Kenneth Bulmer (7 page)

"This
is a good thing," he said emphatically. "We men of science, to use a
convenient yellow-tape phrase, must stake our claim to the riches of the galaxy.
After all, if it was not for science there would be no richness in the galaxy.
It would lie locked up in primal atoms, secreted away in the depths of the sky.
Man would still be grubbing in the dirt for his daily bread."

So
it was that Haffner worked more joyously than he had for years isolating,
producing and orienting the required audio virus. He and Howland had to produce
the finished product in sufficient quantity to satisfy Randolph. That took
time. They went at the job, night and day, keeping all hours in the laboratory.
Time, Randolph told them with a flick of the eyes to the wall calendar, was
running out.

Other
groups working under Mallow, reporting to heads of sub-committees set up at
that first meeting, carried out their part in the complex preparations. Over
all, the dommating influence of Professor Randolph could be felt as a physical
presence, urging, encouraging, domineering, castigating. The day approached.

Through this period Howland, from overwork
and lack of sleep, grew pale and taut and nervy. He felt most of all the lack
of any trusted confidante. Willi Haffner was a help; but Howland held back from
full confidence in the reformed soak. The bitter realization that he was
engaged in a technically criminal activity soured him, turned him
short-tempered and unapproachable as much through the fear of failure as
anything else. It was right—
right—
he told himself a dozen times a day that the frittered-away money of the
galaxy should be directed to cleaner, saner ends.v

Those long and dreary days before Christmas
when he'd been a boy grimly saving his pocket money and working at odd jobs
around the village after school returned to his memory now, here in this period
of hard work and anxious waiting. His parents were both long dead and he'd left
the village school to fight his way up the educational labyrinth to his present
position. Every step of the way he'd had to fight. He wore now a meek and
humble look before the galaxy; but he was made of stem stuff—his upbringing had
seen to that. There were plenty of keen and bright up-and-coming young
scientists in all the branches, ready to take what he could not hold.

Accepting
the position with Randolph to work with that famous man in his inquiries into
the origin of life and—the greatest temptation of all—the opportunity to create
life, had been for Howland a tremendous chance. The positions he had turned
down had been dismissed without regret— until the devastating news that the
Maxwell Fund was not theirs.

Well,
after they had—had stolen—this money, they would finish up their work on
Pochalin Nine and then he could return to the normal galaxy with a reputation
and pick and choose his own next steps in a career that meant eveiything to
him.

The weather continued in a filthy mood all
that week and the next. Snow fell monotonously and people went about with long
faces, anxious to remember to take their anti-cold pills regularly. Overhead
the sky, when it was visible through snow flakes, looked like a ghoul's
soup-pot cover, clapped grey and greasy down over the Earth.

One
afternoon with the lights shining eerily in the long laboratory the telephone
rang and Howland answered peevishly, a clipboard balanced on one knee.

"Is that Doc Howland?"

"Yes. Who is
that?"

"Lissen, doc. Meet me tonight at
eleven-thirty sharp. First door up the stairs on the left, 711 Sirius Street.
Got it?" A pause. "And don't tell anyonel"

"Who is that? What do
you mean—meet you?"

"No
time for any more, doc. Just be there, see? Else you'll be in trouble,
too."

And the line went dead.

Howland
put the phone back feeling as though he'd spoken to a madman as Haffner bustled
through, holding a test tube to the light.

"This
batch is coming along beautifully, Peter. Why— what's the matter? Feel
ill?"

That
hoarse, husky voice rasped into his memory.
"And don't
tell
anyonel"

"No,
no, Willi. Just tired. This particular audio virus we're chasing is a cunning
brute."

"But we're almost there." Haffner
exuded confidence now in strange contrast to Howland's pale and washed out wanness.
"We can begin production in as big a quantity as Randolph wants." He
chuckled. "Provided this batch is the right one."

Howland
excused himself and went away to think. After a half hour of fruitless
brain-searching he still couldn't place that voice. Yet he had heard it before,
and recently. The threat ringing in those rasping tones had been unmistakable.
He'd do tonight. He knew that all right. But if Mallow was mixed up in this
somewhere . . .

Seven-eleven Sirius Street turned out to be
one of those sleazy apartment houses, fifty stories tall, clustering in grey
spires around where once there had been river traffic and docks and the
cheerful tooting of steam whisdes. Now transport jetted out from the airfields
and the tall spires crumbled along with the centuries they had known.

Going
up the stairs, Howland found the first door up on the left. He knocked. His
heavy leather gloves against the cold deadened the sound and he was about to
drag one off, unable to find a bell, when the door sagged inwards, creaking
evilly. A pulse began to hammer in Howland's temple. Keeping his gloves on he
pushed the door.

The
room beyond the open door was in darkness and Howland fumbled along the wall
for a switch. He found it. Light slashed down dramatically from an unshielded
bulb, reflected from the central shining object in the room.

Around
that the room was dusty, meagre, thin with the poverty and neglect of years. A
bed sagged in a corner, the bedclothes dragged on to the floor. A chair lay
overturned. But in the center—a man lay on his face, his body in foppish
clothes hunched, those clothes now dreadfully bedabbled with blood.

And
from the middle of the man's back jutted the shining silver hilt of a
knife—shining and reflecting the brilliance of the light Howland had just
switched on.

For
perhaps three seconds he stood there, his finger on the switch. Then he heard
the door bang from below, hoarse voices, the tramp of feet.

The
light went out under his pressing finger. He turned to face the corridor,
feeling trapped. The possibility of explanations eluded him. He had to get
away—get away,
now!

Like
a madman he rushed for the stairs, began to pad up four at a time, his lean and
lanky body jackknifing with the effort, synthirubber boots soundless on the
treads.

Below him, like an echo chamber insanely
repeating the same maniacal words over and over again, the voices of men
floated up. "Open up in therel" "Come on, in there-police!"
And, finally, exasperated: "Break the door down."

So he must have pulled the door to after him
and the snap catch had caught. That was giving him vital seconds.

But
the police had known which room to go to. Had the same throaty voice warned
them—as it had done him? Or was the owner of that voice now lying, horribly
dead with a dagger in his back, down there in that evil little room?

Four
landings above, Howland halted and punched the elevator buttons. He waited in
agony as the lift slowly creaked down to his floor. On the landing below him a
door opened and light shafted out strongly across the dim, dusty illuminations
of the lobby. A peeved voice threw echoes downwards.

"What's
going on down there? Can't you keep quiet and let decent folk sleep?"

Other
doors opened and other voices raised as the sounds of a door being smashed in
floated truitily up. The lift reached his floor. The old alloy gates squealed
back in neglected gooves. Up—or down?

Hesitating,
Howland saw a door swing open opposite to him and frantically punched the
up-button. As the gates jerked to, a woman in a dressing gown, with muzzy hair
and sleepy eyes, peered around the, opened door. The metal gates thunked
together. Howland snapped the brim of his hat down over his eyes and cowered
back, into the shadows of the cage.

Creaking,
the lift ascended. The woman glanced across and then yelled down the stairs:
"Shut up down there! You stinking, lazy, good-for-nothings . . ." And
then her voice was lost as the lift gathered speed.

Sweat
lay thick and slimy on Howland's forehead. His hands trembled and the calves of
his legs shuddered. If Terry Mallow was at the bottom of this, he'd—he'd—He
remembered .the last time he'd said that, and the consequences. He had had no
time to ponder the strangeness of a respectable university doctor of science
being dragged into a sordid murder in a grimy apartment house, with police
dogging his tracks and everyone's hand turned against him.

He left the elevator at the thirty-seventh
floor—indistinguishable from the fourth except that it lay wrapped in
silence—and again wondered what to do. The elevator indicator flashed and
began to sink. Were the police calling it? Would they take it up after him? He
suddenly cursed himself for riding up here. Hell and damnation! If he'd gone
down he might have been out in the street by now—might have been. They'd leave
a policeman guarding the door, that was for sure.

The
thumping of his heart dizzied him. Been a long time since he'd run about like
this; he was out of condition. But never before had he run from the police
leaving the scene of a murder.

Standing
for agonizing moments of indecision on that grimily lit landing, Howland was
gripped by the conviction that he could not afford to be questioned by the
police, that he was in danger, had been forcibly dragged into this frame up.
His only safety lay in shaking all this mystery off and letting himself be seen
in some familiar haunt—quickly.

Flier
landing-stages had been built at ten story intervals on this old-fashioned
building, and at floor thirty-seven he was three below a landing stage.

He
ran up the carpeted stairs, the artificial fibre worn .thin. Thirty
eight—thirty nine—he wavered a little in his dead run, panting for breath,
gloved hand grasping the banister. The elevator indicator stopped at the first
floor, flickered, then began its laborious climb up.

Halted
there, one foot on the lowest tread of the next flight, hand pressed hard
against his side where a stitch had begun to drive skewers into his body, he
saw a dark bat shape flit past the streaky window, blotting out the stars as it
soared up towards the landing stage on the fortieth floor. Immediately he began
to run in a frenzy of pumping legs up the stairs, ignoring the pain clawing at
his side, his mouth open and rasping for breath.

He burst out onto the fortieth story landing
with a first quick glance for the elevator indicator. Twenty-six. Then his eyes
flicked back to the landing stage doors. They slid open and a man and a girl
walked through—danced, rather, the man's arm around the girl's waist, her hair
disarranged and her eyes alight. Lipstick smudges tattooed the man's lips and
cheeks.

Howland, one hand up to his face, brushed
past them without a word and ran out onto the stage.

The autoflier's doors were
just sliding shut.

He
flung himself forward, hands out like talons to grasp and cling at the closing
edges. His lanky body convulsed with the spring of his leg muscles, forcing
himself through the narrowing gap to tumble onto the floor within.

At
once he punched the go button and the acceleration tossed him back onto the
cushions.

Clumsy
in his big gloves he fumbled out coins and dropped them into the slot meter,
set up a flight pattern for the Golden Cockerel, punched it into the board.
Then he collapsed back onto the seat and stared out and down.

Below
him the city spread out, rivers of golden light intersecting silver-sprinkled
areas of building. Other fliers moved in their lanes as his flier rose smoothly
and silently to join them. If there was a police flier down there he did not
see it. Probably there was. But the dead man had lived on the first floor—the
first door to the left up the stairs—and the police had gone in from the
ground. He lay back, exhausted, trembling, shaking all over. He knew his face
must look ghastly.

From
the Golden Cockerel he went straight to the University. Snow crunched hard and
squealing beneath his shoes. He looked into the commonroom, borrowed the latest
copy of
Nature,
spoke with forced cheerfulness to old Gussman,
and turned straight in, tired out in body and mind.