Chapter IV

She seemed surprised, but tried to smile. “I thought I left you asleep, Will,” she said, in a tone that was meant to be bantering. “‘Smatter, the fuse blow?”

He accepted the excuse for his presence in the basement. “Yeah, it did. You left the iron on. I wondered what happened to you?”

“Nothing. Just shopping. There wasn’t a bit of food in the place--and I must say, Will, you aren’t much of a housekeeper. I bought pounds of soap!”

He followed her up the stairs, and his key opened the door. He was still operating on the general belief that they’d be least likely to spot him where they had already found him once. If the girl had tipped them off, then they had it figured out that he had run off, and probably wouldn’t be back.

He hoped so, at any rate.

She was talking too briskly, and she was too careful not to mention that the iron was cool, with its cord wrapped neatly around the handle. He offered no explanation, but let her babble on about the strange coincidence of his being the Will Hawkes, and how she’d almost forgotten the childhood days.

“How come the Ibañez?” he asked, finally.

“Stage name! I tried to make a go of the musicals, but it wasn’t my line, I found. But the name stuck.”

“And where’d you learn how to drug coffee that way?”

She didn’t change expression. There was even a touch of a twinkle in her eye. “Waitress in a combination bar and restaurant. You needed the sleep, Will. And I guess I still feel as much of a mother to you as I did when you used to get hurt, so long ago.”

She had things out of the bags now, and he saw that she had been doing a lot of shopping. There had still been time enough to call the slim young man, though--or, he suddenly realized, the fat man. He had no more reason to believe her an enemy than a friend. Then he corrected that. If she’d known enough to call the fat man, and had been his friend, she could have told him things. She’d denied knowing anything, though.

He couldn’t understand why he trusted her--and yet, somehow, he did. Even if he knew she’d called them, he would still have to trust her. He was sure now that she was lying, and that she had been the girl at the door--but that meant she’d been with the fat man. And the fat man had seemed to be his friend. Or, had the man been set to lure him out, but miscalculated, and gotten only what had been meant for him?

His head was spinning, and he gave it up. He was a fool to trust her simply because the fear feeling subsided around her--but he had nothing better to do than to follow his hunches, and then try to play the odds as best he could.

“Cigarettes,” she said, handing him a pack of his brand. “And for me. Shoe dye--your shoes need it, and I couldn’t find a shoe store. I did get a shirt though, and a tie. You’ll find a hat in that bag. Size seven and a quarter?”

He nodded gratefully, and went in to change. His old shirt had caught most of the cat’s blood, and he needed a fresh one. There were a couple of spots on his trousers, but they’d do. And the sports jacket matched well enough. He daubed the dye onto his shoes--one of the combined polish and dye things.

“Cold-cuts all right?” she asked, and he called back a vague answer that seemed to satisfy her. He was staring at the shoe dye.

It worked fairly well, when he experimented. He daubed it onto his hair with a wisp of cotton. His hair began to mat down, but he found that combing it out as he went along removed the worst of the wax and still left some of the color. It worked better than it should have done.

He found a bottle of something that smelled of alcohol and belonged in her cosmetics, and began removing most of the mess. By being careful, he got the wax and most of the dye smell off, while leaving his hair darker.

“Better wash up,” she called.

There was a razor among the things she had bought. He daubed some of the dye on his upper lip, where the stubble of a mustache was showing. It was easier there, if it didn’t wash off in soap and water.

Some of it did, but when he finished shaving, he felt better. It wouldn’t pass close inspection, but he now seemed to have darker hair, and the dye had exaggerated the little beginning of a mustache enough to make some change in his appearance.

He waited for her to comment, but she said nothing. He waited for her questions about what he was going to do, and her explanations that of course he couldn’t stay there. She merely went on talking idly, while they ate. It didn’t fit.

Finally he stood up and began taking down the rope that was strung up over one end of the room, to use as a clothes line, he supposed. She looked up at that. “What--”

“You can fight, if you want to,” he told her. “Or you can save yourself the headache of being knocked out. Take your choice. People don’t pay much attention to screams in a place like this. And I’m not going to harm you, if you’ll take it easily.”

“You mean it!” Her eyes were huge in her face, and there was a touch of fright now. She gulped visibly, and then seemed to go limp. “All right, Will. In the bedroom?”

He nodded, and she went ahead of him. She didn’t struggle, until he was about to gag her. Then she drew her head aside. “There’s money in my bag, if you’re going out.”

He swore, hotly and sickly. If she’d only act just once as a normal female should! Maybe Irma had been a hysterical, cold-blooded fool, but she couldn’t have been that much different from other women--even the books indicated Ellen should be anything but so damned coöperative!

“If you’ll tell me what’s going on, I’ll still let you go,” he suggested, drawing her hands tighter together.

“I can’t, Will. I don’t know.”

He had to believe her--he knew she was telling the truth, at least to some extent. And that made it just so much worse. He bound the gag over her mouth as gently as he could, and closed the door behind him. Her big eyes haunted him as he turned to the telephone.

The information girl at CCNY could only tell him that Wilbur Hawkes had resigned abruptly seven months before, and no one knew where he was--they had heard he was doing government research. He snorted at that--it was always the excuse, when nobody knew anything.

He tried a few other numbers, and gave up. Nobody knew--and nobody seemed to react to his name any differently from what they would have done had he remained a quiet, professorish man, minding his own business, instead of being chased by...

He couldn’t complete that. The idea was still too fantastic. Even if there were alien life-forms that were subtly invading Earth, why should they pick on him? What good could a little, unimportant mathematician do them--particularly if they had the powers he already knew they possessed? It was a poor answer, though no harder to believe than that any group on Earth could so suddenly come up with miracles.