PRESSURE PLAY
I locked the door behind Gaylord. Then, crossing to the rack beside the psychostructor, I began hunting down city charts, transport and communications guides, specifications for the planet's anti-Kel defenses.
They added up to a neat pile of reels. Clamping electrodes to my temples, I turned on the psychostructor, slapped the first spool into place, and settled down to the tedium of waiting for the mechanism to hammer data into my brain.
In twenty minutes, the streets and alleys were my own. In forty, I knew my way through every observation post and satellite control board.
At fifty, the voco rang.
Numb with fatigue, I lurched up, tore off the clamps, and hurried to the scanner-speaker unit.
Blonde and lovely, a girl smiled up at me from the plate. "How do you do. May I speak with Agent Mark Traynor, please?"
"I'm Traynor."
"Oh! How nice! I was hoping I might catch you in." The girl's voice was warm and friendly. "You see, I want to congratulate you, Agent Traynor, on your new assignment to Rizal. We feel we have a lovely planet here; and of course we're proud of our position as the outermost bastion of the FedGov's defenses against the Kel. And since Security plays such a vital part in mankind's battle against these alien invaders, one of our citizens—he wishes to remain anonymous, so I can't tell you his name—has asked that you accept a little present; a token of good-will from Rizal to you. A messenger will come in just a moment, and—"
I said, "Come off it, Celeste. This is me you're talking to—me, Mark Traynor. Remember? Remember?"
The girl in the scanner-plate broke off, lips still half-parted. Ever so slightly, the clear eyes changed expression.
"I know what happened on Bejak, Celeste." I smiled as I said it—a wise smile, I hoped, cool and confident. "I know because I was there, right to the last. So that means I know about you, too, and what's going on here. That's why I came: to block you. And don't tell me that first wrench I threw into the works didn't hit hard—you wouldn't have called me if it hadn't! But that's just the beginning. Count on it, there's more to come! So you'd better break clear before I let go. Otherwise, you'll get the same as your Kel friends."
It was as if a shutter had closed behind the clear grey eyes. The girl's hands moved in small, uncertain gestures. "I—I don't know what you mean. I've never seen you before—"
"You haven't?" I made it a point to chuckle softly. "Have it your way, then. Though you certainly took a different view, that last night in the bunker.—By the way, did that cut heal all right? The skin below your throat was so soft, I was afraid it might scar—"
Celeste's lovely features seemed to stiffen. I couldn't be sure, though, because the scanner-plate went blank in the same instant.
Like an echo, someone began pounding on the door.
Cutting off the voco, I went over and unlocked the heavy portal.
A messenger was waiting with a thrill-mill for me.
I frowned. "How did you get in here? Does Rizal Security let strangers wander through its headquarters in the middle of the night?"
"I dunno." The messenger shrugged stupidly. "That man in Communications—he said it was all right."
"Man? What man?"
"This man, Traynor."
The voice came from behind me. I whirled by reflex.
Agent Benjamin Gaylord stood in the office's second doorway. He had a paragun in his hand, and the set of his jaw said that he'd use it.
With an effort, I drew myself together. "What nonsense is this, Gaylord?"
"That's what I wondered." He came towards me a few steps, flat-footed, the paragun's muzzle a steady focal point of menace. "Finally I got to wondering so hard I put in a non-channel call about it to Controller Kruze himself."
"A non-channel call—!"
"Risky, wasn't it?" Gaylord's grin could hardly have been classified as pleasant. "Still, though, I thought it might be worth a gamble: my future against yours, the way you said."
"So?"
"So it turned out even better than I'd dreamed of. I found out more things!" Gaylord's ugly grin broadened. "You know, Traynor—interesting things. Like how the lame-brains in Psychogenetics de-conditioned you over Kruze's protests. How you broke discipline and warped out to Rizal, here, in direct violation of all orders. How the business of shipping all these thrill-mill people back to the FedGov IP Center is strictly your idea, not Kruze's—"
He broke off; gestured with his weapon. "All right, get moving. It's a detention room for you, till Kruze warps in."
The gun in his hand was uncomfortably steady. "Good enough to me. All this line about don't care where you keep me, nor what lies you tell, if it makes you feel any better. Though what Kruze is going to say when he gets the truth is anybody's guess."
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Gaylord stiffen. "What's that supposed to mean?" he demanded glowering.
I shrugged. "It seems plain enough to me. All this line about gambling your future—it's a joke. You simply haven't got the nerve to do it."
"I'll let Kruze convince you, then."
"Kruze?" I laughed harshly. "He won't care. Not when he finds the facts put both of us out of the way."
The last remnants of Gaylord's grin were fading. "Listen, you—"
I said, "Shall I play it back for you, Controller? Shall I tell you how it really happened?" And then, pacing a few steps: "You went down to your communications section first, of course; had the sigman on duty put out my all-points order. I know that, because the Stelpa girl sent me a thrill-mill. And unless my order had gone out, she wouldn't even have known I was here.
"Anyhow, you sent my order—and then discovered there was a message from Kruze himself on the hook. Probably it said that if I turned up, you should contact him non-channel.
"You saw that as a good way of getting out of a bad spot with your hide in one piece. So you called Kruze, got instructions to pick me up, and here you are."
Gaylord stared at me as if hypnotized. "How did you know?"
"I warped in without a clearance. But one was on file when I got here. That meant Kruze had guessed some of what I planned and was taking steps. And one of those steps would be to get in touch with you."
Gaylord's expression, at that moment, might have meant anything. Smiling thinly, I moved a trifle closer to the voco. "I do hope it works out for you, you understand. And it may. But then again, it may not. It's hard to predict Kruze's reactions. Sometimes it's almost as if he were unconditioned, like us—"
I gestured as I talked, a lot more than was needed, as if somehow that was going to make the words worth hearing. I walked, too—pacing, turning, anything to keep Gaylord just a bit off balance.
Worry already was closing in on him. It hung about him like a cloak. The paragun's muzzle wasn't following me quite so closely.
My next turn carried me even nearer to the voco. Then, when I started to turn again, I tripped.
It was a nice job, deftly done. I reeled, arms flailing—and crashed bodily into the bulky instrument.
The voco rocked wildly. Scanner, scriber, audex—they all tottered, then swept out in a big arc, faster and faster towards the floor.
Gaylord yelled hoarsely and leaped in, trying to save them.
I waited till he'd passed me. Then, coming up fast, I chopped with a stiff palm-edge at the base of his brain.
He pitched forward. Not even waiting to strike again, or see if he was stunned, or snatch his paragun, I sprinted for the door.
The messenger still stood in the corridor, just outside. Only now, unfortunately, he didn't look quite so stupid or nondescript as before.
Also, he had his hands up in a strega-fighter's stance.
That made him a Security agent.
I dived at him—a literal dive: head down, arms wide, feet and body completely clear of the floor.
The man spun sidewise, fast, with all of a trained strega-fighter's skill.
But my left arm scooped him in, and my weight and impact bore him down. I drove up the heel of my right hand, hard under his chin. His head snapped back.
Spasmodically, he shoved at me with hands and feet alike—trying to break clear, striving to regain the inter-body space that gives a strega-man his advantage.
For an instant I held him tight, then abruptly and without warning matched his efforts to thrust clear with similar of my own. As if spring-propelled, we bounced to opposite sides of the hall.
Strega tactics said it was a time for maneuvering, regrouping, consolidation.
Instead, scrambling on all fours, I rocketed down the corridor and away as fast as I could go.
There were ramps, after that ... doors and archways ... more corridors.
Then, at long last, the building entrance yawned ahead.
Sobbing for breath, I raced towards it.
Simultaneously, a knot of hurrying men appeared, crowding in from the street and blocking off the doorway. They were grouped about a bulky, familiar figure ... the figure of FedGov Interplanetary Security Controller Alfred Kruze.
For me, it was a moment straight out of nightmare ... a lightning-flash of horror, lifted from one of those awful dreams in which you run and run and run only somehow your legs won't seem to work.
Desperately, I tried to reverse direction.
It was too late. I couldn't brake in time.
Someone yelled as I careened into the group. I glimpsed distended eyes, a startled face. Clawing, I tried to twist past the wall of bodies and slide out the door.
I might have made it, then. But suddenly a bull-voice roared, "Hold him, rack you! Hold him!"
Controller Kruze's voice.
Like lightning, hands came at me from all directions. I rocked back—dazed by their blows; pinned tight against the wall.
Another moment, and Kruze himself was towering over me.
"So!" He hissed the word, as if his rage were too great for normal speech. "I've found you, have I, finally?" And then, turning abruptly: "Back to the warping-chamber with him! I'll deal with him no place short of the Interplanetary Center itself!"
Now the hands that pinned me jerked me forward. Still panting, head still reeling, I found myself dragged out into the street.
"Controller!" I choked. "Controller Kruze! Please! Listen to me—"
"Don't worry! I'll listen! And so will a trial board, and all those fools in Psychogen!"
"No!" I was shouting now; shouting and shaking. Though whether it was out of my own feeling or from the contagion of Kruze's rage, I couldn't say. "Do whatever you want with me. I don't care. But not now! I've laid the ground; everything's set up—"
"No, rack you!"—This in a bellow.
But the others pulling at me hesitated, slowed. Desperately, I babbled on: "Kruze, you don't understand! This whole thrill-mill business—it's a Kel scheme to break through, here on Rizal! But you'll never crack it, trying to back track. You've got to make whoever's in it come to you. That's why I did the things I did. That action order, all the rest—it was just so I could make a contact, be a decoy! I said things that would scare them, raise suspicion. But if you send me back now, it's all wasted. Please, Kruze, please—"
Kruze didn't speak. But standing there, pinioned, looking into his eyes, I didn't need words to know his answer. Not with his hate pulsing out at me like a living thing.
I slumped.
Coldly, then, Kruze said, "Did any of you gentlemen hear me mention the warping-chamber? Or am I going to be forced to take this scum back for trial by rocket freighter?"
Wordless, my captors shoved me towards a grav-car. I went without protest, making no effort to resist.
But as I walked, I let the feeling of the street close in upon me. The green-hazed black of the Rizalian night took on new, subtle overtones. Fragment by fragment, sense by sense, it blended and became one with the mass of tight-integrated information poured into my brain by the psychostructor.
This street—it would be AX7. And that meant the cross-street ahead was MR2.
Which was interesting, because MR2 was also a pneumotube route, complete with sewer-like conduits beneath the paving and access shafts at every corner.
So, if I could by some chance reach that intersection, and duck from sight behind the building....
How far was it? Fifty feet? Sixty?
The first of my captors reached the grav-car. Fumbling, he got out his lock-light.
The rest of us paused. Again, narrow-eyed, I measured the distance to the corner.
Smoothly, the lock-light slid into its tube. The grav-car's door swung open. One agent got in. A second stood aside, waiting for me and the men who held me.
Together, we stepped forward. Then I bent to enter the grav-car, and all let go of me momentarily.
There was just one man to my left, now. One man between me and the corner.
I bent still lower—and then, without warning, drove my shoulder hard into that man's midriff, bowling him aside as I raced madly towards the intersection.
But instantly, behind me, yells rose in wild chorus. Feet pounded pavement. Hands clutched for me.
Something was happening to my knees, too, and my lungs. They wouldn't work the way I needed for this kind of running. The fatigue of my earlier bouts was telling on them.
A last gasp; a last lunge. I spilled to the street.
The yells turned to hoarse, baying triumph.
It was the end of something, and the beginning of something.
The end of mankind, perhaps? The beginning of a ruthless Kel march to victory?
I was too sick, too tired, to even think about it.
Only then, just as it seemed certain that the hands of Kruze's men must surely seize me, there was a sudden flash; a silent sound of energy impacting.
Behind me, a man gave a grunt of pain and shock. My own body went numb.
A grav-car whished down from nowhere in the same instant. Incredulously, I felt myself being seized and lifted. A face came out of the darkness to confound my reeling senses.
A lovely face, really. The face of a woman with blonde hair and laughing lips and clear grey eyes.
Celeste Stelpa's face.
Only that was impossible, of course.
Besides, I couldn't seem to make the face stay in focus. While I watched, the laugh changed to a leer.
Then, quite suddenly, blackness closed in....