“Well, where’ll we go… ?”
“Don’t argue, goddamit; get to work. Is there any extra rope ladder in that box? If there is, we’ll use it to tie the suitcase on…”
Over Herckerd’s shoulder, he saw the jeep enter the passage from the intersecting hall a hundred feet away. For an instant, he was frozen with fright. Then he screamed, “Behind you!” and threw himself through the open doorway, stumbling to the foot of a flight of narrow steel steps and then running up them. A pistol roared twice just outside the door, and then a submachine gun let go, a ripping two-second burst, a second of silence, and then another. Then voices shouted.
They got Herckerd. They got the sunstones, too. Then he forgot about both. Just get away, get far away, get away fast.
There was a steel door at the head of the stairs. Oh, God, please don’t let it be locked! He flung himself at it, gripping the latch-handle.
It wasn’t. The door swung open, and he stumbled through and closed it behind him, hearing, as he did, voices coming up from below. Then he turned, in the lighted hallway beyond.
There was a policeman standing not fifteen feet away, holding a short carbine with a thick, flaring muzzle, a stunner. He crouched, grabbing for his pistol. Then the blunderbuss muzzle of the stunner swung toward him at the policeman’s hip. He had the pistol half drawn when the lights all went out and a crushing shock hit him, shaking and jarring him into oblivion.
THE OPERATION-COMMAND ROOM was silent. When the voice from the screen speaker ceased, there was not a sound for an instant. Then there was a soft susurration; everybody in the place was exhaling at once. Grego found that he had been holding his own breath. So had Harry Steefer; he was exhaling noisily.
“Well, that’s it,” the Chief said. “I’m glad they took Novaes alive, anyhow. It’ll be a couple of hours before he’s able to talk.” He picked up his cigarette pack, shook one out for himself and offered it.
Moses Herckerd wouldn’t do any talking; he’d taken a dozen submachine gun bullets.
“What’ll we do with the sunstones?” the voice from the screen asked.
“Take them to the gem-vault; we’ll sort them over tomorrow or when we have time.” He turned to the open screens to city police and Colonial Constabulary. The non-coms who had been on them were replaced by Ralph Earlie and Ian Ferguson, respectively. “You hear what was going on?” he asked.
“We got most of it,” Ferguson said, and Earlie said, “You got them, and you got the stones back, but just what did happen?”
“They had a contragravity-lifter; they used it to get up one of the main conduit shafts, and then they got into a maintenance passage on the fourteenth level down. One of our jeeps caught them; Herckerd tried to put up a fight and got shot to hamburger; Novaes ran up a flight of stairs and came out in a hall right in front of a cop with a sono-stunner. When he comes to, we’ll question him and check his story with the Fuzzies,” he said. “How are you doing at Mortgageville?”
“We have the place surrounded,” Ferguson said. “They might get out on foot; they won’t in a vehicle. We have three Navy landing-craft loaded with detection equipment circling overhead, and Casagra has a hundred Marines along with my men.”
“I can’t help on that, at all,” the Mallorysport police chief said. “I have all my men out making raids, and if you don’t need that blockade around Company House any more, I want the men who are there. We have Ivan Bowlby, Spike Heenan and Raul Laporte, and we’re pulling in everybody that’s ever had anything to do with any of them, or Leo Thaxter. We don’t have Thaxter, yet. I suppose he’s at Mortgageville, along with the Evinses, waiting for Herckerd and Novaes to bring in the loot. And we have Hugo Ingermann, and this time he can’t talk himself out. We got Judge Pendarvis out of bed, and he signed warrants for all of them; reasonable grounds for suspicion and authority to veridicate. We’re saving him for last; we’ve just started on the small-fry.”
There wasn’t any question in his mind that Leo Thaxter was involved in the attempt on the gem-vault. Whether Bowlby or Heenan or Laporte had anything to do with it was more or less immaterial. They could be questioned, not only about that but about anything else, and anything they admitted under veridication was admissible as evidence against them, self incriminatory or not.
“Well, I’m going over and see what they’ve been getting from the Fuzzies,” he said. “There ought to be quite a little, by now.” He glanced up at the screen from Steefer’s office; half a dozen people were there now, and he was surprised to see Jack Holloway among them. He couldn’t have flown in from Beta Continent since this had started. “I’ll call back, or have somebody call, later.”
Crossing the hall, he joined the group who were interviewing the five Herckerd-Novaes-Evins-Thaxter Fuzzies. Juan Jimenez was there, so were a couple of doctors who had been working with Fuzzies at the reception center. So was Claudette Pendarvis. Jack Holloway met him as he entered, and they shook hands.
“I thought there might be something I could do to help,” he said. “Listen, Mr. Grego, you’re not going to bring any charges against these Fuzzies, are you?”
“Good Lord, no!”
“Well, they’re sapient beings, and they broke the law,” Holloway said.
“They are legally ten-year-old children,” Judge Pendarvis’s wife said. “They are not morally responsible; they were taught to do this by humans.”
“Yes, faginy, along with enslavement,” Ahmed Khadra said. “Mandatory death by shooting for that, too.”
“And I hope they shoot that Evins woman first of all; she’s the worst of the lot,” Sandra Glenn said. “She’s the one who used the electric shock-rod on them when they made mistakes.”
“Mr. Grego,” Ernst Mallin interrupted. “I don’t understand this. These Fuzzyphones are simple enough for any Fuzzy to operate; all they need to do is hold the little pistol-grip and the switch works automatically. Diamond can talk audibly, but he simply cannot teach any of these other Fuzzies to use it. You don’t have your hearing aid on, do you? Well, listen to this.”
Diamond used his Fuzzyphone; he spoke quite audibly. When he gave it to any of the others, all they produced was, “Yeek.”
“Let me see that thing.” He took it from Diamond and carried it over to the desk; rummaging in the top middle drawer, he found a little screwdriver and took it apart. The mechanism seemed to be all right. He removed the tiny power-unit and exchanged it for a similar one from a flashlight he found in the Chief’s desk. The flashlight wouldn’t light. He handed the Fuzzyphone to Mallin.
“Give this to one of the others, not Diamond. Have him say something.”
Mallin handed the Fuzzyphone to one of the pair whom Lansky and Eggers had captured in the vault, and asked him a question. Holding the Fuzzyphone to his mouth, the Fuzzy answered quite audibly. Three or four of the humans said, “What the hell?” or words to that effect.
“Diamond, you not need talk-thing to make talk like Big One,” he said. “You make talk like Big One any time. You make talk like Big One now.”
“Like this?” Diamond asked.
“How does he do it?” Mrs. Pendarvis demanded. “Their voices aren’t audible, at all.”
“You think the power-unit gave out, and he just went on copying the sounds he was accustomed to make with the Fuzzyphone?” Mallin asked.
“That’s right. He heard himself speak in the audible range, and he just learned to pitch his voice to imitate his own transformed voice. I’ll bet he’s been talking audibly for weeks, and we never knew it.”