by Jerry
Out to sea again, on the last leg of the trip. Sometimes he bends down, whispers low, like a prizefighter’s second in his corner when the bout’s going against him: “You can make it. Just a little longer, honey. Do it for O’Shaughnessy.” Sometimes, in the depths of night, he goes up on the boatdeck, shakes his fist—at what? The ship, the limitless ocean, the elusive horizon that never comes any nearer, the stars overhead that don’t give a rap?
The rabbit’s paw has hardly been out of his palm the whole way over. All the pelt’s worn off it with his stroking. His thumb has developed an ineradicable habit of turning inward on itself, circling his palm. “You and me,” he says to it grimly. “We’ll do the trick.”
Frisco at last. And as the anchor plunges into the waters of the bay—they’ve made it—! The three of them, he and she and the rabbit’s foot. There’s still a voice behind that mask—faltering, weak, but alive. Still living eyes behind those immobile eyeholes with their double tier of lashes—real and artificial.
He’s wirelessed ahead from the Islands for a cabin plane, and it’s tuned up and waiting at the airport over in Oakland. He gets Nova through the gang of reporters clogging the deck, has her carried down the gangplank on a stretcher while flashlights go off around her like a constellation. Into a car outside the Customs House, while the newsmen like a pack of hounds in full cry swarm around them, yapping. But there’s one man who doesn’t pepper him with questions, doesn’t say a word—just takes a good look at the beautiful graven face being transferred from stretcher to car, and then dives into the nearest phone-booth. O’Shaughnessy isn’t near enough to overhear him ask for long-distance . . .
And then the plane, with a relief pilot to spell O’Shaughnessy. Up and due east. “And we don’t come down again for snow or rain or fog or engine-trouble until you hit Louisville,” says O’Shaughnessy.
All through the day they hurl through space. “You got that Kentucky map I asked you to get hold of?”
He locates the mountain on it finally, draws a big ring around it. “Here’s where we come down, inside that circle.”
“But on what? How do we know what’s there? It’ll be dark long before we make it,” the relief pilot protests.
“Here’s where we come down,” is O’Shaughnessy’s remorseless answer, “if we splinter into match-wood. Here, right on the perimeter, where this feeder branches off from the trunk-highway on the west and climbs up. That’s as close as we can get.”
“Radio ahead, contact one of the towns near there to have something waiting for you at that point, otherwise you may be held up for hours.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” nods O’Shaughnessy. He starts calling the county seat.
Nova shakes her head, He bends down close to hear what she wants to say. “That may bring them down on us, if you mention the place—tip them off where we’re going to land.”
“How can they beat our time in, unless they’re already somewhere around there?”
“But that’s it, they may be. You wirelessed him from Honolulu and mentioned a chart of this one county. They may have intercepted that message. They’re likely to be within reach of your set, and this’ll bring them right to the exact spot.”
“Then that’ll bring them grief!” is all he says. He fiddles with the dials. “Hello, Wellsville? This is a private chartered plane coming your way, with a desperately ill passenger on board. We need ground transport badly . . .”
“Hello, this is Wellsville. This is Wellsville. There are no facilities here.”
“I’m not asking for hospitalization. All I want is ground transport. I want a car where Route 19 bisects the highway.”
“Well—I dunno—”
“Have you been reading the papers lately?” O’Shaughnessy barks. “This is Penny O’Shaughnessy—Yes, yes, the ‘Dying-Alive Girl,’ if you insist! Now do I get a car at that particular spot?”
“I’ll start out now.”
“We don’t want any publicity. Come alone. We should be there by ten. Tilt your headlights upward to guide us, keep snapping them off and on at two minute intervals, we’re going to have to land in pitch-darkness. If we live through it, be ready to start off at a moment’s notice. Don’t let us down, there’s a human life at stake. This is her last chance.”
Louisville, an hour after dark, is a carpet of gilt thumb-tacks below them, with straight, twinkling lines like strings of beads leading out from it. Southeastward now, toward the Tennessee state-line.
At nine a continuous line of little pinpoints, stretched straight as an arrow, shows up below. They follow it, flying so low now the twinkling lights of an occasional car crawling along it seems to be right under them. Then, in thirty, forty minutes, a firefly down there in the dark fields, going off, on, off, on.
O’Shaughnessy clutches his pilot jubilantly by the shoulder. “See it? Here, gimme the controls—I couldn’t go wrong, not this late in the game!”
Around and around in a narrowing spiral. Then way out, and around, and in again in a straight swoop that barely seems to skim the roof of the waiting car. “Hold on!” he warns, and slaps the pocket holding the rabbit’s foot. The earth comes up flat like a blackboard. A jolt, a rise, a dip, another bump, a short stretch of wobbly taxiing, a shudder, and he cuts off his engine.
The car, waiting off across the field, has lowered its headlights to guide them. Carrying her between them they waver toward it up a thinly-talcumed path of light-motes. A rail fence shows up. “All right, driver! You in the car!” shouts O’Shaughnessy. “Come out here and give us a hand over this!”
A figure jumps out, hurries to meet them on the outside of the fence.
They ease her over the top rail, the newcomer holding her in both arms until O’Shaughnessy can scramble over and relieve him.
They pass her into the back of the car. Then suddenly, a dark motionless outline shows up a little way up the side-road, under shadowing trees that all but blot it out—materializes into a second car, unlighted, stalled, apparently deserted.
The plane pilot, who has been standing off to one side, looking on, cries out: “Hey, there’s a guy lying here at the side of the road, out—”
“Take it easy, pal,” an unseen voice purrs. An orange hyphen flicks toward the pilot from somewhere just behind the car. A report shatters the crossroads’ stillness, and the pilot leans over toward the road, as though he saw a coin lying there and was languidly about to pick it up.
O’Shaughnessy doesn’t wait for him to complete the fall. He whirls back toward Nova, flings out his arms to keep her from going into this car that is a trap. The blurred oval of a second face, not that of the man who helped to carry her to it, looms at him in the dark, above her body.
“No you don’t,” a voice says blandly, “she’s coming with us—we’re taking up where we left off that night—and she ain’t fooling us this time!”
A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O’Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there’s a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall.
A voice from the car says blur redly, while the ground rushes up to meet him, “Finish him up, you guys! I’m getting so I don’t trust their looks no more, no matter how stiff they act!”
Three comets seem to dart down at him as he lies there on the ground. Asphalt-grits fly up beside his skull. A hot wire creases his side while something that feels like a mallet pounds his shoulder. He can feel his mouth opening; he must be trying to say something.
Far away, from some low-flying soundless plane in the skies, a pair of voices reach him. “Did you hear where they were headed for?”
“Yeah, and it sounds like a swell idea—”
High up over him the chattering motor swells into a roar, the air he is trying to breathe is sucked away from him along the ground, grit and road-dust swirl over him. God, they’re flying low! What’re they trying to do—? Looking down his own body he can
see a red light poised momentarily on the toe of his shoe. Then it dips below it, and it’s gone. And he’s alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he’s never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.
He wants to sleep so badly—dying they call it—and he can’t. Something’s bothering him to keep him awake. Something that won’t let him alone. Not about Nova, not about the still pilot either. Something about this other, strange guy.
And then he remembers. The guy has a car, that’s what it is. The guy brought a car here. The guy is dead now, but the car is still standing there, back a little ways under some trees. He saw it himself.
He’s got to get into that car. He may be half-dead, but cars don’t die; it’ll get him wherever he wants to go, good as ever. And where he wants to go is just where Nova is, no matter where.
He rolls over on his face first. And a lot of hot wet stuff comes out on his shoulder and his chest and hip. That makes everything come alive again and hurt like blazes. He starts pulling himself around the other way, with his good arm and shoulder for a propeller, like something maimed that ought to be put out of its misery with a big stick.
Then when he gets all the way around in a half circle, there’s the car, with the pilot and the other guy for milestones leading to it. He starts dragging himself toward it. He can tell it’s no use trying to get up on his feet.
He comes up to the pilot first, rests full length beside him a minute, reaches out, shakes him a little.
Frazier moans a little—almost a bleat—stirs a little.
O’Shaughnessy inches on toward the car. Like a caterpillar goes, contracting in the middle, expanding again, contracting, expanding. Like a caterpillar someone’s stepped on, though. He leaves a moist trail behind him along the asphalt roadbed.
It’s easy to rear up as high as the running-board, but above that there’s a long unbroken stretch of glossy tonneau up to the door-handle. He makes it, on the heels of his hands and the points of his elbows, using them for grips, like vacuumcups. The window’s down, luckily, and a hand on the sill of the frame keeps him up. He falls, sprawling, into the seat.
Light funnels out of the dead headlights again, across the two men on the ground. He jockeys slowly around, then straightens out.
The rush of air through the open windows clears some of the cobwebs from his bullet-stunned mind. He knows where they went, and where to follow. “Did you hear where they were heading for?” the first voice had said. And the second answered, “Sounds like a swell idea.”
The dirt-packed mountain-detour branches off at last, and the new-made treads of the car ahead are plainly visible along it. It’s a hard trail to tackle, with just one good arm to steady the wheel by, and a grade like a loose plank tilted before your face, and obscuring branches and foliage whistling in at you through the windows.
The barbed-wire fence starts up beside him after awhile. He wonders if Denholt still lives behind it. The scooped-out hollows of their ruts are still before him, plain as day, and broken branches hanging down at right-angles. The fence suddenly crumples into the ground, and a big gap torn in it where the gate used to be, where he remembers it, shows him how they got in.
He turns in after them, brakes only when their own car, broad side to him, blocks further progress. Beyond, the house shows palely against his partly-deflected headlights. He gets out, bangs the car door after him out of habit, lurches over to their car, steadies himself against it for a moment. Caution is for the healthy. He laughs sort of crazily and stamps onto the wooden porch. He hangs onto the door-frame for a minute, then goes on through the unguarded opening.
They haven’t even closed the door after them, they’re so sure they’ve left all opposition dead behind them where the highway crosses Route 19. That white light from the laboratory is streaming out to guide him. They’re in there, all of them; he can hear their voices as he comes draggingly nearer. One voice, raised above the others, strident, threatening.
“Don’t tell us you don’t know what we mean! Why the barbed-wire fence and all the trimmings, if it ain’t around here somewhere? Why was the Brown girl, here, heading this way so fast with that guy she calls her husband? And a nifty place, if there ever was one! Here we was thinking it was somewhere down in the Florida keys all the time! That’s just like the Boss, goes off on a cruise in one direction to cover up, sends the do-re-mi in another. He was always smart that way, always doing things like that. Now you be smart.”
“There’s no money here. I don’t know who you are, what brings you here, but there’s no money here. Only the—the results of a lifetime of—For God’s sake, be careful!”
That’s Denholt’s voice. Already O’Shaughnessy has reached the threshold by now and stands there looking in at them like an apparition, unnoticed. Their backs are all to him, even Nova’s, gripped cruelly between two of them, held upright. Only Denholt is facing his way, at bay against the far wall.
Even from behind, O’Shaughnessy can spot one of those backs, Tereshko.
X
He is standing near a retort filled with colorless fluid; as Denholt’s frantic warning singles it out, his elbow has just grazed it, caused it to teeter. The plea has exactly the opposite effect it was intended to; it is something precious to that old crank standing there before him, so his impulse is to destroy it forthwith. He deliberately completes the shove, sweeps it off the trestle it rests on. “Nuts with all this junk y’got here! This is a phony front. Who y’think y’kidding?”
The retort shivers into pieces on the floor. Its contents flood out, spread, dissipate beyond recovery.
Denholt lets out a hoarse, anguished cry. And leaps at the wanton destroyer of his whole life’s work. Tereshko’s gun raps out almost perfunctorily; smoke blooms between them; Denholt staggers, turns around the other way, then goes down to his knees slowly like a penitent in prayer.
They hear him say, in the brief silence: “Yes, it’s better this way—now.” Then he falls forward on his face.
O’Shaughnessy’s leap for Tereshko crashes through the rear-guard, sends the four behind Tereshko lurching off-balance. Nova released, totters aside, keeps herself from falling against the edge of the operating table. They whirl, see who faces them and forget, in their utter disbelief, to use their guns. Tereshko goes down backward, his neck caught in the grip of O’Shaughnessy’s arm, while the Irishman’s other fist is pounding, flailing, slashing, into the side of Tereshko’s head and ribs.
The struggle doesn’t last long; it’s too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it’s easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeer’s collar.
Tereshko is trembling with his anger. “Now him again!” he protests, as though at an injustice. “All they do is die and then get up and walk around again! What’sa matter, you guys using spitballs for slugs? No, don’t kick at him, that’ll never do it—I think the guy has nine lives!”
“Wait!” The mask has spoken, and they turn in awe at the impassive face looking at them. Face that lies now if it never did before—so calm, so untroubled, so serene, at the scene before it. “What is it you want of us—of me? Why do you hound us like this? What have we ever done to you?”
Tereshko sneers, “You’re Benedetto’s girl, ain’t you? You’re Jane Brown, ain’t you? You oughta know what we want of you. We did his dirty work for seven long years, you just come in on the pay-off at the end. Where’s the profits of those seven years, when two bits out of every fifty-cent glass of beer drunk east of the Mississippi went into his pockets? Where’s the million and a quarter dollars in gold and Federal Reserve notes that dropped from sight when he was arrested?”
“I never saw or knew Benedetto,” says the mask slowly.
“You lying tomato! I’m looking right at the face he used to kiss in front of all of us. I’m looking right at the face that stood in a diamond frame on his bureau, every time I went
in there to make a report. I’m hearing the voice that used to call him Benny-boy, I’m seeing the eyes that cried when he got sent away—Oh no! You’re Jane Brown, all right.”
Gloved hands rise from the enfolding cloak, undo tiny straps behind the ears, below the golden hair on top of the head. “Look closer still—and tell me if I’m Benedetto’s girl—if I’m Jane Brown!” The face drops off—a shell—and yet repeats itself, identical, still unravaged, only paler, beneath.
They gasp in surprise. And then in the midst of a deep silence, Tereshko says: “All right, that’s a mask—so what?” but his voice trembles a little.
Her hands flutter up and down the cloak-fastenings, seize it to throw it open. “Look closer,” she says, “and tell me if you know me!”
“No, Nova—don’t!” O’Shaughnessy cries from the floor.
She says softly: “Close your eyes, O’Shaughnessy, and keep them closed, if you love me. For no love could survive this—no love in all the world.” Dumbly obedient, he holds his hands there in front of his eyes. A rustle of Nova’s cloak, a swirl of air as it flies back. A choking sound from someone near him. A gun thudding to the floor. Then a wild, terrible scream—a sudden rush of feet, five pairs of them, around and past him and toward the door. A stampede of mortal terror.
“Get away from me! What—are you?”
Above it all, her voice, serene, sepulchral. “Now—am I Benedetto’s girl—am I anyone’s girl any more?”
Across the wooden floor of the front of the house rushes the retreat of scuffling shoe-leather. A door bangs. The motor of their car comes to life—gears clash and scream. The car sound dies away—then suddenly comes a far-off crash carried thinly on the still night. One dim, final cry of pain and death—and dead silence drops at last like a curtain on a play. Within the room, for long minutes, there is no movement.