At once a voice said. "Awake, Mr. Durell?"
John Padgett sat in a chair across the room. He was in a small chamber with a rough pine floor and a single window, through which the rays of the rising sun glared. There was an unpainted table, a kerosene stove, and a lamp hanging from a nail driven into the plank wall. Durell lay on a rough cot that smelled of age. When he sat up, nausea filled his mouth with saliva. Through the dirty window he glimpsed a beach overgrown with weeds, a few pilings in the muddy water, and a small white crab boat moored to a rickety plank dock.
"How do you feel, Mr. Durell?"
"Not good. Where is this place?"
"We are near Annapolis. You are tougher than I thought."
Durell swung his legs off the cot and sat up. It was warm in the barren room. Wasps hummed and bumped against the slanted ceiling. Slowly his stomach settled and the pulse of pain in his head became tolerable. He said, "Where do we go from here?"
"Nowhere. We stay here."
"Do you know what you're doing, Padgett?"
"I am quite aware of everything."
"Then I don't understand why you're doing it."
"I suggested to you before that all matters are eventually leveled. Many things tip the scale so far in one direction that redress seems impossible. But only death is absolute, from which there can be no recall. In all other matters, one must strive, and sometimes one may succeed."
"Are you talking about your parents?"
Padgett nodded. "And my leg."
"You hold all that against society?"
"If I say yes, you will think me unbalanced. I am not mad. I know what I am doing. And I will be paid for my trouble, in money and security, in the pleasures of this one life we are all awarded, but in different measure."
"You don't care what happens when Cyclops comes down?"
"I need no lecture in humanitarianism. At the moment, I need information. Time is running out, Mr. Durell. Where are the papers you took from Calvin in Las Tiengas?"
Durell laughed. "I gave them to General McFee."
"You are lying," Padgett said quietly.
"Call him and see."
Padgett's face was gray. There were bandages on his right hand; he held his stick between his knees. In the silence, Durell heard the humming of the wasps and the lapping of the tide under the shack. The full orb of the sun was above the edge of the water now, dazzling, glaring, intolerably bright. Padgett spoke thoughtfully.
"McFee is convinced you are not to be trusted. I saw to that. And Swayney has no further use for you. Your bureau is convinced that my sister is a poor security risk and that you were influenced by her to betray your trust. What chance do you have, Durell? At four o'clock this afternoon, Cyclops goes up and comes down. If you survive the holocaust, will your vindication matter then?"
"What do you suggest?"
"You could come to South America with me. Co-operate now, relieve my mind of this last anxiety concerning Calvin's papers and my sister, and I will share the money involved. I know enough to build another Cyclops. There are international buyers for the plans I have."
Durell saw that Padgett was in sober earnest. But there was a dark, uneasy tension in the man as he sat there. Durell limped painfully to the window. The dawn sky looked daubed with blood. The window was nailed shut, but if he were alone, he could break the glass and escape that way. He looked at a hawk perched in a dead pine at the water's edge, and he looked at the molten sunlight on the bay. It all seemed strange and yet familiar, as if he saw it now for the first and the last time.
"You cannot escape," Padgett said quietly. "Franz is in the other room, and he will need little excuse to kill you. Where are Calvin's papers?"
"I told you. McFee has them."
"And Deirdre?"
"I won't tell you anything about her," Durell said.
Padgett took a small gun from his pocket and weighed it in his hand and looked at it. "Do you think anyone will miss you, Durell?"
"I don't matter very much," Durell said.
"You carry more weight than you think. But no one will find you in this Chesapeake mud, will they?"
Durell's head throbbed. "If you plan to shoot me, get it over with."
"Aren't you afraid to die?"
Durell was silent. Padgett sighed. He called for Franz, and when the big man appeared, Padgett limped across the room to Durell, and when he was within reach he suddenly slashed with the gun at Durell's face. Durell ducked and tried to reach for him, but Padgett swung and hit him in the face with the gun and Durell went down on hands and knees on the rough pine floor. When he shook his head, drops of bright blood spattered the dirty planks. His mind blurred. He started up and Franz kicked him in the ribs and he fell over.
Franz kicked him again. "Will you answer the questions?"
Durell got to his knees and lunged at Padgett, but Franz threw him back against the wall, caught a handful of his hair, and twisted his head cruelly to one side in a judo grip.
"Where is Deirdre?" Padgett shouted. "I must know!"
His voice seemed to come from a vast echoing distance above Durell's head. Franz hit him again and the question was repeated. Durell told himself to gel up and try for the door. He started to crawl for the" doorway into the next room, and each move was a separate agony, and when he was almost there Franz quietly shut the door in his face.
"Where were you going to meet Deirdre?" Padgett yelled.
Durell rose swaying to his feet. He breathed pain. The room slipped out of focus. His pain lived in him and possessed him. He drew another breath and with his last strength threw a long right at Franz's face. He landed squarely. Franz crashed backward over a chair and slammed into the wall. Durell started to follow and saw Padgett lift his cane and chop down at his neck and he pitched forward into darkness again…
* * *
He was on the same cot, in the same room. He absorbed pain with the darkness, his mind fleeing in confusion. His watch was real. The identity of the numbers on the dial was tangible. Eight o'clock. Morning or night?
Blindness. Was he blind?
Panic came with screaming mouth on the wings of a hurricane. He sat up and through the darkness he saw a faint slit of yellow where the door did not quite meet the sill. The cot squealed when he stood up.
Why was if dark?
He groped along the wall until he felt the casement of the window. His legs trembled; he was bathed in sweat. It was several more moments before he could go on, and while he rested he heard faint sounds from the other room and he felt reassured by the reality of those sounds. Somebody was there. He heard the muffled lapping of the tide around the pilings outside. The tide? Flooding or ebbing?
His fingers moved over the rough window frame and slid over the cool smoothness of glass. He could see nothing through it. Only total darkness.
Carefully he removed one of his shoes. Each gesture brought a new sea of pain that threatened to drown him. The effort to control his moves and maintain silence brought new outpourings of sweat. Then when he got the shoe off it fell from his fingers and thumped loudly on the floor.
He could have wept.
For an unendurable moment, nothing happened. He watched the slit of light under the doorway, and listened. No one came. He bent and picked up the shoe again and swung it hard against the window. The glass shattered with an ear-splitting noise. Glass showered at him, slashing hands and arms as he reached for the window ledge. Franz yelled in the other room. But he had the catch now, and he swung the casement inward, then heaved himself up to go through.
There was a black, unyielding barrier beyond.
He lost his balance and fell heavily to the floor inside the room. Light bloomed behind him and then he saw there was a double wooden shutter on the window and it was closed and bolted from the outside. It explained the darkness, the fact that day had seemed to become night. He wanted to shout his relief at the reprieve of time.
Durell climbed slowly to his feet. Franz stood in the doorwa
y, enormous, a looming silhouette against the light behind him.
"You son-of-a-bitch," Franz said softly.
Durell stood still as the giant cat-footed toward him.
* * *
When Franz was through with him, the tides of darkness moved back and forth while he fought to remain on the surface, awake and aware of himself. For a time he seemed to float high in space, and he heard Deirdre calling from the infinite starry darkness all around him. He tried to reach for her, and found he could not move. His hands and feet were tied to the cot.
He tried to get up. It was quiet in the room. He heard only the muted, inexorable tick of his watch. He wanted to look at it, but for a long time he was afraid to do so. Finally he twisted around to look at his wrist, tied to one of the legs of the cot, and he saw it was ten o'clock. His effort to see his watch seemed to loosen the knots that held his right arm, and he began to work at these knots patiently as the minutes passed away…
He remembered a time when he was a boy. He was trapping in a swamp, and he had been careless when climbing over a wind drift. With no warning, several of the cypress logs gave way and plunged him into a deadfall. The heavy cypress boles pinned his legs, trapping him there in the isolated wilderness. The terror he had felt as a twelve-year-old boy came back sharply; he felt again the pain, the sounds of the bayou, the awful loneliness of the trapped. He remembered watching a coral snake move over the dead cypress knees; he remembered his frantic breathing, his efforts to lift the enormous weight from his legs. Panic held him. His teeth chattered. Sometimes he wept or shouted. Nobody came to help. The day waned, the sunlight died in the swamp. The insects came, humming, clicking, hungry. Once in the late night he saw distant lights and heard the halloos of searching men, like the voices of agonized ghosts. He had tried to shout, but it was as if a hand seized his throat and only a hoarse whisper came from him. Nobody came. Nobody would ever come. He would die unless he helped himself.
Finally he began scooping away the wet earth from under the logs, digging with his fingers until they bled. All sensation was gone from his legs. At dawn he was still digging at the hollow he had shaped under him. When at last he freed one leg, he could not move it, and he dragged at it with his hands, as if it were dead. Minutes later he got the other leg free and pulled himself away on his elbows. He had sobbed, because he thought his legs were paralyzed. But after a few minutes, just before he reached tie chenière, pain came to them in fine tinglings and then in hot spasms of cramp that made him scream. He fainted when he finally dragged himself onto the road.
Later he remembered his grandfather on the hulk of the old side-wheeler, talking to him, saying things that made him feel proud. But those words and that time were gone now…
Durell kept working on the knots that kept his right hand tied to the cot. He could make the line slip a little now, and he made a single effort, wrenching at the ropes. His skin tore on the back of his hand and blood oozed warmly over his fingers. The line slipped more easily because of the blood. He tried again. The rope slid almost to his knuckles and tightened again. He sweated. He could free himself no further. When he tried again, he knew his effort had grown more feeble.
He relaxed, gasping. Nobody came into the room. He twisted his head to look at his watch.
Eleven o'clock.
He thought of Deirdre and wondered where she was and why she had deserted him. He thought of Las Tiengas and the great, sprawling base in the hot desert, the unearthly machines and cranes and towers that lifted huge needle-shaped bulks to point toward the heavens. Up toward the stars! Someday it would happen; but not today. Today the wild power unleashed would fall back upon mankind, spreading destruction, death. He thought of John Padgett. What made a man feed on hate, relentless and unforgiving, shaking his fist at the silent, wheeling stars that had brought tragedy to his childhood? He understood Weederman, ex-Nazi, with no humility, no respite in defeat, setting former enemies at each other's throats, hoping for the world holocaust to avenge the fall of his own bloody tyranny. But for John Padgett to allow this catastrophe, to plan for it and strive and kill for it…
In the darkness of the room he heard the ping of his watch, the sound magnified by his taut senses; he visualized the tiny mainspring, the small hammer, the fine wheels and cogs and jeweled mechanism that marked the inexorable progress of life and death. He sensed the slow revolution of the earth on its axis in black space, turning seas and continents from shadow into light and into shadow again.
He worked at the knots on his wrist.
Now he was afraid to look at his watch again.
* * *
Much later, John Padgett came into the room, bringing yellow light that fell on Durell as he lay on the cot. Padgett limped to the cot and sat on a chair, his movements heavy. His bony shoulders and knees were all large, awkward angles.
"I am sorry we had to get rough, Durell. You are a stubborn man. For a time, I had the feeling I could not stop you." Padgett paused. "It's getting late now."
"I've been wondering," Durell said. "What happens if some of the fall-out covers this part of the coast? You go under along with everyone else."
"I will not be here. I am leaving soon for South America."
"For exile, you mean," Durell said. "And you have no pity for your victims?"
"They are merely statistics, and even as statistics, I hold hate and contempt for them. Man deserves a new Stone Age." Padgett's voice was harsh. "I had great promise once. I was a child prodigy, a mathematical wizard. It was like carrying an electronic computer around in my head. But because my father and mother died penniless, nothing much came of it. I hated my torn and crippled leg, the poverty, the struggle, the times I was put on display at various universities and exhibited as if I were a freak. Do you understand? But Cyclops will make it all even."
"Did you work on the scheme with Weederman?"
"Of course. We understood each other. But I kept what I knew to myself. He would have preferred blueprints, naturally, and schematic diagrams. I gave him nothing."
"You killed him," Durell said.
"He became obsessed with the thought that I was not keeping my part of the bargain. He upbraided me for leaving the fold, knowing my early record, knowing how I had joined various organizations under Calvin's name. I would not tolerate him or his words. He repelled me. What I did was solely for myself, do you understand?"
"No," Durell said.
"He had no reason to kill Calvin," Padgett said.
"So you avenged him?"
"Call it that. He was interfering with me."
"And now you insist on finishing what you've started?"
"I must."
Durell said, "I'm sorry for you, John. Do you know that?"
"Sorry?" Padgett's voice sharpened. "I did not come in here for your maudlin sympathy. What have you got to be smug about, as you are?"
"I'm not smug. I'm afraid. I've never been so afraid before. And yet I'm sorry for you."
Padgett was suddenly in a deep rage. He lurched up from the chair, knocking it over with a crash, and turned as if to leave the room. Then he limped back, cane in hand, and towered enormously over the cot Durell could not move. Reaching down, Padgett covered Durell's mouth with a trembling hand, fingers digging lightly, then with cruel strength into Durell's flesh. Abruptly he slapped Durell. Durell made no sound. Padgett lifted the cane and hit his body again and again, and the worst of it for Durell was that it was all done in silence except for the shock and sound of the blows. It was a silence that screamed of perverted hatreds.
When Padgett stepped back, gasping, Durell still had not made a sound.
"Damn you," the man whispered, and left the room.
Chapter Twenty-two
His watch had stopped. He could not remember when he had wound it last, and now it was silent, marking the hour of noon. Time and space held him in sluggish suspension, in which the lightning of pain slowly grew dim.
Because of the shuttered window, the room was still
dark when he began working again at the ropes on his wrist. The blood from his torn skin had clotted on the line, and his first efforts tore the clots loose with a single shriek of pain. Sweating, he felt fresh blood ooze from the back of his hand. But now the rope slid easily over the lubrication provided by the wound. On the third try, the rope slid over one knuckle and the widest part of his twisted palm.
And suddenly his hand was free.
He lay still. A pattering sound filled the darkness, and he could not identify it. Then he knew it was rain. The rain became a sudden downpour, and its thunder and beat provided a cover for his next moves. His fingers were stiff, hampered by pain. He tore at the stubborn braids with his teeth until he had to stop and rest. He could hear nothing above the rattle and beat of summer rain on the roof. A leak began in the opposite corner of the room.
Now both hands were free. But he was shaking and spent when he finally sat up and swung his legs off the cot and tried to stand.
His legs collapsed. They would not support him. He pulled himself up and massaged them. The cot creaked with his movements. A chair thumped suddenly in the next room and Durell was still, listening to the guttural sound of Franz's voice, hating it with every fiber of his being. After another moment, he tried to stand again.
This time he succeeded, but he swayed like a drunken man. He wanted to let it all go. He wanted to stop punishing himself, to sleep and forget. But he could not sleep and he could not forget.
There was a cunning in him like that of an animal, and his thoughts did not move in fully rational channels. Breathing quietly, he tried to sense through the darkness the position of chairs and table. When he shuffled forward, he immediately felt the wooden chair that John Padgett had overturned. He knew there was no hope beyond the door where Franz waited. Yet his mind pursued one path, surely and directly.
He remembered the oil lantern hanging on the wall.
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