Rogue in Space

by Fredric Brown

  Then the final ramp, the one that took him to the twenty-seventh floor. Not far now—but surely there’d be a guard stationed at the final door or portal that led to the elevator hallway and relative safety.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THERE was a guard. A quick look around the final turn showed him a closed door with a guard sitting in front of it. And he was awake and alert, although fortunately he did not happen to be looking straight ahead.

  But he was awake and alert and with a heatgun un-holstered and ready, held in his hand in his lap.

  And on the wall over his head—

  Crag smiled grimly as, back out of sight, he detached his left hand and got it ready to throw with his right. Either Olliver or the woman, or both, must have known what was on the wall over the guard’s head—a small hemispherical blister that could only be a thermocouple set to give off an alarm at any sudden increase in temperature. Yet the woman had offered Crag a heatgun. It would have been suicide to shoot the guard with it. And if the guard had time to fire his own gun, even though it would be aimed away from the thermocouple, no doubt the rise in heat would be sufficient to set off the alarm anyway, even if he missed Crag. Not that he would miss, at ten feet or a bit less.

  Nor would, nor did, Crag at that range. When he stepped out into sight his right hand was already drawn back to throw the missile, and it was in the air before the guard had time to more than start to lift the heatgun from his lap. Crag’s hand hit him full in the face long before he had time to pull the trigger. And he’d never pull one again.

  Crag walked to him and got his hand back, putting it on quickly as soon as he’d wiped the blood off it on the guard’s uniform. Then he picked up the guard’s gun, deliberately handling it by the barrel to get his prints on it, and deliberately bloodied the butt. They’d know who killed the guard anyway, and he’d rather have them wonder how he’d managed to take the guard’s own weapon away from him and kill him with it than have them wonder, or perhaps guess, how he had killed the guard. Whenever Crag killed with that left hand and had time afterward he tried to leave evidence that some other blunt weapon had been used.

  Then, using the key that had hung from the guard’s belt, he went through the door and closed it behind him, and no alarm operated. He could probably thank the woman for that, anyway; without the radioactive bar he’d have had a slim chance indeed. Yes, they’d given him a fair chance—despite the fact that he’d also been given a chance to spoil everything if he’d been stupid enough to take that heatgun, and despite the fact that she hadn’t told him to get rid of that bar here and now even though he knew, and she must have known, that outside the sacred precincts of the jail those bars often worked in reverse and set off alarms instead of stilling them.

  He got rid of his in a waste receptacle outside the elevator bank before he pushed the button to summon an elevator. A few minutes later he was safely on the street, lost in the crowd and reasonably safe from pursuit.

  The sidewalk was crowded with scantily clad people. Save those in one or another kind of uniform, few if any wore more than shorts or trunks, a sport shirt or a T-shirt and sandals. Many men wore nothing above the waist. So did a few women, mostly ones who had outstanding good reasons for the extreme style. All of the women who were barefoot and some of the men, had gaudily painted toenails, usually gold or silver.

  Vocoads blared in his ears. Eat at Stacey’s, wear Try-lon, visit the House of Strange Pleasures, use Cobb’s dentifrice, visit Madam Blaine’s, drink Hotsy, use Safe and be safe, travel Panam, buy, drink, visit, use, buy.

  Crag ducked into a hotel and in the privacy of a men’s room booth he took off the gray prison shirt and got rid of it down a waste disposal chute. Not because the shirt itself would have been too likely to draw attention, not because he enjoyed semi-nudity, but because being shirtless made him look like a different man. The hard, flat musculature of his torso and shoulders made him look much bigger and at least twenty pounds heavier.

  He broke the twenty-dollar bill to buy sandals at a little haberdashery shop off the hotel lobby and at a drugstore on the next corner he made two purchases: a cheap wrist watch—his own had been taken from him with his other possessions at the jail—that probably wouldn’t run more than a few days but the band of which would cover the line where flesh met metal at his wrist, and a pair of sunglasses, which at least a third of the people on the streets were wearing. That was all he could do at the moment in the way of disguise, but it was enough. He doubted that even the prison guards who had been seeing him every day would recognize him now, certainly not from a casual glance or from passing him on the street.

  Now, the sooner he got himself inside Olliver’s house the less danger there’d be at that end. By now the guard’s body would have been found and a check of cells would have been made. His escape was known and they were looking for him. They might well throw a protective cordon around the home of the judge who had presided at his trial. Escaped prisoners often hated their judges enough to attempt murder. True, in his case Olliver had deferred sentence, but all he had postponed was a choice between the two forms of maximum punishment he could deal out, so the police would logically reason that his deferring of that choice would not affect Crag’s wish for vengeance, if he had such a wish.

  They might also put men to guard the witnesses who had taped the testimony against him and there, in one case at least, they’d be justified. Crag had nothing against the airport police who had searched him and testified to finding the nephthin, for their testimony had been honest. But the man who had actually given him the drug and then had denied doing so was on Crag’s list, although he could wait—and sweat—for a while, knowing the police couldn’t guard him forever. So was the tipster in Chicago who had sent him to Albuquerque on Crag’s list. And before one of the two of them died, he’d tell Crag which one of his enemies had engineered the deal. But all that could wait and would have to wait. Men who are violent are seldom patient, but Crag was both.

  But it was the other way around when it came to reaching Olliver; the sooner he made it the less danger there would be.

  He took a cab and gave an address that would be two blocks away from the one Olliver had given him. Paid off the driver and pretended to push a doorbell and wait until the cab had turned a corner and was out of sight. Then slowly he strolled past Olliver’s house, keeping to the opposite side of the street. There was a guard at the front door so there’d be one at the back, too; no use checking that. But as yet no extra guards were in sight, no cars parked nearby with men in them.

  He strolled on past, considering what would be the best plan of action. Getting in by killing either guard would be simple. He need merely approach on the pretext of asking whether the judge was home, and then flick the man’s chin with his left hand. It would be simple but useless if he wanted to be able to stay inside for what might be a long talk with Olliver. A dead guard, or even a missing one if he took the body inside with him, would be a dead giveaway. Armies of them would come in looking for him; they’d probably insist on searching, for Olliver’s protection, even if Olliver tried to tell them that he wasn’t there. They’d have warrants of course and he wouldn’t be able to keep them out.

  Getting down from the roof was a much better bet, if he could make the roof from the roof of the adjacent building, and he thought he could.

  Olliver’s home was three stories high and roughly cubical. It was sizeable enough, probably fifteen to twenty rooms, but quite plain and simple, externally at least. It was not the fashion for politicians who aspired to elective office to live ostentatiously, no matter how much money they had. If they loved luxury—and most of them did—they indulged that love in ways less publicly obvious than by living in mansions. The public believes what it thinks it sees.

  The building next to Olliver’s house was the same height and roughly the same shape, although it was an apartment building instead of a private home. Crag’s casual look upward as he had passed had shown him that the roof
s were level with one another and about fifteen feet apart. That building would be his best bet; the one on the other side of Olliver’s home was also three stories, but it was too far away.

  Out of sight from Olliver’s house he crossed the street and strolled back toward it. He entered the adjacent building and looked over the inset mailboxes and buzzer buttons in the hallway. There were six apartments; obviously two on each floor, and numbers five and six would be on the top floor. The glass-fronted mailboxes for both of those apartments had names on them, but the box for apartment five, labeled Holzauer, was stuffed with what seemed like an undue quantity of mail for one day’s delivery. Crag took from his pocket the visitor’s badge he’d worn until he had left the Federation Building and used it to pick the lock of the mailbox. The Holzauers were away, all right; the letters in the box were postmarked various dates over a period of almost a week.

  He closed and relocked the box and used the pin to let himself through the inner hallway door. He went up the stairs and used the same means to let himself into apartment five and to lock the door after him. Luckily, it was on the side of the building nearest the Olliver house.

  He scouted the apartment first, and at leisure, since he’d already decided it would be better to wait until after dark to take his next step. Many people used the roofs by day for sunbathing and there was too much chance of someone on a nearby building seeing him if he tried the building-to-building jump in broad daylight.

  He looked first for clothes, hoping to find a better-fitting pair of shorts—the ones that had been given him were a bit skimpy and tight-fitting—and a shirt to go with them. But he was not in luck there. Although he found clothing, he’d rather have gone naked than wear any of the garments he found. From the clothing, and from other evidence including a book shelf of very specialized pornography, it was obvious that Holzauer & Co. was a pair of homosexuals. Crag did not care for lace-trimmed panties or pink tulle jackets trimmed with leopard skin. But, with time to kill, he amused himself tearing them to shreds. And he began to hope, after glancing again at the pornography, that his unwitting hosts would return while he was there to greet them. But they didn’t, and he contented himself with garnishing the pile of torn cloth with confetti from torn books. Crag did not like homosexuals.

  No money, no jewelry. But that didn’t matter, with a million-dollar job coming up. And Olliver would certainly advance him whatever money he’d need for expenses.

  Time to start thinking, while it was still light, about what he’d be doing as soon as it was dark enough. He studied the Olliver house from one window, then another. There’d no doubt be a hatch door in the roof but if it was bolted from the inside, as most such doors were, there’d be no way he could open it from the outside, without special tools or without making noise. But on the third story one window was open at the top. Hanging from the edge of the roof, he’d be able to get in by way of that window.

  While he was studying it out and measuring with his eye the distances involved, he heard cars stop out on the street and ran lightly to a window at the front corner of the apartment from which he could see what was going on.

  There were two cars parked in front of the Olliver house. Five policemen got out of one car and four out of the other. They walked toward the house, two of them going around it to the back and the other seven going to the front door. A man had remained in one of the cars and as he put his head out of a window to call something after the policeman, Crag saw that the man was Olliver.

  So that was why they hadn’t immediately tripled or quadrupled the guard on the house. They’d left it relatively unguarded, since Olliver had not been home as yet. Now they’d escorted him home but were going to search the house before he himself entered it. The house would be a trap for Crag now, if he’d entered it right away, by whatever means.

  Had Olliver crossed him? Crag wondered for a moment, and then discarded the idea. What would Olliver have had to gain by helping him escape if so soon afterward he had helped the police lay a trap to catch him? No, this must have been an idea of the police, and Olliver must have been unable to dissuade them from giving him what they considered maximum protection. Olliver had no authority whatsoever over the police. Olliver must be hoping right now that Crag had not yet entered, or all of Olliver’s trouble thus far would have been for nothing.

  Crag congratulated himself on not having made that mistake.

  Standing back far enough from the window not to be observed, he waited and watched. After about twenty minutes, ample time for that many men to have made a thorough search of a building that size, the nine men came out. Crag counted carefully to make sure no extra guards had been left. There’d still be one man and only one man at each of the two entrances.

  Olliver got out of the car, talked to one of the policemen briefly, and then went to the front door of the house—and inside, no doubt, although Crag couldn’t see the doorway from his window. The policemen got into the cars and both cars started. One of the cars U-turned and parked across the street and a few buildings away. Suddenly there seemed to be no one in it; the driver had used the control that activated the windows into one-way glass. The car was unmarked as a police car and from now on, to anyone walking or driving past, it would seem to be merely an empty car parked at the curb. The other car went on and turned the corner. But Crag knew it wouldn’t really be leaving and got to a back window in time to see it park in the alley opposite the point where the other car parked in the street.

  And from overhead came the drone of a helicopter. Crag listened long enough to make sure that it was circling the neighborhood and not just passing over, and swore to himself. That helicopter, with a good view of all the roofs in the block, would be a real obstacle to his entering by the route he’d planned to use.

  But there was no use worrying about it now, since he did not plan in any case to make his entry before darkness fell, and by that time the situation might have changed. And a look at his wrist watch showed him that darkness was at least two hours away, so he decided that he might as well sleep for those two hours; it had been a big day and might, for all he knew, be the prelude to a bigger night. Or to no night at all, if he were discovered, for he was still determined that he would not be taken alive.

  Crag had trained himself to be able to sleep on a minute’s notice, any time and anywhere. Almost anywhere, that is; with a disgusted look at the oversized ornate bed of his hosts and a disgusted thought about the things that must have happened on it, he made himself comfortable in an armchair. And within a minute he was asleep, soundly but so lightly that the scrape of a key in the lock or any other sound that could indicate danger would have awakened him instantly.

  No sound woke him, but the passage of an almost exact two hours did. He woke completely and suddenly, as a cat wakes. Stood and stretched, hearing the helicopter still circling overhead.

  Quick looks out of two windows showed him that both of the police cars were parked as he had last seen them. And that, although it was fully dark, there was a bright moon. From the angle of shadows he determined that the moon was about halfway between the zenith and the horizon, and he wondered if he should wait until it had set, for moonless darkness. But that might make things even more dangerous. Without moonlight, the helicopter would be almost useless—even with a searchlight it could observe too small an area at a time—and they’d probably dispense with it and post men on Olliver’s roof or on other roofs nearby. Right now, with the moon as bright as it was, they were probably depending upon it completely for watching roofs. It would be easier to fool one heli load of cops than an unknown number of watchers on roof tops.

  Every helicopter had a blind spot, directly beneath itself. If it ever went straight over, instead of circling—

  Crag groped on the dresser top and found a hand mirror and a nail file. In the living room he climbed the ladder to the roof hatch and pushed it ajar, propping it with the file. Watchers in the heli would think nothing of it being that way, if they noticed, fo
r many top-floor dwellers so propped their hatches for ventilation on a warm evening. And the air, so soon after darkness, was still quite warm; probably there were dozens of raised hatches in the block. On evenings as warm as this, too, many people sat, or even slept, on their roof tops, and Crag used the mirror, held it at various angles, to check the roof tops in all directions. He saw no one and decided that those in the immediate neighborhood who might otherwise be using their roofs this evening were no doubt discouraged from doing so by the annoyance of having a heli so low and so continually overhead. If that was true, having the heli there might be more of an advantage than a disadvantage, and besides its constant drone would help to hide any slight sound he himself might make.

  He put the mirror down flat on the roof and in it followed the motions of the heli as well as he could, for a long time. As nearly as he could judge, it was flying ninety or a hundred feet above the roof tops and holding the same altitude. Most of the time it flew in a circle the center of which was the Olliver residence and the radius of which was about half a block. But once in a while, either because the pilot wanted to vary the monotony or wanted to change his angle of observation, it would make a figure eight instead, with the Olliver roof dead center at the crossing at the center of the eight. Once in a while? Crag watched a while longer and counted; there was a figure eight after every fourth circle, and that meant the heli was on autopilot and that the pattern had been set deliberately and he could count on it.

  And if, at one of those crossings directly overhead, he started at the exactly right instant, he’d have several seconds during which they wouldn’t be able to see him at all, and if, at the end of that period he was hanging from the eaves of the roof opposite, he’d have a slightly longer period to get himself inside the open window while they turned and came back. It would take fast work and split-second timing. With his eye he measured the number of steps, six, he could take between the hatch and the edge of the roof, and decided it would be enough of a start for him to jump the fifteen feet. If it wasn’t—well, he’d taken chances before.