The man dropped the gun and evaded the two-fisted punch aimed at his chest. He brought his left foot up, making a last vicious lunge at Nick's unprotected groin. N3 took the boot in both hands and twisted. The man went down like a felled tree and before he could move, Killmaster was on top of him. The man's knife-hand flashed toward him. Nick chopped with the side of his gloved hand at the exposed wrist. It blunted the forward thrust. His fingers closed around the man's wrist and twisted. The knife wouldn't drop. He twisted harder and felt something snap and the man's arm went limp.
At the same instant the hissing in Nick's ear stopped. The emergency oxygen supply had run out. Searing heat stabbed into his lungs. Yoga-trained muscles automatically took over, protecting them. He could hold his breath for four minutes, but no longer, and physical exertion was impossible.
Something raw and screamingly painful suddenly cut across his arm with a shock that almost made him open his mouth to breathe. The man had shifted the knife to his other hand and cut his arm, forcing his fingers open. Now he flung himself past Nick, cradling his broken wrist in his good hand. He stumbled off along the ravine, a plume of water vapor rising from his backpack.
A dim sense of survival sent Nick crawling toward the flare gun. He didn't have to die. But the voices in his ear said: Too far to go. You can't make it. His lungs screamed for air. His fingers scrabbled out across the ground, reaching for the gun. Air! his lungs kept shrieking. It was getting worse by the second, darker. Fingers closed around it. No strength, but he pressed the trigger anyway and the explosion of light was so blinding that he had to clap his free hand over his eyes. And that was the last thing he remembered doing…
"Why didn't you head for the emergency exit?" Ray Finney, the Project Flight Director, leaned over him anxiously as fellow astronauts Roger Caine and John Corbinet helped strip off his moon suit in the Simulation Building's ready room. Finney held out a small nasal-spray dispenser of oxygen and Nick took another deep swig from it.
"Emergency exit?" he muttered vaguely. "Where?"
The three men glanced at each other. "Less than twenty yards from Grid 12," said Finney. "You've used it before."
That must have been the exit his opponent in the moon suit had been heading for. There were ten of them spotted around the moonscape, he recalled now. Each had an air-lock and pressurization chamber. They were unmanned and opened into a subterranean storage area beneath the Simulation Building. So getting in and out would pose no problem if you knew your way around — and Nick's opponent apparently did.
"Lucky thing John noticed that first signal from the flare gun," Roger Caine was saying to Finney. "We headed for it right away. About six minutes later there was another one. We were less than a minute away by then."
"It pinpointed his position exactly," Corbinet added. "Another few seconds and he would have been a goner. He was already turning blue. We cut him in on Roger's emergency supply and dragged him to the exit. Christ! Take a look at that!" he suddenly exclaimed.
They had removed the pressure suit and were staring at the bloodstained inner garment. Caine poked a finger through the thermal material. "You're lucky you didn't start boiling up," he said.
Finney bent over the wound. "This looks like a knife cut," he said. "What happened? You better start at the beginning."
Nick shook his head. "Look, I feel pretty stupid about this," he said. "I fell on the damned utility knife when I was trying to get out of the ravine. I just lost my balance and…"
"What about your ECM pack?" demanded the Flight Director. "How did that come off?"
"When I fell. It got caught on an outcropping."
"There's sure to be an investigation," said Finney gloomily. "NASA Security wants a report on every accident these days."
"Later. He needs some medical attention first," said Corbinet. He turned to Roger Caine. "Better give Dr. Sun a call."
Nick struggled to a sitting position. "Hell no, I'm fine," he said. "It's just a flesh wound. You guys can bind it up yourselves." Dr. Sun was one person he didn't want to see. He knew what would happen. She would insist on giving him a pain-killing injection — and that injection would finish the job her confederate had botched up on the moonscape.
"I've got a bone to pick with Joy Sun," snapped Finney. "She should never have passed you in the condition you're in. Dizzy spells, lapses of memory. You should be at home, flat on your back. What's the matter with that dame anyway?"
Nick had a pretty good hunch. Once she had seen him naked she knew he wasn't Colonel Eglund, which meant that he had to be a government plant, which meant in turn that he'd been brought in to trap her. So what better place to send him than the moonscape? There her confederate — or was it plural? — could arrange still another convenient "accident."
Finney picked up the phone and ordered some first aid supplies. When he hung up, he turned to Nick and said, "I'm going to have your car brought around front. Caine, you drive him home. And Eglund, you stay there until I can get a doctor over to check you out."
Nick shrugged inwardly. It didn't matter where he waited. The next move was hers. Because one thing was sure. She couldn't rest until he was out of the picture. Permanently.
Poindexter had turned the storm cellar of Eglund's bachelor bungalow into a full-scale AXE field office.
There was a miniature darkroom equipped with 35mm. cameras, film, developers and microdot equipment, a metal filing cabinet filled with Lastotex masks, flexible saw blades in shoelaces, compasses in buttons, fountain pens that shot needles, watches containing tiny transistor transmitters and an elaborate communications setup featuring a solid-state picture-phone that could link them with headquarters at a moment's notice.
"Look as if you've been busy," said Nick.
"I've got an ID on the man in the photo," Poindexter replied with carefully suppressed enthusiasm. He was a straw-haired, choirboy-faced New Englander who looked as though he'd be more at home organizing a church picnic than working with sophisticated devices of death and destruction.
He unpinned a damp 8 × 10 from the dryer and handed it to Nick. It was a front-view, head-and-shoulders shot of a dark, wolf-faced man with dead gray eyes. A deep scar encircled his neck just beneath the third vertebra. "Name's Rinaldo Tribolati," said Poindexter, "but he calls himself Reno Tree for short. The print's a bit fuzzy because I took it directly off the picture-phone. It's a photo of a photo of a photo."
"How come so fast?"
"It wasn't the tattoo. That type of dragon is pretty common. Thousands of GI's who served in the Far East — particularly in the Philippines during World War II — have them. It was the scar around the neck that tipped off the ID boys. They made a blowup and studied it. Caused by rope burn. And that was all they had to know. Seems this Reno Tree was once a hit man for the Las Vegas mobs. One of his intended victims almost got him, though. Garrotted him half to death. He still carries the scar."
"I've heard the name Reno Tree," said Nick, "but not as a hit man. As a kind of dancing master to the Jet Set."
"That's our boy," replied Poindexter. "He's legit now. The society girls seem to love him. Pic Magazine called him the Pied Piper of Palm Beach. He runs the discotheque in the Bali Hai."
Nick looked at the front-view photo, then at the copy of the pornographic snapshot that Poindexter had handed him. The ecstatic expression on Joy Sun's face still haunted him. "Hardly what you'd call handsome," he said. "Wonder what the girls see in him."
"Maybe they like the way he slaps them around."