Werry gave him a grim smile as he made the last connection. “Here it is again, Rob — no two ways.”
“1 don’t know,” Hasson said, donning the mantle of Judas. “It may not do any good to bull your way in. There are so many things that could… I mean, it might be better to wait.”
“The way you would do if it was your son up there?”
Hasson backed away, ashamed and afraid, as Werry switched on his lights, moved a control on the harness’s waist panel and made an easy leap into the air. He went up fast, falling into the sky, a dwindling light, a star being recalled to the rightful business of stars. Far above, as though making ready to receive him in battle, the black disk of the hotel building hurled out a streamer of yellow fire from its south side. The outburst, a solar prominence in miniature, faded almost at once and the watchers on the ground heard a dull powdery report. Quigg snatched his voice magnifier from his pocket.
“That was another bomb,” he announced, already an expert. “Watch out for glass!”
Hasson ran with the others and pressed into the lee of a fire appliance, and a surprisingly long time later there was a brief irregular pattering and whispering in the grass all around. As soon as it felt safe he returned to the television unit. The pyrotechnics which had accompanied the blast indicated that it had occurred on the blazing first floor — but he wanted to be sure that Al Werry had ascended safely through the wind-scattered hail of glass fragments.
Cec, the chief technician, switched on a microphone circuit. Terry, look out for Al Werry arriving up there. He’s got a cutter with him, and he’s about to try going in one of the upper windows. We’re gonna get some good network footage out of this, so stick with him. Right?”
“Right, Cec,” came Terry Franz’s reply and the image in the monitor well swung giddily. It centred on the figure of Werry who was silhouetted for an instant against the inferno on the hotel’s first floor before reaching the darker background of the levels above. Hasson felt an absurd constriction in his throat as he noticed that Werry, contravening police flight regulations, was wearing his ornate cap in place of a helmet.
Werry brought himself into the hovering mode about five metres out from a fourth-floor window and drew his pistol. He aimed it and fired, and the camera — with its superb low-light vision — showed a hole appearing in one of the square panes. Werry kept on firing always hitting the same small rectangle, until it had been cleared of glass. He put the gun back in its holster and worked at the controls of the thermal cutter, bringing a dagger of diamond-sharp brilliance into being at its tip. Without hesitation, Werry moved further out from the wall of the hotel, gaining a little extra height as he went. The headlights of the cars on the ground far below slid into view under his feet, tiny out-of- focus candle flames.
Werry altered a belt control and swooped in towards the window. As soon as he got within field interference radius he began to fall, but he had accurately compensated for the drop and he was able to thrust his left arm through the aperture he had created. His feet scrabbled for purchase on the horizontal divisions between tiles. He obtained a foothold, steadied himself and brought the cutter in his right hand into contact with the window frame. Its sun-white tip slid easily through metal and glass, tracing an orange-glowing line. Werry, clinging tightly to the sheer surface, began to extend the incision. The winds of altitude rugged at his uniform, producing a cold, welling nausea in Hasson’s stomach.
Hasson turned away, wondering if he was actually going to vomit, but checked himself as he noticed a flurry of movement in the dimness beyond Werry’s spread-eagled figure. A man in an unmarked flying suit was briefly seen, face a pale triangular blur, right arm extended. Hasson gave an involuntary shout as Al Werry tumbled backwards away from the window, the thermal cutter flying from his grasp and plunging out of sight. Werry fell a short distance, but his lateral impetus carried him out of interference range and his body began to float away on the night wind, limbs making feeble and uncoordinated movements. His cap fluttered down into the waiting darkness, like an escaping bird.
The menacing rectangular cavern of the window was empty once more.
For Hasson, there followed an agonised period of confusion in which he was only dimly aware of Victor Quigg leaping skywards, already paying out a plasteel line from the dispenser at his waist. Men shouted near him, but their voices were strangely distant. Myriad specks of brilliance wheeled in the overhanging night. Quigg reappeared, looking like an old man, towing an inert shape which many hands reached for as it neared the ground and became heavy, sagging down on to the grass.
Suddenly Hasson was kneeling beside Werry, staring in heart- thundering dismay at the bullet hole in the policeman’s left shoulder. The location of the wound — just above the armpit — made it look relatively harmless, the sort of injury which would have drawn scarcely a wince from a character in a holoplay, but the entire left side of Werry’s tunic was sodden with blood, glistening like a mass of fresh liver. Werry’s face was almost luminescent in its pallor. His drifting gaze triangulated on Hasson and his lips began to move. Hasson bent lower in response to the inaudible plea.
“It all piles up on you,” Werry whispered. It’s funny how it all…,”
“Don’t talk,” Hasson urged. “Don’t try to say anything.”
Werry took his hand in a fragile grip. “You’re not going to believe this, Rob, but I’m not even… I’m not even worried about…” A silence and a stillness descended over him, and his fingers relaxed their grip on Hasson’s hand.
Hasson stood up and looked about him with burning, tear-prismed eyes. A man waiting nearby handed him Werry’s cap, which had somehow terminated its descent in the immediate area. Victor Quigg rose from his kneeling position, snatched the cap and placed it on Werry’s chest. He stood over the body for a few seconds, then turned and walked away in the direction of the nearest police car, trailing leaden feet through the long grass. Hasson ran after him and caught his arm.
“Where are you going, Victor?” he said.
want my shotgun,” Quigg replied woodenly. “I’m going up on the roof of the hotel, and I’m going to wait there with my shotgun. ”
“Lutze mightn’t even reach the roof.”
“If he does, I’ll be there with my shotgun.”
“It’s young Theo I’m thinking about now,” Hasson said, hear-. ing his own words across bleak interstellar distances. “Give me a gun and a spare harness.”
ten
Nothing is happening. I’m still on the ground — safe and secure. Nothing is happening.
Hasson watched the underside of the Chinook Hotel blossom and unfurl like a carnivorous flower. As the circular building expanded to the limits of his field of view he began to see details of its structure — the spray of radial cantilevers, the spiderweb pattern of ribs and intercostals, the twin circular apertures of the elevator shafts, one of which glowed with a shifting ruddy light which made it a back door to hell.
It’s quite simple, you see. The foundation for the supporting column was positioned over a geological fault, or a swamp, and now the whole thing is sinking into it like a piston. I’m still on the ground — safe and secure — watching the hotel drop down to my level.
His flight brought him close to the hotel’s lower rim and for the first time he was able to hear the fire at work. It was making little downward progress for the time being — only a few gleaming razor slashes revealed that beams and slabs were being tortured by heat and heat-induced stresses — but flames and hot gases were pouring up through stairwells and ventilation shafts to reach other floors, and their advance was signalled by ragged explosions of timbers, glass and paint containers. Clouds of smoke interspersed with streamers of long-lived sparks were being carried away an the wind.