here….”
I pulled jeans, sweater, and thin windbreaker from
under my overcoat, all of which I had secreted there
before leaving her apartment. “Do me the honor of a
striptease?” I asked.
She grinned, stripped without asking me to turn my
back (which I would have refused to do anyway), and
dressed in the clothes I had brought.
I felt every inch the hero, all the while my mind was
yelling “Fool” at top volume.
As she pushed past me to leave the cell, she stood on
her toes a moment and kissed me, then turned quickly
away again. Before she could take two steps, I grabbed
her and turned her around. What I thought I had seen was
in her eyes: tears.
“Hey,” I said, feeling the male stupidity that cannot
cope with tears. “Hey.” Really stupid.
“Let’s go,” she said.
“Something wrong?”
“I’ve been wondering if you were alive, wondering if
even you were whether you would care enough to come
for me.”
“But of course—”
“Shush,” she said, stopping the tears. “We haven’t time
for this, have we?”
We closed the cell door and locked it, went up and past
the other cubbyholes. Each was separated from the other
by cement walls, but the fronts were all bars through
which we could see the occupants. None of them, howev-
er, seemed to care much about us.
We went up in the first elevator, passed the first and
second unconscious guards. When the second elevator
opened on the main ground floor corridor, we walked
briskly into the lobby, pushed open the glass doors and
breathed in the cold night air. No one in the lobby or at
any of the work desks paid the least bit attention to us. I
took Melinda’s arm, and we walked down the steps—
—just in time to confront General Alexander Morsfagen
and four young and dedicated men with guns in their
hands!
“Good evening,” he said, bowing to us.
The four men with guns did not bow.
“I do believe you’re surprised, Mr. Kelly. I didn’t ex-
pect to see your cool broken like that.” But whether or
not he expected it, he certainly did enjoy it. His face was
split with a grin you seldom see outside of mental wards.
“Who is he?” Melinda asked.
“Morsfagen.”
“The title too, please,” he said. But he was not just
being humorous. His voice was stiff and deadly beneath
the surface delight.
“General Morsfagen,” I told her.
“And you’re under arrest, of course,” he said.
The four guards advanced on us, efficient but somehow
less wary than they had been at first. It would have been
possible, perhaps, to use my two pistols on the lot of
them. They did not seem to expect that I might be armed,
and with both my hands in my pockets and wrapped
around the sweat-slicked butts of the weapons, they might
have bought it but good before they realized what was
happening.
Might have.
But nothing is certain.
Besides, the back of my mind played with the memory
of those flaming corpses on the beach, with the picture of
the howler drivers screaming as they fell to sudden death.
I didn’t want more blood on my hands.
I contemplated using my esp on them. But the problem
was that I could only invade one mind at a time. I knew I
could not work fast enough to incapacitate all of them
before one of those four boys panicked and put a few
rounds of hard steel into Melinda and me.
What had happened to the god?
What was this? Mere men overpowering me and out-
thinking me, me a god?
“This way, please,” Morsfagen said.
We followed him.
VII
Morsfagen had directed the placement of armed sol-
diers in the storm drains under and within four blocks of
the Tombs. He had positioned a man behind every one of
the slit windows of the administration building where I
might possibly be able to force entrance. Even in the maze
of aluminum air-conditioning ducts which wound through
the great structure, a hundred men waited in silence with
their narcotics pistols drawn and their nerves honed to
crisp attention. With all of this waiting for me, I had