A man grunted in a surprised tone. There was a stirring. A man swore. The words seemed inappropriate to a citizen merely taking a breath of evening air.
Hoddan frowned. The note from Nedda seemed to have been a forgery. To make sure, he readjusted the wave guide to project a thin but fan-shaped beam. He aimed again. Painstakingly, he traversed the area in which men would have been posted to jump him. If Nedda were there, she would feel no effect If police lay in wait, they would notice at once.
They did. A man howled. Two men yelled together. Somebody bellowed. Somebody squealed. Someone in charge of the flares made ready to give light for the police was so startled by a strange sensation that he jerked the cord. An immense, cold-white brilliance appeared. The garden where Nedda definitely was not present became bathed in incandescence. Light spilled over the wall of one garden into the next and disclosed a squirming mass of police in the nearer garden also. Some of them leaped wildly and ungracefully while clawing behind them. Some stood still and struggled desperately to accomplish something to their rear, while others gazed blankly at them until Hoddan swung his instrument their way, also.
A man tore off his pants and struggled over the wall to get away from something intolerable. Others imitated him. Some removed their trousers before they fled, but others tried to get them off while fleeing! The latter did not fare too well. Mostly they stumbled and other men fell over them.
Hoddan let the confusion mount past any unscrambling, and then slid down the tree and joined in the rush. With the glare in the air behind him, he only feigned to stumble over one figure after another. Once he grunted as he scorched his own fingers. But he came out of the lane with a dozen stun-pistols, mostly uncomfortably warm, as trophies of the ambush.
As they cooled off he stowed them away in his belt and pockets, strolling away down the tree-lined street. Behind him, cops realized their trouserless condition and appealed plaintively to householders to notify headquarters of their state.
Hoddan did not feel particularly disillusioned, somehow. It occurred to him, even, that this particular event was likely to help him get off of Walden. If he was to leave against the cops’ will, he needed to have them at less than top efficiency. And men who have had their pants scorched off them are not apt to think too clearly. Hoddan felt a certain confidence increase in his mind. He’d worked the thing out very nicely. If ionization made air a high-resistance conductor, then an ionizing beam would make a high-resistance short between the power terminals of a stun-pistol. With the power a stun-pistol carried, that short would get hot. So would the pistol. It would get hot enough, in fact, to scorch cloth in contact with it. Which had happened.
If the effect had been produced in the soles of policemen’s feet, Hoddan would have given every cop a hot-foot But since they carried their stun-pistols in their hip-pockets…
The thought of Nedda diminished his satisfaction. The note could be pure forgery, or the police could have learned about it through the treachery of the servant she sent to the embassy with it. It would be worthwhile to know. He headed toward the home of her father. If she were loyal to him, it would complicate things considerably. But he felt it necessary to find out.
He neared the spot where Nedda lived. This was an especially desirable residential area. The houses were large and gracefully designed, and the gardens were especially lush. Presently he heard music ahead. He went on. He came to a place where strolling citizens had paused under the trees to listen to the melody and the sound of voices that accompanied it. The music and festivity was in Nedda’s name. She was having a party, on the night of the terrible day in which he’d been framed for life imprisonment.
It was a shock. Then there was a rush of vehicles, and police trucks were disgorging cops before the door. They formed a cordon about the house, and some knocked and were admitted in haste. Then Hoddan nodded dourly to himself.
His escape from the embassy was now known. No less certainly, the failure of the trap Nedda’s note had baited had been reported. The police were now turning the whole city into a trap for one Bron Hoddan. Soon they’d have cops from other cities pouring in to aid in the search. And certainly and positively they’d take every measure they could to keep him from getting back to the embassy.
It was a situation that would have appalled Hoddan only that morning. Now, though, he only shook his head sadly. He moved on. Somehow he must get back into the embassy.
It was not far from Nedda’s house to a public-safety kiosk. He entered it. It was unattended, of course. It was simply an out-of-door installation where cops could be summoned, fires reported, or emergencies described by citizens independently of the regular home communicators. It had occurred to Hoddan that the planetary authorities would be greatly pleased to hear of a situation, in a place, that would seem to hint at his presence. There were all sorts of public services that would be delighted to operate impressively in their own1 lines. There were bureaus which would rejoice at a chance to show off their efficiency.
He used his micro-wave generator — which at short enough range would short-circuit anything — upon the apparatus in the kiosk. It was perfectly simple, if one knew how. He worked with a sort of tender thoroughness, shorting this item, shorting that, giving this frantic emergency call, stating that baseless lie. When he went out of the kiosk he walked briskly toward an appointment he had made.
And presently the murmur of the city at night had new sounds added to it. They began as a faint, confused clamor at the edges of the city. The uproar moved centralward and grew louder. There were clanging bells and sirens and beeper-horns warning all non-official vehicles to keep out of the way. On the raised-up expressway snorting metal monsters rushed with squealing excitement. On the fragrant lesser streets, smaller vehicles rushed with proportionately louder howlings. Police trucks poured out of their cubbyholes and plunged valiantly through the dark. Broadcast units signaled emergency and cut off the air to make the placid ether waves available to authority.
All the noises and all this tumult moved toward a single point. The outer parts of the city regained their former quiet. But in the mid-city area the noise of racing vehicles clamoring for the right-of-way grew louder and louder. The sound was deafening as the vehicles converged on the large open square in front of the Interstellar Embassy. From every street and avenue fire-fighting equipment poured into that square. In between and behind, hooting loudly for precedence, were the police trucks. Emergency vehicles of all the civic bureaus appeared, all of them with immense conviction of their importance.
It was a very large, open square, that space before the embassy. From its edge, the monument to the first settlers in the center looked small But even that vast plaza filled up with trucks of every imaginable variety, from the hose towers which could throw streams of water four hundred feet straight up, to the miniature trouble-wagons of Electricity Supply. Staff cars of fire and police and sanitary services crowded each other and bumped fenders with tree-surgeon trucks prepared to move fallen trees, and with public-address trucks ready to lend stentorian tones to any voice of authority.
But there was no situation except that there was no situation. There was no fire. There was no riot There was not even stray dogs for the pound-wagons to pursue, nor broken watermains for the water department technicians to shut off and repair. There was nothing for anybody to do but ask everybody else what the hell they were doing there, and presently to swear at each other for cluttering up the way.