise.
Revanche’s hand fumbled on the interferer’s switch, and clicked it back and forth. It seemed to be working; it was warm and humming. What then was the matter?
He cursed Da Vincelleo for a strictly third-rate artisan—a bungler, botcher, and bonehead.
Suddenly he was running down another empty corridor, his hard soles bouncing echoes off the faraway walls. Slap! Slap! Puff! Wheeze! There was an open window at the distant end of the hall. If only he could make that...!
Again he stopped short. Half hidden in the shadows stood an X on guard. It turned its head, and tiger-bright eyes flamed.
Revanche choked off a scream, and whirled. He expected to see the other destroyer behind him, but it was not in sight. When he reached the junction of the two corridors, he saw it standing there, sword held out before it in satiric salute.
There was but one way for Revanche to go—straight back to the bank’s vault.
For the first time he realized that he himself, B. T. Revanche, was being herded!
He spun around again to face the oncoming terrors. Frantically, his fingers flicked the switch.
“Stop! Stop! I am your master! I am Revanche! I own you!”
“You are the chosen!” they bellowed.
He whirled, and began running again.
When he reached the vault, he found the X’s lined up in a double row, like the guards at a royal reception. They stood facing each other with eyes blazing at eyes, swords held straight out before them and legs widespread above gleaming shoes of brass.
Revanche did not stop but sped down between the guard of honor as if he were afraid they would all begin chopping at once. He had a vision of tiny fragments of meat swimming in a pool of blood, like protozoa jerking in a drop of water beneath a microscope.
When he came to the huge steel door of the vault, he stopped and looked within. The floor immediately before him had raised up to form a wall. Beneath it was a round hole that acted as the entrance to a large, metallic, and greasy tube.
Down that funnel had slid the entire population, screaming, wailing, weeping, clutching at one another for support, striking out in a burst of maniacal fury.
Down they had gone notwithstanding, with a gnashing of teeth and tongues, and frantic clawings at the smooth and slippery sides in a desperate attempt to keep from hurtling to the doom they knew awaited them.
How well they knew it! This tube was exactly that which had been foretold in the Celestial Blueprint as the passageway for the heathen when they fell headlong to Rejectus!
Revanche had planned to slip down his private stairway to the little balcony that would overlook the other end of the tube. There he would have watched the doomed spilling out in a white and frenzied flood. There he would have lapped up revenge as a placated Greek ghost would have lapped blood at a Trojan hecatomb.
Instead, trembling, and bursting with terror, he turned and faced the X’s. “You haven’t got me yet!” he screamed at them.
He kicked the little wheel, that closed the vault from the inside. Once the two-hundred-ton door clanged shut, it could not be opened as long as the inside wheel remained locked in place. It was an anti-robbery device that he was well aware of, having in his youth once planned to plunder the bank in order to get a start in business.
The huge door swung shut swiftly.
Revanche shook his fist at the onrushing horde, then jerked around, and leaped into the tube. The thunder of brass shoes filled the vault walls. Just before he slid out of view Revanche twisted his head for one last look.
A Bioid was leaping through the air in a desperate endeavor to sacrifice itself by stopping the door with its hard and almost indestructible eternalloy body.
The financier did not see whether or not the Bioid made it, for he dropped abruptly into blackness.