Zeta pinned him, gasping; he held the boy in a huge grip, and at the same time gasping to Nick, “Get her out of here. Take her somewhere he can’t find her. Can’t you see? He’s an alcohol addict. They’ll do anything. Go!”
In a trance, Nick took hold of the girl’s hand and led her rapidly from the apartment.
“You can take my squib,” Zeta, panting, yelled after him.
“Okay,” Nick said; he tugged the girl along—she came willingly, small and light—and he reached the elevator, stabbed at the button.
“We better run off up to the roof,” Charley said. She seemed calm; she, in fact, smiled up at him with her radiant smile which made her face so exquisitely lovely.
“Are you afraid of him?” Nick asked as they got onto the escalator and began to sprint up it, two steps at a time. He still held her gripped by the wrist, and she still managed to keep up with him. Lithe, spirit-like, she combined an animal-like ability to move swiftly with an almost supernatural gliding quality. Like a deer, he thought, as they continued on up.
Far below them on the escalator, Denny appeared. “Come back!” he yelled his voice shaking with agitation. “I’m going to have to go to a hospital to get this bite looked at. Drive me to the hospital.”
“He always says that,” Charley said placidly, unstirred by the boy’s pitiful whine. “Just ignore him and hope he can’t run faster than us.”
“Does he do that to you very often?” Nick panted as they reached the roof field and sprinted in the direction of Zeta’s parked squib.
“He knows what I’ll do,” Charley said. “You saw what I did—I bit him and he can’t stand to be bitten. Have you ever been bitten by a full-grown person? Have you ever thought what it would feel like? And I can do another thing—I stand against the wall and sort of hold myself there with my arms out, so I’m tight against something, and then I kick, with both feet. I’ll have to show you sometime. Just remember: never try to touch me when I don’t want to be touched. No man is going to do that and get away with it.”
Nick got her into the squib, ran around to the driver’s side, slid in behind the tiller. He started up the motor, and there, at the escalator exit, stood Denny, wheezing. Seeing him, Charley laughed in delight, a girlish laugh; she put both hands to her mouth and rocked from side to side, her eyes shining. “Oh God,” she said, “He’s so angry. And there’s nothing he can do. Take off.”
Pressing down on the power knob, Nick took off; the squib, old and battered as it was, had a well souped-up motor which Zeta had built himself; he had modified every moving part. So, in his own squib, Denny would never catch him. Unless of course, Denny had souped up his own squib.
“What do you know about his squib?” he asked Charley, who sat smoothing down her hair and arranging herself tidily. “Has he—”
“Denny can’t do anything involving manual labor. He hates to get his hands greasy. But he’s got a Shellingberg 8, with the B-3 engine. So he can go very fast. Sometimes, if there’s no other traffic, like late at night, he opens it up all the way to fifty.”
“No problem,” Nick said. “This old clinker will reach seventy or even seventy-five. If Zeta’s word can be trusted.” The squib was moving rapidly, now, weaving in and out of the mid-morning traffic. “I’ll lose him,” Nick said. Behind him he saw a Shellingberg, painted bright purple. “Is that him?” he asked her.
Twisting around to see, Charley said, “Yes, that’s it. Denny owns the only purple Shellingberg 8 in the United States.”
“I’ll get into heavy cross-city traffic,” Nick said, and began to descend to the level frequented by short-hop squibs. Almost at once, two innocuous squibs filled in behind him as he tailgated the squib ahead. “And I’ll turn here,” he said, as the balloon marked HASTINGS AVE appeared bobbingly on his right. He turned, became—as he had hoped—utterly involved in the slow rows of squibs looking for parking places . . . most of them driven by women out on shopping trips.
No sign of the purple Shellingberg 8. He peered in all directions, trying to catch sight of it.
“You’ve lost him,” Charley said matter-of-factly. “He depends on speed—you know, free speed high up out of traffic—but down here—” She laughed, her eyes shining with what seemed to him delight. “He’s too impatient; he never drives down here.”
Nick asked, “So what do you think he’ll do?”
“Give up. He’ll get over being mad in a couple of days, anyhow. But for about forty-eight hours he’ll be homicidal. That really was stupid of me to hide those booklets in the lamp; he’s right. But I still don’t like being hit.” Meditatively, she rubbed the side of her head where he had hit her. “He hits hard,” she said. “But he can’t stand to be hurt back; I can’t really hit him and make it work—I’m too small—but you saw me bite.”
“Yes,” he said. “The all time great bite of the century.” He did not wish to dispute that.
“It’s very nice of you,” Charley said, “a total stranger, helping me like this, when you don’t even know me. You don’t even know my name.”
“I’ll settle for Charley,” he said. It seemed to fit her.
“I didn’t get your name,” the girl said.
“Nick Appleton.”
She laughed her bubbling glee from between the fingers of her hands. “That’s the name a character in a book would have. ‘Nick Appleton.’ A private track, maybe. Or on one of those TV shows.”
“It’s the kind of a name that denotes competency,” Nick said.
“You are competent,” she admitted. “I mean you got us—me—out of there. Thank you.”
“Where are you going to spend the next forty-eight hours?” Nick asked. “Until he cools off?”
“I have another apartment; we use that, too. We transfer stuff from one to the other, in case a PSS s-and-s warrant gets served on us. Search and seizure, you know. But they don’t suspect us. Denny’s family has a lot of money and influence, and one time a track started probing around, and a top PSS official, a friend of Denny’s dad, called to tip us off. That’s the only time we’ve had any thouble.”
Nick said, “I don’t think you should go to the other apartment”
“Why not? All my things are there; I have to go there.”
“Go where he won’t find you. He might kill you.” He had read articles about the personality changes often suffered by alcohol addicts. How much feral cruelty often came out, a virtually psychopathic personality structure, blended with the fast moving quality of mania and the suspicious rage of paranoia. Well, now he had seen one, seen an alcohol addict. And he did not like it. No wonder the authorities had made it illegal—really illegaclass="underline" an alcohol addict usually found himself, if caught, in a psychodidactic work camp for the rest of his life. Unless he could pay for a major lawyer who in turn could pay for expensive testing of the individual, with the idea of proving that the period of addiction was over. But of course it was never over. An alc-hound remained what he was forever, even after Platt’s surgery on the diencephalon, the area of the brain which controlled oral cravings.
“If he kills me,” Charley said, “I’ll kill him. And, basically he’s more afraid than I am. He has a lot of fears; most of what he does he does out of fear—out of panic, I should say. He’s in a constant hysterical panic.”