He was raising the gun to shoot!
The arrangements I had earlier made had been needed after all! I closed my hand on the Apparatus radio relay ring I had put on. It activated the vibration speaker I had planted on the balcony rail outside the door.
A scream went off behind him!
He whirled!
He was standing on the door end of the runner rug.
I reached down and grabbed my end and yanked.
With a flip he went forwards.
He staggered.
He hit the balcony rail.
With a clatter he went over and fell fifteen feet to the ground!
I wasted no time.
I grabbed up my things and jammed them in a suitcase.
I snatched up my viewers.
I scrabbled around. I couldn't find my gun! The (bleep) must have stolen it or I had dropped it earlier in the day.
No time now to search.
I streaked out of the room.
Running like mad, I got to the manure truck.
I threw my things into it. I jumped under the wheel. I jimmied the ignition. It started.
I tore out of there, horse biscuits flying behind me in the wind!
Had I had my gun, I might have shot him. But I certainly would not have touched anything he touched, so using his rifle was out. In retrospect, as I drove, I thought it might have been smarter to have gone over to him on the pavement and stamped his head in. But again, I hadn't wanted to touch him. Yes, I was doing right. Just get out of there and fast!
I thought I was safe. The motel proprietor would never suspect anyone would steal this manure truck. He probably wouldn't even notice it was gone until much later in the day, for he never seemed to be around. And if the police stopped me I could say it was a Federal commandeer of transport.
So I felt safe as I drove in to an all-night trucker's station to the north of Lynchburg and filled up with gas and oil.
I was just pulling out of the island when I chanced to look back.
Here came Torpedo! Wild-haired and wild-eyed, insane for revenge, he was driving an old Toyota subcom-pact!
I stepped on it!
With screaming wheels I went tearing up Route 29.
I was outdistancing him!
Charlottesville, Culpeper, Warrenton, Arlington. In the dawn I was rocketing around the Capital Beltway of Washington, D. C.
Anxiously stopping again for gas, I looked behind. I thought I had lost him. For the next hour, I drove more sensibly. I was on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway and just passing Elkton, Maryland, when-BLAM! SCREEYOW!-zn elephant slug hit the car top and went ricocheting away!
Oh, after that I drove!
The prospect of not only being dead but raped and not only being raped but infected totally gave me a very heavy foot upon the throttle.
The New Jersey Turnpike is usually fast but it was too slow for me that awful day.
I had almost come abreast of Staten Island when the horrible realization came to me that I had no place to go!
Torpedo knew my phone number at Miss Pinch's. And furthermore my welcome at that apartment would be very violent.
Driving in that stinking truck, my head spun in a quandary. Then Apparatus training took over. Go to the least expected place. Go to the place where one might get protection.
HIS MOTHER!
She would defend me, that was for sure! She hated her son.
The Goethals Bridge lay just ahead. I turned off the New Jersey Turnpike onto it. I went down the Staten Island Expressway like a fired cannonball. I got across the dizzy heights of the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and was shortly speeding up the Queens Expressway.
Rounding corners on two wheels, I rocketed toward safety. I slammed on the brakes before the house and
leaped out of the steaming car. I raced up the steps and pounded on the door.
The hulking monster of a woman recognized me. I crowded past her into the hall. In a voice I was carefully keeping from sounding hysterical, I told her that her son was after me with intent to kill.
She nodded, seeming to understand. She went up the stairs and was gone a bit. Then she leaned over the banister and beckoned. I went up.
Apparently the room at the top of the stairs had once been Torpedo's. He had painted bars on the window-pane. The bedstead was cold iron. A portrait, a photograph, hung on the wall. The man in it had a crooked, leering face. It was autographed:
To Torpedo,
my best con,
J. Q Conikul, Ph.D.
His prison psychologist!
Mrs. Fiaccola pointed to the closet and indicated I should enter it.
A POUNDING OF FEET ON THE STAIRS!
TORPEDO!
"Where is the son of a (bleepch)?" he was screaming and I realized he had seen the car.
"Torpedo!" she said. "You want a kill. You're going to get one!"
His mother was beckoning him up to the room. Her right hand was obscured in the folds of her skirt.
He was snarling and agitated. But he was obeying.
Firmly, she pushed him into the room and made him sit down on the bed.
She made a shushing signal with her left hand and
then used it to gesture at the closet. "He's in there," she said. My hair stood on end!
His mother lifted her right hand. She was holding his leopard, the sawed-off shotgun!
She pushed it vertical at his chest as though to force him to take it.
He reached out to grab the breach.
With a quick movement, his mother lowered it so that the barrel was against his chin from below.
SHE PULLED BOTH TRIGGERS!
The noise was deafening!
The whole of Torpedo's jaw and head hit the ceiling!
His mother wiped off the triggers with the hem of her skirt. She curled his dying fingers around the guard.
She then opened a drawer and got out some gun cleaning materials and put them on the bed.
Then she stood back. "Ever since you been out of the Federal pen," she said to the dead body, "you talk psychology, psychology, psychology. So I read up. Now you got some psychology, you no-good, filthy, rotten philanderer of corpses! I hope the devil makes you read psychology the rest of infinity!"
She turned to me and beckoned me out of the closet. "You witnessed it. He was cleaning his gun and it went off, wasn't he?"
I nodded numbly.
"So that's the end of my no-good, carrion-{bleeping) (bleep) of a son. And a pleasure it is to see him lying there dead even without the twenty-five thousand insurance I now get."
Only then, at that very moment, was the brutal truth borne in upon me.
Torpedo had failed.
I personally would now have to handle the whole situation.
The fate of Earth, of Rockecenter, of Lombar and the entire Voltar Confederacy depended upon one haggard and worn frail reed, Apparatus Officer Soltan Gris.
And it was more vital than ever to remove the vicious Countess Krak.
As I went out into the night, I shook my fist at the sky. "By all the stars, by all the Gods and Demons of the firmament," I cried. "In spite of what you are doing to me, I must prevail! Do what thou wilt, I shall still terminate that awful woman!"
A deadly oath.
I meant it!
I did not have too much money. I could not go back to Miss Pinch's and endure those women.
I drove to midtown Manhattan and abandoned the manure truck on a side street. Lugging my bag and viewers, I made my way to a hotel I had noticed at times in the past. It was a wino hangout, shabby and dirty, the lobby littered with collapsed human wrecks. The very place to hide out, for here they didn't even bother to sort the living from the dead.
I got a room with a cracked window, cracked washbasin and cracked floor. Cockroaches swarmed, thriving on the remains of a soiled carpet.
I should have been exhausted, but I was not. I had too much to do.
Despite the lateness of the hour, I got out pad and pen and sat down at the rickety table. One must be orderly, one must do things by the textbook. I must be careful and precise, for only in that way was I ever going to bring about the demise of the Countess Krak.