Mortimer stood and emptied the remainder of the magazine bullets through the doorway, then pressed the button to release the magazine and hurled it after the bullets, clicking a new one instantly into place. With a quick pull he worked the slide to shove a live cartridge into the chamber and crouched, ready to attack.
This was it. He wouldn’t need the knife. Walk a few feet forward. Fire through the doorway, then throw in the teargas pen. It would either blind the man or spoil his aim. Then walk through firing with the trigger jammed down and the bullets spraying like water and the enemy would be dead. Mortimer took a deep, shuddering breath — then stopped and gasped as Benedict’s hand snaked through the doorway and felt its way up the wall.
It was so unexpected that for a moment he didn’t fire and when he did fire he missed. A hand is a difficult target for an automatic weapon. The hand jerked down over the light switch and vanished as the ceiling lights came on.
Mortimer cursed and fired after the hand and fired into the wall and through the doorway, hitting nothing except insensate plaster and feeling terribly exposed beneath the glare of light.
The first shot from the pistol went unheard in the roar of his gun and he did not realize that he was under fire until the second bullet ripped into the floor close to his foot. He stopped shooting, spun around, and gaped.
On the fire escape outside the broken window stood a woman. Slight and wide-eyed and swaying as though a strong wind tore at her, she pointed the gun at him with both hands and jerked the trigger spasmodically. The bullets came close but did not hit him. In panic he pulled the machine pistol up, spraying bullets towards the window.
“Don’t! I don’t want to hurt you!” he shouted as he fired.
The last of his bullets hit the wall and his gun clicked and locked out of battery as the magazine emptied. He hurled the barren metal magazine away and tried to jam a full one in. The pistol banged again and the bullet hit him in the side and spun him about. When he fell the weapon fell from his hand. Benedict, who had been crawling slowly and painfully across the floor, reached him at the same moment and clutched his throat with hungry fingers.
“Don’t …” Mortimer croaked and thrashed about. He had never learned to fight and did not know what else to do.
“Please Benedict, don’t,” Maria said, climbing through the window and running to them. “You’re killing him.”
“No — I’m not,” Benedict gasped. “No strength. My fingers are too weak.”
Looking up, he saw the pistol near his head and he reached and tore it from her.
“One less mouth now!” he shouted and pressed the hot muzzle against Mortimer’s chest. The muffled shot tore into the man, who kicked violently once and died.
“Darling, you’re all right?” Maria wailed, kneeling and clutching him to her.
“Yes … all right. Weak, but that’s from losing the blood, I imagine. But the bleeding has stopped now. It’s all over. We’ve won. We’ll have the food ration, and they won’t bother us anymore and everyone will be satisfied.”
“I’m so glad,” she said, and actually managed to smile through her tears. “I really didn’t want to tell you before, not bother you with all this other trouble going on. But there’s going to be …” She dropped her eyes.
“What?” he asked incredulously. “You can’t possibly mean ….”
“But I do.”
She patted the rounded mound of her midriff. “Aren’t we lucky?”
All he could do was look up at her, his mouth wide and gaping like some helpless fish cast up upon the shore.
FAMOUS FIRST WORDS
Millions of words of hatred, vitriol, and polemic have been written denigrating, berating, and castigating the late Professor Ephraim Hakachinik. I feel that the time has come when the record must be put straight. I realize that I too am risking the wrath of the so-called authorities by speaking out like this, but I have been silent too long. I must explain the truth just as my mentor explained it to me, because only the truth, lunatic as it may sound, can correct the false impressions that have become the accepted coin in reference to the professor.
Let me be frank: early in our relationship I, too, felt that the professor was, how shall we describe it, eccentric even beyond the accepted norm for the faculties of backwater universities. In appearance he was a singularly untidy man, almost hidden behind a vast mattress of tangled beard that he affected for the dual purpose of saving the trouble and the expense of shaving and of dispensing with the necessity of wearing a necktie. This duality of purpose was common to almost everything that he did. I am sure that simultaneous professorships in both the arts and the sciences is so rare as to be almost unique-yet he occupied two chairs at Miskatonic University; those of quantum physics and conversational Indo-European. This juxtaposition of abilities undoubtedly led to the perfection of his invention and to the discovery of the techniques needed to develop its possibilities.
As a graduate student I was very close to Professor Hakachinik and was present at the very moment when the germ of an idea was planted that was to flower eventually into the tremendous growth of invention that was to be his contribution to the sum of knowledge of mankind. It was a sunny June afternoon, and I am forced to admit that I was dozing over a repetitious (begat, begat, begat) fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls when a hoarse shout echoed from the paneled walls of the library and shocked me awake.
“Neobican!” the professor exclaimed again-he has a tendency to break into Serbo-Croatian when excited-and a third time, “Neobican!”
“What is wonderful, Professor?” I asked.
“Listen to this quotation, it is inspirational indeed, from Edward Gibbon; he was visiting Rome, and this is what he wrote: `As I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter … the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.’”
“Isn’t that incredible, my boy, simply breathtaking. A singularly important and historical beginning if I ever heard one. It all started there until, twelve years and five hundred thousand words later, racked by writer’s cramp, Gibbon scribbled `The End’ and dropped his pen. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was finished. Inspiring!”
“Inspiring?” I asked dimly, my head still rattling with begats.
“Dolt!” he snarled, and added a few imprecations in Babylonian that will not bear translation in a modern journal. “Have you no sense of perspective? Do you not see that every great event in this universe must have had some tiny beginning?”
“That’s rather an obvious observation,” I remarked.
“Imbecile!” he muttered through clenched teeth. “Do you not understand the grandeur of the concept! Think! The mighty redwood, reaching for the sky, so wide in the trunk that it is pierced with a tunnel for motor vehicles to be driven through; this goliath of the forest was once a struggling single-leafed shrub incapable of exercising a tree’s peculiar attractions for even the most minuscule of dogs. Do you find this concept a fascinating one?”
I mumbled something incoherent to cover up the fact that I did not, and as soon as Professor Hakachinik had turned away I resumed my nap and forgot the matter completely for a number of days, until I received a message summoning me to the professor’s chambers.
“Look at that,” he said, pointing to what appeared to be a normal radio, housed in a crackle-gray cabinet and faced with a splendid display of knobs and dials.