offices we passed, lights were low, and a single corridor guard was yawning at his desk. I asked unsteadily: “Will you take the cocoon off me? I’m going to be a filthy mess if I don’t get out of it.” “No orders about it,” one of them said briefly, and they slammed the solid door and locked it. I flopped around the small floor trying to find something sharp enough to break the film and give me an even chance of bursting the plastic, but there was nothing. After incredible contortions and a dozen jarring falls I found that I could never get to my feet. The doorknob had offered a very, very faint ghost of hope, but it might as well have been a million miles away. Mitchell Courtenay, copysmith. Mitchell Courtenay, key man of the Venus section. Mitchell Courtenay, destroyer-to-be of the Con-sies. Mitchell Courtenay flopping on the floor of a cell in the offices of the sleaziest, crookedest agency that ever blemished the profession, without any prospect except betrayal and-with luck-a merciful death. Kathy at least would never know. She would think I had died like a fool on the glacier, meddling with the power pack when I had no business to … The lock of the door rattled and raided. They were coming for me. But when the door opened I saw from the floor not a forest of trousered legs but a single pair of matchstick ankles, nylon-clad. “I love you,” said the strange, dead voice of a woman. “They said I would have to wait, but I couldn’t wait.” It was Hedy. She had her needle. I tried to cry for help, but my chest seemed paralyzed as she knelt beside me with shining eyes. The temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. She clamped her bloodless lips on mine; they were like heated iron. And then I thought the left side of my face and head were being torn off. It lasted for seconds and blended into a red haze and unconsciousness. “Wake up,” the dead voice was saying. “I want you. Wake up.” Lightning smashed at my right elbow, and I cried out and jerked my arm. My arm moved- // moved. The bloodless lips descended on mine again, and again her needle ran into my jaw, probing exactly for the great lump of the trigeminal facial nerve, and finding it. I fought the red haze that was trying to swallow me up. My arm had moved. She had perforated the
membrane of the cocoon, and it could be burst. The needle searched again and somehow the pain was channeled to my right arm. In one convulsive jerk it was free. I think I took the back of her neck in my hand and squeezed. I am not sure. I do not want to be sure. But after five minutes she and her love did not matter. I ripped and stripped the plastic from me and got to my feet an inch at a time, moaning from stiffness. The corridor guard could not matter any more. If he had not come at my cries he would never come. I walked from the room and saw the guard apparently sleeping face-down on his desk. As I stood over him I saw a very little blood and serum puddled and coagulating in the small valley between the two cords of his shrunken old neck. One thrust transfixing the medulla had been enough for Hedy. I could testify that her knowledge of the nervous system’s topography was complete. The guard wore a gun that I hesitated over for a moment and then rejected. In his pockets were a few dollars that would be more useful. I hurried on to the ladders. His desk clock said 0605. I knew already about climbing up stairs. I learned then about climbing down stairs. If your heart’s in good shape there’s little to choose between them. It took me an estimated thirty minutes in my condition to get down the ladders of executives’ country and onto the populated stairs below. The first sullen stirrings of the work-bound consumers were well under way. I passed half a dozen bitter fist fights and one cutting scrape. The Taunton Building nightdwell-ers were a low, dirty lot who would never have been allowed stair-space in the Schocken Tower, but it was all to the good. I attracted no attention whatsoever in my filthy clothes and sporting a fresh stab wound in my face. Some of the bachelor girls even whistled, but that was all. The kind of people you have in the ancient, run-down slum buildings like R.C.A. and Empire State would have pulled me down if I’d taken their eye. My timing was good. I left the building lobby in the very core of a cheek-by-jowl mob boiling out the door to the shuttle which would take them to their wretched jobs. I thought I saw hardguys in plain clothes searching the mob from second-floor windows, but I didn’t look up and I got into the shuttle station. At the change booth I broke all my bills and went in the washroom. “Split a shower, bud?” somebody asked me. I wanted a shower terribly, and by myself, but I didn’t dare betray any white-