He shifted his weight slightly, trying to assess the situation, and suddenly—there was no perceptible lapse of time—flaking corners of metal were ripping upwards in his hands like saw-blades.
Before he had time to understand that he was falling, before he had time to scream, the beam on which he had been standing smashed into his outflung left arm just above the elbow. Brutal though the impact was, it checked his descent sufficiently to let him throw his legs and right arm around the column. He clung to it with a desperate ardour, pressing his loins and torso and face against the abrasive steel, while he fought to damp down the panic that was exploding through his system.
Reality…nightmare…reality. As the giddy swings in his perception faded away he moved his left arm and knew at once that he was badly hurt. The pain that invaded his body by way of the shoulder left no doubt that a bone had been fractured. With it came the uncompromising message that if he was to complete the long climb to the ground he would have to do it immediately and quickly before the anaesthesia of shock wore off and the real pain began.
Moaning quietly, he slightly relaxed his grip on the flanges of the column and allowed himself to slide to the floor below, checking his descent often enough to prevent a lethal build-up of speed. Windows in the hotel glowed with placid light, a group of youths ran noisily through the fenced-off alley at the rear of the building site, and the siren of a nuclear engine sounded dolefully in the distance, but Lorrest remained locked in a private purgatory.
By the time he neared the ground his right hand was slipping on a copious lubrication of blood. He dropped to the rough concrete of the column’s foundation, almost fell, and stood swaying in the darkness while he tried to formulate new plans for a future that had suddenly become very much more dangerous.
Chapter Sixteen
A panel of food manufacturers and health officers were defending the new practice of introducing insect protein—discreetly tagged as “approved natural ingredients”—into products intended for human consumption.
Gretana had been trying to follow the arguments, particularly those of an assertive man who kept popping live mealworms into his mouth, but her television set was losing its ability to cope with serious power fluctuations, and the picture size and sound levels were changing almost continuously. She had forgotten to buy new batteries, which meant it was hardly worth the trouble of switching over to internal power. Her living room, illuminated by the mandatory low-wattage fluorescent tubes, seemed cheerless and uninviting, but she knew there was little chance of sleep if she went to bed.
The late evening and night seemed to stretch out before her like a Mollanian lifespan. Warden Vekrynn had told her that in his service she would have no need of a life recorder with which to preserve happenings of interest. Her experience on Earth had ratified his promise, but nothing could have prepared her for the mind-numbing rush of events in the past forty-eight hours.
She had a cold inner certainty that her lapses in conduct, especially the failure to make a full report to Vekrynn, were casting long shadows into the future, and yet she continued to leave things unresolved. What made it worse was the feeling that virtually everybody she knew would have acted with much greater decisiveness. Even the embittered little Terran, Denny Hargate, in spite of all his dreadful handicaps, would have plotted his own course through the tides of circumstance and it would have taken a great deal to deflect him, whereas she…You’re a typical product of Mollanian non-education, a remembered voice told her. But that had not been Hargate. It had been…
The pounding on the outer door of her apartment was totally unexpected.
She jumped up and listened for several seconds before realising there was nothing peremptory in the sound. It was slow and deliberate, as though the person responsible assumed right of entry, and somehow that had the effect of increasing her alarm. With one hand holding her blouse closed at the throat, she considered the range of possibilities and with ready prescience selected the most likely.
Lorrest tye Thralen.
She went to the door, irrationally choosing to move in complete silence, tilted her head and said, “Who’s there?”
“William McGonagall, poet and tragedian,” came the immediate answer, followed by a pause in which she heard laboured breathing. “Don’t make me laugh, Gretana—I’m hurt.”
She opened the door and saw the tall figure clutching his left arm. “What do you want?”
He shook his head. “Can’t do any more funny answers—I’ve got a broken arm.”
“You can’t stay here.”
“I believe it’s a greenstick fracture…typical Mollanian resilience…but I’m not used to this kind of pain, Gretana, and they’re hunting me.”
Gretana’s fear increased. “You can’t stay here.”
“Tell you what,” Lorrest said, moving forward and forcing her to retreat. “Why don’t you do what women in your position are supposed to do? You could bring me in and tend to my wounds and pretend to be sympathetic, but all unknown to me you’ve sent a secret signal to Vekrynn.”
“That’s impossible, and you know it.”
“Yeah—I’m not stupid.” Lorrest walked into the kitchen and turned to face her and she saw that his face was haggard. He unbuttoned his overcoat, withdrawing his left arm from the sleeve with great care, and draped the garment over a stool.
“Don’t you think you’re presuming a lot?” Gretana said.
“Not really.” Lorrest’s smile became a grimace as he slipped off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt.” If you were the hotshot Preservationist you think you are you’d have tipped the Warden off about me and I wouldn’t have made it to the top of your stairs.”
“I see.” Gretana’s sense of responsibility increased. Previously she had only suffered forebodings, but here was confirmation that in a single dereliction of duty she had influenced a train of events about which she had no understanding. She watched in silence as Lorrest partly took off his shirt to reveal a left arm which was so massively bruised that between elbow and shoulder it had the appearance of being carved from a blackish marble veined with green. The ghastly discoloration extended down Lorrest’s left side, indicating that the muscles there had been torn by the impact which had wreaked such spectacular damage on his arm.
“You’re really hurt,” she exclaimed. “What happened?”
“A bunch of the Warden’s men showed up at my hotel and I went out on some steelwork next door to get away from them. Then I did something you’re not supposed to do on steelwork—I fell off.”
Gretana weighed up the story, one Mollanian to another. “You climbed around a high building?”
“They were carrying weapons. I had to get away.”
She sighed her exasperation. “Are you still claiming the Warden would harm you?”
“Harm me?” Lorrest looked thoughtful. “For the time being Vekrynn will do everything in his power to make sure I’m not harmed—that’s because I know something he needs to know—but if he gets his information he’ll do me harm, and that’s for sure. The sort of harm you inflict on an ant when you stand on it.”