Authors: Theodore Sturgeon
I kind of blew my top at her because she nosed into it and I called her some things that hurt, I guess, that whole long body twitched when I yelled them at her. And I said she’d have to pay off for mixing into it because now Millikein would have to get rid of her too, what would he figure if he wanted to wipe me out and here was a chick knew all about it? And I said even if he was changing his mind, she had made him change it right back again, running off at the mouth like that.
When I ran out of breath she rolled over and sat up and pushed the hair back from her face. I think I will always remember her like that no matter what else happens. So Goddam beautiful, not only a naked chick, that’s great, but she had a way of being naked like it was clothes, if you see what I mean, good ones, she wore it well like something made for her and cut so well she could forget about it, knowing it was perfect. Oh damn words anyway, that’s what this whole thing is about, damn words anyway.
So I came down off it and sat next to her and told her it was a hell of a way to take good news like that, I felt the first hope I had for a whole year or more, and I know she did it for me. So we went to bed.
The next day she didn’t come home from work at all.
I waited for more than an hour and suddenly got filled up with the worst wild panic I ever had in my life. I ran up the street toward
Bash West and from more than a block away I could see the blinking red lights and the people. Three police cars and two hogs and an ambulance. By the time I got there they were putting her in the wagon, I just got a flash of who it was, then the doors closed and it went howling off. They said somebody attacked a girl and she killed him defending herself. There was another meat wagon came then, and what they put in it had the blanket over its face.
Who can remember all that happened next the way it happened? Running and yelling, a whole lot of stuff about money, why should you need money at a time like that? Yelling at Mrs. Walker the manager to give me twenty so I could get a cab to the hospital, somehow, not that it makes any difference, knowing that when she gave in it was for me not for the girl in five, she wasn’t a nice girl anymore because of me but me, I was still all right, what sense does that make? And then the cab that never came and when it came, standing still or running backwards all the way into Receiving Hospital, oh, forever, and then after all that running and yelling, waiting and waiting and waiting, looking at magazines I couldn’t see, drinking coffee I couldn’t taste out of the machine in the corridor.
Then the doctor, they must have raided a TV show for him, graying temples, tired eyes, stethoscope around his neck:
Now she wants to see you very badly, only a few minutes, can’t say which way it will go, really it all depends on her, she can pull through if she wants to.
And the corner of the IC Unit, that’s Intensive Care in case you didn’t know, all kinds of machines standing around, three nurses running between the beds, a burned kid, an old lady with both legs raised in the air with pulleys and breathing like a power hacksaw, and in the corner, there she was. The nurses put a screen around the bed and said Call me if, and Only a few minutes, and like that.
I thought she might be knocked out, but no, she was just waiting with her eyes closed. Eye. The other one was under the bandages that covered her whole head and half her face. Otherwise she was covered with a sheet.
She said to me, “Are you all right?” That’s what she said. I said, “I’m fine.”
“He’s dead.” She closed her eye.
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Well then, you’re all right now.”
“Why did you do it?”
“He was going to kill you.”
“That’s not what you said.”
“That’s not what he said either.” She could still smile a little. It wasn’t the same, with the one eye. “But it’s what he meant.” Then she said for me to lift the sheet.
I didn’t want to, but she said to. I did and said “Oh my God,” and began to cry. She told me not to.
I said, “Listen, I don’t care what it looks like, I am going to take care of you.”
She said, “There’s a whole piece cut right out of one of them. And I’m not going to get that eye back.”
I said, “Oh, my God.”
She looked at me for a long time with that one eye. It had that tired look. After a while she said, not mad or anything, “All my life I’ve known what people meant, no matter what they said, and I never met one yet that said what he meant. I don’t think anyone knows how.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. I told her I loved her. I told her I would always love her no matter what.
She looked at me for another long time, and then she said, “If I don’t make it, will you take care of my dog? She’s so beautiful, and she needs someone who will really take care of her.”
I said of course she was going to make it.
“But in case,” she said.
“I swear it.”
She closed the eye. The nurse shoved the drape aside and looked in and told me to go.
She didn’t make it, for some reason. Couple of days later I sold the dog and got out of town. I mean, LA really has no character.
The dart was a miracle of miniaturized precision. A tiny sliver of a thing, it contained a laser generator, a proximity device, and a destruct mechanism so efficient that it would, on the instant, separate all its parts down to the molecular level. It would deliver to its target that one brief blast of intolerable heat, from close and lethal range, and would then cease to exist. A dissection of the murdered man would reveal the almost microscopic puncture burn—but then the exit wound would be almost identical and everything between them cooked into a sort of soup. There would be no marks on anything behind or around the victim; even the bright glare of almost-solar heat would be concealed within the victim’s body, and as he fell, he must turn one way or the other; who could reconstruct the trajectory?
The little gun designed to throw the dart was equally a miracle—so small that it was dwarfed by the telescope mounted at its top. The propellant was a series of cryptocryogenic solenoid rings, silent and lightless, wound with tens of thousands of turns of all but invisible, superconductive wire. In the ’scope was a complete light-amplification system, with automatic range-coupling with the focus. Anything found at the intersection of the radiant crosshairs and brought into focus was going to be killed. And all of it, gun and missiles, was made of materials well below the allowable error of the finest detection devices, and demountable into small unnoticeable parts which could be, which had been, distributed in and around the neatly fitted uniform of a Senior Lieutenant in the Leader’s Guard. The Leader was Dorne, and in the bright image in the ’scope was the open balcony door of Dorne’s suite, and all that was lacking to complete the picture, to complete this careful plan, was the appearance in it of Dorne’s famous face.
The stone room in which the Lieutenant leaned yearning into his ’scope was more suited, perhaps, to the fifteenth century than to the twenty-first, with its ironbound oaken door and its single arrow-slit window. It was tomb-dark except for the tiny spot of light in the eyepiece, and empty except for half a lifetime’s worth of hate and purpose and absolute certainty … and now, and now it was complete; now there was a shadow-flicker in the door across the inner courtyard, now it swung back and the face on the coins, the face of stamps and placards and statues and Government edicts, the great gentle-seeming lion-maned powerful face of Dorne appeared in the crosshairs as the Leader came out exactly on schedule (of course!) for his midnight breath of air.
The Lieutenant’s life and career peaked in the two tiny movements of a finger slipping through the trigger guard and a thumb on the focus rotor. The image sharpened into pore-clear detail, and, as the thumb moved to the second rotor, zoomed to fill the frame with that detested about-to-laugh countenance, its muscular cheeks, the hint of crow’s feet around the wide-spaced brooding eyes. The joining of the crosshairs settled on the bridge of the Leader’s nose, the finger tensed on the trigger, the image steadied—
And went out.
Went out, was blank, was gone.
There was a split second then of endless time, a black universe composed entirely of total disbelief, and then he moved his eye back, which did nothing but emphasize the blackness with the dim presence of the arrow-slit. He slid his hand away from the trigger guard and up along the ’scope to the lens, to find what was obscuring it.
It was a hand. He had time enough to touch it and know it for what it was, when something blunt-pointed struck him on the side of the Adam’s apple. He fell, the gun seemingly fastened into the darkness by darkness, staying suspended while he fell away from it, fighting for two impossibilities—breath, and silence. His knees struck the stone floor, and as he bowed his head over the agony in his throat, something struck him across the exposed nape, and he went down. Pain was a brief blaze of even darker darkness, which swallowed him up.
Time skipped a beat then. He was never to remember how he had been moved from a collapsed heap on the floor under the window to a sitting position against one of the side walls. Either it was still dark, or he was blind … No; it was just the dark, for he was aware of the dim arrow-slit. His eyes felt scalded. He had not cried for years, not since his father and two brothers had been taken by a patrol one night, never to be seen again; he had been only a toddler then. What touched him now was all the anguished grief and loss and frustrated anger he had denied himself during these careful years; he was, for the moment, denied anything else. The one thing he did not feel was shame, and that was supplied shockingly as soft cloth touched a cheekbone, one eye, the other, wiping away tears. No one should have known he had tears. He tried to raise two angry hands and could not; tingling agony in a spot just above each collarbone told him the nerves had been expertly pinched, and he knew from experience that his arms wouldn’t belong to him for a while.
Something ringed his head, settled over his brow and eyes.
He gasped. The light, as lights go, was not bright, but any light at all in this place was a dazzle. Understanding was a dazzle too—that these were blacklight goggles—a UV converter, and that with them and the invisible beam from the lamp between the lenses, he had been watched from the moment he entered the stone room in the battlement. He had been seen—photographed? —assembling the weapon and taking his aim. He had been, oh God, seen weeping, and his tears had been wiped away so that he could see through these goggles.
See what? A bright blur, a blink, a leather-backed escutcheon bearing the Leader’s ubiquitous face, and on each side of it a letter, a scintillant S. Secret Service—Dorne’s own legendary, mysterious secret service, above the law, outside the law; for even Dorne’s law, made by Dorne, represented restrictions on Dorne, and Dorne was a man who would not be restricted.
He nodded, and the goggles were immediately snatched away. Three soft footfalls in the darkness, a breathless moment of waiting, listening, and then the heavy door was opened just far enough to
build a black silhouette which slipped outside and closed the door again.
The Lieutenant gaped at where the swift vision had been, and tried not to think—thinking was too terrifying, thinking led to the certain knowledge that he was a dead man, and the even more destroying knowledge that he had been played with like a kitten and backhanded aside like an insect. So much for half a lifetime of care and passion. So instead of thinking he felt—felt the tingling above his collarbones descend to his biceps, forearms, hands, fingers, less an agony each second, until an effort of will was rewarded by a movement in his fingers. He got his hands up and shakily rubbed them together until they belonged to him again; then he pressed himself to his feet and followed the example which had just been set him; he went to the door and held his breath, listening. Nothing. He opened the door a very small crack, peered, slipped out, closed it. No one in sight. He turned to the right and began to walk.
If he had expected the battlement to be in a state of alert or alarm, he was disappointed. It came to him, as he passed a courier, who saluted, and then a noncom, that he had seen their faces at pretty much these places time and again before; that he had slipped back again into his accustomed slot in the intricate workings of the concentric guard. Since he had come on watch tonight he had made his routine contact points each a few seconds early, until he had accumulated a shade under six minutes ahead of schedule. With these six minutes and a weapon it had taken years to design and build, he had meant to change the world. He now knew it had taken no more than that to become useless and dead, leaving the world, Dorne’s world, unchanged and triumphant; for he was right on his posted schedule. He could go straight to the common room and turn over the watch to his relief, and check out, and no one would know that life and all the reasons for living had been drawn out of him, folded up, filed away—in something less than six minutes.
In the familiar common room, full of familiar faces, he checked across the columns of his report (one was headed Unusual Occurrences, one Unauthorized Personnel; he lied and wrote None, none, none all across the page; what could they do to him now, for lying?)
and could appreciate the momentum of familiarity. You could be preoccupied, tired, drunk and do familiar things right. You could be dead. He knew he was watched, as he had been watched. He knew he was more than helpless—he was futile. He turned over the shift to Riggs, a career lieutenant with prominent front teeth and a giggle, and went out into the floodlit night and checked himself out through the familiar gate; and would this be the last time? Perhaps, perhaps not—so much depended on how amusing “they” found the game.
The familiar car was waiting, familiar Zein and Hallowell and Iturbi were climbing in as he reached it, and as the car slid silently along the dark streets, the talk was as usual. Nobody noticed his silence; he was not a talkative man. Iturbi was dropped off. More silent sliding and the new familiarity of the Zein-Hallowell conversation; they always talked about Iturbi. Then they were dropped off at the Shrine of the Leader—they both lived near it, and the car slid away northward on Dorne Boulevard, with the final familiarity of his silent occupancy of the wide rear seat, and the familiar silent presence of the driver.