“Come on, Mai. This kook is some kind of a nut,” Andy said, rising. “Let’s split before someone comes back. Imagine trying to hold us prisoner in this dumb maze-you’d think we hadn’t memorized it or somethin’.” He started for the open alcove.
Illya grabbed an ankle and brought the boy down. “Hold it, speed kills, what’s the hurry? This room is only wired for sound, but the rest of the place is wired for death. Take it easy.”
Andy sat up, rubbing his bruised pride, and gave Illya a very strange look. “You serious? About Thrush and Removal, and wired for death and all?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I guess Fatso is one of them, because I never saw anybody with more gadgets around to puff himself up in my life; looks pretty sick to me, but he never really bugged us before tonight. He messed Napoleon up good, though.”
“You know Napoleon?” Illya sat all the way up. “Where is he?”
“We found him on the beach, soaking wet and tom up one side and down the other. Messed up like that, he didn’t say word one about how he got that way,” Mai answered.
no
“Charlie here, Andy and I, we took him out past the boardwalk and caught him a cab. You a friend of his?”
Tm Illya Kuryakin; we sort of work together.”
Andy spoke up again. “You sure-god aren’t Good Humor Men, to get these Thrush buggers mad at you.” All three sat patiently, letting the implied question hang in the air. Illya leaned his head to one side, then the other, hitting himself to empty the water from his ears, before answering.
“We work for a kindly old gentleman who sends us out to get chopped to pieces, drowned, or shot up, for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.”
“U.N.C.L.E.,” said Charlie, and Mai laughed at the acronym.
“Well,” said Illya, “that is what we call ourselves. Napoleon and I are Enforcement Agents; we get sent out to clean up the sort of messes local police can’t handle.”
“Super fuzz,” said Charlie.
All three were looking at him in awe, and Illya began to feel uncomfortably the center of attention. Finally Malista spoke, breathing her words throatily.
“You’re a spy,” she said lovingly.
“Hey,” said Andy, “you got a fistful of superkill gizmos, like little bombs and wire dinghies?”
“I had, until Porpoise had me frisked. They took away all my weapons, radios, lockpicks, everything.”
“Napoleon is a spy, too,” said Mai, “and he didn’t even tell us.”
“It’s not the sort of thing you talk about, not if you plan to go on being a spy,” Illya explained. “The only reason I mentioned it is that we’re all prisoners together. You’ve got a right to know why Thrush is going to kill you.”
“Kill us,” spat Charlie, “is gonna take more than Arnold and Big Fats. I’d take on any three of that bunch. Any way. Fists, knives, bottles, chairs, or a long-range spitball contest.”
Andy chorused in, “No bunch of tweety-birds bugs us. We woulda laid them out on the beach, if they didn’t take us by surprise. At that, Charlie almost creamed the punk who jumped him, and you shoulda seen Mai hanging from Arnold’s nose by her teeth.”
Mai raised both hands, palms outward, and the boys quieted down. She talked to herself for a minute, smiling, her eyes focusing miles away, and then she chanted to the tune of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?:
“Where have all the Thrushes gone?
Long time passing.
Where have all the Thrushes gone? 1
Long time ago.
Where have all the Thrushes gone?”
Plucked by U.N.C.L.E. every one.
When will they ever learn?
When will they ever learn?”’
The two boys applauded, and Illya smiled at her, then looked down at the floor. “It certainly must be a wonderful thing,” he said, “to expect to take on these plug-uglies with bare hands. They aren’t even going to give us that chance. Most likely, Porpoise will tell Arnold to shoot us through a hole in the wall, and then float our bodies out over the billowing waters. He’s scared right now, finding that you three knew about Napoleon, but any minute he’ll realize the smart move is to get rid of us.”
“Well, why are we just sitting here?” snapped the girl. “You’re a secret agent, even if you haven’t got all your gim-crack special skeleton keys and decoder badges. Can’t you get us out of here?”
“Out of here? There may not be any way out. Thrush doesn’t usually lock people in cages with exits provided, although Napoleon and I have occasionally made exits where they didn’t expect them.” Illya’s eyes lost their look of intensity for a moment as his mind followed a slippery clue; he focused hard on Mai, then. “You said you met Napoleon on the beach, soaking wet, didn’t you?” She nodded dumbly at him as he turned to look through the room.
A quick scan of the room convinced Illya that it had possibilities. “There’s no telling what the devices on that spaceship’s console can do,” he said. He moved close to the three, speaking quietly.
“Napoleon was locked up in this maze, and found a way
out that dumped him in the water. All we really know is that they had him, and he got away, ending up by swimming ashore, With power on, I doubt he found his way through that Space Maze, so I intend to look for a way out right here. Sit where you are, and don’t set foot into the next room. Ill vouch for the mazes deadliness.”
He turned to the mock-up of a spaceship console, and started spinning the control wheels and pushing levers from position to position. His first achievement was to black out the view of stars in the porthole nearby, and then the stars came back, spinning wildly.
“I think I’ve snapped us through hyper-space” he said, “and flipped into a tailspin, probably heading into the maw of a dead star.” x
Another lever slowed the stars, and made them march grandly past the opening. He pushed a button, and all the stars went away except one, which turned out to be the sun Earth revolves around. Suddenly there were planets around old Sol, and the kids and Illya watched as they seemed to approach the solar system. They flashed past Pluto, Neptune and Uranus quickly, and Illya found a switch to slow down the motion as they came near Saturn. The big ringed planet filled all of visible space, and then they went on, catching Jupiter and Mars, then Venus and Mercury, and skipping across the sun to find Earth. .
“Its like the Planetarium,” said Mai, when the spell was broken by another switch, taking them back to interstellar space.
“It’s like being out there,” said Charlie. Illya looked at him, and saw that the boy was frozen in front of the porthole. He brought back Saturn and Mars-a few times, almost as much by chance as by skill, and then the trio went to sit down while he continued to work. Charlie made up a verse that went, “Where have all the planets gone?” and then the three of them were singing together, harmonizing through folksongs, one-world songs, and low-camp like Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.
They were building a tricky roundelay around the Batman theme when Illya accidentally triggered a meteor shower outside the porthole. The sudden silent fire, coupled
with the tension of not knowing when Porpoise’s men would return for them, broke up the singing and started Illya’s palms itching.
He brushed sweat off his forehead, wishing he had so much as one U.N.C.L.E. wire-tracing device. Behind him as he bent back to the board, Mai’s clear voice came on strong with her new doggerel, “Where have all the Thrushes gone?” She finished the verse on a high note of fun and confidence, pounding on the floor with both hands.
Illya clapped, and the boys cheered heartily, raising the roof to relax their nerves. Before the noise had died down, Arnold opened the spacelock door and stepped through.