Whatever Goes Up

by Troy Conway

  Beatrice Howard smiled cruelly. “You’re going to find out very soon. Rod. I’m going to turn the dials on each of those gravity belts so that they will lift you upwards, like a slow rocket bound for the moon.”

  She drew a deep breath and took two steps forward. Her right hand went to the topmost belt that was strapped about my chest. She touched the dial, ran her fingertips over it caressingly, and turned it.

  I felt the power surging through the belt, but I did not rise upward. It needed the lifting properties of a second belt for that. Bea ran her palm over the dial controls in the buckle of the second belt, but she did not turn on its power.

  Bea said, “You can reflect on your sins all the way to outer space. Rod. Once you get up into the atmosphere, you’ll find it very cold. I just hope you don’t freeze to death before you have a chance to think back on your failure. I want your death slow and painful in coming. I think it will. You aren’t going to die all at once. You’re going to have time to think and think while you wait for death to come and find you.”

  Maybe she wanted me to beg. I knew I would get no mercy from her, her hard face and cold eyes told me that much, so I would not give her the satisfaction. I stared up at the pale blue Bahaman sky and fluffy white clouds in the distance, and I tried to appear as nonchalant as possible even though I was damn near dying of fright inside me.

  “Nice day for a trip,” I managed to get out.

  Beatrice Howard stepped forward two paces and let me have the flat of her hand across my cheek. “Bastard! Double-crossing bastard!”

  I looked at her and made my lips smile. “You can kill me, honey—but something tells me I’ve won our personal little war.”

  She screeched and leaped for me. Laura Ogden and a couple of big guards jumped for her. They grabbed her and while she wriggled furiously, Laura panted, “No, Doctor Howard, no! You don’t want him to come down with scratch marks on his cheeks if anything should go wrong with the belts!”

  Beatrice Howard shook her body, nodding so that her black hair came tumbling down across one side of her face. “Y-yes, Laura. You’re ri-right.”

  She pushed back from the men, her hands going to her hair, rearranging and straightening it. Her face was a rigid white mask out of which her eyes burned like black diamonds. There was no pity, no mercy, in her face; it was like the face of a conqueror who sees his foes before him for the killing.

  “I know you don’t pray, so I won’t ask you to,” she snapped, and came to stand before me. Her fingers caught the dials of the second control belt and whipped them to full power.

  I shot skyward like a bullet.

  My eyes were closed in that first rush of speed, but I opened them to stare down at the upturned faces below me. Doctor Howard and Laura Ogden were smiling, the burly men were expressionless. I thought they all should be a little more excited. As far as I knew, they were looking at history. Nobody had ever been executed this way before.

  Then my bravado fell away.

  “No!” I screamed. “I don’t want to die!”

  I am afraid I cursed the Coxe Foundation and Walrus-moustache up and down and sideways while I was lifting up into the air. Until this moment, I doubted very much whether Beatrice Howard had ever used her gravity belts out of doors in the daytime. I hoped against hope somebody would see me, maybe somebody cruising the Exuma Cays in a speedboat.

  Then I thought, “What good will that do me?” By the time anyone could flash an alarm I would be up to the topmost limits of the exosphere bordering on the rim of space. I would be heading for the moon and damn near frozen to death if I weren’t already dead from the lack of oxygen.

  Beneath me the land spread away to the green cays, the water like a field of sparking diamonds in the sunlight. I made out a couple of yachts, and a number of cabin cruisers, far away. They were slightly larger than big dots, this high up. I doubted if they could have seen me if they’d been looking right at my rising body. It was getting harder to breathe. My teeth were chattering from the cold. My mind was getting numb too, because it seemed to be throbbing and roaring deep inside my skull. I listened to the sound my mind made. Did all dying people experience this sensation? The sound was getting louder.

  I struggled with the ropes that held my wrists behind me, I flailed with my legs, but none of it did any good. I went on rising and the sound got louder and louder. “Rod! Rod Damon!”

  Now I was hearing voices! Maybe there was a heaven, after all, and the angels were coming to get mc. I am not ashamed to say there were tears in my eyes. I drew several deep gulps of air.

  I gasped, “I’m re-ready—I—I guess.” Something touched my head and fell away. An angel was reaching for me! I babbled hysterically, laughing and crying. There was nothing up here but me and the clouds. Even the birds were far below me, by this time. Again I felt that brush of angel fingers.

  “Rod! Rod!”

  It was the voice of an angel, all right. A female angel. It was vaguely familiar too. At the time, I must have been more than somewhat out of my skull, because I began to think about the women I have known, and none of them was a candidate for angelhood. Now the sound in my head was ear-splitting.

  I saw a helicopter and a girl in cowboy clothes with a ten-gallon hat on her head and a lasso in her hand. She was leaning out of the open door of the chopper craft, reeling out the lasso while the whirlybird was rising upward just above me.

  “Angel,” I breathed. “I do know you!”

  It was Wanda Weaver Yule. Now I could make out the bulk of Walrus-moustache huddled in the space behind Wanda and the chopper driver.

  “I love you both,” I moaned happily.

  If I had been in any doubt before, I knew I was nuts now, telling the Chief that I loved him. Tears were streaming down my cheeks, there was a silly grin on my lips. I watched that lariat come for me the way a drowning man sees a life preserver twirling through the air.

  The lasso looped around me, pinning my arms against my sides. The loop tightened and I felt the sudden drag of the helicopter.

  Wanda was laughing and crying as her hands caught my belt and yanked me in. I fell across her lap, face up. She put her arms around me and began kissing me all over my cold, tear-wet face.

  “Baby—baby—what’ve they done to you?” she babbled.

  The Chief was more prosaic. He got out a pocket-knife and sawed away at the ropes binding my wrists until my hands were free. They were so numb, my arms were so stiff that Wanda had to reach behind me and draw my hands out from behind my back, one after the other.

  She chafed my hands between her palms to restore my circulation. She whispered, “Poor darling, they’re like ice. Here.” She put my hands under her hot little armpits and tightened her arms on them. The heat felt real good. So did Wanda Weaver Yule, who was all over perfume and soft flesh. I nested my head against her shoulder.

  Walrus-moustache always has to spoil a tender moment. “What are those things you’re wearing? They the gravity belts we’ve talked about?”

  I nodded, muttering, “One belt will lift a hundred and fifty pounds. They needed two for me.”

  “I’ll take them,” he snapped, and yanked them off.

  He was too busy studying the belts to pay me any attention, so I put my lips into the soft vee of Wanda’s red satin cowgirl shirt and kissed her in the vale of her breasts. She gurgled contentment, cuddling me.

  “Imagine destroying you,” she crooned. “What a waste for the women of the world!”

  “Yeah,” I breathed, nodding happily.

  It was taking me some little time to realize that I would not die, that I was still alive. I had been so near death, there had seemed so little hope—so little? there had been no hope at all!—that I still was not myself.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked her big breasts.

  She giggled, “You remember I told you how I was considering a return to the rodeo circuit? But what I needed was a new act, something with sock? Well, thanks to your marvelous boss-
man, I came up with something.

  “Rod, I’m going to fly down over a rodeo—say, at some open place like Pendleton or Cheyenne—rope a calf and fall on it from a choppercraft instead of from a horse. Don’t you think that’ll be sensational?”

  “Right, honey—almost as sensational as you are!”

  I fell asleep talking to her bosom.

  They woke me up as the helicopter landed on Grand Bahama island. I could walk, but the pilot was close beside me until I got into the little car the Chief had rented, along with the seaside villa where Midge Priest and Wanda Weaver Yule were his guests.

  A doctor filled me full of drugs so that I slept for about twenty hours in a queen-size bed with four mahogany posters and a ruffled chintz valance. It was a female-type room, with chintz drapery on the chairs, the vanity bench and the small night tables that flanked the bed.

  I lay there awhile, staring at the top of the bed, thanking my lucky stars for the fact that I was warm, alive, and damn hungry, rather than soaring outward into space behind the exosphere. I could eat, I could make love. I could breathe in fragrant air and bask once more in warm tropical sunlight.

  “Yaaa-hoooh!” I bellowed.

  I leaped out of bed and opened the closet door. I am familiar enough by this time to know how old Walrus-moustache works. He growls, he breathes dragon-fire, he rants and bellows, but he treats his agents like crown princes, at the very least. Nothing is too good for them, so long as they do their jobs.

  My clothes hung in the closet, my shoes were on the floor. A new shoulder-holster, straps dangling, hung on a closet peg, with a Colt .45 automatic thrusting from the brown leather sheath. Quite happily, I grabbed slacks and a sweater, and carrying the shoulder holster and the Colt downstairs, I moved in on the breakfast table.

  I dined in solitary, since it was close to ten in the morning. The maid told me everybody else was out on the beach, getting some sun. So after my ham and eggs, scrambled, plus a pot of coffee and some crumbcake, I sauntered out onto the white sands and stood admiring Midge Priest in a black bikini and Wanda Weaver Yule in a white bikini that set off her sun-bronzed skin to perfection. Even the Chief, in his droopy swim trunks, looked good to my happy eyes.

  Midge yelped and ran to me. I caught her, kissed her for several seconds, until Wanda yanked her away and kissed me herself. I put both arms about their bare middles and walked to the grinning man sitting on the beach blanket and holding up his hand for me to shake. Old Walrus-moustache actually looked human, for a change.

  “I know this isn’t the time to bring up business,” he began, when I interrupted him.

  “Oh, but it is. I want to get back there and pay off that Howard crowd for what they did to me.”

  “Smashing their Quonset hut isn’t going to do us much good,” the boss-man pointed out. “We have to hit them in their heartland, at their laboratory.”

  “I think I know where it is,” I gloated.

  I told him about the circle and dot on the map I had found, that had revealed itself when the hot Bahaman sunlight had touched it. “If that doesn’t mark where their lab is, I’m a cockeyed wombat. It’s got to be there. I’m going to find out if it is.”

  “We’ll all go,” said Wanda, beaming up at me. “My yacht is in Freeport harbor, ready to weigh anchor. We’ll go on a sightseeing cruise across the Exumas. When we come to where that circle and dot is, you can drop over-side and go for your swim.”

  We lounged in the sun for another hour.

  Then we all piled into the big yacht Wanda Weaver Yule owned, and set out across Northwest Providence Channel, moving past the Great Stirrup lighthouse by noon. Walrus-moustache stationed himself in the yacht’s radio room, where he was busy alerting the fighting forces of the Coxe Foundation to be ready when and if we needed them. I was in the gear room, selecting fins, undersea goggles and other assorted diving equipment

  Midge was busy helping me.

  Well, maybe not exactly helping me. She was undoing my shirt and slacks, getting them off so I could don a pair of swimtrunks. She was still in her micro-bikini that exposed all but a few vital areas of her female body to the elements and men’s eyes. I was discovering, glancing from the way her breasts sagged heavily into her nylon bikini cups and the manner in which the thin straps of her micro-trunks dented her soft hipflesh, that I was fully alive again.

  Erotologists say men are more excited by a partially hidden female body than they arc by an entirely naked one. This is because there is mystery involved; the male does not see the hidden charms of the female he looks at, and so his imagination and the subconscious ‘mate image’ which he possesses, born of prior experiences that date all the way back to childhood, are necessarily involved. The hidden parts, bolstered by mystery and imagination, become even more pleasing; the desire to strip the clothing off and see the unadorned female is part and parcel of his aroused sex interest. Conditioned to act according to the mores of his time and society, the male cannot do this, so the desire to do so enhances his sexual attraction toward the clothed or partially clothed female.

  Anyhow, I was reacting to this almost-complete exposure of female flesh, and Midge Priest was glad I was. She cooed and oohed at sight of my return to good health, patting and stroking me with ardent appraisal.

  “Do you think we could?” she breathed, eyes glistening. “We could, but we won’t,” I told her. When she pouted, I leaned forward to kiss her lips. “I have a job to do, honey. I’ll need all my energy, like a soldier going into battle. In the old days, men who went out to fight were forbidden to carnally know a woman, as the historians so graciously put it. Go read your history from its original sources if you don’t believe me.”

  “Oh, I believe you,” Midge nodded. “It’s just that it seems such a shame. You’re right there, I’m right here, and we mustn’t do anything about it.” “I’ll be back before nightfall,” I promised. The Yuletide was making twelve knots across Exuma Sound. The island marked with a circle and dot was off our starboard side. Walrus-moustache was standing at the rail, studying the little cay with powerful field-glasses. As I approached he took them away from his eyes and turned to me.

  “I don’t see a thing. Are you sure this is the spot?” he groused.

  “I’m sure. Here, let me take those things.” I looked, but all I saw were coral growths, a little reef, a high cliff behind which the tiny island showed like the humped back of a dead monster drowned in water. Trees covered most of the island, except where the sand ran down out of the forest to merge with the frothing waters of Exuma Sound. The island was empty of all life.

  I shook my head, lowering the glasses. “It’s got to be this one, or I’ve been wasting my time down here. Let me go scuba diving, chief. Maybe I can find something.”

  I went down over the port side, so anyone watching the yacht from the cay would see nothing. I swam down under the yacht, and set out for the islet. I swam easily, the water was warm, and I made good time.

  Up ahead of me I could see the beach sloping upward, the white sands gleaming in the shallow, clear waters. To my left, the dark rock formation of the high cliff stabbed downward. I was turning to move toward the beach, intending to step onto the island and search it for the laboratory, when my attention was caught by a moray eel that came into view slowly.

  I saw its head first, as if thrust out of solid rock, then the rest of its five-foot body as it slid upward and, at sight of me, darted off into the shoals. Apparently it had emerged from a hole in the rock cliff.

  I veered left and swam forward, fins kicking. As I came closer, I saw the water glow brightly as if to hidden lights. My hands went out, gripped a thin wall of coral. I drew myself forward, peered over the other side.

  Perhaps five feet down the water was very bright. I saw the true wall of the cliff, broken off to show a big rectangle of light. The coral wall to which I clung was like a screen, hiding that opening from any observer. I inched over the wall, diving down.

  I swam through the growi
ng lightness in the waters, under the true cliffwall, and beneath a ten-foot span of that cliff. I knew I was approaching an undersea cavern and my heart was slamming excitedly. Could this be the hidden laboratory that nobody seemed able to find? There was no more perfect hiding place, for if I was right in my conjectures, it was invisible to the outer world. The only way you could get at it was to swim through this submarine tunnel.

  The water was like white fire all about me. I dared not rise to the surface because if this was a cavern that held a laboratory, I would be spotted—and no doubt shot down without hesitation.

  I glided along one of the undersea cave walls, clinging to little projections and encrustations to make sure I would not bob to the surface. I searched along the cavern wall until I found a background of dark stone forming the wall section at this point.

  Very gradually, hoping my hair would blend in against the dark stone behind me, I lifted my head above water, removing my goggles.

  I guess I gawked a few seconds in stunned amazement. There was a laboratory here, all right, built into the rock walls of the cavern. Men and women were moving about in their lab smocks—I recognized a number of them from the levitation love-in—busy at their tasks. The cave itself was a couple hundred feet high and eight hundred or more feet deep. It was brilliantly lighted, which accounted for the brightness of the waters in this hidden cavern pool. The hum of machinery explained how the cavern was fed with fresh air from the outside which was periodically filtered, cleaned, and fed back into the cavern.

  I took a long, slow look around so I might describe the place to Walrus-moustache. It should not be hard to pull a surprise attack on the installation, there were a couple of guards lounging off to one side, but nobody was looking at the pool or at my head poking from the water.

  I submerged slowly, so that hardly a ripple could be seen. I did not begin my swim until I was a few feet above the bottom of the pool. Then I made all speed possible toward the cave entrance.

  Half an hour later I was sitting, dripping wet, on the deck of the Yuletide, making my report. “There must be another way out of the cave, maybe through a tunnel on the landward side, because I doubt very much if Doctor Howard would let her lab technicians come swarming up out of the water. They’d be visible to any chance passerby who might get curious about a swarm of boys and girls appearing so miraculously off the coast of a supposedly uninhabited island like this.”