Instinctively, his right hand twitched toward his paral-dart pistol, even though he knew the holster would be empty. Perhaps the emergency alarm on his belt—
"How do you feel?" one of his captors asked, kneeling down beside him.
Marcovich sighed with defeat and let his hand drop back to his side. "My neck hurts where you hit me," he said. "I'm... surprised I'm still alive. If you're hoping to get some inside information about Trendor's place, you can forget it—I'm not talking."
"What's a Trendor's place? Never mind—we're not here for information. And we're not going to kill you, either. At least I don't think we are."
Marcovich grimaced. "Oh, that's comforting. Really." His eyes flicked away from the face he'd seen so often these past days on Trendor's guardroom wall, over to where his laser rifle was resting against a tree. His communicator and emergency alarm were piled around it, along with the rest of his weapons and other gear. So near. "When does the final decision get made?"
"Right now," a new voice broke in.
Marcovich looked back just as a hypospray tingled against his arm. He frowned—and then gasped as a red-hot flame seemed to course up the limb. "Damn," he breathed. "What're you doing to me?
What is that?"
"To be perfectly honest, we don't know," the second man—Hawking, the name drifted up from his memory—said, frowning at a medical reader already strapped around Marcovich's upper arm. "We needed someone to test it out on, and as long as you Security people were hanging around the mountains doing nothing anyway, we thought we'd borrow one of you for a while."
The fire was pouring like slow lava into Marcovich's chest now, and a mottled haze was beginning to creep across his vision. His muscles trembled uncontrollably; with an effort he licked dry lips and wound up nearly biting his tongue. "How do you feel?" Hawking's voice came dimly to his ears.
"Like I'm dying," Marcovich managed to snap. Maybe there wasn't any way to stop them, but he was damned if he was going to cooperate with them. "Go away and let me die in peace."
"Well?" the other blackcollar asked.
Hawking shook his head slowly. "Sorry, Lathe. I remember well enough what kind of reaction the...
proper stuff caused. This isn't it."
"Damn." Lathe gazed down at Marcovich, and even through his own haze of agony Marcovich was struck by the depth of raw disappointment on the other's face. "You're sure?"
Hawking didn't even bother to answer, and after a minute Lathe seemed to pull himself together.
"Well, then, what is it doing to him?"
"Damned if I know." The other shook his head. "I don't think he's dying—his vital signs are holding steady—but beyond that I haven't even got a clue."
A third man stepped up to Lathe. "What's the word?" he asked, his voice practically dripping with suppressed eagerness.
"Apparently, it's no," Lathe said. "I'm sorry."
The disappointment that Marcovich had seen moments earlier on Lathe's face appeared on the newcomer's. "You sure? I understood several injections were necessary—"
"But there should be a particular physiological reaction on even the first one," Hawking said gently.
"It's simply not there."
"And you'll remember the instructions specified a single dose, anyway," Lathe said. "Still, there's one more thing we can try."
Abruptly, a fist snapped out at Marcovich's face. He twitched away, trying to bring his rebellious arm up to defend himself; but even before he'd moved the punch had stopped centimeters away from his nose. "No." Lathe shook his head, withdrawing his hand. "No enhancement at all."
The third man took a deep breath. "Yeah. Well... we'd better be moving along, then, hadn't we?
Eventually someone's going to miss him."
Lathe frowned. "Hawking?"
"I think he's going to be okay," the other assured him. "It'll be several more minutes before he can go anywhere, but the initial reaction's already passing. He's not going to die out here, if that's what you're worried about."
"I was," Lathe acknowledged. Briefly, his right hand clutched at his left wrist. "All right, get moving. I'm going to gag you and tie your feet together," he added to Marcovich, producing a cord from somewhere. "By the time you can get loose, we ought to be long gone."
Marcovich nodded understanding as the two others disappeared off into the underbrush. Already the fire in his blood was fading away, and with it the immediate fear of death. "I didn't think you blackcollars cared about people like me," he told Lathe, struggling to get the words out.
"We don't," the other said flatly, busying himself with the cord. "At least, not very much. But we don't kill even Security men indiscriminately, and certainly not when it isn't necessary. Though I doubt you'd show similar restraint."
Marcovich thought it over, decided it wasn't worth lying about. "No, I wouldn't," he admitted.
Lathe grunted and finished his work in silence. Carefully, Marcovich tried moving his arms, but it was clear that his muscles were still a long way from full control. The blackcollars were going to get away... unless...
"By the way, my men took the batteries out of your communicator and emergency beacon when they picked you up," Lathe said, getting to his feet and inspecting his handiwork. "Same for your laser.
We thought your friends might try to track you that way once they noticed you were missing. Of course, you can try to get back and alert them, but since you don't know where you are, I wouldn't recommend it. My suggestion is to just sit here and enjoy what's left of the sunshine until they come to find you."
Marcovich gritted his teeth, his last brief surge of hope evaporating. "You blackcollars read minds, too?"
Lathe smiled faintly. "It's how we survive. Thanks for your help, Security man."
"Marcovich is the name," he said, moved by an only dimly understood desire to be more than just another gray-green uniform to this man. "Miro Marcovich."
Lathe nodded to him. "Thanks for your help, Marcovich," he said. Producing the gag—a length of permatape—he carefully applied it across Marcovich's mouth and around behind his neck. Then, turning away, he disappeared behind the trees.
And Marcovich was alone.
It took him the better part of an hour to get enough fine-motor control back to untie his feet. A quick inspection of his equipment showed the blackcollars had indeed left him no way to signal the rest of the Security cordon, and a few minutes of careful reconnoitering confirmed that he hadn't the vaguest idea as to which way Trendor's grounds were. And a permatape gag he knew better than to try to remove without the proper solvent.
With a tired sigh, he found a flat rock and propped himself up against it. There'd be a search party out eventually, and he wouldn't be that hard to find. Though they probably wouldn't be fast enough to catch the blackcollars and find out what the hell they'd injected him with.
Behind the permatape, he grimaced. Deep within him, he could feel the drug churning and grinding, tearing at his system like a canal digger. Changing his whole being... and gradually he came to realize that Lathe had been wrong.
The stuff was indeed going to kill him.
Leaning back against the rock, he closed his eyes and waited for the search party to come.
Chapter 40
Anne Silcox was waiting in a faint pool of starlight outside Reger's mansion as the two cars drove up. "The gate guards called and told us you were back," she said as Lathe got out and trudged with the others up the steps. "I was hoping to talk to you—when you have time, of course."
Lathe nodded and took her arm. "Let's go inside," he said. Signaling Skyler to take the others back to their quarters, he led Silcox in the other direction to the quiet and privacy of the main living room.