Verrick took hold of Pellig. “Get out of here. Go on upstairs. Christ, it’s late.” He started for the wide staircase, hunched over, his shaggy head turned to one side. “Well, in spite of everything, we’ve accomplished a lot today. I’m going to bed.”
Balancing himself carefully, Benteley said clearly after him, “Look here, Verrick. I have an idea. Why don’t you murder Cartwright yourself? Eliminate the middle-man. It’s more scientific.”
Verrick snorted with unexpected laughter and kept on going, without slowing or looking back. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said over his shoulder. “Go home and get some sleep.”
“I’m not going home,” Benteley said stubbornly. “I came here to learn what the strategy is, and I’m staying until I learn it.”
At the first step Verrick halted and turned. There was a queer look on his massive hard-ridged features. “What’s that?”
“You heard me,” Benteley said. He closed his eyes and stood with his feet apart, balancing himself as the room tilted and shifted. When he looked again, Verrick had gone up the stairs and Eleanor Stevens was pulling frantically at his arm.
“You damn fool!” she shrilled. “What’s the matter?”
“He’s a creep,” Moore said unsteadily. He moved Pellig toward the stairs. “Better get him out of here, Eleanor. He’ll start chewing up the carpet pretty soon.”
Benteley was baffled. He opened his mouth numbly but no sound came. “He’s gone,” he managed to say finally. “They’re all gone. Verrick and Moore and that thing of wax.”
Eleanor led him out into a side room and closed the door after them. The room was small and in half-shadow, its edges merged in hazy darkness. She shakily lit a cigarette and stood puffing furiously, smoke streaming from her dilated nostrils. “Benteley, you’re a lunatic.”
“I’m drunk. This Callistan beetle-juice. Is it true a thousand slaves are sweating and dying in a methane atmosphere so Verrick can have his whiskey?”
“Sit down.” She pushed him down in a chair and paced in a jerky little circle directly in front of him, taut as a marionette on a wire. “Everything’s going to pieces. Moore is so damn proud of Pellig he can’t stop showing him off. Verrick can’t adjust to being quacked; he thinks he still has his teeps to hold him together. Oh, God.” She spun on her heel and buried her face bitterly in her hands.
Benteley gazed up at her without comprehension until she had hold of herself again and was dabbing miserably at her swollen eyes. “Can I do something?” he asked hopefully.
Eleanor found a decanter of cold water on a low table in the shadows. She emptied a shallow glazed-china dish of petite hard candies over one of the chairs and filled the dish with water. Very rapidly she doused her face, hands and arms, then yanked down an embroidered cloth from the window case and dried herself.
“Come on, Benteley,” she muttered. “Let’s get out of here.” She started blindly from the room, and Benteley struggled to his feet and after her. Her small bare-breasted shape glided like a phantom between the gloomy objects that made up Verrick’s possessions, huge ponderous statues and glass cases, up short dark-carpeted stairs and around corners where immobile robot servants stood waiting silently for instructions.
They came out on a deserted floor, draped in shadows and dust-thick darkness. Eleanor waited for him to catch up with her. “I’m going to bed,” she said bluntly. “You can come if you want, or you can go home.”
“My home’s gone. I have no home.” He followed after her, down a corridor past a series of half-closed doors. Lights showed here and there. He heard voices. He thought he recognized some of them. Men’s voices mixed with sleepy, half-swallowed women’s murmur. Abruptly Eleanor vanished and he was alone.
He felt his way through a haze of remote movement and wavering shapes. Once he crashed violently against something. A hail of shattered objects cascaded down around him. Stunned, he blundered off away again and stood foolishly.
“What are you doing here?” a hard voice demanded. It was Herb Moore, someplace close by. His face flickered and rose, illuminated like a spectre’s, without sound or support. “You don’t belong here!” The voice mushroomed until it and the flushed, puffy face filled his vision. “Get the hell out of here! Go where you belong, you third-rate derelict. Class 8–8? Don’t make me laugh. Who said you—”
Benteley smashed Moore. The face crumpled and spurted liquid and fragments, utterly destroyed. Something slammed into him and he was bowled over. Choked and imprisoned by a rolling, slobbering mass, he fought his way upward, struggling to catch hold of something solid.
“Pipe down,” Eleanor whispered urgently. “Both of you, for God’s sake! Be quiet.”
Benteley became inert. Beside him Moore puffed and panted and wiped at his bleeding face. “I’ll kill you, you creep bastard.” Sobbing with pain and rage he bellowed, “You’ll be sorry you hit me!”
The next thing he knew he was sitting on something low, bending down and fumbling for his shoes. His coat was lying on the floor in front of him. Then his shoes lay lifeless, separated from each other by an expanse of luxurious carpet. There was no sound; the room was utterly silent and cold. A dim light flickered off in a distant corner.
“Lock the door,” Eleanor’s voice came from nearby. “I think Moore’s gone off his rocker or something. He’s out there in the hall shambling around like a berserker.”
Benteley found the door and locked its old-fashioned manual bolt. Eleanor was standing in the center of the room, one leg pulled up, foot thrust behind her, carefully unlacing the thongs of her sandals. As Benteley watched in dazed silence, awed and astonished, she kicked off her sandals, unzipped her slacks, and stepped from them. For a moment bare ankles gleamed in the lamplight. Pale, shimmering calves; the sight danced in front of him until, overcome, he closed his eyes tight. The slim lines, small-boned, delicate perfectly smooth legs, all the way up to her knees, at which point her undergarment began …
Then he was stumbling his way down, and she was reaching up for him. Moist arms, quivering breasts and dark red nipples full and solid under him. She gasped and shuddered and locked her arms around him. The roaring in his head boiled up and over; he closed his eyes and peacefully allowed himself to sink down into the torrent.
Much later he awoke. The room was deathly cold. Nothing stirred. There was no sound, no life. He struggled stiffly up, bewildered, his mind broken in vague fragments. Through the open window gray early-morning light filtered, and a cold ominous wind whipped icily around him. He backed away, halted, tried to collect himself.
Figures lay sprawled out, mixed with disordered clothing and covers, in heaps here and there. He stumbled between outstretched limbs, half-covered arms, stark-white legs that shocked and horrified him. He distinguished Eleanor, lying against the wall, on her side, one arm thrust out, thin fingers curled, legs drawn up under her, breathing restlessly between half-parted lips. He wandered on—and stopped dead.
The gray light filtered over another face and figure, his old friend Al Davis, peaceful and content in the arms of his soundly sleeping wife. The two of them were pressed tight together, both oblivious to everything else.
A little further on were more persons, some of them snoring dully, one stirring into fitful wakefulness. Another groaned and groped feebly for some covering. His foot crushed a glass; splinters and a pool of dark liquid leaked out. Another face ahead was familiar. Who was it? A man, dark-haired, good features …
It was his own face!
He stumbled against a door and found himself in a yellow-lit hall. Terror seized him and he began running blindly. Silently, his bare feet carried him down vast carpeted corridors, endless and deserted, past stone-gray windows, up noiseless flights of steps that never seemed to end. He blundered wildly around a corner and found himself caught in an alcove, a full-length mirror rising up ahead of him, blocking his way.
A wavering figure hovered within the mirror. An empty, lifeless insect-thing caught momentar
ily, suspended in the yellowed, watery depths. He gazed mutely at it, at the waxen hair, the vapid mouth and lips, the colorless eyes. Arms limp and boneless at its sides; a spineless, bleached thing that blinked vacantly back at him, without sound or motion.
He screamed—and the image winked out. He plunged on along the gray-lit corridors, feet barely skimming the dust-thick carpets. He felt nothing under him. He was rising, carried upward by his great terror, a screaming, streaking thing that hurtled toward the high-domed roof above.
Arms out, he shot soundlessly, through walls and panels, in and out of empty rooms, down deserted passages, a blinded, terrorized thing that flashed and wheeled desperately, beat against lead-sealed windows in desperate, futile efforts to escape.
With a violent crash he struck stunningly against a brick fireplace, Broken, cracked, he fluttered helplessly down to the soft dust-heavy carpet. For a moment he lay bewildered, and then he was stumbling on, hurrying frantically, mindlessly, hurrying anywhere, hands in front of his face, eyes closed, mouth open.
There were sounds ahead. A glowing yellow light filtered through a half-opened doorway. In a room a handful of men were sitting around a table spilled over with tapes and reports. An atronic bulb burned in the center, a warm, unwavering miniature sun that pulled him hypnotically. Surrounded with coffee cups were writers, the men murmuring and poring over their work. There was one huge heavy-set man with massive, sloping shoulders.
“Verrick!” he shouted at the man. His voice came out thin and tiny, a feeble, fluttering insect-voice. “Verrick, help me!”
Reese Verrick glanced up angrily. “What do you want? I’m busy. This has to be done before we can begin moving.”
“Verrick!” he screamed, pulsing with terror and mindless panic. “Who am I?”
“You’re Keith Pellig,” Verrick answered irritably, wiping his forehead with one immense paw and pushing his tapes away. “You’re the assassin picked by the Convention. You have to be ready to go to work in less than two hours. You have a job to do.”
SEVEN
Eleanor Stevens appeared from the gray-shadowed hall. “Verrick, this isn’t Keith Pellig. Get Moore down here and make him talk. He’s getting back at Benteley; they had a fight.”
Verrick’s eyes widened. “This is Benteley? That goddamn Moore! He has no sense; this’ll foul up things.”
Benteley was beginning to get back some sanity. “Can this be fixed?” he muttered.
“He was out cold,” Eleanor said in a thin clipped voice. She had pulled on her slacks and sandals and thrown a greatcoat over her shoulders. Her face was colorless; her deep red hair was stringy and vapid. “He can’t go through with it in a conscious condition. Get one of the lab doctors in here to black him. And don’t dry to utilize this. Put him back before you say anything to him. He can’t take it now, you understand?”
Moore appeared, shaken and afraid. “There’s no harm done. I jumped the gun a little, that’s all.” He caught hold of Benteley’s arm. “Come along. We’ll get this straightened around right away.”
Benteley pulled loose. He retreated from Moore and examined his alien hands and face. “Verrick,” his voice said, thin and empty. “Help me.”
“We’ll fix it up,” Verrick said gruffly. “It’ll be all right. Here’s the doctor now.”
Both Verrick and the doctor had hold of him. Herb Moore fluttered a few paces off, afraid to come near Verrick. At the desk Eleanor wearily lit a cigarette and stood smoking, as the doctor inserted the needle in Benteley’s arm and squashed the bulb. As darkness dissolved him, he heard Verrick’s heavy voice dim and recede.
“You should have killed him or let him alone; not this kind of stuff. You think he’s going to forget this?”
Moore answered something, but Benteley didn’t hear. The darkness had become complete, and he was in it.
A long way off Eleanor Stevens was saying, “You know, Reese doesn’t really understand what Pellig is. Have you noticed that?”
“He doesn’t understand any kind of theory.” Moore’s voice, sullen and resentful.
“He doesn’t have to understand theory. Why should he, when he can hire infinite numbers of bright young men to understand it for him?”
“I suppose you mean me.”
“Why are you with Reese? You don’t like him. You don’t get along with him.”
“Verrick has money to invest in my kind of work. If he didn’t back it, I’d be out of luck.”
“When it’s all over, Reese gets the output.”
“That’s not important. Look, I took MacMillan’s papers, all that basic stuff he did on robots. What ever came of that? Just these witless hulks, glorified vacuum cleaners, stoves, dumbwaiters. MacMillan had the wrong idea. All he wanted was something big and strong to lift things, so the unks could lie down and sleep. So there wouldn’t be any more unk servants and laborers. MacMillan was pro-unk. He probably bought his classification on the black market.”
There was the sound of movement: People stirring, getting up and walking, the clink of a glass.
“Scotch and water,” Eleanor said.
There was the sound of sitting down. A man sighed gratefully. “I’m tired. What a night. I’m going to turn in early. A whole day gone to waste.”
“It was your fault.”
“He’ll keep. He’ll be there for good old Keith Pellig.”
“You’re not going to go over the implementation, not in your condition.”
Moore’s voice was full of outrage. “He’s mine, isn’t he?”
“He belongs to the world,” Eleanor said icily. “You’re so wrapped up in your verbal chess-games, you can’t see the danger you’re putting us in. Every hour that crackpot has gives him a better chance of survival. If you hadn’t gone berserk and turned everything on its head to pay off a personal grudge, Cartwright might already be dead.”
It was evening.
Benteley stirred. He sat up a little, surprised to find himself strong and clear-headed. The room was in semi-darkness. A single light gleamed, a tiny glowing dot that he identified as Eleanor’s cigarette. Moore sat beside her, legs crossed, a whiskey glass in his hand, face moody and remote. Eleanor stood up quickly and turned on a table lamp. “Ted?”
“What time is it?” Benteley demanded.
“Eight-thirty.” She came over to the bed, hands in her pockets. “How are you feeling?”
He swung his legs shakily onto the floor. They had wrapped him in a standard nightrobe; his clothes were nowhere in sight. “I’m hungry,” he said. Suddenly he clenched his fists and struck wildly at his face.
“It’s you,” Eleanor said, matter-of-fact.
Benteley’s legs wobbled under him as he stood unsteadily. “I’m glad of that. It really happened?”
“It happened.” She reached around to find her cigarette.
“It’ll happen again, too. But next time you’ll be prepared. You, and twenty-three other bright young men.”
“Where are my clothes?”
“Why?”
“I’m getting out of here.”
Moore got up quickly. “You can’t walk out; face facts. You discovered what Pellig is—you think Verrick would turn you loose?”
“You’re violating the Challenge Convention rules.” Benteley found his clothes in a side closet and spread them out on the bed. “You can only send one assassin at a time. This thing of yours is rigged so it looks like one, but—”
“Not so fast,” Moore said. “You haven’t got it quite doped out.”
Benteley unfastened his nightrobe and tossed it away. “This Pellig is nothing but a synthetic.”
“Right.”
“Pellig is a vehicle. You’re going to slam a dozen high-grade minds into it and head it for Batavia. Cartwright will be dead, you’ll incinerate the Pellig-thing, and nobody’ll know. You’ll pay off your minds and send them back to their workbenches. Like me.”
Moore was amused. “I wish we could do that. As a matter of fact, we ga
ve it a try. We jammed three personalities into Pellig at once. The results were chaos. Each took off in a different direction.”
“Does Pellig have any personality?” Benteley asked, as he dressed. “What happens when all the minds are out?”
“Pellig becomes what we call vegetable. He doesn’t die, but he devolves to a primitive level of existence. The body processes continue; it’s a kind of twilight sleep.”
“What kept him going last night at the party?”
“A bureaucrat from my lab. A negative type like what you saw; the personality comes across about the same. Pellig is a good medium: not too much distortion or refraction.”
Benteley veered away from the memory as he said, “When I was in it, I thought Pellig was there with me.”
“I felt the same way,” Eleanor agreed calmly. “The first time I tried it I felt as if there was a snake in my slacks. It’s an illusion. When did you first feel it?”
“When I looked in the mirror.”
“Try not looking in the mirror. How do you think I felt? At least you’re a male. It was a little too tough on me; I don’t think Moore should try women operators. Too high a shock value.”
“You don’t jam them in without warning, do you?”
“We’ve built up a trained crew,” Moore said. “Over the last few months we’ve tried out dozens of people. Most of them crack. A couple of hours and they get a weird sort of claustrophobia. They want to get away from it, like Eleanor says, as if it’s something slimy and dirty close to them.” He shrugged. “I don’t feel that way. I think he’s beautiful.”
“How many have you got?” Benteley asked.
“We’ve got a couple dozen who can stand it. Your friend Davis is one. He has the right personality: placid, calm, easygoing.”
Benteley tightened. “So this is his new classification. That he beat the Quiz at.”
“Everybody goes up a notch for this. Bought off the black market, of course. You’re in on it, according to Verrick. It’s not as risky as it sounds. If something goes creeper, if they start popping at Pellig, whoever’s in there at the moment will be withdrawn.”