This time he found himself sitting on a chair on the porch of his old house. At least it looked like his house, except it was apparently built on the edge of a cliff, rather than in the middle of a green lawn the way it should have been. He leaned over the edge of the porch railing and saw a frenzied ocean hundreds of feet below slamming into toothy rocks. The height made him dizzy, and he sat back down and looked around the porch instead.
There was another man standing on his porch. Jebediah gaped in astonishment. This was the first time he had ever seen another human being in this particular mode of dreaming. The man cut an odd figure. He was rather short, with greasy black hair and a ridiculously tiny moustache. He seemed to be wearing some kind of military uniform with an odd insignia on an arm band that looked like an abstract representation of a windmill. The man just finished pouring two glasses of lemonade, and held one of them out to Jebediah, who was too confounded to do anything but take it and hold it stupidly in front of him.
"What? Who are you?" he asked.
The uniformed man shrugged. "My name would mean very little to you, I'm afaid." He said with a thick German accent. "I was born long after your time."
Jebediah set his glass of lemonade down on a small wrought iron table. "But, why are you here?"
The man took a sip of lemonade from his own glass. "To help you."
"With what? The Tall Man?"
"No." The man looked at Jebediah with a peculiar exression on his face, as though he were looking at a particularily succulent cut of steak. It was not an expression Jebediah particularily liked. "You don't have to go back, you know."
"Not go back? What do you mean?" "I mean that you don't have to go back into a body made of decaying flesh that feels like a crust of offal covering your bones. Or even into that metal automaton that keeps what's left of your brain alive. You've almost reached the point by yourself where you don't have to any more. I can take you the rest of the way." He held out his hand, but Jebediah ignored it. Something about this man made him very nervous. He was almost sure that he had seen him, or perhaps a picture of him sometime long ago, but he couldn't remember where.
"But I must go back." He protested. "Without me too decieve the machines, Reggie's plan won't work."
"What plan? To defeat the Tall Man? What if you fail? He'll kill you, you know. Why would you want to do something so dangerous?"
"Why?" Why indeed? He had trouble putting words to what he felt. "So I can perhaps acheive forgiveness for what I have done. Perhaps if humanity forgives me, I will finally be able to forgive myself."
"You say you want forgiveness?" The man sneered. "Don't you realize that with the power I have to offer you, you could kill the Tall Man with a thought? You think humanity won't forgive you when you come out with his head in your hands? Not only will they forgive you, they'll fall at your feet and worship you like a God!"
Jebediah shook his head. Something was very wrong here, but he was too confused to tell what it was. Dark clouds raced across the sky, covering the sun and making the porch seem gloomy, almost as though it were night. "But.... what about the others?"
"What others?" "The silver sentinels." It was very dark now, and rain started falling. A chill wind came over the ocean and blew the drops sideways, covering the wooden floor of the porch with dampness. "There's ten billion helpless people trapped in them, and Reggie said the computer that controlled them was programmed only to free them once the war they were fighting was over, and one side or the other was destroyed. If it weren't for that, we could have killed the Tall Man a long time ago, but the creatures fighting the war would have killed all the silver sentinels to get even."
"What about them?" Puddles began forming on the porch, making it slippery. "They don't even know that they're alive. I hardly think they'll care if they die."
Jebediah gaped at him. He hadn't thought it possible for a human being to be as evil as the Tall Man, but he had been wrong. Suddenly, there was a sudden blow on his back, as if someone had pushed him. He fell forward, barely catching himself with his hands, and splashing water from one of the puddles all over the monstrous person before him. The man cursed in German and brushed water off himself, but Jebediah barely noticed. He was too busy gaping at the man's reflection in the puddle he was kneeling in.
Except the reflection wasn't that of a man at all. It was of a hideous, chitin covered shape that he had seen two weeks ago tearing a hole into a metal wall. "My God!"
The man looked down, but was at the wrong angle to see what Jebediah had. "What are you screaming about, old man?"
Jebediah scramble to his feet and pushed the other man back. "Get away from me!" he shouted. "I'm getting out of here!"
He tried to get inside his house, but the younger man was much faster than him, and got between him and the doorway. "Where do you think you're going?" he snarled ferally.
"Anywhere but with you." Jebediah turned around. Well, if he couldn't walk off the porch, he would jump. Hoping that this was all just a dream, he ran back to the front railing of the porch and threw himself over it, into the churning ocean below.
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Jebediah awoke with a shout back in the store room he had started out in. Mike, Jody, and Reggie were all there. Apparently they had gotten rid of his previous body, because there was no corpse around. The rows of weapons, previously as still as massive tombstones now hummed with the familiar chord of the dimension forks that opened passageways between the worlds.
He shivered in spite of the fact that the temperature in the labrynth the Tall Man had built was always kept at a too-warm 80 degrees. Looking down at his hands, he saw that his complexion was pale and jaundiced. Construct hands. It had worked then. God, he hated this, though. He could even taste the rotten, metallic yellow blood in his mouth. Well, at least it was for the last time, one way or the other. If they succeeded he would be able to live from then on in the far more comfortable bodies that Reggie had helped design. Being in one of them was almost indistinguishable from being alive again. And if they failed, the Tall Man would destroy them all. So either way, he would soon be done with this horror.
He frowned. Had there been some strange dream he had had about a third alternative while he had been unconscious? Funny the things that came into his head like that.
"Are you all right?" Mike asked. "For a minute there we thought something had gone wrong."
"I'm fine. Well, at least as fine as can be expected in this." He gestured toward his clammy flesh in disgust. "Why, what happened?"
"Well, it's just that after we got the sphere out of your old body, you didn't make a new one as soon as you should have. Normally you get adjusted to your senses as a sentinel within a couple of minutes, but you just sat there on the floor for half an hour. We were even thinking about having Reggie open you up to see if he could find anything wrong, but he said to give you a little more time, it might have been harder making a body you haven't been used to for so long. A few minutes later you did synthesize a body, so I guess he was right."
"He usually is." Jebediah looked at the humming rows of machines. "It looks like you put the time to good use. Are they all running?"
"As far as we can tell." Mike said. "We won't know for sure until you perform the final phase of the operation. Hopefully the security systems on all the target worlds will mistake your biopattern for his, and won't set off any alarms. Not until it's too late, anyway."
"Right." Jebediah walked up to the first machine and slid back a panel, revealing two silver globes, the same size and color as ordinary sentinels. He placed his hands on them and concentrated, feeling the space between two worlds, seperated by lightyears and dimensions contacting like a stretched peice of rubber that was suddenly released. The machine hummed louder for a moment, and then vanished.
Jebediah nodded. At least the transportation aspect of the weapon was working perfectly. Hopefully the rest of it's functions would prove to be equally flawless. If they didn't, well, they'd find out soon enough.
Grimly, he stepped over to the next machine.
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One would have thought that the destruction of over a hundred planets would be more dramatic, Jebediah mused nearly two hours later, as the last machine faded from view. Still, the effect from the other end was probably more spectacular. The devices that Reggie had designed gave off a type of radiation that broke apart the bonds in molecules which were composed of more than a few hundred atoms.
The effects on some parts of the world were negligable. The oceans continued to sweep over beached of sand, and dunes continued to be sculpted by the wind in the desert. The effect on living things was far more dramatic, though. All living things, even those on the alien planets the devices had been sent to, are composed of hugely complex molecules such as deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which was composed of millions of molecules. The bonds between these compounds were suddenly severed by the energy given off by Reggie's weapon, and the chemical reactions which made life possible were suddenly stopped. From a large scale view, the effect was grotesque. Animals, plants, and sentient beings simply stopped in their tracks, and disintegrated in a matter of seconds, leaving behind messy puddles of decomposed organic compounds and the calceous remains of their skeletons.
The effect of the devasting ray was blocked by even the thinnest layer of metal, though. There were a very few survivors, at least for a while. Those who had been in hyperbaric chambers or submarines. In the end, of course, even these few survivors died. The only food left, that had not been rotted away along with every unprotected living creature were a few canned goods that quickly ran out. The survivors cursed their 'luck' in the end, as they starved to death. Yet their worlds were not completely devoid of sentient life, even then. Observing all of this destruction were beings who didn't need to eat, the human slaves who had been forced to warfare on many of the worlds. Their brains were safely encased in the metal sentinels. Their prison had now become a lifeboat. A hundred formerly thriving planets joined the Earth in it's unenviable fate as a graveyard, overseen only by billions of nearly indestuctible, suddenly freed sentinels who for the first time in five thousand years were able to wonder just what the hell was going on.
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Back on the Red Planet, Reggie pulled a tarp off a small shape that had gone previously unnoticed, hidden behind the huge recently vanished weapons. They were the two twin pillars that composed a dimensional fork, though not as sparsely functional as the ones the Tall Man used. Jebediah had helped build them, and even after 5000 years, he still had refined tastes, and still liked to make his inventions look elegant as well as funtioning well. One of the pillars had a small lightbulb and a switch built into the side of it. Reggie walked up to the humming device and quickly pulled the switch down.
"OK." he said. "The next dimension fork to be activated should be by our Tall friend. When the antenna I got in here detects that, it'll switch on the light, and set the destination to five feet from wherever the Tall Man departed from. As soon as that happens, you need to go through, Jeb."
Jebediah nodded. When the Tall Man went through his dimensional fork, as he almost certainly would very soon, he would have perhaps five or ten seconds to follow after him. Timing was critical. It wouldn't do to be too soon or too late. Mentally he reviewed how the Tall Man walked. Perhaps three seconds would be the right length to wait.
He concentrated on watching the forks as Reggie spoke to Mike and Jody. He knew what this was about, and deliberately didn't look as Reggie slashed both their throats with a short, thick knife which he then used to chop their skulls open. God, would there never be any end to this killing? What in the name of all goodness had they become? Well, this would all be over in another few minutes, and perhaps then they would finally be able to regain some part of the humanity they had lost in this 5000 year living death.
Two sentinels, still dripping red gore onto the floor floated several feet behind them, one over each of Reggies shoulders, like two guardian angels, corrupted by demonic technology, but still determined to watch over their charge. Just then, the light on the top of the right hand pillar went on. The humming of the fork became louder and higher pitched for an instant, and then returned to normal. Jebediah counted slowly to three, and carefully stepped through the gate.
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The Tall Man stood sneering at a dimensional fork, where two ambassadors from the Xerdet had just vanished. They had been very presumtuous creatures, having the audacity to tell him how to run his own business.
Among other things, they told him that he should not have let any of his human slaves, the ones entrapped in the gold sentinels have free will. And particularily not for such a long period of time. But when he had asked them to explain their objection, they had been unable to, simply saying that it was something that everybody knew shouldn't be done.
What crap. It was either a bunch of old wive's tales, or an attempt on their part to keep him from having new weapons developed that he would sell to their enemies, the Tissin. Obviously it must have been crap, because it hadn't kept the two ambassadors from purchasing schematics and prototypes of the latest methods of killing his slaves had come up with. Or from renewing their lease on five billion silver sentinels for another hundred years.
Really, the ambassadors, and all the Xerdet, and the Tissin, too, were all a bunch of pompous, overdressed fools. They wanted to play at war like two spoiled children playing at a game. So long as their meals came on time, and the casualties were kept well away from where the smell would offend their delicate noses, they really didn't see a reason to care about what went on on the battlefield. Or to whom, so long as it wasn't to them, or to the people in their worlds who counted for something.
He lifted up the heavy black pouch of crystals the two ambassadors had given him. In about an hour, two ambassadors from the Tissin were do to arrive, and it wouldn't be politic to let them see how much wealth he had just gotten from the Xerdet. Not only would they be able to deduce approximately how many of his weapons and slaves the Xerdet had just purchased, but they would use the fact that he had just been enriched by their enemies as an excuse as to why he should be satisfied with a lower payment from them. He would have to place them in his vault, along with the rest of his wealth. Except perhaps he would give one of them to that Jebediah creature. He had done that once, several thousand years ago. Jebediah had just looked blankly down at it like the stupid sheep he was, until he had explained that one of those crystals represented 100 years of slavery for 10 million of his people. Then he had started this ridiculous watering at the eyes that the humans did when they were upset. That had been pretty funny, so the Tall Man had made it a point to give him one of the crystals every five hundred years or so, just to see his reaction to it. He hadn't done it for a while now, so perhaps it would be good to see it again.
Suddenly, the Tall Man was distracted from his dreams of tormenting Jebediah by a harsh buzz coming from his jeweled tie tack. It meant that one of his computers needed to alert him of something. Annoying, but it could be something of importance. He carefully set the valuable crystals back into the heavy pouch he had taken them from and summoned a dimensional fork to take him to the chambers where his computers lay safely buried, 5 miles deep below the crust of the Red Planet.
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The dimensional fork should have vanished within seconds once the Tall Man passed through it. Indeed, it started to fade, but before it could, a second dimensional fork opened a few feet in front of it. From out of this fork stepped a figure many would have mistaken for the Tall Man. Those familiar with him though, would not have made this error. The whole set of Jebediah Morningside's face was far kindlier, although lined with the pain of endless centuries of slavery and guilt for what he had unleashed upon his planet and his people.
Quickly he stepped forward, carefully halting halfway through the gate the Tall Man had just crossed, taking on a ghostly appearance as he strobed between two widely seperate locations. The two forks regained solidity, and Jebediah nodded in grim stisfaction, despite the ill feeling this flickering was given him. It was just as he and his allies had surmised. The gates were designed with a failsafe device which prevented them from closing while the Tall Man stood within them which would have destroyed his current incarnation. And since the Tall Man had made his flesh using Jebediah as a genetic model, the idiot machine that operated the failsafe could not tell the difference between the Tall Man and himself.
Jebediah endured the peculiar fluttering between the forks for a few more seconds before he was joined by Reggie and the two sentinels, Mike, and Jody. Reggie stepped forward quickly and quickly attached two black and silver boxes to the forks.
"You can step out now, Jeb." He told the older man. "I've got them held open with the sympathizers."
"Good." He stepped back with releif. It hadn't actually hurt to stand there, but it felt very peculiar, as if your whole body had the hiccups.
"We'd better get going." Jebediah said nervously. "When he finds out what we did, I am very much afraid he will not be pleased."
"Not yet." Reggie said. "I gotta go back through the gate for a couple of minutes and get something."
One of the gold sentinels, Mike, spoke to Reggie telepathically in an annoyed tone. "Reggie, we have the timing on this worked out. We need to get going!"
"I know" Reggie grinned. "I just don't want to disappoint an old friend of mine. Don't worry, I'll fix the gate to move me back a couple of minutes in time. I won't be late. 'Sides, has the Regman ever let you down?"
The sentinel drifted up near the ceiling an spun around several times in exasperation. He wasn't even going to answer that one!
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The Tall Man stood in front of his computers. They did not resemble the computers that a 20th century human was familiar with, with a keyboard and screen. Instead, numerous microcopic crystals that were organized into a complicated fractal arragement like a boquet of flowers gleamed with iridescent colors as they sent and recieved information telepathically with the Tall Man. Much of this information was in binary code, but the Tall Man had no problem undertanding it regardless. In many ways his own mind was far more like one of his computers than like the irrational human slaves that served him.
It was perhaps because of this rigourously logical component of his makeup, that the Tall Man was greatly lacking, compared to human beings, the quality of imagination that made them such great inventors, despite their abysmal stupidity. It was also due to this lack that he never gave much thought to what the consequences of what he had done to humanity would ultimately be. His opinion of the human mind was based on what they had been capable of during breif lifespan where the best of them had spent maybe 25 years learning to master a particular feild of study, and maybe 50 years at best creating a few pathetic advances in that same feild before they died. And they were so poorly constructed that they never used more than 10 percent of their brains at any time during their lives.
What a human being would be capable of in 5000 years was not something the Tall Man wondered about. He himself had already existed far longer than that, and in all that time had never been more, or less, or other than he was now. Nor was he given cause to wonder. Except for a few incidents in the first 500 years of his dominion over humanity, his slaves had done exactly as he commanded. They produced new weapons and other various inventions for him to sell at various intervals, and did not attempt to harm him or his property as they once had. And so long as everything worked smoothly and he was making money, he had no cause to wonder about anything. At all.
Just now, the computer was informing him of lovely news, news he had not expected to hear for another several millenia at least. The war between the Xerdet and the Tissin had finally ended. One side or the other had been destroyed. But which one? The computer was tens of thousand of years old, and did not provide information unless asked the right questions.
He was about to ask it, when he heard a humming noise behind him. It was the distinctive sound of a sentinel travelling at high speed. The Tall Man turned around, puzzled. There shouldn't be a sentinel here, so close to so much sensitive equipment. He looked around for a moment, not seeing anything, when a flicker of motion caught his eye. It was not one, but two sentinels. They were traveling in a very strange fashion, barely six inches above the polished marble floor.
As the sentinels flew towards him, the Tall Man had a brief moment to notice light gleam off of something very fine that appeared to be suspended between the two golden spheres. Then there was a sudden burning pain as the sentinels passed on either side of him and both his legs were severed halfway between knee and ankle!
Deprived of feet to stand on, the Tall Man fell to the floor, yellow blood gushing from the stumps of his legs. Fury overwhelmed the pain. Another damned attempt at rebellion! Well, he didn't need to bother teaching them obedience any more! The war was over! He'd just kill every single one of these damn creatures, and make sure their deaths would take a good long time, too!
There was a flash of light and heat behind him, as Jody and Mike reformed bodies for themselves. Jody grabbed the Tall Man's arms and pulled them roughly behind him, preventing him from grabbing any weapons he might have hidden. Mike looked to make sure that his brother didn't need any help, and then carefully began winding an invisible something that lay on the floor around a spool that was barely an inch across, but weighed almost fifty pounds.
"Monomolecular filament. Worked exactly the way you said, Reggie" Mike said with admiration, as Reggie came around the corner carrying his four barreled shotgun. The Tall Man's eyes narrowed with fury. The damned icecream man had broken into his trophy room!
Well, this would never do, the Tall Man decided. He prepared to activate the sentinel within his flesh that contained his mind, and do battle without the disadvantage of a crippled body when Reggie raised the shotgun and aimed it at his head. A sudden red light enveloped him and he barely heard Reggie's last words before the glowing crimson darkened into black.
"You got this comin' for 5000 years, you Tall son of a bitch." *********************************************************************************************************************
A very long time later, far longer than even the Tall Man could have guessed, he woke up in a black space that curved all around him. The Tall Man looked around with his other dimensional senses, but the place he was trapped in was sealed off in all dimensions, and in time as well. Which was impossible. Since as far as he knew, such an isolated dimensional bubble was theoretically possible, but neither energy nor matter could ever enter or leave such a space. He tried to summon a dimension fork, but nothing happened, not that he expected it to. The place where he was was completely cut off from the rest of the universe.
Despite what he thought he knew, something entered into the void with him. It was himself- no, it was that stupid traveler, Jebediah, and his three friends. For the first time in his life, the Tall Man felt fear. How could these creatures accomplish what was impossible even for him? He looked at them for a long moment. They were grim figures, for some reason reminding him of a painting he had looted from Earth and sold. What had it been called, "The Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse" or something like that. At the time he had found it amusing. He and he alone was the harbinger of the Apocolypse.
Now suddenly, it didn't seem so funny any more.
"I trust you are comfortable?" Jebediah asked, breaking the silence. "I hope so, because you are going to be here for a very long time."
"You!" The Tall Man rushed at him, intending to rip the sphere from his head and crush it, but somehow found himself slipping oddly sideways, and ending up back where he had started.
He stared at Jebediah in shock. "How did you do that?"
It was Reggie who answered. "We can do a lot of things you don't know jack about. You think we gave you weapons?" He snorted contemptfully. "For the past 4000 years you've gotten what was at the bottom of the barrel. We kept the good stuff for ourselves."
"But I watched you. How could you keep anything from me?"
Mike laughed in his face. "Watched us? We had specialists who took over your security system almost as soon as we got here! You saw what we wanted you to see. It's true we had to do what you told us, but we didn't have to let you know about what we might also be doing."
"But if that's true, why didn't you do this long ago? Why did you wait 5000 years?"
"Because of the others" Jebediah explained. "You had billions of poor souls trapped in mindlessness inside your ordinary sentinels. And despite everything we could do, we were unable to override the program in your computer that was programmed not to release them until either the Xerdet or the Tissin had been destroyed and the war had ended. So we had to wait until we had made a weapon capable of destroying whole planets and doing just that."
Whole planets? Even a tachyon bomb, the most powerful weapon the Tall Man knew of left only a 500 mile crater. The strange new sensation of fear became even greater in him. "What are you going to do with me. How long are you going to keep me here?"
"How long?" Reggie scowled at him. "Well, the way we see it, you've kept ten billion human beings prisoner for 5000 years. That adds up to 50 trillion years, which is how long we've made this place to last."
"50 trillion years!" The universe wouldn't even last that long, though this strange dimension might. "That's ridiculous!"
"No, that's justice." Jebediah said severely. "Something I fear you're not very familiar with." Jebediah sighed and turned towards Reggie. "Come on, lets get out of here. I can't stand the sight of this thing. It sickens me."
"Wait!" cried the Tall Man. "Before you leave, I must know. Who did you destory, the Xerdet or the Tissin. Which one of them won the war?" He had to know. Perhaps there would be a way to contact the winning side and let them know of his predicament. If the humans could get him into this isolated dimension, surely those great races would be able to devise a way to get him out.
The four humans turned to look at him. Jody with hatred, Mike with fury, Reggie with contempt, and Jebediah with simple boredom. Gazing at their faces, he was not sure which of them answered him, before they turned and left him with eternity to contemplate what they had said:
"Don't you get it? Both the Xerdet and the Tissin were using us as slaves. Once we had the means of doing so, we destroyed both of their races. And as for who won the war.....
"We did."
