by Eric Flint
He halted, realizing he was stammering. Barbara's eyes hadn't turned from his face. And in the same way that her knowledge of Vince's fate had not disturbed him—somehow, he took it for granted that she realized and appreciated why and what he had done—so now her expression reassured him.
She said quietly, "Dr. Gloge, there are several things you don't understand. I know I can assimilate the serum. So give me the shot—and the serum—at once."
Barbara Ellington arose and started over toward him. She said nothing, and her face revealed no emotion, but his next awareness was of holding the jet gun out to her on his open palm as she came up.
"There's only one charge left."
She took the gun from his palm without touching him, turned it over, studied it, laid it back in his hand. "Where is your supply of the serum?"
Dr. Gloge nodded at the entrance to the library behind her. "The larger of the two safes in there."
Her head had turned in the direction he indicated. Now she remained still for a moment, gaze remote, lips parted, in an attitude of intent listening; then she looked back at him.
"Give me the injection," she told him. "Some men are coming."
Dr. Gloge lifted the gun, put the point against her shoulder, pulled the trigger. Barbara drew her breath in sharply, took the gun from him, opened her purse, dropped the gun inside and snapped the purse shut. Her eyes shifted to the office door.
"Listen!" she said.
After a moment, Dr. Gloge heard footsteps coming along the narrow corridor from the main laboratory.
"Who is it?" he asked anxiously.
"Hammond," she said. "Three other men."
Dr. Gloge made a stifled sound of despair. "We've got to get away. He mustn't find either of us here. Quick—through there." He waved toward the library.
Barbara shook her head. "This place is surrounded. All passages are guarded." She frowned. "Hammond must think he has all the evidence he needs against you—but don't help him in any way! Admit nothing! Let's see what I can do with my—" As she spoke she moved back to the chair on which she had been sitting. She settled into it, her face composed. "Maybe I can handle him," she said confidently.
The footsteps had reached the door. There came a knock.
Gloge glanced at Barbara. His thoughts were whirling. She nodded, smiled.
"Come in!" Dr. Gloge said harshly, too loudly.
Hammond entered the room. "Why, Mr. Hammond!" Barbara exclaimed. Her face was flushed, she looked embarrassed and confused.
Hammond had stopped, as he caught sight of her. He sensed a mental probing. His brain put up a barrier, and the probing ceased.
Their eyes met; and there was a flicker of consternation in hers. Hammond smiled ironically. Then he said in a steely voice:
"Stay where you are, Barbara. I'll talk to you later." His voice went up. "Come on in, Ames!" he called.
There was threat in his tone; and Dr. Gloge sent a quick, desperate, appealing glance at Barbara. She gave him an uncertain smile. The look of earnest, fumbling innocence with which she had greeted Hammond had left her face, leaving it resigned but alert.
Hammond gave no sign of being aware of the change.
"Ames," he said to the first of the three men who came in through the library from the specimen room—Dr. Gloge recognized Wesley Ames, the chief of Research Alpha's security staff—"this is Barbara Ellington. Take charge of that handbag she's holding. Allow no one to enter this office. Miss Ellington is not to leave and is not to be permitted to touch any object in this room. She is to stay in that chair until I return with Dr. Gloge."
Wesley Ames nodded. "Understood, Mr. Hammond!" He glanced at his men, one of whom went to the office door and locked it while Ames turned to Barbara. She handed him her purse without comment.
"Doctor, come with me," Hammond said curtly.
Dr. Gloge followed him into the library. Hammond closed the door behind them.
"Where's Vince?" he said in an inexorable voice.
"Really, Mr. Hammond," Gloge protested. "I don't—"
Hammond stepped toward him abruptly. The movement seemed a threat. Dr. Gloge cringed, expecting to be manhandled. Instead, the bigger man firmly caught his arm and pressed a tiny metal object against his bare wrist.
"Tell me where Vince is!" Hammond commanded.
Gloge parted his lips to deny any knowledge of Barbara's boy friend. Instead, the confession of what he had done poured forth from him. As he realized what he was admitting, Gloge tried desperately to stop himself from talking. He had already divined that the metal touching his skin was some kind of a hypnotic device, and so he tried to pull his arm from Hammond's grasp.
It was a vain effort.
"How long ago did you drown him?" Hammond asked.
"About an hour ago," said Dr. Gloge, hopelessly.
At that instant shouts came from the adjoining office. The door was pulled open. Wesley Ames stood there, ashen-faced.
"Mr. Hammond—she's gone!"
Hammond darted past him into the office. Dr. Gloge hurried after, legs trembling. As he reached the door, Hammond already was coming back into the office with one of the security men from the hall on the other side. Ames and the other men stood in the center of the office, looking about with stupefied expressions.
Hammond closed the door, said to Ames, "Quickly now! What happened?"
Ames threw his hands up in a gesture of furious frustration.
"Mr. Hammond, I don't know. We were watching her. She was there in the chair . . . then she was not there, that's all. He—" he indicated one of the men—"was standing with his back to the door. When we saw she was gone, he was sitting on the floor next to the door! The door was open. We ran into the hall, but she wasn't there. Then I called you."
"How long had you been watching her?" Hammond asked sharply.
"How long?" Ames gave him a dazed look. "I had just taken my mother down the hall to the elevator—"
He stopped, blinked. "Mr. Hammond, what am I saying? My mother's been dead for eight years!"
Hammond said softly, "So that's her little trick. She reached to that deep of the heart where the pure, unsullied dead are enshrined. And I thought she was only trying to read my mind!"
He broke off, said in a clear, commanding voice:
"Wake up, Ames! You three have been gone from the world for a couple of minutes. Don't worry about how Miss Ellington did it. Get her description to the exits. If she's seen approaching by a guard, tell him to keep her at a distance at gun point."
As the three hurried from the office, he indicated a chair to Dr. Gloge. Gloge sat down, senses swimming, as Hammond took a pencil-shaped device from his pocket, pressed it, and stood waiting.
On the fifth floor of the Research Alpha complex, Helen Wendell picked up the small private phone at the side of her desk, said, "Go ahead, John."
"Switch all defense and trap screens on immediately!" Hammond's voice told her. "Gloge's drowned Strather—as an experimental failure. But the other one's awake and functioning. It's hard to know what she'll do next, but she may find it necessary to get to my office as a way of getting out of this building fast."
Helen pressed a button. "Not this way she won't!" she said. "The screens are on."
X
Outside, it grew darker on that tense Monday night.
At eight-eighteen, Helen Wendell again picked up the small phone purring at the side of her desk in the Research Alpha complex, glanced over at the closed office door, and said into the receiver, "Go ahead, John."
"I'm here at the pool," John Hammond's voice told her. "We've just fished his body out. Helen, the fellow is alive. Some reflex prevented any intake of water. But we'll need an oxygen tent."
Helen's left hand reached for another telephone. "You want the ambulance?" she asked, starting to dial.
"Yes. You have the street number. Tell them to pull up at the side gate. We have to act swiftly."
"Police uniforms, also?" Helen asked.
"Yes. But tell them to stay in the cab unless needed. We're out of sight, behind a high fence. And it's dark. I'll come back with them. Has Barbara been apprehended?"
"No," Helen said.
"I really didn't expect she would be," Hammond said. "I'll question the guards when I get there."
Barbara had allowed Ames to escort her to the nearest elevator, while she continued to have him think that she was his mother.
Once in the elevator she pushed the up-button and came out presently on the roof. As she had already perceived, a helicopter was scheduled to take off. And, though she was not an authorized passenger, the pilot took her along believing her to be his girl friend. Her sudden arrival seemed perfectly logical to him.
A little later, he set her down on the roof of another building. And that, also, seemed the most natural act to him, her reason for going there obvious.
He flew off and promptly forgot the episode.
The hasty landing was an urgent necessity for Barbara. She could feel the new injection beginning to work. So in her scanning of the buildings flitting by below, she perceived one in which the upper floors were unoccupied.
"I'll try to make it down to some office," she thought.
But she didn't get beyond the top floor. She actually began to stagger as she went down the first steps from the roof. And there was no mistaking the out-of-control state of her body. To her left, a door opened into a warehouse-like loft. She weaved through it, closed it behind her, and bolted it. Then she half-lowered herself, half-fell to the floor.
During that evening and night she never quite lost consciousness. Blackout was no longer possible for her. But she could feel her body changing, changing, changing—
The energy flows inside her took on a different meaning. They were separate from her. Presently they would be controllable again, but in another fashion entirely.
Something of Barbara seemed to disappear with that awareness.
"I'm still me!" the entity thought as it lay there on the floor. "Flesh, feeling, desire—"
But she had the distinct realization that "me" even in these early stages of the five hundred thousand year transformations was ME PLUS.
Exactly how the self was becoming something more was not yet clear.
The slow night dragged by.
XI
Tuesday.
Shortly before noon, Helen Wendell came along the hallway that led from John Hammond's quarters to the main office. Hammond was sitting at the far side of her desk. He glanced up at her as she approached.
"How are the patients?" he asked.
"Gloge is role-perfect," Helen said. "I even allowed him to spend part of the morning talking to his assistants here. He's already had two conversations by Telstar with Sir Hubert about his new task overseas. I've put him to sleep again, but he's available. When did you come in?"
"Just now. How's Strather?"
Helen tapped the recorder. "I checked with the MD machine on him twenty minutes ago," she said. "It gave me its opinion in detail. I took it all down. Do you want to hear it?"
"Sum it up for me."
Helen pursed her lips; then: "The MD verifies that he didn't swallow any water, that some newly developed brain mechanism shut off breathing and kept him in a state of suspended animation. Vince himself has no conscious memory of the experience, so it was evidently a survival act of the lower brain. MD reports other developments are taking place in Vince, regards them as freakish in nature. It's too soon to tell whether or not he can survive a third injection. He's under sedation."
Hammond looked dissatisfied. "All right," he said after a moment. "What else do you have for me?"
"A number of transmitter messages," Helen said.
"About Gloge?"
"Yes. New Brasilia and Manila agree with you that there are too many chances of a revealing slip-up if Dr. Gloge remains at Research Alpha any longer than is absolutely necessary."
"You said Gloge is role-perfect."
Helen nodded. "At the moment. But he is a highly recalcitrant subject and naturally I can't give him the kind of final conditioning he'd get at Paris center. That's where they want him. The courier, Arnold, will take him aboard the Paris-jet at 5:10 tonight."
"No!" Hammond shook his head. "That's too early! Gloge is our bait to catch Barbara. His experiments indicate that she won't be able to function until some time this evening. I calculate that somewhere around 9 o'clock will be a good time to let Gloge out from behind the defense screens."
Helen was silent a moment, then said, "There seems to be a general feeling, John, that you're over-estimating the possibilities of any really dangerous evolutionary developments in Barbara Ellington."
Hammond smiled tautly. "I've seen her. They haven't. Mind you, for all I know, she may be dead or dying of the effects of the third shot by now. But if she's capable of coming, I think she'll come. She'll want that fourth injection. She may start any time looking for the man who can produce the serum for her."
By Tuesday, a new awareness had come to Barbara.
She had developed brain mechanisms that could do things with space—do them on an automatic level, without her conscious mind knowing what, or how. Fantastic things . . .
As she lay there, a new nerve center in her brain reached out and scanned a volume of space 500 light-years in diameter. It touched and comprehended clouds of neutral hydrogen and bright young O-type stars, measuring the swing of binaries, took a census of comets and ice asteroids. Far out in the constellation of Ophiuchus a blue-white giant was going nova, and the new, strange linkage in Barbara's mind observed its frantic heaving of spheres of radiant gas. A black dwarf emitted its last spray of infra-red light and sank into the radiationless pit of dead stars.
Barbara's mind encompassed it all, and reached farther . . . reached out effortlessly until it touched a specific Something . . . and withdrew.
Brimming with ecstasy, Barbara cried out in her mind, What did I touch?
She knew it had been something the brain mechanism was programmed to search for. But no conscious perception was involved. All she could be sure of was that the nerve center seemed satisfied, and ceased its scanning.
But she sensed, in an intensely happy way, that it remained aware of What it had contacted.
She was still savoring the joy a while later when she became aware that the shifting energy flows inside her had resumed.
Gradually, then, she permitted her body and mind to sink into a receptive state.
Midsummer heat built up over the city throughout the day. In the locked room on the vacant top floor of the multi-storied building three miles from Research Alpha, the heat grew stifling as the sun shifted overhead, began to beat in through closed, unshaded windows. Barbara, curled on her side on the dusty floor, did not move. Now and then she uttered a moaning sound. Sweat ran from her for a long, long time, as the heat increased; then the skin of her face dried and turned dirty white. She made no more sounds. Even a close study would not have been able to prove that she still breathed.
By four o'clock the sunblaze had shifted past the windows, and the locked room lay in shadows. But it was another hour before the temperature in it gradually began to drop. About six, the curled figure moved for the first time.
She straightened her legs slowly, then, with a sudden, convulsive motion, rolled over on her back, lay flat, arms flung loosely to the sides.
The right half of her face was smeared grotesquely with thick dust caked in drying sweat. She breathed—lay quiet again. Several minutes later, he eyelids lifted. The eyes were a deep, brilliant blue, seemed oddly awake and alert, though they remained unfocused and did not shift about the room. After a while, the lids slowly closed and remained closed.
The day darkened; the city's lights awoke. The empty warehouse stood silent. More than an hour passed before the figure in the room on the top floor moved again.
This time, it was motion of a different order. She rose suddenly and quickly to her feet, went to the ne
arest window and stood looking out through the dirt-stained glass.
The towering Research Alpha complex was a glow of white light to the west. The watcher's eyes turned toward it . . .
A second of time went by. Then the mind that directed the eyes moved on an entirely new level of extended perception.
Night-shift activities in the research complex were not essentially different from those of the day; but there were fewer people around as the awareness that was Barbara drifted along familiar, lighted hallways, about corners, dropped suddenly to a sublevel which contained the biology section. Here she flicked through the main laboratory and up a narrow corridor, pausing before the door to Dr. Gloge's office.