The pilot sat up shakily on the floor, where he had fallen, near Leigh. “Yes, Miss Patricia.”
“You dared to bring a stranger with you!”
“It’s only a reporter, miss; he’s writing up my route for me.”
“You conceited fool! That’s William Leigh. He’s a hypnotized spy of those devils who are attacking us. Bring him immediately to my apartment. He must be killed at once.”
“Huh!” Leigh began; and then slowly he began to stiffen. For the pilot was staring at him from narrowing eyes, all the friendliness gone from his rough, heavy face. Finally, Leigh laughed curtly.
“Don’t you be a fool, too, Hanardy. I made the mistake once of saving that young lady’s life, and she’s hated me ever since.”
The heavy face scowled at him. “So you knew her before, eh? You didn’t tell me that. You’d better come along before I sock you one.”
Almost awkwardly, he drew the gun from his side holster, and pointed its ugly snout at Leigh.
“Get along!” he said.
Hanardy reached toward a tiny arrangement of lights beside the paneled door of Patricia Ungarn’s apartment — and Leigh gave one leap, one blow. He caught the short, heavy body as it fell, grabbed at the sagging gun, lowered the dead weight to the floor of the corridor; and then, for a grim, tense moment, he stood like a great animal, straining for sound.
Silence! He studied the bland panels of the doorway to the apartment, as if by sheer, savage intentness he would penetrate their golden, beautiful grained opaqueness.
It was the silence that struck him again after a moment, the emptiness of the long, tunnellike corridors. He thought, amazed: Was it possible father and daughter actually lived here without companions or servants or any human association? And that they had some idea that they could withstand the attack of the mighty and terrible Dreeghs?
They had a lot of stuff here, of course: Earthlike gravity and — and, by Heaven, he’d better get going before the girl acquired impatience and came out with one of her fancy weapons. What he must do was quite simple, unconnected with any nonsense of spying, hypnotic or otherwise.
He must find the combination automobile-spaceship in which — Mr. Patrick — had escaped him that night after they left Constantine’s. And with that tiny ship, he must try to slip out of Ungam’s meteorite, sneak through the Dreegh line, and so head back for Earth.
What a fool he had been, a mediocre human being, mixing in such fast, brainy company. The world was full of more normal, thoroughly dumb girls. Why in hell wasn’t he safely married to one of them and — and damn it, it was time he got busy.
He began laboriously to drag Hanardy along the smooth flooring. Halfway to the nearest corner, the man stirred. Instantly, quite coolly, Leigh struck him with the revolver butt, hard. This was not time for squeamishness.
The pilot dropped; and the rest was simple. He deserted the body as soon as he had pulled it out of sight behind the corner, and raced along the hallway, trying doors. The -first four wouldn’t open. At the fifth, he pulled up in a dark consideration.
It was impossible that the whole place was locked up. Two people in an isolated meteorite wouldn’t go around perpetually locking and unlocking doors. There must be a trick catch.
There was. The fifth door yielded to a simple pressure on a tiny, half-hidden push button, that had seemed an integral part of the design of the latch. He stepped through the entrance, then started back in brief, terrible shock.
The room had no ceiling. Above him was — space. An ice-cold blast of air swept at him.
He had a flashing glimpse of gigantic machines in the room, machines that dimly resembled the ultramodern astronomical observatory on the moon that he had visited on opening day two days before. That one, swift look was all Leigh allowed himself. Then he stepped back into the hallway. The door of the observatory closed automatically in his face.
He stood there, chagrined. Silly fool! The very fact that cold air had blown at him showed that the open effect of the ceiling was only an illusion of invisible glass. Good Lord, in that room might be wizard telescopes that could see to the stars. Or — an ugly thrill raced along his spine — he might have seen the Dreeghs attacking.
He shook out of his system the brief, abnormal desire to look again. This was no time for distractions. For, by now, the girl must know that something was wrong.
At top speed, Leigh ran to the sixth door. It opened into a little cubbyhole. A blank moment passed before he recognized what it was.
An elevator!
He scrambled in. The farther he got away from the residential floor, the less the likelihood of quick discovery.
He turned to close the door, and saw that it was shutting automatically. It clicked softly; the elevator immediately began to go up. Piercingly sharp doubt came to Leigh. The machine was apparently geared to go to some definite point. And that could be very bad.
His eyes searched hastily for controls. But nothing was visible. Gun poised, he stood grim and alert, as the elevator stopped. The door slid open.
Leigh stared. There was no room. The door opened — onto blackness.
Not the blackness of space with its stars. Or a dark room, half revealed by the light from the elevator. But — blackness!
Impenetrable.
Leigh put a tentative hand forward, half expecting to feel a solid object. But as his hand entered the black area, it vanished. He jerked it back, and stared at it, dismayed. It shone with a light of its own, all the bones plainly visible.
Swiftly, the light faded, the skin became opaque, but his whole arm pulsed with a pattern of pain.
The stark, terrible thought came that this could be a death chamber. After all, the elevator had deliberately brought him here; it might not have been automatic. Outside forces could have directed it. True, he had stepped in of his own free will, but — Fool, fool!
He laughed bitterly, braced himself — and then it happened.
There was a flash out of the blackness. Something that sparkled vividly, something material that blazed a brilliant path to his forehead — and drew itself inside his head. And then — He was no longer in the elevator. On either side of him stretched a long corridor. The stocky Hanardy was just reaching for some tiny lights beside the door of Patricia Ungarn’s apartment.
The man’s fingers touched one of the lights. It dimmed. Softly, the door opened. A young woman with proud, insolent eyes and a queenlike bearing stood there.
“Father wants you down on Level 4,” she said to Hanardy. “One of the energy screens has gone down; and he needs some machine work before he can put up another.”
She turned to Leigh; her voice took on metallic overtones as she said: “Mr. Leigh, you can come in!”
The crazy part of it was that he walked in with scarcely a physical tremor. A cool breeze caressed his cheeks; and there was the liltingly sweet sound of birds singing in the distance. Leigh stood stockstill for a moment after he had entered, dazed partly by the wonders of the room and the unbelievable sunlit garden beyond the French windows, partly by — what?
What had happened to him?
Gingerly, he put his hands to his head, and felt his forehead, then his whole head. But nothing was wrong, not a contusion, not a pain. He grew aware of the girl staring at him, and realization came that his actions must seem unutterably queer.
“What is the matter with you?” the girl asked.
Leigh looked at her with abrupt, grim suspicion. He snapped harshly: “Don’t pull that innocent stuff. I’ve been up in the blackness room, and all I’ve got to say is, if you’re going to kill me, don’t skulk behind artificial night and other trickery.”
The girl’s eyes, he saw, were narrowed, unpleasantly cold. “I don’t know what you’re trying to pretend,” she said icily. “I assure you it will not postpone the death we have to deal you.”
She hesitated, then finished sharply: “The
what room?”
Leigh explained grimly, puzzled by her puzzlement, then annoyed by the contemptuous smile that grew into her face. She cut him off curtly:
“I’ve never heard a less balanced story. If your intention was to astound me and delay your death with that improbable tale, it has failed. You must be mad. You didn’t knock out Hanardy, because when I opened the door, Hanardy was there, and I sent him down to father.”
“See here!” Leigh began. He stopped wildly. By Heaven, Hanardy had been there as she opened the door!
And yet earlier — WHEN?
Doggedly, Leigh pushed the thought on: Earlier, he had attacked Hanardy. And then he — Leigh — had gone up in an elevator; and then, somehow, back and — Shakily, he felt his head again. And it was absolutely normal. Only, he thought, there was something inside it that sparkled. Something — With a start, he grew aware that the girl was quite deliberately drawing a gun from a pocket of her simple white dress. He stared at the weapon, and before its gleaming menace, his thoughts faded, all except the deadly consciousness that what he had said had delayed her several -minutes now. It was the only thing that could delay her further until, somehow — The vague hope wouldn’t finish. Urgently, he said:
“I’m going to assume you’re genuinely puzzled by my words. Let’s begin at the beginning. There is such a room, is there not?”
“Please,” said the girl wearily, “let us not have any of your logic. My I.Q. is 243, yours is 112. So I assure you I am quite capable of reasoning from any beginning you can think of.”
She went on, her low voice as curt as the sound of struck steel:
“There is no ‘blackness’ room, as you call it, no sparkling thing that crawls inside a human head. There is but one fact: The Dreeghs in their visit to your hotel room, hypnotized you; and this curious mind illusion can only be a result of that hypnotism — don’t argue with me — With a savage gesture of her gun, she cut off his attempt to speak.
“There’s no time. For some reason, the Dreeghs did something to you. Why? What did you see in those rooms?”
Even as he explained and described, Leigh was thinking chilly:
He’d have to catch hold of himself, get a plan, however risky, and carry it through. The purpose was tight and cold in his mind as he obeyed her motion, and went ahead of her into the corridor. It was there, an icy determination, as he counted the doors from the corner where he had left the unconscious Hanardy.
“One, two, three, four, five. This door!” he said. “Open it!” the girl gestured.
He did so; and his lower jaw sagged. He was staring into a fine, cozy room filled with shelf on shelf of beautifully bound books. There were comfortable chairs, a magnificent rag rug and — It was the girl who closed the door firmly and — he trembled with the tremendousness of the opportunity — she walked ahead of him to the sixth door.
“And this is your elevator?”
Leigh nodded mutely; and because his whole body was shaking, he was only dimly surprised that there was no elevator, but a long, empty, silent corridor.
The girl was standing with her back partly to him; and if he hit her, it would knock her hard against the door jamb and — The sheer brutality of the thought was what stopped him, held him for the barest second — as the girl whirled, and looked straight into his eyes.
Her gun was up, pointing steadily. “Not that way,” she said quietly. “For a moment I was wishing you would have the nerve to try it. But, after all, that would be the weak way for me.”
Her eyes glowed with a fierce pride. “After all, I’ve killed before through necessity, and hated it. You can see yourself that, because of what the Dreeghs have done to you, it is necessary. So — “
Her voice took on a whiplash quality. “So back to my rooms. I have a space lock there to get rid of your body. Get going!”
It was the emptiness, the silence except for the faint click of their shoes that caught at Leigh’s nerves, as he walked hopelessly back to the apartment. This meteorite hurtling darkly through the remote wastes of the Solar System, pursued and attacked by deadly ships from the fixed stars, and himself inside it, under sentence of death, the executioner to be a girl — And that was the devastating part. He couldn’t begin to argue with this damnable young woman, for every word would sound like pleading. The very thought of mentally getting down on his knees to any woman was paralyzing.
The singing of the birds, as he entered the apartment, perked him violently out of his black passion. Abruptly marveling, he walked to the stately French windows, and stared at the glorious summery garden.
At least two acres of green wonder spread before him, a blaze of flowers, trees where gorgeously colored birds fluttered and trilled, a wide, deep pool of green, green water, and over all, the glory of brilliant sunshine.
It was the sunshine that held Leigh finally; and he stood almost breathless for a long minute before it seemed that he had the solution. He said in a hushed voice, without turning:
“The roof — is an arrangement-of magnifying glass. It makes the Sun as big as on Earth. Is that the — “
“You’d better turn around,” came the hostile, vibrant voice from behind him. “I don’t shoot people in the back. And I want to get this over with.”
It was the moralistic smugness of her words that shook every muscle in Leigh’s body. He whirled, and raged:
“You damned little Klugg. You can’t shoot me in the back, eh? Oh, no! And you couldn’t possibly shoot me while I was attacking you because that would be the weak way. It’s all got to be made right with your conscience.”
He stopped so short that, if he had been running instead of talking, he would have stumbled. Figuratively, almost literally, he saw Patricia Ungarn for the first time since his arrival. His mind had been so concentrated, so absorbed by deadly things that —
— For the first time as a woman.
Leigh drew a long breath. Dressed as a man, she had been darkly handsome in an extremely youthful fashion. Now she wore a simple, snow-white sports dress. It was scarcely more than a tunic, and came well above her knees.
Her hair shone with a brilliant brownness, and cascaded down to her shoulders. Her bare arms and legs gleamed a deep, healthy tan. Sandals pure white graced her feet. Her face — The impression of extraordinary beauty yielded to the amazing fact that her perfect cheeks were flushing vividly. The girl snapped:
“Don’t you dare use that word to me.”
She must have been utterly beside herself. Her fury was such an enormous fact that Leigh gasped; and he couldn’t have stopped himself from saying what he did, if the salvation of his soul had depended on it.
“Klugg!” he said, “Klugg, Klugg, Klugg! So you realize now that the Dreeghs had you down pat, that all your mighty pretensions was simply your Klugg mind demanding pretentious compensation for a dreary, lonely life. You had to think you were somebody, and yet all the time you must have known they’d only ship the tenth-raters to these remote posts. Klugg, not even Lennel; the Dreegh woman wouldn’t even grant you Lennel status, whatever that is. And she’d know. Because if you’re I. Q. 243, the Dreeghs were 400. You’ve realized that, too, haven’t you?”
“Shut up! Or I’ll kill you by inches!” said Patrician Ungarn; and Leigh was amazed to see that she was as white as a sheet. The astounded realization came that he had struck, not only the emotional Achilles heel of this strange and terrible young woman, but the very vital roots of her mental existence.
“So,” he said deliberately, “the high morality is growing dim. Now you can torture me to death without a qualm. And to think that I came here to ask you to marry me because I thought a Klugg and a human being might get along.”
“You what?” said the girl. Then she sneered. “So that was the form of their hypnotism. They would use some simple impulse for a simple human mind.
“But now I think we’ve h
ad just about enough. I know just the type of thoughts that come to a male human in love; and even the realization that you’re not responsible makes the very idea none the less bearable. I feel sickened, utterly insulted. Know, please, that my future husband is arriving with the reinforcements three weeks from now. He will be trained to take over father’s work — “
“Another Klugg!” said Leigh, and the girl turned shades whiter.
Leigh stood utterly thunderstruck. In all his life, he had never gotten anybody going the way he had this young girl. The intellectual mask was off, and underneath was a seething mass of emotions bitter beyond the power of words to express. Here was evidence of a life so lonely that it strained his imagination. Her every word showed an incredible pent-up masochism as well as sadism, for she was torturing herself as well as him.
And he couldn’t stop now to feel sorry for her. His life was at stake, and only more words could postpone death-or bring the swift and bearable surcease of a gun fired in sudden passion. He hammered on grimly:
“I’d like to ask one question. How did you find out my I.Q. was 112? What special interest made you inquire about that? Is it possible that, all by yourself here, you, too, had a special type of thought, and that, though your intellect rejected the very idea of such lowly love, its existence is the mainspring behind your fantastic determination to kill, rather than cure me? I — “
“That will do,” interrupted Patricia Ungarn.
It required one lengthy moment for Leigh to realize that in those few short seconds she had pulled herself completely together.
He stared in gathering alarm, as her gun motioned toward a door he had not seen before.
She said curtly:
“I suppose there is a solution other than death. That is, immediate death. And I have decided to accept the resultant loss of my spaceship.”
She nodded at the door: “It’s there in the air lock. It works very simply. The steering wheel pulls up or down or sideways, and that’s the way the ship will go. Just step on the accelerator, and the machine will go forward. The decelerator is the left pedal. The automobile wheels fold in automatically as soon as they lift from the floor. -
Adventures in Time and Space Page 81
