A Prayer of Investments
“You see what I mean?” Quilty said, digging at my ribs with his soft elbow. “He’s as nutty as peanut butter. They all are.”
“Actually, he seems remarkably unchanged.”
“How’s that! You’ve seen this fellow somewhere before? When?”
I was rescued from the necessity of having to seal up this new breach in my defenses by the timely arrival of two guards who were conducting the shadowy figure of a manacled bitch. “I’m sorry, Major,” one guard said, “but orders came in over the short wave to let this woman look around for her son. The both of them is ordered to be transported to St Paul.”
“That’s him,” the bitch said, pointing. “That’s my son Pluto.”
So Roxanna had finally got around to reporting the probability of my brother and mother being among the captive pets! I had dreaded this moment.
“Exactly!” I rasped in my most Dingo-like tones. “I have been expecting something like this. Before they are sent off, I had better give them a preliminary interrogation. Take them to my chamber, where the other prisoner is already. I shall be there immediately.”
Clea, though but ill-acquainted with the timbre of my voice, stepped forward to peer at me in the gloom, but I turned my back on her abruptly. “Take them away! There is no time to spare!”
When the four of us—St Bernard and Clea, Pluto and myself—were together in the quarters of the unfortunate Lieutenant Mosely, I explained to them, as well as I could, how I had come to be in my present, so-convenient position. Only Pluto received my story calmly and without repeated protests and expressions of incredulity—and I suspect this was because he wasn’t really listening to me at all, but to the sweeter voices of his own superior, interior world.
“Impossible!” Clea declared firmly. “You can’t expect us to believe such a fairy tale. Parachuting right into the prison compound in the middle of the night! In a major’s overcoat! Tell me another!”
“But if he says so, Clea,” St Bernard protested, “it must be true. White Fang wouldn’t lie to a blood-brother.”
“The problem isn’t whether you care to believe me—but how we are to escape. You dare not let them transport you to St Paul. It is the capital of the Dingoes. Your best safety was to lose yourself among the millions of other abandoned pets. How was it that you let them find you out, Clea?”
“They came around calling for me and Pluto by name. They said the Masters were taking us back. I didn’t know if I could believe them, but it seemed that anything would be better than this hellhole. So I spoke up before someone else got the same idea.”
“I’ve already made some escape plans,” St Bernard volunteered. “Is it safe for me to speak of them aloud in this room? Yes? How about digging a tunnel? Under the wall. When I was down in the basement of the bakery I saw that it had a dirt floor. Dirt—that eliminates half of the difficulty from the start. Imagine tunneling through stone! Now, if we start the tunnel there and dig west…”
“But it’s over a hundred yards from there to the wall!”
“So much the better! They’ll expect us to start somewhere else. I figure with two men working all through the night, the tunnel can be done in a month.”
“A month!” Clea scoffed. “But I’m to be carted off tonight!”
“Hm! That puts things in a different light. Well, in that case, I have a second plan. Here, let me demonstrate…” He ripped the bedsheets off the bunk and began shredding them into long strips. “We’ll knot these strips together—into a rope ladder—like this. Now here, White Fang, you take this end—and I’ll take this end. Now, pull! That’s it! Harder! Oops!
“Hm. Does anyone know a better knot?”
“What do you need a rope ladder for?” I asked. It was only a fifteen-foot drop from the window of my room, after all, as St Bernard must have been well aware after spending the last few hours confined there.
“I thought you and I could take care of the guards at the southwest tower—the one with the nice crenelations—and then we’d climb the stairs to the top, and then use the rope ladder to climb down.”
“But I can just order the guards to let us go up to the top.”
“So much the better. Our only problem in that case is making sure the knots will hold. Is a square knot over-and-under and under-and-over or under-and-over and over-and-under? I can never get it straight.”
“But we don’t have to go to the top of the tower, St Bernard. If it were just a simple matter of getting out of the prison, we could jump from the window of this room.”
“You mean you won’t need a rope ladder at all?” He sounded terribly hurt.
“Finding a way out of the prison is not the entire problem, St Bernard. Think of the thousands of other pets I’ll be leaving in Frangle’s hands. What will become of them? Yes, and there’s the little matter of eluding Palmino, who’s on to my masquerade. I have every reason to believe that he has my least actions closely observed. And he will do his utmost to keep me here, for it’s only through me that he possesses a large degree of power here, or hopes of a life in the asteroids hereafter. The problem, then, is not so much escaping from this prison as from him. Palmino—that’s the real problem.”
“Thank you, Major Jones, but it isn’t the case any more,” said Palmino, stepping into the room, brandishing that little pistol of his. “The real problem is escaping with him.”
“Would you introduce your friend, White Fang?” Clea asked loftily.
“Mother, this is Warrant Officer Palmino. Officer Palmino, this is my mother, Miss Clea Melbourne Clift.” Clea offered her hand to Palmino, who received it with his pistol-hand. With a deft motion Motherlove wrenched the pistol from Palmino.
“Now, apologize to my son, young man, for this rude interruption, and pray, explain yourself more fully.”
“I’m sorry. Okay? And you’re going to be sorry too. Because they’re on to us. I’ve intercepted radio messages. They’re arriving tonight en masse.”
“Who? Why? How?”
“The troops from Shroeder and from Fargo. Even a contingent from the capital. They must know you’re here, running the operation. You see, there’s something I didn’t have a chance to tell you. It sort of slipped my mind. Yesterday afternoon Major Worthington showed up for that inspection. The sentry saw him—and as luck would have it, he was one of my men. He fired—”