Whatever Goes Up

by Troy Conway

  The Chief nodded. “I’ll notify our attack units to go on the alert. They ought to be here in a little while, it’s only an hour or two by air from the Florida coast. We could even attack by midnight, except that we wouldn’t catch anybody in the lab that late.”

  So, the next day was set as the attack time. Until then, I was more or less on my own, I thought. Not so you could notice it. I had to talk to a Foundation artist whom the Chief had flown from the mainland to the Yule yacht, so he could draw pictures of the lab, to give the attackers an idea of what they could expect to find waiting for them.

  When I was through talking and he was through drawing, we had a pretty good picture of what I had seen in those few moments I had been staring at the cave laboratory. It was almost nine o’clock at night, by this time.

  Midge had been hanging around mc ever since dinnertime, until the boss-man shooed her off to bed. She had been wearing a see-through dress with just her own sweet self under it. Teasingly tantalizing. She saw that she was getting to me, and as if to give me a shot of extra sock, she posed in light that turned her see-through gown to absolute mist.

  However, old Walrus-moustache brought me a doctor instead of Midge when the artist was finished. “Stick a needle in him,” the Chief growled. “He has to get a good night’s sleep.”

  So I got a needle instead of Midge to take to bed.

  Honesty being one of my virtues, I must admit I almost slept around the clock. The Chief woke me at eight the next morning with a cheery order to get up, get armed, and get cracking.

  The Coxe Foundation was going on the attack.

  We were to hit the laboratory about three in the afternoon. Fifty expert swimmers and expert marksmen were already on deck, fully armed, ready to form the attack detail. There were sea-sleds fitted with machine guns in waterproof mountings; each man was armed with a revolver, also in a waterproof sheathing, and a long knife. Two teams of four men each were assigned to the twin sea-sleds.

  Our little army was lowered over the port side of the yacht, just as I had let myself down the day before. One by one, with a kick of black rubber fins, while some of the men pushed the sea-sleds ahead of them, we went down into the greenish-blue depths beneath the Yuletide.

  It was my job to act as guide.

  I brought the little army to the edge of the coral wall where I had seen the moray eel. My hand signaled them that I was going to dive. The sea-sled boys must be careful in the rock tunnel. They must not let their yellow-painted sea-sleds scrape against the tunnel walls so as to give the alarm.

  I swam through the brightly lighted waters, stroking forward toward the low shelf of the cave floor. When I came up out of the water, the sea-clad soldiers were to open up with the machine guns.

  I counted up two hundred, then started crawling up the stone shelf leading to the laboratory. The guards were to my right. The sea-sled machine guns would be firing in that direction. At the number two hundred one, I stepped up onto the coral shelf, stripping off the sheathing for my automatic.

  The lab workers were all busy, bent above the glass retorts and test tubes, testing machines and gravity chambers. None of them saw me. Only the guards came out of their lazy stances, reaching for their weapons.

  I turned my head. Not a single head, not one sea-sled, had come up dripping from the water. I was alone—a perfect target for the guns turning in my direction—as I tried hastily to bring my finned feet up onto the laboratory floor.

  I snapped off a shot at the guards.

  I missed.

  The guards—there were eight of them—would not miss. I found myself looking down the muzzles of eight automatic assault rifles, with eight hard faces nuzzled into their stocks, with eight fingers curled about their triggers. All hell erupted then.

  I flung myself facedown onto the lab floor. The eight rifles spat a hail of hot lead right where I had been standing.

  At the same time I heard the spatter of a machine gun raining a leaden curtain into the cavern. It was joined a moment later by the chatter of its mate. The eight guards were pinned to the rock wall behind them, dead on their feet. Blood ran in a line across their chests where the machine-gunners had laid their patterns.

  I got up and ran. I snapped a shot at a rack of test-tubes where two girl technicians were standing, big of eye and with their lipsticked mouths wide open. The glass shattered all over them. The girls screamed and fell.

  Up ahead of me I could see Doctor Howard, rising to her feet from behind a laboratory counter where she had been conducting an experiment. I paused only to kick off my rubber fins; running in those things was damn difficult. My pause gave her the opportunity she wanted.

  She turned and reached with both hands toward a segment of the rock wall that was inlaid with a metal control board containing levers in its slots. I did not know what those levers would do, but instinct told me it would not be nice.

  I raised my gun, my finger squeezed trigger.

  The bullet hit the control panel inches from Beatrice Howard. She flinched back; she would not have been human if she had not; but then, with a repressed cry of sheer hatred and despair, she lunged again.

  This time, I was close enough to reach out.

  I caught her, whirled her around. For an instant I thought she was going to collapse in sheer horror as she turned her eyes to my face for the first time. In the goggles and with the aqualung harness on my chest and back, I was more or less in disguise. But up this close, she got a good look at me.

  “Aieeee!” she screamed.

  Her face went white and her shapely legs threatened to buckle under her. She put out her hands as if to feel my solidity. She breathed, “You—you’re alive! But you can’t be! No power on Earth could have saved you.”

  I laughed down at her. The two of us were ignoring the rest of the maelstrom that was the cave laboratory exploding around our cars in a cacophony of bullets and shattering glass and metal. A man bumped me; a girl was screeching less than three yards away in unholy terror.

  “Wanda Weaver Yule saved me—in a helicopter.”

  Her eyes got enormous. She ran her eyes back and forth on my face, as if to see whether I was mocking her. Then she whirled and dove once more for the levers.

  My left hand shot out, caught her by the front of her lab smock and sent her flying backwards. She stumbled, her feet slipping on the spilled chemicals and broken glass lining the lab floor. I wanted to run to her, to catch her. She was falling straight for a big iron block that was used as a testing device. It had about a dozen gravity belts strapped around it.

  She thudded into the iron block.

  To my intense surprise, instead of returning to the attack, Beatrice Howard clawed her way to the top of the block. Her hand reached down, began turning the buckle-dials of the belts. The iron block, with Doctor Howard crouching on top of it, started to rise.

  I yelled, and leaped.

  The block was a good four feet above the cavern floor. I had to jump in order to get a hand on one of the belts. The iron itself was too smooth to afford me a handhold, so my fingers closed down like a vise on a leather belt.

  The woman atop the block looked down at me, grinning the way the Gorgon must have grinned at its victims. I was helpless, too busy hanging on for dear life to attack her.

  She could attack me, however. Her red fingernails clawed for my face as she leaned out over the edge of the slowly lifting block. The cavern ceiling was so far above its floor that from that height, I would be fit food for a large chunk of blotting paper if I fell.

  And I was going to fall. Her long red nails were right at my eyes. It was all I could do to turn my head this way and that to prevent being blinded.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I reached up with my right hand, dangling precariously from a leather belt—hoping it would hold together—and tried to cuff Doctor Howard. She laughed at my futile attempts. She drew back a little onto the iron block so I could not quite reach her.

  “You’re going to die, Ro
d,” she panted maliciously. “They’re going to have to scrape what’s left of you off the lab floor with a knife.”

  I put my right hand on a belt higher up.

  Please hold, I prayed to that belt. Dear God, don’t let that buckle loosen! I moved upward about a foot. My body was swaying back and forth and it was tilting the iron block slightly so that Doctor Howard slid sideways a little.

  She yelped, fastening her fingers to the edge of the block.

  I went up another foot, reaching with my left hand for another belt. I swayed my body more than somewhat, because I could see my swinging weight was making the block tilt even more.

  My eyes went upward. There was an opening in the cavern ceiling, and a sort of flat platform there, of polished wood. Behind it, I seemed to sec part of a room. I had no time to spend on sight-seeing, however. Beatrice Howard was screeching at me like a maniac, reaching down to run her sharp fingernails across the back of my left hand, trying to make me release my hold. I gritted my teeth against the pain as I saw five red, bloody furrows appear on the back of my left hand. Spots jumped in front of my eyes. I did not dare look below me where the broken glass and shattered metal of the laboratory was waiting to catch me.

  My right hand went up. It landed on a cheek.

  Doctor Howard screamed. I could feel the block tilting crazily as her body slid across its smooth top. I waited for the sudden drop in the weight on the iron block and the resultant increase in its speed of lift that would tell when her body went over the edge.

  Then to my horror, I looked upward.

  The block was just a few feet below the opening where the polished wood platform waited. I was below the platform. There was room in the opening for the solid block. When the block lifted into place, the platform would scrape me loose from my precarious hold. I would fall to the floor.

  I tried to swallow. My mouth was too dry.

  So I climbed. I never moved so fast in my life. My right hand grabbed the topmost belt, my left hand went to hook its fingers on the edge of the block top. I pulled myself upwards.

  As my head came above the level of the block top, I saw Beatrice Howard crouched on the opposite side, glaring at me as she clung to her little perch. She did not dare attack, any movement of hers would have pitched her over the side. She could only cling there and hate me with her blazing eyes and writhing lips as I drew myself upward on top of the block.

  The iron block slid into place.

  It fitted neatly into the opening. My feet were toward the wooden platform, so I backed up on my hands and knees until I was inside a modernistically furnished office, fitted out with deep wall-to-wall carpeting, with a huge desk and swivel chair, with filing cabinets hidden behind a folding screen, hanging bookshelves on the walls, and various plaques, masks and pictures that made this concealed office a neat little pad.

  Beatrice Howard was standing on the block now, and advancing toward me. To my surprise, I saw she was smiling. “It was a good fight while it lasted,” she said. “I have to hand it to you, Rod—you’re quite a man when it comes to a fight or a frolic.”

  “Yeah,” I said drily, waiting for the punch line. My eyes searched her lush body for a weapon. Her lab smock hung open over a too-tight sweater that showed off her heavy breasts, sagging gently and moving up and down and sideways in that bobbling motion which brassieres were invented to prevent. Her hips firmed outward into a too-tight skirt. No weapon could have existed unnoticed under those garments.

  Eyes fastened on mine, she shrugged out of the smock, arms behind her, breasts shaking even more ripely as she hunched her shoulders to let the smock drop down her arm.

  “I have a million and a half dollars in good American cash in the office safe, Rod,” she said. “Why don’t you and I form a team? We could get away from that debacle down below. I have a secret cove not far from here where I keep a speedboat against emergencies.” “No, thanks,” I said.

  She eyed me closely. “I’ll pay you half of that million and a half—to let me get away. Nobody’ll ever know.”

  Her swaying hips were in my line of vision as she moved across the carpeting to a big oil painting. Her red-nailed hand thrust the painting back. There was a safe dial set into the wall. She glanced at me archly over a shoulder.

  “Mind if I get the money out?”

  “Go ahead. I’ll have to turn it over to the Foundation, anyhow.”

  She turned the dial back and forth.

  The safe door came open. Doctor Howard reached inside it. Stupid me! When it comes to a female, I am always a little more trusting than I should be. Her hand went in, but when it came out, instead of good American cash it held a good American Colt revolver.

  The revolver pointed at me.

  The revolver was being fired.

  Something hit my shoulder with the kick of a Missouri mule. My knees buckled, but they held long enough for me to reach the woman in the too-tight clothes. My right hand slammed at the gun, driving it sideways. My left fist rammed into the side of her jaw.

  She reeled backwards, arms flailing as she tried to recover her balance. The Colt blasted again, putting a hole in one of the walls, up near the ceiling. Through a fog caused by the pain in my wound, I staggered after her.

  I picked up a standing ashtray and threw it. The metal base took her across the belly, half driving the wind from her lungs. The Colt sent red flame at the carpeted floor. I dived for her.

  My shoulder hit her sideways, at her left knee, and sent her flying through the air to land on the polished platform and slide along it. I got a fast look up her legs, along stockinged thighs and bare thighs, right up to the darkness where her panties normally went. She was not wearing panties. I thought again that she had become a changed woman in a lot of ways. Beatrice Howard screamed.

  Her sliding body hit the top of the iron block. It unbalanced it, sent it crashing against the slot-wall that held it. I heard the grate of metal as the belt-buckles rammed the wall.

  In some manner, the sudden jar caused about five of the buckle controls to go off. The iron block dropped from its perch beside the polished wooden platform.

  Doctor Howard screamed.

  I staggered to the edge of the platform, staring downward. Below me I saw the descending block, with Beatrice Howard clinging to it with her hands. Her terrified face was turned up to me. The block was beginning to tilt over, too, without the lifting powers of those five belts.

  “Help me!” she screamed. “Rod—I’m going to die if you don’t!”

  My wounded shoulder was killing me. I had all I could do to stand there on the platform rim without collapsing. I saw her slide off the block, begin her fall. She looked like a straw doll turning over and over, lazily, all the time screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Her body hit the lab floor and bounced.

  The huge iron block settled down on top of her.

  I felt sick. I could see her head and a foot stuck out from under the block. I moved backward on the platform and lay flat on my back. My senses were deserting me. I would lie here and wait for somebody to come and get me, I decided.

  Of course, I might bleed to death in the meantime. Somehow, I just didn’t care. My memory went on telling me how Beatrice Howard had lifted a hand to that block as it came down. She had been alive when that weight had descended slowly on her writhing body.

  I was still flat on my back, but now I was in bed.

  Midge Priest was standing to one side of the bed, drawing my pajama trousers off my hairy legs. She was being very gentle about it; I hadn’t felt a thing until just now, when her tuggings moved my hips.

  “Well, hello there,” I greeted her.

  She turned startled eyes at me. Her forefinger went to her lips, giving me the silence gesture. Midge looked very delectable in a black satin evening gown cut down to where her bellybutton played wink with light and shadow. Her big white breasts bulged out the panels that were supposed to cover them. Her stiff nipples made dots in the black satin.

/>   “I got away as soon as I could,” she whispered.

  “Good for you,” I grinned.

  I was lying there stark naked except for a bandage about my shoulder. She was fully dressed. The fact that her eyes were caressing my priapic pride was enough to set me off, I was discovering. I looked past my chest at my rising self. Midge was making funny noises in her throat.

  “They’re still eating in the dining room,” she told me when the gurgling sounds stopped. “You’re in the Yule beach villa, in case you don’t know. They brought you here last night so the doctors could bandage you up. You’ve been sleeping for a hell of a long time, in case you don’t know that either.”

  “I do feel rested,” I admitted.

  She was raising the evening gown skirt. “I hope you are, Rod. I really do. Because I’m going to leave here tomorrow morning with your boss to give evidence in the trial about the Yule-lift crowd. And that means I’ll be a material witness under guard. I won’t be allowed any visitors.”

  The skirt was up to her knees. She frowned, looking down at me. “You can’t see me too well, with me on the floor. Here, let me step up on this chair.”

  She pulled a chair away from the little writing desk and, yanking her skirts up to her garterclasps, showed me all her stockinged legs as she stepped up. She stood there and went on raising her skirt hem.

  “You can see me now, can’t you? Oh, my, yes, you can. You’re paying me the perfect tribute, Rod darling. Look how big you’re getting!”

  I guess I was, at that. I didn’t want to look away from those two shapely legs to check it. High-heeled shoes, black nylon stockings, bare female thighs, white and plump, a couple of garters—black Lastex and red lace bisecting those thighs—and I was off in a voyeuristic heaven.