Pleading, cajoling, shaking, other voices joined.
"Mary--give us the gun now!"
"Please, Mary, you can kill people--"
"You just give Uncle Patrick the gun now, honey, and--"
She was backing away toward the arched opening. Beyond that were the
gardens, the fountains the pretty landscape of the courts. Beyond that
were the helio landings, and then the pits. It wasn't so far.
Jonothan was trying to smile at her as he reached again for the gun.
Behind him, the others stood immobile and without any more words. The
intercom had words, but no one was listening now.
* * * * *
She fired a much heavier charge than that against the guard on the
tenth floor. Between Jonothan's outstretched arms which had held her
with love, his torso and head disappeared. His arms fell and the legs
toppled like parts of a mannequin. Beyond the vacancy that had been
Jonothan, several others tried to draw their guns. All were abruptly
reduced to jellied and smoking anonymity. Mary ran for the courts.
She heard herself giggling without recognizable meaning as she ran
under the rainbowed fountains, leaped the flower hedges, and skimmed
over the carefully designed green of lawn patches.
She still had that initial advantage. No one still could logically
connect her with what was happening. So far there were no living
witnesses. At least it was unlikely that there were.
She was a little behind her schedule and every second was now
important. Where before there had been allowed some margin for error,
now there was none.
She wanted to get a helio. She wanted to get as far up wind and as
far into the air as possible when the G-Agent began drifting over the
land. She wanted to live for the reasons she had thought about before,
many times. She couldn't say that her life was important to her now
any more than it ever had been. It had never been her life, not in her
memory. Always she had been the instrument of others. She could blast
the rocket back to earth from inside a helio, and keep on from there to
some degree of personal safety.
That was the plan.
As she ran she wondered with a kind of dull throbbing hope if after
this task was fulfilled, she would be free of the Martian directives.
She didn't know. She could only hope.
Long after the high degree of intelligence she now possessed came
to her, (that too having been something imposed to increase her
effectiveness as an instrument) she had prayed to be free of pain and
imprisonment. Even where there was not the capacity to formulate any
awareness of her merely being used, or of being a prisoner of others,
she had felt the primitive cellular discontent that had now become open
and passionate desire for freedom.
Maybe after this was done, she would be free for the first time that
she could really remember. What she could do with it, where she could
go, where she could hide with it, whether she could even live to enjoy
it, if in fact she could enjoy something she had never had, was really
not of much consequence to her as she ran and thought about it. Even
one brief flare of freedom would be its own exultant reward.
Figures made a scrambling chaos of unreality out of the area which
usually displayed such a paradoxical atmosphere of quiet peacefulness.
Sirens shrieked. Helios hummed and hovered nervously, then darted off
in angled desperation through the slanting rays of dusk. Evidently
there were a fortunate few whose emergency obligations were taking
them elsewhere. And a few others, undoubtedly, who were escaping in
guilt-ridden cowardice from an intolerable suspense.
She jumped, slid the cowl back, crawled into the plastoid bubble before
the two-seated passenger helio. The controls were simple. She had
watched Daddy Mike many times as he commuted to and from Lake House.
Jokingly he had let her sit on his lap and play with the controls, not
being able even to suspect what she was really learning, and what the
end result would be.
As the helio whirred to lifting life, Mary did not bother with
altitude. That would come later. She sent the helio skimming low over
the courts and the landing plots, over the monuments and fountains,
toward the pits.
Warnings would be going out across the decentralized populations of the
nation. Terror would be creeping over the land as the G-Agent would
creep over it soon, very soon now.
One thing she was still sure of--no one knew, or could even suspect,
the identity of the saboteur they were searching for.
She heard the gasp, then a sort of whimpering moan, and that changed
even as she turned with tense sharpness, to hoarse and spasmodic
laughter.
She seemed geared to any emergency, so that nothing, such as this,
could be a surprise. A surprise would mean temporary indecision. She
could not afford that. She turned, keeping the controls level, and
raised the gun.
A man was on his knees, his hands gripping one another. His eyes
and teeth protruded, and saliva ran out of the corner of his mouth.
Evidently he was a civilian employee, a clerk with his anonymous brown
suit and his shaven head. Someone who had felt no strong identification
with the plant except that it was a job, it was security. So now that
it had turned into a giant gas capsule, he had only wanted to get away
from it. His eyes kept bulging as they stared at Mary. They didn't
believe in Mary. He was trying to laugh away what wasn't logical. But
he couldn't laugh it away.
"I was told to lay off the neuro-tabs," he whispered. "The medic
told me I'd start flipping--flip, flip--he said--if I took too many
neuro-tabs. He was right. I've flipped. I'm gone." Then the laughter
that was not laughter really broke out all over him like a rash, and
it filled the interior of the helio. "I've run away from my job when
the alarm sounded!" He started screaming. "I can't go back anyway. No
job--hell--I'm finished no matter what!"
He bent forward and groped for the button that would open the rear
helio door. Mary lowered the gun, hoping this man's own madness would
make it easier for her. Adjusting the blast so that it would kill him
without releasing too much deadly kinetic energy within so small a
space would be a delicate thing. It was highly dangerous.
He turned while the wind sucked at him and flapped his brown suit
around his bony legs. He blinked slowly at Mary and tears ran down his
cheeks. "Even if you're not real, you're the last I'll see, the last
thing. So good-bye!"
The air pulled him abruptly out into its deceptive nowhere. For an
instant, she felt drawn to his lonely pathway of escape. She wanted to
say after him, "Good-bye," but she couldn't.
As the helio swung to the left, the rocket lifted with strange
slowness, heavy and steady, on its column of fire. Reality compressed
to only the helio and a narrowly restricted line between the gun and
the lifting rocket.
A few other helios moved in the area, but none nearly this close to the
rocket. Observers would know. Once the thing was done, she wondered if
she could possibly escape. They would know that the destructive blast
came from this helio.
[Illustration: A section of the cowling slid back. The helio slowed,
hung suspended. Mary aimed slightly upward. She felt the automatic
sight adjuster clicking delicately, the slight tug as the mags tilted
the barrel directly into the meticulous balance of the firing jets.]
As she fired, she sent the helio straight up at maximum speed and the
cowling slid closed.
* * * * *
This was the end of her assignment. The gun's full charge had been
exhausted. It was no longer of any use. She dropped it. She knew the
hit had been direct. A glance showed the rocket already curving in
a terrible kind of deceptive gentleness away to the right over New
Washington. Soon its parabola would become a screaming plunge. Nothing
could divert it. To try to destroy it in the air would mean nothing,
for in any case, its deadly tons of G-Agent would be spread on the
winds over the land.
The Foundation and everything in it would by now be thoroughly
contaminated by the G-Agent she had released inside. It would take a
long time to decontaminate, to rebuild. And a lot of people were going
to die, would be dying now. The antidote would save many from death. It
would preserve others short of death in a state she could not envy, for
to her it would be far worse than dying.
But Mary could hardly concern herself with the wrecking of the
Foundation, or the people who would die. Her concern was intense--to
escape, to hide. And to know for certain whether or not, now that her
task was done, the agonizing coercive directions from the Martian
rocket would continue.
So far there was no hint of this. She only wanted to get away. There
were no invisible fingers probing in there, none of the drawing to
tautness that had so many times ended in torture. Maybe, somehow, the
directive rocket with its intricate mechanism was delicately equipped
to know when her job was successfully done.
She would soon know.
The helio whined with strain. A shiver racked the metal. A scream burst
from Mary's lips. She concentrated on her hands, forced the controls,
drove the helio at maximum speed, trying to head across the park
reserve toward the river and the great National Forest area.
But already they were in close pursuit. Figures were running in all
directions far below.
The stars were breaking out and it was night now except for the glare
of the exploding rocket far to the left. Now below the forest area
shifted into view and the winding shine of the river.
Night was the best time for the spreading of the G-Agent. Inversion
was right. The stuff swept along close to the ground which cooled more
slowly than the air. That, too, had been planned. The timing was
right. Everything had been worked out right.
But now--what was to happen to her?
She felt none of the probing demands from the direction rocket. She
felt not even a hint of them. Perhaps they had gone away forever and
she was free. Free! FREE!
They wanted her alive, or her helio with her as part of it, would have
been disintegrated long before this. She could understand why. The
worst that she could do she had done. There was no need in killing
her to prevent more sabotage. They wanted her alive. They wanted to
know who she was, what she was, what organization or organizations
she represented, if any. They had no idea who she was. Or at least
it seemed unlikely yet that they had found out. Perhaps they even
thought she was a Martian. Whatever they thought, they didn't know. She
realized how desperately they had to know.
The helio dropped straight down toward the deceptive softness of the
forest sea. The wind sighed around the helio as the green darkness
loomed up, seeming to rush up from all sides, its softness changing
suddenly into the harshness of jagged limbs and bulging trunks. She
clung to the dead controls as though there were some kind of promise in
them, some solidity. But everything dropped from under her, a sickening
dislocation, as she clung as though she had no support, as though the
earth itself were falling away.
The tearing impact was like a thousand echos of her terrors.
And the forest and the wet shine of harsh wood that tore metal and
ripped like flashes of hot light, the blanket of crushing leaves, and
the cooling shadows rushed smothering in around her.
Lights fingered through the leaves. She could hear footsteps,
stealthy and invisible, flowing among the lights. The lights moved
around, streaming in from all directions, like the shifting bars of a
tightening cage.
She wasn't dead! When she moved slightly in the twisted shine of metal,
a beam of light glanced from it in a blinding glare. She felt the pain
from her torn leg. Her right side seemed crushed. She felt the hotness
of blood burning her ribs.
She heard voices murmuring through wet leaves, caught the slight
movement of protective green suiting and the shining leer of gas masks.
They were far upwind now from where the rocket had crashed to spew out
its lethal loads. She didn't know as she squirmed desperately through
the jagged hole in the metal, whether or not one of the many subsidiary
rockets had exploded up wind from this location.
It was something to look forward to.
She tried to suppress the whimpering moan as the torn leg scraped over
the metal. Then she dropped to the damp leaves and crouched there and
wondered which way to go. The light beams moved in, criss-crossed now
like a tightening wire mesh. She crawled, digging her fingers into the
leaves. The leaves whispered a call to her from above.
The light swung. Its beam flooded full and blindingly in her face. A
gun came into view over the edge of the beam and feet smashed toward
her through the brush.
Her only weapon was the oldest one of all. She sprang up. The beam
flashed upward in a wavering circle as her hands closed on the man's
throat. Her weight carried him scrambling back. His heels caught. He
fell. His hands stabbed around with the gun as his breath choked off
and his muscles worked with panicky power. With her left hand she dug
into his windpipe. She released the other hand and tore the mask away,
ripping the tough fiber like rotten cloth.
She flung the flashbeam away, dragged the guard into the brush. Light
beams slashed around as she crouched among the leaves. The man no
longer struggled. When she took her hand away from his throat, he still
did not struggle.
A beam flashed full over her, held. Someone yelled wildly: "The guy who
fell out of the helio! He was right. Oh God--he wasn't crazy!"
"Don't shoot! Don't shoot, you idiot!"
"I tell you he was right! It's Mary! The man was right--"
"Don't shoot! That's an order!"
She leaped up, caught the limb. She went on up among the thick sweet
concealment of a thousand leaves. She swung into the next tree, then
the next, faster and faster she moved. The leaves skimmed past her
face.
Her breath came in ecstatic gasps as the light beams faded behind, and
the damp dark freedom of the trees spread away in all directions.
She knew which way to go. And she was going there a long time before
she even realized the fact. She wondered vaguely for a moment then
how it was that she knew where to go, for it was a long way, over the
river, and through the hills and the forest.
Guards in helios whirred everywhere in the night clouds. Cars whined
through the narrow roads around her. A net formed through the forest. A
net of men, guns, lights, cars, helios, and many kinds of detectors.
For what seemed much longer than it was, her strength held.
* * * * *
It enabled her to pierce the net again and again when they were sure
she was trapped. She went over it, under it, through it, part of the
thick night in the trees and the brush. The river was the worst, for
she hated water.
But she could no longer climb through the comparative safe corridors of
the trees. She could no longer run. Air sucked between her teeth. One
leg dragged behind her as she crawled slowly through the dark, along
the lake, up the winding path. She could only crawl. Finally crawling
became a hitching dragging effort that slowed with each attempt.
Blood and dirt had formed a sticky mud over her leg and ribs and chest.
Damp leaves stuck to her, and the bitter rocks of the path leading
up to the cabin had cut her flesh. There were lights in the windows
of Lake House. The windows and the door were open to the warm night.
Beyond the cabin she could see Daddy Mike's helio on the landing.
How quiet and peaceful it is, she thought, here by the lake in the
forest in the night. The moon moved from behind the clouds and spread a
warm golden mist over the ground. Frogs sang from the lake below. And
from all around came the insistent humming and stirrings and singings
of life, but all muted and peaceful and subdued to make the night
peaceful and quiet.
She dug her fingers into the rock of the path. Her body dragged on a
little at a time. She whimpered again, but not very loud. Her body
flattened in a weariness that was only a little above defeat. Her face
pressed to the cool stone.
"Daddy," the inexpressible thought was a whisper in her mind. "Help me,
Daddy. You love me--"
She remembered the warmth inside, the old man with his warm laughter,
taking her on his lap, caressing her, swinging her up on his shoulders
and walking with her along the lake in the evening. She thought of the
old man who loved her.
The thought gave her enough strength to reach the open door. She lay
there sighing in her chest, her face pressed against the wood.
She raised her eyes to the interior of the cabin.
She tried to move nearer, tried to lift her hand up into the shaft of
light. She wanted to call out, say something. Only a low inaudible moan
strained through her clenched teeth.
She rolled half over. Inside then, she saw Daddy Mike. He was sitting
near the big radio panel, his head bowed and resting on his hands. On
the other side, through the open door, she could see the gleam of glass
and metal from the big laboratory. A spasm went through her. She could
hear the sounds of caged life in there.
Lights blinked on the radio panel. Michelson slowly raised his head and
twisted a dial. "Yes," he said. She could hardly hear him. He seemed
very tired, more tired than she had ever seen him. And much older too.
Old and thin and tired.
"Mike--"
"Hello, Engstrand."
"I've got Guards on the way up there, Mike! Has that damn thing showed
up yet?"
"No--not yet."
"I don't know why I never figured it would try to get back there. But
that's where it's heading, we're sure of it now. Listen, Mike--if
it does get up there before my men do, remember, don't kill it! Do
anything you can think of, but keep it there and don't kill it!
Apparently it's wounded anyway!"
"Yes, yes," Michelson said. He brushed at his eyes.
Mary lay there, half inside the open cabin door, imprisoned by her
inability to speak. She stared into the laboratory, then at Michelson.
"We're set back at least five years, Mike! It's a hellish thing! But
who could have anticipated a thing like that?"
"I guess nobody could."
"We're getting things under control, but it's hell down here! We don't
know yet how many people have died."
"How could it be," Michelson said. "I've tried to figure out--"
Engstrand's voice was loud. It seemed to Mary that he was right there
in the cabin with Michelson. "It's obvious what happened, Mike! Those
first experimental rockets we sent up there. The damn Martians got hold
of one of those chimps and worked on it. Sent it back and we didn't
suspect the difference. They made it intelligent enough to plan and
execute this whole thing! They must have put one of their own brains
into it or something. Only a damn Martian would think of a thing like
that!"
Michelson's head raised quickly. From the side, Mary could see his eyes
suddenly widen. Then he wiped his hand across his lips.
The hand trembled. "Of course," he whispered then. "But who could ever
have suspected it?"
"That's the only explanation," Engstrand said. "We've got to have that
chimp alive! We can learn plenty from it. We'll cut in there and put
that brain under observation...."
"I'll do what I can, if Mary shows up here," Michelson said. "But those
Guards should get here!"
"They will, Mike! They will! They're on their way."
Mary dug her fingers into the floor. She moved slightly, and one hand
fell with a slight thud. Michelson looked down. He kept on staring.
His lips moved without saying anything a few times, then he stammered.
"Engstrand--she's here!"
"What? What?"
"She's here--here on the floor. She just--just crawled in through the
door!"
"Don't kill her! Get a hypo or something--"
Michelson slowly stood up. "There's no danger," he finally said, still
looking down at her. "She's wounded all right. She looks almost dead
now."
"Don't let her die!" Engstrand's voice filled the room. "You've got to
keep her alive!"
"All right, I'll do what I can," Michelson said. "You'd better come up
now. Bring the medics. We may have to work on her fast."
"I will. I'm on my way!"
* * * * *
She wanted to say no. She wanted to scream out no and tell him it was
all wrong. If the Martians had given her the ability to speak, she
could have explained everything long before this, and they could have
helped her, and none of this would have happened. She could explain how
she was forced to kill and destroy.
Michelson backed away from her, haltingly, then ran into the lab. He
came back out and knelt down. He had a long hypodermic needle. The
needle came down. It looked bigger and bigger.
She had thought maybe he would understand. But he didn't. He couldn't.
Nobody could.
A few words could have made all the difference. But she could not speak.
What she wanted to explain most of all was that it was no kind of
Martian intelligence that had been given to her. The Martians had no
familiar kind of intelligence. They had worked on her, developed her
own brain to its capacity. If they only knew that here it would be so
different. I'm more like you, she wanted to explain, more like you than
you could possibly guess. She could say nothing.
She could only whimper as the needle went in. Dimly, she saw the table
wheeled out, the shiny familiar gleam of the instruments, the septic
chrome containers and the rising cleansing waves of steam.
She felt herself being lifted to the table. The wheels turned
inexorably under her. The ceiling swam in a blur above her. The gray
aging tired face bent over her. She could roll her eyes back and see
the dark mouth of the laboratory door opening wider and wider as she
was wheeled toward it, through it--
You said you loved me, she thought, as he bent over her and she could
hear the clinking of glass. But you never did because if you did you
would understand, even though I cannot speak.
She closed her eyes. Around her were the familiar smells, the
antiseptic, the chemicals, the odor of animals waiting to die or be
experimented on in their cages. She could hear the chattering of
the monkeys, the coughing of dogs, the squealing of rats. She could
remember how the placid guinea pigs would be seeking one anothers'
warmth in the corner of a cage.
It was all beginning again, and there would never never, she knew, be
an ending to it.
She clutched at his hand, squeezed it between her hands and pressed it
against her cheek.
"Daddy," the thought whispered unheard, "Daddy Mike--"