Chapter 5

His first impulse was to turn and run. There was no explaining it, no rationalizing the feeling of dread and danger that struck him as he walked into the room. The feeling swept over him with almost overpowering intensity; something was unbearably wrong here.

Jeff walked in slowly, closing the door behind him. The door seemed to be pulled tight shut, sucked out of his hand. That was when the tension in the air struck Jeff like an almost physical force, and his mind filled with dread.

No one noticed him. He stared around himself curiously. He watched the Nasty Frenchman shoulder his way through the crowd. One of Silly Giggin’s particularly maddening nervous-jazz arrangements was squawking from a player somewhere in the room, and the air itself was filled with a jagged rattle of conversation that rose above the music.

Most of the faces were new to Jeff. There were tired, old ones, marked indelibly with lines of fear, lines of hunted hopelessness. There were faces with tight, compressed, bloodless lips; faces with eyes full of coldness and cynicism, and faces radiating sharp, perverted intelligence.

Crowds leaned tensely around the tables and watched the cards with eager, calculating eyes. Side bets were made as the hands were opened. Other groups huddled on the floor and watched the dice with beady, avaricious eyes.

The music jangled and scraped, and little bursts of harsh laughter broke out to compete with it. And through it all ran the chilling inescapable feeling of error, of something missed, something gone horribly wrong.

He moved slowly through the room and searched the faces milling around him. His eyes caught Blackie’s, far across the room, for the barest instant, and the chill of something gone wrong intensified and sent a quiver up his spine. He stopped a passerby and motioned at the nearest dice huddle. “How do you get in?” he asked.

The man shrugged, looking at him strangely. “You lay down your money and you play,” he snapped. “If you got no money, then you’ve got the next job’s payoff to bet with. ‘Smatter, Jack, you new around here?” And the man moved on, shaking his head.

Jeff nodded, realization striking. What would be more natural to a group of people teetering from day to day on the brink of death? The need for excitement, for activity, would be overpowering in a dismal prison-place like this. And with the huge sums of money yet unearned to bet with--Jeff shuddered. Cut-throat games, yes, but could they really explain this strange tension he sensed? Or had something happened, something to change the atmosphere, to pervade every nook and cranny of the room with an air of explosive tension?

Jeff started moving toward the Nasty Frenchman. The little man was gulping coffee in the corner. He sucked on a long, black cigar and appeared to be in deep conversation with a bald-headed giant who leaned against the wall. Jeff spotted Blackie again. She was across the room on her knees. She faced a little buck-toothed man, as she swiftly rolled the three colored dice. Her eyes followed them, quick and unnaturally bright.

Jeff shook his head. Panmumjon was a high-speed, high-tension game--a game for the steel-nerved. Its famous dead-locks had often led to murder, as the pots rose higher and higher. The girl seemed to be winning. She rolled the dice with trance-like regularity, and the little buck-toothed man’s face darkened as his money pile dwindled.

Across the room a corner crap game was moving swiftly, with staggering sums of money passing from hand to hand; the card games, though slower, left the mark of their tension on the players’ faces. Jeff still stared, until he had seen every face in the room. Paul Conroe’s face was not one of them.

No, he had not expected that. But what had happened? It was maddening to stand there, to feel the tension in the room, sense that it was growing until it seemed to pound at his temples. No one else seemed to notice it. Was he the only one aware of the change in the air, in the sounds, even in the color of the light against the walls? Something was impelling him, urging him to run, to get away, to leave the room now while he could. Yet when he tried to analyze the creeping, poisonous fear, tried to pin it down, it wriggled away into the fringes of his mind, and mocked him.

Finally, he reached the corner of the room. His ear caught the Nasty Frenchman’s nasal voice, and he froze as he stared at the little man.

“I tell you, Harpo, I heard it with my own ears. You never saw Schiml so excited. And then Shaggy Parsons was saying that the whole unit was being split up--that’s the A unit. I saw him when I was going through this afternoon. He was all excited, too.”

“But why split it up?” The huge bald-headed man called Harpo growled, his heavy lips twisting in disgust. “I don’t trust Shaggy Parsons for nothin’, and I think you hear what you want to hear. What’s the point to it? Schiml’s coming along fine in the work he’s using us in--”

The Nasty Frenchman turned red. “That’s just it: we’ve been in and we’re going to be out, right out in the cold. Can’t you get that straight? Something’s going to break. They’re onto something--Schiml and his boys--something big. And they’ve got a new man, somebody they’re excited about, somebody that’s been knocking walls down just by looking at them, or something--”

Harpo made a disgusted noise. “You mean, the old ESP story again. So maybe they go off on another spook hunt. They’ll get over it, same as they did the last time or the time before.”

The Nasty Frenchman’s voice was tense. “But they’re changing things. And changes mean trouble.” He glanced at Jeff and his eyebrows went up. “Look, they get on a line of work, they assign men to different parts of a job, they get work lined up months in advance. Then all of a sudden something new comes along. They get excited about something and they toss out a couple dozen workers, add on a couple dozen new ones, change the fees, change the work. And they end up handing the best pay to somebody who’s just come in. I don’t like it. I’ve been in this place too long. I’ve had too many tough, lousy jobs here to just get pushed aside because they don’t happen to be interested any more in what they were doing to me before. And they never tell us! We never know for sure. We just have to wait and guess and hope.”

The little man’s eyes blazed. “But we can pick up some things, a little here, a little there--you learn how, after a while. And I can tell you, something’s wrong, something’s going to happen. You can even feel it in here.”

Jeff’s skin crawled. That was it, of course. There was something wrong. But it hadn’t happened yet. It was going to happen. He stared at a huddled group around a panmumjon game, watched the bright-colored dice cubes roll across and back, across and back. A newcomer, the Nasty Frenchman had said, someone who had come in and disrupted the smooth work schedule of the Center, someone who had the doctors suddenly excited. Someone whom they were planning to use--on a spook hunt.

What kind of a spook hunt? Why that choice of words? Could Conroe conceivably be the newcomer they had been talking about? It didn’t seem possible that it could have happened so suddenly if Conroe were the one--but who? And what did this have to do with the ever-growing sense of impending danger that pervaded the room, right now?

Jeff’s eyes wandered to the dice game, and the fear in his mind suddenly grew to a screaming torrent. Go away, Jeff. Don’t watch, don’t look--He scowled, suddenly angry. Why not look? What was there so dangerous in a dice game? He moved over to the nearby huddle and watched the moving cubes in fascination. No, Jeff, no, don’t do it, Jeff--With a curse, he dropped to his knees and reached out for the dice.

“You in?” somebody asked. Jeff nodded, his face like a rock. The voice had stopped screaming in his ear, and now something else grew in his mind: a wild exhilaration that caught his breath and swept through his brain like a whirl-wind. His eyes sparkled and he pulled money from his pocket. He laid the bills on the floor and his hands closed on the dice.