21

 

 

Murray had left the key in the lock, with a vague idea of foiling a pass-key. Clearly the intruders had more sophisticated means of opening doors. There was the faintest of snicks as the wards turned; then the hushing of the bottom of the door on the thick-piled carpet; then cautious footsteps. There was no light. Murray opened one eyelid invisibly close to the pillow, and saw darkness as complete as before: there was not even a light on in the corridor now.

Apart from their cat-soft tread, the only sound from Valentine and Delgado was a hissing intake of breath when they came close to the bed.

Not the experience contracted for.

Whatever that might mean, Murray thought grimly, there was really no reason why he shouldn’t give them another uncontracted experience. From the noise of breathing, he could tell that they had both gone around to Heather’s side of the bed—

‘You fool.’ The words barely disturbed the air; genuine sleepers would never have been woken by them.

‘But there was nothing on their tapes to suggest—!’ That would be Delgado, very slightly louder, almost babbling.

‘How could there be? We haven’t had a tape from either of them—except in the theatre—since the first night! Out of here now, quickly.’

Murray moved.

He had spent the past several moments calculating in his mind’s eye exact distances and directions. When he slid out of bed, he was closer to the half-open door than either Delgado or Valentine. He was at the door while they were still dumbfounded, shut it and turned the key and put on the light within the space of a few heartbeats.

In the bed, Heather rolled over and gave a convincing pantomime of waking from deep sleep. Her intention to feign astonishment at the intrusion gave way to real surprise when she opened her eyes and saw what Murray had already seen.

Delgado and Valentine were masked. At least, that was the first impression; the upper parts of their faces were covered by black goggles with large flat lenses, and in the middle of their foreheads another lens suggested a third eye. Murray had never seen such equipment before, but he could make an excellent guess at its function. These were exceedingly compact night-vision glasses, with their own black-light sources built in.

In Valentine’s left hand there was an object much harder to identify—a box, about six inches square by ten deep, held by a handle attached to one side and having on the side opposite the handle a square open-meshed grille. Whatever it was, Valentine was alarmed at it being seen, and as soon as he recovered from his first shock, he thrust it as well as he could inside his jacket.

‘All right,’ Murray said after a pause. ‘What the devil are you doing in my room?’

Delgado’s self-possession had deserted him completely; he scarcely resembled the arrogant dominating person Murray had known. By contrast, Valentine summed the situation up almost at once. He made no attempt to excuse his presence or prevaricate.

‘Delgado!’ he said sharply. ‘You’ve observed him—what’s he most likely to do?’

‘Uh—’ Delgado strove to master himself, raising a hand to peel off his dark-vision goggles. There was a sucking noise as they parted from his skin. ‘Call—uh—call the others to witness the fact that we’re in here, I guess.’

‘How many intractables are left?’

‘Stop this nonsense!’ Murray interrupted harshly. He had an uneasy feeling that he knew too little, and his temporary control of events was slipping away. ‘Heather, I think Delgado has a good idea. Here!’ He reached behind him without taking his eyes off the intruders, unhooked a dressing-gown from the back of the door, and tossed it towards her. ‘Go and wake Sam Blizzard and get him along here. Do you know which is his room?’

‘Y-yes,’ Heather whispered, sitting up in bed and pulling the robe around her.

There was no hint of a reaction from Valentine to tell Murray whether his guess about Blizzard’s ‘tractability’ was right or not. But judging by the way the producer had made Delgado eat crow over scrapping the play he should be a tough customer to argue with.

Heather padded barefoot from the room. Warily, Murray concentrated on seeing that neither Valentine nor Delgado tried to make a break. But they seemed resigned to their predicament, and that nettled him.

‘What’s the long silence for?’ he taunted. ‘Thinking up a good story?’

Valentine glanced at Delgado. For public consumption, Murray guessed, he wanted to return to his former subordinate’s role. Delgado, however, was too upset to take his cue, and failed to reply.

‘Not enjoying this experience, hey?’ Murray went on after a pause. ‘Didn’t you contract for it?’

Even Valentine’s composure fractured at that; as for Delgado, his jaw dropped as though he had seen a ghost. ‘What did you say?’ he blurted.

‘Quiet!’ Valentine rapped.

‘Ah! Beginning to get worried, are you? I’m delighted.’ Murray cast around in his mind for something else that might disturb Valentine, and settled on the first possibility to strike him. ‘What did you think you’d got when you hired me—another Jean-Paul Garrigue? Well, you were wrong. You got another Léa Martinez instead—with teeth this time.’

Valentine flinched visibly, and Delgado caught at his arm. ‘We’ve got to shut him up!’ he exclaimed. ‘We can’t let him talk like this to—’

‘Hold your tongue!’ Valentine snapped. ‘That’s exactly what he want you to do—tell him more than he actually knows. He doesn’t know anything. He can’t possibly.’

‘No?’ Murray said, curling his lip. ‘I suppose it was because I didn’t know anything that I avoided all the tapes you put in my bed—and turned the television set around so my room couldn’t be scanned!’

Delgado whimpered.

‘Keep you head,’ Valentine adjured him through white lips. ‘He’s bluffing. He’s got a few hints and he’s trying to make us think he knows it all.’

That was so true Murray almost allowed himself to smile. He repressed the impulse, wondering why it was taking Heather so long to wake Blizzard and come back.

‘Your trouble’s obvious, Valentine,’ he said, to keep the others’ minds occupied during the interminable waiting. ‘You don’t know anything about me. You’re too used to your scanners and tapes and God knows what, and because I’ve been dodging I’m a mystery to you. But I don’t need to use anything except my common sense. I’ve never become dependent on anything else. Delgado kidded Sam Blizzard along pretty well, but he didn’t kid me. He lets it be seen much too easily that he doesn’t care a hoot in hell about this play he’s alleged to be writing with us. All he’s interested in is corrupting people.’

‘You don’t count taking young girls to bed as corrupting them?’ Valentine suggested, with a hint of sarcasm.

‘I didn’t have time to corrupt her, Valentine. I laid on a little trap for you, and you fell into it beautifully.’ Murray smiled. It felt—and probably looked—more like a sneer.

There was a tap at the door behind him. The tension diminished sharply.

‘Right!’ Murray said. ‘Now’s your chance to explain yourselves.’ He turned the handle. ‘Come in, Heather!’

She complied. But not willingly. The image of her being followed by Blizzard was so imprinted on Murray’s mind that for a long moment he failed to see—from the corner of his eyes—what was really happening to her.

When he did, he was so shaken that his attention left Valentine, and Valentine seized his chance. Murray had no idea what he used—possibly the heavy box he had been hiding in his coat—but he made the blow violent.

One second, Murray was turning to see Heather pinioned by another of the black-garbed ‘stewards’—the tallest of the three, whose name he had never learned—both arms locked behind her back with one hand and the other clamped over her mouth, thumb and fore-finger beside her nose to choke off her breath if she dared to make a sound. The next, he was lost in a blinding aura of pain, which began at the top of his head and ended when the floor came spiralling to meet him.

He lost consciousness for perhaps a minute. When he came to, he had no energy to rise. All his willpower had been sapped by the blow and the pain. He heard voices as though they were lights in swirling fog.

‘I was servicing Blizzard’s tape.’ That was the tall ‘steward’. ‘A beautiful clean record. I’d just changed it for the new playback when the girl came to the door. I imitated Blizzard’s voice and took her in. She said what she wanted before I opened the door, and in view of that I brought her around.’

‘Very quick thinking, Walter.’ That was Valentine. ‘You saved us a great deal of trouble.’

‘But what are we going to do?’ That was Delgado, still not recovered from his shock and dismay. ‘You told me yourself, Valentine—Douglas promised his friend he was going to leave in the morning!’

‘I know.’ Valentine sounded impatient. ‘And I no longer think we can afford to let him go so easily. I told you he was bluffing, and he was—but he was building that bluff on too many hard facts for my liking. We shall have to find out how he picked up all his clues. Walter, is everything else in order?’

‘Yes, as far as I know. I’d just started the tape for Blizzard when I was interrupted, and that was the only exchange required tonight, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes. But it’s no longer so urgent. We’ve overlooked something in Blizzard’s case, that’s certain, from the way he spoke to Manuel about the play. We can live with that for a day or two, though. Right now—Manuel!”

‘Yes?’—hesitantly from Delgado.

‘Go and edit up a concentrape for the girl. Put in a basic wipe at the beginning to cure her of this damned habit of cutting the triplem to her recorder. Walter, get her something to make her sleep. I want the last four nights’ urges in her mind—solidly in—by morning. Is that clear?’

‘It’s risky, isn’t it?’ Walter countered. ‘You might unstable her whole personality.’

‘It doesn’t have to hold for long. And we have bigger fish to fry, anyway. As soon as I’ve made my rounds, Manuel, I’ll come in and help you edit a tape for Douglas. It’ll have to be mainly basic wipes tonight, I’m afraid—with some kind of excuse for his deciding to stay here, of course. I doubt if this friend of his will actually come to see him, but he just possibly might. I’ll think up a good way of phrasing it. Go on, out with you.’

There was the sound of the door opening and closing. Lying face down on the carpet, Murray fought to make sense of what he was hearing, and failed. Concentrape—triplem—they were without meaning for him. The only fact which he had secured was equally absurd: it was that these men were talking as if they could make adjustments to a human brain as easily as a mechanic could re-time an engine.

‘What exactly happened?’ Walter inquired as the door closed behind Delgado.

Valentine recounted the events of the past hour briefly. In conclusion, he said, ‘But as you probably gathered from what I told Manuel, somebody’s been careless. Douglas wasn’t just flapping his lips when he challenged us. He’s got hold of a few phrases—contracting for an experience, that’s one—which just oughtn’t to be in his vocabulary. Cleaning his mind will be the devil’s own job. I shall have to probe for all kinds of chance references. … Well, it has to be done, if we aren’t to abandon this project entirely. Help me to get him up on the bed. I suppose he’s played his usual trick of stripping the triplem off the mattress. Never mind—I have the conditioner with me, and it may still be working after I used it to bang him on the head.’

Murray summoned up what power to act was left him by the blinding pain in his skull, and snatched at the only thing to come within reach as the two men bent to take his legs and drag him towards the bed. He put his remaining strength into a convulsive jerk, and something gave.

‘Damn. I thought he was unconscious,’ he heard Valentine say calmly. ‘Surprising endurance they have, considering their primitive physical maintenance, don’t you think?’

A foot came down cruelly on the fingers grasping the—the—what had he taken hold of, anyway? Murray saw foggily that it was the cable running from the television set into room thirteen. He hoped he had done some more damage by hauling on it. He couldn’t really accept the idea, but if what Valentine had said was a guide, it might be his last act of his own volition before they turned him into a puppet.

‘Just a second,’ he heard Walter say. ‘He hasn’t stopped at stripping off the triplem tonight. He’s removed the tape as well.’

‘Probably thrown it out of the window again.’ Valentine sighed. ‘Go and get a fresh spool from Manuel, will you? I shall have to have a fairly long recording of Douglas before I can make up his wipes.’

‘Right.’ Walter moved towards the door.

Painfully, Murray gathered the tattered shreds of his faculties. If he could even get to his feet while Valentine was alone in the room—

‘Is something wrong?’ Valentine said sharply.

‘Yes,’ Walter snapped. ‘I smell something. I think it’s burning.’

‘A fire?’ Valentine started. ‘Look in thirteen, quick!’

Noise of a door opening. A cry of alarm. ‘It’s an inferno in there! He must have caused an arc when he pulled that cable! I told Manuel—’

‘Never mind! Get Victor! Run for it—these places were built like tinderboxes!’

‘What about—?’

‘The rest of them can take their chance! I’m not going to stay and be roasted alive! Out of my way, damn you!’