Part 4

"People have been killed," I said, and could have bitten my tongue out. Why let him even suspect that I was thinking about something that wasn't tied in with his argument at all, why give him the slightest hint? The Underground's accident record was good and couldn't have justified such cynicism on my part. And just suppose he wasn't the garrulous, middle-aged business man he appeared to be--

A very sinister game can start in just that way, with everything favoring the alerted party until he lets the other know that he's on his guard and is having uneasy thoughts. That's where the danger lies, in a subconscious betrayal, a slip of the tongue that will precipitate violence faster than it would ordinarily occur.

If a killer feels that he must move swiftly, before suspicion can become a certainty, the odds shift in his favor. He has the advantage of surprise. He becomes alerted too, and necessity acts as a goad--a kind of trigger-mechanism. He'll act more quickly and decisively, without the careful planning that may prompt him to talk too much and give himself away.

He'll take risks that are dangerous and could destroy him, strike with witnesses present and all escape routes blocked. If he has to, he'll strike even in a crowded Underground train with the next station minutes away. And that kind of audacity sometimes pays off.

I told myself that I was imagining things, jumping to a completely unwarranted conclusion. The conversation of the man next to me was exactly what you'd expect from a magpie. He was carefully sidestepping all realistic appraisals of the Underground's shortcomings, trying his best to look at the problem from all sides, even if it meant being shallow and over-optimistic. He was the citizen with a smiling face, the rather likeable guy--why should one hold it against him?--who was trying his best to be fair to everybody, even if he had to burst a blood-vessel doing it.

Realizing all that made me feel less tense and part of the nightmare feeling I'd been experiencing went away. But not quite all of it and when the train passed into an unlighted tunnel and the aisle went dark apprehension began to mount in me again.

What if he was putting on an act, and wasn't the kind of man he appeared to be at all? What does a killer look like? Certainly age had nothing to do with it. He can be young or old--eighteen or seventy-five.

His appearance, his clothes? There were wild-eyed killers with "psycho" stamped all over them, and dignified, soberly-dressed men who looked no different from your next door neighbor and had criminal records a yard long, including, in all likelihood, a murder or two the Law would have a difficult time proving.

I didn't have to speculate about it. I _knew_, because I'd done more than my share of social research. There was nothing to prevent a man of distinction from becoming a killer, if he had a secret life that was ugly and devious and a powerful enough motive.

But now he was talking again, despite the darkness, and I was listening with my nerves on edge. I was completely in the dark as to why something about him had set the alarm bells ringing but I was sure I could hear them, very faint and distant this time, but clearly enough. It was funny. Sometimes it meant something and sometimes it didn't. I could feel that danger was hovering right at my elbow and in the end discover I'd been completely mistaken.

I hoped I was mistaken this time, but I knew there was a possibility--remote, perhaps, but dangerous to ignore--that the man who had set the small mechanical killer in motion by the Lakeside had followed me from the Administration Building into the Underground and was standing by my side.

"You take one of the really big power combines," he was saying. "Like, say, Wendel Atomics. It has its defenders and detractors, and I daresay there are quite a few people who would be happy to see its Board of Directors behind bars. I'm not defending the Wendel monopoly, understand. If I was a Martian colonist I might feel quite differently about it. But you've got to remember that when you give the go-ahead signal for a project that big you're asking fifty or a hundred key executives to do the impossible--or pretty close to the impossible."

"The impossible?" I said, trying to sound no more than mildly interested, because I didn't want him to suspect what a jolt his mention of Wendel Atomics had given me.

"Oh, yes," he went on. "That's what it boils down to. Every one of those men will be as human as you or I. They'll react in highly individual ways to every problem that comes up, every frustration, every serious interference with their private lives. You've got to remember that a man's private life is the most important thing in the world--to him personally. Every one of those fifty or a hundred men will have health worries, money worries, love life worries, every kind of worry you can think of. And on Mars worries can pile up."

"So I've heard," I said.

"Well, that's all. That sums it up. I'm simply citing Wendel as an example of what the New Chicago Transportation System is up against. I'd say, in general, that most of the directors are doing their best, when the Old Adam in them isn't in the driver's seat, to keep the trains running on schedule."

He stopped talking abruptly. I didn't think anything of it for a moment, for a loquacious man will often pause in the middle of a conversation to wonder what kind of dent he's been making on the party who's doing most of the listening. But when a full minute passed and the darkness held, and he didn't say a word, when I couldn't even hear him breathing, I began to grow uneasy.

Reach out and touch him? Well, why not? It was the simplest, quickest way of finding out whether he was still at my side and he could hardly be offended if my hand grazed his elbow in a jostling motion that would seem accidental.

It was very strange. I didn't think he was the man I'd feared he might be any longer, because of what he'd said, because he had brought Wendel Atomics into the conversation. If he'd _had_ designs on my life giving his hand away like that would have been the height of folly. It would have been like giving me cards and spades, and a detailed history of his activities for the past five years.

It didn't take any gifted reasoning to figure that out and I didn't pride myself on it. Even a child could have done it. What disturbed me and kept me from feeling relieved was something quite different. The alarm bells were still ringing. _They were still ringing._

Louder now and with a dirgelike persistence, as if I was already dead and buried. And neither a child nor a grown man could have figured that one out.

That's why I felt I had to reach out and touch him, had to start him talking again ... had to be sure he was still there at my side.

He was there, all right. He was there in the most alarming possible way, as a dead weight lurching against me, then swaying and screaming as I tried to straighten him up, and stop the terrible downward drag of his sagging body.

He was sinking lower and lower, clutching at my knees now, refusing to take advantage of the support I was offering him. I strained and tugged, but it was no use. He was too heavy to raise and I could hear the breath wheezing out of his throat and there could be no mistaking the weight of horror that was making him twist and writhe as he sagged--the deadliness of whatever it was that had struck at him in the darkness without making a sound.

He screamed again. It was the kind of agonized protest which could only have come from the throat of a man who hardly knew what was happening to him ... a man with his terror heightened and made more acute by the awful, groping-in-the-dark realization that he was experiencing a torment he was powerless to explain.

There had to be an answer but I didn't know what it was, and when the scream died away and the tugging stopped all I could hear for an instant was the steady droning of the train. Then there was another violent movement close to me and a harsh intake of breath.

My hand shot out, grazed something smooth that whipped away from me and caught hold of a wrist that was much thinner than a man's wrist had any right to be.

Much softer too, velvety soft, and it tugged and jerked in a frantic effort to free itself, holding tight to the knife that it would have taken all of a woman's strength to plunge deep into my heart.

But she could have done it, whoever she was, for there was a wiry strength in her--a strength so great that I had to twist her wrist cruelly before her fingers relaxed and the knife dropped to the floor of the train.

She gasped in pain--or was it fury?--and exerted all of her strength again in a desperate effort to break my grip. And this time luck was on her side. No, call it what it was. Luck may have figured, but most of it was plain blundering stupidity on my part. I was pretty sure I knew what her first, misdirected blow with the knife had done to the man I'd been talking to, and the thought so sickened and unnerved me that my fingers relaxed a little when the knife went clattering, and she took advantage of that to break free.

The passengers were crowding me now, pushing, shoving in alarm, and I knew it would be easy enough for her to force her way between them, still exerting all of her strength and get far enough away to be just one of the thirty terrified people when the train roared out into the light again. They'd all look disheveled, on the verge of panic and I wouldn't have a chance of identifying her.

How could I have identified her with any certainty, even if she'd been the only one with a guilty stare? I hadn't the least idea what she looked like. I only knew that she wasn't old, was all woman in her lithe softness, the opposite of an Amazon despite her strength. The femininity which had emanated from her--how instantly it can make itself felt, how instinctively overwhelming it can be!--had made me feel like a brute for an instant, even though I'd known it was her life or mine and I would have been quite mad to spare her.

There were men I could think of, the opposite of brutes, who would have knocked her unconscious with a blow to the head. To spare a determined killer is potentially suicidal, but I doubted if I could have done that.

I was still doubting it an instant later, when the train emerged from the unlighted tunnel and the bright glare of the Underground lamps flooded the aisle, bringing the man she'd stabbed by accident into clear view.

I was sure by now that she'd stabbed him by accident in a try for me, but that wasn't going to help him at all. He had flopped over on his back and was lying sprawled out in the middle of the aisle, and his eyes stared up at me, sightless and glazed.

There was no blood either on or beside him, but that only meant that he'd been stabbed in the back and there hadn't been time for blood from the wound to stain the edge of his clothes and trickle out from beneath him across the aisle.

His face had the pallor of death and his lips were drawn back over the large white teeth I'd noticed when he'd been talking to me. Drawn back in a stiff, unnatural grin and I didn't have to bend down and listen for a heartbeat I knew I wouldn't hear to be completely sure that the words he'd spoken to me would be the last he'd ever speak on Earth.

Just the way his head lolled, back and forth with the rhythmic throbbings of the train, would have clinched it for me. And I couldn't have bent down, because the other passengers were all staring at him too now, and elbowing me away from him to get a closer look, torn between morbid curiosity and stark terror.

I was too shaken, too sick at heart, to resent the elbowing. There was anger in me too, cold, uncompromising and right at that moment I could no longer even think of her as a woman.

* * * * *

It was past midnight when I got home and let myself into the apartment. I was more shaken than I would have cared to admit to anyone who didn't know me as well as Trilling did, because casual acquaintances can do you an injustice and judge the extent of your control by the way you happen to be looking at the moment.

I was quite sure that I was looking _very_ bad, and however severely I'd been shaken up by what had happened I still had a fair measure of control over my emotions.

I hadn't stayed in the train or on the platform to assist in the investigation, but I didn't feel guilty about it. Trilling could square all that with the authorities easily enough and he wouldn't have wanted me to talk to the police and have to identify myself. I was sure of that. My evidence would be taken down and turned over to the proper authorities in good time. The rule for me--the only rule I had a right to consider--was no entanglements.

I shut and locked the front door and almost called out: "It's me, darling!" as I usually do when I come home late, because when Joan is alone in the apartment and hears a door opening and closing she gets angry when I just walk in unannounced. It's part woman-curiosity, part fear, I guess--the thought that it could be a prowler and why should she be kept in suspense while I'm hanging up my hat and coat?

But this time something prevented me from calling out. Possibly the quarrel we'd had was still rankling a little deep in my mind and I wasn't quite sure how she'd take the "Darling."

My stubborn pride again. Or possibly it was just the feeling I had that the apartment was quieter than usual, that when you're keyed up and alert enough to hear a pin drop and you hear nothing--just a stillness that's a little on the weird side--your anxiety becomes too great to be relieved by calling out a cheery greeting.

I felt somehow that it would be wiser, and set better with the way I felt, if I just hung up my coat and walked into the living room without saying a word.

So I walked into the living room without saying a word and she was sitting right in the middle of it, on a straight-back chair with all of her bags packed and standing on the floor by the window, and with all of my bags packed and standing cheek-by-jowl with hers, and the three trunks that were going with me to Mars all sealed up and double-locked, and she wasn't angry or shaking her head or looking at the luggage with scorn.

There was pride in her lustrous brown eyes and the adorable tilt of her chin, and a warmth and a tenderness, and she was smiling at me and nodding.

"Oh, darling," she said. "Darling ... darling ... come here. Did you think I'd ever let you go to Mars without me? It was just talk--just stubborn, wild, crazy talk and it didn't mean a thing."

If you marry a woman like Joan and ever have a moment of doubt ... well, it means you ought to have your head examined. But you're twice as far removed from sanity if you throw away the check. For you can always be sure it will be redeemed eventually, in full measure and brimming over.

I didn't even have to put on my uniform and attach the small silver hawk to it.

6

We were not the only passengers in the eight-cabined forward section of the big sky ship which had been assigned to us. But it had taken us almost a week to get acquainted. To get really acquainted, that is, so that we could relax and feel at ease and really enjoy one another's company.

We were sitting in lounge chairs on the long promenade deck that ran parallel with all eight of the cabins, staring out through translucent crystal at a wide waste of stars.

Sitting in the first chair was a tall, sturdily built man of thirty-eight, with keen blue eyes and a dusting of gray at his temples. His name was Clifton Maddox and he was an electronic engineer. He had stories on tap that could turn your hair white, because he had been to Mars and back eight times.

Seated next to him, with her hand resting lightly on his arm, was a woman in her early twenties, with honey-blonde hair and eyes that held unfathomable glints and an enigmatical ingenuousness that could keep a man guessing in an exciting way. Her name was Helen Melton and she had eyes only for the man at her side. She had managed to make of the trip a continuous honeymoon, despite a few lovers' quarrels and the stern exactions which her work as a medical laboratory technician had imposed on her.

I mention these two because they were fairly typical of the group as a whole. They were all unusual individuals, the kind of people you take a liking to straight off, when you meet them casually at a party and exchange a few words with them that you keep remembering for days.

Joan and I sat in the last two chairs on the promenade deck, a little apart from the others. Joan was deep in a book and a little weary of talking and I ... was thinking about the robots.

The robots were a story in themselves--a story that could bear a great deal of re-telling. If right at that moment I'd had a son--a bright and eager lad of six or eight--I'd have set him on my knee and talked about the robots.

The five hundred passengers in the big sky ship were not alone in the long journey through interplanetary space. In the last years of the twentieth century, I'd have taken pains to make very clear to him, and in the early years of the twenty-first, a great new science had grown from an infant into a giant.

The science of cybernetics, of giant computers that could do much of Man's thinking for him on a specialized technological level, had transformed the face of the Earth and was continuing to transform it at a steadily accelerating pace.

The rocket's four giant computers were of the newest and most efficient type--humanoid in aspect, with conical heads, massive metal body-boxes, and three-jointed metal limbs which had all of Man's flexible adaptability in the carrying out of complex and difficult tasks.

Robotlike and immense, they towered in the chart room with their six-digited metal hands on their metal knees, their electronic circuits clicking, their tiers of memory banks in constant motion, but otherwise outwardly indifferent to the human activity that was taking place around them.

Four metal giants in a metal rocket, functioning cooperatively with Man in the gulfs between the planets, might have made an imaginative fiction writer of an earlier age catch his breath and glory in the fulfillment of a prophecy. An H. G. Wells perhaps, or an Olaf Stapledon. But the reality was an even greater tribute to the human mind's inventive brilliance than the Utopian dream had been.

The four giant computers were capable of solving problems too technical for the human mind to master without assistance, usually with astounding swiftness and always with the more-than-human accuracy of thinking machines whose prime function was to correlate without error the data supplied to them on punched metallic tapes, and to perform intricate mechanical tasks based upon that data.

The robots were tremendous, by any yardstick you might care to apply, and if I'd had a son--

I stopped thinking about the robots abruptly and sat very still, listening. A sound I'd heard a moment before had come again, much louder this time--a chill, unearthly screeching.

The chart room was just outside the eight-cabin section and I could hear the sound clearly. My nerves again, my over-stimulated imagination?

In space strange and unusual sounds are as common as pips on a radar screen. It was queer how quickly you got used to them. You had to walk around with your ears plugged up, in a sense, but the plugs didn't have to be inserted. They were just natural growths inside your ears--invisible and without substance, but plugs notwithstanding. They produced a kind of psycho-somatic deafness which didn't otherwise interfere with your hearing.

Just the very unusual sounds, the totally inexplicable raspings, dronings, creakings--usually of short duration--were blotted out.

You didn't hear them unless something deep in your mind whispered: "This one is different. This is an emergency. Take heed!"

The screeching was very different. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before, on Earth or in space.

The others must have heard it too, for it had been too loud, the second time, to be ignored. But apparently that strange acceptance of strange noises in space which goes with the kind of deafness I've mentioned had only been shattered for me. The six men and women in the lounge chairs had looked a little startled for a moment and exchanged puzzled glances. Which meant, of course, that they had heard it despite the mental earplugs in some inner recess of their minds. But that didn't prevent them from shrugging it off and resuming their conversation.

Joan also looked a trifle uneasy. She stopped reading just long enough to raise her eyes and frown, then became absorbed in the book again.

I got up quietly and pressed her wrist. "See you," I said.

She shut the book abruptly and straightened in her chair. "Where are you going, Ralph?"

"Just stay right where you are, kitten," I said. "I'll be back in a moment."

"That screeching noise," she said. "I was wondering about it, Ralph. I guess you'd better see what's causing it."

So she'd been disturbed by it too, and ignoring it had taken a deliberate effort of will which I hadn't realized she was exerting. It made me happy in an odd inner way, because it proved again what I'd always known ... that we were very close and there were currents of understanding which flowed back and forth between us and I had a wife I could be proud of.

"It's probably nothing," I said, not wanting to alarm her. "But I might as well take a look. It seems to be coming from the chart room."

"All right," she said and squeezed my hand.

I had to open and shut two sliding panels and pass along a blank-walled passageway to get to the chart room. To my surprise the door was standing open. It's usually kept locked, because there's no section of the sky ship where a man who didn't want anyone to suspect that he harbored within himself the most dangerous kind of destructive impulses could do more damage.

The shattering of a photo-electric eye or the ripping out of a single live connection in just one of the four cybernetic robots could have wrecked the rocket, and sent it spiraling down through the space gulfs in flaming ruin, depending on just how vital to the robot's functioning the shattered part happened to be.

There was a security alert system which would have to be disconnected first, but anyone resourceful enough to get inside the chart room at all, without identification-disk proof that he had a right to be there, would have known precisely how to take care of the preliminary obstacles.

I didn't waste any time in getting to that wide-open door, for my mind was racing on ahead of me like the most alerted kind of alarm system, its jaggling warning me that every second counted and that what I dreaded most might very well be true.

What I actually saw, when I reached the doorway and stood there looking in, took me completely by surprise. It wasn't the way I'd pictured it at all. But it was just as unnerving, just as much of a threat to the safety of the ship and it startled me so I must have looked almost comic, standing there idiot-still. But there was nothing comic about what I saw.

The woman I'd almost asked to go to Mars with me was staring straight at me, her hair still piled up high, a look of terrified appeal in her eyes. She wasn't alone. She was struggling furiously with a crewman I'd talked to a few times and neither liked nor disliked--a heavyset man with high cheekbones and pale blue eyes. He was gripping her savagely by the wrist and they were both backed up against one of the robot giants.

Suddenly as I stared her head went back and a convulsive trembling seized her. She began to scream.

7