by H. B. Fyfe
“I’m not kidding at all,” said Parrish. “Did you look everywhere? Are you sure?”
“I even poked into the power shaft,” retorted Westervelt. “Were you in his office?”
“Naturally. I checked everything, even the men’s room.”
They had wandered back to the corridor door, peering about the laboratory to make sure no one could have concealed himself on the floor under a workbench, or behind a pile of cartons.
Parrish opened the door, and they stood puzzling at the empty hall.
“He wasn’t even taking a shower,” said the elder man.
Westervelt brooded for a moment.
“Did you say everywhere?” he insisted.
“Well…everywhere he would have any call to go.”
They stood there, passing the buck silently back and forth between them. At length, Parrish said, “I’ll just look again in his office and the other two rooms, in case he was, and slipped out behind me.”
Westervelt watched him run lightly up the hall to each of the doors. Parrish’s expression, as he returned slowly, was something to behold.
“I’ll go,” said Westervelt grouchily.
Parrish put a hand on his arm.
“No, that wouldn’t look natural. I’ll phone Smitty to send one of the girls down.”
“Better phone him to send two,” suggested Westervelt.
“Yeah,” agreed Parrish. “That’s even more natural. Watch the hall while I buzz them.”
He went into Lydman’s office. Westervelt leaned in the laboratory doorway, feeling depressed. After some delay, he sighted Simonetta and Beryl turning the far corner with their pocketbooks in hand. Neither one looked particularly pleased, but their expressions lightened a bit at the sight of him.
“You there, Pete?” murmured Westervelt.
“Right at the door,” whispered Parrish from inside Lydman’s office.
The girls clicked in muffled unison along the hall. Beryl paused at the entrance to the ladies’ rest room. She raised her eyebrows uncertainly at Simonetta. The dark girl threw Westervelt a puzzled shrug, then pushed past Beryl and went inside. The blonde followed almost on her heels.
Westervelt waited. When he thought he could no longer stand it, Parrish hissed, “How long are they in there, Willie?”
“I don’t know,” said the youth, “but maybe we’d better—”
The door opened. Simonetta and Beryl walked out, staring quizzically at the two men, who had taken a few steps toward them.
“What is this gag?” asked Simonetta. “There’s no one in there. Who would be in there?”
Parrish swore luridly, and none of them seemed to notice.
“It can’t be!” he exclaimed. “You’re sure?”
“Of course we’re sure,” said Beryl.
“What if the power came on and we didn’t notice?” mused Parrish. “He wouldn’t just leave and not tell any of us, would he?”
“You know him better than I do,” commented Beryl. “I’m beginning to wonder, from what you told us on the phone, if he jumped out of a window somewhere. I know it’s a terrible thing to bring up—”
Westervelt stopped listening to her. He was remembering the draft he had felt, twice now, in the laboratory.
TWENTY
Westervelt watched them walk up the hall. He thought of going back into the laboratory to find the open window. In his mind, he could see the straight, twenty-five story drop down the side of the dark tower to the roof of the larger part of the building.
He recalled having looked down once or twice. The people down there had paved patios outside their offices. A hurtling body would…
He shook the thought out of his head and hurried to catch up to Parrish and the two girls.
They trouped into the main office and took turns in telling Smith the story. He flatly refused to believe it for about five minutes. Ultimately convinced, he told Pauline to check Rosenkrantz by phone every ten minutes.
“If we’re wrong,” he said, “it’s unfair to have him sitting down there all alone. Bob might somehow have outsmarted us, but if he did it to this extent, it means he isn’t safe on the loose!”
Westervelt noticed that Simonetta was looking pale. He wondered about his own features. The eye would probably stand out very picturesquely.
“I don’t believe it,” he said when the others had all fallen silent.
They looked at him, hoping to be convinced.
“He isn’t that kind,” said Westervelt. “All right, you tell me he had a hard time in space and it left him a little off; but this doesn’t sound like the direction he would go off in.”
“What do you mean, Willie?” asked Smith intently.
“Well…maybe he’d run wild. Maybe he’d get desperate and blow something up. I could see him taking a torch to that door and burning anybody that tried to stop him…”
He paused as they hung on his words.
“…but I can’t see him quitting!” said Westervelt. “If he was that kind, he never would have gotten back to Terra, would he?”
Smith snapped his fingers and looked around.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking up in my imagination. We’ve all heard Bob utter a threat now and then, when some bems out in deep space broke his own private law, but no one ever heard him even hint at suicide.”
He grinned ruefully, and added, “I should have thought of it myself—I had to review his application and examinations when he came to us.”
“Some days,” said Parrish, “are just too much. Nobody’s fault.”
“Then, in that case,” said Westervelt, “there was one little thing I noticed.”
He told them about the open window. Who would keep a window open with the building air-conditioning operating as perfectly as it did?
Smith fell to running his hands through his hair again. “Now, let’s think!” he muttered. “There must be some logical explanation.”
Logical explanations, Westervelt thought, are always the reasons other people think of, not me.
He found a space to sit on the edge of the empty desk. Simonetta leaned beside him, and Beryl wandered over to the window of the switchboard cubicle to listen as Pauline checked Rosenkrantz.
She shook her head to Smith’s inquiring look.
Then Lydman strolled through the double doors.
“What’s the conference about?” he asked.
Beryl let out a shriek. Her back had been to the corridor when she jumped, but she came down facing the other way.
Everyone stiffened.
Lydman stood quietly, regarding them with considerable calm.
After a moment, Beryl tottered back to lean against the glass of Pauline’s window. She pressed one hand to her solar plexus, looking as if she might fold up at any breath.
“Oh,” she gasped. “Oh, Mr. Lydman…”
He examined her with a clinical detachment.
“Doesn’t someone have a tranquilizer for her?” he asked. “I don’t usually scare pretty girls.”
“Oh, no, no, no…it’s just that…I mean, everyone was worried about you,” stammered Beryl.
“Why?” asked Lydman. “Don’t you think I can take care of myself?”
For the first time, Westervelt noticed the curiously set expression on the ex-spacer’s face. He had until then been too busy watching Beryl and trying to calm his own nerves. He could not be certain, but it seemed as if Lydman’s forehead displayed a faint sheen of perspiration.
“Of course you can, Bob,” said Smith. “We were—”
Beryl, nearly to the point of hysteria in her relief, got the ball away from him.
“We were worried about the elevator being stopped,” she babbled. “And the door—you’ll never believe it, Mr. Lydman, but the door to the em
ergency stairs wouldn’t open!”
Westervelt thought he heard Parrish swear, then realized it had been his own voice. He started to step in front of Simonetta.
Parrish was moving slowly in Lydman’s direction, trying to look at ease but looking tense instead.
“Dammit!” shouted Smith. “Beryl, you’re fired!”
It did not seem to register on anybody, Beryl least of all. Lydman was confounding them all by standing quietly. His face tightened a little more at the news, but it did not seem to be the expression of a man who had just taken a bad jolt.
“I know,” he said. “I looked at it a couple of times after I saw the blackout downstairs.”
Smith regarded him warily.
“How do you feel, Bob?” he asked.
“You know how I feel,” said Lydman.
He let his gaze wander from one to another of them. Westervelt felt a chill as the handsome eyes looked through him in turn, but accepted the comforting realization that the stare was about as usual.
Beryl was the picture of a girl afraid to breathe out loud, but the others relaxed cautiously. Smith even planted one hip on the corner of Simonetta’s desk and tried to look casual.
“You seem to be doing pretty well,” he said. “We were thinking of looking in the lab for something to cut the latch with, but it might have been waste motion. They should be getting the power on any minute now.”
“I think…” Lydman began.
“Oh, I guess we could find something in the lists,” pursued Smith. “If you’d rather we look…?”
“I have several things we could use,” said Lydman.
He walked into the office proper and looked about for a chair. Westervelt stepped back of the center desk and brought him the chair of the vacationing secretary. Lydman sat down beside the partition screening the active files opposite Simonetta’s desk.
“In fact,” continued the ex-space, “I got them out when I was trying to figure how much that door would stand. Then I decided that would only raise a commotion.”
Westervelt watched him with growing interest. Now that he had the man at closer range, he was sure that it was a tremendous effort of will that kept Lydman so relatively calm. The man seemed to be seething underneath his tautly controlled exterior.
“What did you think of doing?” asked Smith carefully.
“Oh, I dug out a better gadget, one that would do me more good, anyhow,” said Lydman. “It’s a little rocket gun attached to a canister of fine wire ladder.”
“Wire ladder?” repeated Smith.
“Yeah. About six inches wide at the most. I opened a window and shot it up to the flight deck. Say—did you know some hijackers stole all three of our ’copters?”
“Stole all three of…” Smith’s voice dwindled away. When no one else broke the silence, he forced himself to resume. “Yes, I knew. What I would deeply appreciate, Robert, is your telling me how the hell you knew!”
He finished yelling. Westervelt thought that he looked at least as bad as Lydman. Anyone twenty feet away would have completely misjudged them.
“Just as I said,” answered Lydman with his tight calm. “I shot this ladder to the roof and climbed up.”
“You climbed up? Outside the building?”
“Of course, outside,” said Lydman, for the first time showing a trace of snappishness. “I couldn’t stand it inside.”
He looked around at them again, surprised that there was the slightest hesitation to accept his statement.
“We’ll have to redesign that ladder, though,” he said. “It’s a mite too fine—cuts the hell out of your hands!”
He held out his palms. Across each were several welts. One, on his right hand, had apparently resumed bleeding stickily since Lydman had come in. He fumbled out a handkerchief with his other hand and blotted it.
Smith held his hands to his head.
“I can’t swallow it yet!” he groaned. “You feel…uneasy…in here, so you go out a window ninety-nine floors in the air—”
“Only twenty-four above the set-back, really,” Lydman corrected him.
“It’s enough, isn’t it? So you go out, climb up to the helicopter roof, and then climb down again and back through the window! And you pretend to feel better. I would have had a heart attack!”
“Who wouldn’t?” said Westervelt.
The mere conception of what it must have been like made him feel sick.
“As long as I know it’s there,” muttered Lydman. “As long as I know it’s there. I can use that way any time. Just don’t anybody pull that little ladder down.”
“Would…?”
The meek little syllable came from Beryl, who had now managed to stand without the support of the partition.
Every head in the room swiveled to bear upon her. She gulped, and found part of her voice.
“Would there be an old martini lying around in the locker?” she asked. “I’m afraid to go for it myself because my knees feel as if they’ll collapse at the first step.”
There was a general outburst of laughter that revealed the enormity of their relief. Parrish hurried over to put an arm around the blonde, and Smith himself went to the locker and opened it.
With the break in the tension, Beryl managed to walk pretty well, perhaps with a little more swagger of the hips than usual, Westervelt thought. Smith found a drink for her, and insisted that Lydman have tea. The chief pulled the tab himself and held the cup for the few seconds required to heat the beverage.
Most of them, like Westervelt, had had too many coffees or sandwiches, and were content to sit down and regain their composure. Westervelt was mildly surprised to see Parrish take a position behind Lydman and knead the big man’s neck muscles to relax him.
“Did they tell you the news yet?” asked Smith. “We got two out—Syssoka and Greenhaven!”
“No!” said Lydman, managing a smile. “Tell me, but if I get up to leave in the middle, I’d rather you didn’t stop me.”
“Nobody is stopping anybody tonight!” said Smith, and fell to giving his assistant an account of Taranto and Meyers.
Westervelt got up quietly and padded into the switchboard cubbyhole.
“Lend me your headset, Pauline,” he murmured, “and punch Joe’s number.”
“Sure,” said the little blonde.
She left the screen off and kissed him behind the ear just as Rosenkrantz answered.
“Nothing personal, Willie,” she giggled. “I just feel so relieved!”
“Who is it now?” demanded Rosenkrantz’s voice. “You left the lens off, did you know that?”
“It’s Willie, Joe. He came back and he’s sitting down having tea.”
“Back? Where was he?”
Westervelt told him.
Then he told him again and switched off. Joe, he thought, would have to live with it for a while.
When he stepped out of the cubicle, everyone was watching Smith narrate, with broad gestures, the flummoxing of the staid authorities of Greenhaven. The chief was not above calling upon Parrish for an estimate of the charms of Maria Ringstad that caused an outcry among the girls. Lydman smiled politely, but not from the heart. He was still quietly reserved.
Everyone was watching Smith. No one paid any attention to the redhaired man who drifted into the office area just as Westervelt squirmed past Pauline and stepped out of the switchboard room.
The youth blinked at the topcoat over the man’s arm. He focused upon the wavy hair and reached for the man’s shoulder to turn him around.
“Charlie Colborn!” he yelped.
Smith got it first.
“Well, now,” he said, standing up. “If it’s getting so everybody and his brother start parading through that door at this time of night, I’m leaving! Where’s my hat, Si?”
Lydma
n had caught on almost as quickly, and was on his feet before the general whoop went up.
“I just want to phone my wife,” said Colborn. “It’s so late I might as well stay here the rest of the night. What’s keeping all of you?”
They glared at him.
“The power’s been on for fifteen minutes,” he told them. “I would have been up sooner, but that nut of a building manager insisted on running test trips with all the elevators before he’d let anyone come up.”
Lydman had started for the elevator, in shirtsleeves as he was and carrying a cup of tea in one hand and a bloody handkerchief. There was no doubt that he meant to go home that way.
“BOB!” roared Smith. “All of you—listen!”
Lydman stopped but did not turn around.
“In the first place, Charlie,” said Smith, “you are not going to call your wife from here unless you faithfully give the impression that you are all alone. If you slip, I’ll swear to her I saw you picked up by two redheads in a helicopter and you had all the office petty cash with you.”
“But—”
“Tell her the traffic was too much. Don’t tell her we couldn’t get to the street. That goes for everybody else too!”
“But…why?” Colborn got out.
“Why? You want the D.I.R. boys throwing this up to us every time I try to get money out of them for the bare necessities of our operation? We can get people out of dungeons on planets not even in the Galatlas, but can’t even escape from our own little hideaway?”
“It never happened,” Parrish agreed quickly.
“Damn’ right!” said Smith. “Okay, Bob, push the button! Go with him, Willie! You girls—nobody in before noon tomorrow; we have an extra TV operator to take care of things.”
“Look, I…” Colborn started to say as he stepped out of Westervelt’s way.
“Aw, thanks for phoning in the first place,” grinned Smith, punching him lightly on the shoulder. “Wait for me downstairs, Willie! We’ll see what we can do about Harris tomorrow!”
“Appoint him an ambassador,” muttered Westervelt, coming up behind Lydman as the elevator door slid smoothly open.