The blow made the joints of his skull creak like rusty hinges, and for a while time stood still. When he began to struggle out of the fog, there was a while when he only wanted to crawl back under it and leave his headache outside.
He grew aware that he was sitting propped up, and the feel of the cushioned seat and its slight movements told him he was in a car. Someone was on each side of him. He thought: I’m getting lots of free rides. Then he realized that this was a Ride in the worst sense of the word.
A BRASSY voice was speaking—Degnan couldn’t see, because something like a sack was pulled smotheringly over his face, but he formed an instant dislike for the speaker—“I say get rid of him. Hell! If I’d hit him a little harder, there wouldn’t be any argument.”
“Nah,” said a whining voice that he remembered sharply, from yesterday evening, “you couldn’t hit that hard, Clark. His head’s so thick, even they couldn’t pound anything into it.”
“Maybe I’ll show you if I could,” said Clark viciously. “Now, what’s wrong with stopping right here and kicking him off a pier? We got enough troubles without him . . .”
“Will you listen to me?” broke in a voice that chilled Degnan to the bone, for it was the voice of Margaret Lusk. “I tell you, he knows something. He has a command. Or why would I have been told to send him a message?”
Degnan thought dully: Slaves of Venus, all of them. I was going to lead them on and find out what they know about this hypnotic business—so I walked straight into a baited trap. And now I’m supposed to know something they don’t!
What, exactly, was he supposed to know? . . . Oh, yes. Sure. That’s right.
He remembered, but not the where and how of his coming to know what he did. It fitted somewhere in that twelve-day blank that he still couldn’t fill in consecutively . . . It was like in the stories where a crack on the head cures the hero’s amnesia; but he knew it wasn’t that simple.
Clear to him were principles and details of the construction and operation of the Venusians’ new weapon, the hyperspace projectile, and of the hyperspace drive in general—a startingly simple modification, simple at least to Venusian minds, of the Earth-invented gravities. It was as plain as if someone had just been explaining it all to him, even the gravitic principles he’d been hazy on before.
The revelation shocked him so that he moved convulsively, and discovered that his wrists were lashed together.
“He’s coming to life,” announced still another voice beside him.
The girl went on unheeding: “It’s obvious they have a purpose in this, and we’d be crazy if we disregarded it. They cast him adrift with me in the Sheneb’s life rocket, close to Earth—and I think he was the one they wanted to be sure got here, and I was just ballast. We’ve got to wait and see.”
“Okay, okay,” grumbled the man called Clark. “But I think we’re cutting our throats.”
Degnan hadn’t stirred again; he was slumped between his captors, prey momentarily to a paralyzing horror.
He could imagine what was happening now all over Earth—wherever the Venusians chose to aim their new unstoppable projectiles. Irresistible, yet real and deadly, because the concept of hyperspace as an otherwhere, wholly out of touch with here and now, was false; rather, it was an otherhow. The great calculators of the Earth’s defense centers, and the lesser brains of the barrage, could compute trajectories and probabilities in normal space time, but the course of a hyperspace missile was utterly unpredictable by normal mathematics. Interception of one of them would be pure lucky accident.
THE CAR stopped. Still blinded, he was pushed roughly out. Even with a hard muzzle thrusting into his back, he had to draw tight rein on the impulse to break away and mako a dash for freedom.
He tripped over low steps, heard a door open and smelled close indoor air. The gun prodded him forward a short distance, then Clark’s voice behind him ordered, “Turn left.”
Degnan sensed that the room was a small one even before someone jerked off the blinder. He found himself facing a beefy redfaced man who stood negligently pointing a heavy gun. Degnan’s eyes widened slightly; the gun was a flame pistol, actually a compact, pocket-sized atomic blast, strictly forbidden to civilians.
The room was sparsely furnished with a couple of chairs, a table, and a studio couch; dust of neglect on everything. The single window was shuttered, the ceiling light on, which must mean the power had come back.
Behind Clark’s thick figure, Degnan saw the slight one of Margaret Lusk, flanked by his insinuating acquaintance of yesterday and another man, a hollow-eyed, unshaven specimen. The girl’s dark gaze rested on Degnan with speculation and, he thought, a touch of compassion.
Clark waggled the flame pistol. “Okay, fellow. She says you’ve got a command. What is it?”
Degnan was stonily silent. The truth wouldn’t do him any good, and he didn’t know enough to risk making up a story. If he could learn a little more about what went on—
Clark scowled. “If we’re going to find out anything from this dummy, maybe I’d better persuade him to talk.”
“You don’t really think that would work?” said the girl coldly.
“Never know what a guy’ll take until you try him.”
“You make me sick,” she said, and Degnan had to marvel despite himself at her air of cool superiority. “I don’t know why you had to go after him in the first place. Whatever command he carries with him will be set to function in its own time and way, though he may not know what it is himself—and we may be interfering with the Over Race’s plans.”
Clark’s red face grew shades paler; he backed away from the prisoner, the flame gun jittering in his grip in a way that set Degnan’s teeth on edge.
“But we can’t let him go,” mumbled the big man. “Can we?”
The girl shrugged. “No. But we can keep him here, and try to find out—in an intelligent way—what he’s supposed to do.”
“How?”
She bit her lip, frowning faintly. Her gaze traveled searchingly over Degnan’s set face, as if trying to read his thoughts. If she could have done so, she wouldn’t have found them pleasant; he was nursing the bittersweet thought of getting his hands on her throat. At the moment, it seemed to him that he hated the girl more than the others, as if her betrayal of humanity had wounded him personally and deeply . . .
She said with decision, “We’ll have to try hypnosis.”
The other slaves of Venus stared. Clark grunted suspiciously, “Maybe you know how to do that?”
MARGARET LUSK nodded confidently. “It’s the only way to find out what’s in a person’s subconscious mind—and that’s where the Over Race plant their commands.” She picked up a handbag from the table and rummaged in it, came out with something that flashed—a small mirror; she explained, “It’s not hard. You fix their attention with something bright, and . . . Well, just keep quiet and I’ll show you.”
She moved to the studio couch and spent a minute or so carefully adjusting its cushions, then beckoned Degnan to sit down. He obeyed silently, watching her with gathering puzzlement. “That’s it. Now lean back. Way back. Relax.”
There was an odd tense urgency in her low voice—scarcely the soothing note the hypnotist uses. And the whole show was unutterably phony. Degnan was no expert on hypnotic technique, but he was familiar enough with it to realize that Margaret knew a good deal less than he . . . Deliberately he kept his expression impassive, leaned back obediently against the cushions, hands still bound behind him.
She was waving the hand-mirror slowly to and fro in front of his eyes, murmuring, “Relax. Sleep. Go to sleep . . .” She couldn’t really imagine that hocus-pocus would work. It might conceivably have had an effect on a very cooperative subject; but anybody knew that to put an unwilling victim under you needed drugs or other drastic aids. Then he noticed from the corner of his eye that the spot of light reflected from the little mirror was dancing erratically on the wall; the hand that held it was trembling.
Margaret’s dark eyes held Degnan’s, and their bright intense gaze mirrored—pleading? “Go to sleep. You’re sinking—down, down—deep into the cushions—”
Degnan’s bound hands writhed behind him, while with all his control he strove to remain outwardly immobile. He managed to keep from moving, even when a sharp pain stabbed one of those searching hands. He fumbled further, got hold of the penknife that had been hidden just under the edge of the cushion at his back. It was a little thing, but razor-keen. With infinite care he began working it between his wrists and the thin, tough cord that held them.
Clark scowled darkly and came forward, hulking and purposeful; he grasped Margaret’s arm, and Degnan saw her wince. “You’re getting nowhere fast,” he growled. “I’ve seen hypnotism acts, and that’s not the way—”
She whirled on him in a fury that must have been real. “Now you’ve done it. I’ll have to start over—”
“I don’t know.” Clark didn’t let loose of the girl. “I’m beginning to wonder just what the hell you’re up to.”
THERE WOULD’T be a better chance. Degnan came to his feet in a rush whose impetus was behind the long straight punch he aimed at a point below the big man’s ear.
Clark had time to start turning his head, and caught it glancingly on the side of the jaw, but it sent him reeling against the wall. And Degnan, without ever stopping moving, had scooped up a chair and clubbed it down on the fellow who had tried to convert him the day before.
The hollow-eyed one was backing to the far end of the room and tugging out a pistol. Degnan sent the chair rocketing at him with the speed and unavoidability of an artillery shell, and swung around to face Clark, who had come dizzily erect and was clawing at his coat pocket. Degnan tackled him and they crashed to the floor together; Degnan applied the ju-jitsu methods that were part of his NAMI training, and an instant later the flame gun was in his-hand.
As he scrambled clear of the groaning Clark, he heard Margaret’s scream blend with a crash of glass. The hollow-eyed man was backed against the further wall with an automatic in his hand, and he had just dodged a thrown table lamp. Without hesitation and almost without aiming, Degnan pulled the trigger.
The concussion was almost stunning in the little room. The air filled chokingly with smoke, and through it flames climbed with a crackling roar, blanketing one end of the room and already blocking the doorway. Degnan snatched up the other chair, found Margaret with his eyes. He shouted, “The window!” and drove the chair—luckily it was a metal-framed one—through glass and shutters. Instantly the fire whipped toward the vent created. Degnan caught Margaret’s hand; he shouldered his way through the window, breaking out the remains of the pane, and drew the girl after him.
The night air was cool and sweet. Behind, the house was burning like a torch; some not too scrupulous builder must have used inflammable plastics in it. “Make sure your clothes haven’t caught,” said Degnan breathlessly, “and come on!” He gestured toward the back, where a weed-grown garden seemed to lead to an alley.
“Wait!” cried Margaret. “Maxon’s car’s out front.”
“That’s ri—No; we haven’t got the key.”
He saw her smile in the glare of the fire. “I have it. I took it off him while you were fighting the others.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!”
THEY raced round to the front of the burning house. As yet, the noise and blaze didn’t seem to have attracted anyone; the nearest dwellings were lightless—perhaps many people had fled the city or taken to their cellars in fear of the hyperspace bombardment, and the police and perhaps the fire department too would be having their hands full tonight.
As he set the car in motion, Degnan said quietly, “Thanks, Margaret. I hope you’ll live to know how much this means.”
She didn’t look at him or answer. Degnan drove slowly for a little while, to avoid being reported fleeing from the scene of the fire; he touched the button that slid back the top of the car, and glanced at the night sky. Overhead, the stars were lost in a murky darkness in which intermittent lightning flickered, weirdly soundless, and once or twice there were long streaks of fire and far thunder. With prescient certainty, Degnan knew that Earth could not long endure the punishment Venus was giving her now . . . His face grew hard with determination.
He turned onto one of the arterial highways, heading toward the center of the city, and increased speed as much as he dared, until the old car’s drive unit whined protest into the whistle of wind.
Margaret said abruptly, “I want you to know—I didn’t lead them to you on purpose. They knew where you were, anyway—it was Clark that gave me your address.”
Degnan’s mouth tightened; he didn’t take his eyes off the road. “I still don’t get the whole picture. What about these ‘commands’ of yours?”
This time her gaze was steady and fearless upon him. “It was horrible. I just didn’t seem to care. Everything was ugly and useless, and I hated everybody and myself most of all . . . It wasn’t hearing voices or anything like that. I just knew what I had to do, and all the time I knew too that something a long way off was pulling the strings and making me do it . . . Then, when they slugged you, there in the park, something seemed to go ‘pop’, and I knew it had lost control.”
“For keeps?”
She held her head high, beautiful in a defiance aimed not at Degnan but at the monstrous thing in her memory. “Sometimes I can feel it trying to creep back like a snake, crawling, trying to wrap itself around me.” She shivered. “But I can brush it away. I’m myself now, and I’m going on being myself.”
Degnan was silent, wondering: posthypnotic suggestions, then? Her telepathic sensitivity must be way up there, ever a hundred on the Bjornsson scale . . . His own sensitivity was low, he knew, and he hadn’t felt anything like that. In his case there were only memory gaps and memories that weren’t real. For the first time it occurred to him that his knowledge of the hyperspace principle might be one of those—but he couldn’t believe that; the knowledge was too complete, too logically coherent.
“How’d you come to get mixed up with that gang?”
“I wandered away from the spaceport—I didn’t know where I was going. Somebody was following me, I think—” Degnan nodded, as if to say “naturally”—“then I met Clark, and he showed me how to lose them, and took me to that house where the others were. They told me I’d left my soul on Venus, and it was true, then. Later on they seemed to be afraid of me, because I knew things they didn’t . . .” She paused, passing a hand across her eyes.
INWARDLY, Degnan cursed the Over Race’s science. But outwardly he smiled and said, “You’re out from under now. They can make it stick with minds that are off balance already, but they guessed wrong about us.”
She gave him a queer, scared look. “I’m free now. But I’m not so sure about you.”
“Eh?”
“I told those men I thought you had a command from Venus. I’m still not sure it isn’t true.”
“If so,” said Degnan harshly, “something’s gone wrong with their chain of command. They’re due for a shock! But if you thought that, why’d you help me get away?”
Margaret’s face was in shadow as they passed between lightless rows of houses. “I’m not sure,” she said candidly. “I like you, Degnan, and I wanted to help you—but I have a funny impersonal sort of feeling about you, too. As if—you were the most important man in the world.” Degnan smiled tautly. “There your feelings are on the right track. I am.
“What do you mean?”
“That thing that landed east of here tonight—and others like it must be hitting Earth every few minutes. I know what they are and how to stop them, and I’ve got to make what I know count in time. That’s why
we’re on the way to NAMI headquarters now.”
“Oh,” was all she said.
He had once more to admire her control. There on the Sheneb he had thought her hysterical; actually she had been sapped by the mental poison the Venusians had administered. Now she was whole again and strong.
“I’m not taking you there,” he assured her. “Stop off anywhere you like.”
She didn’t brighten. “I’ve nowhere to go; my brother was my only relative,” she said tonelessly, and he wondered if she knew the prison ship had been destroyed. “And if any of those men got out of the fire back there—they and the others like them will be after me.”
Degnan hesitated momentarily. “Now’s not a good time to turn yourself in. Everybody’ll be scared halfwitted by what’s happening and you might get some rough handling. I’m not looking forward to an easy time myself.” He came to a quick, illogical decision, assuring himself that what he, and the whole world, owed this girl outweighed the minutes that would be lost. “I’ve got a room rented for a week in advance and a feeling I won’t be using it. There’s automatic service; if you don’t go out, nobody’s likely to even know you’re there for a few days, anyway. And when this is over, I’ll see you again.”
He knew where he was now, and picked a turnoff from the highway without hesitation. In front of the hotel, he pressed the key and some folded bills into her hand, then gave her the flame gun he had taken from Clark, and advised curtly: “If the police find you—better give yourself up and hope for the best. But if your ex-playmates come around—give them fair warning, then push off the safety, like this, and let fly. It’ll blow the side out of the apartment but don’t let that stop you. You ought to be all right if nothing hits Los Angeles—which it won’t, if I get through in time.”
On impulse he bent to kiss her goodbye. The kiss lasted longer than it was meant to, with the race for the world’s life still ahead.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 35
