“Marc!” she screamed, and ran forward.
THERE WAS also a cry from the Blemishes. But she didn’t stop to listen. In the darkness she felt her way rapidly through the machinery to the base of the catapult. As another streak of lightning writhed across the sky, she saw George climbing down from the scaffolding and moving toward the switch. She reached out and grabbed wildly at his sleeve.
“Stop!” she cried. “It isn’t fair!”
But George moved doggedly forward. In the darkness, Toffee knew that he was reaching toward the switch. Then, as the enormous room once again flashed with light, she looked upward toward Marc, and almost laughed with relief. Even in that small interval, she had seen his lank figure rise buoyantly above the cartridge and start inching into space.
“He’s floating!” she cried triumphantly. “He’s getting away!”
George suddenly brushed past her in the darkness and leaped to the scaffolding. In the next flash of light Toffee saw him climb to the top of the cartridge and grab vainly at Marc’s rising coat tails. Suddenly, she knew what she had to do. She whirled about and reached for the switch, found it, and pulled with all her might.
Instantly there was a terrible sucking sound and a great flash of light. As George fell back into the cartridge, it streaked up the track of the catapult and out into the night so fast, that it seemed, a moment later, never to have been there at all. There was a beat of silence, and then, frighteningly, all the heavens seemed to tremble with an angry light. A moment later a roar of thunder rolled back across the earth and crashed deafeningly against the walls of the old house. It was as though the whole universe shook with a destructive rage.
Toffee gazed weakly toward the now darkened heavens. “Bon Voyage, George!” she murmured. Then she turned back to the darkness. “Marc!”
There was no answer, but as she waited, the beam of a flash-light knifed the darkness in the direction of the small catapult. The Blemishes, murmuring together, were back at work. Toffee crept forward until she was close enough to hear what they were saying.
“I don’t care what they’re up to,” Cecil said. “I don’t care if they all went to eternity, it’s eight thirty and we’re going to launch the bomb. After that, they can live or die or sit around in their stocking feet. It won’t make any difference to us.”
Gerald directed the beam of the flashlight up the track of the small catapult, then to the face of the turret.
“There he is!” he cried.
MARC, SPREAD eagled across the face of the metal covering, was clinging frantically to the cable that lifted the contrivance. As the light caught him, he glanced around, but made no effort to avoid discovery. He seemed curiously agitated.
“Fine!” Cecil said. “That’s a good place for him. We’ll get him with the bomb. Put the light back here so I can see what I’m doing.”
“That dame would have to blow out the lights,” Gerald said sullenly. “Never mind. We can manage. The bomb is all set now. You take the lever that raises the turret shelter. I’ll pull the switch on the catapult. I’ll give the signal and we’ll pull together.”
“Okay,” Gerald agreed. The beam of the flash moved off at a distance, then darted upward again to illuminate Marc’s activities in the turret. “I’m ready!”
“Marc!” Toffee screamed. “Get away! They’re firing the bomb!”
Marc glanced back at her, but didn’t move. He seemed to be pulling frantically at the cable, almost as though he had somehow gotten caught on it.
“Ready!” Cecil yelled. “Aim ... !”
“Marc!” Toffee screamed. “Marc! Marc!”
“Fire!”
In the dreadful flash that followed, Toffee couldn’t be certain of what she saw. It seemed that Marc had darted away from the face of the turret, but she couldn’t be sure. In the same moment there was a cry of terror from Gerald.
“It didn’t open!” he screamed. “He jammed the cable!”
The tracks of the catapult gleamed red with friction, and the room was lighted with a dull glow. And then Toffee saw that the metal covering had remained secure, blocking the passage of the bomb. She had only a glimpse before the crash came.
There was an awful rending as the old house groaned and screamed under the impact of the blow. The turret tore loose from its moorings on the roof, but the bomb had been deflected. The great metal cylinder looped away from the track, tore through a section of the ceiling and streaked upward into the night, traveling in a straight line. There was a breathless silence as Toffee and the brothers watched the terrible thing move into the sky directly above the house. It hovered for what seethed to be minutes, then started down again in a definite course.
“My God!” Cecil screamed. “It’s coming down on top of us!” He began to run.
And then the bomb struck. The whole world glared with screaming light, and then exploded.
In that last moment, Toffee had only a brief, horrified glimpse of the lank figure, some distance above the house, soaring away into the darkness, and the rain.
The world gasped and crumbled around her...
CHAPTER XIV
SMALL hum stirred at the back of the darkness, a glimmer of sound, like a faint ray of silver white light in an area of great stillness. Somehow sound and light had gotten themselves mixed up together, so that one was difficult to distinguish from the other. But this was sound and it had started with a humming smallness and grown shrill. It screamed in Marc’s head so that he had to open his eyes to let it out.
A great brightness rushed forward, stabbing at his eyes, thrusting deep into the nerve centers at the back of his head. He blinked painfully and looked away, but the light came at him again, nervous light that moved toward him, then away, but always in the same direction, jittering along with small, irregular spurts.
Marc was aware that he was lying on his back, and there was a sharp pain in his shoulder. It didn’t make sense. The last he could remember was the night drawing him upward, squeezing the breath and the life out of him. He lay back and gave himself over to the effort of breathing. And then a voice spoke close by, irritably.
“Of all the perfectly insane places to wind up, this snags the prize!”
There was no question that the voice was Toffee’s. Marc glanced around, then up. The redhead was standing over him, an evil glint in her eyes.
“Toffee!” he said.
“Of course,” Toffee said. “Who’d you think? Who else would be silly enough to sit up here in this ridiculous place with you?”
“What place?” Marc asked. “Where are we?”
“What place?” Toffee said. “We’re back in the city. In fact we’re right back in the center of the city.” She waved a hand at the jittering lights that were still skittering along behind her. “That,” she announced amusedly, “is the news sign on the face of the Dispatch building. You know, the one that has the lights that spell out words and keeps moving all the time? We’re on the ledge right in front of it. And a fine spectacle we make, too, I imagine.”
“My gosh!” Marc exclaimed. He sat up. Now that Toffee had told him he could see that the jittering lights did spell out letters as they moved along.
“In fact,” Toffee said, “talking about being in the news, the story of the explosion is coming through right now. She turned to the sign and paused to read:
MYSTERY EXPLOSION LAYS WASTE SEVERAL MILES OF PASTURE NEAR CITY ... WRECKAGE ... VEGETATION ... EVERYTHING CHANGED TO BE BUOYANT ... PILLSWORTH FORMULA BELIEVED TO HAVE PROVIDED BASIC EXPLOSIVE
Then suddenly a meaningless jumble of lights burst forth upon the atmosphere. It appeared that the sign had been surprised into a fit of exclamatory stuttering. Then the words began to come again.
PILLSWORTH AND UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SIGHTED HERE ON NORTH WEST LEDGE OF BUILDING ... POLICE AND FIRE EQUIPMENT PREPARING RESCUE.
“Thank heavens,” Toffee said. “We’re not going to grow old together up here after all.” She moved away from Marc and to the brink of the led
ge. As Marc followed her progress he noticed for the first time that it was still night, but as his gaze moved toward the horizon he saw a growing margin of dawn.
“Golly!” Toffee said happily. “You should see all the people down there! And there are some men with a big ladder on a truck. We’ll be down from here in no time at all.” She patted her drooping butterflies into place. “They’ve got a search light on the man who’s climbing up. He’s terribly big. Why don’t you stand up and let me lie down for a while? I’d look more helpless.”
“Any time you look helpless,” Marc said, “I want to see it.”
“That may be,” Toffee said, “but don’t be surprised if I faint gracefully at the proper moment.”
Marc moved closer to the ledge. “I wonder if Julie’s down there?” he murmured. But even as he said it, he knew she wouldn’t be.
AT THE BOTTOM of the ladder Marc and Toffee were promptly greeted by the two government men, ushered without delay to a limousine, whisked across the city to a large grey building, and taken to an office with large comfortable furniture and soundproofed walls. While a male secretary wrote it all down, Marc and Toffee tiredly narrated their experiences at the hands of the Blemishes.
“It was dreadful,” Toffee said eyeing the secretary. “I feel faint.” The more talkative of the two government men told them the rest of the story from where they left off.
“There wasn’t anything left by the time we got there,” he said. “Even the grass was uprooting itself out of the ground and drifting up into space. There was no sign of the Blemish brothers, of course. Definitely criminally insane!”
Marc gazed out the window at the city stretching up around them, and was taken with a tremor of horror.
“There’s just one thing puzzling me, Mr. Pillsworth,” the government man said. “How is it that you returned to earth? Will all the debris finally return to earth in a few days?”
Marc gazed at them blankly. He had been wondering the same thing himself. He passed a trembling hand over his eyes and shook his head.
“I know,” Toffee said mildly. All eyes turned curiously in her direction. She smiled blandly. “You see,” she said, charmed with the idea of having so much male attention all at once, “you see, being rather a creature of nature . .. but I don’t suppose you gentlemen would understand that ... just let it go that I have a special understanding of natural causes and effects that do not occur in the ordinary human being.” She nodded toward Marc. “It was the double dosage that brought him back. The original treatment made him give off the impulses which caused him to be buoyant, but the second one, instead of increasing his buoyancy, merely counteracted it. It was a matter of a war between impulses of equal strength and pull. The ones moving outward were met by the ones forcing their way inward. It was what might be called a condition of impasse. Eventually, the two exhausted each other, and so he returned to earth.” She smiled beguilingly. “Is that all perfectly clear?”
The government man whistled shrilly and glanced at the ceiling. “If you say so,” he muttered.
“Of course,” Toffee went on, “the thing that really saved his life was the fact that, in being buoyant, he drifted far enough away from the explosion so that the impulses that reached him were in exact proportion to those he was giving off. It wouldn’t happen again in a million years.”
THE GOVERNMENT man gazed at her from the corner of his eyes. “No,” he said. “I’m sure it wouldn’t.” He turned to the secretary. “I hope you got all that on paper.”
The young man shook his head. “I was too fascinated,” he said. Even as he spoke, his eyes did not leave Toffee’s well crossed leg.
The government man cleared his throat.
“Well, anyway, everything is all right now,” he said.
He turned to Marc, who was showing increasing evidence of complete collapse. “I hate to do this,” he said, “but I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you for another favor. This incident, along with the one of the monument and all the attention in the newspapers, has caused a national panic. The people are threatening to do all sorts of things. There have already been several suicides. Anyway, we have to reassure the public at large that your formula is in our hands and safe. The best way to do this, we’ve decided, is in a public presentation; if the people can see you handing your formula over to us with their own eyes, then they’ll have to believe it. It’s not the orthodox procedure in such matters, of course, but this is an extreme situation and calls for extreme measures.
“Anyway, we’d like you to go with us to the stadium this afternoon and publicly present your formula to the chief. Every precaution will be taken and you’ll have the very best of protection. Will you do it?”
Marc, too far gone for words, merely nodded. He could hold off sleep no longer.
“Fine?” the government man said, and got up. The others followed. “Then we’ll leave you here to rest and will call for you at four o’clock. And, you, young lady?”
The man stopped, stared, turned to his companions. “Where did she go?” he asked in a whisper. “What happened to her?”
“Gosh, I don’t know,” the secretary said. “But I wish she’d taken me along!”
In hushed bewilderment the men went to the door and quietly left the room. After they had gone, there was only the sound of Marc’s exhausted breathing which bore the promise of a good healthy snore.
FOR A LONG time Marc lay immersed in the unbroken blackness of complete sleep. And then the darkness lifted, gradually, and a soft light began to glow around him. He gazed up at a sky of unbroken blue, and somehow his spirit lightened. He sat up and looked around. He knew instantly, by the gentle misted slopes and the strange trees, that he had returned to the valley of his mind. He looked around expectantly.
It happened just as he had known it would, on the nearest rise. The mists swirled aside and a shapely leg appeared, leading quickly after it another of its kind and a perfectly formed body. Toffee smiled as she ran toward him.
“I knew you’d turn up sooner or later, you old wretch!” she cried happily. She dropped to the grass beside him. Marc noticed that she once more was wearing the negligible green tunic that she’d had on the first time he’d dreamed of her.
“I wonder how I got back here,” Marc said.
“Who cares?” Toffee said happily. “Let’s take advantage of it. What’s more private than your own thoughts?”
“Now, just a second .... ”
“Still the same old prude,” Toffee said. Then she giggled. “We certainly took the four bit tour through the mill, didn’t we?”
“I don’t like to think about it,” Marc said grimly. “I wish it hadn’t happened.”
“Nonsense,” Toffee said. “You needed trouble and a good adventure. That’s what was wrong with you and your life. That’s why you dreamed me up. A good upheaval does anybody a lot of good. Even a bottle of medicine has to have a good shaking to be worth anything. That’s why it all happened.”
“I wonder about Julie,” Marc said darkly. “I wonder if she’s—?”
“Wait and see,” Toffee said. “Don’t rush things.” A reminiscent look came into her eyes as she gazed off into the distance, across the valley. Suddenly she was taken with a fit of laughter.
“What is it?” Marc asked.
“George,” Toffee said. “I wonder where he is now.” She began to laugh again. “I had a glimpse of his face just before he took off. He was the most surprised ghost that ever moaned at midnight.”
“Poor George,” Marc said. “I suppose he didn’t have a very good time of it. But then neither did any of the rest of us.”
“Oh, well,” Toffee said. “All that’s over with now.” She shifted closer to Marc. “Let’s get down to the important stuff.”
“Hey! Wait a min—?” Marc cried.
But too late. Toffee had already twined her arms about his neck and was kissing him. Finally, she let him go.
“You never change, do you?” Marc said shortly.
“Never.” Toffee said. “Isn’t it delightful? I know a game that’s fun. We take turns...”
“No!” Marc said. “No games!”
“Well, all right,” Toffee sighed. “Then I guess we’ll just have to go on necking.” She made a second dive at him.
“Help!” Marc yelled. “Help!”
Then suddenly both of them froze where they were. The valley had begun to tremble and the darkness was descending rapidly.
“You’ll have to go now,” Toffee said.
“I know,” Marc said. For a moment he just looked at her, hesitant. Then quickly, he leaned forward and kissed her lightly on the lips.
“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks for everything.”
Toffee smiled gently. “Oh, hell,” she said grandly, “that’s all right. Just call on me any time.”
“Goodbye,” Marc said, almost wistfully. “Goodbye, Toffee!”
“So long,” Toffee whispered. “Happy landings.” And the little valley fell into darkness.
MARC OPENED his eyes, fighting the pressure of sleep that still weighted his consciousness. The government man’s face, like an affidavit of official duty, appeared over him. Marc struggled to a sitting position and tried to shake the sleep out of his mind with a toss of his head.
“When we were driving over, you asked me to find out about your wife,” the man said.
Marc nodded hopefully.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Pillsworth. We haven’t been able to reach her. Either here or in Reno. They’re still trying, however, and they’ll locate her before long, I’m certain.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s three forty five; we’d better be going to the stadium.
Wearily, Marc got to his feet. He dreaded the affair at the stadium; there was nothing he wanted to do more than start out looking for Julie. Even as tired as he was. It didn’t matter where or how, just so long as he was looking for her doing something to find her ...
The Complete Adventures of Toffee Page 51