There were men with guns in the street. He'd heard two shots as he
came down the stairs, and had shoved Ellen behind him. But it was
silent now. People with dazed, frightened faces were still darting
into the houses, leaving the street to the men with the guns.
Hawkes marched forward grimly, perversely stripped of fear, even
though he was sure some of the men out there were monsters and others
were their dupes. He tapped one of the men on the shoulder.
"Okay, here I am. The girl goes free!"
The man spun around as if mounted on a ball bearing and pulled by
strings. The gun fell from his hands. His emotion-taut face loosened
suddenly, seemed to run like melted wax, and congealed again in an
expression of utter idiocy. He gargled frothily, and then
screamed--high and shrill, like a tortured woman.
Suddenly he was a lunging maniac, tearing up the street.
Now the others were running--some toward cars, and some toward the
corners, running flat and desperately on the flat of their feet,
without any spring to their motions.
Hawkes jerked his eyes down toward the big gas-storage tanks where
most of them had been, and the glow that had been in the corner of his
vision was gone. Men seemed to be coming out of a trance. They were
breaking away, forgetting about their guns and fleeing.
Three men alone were left.
Hawkes ducked back into the hall of the apartment, dragging Ellen with
him. The glass of the door was somewhat dirty, but it made a dim
mirror. He could see the slim young man and two others still there.
The two men darted into a waiting car, and the leader turned up the
street, running smoothly toward the apartment house.
Hawkes could make no sense of it--unless it was another of the seeming
tricks designed to drive him out of his mind. He had decided he was
one of the rats in the maze that didn't go crazy--the pressure could
drive him somewhat mad, but it couldn't keep him that way.
He didn't wait to see what had happened, or whether the sirens that
were sounding now were reinforcements for the men with guns or the
police. He didn't bother with the slim young man any more. They'd
apparently used their dupes to frighten out the people, and then had
scared off the dupes--the poor humans who didn't know what it was all
about. Now two of the three were gone, and the third monster was
coming for him.
He'd escaped before. But sooner or later, they'd catch him--once they
were sure he wouldn't be driven insane.
Or was this the beginning of insanity--a delusion of power, a feeling
that he could escape? He could never know, if it was. He had to assume
that he was sane.
* * * * *
He crouched back behind the stairs, while the young man in the gray
tweeds dashed up them. Then he headed out into the street. The siren
was near now--and tardily, he realized that the siren might herald the
coming of the real monsters. It was as easy to look like a cop as any
other human!
He jerked open the door of the nearest car, pulled Ellen in, and
kicked the motor to life. He gunned away from the curb, tossed it into
second, and twisted around the corner, straight toward the siren that
was nearest. At the last minute, he jerked to the side of the street,
to let the police car shoot by. "Never run from a tiger--run toward
it. It sometimes works, and it's no worse."
The car was a big one, and the motor purred smoothly. He glanced down
at the dash, and frowned. There was no key in the switch. For a
second, he stared at it, and then grinned. He'd picked a monster's
car, apparently--they'd done a neat job of duplicating, but they
didn't need all the safeguards that humans used, and the switch had
obviously been a dummy.
He looked at the buttons on the dash, wondering which would make it
levitate. But he had no desire to test it, nor to stay in an auto
which could probably be traced so easily.
He braked to a halt outside the subway and led Ellen down.
"We're down to the last hole," he told her as the train pulled out of
the station. "How much money do you have?"