Bass jolted to a halt, hearing the man’s unintelligible shout, seeing the glint of metal in his raised fist. He half-whirled toward the shelter of the houses behind him, then stopped, hopelessly. It was too far.
He was fairly caught. He’d have to stand where he was and hope that bluff, and his demon clothing, would save him.
The red-uniformed man came forward, moving with an odd stiffness. He held the gun rigidly trained on Bass’s body. With the other hand he took a tiny instrument from his belt, spoke a few words into it and put it back again, all without shifting his glance from Bass for an instant.
Two yards away, he stopped.
Except for its revolting color, his uniform was an almost-exact duplicate of a Guardsman’s, from the flat, visored cap to the polished shin-guards and heavy boots. Bass’s heart leaped painfully as he saw one of the differences: in each of the mirror-bright buttons, instead of the familiar “GP,” was another insigne—the same one he had seen once before, in Manager Wooten’s office—U/M.
He wanted to digest the implications of that, but there was no time. His perception of danger, already at an unbearable intensity, had risen to a shrieking crescendo—and after an instant he understood why.
The pseudo-Guardsman had not asked him a single question.
Under the red half-mask, the man’s lips were thinned to a pale line. His whole body was tense, his right forefinger white-knuckled behind the trigger-guard.
Desperately, Bass concentrated on the remembered sound of the old man’s voice—the elided vowels, the harsh consonants, the rhythm of his speech. Reproducing them as well as he could, he said, “Please, sir, what’ve I done? I’m George Parsons, everybody knows me—”
The Guard made a sharp, jerky motion with his gun-barrel. “Shut up!” he said.
A red car whirled silently around the corner, hurtled to within a dozen yards of them and stopped. Almost instantly, another appeared from the opposite direction. Red-uniformed men poured out of them and moved forward with exaggerated caution, guns in their fists. Every one of them stared at Bass unblinkingly, not glancing aside even when they spoke to one another.
“Any trouble?” called one. Like the others, he spoke in a flat brogue that gave Bass no difficulty; he had heard it often enough from the Guardsmen in Glenbrook.
“Not so far, sir,” said the first Guardsman. “It tried to talk to me, but I soon shut its mouth for it.”
The ring of men closed in a little. “What’d it say?” one of them asked.
The first man shuddered. “Tried to tell me it was a man.”
A ripple of disgust swayed the circle.
Bass’s mind was turning frantically, trying to discover how he had betrayed himself. They didn’t suspect, they knew he was the “demon” they were after. But how? His shirt was well covered by the green cape; his shoes were alien, but surely the difference was not so obvious as that under his cuffs
“With that hat on the filthy head of it!” said the first man in a strained voice.
Bass’s hands lifted automatically toward his head, a fraction of an inch then dropped. Of course, he though sickly, that was it. The old man had not been wearing a hat; he had not even thought of a hat—but he remembered now that the other two, the ones who had run when they saw him, had been wearing tall peaked constructions of their heads. And he himself was still wearing his flat, eight-segmented Glenbrook cap—so used to the touch of it that he’d been no more conscious of it than of part of his own body.
Another red car pulled up, and then another. More men joined the ring.
“All right, we can start now,” said one. “McGovern, we’ll use your car. You and Clintock ride back with somebody else.”
A lane formed, leading to the open rear door of a car… Hopelessly, following the nearest Guardsman’s gesture Bass began to walk down it.
V
THREE men climbed into the front seat; two of them immediately turned to face the rear. Each of these rested the slim blue-steel barrel of a weapon on the top of the seat, aiming squarely at Bass.
A fourth man got into the rear compartment on the right side and settled himself carefully with his back against the side-cushions. His weapon, unlike the others, was a familiar one—a gas-pellet pistol, with its short barrel sprouting from a fat ovoid casing.
All four had clipped tiny respirator cartridges into their nostrils.
They were taking no chances what ever, Bass realized vaguely. The two in front beside the driver had something more deadly than gas-pistols, probably solid-projectile guns, perhaps; he had heard that the Glenbrook Guard had such things, though he had never seen one.
Even if he should somehow be able to overpower the man in the back—the only one within reach—and take his gun away, it would do him no good. If he made any hostile move toward the driver, or the other two in front, the man in back would gas him.
A Guardsman outside took a key from the driver and stepped back to lock the door through which Bass had entered. Bass turned his head to watch.
“Eyes front!” snapped the man with the gas-pistol. “Hands in your lap, and don’t move!”
Bass obeyed. No chances at all, he thought. Three men with guns … door locked on my side … they daren’t even let me turn my head, or move my hands.
They’re afraid.
The thought was oddly exhilarating. The fear and respect of the three men with guns, surrounding him as he sat unarmed and defenseless, was an almost palpable flow. Half-consciously at first, then with deliberate purpose, Bass reacted to it: he sat up straighter, feeling his muscles loose and ready from calf to shoulder; he stared back at the fixed, stony glitter of their eyes behind the masks. His own eyes narrowed slightly and he let his lip curl slightly, as if in malicious amusement.
They reacted as if they had been struck, flinching perceptibly, fingers tensing on triggers—and at that realization, despair washed over Bass again. It didn’t matter what they thought: the actuality was that he was hopelessly trapped, alone, unarmed, friendless—and he was on his way to be killed.
The car began to move. To his right, out of the corner of his eye, Bass could see another keeping pace with it; in front was still another. That made three. The fourth, presumably, was bringing up the rear. Again: no chances.
They turned south, then east again at the next corner. The land rose imperceptibly as they went, until they were climbing a steep hill, the Guardsmen front looking down on Bass as if they were on stepladders. Five blocks; ten; fifteen.
The noises Bass had heard before were nearer now: shouts, screams, tatters of music, all blended into a single cacophonous roar. One of the men in the front seat made a sound of annoyance. “Go up DuPont to Hoyle,” he said to the driver. “See can you get around it.”
The driver punched a series of studs on the control board and repeated the instructions. Obediently, the lead car swung right around the next corner.
WITH an effort that shook him with its intensity, Bass forced his mind free of its numb paralysis. There had to be something he could do—now, while he still had some freedom to act. There had to be … if only because these men thought there was.
He had two facts to work with. One: incredibly, this world and the one he knew were like mirror twins. The people who had fled in terror at sight of him had acted just as he would have done himself, if he had seen them in Glenbrook. The common people of each world believed the other to be inhabited by monsters; and each side was horribly, tragically wrong.
The common people—not the Executives or Stockholders. It could not conceivably be coincidence that Laudermilk, in Glenbrook, had showed him the same trademark that he saw in use here on the other side. The double deception had been deliberately established, was being deliberately maintained with all the elaborate mechanism of store and state, for some purpose Bass could not imagine.