Read Hell's Gate for Free Online Page B

out and grasp him.
        His horror did not motivate him to flight, but paralyzed him completely. His vital organs had turned to cast iron. Someone had even pinned open his eyelids so that he could not blink out the alien vision.
        Then the lighted portal fluttered brighter, dimmer, and was suddenly gone as if some delicate electronic link between alien world and basement wall had been severed. He stared stupidly at the blank tile which had been a window into hell only moments ago. His feet grew lighter. His organs turned back into flesh. Someone removed the pins from his eyelids. Still, he was emotionally incapable of acting. He was gasping frantically for breath.
        Intrepid recovered faster, leaped and slammed against the wall. He took a second running lunge, hit with his feet in a flying leap, fell away and looked at Victor with glistening eyes that demanded his master do something about the things in the walls.
        Victor recovered his wits under that gaze. He shrugged his shoulders at the dog, then crossed to the steps, went up them two at a time. There was a tremendous thumping and scraping as Intrepid tried desperately to keep up with his master. Salsbury went to the second floor bedroom where he had stowed the three trunks. He opened the door a bit hard, sent it banging back against the wall where it shivered and quaked as if it were alive. He went to the computer trunk, gave it a solid kick. The stinging pain leaped up his leg, but he did not much care. He kicked it again. Intrepid had joined him by this time and he set to snuffling and whuffing, dancing around the computer trunk with a look of expectancy.
        “Let's have a briefing,” Victor said to the 810-40.04.
        It wasn't in the mood for conversation.
        “Come on, damnit!”
        Nothing.
        He remembered the tool bench in the cellar and went back down. Intrepid followed to the head of the stairs and watched him descend, but did not follow. In the cellar, Victor found the tools racked on a pegboard wall. He chose a medium weight crowbar and took it back to the bedroom, moving like a caveman with his favorite stone axe.
        He squared off before the computer trunk and brandished the weapon. “A briefing now, or I pry you up good!” There was a great deal of adrenalin pumping through his system, and all his nerves seemed to grate against each other, alive, aware and excited. There was something going on that he did not understand, something involving shrunken, leathery lizardmen with sucking eel mouths. It was definitely going to get dangerous, for those were dangerous looking customers, those scaly freaks. If he was expected to play a role in it, then he damn well better be informed.
        But the 810-40.04 was unresponsive.
        He stepped forward, swung the bar, smashed it against the top of the trunk. It bounced off, ringing his arm like a bell. His bones screamed at him to stop acting like an idiot, to have more respect for the fragile parts of him. He dropped the bar and massaged his arm until it started to fed like flesh again. Carefully examining the top of the trunk, he could not find the smallest dent or scratch where the bar might have struck. Thus ended round one.
        “I'm getting mad,” he told the computer. And he truly was. He realized, not without a start, that this was the most heated emotional moment he had experienced since he had wakened in the orchard with iron Victor in command of his body. He felt more human than ever.
        But the computer was inscrutable.
        He picked up the crowbar again.
        Intrepid snuffled and chortled like a mare in heat.
        Victor knelt beside the trunk and examined the thin line where the lid met the body. Gently, he inserted the thin edge of the crowbar tip into the crack, worked it in a bit, then brought his weight down on it. For a moment, the increasing pressure seemed to have no effect whatsoever on the box. Then the bar