Sincerely yours,
CARLTON FRISBEE
cf/cf/enc.
“Enc.” meant “enclosure”; I pried up Parst’s arms again and found another sheet of stiff paper, folded three times, with a paperclip on it.
It was a First Lieutenant’s commission, made out to Robert James Dahl, dated three days before, and with a perfect forgery of my signature at the bottom of it.
If commissions can be forged so can court-martial records.
I put the commission and the letter in my pocket. I didn’t seem to feel any particular emotion, but I noticed that my hands were shaking as I sorted through the “General information” file, picked out a few sheets and stuffed them into my pocket with the other papers. I wasn’t confused or in doubt about what to do next. I looked around the room, spotted a metal locker diagonally across from the filing cabinets, and opened it with one of the General’s keys.
Inside were two .45 automatics, boxes of ammunition, several loaded clips, and three odd-looking sets of handcuffs, very wide and heavy, each with its key.
I took the handcuffs, the keys, both automatics and all the clips.
In a storeroom at the end of the corridor I found a two-wheeled dolly. I wheeled it all the way around to Section One and left it outside the center door. Then it struck me that I was still wearing the pinks they had given me when I arrived, and where the hell were my own clothes? I took a chance and went up to my room on the second floor, remembering that I hadn’t been back there since morning.
There they were, neatly laid out on the bed. My keys, lighter, change, wallet and so on were on the bedside table. I changed and went back down to Section One.
In the gun room were two sprawled shapes, one beside the machine-gun that poked its snout through the hemispherical blister, the other under a panel set with three switches and a microphone.
The switches were clearly marked. I opened the first two, walked out and around and laid the three sets of handcuffs on the floor in the middle room. Then I went back to the gun room, closed the first two doors and opened the third.
Soft thumping sounds came from the loudspeaker over the switch panel; then the rattling of metal, more thumps, and finally a series of rattling clicks.
I opened the first door and went back inside. Through the panel in the middle door I could see Aza-Kra; he had retreated into the inner room so that all of him was plainly visible. He was squatting on the floor, his legs drawn up. His arms were at full stretch, each wrist manacled to an ankle. He strained his arms outward to show me that the cuffs were tight.
I made one more trip to open the middle door. Then I got the dolly and wheeled it in.
“Thank you,” said Aza-Kra. I got a whiff of his “breath”; as Donnelly had intimated, it wasn’t pleasant.
Halfway to the airport, at Aza-Kra’s request, I held my breath again. Aside from that we didn’t speak except when I asked him, as I was loading him from the jeep into a limousine, “How long will they stay unconscious?”
“Not more than twenty hours, I think. I could have given them more, but I did not dare, I do not know your chemistry well enough.”
We could go a long way in twenty hours. We would certainly have to.
I hated to go home, it was too obvious and there was a good chance that the hunt would start before any twenty hours were up, but there wasn’t any help for it. I had a passport and a visa for England, where I had been planning to go for a publishers’ conference in January, but it hadn’t occurred to me to take it along on a quick trip to Washington. And now I had to have the passport.
My first idea had been to head for New York and hand Aza-Kra over to the UN there, but I saw it was no good. Extraterritoriality was just a word, like a lot of other words; we wouldn’t be safe until we were out of the country, and on second thought, maybe not then.
It was a little after eight-thirty when I pulled in to the curb down the street from my house. I hadn’t eaten since noon, but I wasn’t hungry; and it didn’t occur to me until later to think about Aza-Kra.
I got the passport and some money without waking my housekeeper. A few blocks away I parked again on a side street. I called the airport, got a reservation on the next eastbound flight, and spent half an hour buying a trunk big enough for Aza-Kra and wrestling him into it.
It struck me at the last minute that perhaps I had been counting too much on that atmosphere-plant of his. His air supply was taken care of, but what about his respiratory waste produced—would he poison himself in that tiny closed space? I asked him, and he said, “No, it is all right. I will be warm, but I can bear it.”
I put the lid down, then opened it again. “I forgot about food,” I said. “What do you eat, anyway?”
“At Chillicothe I ate soya bean extract. With added minerals. But I am able to go without food for long periods. Please, do not worry.”
All right. I put the lid down again and locked the trunk, but I didn’t stop worrying.
He was being too accommodating.
I had expected him to ask me to turn him loose, or take him to wherever his spaceship was. He hadn’t brought the subject up; he hadn’t even asked me where we were going, or what my plans were.
I thought I knew the answer to that, but it didn’t make me any happier. He didn’t ask because he already knew— just as he’d known the contents of Parst’s office, down to the last document; just as he’d known what I was thinking when I was in the anteroom with Donnelly.
He read minds. And he gassed people through solid metal walls.
What else did he do?
There wasn’t time to dispose of the limousine; I simply left it at the airport. If the alarm went out before we got to the coast, we were sunk anyhow; if not, it wouldn’t matter.
Nobody stopped us. I caught the stratojet in New York at 12:20, and five hours later we were in London.
Customs was messy, but there wasn’t any other way to handle it. When we were fifth in line, I thought: Knock them out for about an hour—and held my breath. Nothing happened. I rapped on the side of the trunk to attract his attention, and did it again. This time it worked: everybody in sight went down like a rag doll.
I stamped my own passport, filled out a declaration form and buried it in a stack of others, put a tag on the trunk, loaded it aboard a handtruck, wheeled it outside and took a cab.
I had learned something in the process, although it certainly wasn’t much: either Aza-Kra couldn’t, or didn’t, eavesdrop on my mind all the time—or else he was simply one step ahead of me.
Later, on the way to the harbor, I saw a newsstand and realized that it was going on three days since I had seen a paper. I had tried to get the New .York dailies at the airport, but they’d been sold out—nothing on the stands but a lone copy of the Staten Island Advance. That hadn’t struck me as odd at the time—an index of my state of mind—but it did now.
I got out and bought a copy of everything on the stand except the tipsheets—four newspapers, all of them together about equaling the bulk of one Herald-Star. I felt frustrated enough to ask the newsvendor if he had any papers left over from yesterday or the day before. He gave me a glassy look, made me repeat it, then pulled his face into an indescribable expression, laid a finger beside his nose, and said, “ ‘Arf a mo.’ ” He scuttled into a bar a few yards down the street, was gone five minutes, and came back clutching a mare’s-nest of soiled and bedraggled papers.
“ ’Ere you are, guvnor. Three bob for the lot.”
I paid him. “Thanks,” I said, “very much.”
He waved his hand expansively. “Okay, bud,” he said. “T’ink nuttin’ of it!”