As she approached the far wall, she saw Dr. Lowry come out of the passage from the office, smiling absently, blinking at the floor through his glasses. He turned without looking up and walked behind her towards the closed narrow door before Colonel Weldon’s nonspace conduit entry.
So it wasn’t to be death, Arlene thought, but personal slavery. The rogue still had use for them. They were to follow where Weldon had gone. . . .
Her hand tugged at the door. It wouldn’t open.
She wrenched at it violently, savagely, formless panic pounding through her. After a moment, Dr. Lowry began to mutter uneasily, then reached out to help her.
The room seemed suddenly to explode; and for an instant Arlene Rolf felt her mind disintegrating in raging torrents of white light.
* * *
She had been looking drowsily for some moments at the lanky, red-headed man who stood, faced away, half across the room before any sort of conscious understanding returned. Then, immediately, everything was there. She went stiff with shock.
Dr. Lowry’s living room . . . she in this chair and Dr. Lowry stretched out on the couch. He’d seemed asleep. And standing above him, looking down at him, the familiar rawboned, big figure of Frank Harding. Dr. Frank Harding who had walked up to the Cleaver Spaceport entry with her today, told her he’d be flying back to the coast.
Frank Harding, the . . .
Arlene slipped quietly out of the chair, moved across the room behind Harding’s back, watching him. When he began to turn, she darted off towards the open hall entry.
She heard him make a startled exclamation, come pounding after her. He caught her at the entry, swung her around, holding her wrists. He stared down at her from under the bristling red brows. “What the devil did you think you were doing?”
“You . . . !” Arlene gasped frantically. “You—” What checked her was first the surprise, then the dawning understanding in his face. She stammered, almost dizzy with relief, “I . . . I thought you must be . . .”
Harding shook his head, relaxed his grip on her wrists.
“But I’m not, of course,” he said quietly.
“No . . . you’re not! You wouldn’t have had to . . . chase me if you were, would you?” Her eyes went round in renewed dismay. “But I don’t . . . he has the diex projector now!”
Harding shook his head again and took her arm. “No, he doesn’t! Now just try to relax a bit, Arlene. We did trap him, you know. It cost quite a few more lives at the end, but we did. So let’s go over and sit down. I brought some whisky along . . . figured you two should be able to use a little after everything you’ve been through.”
Arlene sat on the edge of a chair, watching him pour out a glass. A reaction had set in; she felt very weak and shaky now, and she seemed unable to comprehend entirely that the rogue had been caught.
She said, “So you were in on this operation too?”
He glanced around. “Uh-huh . . . Dome at the bottom of an ocean basin wasn’t at all a bad headquarters under the circumstances. What put you and Dr. Ben to sleep was light-shock.” He handed her the glass.
“Light-shock?” Arlene repeated.
“Something new,” Harding said. “Developed—in another security island project—for the specific purpose of resolving hypnotic compulsions, including the very heavy type implanted by the rogue. He doesn’t seem to have been aware of that project, or else he regarded it as one of our less important efforts which he could afford to ignore for the present. Anyway, light-shock does do the job, and very cleanly, though it knocks the patient out for a while in the process. That side effect isn’t too desirable, but so far it’s been impossible to avoid.”
“I see,” Arlene said. She took a cautious swallow of the whisky and set the glass down as her eyes began to water.
Frank Harding leaned back against the table and folded his arms. He scowled thoughtfully down at her.
“We managed to get two persons who were suspected of being the rogue’s unconscious stooges to the island,” he said, “and tried light-shock out on them. It worked and didn’t harm them, so we decided to use it here. Lowry will wake up in another hour at the latest and be none the worse. Of course, neither of you will remember what happened while the rogue had you under control, but . . .”
“You’re quite wrong about that,” Arlene told him. “I don’t remember all of it, but I’m still very much aware of perhaps half of what happened—though I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to forget it. It was like an extremely unpleasant nightmare.”
Harding looked surprised. “That’s very curious! The other cases reported complete amnesia. Perhaps you . . .”
“You’ve been under a heavy strain yourself, haven’t you, Frank?” she asked.
He hesitated. “I? What makes you think so?”
“You’re being rather gabby. It isn’t like you.”
Harding grunted. “I suppose you’re right. This thing’s been tense enough. He may have enjoyed it—except naturally at the very end. Playing cat and mouse with the whole human race! Well, the mice turned out to be a little too much for him, after all. But of course nothing was certain until that last moment.”
“Because none of you could be sure of anyone else?”
“That was it mainly. This was one operation where actually nobody could be in charge completely or completely trusted. There were overlaps for everything, and no one knew what all of them were. When Weldon came here today, he turned on a pocket transmitter so that everything that went on while he was being instructed in the use of the diex projector would be monitored outside.
“Outside was also a globescanner which duplicated the activities of the one attached to the projector. We could tell at any moment to which section of Earth the projector’s diex field had been directed. That was one of the overlapping precautions. It sounded like a standard check run. There was a little more conversation between Lowry and Weldon than was normal when you were the assistant operator, but that could be expected. There were pauses while the projector was shut down and preparations for the next experiment were made. Normal again. Then, during one of the pauses, we got the signal that someone had just entered Weldon’s private nonspace conduit over there from this end. That was not normal, and the conduit was immediately sealed off at both exits. One more overlapping precaution, you see . . . and that just happened to be the one that paid off!”
Arlene frowned. “But what did . . .”
“Well,” Harding said, “there were still a number of questions to be answered, of course. They had to be answered fast and correctly or the game could be lost. Nobody expected the rogue to show up in person at the Cleaver Project. The whole security island could have been destroyed in an instant; we knew he was aware of that. But he’d obviously made a move of some kind—and we had to assume that the diex projector was now suspended in the conduit.
“But who, or what, was in there with it? The project guards had been withdrawn. There’d been only the three of you on the island. The rogue could have had access to all three at some time or other; and his compulsions—until we found a way to treat them—were good for a lifetime. Any of you might have carried that projector into the conduit to deliver it to him. Or all three might be involved, acting together. If that was the case, the conduit would have to be reopened because the game had to continue. It was the rogue we wanted, not his tools. . . .
“And there was the other possibility. You and Dr. Ben are among the rather few human beings on Earth we could be sure were not the rogue, not one of his impersonations. If he’d been capable of building a diex projector, he wouldn’t have had to steal one. Colonel Weldon had been with Special Activities for a long time. But he could be an impersonation. In other words, the rogue.”
Arlene felt her face go white. “He was!” she said.
“Eh? How do you know?”
“I didn’t realize it, but . . . no, go ahead. I’d rather tell you later. ”
“What didn’t you realize?” Harding persisted.
Arlene said, “I experienced some of his feelings . . . after he was inside the conduit. He knew he’d been trapped!” Her hands were shaking. “I thought they were my own . . . that I . . .” Her voice began to falter.
“Let it go,” Harding said, watching her. “It can’t have been pleasant.”