He turned abruptly toward the dining room, and was face to face with Matt.
Matt said, “What are you grinning at?”
The crew batted an eyelash; he was discomposed for just that long. Speaking low, he asked, “Are you one of the Sons of Earth?”
Matt shook his head.
Consternation! And why that reaction? Matt held up a hand. “Don’t do anything rash,” he said. He’d wrapped a handcuff chain around that hand to make it a better weapon. The old man settled back on his heels. Three of him would have been no physical match for Matt.
“I’m going to search you,” said Matt. “Raise your hands.” He moved behind the old man and ran his hands over various pockets. He found some bulky objects, but no handphone.
He stood back, considering. He had never searched anyone; there might be tricks a man could use to fool him.
“What do you want with the Sons of Earth?”
“I’ll tell them when I see them.” The baritone lilt was not hard to understand, though Matt could never have imitated it.
“That won’t do.”
“Something very important has happened.” The old man seemed to make a difficult decision. “I want to tell them about the ramrobot package.”
“All right. Go ahead of me. That way.”
They moved toward the dining room with Matt trailing.
Matt was about to yell when the door suddenly opened. Lydia Hancock had her nose and a sonic showing around the edge. It took her a second to realize that the man in the lead was not Matt, and then she fired.
Matt caught the old man as he fell. “Stupid,” he said. “He wanted to talk to you.”
“He can talk to us when he wakes up,” said Lydia.
Harry Kane emerged warily, holding the other stolen sonic ready in his hand. “Any others?”
“Just him. He had a police escort but they left. Better search him; there might be a radio on him somewhere.”
“Mist Demons! It’s Millard Parlette!”
“Oh!” Matt knew the name, but he hadn’t recognized the man. “I think he really wanted to see you. When he realized someone was here, he acted sneaky. He didn’t panic until I told him I wasn’t one of you. He said he wanted to talk about the ramrobot.”
Harry Kane grunted. “He won’t wake up for hours. Lydia, you’re on guard duty. I’m going for a shower; I’ll relieve you when I come down.”
He went upstairs. Lydia and Hood picked up Millard Parlette, moved him into the front entrance; and sat him up against a wall. The old man had gone loose, like, a puppet without strings.
“A shower sounds wonderful,” said Laney.
Matt said, “May I talk to you first? Hood too.”
They got Jay Hood and went into the living room. Hood and Laney flopped in front of the fire, but Matt was, too restless to sit. “Hood, I’ve got to know. What makes you think I’ve been using my psi power to drive away women?”
“You’ll recall it was Laney’s idea first. But the evidence seems good. Do you doubt that Polly left because you contracted her irises?”
Of course he doubted it. But he couldn’t back it up. He looked at Laney, waiting.
“It’s important, isn’t it, Matt?”
“Yah.”
“You remember, just before the raid, when you asked me if everyone was as nervous as you were?”
“Mmm…Yah, I remember. You said, ‘Not that nervous, but still nervous.’”
“What are you two talking about?”
“Jay, do you remember your first—mmm. Do you remember when you stopped being a virgin?”
Hood threw back his head and laughed. “What a question, Laney! Nobody ever forgets the first time! It was—”
“Right. Were you nervous?”
Hood sobered. “At one point, I was. There was so much I didn’t know. I was afraid I’d make a fool of myself.”
Laney nodded. “I’ll bet everyone’s nervous the first time. Including you, Matt. You suddenly realize, This Is It, and you get all tensed up. Then your girl’s eyes go funny.”
Matt said a bad word. This was exactly what he hadn’t wanted to hear. “But what about us? Laney, why didn’t I defend myself against you?”
“I don’t know.”
Hood snapped, “What difference does it make? Whatever you’ve got, you’re not going to use it.”
“I have to know!”
Hood shrugged and went to stand before the fire.
“You were pretty sloshed,” said Laney. “Could that have had anything to do with it?”
“Maybe.”
She couldn’t have known why it was important, but she was trying to help. “Maybe it’s because I’m older than you. Maybe you decided I knew what I was doing.”
“I didn’t decide anything. I was too drunk. And too bitter.”
She turned restlessly, her wrinkled party dress swirling out around her. She stopped. “Matt! I remember! It was pitch dark in there!”
Matt closed his eyes. Why, so it was. He’d stumbled unseeing across the bed; he’d had to turn on a light to see Laney at all. “That’s it. I didn’t even realize what was going on until the door was closed. Oookay,” he sighed, letting all his breath rush out with the word, leaving him an empty man.
Hood said, “That’s great. Are you finished with us?”
“Yah.”
Hood left without looking back. Laney, on the verge of leaving, hesitated. Matt looked half dead, as if every erg of energy had been drained out of him.
She touched his arm. “What’s wrong, Matt?”
“I drove her away! It wasn’t her fault!”
“Polly?” She grinned into his eyes. “Why let it bother you? You got me the same night!”
“Oh, Laney, Laney. She could be in the organ banks! She could be in the—coffin cure, whateverthehell that is.”
“It’s not your fault. If you’d found her in the vivarium—”
“Is it my fault that I was glad? She dropped me like a sick house-cleaner, and an hour later Implementation took her away! And when I found out, I was glad! I had revenge!” His hands were on her upper arms, squeezing, almost hard enough to hurt.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she repeated. “You’d have saved her if you could.”
“Sure.” But he wasn’t hearing her. He let go of her arms. “I’ve got to go after her,” he muttered, saying the words aloud, trying the taste of them. “Yah. I’ve got to go after her.”
He turned and made for the entrance.
The Way Back
IX“Come back here, you idiot!”
Matt stopped halfway to the door. “Huh? Isn’t this what you all want?”
“Come back here! How are you going to get over the wall? You can’t pound on the gate again!”
Matt turned back. He felt feverish, unable to think. “Castro’d be ready for that, wouldn’t he? He may not know what happened last night, but he must know something’s wrong.”
“We tried hard enough to tell him! Come here, sit down…Don’t underestimate that man, Matt. We’ve got to think this through.”
“That wall. How am I going to get over? Oh, damn, damn.”
“You’re tired. Why not wait till Harry comes down? Then we can get things organized.”
“Oh, no. I’m not taking help from the Sons of Earth. This has nothing to do with them.”
“How about me? Will you take my help?”
“Sure, Laney.”
She decided not to question the illogic of this. “All right, let’s start at the beginning. How are you going to reach the Hospital?”
“Yah. Too far to walk. Mmm…Parlette’s car. It’s on the roof.”
“But if Castro gets it, it’ll lead him straight here.”
“I’d have to wait till midnight to get the other car.”
“That may be the only way.” Laney wasn’t tired; she’d had twice as much sleep as she needed in the vivarium. But she felt used, ready for the laundry. A hot bath would help. She put it out of her
mind. “Maybe we can raid a crew house for another car. Then we set the autopilot to take Parlette’s car back here.”
“That’ll take time.”
“We’ll have to take it. We’ll also have to wait till after sunset before we start.”
“Will we need darkness that early?”
“It would help. And suppose the fog cleared while we were over the void?”
“Oh.” Colonist and crew alike, the people of the Plateau loved to watch the sun setting over the void mist. The colors were never the same twice. Land along the void edge always cost three times as much as land anywhere else.
“Suddenly we’d have a thousand crew looking down at us. It might be a mistake to use the void at all. Castro may have thought of that. We’ll be safe if the fog holds. But whatever we do, we’ll have to wait till dark.”
Matt stood up and stretched muscles that felt knotted. “Okay. So we get to the Hospital. How do we get in?—Laney, what’s an electric eye?”
She told him.
“Oh. I didn’t see any light…Ultraviolet, of course, or infrared. I should be able to get over that.”
“We.”
“You’re not invisible, Laney.”
“I am if I stick close to you.”
“Phut.”
“I’ll have to come that far with you anyway. You can’t program an autopilot.”
Matt got up to pace. “Leave that a moment. How do we get over the wall?”
“I don’t,” said Laney, and stopped. “There may be a way,” she said. “Leave it to me.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.”
The cold breeze outside had become a wind, audible through the walls. Laney shivered, though the electric fire was hot enough. The fog beyond the south windows was growing dark.
“We’ll need guns,” she said.
“I don’t want to take one of yours. You’ve only got the two we picked up on the way to the car.”
“Matt, I know more than you do about crew. They all go in for sports of one kind or another.”
“So?”
“Some of them hunt. A long time ago Earth sent us some frozen fertilized deer and caribou ova in a cargo ramrobot. The Hospital hatched them out, grew ’em to adulthood and scattered them around the bottom edge of the glacier, north of here. There’s enough grass there to keep them happy.”
“Then we might find guns here.”
“It’s a good bet. The richer a crew is, the more sports equipment he buys. Even if he never uses it.”
The gun rack was in a room in the upper story, a room lined with paintings of more-or-less wild animals and with heads and hooves of deer and caribou. The rack held half-a-dozen air-powered rifles. They searched the room, and eventually Laney found a drawer containing several boxes of crystal slivers, each sliver two inches long.
“They look like they’d stop a bandersnatch,” said Matt. He’d never seen a bandersnatch, except in filmed maser messages from Jinx, but he knew they were big.
“They’ll stop an elk cold. But the guns only fire one at a time. You have to be accurate.”
“Makes it more sporting?”
“I guess so.”
Implementation mercy-guns fired a steady stream of tiny slivers. One would make the victim woozy; it took half a dozen to drop him in his tracks.
Matt closed and pocketed the box of oversized mercy-slivers. “Getting hit with one of these would be like being stabbed with an ice pick, even without the knockout effect. Will they kill a man?”
“I don’t know,” said Laney. She chose two guns from the rack. “We’ll take these.”
“Jay!”
Hood stopped halfway to the living room, turned, and made for the entrance hall.
Lydia Hancock was bending over Millard Parlette. She had folded his flaccid hands neatly in his lap. “Come here and have a look at this.”
Hood looked down at the stunned crew. Millard Parlette was coming around. His eyes didn’t track and wouldn’t focus, but they were open. Hood saw something else, and he bent for a closer look.
The crew’s hands didn’t match. The skin of one was mottled with age. It couldn’t be as old as Parlette must be, but he hadn’t replaced the skin in a good long time. From fingertips to elbow the arm showed a curious lack of personality, of what Hood decided was artistic continuity. Part of that might have been imagination. Hood knew in advance that Parlette must have used the organ banks continuously during his lifetime. But no imagination was needed to see that the left hand was dry and mottled and faintly callused, with cracked fingernails and receding quick.
Whereas the skin of the right hand was like a baby’s, smooth and pink, untanned, almost translucent. The quick of the fingernails ran all the way to the tips of the fingers. Many high school students could not have said the same.
“The old love-child just got a transplant job,” said Hood.
“No. Look here.” Lydia pointed to the wrist. There was a ragged band of color, something less than an inch wide, running round Parlette’s wrist. It was a dead milky-white such as Hood had never seen in human skin.
“Here too.” A similar ring circled the first joint of Parlette’s thumb. The thumbnail was cracked and dry, with a badly receding quick.
“Right, Lydia. But what is it? An artificial hand?”
“With a gun inside, maybe. Or a radio.”
“Not a radio. They’d be all over us by now.” Hood took Parlette’s right hand and rolled the joints in his fingers. He felt old bone and muscle under the baby skin, and joints that would be arthritic someday soon. “This is a real human hand. But why didn’t he get the whole thing replaced?”
“We’ll have to let him tell us.”
Hood stood up. He felt clean and rested and well fed. If they had to wait for Parlette to talk, they’d picked a nice place to wait.
Lydia asked, “How’s Laney doing with Keller?”
“I don’t know. I’m not going to try to find out.”
“That must be tough, Jay.” Lydia laughed a barking laugh. “You’ve spent half your life trying to find psychic powers on Plateau. Now one finally shows up, and he doesn’t want to play with us.”
“I’ll tell you what really bothers me about Matt Keller. I grew up with him. In school I never noticed him, except one time when he got me mad at him.” Absently he rubbed a point on his chest with two fingertips. “He was right under my nose all the time. But I was right, wasn’t I? Psi powers exist, and we can use them against the Hospital.”
“Can we?”
“Laney’s persuasive. If she can’t talk him around, I sure, can’t.”
“You’re not pretty enough.”
“I’m prettier than you.”
The barking laugh rang again. “Touché!”
“I knew it,” said Laney. “It had to be the basement.”
Two walls were covered with various kinds of small tools. Tables held an electric drill and a bandsaw. There were drawers of nails, screws, nuts…
Matt said, “Parlette the Younger must have done a lot of building.”
“Not necessarily. It may be just a hobby. Come on, Matt, get your wrists down here. I think I see the saw we want.”
Twenty minutes later he was rubbing bare wrists, scratching furiously where he’d been unable to scratch before. His arms felt ten pounds lighter without the handcuffs.
The time of waiting sat heavily on Jesus Pietro.
It was long past quitting time. From the windows of his office he could see the trapped forest as a darker blur in a darkening gray mist. He’d called Nadia and told her not to expect him home that night. The night shift was in charge of the Hospital, reinforced at Jesus Pietro’s orders with scores of extra guards.
Soon he’d have to alert them for what he expected. Right now he was trying to decide what to say.
He wasn’t about to impress them with the startling news that all of five prisoners were loose somewhere on Alpha Plateau. They would already have heard about the escap
e. They’d leave the mop-up job to the hunting squads.
Jesus Pietro activated the intercom. “Miss Lauessen, please connect me with all of the Hospital intercoms.”
“Will do.” She didn’t always call him Sir. Miss Lauessen had more crew blood than Jesus Pietro—she was nearly pure—and she had powerful protectors. Fortunately she was a pleasant person and a good worker. If she ever became a disciplinary problem…
“You’re on, sir.”
“This is the Head,” said Jesus Pietro. “You all know of the man captured last night infiltrating the Hospital. He and several others escaped this morning. I have information that he was scouting the Hospital defenses in preparation for an attack to take place tonight.
“Sometime between now and dawn the Sons of Earth will almost certainly attack the Hospital. You have all been issued maps of the Hospital showing the locations of automatic protective-devices installed today. Memorize them, and don’t stumble into any of the traps. I have issued orders for maximum dosage of anesthetic in these traps, and they can kill. Repeat, they can kill.
“I think it unlikely that the rebels will make any kind of frontal attack.” Unlikely, indeed! Jesus Pietro smiled at the understatement. “You should be alert for attempts to infiltrate the Hospital possibly by using our own uniforms. Keep your identification handy. If you see someone you do not recognize, ask for his ident. Compare him with the photo. The rebels have not had time to forge idents.
“One last word. Don’t be reluctant to shoot each other.”
He signed off, waited for Miss Lauessen to clear the lines, then had her contact the Power Sections. “Cut off all power to the colonist regions of the Plateau until dawn,” he told them.
The men of Power took pride in their work, and their work was to keep the power running. There were loud protests. “Do it,” said Jesus Pietro, and cut them off.
Once again he thought longingly of issuing death darts to his men. But then they would be afraid to shoot each other. Worse, they’d fear their own weapons. Never since the Covenant of Planetfall had Implementation used deadly weapons. In any case the poison slivers had been stored so long that they’d probably lost their effectiveness.