The guard jerked up in surprise, staring incredulously at the man running at him stark naked down the corridor. Instead of blasting at him with the stunner he was wearing, the guard stood open-mouthed, as Alexander had anticipated, expecting that the last thing a naked man fleeing a fire would do would be to slug him. On the dead run, Alexander swung the pillow case, and the three metal rollers slammed into the guard’s head.
As soon as the guard hit the floor Alexander unzipped the front of his light blue duty coveralls. Then he hoisted the limp form to his shoulder and hurried back to the room. Smoke was billowing out the door, and in the distance he heard the fire gong clanging. He held the coveralls and let the guard slide out of them like an egg yolk. Once into the coveralls, he shoved the guard’s body into the smoke-filled room.
At the end of the corridor there was a sudden burst of noise . . . undoubtedly the fire squad. Alexander took a deep breath, and plunged into the smoke. He seized the guard’s ankle and began to back out slowly, coughing noticeably as the first of the emergency crew arrived.
Eager hands assisted him to get the guard, face down, out of the room. Someone started artificial respiration, and Alexander coughed into his hands and backed away as more people and equipment began to arrive. An extinguisher began to spray the smoldering mattress, which threw up great clouds of acrid black smoke. In twenty seconds Alexander was walking slowly away, past several interns who were hurrying toward the noise, and into the main-wing corridor of the George Kelley Hospital.
With the first step behind him, Alexander moved swiftly toward the service elevator which had brought up the fire-fighting equipment. It was only a matter of time before somebody noticed that the victim in the smoke-filled room was a guard and not a patient; he had to get beyond the hospital walls before the security alarm went off.
He had long since discarded the idea of posing as a dischargee, impossible because discharge hours were over for the day; or as a guard or even a doctor, impossible because the fingerprint-check would stop him cold at the gate. He knew the hospital used plastic sheets and gowns which were sterilized and remolded after use, so no laundry trucks ever left the compound. Food cartons and supplies came in from outside on standard conveyor strips, X-ray checked as they entered. Garbage and trash were similarly conveyed out in sealed drums.
But in Buenos Aires, Alexander had noticed a curiosity in that hospital’s security procedure which he thought should be present in the Kelley’s system as well.
He found the morgue in the basement, adjacent to a loading platform in the rear of the main part of the building. He reached it through an employee’s stairwell and a concrete tunnel leading past the power pile.
Chicago, like all major cities, had a central autopsy room; and the Kelley, like other hospitals in the city, shipped all its cadavers there on a day-to-day basis. The transit was usually made at night to avoid traffic on Wahanakee Drive. Now Alexander saw that the truck was still waiting, backed up to the loading platform while the drivers were in the cafeteria for coffee. There were four wheeled stretchers, with sheets covering the bodies, loaded into the back of the refrigerated truck.
Alexander scrambled up the tailgate, peering into the truck. Back of the stretchers the undomed gyro was spinning, an almost inaudible high-pitched hum coming from the flywheel. Back of the gyro unit was a two-foot work space with a spare wheel and half a dozen plastic sheets.
He heard the drivers returning, and crouched down behind the gyro, half-covering himself with a sheet. Heavy footsteps came to the back of the truck; then the tailgate squeaked up. The doors closed with a clang, and he was locked in with four bodies in a black and freezing coffin.
The blackness took him by surprise; he hadn’t counted on it, and for a moment he fought down a rising wave of panic. In spite of the sheets he began shivering with cold. He heard the driver rev up the motor, and the truck gave a lurch and began moving.
There were three stops, the last one accompanied by the noise of the exit-gate swinging open. Then they were rolling . . . outside.
He waited until his teeth were chattering with cold, and he was certain the truck was on open Throughway. Then he groped forward in the darkness until his hand touched the gyro mount. The gyro was one of the air-driven Robling types, very simple, very reliable, the flywheel driven by a tiny stream of air impinging on the peripheral turbine blades. Once it was in motion, very little energy was needed to keep the heavy rotor turning at a high enough speed to stabilize the truck. The flywheel and turbine blades were shielded, but directly under the pressure nozzle there was a slot to let the air out. The air stream produced the hum, and Alexander felt around the rim of the turbine casing until he felt the cool steady jet.
He moved his fingertip up gingerly until he felt the turbine blades nick the tip of his fingernail like a buzz saw. Then he pulled one of the toilet paper rollers out of his pocket.
Wrapping his hand carefully in one of the plastic sheets, he rammed the metal roller up against the spinning turbine.
There was a shower of hot sparks, and the turbine screamed and shuddered. The metal rod began to heat up as the turbine blades ground down the soft metal. Suddenly the whole truck bucked and lurched, throwing him down onto the stretchers; the flywheel dropped below critical stability RPM, and the truck tipped and fell over on one side with a long skidding crash, wrenching the doors open and dumping three corpses out on top of him on the ground.
There were curses from the cab, and the drivers piled out. “Musta been the gyro. What in hell went wrong with it?”
“Oh, my God. Look at the stiffs all over the place.”
“Never mind the stiffs, what happened to the gyro? Where’s the flashlight?” Together the drivers shoved the corpses and Alexander unceremoniously out of the way and crawled into the truck with the flash. Neither one noticed that one of the corpses had coveralls on.
There were headlights coming down the road, and Alexander slid hastily into the shadow of the truck as the car roared by. Then he crouched low and ran over to the shoulder of the road. He slithered down into a drainage ditch as two more cars approached, slowed, and stopped.
He knew he was on Wahanakee Drive, but he didn’t know where. There were apartment buildings nearby, and now people were running down the road toward the wrecked truck. In the distance he heard the first faint rising whine of a siren.
Alexander hurried down the drainage ditch, then climbed up and crossed the highway as the steady trickle of people grew into a crowd and jammed the traffic, their voices rising on the excitement. He walked slowly away, fighting the urge to run, staying out of the way of people who kept hurrying flown to the road, expecting at any moment that the drivers would discover what had happened to their gyro and begin to wonder how four naked corpses had managed to wreck it so completely.
He was out.
He found an apartment building with the door wide open, the tenants out on the highway sharing in the excitement. He picked up the lobby phone, dialed a suburban Chicago number. Three long rings, and then a woman’s voice said, “Hello?”
“BJ?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Harvey.”
There was a moment’s silence, then a cool, deliberate answer. “Oh . . . .”
“Listen to me, BJ,” he said urgently. “This is very important. I’m over on Wahanakee Drive, at the Kingston Apartments. Can you pick me up at the parking lot by the north entrance?”