Okay, he said to himself. Here goes.
He opened the door and said, "Mrs. Hermes? You're coming home."
Soundlessly, without moving, the three of them, Lotta and Mavis McGuire and the tall, straw-like Erad with his ugly elongated face, stared at him.
The far door of the office had been left open, and from within four more Erads also peered. Everything had come to a stop. He had frozen the seven of them, suspended them and their activities out of time, just by his presence. By the big gray gun he held; the regulation police-issue mammoth revolver. He was a man with a gun, not a police officer, but he knew how to talk from behind his gun; he knew how to use it without using it.
Beckoning to the hunched-up little shape of Lotta Hermes he said, "Come over here." She continued to stare blankly. "Come over here," he repeated in exactly the same tone; he made it unvarying. "I want you," he told her, "to come and stand over by me."
He waited and then, all at once, she rose and made her way over to him, to stand by him. No one interfered; no one even spoke.
The knowledge of wrong-doing--and the recognition of being caught at it--had on most people a paralyzing effect. As long, he thought, as I can keep about me the archetype of authority. Even Erads, he thought, are not exempt. Maybe.
"I've seen you before," Mavis McGuire said. "You're a police officer."
"No," he said. "You've never seen me before." He took hold of Lotta's wrist and said to her, "Go upstairs to the roof field and wait in my aircar. Make sure you get the right one; it's parked over to the left as you come out of the stairwell." As she started obediently off he said, "Feel the hood; the motor's warm. You can tell by that."
One of the Erads within the inner office fired at him with what he recognized as an illegal pelfrag pistol, very small, with one single fragmenting shot.
The slug, without fragmenting, hit him in the foot. Evidently the ammunition was old, and the pistol probably had never been used; its owner, the Erad, probably did not know how to clean and maintain a gun, and the rim-fire hammer had missed the inner charge.
Tinbane swiftly fired nine random shots, sweeping both offices. He squeezed the trigger of his service revolver until the rooms had become opaque with ricocheting pellets, all of them traveling at a velocity which would stun or inflict a minor injury or blind--he fired once more as he limped into the hall and then, as best he could, he hopped and hobbled up the hall to the stairs, cursing the wound in his foot, feeling the pain and the malfunctioning; he could hardly make any time at all and he felt them behind him, doing something--food, he thought savagely; what a place to be hit. As the stair door swung shut behind him a pelfrag slug detonated in the hall behind him; the glass window of the door shattered and shards slashed at his neck and back and arms. But he continued on, up the stairs. At the top of the stairs, at roof level, he fired his remaining shot back down the stairs, filling the well with rebounding pellets, enough to stop anyone, unless the person was willing to risk blindness, and then he dragged himself and his injured foot to his prowl car.
Beside the car, not inside it, he found Lotta Hermes; she looked up into his face speechlessly, and he opened the car door for her and got her inside. "Lock your door," he said, and limped to the driver's side, also getting in, also locking his door. Now a group of Erads had come out onto the roof, but they milled in confusion, some evidently wanting to try one good, planned shot at the prowl car, some wanting to follow in their own cars, some possibly willing to give up.
He took off, gained altitude, accelerated as rapidly as the beefed-up engine which the police department used could manage, and then lifted his microphone and said to the dispatching officer at his substation, "I'm on my way to Peralta General and I'd like another car waiting for me in the parking lot, just in case."
"Okay, 403," the dispatcher acknowledged. "301," be instructed, "join 403 at Peralta General." To Tinbane he said, "Aren't you off duty, 403?"
Tinbane said, "I ran into some trouble on my way home." His foot throbbed and he felt fatigue, general and all-embracing. I'll be laid up for a week, he said to himself as he reached gingerly down to unlace the shoe on his injured foot. Well, there goes the assignment regarding being a bodyguard for Ray Roberts.
Seeing him fussing with his shoe, Lotta said, "Are you hurt?"
"We're lucky," he said. "They were armed after all. But they're not used to a showdown." Handing her the vidphone receiver, he said, "Dial your husband at the vitarium; I told him I'd let him know when I had you out of there."
"No," Lotta said.
"Why not?"
Lotta said, "He sent me there."
Shrugging, Tinbane said, "I guess that's true enough." He felt too foolish from his injury to argue; anyhow it was so. "But I could have given you the info," he said. "That's what's rotten about me, about what I did. You might as well blame me as him."
"But you got me out," Lotta said.
That, too, was true; he had to agree.
Reaching, Lotta hesitantly touched his cheek, his ear; she examined his face with her fingers, as if she were blind.
"What's that mean?" he said.
Lotta said, "I'm grateful. I always will be. I don't think they would ever have let me go. It was as if they enjoyed it, as if my knowing about the Anarch was just a--pretext."
"Very probably," he murmured.
"I love you," Lotta said.
Startled, he turned to look at her; the girl's expression was calm, almost peaceful. As if she had resolved some major mdecision.
He thought he knew what it was. And his gladness knew no bounds; he was thoroughly elated--more so than in his whole life.
As they drove on toward Peralta General she continued to touch him, as if never intending to let go. He at last took hold of her hand, squeezed. "Cheer up," he said. "You won't have to go back there."
"Maybe I will," she said. "Maybe Seb will tell me to."
"Tell him to go to hell," Tinbane said.
Lotta said, "I want you to tell him for me; I want you to talk for me. You talked to those Erads and Mrs. McGuire, you made them do what you ordered them to do. Nobody else has ever stood up for me. Not in my whole life. Not like that, the way you did it."
Putting his arm around her he held her against him. She seemed, now, very happy. And relieved. My god, he thought, this is a big thing she's done, bigger than what _I_ did; she's transferred her dependency from Sebastian Hermes to me. Because of a single incident. I've got her, he realized. Entirely away from him; _I swung it!_
10
Thus God, considered not in Himself but as the cause of all things, has three aspects: He is, He is wise, and He lives.
--Erigena
The vidphone at the Flask of Hermes Vitarium rang; expecting the call-back from Officer Joe Tinhane, Sebastian answered it.
On the screen Lotta's, not Tinbane's, face appeared. "How are you?" she asked wanly, with a peculiar mechanical listlessness which he had never heard in her voice before.
"I'm fine," he said, violently relieved to see her. "But that's not important; how are you? Did he get you away from the Library? I guess he did. Were they actually trying to keep you there?"
"They were," she said, still listlessly. "How's the Anarch?" she asked. "Did he come back to life yet?"
Sebastian started to say, We dug him up. We revived him. But instead he took pause; he remembered the call from Italy. "Whom, specifically, did you tell about the Anarch?" he asked. "I want you to remember everyone you told."
"I'm sorry you're mad at me," Lotta said, still listlessly, as if reading the words from a piece of paper held in front of her. "I told Joe Tinbane and I told Mr. Appleford at the Library and that's all I told. What I called for is to tell you that I'm okay; I got out of the Library... Joe Tinbane got me out. We're at the hospital; they're removing a bullet from his foot. It isn't serious but he says it hurts. And he'll undoubtedly be laid up for a few weeks. Sebastian?"