I
The bolt of flame from the gun hissed by, twenty millimeters from his nose.
There was silence, and then the door opened behind him. Light footsteps approached, muffled by the fine, deadly dust on the floor. Gull craned to see the person approaching, but he was tied too tightly for that.
“You are most foolhardy, Meesta Gull’” said the girl’s soft voice. “I beg you, do not drop the fuse again or I must resort to more ‘arsh methods.” And from the corner of his eye Johan Gull saw her slim figure swiftly stoop to recover the half-meter length of rubbery plastic fuse-cord.
As she attempted to jam it into his mouth again he jerked his head aside and managed to ask, “Why are you doing this?”
“Why?” There was the soft hint of a laugh in her voice. “Ah, why indeed!” She caught his head in the crook of an arm and, surprisingly strong, held it still. He felt the stiff strand thrust between his teeth, tasted again the acrid chemical flavor. When she had done the same thing before he had been able to spit the fuse out before she could ignite it. She did not chance his dropping it again; her flame-gun hissed, and the end of the fuse began to sizzle with a tiny green spark.
“I think,” she whispered, “that it is because I love you, Meesta Gull.” And he felt something like a quick touch of lips, a scent of perfume that carried even above the pyrotechnic reek of the sputtering fuse; and then the door closed softly and he was alone in the room that was about to become an enormous bomb.
The green halo hissed the length of the dangling fuse toward his lips. Johan Gull, estimating seconds by the beat of his pulse where his wrists were tied to the wall, timed its course at perhaps two millimeters a second. Say four minutes before it reached his lips.
He sighed. It was a nuisance to think of his career ending like this—a daring foray into enemy territory to break up a smuggling operation of the Black Hats… complete success, the ring destroyed, the dozen men in charge of it dead… and then to allow himself to be tricked by the one person who survived, a slip of a girl. If he had only not answered her cry for help!
But he had. And he had found himself trussed up in a karate grip, then tied to the wall. And now—he had four minutes of life, or actually a bit less, unless he thought of something rather quickly.
He could, of course, drop the fuse any time before the spark touched his flesh and his instinctive reaction made him drop it. But the girl had said, and he had no reason to think that she lied, that the powdery dust she had spread about the floor was gunpowder. In the unconfined space of the room it would perhaps not explode; it might only flare up like the igniting of a gas jet; but it would kill Johan Gull nonetheless. Could he scrape a spot clean with his feet and drop the burning fuse there?
Experimentally he shifted position and tried. It was slow work. The floor was rough-cast cement and the tiny particles of explosive powder adhered like lint on wool. By arduous scraping with the side of his shoe Gull managed to get a six-inch square mostly free of the stuff. But it was not good enough, he saw. A pale powdery haze clung to the crevices. It was not much, but it was too much; it would take very little to flash and carry the spark of the fuse to the main mass; and two minutes were irretrievably gone.
Could he sneeze it out? It was at least worth a try, he thought; but annoyingly his nose would not itch, there was no trace of nasal drip, all he managed to do was snort at the tiny green light and make it flare brighter for a moment. He redoubled his efforts to slip his wrists out of their bonds. The thing could be done, he discovered with tempered pleasure. The girl had tied him well; but she was only a girl and not strong enough, or cruel enough, to cut deeply into his wrists. The cord stretched slowly and minutely; he would be able to work himself free.
But not in four minutes. Still more certainly not in the minute or less that was all he had left. Already he could feel the heat of the glowing end of the fuse on his chin. He was forced to lean forward for fear of igniting his goatee, but soon it would be too close for that to help.
There really was only one thing to do, thought Johan Gull regretfully.
He nibbled the short remaining length of fuse up to his lips and, wincing from the pain but denying it control of his actions, chewed out the spark.
A quarter of an hour later he was free of his bonds and through the door.
The girl was long gone, of course. Spirited little devil. Gull wished her well; he bore her no animus for taking one round of The Game, wished only that he had been able to see her more clearly, for her voice was sweet. Perhaps they would meet again.
Rubbing his wrists, Gull looked about the dingy shed in which he had been held captive. He knew this part of Marsport less well than almost any of the rest of the red planet, but recognized this rundown corridor as a slum. An uncontrolled trash basket kicked over on its side spewed refuse across the steel decking. On the black wall that had housed him some despairing wretch had scrawled. We are Property! The air pressure was low, but it reeked of dirt, drugs and vice.
Gull shrugged, lighted a cigarette, turned his back on the room that had so nearly been his death trap and strode toward the sign marked Subway. He would be late, and .5 was a stickler for promptness. But he paused to glance back again, and thought of the girl who had trapped him. He had liked her voice. She had had a charming fragrance. It had been cool of her to have ignited the fuse while she was still in the room; he might have dropped it and then and there blown both of them halfway to Deimos. And she had said that she loved him.
II
The entrance to Security lay through a barber shop. Gull hung his coat on a rack and sat back in the chair, ‘musing about the adventure he had just had and wondering about the next to come. In the corridor outside a chanting mob of UFOlogists demanded equal rights for spacemen; Gull had nearly been caught in the marching front of their demonstration as he entered the shop.
He submitted to being lathered, shaved, talced and brushed, but the jacket he was helped into was not his own. His hand in the pocket closed over the familiar shape of the pencil-key. He let himself out the back way of the barber shop and opened the private door to .5’s office.
“Sorry I’m late, sir,” he apologized to the ancient, leathery figure with the hooded eyes behind the desk.
The Old Man’s secretary, McIntyre, looked up from his eternal notebook. From the hooks and slants in that little leather-bound pad messages flew to every corner of the Solar System, alerting a battalion of Marines on Callisto, driving a Black Hat front into bankruptcy in Stuttgart, thrusting pawns against a raid on Darkside Mercury, throwing an agent to his death here on Mars. To McIntyre it was all the same. He was a dark young man who had never been known to show emotion. He said calmly “.5 is a stickler for promptness, Gull.”
Gull said, “I ran into difficulties. Something didn’t want me to get here today, I’m afraid.”
Was it his imagination, or did .5’s imperturbable face show the vestige of a frown? McIntyre put down his pencil and regarded Gull thoughtfully. “I think,” he said, “that you’d better tell .5 just what you mean by that.”
“Oh, just that I had difficulties, sir.” Quickly Gull sketched the events of the day. “Afraid I allowed myself to be decoyed. Shouldn’t have, of course. But next thing you know there was a flame-pencil in my ribs, I was tied up and a lighted fuse between my teeth. Quite unpleasant, as the floor was covered with gunpowder. I would have been here sooner, but I didn’t quite trust myself to spit the fuse clear of the gunpowder.”