“That does it!” groaned Sorrel. “The whole building will be awake now!” And they all held their breaths expecting to hear, at any second, a rising clamor of aroused voices from other parts of the structure.
But nothing happened. ‘They looked at each other in amazement.
“Some kind of soundproofing?” said Mal.
“Must be,” answered Sorrel. “We’re down one level. It may be all the floors are soundproofed off from each other.”
Peep got to his feet, looking repentant.
“How can you ever forgive me?” he said.
“Don’t give it another thought, Peep,” Mal answered. “If it wasn’t for you we’d still be locked up inside. Remember?”
“There is nothing,” said Peep earnestly, “nothing so annoying as a stubborn inanimate object.”
“Of course,” said Margie.
Peep looked grateful.
“However,” he said, “that is no excuse. If I have brought disaster on you by my intemperance, the responsibility will be mine. I will lead the way, therefore; and be the first to encounter any trouble along the way.”
He turned and marched off down the corridor. The others hurried after him but found remonstrance to be useless. Peep had made up his mind and, since he could not bodily be shoved to the rear, the rest were forced to put up with his decision.
The passage down which they traveled was paneled in imitation wood and floored by a heavy green carpet. The only sound, except that made by their own passage, was the gentle susurrus of air from the overhead ventilators spaced along the corridor at distances of about every two meters. The few doors along the length of the passage were closed and the five friends felt no desire to disturb whoever slept—if anyone did—behind them.
They made their right and then their left turn according to schedule and without incident and arrived at the foot of the stairs. And here their good luck ran out. As they reached the foot of the stairs there was no one in sight. But hardly had Peep, in the lead, put one small black foot on the first step, before a door opened unexpectedly in the corridor above; and a man in Company Police uniform came out of it and started to descend.
He actually came down half a dozen steps before it registered on his unsuspecting mind that the people approaching were not ordinary inhabitants of the Headquarters building. Then he checked, stared, and—the fact of their presence finally registering—turned with a wild yell of alarm to run back up the stairs.
“Stop him!” shouted Mal; and Dirk, snatching up an ornamental vase from a small table at the foot of the stairs, sent it flying through the air. It missed the guard but, smashing on the wall before him, distracted him momentarily so that he stumbled, and in that moment gained, Mal had bolted past Peep and was upon him. Mal caught the guard turning and lashed out with his fist. There was ajar which traveled the full length of his arm; and— somewhat to Mal’s surprise—the guard dropped.
Sorrel snatched the hand gun from the fallen man’s holster and fired, all in one swift motion. Twelve feet down the upper hall, a door which was opening slammed shut again as the wall beside it went white with frost and shattered into brittle pieces under the forces of its own internal tensions.
“In here,” cried Mal, slamming open a door and all but throwing Margie through it.
“Look for another gun!” roared Dirk and dived through after her. Sorrel fired again and the Company man Mal had knocked down opened his eyes and tried to sit up. Peep bent over him solicitously.
“I sincerely hope you have sustained no permanent injury,” he murmured.
The policeman turned white, closed his eyes and fell back again. From the end of the corridor another gun returned Sorrel’s fire. Mal, Sorrel, and Peep scurried through the open door and locked it behind them.
They found themselves in a sort of storeroom.
Crates of various sizes stood about. Mal tried to move one and grunted, unsuccessful.
“Help me block the door!” he shouted. And the others leaped to give him a hand at shoving the heavy crates against it. The metal of which it was composed was already beginning to turn white with frost and crack under the charges of the warp guns concentrating upon it. It was not until several feet of barrier walled them off from the corridor that they relaxed.
“Take it easy,” panted Sorrel. “They can’t get close to that wall themselves until it warms up some.” He leaned against a crate and sweated.
“Not a blasted other gun in the place,” said Dirk, in ferocious disappointment, casting his eyes about the dusty room. He finally gave up and returned to the group. “Well, what do we do now?”
“Exit,” replied Sorrel briefly.
“Yes,” said Mal. “But how?” And indeed it was a good question. The room in which they had just barricaded themselves was without any other exit or window.
“Through the wall,” said Sorrel. “How about it, Peep?”
“Of course. Allow me,” replied the little Atakit. He backed off and charged one of the metal side walls. It bulged fantastically with the sound of something like an enormous drum being struck and split down the middle. Peep’s paws grasped the edges of the split and ripped it wide.
“Come on,” said Mal. And they all tumbled through.
This new room was fitted up like an office. It contained a desk, other furniture, and—blissful miracle—a large dissolving window.
They leaped for it. Mal set the controls to negative and they dived through to land some half a meter below on the smooth concrete of the courtyard which the Company Headquarter’s building surrounded. Just before them was the transport that had brought them from the funnel spot.
“Get inside!” shouted Sorrel, indicating it. “And hur—”
He broke off, choking suddenly, as there was a sudden explosion on the concrete before him, and a thick yellow gas began to float upward into his face. He wavered a moment, then dropped.
“Hold your breath and run,” called Mal, setting an example. But even as he started for the transport on legs suddenly gone rubbery, he realized the advice had come too late. Dirk was down and Margie was falling. And as he himself reeled toward the entry port of the vessel, he saw Peep —Peep the mighty, Peep the indestructible— stagger and fall.
For a moment longer Mal continued to try to fight his way alone. Then the concrete floor of the courtyard seemed to swell up about him and he drifted off into darkness.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
MAL’S FIRST SENSATION was that he was lying on something cold. Then he became aware of a ringing, aching head and a sensation of emptiness about him. He opened his eyes and looked up into the high, distant yellow glimmer of an overhead light in a large storage building.
“He’s finally waking,” said Margie’s voice beside him.
He turned his head slightly and saw her kneeling beside him. Behind her Sorrel stood, and behind him a host of rough, unfamiliar faces.
“What—” he began, with a thick tongue.
“Don’t try to talk yet,” said Margie.
“I’m all right,” he said. “Where’s Peep?”
“We don’t know,” said Margie. She took a cloth from his forehead moistened with some cold, soothing liquid. “Nobody’s seen him since they gassed us. Maybe he got away.”
“No,” answered Mal, “I saw him go down.” He looked beyond at the unfamiliar faces. “What—who—?”
“The boys,” said Sorrel. And, looking at them, Mal was suddenly able to pick out the fat, expressionless features of Bobby and of the small man, Jim, who had kidnaped the three of them in the first place for the Underground. “Thayer got them too. Martial law, just like we figured. And there must have been a leak somewhere, because they didn’t miss one of us.” He cursed. “And now they’ve got us locked up in one of the warehouses where a regiment of Atakits couldn’t break us out.”
“I see,” said Mal slowly. He sat up. Dirk came pushing through the crowd.
“Look what I found,” he said, handing Mal a couple of small
white tablets. “Enerine.” Gratefully, Mal accepted and swallowed them. Peace came suddenly to his aching head.
“So that’s where we are,” he said. “In one of the warehouses.” He looked around at the others. “How is it I took so long to wake up?”
“That was scopromane,” said Sorrel. “The more you exert yourself when you breathe it, the harder it hits you. The last one to go out is usually the last one to wake. You say Peep was knocked out, too?”
“He went down,” said Mal.
“Dammit!” said Sorrel bitterly. “I was hoping …”
Mal got to his feet, assuring Margie that he felt all right now that the enerine was in him. He looked around at the vaulted dimness and vastness of the warehouse.
“You say there’s no way to break out of this?” he said.
“What do you think?” asked Sorrel. “Solid concrete all around.”
“How about the entrance?”
“A two-foot-thick fire door with a cold storage seal around it at the edges,” answered Sorrel. “Anything else you want to know, hopper?”
“Frank!” flashed Margie.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” snapped Sorrel. “Don’t let me hurt your feelings, for cripes’ sake.” And he stalked off to sit down on a crate and brood by himself.
Mal looked uncomfortably at the faces surrounding him. Hopelessly, they looked back at him.
A few hours later, the communicator between warehouse and warehouse office cleared its throat and requested that Malcolm Fletcher come alone to the fire door. Mal rose from where he had been sitting on a crate of tools, still furiously cudgeling his brain for an answer to their present problem, and went.
The heavy, thick door was closed. When he rapped upon it, however, it slid aside to show an opening, just barely wide enough to admit the passage of his body sideways and he slipped through.
It rolled shut again behind him.
Mal found himself in a long, windowed section that was really more an addition to the warehouse structure than part of its integral design. It was, in fact, a sort of plastic addition built around the fire-door entrance; and its inner wall was the bare, blank cement of the warehouse itself. There were two young men in the uniform of Company Police waiting for him among the empty desks and stolid filing cabinets—fresh-faced beefy youngsters, the type so often seen in the Company Police during the last few years, perhaps somewhat short on brains and long on energy—but decent enough. They told Mal he would have to wait and offered to get him something for the after effects of the gassing he had taken. Mal refused but decided to say nothing of the enerine Dirk had found for him—on general principles.
After about twenty minutes, the outer door of the warehouse office slipped aside and Ron Thayer entered.
“Hello, Fletch,” he said pleasantly. Mal looked at him without answering; and the dark, slim man turned to the guards.
“Outside,” he said.
They went. Ron perched on a desk in front of Mal, one foot on the floor, the other in its slim, black police boot swinging casually in the air.
“Well, Fletch,” he said. “I thought I’d have a talk with you.”
“I’m listening,” said Mal. “Get to the point.”
“It’s nothing important,” said Ron. “I just thought I’d ask you what you knew about your friend’s physical makeup.”
“Peep?” Mal felt a sudden, small spasm of anxiety clutch at his chest with sharp fingernails.
“If that’s what you call him,” answered Ron.
“He’s down on the Neo-Taylorite rolls with a name as long as he’s tall.”
“What about him?” demanded Mal.
“He’s a little slow coming out of the gas,” said Ron. “We thought you might know something about him that would help us bring him around quicker.”
“You mean he’s still under?”
“What do you think I mean?”
“What’s the matter with him?” snapped Mal sharply.
“We thought you might be able to tell us.”
“Why, you damn fools!” said Mal savagely. “He hasn’t got the insides of a human being. You may have poisoned him.”
“All right, Fletcher,” he said. “Just watch yourself now. If you want a chance to help that overgrown squirrel, keep your voice down and talk politely.”
“Oh?” said Mal. His eyes were boring into the other man. “You wouldn’t be a bit worried yourself, would you? If something’s happened to Peep, you’re the man responsible; and I wonder what the Federation will say about one of their full-class citizens being murdered by a human.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Ron answered. “Worry about yourself. And the Alien.”
He straightened suddenly and took a step toward Mal.
“I’ll be honest with you, Fletcher,” he said, looking Mal squarely in the face. “I don’t give a damn for you or this Peep; and I don’t give a damn for the Underground. But I give considerable for myself.”
He turned and walked across to the outer door of the warehouse office, opened it and shouted outside.
“Bring it in!”
There was a moment’s wait; and then he stood back from the entrance and the same two young Company policemen who had earlier been keeping an eye on Mal came through the entrance, guiding a heavy plastic sling or hammock suspended from two laboring individual power packs. In the sling lay Peep.
“All right, leave it there,” Ron told the two policemen. “And wait outside.”
They went. Ron put out a hand to arrest the sling’s drift toward the far wall and came back to Mal.
“All right,” he said, shoving his face close. “There he is, And now it’s up to you.”
“Up to me?” echoed Mal.
“You heard me.” Ron’s face was within a few inches of Mal’s; and Mal found himself watching with fascination the visible white around the dark pupils of the other man’s eyes and the light sheen of perspiration on the deeply tanned skin. “I worked a long time for what I’ve got, Fletch. Every dirty job old Vanderloon cooked up, he handed to me. I helped build the Neo-Taylorites into a tool for him. And I took the Company Police and made them over from a bunch of fancy-dress personal bodyguards into an army. I’ve got myself to the point finally where I’m irreplaceable. I’m their link with the machinery that’s due to take over things. I can write my own ticket.” He dropped his voice abruptly. “And I can use you, too, Fletcher. On my own side. I can save your life and see you get anything you want. I’m not like the old group that’d just as soon cut all progress off for good and all. Your kind of work is going to be needed, still. So I tell you—get that thing in the sling back on its feet and in a good humor and you can write your own ticket.”
“You’re psychotic,” Mal said disgustedly. “You crazy fool. Peep there is my friend. Can you understand that? Anything I can do for him, I’ll do for him—but for his own sake, not for yours.”
“I don’t care why you do it, just do it,” replied Ron. “But I’ll tell you this. I’m not going to be the fall guy for trouble with the Federation. I’ll give you and him twenty-four hours. If you haven’t got him on his feet by that time, not one of you is going to be alive to testify about what happened to any Alien. I don’t care whether your ideas for a drive die with you or not. The Company can do without it, if I have to do without you.”
He turned and walked toward the outer entrance of the office.
“It’s all yours,” he said, turning in. “Do anything you want with him. But just don’t try to leave the building. I’ve got men outside with orders to cut you down if you try it.”
And then he was gone.
For a moment Mal stood staring after him. Then, almost absentmindedly, he turned and walked over to the sling. He looked down at Peep.
Peep lay still. Mal walked over to the wall, and pressed the control button that set the big fire door of the warehouse proper to rolling back into the wall. Ponderously but noiselessly, it slid away from before him. He returned to th
e sling and pulled on it. Heavily it resisted with the inertia of Peep’s weight. Then, slowly and clumsily, it yielded and began to swim after him through the air.
He went into the warehouse, towing it behind him.
“I don’t know what we can do,” said Margie unhappily.
They had rigged up a series of power lights and under the white illumination of them, Peep lay still in his sling. His eyes were closed as he lay on his back, with no motion of his body to show whether he breathed or his heart beat. He feet were curled, and his small hands closed into tight black fists with the miniature thumbs on the outside.
“Sure,” said Sorrel bitterly, looking at all of them across the silent Atakit. “You don’t suppose Thayer brought him to us without trying every doctor and hospital on the plateau first?”
“The trouble is,” said Mal slowly, “that we don’t know a thing about Peep. There’s even no way of telling what it was in the gas that knocked him out. It may not be what bothered us at all.”
“What he needs,” said Dirk, “is medical help from his own people.”
“And the nearest of those,” said Mal, “is on Arcturus.”
He looked down at Peep. Under the still black nose, the sharp whiskers stood out, stiff and unconquerable.
“All right,” said Mal. “Then we’ll take him to Arcturus.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EVEN AFTER MAL had explained what he meant, the rest of them still looked at him with unbelieving eyes.
“You’re crazy!” said Sorrel bluntly.
“No,” Mal shook his head. “I just know what this drive of mine can do. There’s no reason under the sun why we can’t do it.”
“This isn’t under the sun,” said one of the Underground men, a lean, faded individual with tired eyes. “This is out between the stars. This is Arcturus.”
“It’s all the same,” said Mal. “Arcturus or halfway across the universe.”
“You’re nuts, I say! You’re nuts!” insisted Sorrel.