"What's going on?" he asked her, yawning. "I thought I heard some shouting outside."
She told him as rapidly as she could. She had just finished when the speaking tube by the big bed whistled its summons. Mack looked at her with raised eyebrows, then rose to answer it.
He gave terse answers to his unseen colloquist, then let the tube slip back into place and ran his fingers through his hair. "That was the desk," he told her, frowning. "You seem to have got us into some sort of a mess. A Captain Logan is waiting for you downstairs— he said something about a formality but I don't like it. I don't like any of this setup."
"But I haven't done anything," Elspeth protested.
Mack lit a cigarette, threw the pack to her as she sank onto the edge of the huge bed. "They're giving us fifteen minutes to get downstairs," he said. "I'm for getting out of here. We may be tied up for days—or longer—if we do report. Get dressed."
"But if they're waiting downstairs how are we—"
"I'm trying to figure out a way," said Mack quickly. "Get your duds on. And for the love of heaven don't go prudish now."
"Don't be a dastard," Elspeth told him, gathering the shreds of her ego about her and darting for the bathroom. By the time she emerged, five minutes later, Mack was already dressed and in the act of closing her suitcase.
"But we haven't a chance," said Elspeth. "You haven't seen these—these weapons of theirs in action."
"We took on a job, didn't we?" said Mack, poking a protruding bit of nightgown inside the edge of the bag without regard for wrinkles. "We took money, didn't we? We promised to make our contact in New Orleans today, didn't we? Come on."
He handed her one of the bags and pulled from his pocket a flat automatic pistol of whose presence amid his gear she had not had a previous suspicion. He caught her glance, said, "It's a good thing I have it," and opened the hall door cautiously.
Apparently it was against Bienville House rules to have soldiery patrolling the corridors for their exit was unguarded. But when they reached the elevators Mack said, "Oh-oh!" and drew her quickly past and into the shelter of a stair well beyond them.
They were barely concealed when the lift-light showed and its heavy metal grille clicked open. A pair of erect young men in civilian clothes moved away from them toward their room with purposeful strides in well-briefed silence.
"Are they after us?" said Elspeth, shuddering.
Mack nodded grimly. "I wonder," he said and his eyes lighted. "Come on, Elly." He moved as swiftly and silently as the plainclothesmen down wide marble stairs, Elspeth following and wishing her bag was not quite so heavy.
"Stick right behind me and keep your mouth shut," he ordered her crisply, peering along the corridor of the floor below their own. "I got a glimpse of this layout last night. If I'm right—and I'll give odds that I am—"
He moved swiftly to a door directly across from the elevators and knocked on it. Elspeth found herself admiring his ability to make quick decisions and act on them in an emergency, and disliked herself for her admiration. After all, Mack was little more than a well-trained male animal who could handle the trickeries of camera-focus competently. But could he write a sonnet or compose an original philosophic theorem? Could he paint a picture worth looking at or sculp a statue? Could he compose a—
"Snap out of it, Elly, for God's sake!" Mack's whisper was almost vicious. At that moment one of the big double doors at which he had knocked was opened a trifle. Without hesitation Mack pushed on in, holding his pistol against his side. With a jerk of his head he motioned Elspeth to follow and close the door. She did so, parking her bag carefully along his inside.
Only then did she look up—and gasp. Facing them, clad in underwear of pongee, was the towering figure of Marshal Henry, his black face gathered in a thunderous scowl as he lifted his hands slowly above his gray head.
"Sorry to be rough, sir," said Mack with unusual politeness. "My friend here had the bad luck to see some of your boys use a disintegrator or something on a fugitive in the courtyard just now. They want to detain us and we haven't got time."
THERE was a long pause. The huge chief of staff frowned into space, seemed to have some difficulty refocusing his attention on Mack and the pistol in his hand. "A disintegrator?" he said. "In the courtyard?" He looked at Elspeth. "Tell me what you saw."
She did so briefly and he nodded slowly, then said, "You have been exceedingly unfortunate, young lady. But, young man, just how do you think making entry at the point of a gun is going to help you out of your difficulties?"
"You're going to do that, Marshal," Mack said calmly. "You're going to take us out of this hotel to our car. So be a good chief of staff and pop into a pair of pants, won't you? I took a chance on their calling your plainclothes guards away to nab us and it paid off. But they'll be back in a little while. So I suggest you hurry."
Marshal Henry regarded Mack for another long moment, then permitted himself a faint smile and moved toward a dressing room, whose door stood open at the far side of the room. Mack kept close to him, very much on the alert for hidden weapons. But nothing happened as the chief of staff donned a magnificent blue-and-silver uniform on whose chest fluttered a vast number of ribbons.
"I hope you don't expect to get away with this, young man," he said as they reached the door. "You're bound to be caught."
"We can and do," said Mack. "Shall we go?" He slipped the pistol into his pocket but held it so that it bore on the immensely tall marshal at all times. They rode down in the elevator in silence, to the evident perturbation of the operator.
There was surprisingly little delay. The guards in the lobby, including a knot of young officers, apparently were too overwhelmed by the sponsorship of the chief of staff to put any obstacles in their path. But they began to follow them slowly.
"Tell them to stand back," Mack whispered to Marshal Henry.
"Report to barracks for a weapons check," the huge negro told them with crisply quiet authority. There was no need for further orders until they reached the garage and Mack told the attendant to get the Pipit out for them. The chief of staff looked at their newly-washed car speculatively.
"You'll never make it," he told them briefly. "I shall have to raise an alarm at once if only to save my own reputation."
"Perhaps you'd better come with us," said Mack quietly.
Marshal Henry laughed unexpectedly. "My dear chap," he said, "then there would certainly be a hue and cry at once. No, you'll have to take your chances. I shall see you later."
His teeth flashed a brilliant white, and Elspeth half expetced him to make a break as Mack got into the driver's seat. But he stood there, still laughing like some great orangutang, until the motor purred and their tires cut gravel in the court in front of the garage.
"What are you going to—" Elspeth began, then gasped as a file of lavender uniforms appeared less than a hundred yards in front of them. They carried weapons that looked like the disintegrator Elspeth had observed.
"This!" said Mack, pulling the wing attachment on the dashboard. "It's no time to hold back, Horelle notwithstanding."
Even as he spoke the Pipit's wings, slotted neatly inside the top, slid into flying position. Feeling their tug, Mack pressed the superdrive button and the sturdy little vehicle leaped ahead with a new and powerful motor hum. They lifted and automatically the engine pan dropped to become a jet-vent.
THE soldiers were far behind and beneath before any of them had time to fire. Within a minute the entire city of Baton Rouge lay a mile below and seven or eight miles to their rear, its palaces and boulevards and gardens making a magic geometry beside the lazy curves of the great brown river.
"How are we going to make contact?" Elspeth asked. "Surely they must have some means of rapid communication. And we're bound to be spotted on our way."
"Since we've been forced to use the Pipit's wings we'll have time for a diversion," Mack replied. "We'll spot the arteries around New Orleans from the air and come in by road from some
other direction. I have an idea we'll have time to make connections. Wonder why that disintegrator or whatever it was you saw has the wind up with all of them?"
"Did you notice—the marshal, too?" Elspeth asked him.
Mack nodded and put the Pipit above a fortuitous cloud bank directly in their path. "It bothered him. And it bothered the men you saw using it. Maybe it's some sort of outlaw weapon in this world. It sounds tough enough."
"Oh, it was," said Elspeth, shivering.
Through gaps in the clouds, as they sped south, she could see the immense development of the lower Mississippi in this exotic republic of Columbia. From Baton Rouge to the capitol itself was almost one huge city, interspersed only rarely with signs of rural roominess.
They flew, high and all but silently, above New Orleans and noted its immense sprawling expanse. The clouds sheltered them at frequent intervals but Mack expressed little fear of being spotted from the ground at an altitude of two miles in a planeless world.
HE WENT on to the south and Elspeth, feeling reaction from the high adventure of the early morning, relaxed and studied the puffs of cloud beneath them and the birdlike shadows they cast on the checkerboard that was the Earth still further below.
There was heavy ocean travel through the delta and on the gulf. Some of the ships were steamers but the larger ones, like the train and the trucks they had seen, were double-hulled rocket affairs that seemed to cover the water at extremely high speed.
"Funny they can't fly," Mack mused. "They've got plenty of other up-to-the-minute gadgets in this world."
"Perhaps they never thought of it," said Elspeth vaguely. Then, "I'm hungry, Mack. We haven't eaten a real meal since yesterday noon. Where are you bringing us down?"
"North of Pontchartrain," said Mack. "There's some pretty open country up that way with a number of narrow roads. We ought to be able to sneak into New Orleans that way."
As it turned out they made it successfully. They paused for lunch at a sort of roadhouse and for once were spared the routine fried-chicken-and-grits of "orthodox" Southern cooking. Oysters in exotic Creole sauce, red snapper papillon, jambalaya, fine wines and the surroundings of a pleasant iron-balconied courtyard made the meal an event for Elspeth. Over ices and coffee she sighed.
"I am ruint," she told Mack, "but it's worth it."
"For once we agree," he told her. But he looked at his watch and frowned. "We've got to get parked at the St. Louis before dinner time and we're still a long way out of town. Let's go."
"You ought to be burped," said Elspeth, annoyed at having mundane considerations inflicted upon her happy satiation. They paid an unexpectedly modest check for their repast and took off again in the Pipit, once more restored to its road-running aspect.
They found a garage within a couple of blocks of the hotel, which was on a barriered-off Canal Street, walked slowly toward their seven-story destination, Mack grumbling at having to carry both suitcases.
"Hey—what's this?" the photographer inquired as they discovered that doors in the wall barring Canal Street opened for them by some sort of magic.
"Probably an electric eye or something," said Elspeth, glad for once to have come up first with a practical answer. Mack grunted and followed her on through, bumped into her, then froze behind her with equal astonishment.
"What the—?" he muttered. But the question was purely rhetorical. They understood now why the city's chief thoroughfare was barred to motor traffic. It was an immense moving boulevard, apparently arranged in eight strips, four of them moving in each direction. The two inner strips in either direction were considerably faster than those on the borders and there was a stationary strip in the center, apparently to permit passengers to change direction.
"Doesn't look so remarkable once you've seen it," said Mack at last, turning away. Elspeth said nothing, for after her first moment of rapture at seeing such a fantastic human dream fulfilled, she was forced to agree with him.
The moving strips seemed to run for several miles and were segmented at chief intersections. At their far end, beyond a number of vehicular overpasses, could be seen the lofty dome of a huge white building, which Elspeth judged to be the capitol of Columbia. At the river end of the moving boulevard was another dome atop a complex arrangement of marble arches, which she thought must be a memorial of some kind.
But despite its sweep and newness of concept it was a disappointment. Like virtually every other publicly-owned project she had seen since entering this world it looked dingy and ill-tended. One of the inner strips seemed to be running faultily and was noisily protesting its ill health.
She wondered how often there were breakdowns and then decided she was thinking like Mack and disliked herself for it. She followed him dutifully along a slow strip to the Hotel St. Louis, another ornately balconied structure with a high almost cool lobby. The photographer went directly to the desk and asked a foppish mulatto assistant manager if there was a message for Mr. Horelle. This was according to instructions.
The manager at once unbent, handed Mack a note and summoned a bellboy for their bags without putting them through the routine of signing the register. As they rode up in another slow moving and ornately grilled elevator Mack grinned at her mockingly.
"Don't blame me if you have to sleep on the couch tonight—if there is a couch," he told her. "Horelle arranged this."
"I could spit," she replied. But to Mack's good-humored disappointment they were ushered into a suite of five rooms—a drawing room, two bedrooms and two baths. It was roomier but not quite as lush as the room and bath they had shared the night before at Bienville House in Baton Rouge.
ELSPETH'S first act was to brush her teeth with the powder she had found in her room in Atlanta. There was another such box in the mirrored cabinet above the bowl, as there seemed to be in all public bedrooms. Columbia, she thought, was a land of contradictions— of recent slavery, of feudal power, of no air travel—but of applied rocket power, cavity-killing toothpowder and disintegrator weapons—to say nothing of moving streets.
"'Hail Columbia, Happy Land," she told herself as she put her hair into some sort of rough order and wondered when if ever she would get a chance at a decent coiffure again. She found she was out of cigarettes and wandered into the drawing room, where Mack was comfortably smoking and studying one of the books he had purchased the night before.
"Help yourself," he said, waving at a package beside him when she told him she wanted a smoke. "Incidentally, I ordered drinks sent up. Thought we could use them."
"Is that all we have to do now?" she asked him.
"The message simply says we're to wait until Weston's mob makes contact," he told her. "It seems the government is making things hot for them."
"As if we didn't know," she replied, again aggrieved at his lack of courtesy in not lighting her a cigarette. There was something just a trifle too casual, too intimate, about his lack of manners. It was almost as if he thought they were—
The arrival of the man with the whisky and ice and soda cut short that dangerous line of thinking, for which she was grateful. She mixed herself a highball and, while the photographer did honors for himself, studied him carefully.
Certainly propinquity had not improved his somewhat battered features, His nose was as far off center as ever, his eyelids as thick with scar tissue. His body, while not bulky, was the next thing to it. But his looks might have been passable, even his voice—it was his damned materialistic soul that spoiled him for her.
She tried to forget the fact that he had extricated her at great risk to himself from a highly explosive situation that morning in Baton Rouge. Then she caught him looking at her and felt herself blush and turned away quickly. A shrill piping sound from outside caught her attention.
It grew louder and louder, reminiscent of scores of sirens, all stuck on one very high note. She moved instinctively toward the balcony but Mack, who had risen, caught her roughly by the arm.
"Careful," he said. "Remember what happ
ened this morning."
"It's hardly likely to happen here," she replied. She almost had to shout as the shrill note seemed to come right into the room. Freeing herself she opened the french windows and stepped out.
On the far side of Canal Street was an armed motorcade, stalled on the fast strips that moved toward the capitol. First were small rocket cars, then trucks, then armored vehicles carrying big guns. In their center was a large gleaming rocket car.
Standing up in its rear was a tall military figure, magnificent in blue and silver, saluting continually a crowd that had assembled along the moving ways. As it came abreast of them they saw that it was Marshal Henry and that he was drawing cheers from the mob below.
Mack seized her shoulders to draw her back out of sight but not before the Negro chief of staff came abreast of them. As he did so his handsome black face lifted and his teeth showed white in a smile while he lifted his cockaded hat from his gray head in a direct salute.
"He saw us!" gasped Elspeth when they were back in the drawing room with the french windows tightly closed. "Mack, we've got to get out of here. I'm frightened."
"It's worse than that," said Mack, pacing the thick carpet and frowning. "He knew we were here. He didn't look up by accident. We're sitting ducks."
At that moment there was a sharp rap on the corridor door.
VI
THEY exchanged a brief and meaningful glance. Then Mack motioned Elspeth toward her room, crossed quickly to his own bedroom. The knock was repeated more sharply as he emerged, releasing the safety catch on his pistol. He stood well back from the door when he opened it.
A tall, pale, angular young man entered and stopped short at the sight of Mack's automatic. His light blue eyes were flashing with fright, as he turned to Elspeth, who stood in the bedroom doorway, then back to Mack. He laughed, nervously, stroked a thin lip mustache.
House of Many Worlds Page 5