X
“AND how did you plan to get inside when the place is closed for the night?” Carstairs prodded sardonically.
For answer Phil cocked his eyebrows defiantly and gave the restaurant door a smart shove. It swung silently inward. He led them in haughtily, vaguely aware that Llewellyn was examining the lock.
The long room was very dark. It smelled stalely of people and liquor and seared meat; Phil even thought he could distinguish Juno’s burned rabbit chops. Otie snuffed eagerly and tugged Buck forward by his leash. Phil steered their course confidently between the counter and the booths. He was feeling particularly pleased with himself because Mitzie had found opportunity to ask him for his address on the way over.
“All right, all right,” he heard Carstairs whisper behind him to Llewellyn, “so the lock was burned. Somebody’s ahead of us. We’ll be watching out.”
Phil pushed open the door to the stairs, and hesitated. Inside it was now completely black.
Something hissed softly beside him and a luminescent cone puffed out. A couple of seconds later, the half dozen treads of the stairway glowed milkily.
Buck chuckled inches from Phil’s ear. “Lum’niscint mist,” he explained with professional casualness. “You get going. I’ll spray.”
Phil started up, the milky surface light keeping two or three treads ahead of him in blobby advances. The mist got on Otie, so that he glowed like the Hound of the Baskervilles. Some of it even got on Phil’s trouser bottoms and sockasins.
“We’re certainly marked if we have to run away and hide,” Phil commented dubiously as he reached the corridor he and Juno had come through and then took the unknown way upward.
“Uh-uh,” Buck chuckled wisely, “’cause I’m spraying a neutralizer behind us.” He directed at Phil’s feet a dark, faintly hissing canister and Phil’s feet blacked out, along with a blob of surrounding treads. Looking back, Phil saw that the glow on the stairs vanished abruptly. He could not see Mitzie. Carstairs, and Llewellyn.
He asked Buck, “How do you manage two canisters and Otie all at the same time?”
“Hell, I could aim a squirrel rifle and run a still in addition,” Buck assured him.
Phil became aware of a dim radiance above him, beyond the range of Buck’s mist. Buck hurriedly neutralized all the luminescence, including that on Otie and Phil. Phil cautiously went up the last ten treads, the upper radiance increasing all the while, and found himself in a shadowy, curving corridor. His steps got shorter and shorter, then stopped.
A couple yards ahead lay three swollen furry shapes, each with a half dozen slim black things stuck into them, like feathered darts.
He recognized at least two of the dead cats. Although grotesquely puffed up, their markings told him they were a Siamese and a short hair he had seen at the Akeleys’.
“Watch it!” he heard Carstairs whisper, but at the same instant Otie jerked away from Buck and moved swiftly forward, his leash trailing, to snuff at the nearest swollen shape. The tail of the dart next to Otie’s nose began to revolve with a faint, feathery rustle. Otie became tensely still, disregarding his master’s anxious, “Back Otie!” The rustle became a whirr. Otie suddenly snapped sidewise at the dart, but at the same instant the dart withdrew quickly from the dead cat. Otie’s teeth clashed emptily. The dart hovered a few feet in the air, just like a huge black wasp. ’don’t anybody go closer.” Carstairs ordered hoarsely. Buck grabbed for the end of the leash, but it was flirted away from his hand when Otie abruptly changed position, watching the dart with deadly intentness.
The whirr became a loud sinister buzz. There were two quickzings and the hovering dart trembled like a blown candle flame. Half turning, Phil saw that Carstairs was shooting at it with some sort of airgun. The dart began to waltz in little loops. Otie leaped straight up, and snapped at it as a dog might at a bee, but the dart curtsied away.
Buck’s “Back, Otie,” was desperate. Otie stayed on his feet and batted at the dart with his paws. There were more futilezings from Carstairs’ airgun. The dart looped back and hovered in front of Otie’s muzzle. As he opened his jaws for a snap, it shot down his throat.
Otie, his eyes and jaws open wide, beat the air with his paws. Then he dropped to all fours and hurled himself off at top speed. He slammed against a wall, got up with difficulty, trembled over to Buck, and fell down and didn’t move. It seemed to Phil that the gaunt creature was taking a deep breath, and then Phil suddenly felt sick, for the coyote was beginning to swell.
“Don’t touch him!” Carstairs shouted, but Buck was keeping his distance. Carstairs came up beside Buck and leaned prudently forward, his bangs swinging out from his forehead. “Always did want to see one of those things in action,” he said softly.
“They’re what they call singular missiles, aren’t they?” Llewellyn asked fascinatedly, coming up. “Anti-individual, I mean.”
Carstairs nodded. “Used them in the last cold war, though hardly any rumors got out. They were for assassinations. The FBL and the Russkies could tell tales. They’re supposed to be driven by a tiny, ion-emitting radioactive fan. I wish I had a counter so I could know. And of course, they home on the radiant heat of flesh and then inject a poison.”
Buck muttered, “Otie.” The coyote’s puffed eyes turned toward him, then glazed over. Buck jerked up and made a derisive noise. “Always was a dumb pooch,” he said harshly. Mitzie, drawn even with Llewellyn, looked on coldly.
Phil started ahead, drugs battling nausea inside him, so that the dim corridor seemed both vivid and unreal.
“Where are you going?” Carstairs demanded.
Phil shrugged. “To find what I came for,” he said hazily.
“Well, keep away from the cats,” Carstairs called after him softly, but Phil was already hugging the wall.
“How we know those sing’lar missles won’t heat up and go for us like they went for Otie?” he heard Buck demand fretfully.
“The others got through, didn’t they?” Carstairs said irritably.
“What others?” Phil heard Buck ask.
“The ones who burnt the lock on the door, the ones who threw the cats ahead of them to draw the missiles,” Carstairs told him impatiently. “Incidentally, if any of the missiles start spinning their tails, you might try throwing your coat over them.”
Beyond the dead cats, Phil came to a silvery mesh barricade with several jagged cuts in it, three of them making a crude doorway. The mesh looked fine and strong enough to have kept the wasps on this side. He stepped over the fallen section of mesh. The cut ends of silvery wire were rounded and fused, as if by great heat.
Just beyond the mesh lay a chunky man in a gray, company-guard uniform. He had a gun in his hand. He was intact except that the top of his head had rolled about a foot away. It had been sliced off tidily just above the nose by something hot. Phil remembered how neatly the blue needle had sliced the steel beam. He hurried past toward an open arch just ahead, and jerked back from a large gray snake coiled there. Then he saw that the snake was a robot doorman like Old Rubberarm, and looking higher he saw that it had been sliced off close to the wall.
Mitzie and the rest came through the mesh. Carstairs kneeled eagerly by the dead man and examined the gun he was clasping, but a moment later got up with a shrug.
“Not an ortho, eh?” Buck inquired. “Usin’ those sing’lar missiles, you’d think they’d be up to date in other things.”
“No, just an ordinary gas gun,” Carstairs told him. “But we can be pretty sure his head wasn’t taken off by a red hot buzz saw. The others must have orthos.” He turned on Phil and grabbed him by the lapels of his jacket. “Look here, clown,” he said quietly, “who are those others? You must have known someone was going to break in here tonight. You were counting on that door being open.”