The clanging grew louder now.
It would be one of them. One of them with a warning, and if he did not open up, surrender.... But the blue light still blinked.
He could have missed them. As he swung the screen, they could have been running in an area yet untouched—the last ten degrees....
The clanging was lessening.
He hauled down the knife-switch marked "STERN PORT."
The clanging ceased.
And then, muffled almost to inaudibility, a wild, far-off yell. "Shut it, Dad, for the luvva mike, SHUT it!"
And he jammed the switch home.
There was an awful racket then. An awful, wonderful racket. Mike, Terry, clambering hell-bent up the spiraling cat-walks! Mike, Terry, safe aboard....
A movement in the viewplate stilled the cry that had formed in his throat. The strange devices—there was a bluish-white flash, and the viewscreen was suddenly white with a ball of coruscating brilliance. Short....
Had to blast-off—but the kids, not braced on the cat-walks.... Still clambering, maybe only half-way up....
Another streak, but no flash. Over. They were bracketing.
The next one, whatever it was, the next one would be a bulls-eye.
With all his voice he bellowed "HANG ON!" even as Mike and Terry burst, breathless, into the control room.
His finger hesitated only a moment. And then he jammed the bottom button in and his knees bent, but they held.
And in the corner of his eye he saw the blue-white flash erupt dead-center below.
He eased the button pressure and hovered, out of range.
In a moment Gundar Tayne's craft would be in the air. Then....
"Kids—kids, you O.K.?" He locked the ship in its hover and then he was beside them, scanning their half-naked, bruised bodies in quick glances, then holding them to him with all the strength of both arms.
"Dad?"
"Yes. Me, your old man...."
"We been dodgin' and watchin' for hours, Dad. Let's get out of here!"
He held them to him a second longer, then turned to the communications panel, Mike at his left, Terry at his right. "... They almost caught us at the door down there.... Dad I—I think I killed one...."
"We did as you said, Dad. We watched as much as we could, but most of the time we had to stay on the ground, playing dead...."
The communications dial was still atFIELD ADDRESS.
He looked at it, then looked at the viewscreen. Thousands of them, stilled for so short a moment, now surging, tearing at each other's vitals again. There was a terrible hurt somewhere deep inside him, and he wanted to voice it, to get it out, to tell them somehow.
But they would not understand him if he were to speak for a minute or for an hour. These whom he watched had been lost from the day of their birth.
But, thank Heaven, not the two at his side.
"Get in those hammocks, kids," he said.
They did, and he braced himself against the bulkhead. He was twisting the top button even as he punched it home, and it caught.
The deck rushed up with smashing force.
The white, sterile room seemed to have closed in upon itself since she had been first brought to it so many hours before, and the heavy desk was now just a great mass of steel, its curved lines no longer distinct, but trailing off somewhere in an incomprehensible geometry of their own. There was movement behind the desk, white, blurry movement that blended with the walls, but the flesh-colored mask that hovered above it did not seem to move at all. Dot's eyes could no longer focus for the fatigue of the tests had sucked the well of her physical energy dry, but she knew the face.
He was Mannix, director of the S-Council, they had told her.
The tests had torn her soul from her, turned it inside out, stripped it naked, examined it beneath their microscopes of unending questions asked in a thousand different ways with a thousand different inflections, connotations.... The sterile white rooms, the lights, the darkness....
To hear what she and they had known from the beginning, and what the blurred, unmoving face was telling her now.
"... tests have been evaluated according to Section 679, Sub-section B of Commandment Seventeen, Part E, as amended, and you have been found to be unquestionably sane. It is my duty therefore to interpret the law with a finding of guilty of acts of heresy, as charged in each of the counts cited, committed with the premeditated deliberation of a sound, and therefore fully responsible mind."
Dot no longer felt fear, only a terrible tiredness. It did not matter what Mannix said. Nor of course, could it matter what she might say. There was the truth, of course, but it would be doubly incriminating, and would spell disaster for Doug.
She would never see Doug again.
"... entitled, by rank, to denial...."
Or know him if she did.
"... may speak, now as privileged, before you are sentenced...."
Never see her Earth, her Terry or her Mike again!
"... and in the absence of remonstrance as privileged...."
Or know that the sun and the stars above the alien planet upon which she would walk were not those under which she had been born....
"... hereby sentence you, Madame Lisa Blair, to loss of privilege to breed offspring through sterilization, and to the complete loss of all ego and all memory therewith connected through psychomutation, which treatment shall immediately follow the first. In the name of the Prelatinate, the Prelate General, and the party hosts, I do so pronounce sentence."
A panel had opened noiselessly behind her.
The blurred face nodded imperceptibly, and arms suddenly were lifting her to her feet, leading her from the white, sterile room....
There was an empty roaring in his ears as he struggled for consciousness, and he could only half-feel the tugging at his body, half-hear the frightened sound of Terry's voice.
"Dad—dad, you've got to get up, dad!"
Painfully, he made his shaking muscles take over the burden of his weight, forced himself to his feet.
The viewscreen was black save for the receding white disk that was Venus. The acceleration needle quivered at just under two gravities.
"—Dad, everything feels funny. So heavy. For a long time we couldn't even move out of those bed-things."
His head hurt and there was drying blood on the side of his face. His body felt as though it had been flailed by a thousand of the maces, and his back wound was a long, throbbing ache, and it was sticky-wet again.
He tried to force a grin to his face, and even that drew tiny shards of pain.
"Wish I could've gotten to one of those bed-things, Mike! Believe me I never want to hear the expression 'hit the deck' again."
"Well you sure hit it. Anything feel busted?"
"Everything sure does! But I'll be O.K. in a minute." He sat heavily on the edge of a hammock, fought against the tugging urge to sink back into unconsciousness. But when the acceleration needle said one gravity and the gyros took over, he had to get back on his feet.
"Dad! Where the heck are we going?"
"And when you get us there, will you tell us what the contraption did to get us in this place, and make us all—even you—look all different? We thought it was one of those scary dreams until you got us out in front of everybody ... and I still ain't so sure...."
Doug still hurt, but the dizziness was going, and there was Terry's question to answer. It was a good question.
"Earth, that's where we're going! Ever hear of it?"
"This is arealspace-ship, Dad?"
Doug smiled down at him. "It's pretty real," he said.
They watched him in silence as he began his search.
He wasted twenty minutes at it before he was forced to the conclusion that there were no astronomical charts, no star maps. The Science Council would have its own, and the robot didn't need any....
He was glad the boys were with him. Glad, because without them, the cold panic that welled inside might have taken hold. Glad, because with them, he could muster the will it took to keep from telling himself how terribly big and empty infinity was.
Maybe you should've stuck with the MIT degree after all, Carl Grayson had said. And, he had stuck himself with it! But, if the things he had learned to get it had gotten him into this, then they would damn well have to get him out!
Doug ripped the blank plastisheets from Tayne's unused notebook, tossed them to the flat surface of the console. There was an ink-stylus in another pocket of the dead man's tunic.
He pointed to a bulkhead chronometer. "Tell me when an hour's up, boys," he said.
He must have his answers within the hour, for in computing them he would need a constant to represent known navigation error, and the hour would represent it, once he determined its value. And if he should exceed that time, its value would be changed—and the constant, the calculations, worthless.
With the viewscreen, he began his search of space for the bright, blue-white planet that would be Earth. When he found it, he would use twenty minutes of the hour to establish the plane of its ecliptic. Then, if he could remember what the books had said, remember its orbital speed, its orbital arc for the month of August and its resultant distance from the sun. And then of course the same mathematical equivalents for Venus, and subsequent establishment of the necessary relationships. And then interjected in it must be his own speed and relative direction for the space of one hour.
And when he had his dead-reckoning solution, it would still be like shooting ducks—with Earth the biggest duck that a man ever had to bag. And with a sling-shot—his stylus—not the finely-machined shotgun that would be the slide-rule and calculator which he didn't have.
He kept turning the screen. In six precious minutes he found it, like a bright new jewel pinned to the white silk scarf of the Milky Way.
Earth.
He reached for the ink-stylus, the blank plastisheets....
There was a searing, bright light above her and it sent stabbing tentacles of pain through her head, and they lashed at her flagging brain.
They had lain her prone on a cold, flat surface, and their faces circled her, blurred as Mannix' had been, and infinitely far above her.
There was the murmur of voices, and the bright light was divided and divided again into myriads of white, stabbing lances as it was broken into glittering bits upon the edges of the slender instruments they held.
Let them, let them....
No, scream—scream or something, you idiot!
In a second there would be the hypodermic or the anaesthesia and she would not be able to scream—
"You're so—so stupid ..." she heard her voice saying, a dimly audible echo off the edges of infinity itself. "Sterilize me. Keep me from breeding. What I want, you fools! They all do, they all do, you know. And you, yourselves, give the answer to it. To our question, how much longer, how many, many more...."
She could not be sure if she spoke waking or dreaming, in the delirium of exhaustion or in the unintelligibility of anaesthesia. But she was thinking the words, and she could still feel the motion of her tongue, its fuzzy touch against her teeth.
The glittering instruments were immobile.
"If heresy brings us this—this relief from a fear of forever being only a machine of flesh and blood to produce—to produce as any machine with no value whatever other than to produce until it falls into wreckage—then, then heresy will some day flourish, and you'll all be wrinkled and old, and there will be no young voices."
She let the words bubble from her, not caring, yet somehow caring, somehow fighting with all her being. But it was not a clever ruse, for there was still not strength enough to consciously pit her wits against them. It was something else, this strange fight, something else that stemmed from deep within her.
And now the murmur of voices above her had changed tenor, oddly interrupted by jagged bits of silence.
Done something. What she had said had done something, and they were hearing her. Hearing her, so she must speak louder, must open her eyes wide and let the bright light send the stabbing flashes of pain deep into her brain, whip it stingingly into consciousness.
It hurt, it hurt....
Colored circles, drifting, but it was from the light—and she was thinking now, and in a moment she would be seeing their faces more clearly. Had to talk again....
Dot lurched up on her elbows, felt the curious relaxation of a smile on her lips. "Go ahead! The rest of the women know what you're going to do to me! And pretty soon they'll let you do it to them! If we're no good as an underground to stop you, we'll let you use us to stop yourselves—think that one over before next election!"
From somewhere very near her a voice said "Madame Blair, please. You are interfering with the operation!"
But now the words were coming more easily. Her hands and feet were cold and wet, and her muscles shook, but now she was fighting with the last of the energy in her, she was fighting because she had found the chink in their armor, and she could widen it, could break through!
"Oh, very well—I wouldn't do that! Because I've been looking forward to this for so very long. Just to think, I'll be comfortably dried up, and—it'll be legal! No more fear!"
"You must be silent, Madame Blair."
"Is there some new amendment to the precious Commandments that says I must be silent? The last one I heard was just before I was brought here—Yes, have you heard the latest, gentlemen? An amendment prohibiting the execution of a sentence on an official's wife, until that official is present as a legal witness? But no, I can see you haven't, and hope you get into all kinds of trouble! Chapter—Chapter 580, gentlemen—Book 631, Section 451, Paragraph A, Sub-paragraph 34, Sentence."
And abruptly she let the bitter spurt of words taper into silence, and her eyes were wide. Only one of them was at her side—the rest were suddenly grouped around the one in charge, who was nervously fingering a telecall dial.
Like children! Doug said they were creatures of pattern, and something had suddenly smashed the pattern to smithereens, and they dared do nothing until they had a firm hold on the torn-up ends again. She had got them scared stiff!
This is it, girl! Move!
The last of her strength. A swift, sidewise kick, and she buried the heel of one bare foot into the groin of the man who had stayed to guard her. She had braced her other leg on the edge of the low operating table, and thus anchored, the kick carried all the merciless impact that was needed. She did not wait to see the quick look of agony that mottled his face and she was off the table and running before he had sunk silently to his knees. The surgical robe was short and did not hamper her legs, and for the first time since she was a little girl, she ran for the sake of pure, uninhibited speed. She had reached the door marked EXIT ONLY before the rest of them realized what she had done, and then they were after her, their howling voices a mixture of disbelief and dismayed anger.
It was a long, wide corridor. The enraged shouts of alarm behind her had already turned it into a thunderously echoing cacophony of pure and terrible noises, and she knew that within moments, around some turn ahead of her there would be more of them, and she would be trapped, and it would be all over.
She would have let the sudden pain in her side double her when, less than a hundred feet ahead of her, more of them did appear; her flagging strength would have let her fall at their feet had she not seen it at the last moment, hardly twenty feet from her—the thing for which she'd been so desperately looking, had not been able to see through the stinging mist that still made things blur uncertainly.... Another door. Another door marked SERVICE EXIT at the top.
She ran through it, breath sucking painfully into her lungs, the surgical gown already wet and clinging to her with ice-cold sweat. A long steel ramp, forty feet above the ground, curving in a gentle half-spiral to the broad street below.
She fled the curving length of it, swiftly past other service exits, her flight becoming more of a fall each split-second than a run, for her legs would not keep up. And then her momentum pitched her headlong into the street and she struggled desperately for balance.
She heard them behind her, feet thundering on the ramp, thundering in her ears.
A silver vehicle sped by, missed her, its undertow plucking at the sodden fabric of her garment. Another, and then suddenly the thundering grew louder and there was no more strength left.
The speeding golden-hued vehicle bore down on her, and Dot screamed, fell headlong in its path.
Doug's error was wide, but mercifully, he had led his target by too great a distance rather than by too little, and the ecliptic had been right. It would not be a chase, but a meeting. He brought Ship QT into a sharp, angling turn when he was sure, and there was silent thanksgiving at his lips as the moon of Earth rolled slowly far below him. And Earth itself became a pale blue bull's eye, growing perceptibly larger with each minute in the viewscreen.
He did not unlock the top button. He could be already many, many hours too late, but there was no knowing.
Like a great torpedo, the ship hurtled toward its target as though to blast it from Space. In eight minutes it would be midway between Earth and its moon, and in nine, Doug would invert, cutting the difference between crash and controlled landing perilously thin.
"Terry, get the dead man's sword and belt. Mike, help me find some tools—anything that even looks like a wrench."
When two of the nine minutes were gone, Doug had found a tool that would serve. When a portion of the third was gone he had a section of the communications panel naked. When seven of them were gone he had its high-kempage pack loose on its bearers, and when there were but seconds left in the ninth, he had it free, and lashed with torn strips of his cloak to one of the hammocks.
"Hold on, now," he said then. His voice was raw and it hurt to talk. There was a dryness in his mouth that made his words fuzzy and indistinct, and his tongue felt swollen enough to choke him. "I want both of you on that hammock—get that thing between you, strap yourselves down, and then hold onto it for all your life. When we land, get the straps off quickly, and—" he clenched his teeth, had to push the words through them, "—and have your swords ready. I'll take care of the rest; you just follow me. Understand, boys?"
They nodded silently, strapping themselves securely to the hammock.
Three seconds ... two, one. Release the top button. Press the panel full around, all the way ... there go the bow belly-jets—stern jets topside.... Top button, all the way in, twist it—
The Moon swam into the viewscreen, was shrinking fast, too fast. No, slowing a little....
He swung the screen to full stern, and Earth was rushing up, not quite yet filling it.
Speed in thousands per second ... sixteen ... fifteen point five—fifteen. The needle fell so slowly. Gravs were coming up, one point five—two full. Over two now, and speed falling a little faster.
Earth filled the screen.
And then he took his eyes from the dials, for he knew that whatever they read, he was at the full mercy of the ship itself. The top button was all the way in, and locked. She was giving all she had.
When the grav indicator quivered at four, Doug slumped to the deck, unable to stand. He rolled to his back, winced, and tried to keep his eyes on the grav needle.
They blurred, stung in oceans of hot tears. The shrill siren-scream of atmosphere pierced the thick, heavily insulated hull and Doug knew what was coming—heat, unbearable heat.
His short gasps seared his mouth, and his heart was like a gigantic pile-driver inside him, struggling to burst its way through his chest.
And then as though it had all been but part of a timed experiment in some weird laboratory, the sensation of being crushed to death began to abate. He could see the grav needle again, and it had already fallen back to two. Speed was now in unit miles per hour, and the figures were dropping from nine hundred.
Doug forced himself to his feet.
"Dad ... Dad, are we O.K.? Dad?"
"Maybe," he said.
When the grav needle was steady at One, Doug reduced thrust to hold them hovering at a little more than two hundred thousand feet over the Atlantic, with the coastline of what to him was France almost directly below.
A sickening, quick drop and the horizon-ecliptic indicator showed parallel flight, and Doug could feel the thrust of the belly engines beneath his feet. Then he pressed the bottom button, then the middle, and the Atlantic was rushing beneath them. Carefully, he depressed the next one up. All the way in, he locked it. The velocity figure in unit miles per hour was fifteen thousand.
Eleven minutes later he cut the power again, slowed, brought the ship once more on its stern, and began his descent over Washington.
Within moments they would spot him, would be ready.
It would have to be fast, miles from the central space-port—a suburb, near a highway.
He let her fall fast. Ten thousand. Eight. Four.
He tilted, angled a little north and west, then dropped again.
At five hundred feet he trebled the power, and it was as though a great 'chute had snapped open above them.
Three hundred feet—the highway perhaps a quarter of a mile distant.
No one down there, but they could be hiding, waiting.
Fifty feet. Had to time it just so, now....
The last ten feet they fell.
He estimated that there would be five minutes at the most before the area was flooded with S-men. The rest of the gamble hinged entirely on what they succeeded in doing, or failed to do, within the space of a few hundred heart-beats.
They made the roadside in little more than a minute after leaving the ship. Terry and Mike lay prone in the wide drainage gutter, their swords drawn, their bodies camouflaged by a few handfuls of hastily hacked scrub brush.
Doug stood at the side of the superhighway, the power-pack at his feet, his shredded cloak in his hands to wave.
The traffic seemed light for so late in the afternoon. The sun was hot, and he was breathing heavily from the stumbling, desperate run across the small, rutted field. The ship towered above what few trees there were, and it marked them for a target.
A streamlined shape was racing toward him. It seemed to take all the strength he had left to wave the cape, and he wondered if he were waving it at searching S-men....
The vehicle sped by, whipping the cape in its undertow. It was going nearly two hundred miles an hour, and there was no driver inside it. A robot carrier.
Thirty seconds went by before the next one came. It was going slower, and it too was driverless.
Doug glanced at the sky. To the west, high, tiny dots—
It was a full minute before the next one came. With both hands, cloak dropped because it was too heavy, Doug waved, and the vehicle was slowing.
"Ready, boys...." There was a slight rustle behind him as they came to their knees.
The driver stopped his car almost abreast of him, and opened the passenger door.
"What's the trouble? You crack up? While we're riding you can use the autophone—"
Doug moved into the vehicle slowly, then lashed out at the man's head with the smooth, heavy rock that was in his left hand. In his exhaustion he struck only a glancing blow, and there was barely time for a second, but the second connected, and the driver slumped, jammed behind his semi-circular steering wheel.
"Mike, Terry—"
In a moment the helicopter would have him spotted, or an S-Council patrol car would be braking beside him.
They hauled the driver out, left him at the road side. He was not dead, and Doug was curiously thankful for that. He had killed one man already....
He wasted a second for another glance at the sky. Closer now, and it was obvious that they had spotted the ship. He had to get the vehicle in motion somehow. A robot sped by, its air wake rocking them slightly. He had the pack on the seat beside him, and Terry was slamming the door.
No clutch or brake pedal. Only one pedal, and it could only be an accelerator. But pivoted in the middle. There was no sound to the engine, no way to tell if it were running because the only dash instrument was a speed indicator.
He pressed the pedal forward. And they did not move. Backward, then....
It moved. In five seconds the speed needle was climbing past eighty, going smoothly upward.
He wondered if they had been seen.
In a dash mirror he saw Terry and Mike turning their heads up, looking through the curved transparent metal top.
"Must be a hunnerd of 'em—they're starting to land I think!"
"All of them?"
"I guess so—wait! Yeah, he's gonna land, too, I guess. I can't see 'em anymore. Gosh, we're sure moving."
"Creepers, a hundred andeighty! Hey Dad, where are we going, anyway?"
"To the headquarters hospital building. I think—I think that's where your mother is."
"Is she hurt?"
"I don't know, Mike, I don't know."
He pressed his heel to the floor-board. He was glad for Tayne's sword at his side. Even for the ones the boys carried.
The sign said City of Washington, District of Columbia, Population 531,423. Speed Limit 55 MPH.
Doug raised his heel, the car slowed. He frowned. No road-blocks, no pursuit! There had been plently of time since the helicopters had landed—five, six minutes perhaps. They knew where he was going, and were going to let him walk right into it, some neatly conceived trap at the hospital. So they'd be sure to have him alive ... alive, to be used as an example!
Savagely, he heeled the pedal down. Let them be waiting—they were fools if they hadn't figured on the swords! Or—or he was a fool, for counting on them.
The car's tires wailed as he rounded the long, curving turn that brought him onto St. Jefferson Way, past the Payne Monument, and within two blocks of the headquarters building hospital wing.
The traffic was thickening, planned of course to make things look as natural as possible—not to arouse his suspicion at the last moment....
"Get those swords ready, kids...."
He heard them scrape from their scabbards.
And without warning the form of a woman darted into his path. He swerved, jammed the pedal forward, and the car rocked sickenly.
And he had seen her face in that one awful second—it was Dot who had fallen in the street behind him!
The boys were at his heels as he leapt from the car. There were white-clad men rushing toward them, and he had Dot's form in his arms as the first of them closed in.
There was the quick blink of sunlight on steel as Mike and Terry swung their weapons.
And as though stunned, the men in white stopped short, suddenly silent, awkwardly-poised statues.
Doug knew the spell would last for seconds at best. The half-naked boys stood grimly, feet wide apart, sword-hilts grasped in both hands.
Doug, with Dot's limp body in his arms, broke for the car.
"Come on!"
And Terry and Mike were at his heels. The men in white broke their frozen ranks then and swarmed over the small area of street that the two broadswords had commanded for the telling few seconds.
Doug bolted the vehicle into motion. And then they were free.
"What dopes," Mike was saying. "Were they scared! I bet they didn't figure we'd be ready to fight 'em! But who did we—?"
"Boys, see what you can do for your mother. It is your mother, she just looks different, like we do...."
"Mother—"
"Hurry up. She's just fainted, that's all. We didn't hit her."
Dot was conscious when they arrived at the house, and she was managing to speak.
"Are they—"
"The boys, yes Dot. Our boys. Now look, we've got to run for it. I'll carry you, and you hang on to the pack.... Mike, Terry—"
"Ready, Dad. Will there be many?"
"I don't know. Maybe none, but if there aren't, it'll only be for a very few minutes. Let's go!"
They ran, and the boys burst through the front door with their swords lunging at emptiness.
"The cellar!"
He heard them clamber down the steel stairs.
"It's O.K. Dad—come on!"
Dot's face was white, and her eyes were open wide. He carried her as gently as he could, but she had never been so terribly heavy in his arms.
It happened at the cellar doorway, at the top of the stairs.
He stumbled, fought for balance, fell to one knee, clutched hard and Dot screamed.
But he held her, and her arms were choking at his neck.
And there was a crashing, clanging noise as the power-pack fell from her, caromed from step to step, and lay finally in a shattered ruin on the cellar floor.
Slowly, Doug straightened, descended the stairs with Dot's trembling body still in his arms. The boys stood motionless.
There was only the sound of Dot's quiet sobbing, and that of Doug's boots as they struck hollow sounds from the steel stair treads, moved heavily as though fitted to the legs of an awkward robot to scatter the shattered bits of the power-pack tubes and crush them as they came underfoot.
Gently, he put her down. The boys knelt at either side of her, Doug himself before her.
"Don't, please don't, Dot," he said.
"Oh, Doug—"
And then she clung to him, and her face was wet against his own, but they were the last of her tears.
"Afraid?"
"No. Scared a little, but just scared. I don't fear them, Doug ... they're not worth enough to fear."
Mike and Terry had gone over to where the Contraption was, had pulled off its dust-cover, and stood looking at it as though puzzled, as though wondering why, so suddenly, it had become a worthless thing.
"Nobody's touched it, Dad," Doug heard Mike saying. "I don't think anybody's done anything to it."
Doug didn't answer, for he did not know how to tell them, how to make them know that there was no way.
"I just—just dropped it, Doug...."
He tried to smile, and his face felt old and tired. "We were overdue anyway," he said. "Way overdue. I guess it's against the rules to beat the odds forever."
"I just ... just dropped it...."
"Don't, don't my darling. It wasn't you, don't you understand? It wasn't you, or me—the little fight we made just prolonged things for awhile. Sort of like living itself, I guess. The big system. You can let it sweep you along as it will or you can fight it if you're fool enough...."
"Doug! Doug, you don't believe those things!"
He felt the muscles of his face tighten, and he said nothing. No, no he did not believe them, but what difference did that make? It was the ways things were that mattered!
He picked up the broadsword Terry had let fall.
"How long—how long will it be, Doug?"
Her voice was calm; there was even a faint flush of color in her face again.
"I don't know," he said. "For awhile at least, this might seem the least logical place."
"Dad, what's in this big box? Hey, Dad!"
He stood up, turned toward them. The kids—so full of life and the love of living, so full of the myriad curiosities that made living a colorful vibrant thing.
"This one here. Over here—a big tall wooden one."
Doug heard her quick intake of breath, turned to her.
"Before the telecall, Doug. Before they took me. A helicopter came, from the electronics place ... they brought that box, and I—"
In quick strides he was beside Mike and Terry, and everything inside him was suddenly churned up, cold, hot....
Mike had wrenched a section of planking loose, had reached inside.
"I got the label, Dad.... High-Speed Blower-Rack, With Double Blower, Model 4-L532, two each—"
The final, hellish irony. As though it were not enough to fail, but to be mocked as he failed, as though Fate—or was it Providence?—could not close the incident without at least a gentle laugh at him, a cruel laugh to make light of all his confusion, his efforts and all that had driven him to make them. Doug wondered if there would be enough of the strength he would need, when he died, to laugh back.
The planking squawked as Terry pried with Mike's broadsword.
"Maybe it can help, Dad ... maybe it can," Terry said, and he continued the prying. Mike pulled at it, and there were louder squawks as the nails protestingly surrendered.
Doug wanted to stop them, to tell them, but there could be such a little time left, and if it kept them busy there might not be time for them to become afraid.
He watched them as they ripped the top from the crate, eagerly began hauling out its contents.
Four large, wide-bladed fans, each perhaps sixteen inches in diameter, and each driven by a compact electric motor. They were coaxially mounted on tall, slender chromium plated racks and could be adjusted on them to meet any conceivable experiment in ventilation engineering.
Doug said nothing, let them continue. It might not even be necessary to tell them that their discovery was nothing more than two ingeniously designed air conditioning units.
He wondered why they had come at all. The Prelatinate-Attorney's idea, perhaps, of a not-too-subtle jest. That, or even a veiled warning.
There was more squawking of wood, and in a few moments Mike and Terry had each of the units placed beside each other on the cellar floor.
"There's other junk here too," Terry was saying. "Pulleys and stuff, Dad. And a sheet of directions or something. Here, look Dad ... maybe it'll help."
Doug looked at the smudged sheet of plastisheet that Terry had thrust in his hand. Only simple diagrams, indicating the use and assembly of the pulleys for desired variations in blower speeds. Even the simple rheostat, Doug mused, was taboo....
He crumpled the sheet, let it fall to the floor.
And suddenly grabbed it up again, smoothed it, looked again at the last sentence! ...each motor operates on regular household direct current of 250 Kemps, as authorized by...
Two hundred fifty Kemps—and there were four of the motors!
"Dot! Dot those tools by the Contraption! And any scrap wire there—hurry!"
He worked with inhuman swiftness of desperation. Dot knelt beside him, handed him tool by tool as he asked for it, as though she were a scrub nurse and he the surgeon, with a patient that might have but moments to live.
And silently, Terry and Mike watched, eyes wide with wonderment. They watched as Doug equipped two of the motors with the large pulleys, the two others with pulleys of less than half their diameter. Then he linked them with the flat rubber belts.
"See if you can get the insulation off the ends of those wires—the ones a couple feet long are all right."
He moved the racks next to the bench, brought them close together, and when Dot handed him the wire, he had the two motors on which he had placed the small pulleys denuded of their streamlined jackets. It was between those two that he made a simple connection in series.
"Terry, Mike—while I'm making connections to the Contraption, see if you can get the fan blades off their shafts."
Two connections—two simple connections....
He finished the second connection.
"One more fan to go, Dad—"
He plugged the two outer motors with the large pulleys into the wall outlets above the bench. Then his fingers waited on the switches.
"But Doug, the fan motors will only work on house current—"
"Yes, that's right, but I've geared—pulleyed, I mean—two of them up, so that they'll turn the other two at least twice their normal armature speed. And the simple electric motor works—"
"—in reverse, too, doesn't it! If you turn it by mechanical means, it generates electric current!"
"That's about it. I ought to get about five hundred volts from each, with the pulley ratio I'm using. And they're both connected in series, so—a thousand volts, I hope. Childish, isn't it—"
There was sudden chaos above them.
"Doug—"
Terry dropped the last fan-blade to the floor.
Doug pressed the switches, and the two electric motors spun into humming, whirring motion, driving the other two at a speed he knew might burn them out in minutes. Then he closed the Contraption's main switch, and pulled Terry and Mike bodily to him with one arm as he held tightly to Dot with the other.
S-men swarmed down the cellar stairs.
A dozen men clad in white uniforms of the S-Council surrounded them, and there were weapons in their hands.
Senior Quadrate Blair understood. Partially, he understood. He had been reading a banner headline, and then suddenly—suddenly there had been an indescribable moment of utter dark, of awful timelessness—and cold. And there was still the cold, tangible and fluorescing in a green-blue flame about him. Through it he could see the white blurs—the men in white. S-men....
"Lisa—" He felt her beside him, crushing their two sons to her trembling body. He could see their faces, then—upturned to his, pleading, afraid. "The change. Somehow my counterpart, my imposing alter-ego has succeeded, Lisa! He has found his way back, and in so doing he has returned the four of us...."
And then the green glow and the cold was gone, and there was no more time to speak.
"Stand where you are! You have only to move to—Madame Blair!"
The leader of the white-uniformed band had half-succeeded in masking his initial amazement, but now the surprise on his heavy face was a naked thing. The others stood as statues to each side of him.
There was an awful moment of silence, and the weapon-muzzles held steady, even if the dozen hands that gripped them were momentarily incapable of flexing trigger-fingers.
And then the Senior Quadrate had found his full voice.
"There has of course been some error. S-men do not enter the home of a Senior Quadrate—"
And Lisa's voice cut across her husband's.
"They—Douglas, these aren't—aren't S-men! I recognize him—the leader! Mylor Kuun...."
"Of course, Madame," the heavy-faced one said rapidly. "The disguises—a desperate necessity, I assure you. There is very little time, however. Once informed of your escape from the hospital, and of the Senior Quadrate's violation of arrest, it was necessary to act at once to find you. Genuine S-squads cannot be much behind us. We're but one of a number of our groups in the search, and we came to your home only so no possibility might be overlooked. Yet I don't understand—" For a moment a look of puzzled doubt flickered on the underground leader's heavy features. His nervous gaze touched the strange array of forbidden equipment which but moments before had been bathed in the green-blue glow.
"There will be time for explanations later!" Lisa said. She caught herself as she was about to add that what the agent was saying made little sense.
She put a protective arm around each of her still, frightened children. There must be great trouble or the group would not have so brazenly exposed itself, and come here to her home. Something desperate enough so that added confusion might serve only to make a dangerous situation an impossible one.
"But I don't—you said violation of arrest," her husband was saying stubbornly. "I demand a thorough—"
"Your lives are in danger, sir. If we do not move immediately, it will very probably be not at all. Gundar Tayne is relentless, and is reported enroute from Venus to join this search himself."
"Tayne!" Blair's face blanched, then reddened. "The Taynes, you mean! Gundar and Larsen, with Larsen behind it—"
"Sir? You're being tracked down for—they say, for murdering Larsen. Please follow us sir, Madame...." The look of puzzled bewilderment deepened on the underground leader's face as he motioned his men in screening flanks surrounding the four. One of the men handed him a white bundle from a compact equipment-pack on his back.
"You had better get these on. We would say we have captured your boys—"
They were S-Council uniforms, and the Quadrate and his wife donned them quickly; Blair doing so more in hesitant imitation of Lisa's frantic haste than from the desperation of a situation which he only half-understood.
MurderedLarsen Tayne? Then ... yes of course. The other Blair. But why should the other Blair hate Tayne so? He was of a different Earth, of course.... He would think like those of his own world. He would hate all this world stood for. Hate Tayne for his overbearing, brutish use of authority—criminal cleverness at deception.
Suddenly, he knew the confusion of panic for the first time in his life. Suddenly, his mind was a boiling thing, and all the brilliant solutions that had been forming in it with split-second rapidity were inexplainably invalid, wrong....
And then they were at a half-run, leaving the house, heading for a 'copter painted with the S-Council insigne, counterfeit serial code-numbers beneath it.
In moments, the craft was airborne, and Washington was falling away below them, fading away behind. And now any small thing—an incorrectly acknowledged radio challenge—would undo them, the Quadrate realized, but that was only a part of this terrible gamble they were taking. Gamble, on their very lives, yes—only why? Why?
Slowly, bit by bit, the thing pieced itself together as they flew. A great forest stretched ten miles beneath them, faded, wilted at last into desert as the first shadows of a day dying crept silently upward to engulf them.
In low tones, he and Lisa talked with the heavy-faced leader, and they talked for a long time.
"If it were not for the boys—" Blair murmured finally.
"The boys will be safe with us," Lisa answered. She looked at them, and they were sleeping, hardly looking the part now of young warriors of broadsword and mace. "We will teach them a different way...."
He was silent for long moments. Then: "I cannot understand. I cannot, Lisa. That I have always believed as I have—and he, as we know he did. Yet that we should both have mortal hatred for the same men; he to the point of doing what I did not have courage to do. And now, regardless of what I believe, my own kind are hunting me down."
"They would have, had you had the courage of which you speak—the courage of that conviction. And was it, Douglas, simply a conviction about a single man?"
"I—I don't know." He looked through a port; it was night, and they were speeding silently westward. Then he was looking back to her, and deep into her eyes. He had never felt lost, alone, hunted before. There was something very wrong.
"With us, Douglas ... will you try? To understand—with us?"
"Not because I am hunted."
"No. No. But now is the time for that wanting courage. Another man, too, hated a Tayne, and killed him. Can you help us kill the things that all Taynes stood for? In our way?"
Great mountains were looming before them, and the 'copter was beginning to lower into their darkened maw. And suddenly he felt a new strength in him from depths of his being that were opening to him for the first time.Another man had killed Tayne. And could he—
"But what of the other man?" he suddenly heard himself asking. "What have I done to him? What have I done tohisworld?"
"He must be a man of great courage." Lisa answered slowly. "I think—I think such a man will find a way to undo what you have done. For such a man, and for such others as he, there is always great hope."
"You will help me, Lisa."
"All of us, Douglas."
"Then that is allIshall need," he said softly.
The 'copter vanished into the mountains.
Terry and Mike came running from Doug's den, a welter of books open on the floor behind them which they had not opened.
Dot was coming from her bedroom. A pistol Doug owned had been in her hand, and she put it in its place in the open drawer from which she had taken it.
"Dot! Kids—the living-room, I'm in the living-room! Dot!"
In a moment they were around him, and they were the Dot and the Mike and the Terry whose faces had been so familiar so long ago.
"I must've—he—I must've been reading this final—look, Dot, my God look—"
She saw the Page One streamer.
"Then he was—he was trying, here, he was trying, Doug.... That was why. When I arrived, I had a pistol in my hand...."
The headline read BLAIR BILL GOES TO HOUSE TOMORROW. And in the three-column drop beneath it:Unanimous Passage Seen—Senate Reported Favorable—President Says He'll Sign Immediately—Draft Of 13's Would Begin Nov. 15—Soviet Terms Measure 'Fantastic.'
"Doug—"
"He's begun it all right. How, I don't know, unless—And beneath the centerfold he read CLERGY LAUDS BLAIR BILL AT PARLEY HERE.
"Had them falling for it, had 'em mainlined all the way!" Doug said.
And then he was going swiftly toward the den, almost at a run.
He pulled a battered chair up to the big desk, lifted his telephone from its cradle almost in a single motion.
Quietly, Dot shut the door behind him. It would be a long time, she knew, before it would open again.
The night was quiet, and the air was warm and still.
The man and the woman walked close together, and with slow, unmeasured steps, as though the great, slumbering city was a garden, and they were exploring it for the first time.
They did not speak, for their eyes were wide, engrossed simply in seeing.
A soldier passed them, then a man who might have been a store-clerk, a student, a salesman, a clergyman, a scientist.
A young couple approached from the opposite direction, saying quiet things to each other, perhaps deciding intimate, very important plans for some near future time.
They passed an all-night drug store, its gaudy light washing the sidewalk to the curb, limning the wide racks of newspapers and magazines which told their stories in a dozen languages, on a thousand themes.
The streets were wide and empty, but they were not lonely, for in them were the silent echoes of the struggles and victories, big and small, that had been fought, won and lost in them in a day just dying, just to be born again in a few short hours.
The man and woman walked for a long time.
And Douglas Blair thought of what would not happen tomorrow.
Not tomorrow or, perhaps with great care and the forgiveness of the Almighty, not even the day after that.