“She’s the other programmer,” said Tim, certainty in his voice. “I don’t know why she did it, but it has to be her.”
“We have Nevis in custody,” said Kennelly in a summing up mood. “We have the body of a man from Leningrad who has spent time in an asylum and in Siberia, considered dangerous by the Russians, and we have Atgeld here. Now, we have a woman named Emily Joraski, that we know nothing about!”
“But we don’t have her, Chief. She’s still here, somewhere in the building, ready to strike again, maybe,” said Tim.
“It must have been the same as phoned me,” said Nevis.
“Whoa, back it up there. Phoned you?” asked Kennelly, suddenly interested in the old man again. “Why?”
“She told me her father was killed by Wertman. She told me where the body was taken, so I could see for myself! When I went there, when I saw Emil, I went mad! I stormed up to Wertman’s newsroom. I tried my best to kill him with my bare hands!”
“Did she say she was Emil’s daughter?”
“No. She said that it was Wertman who-and I quote ‘First cast doubt on my father’s name. Now, he has killed him! The Iceman, the Iceman,’ she shouted.”
“Would you recognize her, if you met her?”
“Maybe not. I haven’t seen her since she was a child!” “When was that?”
“I don’t know, 1989, perhaps. It was in Alaska.” Tim was suddenly struck with the place. “Alaska? Joraski was doing some work in Alaska?”
“Among other places, yes. He kept his home there until funds were cut off by his government, so his research could not continue.”
“Was that during the glaciation of Glacier Bay, Alaska?”
“His wife and child lived in the Bay area. He and other scientists would spend months further north,” answered Nevis. “It was a lonely life.”
“Y ou were there, on the science team?”
“Everyone was there, including your Mr. Wertman.” “Tim,” interrupted Kennelly. “I think we should continue this upstairs with Wertman.”
“I am in agreement one-hundred per cent, Chief.”
30
In his semi-darkened, inner office, Mark Wertman was just completing a tape recording. He’d wheeled his chair around, parted the drapes behind his desk a few inches, and stared out as he spoke in the microphone. He was quite unaware that a slender, silent-moving figure had entered his office. The intruder was wearing a full length, black coat with a wide monk’s hood. Beneath the hood were two burning eyes, which seemed made of some combustible mineral. Flowing about the shoulders was thick, matted hair-as black as the coat. The figure moved step by step closer to the seated Wertman, breathing heavily, nostrils flared, seemingly unconcerned with Wertman’s monologue.
“Every calculation,” Wertman said into the recorder, “from all the members of the Worldwide Climate Control, points to a calming trend, and though we must expect to lose a great deal more land, especially along the seacoasts, Earth Two conditions will prevail. There can never be a return to the paradise we knew as Earth Three, the life we took for granted only fifty years ago.”
Wertman clicked off the tape recorder. At his back, the hooded figure lifted a long, thin-bladed knife as high as it tumbled him over his head. The attacker crashed into the sofa, and landed on the floor with a heavy thud. Meanwhile,
Mark got up immediately, feeling a sharp pain course through his entire frame. He rushed to the killer’s side, glancing everywhere for the knife. The killer seemed out cold, lying there silent. But the moment he took his eyes away from the prone figure, the knife shaft caught him in the side.
Mark’s groan of horror and pain mingled with the wild, delighted scream of the attacker whose head went back now with laughter, the hood falling away. Mark stared down at the killer in amazement. It was a woman. She looked familiar and yet, like no woman he’d ever seen in his life before.
Mark held her hand and the blade fixed in his side, refusing to allow her another chance to stab him again. The look in the woman’s eyes told him she was quite mad, and that she would like nothing better than to cut him into as many pieces as possible.
“Who are you?” he begged.
She spoke with a trace of an accent. “I’ll kill you!” “Who the hell are you?” he shouted.
“Emily,” she answered.
At that moment Tim Crocker, Kennelly, Ben Nevis, Walsh, and Hornell, followed by Joanna Sommers, burst into the room. Crocker shouted, “What happened?”
“Mark,” Joanna shouted, rushing toward him. Wertman was covered with blood. He pulled away from the mad woman at his feet, the knife still embedded in his side. The angle of the wound was almost straight up and Wertman’s blood spilled over the handle of the knife.
“Sit down here,” ordered George Walsh. Joanna helped Mark to the seat which Walsh had pulled up.
Tim Crocker and Herb Kennelly each bent over the prone figure of Marie Stanton, or, more rightly, Emily Joraski, Tim’s eyes shown with amazement. “Marie! Why? How could you?”
“She’s cut badly too, Walsh,” said Kennelly, seeing the wound in Emily Joraski’s side, and tearing away the black coat.
Ben Nevis stood over Tim and Kennelly. His face showed anguish when Emily Joraski’s wound was exposed. She’d lost a lot of blood. “It’s Joraski’s daughter,” Nevis managed to say.
Tim pulled her limp form up to him and held her for some time. He shook his head over her. “Marie, it was you—you all along!”
“No,” she whispered into his ear. “It was Emily.”
Tim looked around at the others. Walsh left Wertman’s side to have a look at Marie. He looked into Tim’s eyes, and Tim lay her down gently on the floor.
“It was her father’s coming,” mused Nevis, shaking his head up and down. “When she saw him, she snapped.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” said Kennelly. “Anyway, it was awfully clever of her to get a job working under her intended victim’s nose.”
“Her apartment, here, at Fieldcrest,” said Tim thoughtfully. “She must have let her father use it.”
“The reunion could have brought Emily out,” said Walsh as he cleaned the wound in her abdomen. “Your Marie, Tim, could have successfully buried Emily Joraski, Of’ that part of her that would commit murder, for the rest of her life had it not been for Joraski’s return …”
“Will she be all right, Walsh?” Tim begged.
Walsh shrugged. “If we could get her to a hospital. If she remains still. I don’t know.”
But Emily Joraski did not remain still. She tried to get up and she was shouting. “I gave them a mathematical model, showing the odds against a true glacier coming to be as great as twenty to one! It was crude arithmetic they said! They ignored me! They didn’t want to hear the truth!”
“Marie! Marie!” shouted Tim. “Stop it. Lay back!” Kennelly helped Tim to restrain the woman. But even with her shoulders pinned to the floor, she continued to rant. “Danger! Millions will starve from drought. Whole countries will be wiped from the face of the earth!”
“Haven’t you got something you can give her Walsh?” shouted Tim.
Walsh dug into his bag for a needle and drugs. Emily Joraski stared into Tim’s eyes. She suddenly stopped shouting, and spoke to him as though normal and reserved. “If I may show you my own comparison of the record of the centuries; with arithmetic, based upon variations in summer sunshine at 50 degrees North, the calculations can be extended into the future to arrive at an explicit forecast.”
“My God,” said Nevis, “She’s speaking as Joraski himself! Those are his words.”
“Psychotic, huh?” said Gary Hornell from his seat on the couch.
Joanna Sommers had left Mark Wertman’s side also to stand over the struggling, pitiful figure of Emily Joraski. “Poor child.”
“Please, Walsh,” cried Tim, tears in his eyes now. “Give her the injection.”
Walsh bent over the writhing, struggling woman. As Tim held onto her he thought of the las
t time they were together. He thought of her melancholia and the little story she told of Glacier Bay, Alaska. Walsh’s needle was sunk into her arm. In a moment she was asleep.
31
Miles above the concrete fortress of the Fieldcrest Building, the ice, wind, and thick snow appeared to be weakening. The shift was slight, near imperceptible. Outside Fieldcrest, on the sidewalk or even at the observation tower, the storm center over Chicago looked the same. The movement away from Chicago was hardly noticeable even to Marlo Cigliani, whose helicopter dangled several miles over Lake Michigan again.
Marlo was feeling his way back to Fieldcrest, trying to find the calmer pockets of air to ride on. He had never felt so vulnerable in his helicopter, like a new father driving his wife and his child home from the hospital the first day, certain that every other car on the road was trying to ram his. He knew his worries were for his cargo, Arlene and her son, Stephen. But it didn’t lessen the concern. His bird seemed so fragile, a pendant being dangled by some ruthless Zeus atop Mount Olympus, uncaring, mocking his horror.
But the instrument panel showed a steady lessening of the barometric pressure and wind speeds, while the temperature was stable. “Still,” he told himself, “any number of things could go wrong.”
Marlo pictured the machine parts in the rotor-head, turning the huge blades of the copter against the gale force winds. There were a thousand or more parts in the rotor-head alone, each of which was absolutely essential to flight. Most of them were moving parts. The bird could come crashing down like an awkward, wingless pelican, and as quickly as a stone statue, even in good weather, if any single part of the whole mechanism failed. He’d never allowed himself to think about this aspect of his work before. But he’d always joked with other pilots that a balloon was safer than a copter!
In the blink of an eye Marlo lowered the throttle, taking the helicopter down easily, steadily. He found the resistance to the tilted blades to be firm but not brutal, as before.
He looked at Stephen, who sat on his mother’s lap, intently watching the gray and white of the billowy cloud cover they were in. Arlene looked close to tears, her fright was so great. Marlo patted her shoulder firmly and said, “Hey, don’t you like it up here? Beats that car, doesn’t it?”
She didn’t answer, but smiled and nodded in return.
Marlo was taken with the twinkle and life in her eyes.
“We should be close now,” he said reassuringly. Arlene sighed heavily and answered, “Thank God.” Stephen, on Arlene’s lap suddenly pointed out the window and cooed, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhl”
They were coming out of the cloud cover and the skyline of Chicago began to marerialize below them. Marlo said to Stephen, “You like it up here with Marlo, don’t you?”
Stephen smiled back at him, and tried to pull at the throttle in his hand. The wispy-haired boy laughed devilishly at his prank.
Marlo laughed in return. “You’re a teaser, aren’t you?” Arlene held Stephen a little tighter and said, “Don’t encourage him. He’s bad enough on his own!”
“Oh, no!” Protested Marlo. “He’s a good boy. Aren’t you?”
“Yah!” cackled Stephen’s voice.
Applying just enough pressure to descend at a steady pace, Marlo returned to his thoughts. In an earlier life, he imagined himself an aerial balloonist, going up, up, and up into the stratosphere, discovering new heights, living on the wonders of the mysterious skies, and sending messages back to earth. He’d send word of conditions aloft for weathermen like Wertman to make their rudimentary predictions. Weathermen really didn’t know anything about it, about the vastness, the unleashed power of the air. In olden times the Puritans thought the Devil was the controller of wind and storms. He was called the Prince of the Power of Air.
Marlo was never surprised at the power of the air. He loved to see its raw power. There was a certain beauty, a fascination about it. He loved the sky, the clouds, and the feeling of freedom derived from flying among them like a seagull. But right now, with the boy and his mother hugging the seat beside him, the freedom and exhilaration were lost.
“Still,” he thought to himself, “I’d rather die here than like some mole on the ground, buried below a snow bank.”
They were away from the lake now, hovering over the tall buildings along the lake front. The streets, buildings, and parks were indistinguishable from place to place, being covered with high snowdrifts. It seemed impossible to pinpoint one particular building among the white- capped roofs. But Fieldcrest had a beacon shining from its tower. Marlo spotted the beacon.
“We’re here!” shouted Marlo with excitement.
A large grin covered Arlene’s face. “We’re going to make it.”
Marlo was on the radio, trying to hail someone at Fieldcrest Central Tower to get help. “Central Tower, this is Able-six, this is Marlo, come in, please.” He was answered by a great deal of static, then an excited voice came through.
“Able-six? Marlo, is that you?”
Marlo recognized the voice from the tower. It was Fred Orme, a good man who’d get some help.
“I’m in trouble,” said Marlo, and for the first time Arlene heard the news that their fuel was low. “I need that helipad. Can you get a crew out to assist?”
“Damn it, Marlo, I’ll do it myself if I can’t find anyone else,” answered Fred. “I thought you parked it out at Meig’s.”
“Couldn’t get down there, nor at O’Hare!”
The talk was garbled with static. But Fred Orme’s voice was coming through most of it. “All my men are scattered, Marlo, it could take time.”
“Call Doc Wertman, Fred. He’s got a lot of help, and he’ll get some of them newsmen off their dead ahhhh,” Marlo stopped himself.
“Will do,” said Fred, “Stand by. Over and out.” “Amen,” said Marlo.
Arlene stared out the window of the helicopter. Everything was white and indistinguishable below. “How are we going to get down, Marlo? It all looks the same? We could set down right over the side of the building!”
“First, you are going to calm down!” he shouted at her.
“We’ve got help on the way.” After scolding, he softened his voice. “This old bird is tougher than you think. I thought we’d be smashed to pieces when we were fighting to get aloft on the expressway. We were more than just lucky then. Our luck will hold.”
“I don’t know if I will,” she said shyly.
“Sure you will,” he answered. “Besides, can’t you feel how calm the wind is now? This will be a cinch.”
Arlene took a moment to answer, looking out the bubble window again, stretching to see above Stephen’s head. The boy was using her lap to stand. “Yes, I guess it does seem calmer now.”
“Seem? It is! My instruments don’t tell lies.”
32
“How long will she be out, George?” asked Tim.
Everyone was trying to regain his equilibrium. Gary Hornell sat down on the sofa to keep from saying, I don’t believe this again, and to keep from shaking. Old Ben Nevis stood and stared out the window. Kennelly busily turned on as many lights as he could find. Joanna hung on Tim’s arm. Walsh had just completed bandaging Wertman’s wounds. Wertman Was nearly asleep with weakness.
“A few hours,” Walsh answered.
“Will she be the same when she wakes up?” asked Joanna.
“I don’t know. Perhaps not. The drug I gave her might soothe her for some time—same thing Michael Jackson OD’d on but hey, I know what I’m doing.”
“1 can’t believe she’s the same girl, you know,” said Tim to them both.
“She was in a position to know or to find out anything she needed about the operation of the building, and Wertman’s comings and goings,” said Kennelly. “The fact that she got a job here suggests premeditation. She knew what she was doing. She’s also our other operator. The one who set the Environment Box for kill, and almost killed Miss Sommers. She made frequent telephone calls too.”
“Em
ily did all those things,” countered Tim.
“Emily, Marie, what’s in a name,” answered Kennelly.
“She just used this Marie character as a cover.”
“1 don’t know,” said Walsh, thoughtfully. “Marie seems to be another person, deep within her-just as Emily is. I suggest that Marie didn’t do any of the things for which Emily may be accused.”
“That’s too much mumbo jumbo for me,” said Kennelly.
“A court of law will determine whether it’s mumbo jumbo or not,” said Walsh in response.
“What she was saying, just before she was put under,” began Nevis, coming to join the group from the window. “She was then, at that moment, a third person! She was her father. I knew Joraski. Those were not only his words, but the very inflection. You caught the accent?”
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