Her right eye seemed to have something . . . wrong? . . .with it.
She blinked a couple of times and the double exposure vanished. Her face was itself. Again it occurred to her to brush her teeth. After several monotonous minutes the vibrating brush massaged her into dreaminess. . . .
The helicopter made a loud thrumming outside, soundly rattling the windows as it landed on the lawn.
The staff scurried hurriedly about; the unexpected arrival of a helicopter generally meant an inspection.
When the doctor came upstairs from his apartment he found one of the director’s aides waiting in his office. The doctor was bothered but tried not to show it.
“We promised you the director would get back to you,”
said the aide. He was a small fellow and scrupulously polite, with bright orange hair curled tightly against his skull.
“I thought you were still at Fort Meade.”
“The director asked me to deliver his message personally.”
“Surely he could have called.”
“The director requests that you leave with me and come to headquarters. Right away, I’m afraid.”
“That’s impossible.” The doctor sat down, tensely upright in his old wooden armchair.
“Quite.” The aide sighed. “Which is why the phone just wouldn’t do, you see.” The orange-haired fellow was still wearing his camel’s hair overcoat and a Peruvian wool scarf around his neck, bright orange; his shoes were hightops of some shiny orange leather. All organics, flaunting his high salary. Carefully he opened the coat and removed a .38 caliber Colt Aetherweight with a four-inch suppressor from the open holster under his armpit. He was a symphony in orange. The pistol was of dull blue steel. He leveled it at the doctor’s ample belly. “Do please come with me now.”
On her way back to her room, Sparta felt a pain in her left ear, so fierce it made her stumble and lean against the plaster wall. Buzz and moan of sixty-cycle current through lath and plaster walls, clatter of pots washing in the kitchen, groans of an old woman—the old woman in 206, Sparta realized, without knowing how she knew there was an old woman in 206—other rooms, other noises, two men talking somewhere, voices that seemed familiar— * * *
The doctor hesitated. He was not really surprised, but the game was moving faster than he had hoped. “Let’s say . . .” He swallowed once, and went on, “that I don’t come with you.” He had the feeling that this was happening to someone else, and wished that were true.
“Doctor . . .” The orange man shook his head once, ruefully.
“The staff here is utterly loyal. Whatever passes between you and me will never be discussed outside this room, I assure you.”
The doctor stood then and moved slowly to the door.
The orange man stood at the same time, never taking his eyes from the doctor, managing to seem deferential even while he kept the long barrel of the Colt, hardly wavering, aimed at the fork of the doctor’s wishbone.
The doctor took his Chesterfield from the coat rack and, hauling it on, got himself tangled with his scarf.
The orange man smiled sympathetically and said, “Sorry,” indicating that had circumstances permitted he would have lent a hand. Finally the doctor pulled himself into the coat. He glanced backward; his eyes were wet and he was trembling, his face contorted with fear.
“After you, please,”said the orange man, amiably.
The doctor plucked at the doorknob, jerked the door open, stepped into the hall—stumbling against the sill in what seemed imminent panic. As he went to one knee the orange man came forward with his left hand outstretched, contempt curling his smile. “Really, there’s nothing to be so upset . . .”
But as the hand came toward him the doctor erupted from his crouch, pinned the dapper orange man against the door frame with a massive shoulder, thrust the fist with the gun in it high to the side. The doctor’s right hand came up swiftly with brutal force, brushing aside the man’s flailing left, pushing up hard under his breastbone.
“Aaahhh . . . ?” It was no scream, but a surprised gasp, rising on a note of anxiety. The orange man lowered his startled eyes to his midriff. The barrel of an outsized hypodermic needle, still gripped in the doctor’s fist, protruded from the camel’s hair coat at the level of his diaphragm.
No blood showed. The bleeding was internal.
The orange man was not dead yet, not nearly dead. His coat was thick and the shaft of the hypodermic too short to reach his heart. The telescoping shafts within it were still thrusting, seeking his heart muscle when he twisted his right wrist and brought the barrel of the Colt to bear, pulled the trigger spasmodically— The phttt, phttt, phttt, phttt of the silenced weapon howled like a rocket launcher in Sparta’s painfully sensitive ear. She recoiled and stumbled down the hall toward her room, her head ringing with the screams and agonized gasps, the tremor of running feet on the floor below shaking her like an earthquake.
Into her mind like a slide flashed on a screen came an image to match one of the voices she’d heard—that of a little man who always dressed in expensive clothes that were too loud, a man with curly orange hair, a man she knew she disliked and feared. With the conscious formation of that image, the amplified sounds vanished.
By now the other inmates were wandering bewildered in the hall, clinging to the walls, for even ordinary hearing was enough to apprehend the commotion downstairs. In her room Sparta tore off her nightgown and quickly dressed in the warmest clothes she could find in the un- familiar closet, clothes she didn’t really recognize but that were obviously her own. For reasons her memory would not reveal, she knew she must flee.
The doctor’s body lay face up across the sill, blood pooling under his head. Next to him the orange man was writhing on the floor, plucking at the thing in his midriff.
“Help me, help me!” he gasped to the nurses who were already trying their fumbling best to help him. A woman in a pilot’s uniform thrust the nurses aside and bent to catch his words, but a sudden hooting of sirens filled the air. “After her! Take her . . .” he gasped at the pilot, then tried to shove her out of the way. He screeched in pain— the hypodermic had come out in his hand, but not all of it—”Take her to the director!” Then his voice rose in a terrified howl—”Oh, help me, help me”—as the questing hair-fine remnant of the needle pierced and paralyzed his heart.
A nurse slammed into L. N.’s room and found it deserted.
One side of the bed had collapsed on the floor. The window sash had been thrust up and the yellowing lace curtains were stirring in the frigid outside air—an iron bar was thrust like a spear through the screen of heavy wire that covered the outside of the window, twisting it aside.
The iron bar in the screen had been part of the bed frame.
The nurse rushed to the window as the rising pitch of twin turbine engines reached a near-supersonic shriek.
Black against the frozen brown grass of the lawn below, a sleek shape ascended and hovered, a viperlike snout quested this way and that under the thump, thump of counter-rotating rotors.
The pilot stumbled into the room, holding a drawn pis- tol; she shoved the nurse away from the window. Below, the black tactical helicopter rose another couple of meters, leaned forward, and skimmed off over the fence between two poplars, hugging the ground.
“Damm it!” The pilot watched in disbelief, not bothering to waste any rounds on the armored machine. “Who the hell is in that thing?”
“She is,” said the nurse.
“Who the hell is she?”
“The one we were hiding here. The one he wanted you to take to the director.”
The pilot stared after the helicopter until it dropped into an arroyo beyond the highway and failed to reappear.
She swore and turned away.
Sparta had no clear idea what she was doing. The irregular frozen ground was racing past a meter or two beneath the skids, the arroyo’s low mud and gravel walls swaying too close to the whirling tips of the blades as she played with the stick and pedals. She dug up gravel with a skid: the machine lurched, declined to flip over, flew on.
A moving map of the terrain was displayed in space in front of Sparta, holographically superimposed upon the reality she saw through the windscreen. Just now she was flying uphill—the interstate magneplane tracks she had crossed before finding the arroyo now reappeared in front of her, carried on a steel trestle, barring her path. She flew under the trestle. The howl of the aircraft’s engines echoed for a split second, and one rotor rang sharp and clear from nicking a steel pylon.