They watched her, too. Christina, Shirley Scofield,—with what sort of feelings? And the normals about us, what were they thinking, too? I didn’t even try to wonder about Jerry who had become Keeban and who was doing this thing.
My hands, tied together, grasped the top of the back of a chair against which I leaned; and my muscles went tight to raise it and, spinning, to swing it upon him and kill him. Yet I knew I would not do that; I might knock him down; that was all. It would not help my girl at all.
She half turned her head toward me and then, quickly, she faced to the ceiling again. She wanted to look at me, I thought; and then she had thought it must seem like an appeal to me, which I could not bear when I could not help her.
I held on to the back of that chair and waited, watching her bosom rise and fall. I kept saying to myself something that Teverson told me. When Costrelman and his butler had been killed by the gas, others in the room had been affected but had recovered. An under-dose was not deadly, therefore; that is, if this were the same gas.
I could see nothing; smell nothing; sense nothing going on in that cabinet; but neither had I when the rabbits had died.
My plan depended entirely upon time. There must be gas in the cabinet, but not too much gas,—not enough to kill my girl in there.
She breathed more slowly, I thought; I stared and seemed sure of it. At the same time, Keeban began looking at me. He suspected I was about to act; and I did it. I lifted that heavy chair behind me and, spinning, I swung it against the glass side of the cabinet and smashed it through. I followed it myself and was inside, smashing, kicking, demolishing glass. A girl screamed.
Keeban started after me; I felt—or I had felt—his hand grabbing me; but now his clutch was gone. He was away from that break in the glass. I heard him call and cough, “Beat it! Duck! Don’t suck it in!” Shirley, for it was Shirley, screamed again.
I thought, “He knows. A little kills. I’ve got it. Cleopatra, Doris, Margaret; she’s got it, too.” But I had her and I hardly cared. The rest of them had got away.
My smash of the glass, with Keeban’s yell—and more than that, his example—had given the start. Now shots were speeding them along. I didn’t know who was shooting; they were out of the laboratories; and still they were going away.