A fat silver robot rolled in carrying a tray of vials.
Nick chuckled nervously and returned the gun to her head. The weight of it was making his wrist ache.
“Put them over here,’’ Scolpes ordered. The robot lowered the tray to one of the counters.
“That will be all,’’ Scolpes said.
The robot turned and advanced toward Nick.
“I said, that will be all\”
Before Nick could move, one hydraulic arm shot out; pincer fingers gripped the gun and turned it so the barrel faced the ceiling. Nick immediately smashed the robot’s faceplate with his fist, reached inside and yanked out the photoelectric scanning device which functioned as eyes, immobilizing the machine. While he was trying to pry the gun out of its steel grip, he noticed that the door was opening again, and he caught a glimpse of shiny black police uniforms outside.
“Scolpes,’’ he shouted, “the door . .
But Scolpes had already noticed it. He sprinted across the room and yanked a large red lever on the wall marked “Emergency Containment.”
A metal panel slammed over the half-open door and three more fell like guillotine blades across the windows. Powerful ventilating fans came to life, sucking the “contaminated” air from the room and treating it with ultraviolet radiation. Things began to smell of ozone.
Scolpes collapsed in a chair, holding his hand over his heart. “Oh my,” he murmured, “oh my ...”
Once Nick had succeeded in prying the gun from the robot’s fingers with a screwdriver, he ran to Scolpes’ side.
“Are you okay, Doc?”
His breathing was labored. “Help me with this,” he gasped.
Nick unfastened the clasps and lifted the helmet off Scolpes’ head. The old man took a blue tablet out of his sterile suit pocket, squeezed it between his fingers—it made a cracking sound—and placed it under his tongue. In a minute his breath returned to normal and a protuberant vein in his forehead stopped throbbing.
For a time they both sat there recovering their wits. The phone chimed and Nick answered it. Chief Clinger filled the cube.
“Harmon,” he said quickly, “a couple of my boys were overzealous. They didn’t tell me they were going to try this stupid stunt; I never would have permitted it—do you understand?”
“Sure.”
“But now I’m here, I’m right here in the hall and I’m personally making sure it won’t happen again. Althea—she’s all right? You didn’t . . . ?”
“I didn’t. But next time I will. And I’ve got Scolpes tied up, too,” Nick improvised, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Scolpes was out of camera range. “If I have to wipe Althea he’ll take her place.”
“No, no, Harmon, that’s the last thing we want. No violence. We’ll do whatever you say.”
“Good. My second demand: I want a small, fast MHD saucer delivered to the garden outside this post—and you better get me one with storage cells. I don’t want to be drawing off the power satellites. Make sure it has SAB Standard instrumentation. And make sure Ms. Hasannah is in the back seat.”
“Harmon, we can’t! She’s a prisoner of the Federation. She’s already been transferred to the maximum-security facilities at Mendeltown and ..
As Clinger spoke, Nick went over to a cage of white rats. Scolpes had grown fond of the creatures during student days and kept them as pets, along with all the other clutter. Loving animals as he did, he never experimented on them; and Nick, who had had many of his values formed by this gentle old man, held them in similar regard. However, if life was the currency of the universe, the sacrifice of one small creature to save a few large ones might be a bargain.
He removed a rat from the cage and dangled it by the tail in front of the holocube. Clinger kept right on talking:
“ . . . might take days to get her released. We couldn’t do it without a presidential pardon, and the president is a hard
man to reach. After all, I’m just a minor functionary on an out-of-the-way planet, I’d have to apply for an audience and »
The rat wriggled its nose and made cheeping noises. It was so beautiful in its soft whiteness, with its dainty pink feet. Nick silently asked forgiveness for what he was about to do.
. . to be reasonable, Harmon! We’ll do anything we can, but we can’t do the impossible. The alien will get a fair trial and a . .
Nick pointed the nerve gun and squeezed the trigger. The rat squealed and stiffened, then it hung limp. Chief Clinger never finished his sentence; he watched dumbfounded as Nick placed the creature on the counter. It stood there staring stupidly ahead. It could still eat and excrete, and perform a few of the simplest motor functions (of course on humans the effect was far more dramatic). Still without a word, Nick went over to Althea and pressed the wand to her temple.
“All right, Harmon,’’ Clinger cried. “We’ll get her to you—I don’t know how, but we’ll get her to you.”
While they waited, Scolpes injected Nick with transdimen-sional replicon.
IV
Floodlights turned the garden into harsh patterns of black and white, and glared from the silvery surface of the saucer which had landed minutes before. It was similar to the company ship Nick had flown, only smaller, a scant sixteen feet in diameter, with one deck. On either side of the observation bubble a hydrogen booster was elevated on a streamlined fin. Nick tried to see within the bubble, but the floodlights were too much competition.
Around the saucer a broad circle had been cordoned off. Journalists with camera crews and crowds of curious onlookers were straining for a view. Nick recognized Dorce and Aynn, looking as though they’d been horribly cheated, and Mrs. Clinger crying into a handkerchief, and Chief Clinger directing operations with a walkie-talkie.
As he entered the floodlighted area, pushing his hostage roughly in front of him—he had untied her from the chair, leaving only handcuffs and ball gag—split-beam holocameras focused on them and the crowd began to buzz. He felt like a rare species on exhibit at the zoo.
He moved quickly now, hugging Althea to him so any marksman might have difficulty picking him off. He hurried her up the boarding ramp and shoved her through the hatch. The dark interior made him even more uncomfortable. Shadows and alcoves, lockers and access hatches, too many places to hide. He opaqued the bubble, depriving the cops outside of an easy target, and then turned on the lights.
There was Hali.
“Hello,” Nick said.
“Hello.”
“How are you?”
“I am well.” She smiled. It sounded like conversation over tea. “And you?”
Nick shrugged. “No complaints.” Then he smiled too, but only for a minute; next thing he was racing around again, tying Althea to one of the couches, arming himself with nerve gun and flashlight and inspecting the ship, inch by inch. Fifteen minutes later, satisfied that the craft was more or less what he had requested, and that it concealed neither cops nor devices of sabotage, he raised it into the air.
V
Cruising low over Darwin’s Desert in the relatively uninhabited northeast sector of the continent, Nick spied a small garage like a pimple in the middle of an otherwise smooth face. He had Hali buckle into her couch—they were maneuvering at close to Mach 2—and began a descent.
Despite all his precautions, he was certain that a bug had been planted aboard the ship. Since it might be a submicrominiaturized piece of nanocircuity (long organo-metallic molecules used as circuit elements) no bigger than a dust mote, his chances of locating it without special equipment were almost nil. However, if the garage was at all well equipped, they would have a pan-frequency signal tracer, with which he could root out a bug, no matter how small its size.
Radar revealed that Chief Clinger was keeping his word; they were not being pursued, at least not yet. Nick could certainly spare a few minutes for this precaution.