Chapter 14

He’d made it plain that he was representing Wendel. But he hadn’t come right out and identified himself, and I had no way of knowing exactly what kind of Wendel agent he was. The worst kind, beyond a doubt. But what I would have liked to know took in more territory than that.

Was he ... a replacement? Had he been instructed to step into the shoes of the secret agent the robot had killed in space? If he had, the satisfaction he’d get from killing me would probably exceed the pleasure a run-of-the-mill Wendel police officer would experience.

It would be easier for him to identify with the slain crewman and feel a sense of personal outrage strong enough to make him think of himself as an avenger. The fact that he wasn’t wearing a uniform lent support to that grim possibility. When a man has a strong personal reason for wanting you dead it can make the official reason seem twice as urgent. It could also bring into his face the kind of look that Glacial Stare was still keeping trained on me.

There was only one thing I knew with absolute certainty. Answering his questions would do me no good--would only make the danger greater the instant I stopped talking. I’d be signing my own death warrant with a vengeance if I co-operated with him right there in the hospital room and spared him the trouble of having me bound and gagged and smuggled out of the hospital into a Big-Image interrogation room.

Why make him a present of the only card I was holding? Why be that charitable when ... God, how silly could you get? If I’d had my strength or there had been anyone within earshot to dispute his authority if I shouted for help--a one in fifty chance of it, even--I might have been holding at least a Jack or a Queen. But never an Ace, or four of a kind or a Royal Flush. About all I was holding was the joker. In some games the joker can be the highest card in the deck, but not in the kind of game the three of us were playing.

It was the third player who was holding all of the really high cards. He was hovering just behind Glacial Stare, with a shroud with my name embroidered on it draped over his arm. He could see my hand clearly, because he was looking straight at me out of eyes like holes in a skull.

That scythe-and-sickle round is almost unbeatable because of the way Death has of just quietly raising the ante until all hope is gone. Sometimes you’ve no choice but to let him call your bluff, lay your cards face up on the table, and wait for the blow to fall.

Sometimes ... but not always. Death is a weird-o who doesn’t really want anyone to live to a crusty old age and that can anger you, and there are no limits to what a certain kind of resentment can do for you. You’ll take desperate chances when you know the sands have just about run out.

I came up out of the bed so fast the electricity my body generated made the sheets crackle. It wasn’t the helplessly weak body I’d thought it. Not at all. When I whipped back my arm I could feel a thrust of power and resilience in my shoulder muscles that amazed me, because it shouldn’t have been there. There was no flabbiness or lack of muscle tone.

I crashed into him before my feet hit the floor, sinking my fist into his mid-section and sending the chair he was sitting in skidding half across the hospital room.

He clung to both arms of the chair, too jolted to straighten up and try to heave himself out of it before I shortened the distance between us by hurling myself directly at him again. I just missed fumbling that crucial follow-up, because my legs were deficient in muscle tone and they almost collapsed under me before I got to him.

I dragged him out of the chair and had him down on the floor and was banging his head against the floor before he could get any kind of grip on me. I wasn’t in the least bit gentle about it. If I’d been banging him around for five or ten minutes without stopping I couldn’t have heightened the look of shock and absolute horror in his eyes.

The best he could do was twist about under me and try desperately to raise himself a little, thrusting his head forward to keep me from bringing it so violently into contact with the floor. He seemed to be trying so hard to get out from under that I decided to help him. I lifted him clean off the floor and slammed him back against the wall--not once, but several times.

I don’t know where my strength came from, but even my legs were doing all right now. They were still the weakest part of me, but they went right on supporting me until I’d finished clouting him with something that was just as good as a sledgehammer--the firm wall itself, completely stationary as it was. If I’d been standing behind it using it as a forward-thrusting shield his skull couldn’t have cracked against it any harder.

I suppose it wasn’t really the hospital room wall I was clouting him with, because, as I say, it was stationary. But when you’re extracting the fangs of a dangerous little reptile who has just threatened you with Big-Image interrogation and know that your strength may give out at any moment cause and effect get swallowed up in an urgency that can distort reality. His face was a confused blur for a moment. But a second or two before all of the expression drained out of it and he slumped jerkily to the floor my vision steadied and I saw that his look of absolute horror had been replaced by the deadliest kind of hatred.

It’s always a little jolting, no matter how you slice it, to know that a man who should be incapable of feeling anything but shock and pain can pass out cold with that kind of look in his eyes.

I’d gone berserk for a moment, but when I have to, when there’s some compelling reason for it, I can cool off fast. Calm down would be a more accurate way of phrasing it, for I knew it would take a long time for the way I felt about Glacial Stare to turn from anger to enlightened scientific detachment. He couldn’t really help being what he was, because what is known as the bastard-pattern gets grooved into the poor unhappy devils who are afflicted with it way back in childhood. They injure themselves more than they injure others, even though what they do to others in the process often doesn’t bear thinking about.

Right at the moment Glacial Stare had injured himself, but not deliberately. I had done most of the injuring for him. But there would be times when he’d punish himself twice as remorselessly, and he’d go on doing it to the end of his days. If there’s a hell on Earth the sadistic bastards occupy it, and it’s unscientific to feel anything but pity for them.

It was equally unscientific for me to feel anything but concern for my own safety right at the moment, because I was still trapped in a hospital room with all of the physical weakness I’d felt a few minutes before creeping back and with no guarantee that if I walked out of the room in a tottering condition I wouldn’t run smack into another Wendel agent.

Quite possibly they had the hospital surrounded and when they saw what I’d done to Glacial Stare they wouldn’t talk with me as long as he had done before I’d belted him unconscious.

They’d either blast me down, cold-bloodedly and on the spot, with one of the compact little hand-guns Doctor Mile-Away had discussed with Joan on the ambulance--how many days, weeks away that ride seemed--or gag and bind me and carry me out on a stretcher.

Glacial Stare himself no longer worried me. He’d be out for as long as it would take me to decide whether it would be better to go staggering out of the hospital room and trust the first person I collided with not to betray me, or flop back on the bed and shout for help from there.

You do crazy things, sometimes, when you’re that uncertain. There wasn’t a chance of his coming to immediately, but just automatically I crouched beside him and rolled one of his eyelids back with my thumb. The glazed pupil that stared sightlessly back at me gave me a jolt, because it could have meant that I’d killed him. I thrust my hand under his shirt and felt around for a heartbeat and found no trace of one. His skin was clammy and very cold.

Then I saw that he was still breathing. His chest rose and fell and there was a sudden, dull thumping where my palm was resting.

All right, that took care of him. He would live to turn vicious again. But it didn’t take care of me. I was still in the worst kind of danger, and sounding off might be the unwisest thing I could do. But what chance would I have otherwise? Someone would have to know or I’d likely as not take all of the wrong risks.