The Terminators

by Hamilton, Donald

  I looked at her for a moment. "You're a bright girl. I'm sure you can figure out what's got to be done next," I said. "Keep that gun handy,' and shoot hell out of anybody who opens that door, as long as it isn't me."

  V.

  THE ship's first-class lounge looked out upon the bow deck with its mast and cargo booms, only dimly visible in the darkness outside the rain-wet windows. I hoped the guy up on the bridge could see more out there than I could and that he had an efficient radar to help him. We seemed to be proceeding at a good clip, judging by the sound of the machinery below, and the map of Norway I'd studied had indicated that it was a hell of a rocky, reef-strewn coast to go blasting along blindly on a stormy night. I consoled myself with the thought that this ship, and presumably this captain, had been making it for years, clear up beyond the Arctic Circle and back. Maybe it was easy when you knew how.

  A TV set was going in the lounge, tuned to a Norwegian quiz show that had the studio audience roaring with appreciative laughter. Only a few of the people scattered around the room were paying any attention. The rest were manfully, or womanfully, trying to ignore the noisy box as they chatted, read, or napped, bracing themselves against the motion of the ship in their comfortable, clamped-down chairs. Again, as on the plane, I found myself wondering about a society that permits one person with a coin, or the strength to manipulate a switch or just make a request, to inflict his entertainment preferences on everybody around; but it was hardly a time for solving odd social problems. . . .

  I saw the red backpack, mate to the one I'd watched being carried ashore, parked by the lounge door. Then I spotted the owner, in the corner to my right where he could see who entered while ostensibly enjoying the funny, funny show on the black-and-white screen. I say ostensibly, Because when I first saw him he was being seriously distracted by a pair of nylon-clad legs belonging to an attractive, nicely dressed young lady passenger sitting on a nearby sofa. I didn't blame him for his preoccupation, considering the scarcity of that kind of entertainment in Scandinavia, these trousered days—but the older man seated beside the girl was rather small and inconspicuous, with fine, white, carefully combed hair that let die pink scalp show through on top.

  A rather mild-looking little whitehaired man, Hank Priest had said, describing Dr. Adolf Elfenbein. Fairly small and rather attractive, he'd said, referring to Greta Elfenbein. Well, that was fine, the enemy high command was in sight, but it could wait. At the moment I had business with the lower echelons.

  My man glanced around, nudged by some primitive instinct, and saw me standing there. For a moment, he couldn't decide how to treat the discovery; but I was looking straight at him, and there was really nothing to be cute about, so he looked back with a direct challenge in his eyes. We both knew what he'd done tonight, he said to me silently across the room and what was I going to do about it, hey? Of course, I knew he was a successful murderer and he thought he'd failed; but that was my little joke, and I wasn't going to share it with him or anybody else, if I could help it.

  His eyes were very blue, I saw, and his ruddy, rugged, thirty-year-old face might have been considered handsome by some. I had a hunch he was rather impressed with it himself; and not only with his looks, but with his strength, his courage, his skill, and his ruthlessness. So much the better. The vanity boys are almost always pushovers, if you handle them right. I jerked my head slightly, requesting his presence outside. He gave no answering sign. I grinned mockingly, reached down, and picked up the gaudy red nylon pack and walked off with it, aware of his eyes widening abruptly in an outraged way. . . .

  It was too bad, really. It was a reflection on the personnel policies of the Elfenbein outfit. They should have hired somebody less concerned with his own brave image; less ready to challenge and be challenged. Of course, I had everything going for me. The man had undoubtedly been briefed. He'd been shown the dossier and told I was supposed to be dangerous.

  He'd even, apparently, been ordered to steer clear of me and take the girl instead; the easy pickings. He was, by his looks, the virile kind who'd feel that was an insult; a hint that somebody thought he wasn't good enough to run in truly fast company. He'd be hoping for an excuse to forget his instructions and cut me down to size: the local fast-draw kid eager to make a name for himself by tackling the stranger in black with the tied-down guns and the big reputation. . . . Okay, so it was corny, but punks are punks the world over, and have been since history began. In the primeval cave, on the streets of Abilene, or along the coast of Norway, they're all the same. At least I hoped so.

  I pushed open the door to the deck outside, and was greeted by a fierce blast of wind with some rain and spray in it and by the rhythmic, surging hiss of the ship driving hard through the black, stormy night. There was nobody out on deck. I moved aft, bracing myself against the ship's roll and the thrlist of the wind, half-dragging the heavy pack. Slinging it over a shoulder would have been easier, but I didn't want to be tangled up in it if he should come with a rush.

  He didn't. I guess he was puzzled. Maybe he couldn't believe I was being as obvious as I seemed, deliberately spitting in his eye, so to speak. There had to be a trick, a trap, somewhere. I guess he had a little caution in his system after all, but it wasn't enough to keep him from following. He called after me once from the door, and came after me, and shouted again, angrily. I turned, and gave him that mean grin again, and threw his pack over the rail into the sea.

  That shocked him. It tripped the trigger inside him, as I'd hoped it would. caution forgotten, insulted and furious, he moved forward deliberately, stalking me; a big man with lots of light hair whipping past his face. I was aware that the Vikings, no sissies, had worn it long but I still wasn't quite hardened to the sight of a man with flowing golden tresses. It still seemed feminine and unnatural to me in a combat situation, along with the fancy necklace he was wearing over his dark turtleneck. There was a gun in his hand now, but with the jolting wind, and the erratic motion of the ship, he wanted to get close enough to make quite sure. Maybe he was remembering a girl who'd come back to life Because he hadn't been quite thorough enough, or thought he hadn't.

  I guess he also wanted to frighten me a bit before he killed me. They generally do if you make them mad enough. You can practically count on it.

  I knew the instant he made up his mind to shoot—well, to shoot the next time the deck was halfway steady. It showed in his eyes and in his stance. As the gun started to line up, I threw myself low and to one side, swinging my arm in an arc parallel to the deck. The belt I'd held coiled in my hand whipped out, weighted by its heavy buckle. It wrapped itself around the ankle of his advanced leg before he could pull back. He really wasn't very good. He should have fired, of course, and to hell with dodging. What harm could a belt do in the hand of a dead man?

  But, trying to avoid the flashing buckle, too late, he missed his opportunity to nail me. Then I'd yanked the foot out from under him. He came down awkwardly on his tailbone, legs apart; and the gun flew out of his hand and skidded away along the deck. He tried to scramble after it, another mistake. He should have let it go and come for me barehanded. Big and strong as he was, he'd still have had a good chance.

  But he went for the weapon instinctively and I hauled back and managed to stretch him out before the belt unwound itself and came loose in my hand. Dropping it, I rose, and stepped forward and kicked the side of his head, hard, as he tried to get to his knees. Dazed, he covered up, expecting another kick. I turned and grabbed his ankles instead, and dragged him to the rail with a rush, and heaved up and out. For a moment he was draped there ridiculously, head down, with his feet kicking over the side and his fingers trying for a grip on the metal mesh of the rail. A chop at one clutching hand, a kick at the other where it clung to the grillwork and I grabbed a couple of fistfuls of the long hair, finding a good use for it at last, and levered him the rest of the way over, hoping there was no one on the deck below to hear the wailing cry he let out as he fell.

  I stood th
ere a moment, breathing hard. Instinct, and perhaps a glimpse of movement, brought me around fast. A small figure was making for the fallen gun. Concentrating on the man, I hadn't been aware of another presence. The girl almost made it, but I got there first and put my foot on the weapon before she could reach down and grab it.

  She straightened up to face me; the young lady I assumed to be Greta Elfenbein; the attractive passenger from the lounge sofa; the little dark-haired, dark-eyed one with the nice nylons; but it was not a good night for pretty ladies and their pretty clothes. The howling wind along the deck was dismantling and demolishing her as she stood there, destroying her careful hairdo, getting under the pleated skirt of her neat, gray suit and streaming it from her waist like a storm flag, yanking her tailored jacket into wild, unbuttoned disorder, dragging her thin blouse, flapping, out of her waistband. . . .

  "You . . . you killed him!" she shouted accusingly. Her English was good but accented. "You threw him in the sea to drown!"

  "He had it coming, Miss Elfenbein," I yelled. "Don't send any more of your friends after Madeleine Barth. Not unless you've got friends to spare."

  Her eyes told me I had the right girl, not that I'd had any serious doubts. I waited for her to speak. I could see that she wanted to say something that was fierce and threatening, and at the same time full of disdain and dignity; but with one hand busy keeping her whipping, snapping hair out of her eyes, and the other engaged in getting her crazily blowing skirt down where it would conceal at least a little of her panty-hose, she didn't have much dignity to work with. She turned and ran forward and disappeared into the cabin.

  It would take a little time for her to put herself back together, both physically and mentally. Not wanting to get involved in another major confrontation tonight, I made a slow business of putting my belt back on and picking up the pistol and examining it by one of the weak deck-lights. It was a small Spanish job stamped: LLAMA, Gabilondo y Cia Vitoria (Espana) Cal. .380. Strangely, it was a miniature replica of the Colt .45 auto, complete with exposed hammer and grip safety. There's nothing wrong with the big Colt, of course, except that it kicks too hard for some people. It's a great old cannon but I couldn't see much point in faithfully copying a relatively clumsy and awkward military sidearm in three-quarter size for use as a pocket pistol. It was kind of like building a small working model of an antitank gun to use for a deer rifle.

  Having stalled long enough, or what I hoped was long enough, I pocketed the weapon and went inside. The girl was nowhere to be seen. In the lounge, the sofa on which she'd been sitting earlier was empty. The white-haired man, presumably her father, was missing also. Perhaps they'd retired to their quarters to hold a council of war: subject, retribution. I hoped they'd come to a sensible decision. I thought they probably would. Judging by what I'd been told, Dr. Adolf Elfenbein had been working at his particular racket long enough not to blow his stack at the loss of a little low-grade manpower.

  When I knocked on the cabin door two decks down, Diana's voice told me to come in. Inside, the light was still on and she was sitting on the berth as before, armed, alert, and ready to repel boarders. I'd kind of expected to find that she'd retired, or at least got out of her ill-fitting, borrowed costume but she'd only discarded the jacket and combed her hair. Obviously, not quite knowing what to expect, she hadn't wanted a sudden crisis to catch her with her clothes off.

  It showed a commendable attention to duty and the revolver was steady in her hand. It occurred to me that, for a member of an outfit so ineffectual that it had to use imported muscle, she showed a surprising tolerance for firearms. Generally, an inexperienced young lady—I'd had to tell her the difference between hammer and trigger —grasps a loaded gun as if it were a live and angry rattlesnake.

  "Is everything all right?" she asked. "You were gone a long time."

  "Everything's fine," I said. "Any trouble here?"

  "There hasn't been a soul around to bother me." After a moment, she said, "I figured it out. What you had to do."

  "Good for you," I said. "Point that thing somewhere else, will you? The theory is, you don't aim it at anything you don't want to shoot."

  "I'm sorry."

  She lowered the weapon. She'd had time to warm up and dry off and the white turtleneck she was wearing— Evelyn Benson's white turtleneck—while not quite immaculate after its dip in the harbor, was a lot more becoming without the too-tight jacket buttoned over it. With her hair nicely combed, she looked reasonably human once more. She had a symmetrical, oval face, I noted, and odd, greenish eyes. Once you got used to it, the pale skin was kind of striking, setting her apart in a world of conventionally tanned or rosy beauties. She really wasn't a bad-looking girl.

  "The man who murdered Evelyn," she said. "He'd seen her up close. I fooled him on the gangplank, at night, hurrying past him in her clothes with my hair all down my face and your coat over my head; but if he saw me in daylight, he'd know. So ... so he had to be killed."

  "Yes," I said.

  "Did you?"

  "Yes," I said. "Of course. That's what you people got me here for, wasn't it, my goddamned lethal reputation? I said I had a few shocks in mind for the opposition, remember?"

  She hesitated. "What about the other one?" she asked. "The one who went ashore. He probably saw Evelyn too, you said."

  I studied her for a moment, puzzled. It wasn't going at all the way I'd expected. Working with a shy, sheltered maiden brought up on tender principles of humanitarian-ism and nonviolence, I'd been braced for the old hand-wringing, breast-beating, bleeding-heart act, or at least a few conventional expressions of shock and dismay, but I wasn't getting them.

  "The kid?" I said. "Not to worry. He's just juvenile help."

  "But you'll have to deal with him, too, sooner or later, won't you?"

  Her voice was quite calm and matter-of-fact. I realized that I'd got hold of something kind of special here, maybe even unique, but it was too early for me to tell whether it was good or bad.

  "He's on shore," I said. "We're afloat. We don't have to worry about him tonight."

  "You're really taking this masquerade seriously," she said. "I mean, killing a man to protect it."

  "Well," I said, "let's just say it made a hell of a good excuse."

  She was silent for a little. "Vengeance, Mr. Helm?" she murmured at last.

  "I don't go out of my way for it, usually," I said. "I certainly won't jeopardize a mission for it. But if it's right in front of me for the taking, sure, I'll take it. People shouldn't go tossing people into the drink if they're not prepared to do a little swimming themselves."

  She licked her lips, watching me. There was a funny gleam in the greenish eyes. "Was that what you did, threw him overboard?"

  "That's right," I said. "I got him separated from his gun, kicked him in the head, and dumped him over the side." I glanced at her. "Why?"

  She said steadily, "Because, since I'm here, I don't want to miss anything, Mr. Helm, not even murder. I want to learn all about it. Everything." She drew a long breath and when she spoke again, her voice wasn't quite so steady: "I . . . I've always been a very nice girl. I don't mean I'm a virgin, or anything silly like that but I've worked hard at being a truly civilized person. You know. Peaceful. Considerate. Kind. Intellectual. Sympathetic to all the good, worthy, conventional causes. Nonviolent, of course, Because that's the only way to be, isn't it? I mean, we've all got to be that way, or get that way, if the world is going to survive, don't we? People like you, people with guns, are ugly, dangerous anachronisms threatening our peaceful modern society. . . . What peaceful modem society, Mr. Helm?"

  I didn't answer. She didn't expect me to answer. I just listened to the steady rumble of the ship's machinery, that turned the tiny cabin into a very private place, insulated by the noise from the rest of the universe.

  "I'm tired," she said softly. "I wish I could make you understand how tired I am of pretending to be something I'm not—I don't mean just an imaginary Madeleine Barth; I
've been an imaginary person all my life—and pretending the world is something it isn't, like everybody else of my generation. Who's kidding whom, Mr. Helm?"

  If there's a screwball with an identity crisis around, we'll get him every time. Or her.

  I said, "Sweetheart, I think you got the wrong door. The psychiatric department is down the hall to the right."

  "You don't understand," she said, unruffled. "I've found what I was looking for right here, waiting in this cramped little stateroom in a dead person's soggy clothes. I've died of fear ten times while you were gone, don't you

  know that, Matthew Helm? And I've loved every terrified minute of it!" She'd got to her feet as she talked. Now she glanced at the blunt revolver she was still holding, and tucked it into her waistband. "And I've happily killed two dozen people with that, one every time the door rattled, don't you know that?"

  "Quite a trick, with a five-shot gun," I said.

  "Five? I thought they all shot six times."

  "Don't count on it," I said.

  "What are we talking about?" she asked.

  I said, "You know damned well what we're talking about, and the answer is no."

  "No?"

  "No, I won't go to bed with you, just to make your thrilling evening complete, Miss Lawrence."

  There was a little silence, then she laughed quite cheerfully. "Oh, dear," she said. "Is that what I was leading up to? I guess it was." She grinned at me impishly. "And of course, you're perfectly right not to humor the shameless whims of an unbalanced female who really ought to be in a clinic with bars on the windows. I mean, if you took ungentlemanly advantage of her aberration, you'd never forgive yourself, would you?"

  Something had changed in the room, the way the atmosphere changes noticeably after a weather front moves through. She was looking up at me, laughing at me with those odd, greenish eyes in that strangely pale face. I found myself thinking uncertainly that, well, hell, there was really no good reason for me to fight for my virtue, or hers. The girl might be a kook, but she was a grown-up kook. We had a long boat-ride ahead of us. If it made her feel thrillingly wanton and wicked to precipitate tonight what would probably happen between us later, anyway, under the intimate circumstances of our mission, why should I hold back like a timid bride?