That brought her to her feet in a hurry.
"I don't want even a fifteen-hundred-dollar abortion!" she said. "Let me get myself cleaned up, will you?"
She had a haunted look on her face that Paul could not catalog at all. He wasn't anxious for her to get worked up into hysteria, so he shrugged and started for the door.
"Come on," he said. "I'll take you to the thing."
She followed him like a robot, two paces behind him and with that haunted expression fixed on her face.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The floor current was switched off so Pal could make repeated trips to the lavatory in her tiny room. She kept applying cool compresses to her torn pussy, from a supply of gauze pads Paul had brought her.
After a couple of hours, the bleeding stopped. She felt somewhat weak, but didn't know how much was from pure exhaustion and how much from the shock her system endured when she was so brutally raped and torn. She knew she couldn't have lost enough blood to matter.
When she knew she had the bleeding under control, she lay on the bed and tried to relax, hoping that the smarting, burning sensation would cease, also.
She fell asleep for a while, and when she awoke she had the sensation of a very full bladder. She was about to ring for relief, then remembered that the floor current was off. She slipped off the bed and went to the toilet.
Unfortunately, she had not remembered torn flesh that lay just behind the curtain of her inner cuntlips. The final dribbling flow of her urine ran into the tender area and started it smarting all over again. She jumped up to the lavatory and applied one of the cooling wet pads until the misery let up a little.
When she felt relieved, she started back to the bed, then decided to take advantage of her small freedom, not knowing how long it might last. She headed for the window near the top of the wall, then saw that there was no way she could reach it.
After a moment of study, she pulled the hospital bed across the floor until it was below the window, then climbed up on it and prepared to see what the outside world looked like around her prison.
When her eyes leveled with the pane of glass in the small window, she groaned in disappointment. Behind the glass was another glass, opalescent and milky-white. The brighter portions of it, she saw, were due to the fact that a pair of fluorescent tubes provided the illumination she had taken for granted as sunlight. They must have a manner of dimming them.
But she recalled that someone had told her fluorescents could not be dimmed electrically. If the current dropped, they would either flicker or just go out.
But while she watched, she saw the blades of a shutter-like device close slightly, decreasing by a small amount the light which penetrated the milky rear glass.
With a bitter sigh, she got down, moved her bed back to its original position, and threw herself across it once more.
It was obvious that either she was being held below ground, or she was in a windowless modern structure of some kind. Either way, she was prevented from assessing the outside deterrents which might exist to prevent escape.
Another thought came to her. While she was able to look around without supervision, she should learn as much as she could about her room. With a jerking jump, she pounced out of bed and went to the door. She placed her hand carefully over the knob and turned it slowly – so slowly that she almost had heart failure with the pressure of her impatience. But she didn't dare take any chance of being detected in her investigations, lest they become warned of her obsessive desire to escape. The less they suspected of her will to fight free of them, the better would be her chances.
When the knob had turned as far as would go, she tried to ease the door gently inward. It moved toward her as she pulled, and her heart seemed to skip a beat as she got the first thrill of hope since she was kidnapped.
But just as she widened the gap between door and frame to less than two inches, she heard someone coming down the hall, and she closed it quietly, letting the knob revolve slowly until it settled in place.
The current grabbed her with a jolt, and she shrieked as the reflex made her stiffen and jerk convulsively. But she forced herself to jump and hop across the room until she made it to the safety of the bed.
When she stopped panting, and the beat of her pounding pulse got back to a point somewhere near normal, she tried to assess what had happened. Her first reaction was to suspect that some switch in a central control area had been closed. But it seemed too much of a coincidence that the current had turned on just as she closed the door.
Thinking back, she believed that whenever Paul had entered her room, he had left the door open. Could it be that the shocking current was isolated from the floor contacts whenever the door was open? But why had it also been switched off while her door was closed, during this "freedom period" they had given her?
It was too much for her to figure out while she was still not quite recuperated from the prolonged shock she had received.
She closed her eyes, regrouping her strength, and then the door-latch clicked and Paul stuck his head inside the doorway.
"Get the bleeding stopped?" he asked, grinning at her. She thought fast, and decided to attempt a slight hoax.
"Almost, I think. Maybe a few more compresses, and it should stop." Unless he came further into the room, his view would not reveal to him that she had no compress between her legs.
"Well, don't move around too much, and it should clot pretty soon." He started to pull the door shut, and she saw – from the corner of her slyly peeking eye the movement of his finger on the door frame just before he closed the door completely. Then it clicked, and she drew a deep, shaky breath.
So that was it! Some kind of switch in the door frame itself. Carefully, she tested the floor with her foot. There was no current!
She waited for a while, hoping that there would be a halt to any activity in the hall. Then she slipped across the floor and tried the knob again. When she had the door ajar for several seconds, and could hear nothing in the corridor, she opened it wider and saw the push-button in the frame. It had popped out when the door opened. In the outer edge of the door, a notch was cut to slip over the button at those times it was to be left out. Then, when the door was latched, she knew, the circuit would be completed.
She decided to take a look, and peered out into the hall. It was deserted, so she padded out and sneaked in the direction she knew would lead away from the exercise room.
She passed two doors like her own. She forced herself to place her ear to each door, but all she could hear at either one was the pounding of her own pulse. She wouldn't risk opening them.
Further the hall there was a large double-section door that had a familiar look about it. She had to study it a bit before she recognized it as an elevator door. Just as she started to continue her trip down he hall, she heard the whirring of the car in the shaft.
It was a difficult decision to make. If she raced back for her room and postponed her investigating trip until later, she might never get another chance, with the floor current on. On the other hand, if that was someone who might go into her room, they would discover her absence. And the corridor ahead was an unknown area in which she might be unable to find a hiding place.
When the motor stopped, she knew it was too ate to go back. As the clicking of the elevator door latch exploded on her ears, she made a mad dash for the closest door ahead, opened it, and jumped inside, closing the door behind her, sure it could be heard on the other side of the door.
Her breathing seemed so loud that she was door. She tried to hold her breath, but when she had to gulp in air, it sounded even louder. She stood there, doorknob still in her hand, shaking and gasping.