His tone also made it evident that he did not think Kickaha would succeed.
He wanted to know Kickaha’s plans, but Kickaha could only tell him that he had none except to improvise. He wanted Orc to use his devices to ensure a minute’s distortion of Urthona’s detection devices.
Orc objected to loaning Kickaha an antigravity belt. What if it fell into the hands of the Earthlings?
“There’s not much chance of that,” Kickaha said. “Once I’m in Urthona’s territory, I’ll either succeed or fail. In either case, the belt isn’t going to get into any outsider’s hands. And if it did, whoever is Lord will have the influence to see that it is taken out of the hands of whoever has it. I’m sure that even if the FBI had it in their possession, the Lord of the Two Earths could find a way to get it from them. Right?”
“Right,” Orc said. “But do you plan on running away with it instead of attacking Urthona?”
“No. I won’t stop until I’m dead, or too incapacitated to fight, or have won,” Kickaha said.
Orc was satisfied, and by this Kickaha knew that the truth drug was still effective. Orc stood up and said, “I’ll prepare things for you. It will take some time, so you might as well rest or do whatever you think best. We’ll go into action at midnight tonight.”
Kickaha asked if the cord could be taken off him. Orc said, “Why not? You can’t get out of here, anyway. The cord was just an extra precaution.”
One of the kilted men touched the shackle around his leg with a thin cylinder. The shackle opened and fell off. While the two men backed away from Kickaha, Orc strode out of the room. Then the door was shut, and Kickaha was alone.
He spent the rest of the time thinking, exercising, and eating lunch and supper. Then he bathed and shaved, exercised some more, and lay down to sleep. He would need all his alertness, strength, and quickness and there was no use draining these with worry and sleeplessness.
He did not know how long he had slept. The room was still lighted, and everything seemed as when he had lain down. The tray with its empty plates and cups was still on the table, and this, he realized, was a wrong note. It should have been gated out.
The sounds that had awakened him had seemed to be slight tappings. When coming out of his sleep, he had dreamed, or thought he dreamed, that a woodpecker was rapping a tree trunk.
Now there was only silence.
He rose and walked toward the door used by Orc and his servants. It was of metal, as he had ascertained after being loosed from the cord.
He placed his ear against it and listened. He could hear nothing. Then he jumped back with an oath. The metal had suddenly become hot!
The floor trembled as if an earthquake had started. The metal of the door gave forth a series of sounds, and he knew where the dream of the woodpecker had originated. Something was striking the door on the other side.
He stepped away from it just as the center of the door became cherry red and began to melt. The redness spread, became white, and then the center disappeared, leaving a hole the size of a dinner plate. By then, Kickaha was crouching behind the sofa and looking out around its corner. He saw an arm reach in through the hole and the hand grope around the side. Evidently it was trying to locate a lock. There was none, so the arm withdrew and a moment later the edge of the door became cherry red. He suspected that a beam was being used on it, and he wondered what the metal was. If it had been the hardest steel, it should have gone up in a puff of smoke at the first touch of a beam.
The door fell inward with a clang. A man jumped in, a big cylinder with a bell-like muzzle and a rifle-type stock in his hands. The man was one of the kilted servants. But he carried on his back a black bell-like object in a net attached to the shoulders with straps.