three
Tallon did not have long to wait.
His first realization that he was under attack came when he found himself dancing with Myra, a girl who had died back on Earth twenty years earlier.
No, he whispered, I don’t want this. But she was there in his arms as they slowly gyrated in the varicolored dimness of the Stardust Room. He tried to feel the hard pressure of the chair in the dingy hotel room on Emm Luther, but the effort seemed pointless, for that was part of a future which was still a long way off.
Suddenly he was very much younger, still working for his degree in electronics, and he was holding Myra. It was all real. His eyes filled gratefully with the sight of her massive helmet of auburn hair, her whiskey-colored eyes. They moved slowly and contentedly to the sound of the music, with Myra, as always, a fraction behind the beat. She never could dance very well, he thought warmly, but there would be lots of time to work on it after they were married. In the meantime it was enough to drift on and on through pastel mists and star-shot twilight.
The ballroom tilted ponderously away. Another time, another place. He was sitting in the comfortable old bar of the Berkeley, waiting for her. Oases of orange light reflecting on paneled walls of rich dark wood. She was taking far too long, and he grew angry. Myra knew where he was waiting, so if she couldn’t keep the date she could at least ring him. Probably starting to take too much for granted, expecting him to go all the way out to her place to see what was wrong. Well, he would teach her a lesson. He began to drink determinedly, vindictively — and the horror was growing, spreading like a dark stain in spite of his frantic efforts to stop it.
Next morning. The drowsy quietness of the standards lab. The newspaper spread on the cigarette-scarred bench and, incredibly, Myra’s face looking up at him from the matte plastic sheets. Her father, a sad, mumbling giant who had been deserted years before by Myra’s mother, had smothered Myra with a pillow, then opened his wrists with a portable circular saw.
Dissolving colors, the searching tides of grief, again the music, and they were dancing; but this time Myra was dragging far behind the slow rhythms. She was limp and heavy. He fought to hold her up, and her breath sobbed and gurgled in his ear… .
Tallon screamed and clamped his fingers on the greasy arms of the chair.
“Here he comes,” a voice said. “Romantic little fellow, isn’t he? You never can tell just by looking at them.” Somebody laughed quietly.
Tallon opened his eyes. The room was filled with men in the gray whipcords of the E.L.S.P. civil security force. They carried small arms, most of them with the fan-shaped snouts of hornet guns, but he noticed several circular muzzles belonging to a more traditional type of weapon. Their faces were amused, derisive, some of them still indented with faint pink lines left by the masks that had protected them from the psychoneuro gas.
His stomach was erupting noisily at every breath, but Tallon found the physical nausea unimportant compared with the emotional turmoil still rocking his senses. The psychic shock was mingled with an intolerable feeling of outrage, of having been invaded, slit open, and pinned to a dissecting board like a laboratory specimen.
Myra, my love … I’m sorry.
Oh, you bastards, you grinning, stinking —
He tensed for a moment, ready to dive forward, then realized he was reacting exactly as expected. This was why they had used an LSD derivative instead of a simple knockout gas. Tallon made himself relax; he could take anything Kreuger, Cherkassky, or Zepperitz could hand out, and he would prove it. He would live on, in one reasonably healthy piece, even if it was only to read every book in some prison library.
“Very good, Tallon,” a voice said. “Self-control is so important in your profession.” The speaker moved into Tallon’s line of vision. He was a dry, thin-faced man, wearing the black coat and white dog collar of an Emm Lutherian government official. Tallon recognized the narrow face, the vertically wrinkled neck, and the incongruously lush wavy hair of Lorin Cherkassky, number two man in the security executive’s hierarchy.
Tallon nodded impassively. “Good evening. I wondered — ”
“Just keep it shut,” interrupted a chunky-shouldered blond who wore sergeant’s chevrons.
“It’s all right, Sergeant.” Cherkassky waved the younger man aside. “We mustn’t discourage Mr. Tallon from being communicative. He may be expected to tell us quite a lot during the next few days.”
“I’ll be glad to tell you all I know, of course,” Tallon said quickly. “What’s the point of trying to hold on to it?”
“Precisely!” Cherkassky’s voice was an excited yelp, reminding Tallon of the little man’s notorious instability. “What’s the point? I’m glad you see it that way. Now, Mr. Tallon, will you answer one question right away?”
“What is it? Yes.”
Cherkassky walked to the chest of drawers, his head making peacocklike movements on the long neck at every step, and took out the empty automatic pistol. “Where is the ammunition for this weapon?”
“In there. I threw it in the wastebasket.”
“I see,” Cherkassky said, stooping to retrieve the clip. “You hid it in the wastebasket.”
Tallon shifted uneasily on the seat. This was too childish to be true. “I dropped it in the wastebasket. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any trouble.” He kept his voice low and flat.
Cherkassky nodded sympathetically. “That’s what I would say if I were in your position. Yes, that’s about the best thing you could say.” He slid the clip into the pistol butt and handed it to the sergeant. “Don’t lose this, Sergeant. It’s evidence.”
Tallon opened his mouth to speak, then closed it abruptly. The very childishness of the proceedings was an important part of the technique. There is nothing more galling, more frustrating, than being forced to act like an adult when everybody around you is behaving like a malicious juvenile. But he was going to take it all, without cracking.
There was a long silence during which Cherkassky watched him intently. Tallon sat perfectly motionless, trying to subdue occasional gusts of brilliant memory shards, pictures of Myra still alive, pale skin, whiskey-colored eyes. He became aware of the seat cutting into the backs of his legs and wondered if any movement on his part would bring the multiple impact of a hornet gun. Most authorities regarded it as a humane weapon, but Tallon had once accidentally stopped a full charge of the tiny drug-laden darts, and the ensuing paralysis had caused thirty minutes of agony.
As the silence stretched into minutes, without any preparations being made to remove him from the hotel, Tallon began to worry. He looked around the room, trying to find a clue, but the faces of the E.L.S.P. men remained professionally impassive. Cherkassky pottered around contentedly, smiling and shrinking back against the wall each time he met Tallon’s eyes.
Tallon became aware of a peculiar sensation involving the skin of his forehead and cheeks, an icy feeling combined with waves of pinpricks passing across the individual pores. I’ve graduated, he thought; I’m having my first cold sweat.
Seconds later the door was bumped open, and a uniformed man came in carrying a heavy box of gray metal. He set it on a chair, glanced briefly at Tallon, and left. Cherkassky snapped his fingers, and the blond sergeant opened the box, revealing a control panel and coiled leads on plastic reels. In a shallow tray, the ten circular terminals of a brain-brush headset gleamed like tawdry jewelry.