And still there was no real tension in him. He was only going to a restaurant.
He turned into the splendid foyer that was the beginning of the vast and wonderful Constantine’s. In the great doorway, he paused for a moment to survey the expansive glitter of tables, the hanging garden tearooms; and it was all there.
Brilliant Constantine’s, famous the world over — but not much changed from his last visit.
Leigh gave his name, and began: “A Mr. Patrick made reservations, I understand — “
The girl cut him short. “Oh, yes, Mr. Leigh. Mr. Patrick reserved Private 3 for you. He just now phoned to say he’d be along in a few minutes. Our premier will escort you.”
Leigh was turning away, a vague puzzled thought in his mind at the way the girl had gushed, when a flamelike thought struck him:
“Just a minute, did you say Private 3? Who’s paying for this?”
The girl glowed at him: “It was paid by phone. Forty-five hundred dollars!”
Leigh stood very still. In a single, flashing moment, this meeting that, even after what had happened on the street, had seemed scarcely more than an irritation to be gotten over with, was become a fantastic, abnormal thing.
Forty-five — hundred — dollars! Could it be some damned fool rich kid sent by a college paper, but who had pulled this whole affair because he was determined to make a strong, personal impression?
Coldly, alertly, his brain rejected the solution. Humanity produced egoists on an elephantiastic scale, but not one who would order a feast like that to impress a reporter.
His eyes narrowed on an idea: “Where’s your registered phone?” he asked curtly.
A minute later, he was saying into the mouthpiece: “Is that the Amalgamated Universities Secretariat? … I want to find out if there is a Mr. Patrick registered at any of your local colleges, and, if there is, whether or not he has been authorized by any college paper to interview William Leigh of the Planetarian News Service. This is Leigh calling.”
It took six minutes, and then the answer came, brisk, tremendous and final: “There are three Mr. Patricks in our seventeen units. All are at present having supper at their various official residences. There are four Miss Patricks similarly accounted for by our staff of secretaries. None of these seven is in any way connected with a university paper. Do you wish any assistance in dealing with the impostor?”
Leigh hesitated; and when he finally spoke, it was with the queer, dark realization that he was committing himself. “No,” he said, and hung up.
He came out of the phone box, shaken by his own thoughts. There was only one reason why he was in this city at this time. Murder! And he knew scarcely a soul. Therefore — It was absolutely incredible that any stranger would want to see him for a reason not connected with his own purpose. He shook the ugly thrill out of his system; he said:
“To Private 3, please — “
Tensed but cool, he examined the apartment that was Private 3. Actually that was all it was, a splendidly furnished apartment with a palacelike dining salon dominating the five rooms, and one entire wall of the salon was lined with decorated mirror facings, behind which glittered hundreds of bottles of liquors.
The brands were strange to his inexpensive tastes, the scent of several that he opened heady and — quite uninviting. In the ladies’ dressing room was a long showcase displaying a gleaming array of jewelry — several hundred thousand dollars’ worth, if it was genuine, he estimated swiftly.
Leigh whistled softly to himself. On the surface, Constantine’s appeared to supply good rental value for the money they charged.
“I’m glad you’re physically big,” said a cool voice behind him. “So many reporters are thin and small.”
It was the voice that did it, subtly, differently toned than it had been over the phone in the early afternoon. Deliberately different.
The difference, he noted as he turned, was in the body, too, the difference in the shape of a woman from a boy, skillfully but not perfectly concealed under the well-tailored man’s suit — actually, of course, she was quite boyish in build, young, finely molded.
And, actually, he would never have suspected if she had not allowed her voice to be so purposefully womanish. She echoed his thought coolly:
“Yes, I wanted you to know. But now, there’s no use wasting words. You know as much as you need to know. Here’s a gun. The spaceship is buried below this building.”
Leigh made no effort to take the weapon, nor did he even glance at it. Instead, cool now, that the first shock was over, he seated himself on the silk-yielding chair of the vanity dresser in one corner, leaned heavily back against the vanity itself, raised his eyebrows, and said:
“Consider me a slow-witted lunk who’s got to know what it’s all about. “Why so much preliminary hocus-pocus?”
He thought deliberately: He had never in his adult life allowed himself to be rushed into anything. He was not going to start now.
3
The girl, he saw after a moment, was small of build. Which was odd, he decided carefully. Because his first impression had been of reasonable length of body. Or perhaps — he considered the possibility unhurriedly — this second effect was a more considered result of her male disguise.
He dismissed that particular problem as temporarily insoluble, and because actually — it struck him abruptly — this girl’s size was unimportant. She had long, black lashes and dark eyes that glowed at him from a proud, almost haughty face. And that was it; quite definitely that was the essence of her blazing, powerful personality.
Pride was in the way she held her head. It was in the poised easiness of every movement, the natural shift from grace to grace as she walked slowly toward him. Not conscious pride here, but an awareness of superiority that affected every movement of her muscles, and came vibrantly into her voice, as she said scathingly:
“I picked you because every newspaper I’ve read today carried your account of the murders, and because it seemed to me that somebody who already was actively working on the case would be reasonably quick at grasping essentials. As for the dramatic preparation, I considered that would be more convincing than drab explanation. I see I was mistaken in all these assumptions.”
She was quite close to him now. She leaned over, laid her revolver on the vanity beside his arm, and finished almost indifferently:
“Here’s an effective weapon. It doesn’t shoot bullets, but it has a trigger and you aim it like any gun. In the event you develop the beginning of courage, come down the tunnel after me as quickly as possible, but don’t blunder in on me and the people I shall be talking to. Stay hidden! Act only if I’m threatened.”
Tunnel, Leigh thought stolidly, as she walked with a free, swift stride out of the room — tunnel here in this apartment called Private 3. Either he was crazy, or she was.
Quite suddenly, realization came that he ought to be offended at the way she had spoken. And that insultingly simple come-on trick of hers, leaving the room, leaving him to develop curiosity — he smiled ruefully; if he hadn’t been a reporter, he’d show her that such a second-rate psychology didn’t work on him.
Still annoyed, he climbed to his feet, took the gun, and then paused briefly as the odd, muffled sound came of a door opening reluctantly — He found her in the bedroom to the left of the dining salon; and because his mind was still in that state of pure receptiveness, which, for him, replaced indecisiveness, he felt only the vaguest surprise to see that she had the end of a lush green rug rolled back, and that there was a hole in the floor at her feet.
The gleaming square of floor that must have covered the opening, lay back neatly, pinned to position by a single, glitteringly complicated hinge. But Leigh scarcely noticed that.
His gaze reached beyond that — tunnel — to the girl; and, in that moment, just before she became aware of him, there was the barest suggestion of uncertainty
about her. And her right profile, half turned away from him, showed pursed lips, a strained whiteness, as if — The impression he received was of indecisiveness. He had the subtle sense of observing a young woman who, briefly, had lost her superb confidence. Then she saw him; and his whole emotion picture twisted.
She didn’t seem to stiffen in any way. Paying no attention to him at all, she stepped down to the first stair of the little stairway that led down into the hole, and began to descend without a quiver of hesitation. And yet — Yet his first conviction that she had faltered brought him forward with narrowed eyes. And, suddenly, that certainty of her brief fear made this whole madness real. He plunged forward, down the steep stairway, and pulled up only when he saw that he was actually in a smooth, dimly lighted tunnel; and that the girl had paused, one finger to her lips.
“Sssshh!” she said. “The door of the ship may be open.”
Irritation struck Leigh, a hard trickle of anger. Now that he had committed himself, he felt automatically the leader of this fantastic expedition; and that girl’s pretensions, the devastating haughtiness of her merely produced his first real impatience.
“Don’t ‘ssshh’ me!” he whispered sharply. “Just give me the facts, and I’ll do the rest.”
He stopped. For the first time the meaning of all the words she had spoken penetrated. His anger collapsed like a plane in a crash landing.
“Ship!” he said incredulously. “Are you trying to tell me there’s actually a spaceship buried here under Constantine’s?”
The girl seemed not to hear; and Leigh saw that they were at the end of a short passageway. Metal gleamed dully just ahead. Then the girl was saying:
“Here’s the door. Now, remember, you act as guard. Stay hidden, ready to shoot. And if I yell ‘Shoot,’ you shoot!”
She bent forward. There was the tiniest scarlet flash. The door opened, revealing a second door just beyond. Again that minute, intense blaze of red; and that door too swung open.
It was swiftly done, too swiftly. Before Leigh could more than grasp that the crisis was come, the girl stepped coolly into the brilliantly lighted room beyond the second door.
There was shadow where Leigh stood half-paralyzed by the girl’s action. There was deeper shadow against the metal wall toward which he pressed himself in one instinctive move. He froze there, cursing silently at a stupid young woman who actually walked into a den of enemies of unknown numbers without a genuine plan of self-protection.
Or did she know how many there were? And who?
The questions made twisting paths in his mind down, down to a thrall of blankness — that ended only when an entirely different thought replaced it:
At least he was out here with a gun, unnoticed — or was he?
He waited tensely. But the door remained open; and there was no apparent movement towards it. Slowly, Leigh let himself relax, and allowed his straining mind to absorb its first considered impressions.
The portion of underground room that he could see showed one end of what seemed to be a control board, a metal wall that blinked with tiny lights, the edge of a rather sumptuous cot — and the whole was actually so suggestive of a spaceship that Leigh’s logic-resistance collapsed.
Incredibly, here under the ground, actually under Constantine’s was a small spaceship and — That thought ended, too, as the silence beyond the open door, the curiously long silence, was broken by a man’s cool voice:
“I wouldn’t even try to raise that gun if I were you. The fact that you have said nothing since entering shows how enormously different we are to what you expected.”
He laughed gently, an unhurried, deep-throated derisive laughter that came clearly to Leigh. The man said:
“Merla, what would you say is the psychology behind this young lady’s action? You have of course noticed that she is a young lady, and not a boy.”
A richly toned woman’s voice replied: “She was born here, Jeel. She has none of the normal characteristics of a Klugg, but she is a Galactic, though definitely not the Galactic Observer. Probably, she’s not alone. Shall I investigate?”
“No!” The man sounded indifferent to the tensing Leigh. “We don’t have to worry about a Klugg’s assistant.”
Leigh relaxed slowly, but there was a vast uneasiness in his solar nerves, a sense of emptiness, the first realization of how great a part the calm assurance of the young woman had played in the fabricating of his own basic confidence.
Shattered now! Before the enormous certainties of these two, and in the face of their instant penetration of her male disguise, the effects of the girl’s rather wonderful personality seemed a remote pattern, secondary, definitely overwhelmed.
He forced the fear from him, as the girl spoke; forced his courage to grow with each word she uttered, feeding on the haughty and immense confidence that was there. It didn’t matter whether she was simulating or not, because they were in this now, he as deep as she; and only the utmost boldness could hope to draw a fraction of victory from the defeat that loomed so starkly.
With genuine admiration, he noted the glowing intensity of her speech, as she said:
“My silence had its origin in the fact that you are the first Dreeghs I have ever seen. Naturally, I studied you with some curiosity, but I can assure you I am not impressed.
“However, in view of your extraordinary opinions on the matter, I shall come to the point at once: I have been instructed by the Galactic Observer of this system to inform you to be gone by morning. Our sole reason for giving you that much leeway is that we don’t wish to bring the truth of all this into the open.
“But don’t count on that. Earth is on the verge of being given fourth-degree rating; and, as you probably know, in emergencies fourths are given Galactic knowledge. That emergency we will consider to have arrived tomorrow at dawn.”
“Well, well” — the man was laughing gently, satirically — “a pretty speech, powerfully spoken, but meaningless for us who can analyze its pretensions, however sincere, back to the Klugg origin.”
“What do you intend with her, Jeel?”
The man was cold, deadly, utterly sure. “There’s no reason why she should escape. She had blood and more than normal life. It will convey to the Observer with clarity our contempt for his ultimatum.”
He finished with a slow, surprisingly rich laughter: “We shall now enact a simple drama. The young lady will attempt to jerk up her gun and shoot me with it. Before she can even begin to succeed, I shall have my own weapon out and firing. The whole thing, as she will discover, is a matter of nervous coordination. And Kluggs are chronically almost as slow-moving as human beings.”
His voice stopped. His laughter trickled away.
Silence.
In all his alert years, Leigh had never felt more indecisive. His emotions said — now; surely, she’d call now. And even if she didn’t, he must act on his own. Rush in! Shoot!
But his mind was cold with an awful dread. There was something about the man’s voice, a surging power, a blazing, incredible certainty. Abnormal, savage strength was here; and if this was really a spaceship from the stars — His brain wouldn’t follow that flashing, terrible thought. He crouched, fingering the gun she had given him, dimly conscious for the first time that it felt queer, unlike any revolver he’d ever had. -
He crouched stiffly, waiting — and the silence from the spaceship control room, from the tensed figures that must be there just beyond his line of vision, continued. The same curious silence that had followed the girl’s entrance short minutes before. Only this time it was the girl who broke it, her voice faintly breathless but withal cool, vibrant, unafraid:
“I’m here to warn, not to force issues. And unless you’re charged with the life energy of fifteen men, I wouldn’t advise you to try anything either. After all, I came here knowing what you were.”
“What do you think, Merla? Can we be sure she’s a Klugg? Could she possibly be
of the higher Lennel type?”
It was the man, his tone conceding her point, but the derision was still there, the implacable purpose, the high, tremendous confidence.
And yet, in spite of that unrelenting sense of imminent violence,
Leigh felt himself torn from the thought of her danger — and his. His reporter’s brain twisted irresistibly to the fantastic meaning of what was taking place:
— Life energy of fifteen men — It was all there; in a monstrous way it all fitted. The two dead bodies he had seen drained of blood and life energy, the repeated reference to a Galactic Observer, with whom the girl was connected.
Leigh thought almost blankly: Galactic meant — well — Galactic; and that was so terrific that — He grew aware that the woman was speaking:
“Klugg!” she said positively. “Pay no attention to her protestations, Jeel. You know, I’m sensitive when it comes to women. She’s lying. She’s just a little fool who walked in here expecting us to be frightened of her. Destroy her at your pleasure.”
“I’m not given to waiting,” said the man. “So — “
Quite automatically, Leigh leaped for the open doorway. He had a flashing glimpse of a man and woman, dressed in evening clothes, the man standing, the woman seated. There was awareness of a gleaming, metallic background, the control board, part of which he had already seen, now revealed as a massive thing of glowing instruments; and then all that blotted out as he snapped:
“That will do. Put up your hands.”
Adventures in Time and Space Page 78