“What are you doing here?” a hard voice demanded. It was Herb Moore, someplace close by. His face flickered and rose, illuminated like a spectre’s, without sound or support. “You don’t belong here!” The voice mushroomed until it and the flushed, puffy face filled his vision. “Get the hell out of here! Go where you belong, you third-rate derelict. Class 8-8? Don’t make me laugh. Who said you—”
Benteley smashed Moore. The face crumpled and spurted liquid and fragments, utterly destroyed. Something slammed into him and he was bowled over. Choked and imprisoned by a rolling, slobbering mass, he fought his way upward, struggling to catch hold of something solid.
“Pipe down,” Eleanor whispered urgently. “Both of you, for God’s sake! Be quiet”
Benteley became inert. Beside him Moore puffed and panted and wiped at his bleeding face. “I’ll kill you, you creep bastard.” Sobbing with pain and rage he bellowed, “You’ll be sorry you hit me!”
The next thing he knew he was sitting on something low, bending down and fumbling for his shoes. His coat was lying on the floor in front of him. Then his shoes lay lifeless, separated from each other by an expanse of luxurious carpet. There was no sound; the room was utterly silent and cold. A dim lamp flickered off in a distant corner.
“Lock the door,” Eleanor’s voice came, from nearby. “I think Moore’s gone off his rocker or something. He’s out there in the hall shambling around like a berserker.”
Benteley found the door and locked its old-fashioned manual bolt. Eleanor was standing in the center of the room, one leg pulled up, foot thrust behind her, carefully unlacing the thongs of her sandals. As Benteley watched in dazed silence, awed and astonished, she kicked off her sandals, unzipped her slacks, and stepped from them. For a moment bare ankles gleamed in the lamplight. Pale, shimmering calves; the sight danced in front of him until overcome, he closed his eyes tight. The slim lines, small-boned, delicate perfectly smooth legs, all the way up to her knees, at which point her undergarment began . . .
Then he was stumbling his way down, and she was reaching up for him. Moist arms, quivering breasts and dark red nipples full and solid under him. She gasped and shuddered and locked her arms around him. The roaring in his head boiled up and over; he closed his eyes and peacefully allowed himself to sink down into the torrent.
Much later he awoke. The room was deathly cold. Nothing stirred. There was no sound, no life. He struggled stiffly up, bewildered, his mind broken in vague fragments. Through the open window gray early-morning light filtered, and a cold ominous wind whipped icily around him. He backed away, halted, tried to collect himself.
Figures lay sprawled out, mixed with disordered clothing and covers, in heaps here and there. He stumbled between outstretched limbs, half-covered arms, stark-white legs that shocked and horrified him. He distinguished Eleanor, lying against the wall, on her side, one arm thrust out, thin fingers curled, legs drawn up under her, breathing restlessly between half-parted lips. He wandered on—and stopped dead.
The gray light filtered over another face and figure, his old friend Al Davis, peaceful and content in the arms of his soundly sleeping wife. The two of them were pressed tight together, both oblivious to everything else.
A little further on were more persons, some of them snoring dully, one stirring into fitful wakefulness. Another groaned and groped feebly for some covering. His foot crushed a glass; splinters and a pool of dark liquid leaked out. Another face ahead was familiar. Who was it? A man, dark-haired, good features . . .
It was his own face!
He stumbled against a door and found himself in a yellow-lit hall. Terror seized him and he began running blindly. Silently, his bare feet carried him down vast carpeted corridors, endless and deserted, past stone-gray windows, up noiseless flights of steps that never seemed to ‘end. He blundered wildly around a corner and found himself caught in an alcove, a full-length mirror rising up ahead of him, blocking his way.
A wavering figure hovered within the mirror. An empty, lifeless insect-thing caught momentarily, suspended in the yellowed, watery depths. He gazed mutely at it, at the waxen hair, the vapid mouth and lips, the colorless eyes. Arms limp and boneless at its sides; a spineless, bleached thing that blinked vacantly back at him, without sound or motion.
He screamed—and the image winked out. He plunged on along the gray-lit corridors, feet barely skimming the dust-thick carpets. He felt nothing under him. He was rising, carried upward by his great terror, a screaming, streaking thing that hurtled toward the high-domed roof above.
Arms out, he shot soundlessly, through walls and panels, in and out of empty rooms, down deserted passages, a blinded, terrorized thing that flashed and wheeled desperately, beat against lead-sealed windows in desperate, futile efforts to escape.
With a violent crash he struck stunningly against a brick fireplace. Broken, cracked, he fluttered helplessly down to the soft dust-heavy carpet. For a moment he lay bewildered, and then he was stumbling on, hurrying frantically, mindlessly, hurrying anywhere, hands in front of his face, eyes closed, mouth open.
There were sounds ahead. A glowing yellow light filtered through a half-opened doorway. In a room a handful of men were sitting around a table spilled over with tapes and reports. An atronic bulb burned in the center, a warm, unwavering miniature sun that pulled him hypnotically. Surrounded with coffee cups were writers, the men murmuring and poring over their work. There was one huge heavy-set man with massive, sloping shoulders.
“Verrick!” he shouted at the man. His voice came out thin and tiny, a feeble, fluttering insect-voice. “Verrick, help me!”
Reese Verrick glanced up angrily. “What do you want? I’m busy. This has to be done before we can begin moving.”
“Verrick!” he screamed, pulsing with terror and mindless panic. _”Who am I?”_
“You’re Keith Pellig,” Verrick answered irritably, wiping his forehead with one immense paw and pushing his tapes away. “You’re the assassin picked by the Convention. You have to be ready to go to work in less than two hours. You have a job to do.”
SEVEN
ELEANOR STEVENS appeared from the gray-shadowed hall. “Verrick, this isn’t Keith Pellig. Get Moore down here and make him talk. He’s getting back at Benteley; they had a fight.”
Verrick’s eyes widened. “This is Benteley? That goddam Moore! He has no sense; this’ll foul up things.”
Benteley was beginning to get back some sanity. “Can this be fixed?” he muttered.
“He was out cold,” Eleanor said in a thin clipped voice. She had pulled on her slacks and sandals and thrown a greatcoat over her shoulders. Her face was colorless; her deep red hair was stringy and vapid. “He can’t go through with it in a conscious condition. Get one of the lab doctors in here to black him. And don’t try to utilize this. Put him back before you say anything to him. He can’t take it now, you understand?”
Moore appeared, shaken and afraid. “There’s no harm done. I jumped the gun a little, that’s all.” He caught hold of Benteley’s arm. “Come along. Well get this straightened around right away.”
Benteley pulled loose. He retreated from Moore and examined his alien hands and face. “Verrick,” his voice said, thin and empty. “Help me.”
“We’ll fix it up,” Verrick said gruffly. “It’ll be all right. Here’s the doctor now.”
Both Verrick and the doctor had hold of him. Herb Moore fluttered a few paces off, afraid to come near Verrick. At the desk Eleanor wearily lit a cigarette and stood smoking, as the doctor inserted the needle in Benteley’s arm and squashed the bulb. As darkness dissolved him, he heard Verrick’s heavy voice dim and recede.
“You should have killed him or let him alone; not this kind of stuff. You think he’s going to forget.this?”
Moore answered something, but Benteley didn’t hear. The darkness had become complete, and he was in it.
A long way off Eleanor Stevens was saying, “You know, Reese doesn’t really understand what Pellig is. Have you noticed that?”
“He doesn’t understand any kind of theory.” Moore’s voice, sullen and resentful.
“He doesn’t have to understand theory. Why should he, when he can hire infinite numbers of bright young men to understand it for him?”
“I suppose you mean me.”
“Why are you with Reese? You don’t like him. You don’t get along with him.”
“Verrick has money to invest in my kind of work. If he didn’t back it, I’d be out of luck.”
“When it’s all over, Reese gets the output.”
“That’s not important. Look, I took MacMillan’s papers, all that basic stuff he did on robots. What ever came of that? Just these witless hulks, glorified vacuum cleaners, stoves, dumbwaiters. MacMillan had the wrong idea. All he wanted was something big and strong to lift things, so the unks could lie down and sleep. So there wouldn’t be any more unk servants and laborers. MacMillan was pro-unk. He probably bought his classification on the black market.”