Fear that man Read Online Free PDF Page B

for some reason my subconscious talent began boosting their vividness and re-broadcasting them.”
        “But I wouldn’t have dreamed them without your help.”
        Hurkos smiled sadly. “You would have dreamed them just the same and just as completely. You would not have been aware of dreaming them, is all.”
        “But then what was it? It reminded me of the man on the cross you toppled after Belina’s death.”
        “It’s the Christ legend,” Gnossos said. They turned to stare at him. “I make legends my business. Poets work in all sorts of mythologies. There have been a large number of them-and a large number of wild ones too. The Christ legend is not so ancient. There are still Christians, as you know, though damn few. Most of the religion, along with all the others, died out about a thousand years ago, shortly after the Permanent Peace and the immortality drugs. According to legend, the god-figure Christ was crucified on a dogwood cross. This dream seems to be a reenactment of that myth, though I do not recall that the man hung there that long or that there were administering angels and tempting demons.”
        “This could be another clue,” Hurkos offered.
        “How so?” Sam was ready to clutch at the smallest straw.
        “Perhaps your mystery hypnotist is a neo-Christian, one of those who refuse the immortality drugs. That would certainly explain why he would want to overthrow the empire. He would want to convert the pagans, bring the savages into the fold. That’s us.”
        “Good point,” Gnossos said. “But that doesn’t explain the blob.”
        Hurkos lapsed into silence.
         Bong-bong-bong!
        PREPARE FOR NORMAL SPACE AND MANUAL CONTROL OF THIS VESSEL!
        “We’re almost to Hope,” Gnossos said. “Perhaps we will soon be having more clues.”
        The flight-control system of the planet-wide city locked them into its pattern and began bringing them down to a point of its own choosing since they had not requested any particular touchdown spot. Ships fluttered above, below, and to all sides of them. Bubble cars spun across the great elevated roadway, zipping between the buildings, sometimes slipping into tunnels in the skyscrapers from which they often emerged going another direction. They settled onto a gray pad where the flames of their descent were soaked up, cooled, dissipated.
        Beyond the pad, on all sides, lay Hope. Super-city. The hope, literally, of a new way of life for billions. They stood at the open portal, waited while the attendant marked their checkslip so that they would have the proper ship to return to, tore it in half and gave them their portion.
        “Well,” Gnossos said, “where to?”
        “No orders yet,” Sam said.
        “Let’s just wander around a bit.”-Hurkos.
        “Okay, we will.”-Gnossos.
        And they did.
        
        He sat before the thick window that was not really a window at all, and he looked at the thing beyond. It raged, lashing, screaming, roaring like a thousand bulls with pins in their brains. How long? How long had it fought against the Shield, trying to get out? Breadloaf peered deeper into the Shield, clutched his chair and leaned farther back in it. The massive desk nearly concealed his slumped form. A thousand years and more. That was how long. His father had constructed the barrier and the chamber beyond, which dipped into the other dimension. No, not another dimension either-a higher dimension. Not another alternate scheme of things, just a different layer of this particular scheme. And when his father had died in a freak accident that the medics could not undo the damage of, he had come into possesssion of the family fortune, the family buildings, the family office structure here in the Center of Hope, the Shield and the tank beyond. The last two things were something one did not advertise. It was a family secret-a big, hoary skeleton in the family closet. The burden