“Jammed,” Janas said. “Somebody’s trying to kill us.”
That was the last thing Janas said before they hit bottom.
The fall ended with terrible swiftness—the floor rushed up to meet him, smashing against his feet, his knees, his whole body. Blackness became a blaze of light, filling the entire universe. Then blackness again.
Chapter XXII
The first matinée at Eddie’s had just begun. There was a reasonably full house for that time of day when the curtains went up, exposing the simulation of the Odinese Craterlands and the twelve almost naked dancing girls who preceded the headline act.
The girls had almost finished their routine and the hidden band was ready to swing into its introduction music for Rinni and Gray, The Moondog Dancers, when the Federation soldiers, dressed in harsh combat green and not even bothering to display warrants, marched into the lounge. Neither the band under the floor nor the girls on the stage or even the couple who stood in the wings awaiting their musical cue were aware of the entry of the armed soldiers. Only a few of Eddie’s patrons noticed them, and they, gradually becoming accustomed to seeing armed soldiers and even stranger sights in their city, quickly turned their attention back to the performance.
The soldiers stood in the shadows near the entrance as if waiting for some signal to tell them to do what they had come to do. Their leader, a young, downy-cheeked lieutenant, looked nervously about, his right hand continually flitting to and away from the service needle pistol on his hip. After a few awkward moments he pulled a cigarette from his uniform blouse pocket, clumsily placed it between his lips, and applied his lighter to its tip with shaking fingers. A private standing near him gave his superior officer a sidelong sneering glance, and then returned his eyes to the twelve beauties cavorting on the stage. He gave the lieutenant very little thought after that.
The lieutenant, for his own part, wished that he could allow his attention to be completely absorbed by the attractive girls; tried to visualise himself with the little brunette, third from the left. But it did not work. Too much of his mind was occupied with the two pieces of paper in his pocket beside the cigarettes and with what he had come there to do.
The drums of the hidden band rumbled, the horns squealed, and the chorus girls retreated toward the rear of the stage. A subdued chatter gave way to silence as a mournful guitar cued the headliners and heralded the pseudo-Moondog theme.
Light shifted from white to azure. Rinni—part running, part dancing, part floating, spreading a dissipating cloud of shimmering white fog behind her—came onto the stage, dressed only in the vanishing mists and the pale blue, decorated breechcloth. An involuntary gasp, a sigh, came up from the audience, or at least from the masculine half of it.
Behind her, in half serious, half light-hearted pursuit, came her lover-partner. What response he elicited from the audience was not audible, but the young lieutenant saw a desiring look on the face of at least one woman near him.
The pale-skinned, soft-cheeked, shaky-fingered lieutenant of the Federation Army dropped his cigarette to the floor, crushed it under the heel of his regulation boot, and hesitantly drew his needler from its holster.
“Let’s go,” he said in a tremulous voice—and his soldiers, no more veterans than he, tremulously followed.
With as much boldness as he could muster the young officer marched straight across the floor, ignoring as best he could the outraged gasps of the people against whom he rudely, nervously brushed. He brought his soldiers to within a few meters of the stage, halted, and took the two official forms from his breast pocket. Transferring them to his left hand he rested his right on the butt of his needier.
“Citizeness Rinni Kalendar and Citizen Grayson Manse,” he said in a voice unnaturally high and thin, “by orders of the Chairman of the Terran Federation, pursuant to legislation passed this day by the Parliament of the Terran Federation, you are hereby charged with treason and placed under arrest pending trial by a military court of justice.” It was a long speech and he was surprised to get through it as easily as he did. He looked back at the stage.
The two dancers had stopped suddenly, spun to face the source of the voice, anger and astonishment on their faces. Any words that they might have spoken were drowned by the gasps and cries of amazement from the watchers.
“Please come…” the lieutenant began, but his words were cut off by the leaping form of Gray, plunging off the stage toward the young officer.
“Run!” Gray yelled as he jumped.
Rinni’s eyes followed him for a moment, wide and bright, pain and fear rippling across her delicate features. Then she turned.
Gray’s plunge from the bright light of the stage into the darkness was miscalculated. He missed the lieutenant by a full meter, slamming against a portly man and the table at which he sat. The man sputtered indignantly and an energy rifle discharged, more by accident than intent, though the aim was excellent. Lightning leaped across the marble-topped table, spraying across Gray’s naked chest, shoulders and face. He was not even able to scream before he died, faceless and smoldering.
The girl had crossed the stage and nearly escaped when the lieutenant recovered sufficient presence of mind to yell “Stop!” and at the same time, the result of months of intensive training, automatically fired the needle pistol that had somehow come into his hand. The training had done its work well.
The narrow tenth-level beam from the energy pistol seared across Rinni’s hip, crisping flesh, burning away part of her breechcloth. She staggered forward, grasping blindly in front of her for something to catch her fall. The lieutenant’s needler fired again, blackening a three centimeter circle between her shoulder blades.
Rinni gasped through burning lungs, half fell backward, and did a stumbling turn. Blood mingled with the redness of her lips, stark against the sudden whiteness of her face, as she staggered toward the front of the stage. The fragments of her scorched breechcloth fell away and she stumbled on naked, beautiful, dying.
“It doesn’t matter,” she cried. “It doesn’t matter. You can’t stop them from coming.”
Then she fell forward across the stage.
She was dead when the doctor arrived.
*
In the San Mateo district of the San Francisco-Oakland Complex, an auburn-haired girl stood at the window of an apartment high in the old building that overlooked San Francisco Bay. She gazed eastward across the water, over to the cluster of buildings that lined the man-made shore of New Mount Eden. She awkwardly fumbled with a cigarette, breaking it in the process of getting it out of the pack. Throwing it to the floor, she more slowly, more carefully, concentrating all her attention on the act, withdrew a second and successfully transferred it to her mouth. It took her a while longer to find matches, and when she did it took her three tries to get one burning.
Exhaling a lungful of smoke, Enid Campbell looked directly down toward the surface some fifteen stories below her. She could not see the man whom she was sure was still standing in the shadows across the street from the apartment building, but she knew he was there; he had been there all day.
Who is he? she asked herself. And why? But she was not sure she really wanted to know the answer.
At last she turned away from the window, opaquing it, and stood for a moment, deliberating. Then she went into the bedroom and began to remove her street clothes, carefully hanging them in the closet. Naked, she turned to the full-length mirror on the back of the door and stood looking at herself for a long while, the forgotten cigarette smoldering between her fingers. She felt within the attractive body she saw reflected in the mirror a pain and a hunger, an emptiness and a desire, and wanted Robert Janas with her so badly she could almost cry. Then, with a sudden, almost angry motion, she grabbed a peignoir from the closet, loosely draped it across her shoulders and returned to the apartment’s living room.
She stopped in front of the 3-V unit sitting on a low table in the corner. It took all her willpower not to punch out the co
de for a certain room in the STC Officer’s Hostel in Central. She knew better than to call Bob. It could be very dangerous for them both. But that did not diminish her desire to do so.
She dropped onto a couch, the peignoir slipping off her shoulders, and lit another cigarette and wondered about her brother. He had not been in his apartment the morning before when she and Bob returned. In fact she had been unable to locate either him or his friends, whom she had tried to call. But she knew where he was, she knew it as well as if he had told her himself—but she wanted to think it wasn’t so; she wanted to believe that her hotheaded brother had not taken a stratoflyer to Geneva, a gun in his hand, to kill the Chairman. But she knew it was so. Oh, Rod, she cried to herself, oh, you fool!
Rising, her thin garment falling forgotten to the floor, Enid went back to the window, unpolarized it, and looked out at the bay and wished that the long, long day would end, and yet dreaded the coming of night.
*
Approximately nine thousand, six hundred and eighty odd kilometers east of the San Francisco-Oakland Complex, on the edge of the Rhone River, stood the ancient city of Geneva. In the center of an almost equally ancient park, once called Place Neuve, stood a complex of buildings which bore some slight resemblance to, though much larger than, the old Palace of the League of Nations that had stood near that spot some fifteen hundred years before.
It was night in Geneva, nearly 23:00, though that little deterred the constant stream of traffic that passed through this capital city of the Terran Federation, nor did it deter the Chairman of the Federation from calling an emergency night session of the Parliament to rubber-stamp another of his decrees. Grumbling and disaffected with “his majesty,” the representatives of the Complexes of Earth and of her stellar colonies filed into the chamber and sat down to await the coming of his august personage.
Outside the building, still some half a kilometer from the Parliament chambers, six young men walked slowly down the tree-bordered lane that led to the Parliament building. They had been told that Jonal Constantine Herrera would soon make his appearance, would soon address the joint meeting of Parliament, and they meant to be there. Their object was to kill him.
The six young men, the action squad of the Sons of Liberty, all carried illegal needle pistols hidden inside their garish clothing, but for one of them the pistol seemed to weigh a thousand kilograms, for his was the weapon designated to bring an end to the life of the despot who ruled the crumbling Federation. He had volunteered to do it and now there was no way that he could back out of it. Like it or not, history was sitting in the palms of his sweaty hands.
Rod Campbell licked his lips with a dry tongue, glanced at the guards who stood beside the doors at the top of the flight of marble stairs that they approached, the main entrance into the Federal Parliament Chambers. His back muscles involuntarily tensed, almost painfully, and his empty stomach unpleasantly churned within him.
“Where do you think you’re going?” the nearest of the guards asked as they mounted the flight of stairs.
“I don’t know,” Campbell stammered. “Just looking around, I guess.” His casualness was a terribly thin veneer over the stark fear that grew cancer-like within him.
“Not here you ain’t,” the guard said. “Not tonight. Go someplace else.” He dismissed them with a wave of his hand.
Campbell reached up to scratch his head—and on that signal five needlers were ripped out into the open, five firing studs were depressed, five beams of energy bore toward the three uniformed guards. All three Federal guards died before gaining their weapons.
Drawing his own pistol, Campbell leaped toward the doors, kicking them apart, and then jumped into the huge Parliament Chambers amid the clanging and screaming of alarms.
Rod Campbell never saw the Chairman.
Closed circuit 3-V monitors trained on the doors, wary for uninvited visitors, saw the events outside, saw Campbell kick open the doors and leap in. An operator sitting in a room high above the chambers then moved his hand to a toggle switch that activated two energy rifles trained on the doorway.
A sheet of flame came into being, for an instant outlining Campbell’s figure, a dark humanoid form amid the white-hot glow of hell. Then that figure ceased to exist, became vapor and ash and charred bones blown back by the explosion of the melting energy pistol. The five young would-be assassins behind Campbell died as well, though not as quickly or painlessly.
Chapter XXIII
At first Janas could not remember where he was or how he had gotten there or why there was pain in his ankles and his left shoulder. Then the blackness began to recede a little from him, the blackness that was in his mind, and he opened his eyes and still saw darkness, though this was the darkness of the absence of light, and not the darkness of unconsciousness.
Shifting himself around enough to relieve the pain in his ankles, he began to feel about. On his right he found something soft and warm that responded to his touch with a faint moan.
“Maura?” he asked.
“Captain,” the girl replied in the darkness.
“Are you hurt?”
“No, I don’t think so,” the girl answered. “Are you?”
“Twisted my ankles, I think,” he said. “Not serious.”
“Bob,” a voice said from his left, “it’s me, Jarl. They didn’t quite make it, did they?”
“Not yet,” Janas answered. “I doubt that they expected to, at least not this way. Are you hurt?”
“Bumped my head. Other than that, okay. But if it hadn’t been for the buffers at the bottom of the shaft we would have been killed.”
“Altho?” Janas asked. “Bilthor?”
Altho Franken grunted reply, then said, “Bilthor’s unconscious.”
“He’ll be okay,” Janas said. “We didn’t hit hard enough to break any bones. Now listen carefully, Al. Someone’s trying to stop us from getting revised corporate policy orders out. At this stage I assume it’s Herrera’s men.”
“This isn’t my doing,” Franken said gloomily.
“I believe you,” Janas told him. “These people mean to stop us, Al, even if they have to kill you in the process. You remember that.”
By this time Emmett had risen to his feet in the darkness and was trying to open the doors of the elevator car.
“I think we can get these doors open if you’ll help me, Bob,” he said.
“Wait,” Janas told him.
“Why?”
“Whoever’s doing this is probably outside there now,” Janas said, “waiting for us to come out. We can expect them to be armed and we’ve only got one gun between us.”
“We can’t just sit here,” Emmett said. “We don’t have that much time.”
“Your people ought to know what’s happened by now and be on their way down here,” Janas said.
“Yes, but still…” Emmett began but was interrupted by a banging on the car’s door.
“Jarl?” a muffled voice came through the metal.
“Who is it?” Emmett asked.
“Hal Danswer,” the voice replied. “What happened?”
Janas thought he heard Franken sigh with relief.
“Something happened to the power and the friction stops didn’t work,” Emmett answered. “Get us out of here.”
“Just a minute.”
Stepping to Emmett’s side, Janas whispered into his ear: “Stand away from the door.”
“Why?” Emmett asked.
“Don’t take any chances.”
“With Hal? Hell, Bob, he’s as trustworthy as you are.”
“Do you know who the spy is?” Janas asked.
“No. It could be anyone.”
“That’s what I mean. Stand away from the door.”
“You don’t have to worry about Danser,” Franken said lightly from the darkness.
“What do you mean?” Emmett snapped.
“Danser isn’t trying to kill me,” Franken said. “You see, he’s working for me. He has been all al
ong. How do you think I knew what you were planning?”
Emmett released something halfway between a curse and a groan, and Janas heard him move toward Franken.
“Hold it, Jarl,” he said. “We’ll take care of Al later. Right now you get out of the way.”
While Emmett moved back into the compartment, pressing himself against the wall, Janas drew the .45 from his waistband. He leaned against the door frame, relieving as much weight as he could from his painful ankles, and waited. He did not have long.
Already there were the sounds of a metal tool being wedged into the tiny space where the two metal doors came together. The edge of the tool worked its way in, separated the doors slightly, and allowed a thin beam of light to fall into the dark car. Janas could see nothing save the tip of the tool wedged between the slabs of metal.
“We’ll have you out in a shake,” Hal Danser’s voice said as another tool was placed into the crack. “Now, all together,” Danser’s voice went on. “On the count of three, pry. One. Two. Three.”
There was a grumbling sound from the skewed doors as they began to slide apart, as hands gripped them and tore them open. Light spilled into the darkness.
For a moment Janas was partially blinded, but not enough that he could not distinguish the shapes of the three men, and the things that they held in their hands. He squeezed the trigger of his .45.
The men outside apparently had not expected the ones within the elevator car to resist, or to resist with such fury. The nearest of them stumbled backward, losing the grip on the energy weapon he carried, throwing his left hand up to stop the blood that suddenly gushed from the rip in the flesh of his right arm.
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