Not in time.
By the time she began to guess what that something was, and long before she had even begun to decide what, if anything, to do about it, Dopey was turning to leave. The wall began to cloud, preparatory to letting him through.
He didn’t get that far. “Grab him!” Delasquez shouted, hurling his weight against the milky place in the wall. Lin did as ordered-threw himself on the alien, who squawked once in astonishment and then was still.
If Delasquez was trying to escape, he failed. The wall was not deceived. He struck against it and was hurled violently back into the cell, as the wall turned mirror-bright again against him. Delasquez didn’t walk away; he was catapulted backward, staggering into the pile of Dopey and Jimmy Lin on the floor. He sat down heavily on top of them and gasped dismally, “Mother of God, that hurt!”
From beneath him Lin, breathless and equally dismal, begged, “Get off me.” He struggled to his feet and backed away, Delasquez at his side, the two of them looking apprehensively at the alien.
Dannerman gave them both a hard look, but said nothing as he knelt by Dopey’s side. “Is he breathing?” Martin asked.
“I don’t know. It didn’t feel like it,” Jimmy Lin said uneasily.
“Maybe he just had the breath knocked out of him,” Martin offered, but Dannerman looked up and shook his head.
“Knocked out of him for good, I’m afraid. I don’t know much about his anatomy, but there isn’t much doubt about it. He’s really dead.”
Ever since they had been taken captive there had been no times for Pat Adcock that she could think of as really good, but there had never before been one quite as bad as this. She had a pretty good idea of what was done to zoo animals who murdered their keeper. Was it going to be done to them?
Dannerman was saying, “Well, that was stupid,” and even Rosaleen was looking reproachfully at the two, Jimmy Lin shamefaced, Martin belligerent but-crossing himself? Pat couldn’t be sure. The general’s right hand was fingering the left shoulderboard of his uniform jacket as he answered.
“It was your suggestion, Dannerman,” Delasquez said.
“Bullshit! I never said anything about attacking Dopey!”
“You spoke of taking hostages. Well, we decided to try it. The other part, trying to crash out, that was my own idea, I just thought of it at the last minute.”
“Obviously it wasn’t a real good idea,” Dannerman said. “Taking a hostage wasn’t much better. That only works if you don’t kill the hostage.”
“His death was simply an accident. How could we know the thing was so delicate? In any case, it’s done. And we have an opportunity.” The general reached down to the corpse-but with his left hand, Pat saw in puzzlement; his right hand was still close to his lapel. He was trying to pick the coppery metal-mesh muff from Dopey’s slack hands.
“Wait!” Dannerman cried warningly, but too late. As soon as Martin’s hands touched the metal he screamed, jolted erect and fell unconscious to the floor.
“Damn fool,” Dannerman snarled, leaping to his side. But ancient Rosaleen was there before him, her ear pressed to the general’s chest.
“No breath. No pulse,” she reported. “Electrical shock, I think. Dan, do you know CPR?” She didn’t wait for an answer, simply bent her mouth to the general’s for artificial respiration. Dannerman didn’t speak, either, as he dropped to his knees and began pounding a fist rhythmically on Martin’s chest. Beside Pat Jimmy Lin was muttering to himself, but it was Pat who caught the first flicker of a reflection in the mirror wall. “Watch out!” she cried as a pair of the great, ungainly Docs came lumbering in. But the creatures paid no attention to their prisoners. If there was any expression on their white-bearded faces Pat could not identify it; they were strictly businesslike. They bent down to Dopey’s body, disentangled his fingers from the coppery muff and bore it away through the wall without a sound, leaving the corpse abandoned behind.
Rosaleen had paid no attention, continuing to breathe for the general. Pat watched, nervous, unsure of what to do; she knew what CPR was, of course, but she had never seen it done before, had not expected it to be so violent. Beside her Jimmy Lin was glumly watching. “What do you guess they’ll do to us now?” he asked the room in general. No one answered.
It was a good question, Pat thought dismally, shifting from one foot to another. The two Docs had shown no punitive intention, but then the Docs never spoke, never seemed to show any independent thought or emotion at all.
Then Dannerman sat back on his heels, regarding the patient. He placed one finger at the base of Martin’s neck and held it for a moment. “It’s irregular, but it’s beating,” he informed Rosaleen; and then, as she lifted her head for a moment, Martin gasped and coughed and opened his eyes, staring wildly about. He struggled to sit up, but Dannerman pushed him back. “Stay put,” he ordered.
“What- What-“ Martin tried.
“You got yourself killed, Martin,” Dannerman informed him, “Lie still for a while. I think you’ll live, but don’t push it.” He tested the pulse with a finger again; then, Pat was puzzled to observe, Dannerman’s fingers moved to the lapel of Martin’s uniform jacket, as though feeling for something. When he stood up he looked almost amused, but all he said was “Keep an eye on the walls for me while I see if Dopey had anything we can use.” He walked over to the corpse of the alien and looked down at it. The slack mouth was open, so were the eyes; the peacock tail, half erected, seemed to have lost some of its scales.
“Are you going to search the body?” Pat asked.
He gazed at her for a moment. “Unless you’d rather do it yourself? Don’t worry. I’ve done it before, though of course the others were at least human.”
“Be careful,” she begged. He nodded and knelt beside Dopey’s corpse. The creature had worn only the one garment, and, though Dannerman poked at it-diffidently at first, then with more assurance as there was no punishing electrical shock-it seemed to have no pockets. It did have some sort of decoration, things like glassy buttons sewn on it; Dannerman tugged at them experimentally. The Dopey had also worn a bangle over the base of its tail, and a wristlet of the coppery metal, but Pat caught only a glimpse of them as Dannerman completed his search of the corpse.
He sat up and shrugged. “I guess he carried everything he had in that muff,” he said. “At least, I can’t find anything.”
“Maybe he carried some stuff internally,” Jimmy Lin offered.
“Good thinking, Jimmy. Do you want to give him a body-cavity search? Because I don’t think I’d like to.”
“I wonder why the Docs didn’t take his body away?” Rosaleen mused, squatting beside the semiconscious Martin.
Dannerman shrugged. “Maybe they’ll come back for it. Maybe we’ll wish they would, because I imagine it’s going to decay pretty rapidly.”
Rosaleen nodded, then checked herself, staring at the body. “Perhaps not,” she said. “Look at that!”
Pat peered at the dead alien, and saw what Rosaleen meant. Something was happening to the corpse. The bottom of it, where it touched the floor, was soaked with a dark brown liquid, and Pat noticed a sharp, nasty smell, as of some foul brew cooking on a stove.
Dannerman knelt for a closer look. “The floor’s dissolving it away,” he announced incredulously.
“Please, Dan, don’t get too close to it,” Pat pleaded.
“Don’t worry,” he said dryly. “Although it’s kind of interesting. That’s a great waste removal system; I bet if I lay down right next to Dopey the floor would leave me alone-but, no, I’m not going to try it.” He stood up and looked around. “How’s the patient doing?”
Rosaleen was supporting Martin’s head while holding a cup of water to his lips. “Seems to be improving. He opened his eyes and looked at me.”
Dannerman nodded. “So the question now,” he said, “is what we do when, and if, somebody takes a dim view of this. Do we just take our punishment, whatever it is? Or do we try to fight back?”
“What have we got to fight with?” Pat demanded.
He looked at her quizzically. “Whatever we can find,” he said.
From her post by the patient Rosaleen called, “I do not think that fighting back would be advisable. Not now, anyway.”
“I think you’re right,” Dannerman agreed. “After all, if they want to hurt us they wouldn’t have to get into hand-to-hand combat. They wouldn’t even need weapons. The easiest thing would be just to leave us here until we run out of food and starve. Speaking of which,” he said, “why don’t we see what cooking can do for some of those rations?”