The Best Laid Plans

by Troy Conway

  My flesh prickled to the thought of hundreds of razor-sharp teeth eating me alive. I felt like being sick, but I didn’t have the time for any such luxury.

  I let go my rope, reaching for another.

  I breathed a sigh of relief as my hand fastened on a length of twisted hemp. Then I realized the rope was sliding downward! But slowly, to give a guy time to study the little fishies in the pool swimming about waiting for their meal to come down to them.

  My imagination made them all appear to be looking up at me hungrily. Does a fish’s mouth water? If I ever got the chance, I determined to ask that question of a qualified ichthyologist.

  I went to the next rope. It moved neither up nor down, it just stayed where it was. It figured. HECATE was devilishly cunning. It knew nobody could cling to this rope forever. Sooner or later his muscles would weaken, and he would be forced to let go.

  At least, I had the opportunity to study the piranhas and the pool where they swam. Then I noticed something. Here and there, parts of the pool were free of the fish. I had a bad angle to study those fish-free sections, so I went down a little on the rope, hand under hand.

  I grinned with sheer happiness.

  Solid glass pillars, that’s what they were. No wonder those piranha punks weren’t swimming there. There must have been eight to a dozen of those solid glass columns rising up from the bottom of the glass-lined pool. Almost invisible, thanks to the clearness of the water and the horde of fish swimming back and forth in there. About a quarter-inch of water washed across their tops so that the pool surface was unbroken.

  I began to swing the rope back and forth.

  When I was right over the top of a glass pillar, I let myself down. My body-stockinged feet were awash in cool water, but the piranhas could not get at them. There wasn’t enough water for them to swim in, thank God! I just stood there breathing, happy to be alive.

  My nerves needed time to quiet down.

  There were four more guards somewhere in this maze, searching for me. Maybe they had even alerted the HECATE bosses. I doubted this, because if Yves Roger-Viollet or Cyrano Matelot knew I was in here disobeying orders, either one or both of them could never resist the whim to talk to me over the intercom.

  I thought about Noelle Berlet and the police, waiting for my signal. Well, I was in no position to signal. I had all I could do to find my way out of this damn maze.

  There was a maroon door on the other side of the pool. My eyes dropped from it along the water, hunting out other glass columns. I found them, after a time. They were arranged like stepping stones, but in a zigzag pattern.

  I extended my leg, gathered up my courage, and stepped.

  One foot put its weight down on a glass pillar, then the rest of me was standing there. The piranhas were growing frantic, seeing their nice, juicy meal getting away. The hell with them!

  Two more columns, and I was home free. I stepped onto them gingerly, afraid I might get dizzy and fall off. I made it. The last column was right in front of the door. I reached out, turned the knob, and stepped onto the sill as the door opened.

  I damn near fainted.

  A big black leopard was crouched in the next room, green eyes sparking with the lust to kill. We froze, man and beast, me with a foot on the sill of the doorway, the leopard flattened down, head low, tail a quivering length of black fur. Its leg-muscles were bunching. It crooned to me, deep in its throat.

  The leopard sprang, a black weight hurtling right at my chest, claws out and poised to sink into my tender man-flesh. I yowled.

  I could not help that cry that burst from my throat. I figured I had been through enough in this labyrinthine compound. The cry came out of me in a burst of frantic sound while that ebony cat was flying through the air.

  I could not go forward—nor backward. I was pinned there in the doorway, bait for the claws coming at me. I squeezed my hand tight on the doorknob I still held, until my hand-muscles ached. Then a brain rain washed over me.

  Idiot! The answer was right there in my palm.

  My right hand tightened on the doorknob. My left hand went up to clasp the top of the door as I kicked against the door, coming off the glass pillar. The door opened outward over the pool with me clinging to it with all my strength. I hung there like a babe in its mother’s arms.

  A black fury went screeching past me, through the air.

  All this happened in about half a split second.

  I turned my head, wincing. The black leopard hit the water with a titanic splash. It screamed once, then it was deep under the water and those pool waters were reddening with its life blood.

  The leopard struggled. I could see its twisting, heaving, body as it sought to rip free of the teeth slashing it to its skeleton. I felt pity for the beast, it was only doing what came naturally to it, by attacking me. My pity for the animal turned to hate for HECATE.

  I snarled, staring at the red waters.

  In a short time, a skeleton was sinking toward the bottom. I let out my breath, kicked the wall and swung back on the door over the bloody pool. My bare foot hunted the door sill, then I was sliding free of the maroon door and balancing myself right on the edge of that damned death-pool.

  I slammed the door shut behind me.

  The room in which I stood was empty, of course. Its walls were painted to represent the flora to be found in a jungle, to make the leopard feel at home, I suppose. It also served to disguise the door on the other side of the room in case the man who came in here was lucky enough to avoid the black cat. By the time he found the door, the leopard would have him.

  I needed time to use my think tank. I was reasonably certain where I was, deep in this lethal labyrinth, in relation to the overall compound. The time I had spent with Jeannette Lons in studying this maze was paying off big dividends. I fashioned an imaginative picture of the connecting rooms and spotted my position on a mental map.

  There was another room beyond this, and on the other side of that was a kind of lounge room where the guards would be waiting to congratulate the HECATE-hero who might have passed through those barriers. Either that, or they would be marking time until it was safe to go in and recover his dead body. I had a feeling the four guardsmen who had separated from their five fellows would be waiting for me there. With drawn revolvers, yet. My immediate problem was—

  What was waiting for me beyond the next door?

  I drew a deep breath. No use standing here. I had to keep going or let HECATE win this battle. I put a palm on the flowered doorknob and turned it.

  I walked into a chamber with white walls, pink ceiling, and a red floor. The colors are unimportant to the action. What was important was the fact that the floor dropped an inch under my weight—and the side walls started moving together, with me in the middle.

  I gulped and stood like a statue.

  Those walls would crush me to death when they met!

  Still, HECATE always played fair with the candidates it tested, so I guessed there might be a way out of this death-room. My job was to find that means of escape before those walls found me. I ran around the room, hoping the red paint covered a hidden switch that would stop those walls in their tracks. No such luck.

  I knelt down on the floor before one of those moving walls and slipped my fingers into the inch of space between wall and floor, searching for a switch. My fingertips went all along the under-edge of the wall before it dawned on my hopeful mind that there just wasn’t any switch down there.

  Maybe it was on the other side of the second wall. By this time—I’d had to move backward as I fumbled around—the two walls were about ten feet apart and closing in.

  I raced to the other wall, knelt down and began feeling along the under-wall. Nothing here either. Now the walls were five feet apart. Four and a half feet, four feet, three and a half feet, three feet.

  My face was wet with sweat. I had no time left for thinking. It was act, man—or die. And I had to act right.

  By reaching out, I could touch both w
alls. If I were Hercules or Samson, I could stretch out my arms and keep them from closing by sheer muscle-power. I am considered a strong man, but not that strong.

  However, thinking of Hercules made me think also of Antaeus, son of Terra, a great fighter and wrestler who derived his great strength from contact with the earth under his feet. Hercules had finally beaten Antaeus by lifting him off the ground and into the air so his strength could not be renewed. Hercules had strangled Antaeus, but all I needed to do—

  Idiot! Dope! Dumbkopf!

  The answer was so obvious it was ridiculous. The entire floor was a switch. When I had stepped on it, I’d triggered off the mechanism that moved the walls together. Theoretically, by getting off the floor, it would return to the “off” position and the walls would slide back to normal. And while they were doing that I could sprint to the striped door on the far side of the room, open it and step through to face the four remaining guards.

  I jumped upward off the floor.

  I heard a click. Instantly the walls stopped their forward progress and began to recede. I landed back on the floor, naturally, but the mechanism could not reset itself until the walls returned to their original, at-the-end-of-the-room position.

  I ran for the striped door before that could happen. My hand fumbled for a tear-gas bomb hanging at the broad black leather belt buckled over my body-stockinged self.

  With my left hand I opened the door while my right got ready to hurl the bomb. Just as I let it go, I would duck away from the bullet-rain coming my way from the guards’ guns. This was my fight plan.

  But as I saw the guardsmen in the lounge room, I knew I wouldn’t have to duck. Oh, the four men were there all right.

  One of them was sound asleep on a leather lounge. Two ohers were playing chess. A fourth was slumped down in an easy chair, legs crossed at the ankles, dozing.

  A chessplayer lifted his head and stared at me. I have never seen such a grotesque expression of surprise on any face. His jaw dropped, his eyes bulged. His opponent seeing that face, turned his neck. He got a look of astonished awe on his features.

  “Sacré bleu!” shouted the first man. “It cannot be! Nobody could go through all those rooms and live!”

  As if he felt called upon to explain this, his fellow chessplayer said dully, “It was a new course. HECATE hasn’t used it yet. It was to test our finest operatives—but HECATE hadn’t figured out how to install safety devices without weakening the impact of the testing ground.”

  Those words came out in a rush. Both men were thinking their thoughts out loud in their amazement. The man in the easy chair was sitting up by this time, staring around with bleary eyes. Apparently these four had been waiting until it would be safe for them to go in to recover what they believed would be my dead body.

  “Surprise,” I yelled, and hurled the bomb.

  I slammed the striped door shut on the hiss of escaping gas. While I waited there, I slipped on my gas mask. I gave the gas a few more seconds, then I opened the door and walked in on them.

  The man who had been sleeping was kneeling beside his couch, bent over and retching. One of the chess players was clawing at the far door, trying to open it and get out into clean air. The other two guards were staggering about, sobbing and wiping at their tear-wet eyes.

  I leaped into the room.

  One man I belted with an uppercut to the jaw, the second I rapped across the temple with the edge of my hand. They dropped to the floor and lay there motionless.

  The man by the couch, I ignored; he was too sick to be in on the action. But the man at the door I yanked back with a hand tight on his uniform blouse, turned him slightly and let him have it right across the cheekbone.

  His head cracked hard into the door, his mouth opened and his eyes crossed. Spine to the door, he sagged downard. I had to pull him out of the way before I could step over him and out into the corridor.

  In the hall I removed the mask and took half a dozen deep breaths. The mental map my mind had made back in the room of the leopard served to position me. I was about a hundred yards from a big chamber where the initiates into HECATE underwent certain tests so Doctors Roger-Viollet and Matelot could learn their reactions to orders flashed to the radio thought control gadgets implanted in their heads.

  I figured nobody was being tested this early in the morning. It was close on to three o’clock. I ran down the corridor, loosening two hand grenades at my belt.

  I skidded to a halt. I had been wrong about the testing chamber not being used. I had almost gone barging right into that brightly lighted room which was filled with a lot of naked men and women, all HECATE agents, taking part in a kind of orgasmogenic orgy.

  I backed off slowly, hoping nobody watching from the control room had seen me. My black body stocking was great for running around in the dark night, but it would betray me instantly to the eyes studying the love-in at the control screens.

  Beyond the room I saw another archway and through that the stairway that would lead me to the second floor where the control room was located. I had to get across the open space of brightly lighted space without arousing suspicion.

  I swore under my breath. It was an impossible task.

  Sure, I could have tossed a gas bomb in among the naked boy and girls—but I could never get across the room without being seen where it counted, in that control room. They’d be waiting for me up there with machine-guns.

  I stayed in the corridor and studied the revelers. Something struck me suddenly. I knew most of the girls. They were nurses at the hospital!

  Apparently HECATE was enlarging its forces. Until now, the nurses had been only mat, nurses who worked there for a living. But I guess HECATE figured there was no reason why they should not accept them into the organization too.

  The nurses had been operated on. Each pretty head in that room held a thought control gimmick embedded in it. Those gadgets were being tested now, by Doctors Roger-Viollet and Matelot. The nurses were being compelled to engage in this orgy so their actions and speed of response to the embedded stimulators could be studied.

  Then I got an idea.

  If I shucked out of my black body stocking, maybe I could take part in that love-in long enough to reach the staircase on the other side of the room. I had to have a partner for the task. I had to use her body to hide my face from anybody who might be looking from above.

  Oh, yeah? What would happen when one of those nurses saw me? She would let out a yip of surprise, and catch the attention of the men watching the love-in.

  I had one desperate hope.

  My eyes ran around the room, past the twisting, pumping bodies which were engaged in a variety of joy rides, from the favorite European position of the woman supine to the more acrobatic variations. In a far corner, a woman was riding rantipole on a man stretched out on his back. It was like looking at an illustrated sex manual come to life.

  I studied the nearest pair of lovers. They were busy with the nik el haddadi of the Shayk Nefzawi, except that the man was not adding the refinement of sferdgeli, which is likened to the blacksmith plunging a red-hot iron into cold water. I stared at them a little harder.

  I knew that female body bent before the male. It was my little French sweetheart, Jeannette Lons! So they had made a slave out of her too! I felt hate rise up in my throat like bitter bile.

  HECATE would pay for doing that to her, I vowed. Then my lips twisted in a grin. Why not use Jeannette herself to make them pay? She was within easy reach. If only their position was such that her body could hide the face of her companion, it would be easy.

  First things first. I stripped naked. I grabbed up two hand grenades, held them firmly in my palms with my fingers wrapped around them to hide them. All this time I kept my eyes glued to Jeannette and her lover-boy. He was taking her now in the Ninth Manner of the Arab erotologist. She was leaning the flats of her palms against the wall to maintain her balance as he drove into her in the Venus reversa posture. This was a delightful way of makin
g love, but it exposed the face of the man, and I had to have some way of masking my features.

  As I watched, the man drew back, Jeannette turned, thighs still parted. The man swung about, feeling with his back for the wall to brace himself against the standing St. George posture.

  He was less than a yard away.

  I reached out, caught his head, yanked him back. My hand belted him on the side of the jaw. We were inside the archway, there was no way the man or men at the control screens could see us. My hands caught him as he fell and lowered him gently to the floor.

  Jeannette goggled at me. I warned her as I stepped forward to take the place of her unconscious partner, “Don’t talk! Act natural!”

  She was waiting to be swept into the woman-above erotipose. I braced the small of my back to the wall, I took Jeanette across my thighs, letting her sink down slowly onto my manhood.

  “What are you doing here?” she gasped as I let her ride me as Andromache was wont to ride her Trojan hero-husband, Hector.

  “No time to talk, just act,” I grated.

  I pushed away from the wall, my face between the bobbling white breasts that shook so richly beside either cheek. I pressed my lips against the inner slope of one jiggling breast, and then the other, the better to hide my features from the onlookers in the control room. Jeannette Lons did not bother to ask questions, she was too busy grunting in pleasure as I stepped between the bodies on the testing floor.

  Under the soft buttock cheeks pressing into my hands, I had my fingers crossed. If I could make it across the room, if I could gain the archway door and the staircase beyond, I might still carry this off.

  I had to make sure those watchers in the control booth did not notice me and so direct their attentions at this one male among all the others who seemed to be pursuing an independent course. Actually, by HECATE thinking, I was just a flesh-and-blood robot down here, performing for their amusement, no matter whether they called it initiation or nurse-testing or whatever.