Part 10

He tried to get beside her to speak to something besides the back of her blonde head, but she was a tall girl and had a long stride. He hesitated to take her by the elbow.

Beryl stopped at the door to the library.

"Please take note, Willie," she said coldly, "that the light is on inside and I am all alone."

_At least she spoke_, thought Westervelt.

"I have come down here for a little peace and quiet," she informed him. "I hope you didn't intend to learn how to read at this hour of the night."

"Aw, come on!" protested Westervelt. "It was an accident. Could I help it?"

"Being the way you are, I suppose not," admitted Beryl judiciously. "Why don't you go elsewhere and be an accident again?"

"I'm trying to say I'm sorry," said Westervelt, feeling a flush spreading over his features. "I don't know why I have to apologize, anyway. It wasn't _me_ in there, filing away in the dark!"

Beryl looked down her nose at him as if he were a Mizarian asking where he could have his chlorine tank refilled.

"Is that the story you're telling around?" she demanded icily.

"I'm not telling--" Westervelt realized he was beginning to yell, and lowered his voice. "I'm not telling any story around. Nobody knows anything about it except you and I and Pete. Bob couldn't have seen anything."

Beryl shrugged, a small, disdainful gesture. Westervelt wondered why he had allowed himself to get into an argument over the matter, since it was obvious that he was making things worse with every word.

"I don't know why you should be so sore about it," he said. "Even Pete said to me I should forget about it."

"Oh, you two have been talking it over!" Beryl accused. "Pretty clubby! Do you take over for him on other things too?"

Westervelt threw up his hands.

"You don't seem to mind anything about it except that I should know you were in there with him," he retorted. "If he was so acceptable, why am I a disease? Nobody ever left this office on account of me!"

"It could happen yet," said Beryl.

"Oh, hell! The trouble with you is you need a little loosening up."

He grabbed her by the shoulders and yanked her toward him. Slipping his left arm behind her back as she tried to kick his ankle, he kissed her. The result was spoiled by Beryl's turning her face away at the crucial instant. Westervelt drew back.

The next thing he knew, lights exploded before his right eye. He had not even seen her hand come up, or he would have ducked. He saw it as he stepped back, however. Despite a certain feminine delicacy, the hand clenched into a very capable little fist.

Beryl took one quick stride into the library.

"I don't like to keep hinting around," she said, "but maybe that will play itself back in your little mind."

She slammed the door three inches from his nose. Westervelt raised a hand to open it, then changed his mind and felt gingerly of his eye. It hurt, but with a sort of surrounding numbness.

Realizing that he could see after all, he looked up and down the corridor guiltily. It seemed very quiet.

_Right square in the peeper!_ he thought ruefully. _She couldn't have aimed that well: it must have been a lucky shot. I ought to go in there and belt her!_

It was not something he really wanted to do. He could not foresee any pleasure or satisfaction in carrying matters to the extent of open war.

_You lost again, Willie_, he argued. _You might as well take it like a man. She got annoyed at something you said, like as not, and it was too late when you began._

He prodded gently at his eye again, and decided that the numb sensation was being caused by the tightening of skin over a growing mouse.

He set off up the corridor, passed the main door with his face averted, and hurried down to the washroom before someone should come along.

Spying out the land through a cautiously opened door, he discovered the place unoccupied. In the mirror, the eye showed definite signs of blossoming. The eyebrow was all right, but the orb itself was bloodshot and tearing freely. Beneath it, the flesh above the cheekbone was pink and puffy.

"Ohmigod!" breathed Westervelt. "It'll be blue tomorrow! Probably purple and green, in fact. Or does it take a day or two to reach that stage?"

He ran cold water into a basin and splashed it over his face, holding a palmful at a time against the damaged eye.

When this did not seem sufficiently effective, he wadded a soft paper towel, soaked it in running water, and applied it until it lost its chill.

"Am I doing right?" he wondered. "I can never remember whether it's hot or cold you're supposed to use."

He thought about it while holding the slowly disintegrating towel to his eye. Someone had told him, as nearly as he could recall, that either way helped, depending upon when heat or cold was applied.

"I guess it must be that you use cold before it has time to swell," he muttered. "Keep the blood from going into the tissues--that must be it. But if you're too late for that, then heat would keep it from stiffening. Now, the question is, did I start in time?"

He examined the eye. It did not feel too sore, but it was still red and slightly swollen. The flow of tears had stopped, so he decided there was little more he could do. He dried his face and walked out into the corridor, blinking.

_The com room is pretty dim_, he thought.

He went to the laboratory door and opened it quietly. The room was dark and unoccupied. Westervelt swore to himself that if he stumbled over anyone this time, he would punch every nose he could reach without further ado. Unless, he amended the intention, he ran into Lydman.

He was squeamish about turning on a light, which left him the problem of groping his way through the maze of tables, workbenches, and stacks of cartons. He set down for future conversation the possibility of claiming that the department was as normal as any other business; it too possessed the typical, messy back room out of range of the front office.

He had negotiated about half the course when he felt a cool breeze. At first, he thought it must come from an air-conditioning diffuser, but it blew more horizontally. Someone must have opened a window, he decided, or perhaps broken one trying out a dangerous instrument.

He succeeded in reaching the far wall, where he felt around for the door leading to the communications room. This was over near the outside wall, but he reached it without bumping into more than two or three scattered objects.

Once through the door, he could see better because a little light was diffused past the wire-mesh enclosure around the power equipment. He walked along the short passage formed by this, turned a corner, and came in sight of Joe Rosenkrantz sitting before his screen.

"Hello, Joe," he greeted the operator.

The other jumped perceptibly, looking around at the door.

"It's Willie," said Westervelt. "I came around the other way."

He was pleased to find that Rosenkrantz had the room as dimly lighted as was customary among the TV men. Joe stared for a moment at him and Westervelt feared that the other's vision was too well adjusted to the light.

"I didn't think anybody but Lydman used that way much," said Rosenkrantz.

"It's a short-cut," said Westervelt evasively.

He found a spare chair to sit in and inquired as to what might be new.

Rosenkrantz told him of putting through a few calls to planets near Trident, asking D.I.R. men stationed on them to line up spaceships for possible use, either to go after Harris or to ship necessary equipment for plumbing the ocean. He offered to let Westervelt scan the tapes of his traffic.

"That's a good idea," said the youth gratefully. "Even if I don't spot an opening, it will look like useful effort."

"Yeah," agreed the other. "Time drags, doesn't it. Wonder how they're making out down in the cable tunnels?"

"It can't last much longer."

"That's what this here Harris is saying too, I should think. Now, _there's_ one guy who is really packed away!"

"Well...."

"Oh, they've pulled some good ones around here, but I have a feeling about this one," insisted the operator. "I'd bet ten to one they won't spring Harris."

Westervelt took the tapes to a playback screen and dragged his chair over.

"I told Smitty they ought to offer to swap for him," he said. "At the time, I meant it looked like the perfect way to unload undesirables. Come to think of it, though, I wouldn't mind going myself."

"What the hell for?" asked Rosenkrantz.

Westervelt realized that he had nearly given himself away.

"Oh ... just for the chance to see the place," he said. "Nobody else has ever seen these Tridentians. How else could somebody like me get a position as an interstellar ambassador."

"Maybe Harris wants the job for himself. He sure went looking for it!"

The phone buzzed quietly. Rosenkrantz answered, then said, "It's for you."

Westervelt went to the screen. It was Smith.

"I thought you must have found a way out, Willie. Where did you get to?"

Westervelt explained that he was looking at the tapes of the Trident calls, to familiarize himself with the background.

"I figured there was plenty of time for me to--" He broke off as he saw Rosenkrantz straighten up to focus in a call from space. "Joe is receiving something right now. I'll let you know if it has anything to do with Trident."

"Department 99, Terra," the operator was saying when Westervelt turned from the phone, as if the mere call signal had not satisfied the party at the other end.

There seemed to be a lot of action on the screen. Men were running in various directions in what appeared to be a large hall with an impressive stairway.

"Yoleen!" Rosenkrantz flung over his shoulder. "Tell Smitty!"

"Mr. Smith!" said Westervelt, turning back to the phone screen. "Joe says it's Yoleen coming in. Maybe you'd like to see it yourself. Something looks wrong."

"Coming!" said Smith, and the phone went dark.

Westervelt looked around to see that most of the running figures had hidden themselves. A voice was coming over, and he listened with the operator.

"... knocked apart so I have to use one of the observation lenses they have planted around the embassy. He's shooting up the place good!"

"I'm taping until someone gets here," said Rosenkrantz. "Better tell me what happened, just in case."

_Yoleen_, thought Westervelt. _That would be ... let me see ... Gerson, the kidnap case. Do they mean that he's shooting them up?_

"... and after he left me with this mess, in the com room, he headed for the stairs," said the voice of the unseen operator. "He seems to be trying to get out of the embassy. We don't know why--the boys got him there without any trouble."

"Was he all right?" asked Rosenkrantz, cocking an ear at the door.

"He looked pretty sick, as if he wasn't eating well, and he had a broken wrist. They took him along to the doctor with no trouble. Then the chief went up to see how he was and found Doc out cold on the floor. He set up a yell, naturally. Someone finally caught up with Gerson in the military attache's office."

"What did he want there?" asked Rosenkrantz.

"We don't know yet. He left a corpse for us that isn't answering questions."

FIFTEEN

In the building to which the two terrans had brought him, Gerson crouched behind the ornate balustrade edging the mezzanine. He was near the head of the stairway and hoped to get nearer.

A look down the hall behind him showed no unwary heads in view. He studied the sections of the hall below, which he could see through the openings in the railing. There had been a great scrambling about down there a moment earlier, so he was uneasy about showing himself.

He had armed himself as chance provided: a rocket pistol of Yoleenite manufacture--doubtless purchased as a souvenir--and a sharp knife from a dinner tray he had come upon in one of the rooms he had searched. Because of his injury, he had to grip the knife between his teeth. Something bothered him about this arrangement. He had the papers thrust in his shirt, he held the rocket pistol in one hand, one hand was hurt--yet the only way left to hold the knife was in his teeth. It did not seem exactly right, but he had had no time to ponder. The Terrans were keeping him busy.

Since he had been brought to this building, he had seen four threes of Terrans. One, the medical worker, he had rendered helpless. Then he had gone to search for secrets, and that other one had seen him. By that time, he had found the rocket pistol. He had left that Terran dead, but others had come running.

Something had told him to shoot up the communications equipment, although the Terran working it had escaped. He was somewhere behind Gerson, behind one of the many doors leading off that high, bright corridor.

He believed that he had seen one other duck into a doorway ahead of him, along the hall on the other side of the mezzanine. There was yet another hiding behind the opposite balustrade. Gerson wondered idly if the last one was armed.

He tried to review the probable positions of those on the main floor. One had definitely run out the front door, which faced the bottom of the broad stairway, about thirty feet away. There was a shallow anteroom there, but Gerson had seen him all the way across it.

Of the others, one had ducked into a chamber at the front of the main hall, to Gerson's left as he would be descending the stairs. Another had run back under cover of the stairway on the same side, and the remaining four were lurking somewhere to the right, either behind the stairs or in adjoining chambers.

He leaned closer to the balustrade in an effort to see more. In the act, his injured limb came in contact with the barrier and made him grimace in pain. The drug the Terran medical worker had shot into it was wearing off.

Since he had made a slight noise already, Gerson crawled along about ten feet until he was just beside the head of the stairs. He made himself quiet to listen.

Somewhere below, two of the embassy staff were talking cautiously. It might be a good time to catch them unawares. He rose and took a step toward the stairs.

A voice that sounded artificially loud spoke in one or another of the lower chambers. It had a slight echo, making it nearly impossible for Gerson to determine the direction. The Terran who had ducked into the room on the left appeared, raising a weapon of some kind.

Gerson blazed a rocket in his direction. The slim missile, the length and thickness of the two top joints of his thumb, left a smoky trail just above the stairway railing and blew a large hole in the wall beside the doorway where the staff man had been standing. Somehow, the fellow had leaped back in time to avoid the flying specks of metal and plaster.

Gerson knelt behind the balustrade again, shaken by the sense of new pain, and wondering at its source. He concentrated. After a moment, he felt the wetness trickling dawn his left side. Some small object had grazed the flesh; and he realized that it must have been a solid pellet projected by the weapon of the Terran at whom he had shot.

He knew that the Terrans had more dangerous weapons than that, but had been confident that they would dare nothing over-violent here within their own building. The pistol used against him must be an old-fashioned one or a keepsake. Possibly it was a mock weapon built for practicing at a target. He seemed to remember vaguely having handled such a thing in the past.

He strained after the fleeting memory, clenching his teeth with the effort, but it was gone. So many memories seemed to be gone. All he was sure of was that he must get out of here with those papers.

He checked the upper hall again, before and behind. He looked across the open space for the Terran hiding like himself behind the balustrade, but could not find him. It might or might not be worthwhile to send a shot over there at random. If he missed, he might at least scare the fellow.

The loud voice with the mechanical sound to it blared out from below.

"Gerson!" it called. "Gerson, throw down your weapon and stand up. We can see where you are. We want to help you."

Gerson showed no reaction. Analyzing the statement, he reminded himself that one Terran had shot him. Not very seriously, it was true, but it was not in the nature of help. Either the voice lied or it had no control over the individual who had fired at him.

He did not blame it for the presumable untruth, since he was not deceived by it. It would be preferrable to kill the man who had shot him, but he must bear in mind that his main task was to get out of the building.

"Gerson!" called the voice again. "We know you are injured. You are a sick man. We beg you to drop your weapon and let us help you!"

Gerson wondered what the voice meant by the expression "sick."

It was possible that someone had seen him wounded by the last shot. Or did they mean his sore limb. It occurred to him then that the blood that had run out and dried on the right side of his face must be clearly visible. The Terran he had killed back along the corridor had flung a small ceramic dish at him, and Gerson had been slow in raising his injured limb to block it. The whole side of his face was sore, but the skin of his cheek no longer bled so it was a matter of opinion whether he was sick on that account.

The voice must mean the last wound, when it called him sick. That meant that the Terran he had shot at was the voice or that there was another Terran in the room with him. Gerson did not think that any of the others could have seen. Some doubt at the back of his mind struggled to suggest an oversight, but he knew of none.

He peered once more between the balusters, and this time he saw a motion, a mere shadow, across the way. Instantly, he stood up and launched a rocket at the spot. It streaked on its way and exploded immediately against one of the uprights. Gerson regretted fleetingly that it had not gone through and struck against the wall beyond, which would have accounted for the skulking Terran with a good deal of certainty. As the baluster disintegrated, leaving stubs at top and bottom, Gerson started down the stairs.

Yells sounded from below. He threw one leg up to mount the stair railing, leaned back along it, and let himself slide. The rocket pistol, waving wildly at arm's length in his left hand, helped him to balance. He reached the landing at the middle of the stairs in one swoop.

The human at whom he had shot reappeared in the same doorway. Gerson rolled to his left, felt both feet hit upon the landing, and let go another missile. It was too late; the Terran had not even lingered to fire back. It seemed almost like a feint to distract.

"_Gerson!_" blared the mechanical voice.

"Gerson! Gerson!" shouted other voices.

They came from many directions, and he was unable to comprehend them all. He had reached a point near the bottom of the stairway, running three steps at a time, when a louder yell directed his attention to the doorway on his right. The figure of a Terran showed there.

Without breaking his stride, he whipped his left hand across his body and fired a rocket. He had a glimpse of the figure dodging aside before the smoke and dust of the explosion told him he had nicked the edge of the doorway.

It seemed to him that he must have shot the Terran as well, and he let his eye linger there an instant as he reached the floor of the hall. Thus, he saw the figure reappear and was in position to fling two more shots with animal quickness.

The figure was blown straight backward this time, but Gerson had time to realize that there had been no head on it when it had been thrust out.

His first shot must have done that. All told, he had wasted three missiles on a dummy.

Then the loop of rope fell about him, and he knew why he had been lured into facing this direction. He tried to bring the rocket pistol to bear on the three Terrans running at him from behind the stairway. The fourth, at the end of the rope, heaved Gerson off his feet.

He crashed down upon his sore limb, letting out a groan at the impact. One of the runners dove headlong at him, batting at the pistol as he slid past on the polished floor. Gerson felt the weapon knocked out of his grasp. It rattled and scraped along the floor out of reach, but he kicked the one who had done it in the head.

Two of the Terrans were trying to hold him down, now. He got the knife from his mouth into his left hand, let a Terran see it, then bit him viciously on the wrist. The Terran let go, and Gerson found it simple to knee the remaining one in the groin. He rolled over to get a knee under him, pushed himself up with the fist gripping the knife, and saw Terrans running at him from all directions.

One of them had a broad, white bandage on his head. Gerson recognized him as the medical worker. The man carried a hypodermic syringe.

Unreasoning terror swept through Gerson. He knew that he must, at all costs, avoid that needle.

He whirled around to slash at the men coming up behind him. The nearest fell back warily.

"Put it away, Gerson," he said. "We don't want to hurt you, man! Why, you're half dead on your feet."

"What's the matter?" asked another, more softly. "We can see that you're not normal. What did those bastards do to you?"

Gerson looked from side to side, seeing them closing in but unable to spot an opening for a charge.

"Just listen to me a minute," said the medical worker. He made the mistake of holding the hypodermic out of sight this time, too late. "Gerson, talk to me! Say something! Whatever the trouble is, we'll help you."

It was the only opening.

Gerson took a carefully hesitant step toward him, then another. He held up his damaged limb.

"Yes, your wrist is broken," said the Terran. "I was going to put a cast on it for you, remember. Now, just relax, and we'll take care of--"

He saw Gerson's eyes and leaped back.

The knife swept up in a vicious arc that would have disemboweled him.

Without wasting the motion, Gerson slashed down and left at another as he plunged forward. The point grazed an up-flung arm, drawing a startled curse from the victim.

"Tackle him!" shouted one of the Terrans.

"Careful! He's already hurt bad enough," cautioned another.

Gerson tried to feint and throw his weight in the opposite direction, but his legs would not obey him. He recovered from the slip only to have one of the men push him from behind.

Someone clamped a tight hold on his left forearm as he staggered. A moment later they twisted the knife out of his grasp and bore him to the floor. He kicked ineffectively and then caught one of them by surprise with a butt.

The man recoiled, blood spurting already from his nose. He brought his fist around despite warning yells, and clipped Gerson on the temple.

"Hold him, dammit!" shouted someone. "Get that rope over here. Do you want to kill him? Just hold him still."

"You try it," invited one of those holding Gerson pinned.

"I think he's weakening," said another. "Watch out--he may be playing possum."

The talk seemed to come from far away. Gerson felt them tie his ankles together. They hesitated about his hands; one was injured. One voice suggested tieing his left wrist to the stairway railing, but it was decided that they could watch him well enough as long as he could not run. The weight lessened as those pinning him arose to look to their own bruises. Gerson was vaguely surprised to discover that all of them were off him. He still felt as if great weight were holding him pressed against the floor. He found it difficult to catch his breath.

They had taken the papers from his shirt, he noted. One of the Terrans passed them to a man in a dark uniform, who began to leaf through them worriedly.

A Terran came in through the front door.

"Have you got him?" the newcomer asked. "That helicopter is still floating around up there. I've been watching it for half an hour with the night glasses. They sure as hell are waiting for something."