Alan E. Nourse & J. A. Meyer (21 page)

"That's
right," another KM confirmed. "It's the freak hunt.
ICven
the regular lines are getting stopped by DIA."

"I'll cover
expenses," Alexander said.

"Sorry,"
said
Wah
. "I'd like to take your money, but we
have to keep up our standing." Alexander nodded, noticed uneasily the
hard avaricious glint in the eye of a couple of ten-year-old bowmen. One of
them was toying with his bow, a small spring-steel crossbow that could fire a five-inch
shaft
lh
rough a man's body
at fifty feet, yet folded up into a pseudo-jackknife.

"Okay,"
he said. "Thanks anyway." He started down the stairs of the deserted
loft the local KM used for a head-'
inarters
. Behind
him he heard voices suddenly raised, and
Wah
arguing
briefly. He leaped down the remaining stairs, (lien paused to scatter a handful
of small credit notes on the floor where the light would hit them. He heard a
clatter on the stairs, and burst out on the street, catching the eight-year-old
chickie
in the chest with his knee. He seized a
bicycle and pedaled
oS
furiously, staying in shadows,
crouching over the handlebars of the awkwardly small two-wheeler.

There
was a roar of pursuit behind him, giving way to a louder greedy squabble as the
pursuers stopped to pick up the scattered credits. After a moment he heard the
yelps as the bicycle posse started after him.

At
the man-strip at the end of the street he parked the bike on the loading deck,
dropped a token in the gate and hurried through, leaving the bike behind. His
guess was right. The KM's would not pay a token apiece to follow him once they
had recovered the bike. But the alarm would be out about a drifter with money.

He
knew he would have to get out of St. Louis by morning.

Above
all, he had to get to New York, to somehow establish a contact with a BRINT
agent high enough up to listen to what he had to say, not as a fugitive and
possibly an alien-influenced traitor, but as a man who had somehow managed to
keep his head and see die way through to the truth.

The
report on Colossus had been the key, jarring the not-quite-fitting pieces down
into a compact perfect fit, a quite different pattern than he had considered
before, but a pattern that was for the first time unmistakably clear.

He
knew now what had happened at Wildwood. He knew that he could not waste a
minute now. He might already be too late.

Once
on the man-strip he began switching strips at the switching centers to see if
his previous tail had managed to follow him after he left the temporary
protection of the KMs. There was no one following him on the strip itself, but
a Hydro was moving doggedly on the
roadstrip
below.
Alexander crouched back out of stunner range, fear creeping up his spine again.
They couldn't be DIA; they would have picked him up long ago. But if they were
aliens, why were they stalking him so patiently?

He
dropped off the strip as it passed back through the trucking center. What he
needed was an accomplice so his pursuers would have another branch-point to
worry about, and so he could get a truck.

It
was the only way. With a truck, and a trucker's ID he could drive to New York;
and plenty of New York long hauls went through at this time of night. But he
needed a decoy bait to get a trucker out of a brightly lighted diner and into
an alley or motel room.

He
found his prospect in the third diner he checked. It was surprising to find a
woman left in one of them; most of the night runs had left already. He walked
up behind her, grabbed her by the wrist. "Let's take a walk," he
said.

Her
lips twisted into a snarl as she whirled on him. "DEPCO?" she asked,
the words sticking hatefully in her throat.

Alexander
shook his head.
"A friend."
He tightened his
grip on her wrist and started to walk her out. He had not seen his shadow since
the last switch on the man-strips, but lie paused warily at the door, then
pulled her out into the darkness.

"Two
credits," she whispered, "flat rate, if you don't take too long, two
credits, you can take your pick. . . ."

"This
is something special," he said. He told her what he wanted, then slipped
her a ten-credit note.

"But
where?"

"There's a motel
behind there."

"He might kill
me."

"He won't kill
anybody, don't worry."

He
watched her go back into the diner. Ten minutes later she came out with a
heavy-set, stupid-looking man with a trucker's cap on. They walked back to the
motel office, then clown the darkened path toward the cabins.

Alexander
moved after them silently. He couldn't count on handling a hulking truck driver
alone, but there are times when a man is helpless. He hoped the woman would
remember the signal, and fought down the intense wave of self-loathing that welled
up in him. There was no stopping now, no turning back to order and precision
and the proper running of things, no turning back to the warm, easy security of
Absolute Stability, the peaceful quiet of not having to think or worry. A week
before he would not have dreamed of doing the things he was doing now as a
matter of course.

But
it was not as a matter of course, not now,
he thought.
It was a matter of survival.

He
heard them inside, heard the woman's voice, low and suggestive, then dropping
into a stream of underworld jargon so filthy Alexander was afraid for a moment
she would frighten the quarry away. Then it was quiet, with only murmuring
sounds, and he waited for the signal.

Silence.
It
took an instant to register that it was too quiet, suddenly deathly still. He
gripped the latch, turned it and burst into the darkened room.

Then
he screamed as the fight hit his eyes, glaring, blinding, burning white,
searing his retinas, and he clamped his hands over his face . . .

He
felt the blow at the back of his head, and then the glare-whiteness dissolved
into blackness.

He
was in a room without windows, a single door, a single chair, utterly black,
although he could feel other presences there, other light breathing quite near
him. He could not move his head, and he realized, quite suddenly, that it was
clamped into a frame on the chair.

And
it was silent, except for the voice that was asking him questions. It had been
asking them for a long time, it seemed, and he tried to orient himself, to
remember when the questions had started, and what they had been about.

But
only now could he focus on the voice, slowly repeating a question, pausing,
then another, pausing,
a
curiously metallic,
unmodulated
voice like a person talking with laryngitis.

He had heard that voice before, years before
in the communications shack in Antarctica, transcribing messages from

Control in Washington, and he remembered now,
with a jolt of fear, what the voice was.

It was the characteristic electronic voice of
a
tik
-talker.

Part
III
THE TIGER PIT

Libby Allison
was kneeling on the floor playing
googly
-goo with the tow-headed baby in the playpen when
Julian Bahr walked in, threw his coat on the bed-couch, and walked a-round a
few seconds impatiently while she continued to ignore him. Then his impatience
seemed to evaporate, and he sat heavily on the edge of the
relaxo
,
and with a half-groan, half-sigh began to pound his fist into the palm of his
left hand.

Libby looked up then.
"Trouble?" she asked.

Bahr's
only answer was a sudden vicious smack of fist against palm, as if in his mind
he had just driven his knuckles into the fragile bone-structure of somebody's
face.

"DEPCO?"

"That
too."

She
put the youngster back in the playpen, and brushed her hair back where his
small hands had been pulling at it. "What else?" she said.

He
didn't answer for a minute or more. His jaw was knotted in anger, his huge body
tense, but there was something else in his face, perhaps just in his eyes,
when he looked at her. Then he shook his head helplessly.
"The
elephant, again."

Libby
turned sharply, the baby forgotten, her heart suddenly thumping wildly, her
trained psychologist's mind focusing abruptly on an almost simultaneous
kaleidoscope of incidents, remarks, mannerisms, and the few desperate grudging
revelations that formed in her mind the clinical picture of Julian Bahr.

"Last
night," he said angrily.
"Actually this morning,
just before I woke up."
He held out his left hand for her to see.
The knuckles were cut and bruised.

"Julian . . ."

"I was hitting the wall. I hurt my
hand,
I guess that was what woke me up." He sat
quiedy
for a moment, his breathing shallow and rapid.
Holding his hand, she could feel the furious pounding of his pulse, watch the
slow tensing of back and shoulder muscles as if he were trying by sheer
physical force to throw off an ugly, frightening memory.

Finally
he stood up, jammed his hands in his pockets, walked around the room once, then
came back and sat down. "All right," he said. "It's the first
time in two years. Why did it come back, Libby? I went to sleep all right. I
worked until I was ready to collapse, I can always get to sleep then, but I
woke up at three in the morning beating my fist on the wall, and all I can
remember is the elephant."

"Did it start out the
same way? Out in the street?"

"Yes,
the same way.
The same woman, too.
Some man was
looking for her, and she had to hide, so I went into the building with her.
There was the long
hall
with doors all up and down,
and little rooms opening into it, and the elephant was at the end of the
hall."

She
nodded wearily. It was the same, detail for detail. "And the elephant
picked her up?"

"Just
like before—in his trunk. He wasn't hurting her any but he was going to carry
her off, and she screamed for me to get a blanket and put it over his eyes so
he couldn't see. So I took the blanket and threw it over the elephant's eyes,
but it stuck on his tusks and only partly covered his eyes. He started to come
down the hall, and I knew he could see me, and I had to
run,
only I couldn't run fast enough, so I went into one of the little rooms and
closed the door. The elephant went right on by, but when he got to the end of
the corridor he started back, with people going past him like he wasn't there.
There was no way out of the room, and I

couldn't
jump, and the elephant began pushing in the
door
»

He stopped for breath, and straightened his
back for a moment. "Then I woke up. I was hitting the wall and I woke
up." He sighed again, his breathing deep and labored.

"The woman,"
Libby said. "Did you know her?"

"No."

"Was she with the
elephant when he was chasing you?"

"No,"
Bahr said. "After I started to run she wasn't there at all." He
looked up at her, suffering in his face and eyes. "What does it mean,
Libby? Why does it . . .
scare
me
like that? Why does it start coming back now? I haven't had it in two
years."

She
sat down, shaking her head and holding his hand between hers. "Julian,
the last time, I told you . . ."

"But
what have I got to be scared of?" he roared, jerking to his feet.
"You want to dig and poke and scrape things open in my mind, but those
things are all gone now, they aren't ever going to come back again; I won't let
them come back!" He collapsed into the seat again, the anger fading as
suddenly as it flared. "It's no good, Libby, it's just no good. I can't do
it your way."

"It's
the only way I can help you. And I want to help you, you know that."

"I know." He leaned back, breathing
slower again, more relaxed. "Thank God I can come here sometimes," he
said, almost to himself. "Sometimes things start pressing in until it's
more than I can stand. Here I can rest."