by Greenberg
When Nick asked whether the pilot plant lay beyond, he received a grunt in reply. The big chauffeur pushed the panic-bar and the door swung open. Rathke moved ahead, onto a kind of steel-floored gallery with a rail. Below, for two stories, there was emptiness crisscrossed with a weird tangle of glass piping.
Nick was starting through the scarlet door when he realized the wrongness of it all.
The pilot plant tanks, distillation apparatus, centrifuges, were two floors down on the cement.
Rathke had chosen to bring him into the plant on the third level – the catwalk went all the way round the big chamber in a square at the second level, too.
He was halfway through the door now, and Rathke was midway between door and rail.
Nick broke stride as the notion registered that it was all wrong. This brief hesitation was what Rathke had counted upon. Too late, Nick realized that the chauffeur’s mind was less spongy than it seemed. For even as Nick’s mind noted the arrangement of the pilot plant – huge windows; the chemical piping swooping up and down like big clear glass arteries in which colored liquids flowed sluggishly – Rathke turned and rolled his shoulder down and came charging in to kill.
Nick tried to keep hold of the attache case and get off a shot at the same time. Rathke’s shoulder hit Nick violently at the waist. The attache case dropped, slid away on the catwalk floor. Rathke lifted hard, up and over in one immensely powerful lunge. Nick tumbled down the man’s back – straight at the rail and the drop over, and death.
Wildly, Nick shot out his free hand, fingers in a claw.
He caught the top of the railing, grappled for purchase, closed his fingers.
A red-purple pain hit his mind, and his arm was nearly wrenched out of place as it took the whole brunt of his body dropping. But he hung on. He hung by his left hand, cheek smashed against the rail’s middle rung.
Rathke threw his cap away. He wiped his sleeve across his upper lip. He smoothed the front of his uniform tunic. He started walking toward the rail. His great black boots gleamed with a leather luster as he came on, nailed heels going clang-scrape, clang-scrape with each step.
Nick lifted his right hand with the automatic pistol in it. He hurt from hanging there by one hand, two floors above the concrete of the pilot plant floor. His face contorted as he tried to steady his trembling right hand, aim between the railing rungs.
The chauffeur leaped, closed thick fingers, twisted the gun loose. He threw it, clanging, down the catwalk floor where it slid to a stop several yards away.
Sweat formed on the palm of Nick’s left hand, on the inside of his fingers by which he was hanging. That left hand began to slip.
“Is the American growing tired?” Rathke said. He drew out something long that suddenly doubled its length with a snick, and shone bright blue.
“Tired of holding on, jah?” Rathke continued, pointing the knife blade down at Nick’s bloodless left hand clawed around the top rail. Nick struggled to get his right leg up. He managed to do it, giving himself a little extra support on the catwalk’s edge.
Rathke kicked his foot away. Nick nearly dropped again. His shoulder took another bad jolt.
“Perhaps we release the fingers with a cut, one at a time,” Rathke said. He brought the knife down toward Nick’s middle finger knuckle.
The blade edge touched skin, broke through, went down to bone. Nick bit his tongue to keep from yelling. Every bit of power he had left went into the frantic surge as he brought his right foot up again to the catwalk edge, tore his left hand back, out from under the knife, away from the rail.
His middle finger burned. For a moment he held onto nothing.
Then his grappling right hand caught the rail. With his left he reached up and dragged hard at Rathke’s white collar, one quick, strong jerk at the point where the chauffeur’s tie was knotted. And suddenly Rathke was pitching over, dumb eyes growing as he sailed past the rail, past Nick.
Rathke seemed to spiral slowly. His boots shone. Then his head struck the concrete and burst.
Something hurt Nick’s ears. A deep, throaty sound. As he clambered up over the rail and stumbled across the catwalk, he realized that Rathke had yelled loudly when he went over. Yelled in wild, frantic fear.
How loudly?
Yes. There were footfalls somewhere off the second level of the pilot plant.
Nick could barely move. But he had to move. He shambled over and picked up his gun. Then he headed for the metal service stair down to the main floor.
Halfway to the bottom he passed another of the black pull-toggle devices set in the wall. He was recovering a little from the shock of the fight now. The footfalls had stopped. Had he imagined?
As soon as he set the timer on the explosives, he wanted out of the plant. He wouldn’t be able to get much beyond the exercise yard before the explosives blew, however. There were night guards in the main building. They would surely catch him in the open. Some diversion, confusion, might help. But he had to plan for that now, and then move very fast.
Police or fire-fighters from the village would create the right kind of diversion, keep the guards from the main plant busy and give him a chance to escape. Nick reached up and pulled down the toggle. He hoped the alarms really rang in the village.
He went lurching on down the iron steps and out onto the pilot plant floor. Overhead the glass pipes full of liquids – and several contained smokish gasses, he saw – soared and crisscrossed so that he moved through a weird checkerboard of shadows. He ran panting past Rathke’s corpse to a central place on the floor, knelt, unfastened the snaps of the attache case.
“That will be quite all, Herr Lamont. Quite all.”
Nick twisted his head around. He’d been watching the corridor entrances at the back end of the research wing. Now he saw that the voice came from the opposite side entirely: an almost wholly shadowed doorway on the second level, but on the side leading into the main building.
At the railing was a woman in a dressing gown. Blurrily he recognized her as Judith Yonov. Beside her, gaunt, in an old maroon lounging jacket with black lapels, holding a pistol, was Dr. Sweetkill.
It was Dr. Genther Yonov who had spoken.
He was a tall, slope-shouldered man, mild of face and affecting a tuft of beard.
“Our apartments are on the end of the wing through which you entered,” Yonov said as he headed toward the stairway. Judith followed. “We decided it might be prudent to circle around and approach from a different direction. Poor Rathke’s yell carried, I’m afraid. Be so kind as to throw the pistol on the floor. Then you will stand back from the briefcase.”
Feeling weary and defeated, Nick obeyed. Judith Yonov’s voice was stridently sharp, bouncing back and forth across the pilot plant as she followed her father down the stairs:
“From the beginning it had all the smell of a penetration.”
“Pity we had to lose Rathke to verify it,” Yonov said. Like specters the two came toward him.
Judith Yonov came only part way, however. She stopped, standing back in the shadow thrown by a tall chemical mixing tank. Dr. Yonov appraised the disheveled Nick.
“I am aware,” Yonov said, stroking his long scholar’s nose with his free hand, “that you triggered the village alarm connections. All doors from this area are now locked, so the police cannot enter except by force. Still, they will be here. Their vans move rapidly. They should arrive at the back gate shortly. Well, I have already decharged that gate. They will have no difficulty getting in to the yard.”
Nick’s head pounded. What was there to say, or argue about? Yonov had him.
The man called Dr. Sweetkill was in his late fifties. He looked bright enough, but there was an odd, private-world gleam in his deeply set brown eyes.
Nick sucked in long breaths. Why the hell was Dr. Yonov so casual about the police arriving? Had he fixed them? Not all of them, he couldn’t have, that wasn’t possible. Nick would try talking his way out. Stupid idea, but what else was there now? The g
un was gone, dropped on instructions. The attache case lay open several yards away, near a centrifuge recessed into the concrete floor. The case was useless, too.
Dr. Yonov stepped around Nick, instructing him to turn so as to keep his face toward him.
“Who you are makes little difference, though we may learn that in a moment,” Yonov said. His thin free hand reached up to a vertical pipe of steel which rose through the floor. A big but delicately balanced wheel with four metal spokes spun at his touch.
Through one of the glass pipes overhead, a whitish fume of smoke went crawling and flittering. Then it twisted and leaped as blowers took over.
“For the moment,” Yonov went on, “it’s quite enough to say that we have long anticipated a penetration attempt. Obviously they have sent us an amateur. Ah, you’re looking at the wheel. Well, out there – ” The gun waved toward the high windows which overlooked the night-blackened grass of the exercise yard. “Out there we have an underground valve system. We frequently employ it to test our experimental gasses in the open air on small animals. When there are no humans – no staff members relaxing there, of course,” Yonov added with a stilted chuckle. “What you see going through that tube overhead is now being pumped down through conduits and up again through the valves scattered in the grass. If I no longer have the required cover for operating in this facility, then I might just as well leave it in grand style, wouldn’t you say so, whoever you are?”
“Red light!” Judith Yonov said from the shadow. “Coming up the road fast.”
“The gas mists quite easily,” Yonov explained. “They’ll not see, feel, taste or smell it until they’re in the midst of it. The alarm was an idle gesture on your part. I have not tried this special compound on small animals - or any animals. It will be interesting to note what happens.”
Red light whirling, the police van screamed up to the gate in another 90 seconds. Men opened the gate. Others, also armed, followed the first pair across the lawn. Before any of them had reached the halfway point between the fence and the building, they had all dropped, white faces distorted, ugly.
Over the seven incredibly still bodies the revolving van light washed waves of dark red color. Nothing else moved.
“Satisfactory,” Dr. Yonov murmured. “Yes, satisfactory.” He smiled. “And now, dear friend, we turn to you.”
6
Dr. Genther Yonov stroked the ball of his index finger up and down the side of his nose for a meditative moment. Nick’s mind was dull, thick, struggling for some way to live, some way to even the wretched odds. Judith Yonov had not stirred from under the shadow of the huge chemical tank. She acted as if she were afraid of the light.
Yonov gave his gun hand a slight twist. The gesture seemed to indicate that he had made up his mind.
“First,” he said in a conversational tone, “we had best cut off the gas flow into the yard, else we shall have half the neighborhood dead.” Nimbly the man moved to the upright pipe, spun the delicately balanced wheel again. In the act of turning back around he suddenly seemed to move much faster, dancing across the concrete to hit Nick viciously across the side of the head with the pistol muzzle.
Nick stumbled. He tried to fend off the next blow, to right himself, to grab Yonov’s gun. Yonov kicked hard with a high, telling kick to the small of the back.
Off balance, Nick skidded across the concrete floor. Suddenly there was nothing beneath him but a great, round circular darkness. Primitive panic brought a yell choking up in his throat.
Everything dropped away. He fell.
He hit hard, with a whanging sound and a cold, nasty smack to the side of his head. He sprawled on the bottom of one of the great stainless steel centrifuges whose upper rims were flush with the concrete floor.
Nick shook his head, crawled to hands and knees. The shadow of Yonov fell across the mirrored interior of the sunken centrifuge. Nick gauged the height up to the concrete floor as hardly more than four feet. But his arms and legs felt heavy, useless. He had to jump. He had to get up, get out of this sunken silvery dish –
Everything twisted again, distorted with pain. He came up on his feet, reached for the lip of the centrifuge. Yonov gave another of his little waves with the gun.
“Judith, please?”
A rasping click somewhere. Suddenly, beneath him, the slippery steel floor seemed to revolve.
The centrifuge was spinning.
Nick was slammed, hurled, around and around. Each time he tried to stand he was thrown helplessly further around the circular inside. Yonov’s shadow flicked past, and past again.
Nick felt like he was in a fun-house device, crazy, laughable, but he could not stand up, nor grasp the concrete lip now because force hurled him always outward toward the wall.
Somehow Yonov’s voice penetrated, filtering down: “Now, Herr Lamont, before I increase to the next highest r.p.m., perhaps you will tell me for whom you are working?”
Around and around everything went, sickeningly, a blur. Yonov’s shadow was the only constant, black across Nick’s field of vision every other second or so. Why couldn’t he stand up?
Each time he tried he was thrown back to hit against the outer wall, revolving more swiftly now. Or was that all in his head?
Above, the next time round, a blue-shiny object glimmered. Yonov’s voice as he called down alternately dinned and faded, depending upon the point to which the centrifuge had revolved.
“You are traveling slowly enough to see these objects which I have brought to the rim. Ten-gallon glass chemical vessels. I propose to kick one, then the next, then the third, down into the machine. Then I propose to throw a control which will slide the steel cover outward from its recess, completely covering you and all the broken glass. Instead of mixing up an intermediary as we do in production, I think 30 seconds with the cover closed and the glass flying into you will make a nice blend of blood and pain. Then I propose to slow the machine down again and you will have an opportunity to tell me who assigned you here.”
Around and around.
The bell-shaped glass vessel was recognizable to Nick because Yonov’s words had made it so. Already Nick could imagine the bits of shattered glass being whirled outward like deadly darts, at his cheeks, his wrists, his eyeballs.
“Say welcome to the first of the glass, my spy friend,” said Yonov, pulling back to kick.
Glass shattering. Tinklings, crashings. There was a loud, flat report mingled with the breaking. Nick was still pinned against the wall of the spinning centrifuge. Only a moment later did he realize two peculiar things:
The centrifuge was slowing down.
And Yonov’s shadow had vanished from the rim.
In a daze Nick swallowed hard, as the centrifuge came to a full stop by revolving one last time past the body of Dr. Sweethill.
The scientist lay on his back. His mouth was open in dismay. His eyes were huge and fixed on the piping overhead. Blood bubbled out of a hole in his throat.
That had been the report Nick had heard. A shot. The huge glass vessels stood unbroken. Nick’s sweat-blinded eyes finally found the source of all the sounds of shattering – a large lower pane in one of the pilot plant windows had smashed inward.
And threading a path through the litter, wrapped in an old tan trench coat that bore rips from where she’d climbed through the window, and looking pale and frightened, but with a small wicked gun in her right hand –
“My God,” Nick said. “My God, Charity. My God.”
“I – I thought you were down in there. I couldn’t see exactly. I shot twice at the window first, to break it.”
Through the night, out where the red van light still revolved, bells jangled.
“The alarms,” Nick said. “The breaking glass triggered the plant alarms.”
“I had to come after you,” she said, her words overlapping his. “You’d told me about the police and fire bells being connected in the village. I was walking – just walking in the, street, worrying about you and – ” S
he fell against him. Then after she had buried her face for a moment, she drew back. “The police alarm rang in the station. I heard it from a block away. A van left. I came too. After I ran all the way up here, I saw all those men lying out there. All dead. I thought they would have things in control. I saw Sweetkill through the window. They do teach us how to fire one of these accurately, you know. It’s part of the training.”
Nick Lamont swallowed a long, sweet breath of air. His temples had stopped hurting. Things had settled into reasonable focus.
“Then we can get out of here. We can – ”
“Not as you think,” came her voice from the shadows, forgotten till now. “No, not as you think. The young lady’s back presents a splendid target. She will please put her gun down, and turn.”
Nick stared past Charity, who was frozen, trying to see in the mirrors of his eyes the source of the ugly feminine voice. Nick’s belly iced again. He’d drawn a hand that looked like a lucky one at last, and now there was a trump.
Yonov’s fallen gun had been retrieved by the girl who came walking out of the shadows.
Charity’s fingers whitened about the trigger of her own weapon. Nick gauged the risk, then shook his head. Carefully he reached down and pried her fingers apart.
“I’ll throw the gun off to the right,” he said.
“Yes,” said Judith Yonov. “Then the young lady will please stand to one side.”
This Charity did, as Judith Yonov came all the way out of the chemical tank’s shadow.
The strong nose, the full figure, the lipstick mouth were as Nick had remembered them. His mind created a beery image of a young woman hiding under a picture hat. Only this woman was not young.
Turkey-skin, all wrinkled and reddish, showed at the throat of her robe. Her hair was dyed. Her eyes veed with folds at the outer corners. Her makeup laid a hideous pink-orange patina over pale skin. She was not pretty, and she was at least Yonov’s age.
