"So was I."
Matt glanced up at the trapdoor, then stretched to reach, for the sonic. Nirvana was over.
"You really came to rescue me?"
"Yah." He didn't mention Laney, not yet. No point in spoiling this moment.
"Thanks."
"You're welcome. We've still got to get out of here."
"You don't have any questions to ask me?"
What was she doing, testing him? Didn't she trust him now? Well, why should she? "No," he said, "no questions. But there are things I've got to tell you--"
She stiffened under him. "Matt. Where are we?"
"In the Hospital. Deep in the Hospital. But we can get out.
She rolled away and came to her feet in one smooth motion. "We're in one of the slowboats! Which one?"
"The Planck. Does it matter?"
She scooped the other guard's sonic stunner from his holster in what looked like a racing dive. "We can set off the fusion plant! Blow the Hospital and the crew into the void mist! Come on, Matt, let's get moving. Are there guards in the corridor? How many?"
"Set off--Are you out of your mind?"
"We'd wipe out the Hospital and most of Alpha Plateau." She picked up her ripped mock-playsuit and threw it down again. "I'll have to depants one of these police. And that'll be it! We'd win, Matt! All in one stroke!"
"What win? We'll be dead!"
She stood up with her hands on her hips and regarded him with disgust. Now she wore a pair of Implementation uniform pants too big for her. Matt had never seen anyone more thoroughly alive. "I'd forgotten. You aren't a Son of Earth. AL right, Matt, see how far you can get. You may be able to get out of range of the blast. Personally, I doubt it."
"I've got a personal interest in you. I didn't come all this way to have you commit suicide. You're coming with me."
Polly donned a guard's shirt, then hurriedly rolled up the pants, which were much too long. "You've done your duty. I'm not ungrateful, Matt, but we just aren't going in the same direction. Our motives aren't the same." She kissed him hard, pushed him back, and whispered, "I can't pass up this chance." She started for the ladder.
Matt blocked her way. "You haven't a prayer of getting anywhere without me. You're coming with me, and we're leaving the Hospital--if we get that far."
Polly hit him.
She hit him with stiffened fingertips just under the sternum, where the ribs make an inverted V. He doubled up, trying to curl around the pain, not yet trying to breathe, but gaping like a fish. He felt fingers at his throat and realized that she'd seen the gas filter and was taking it.
He saw her as a blur at the corner of his eye, climbing the ladder. He heard the door open, and a moment later, close. Slow fire was spreading through his lungs. He tried to draw air, and it hurt.
He'd never learned to fight. "The luck of Matt Keller" had made it unnecessary. Once he'd struck a guard on the point of the jaw. Where else would you hit somebody? And who'd guess that a slightly built girl could hit so hard?
Inch by inch he uncurled, straightened up. He drew his breath in shallow, painful sips. When the pain over his heart would let him move again, he started up the ladder.
CHAPTER 13
IT ALL HAPPENED AT ONCE
POLLY MOVED at a gliding run. The gas filter was in place over her nose. She held the sonic straight out ahead of her, pointed around the curve of the inner hull. If an enemy appeared, that was where he would be, right in the gunsight. Nobody would come at her from behind. She was moving too fast.
As one of the inner core of the Sons of Earth, Polly knew the Planck as well as she knew her own home. The flight control room was a diameter's distance from airlock. She ticked off the doors as she passed under them. Hydroponics... Library...
Flight Control. The door was closed. No ladder.
Polly crouched and sprang. She caught the handle at the top of her leap. The door was not locked; it was closed, because nobody ever used the flight control room. Unfortunately the door opened inward, upward. She dropped back, frustrated, landing silently on her toes.
If she'd chosen the fusion room... but the fusion room was for fine control. There, the Hospital electricians kept power running to the colonist regions. She'd have run into people, and they might have stopped her.
The guard had carried a wallet.
She leapt again, caught the knob and turned it, pushed the wallet between the door and the jamb, where the catch of the lock ought to be. Again she dropped, and again she leapt. This time she slapped the flat of her hand hard against the door. It flipped upward... and over.
Far down the curve of the corridor someone yelled, "What's going on down there?"
Polly's chest heaved, pulling deep lungfuls of air through her nose, under perfect control. She jumped a last time, caught the jamb, and pulled herself up. Heavy footsteps... Before someone could come into sight, she had closed the door.
There was a ladder here, built into what had been the ceiling. Doubtless the Planck's original crew had used it to climb down from those six control chairs after the First Landing. Polly used it now.
She squirmed into the second seat on the left and found the control panel and the bypass. Part of the wall had been pried up, and a simple iron bar had been welded into place between two plates, removing control from the flight control room and giving it directly to the fusion room. In flight both control points had been necessary: the fusion room to keep the drive working and stable, and the flight control room to keep it pointed. Now the fusion drive was used only for making electricity. and Polly's control panel was dead.
She went down the ladder fast. There was a tool closet by the door. If it held a welding arc--
It did.
And if there was no anesthetic gas around or if it wasn't inflammable...
Nothing exploded as she turned on the welder. She began welding the door shut.
Almost immediately she attracted attention. She could hear excited voices, muffled by the door. Then there was the faint numbness of a sonic beamer. The door didn't conduct subsonics well, but she couldn't take this long. Nonetheless she finished the welding job before she went back up the ladder.
She used the welding arc to cut away the bypass. It was slow work. Implementation would surely have barged in on her before she finished. Now they could whistle for entrance. She had all the time in the world. In their world.
Matt reached the corridor and began to walk, leaving the interrogation room open behind him. He walked bent, with his chest half collapsed and his arms folded over the pain. He'd forgotten to take the remaining sonic.
"I'm not the domineering type," he muttered, perversely enjoying the sound of his own voice. And, "Either that, or I'm trying to dominate the wrong woman."
A heavy figure came pounding around the curve. Jesus Pietro Castro, wearing a gas filter and carrying a heavy mercy-sliver gun, looked up in time to avoid a collision. He jerked to a stop, and then his mouth dropped open as he took in blue eyes, brown hair, a bitter and angry colonist's face, an ear with a small piece bitten out of it, and blood soaked into the collar of a crewish overjacket.
"You agree?" Matt said brightly.
Castro raised his gun. The "luck" was off.
And all the rage and humiliation in Matt broke loose. "All right," he yelled, "look at me! Damn you, look at me! I'm Matthew Keller."
The Head stared. He did not fire. He stared.
"I crashed my way into your crummy Hospital singlehanded, twice! I came through walls and void mist and sleepy gas and mercy bullets to rescue that damn woman, and when I got her loose, she punched me in the gut and folded me up like a flower! So go ahead and look!"
Castro looked and looked.
And finally Matt realized that he should have fired.
Castro swiveled his head from side to side in a negative motion. But his eyes never left Matt. And slowly, slowly, as if he were knee deep in hardening cement, he moved one slow step forward.
Abruptly Matt realized what was happening. "Don't look away," he said hastily. "Look at me." The Head was close enough now, and Matt reached out and pushed the barrel of the mercy-gun aside, still striving to hold Castro's eyes. "Keep looking."
They stared eye to eye. Above his bulky false nose, Castro's eyes were remarkable: all white and black, all whites and huge, expanded pupils, with practically no iris showing. His jaw hung loose under the snowy handlebar moustache. He was melting; the perspiration ran in slow streams into his collar. Like a man in an ecstasy of fear, or awe, or worship... he stared.
Contract the pupils of eyes not your own, and you got psychic invisibility. Expand them, and you got... what? Fascination?
For damn sure, he had the Head's complete attention. Matt drew back his fist, cocked it-and couldn't follow through. It would have been like attacking a cripple. Castro was a cripple: one of his arms was in a sling.
There was shouting from down the corridor, from the direction Polly had taken.
The Head moved another gluey step forward.
Too many enemies, before and behind. Matt slapped the gun out of Castro's hand, then turned and ran.
As he dropped through the door to the coffin room, he saw the Head still looking after him, still held in the strange spell. Then he pushed the door closed above him.
Polly cut the last of the bar away, and the control board came alight. She ran her eyes quickly over the lighted dials, then once more, slowly.
According to the control board, the fusion drive was as cold as Pluto's caves.
Polly whistled between her teeth. It was no malfunction of the board. The several dials checked each other too well. Someone had decided to black out the colony regions.
She couldn't start the drive from here. And she'd never reach the fusion room; she'd locked herself in with a vengeance.
If only this had been the Arthur Clarke! Castro would never dare cut power to the crew. The Clark's fusion plant must be going full blast.
Well, now, she thought in growing excitement. She slid out onto the ladder. There might be a way to reach the Clarke.