“Well, after I found out all about you, Steve, that’s what I had in mind. But now—”
“Now what?” I urged her gently. I had a hunch that she was leading up to something, but ducking shy about it until she managed to find out how I thought. It would have been all zero if we’d been in a clear area, but as it was I led her gently on.
“But now I’ve failed,” she said with a slight wail.
“What do they do with failures?” I asked harshly. “Siberia? Or a gunny sack weighted down with an anvil? Or do they drum you out of the corps?”
“I don’t know.”
I eyed her closely. I was forced to admit that no matter how Catherine thought, she was a mighty attractive dish from the physical standpoint. And regardless of the trouble she’d put me through, I could not overlook the fact that I had been deep enough in love to plan elopement and marriage. I’d held her slender body close, and either her response had been honestly warm or Catherine was an actress of very rare physical ability. Scholar Phelps could hardly have picked a warmer temptress in the first place; putting her onto me now was a stroke of near-genius.
I got up from the edge of my bunk and faced her through my bars. She came close, too, and we looked into each other’s faces over a cross-rail of the heavy fence.
I managed a wistful grin at her. “You’re not really a failure yet, are you, kid?”
“I don’t quite know how to—to—” she replied.
I looked around my little cell with a gruesome gesture. “This isn’t my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I’m too expensive to keep.”
“I know,” she breathed.
Taking the bit in my teeth, I said, “Catherine even though—well, heck. I’d like to help you.”
“You mean that?” she asked in almost an eager voice.
“It’s not impossible to forget that we were eloping when all this started.”
“It all seems so long ago,” she said with a thick voice. “And I wish we were back there—no, Steve, I wish Mekstrom’s Disease had never happened—I wish—”
“Stop wishing and think,” I told her half-humorously. “If there were no Mekstrom’s Disease, the chances are that we’d never have met in the first place.”
“That’s the cruel part of it all,” she cried. And I mean cried.
I rapped on the metal bars with a fist. “So here we are,” I said unhappily. “I can’t help you now, Catherine.”
She put her hands through the bars and held my face between them. She looked searching into my eyes, as if straining to force her blocked telepath sense through the deadness of the area. She leaned against the steel but the barrier was very effective; our lips met through the cold metal. It was a very unsatisfactory kiss because we had to purse our lips like a pair of piccolo players to make them meet. It was like making love through a keyhole.
This unsatisfactory lovemaking did not last long. Unsteadily, Catherine said, “I want you, Steve.”
Inwardly I grinned, and then with the same feeling as if I’d laughed out loud at a funeral, I said, “Through these steel bars?”
She brought out a little cylindrical key. Then went to a brass wall plate beside the outer door, inserted the key, and turned. The sliding door to my cell opened on noiseless machined slides.
Then with a careful look at me, Catherine slipped a little shutter over the glass bull’s eye in the door. Her hand reached up to a hidden toggle above the door and as she snapped it, a thick cover surged out above the speaker, television lens, and microphone grille, curved down and shut off the telltales with a cushioned sound. Apparently the top management of the joint used these cells for other things than mere containment of unruly prisoners. I almost grinned; the society that Scholar Phelps proposed was not the kind that flourished in an atmosphere of trust, or privacy—except for the top brass.
Catherine turned from her switch plate and came across the floor with her face lifted and her lips parted.
“Hold me, Steve.”
My hand came forward in a short jab that caught her dead center in the plexus below the ribs. Her breath caught in one strangled gasp and her eyes went glassy. She swayed stiffly in half-paralysis. My other hand came up, closing as it rose, until it became a fist that connected in a shoulder-jarring wallop on the side of her jaw. Her head snapped up and her knees caved in. She folded from the hips and went down bonelessly. From her throat came the bubbly sound of air being forced painfully through a flaccid wet tube.
I jumped outside of the cell barrier because I was certain that they had some means of closing the cell from a master control center. I don’t know much about penology, but that’s the way I’d do it. I was half-surprised that I’d been able to get away with this much.
Catherine stirred and moaned, and I stopped long enough to take the key out of the wall plate. The cell door closed on its silent slides.
I had hardly been able to more than run the zipper up my shirt when the door opened and I had to dance like a fool to get behind it. The door admitted a flood of bright light from the corridor, and Dr. James Thorndyke. The cell door must have been bugged.
Thorndyke came in behind a large automatic clutched in one nervous fist. He strained his eyes at the gloom that was not cut by the ribbon of light.
And then I cut him down with a solid slice of my right hand to the base of his neck. I remembered to jump off the ground as the blow went home; there was a sickening crunch of bone and muscle as Thorndyke caved forward to the floor. He dropped the gun, luckily, as his body began to twitch and kick spasmodically as the life drained out of him.
I re-swallowed a mouthful of bitter bile as I reached down to pick up his gun. Then the room got hot and unbearably small and I felt a frantic urge to leave, to close the door upon that sight.
* * *
XXV
I was yards away from my door before my panic left me. Then I remembered where and who I was and took a fast look around. There was no one else in the corridor, of course, or I would not have been able to cut and run as I had. But I looked around anyway until my reasoning power told me that I had done little to help my position.
Like the canary, my plans for escape ended once I was outside of my cage. I literally did not know what to do with my new-found freedom. One thing was becoming painfully obvious: I’d be pinned down tight once I put a foot outside of the dead area in which this building was constructed. What I needed was friends, arms, ammunition, and a good, solid plan of escape. I had neither; unless you call my jailed friends such help. And there I could not go; the telltales would give me away to the master control center before I could raise my small—and unarmed—army.
So I stood there in the brightly lighted corridor and tried to think. I got nowhere, but I was driven to action again by the unmistakable sound of the elevator at the end of the corridor.
I eyed the various cell doors with suspicion; opening any but an empty room would cause some comment from the occupant, which again would give me away. Nor did I have time to canvass the joint by peeking into the one-way bull’s eyes, peering into a semi-gloom to see which room was empty.
So instead of hiding in the corridor, I sloped towards the elevator and the stairwell that surrounded it, hoping that I could make it before the elevator rose to my floor.
I know that my passage must have sounded like a turbojet in full flight, but I made the stairway and took a headlong leap down the first short flight of stairs just as the elevator door rolled open. I hit the wall with a bumping crash that jarred my senses, but I kept my feet and looked back up the stairs.
I caught a flash of motion; a guard sauntering past the top of the well, a cigarette in one hand and a lazy-looking air about him. He was expecting no trouble, and so I gave him none.
I crept up the stairs and poked my head out just at the floor level.
The guard, obviously confident that nothing, but nothing, could ever happen in this welded metal crib, jauntily peered into a couple o
f the rooms at random, took a long squint at the room I’d recently vacated, and then went on to the end of the hall where he stuck a key in a signal-box. On his way back he paused again to peer into my room, straining to see if he could peer past the little shutter over the bull’s eye. Then he shrugged unhappily, and started to return.
I loped down the stairs to the second floor and waited. The elevator came down, stopped, and the guard repeated his desultory search, not stopping to pry into any darkened rooms.
Just above the final, first-floor flight, I stopped and sprawled on the floor with only my head and the nose of my gun over the top step. Below was the guard’s desk and standing beside the desk with anger in every line of his ugly face was Scholar Phelps!
The elevator came down, stopped, and the guard walked out, to be nailed by Phelps.
“Your job,” snapped the good Scholar coldly, “says you are to walk.”
“Well, er—sir—it’s—”
“Walk!” stormed Phelps angrily. “You can’t cover that stairway in the elevator, you fumbling idiot.”
“But, sir—”
“Someone could easily come down while you go up.”
“I know that, sir, but—”
“Then why do you disobey?” roared Phelps.
“Well, you see, sir, I know how this place is built and no one has ever made it yet. Who could?” The guard looked mystified.
Phelps had to face that fact. He did not accept it gracefully. “My orders are orders,” he said stiffly. “You’ll follow them. To the last letter.”
“Yes sir. I will.”
“See that you do. Now, I’m going up. I’ll ride and you walk. Meet me on the fourth and bring the elevator down with you.”
“Yessir.”
I sloped upstairs like a scared rabbit. Up to the third again where I moved down the corridor and slipped into the much-too-thin niche made by a door. Stolidly the guard came up the stairs, crossed in front of the elevator with his back to me, turned the far corner and went on up to the fourth.
As his feet started up the stairs, I was behind him; by the time he reached the top, I was half way up.
Phelps said, “Now, from this moment on, Waldron, you’ll follow every order to the absolute letter. And when I ring, don’t make the error of bringing the elevator. Send it. It’ll come up and stop without a pilot.”
“Yes sir. I’m sorry sir. But you understand, sir, there isn’t really much to guard, sir.”
“Then guard nothing. But guard it well, because a man in your position is gauged in success by the amount of boredom he creates for himself.”
The guard started down and I darted up to poke my head out to see where Phelps was going. As I neared the floor level, I had a shock like someone hurling twenty gallons of ice water in my face. The top floor was the end of the dead area, and I—
—pulled my head down into the murk like a diver taking a plunge.
So I stood there making like a guppy with my head, sounding out the boundary of that deadness, ducking down as soon as the mental murk gave me a faint perception of the wall and ceiling above me. Then I’d move aside and sound it again. Eventually I found a little billowing furrow that rose above the floor level and I crawled out along the floor, still sounding and moving cautiously with my body hidden in the deadness that rose and fell like a cloud of murky mental smoke to my sense of perception.
I would have looked silly to any witness; wallowing along the floor like a porpoise acting furtive in the bright lights.
But then I couldn’t go any farther; the deadness sank below the floor level and left me looking along a bare floor that was also bare to my sense of perception.
I shoved my head out of the dead zone and took a fast dig, then dropped back in again and lay there reconstructing what I’d perceived mentally. I did it the second time and the third, each time making a rapid scan of some portion of that fourth floor.
In three fast swings, I collected a couple of empty offices, a very complete hospital set-up operating room, and a place that looked like a consultation theatre.
On my fourth scan, I whipped past Scholar Phelps, who was apparently deep in some personal interest.
I rose at once and strode down the hall and snapped the door open just as Phelps’ completely unexpecting mind grasped the perceptive fact that someone was coming down his hallway wearing a great big forty five automatic.
“Freeze!” I snapped.
“Put that weapon down, Mr. Cornell. It, nor its use, will get your freedom.”
“Maybe all I want out of life is to see you leave it,” I told him.
“You’d not be that foolish, I’m sure,” he said.
“I might.”
He laughed, with all the self-confidence in the world. “Mr. Cornell, you have too much will to live. You’re not the martyr type.”
“I might turn out to be the cornered-rat type,” I told him seriously. “So play it cagey, Phelps.”
“Scholar Phelps, please.”
“I wouldn’t disgrace the medical profession,” I told him. “So—”
“So what do you propose to do about this?”
“I’m getting out.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. One step out of this building and you’ll return within a half minute. How did you get out?”
“I was seduced out. Now—”
“I’d advise you to surrender; to stop this hopeless attempt; to put that weapon down. You cannot escape. There are, in this building, your mental and intellectual superiors whose incarceration bear me witness.”
I eyed him coldly and quietly. “I’m not convinced. I’m out. And if you could take a dig below you’d see a dead man and an unconscious woman to bear me witness. I broke your Dr. Thorndyke’s neck with a chop of my bare hand, Phelps; I knocked Catherine cold with a fist. This thing might not kill you, but I’m a Mekstrom, too, and so help me I can cool you down but good.”
“Violence will get you nothing.”
“Try my patience. I’ll bet my worthless hide on it.” Then I grinned at him. “Oh, it isn’t so worthless, is it?”
“One cry from me, Mr. Cornell, and—”
“And you’ll not live to see what happens. I’ve killed once tonight. I didn’t like it. But the idea is not as new now as it was then. I’ll kill you, Phelps, if for no other reason than merely to keep my word.”
With a sneer, Phelps turned to his desk and I stabbed my perception behind the papers and stuff to the call button; then I launched myself across the room like a rocket, swinging my gun hand as I soared. The steel caught him on the side of the head and drove him back from his call button before his finger could press it. Then I let him have a fist in the belly because the pistol swat hadn’t much more than dazed him. The fist did it. He crumpled in a heap and fought for breath unconsciously.
I turned to the wall he’d been eyeing with so much attention.
There was row upon row of small kine tubes, each showing the dark interior of a cell. Below each was a row of pilot lights, all dark.
On his desk was a large bank of push buttons, a speaker, and a microphone. And beside the push button set-up was a ledger containing a list of names with their cell numbers.
I found Marian Harrison; pushed her button, and heard her ladylike snore from the speaker. A green lamp winked under one of the kine tubes and I walked over and looked into the darkened cell to see her familiar hair sprawled over a thick pillow.
I went to the desk and snapped on the microphone.
“Marian,” I said. “MARIAN! HEY! MARIAN HARRISON!”
In the picture tube there was a stir, then she sat up and looked around in a sort of daze.
“Marian, this is Steve Cornell, but don’t—”
“Steve!”
“—cry out,” I finished uselessly.
“Where are you?” she asked in a whisper.
“I’m in the con room.”
“But how on Earth—?”
“No time to gab. I’ll be down in a r
ush with the key. Get dressed!”
“Yes, Steve.”
I took off in a headlong rush with the ‘Hotel Register’ in one hand. I made the third floor and Marian’s cell in slightly more than nothing flat, but she was ready when I came barging into her room. She was out of the cell before it hit the backstop and following me down the hall towards her brother’s room.
“What happened?” she asked breathlessly.
“Later,” I told her. I opened Phillip Harrison’s cell. “You go wake up Fred Macklin and tell him to come here. Then get the Macklin girl—Alice, it says here—and the pair of you wake up others and start sending ‘em up stairs. I’ll call you on the telltale as soon as I can.”
Marian took off with the key and the register and I started to shake Phillip Harrison’s shoulder. “Wake up!” I cried. “Wake up, Phillip!”
Phillip made a noise like a baby seal.
“Wake up!”
“Wha—?”
“It’s Steve Cornell. Wake up!”
With a rough shake of his head, Phillip groaned and unwound himself out of a tangle of bedclothing. He looked at me through half-closed glassy eyes. Then he straightened and made a perilous course to the washstand where he sopped a towel in cold water and applied it to his face, neck, and shoulders. When he dropped the towel in the sink, his expression was fresher and his eyes were mingled curiosity and amazement.
“What gives?” he asked, starting to dress in a hurry.
“I busted out, slugged Scholar Phelps, and took over the master control room. I need help. We can’t keep it long unless we move fast.”
“Yeah man. Any moving will be fast,” he said sourly. “Got any plans?”
“We’ve—”
The door opened to let Fred Macklin enter. He carried his shirt and had been dressing on the run. “What goes on?” he asked.
“Look,” I said quickly. “If I have to stop and give anybody a rundown, we’ll have no time to do what has to be done. There are a couple of sources of danger. One is the guard down at the bottom of the stairway. The other is the possible visitor. You get a couple of other young, ambitious fellows and push that guard post over, but quick.”
Highways in Hiding (1956) Page 24