Then his shoulders slumped, and he turned and walked toward the
elevators. Burgess was right. He felt worn out, and uninclined to make
grandstand plays. Besides, he thought, thumbing the elevator button,
it would be nice to see the _real_ Carol again, after her nebulous
pseudo-self. He wanted very much to put his arms around a girl who
wouldn't suddenly turn into something horrible in his embrace.
The steel doors slid open before him, and the elevator boy leaned out
to check the corridor for other passengers. "Down," he said. Jerry
nodded and started into the elevator.
Then he hesitated, and looked back toward the room where Mawson reigned
supreme, then back at the elevator boy. "Say," he said, uncertainly,
"that's a strange outfit for an elevator attendant in a hospital. I'd
have expected an orderly in an all-white getup."
The boy glanced down at his uniform, the bright blue pants, shined
black shoes, and scarlet jacket bright with twin rows of brass buttons.
"I suppose it is," he said. "But I don't usually run this elevator. I'm
from the hotel next door. I'm just doing this while the regular guy
takes his coffee break."
Jerry hesitated, then stepped toward the waiting elevator with its
pale gray walls. And stopped again. His hand went to his forehead,
bewilderedly. "There's something--" he said.
Then Carol was beside him, slipping her arm through his. "Come on,
Jerry," she said urgently. "We'll be late for our date."
Jerry looked at her, then at the hotel corridor behind her, then again
at the waiting elevator.
"I have the oddest feeling something's wrong," he said. "I--I don't
remember coming over here for you."
"You didn't," she said promptly. "I came for you, Jerry. This is your
hotel, remember? Doctor Burgess said you'd had a bad shock, but I
didn't know how bad till now."
"Shock?" said Jerry. "What shock? What was bothering me?"
Carol smiled tightly. "Nothing. Nothing at all. Come on, Jerry,
darling." Again she drew him toward the elevator.
"If I could only remember," he said, uneasily, on the brink of that
open cube of bright grayness. Then his eyes focused upon the brass
buttons fronting the boy's jacket, and at his own shadow as it passed
across those glowing hemispheres. As the shadow crossed a button, the
color would die, and the button would be dull crystal, and then glow
bright and brassy again when the shadow had passed.
"Photoelectric cells!" said Jerry. "Light-sensitive cells. Those aren't
buttons, they're eyes! Multiple robot eyes!" He staggered away from the
boy. Carol stopped him.
The elevator boy, suddenly half again Jerry's height, was towering
over him, long steel arms extending like hooked telescopes toward him.
"Get in, Jerry, get _in_!" cried Carol, struggling to push him forward
toward those invincible metal clamps.
In a fury of fear, Jerry fought her, grappled with her, twisted to
avoid those extending robot hands that would drag him to destruction.
And suddenly Carol was screaming his name, and her eyes were pools
of terror and betrayal, and the leaping metal fingers had buried
themselves in the soft flesh of her shoulders and dragged her back into
grayness.
Incredible energies came alive about her, and then there was only a
shimmer of dusty crystalline winds, and she was gone.
Jerry found himself standing before the still-warm plates of the atomic
duplicator, in the room where Mawson had had his short-lived universe.
Beside the machine, a squat cubic box dangled limp steel arms, its rows
of photo-electric cells losing their golden glow.
And then, as Burgess came hurrying in through the door, he toppled over
in a dead faint.
* * * * *
"So there is no such person as Carol?" said Burgess, standing at
the foot of the hospital bed. "She was only the figment of your
imagination?"
"Yes," said Jerry dully. "And all along, it was Mawson I was really
with. He was clever, all right. She was certainly the last occupant of
that crazy place I was likely to attack. If he had not tried attacking
me himself--I might be atom dust by now. A little longer, and she--he,
I mean--might have _talked_ me into that elevator."
"Well," said Burgess, "I'm sorry this thing ended with Mawson's
dissolution, but that can't be helped. You did your job well,
Lieutenant."
"Thanks," said Jerry, expressionlessly.
"To come so near death so many times--" Burgess shuddered. "You have
a remarkable constitution, not to have cracked under such a strain.
Lieutenant, you're a lucky man."
And Jerry, his mind still filled with a vision of golden hair, soft
brown eyes and warm, eager lips, could only echo wearily, "Very lucky."