He knew now what had happened at Wildwood. He knew that he could not waste a minute now. He might already be too late.
Once on the man-strip he began switching strips at the switching centers to see if his previous tail had managed to follow him after he left the temporary protection of the KMs. There was no one following him on the strip itself, but a Hydro was moving doggedly on the roadstrip below. Alexander crouched back out of stunner range, fear creeping up his spine again. They couldn’t be DIA; they would have picked him up long ago. But if they were aliens, why were they stalking him so patiently?
He dropped off the strip as it passed back through the trucking center. What he needed was an accomplice so his pursuers would have another branch-point to worry about, and so he could get a truck.
It was the only way. With a truck, and a trucker’s ID he could drive to New York; and plenty of New York long hauls went through at this time of night. But he needed a decoy bait to get a trucker out of a brightly lighted diner and into an alley or motel room.
He found his prospect in the third diner he checked. It was surprising to find a woman left in one of them; most of the night runs had left already. He walked up behind her, grabbed her by the wrist. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
Her lips twisted into a snarl as she whirled on him. “DEPCO?” she asked, the words sticking hatefully in her throat.
Alexander shook his head. “A friend.” He tightened his grip on her wrist and started to walk her out. He had not seen his shadow since the last switch on the man-strips, but lie paused warily at the door, then pulled her out into the darkness.
“Two credits,” she whispered, “flat rate, if you don’t take too long, two credits, you can take your pick . . . .”
“This is something special,” he said. He told her what ho wanted, then slipped her a ten-credit note.
“But where?”
“There’s a motel behind there.”
“He might kill me.”
“He won’t kill anybody, don’t worry.”
He watched her go back into the diner. Ten minutes later she came out with a heavy-set, stupid-looking man with a trucker’s cap on. They walked back to the motel office, then clown the darkened path toward the cabins.
Alexander moved after them silently. He couldn’t count on handling a hulking truck driver alone, but there are times when a man is helpless. He hoped the woman would remember the signal, and fought down the intense wave of self-loathing that welled up in him. There was no stopping now, no turning back to order and precision and the proper running of things, no turning back to the warm, easy security of Absolute Stability, the peaceful quiet of not having to think or worry. A week before he would not have dreamed of doing the things he was doing now as a matter of course.
But it was not as a matter of course, not now, he thought. It was a matter of survival.
He heard them inside, heard the woman’s voice, low and suggestive, then dropping into a stream of underworld jargon so filthy Alexander was afraid for a moment she would frighten the quarry away. Then it was quiet, with only murmuring sounds, and he waited for the signal.
Silence. It took an instant to register that it was too quiet, suddenly deathly still. He gripped the latch, turned it and burst into the darkened room.
Then he screamed as the light hit his eyes, glaring, blinding, burning white, searing his retinas, and he clamped his hands over his face . . . .
He felt the blow at the back of his head, and then the glare-whiteness dissolved into blackness.
He was in a room without windows, a single door, a single chair, utterly black, although he could feel other presences there, other light breathing quite near him. He could not move his head, and he realized, quite suddenly, that it was clamped into a frame on the chair.
And it was silent, except for the voice that was asking him questions. It had been asking them for a long time, it seemed, and he tried to orient himself, to remember when the questions had started, and what they had been about.
But only now could he focus on the voice, slowly repeating a question, pausing, then another, pausing, a curiously metallic, unmodulated voice like a person talking with laryngitis.
He had heard that voice before, years before in the communications shack in Antarctica, transcribing messages from Control in Washington, and he remembered now, with a jolt of fear, what the voice was.
It was the characteristic electronic voice of a tik-talker.
Part III
The Tiger Pit
Chapter Eleven
Libby Allison was kneeling on the floor playing googly-goo with the tow-headed baby in the playpen when Julian Bahr walked in, threw his coat on the bed-couch, and walked around a few seconds impatiently while she continued to ignore him. Then his impatience seemed to evaporate, and he sat heavily on the edge of the relaxo, and with a half-groan, half-sigh began to pound his fist into the palm of his left hand.
Libby looked up then. “Trouble?” she asked.
Bahr’s only answer was a sudden vicious smack of fist against palm, as if in his mind he had just driven his knuckles into the fragile bone-structure of somebody’s face.
“DEPCO?”
“That too.”
She put the youngster back in the playpen, and brushed her hair back where his small hands had been pulling at it. “What else?” she said.
He didn’t answer for a minute or more. His jaw was knotted in anger, his huge body tense, but there was something else in his face, perhaps just in his eyes, when he looked at her. Then he shook his head helplessly. “The elephant, again.”
Libby turned sharply, the baby forgotten, her heart suddenly thumping wildly, her trained psychologist’s mind focusing abruptly on an almost simultaneous kaleidoscope of incidents, remarks, mannerisms, and the few desperate grudging revelations that formed in her mind the clinical picture of Julian Bahr.
“Last night,” he said angrily. “Actually this morning, just before I woke up.” He held out his left hand for her to see. The knuckles were cut and bruised.
“Julian . . . .”
“I was hitting the wall. I hurt my hand, I guess that was what woke me up.” He sat quietly for a moment, his breathing shallow and rapid. Holding his hand, she could feel the furious pounding of his pulse, watch the slow tensing of back and shoulder muscles as if he were trying by sheer physical force to throw off an ugly, frightening memory.
Finally he stood up, jammed his hands in his pockets, walked around the room once, then came back and sat down. “All right,” he said. “It’s the first time in two years. Why did it come back, Libby? I went to sleep all right. I worked until I was ready to collapse, I can always get to sleep then, but I woke up at three in the morning beating my fist on the wall, and all I can remember is the elephant.”
“Did it start out the same way? Out in the street?”
“Yes, the same way. The same woman, too. Some man was looking for her, and she had to hide, so I went into the building with her. There was the long hall with doors all up and down, and little rooms opening into it, and the elephant was at the end of the hall.”
She nodded wearily. It was the same, detail for detail. “And the elephant picked her up?”
“Just like before—in his trunk. He wasn’t hurting her any but he was going to carry her off, and she screamed for me to get a blanket and put it over his eyes so he couldn’t see. So I took the blanket and threw it over the elephant’s eyes, but it stuck on his tusks and only partly covered his eyes. He started to come down the hall, and I knew he could see me, and I had to run, only I couldn’t run fast enough, so I went into one of the little rooms and closed the door. The elephant went right on by, but when he got to the end of the corridor he started back, with people going past him like he wasn’t there. There was no way out of the room, and I couldn’t jump, and the elephant began pushing in the door . . . .”