The Cross of Gold Affair - Davies Fredric. Страница 12

With the whole house in his hand, he opened up the Solo smile full on the human beach ball paddling in front of him. “I sank your drink, didn’t I?” he asked.

Porpoise sank back into the water, covering his eyes with one hand and waving the other feebly, to hasten Napoleon’s departure. Arnold marched him past a dripping, frowning Apis, and down a corridor as Gambol squealed, “How did he get that thing on Apis’ belt, anyway? Isn’t it pretty suspicious, finding that thing there, on one of your own men ?”

“Gambol, you are a low-life, a yellow, rum-dum underachiever. Solo led my men a pretty chase out there and tangled with all three of them. One of them may not recover from this particular beach party, but you took him with no risk and no fight. That was where he ought to have been searched, not after he’s roughed up my men and had half a hundred chances to plant his tracer on someone.” Porpoise’s next words were lost to Napoleon in the twisting of corridors, but moments later he recognized Gambol’s quavering, liquid yell.

“Judge not,” he said to Arnold, “lest ye also be judged.” Arnold looked at him stonily. “I read that in an old book,” said Napoleon apologetically.

Once away from Porpoise’s steam-bath climate the temperature dropped alarmingly. Arnold whisked his prisoner along in the increasing cold until the trip ended before a blank wall. Napoleon looked questioningly at his guide, and Arnold backed off to the far wall.

“When the door opens, step through and don’t move once you get inside.” He operated a hidden catch, and the wall developed a round seam that produced a circular door. The cut-out part of the wall rotated inward to reveal a cabin belonging between the stars.

The other side of the circular door was covered with wheels and levers. It looked like something from a bank safety-vault. The floor and walls were of even, glare-reducing linoleum, pleasantly off-white. On the slanted floor, on the walls and ceiling, Napoleon saw equally-spaced handholds. He realized the room was meant to suggest a trip under zero gravity, where a man might want to use any surface for a floor. Movement in free-fall would be a mere trifle with handholds every few feet.

Covering two walls, a control console spread itself in gadget-crazy confusion. Knobs, verniers, display panels, buttons, alarm-lights and oscilloscopes were all dutifully labeled so that anyone, provided he could read and understand a hundred instructions, could operate the mockup spaceship. Out a fake porthole, stars flickered and occasionally a ringed planet, not looking much like Saturn, would disturb the imitation interstellar heavens, as the view made the ship seem to move.

“Almost any of those levers will move the porthole view faster, slower, or at an angle,” said Arnold, “but none of them will open this spacelock door. We wouldn’t want you stepping into the vacuum of outer space without a special suit-and Mr. Porpoise wouldn’t want you leaving this room without his permission under any circumstances.”

Hands in the pockets of his rumpled suit, Napoleon looked over his prison. He turned to Arnold, indicating with raised eyebrows the other door to the room, which seemed to be a way out.

“Yes, that’s an exit. But we’re fairly certain you won’t try that way, because it goes through the Space Maze, the most confusing house of mirrors in Coney. Besides its normal difficulty, we have an added reason to believe you’ll sit right here until we free you.” He reached in his pocket and took out a Johnson quarter.

“When the power is on in this maze, it keeps the public amused with flashing lights, scurrying monsters and what we modestly call fourth-dimensional projections. When we turn on an additional power source, however, it becomes just the tiniest bit deadly.” He showed Napoleon a slit of teeth meant to be a smile, and flipped his quarter through the room into the adjoining chamber.

The quarter hit one wall, and bounced down. As it landed, before it really touched the floor, it crossed unseen lines of current. A tiny flash was followed by the splitting of the entire floor along a precise line. The two parts of the floor slipped back into the wall, and Napoleon looked down through the opening to follow the fall of the coin.

A shudder gripped his whole frame as he stared down into the ocean at the tips and edges of a forest of knives. He half sprang, half fell back from the doorway as the floor slammed back together. Napoleon crouched down to the floor of his wide-open prison, and stared at the floor in the next room, trying to count the blades in his memory of one brief glimpse into a hell specially designed for him. Each one seemed to be working its way into his flesh, and he sweated in the cold while the vision swept over his nervous system.

“You see,” said Arnold, “we just don’t want you to leave. You might dive across that floor at an angle to land in the next room, with some assurance that that floor wont split under you. But even though I designed this maze, it was long ago, and I wouldn’t guarantee that the next room isn’t highly charged with electricity, or that your slightest touch on a wall wouldn’t release deadly gas.” He sighed over the loss of his quarter, and turned to go. “Those knives have been lashed to this pier’s pilings for many years/’ he said in afterthought. “You could catch lockjaw if any of them cut you. I really wouldn’t advise you to try our maze at all.” He stepped away from the spacelock door, and it swung to a solid close.

Chapter 6

“You’re using real bullets!”

“Frontal attack,” Illya said to himself. “They can teach all the sneak and secret classes they want at U.N.C.L.E. refresher sessions, but sometimes a spy has to get right out in the daylight and scare the bejeebers out of the enemy.” The marble and whitestone facade of Gambols office building loomed up at him from across the street as he backed the U.N.C.L.E. sedan into the alley a second time and slid out. Pedestrian traffic had increased since he’d fled backwards down that alley ten minutes earlier, but he threw out the idea of mixing with the crowd. He dodged across the

busy streets like a salmon confused by the rush of traffic at spawning-time, and entered the building at speed.

His lockpick made it the work of a moment to jam both banks of elevators. The tiled floor led in two directions, and he picked the dimmer corridor almost without thinking about it. At the rear of the building he found and blocked the service elevator, leaving a large stool propped across the open door, with the out of service sign across it. With all routes but the stairs and the street door cut off, he felt a bit better about his chances of tackling the Gambol menagerie meaningfully.

Back up the dim cement and tile hall he turned and took the stairs three at a time. On the second floor things got dingier, but he hardly paused. With no one in sight, he kept on up the stairs, heading for Gambol’s fourth-floor office. The carpeting gave out, and metal runners did their best to trip him up as he moved on. On the next level, he saw a girl standing at the elevator bank, pushing the down button and tapping one foot.

“Frontal attack,” he muttered. One hand pushed his hair back reflexively as he sucked in a deep breath and stepped out toward her.

“Pardon me, Miss,” he said, “but are you with the local satrapy?”

She didn’t blink an eye as she turned from the elevator to smile at him. “I’ve got to admit that’s a new one,” she said. Her micro-second smile didn’t have a lot of warmth in it. “But I’m not part of the satrapy, and I don’t want to join the neighborhood seraglio, either. This is a lousy neighborhood; a girl can’t even get an elevator.” She turned back to push the down button again, jabbing it with a great deal of force. Illya wondered how Napoleon would have fared with the same problem, and backed off, excusing himself.