They all shook hands with Michelson. "Write us, will you, Mike,"
Engstrand said. "Let us hear from you often."
"Of course," Michelson said. At the door he turned, an old man, stooped
by years of devotion to more and more deadly chemicals. "If you need
me, I'll still be at Lake House."
* * * * *
He went out of the observation room and stood for a moment looking at
the elevator that waited with an open mouth. He had always been with
G-2. Back when they had started over again in the ruins of World War
III he had been in charge of various space-going projects aimed at a
quick defeat of the Eurasians, and this always included the latest
complex developments in bacteriological warfare, and the use of liquid
and atmospheric gases. He had sent the first New Era test rocket into
space, the first one to the moon, the first ones to Mars.
Instruments far in advance of the original telemetering and servomotor
devices, had measured temperature, radiation, chemical makeup of
atmosphere, minerals, various field effects, measured and catalogued
all life, even to its cultural development, then sent back their
measurements and evaluations on ultra-high-frequency to ground
observers on Earth.
He had sent out the first rockets with monkeys, rats, guinea pigs and
birds to test the effects of alien conditions on living organisms. No
human being had ever survived. They stopped trying.
But the Martians had been carrying on a program much the same. They
had been frightened. They had sent deadly rockets. The war had begun,
a fantastic push-button operation between worlds millions of miles
apart. This Earth rocket loaded with three tons of G-agent was what the
UN hoped would be the last retaliatory gesture in a number of years of
interspatial bickering. For it was also evident now that no Martian
could get across space to Earth.
Michelson sighed, stepped into the elevator and started home. Home to
rest, fish, lie in the sun. Home to Mary who kept him occupied and
entertained in his loneliness.
But Mary had not been ill. She had not stayed at Lake House either. She
had been aboard Michelson's helio, hiding in the luggage compartment.
She had the key to Michelson's office and she was there.
But her head ached now. She hadn't slept for two days, thinking about
what had to be done. Her head ached worse now as the wave directives
came again and again, bringing new bursts of coercive pain with any
deep emotional hint of possible resistance.
Now, in fact, there was doubt in Mary's mind that there was any desire
to resist the directives, or if there ever had been. Now even those
lingering wonderings about the possibility of doubt brought pain.
Better just to act. And it was time.
The clock gave her exactly one hour, she knew, to destroy the central
building sector, the heart of the giant UN Research Foundation, and
also wreck the rocket due to blast for Mars. She had heard Daddy Mike
say what time the rocket would blast if he got the G-Agent loaded on
schedule, and she knew he had done that.
There was little if any caution exercised at the Foundation. It had
been well established by years of precedent that humans just didn't
sabotage an effort directed at aliens. Especially Martians who, time
and time again, had almost brought destruction to earth in innumerable
unexpected ways. Added to that was the fact that no Martian could get
across the void to take care of it directly, any more than an Earthman
could to Mars for a similar purpose.
Mary had the advantage of this freedom. But the immediacy with which
she could be identified by all the personnel about the Foundation
might be a handicap as well as a possible advantage. She would have to
exercise extreme caution herself.
The directives had stopped. She was on her own as long as she didn't
resist the preceding orders. From this point on it was strictly Mary's
responsibility.
She checked the electrodoor. No one was approaching Daddy Mike's
office. She wasn't sure whether or not he would return to his office
before going to Lake House. She wondered what he would do, how sad he
would be, to find her gone.
From behind the rearmost, long unused files in the filing cabinet, she
took the capsule of G-Agent. There was enough of the nerve gas in the
ten ounce container to destroy everyone in the building, within half an
hour after it was thrown into the ventilator shaft.
She went to the wall, pressed the button, and the opening was revealed
by a sliding panel. Without hesitation, she tossed in the capsule of
G-Agent. Dimly, she remembered how she had collected it, painfully
over a period of months, drop by drop and stored it in the special
non-corrosive alloy of the container. She had access to all of Daddy's
laboratory equipment.
The container would explode in half an hour. Thirty minutes to get
outside the buildings and over to the pits and the lethal rocket.
She felt nothing but a kind of depersonalized tension of responsibility
as she removed her hat and took the small deadly neutron beam gun from
the tiny sling she had fixed inside. She put the hat back on and tied
the ribbon under her chin. The hat had caused much amused reaction from
those friends of Daddy Mike who had become accustomed to her being
constantly with the old man.
She ran into the bright shine of the tubular metal hall. She hoped with
a flash of unexpected feeling that Daddy Mike would leave the building
before the G-Agent was activated.
He loved her. Her heart throbbed painfully as she remembered how
much Daddy loved her. How he had held her on his lap and stroked her
hair and philosophized endlessly to her, not caring that she was not
supposed to understand such complexity. But sharing this as he did all
things with her in his aging loneliness.
She crouched there in the hall and thought of that, how she would love
Daddy as Daddy loved her. Except that she was incapable of love. Dimly
she remembered that once, long, very long ago, there had been a kind of
spontaneous expression of physical desire, and sensuous pleasure, from
the contact with others. But since then there had been the experiments,
endless, too painful to recall. The bursting of blood and the repair,
the brain slicing and the laying open of cells, and the sewing up.
Years, a lifetime, a foreverness of pain, and the apparent making good
as new again. But the scars were too deep too show, and too deep to
mend.
Such pain for so long, the cold objective testing, had killed any
capacity for love. Mary was convinced of that.
She held the gun to her left side and ran in nakedness and silence down
the glowing tube.
An overweight guard in his brown UN uniform eased around the curve in
the tube and stood with his back to her. It was a good place for him to
walk what was to him a useless beat. There was nothing to guard against
but boredom. This was the building's left wing and fairly isolated, and
he could merely stand here and wait for the far end of his shift.
She slid along the wall. Her feet moved with a vague whispering
silence, the silence of unconscious stealth. But then the guard turned
to place his heel more comfortably on the inward-sloping bottom of the
tube. And he saw her.
He grinned. "Mary!" he said. Everyone knew her. And everyone loved
Mary. "What are you doing out here?"
He could never guess the truth, she thought. Even if someone told you,
you would never believe it.
The good humor spontaneously beginning to bubble from the fat guard was
changed into a kind of gasping cough of unbelieving fear. Desperate
words filtered out through his teeth. A white line moved around his
lips. His hands reached out and hung suspended.
"Mary--Oh God, Mary--the gun, that's--that's a real gun, Mary--"
The charge was light. It contacted the Guard's face just above the
chin. It dissolved instantly all of his face and most of his brain. It
left only a smeared shell of bone behind, like a bowl tipped up.
She ran on down the slightly curving tube. _They were never never so
kind to me. For he is free from the directives that pull and push and
pry and pick at the brain. He is free from pain._
When this was done, she would be free. As free as the guard.
Once near the rocket, the long task would be ended. She would then
theoretically be free from the complex thought which her body was
incapable of handling without pain. Free from the pain of an imbalanced
body and nervous system. And free of the coercion bands, the directive
waves that could sometimes rip the cells apart.
She pressed the down button of the elevator. At that moment the high
scream of the alarm sirens shrieked in her ears. She cowered a moment.
It came from all around. It bathed her in painful sound. It became a
pervading throb that seemed to come from the metal everywhere.
They had discovered the guard already. That was one of those
unpredictable elements. Purely chance that anyone would have passed
there just after the guard was killed. That could be the only reason
for the alarm!
She had to get outside the buildings. She had to get over there near
enough to the rocket to blast the firing tubes! She wasn't even off
the tenth floor.
There was nothing to fear except failure. Death itself would be a
welcome if not a preferred kind of freedom for her. But if she failed
and lived, there would be torture. And the misty worlds of pain, not
only in the labs but from the coercion directives. As far as she knew,
perhaps the directive rocket buried somewhere high in the pines near
the lake would contain even more duties for her, if this failed. Except
that now she would be known and they would hunt her down and--but so
far they did not know who had killed the guard.
No, if they caught her they wouldn't kill her. That was sure enough.
There would be the labs again. They would probe, cut her open, try to
find out why. She had long been a living instrument for finding out why.
As the elevator dropped, the walls pulsed with the screams of the
alarms.
She had one advantage she realized that she had been doubtful of
earlier. She was Mary, and everyone knew and loved her. Though it was
definite now that a saboteur was loose inside the Foundation, there was
nothing so far to connect Mary with such a fact.
She concealed the gun in the sling inside her cap, and tied the ribbon
firmly under her chin. When the elevator reached the first floor, the
panel slid back. She was tensed to run out, but a group of Foundation
guards were running for the opening. Their faces were twisted into
various expressions of tense terror. They were all inside a gigantic
gas capsule, they knew that, one of terrible potential lethality.
Evidently it was suspected that the G-Agent might be used.
Mary ran out, turned, leaped for the narrowing gap between the guards
and the arched opening that led into the court. Most of the guards
scarcely noticed her at all, and if they did they evidently figured it
was hardly anything to cause diversion from the awful emergency.
But one of them, a man named Jonothan who had often caressed her and
expressed his love for her, smiled. It was a kind of conditioned
reaction that broke the frozen fear of his mouth and cheeks. He leaned
toward her, his hand outstretched.
"Mary--this is no place for you, baby. You'd better come back up with
us."
The invisible mouth of the intercom spoke. "The saboteur may be
heading for the rocket which must blast on schedule. Already deadly
gases may have been released inside the Foundation. Sections five
and six will establish instant cordon around the rocket pits. Anyone
not obeying security instructions will be shot instantly. Anyone
entering or leaving the Foundation buildings or grounds without proper
identification will be shot. All guards will immediately put on masks,
and protective suiting, and will prepare antidote injections. Sections
seven and eight will search the main wing. Sections nine and ten--"
"Come on, John!" someone yelled from the elevator. Kits were falling
open. Masks were unfolding. Suit capsules were exploding under
compressed air, and the special suits were breaking out in fluffs of
green.
"Hey, for God's sake, Johnny, come on!" The voices were ragged with
fear.
A warning would also, Mary knew, be going out to all civilians made
susceptible immediately by inversion, movements of predictable winds.
But Mary knew that many would die, many many would die, when the rocket
crashed. If she could succeed.
Only for that inevitable percentage who would die in great pain did she
have any recognizable sympathy. She had a duty, else she herself would
experience greater and greater pain.
"You'd better come along with us, Mary baby," Jonothan said. He reached
for her, while the others yelled at him. The intercom itself was toned
with terror that was in the walls and in every man's eyes and his voice
and the stance of his body.
Mary giggled. She started a kind of disarming dance. But this time it
did not excite the laughter and general response it usually did.
Her stomach turned sickeningly as she felt the release, the ribbon
fluttering and the cap falling. The thud and the bright shining spin of
the gun over the mosaicked floor. The sling had broken.
She danced toward it.
Jonothan yelled, but the voices of the others snapped off into a
pulsing silence. Then an incredulous murmur trickled over the floor.
"Mary--what are you doing with that? Mary--stop--wait, Mary--"
Desperately, Jonothan dived to the floor. He clawed. He kicked with his
frantic feet for traction on the floor. He screamed at her as he pawed
to reach the gun. But she leaped over him and turned with the gun ready.
Jonothan was slowly standing up. His face was white. His lips moved.
His throat trembled. But no words came out.