Drifting slowly on the thread of his spinneret, Rufus Sollenar came
gliding down the wind above Cortwright Burr's building.
The building, like a spider, touched the ground at only the points of
its legs. It held its wide, low bulk spread like a parasol over several
downtown blocks. Sollenar, manipulating the helium-filled plastic
drifter far above him, steered himself with jets of compressed gas from
plastic bottles in the drifter's structure.
Only Sollenar himself, in all this system, was not effectively
transparent to the municipal anti-plane radar. And he himself was
wrapped in long, fluttering streamers of dull black, metallic sheeting.
To the eye, he was amorphous and non-reflective. To electronic sensors,
he was a drift of static much like a sheet of foil picked by the wind
from some careless trash heap. To all of the senses of all interested
parties he was hardly there at all--and, thus, in an excellent position
for murder.
He fluttered against Burr's window. There was the man, crouched over
his desk. What was that in his hands--a pomander?
Sollenar clipped his harness to the edges of the cornice. Swayed out
against it, his sponge-soled boots pressed to the glass, he touched his
left hand to the window and described a circle. He pushed; there was a
thud on the carpeting in Burr's office, and now there was no barrier to
Sollenar. Doubling his knees against his chest, he catapulted forward,
the riot pistol in his right hand. He stumbled and fell to his knees,
but the gun was up.
Burr jolted up behind his desk. The little sphere of orange-gold metal,
streaked with darker bronze, its surface vermicular with encrustations,
was still in his hands. "Him!" Burr cried out as Sollenar fired.
Gasping, Sollenar watched the charge strike Burr. It threw his torso
backward faster than his limbs and head could follow without dangling.
The choked-down pistol was nearly silent. Burr crashed backward to end,
transfixed, against the wall.
* * * * *
Pale and sick, Sollenar moved to take the golden ball. He wondered
where Shakespeare could have seen an example such as this, to know an
old man could have so much blood in him.
Burr held the prize out to him. Staring with eyes distended by
hydrostatic pressure, his clothing raddled and his torso grinding
its broken bones, Burr stalked away from the wall and moved as if to
embrace Sollenar. It was queer, but he was not dead.
Shuddering, Sollenar fired again.
Again Burr was thrown back. The ball spun from his splayed fingers as
he once more marked the wall with his body.
Pomander, orange, whatever--it looked valuable.
Sollenar ran after the rolling ball. And Burr moved to intercept him,
nearly faceless, hunched under a great invisible weight that slowly
yielded as his back groaned.
Sollenar took a single backward step.
Burr took a step toward him. The golden ball lay in a far corner.
Sollenar raised the pistol despairingly and fired again. Burr tripped
backward on tiptoe, his arms like windmills, and fell atop the prize.
Tears ran down Sollenar's cheeks. He pushed one foot forward ... and
Burr, in his corner, lifted his head and began to gather his body for
the effort of rising.
Sollenar retreated to the window, the pistol sledging backward against
his wrist and elbow as he fired the remaining shots in the magazine.
Panting, he climbed up into the window frame and clipped the harness
to his body, craning to look over his shoulder ... as Burr--shredded;
leaking blood and worse than blood--advanced across the office.
He cast off his holds on the window frame and clumsily worked the
drifter controls. Far above him, volatile ballast spilled out and
dispersed in the air long before it touched ground. Sollenar rose,
sobbing--
And Burr stood in the window, his shattered hands on the edges of the
cut circle, raising his distended eyes steadily to watch Sollenar in
flight across the enigmatic sky.
* * * * *
Where he landed, on the roof of a building in his possession, Sollenar
had a disposal unit for his gun and his other trappings. He deferred
for a time the question of why Burr had failed at once to die.
Empty-handed, he returned uptown.
He entered his office, called and told his attorneys the exact times of
departure and return and knew the question of dealing with municipal
authorities was thereby resolved. That was simple enough, with no
witnesses to complicate the matter. He began to wish he hadn't been so
irresolute as to leave Burr without the thing he was after. Surely,
if the pistol hadn't killed the man--an old man, with thin limbs and
spotted skin--he could have wrestled that thin-limbed, bloody old man
aside--that spotted old man--and dragged himself and his prize back
to the window, for all that the old man would have clung to him, and
clutched at his legs, and fumbled for a handhold on his somber disguise
of wrappings--that broken, immortal old man.
Sollenar raised his hand. The great window to the city grew opaque.
Bess Allardyce knocked softly on the door from the terrace. He would
have thought she'd returned to her own apartments many hours ago.
Tortuously pleased, he opened the door and smiled at her, feeling the
dried tears crack on the skin of his cheeks.
He took her proffered hands. "You waited for me," he sighed. "A long
time for anyone as beautiful as you to wait."