He could drop into the dimensino room for a minute or two, but there was danger in that. One got identified with what was going on too quickly. One lost one’s sense of time; one lost everything but the situation which dimensino created. And it often was disturbing and confusing to drop into the middle of it.
It would not be, he decided, a very good idea. He exchanged brief greetings with a couple of acquaintances; he suffered a backslapping reunion with a slightly inebriated gentleman he’d seen no longer than ten days before; he was forced to listen to two off-color stories; he went through a mild flirting routine with a simpering dowager who came charging out of ambush.
And all the time he moved steadily toward the door that led down to the kitchen.
Finally he arrived.
He stepped through the doorway and went casually down the stairs.
The place was empty, a cold, metallic place with the gleam of chrome and the shine of high utility. A clock with a sweep second hand hung upon one wall and its whirring sound hung heavy in the room.
Blaine placed his glass, still half full of Scotch, on the nearest table, and there, six strides away, across the gleaming floor, was the outside door.
He took the first two steps and as he started on the third a silent shout of warning sounded in his brain and he spun around.
Freddy Bates stood beside the huge refrigerator, one hand jammed deep into a jacket pocket.
“Shep,” said Freddy Bates, “if I were you, I wouldn’t try it. Fishhook has the place tied up. You haven’t got a chance.”
SIX
Blaine stood frozen for a second while wonder hammered at him. And it was surprise and bafflement, rather than either fear or anger, that held him frozen there. Surprise that, of all people, it should be Freddy Bates. Freddy, no longer the aimless man-about-town, the inconsequential mystery man in a town that was full of such as he, but an agent of Fishhook and, apparently, a very able one.
And another thing — that Kirby Rand had known and had allowed him to walk out of the office and go down the elevator. But grabbing for a phone as soon as he had reached the corridor to put Freddy on the job.
It had been clever, Blaine admitted to himself — much more clever than he himself had been. There had never been a moment that he had suspected Rand felt anything was wrong, and Freddy, when he picked him up, had been his normal, ineffectual self.
Anger soaked slowly into him, to replace the wonder. Anger that he had been taken in, that he had been trapped by such a jerk as Freddy.
“We’ll just walk outside,” said Freddy, “like the friends we are, and I’ll take you back to have a talk with Rand. No fuss, no fight, but very gentlemanly. We would not want to do anything — either one of us — to cause Charline embarrassment.”
“No,” said Blaine. “No, of course, we wouldn’t.” His mind was racing, seeking for a way, looking for an out, anything at all that would get him out of this. For he was not going back. No matter what might happen, he wasn’t going back with Freddy.
He felt the Pinkness stir as if it were coming out.
“No!” yelled Blaine. “No!”
But it was too late. The Pinkness had crawled out and it filled his brain, and he was still himself but someone else as well. He was two things at once and it was most confusing and something strange had happened.
The room became as still as death except for the groaning of the clock upon the wall. And that was strange, as well, for until this very moment, the clock had done no groaning; it had whirred but never groaned.
Blaine took a swift step forward, and Freddy didn’t move. He stayed standing there, with the hand thrust in the pocket.
And another step and still Freddy barely stirred. His eyes stayed stiff and staring and he didn’t blink. But his face began to twist, a slow and tortured twist, and the hand in the pocket moved, but so deliberately that one only was aware of a sort of stirring, as if the arm and hand and the thing the hand clutched in the pocket were waking from deep sleep.
And yet another step and Blaine was almost on him, with his fist moving like a piston. Freddy’s mouth dropped slowly open, as if the jaw hinge might be rusty, and his eyelids came creeping down in the caricature of a blink.
Then the fist exploded on his jaw. Blaine hit where he was aiming and he hit with everything he had, his torso twisting to follow through the blow. Even as he hit and the pain of contact slashed across his knuckles and tingled in his wrist, he knew it was all wrong. For Freddy had scarcely moved, had not even tried to defend himself.
Freddy was falling, but not as one should fall. He was falling slowly, deliberately, as a tree will topple when the final cut is made. In slow motion, he crumpled toward the floor and as he fell his hand finally cleared the pocket and there was a gun in it. The gun slipped from his flaccid fingers and beat him to the floor.
Blaine bent to scoop it up and he had it in his hand before Freddy hit the floor and he stood there, with the gun in hand, watching Freddy finally strike the floor — not actually striking it, but just sort of settling down on it and relaxing in slow motion on its surface.
The clock still groaned upon the wall, and Blaine swung around to look at it and saw that the second hand was barely crawling across the numbered face. Crawling where it should have galloped, and groaning when it should have whirred, and the clock, Blaine told himself, had gone crazy, too.
There was something wrong with time. The creeping second hand and Freddy’s slow reaction was evidence of that.
Time had been slowed down.
And that was impossible.
Time did not slow down; time was a universal constant. But if time, somehow, had slowed down, why had not he been a party to it?
Unless -
Of course, unless time had stayed the way it was and he had been speeded up, had moved so fast that Freddy had not had the time to act, had been unable to defend himself, could under no circumstances have gotten the gun out of his pocket.
Blaine held his fist out in front of him and looked at the gun. It was a squat and ugly thing and it had a deadly bluntness.
Freddy had not been fooling, nor was Fishhook fooling. You do not pack a gun in a little game all filled with lightness and politeness. You do not pack a gun unless you’re prepared to use it. And Freddy — there was no doubt of that — had been prepared to use it.
Blaine swung back toward Freddy and he was still upon the floor and he seemed to be most restful. It would be quite a little while before Freddy would be coming round.
Blaine dropped the gun into his pocket and turned toward the door and as he did so he glanced up at the clock and the second hand had barely moved from where he’d seen it last.
He reached the door and opened it and took one last glance back into the room. The room still was bright with chrome, still stark in its utility, and the one untidy thing within it was Freddy sprawled upon the floor.
Blaine stepped out of the door and moved along the flagstone walk that led to the long stone stairway that went slanting down across the great cliff face.
A man was lounging at the head of the stairs and he began to straighten slowly as Blaine raced down the walk toward him.
The light from one of the upstairs windows shone across the face of the straightening man, and Blaine saw the lines of outraged surprise, as if they were sculptured lines in a graven face.
“Sorry, pal,” said Blaine.
He shot his arm out, stiff from the shoulder, with the palm spread flat and caught the graven face.
The man reeled backward slowly, step by cautious step, tilting farther and farther backward with each step. In another little while he’d fall flat upon his back.