A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

I

Three o’clock in the morning. The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil-drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.

Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short.

The man hunched at the wheel is tense; his eyes are fixed unblinkingly on the hem of the black curtain that the headlights roll up before him. His eyes are like two little lumps of coal. His face is brown; his hair is white. His figure is gaunt, but there is power in the bony wrists that grip the wheel, and power in the locked jaws that show white with their own tension.

The speedometer needle flickers a little above eighty...

The rear-view mirror shows a very tired young woman napping on the back seat. Her legs are tucked up under her, and the laprobe has been swathed around her from the waist down. One black-gloved hand is twisted in the looped cord dangling from the side of the car; it hangs there even as she sleeps, of its own weight. She sways with a limpness, a lack of reflex-resistance, that almost suggests an absence of life.

She has on a tiny pillbox-hat with a fine-meshed veil flaring out all around below it. The wind keeps pushing it back like a film across her face. The contact of her nose makes a funny little knob on it. It should billow out at that point with her breathing, at such close contact. It doesn’t, just caves in as though she were sucking it through parted lips. She sleeps with her mouth slightly open.

The moon is the only thing that keeps up with this careening car, grinning down derisively on it all the way, mile after mile, as though to say, “I’m on to you!”

A scattering of pinpoint lights shows up in the blackness ahead. A town or village straddling the highway. The indicator on the speedometer begins to lose ground. The man glances in his mirror at the girl, a little anxiously as if this oncoming town were some kind of test to be met.

An illuminated road-sign flashes by.

The man nods grimly, as if agreeing with that first word. But not in the way it is meant.

The lights grow bigger, spread out on either side. Street lights peer out here and there among the trees. The highway suddenly sprouts a plank sidewalk on each side of it. Dark store-windows glide by.

With an instinctive gesture, the man dims his lights from blinding platinum to just a pale wash. A lunch-room window drifts by.

The lights of a big bus going his way wink just ahead. He makes ready to swerve out and get past it. And then there is an unlooked-for complication. A railroad right-of-way bisects the main street here. Perhaps no train has passed all night until now. Perhaps no other will pass until morning. Five minutes sooner, five minutes later, and he could have avoided the delay. But just as car and lighted bus approach, side by side, a bell starts ringing, zebra-striped barriers weighted with red lanterns are slowly lowered, and the road is blocked off. The two cars are forced to halt abreast while a slow procession of freight cars files endlessly by. Almost simultaneously, a large milk-truck has turned in behind him from the side road, sealing him in.

The lights of the bus shine into the car and fall on the sleeping woman. There is only one passenger in the bus, but he is on the near side, and he looks idly out the window into the neighboring machine. His eye drops to the sleeping woman and remains there, as any man’s would.

There is a terrible rigidity about the man at the wheel now. White shows over his knuckles. His eyes are glued on the mirror, in which he can see the bus-passenger gazing casually into the rear of his car. A shiny thread starts down his face, catches in one of its leathery furrows. Sweat. A second one follows. His chest is rising and falling under his coat and he breathes as if he has been running.

The man at the bus window keeps looking at the woman, looking at her. He doesn’t mean anything by it, probably. There’s nothing else for him to look at. Why shouldn’t he look at a woman, even a sleeping one? She must be beautiful under that veil. Some men are born starers-at-women, anyway.

But as the endless freight cars click by ahead, as the long scrutiny keeps up, one of the white-knuckled hands on the wheel is moving. It leaves the polished wooden rim, drops to its owner’s lap. The whiteness goes out of it. It starts crawling up under his coat, buries itself between the buttoned halves, comes out again, white over the knuckles again, gripping an automatic.

His eyes have never once left the rear-view mirror, never once left the reflection of the bus-passenger’s face. He acts as if he is waiting for some expression to come into it. Some certain, telltale expression. He acts as if, then, he will do something with that gun on his lap.

But the caboose has finally terminated the endless chain of freight cars, the bell stops ringing, the barriers slowly rise. The bus-driver unlimbers his clutch, the line of lighted windows start to edge forward. The gun vanishes, the hand that held it returns to the wheel empty. A moment later bus, and passenger, and face have all spurted ahead. The touring car hangs back a moment, to give it a good start. The milk-truck signals impatiently for clearance, then cuts out around the obstacle, lurches ahead.

The leathery-faced man at the wheel has his under lip thrust out, expelling hot breath of relief up past his own face. He touches the two liquid threads the drops of sweat left on his face, blots them.

He goes on into the night, along the arrow-straight highway, under the peering moon. The lady sways and dreams, and puckers her veil in.

A long slow rise begins, and now the car starts to buck when he gives it the accelerator. He looks at the gauge; his gas is dwindling fast. The tan washes out of his face for a moment. He’s on a main road, after all. All he has to do is pull over, wait for a tow-line, if he runs out of gas. Why that fleeting panic on his face?

He nurses the car forward on the dregs of gas remaining. Zigzags it from side to side of the highway, to lessen the incline that might defeat it. It goes by fits and starts, slower all the time, but he’s near the crest now. If he can only reach it, he can coast down the dip on the other side without an engine.

The car creeps up over the rise, hesitates, about to stall. Before him the road dips downward under the moon for miles. In the distance a white glow marks a filling station. He maneuvers the wheel desperately in and out, the momentum of the descent catches at the machine, and a moment later it’s coasting along at increasing speed.

The filling station blazes nearer, an aurora borealis in the middle of the dark countryside. He dare not go past, yet he’s very tense as the car rolls within the all-revealing light. He glances anxiously in the mirror. He wonders about the window-shades, but leaves them the way they are. There’s nothing that draws the human eye quicker than a suggestively lowered shade.

He turns aside, inches up the runway, brakes to a stop. An attendant jumps over.

“Five,” he says, and sits there watching the man hook up the pipeline. Watching him with utter absorption. The gun is in his lap again, bedded under the hem of his coat.

The grease monkey approaches the front window. “Wash your windows, chief?”

The driver stretches his lips into a grin. “Leave ’em.”

The monkey grins back, and his eyes wander on past the driver to the girl in the back of the car, rest there for a minute.

“Dead tired,” the man at the wheel says. “Here’s your money; keep the change.” The car moves out of the yellow radiance into the sheltering gloom again. Secrecy wells up into its interior once more, like India ink.

The flabbergasted attendant is shouting something after him. “Hey, mister, that’s a twenty-dollar bill you—”

The car is racing along again now. The man at the wheel tenses. What’s that peppering sound coming up behind him? A small, single beam of light is seesawing after him. If the man was frightened by the bus and by the filling station, what word can describe the look on his face now, as his mirror shows him a state policeman on his tail? Teeth bared in a skull-like flash, he fights down an impulse to open up, to try to race for it. He pulls over to the side, slows, stops. Again the gun comes out, and again it is bedded under his thigh with the butt protruding in readiness on the side away from the window. Then he sits grinding his fist into the hollow of his other hand.

The motorcycle flashes by, loops awkwardly around, comes back. The rider gets off, walks over, planks his foot down heavily on the runningboard. He ducks his head, leers in at him, beetle-browed.

“What’s your hurry, fellow? I clocked you at eighty.”

“Eighty-four,” corrects the leathery-faced man, with a dangerous quietness that cannot be mistaken for humility.

“Well, fifty’s the limit around here. Lemme see your license.”

The driver takes out his license with his left hand; the right is lying idly beside his right thigh, on cold black metal.

The state cop reads by the dashboard-light, leaning even further in to do so. His own weapon is way out behind at his hip; the window frame would block his elbow in a sudden reach. “Anton Denholt. Doctor, eh? I’m surprised at you, all the more reason you oughta have more sense! Next state, too, huh? You people are the ones give us the most trouble. Well, you’re in my state now, get that; you didn’t quite make that state-line marker down there—”

Denholt glances along the road as if he hadn’t seen the marker before. “I didn’t try to,” he says in that same toneless voice.

The cop nods thoughtfully. “I guess you could have at that,” he admits. “What were you doing eighty-four for—?”

Perhaps Denholt can’t stand waiting for the man to discover the girl sleeper in back, perhaps his nerves are so frayed by now that he’d rather call attention to her himself and get it over with. He jerks his head toward the back seat. “On her account,” he says. “Every minute counts.”

The cop peers back. “She sick, Doc?” he asks, a little more considerately. Denholt says, “It’s a matter of life and death.” And again he is speaking the absolute truth, far more than the trooper can guess.

The cop begins to look apologetic. “Why didn’t you say so? There’s a good hospital at Rawling. You must have passed by there an hour ago. Why didn’t you take her there?”

“No. I can make it where I’m going, if you’ll only let me be on my way. I want to get her home before the baby—”

The cop gives a low whistle. “No wonder you were burning up the road!”

He slaps his book closed, hands Denholt back his license. “You want an escort? You’ll make better time. My beat ends at that marker down there, but I can put in a call for you—”

“No, thanks,” says Denholt blandly. “I haven’t much further to go.”

The touring car glides off. There is a sort of fatalism in Denholt’s attitude now, as he urges the car back to high speed. What else can happen to him, after what just did? What else is there to be afraid of — now?

Less than forty miles past the state line, he leaves the great transcontinental highway and turns off into a side-road, a “feeder.” Presently it begins to take a steady upgrade, into the foothills of a chain of mountains. The countryside changes, becomes wilder, lonelier. Trees multiply to the thickness of woodlands. The handiwork of man, all but the roadway itself, slowly disappears.

He changes his course a second time, leaves the feeder for what is little better than an earth-packed trail, sharply tilted, seldom used. The climb is steady. Through occasional breaks in the trees of the thickly wooded slopes that support the trail, he can see the low country he has left below, the ribbon of the trunkroad he was on, an occasional winking light like a glowworm toiling slowly along it. There are hairpin turns; overhanging branches sway back with a hiss as he forces his way through. He has to go much slower here, but he seems to know the way.

A barbed-wire fence leaps suddenly out from nowhere, begins to parallel the miserable road. Four rungs high, each rung three strands in thickness, viciously spined, defying penetration by anything but the smallest animals. Strange, to want privacy that badly in such an out-of-the-way place. A double gate sidles along in it, double-padlocked, and stops abreast of him as his car comes to a halt. A placard beside it reads in the diamond-brightness of the headlights: “Private Property. Keep Out.” A common-enough warning, but strange to find it here in this mountain fastness. Even, somehow, sinister.

He gets out, opens both padlocks, edges the freed halves of the gate inward with his shoe. Instantly a jarring, jangling sound explodes from one of the trees nearby. An alarm bell, wired to the gate. Its clang is frightening in this dark silence. It too spells lack of normality, seems the precaution of a fanatic.

The car drives through, stops while the man closes and fastens the prickly gate behind it. The bell shuts off; the stillness is deafening by contrast. The car goes on until the outline of a house suddenly uptilts the searching head-light-beams, log-built, sprawling, resembling a hunting-lodge. But there’s no friendliness to it. There is something ominous and forbidding about its look, so dark, so forgotten, so secretive-looking. The kind of a house that has a maw to swallow with — a one-way house, that you feel will never disgorge any living thing that enters it. Leprous in the moonlight festering on its roof. And the two round sworls of light played by the heads of the car against its side, intersecting, form a pear-shaped oval that resembles a gleaming skull.

The man leaves the car again, jumps up under a sort of a shed-arrangement sheltering the main entrance. Metal clashes and a black opening yawns. He vanishes through it, while pulsing bright-beamed car and sleeping lady wait obediently outside.

Light springs up within — the yellow-green wanness of coal-oil, shining out through the door to make the coal-black tree-trunks outside seem even blacker. The place looks eerier than ever now.

Homecoming?

The man’s shadow lengthens, blacks out the doorway, and he’s ready to receive the patient lady. He kills the engine, opens the rear door and reaches in for her with outstretched arms. He disengages her dangling wrist, from the intertwined support-strap, brushes off the laprobe, cradles her body in upturned arms, and waddles inside with her, like someone carrying something very precious. The door bangs shut behind him at a backward thrust of his heel, and darkness swallows up the world outside.

II

He carries her through the building into an extension hidden from view from the outside. There is a distinct difference between it and the rest of the rambling structure. Its walls are not log, but brick, covered with plaster, that must have been hauled to this inaccessible place at great trouble and expense. It’s wired for electricity, current supplied by a homemade generator. Dazzling, clinical-white light beats down from above in here. And there are no chairs here, no rough-hewn tables, anything like that. Instead, retorts and bunsen-burners. A zinc operating table. Solution pans. A glass case of instruments. And across one entire side of the room, a double tier of mesh cages, each containing a rabbit.

He comes in swiftly with his burden, puts her down on the zinc table. She never stirs. He turns back and closes the door, bolts it both at top and at bottom. He strips off coat and shirt and undershirt, slips into a surgeon’s white jacket. He takes a hypodermic needle out of the instrument-case, drops it into a pan of antiseptic solution, lights a flame under it. Then he goes back to the table.

The girl’s figure has retained the doubled-up position it held all during the long ride; it lies on her side, legs tucked-up under her as they were on the car-seat, arm thrust out, wrist dangling just as the strap held it. Denholt seems to have expected this, yet he frowns just a little. He tries to straighten out the stiffened limbs; they resist him. Not all his strength can force them into a straight line with the torso. He begins to do what he has to do with frantic haste, as if every moment was both an obstacle and a challenge.

This is so. For rigor is setting in; the sleeping lady has been dead the better part of the night...

Denholt tears her things off arm over arm, with motions like an overhand swimmer. Hat and veil, black dress, shoes, hosiery, fall about the floor.

The girl was evidently pretty; she must have been quite young too. The rouge she put on in life still frames her parted lips. Her figure is slim and shapely, unmarred by wounds. There is no blood on her at all. That is important. Denholt races up with a jar of alcohol, douses it all over her with a great slapping splash.

He seizes the hypo from the scalding pan, hurriedly fills the barrel at a retort of colorless liquid, turns the huddled dripping figure over on its face, sweeps the nape-hair out of the way with one hand. He poises the needle at the base of the skull, looks briefly at the whitewashed ceiling as though in prayer, presses the plunger home.

He stands back, lets the hypo fall with a clash. It breaks, but that doesn’t matter; if it has failed, he never wants to use one again.

The needle’s tiny puncture doesn’t close up as it would in living tissue; it remains a visible, tiny, black pore. He takes a wad of cotton, holds it pressed there, to keep the substance just injected from trickling out again. He is trembling all over. And the seconds tick into minutes.

Outside it must be dawn, but no light penetrates the sealed-up laboratory. It must be dawn, and the last breath went out of this body on the table — how long before? Irretrievably gone from this world, as dead as though she had lived a thousand years ago. Men have cut the Isthmus of Panama and joined the two oceans; they have bored tunnels that run below rivers; built aluminum planes that fly from Frisco to Manila; sent music over the air and photographs over wires; but never, when the heart-beat of their own kind has once stopped, never when the spark of life has fled, have they been able to reanimate the mortal clay with that commonest yet most mysterious of all processes: the vital force. And this man thinks he can — this man alone, out of all the world’s teeming billions!

Five minutes that are centuries have gone by. There has been no change in her face or body. He lifts the wad of cotton now because his thumb and forefinger ache from holding it so steadily. And then—

The black puncture has vanished. The indented skin has closed up to erase it. Denholt tries to tell himself that this is due to the moisture of the serum itself or to the pressure of his fingers; but he knows that only life can do that — neither moisture nor pressure if there isn’t life. Shrinking from facing disappointment, he whispers aloud: “It’s still there; I don’t see it, that’s all. My eyes aren’t sharp enough.”

Tottering, he moves around the zinc table, picks up a small mirror, comes back with it. He turns her head slightly, holds the glass to the rigid mouth. Something wavers across it, too nebulous for the eye to discern at first. It comes again, stronger. Like a flurry. The glass mists, then clears. Then it mists once more, unmistakably now.

“The nervous exudation of my own fingers, holding it,” he whispers. But he knows better. He drops the mirror as he did the needle. It clashes and shivers into pieces. But it has told him all it could.

There remains the heart to go by. If breath has done that to the glass, the heart will show it. Without the heart, no breath.

He turns her over completely now, on her back once more. His hand slowly descends to her chest, like a frightened bird spiraling to rest. It leaps up again spasmodically, as though it has received a galvanic shock at what it felt. Not alone a vibration, but warmth. Warmth slowly diffusing around the region of the heart; a lessening of the stone-coldness that grips the body elsewhere. The whole chest-cavern is slowly rising and falling. The heart is alive, has come back to life, in a dead body. And life is spreading, catching on!

Awed almost beyond endurance — even though he has given up his whole life for this, believing he could accomplish it, believing some day it would happen — he collapses to his knees, buries his head against the side of the table, sobs broken-heartedly. For extreme joy and extreme sorrow are indistinguishable beyond a certain point. Denholt is a very humble, a very terrified man, at the moment, almost regretting what he has done — he has set God’s law at bay, and he knows it. Pride, triumph, the overweening egotism that spells complete insanity will come later.

He rouses himself presently. She still needs help, attention, or he may lose her again. How often that happened with the rabbits until he learned what to do. The warm radiations from the heart have spread all over the body now, and it is a greater warmth than that of his own body. A ruddy flush, a fever-redness, has replaced the dead-white hue, especially over the heart and on the face and throat. It needs a furnace-temperature like this to cause the once-stagnant blood to circulate anew. He snatches up a thermometer, applies it. One hundred and five degrees, high enough to kill her all over again a second time. But death must be burned out and new life infused at molten heat, for this is not biological birth — but pure chemistry.

He must work fast.

He opens the door of the electric refrigerator, removes a pail of finely chopped ice he had prepared. The fearful heat of almost-boiling blood must be offset or it will destroy her before she has begun again to live. He wraps a rubber sheet around her, packs her body with the chopped ice, rolls her tightly up in it. He tests her temperature repeatedly. Within five minutes it has gone down considerably. The ice has all melted, as if placed on a hot stove. As he opens the sheet streams of water trickle out of the four corners. But the heart and the lungs are still going, the first danger has been met and overcome, the process of revivification has not in itself destroyed her. A delirious groan escaping her lips is the first sound she makes in this second life of hers; a feverish tossing from side to side the first movement. She is in full delirium. But delirium is the antithesis of death; it is the body’s struggle to survive.

The laboratory has done all it can for her; from now on it is a matter of routine medical care, nursing, as in an ordinary illness. He wraps her in a thick blanket, unbolts the door, removes her from the cold zinc table and carries her to a bed in a room in another part of the house.

All through the long hours of the day he sits by her, as a mother sits by her only child in mortal illness, counting each breath she takes, feeling her pulse, helping her heart-action with a little digitalis, pouring a little warm milk and brandy down her parched throat from time to time. Watching, waiting, for the second great mystery to unfold itself. A mystery as great or greater than the one he has already witnessed. Will reason return full-panoplied, or will the brain remain dead or crippled in an otherwise living body? Will she be some inarticulate, idiot thing better left unrevived? Or will she remember who she was, what went before — be the first human to bridge the gap of death, to tell the living what awaits them on the other side of the shadowy border?

All through the day the fever-reaction induced by the serum continues — and unconsciousness with it — but she lives. Undeniably she lives! At nightfall the fever increases a little, but then all fevers do; any doctor knows that. At midnight of this second night, a full twenty-four hours after she died, there is a sudden, unexpected break in her heavy breathing, and before the watcher has quite realized it, her eyes are wide open for the first time. She has regained consciousness! For the first time he sees the color of her eyes — blue — as the lids go up. Blue eyes, that have seen death, now looking into his. Calmly, undilated, unfrightened, peaceful.

He hastily takes her temperature. Normal. The serum has at last been accepted by her system. All that remains now is the answer to the second mystery. In medieval terms, has he saved her soul as well as her body? In modern scientific ones, have the accumulated memories of the past existence been carried over into this one, or were her brain cells damaged beyond repair?

The blue eyes fix themselves on him, stare unblinkingly. He says softly, almost afraid of the sound of his own voice, “Good evening.” The blue eyes continue to stare. He waits, trembling. He knows that she was an American, knew the language. He whispers it over again, “Good evening, young lady.”

A change is coming over her face. The staring blue eyes fill with tears that presently overflow and stream down her face. The eyes themselves narrow in a squint. The lips that knew rouge, cigarettes, and men’s kisses, pucker into infant’s whimper. A feeble bleating cry, the wail of a new-born child, escapes from her. The wordless, pitiful sound that any nursery knows.

The shock, the disappointment, is terrific; his gaunt face pales, he clutches his chair to keep from slumping off it, lets out a long sighing breath. Then presently, somewhat recovered, he takes out a shiny gold watch from his pocket, dangles it before her eyes. The light flashes from it. The tears stop, the wailing breaks off short. Her eyes sparkle with interest. She reaches toward it with ten fingers whose nails still bear adult nail-lacquer; her mouth wreathes in an infantile grin. She says, “Da!” and crows with pleasure. Reason is back — at least in its primary stages. For if she were a newborn infant, this would be a highly precocious reaction. Her faculties are intact. It is not as bad as he thought.

He will have to teach her to speak, to walk all over again, as one does any child, that is all. Intelligence has returned, but not memory. Her memory went into the grave. He murmurs to himself, “Her body is twenty-two, but she is in the infancy of a second life. I will call her Nova, the New One.” He rubs his hand over his eyes.

Exhausted by his long vigil he slumps to the floor beside the bed, goes to sleep with his head resting against its edge. Above him the resurrected woman’s hands stray gropingly to his thick white hair, clutch playfully at it like a child in its crib...

III

The plane is a hopeless wreck, and even in the act of crawling out into the blinding rain, Penny O’Shaughnessy wonders dazedly why he’s still alive. Dazedly, but briefly. O’Shaughnessy is not the kind to waste time wondering. Just one more lucky break, he supposes. His whole adult life has been an unbroken succession of them. His given nickname itself is a token of this, dating from the time he was sighted flying in from the open Caribbean after a particularly devastating hurricane had turned half the Lesser Antilles upside down.

“I just went up over it and waited till it went by below,” he explained, alighting midst the splinters of the airport-hangar.

“A bad penny always turns up,” someone muttered incredulously.

Who else had ever met the business-end of a bolt of lightning in mid-flight, as he had just now, flying blind through a storm, lost a wing, managed to come down still alive even if it is on a wooded mountainside, to cut the contact at the moment of crashing so that he wasn’t roasted alive, and crawl out with just a wrenched shoulder and a lot of cuts and bruises? He couldn’t bail out because he was flying too low, hoping for a break through the clouds through which to spot something flat enough to come down on; he doesn’t like bailing out anyway, hates to throw away a good plane.

This one lying all over the side of the mountain around him is not so good any more, he has to admit. The first thing he does is feel in his pocket, haul out a rabbit’s foot, and stroke it twice. Then he straightens up, hobbles a short distance further from the wreck, turns to survey it. Almost instantly the lightning, which already stunned him once in the air, strikes a nearby tree with a bang and a shower of sparks. It cracks, comes down with a propeller-like whirr of foliage, and flattens what’s left of his engine into the ground.

“All right, you don’t like my crate,” O’Shaughnessy grumbles, with a back-arm swing at the elements in general. “I believed you the first time!”

He trudges off, neck bowed against the rain, which forms a solid curtain around him. He hasn’t the faintest idea where he is, because he was flying blind a full forty minutes before the crash. There is no visibility to speak of, just a pall of rain and mist, with the black silhouettes of trees peering through all around. The sharp slant of the ground tells him he’s on a mountainside. He takes the downgrade; people, houses, are more often to be found in valleys than on mountains.

The ground is muddy soup around him; he doesn’t walk as much as skid on his heels from tree trunk to tree trunk, using them as brakes to prevent a headlong fall. Rain water gets in between clothes and skin; the cuts and welts tingle; the wrenched shoulder pounds, and the thickening of the gloom around him tells him it is night.

“All set,” he mutters, “to spend a quiet evening at home!”

The tree trunks blend into the surrounding darkness, and it gets harder to aim for them each time; he has to ski-jump blindly and coast with outspread arms, hoping one will stop him before he lands flat on his face. He misses one altogether — or else it isn’t there in the first place — goes skittering down in axle-grease mud, wildly spiraling with his arms to keep his balance, and finally flattens into something that rasps and stings. A barbed-wire fence.

All the air has been knocked out of his stomach, and one of the wicked spines just missed his left eye, taking a gouge at his brow instead. But more than that, the jar he has thrown into the thing has set off an electric alarm-bell somewhere up in one of the trees nearby. Its clamor blasts through the steady whine and slap of the rain.

His clothing has caught in ten different places, and skin with it in half of them. As he pulls himself free, swearing, and the vibrations of the obstacle lessen, the alarm breaks off. He kicks the fence vengefully with his foot, and this elicits an added spasm or two from the bell-battery, then once more it stops.

He is too preoccupied for a minute rubbing his gashes with his bare hands and wincing, to proceed with an investigation of this inhospitable barrier. Suddenly a rain-washed glow of murky light is wavering toward him on the other side of the fence, zigzagging uncertainly as though its bearer were picking his way.

“What the—” Somebody living up here in this forsaken place?

The light stops flush against the fence directly opposite where he is standing and behind it he can make out a hooded, cloaked figure. O’Shaughnessy must be practically invisible behind the rain-mist and darkness.

“That yours?” he growls, balling a fist at the fence. “Look what it did to me! Come out here and I’ll—!”

A musical voice from below the hood speaks softly: “Who are you? Why are you here?”

“A girl!” O’Shaughnessy gasps, and the anger leaves his voice. “Sorry, I couldn’t make you out. Didn’t mean to tear loose that way, but I’m clawed up.” He stares at her for a long minute. Twenty-three, pretty, he can see that much. Blue eyes gaze levelly back at him from under the hood she is wearing as he steps up closer to the fence. “I cracked up further back along the mountain, the plane came down—”

“What’s a plane?” she asks, round-eyed.

His jaw drops slightly and he stares at her with disapproval, thinks she is trying to be cute or something. He keeps waiting for the invitation to shelter that a dog would be given, in such weather, at such an out-of-the-way place as this. It isn’t forthcoming.

“Got a house back there?” he says finally.

She nods, and drops of rain fly off her hood. “Yes, straight back there.” Just that, answered as asked.

He says with growing impatience, “Well, won’t you let me in a few minutes? I won’t bite you!” The reason he thinks she’s playing a part, knows better, is that her voice is city-bred, not like a mountain girl’s.

She says helplessly, “It’s locked and he has the keys. No one ever came here before, so I don’t know what to do. I can’t ask him because he’s in the laboratory, and I’m not allowed to disturb him when he’s in there.”

“Well, haven’t you got a telephone I can use at least?”

“What’s a telephone?” she wants to know, without a trace of mockery. This time O’Shaughnessy flares up. Enough is enough. “What kind of a person are you anyway? All right, keep your shelter. I’m not going to stand here begging. Would it be too much to tell me which direction the nearest road or farmhouse is from here, or would you rather not do that either?”

“I don’t know,” she answers. “I’ve never been outside this” — indicating the fence — “never been out there where you’re standing.”

It’s beginning to dawn on him that she’s not trying to make fun of him. He senses some mystery about her, and this whole place, but what it is he can’t imagine. “Who lives here with you?” he asks curiously.

“Papa,” she answers simply.

She’s already been missed, for a voice shouts alarmedly: “Nova! Nova, where are you?” And a second lantern looms toward them, zigzagging hurriedly through the mist. A blurred figure emerges, stops short in fright at sight of the man outside the barrier, nearly drops the lantern. “Who’s that? Who are You? How’d you get here?” The questions are almost panic-stricken.

“Papa,” thinks O’Shaughnessy, “doesn’t like company. Wonder why?” He explains his situation in a few brief words.

The man comes closer, motions the girl back as though O’Shaughnessy were some dangerous animal in a zoo-cage. “Are you alone?” he asks, peering furtively around.

O’Shaughnessy has never lacked self-assertiveness with other men, quite the reverse. “Who’d you think I had with me, the Lafayette Escadrille?” he says bluntly. “Why so cagy, mister? Got a guilty conscience about something? Or are you making mash back there? Did you ever hear of giving a stranger shelter?” He swipes accumulated raindrops off his jaw and flicks them disgustedly down.

The hooded girl is hovering there in the background, looking uncertainly from one to the other. The man with the lantern gives a forced laugh. “We’re not trying to hide anything. We’re not afraid of anything. You’re mistaken,” he protests. A protest that rings about as true as a lead quarter to O’Shaughnessy’s experienced ears. “I wouldn’t for the world want you to — er, go away from here spreading stories that there’s anything strange about this place — you know how folks talk, first thing you know they’ll be coming around snooping—”

“So that’s it,” says O’Shaughnessy within his chest.

The man on the other side of the fence has taken a key out, is jabbing

it hurriedly at the padlocks. So hurriedly that now he almost seems afraid O’Shaughnessy will get away before he can get the gate open. “Er — won’t they send out and look for you, when they find out you’re overdue at the airport?”

O’Shaughnessy snaps briefly, “I wasn’t expected anywhere. I was flying my own time; the crate belonged to me. What d’ye think, I’m somebody’s errand-boy, or one of these passenger-plane pilots?” He expectorates to show his contempt, his independence.

The black shoe-button eyes opposite him gleam, as though this is an eminently satisfactory situation, as though he couldn’t ask for a better one. He swings the gate-halves apart. “Come in,” he urges with belated insistence. “Come in by all means! Get back in the house, Nova, you’ll get soaked — and see that you close that door! I’m Doctor Denholt, sir, and please don’t think there’s anything strange about us here.”

“I do already,” says O’Shaughnessy, bluntly, as he steps through the enclosure. He cocks his head at the renewed blare of the alarm-bell.

Denholt hastily closes and refastens the gate, shutting off the clangor. “Just an ordinary precaution, we’re so cut off here,” he explains.

O’Shaughnessy refrains from further comment; he is on this man’s domain now. He has one iron-clad rule, like an Arab: Never abuse hospitality. “I’m O’Shaughnessy,” he says. They shake hands briefly. The doctor’s hand is slender and flexible, that of a skilled surgeon. But it is soft, too, and there is a warning of treachery in that pliability.

He leads his uninvited guest into the lamp-lighted house, which looks mighty good to O’Shaughnessy, warm and dry and cheerful in spite of its ugly, rustic furniture. The girl has discarded her cape and hood; O’Shaughnessy glimpses her in the main room, crouched before the clay-brick fireplace readying a fire, as Denholt ushers him into his own bedroom. Her hair, he sees now, is long and golden; her feet are stockingless in homemade deerskin moccasins, her figure slim and childlike in a cheap little calico dress.

At the rear of the room is a door tightly closed. The flyer’s trained eyes, as they flicker past it, notice two things. It is metal, specially constructed, unlike the crude plank-panels of the rest of the house. A thread of platinum-bright light outlines it on three sides, too intense to be anything but high-voltage electricity. Electricity in there, coal-oil out here.

He hears the girl: “He’s in the laboratory, I’m not allowed to disturb him when he’s in there.”

He hears the man: “See that you close that door.”

He says to himself: “I wonder what’s in back of there.”

In Denholt’s sleeping-quarters he peels off his drenched things, reveals a bodyful of livid welts, barbed-wire lacerations, and black grease-smudges. His host purses his lips in long-forgotten professional inspection. “You are pretty badly scraped up! Better let me fix up some of those cuts for you, that barbed — wire’s liable to be rusty. Just stand there where you are a minute.” He takes the water-logged clothing outside to the girl.

O’Shaughnessy crooks a knowing eyebrow at himself, waiting there. “Why not in the laboratory, where he keeps all his stuff and the light’s better? See no evil, think no evil, I guess.”

Denholt hurries back with hot water, dressings, antiseptic. O’Shaughnessy flinches at the searing touch of it, grins shamefacedly even as he does so, “Can’t take it any more, I guess. In Shanghai once I had to have a bad tooth pulled by a local dentist; his idea of an anaesthetic was to have his daughter wave a fan at me while he hit it out with a mallet and steel bar.”

“Did you yell?”

“Naw. Ashamed to in front of a girl.”

He catches Denholt staring with a peculiar intentness at his bared torso and muscular shoulders. “Pretty husky, aren’t you?” the doctor remarks, offhandedly. But something chilly passes down the flyer’s back at the look that goes with the words. O’Shaughnessy wonders what it means. Or do all doctors look at you that way, sort of calculatingly, as though you’d do nicely for some experiment they had in mind?

“Yep,” he answers almost challengingly, “I guess I can take care of myself all right if I have to.”

Denholt just looks at him with veiled guile.

IV

Outside afterward, at the rough pine-board table set in the cheerful glow of the blazing hearth, Denholt’s borrowed clothes on him, he has a better chance to study the girl at closer range. There is nothing strange about her in the least; she is all youthful animation, her face flushed with the excitement of having a stranger at their board; sits there devouring him with her eyes, as if she never saw an outsider before. But in her talk and in her movements there is perfect rhythm, harmony, coordination, balance, call it what you will; she is an utterly normal young girl.

The old man on the other hand — O’Shaughnessy characterizes him mentally thus — the old man has this brooding light in his eyes, is spasmodic and disconnected in his talk and gestures. The isolation, the years of loneliness, have done that to him perhaps, O’Shaughnessy thinks.

“All right,” he says to himself, “that’s his own business. But why does he keep a lovely kid like that cooped up here? Never heard of a plane, a telephone. What’s he trying to do to her? Darned shame!”

Denholt catches him watching the girl. “Eat,” he urges, “eat up, man. You need strength after what you went through.”

The flyer grins, obeys. Yet something about the way it was said, the appraising look that went with it, makes him feel like a fowl being fattened for slaughter. He shakes his head baffledly.

Lightning keeps flaring like flashlight-powder outside the windowpanes every half-minute or so; there is an incessant roll of celestial drums all up and down the mountainside, so deep that O’Shaughnessy can feel it in his chest at times; the rain on the roof sounds like a steak frying.

Denholt is staring abstractedly into his plate, fingers drumming soundlessly on the table. O’Shaughnessy turns to the girl, to break the silence. “Have you lived here long?”

“Two years.”

His eyebrows move a little, upward. She doesn’t know what a plane is, a phone? “Where’d you live before then?”

“I was born here,” she answers shyly.

He thinks she’s misunderstood. “You look older than two to me,” he says with a laugh.

The point seems to baffle her too, as if it has never occurred to her before, “That’s as far back as I can remember,” she says slowly. “Last spring, and the spring before, when I was learning to talk and walk — that’s two years, isn’t it? How long ago did you learn to talk?”

He can’t answer; a chunk of rabbit has gone down whole; he’s lucky he doesn’t choke. But it isn’t the bolted rabbit that stiffens the hairs on the back of his neck, puts a needle of fear through his heart.

“That’ll do, Nova,” says Denholt sharply. There’s a strain around the eyes. His fork drops with a clash, as if he has just had a fright. “You’ll find — er, some cigarettes in a drawer in my bedroom for Mr. O’Shaughnessy.” And as soon as she’s left the table, he leans forward confidentially toward the flyer. “I’d better give you a word of explanation. She’s not quite — right.” He touches his own head. “That’s why — the fence and all that.

I keep her secluded up here with me, it’s more humane you know. Don’t take anything she says too seriously.”

O’Shaughnessy won’t commit himself on this point, not even by a monosyllable. Just looks at his host, keeps his own counsel. It sounds reasonable enough, Lord knows, but he can’t forget the girl’s clear, sane eyes, nor Denholt’s hungry, probing, almost gloating, stare. If anyone is crazy in this house — the little chill plays on his spine once more, and his flesh crawls under the borrowed clothes.

They have very little to say to one another, after that, while they sit there puffing away and the fire in the hearth slowly dies down into itself.

The girl is in the adjoining room, washing the dishes. The waning fire throws the two men’s shadows on the walls, long and wavering. Denholt’s, in particular, looks like that of a monster breathing smoke out of its nostrils. O’Shaughnessy grins a little at the idea.

He crushes out his cigarette. “Well,” he says, “looks like the storm’ll keep up all night. Guess I better make a break for it.”

Denholt stiffens, then smiles. “You’re not thinking of leaving now? You’ll spend the rest of the night wandering around in circles out there in the dark! Wait till daylight at least, maybe it’ll let up by then. There’s an extra room back there, you won’t be any trouble at all.”

The girl says from the doorway, almost frightenedly, “Oh, please, don’t go yet, Mr. O’Shaughnessy! It’s so nice having you.”

She waits for his answer.

O’Shaughnessy gives them both a long look in turn. Then he uncrosses his long legs, recrosses them the other way around. “I’m staying, then,” he says quietly.

Denholt gets up. “I’ve a little work to finish — something I was in the midst of when — er, your arrival interrupted me. If you’ll excuse me for a few minutes— You can go to bed any time you feel like it.” And then, with a covert glance toward the kitchen doorway, “Just bear in mind what I said. Don’t take anything she says too seriously.”

The girl comes in after the doctor has gone, sits shyly down on the opposite side of the cleared table. That strange hungry look of hers rests steadily on his face, as if she never had seen anyone like him before.

“I’m glad you’re staying,” she murmurs finally. “I wanted you to because — well, maybe if you’re here, I won’t have to take my injection.” O’Shaughnessy droops his lids a little. “What kind of an injection?” he says with almost somnolent slowness.

She turns her hand up, down again. “I don’t know, I only know I have to take them. About once a month. He says it’s bad for me if I miss any. Tomorrow would be the day, if you hadn’t come.” She screws up her eyes at him pathetically. “I don’t like them, because they hurt so, and they make me feel so ill afterward. Once I tried to run away, but I couldn’t get through the fence.”

There’s something a little flinty in O’Shaughnessy’s eyes that wasn’t there before. “And what’d he do when he caught you?” His own hand on the table flexes a little.

“Oh nothing. Just talked to me, told me I had to have them whether I liked it or not. He said it was for my own sake he gives them to me. He said if I went too long without getting one—”

“What would happen?”

“He didn’t say. Just said something pretty awful.”

O’Shaughnessy growls to himself deep in his throat. Drugging, eh? Maybe that’s why she can’t remember further back than two years, and why she says such weird things from time to time. But on second thought, it can’t be that, either. The infrequency of the injections argue against it. There wouldn’t be pain, if it were some kind of a drug. And if it were something able to affect her memory of the far past, why not the recent past as well? O’Shaughnessy’s no medical man, but he’s knocked around enough to know a little something; in the Orient and South America he’s seen the telltale traces of almost every known narcotic under the sun. There is absolutely no sign of it about Nova. She is as fresh as that rain falling from the sky outside.

He only asks her one question, to make sure. “Do you dream — dream about pretty things — after you’ve had one of these shots?”

“No,” she shudders, “I feel like I’m all on fire. I woke up once and there was all ice around me—”

Not a drug, then. Maybe he has Denholt all wrong; maybe she really does need these treatments — vaccine or serum it sounds like — maybe she had some ghastly illness that robbed her of her memory, the use of her limbs, two years ago, and these injections are to speed her recovery, guard her against a relapse. Still, Denholt did try to pass her off as mentally unbalanced, when she isn’t at all. No, there’s something the man is up to — something secret and — and ugly. The barbed-wire fence, the alarm-bell show that too. Why bring her way up here when she could have far better care and attention — if she needs any — at a hospital in one of the big cities?

“Did you really mean what you said about only learning to walk and talk the spring before last?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’ll show you one of the copy-books he taught me out of.” She comes back with a dog-eared primer.

He thumbs through it. “C is for Cat. Does-the-Cat-see-the-Rat?” He closes it, more at sea than ever.

“Were you as big as now when he taught you to walk?”

“Yes. I wore this same dress I have on now, that’s how I can tell. I learned by myself, mostly. He used to put me down on the floor over there by the wall, and then put a lump of sugar on a chair all the way across the room, and coax me to walk over to get it. If I crawled on my hands and knees, he wouldn’t let me have the sugar. After awhile I got so I could stand up straight—”

“Stop!” he says, with a sudden sharp intake of breath. “It’s enough to make a person go crazy just trying to figure out! There’s — there’s craziness in it somewhere! And I know on whose part. Not yours! God knows what he did to you the first twenty years of your life to make you forget everything you should have known—”

She doesn’t answer. She can’t seem to understand what he means. But her eyes show fright at the force of his speech. He sees he may do more harm than good by telling her other people aren’t like she is. She’s grown up, and she’s been held here in some kind of mental thralldom — that’s the closest he can get to the answer. And the man that would do that to another human being is a monster and a maniac.

His voice hoarse with pity and anger, he says, “Tell me now, did you ever see any other man but me and the doctor before in your life?”

“No,” she breathes, “that’s why I like you so much.”

“Didn’t you even ever see another girl — have someone like yourself around you to talk with?”

“No,” she murmurs again. “Only him. No one else at all.”

He rises as if he can’t stand any more of it, takes three quick turns around his chair, raises it, bangs it down again.

She watches him timidly, not speaking, with just that fright in her eyes. He slumps down in his chair again, looks at her broodingly. Somehow he knows he’s going to take her with him when he leaves, and he wonders if he has any right to. What’ll he do with her afterward — turn her loose like a lamb among wolves? Drag her around with him from bar to cantina to bistro, when he’s not up in the air risking his neck for some Chinese war lord or Nicaraguan outlaw? His kind of a life— At least she has peace here, and a sort of security.

The bolts shoot back behind the laboratory door. He sees her glance past him, but doesn’t turn his head to look. On the wall opposite Denholt’s long wavering silhouette appears more ominous now than before. Madman, criminal, Samaritan — which? Playing the role of God to this girl — in some obscure way that O’Shaughnessy cannot fathom even yet — which he has no right to do. Better the cantinas and the tropical hell-holes of his own life. If she has anything in her, she’ll rise above them; this way she hasn’t even a chance to do that.

Her quick whisper reaches him while Denholt is in the act of closing the door after him. “Don’t let him give me another injection. Maybe if you ask him not to he’ll listen to you!”

“You’ve had your last!” O’Shaughnessy says, decisively.

Denholt approaches the table, looks suspiciously from one to the other. Then a smile crosses his face. “Still up, eh? How about a nice hot toddy for both of us before we turn in?” Nova makes a move to leave her chair and he quickly forestalls her. “I’ll fix it myself.”

O’Shaughnessy doesn’t miss that. He stares up into the other’s face, takes his time about answering. “Why not?” he says, finally, jutting out his chin.

Denholt goes into the kitchen. O’Shaughnessy can see him pouring whiskey into two tumblers, spooning sugar, from where he is. The doctor keeps looking obliquely out at him from time to time, with a sort of smirk of satisfaction on his face.

O’Shaughnessy says quietly to the girl, sitting there feasting her eyes on him with a doglike devotion: “Go over there to my coat, hanging up over the fireplace. You’ll find an oil-silk packet in the inside pocket, full of papers and things. Take the papers out and just bring me the folder. Don’t let him see you.”

He thrusts the moisture-proof oblong down just under the collar of his shirt, buttons the neck over it, stretches the collarband out as far as it will go, to create a gap. Then he bends forward a little, sticks his elbows on the table, rests his chin on his hands. His upthrust arms obscure his chest and neck. He drawls something she doesn’t understand — one more of the many incomprehensible things he is always saying: “I can smell a Mickey a mile away.”

Denholt comes in with the two toddies, says to her, “You’d better go to your room now, Nova, it’s getting late, and you’re going to need all your strength. Tomorrow, you know.”

She shivers when she hears that, slowly withdraws under the compulsion of Denholt’s stare, sending appealing looks at O’Shaughnessy. A door closes after her somewhere in the back.

Denholt has noticed the telegraphic communication between them. “I don’t know what my ward has been telling you—” he begins.

O’Shaughnessy is not showing his cards yet. “Not a thing, Doc,” he says. “Not a thing. Why? Is there something she could tell?”

“No, no, of course not,” Denholt covers up hastily. “Only — er, she gets delusions about injections and things. That’s why I don’t allow her in the laboratory any more. She caught me giving a rabbit an injection one day, and she’d be perfectly capable of telling you that it was she I gave it to, and what’s more, believing it herself. Let’s drink up, shall we?”

He hands his guest one of the two glasses. O’Shaughnessy takes it with one hand, keeps the other cupped along the line of his jaw. He hoists it an eighth of an inch. “Here’s to tomorrow.”

Denholt’s piercing gaze transfixes him for a minute. Then he relaxes into a slow, derisive smile. “Here’s to tonight he contradicts, “tomorrow will take care of itself.”

O’Shaughnessy thrusts the rim of his glass up under his lower lip, slowly levels it until it is horizontal — and empty. The forked hand supporting his chin is between it and Denholt. He’s a sloppy drinker, the collar of his shirt gets a little wet...

The yellow-green of the doctor’s oil-lamp recedes waveringly from the doorway of the bedroom O’Shaughnessy is to occupy. Pitch-blackness wells up all around, cut by an occasional calcium-flare of lightning outside the high, small window. The flashes are less frequent now and the rain has let up.

O’Shaughnessy is lying flat on his back, on the rickety cot. He has left on his trousers and shirt. Denholt said, perhaps with ghastly double meaning, “I’m sure you’ll be dead to the world in no time at all!” as he went out just now. The first thing the flyer does, as the waning lamp-glow finally snuffs out altogether and a door closes somewhere in the distance, is to take out the bulging waterlogged oil-silk envelope from his shirt and let its contents trickle silently onto the floor.

The rustle of the slackening rain outside begins to lull his senses before he knows it. The ache of his wrenched shoulder lessens, is erased by oncoming sleep. The lids of his eyes droop closed. He catches them the first time, holds them open by sheer will-power. Not a sound, not a whisper comes to help him keep awake. The lonely mountain-house is deathly still; only the rain and the far-off thunder sound outside. The girl’s story begins to take on a dream-like quality, unreal, remote, fantastic—

The muffled creak of a pine wood floor-board, somewhere just beyond the open door of his room, jerks his senses awake. At first he thinks he’s still at the stick of his plane, makes vague motions to keep from going into a tailspin... Then he remembers where he is.

Twenty minutes, half an hour, an hour maybe, since Denholt’s murky lamp-glow flickered away from the door. Maybe even more than that. O’Shaughnessy swears at himself mentally for fading out like this. But it’s all right; if this is it now—

It must be deep in the night. There’s no rain now any more, just the plink of loose drops as they detach themselves one by one from the eaves. A pale silver radiance, little more than a phantom glint, is coming through the window up over him. Dawn? No, a late moon, veiled by the last of the storm clouds.

The creak is repeated, closer at hand, a little more distinct this time. He can hear breathing with it. Outstretched there on the cot, he begins drawing up his knees closer to his body, tensing himself for the spring. What’ll he have — a knife, a gun, some viciously-keen surgical instrument? O’Shaughnessy widens his arms, into a sort of simulation of a welcoming embrace. The dark hides the great fists, the menacing grin at his mouth.

Something comes over the threshold. O’Shaughnessy can sense the stirring of air at its furtive passage, rather than see or hear anything. There’s a whispered footfall within the room itself. A blur of motion glides momentarily through the wan silvery light, which isn’t strong enough to focus it clearly, into the concealing dark on his side of it.

There’s a clang from the bucked cot-frame, the upward fling of a body, a choked sound of fright as a pair of arms lash out in a bear-hug. In the soft purring tones of a tea-kettle O’Shaughnessy’s voice pours out unprintable maledictions.

Her softness warns him just in time, before he’s done more than pinion her arms fast and drive all the breath out of her body. “Don’t,” she pants, “it’s me.” His arms drop away, he blows out breath like a steam-valve, the reaction staggers him back a step to the wall, off balance. “You! Why didn’t you whisper a warning? I was—”

“I was afraid he’d hear me. He’s in the laboratory. He left the door open behind him and I’ve been watching him from outside in the dark—”

“What’s he think he’s going to do, give you one of them shots again?”

“No, it’s you — he’s going to do something to you, I don’t know what! He took your coat in there, and took all the papers in it and burned them. Then he — he lit flames under all those big glass things, and put a needle in a pan to soak, like he does with me. But this time he has a silk cord in there with him, and he made a big loop in it and measured it round his own neck first, then took it off again and practiced throwing it and pulling it tight. He’s got a big black thing in there too, you hold it this way and point it—”

“A gun,” says O’Shaughnessy softly, mockingly. “He’s not missing any bets, is he? Knockout drops, a noose, a positive. How’s he fixed for hand-grenades?”

She puts the flats of her hands against his chest. “Don’t stay, please!

I don’t want — things like that to happen to you! Go before he gets through! He’s awfully quick and strong, you ought to see how he ran after me that time when I tried to get to the fence! Maybe you can sneak by outside the door without his seeing you, or get out one of the windows— Don’t stand there without moving like that! Please don’t wait. That’s why I came in here to you. There’s steam coming from the pan the needle’s in already. I saw it!” And then, in a low heartbroken wail, “Aren’t you going to go?”

Instead he sits down on the edge of the cot, leisurely puts on the soiled canvas shoes Denholt has lent him. Reaches toward her, draws her over, and stands her before him.

“Nova, d’you like me?” he says.

“I like you very much.”

He rubs his hair awry with one hand, as though at his wits’ end. “Don’t be givin’ me any blarney now. D’you want to marry me?”

“What’s marry?”

“I ought to be shot,” he says softly to himself. “Well — d’you want to be with me always, go wherever I go, tell me how good I am when I’m good, buck me up when I’m down in the dumps — and one of these days, pretty soon, wear black for me?”

“Yes,” she says softly, “I want to be near you. If that’s to marry, then that’s what I want.”

He puts out his hand at her. “Shake, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy! Now let’s get out of here.” He goes over to the door, looks out at the distant bar of light escaping across their path from the open laboratory-door. “Got anything you want to bring with you? You’re standing in the middle of your wardrobe right now, I guess. Got any idea where he keeps that key?”

“The one to the padlock on the gate outside? In the pockets of his coat, I guess; he always seems to reach in there for it. He hasn’t got it on, though; he’s got on that white thing he wears in the laboratory. It must be in the room where he sleeps.”

“Okay, we’ll try lifting it. I wouldn’t mind roughing that bird up, only I don’t want anything to happen to you. He’s probably got an aim, with that gun of his, like a cockeyed nervewreck with palsy. Stick close behind me.”

V

They glide through the velvety dark, O’Shaughnessy in the lead, the girl behind him, keeping contact with her fingers resting lightly against the back of his shoulder. The vague outline of the room-doorway seems to move toward them, not they toward it, to come abreast, to slip past. Ahead there is just that bar sinister of bleaching whiteness, falling across the floor of the main room and leaping up one wall.

“Gotta watch these boards,” he breathes across his shoulder, “you woke me up getting in here, and you don’t weigh what I do.” The touch of her fingers against his back tells him she’s shaking all over. “It’s all right. You’re with me now.”

A board whimpers a little, and he gets off it with catlike litheness before it goes into a full-bodied creak. The gash of laboratory whiteness comes slowly nearer, outlining the angles of things even beyond its own radius. This house, he thinks, is as black physically as it is in spirit. Little tinkering, puttering sounds become audible from the still-distant laboratory, magnified in the stillness. Mania at its preparations.

She signals with her fingertips, abreast of an open door. “In here?” he whispers. They turn aside and glide through. “Stand here right beside the door where I can find you again. I’ll see if I can locate his coat.”

He does after a lot of cautious circling and navigation; it is hanging from a peg in the wall. He finds the key very quickly, though to her it must seem forever that he’s standing there fumbling with the coat. He slips back to her, jaunty with his own peculiar jauntiness even in this eerie situation. “Got it. Now here we go.”

Outside again. Step by step through the silence and the blackness, the triangular wedge of white ahead the only visible thing. A board barks treacherously under him, this time before he can withdraw his foot. They stand rigid, while the echoes move into the night. The tinkering has stopped abruptly. Questioning silence from the laboratory now. O’Shaughnessy nudges her with his elbow, and they draw in against the wall.

Not a sound from the laboratory. The bar of escaping light, narrow as a candlestick until now, slowly, insinuatingly, broadens out fan-shaped as the door behind it silently widens. A silhouette bisects it, Denholt’s outline thrown before him over the floor and up the wall, rigid, standing just within the opening, listening.

The grin has come back to O’Shaughnessy’s face; he reaches behind him and squeezes her throbbing wrist reassuringly. It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he’s missing a lot by being like this — fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is he lost it all, and what there is — if anything — ever to bring it back.

One thing’s sure, she’s being afraid for the both of them, and plenty left over; her pulse is a whipcord under the thumb that is holding her wrist.

The silhouette moves at last, begins to recede within the lighted room. The noise that conjured it up, like a genie out of a bottle, hasn’t been repeated. The tinkerings and drippings resume where they left off. Only the path of light remains wider than before, a ticklish gap to bridge undiscovered. When they are almost abreast of it and can hear Denholt’s breathing inside, O’Shaughnessy stops, gropes behind him, draws Nova around in front of him. He transfers the padlock key to her palm, closes her fingers over it. “I want to be sure you make that gate, no matter what. Take a deep breath and get across that lighted place. Don’t be afraid, I’m right here backing you up.”

She edges forward, cranes her neck toward the open door. Apparently Denholt’s back is toward it. She takes a quick soundless sidestep, with instinctive feminine deftness, and is on the other side of the luminous barrier. He can see her there anxiously waiting for him to join her.

A moment later he is beside her again, bringing with him a quick bird’s-eye glimpse of a white-coated form bent over, laboriously pouring something from a retort into a hypodermic-barrel. In the background a pair of operating tables, not just one. One an improvised one — planks bridging two chairs, with a rubber sheet draped over them. “Double-header coming up,” thinks O’Shaughnessy. “Rain — no game.”

She is tugging insistently at his arm, but he is suddenly resistant, immobile. She turns her face up toward his. “O’Shaughnessy, come on! Any minute he’s—”

“My rabbit’s foot. He’s got it in there with him, in my coat. I couldn’t go without it—”

“O’Shaughnessy, he’ll kill you.”

“Him and what sextet? Get over there to the door, kid, and start working on it. I want you in the clear in case that gun of his starts going boom. I’ve got to go in after my lucky paw, no two ways about it.” He has to jog her, push her slightly, to get her to tear herself away from him. Finally she slips off in the dark with a little whimper of protest. He waits there until a faint clicking comes from the main door. Then a bolt grates miserably as she clears it, and there is sudden, startled silence from within the gleaming laboratory.

O’Shaughnessy, muscles taut as wires, rounds the angle of the doorframe, unhurried, casual. Digs a thumb at the man in the white jacket who has just whirled to face the door. “My coat, Doc. I’m leaving.”

Denholt has just finished putting down the loaded needle he was preparing. The gun the girl mentioned is on the table, but under his hand already.

“So you think you’re leaving? You’re very foolish, my friend. It would have been easier to sleep, the way I meant you to. No fright, no last-minute agony. You would not have seen your own death.”

“No fright, no agony this way either.” O’Shaughnessy calmly reaches for his coat, extracts the charm, stuffs it into his trouser-pocket. “Don’t be so handy burning my identification papers next time,” he says, “or I’ll slap your head all the way around your neck—”

The gun is up now, level with his chest.

Behind them in the darkness the heavy outer door swings open with a grinding whirr. Denholt takes a quick step forward. O’Shaughnessy doesn’t move from before him, blocking his way. He’s flexing his wrists slightly, in and out.

A patter of quick, light footsteps recedes outside in the open, flying over the clayey rain-wet ground.

“Who’s that?”

“Who should it be? That’s the girl. I’m taking her with me.”

Denholt’s face is a sudden mask of dismay. “You can’t!” he cries shrilly. “You don’t know what it means, you fool! You can’t take her out into the world with you! She’s got to stay here, she needs me!” He raises his voice to a frenzied shout. “Nova! Come back here!”

“That’s your story and you’re stuck with it.” O’Shaughnessy raises his own voice, in a bull-rumble. He shifts dead-center in front of the leveled gun, to keep Denholt from snaking past around him.

“Get out of my way, or I’ll shoot you dead. I didn’t want to puncture your skin, damage any vital organ, but if I have to, you’re the loser! Nothing can bring you back then, do you hear me, nothing can bring you back! You’ll stay dead!”

O’Shaughnessy just stands, crouched a little, measuring him with his eyes. O’Shaughnessy is a gambler; he senses a reluctance on Denholt’s part to shoot him, and he plays on it for what it’s worth. Instead of giving ground before the weapon, he takes a sidling step in, and another.

The alarm-bell begins ringing somewhere off in the dripping trees... She’s got the last barrier open, she’s made it.

A sudden taut cord down the side of Denholt’s neck reveals to O’Shaughnessy the muscular signal sent down to his unseen trigger-finger. He swerves like a drunk. A foreshortened bar of orange, like a tube-light, seems to solder the two of them together for a second. Noise and smoke come later. O’Shaughnessy isn’t aware of pain, only knows that he’s been hit somewhere and mustn’t be hit any more. He has the gun-hand in his own now, ten fingers obeying two different brains, clutching a single weapon. It goes off again, and again, and again — four, five, six times.

O’Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick- and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O’Shaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube-glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow.

O’Shaughnessy can’t hit with his left arm, he notices; the shoulder blocks off the brain-message each time. He just uses that arm to hold Denholt where his right-hand blows can find him. He has lost track of the other’s left hand for a moment, it comes back again around his body from somewhere, with a warning flash to it. Scalpel or something.

O’Shaughnessy dives, breaks, puts space between them. A downward hiss misses his chest-barrel, he pounces, traps the arm before it can come up again, vises it between his own arm and upthrust thigh, starts forcing it out of joint. The thing drops with a musical ting! He scuffs it aside, takes a quick step back to get driving-force, sends a shattering haymaker in. Denholt topples, skids through broken tube-glass, lies there stunned, tilted on one elbow.

O’Shaughnessy, his shoulder throbbing with pain like a bass drum, pants grimly: “Now — got it through your head I’m taking her?” He turns and shuffles unsteadily toward the door.

Denholt is trying to struggle up, gabbling: “You’re taking her to her death!”

The alarm-bell keeps pealing, waiting. O’Shaughnessy stumbles out of the laboratory, on through the darkness toward the front door. Cool, dank, before-dawn air swirls about him. He turns and sees Denholt outlined there behind him in the lighted doorway, where he has dragged himself, hanging weakly onto the frame, holding up one arm in imprecation — or in warning.

“Remember what I’m saying. You’re dooming her. This is the thirtieth of June — remember this date, remember it well! You’ll know, you’ll know soon enough! You’ll come crawling back to me — with her — begging me to help you! You’ll get down on your bended knees to me, you’ll grovel at my feet — that’ll be my hour!”

“Have another shot — on me,” O’Shaughnessy growls back from the darkness under the trees.

“You’re not taking her out to life, you’re taking her out to her death — the most awful death a human being ever experienced!”

The shrieking, maddened voice dwindles away behind him in the house, and he can make out Nova waiting tremblingly for him at the opened barbed-wire barrier. He stumbles to her through the mud of the storm-wrack, holding his bullet-seared shoulder. He grins and drawls in that quiet way of his above the slackening noise of the exhausted alarm-bell: “H’lo, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Shall we go now?”

He takes her arm.

VI

O’Shaughnessy, dickering with a man named Tereshko at the bar of the Palmer House, Chicago, excuses himself, steps into a booth to call his North Side flat.

“Why not have your wife join us for dinner?” Tereshko says. “Say, at the Chez Paree. We can talk business to music just as well as here.”

“Great,” says O’Shaughnessy. Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don’t you’re a fool. You could call Nova O’Shaughnessy’s illuminating beauty that of a star-shell. If he uses it to help dazzle this wary gentleman he is trying to dent, it doesn’t mean he values it any the less himself.

So he says into the phone: “Nova, I want you to meet me at Chez Paree. I’ve got a man with me. He’s looking for a pilot, and he’s talking big money, so be as beautiful as you can. Take a cab, honey.” Nova is still new to the city streets. “Just one thing. Any offer under seventy-five hundred and you give me a look, much as to say, ‘Isn’t he funny?’ Get it? And not a word about — that place on the mountain, of course.”

At the Paree they order a table for three. They’ve been drinking a good deal, and Tereshko is beginning to show it. He isn’t drunk but he loses some of his caginess. Loosens up, so to speak.

“You had much experience locating mining claims from the air?” he resumes.

“No, just flying. But as I understand it, all you want is to be piloted up there, so you can look them over yourself. I can guarantee to do that for you. All I need’s the general direction and plenty of gas.”

It’s obvious that money isn’t the hitch. This Tereshko has that written all over him, in a flashy uncouth sort of way. His hesitancy — and O’Shaughnessy is a good judge of men’s motives — seems to stem from caution, as though he wants to make sure whom he’s dealing with first before he puts all his cards on the table. He can’t doubt by now that O’Shaughnessy’s an experienced enough flier to get him anywhere he wants to go, after the clippings and documents he’s been showing him all afternoon long.

“Of course,” Tereshko feels his way, offering the applicant a cigarette out of a platinum case with an emerald catch, “what I’m mainly interested in is to see that the whole undertaking is kept strictly between ourselves. I don’t want known to anyone what its object or destination is. No one at all, is that clear? Not even after it’s been wound up.”

“I can give you a guarantee on that too. I’m no loudspeaker.”

“No, you seem like the sort that minds his own business — that’s why I approached you in the first place.” He — very unwisely — signals for another drink.

Tereshko relaxes still further. “I don’t mind telling you,” he admits, “that that whole mine-location business was just camouflage. What I’m looking for is already mined and minted, only it was put back in the ground. And it’s all the way around the compass from where I said. Not British Columbia at all, but in one of the Florida keys, we think. Maybe one of the Bahamas. I suppose that gives you the clue. Well, it looks like you’re our man, so there’s no harm in your knowing.”

“Pirate stuff, eh?”

“Yes and no,” says Tereshko. “Certainly was a pirate all right, but he dates from prohibition days and not Captain Kidd’s time. Guess you know who I mean now.”

O’Shaughnessy doesn’t, but it doesn’t cost anything to let the other think so.

“He won’t get out until, let’s see—” A pecan-sized diamond flames as he figures on his fingers. “1948, or is it ’50? Hell, he was a great guy and all that,” he goes on by way of self-excuse, “but you can’t blame the rest of us. After all, we’re getting older every day. He got his, why shouldn’t we get ours? He’s served two years of his sentence — why should we wait?”

“Then you have no right to it?”

“Any more than he had!” snaps the other. “It’s nobody’s money. It don’t even belong to the saps he got it from, because he gave ’em needle-beer for it at four bits a throw.”

“One way of looking at it,” says O’Shaughnessy non-committally. “What other way of looking at it is there? Is it doing anybody any good lying where it is in the ground? We wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble only — you see banks were no good, nor safe-deposit boxes nor anything else, because his trouble was — Government trouble. He musta seen it coming up. We didn’t, but he musta, because we all remember how just before it happened he went off on a cruise down Florida waters in his motor yacht. Just him and a small crew to run the thing for him and, oh yes, some girl he was playing around with at the time. None of us, not one of us. We all thought that was funny, too, because he was a guy loved company. Until then he’da caught cold without the bunch of us being around him all the time. Well funnier still, just before turning back they touch at Havana. Him and this dame go ashore and nobody else’s allowed to leave the boat. Then, on very sudden orders from him, the yacht leaves Havana — without him and the girl coming back to it. It’s supposed to pick them up later at Bimini or something. It was never seen in one piece again. A piece of charred wood was picked up later with its name on it. Must have been destroyed at sea by an explosion, and not a soul aboard escaped alive. Funny, huh, to send it on ahead like that, when it could have waited right in the harbor for them? They were the only two it had to cater to.”

“Tunny is right, but not for laughing,” O’Shaughnessy agrees.

“Just when we were getting out our black neckties and armbands, a cable comes from him. ‘Hope you’re not worried, I’m okay, taking the next plane north, and wasn’t that a terrible accident?’ Thirty days later to the hour, Uncle Sam jumps on his neck and—” He pinches his fingers together, kisses them, flies them apart. “How much turned up, when the smoke had cleared away? Five grand. Why, he used to carry as much as that around in his pocket for change! Does it look like I’m right, or does it look like I’m right? Every other lead we’ve had since then has petered out. It took us long enough to tumble, but now I think we’ve got it added up right. Now, d’you think you can help us swing it?”

O’Shaughnessy shrugs. “What’s hard about it? I can taxi you around for a month, two months, as long as it takes you to locate it. An amphibian is the answer, of course. Now there’s this: you’ll have to stake me to the plane. I banged my own up week before last — that’s when I got this busted shoulder. Don’t get the idea I can’t fly — lightning butted in, that was all.”

“We’ll provide you with the plane,” Tereshko assures him. “You shop around and pick up what you think you’ll need, and you can keep it, as an extra bonus, when we get back.”

“Just how long will I last after that to enjoy the use of it?” wonders O’Shaughnessy knowingly. But that isn’t really a deterrent — people have thought they’d get rid of him, once he’s served his purpose, before now — and haven’t made a go of it. These fellows’ll find that out too.

“The wren would come in handy for a guide — did you ever think of contacting her?” he says thoughtfully.

“Did we think?” scoffs the other. “His cell door wasn’t closed behind him yet before we started to put on the pressure. Well we put it on too heavy. We had her figured all wrong. It just happens she was one of those innocent babes, hadn’t known what it was all about until the lid blew off — musta thought he made his dough in stocks and bonds or something.” O’Shaughnessy makes that derisive sound with his lips commonly known as the raspberry.

“No, that’s what we thought too,” Tereshko assures him, “but it was on the level. He used to tell us everything was on the up-and-up between them — you know what I mean, and she wasn’t really his moll... He called her his madonna—”

“Machine-gun madonna,” chuckles O’Shaughnessy.

“He was going to marry her. She was only a kid, seventeen or something like that. Well, between the shock of finding out who she’d been mixed up with, and us putting the pressure on her, the poor dame never had a chance. She claimed she didn’t know anything that went on during that cruise. So then we lock her up in a dark garage overnight, to frighten her into talking. We frightened her all right, but not into talking. Just our luck — he’d never let her cut her hair, said she looked like an angel with it long. So she has a hairpin to unlock the engines of all the cars in there — and there was about six of them — and starts them all turning over and breathes the monoxide until she’s gone. With a kitten he gave her still in her arms.”

“Fine note.” O’Shaughnessy scowls sympathetically. Not with them, but with the harried, friendless girl in the garage.

Tereshko grins.

“Yeah, ain’t it? Of all the dirty tricks! We hadda leave her lie in there all next day. Then we sneaked her out after dark, carried her miles away, and planted her somewhere else. I never even read about them finding her. If they did, they never tumbled to who she was, not a word about it came out in the pa—”

“Here’s my wife,” O’Shaughnessy interrupts, standing up. He’s sighted her across Tereshko’s shoulder as she comes in from the street just then, stands there a second, looks around. She’s something to look at, as she locates them, starts over toward them, with a smile for him on her face.

Tereshko, whose chair is facing the other way, follows him to his feet, turning around to greet her as he does so.

O’Shaughnessy is saying, “Nova, meet Mr. Vincent Tereshko.”

There’s a tinkle as Tereshko’s cocktail glass hits the floor. There’s a peculiar hiss at the same time, like an overheated radiator, or an inner tube deflating. Tereshko sort of reels back, the low top of the chair he has just risen from catches him across the spine, he goes over it, dumping the back of his head onto the soft padded seat, and then he and chair alike roll over sideward to the floor. Instantly he scrambles up again, gives a hoarse cry that sounds like, “No! Get away from me! You’re not real.”

He makes flailing motions with both arms, buffeting the air before him, then turns and runs through the foyer and out into the street.

They come out of their trance after awhile, not right away. “Well, I’ll be a— Did you see that? What bit him? A minute ago he’s sitting here chatting with me, then all at once he goes haywire.”

“It was — me,” she says wonderingly, still staring after Tereshko.

He flips his head impatiently at such an idea. “Nah, how could it have been you? Talk sense. You’re not used to crowds yet, every time anyone looks at you you think something’s the matter.” He can’t, after all, really tell who or what Tereshko saw.

“It was, O’Shaughnessy,” she insists troubledly. “He was looking right at me, right into my face. Something must be the matter with me! Is there anything wrong with the way I look? Because that’s the second time tonight that’s happened—”

He turns to her, startled. “Second! What d’you mean?”

“Just now, outside the door. There was a man sitting waiting in a limousine for someone, and as I got out of my cab, he turned around and looked at me, and then he — he gave a yell like this one did, and started off, tearing down the street a mile a minute as if he’d seen a ghost—”

O’Shaughnessy looks puzzled.

“Turn around a minute. Lemme see,” he says. Then as she slowly revolves before him: “You’re okay from every angle, I don’t see anything about you to scare grown men out of their wits. He musta seen somebody or something in back of you that did that to him. The heck with it. Let’s go home. It looks like the deal’s off, and I’m just as satisfied. It had a bad smell to it from the beginning.”

Seventy-two hours go by, the lull before the storm. Then, the third night after that, he happens to come back to the flat earlier than usual. He’s down to his last few dollars, and he’s been tramping around all day trying to make connections. But free-lance pilots, flying soldiers of fortune, don’t seem to be in great demand at the moment. He has her to look after now...

He spots her standing at the curb in front of their house, as he rounds the corner. She’s looking for a taxi. She signals one, and just as she’s on the point of getting in, he shouts: “Hey Nova! What’s the idea?” and comes running up just in time.

She seems astonished to see him. Not confused, just astonished.

“I’m sorry it took me so long. I didn’t mean to keep you waiting like that. Is that why you changed your mind and came back here instead? You’re not sore, are you, O’Shaughnessy?”

He says: “What’re you talking about? Sore about what?”

“Why, because I’m half an hour late in meeting you.”

“Who told you to meet me?”

She’s more astonished than ever. “Why, you did! You telephoned me over an hour ago and said to take a taxi and come out and meet you at—” He takes a look around him up and down the street. “Come on upstairs,” he says crisply. “Never mind, driver, we don’t want you.” And upstairs: “What else did I say?”

“You told me to come as quickly as I could, that’s all.”

“Don’t you know my voice on the wire?”

“I’ve never heard anybody else’s but yours, so I thought it was you again. You sounded a little far-off, that’s all.”

“Well it wasn’t me. And I’m wondering who it was. Listen, Nova, honey, don’t go out any more by yourself after this. I’ll give you a password over the phone from now on. Barbed wire, how’ll that be? If you don’t hear me say barbed wire, you’ll know it isn’t me.”

“Yes, O’Shaughnessy.”

The following evening, when he comes back, he has trouble getting in. His latchkey works, but she has something shoved up against the door on the inside, a chair inserted under the knob, maybe. It doesn’t hold him very long, and she’s standing there in the middle of the room shaking like a leaf.

“What’d you do that for?” he asks. “And how’d that hole get in the door, over the lock?”

She runs over and hangs on tight. “They called again. They said it was you, but I knew it wasn’t because they didn’t say barbed wire.”

“They try to get you to come out again?”

“No, they didn’t. They said, ‘We’ve got a message for you from Benny.’ Who’s Benny?”

O’Shaughnessy just looks at her, eyes narrowing

“Then they said, ‘Oh, so your torch went out?’ Then they laughed and they said, ‘Where’d you get hold of the mick?’ What’s a mick?”

“Me,” he says slowly, wondering. “Anything else?”

She shakes her head dazedly. “I couldn’t make head or tail out of it. They said, ‘You sure put one over on us, didn’t you? It was a good gag while it lasted, but it’s run out now. We’ll be seeing you.’ ”

“Then what?”

“Oh, O’Shaughnessy, I was so scared. I didn’t know where to get hold of you, except you were downtown in the Loop somewhere. I locked the door and I hid in the closet, just left it open on a crack. In about half an hour, all of a sudden I could see the doorknob slowly turning, as if someone was out there trying it. Then when that wouldn’t work the bell started to ring, and a voice said thickly, ‘It’s me, babe. Let me in, I forgot my key.’ But I knew it wasn’t you. I got way in the far corner of the closet and pulled all the clothes over me—”

Meanwhile he’s taken his gun out of the valise where he keeps it and is checking it over, his wrists trembling a little with rage. That’s a man’s vital spot, the helpless thing he loves.

She goes on:

“Then something went polfa right into the door and came through on this side. I couldn’t stand it any more, I was afraid they’d come in and get me. I ran out of the closet and climbed out that window there onto the fire escape and got into the flat next door and begged the lady to hide me. I told her someone was trying to break into our flat, and she started to call the police, but by that time they’d gone. I could hear feet scuttling down the stairs, a whole lot of them, and a big car driving off outside—”

Walking back and forth, trying to dope it out, tapping the muzzle of his gun against his palm, he says, “Listen kid, I don’t know what we’re up against, it may be just a false alarm, but— Shooting a bullet-hole through your door in broad daylight makes it look like the McCoy. If I could only figure what it was all about! It’s no one in my life. I’ve made enough enemies, heaven knows, but not in this country. Nova, tell me the truth — were you ever in Chicago before?” He stands still and looks at her.

“Never, O’Shaughnessy, never, until we came here two weeks ago. I don’t know anyone here but you. I’ve never spoken to anyone but you the whole time we’ve been here. You’ve got to believe me!”

He does, how could he help it?

But then, what is it? What would you call it, anyway? If he had anything, he’d say it had the earmarks of an attempted snatch, for ransom. Mistaken identity? Yes, but who do they take her to be? The whole thing’s a maze. He wonders if he ought to give it to the police to handle for him. But then, what can he tell them? Somebody impersonated me on the phone to my wife, somebody tried to break into my flat while I was out. It doesn’t stack up to much when you put it that way. And he’s an individualist, anyway, used to being on his own. When it comes to anything threatening Nova, he’d rather take care of her himself.

Tereshko rings up unexpectedly that night. “This is Tereshko, O’Shaughnessy,” he says. “I’m down on lower State Street. I’d like to conclude that transaction we were talking over. Can you run down and meet me for ten minutes or so?”

“What happened to you the other night? Something seemed to frighten you.”

A phony laugh. “Me? Not at all. I got kinda sick all of a sudden, and beat it for the street.”

O’Shaughnessy motions Nova over, puts the receiver to her ear and whispers: “This the same voice you heard the other times?”

She listens, shakes her head.

So he says into the phone: “Frankly, the deal’s off, count me out.”

Tereshko doesn’t seem very perturbed, perhaps he doesn’t realize how much he revealed that night. “Sorry you feel that way, but you know best. Come down anyway for a drink, to show there’s no hard feeling. Come alone.”

O’Shaughnessy decides then and there that he will, to see what this is all about. That first night Tereshko was all for having Nova join them. Tonight he wanted O’Shaughnessy to come down alone. Does Tereshko want Nova left alone in the flat? Is he the one behind all this? Nothing like finding out. He says, “Get your hat.” And on the street, a couple of blocks away: “You’ve never been to a movie, have you? Well, you’re going to one now.”

He buys two seats, takes her in, finds a place for her. “Now don’t move from there till I come back and get you!” As if she were a child.

“Yes, O’Shaughnessy.”

There is no sign of Tereshko at the taproom where they were supposed to meet. O’Shaughnessy waits ten minutes, leaves, goes back and gets Nova. He fingers the gun in his pocket as they near their flat. “So now,” he says to himself grimly, “I think I know who Pm up against — if not why.”

The flat-door falls back unfastened before them. They give one another a look. “I thought — I saw you lock it after us when we left,” she whispers.

“You thought right,” he says grimly. He goes in first, gun bared.

No one there. “Must have blown open,” he says. “Maybe sneak-thieves.”

This alarms her. “My clothes! All the pretty things you gave me!” He grins a little at the woman of it, while she runs to the closet to find out. She comes out again as puzzled as ever.

“Anything missing?”

“No, but — I don’t remember this being on here before.” She’s holding one up to show him. A large lily is pinned to the front of it!

“Maybe it came that way and you’ve forgotten it.”

She strokes it with her fingers. “But it’s alive. They don’t put live ones on them.”

Even he knows that. He also knows what lilies stand for as a rule. He softly starts to whistle a bar or two. “Chicago, Chicago, I’ll show you around—”

VII

Some church-belfry on the other side of the river bongs twelve times. “Got everything in?” he says quietly. “I’ll carry the bags down. You put out the lights.”

She tiptoes submissively down the stairs after him. “I don’t know how far we can get on five bucks,” he remarks, “but it’s a cinch I can’t leave you up there by yourself any more in the daytime, and I can’t drag you all over town with me either. Maybe we can get a room on the other side of the city—”

Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street’s dead to the world.

Then suddenly, from nowhere, ping! Something flicks off the wall just behind him, flops at his feet like a dead bug. He doesn’t bend down to look closer, he can tell what kind of a bug it is all right. He’s seen that kind of bug before, plenty of times. No flash, no report, to show which direction it came from. Silencer, of course.

He hasn’t moved. Fsssh! and a bee or wasp in a hurry strokes by his cheek, tingles, draws a drop of slow blood. Another polfa! from the wall, another bug rolling over. The insect-world seems very streamlined, very self-destructive, tonight.

He takes a wary step back, slips inside the doorway again, still facing front. If he could only spot the flash, see where it was coming from, he could send them a few back. Meanwhile he’s half-in, half-out of the iron-grilled, thick, glass street-door.

There’s an anvil-like sound, and the warped spokes of a wheel show up in the glass, centering in a neat, round hole. Powdery stuff like dandruff dusts his shoulder. Another bug has dropped inside the hallway.

Hands are gripping at his coat, pulling at him from behind. “O’Shaughnessy, don’t — you’ll kill yourself standing there like that! Think of me!”

“Douse that bulb back there, swat it with-your handbag — I want to see if I can catch the flashes.”

But she won’t do it, and that traps him into going back and doing it himself. Then her arms wind around him when she gets him back there at the far end of the hallway, and she clings for dear life.

“No! No! I won’t let you— What good’ll you be to me dead? What’ll become of me?” He gives in at last — it’s either that or drag her bodily after him back to the entrance clinging like a barnacle.

“All right, all right. There must be a back way out of here.”

But, at the outlet to the electric-lighted basement passageway, as he emerges in advance of her — there are again winged insects on the loose, spitting off the wall. “Wait a minute!” he says, cutting short her plaintive remonstrances. “I think I caught the flash that time! Along the edge of the roof on that next house. Wait’ll it comes again.” And cuts his hand at her backhand. “The bulb. The bulb.” This time she obeys, blackness inks the passage behind him.

He draws and slowly raises his gun, standing perfectly still, face tilted to the sky. Gambler’s odds: his life against the chances of hitting a powder-flash six stories up. His left thumbnail scrapes past the rabbit foot imbedded in his vest-pocket, half absent-mindedly.

A winking gleam just over the cornice up there, a flare from his own gun as fire draws fire. A chipping of the stonework just over and behind his head, and then something black and gangling falling clumsily down six stories, a blur against the gray-gloom of the walls. A sickening thud against cement, just out of sight behind the eight-foot dividing-fence.

More flashes up there, six in a row, and a sound like hail or gravel down where they are. But O’Shaughnessy’s already back inside the sheltering passageway. “It won’t work. There’s still a second one up there, and we could never get over that eight-foot fence alive. They seem to be doing this up in style. Come on back up to the flat.”

She goes up the inner stairs with her hands shielding her face. “That fall. I hope he was dead before — he landed.”

“That evens the score a little,” he says unsentimentally. “They that live by the sword—”

Night in a Chicago flat. He says: “The door’s locked, and I’m here with Buster. You try to get a little sleep, honey, your old man’ll look after you.”

“But promise me you’ll stay up here with me, you won’t go down there again.”

“I promise.”

So, fully dressed, she lies there on the bed, and after awhile she sleeps, while he stands guard at the shade-drawn window, gun in hand, the spark of his cigarette held carefully behind his back.

A milkman comes and never dreams the muzzle of a gun is four inches away from his head on the other side of the door as he stoops to set down a bottle of milk. Nova sleeps on, like a child. Night in a Chicago flat.

Three hours after daylight they’re ready to leave. There are enough people on the streets now to give them a chance. If they don’t get out now, they never will. This net that’s been meshed loosely around them all night will be pulled tight by the time darkness comes a second time. They want him out of the way, but they want her alive. That much he’s sure of.

Just before they go, he murmurs, “There’s a cab been standing there ever since dawn, probably all night, just past the next corner. There’s no public hack-stand at that spot, either.”

“Do you think that’s — them?”

“I don’t give a hoot whether it is or not, I can’t breathe in here any more, I’ve got to get out in the open! Stick close behind me, and if I tumble, you keep going. I’ve been shot at before. I’m the bad penny that always turns up again.”

But then, as he puts his hand out to the doorknob, a sudden rigidity, as though some indefinable sound has reached him from outside it. “There’s someone out there,” he breathes.

She winces. “We’re too late.”

He motions her behind him, shielding her; reaches out and does something to the lock, levels his gun. “It’s open,” he calls out. “Come in at your own risk.”

Nothing for a minute. Then very slowly it starts to fall back toward them.

“Quicker than that or I’ll shoot!” He kicks it the rest of the way with the edge of his foot.

The tremblingly upraised arms are the first things they see. And the empty background behind the solitary figure. O’Shaughnessy takes a step backward, propelling her with him, not in retreat but to give himself elbow-room.

The face is Oriental, Chinese. Spectacles and close-cropped hair. Hat fallen off just now at the unexpected welcome.

O’Shaughnessy: “This is the place you wanted?”

“Yes, if you will permit me to mop my forehead—”

“You warm?”

“No, but my reception was.”

“All right, close the door behind you. We’ve been a little draughty here all night.”

The visitor bows nervously. “Allow me to introduce myself—”

“You’re on the air.”

“I am Lawrence Lee, American name. I have come to offer you interesting proposition—”

“I just had one, thanks, a couple days ago.”

“I had great trouble finding you—”

“You’re going to have even greater losing me, if this is a come-on.”

“I represent the illustrious Benevolent-Wisdom Yang. His recruiting-agent in United States. He has ordered a shipment of lovely planes, and needs someone who will know how to make them work. Your reputation has reached our ears. Can I offer you post on generalissimo’s staff?” O’Shaughnessy, gun still bared, sticks his left hand in his pocket, pulls it out again, lets the lining trail after it. “You make it sound interesting — up to a point.”

“Five hundred dollars American, a week.”

“I’m no greenhorn, I’ve been in China before. I’m O’Shaughnessy of Winnipeg, he can’t get another like me. The coolies used to bow down and worship in their rice-paddies whenever I passed overhead.” That he can stand and bargain like this, when both their lives are hanging by a thread, is — well, just part of his being O’Shaughnessy.

“Two thousand, p’aps?”

“More like it.” He turns to her, still huddled behind him. “Shall we do it, just for the fun of it?” Then, with a grin to the emissary, “Yang would not, I take it, be interested in a dead pilot?”

The agent, with Oriental lack of humor: “Dead pilot could not handle planes satisfactory.”

“Well, I may have a little trouble getting through alive from here to the Northwest Station. I can’t promise you I will.” She shudders at this point, clings closer. “However, that’s my look-out. You leave two through tickets for Frisco on tap for us at the ticket-office, and if I don’t show up to claim them, you can always get a refund from the railroad — and another pilot.”

“Today-train agreeable? Shall do. Boat-tickets will be waiting in Frisco at N. Y. K. Line office. And for binder, one thousand advance suitable?” O’Shaughnessy says in Chinese, “I could not wound your generosity by refusing.” Then in English, “Carry your hat in your hand leaving here, so your face can be seen clearly.”

The envoy bows himself out. “Happy comings-down.”

When they’re alone once more, he says to her: “Shanghai-ho. The Coast Limited leaves at eleven, so we’ve got just one hour to make it.”

“But how are we going to get out of here?”

“I don’t know yet, but we are.” He goes back to the window, peers narrowly down through the gap of the drawn shade. “There goes Confucius without anyone stopping him; I guess they didn’t tie him up with me.” Then, “Who’s that fat woman walking up and down out there with a poodle?”

“Oh, that’s the lady in the rear flat I climbed into yesterday. She always airs her dogs like that regularly every morning.”

“Dogs? She’s only got one there.”

“She’s got two in the flat. She has to take them down in relays because they fight.”

“I’ve got it now!” he says. “Wait’ll she comes upstairs again.”

“What are you going to do?”

“You’re going to take the next one down. I’m going to see that you get to the station and safely aboard that train first of all. I’ll stall them off here; you call me back as soon as you get there. Then I’ll make a break for it myself—”

“Leave you—?” she wails.

“I’m giving the orders in this ground-crew. Here she comes now.” He goes to the door, stops her, brings her in with him. She’s globular and baby-faced, with carefully gilded hair under a large cartwheel hat that flops around her face.

“Do you want to do something for us? I’ve got to get my wife out of the building and I can’t do it openly — we’re being watched. Will you lend her your hat and coat and dog? Your other dog.”

“I’ll gladly lend my hat and coat, but Fifi — my little Fifi — who’ll bring her back?”

“She’ll turn her over to the station-master for you, you can call for her later. I tell you her life’s in danger. Do this, won’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, looking at Nova, “I think I understand. I was sure I’d seen your face somewhere before — in the paper, you know. Tell me, what was he like? Was he as bad as they said? I heard he used to make people stand with their feet in buckets of cement—”

“Skip it,” says O’Shaughnessy, “you’ve got your wires crossed.”

It only takes a couple minutes for the change. The wide-brimmed concealing hat hides everything but Nova’s chin. He ties a couple of pillows around her with cord, one in front and one in back, under the coat, apologizing, “No offense,” to the woman as he does so.

“That’s all right,” she sighs. “I know I’ve filled out.”

The fat lady stays up in their flat; she thinks it will be a good idea to give them a glimpse of her passing back and forth behind the windows. Make them think Nova’s there. For this purpose they raise the shades once more. He goes down to the lower hall with Nova and the dog. Their parting is a mixture of comedy and tension. “I’ll be standing here behind the door covering you with my gun. Don’t be frightened. Imitate her waddle. Walk slow and keep your eye on the dog, like she does. Give yourself a good two blocks before you jump for it. And don’t drop those pillows to the sidewalk, whatever you do!”

“Oh, O’Shaughnessy, if you don’t show up, I’m going to die.”

“I’ll be there with bells on.”

The bulky, padded figure eases out through the door, minces after the dog, straining at its leash. He edges up slantwise against the door, screened by an abutment of the hall-wall, peering out after her, gun ready, until she passes from his radius of vision. Then quickly chases upstairs where the window will give him a wider perspective.

The dog stops. The figure under the concealing hat-brim stands patiently by. They go on again a few yards. They stop again. “Darn dog!” he chafes, sweating with impatience in the hollows of his hands. Finally, almost imperceptibly, by fits and starts, she’s progressed around the corner and out of sight.

He glues his eyes on the motionless taxi now. That street she just went up is a continuation of the one it’s on. If it makes a move, starts out after her suddenly, he’ll know—

Slow tense minutes. She must be a block away now. The cab’s still standing. She ought to be off the streets by this time, safely installed in a cab, whirling toward the station. They’ve put it over!

He takes a deep breath of released tension, steps back into the room away from the window. The worst’s over, she’s made it. All that’s left now is to sit tight until she calls him to let him know she’s reached the station. Fifteen minutes ought to do the trick, making every allowance for traffic-hitches and lights.

He sits there smoking calmly, waiting. The fat lady is still there in the flat. This, to her, is romance with a capital R. She’s enjoying it more than a box of marshmallows. She’s eating it up.

And then in a flash, before he quite knows how it’s happened, seventeen minutes have passed, and the call is two minutes overdue, and the calmness is going out with every noseful of smoke he’s expelling.

Twenty minutes. He throws down his cigarette, and takes three or four quick turns around the room. “She should have called by now,” he says.

“Yes, she should have,” agrees the fat lady. “It doesn’t take that long to get from here to the Northwest Station.”

Twenty-five minutes, half an hour. “Maybe the phone’s out of order—” But he’s afraid to get on and test it, afraid to block her call. He shakes his fist at it helplessly.

He’s prowling back and forth like a lion with distemper now. There’s a shiny streak down one side of his face. “I shouldn’t have let her go ahead — I ought to be hung! Something’s gone wrong. I can’t stand this any more!” he says with a choked sound. “I’m starting now—”

“But how are you—”

“Spring for it and fire as I go if they try to stop me.” And then as he barges out, the fat lady waddling solicitously after him, “Stay there; take it if she calls — tell her I’m on the way—”

He plunges straight at the street-door from all the way back in the hall, like a fullback headed for a touchdown. That’s the best way. Gun bedded in his pocket, but hand gripping it ready to let fly through lining and all. He slaps the door out of his way without slowing and skitters out along the building, head and shoulders defensively lowered.

It was the taxi, you bet. No sound from it, at least not at this distance, just a thin bluish haze slowly spreading out around it that might be gas-fumes if its engine were turning; and at his end a long row of dun-colored spurts — of dust and stone-splinters — following him along the wall of the flat he’s tearing away from. Each succeeding one a half yard too far behind him, smacking into where he was a second ago. And they never catch up.

He rounds the corner unscathed, spins like a dervish on one leg, brakes with the other, snaps a shot back at the cab, mist-haloed now, which is just getting into gear; and slipping out away from the curb. Glass tinkles faintly back there — he got the windshield maybe — and he sees the cab lurch crazily for a minute, as though more than glass got the bullet.

Then he sprints up the street without waiting to see any more. His own shots make plenty of noise, and the vicinity is coming to shocked life around him. Nothing in sight though that’s any good to him — a slow-moving truck, a laundry-wagon. But music somewhere ahead — a cab radio — and he steers toward the sound, locates it just around the next corner, is in and on the way almost between two notes of a single bar. At the wheel herself.

The driver rears up in consternation in the back, holding a handful of pinochle-cards, shrieks, “Hey! what’s the—”

“All right, climb around here and take it — I’m in a hurry, got no time to lower the gangplank!”

“What about these other guys?” The back of the cab is alive with shanghaied card-playing cab-drivers.

“They’ll have to come along for the ride.” Two blocks behind the other cab has showed up, is putting on a burst of speed. O’Shaughnessy warns, as the driver crawls over his lap: “I want you to keep that cab back there where it belongs — zigzag, I don’t care what you do — but lose it. It means your back-tires if you don’t!”

The rear-view mirror suddenly spatters into crystal confetti.

“See, what’d I tell you? Left, left, get offa here, don’t stay in a straight line with ’em!”

The driver says, “What you done? I don’t like this!” He takes a turn that nearly lands them axle-shafts in air.

A series of two-wheel turns, and a combination of lights in their favor — the rabbit’s foot must be working again — closing down after them like portcullises each time. They shake them off.

It’s twelve-and-a-half minutes before train-time when he jumps down at the Northwest Station, slaps one of Lawrence Lee’s sawbucks in through the cab window and dives inside.

At the barrier: “Tickets, please!”

“Wasn’t one left here for me with you?”

“Nope.”

“My wife must have taken them through to the train with her, then. Didn’t you see her — pretty blonde, big floppy hat—?”

“All blondes are pretty to me, haven’t seen a bad-looking one so far today—”

“Buddy, I’m not interested in your love-life, I wanna get through here to see if I can find her—”

“Hey, come back here!”

The agony of that wild, headlong plunge into car after car, calling: “Nova! Nova!” from the vestibule of each one. No sign of her. Upstairs again at a mile a minute, nearly knocking over the gateman a second time — eight minutes to train-time now.

At the ticket-window, “Two for the Coast — O’Shaughnessy — were they picked up?”

“Nope, here they are waiting for you.”

Uncalled for! She never got here, then! Seven minutes to find her, in a city of four million people! Outside again, and looking around him dazed. Dazed — and dangerous — and yet helpless. Ready to give this town something to be tough about, but not knowing where to start in — Instinctively touching the rabbit’s foot, that habit of his. And then — like a genie at the summons of Aladdin’s lamp — a redcap, haphazardly accosting him in line of duty. One out of the dozens swarming all over the place, but the right one, the right one out of all of them!

“Cab, boss?”

“No. Wait, George — blonde lady, big droopy hat, did you see anyone like that drive up here at all the past half-hour or so?”

“Li’l dog with a haircut ’cepting on its ankles?”

“Yes! Yes!” He grabs the guy by both shoulders. “Hurry up and tell me, for Pete’s sake!”

The redcap show’s his teeth.

“That sho’ was a dirty trick that lady have played on her. She done come away without bringin’ no change fo’ her cab-fare, and the driver he wouldn’t listen to her no-how, he turn around and take her to the police station.”

“Which?”

“Neares’ one, I reckon.”

And there she is when he tears in a couple minutes later, sitting on a bench under the desk-sergeant’s eye, dog and all. Driver, too.

“We’ve been trying to reach you, young fellow.” The sergeant clears his throat meaningly, winks at O’Shaughnessy to show he won’t give him away. Wife starting on a vacation, somebody else answering the phone; he understands. “Couldn’t seem to get you.”

“How much is it? We’ve got a train to make.”

“Two dollas and twenny cents,” says the driver.

“Here it is. And here’s a little something extra—” Wham! and the driver nearly brings down the rear wall of the room as he lands into it.

Then he’s outside with her again, minus dog and pillows now, in another machine, tearing back to the station. Three minutes to spare. He doesn’t notice as he jumps down that die cab ahead of theirs, the one that’s just pulled into the driveway before them, has a shattered windshield.

They don’t have to be mind-readers, these others, to figure out where he and she will head for. If they’re on their way out of town, that means one of the stations. They’ve cased the La Salle Street Station first, now this one.

He starts her through the big vaulted place at a quick trot. Then suddenly a shout somewhere behind them, “There they are!” and five men are streaming in after them, one with a bloody bandage over his head.

O’Shaughnessy daren’t shoot; the station’s alive with people crisscrossing the line of fire. His pursuers can’t either; not that the risk of hitting somebody else would deter them, but they’re sprinting after him too fast to stop for aim. A redcap goes keeling over, and one of the rodmen topples over a piece of hand-luggage the porter dropped, goes sliding across the smooth floor on his stomach. And above it all the amplifier blaring out remorselessly, “Coast Limited — Kansas City — Denver — Salt Lake City — San Francisco! ’Board!”

He wedges her through the closing barrier, throws the tickets at the gate-man. A shot, and looking back he can see the uniformed figure at the gate toppling, even while the gateman still tries to wedge it closed. A young riot is taking place back there, shouts, scuffling, station-guards’ clubs swinging. But one figure squeezes through, detaches itself, comes darting after him, gun out. Tereshko.

O’Shaughnessy shoves her into a car vestibule. “Get on, kid. Be right with you.” The train is already giving its first few preliminary hitches — forward.

Tereshko’s gun flames out as he comes on; the shot hits the L of El Dorado, the Pullman’s gold-lettered name, slowly slipping past behind O’Shaughnessy’s back. Tereshko never has a chance for another shot. O’Shaughnessy closes in bare-handed; his fist swings out, meets Tereshko half way as he crashes into it, lands him spread-eagled on the platform. The gun goes flying up in a foreshortened arc, comes down again with a clank, and fires innocuously.

O’Shaughnessy flicks him a derisive salute from over one ear. “I gotta make a train, or I’d stay and do it right!” He turns and catches the handrail of the next-to-the-last vestibule as it glides by, swings himself aboard. Tereshko stands staring blurredly down his own nose at the dwindling observation-platform of the Coast Limited.

O’Shaughnessy sinks wearily down in the seat beside Nova, and as she shrinks into the protective angle of his outstretched arm, he tells her grimly: “You’re O’Shaughnessy’s girl for keeps. Let ’em try to take you away from me now!”

VIII

O’Shaughnessy, minutes after his Bellanca has kissed the hard-packed earth of the Shanghai municipal airport, is already on one of the airport phones asking for the Broadway Mansions. Seven weeks out of Shanghai, seven weeks back in the red mountains of Szechuan, China’s “wild west” piloting the great General Yang around, dropping a few well-placed bombs for him, and trans-shipping machine-gun parts inland from below Ichang, which is as far as the river boats can go. No commission in Yang’s fighting-forces, nothing like that — just his own crate, his own neck, payment in American gold dollars, and a leave of absence whenever he feels like it, which happens to be right now. Seven weeks is a plenty long time.

He’s still in the crumpled slacks and greasy khaki shirt he left the interior in, but under them a triple-tiered money-belt, twice around the chest and once across the waist, packed with good solid chunky gold eagles, outlawed at home now but as good as ever over here. Fifteen-thousand dollars’ worth; two thousand a week salary, and a thousand bonus for obliterating

a caterpillar-tank that General Yang didn’t like the looks of. Not bad, two thousand a week. But seven weeks is still a long time, any way you look at it.

Her voice comes over the wire throbbing with expectancy; every time it’s rung she’s hoped it was he — and now at last it is.

“O’Shaughnessy.” A love song in one word. She’s never called him by anything but that.

“Just grounded. I’ve brought back fifteen-thousand-worth of red paint with me. Turn the shower on, lay out my dude-clothes, and get ready for a celebration!”

He just lingers long enough to see his plane put to bed properly, then grabs a cab at the airport-gate. “The Settlement,” and forgetting that he’s not inland any more, that Shanghai’s snappier than Chicago, “Chop-chop.”

“Sure, Mike,” grins the slant-eyed driver. “Hop in.”

A change has come over the city since he went away, he can feel that the minute they hit the outskirts, clear the congested native sections, and cross the bridge into the Settlement. Shanghai is already tuning-up for its oncoming doom, without knowing it. A city dancing on the brink of the grave. There’s an electric tension in the air, the place never seemed so gay, so hectic, as tonight; the roads opening off the Bund a welter of blinking, flashing neon lights, in ideographs and Latin letters alike, as far as the eye can see. Traffic hopelessly snarled at every crossing, cops piping on their whistles, packed sidewalks, the blare of saxophones coming from taxi-dance mills, and overhead the feverish Oriental stars competing with intercrossed searchlight-beams from some warships or other on the Whang-poo. Just about the right town and the right night to have fifteen thousand bucks in, all at one time.

He says: “Hold it, Sam,” in front of a jewelry-store on Bubbling Well Road, lopes in, comes out again with a diamond solitaire in his pocket.

The skyscraper Mansions shows up, he vaults out, counts windows up to the tenth floor, three over from the corner. Brightly lighted, waiting for him. Shies a five-dollar bill at the driver.

The elevator seems to crawl up; he feels like getting out and pushing. A pair of Englishmen stare down their noses at his waste-rag outfit. The rush of her footsteps on one side of the door matches his long stride on the other.

“I’d recognize your step with cotton in my ears!”

“Watch it, you’ll get fuel-oil all over you!”

They go in together in a welter of disjointed expressions, such as any pair might utter. “I thought you were never coming back this time!”

“Boy, you certainly made time getting dressed. All set to go, aren’t you?” As a matter of fact she isn’t, it’s her gloves that mislead him. She has on a shimmery silver dress, but no shoes. Her hair is still down too.

He laughs. “What do you do, put on your gloves before your shoes?” A shadow of something passes across her face. Instantly she’s smiling again. “Just knowing you were back got me so rattled—”

He takes a quick shower, jumps into his best suit. Comes in on her just as she is struggling into a pair of silver dancing-shoes — just in time to catch the expression of livid agony on her pretty face. She quickly banishes it.

“Matter — too tight? Wear another pair—”

“No, no, it isn’t that. They’re right for me — my feet got a little swollen wearing those Chinese things all day.”

He lets it go. “Come on, where’ll it be? Astor House, American Club, Jockey Club?” He laughs again as she drenches herself with expensive perfume, literally empties the bottle over herself. “Incidentally, I think we’ll move out of here. Something seems to be the matter with the drains in this apartment, you can notice a peculiar musty odor inside there — decay—”

The haunted look of a doomed thing flickers in her eyes. She takes his arm with desperate urgency. “Let’s — let’s go. Let’s get out into the open, O’Shaughnessy. It’s such a lovely night, and you’re back, and — life is so short!”

That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, “New York.” You wouldn’t know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, “You’re gonna lose your gal.”

O’Shaughnessy leads Nova back to the table apologizing. “I knew I wasn’t cut out for dancing, but I didn’t know how bad I was until I got a look at your face just now. All screwed up like you were on the rack. Kid, why didn’t you speak up—”

“It wasn’t you, O’Shaughnessy,” she gasps faintly. “My — my feet are killing me—”

“Well, I’ve got something here that’ll cure that. We don’t get together often, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, but when we do — the sky’s the limit.” He takes the three-thousand-dollar ring out of his pocket, blows on it, shows it to her. “Take off your glove, honey, and lemme see how this headlight looks on your finger—”

Her face is a white, anguished mask. He reaches toward her right hand. “Go ahead, take the glove off.”

The tense, frightened way she snatches it back out of his reach gives her away. He tumbles. The smile slowly leaves his face. “What’s the matter — don’t you want my ring? You trying to cover up something with those gloves? You fixed your hair with them on, you powdered your nose with them on— What’s under them? Take ’em off, let me see.”

“No, O’Shaughnessy. No!”

His voice changes. “I’m your husband, Nova. Take off those gloves and let me see your hands!”

She looks around her agonized. “Not here, O’Shaughnessy! Oh, not here!”

She sobs deep in her throat, even as she struggles with one glove. Her eyes are wet, pleading. “One more night, give me one more night,” she whispers brokenly. “You’re leaving Shanghai again in such a little while. Don’t ask to see my hands. O’Shaughnessy, if you love me...”

The glove comes off, flops loosely over, and there’s suddenly horror beating into his brain, smashing, pounding, battering. He reels a little in his chair, has to hold onto the edge of the table with both hands, at the impact of it.

A clawlike thing — two of the finger extremities already bare of flesh as far as the second joint; two more with only shriveled, bloodless, rotting remnants of it adhering, only the thumb intact, and that already unhealthy-looking, flabby. A dead hand — the hand of a skeleton — on a still-living body. A body he was dancing with only a few minutes ago.

A rank odor, a smell of decay, of the grave and of the tomb, hovers about the two of them now.

A woman points from the next table, screams. She’s seen it, too. She hides her face, cowers against her companion’s shoulder, shudders. Then he sees it too. His collar’s suddenly too tight for him.

Others see it, one by one. A wave of impalpable horror spreads centrifugally from that thing lying there in the blazing electric light on O’Shaughnessy’s table. The skeleton at the feast!

She says forlornly, in the stunned stillness: “You wanted me to wear your ring, O’Shaughnessy—” and slips it over that denuded bone protruding like a knobby spine from her hand. Loosely, like a hoop, it falls down to the base of the thing, hangs there, flashing prismatically, an inconceivable horror. Diamonds for the dead.

The spell breaks; the glitter of the diamond perhaps does it, shattering his hypnosis, freeing him. So lifelike there, so out of place. Not a word has passed between them, but for that one lament of hers. He seizes her to him suddenly, their two chairs go over, their champagne glasses crash to the floor. He pulls out a wing of his coat, wraps it concealingly around the thing that was once her hand, clutches it to him, hurries her out of the place, his arm protectively about her. The flash of a silver dress, a whiff of gardenia, a hint of moldy, overturned earth, as they go by, and the dead has been removed from among the living. The ring drops off the insufficient bone-sliver that carries it, rolls unheeded across the floor.

“Not so fast, O’Shaughnessy,” she pleads brokenly. “My feet too — they’re that way. My knees. My side, where the ribs are. It’s coming out all over me.”

And then, in the cab hurtling them through the mocking constellations that were the Bund an hour ago, she says: “Life was swell, though, while it lasted. Just knowing you has made — well, everything.”

He says again what he said before: “No one is going to take you away from me!”

The English doctor says, “Looks rather bad, y’know, old man.” O’Shaughnessy, white-lipped, growls out something...

The German doctor says, “Neffer before haff I such a thing seen. This case will become zenzational—”

“The case will, but what about her, that’s what I want to know?”

“My gut man—”

“I get it. Send the bill around—!”

The American doctor says, “There’s just a slim chance — what you might call a thousand-to-one shot, that chaulmoogra oil might benefit her.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t leprosy?”

“It isn’t. It may be some Chinese disease none of us ever heard of before. She seems to be dying alive. Her bodily functions are unimpaired, the X-rays show; whatever it is seems to be striking on the surface. If it continues unchecked — and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do to stop it — the whole skeletal structure will be revealed — you’ll have an animated corpse on your hands! And then of course... death.” The French doctor — the French, they are a very logical race and make good doctors — says: “M’sieu, they have all been on the wrong track—” O’Shaughnessy’s wan face lights up. “What can you tell me?”

“I can tell you only this: there is no hope. Your wife is lost to you. If you are a merciful man — I do not give you this advice as doctor, I give it to you as one husband to another — you will go to one of the opium houses of Chapei, buy a quantity sufficient for two at least—”

O’Shaughnessy says in a muffled voice, “I’m no quitter. I’ll beat this rap.

There’s pity in the Frenchman’s face. “Go to Chapei, mon ami. Go tonight. I say this for the sake of your own sanity. Your mind will crumble at the sight of what it will have to behold in a few more weeks.”

O’Shaughnessy says the name of his Maker twice, puts his arm up swiftly over his face. The doctor’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder. “I can see what led them astray, the others. They sought for disease. There is no disease there. No malady. No infection. It is not that; it is the state of death, itself, that has her. How shall I say? This flesh that rots, drops away, is, paradoxically, healthy tissue. My microscopes do not lie. Just as, let us say, a person who has been shot dead by a bullet is otherwise a healthy person. But he lies in his grave and nature dissolves his flesh. That is what we have here. The effect without the cause—”

O’Shaughnessy raises his head after a while, gets up, moves slowly toward the door. “You, at least,” he says, “are a square shooter. All right, medical science tells me she’s as good as dead. I’m not licked yet. There’s a way.” The doctor shrugs gloomily. “How? What way is there? Lourdes, you are thinking of?”

“An awful way,” O’Shaughnessy says, “but a way.”

He stumbles out into the bright sunlight of the Concession, roams around hopelessly. Along the Avenue of the Two Republics, bordering the French Concession, he finds himself beginning to tremble all over, suddenly.

Fear! Fear again, for the first time since his ’teens. Fear, that he thought he would never know any more. Fear that no weapon, no jeopardy, no natural cataclysm, has ever been able to inspire until now. And now here it is running icily through him in the hot Chinese noon. Fear for the thing he loves, the only fear that can ever wholly cow the reckless and the brave.

Fear of the Way, the Way that he mentioned to the doctor. Fear of the implication involved in it. A mad voice howling in the darkness sounds in his ears again: “You’ll come crawling back to me, begging me to help! That’ll be my hour!” Oh, not that his own life will assuredly be forfeit as part of the bargain, that isn’t what makes him tremble. Nor any amount of pain and horror that vindictive mania can devise. He can stand it with a smile, to give her an hour, a day, or a week of added life. It’s what will come after, what she must face alone without him, once he’s out of the way. The barbed-wire fence — cooped up with a madman; kept trapped like an animal in a cage, after having known the world. Better if he’d left her as he’d found her...

But that’s the Way, and there is no other. And once his mind’s made up, the trembling and aimless walking stops, and he can look doom in the face without flinching.

He has their boat-tickets in his pocket when he goes back to the Mansions. All down the corridor, from the elevator-shaft to their door, there’s that cloying odor of perfumery — to conceal another, different one.

She’s propped up in bed, a native amah sitting by her fanning her. He stops short in surprise. The screwy clock of this bedevilment seems to have spun backward again to that awful night, when he first came out of the interior — and didn’t know yet. For she’s beautiful there, composed, placid again, expressionless as a wax doll, the stigma of the knowledge of approaching doom erased from her face.

“The mask came,” she says through it, in a slightly resonant voice. Her own features, reproduced by a clever Chinese craftsman, at her terrified request — before anything happens to them. Not for herself, this, for the man who stands there looking at her — the man whom life and love have laughed at, the man to whom life and love and laughter, too, have been denied.

He gestures the Chinese woman out of the room.

When they’re alone Nova asks, as tonelessly as though she were asking what the weather was like, “Any hope?”

“Not here.” It’s not the first time it’s been asked and answered that way, so there’s no shock to it any more.

He sees a small canvas bag upon the table beside her bed. “What’s that?”

“Another agent of Yang was here while you were out. He left this bag of gold, and a thinly veiled threat that your tea will be bitter if you don’t report back soon. They think you’ve run out on them. Better go back, O’Shaughnessy.”

“Not a chance, darling. I’ve sold my plane. We’re taking the early morning boat back to the States. I’m taking you back to Denholt.”

She is silent for a long minute. He can see her shivering through the thick, brocaded, Chinese jacket, pretty much the way he was, out in the sun-baked streets.

He sits down close beside her. “You’ve knocked around with me now for almost a year. You’ve talked to lots of other girls your age. You must have found out by now that none of them learned to walk and talk as late as you did. Something happened to you, and there’s only one man alive knows what it was and what’s to be done about it. Those injections — can’t you see that he was keeping you alive in some way? It’s our only chance, we’ve got to go back there, we’ve got to get more of his stuff.” And bitterly, as he hauls out a valise and tosses up the lid, “O’Shaughnessy wasn’t so smart. O’Shaughnessy knows when he’s licked...

Down the Whangpoo to the Yangtse, and out into the China Sea. A race against time now. A race against death. And the odds are so tall against them. The widest body of water in the world to cross. Then a whole continent afterward from west to east. Three weeks at the very least. Can she hold out that long by sheer will-power? Or have they waited too long, like fools? Then too, how can he be sure there is help waiting at the end of the long journey, even the help that they both dread so? Suppose Denholt is gone. How to locate him again in time? He may be in a strait jacket at this very moment, unable to tell a serum from a split of White Rock. The odds are pretty steep. But — at least there are odds.

She sits in a deck-chair covered up to her chin in a steamer-rug; her beautiful masked face above it never smiles, never frowns, never changes — just the eyes alive and the voice. He haunts the chart that marks their daily progress. Comes back to it a hundred times a day, says prayers before it while it lengthens a pitiful notch at a time, in red ink across the graph.

Kobe. Bad news. A Japanese English-language paper has picked up the story from something that must have come out in Shanghai after they left. Fright sounds through the mask. “It’s — it’s leaked out already. Here. Beautiful girl stricken with living death. First case of its kind on record. Being rushed home by husband—’ ”

She makes a small, plaintive sound. “Don’t you see? The papers in America will pick it up, follow it through, play it up. And your name’s here. They, whoever they were, they’ll know it means us, they’ll find out we’re coming back. They’ll be waiting for us to land, they’ll — we’ll never make it. Oh, let’s turn back, O’Shaughnessy! Let me die in China — what’s the difference where it is? I’ve brought you enough grief, don’t let me be the cause of—”

He takes her in his arms and holds her tight. “You don’t seem to think much of my ability to take care of us.”

She makes a thoughtless gesture to reach out and clasp his hand understanding^; but she remembers and draws the gloved claw back again.

Days pass. The story has circulated now, and turned the ship into a buzzing beehive of curiosity. People find excuses to go by her on the deck, just so they can turn and stare. O’Shaughnessy overhears two men bet that she won’t reach Frisco alive. She tries to smoke a cigarette through the lips of the mask one afternoon, to buoy up his spirits a little. Smoke comes out at her hair-line, under her chin, before her ears. A steward drops a loaded bouillon-tray at the sight of her. Nova stays in her cabin after that.

IX

Three thousand years later they’re at Honolulu. Leis and steel-guitars above deck; and below, something that scarcely stirs, that lies still now, saturated with cologne, smothered with fresh-cut flowers as though she were already on her bier. It’s too painful to force the fleshless footbones to support her tottering body any more, even swathed in bandages, except for a few moments at a time. Reporters try to get in to see her; O’Shaughnessy has to swing his fists to get them to keep their distance.

Out to sea again, on the last leg of the trip. Sometimes he bends down, whispers low, like a prizefighter’s second in his corner when the bout’s going against him: “You can make it. Just a little longer, honey. Do it for O’Shaughnessy.” Sometimes, in the depths of night, he goes up on the boatdeck, shakes his fist — at what? The ship, the limitless ocean, the elusive horizon that never comes any nearer, the stars overhead that don’t give a rap?

The rabbit’s paw has hardly been out of his palm the whole way over. All the pelt’s worn off it with his stroking. His thumb has developed an ineradicable habit of turning inward on itself, circling his palm. “You and me,” he says to it grimly. “We’ll do the trick.”

Frisco at last. And as the anchor plunges into the waters of the bay — they’ve made it—! The three of them, he and she and the rabbit’s foot. There’s still a voice behind that mask — faltering, weak, but alive. Still living eyes behind those immobile eyeholes with their double tier of lashes — real and artificial.

He’s wirelessed ahead from the Islands for a cabin plane, and it’s tuned up and waiting at the airport over in Oakland. He gets Nova through the gang of reporters clogging the deck, has her carried down the gangplank on a stretcher while flashlights go off around her like a constellation. Into a car outside the Customs House, while the newsmen like a pack of hounds in full cry swarm around them, yapping. But there’s one man who doesn’t pepper him with questions, doesn’t say a word — just takes a good look at the beautiful graven face being transferred from stretcher to car, and then dives into the nearest phone-booth. O’Shaughnessy isn’t near enough to overhear him ask for long-distance...

And then the plane, with a relief pilot to spell O’Shaughnessy. Up and due east. “And we don’t come down again for snow or rain or fog or engine-trouble until you hit Louisville,” says O’Shaughnessy.

All through the day they hurl through space. “You got that Kentucky map I asked you to get hold of?”

He locates the mountain on it finally, draws a big ring around it. “Here’s where we come down, inside that circle.”

“But on what? How do we know what’s there? It’ll be dark long before we make it,” the relief pilot protests.

“Here’s where we come down,” is O’Shaughnessy’s remorseless answer, “if we splinter into match-wood. Here, right on the perimeter, where this feeder branches off from the trunk-highway on the west and climbs up. That’s as close as we can get.”

“Radio ahead, contact one of the towns near there to have something waiting for you at that point, otherwise you may be held up for hours.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” nods O’Shaughnessy. He starts calling the county seat.

Nova shakes her head, He bends down close to hear what she wants to say. “That may bring them down on us, if you mention the place — tip them off where we’re going to land.”

“How can they beat our time in, unless they’re already somewhere around there?”

“But that’s it, they may be. You wirelessed him from Honolulu and mentioned a chart of this one county. They may have intercepted that message. They’re likely to be within reach of your set, and this’ll bring them right to the exact spot.”

“Then that’ll bring them grief!” is all he says. He fiddles with the dials. “Hello, Wellsville? This is a private chartered plane coming your way, with a desperately ill passenger on board. We need ground transport badly...”

“Hello, this is Wellsville. This is Wellsville. There are no facilities here.”

“I’m not asking for hospitalization. All I want is ground transport. I want a car where Route 19 bisects the highway.”

“Well — I dunno—”

“Have you been reading the papers lately?” O’Shaughnessy barks. “This is Penny O’Shaughnessy— Yes, yes, the ‘Dying-Alive Girl,’ if you insist! Now do I get a car at that particular spot?”

“I’ll start out now.”

“We don’t want any publicity. Come alone. We should be there by ten. Tilt your headlights upward to guide us, keep snapping them off and on at two minute intervals, we’re going to have to land in pitch-darkness. If we live through it, be ready to start off at a moment’s notice. Don’t let us down, there’s a human life at stake. This is her last chance.”

Louisville, an hour after dark, is a carpet of gilt thumb-tacks below them, with straight, twinkling lines like strings of beads leading out from it. Southeastward now, toward the Tennessee state-line.

At nine a continuous line of little pinpoints, stretched straight as an arrow, shows up below. They follow it, flying so low now the twinkling lights of an occasional car crawling along it seems to be right under them. Then, in thirty, forty minutes, a firefly down there in the dark fields, going off, on, off, on.

O’Shaughnessy clutches his pilot jubilantly by the shoulder. “See it? Here, gimme the controls — I couldn’t go wrong, not this late in the game!”

Around and around in a narrowing spiral. Then way out, and around, and in again in a straight swoop that barely seems to skim the roof of the waiting car. “Hold on!” he warns, and slaps the pocket holding the rabbit’s foot. The earth comes up flat like a blackboard. A jolt, a rise, a dip, another bump, a short stretch of wobbly taxiing, a shudder, and he cuts off his engine.

The car, waiting off across the field, has lowered its headlights to guide them. Carrying her between them they waver toward it up a thinly-talcumed path of light-motes. A rail fence shows up. “All right, driver! You in the car!” shouts O’Shaughnessy. “Come out here and give us a hand over this!”

A figure jumps out, hurries to meet them on the outside of the fence.

They ease her over the top rail, the newcomer holding her in both arms until O’Shaughnessy can scramble over and relieve him.

They pass her into the back of the car. Then suddenly, a dark motionless outline shows up a little way up the side-road, under shadowing trees that all but blot it out — materializes into a second car, unlighted, stalled, apparently deserted.

The plane pilot, who has been standing off to one side, looking on, cries out: “Hey, there’s a guy lying here at the side of the road, out—”

“Take it easy, pal,” an unseen voice purrs. An orange hyphen flicks toward the pilot from somewhere just behind the car. A report shatters the crossroads’ stillness, and the pilot leans over toward the road, as though he saw a coin lying there and was languidly about to pick it up.

O’Shaughnessy doesn’t wait for him to complete the fall. He whirls back toward Nova, flings out his arms to keep her from going into this car that is a trap. The blurred oval of a second face, not that of the man who helped to carry her to it, looms at him in the dark, above her body.

“No you don’t,” a voice says blandly, “she’s coming with us — we’re taking up where we left off that night — and she ain’t fooling us this time!”

A second red-orange spearhead leaps straight at O’Shaughnessy. The whole world seems to stand still. Then the gun behind it crashes, and there’s a cataclysm of pain all over him, and a shock goes through him as if he ran head-on into a stone wall.

A voice from the car says blur redly, while the ground rushes up to meet him, “Finish him up, you guys! I’m getting so I don’t trust their looks no more, no matter how stiff they act!”

Three comets seem to dart down at him as he lies there on the ground. Asphalt-grits fly up beside his skull. A hot wire creases his side while something that feels like a mallet pounds his shoulder. He can feel his mouth opening; he must be trying to say something.

Far away, from some low-flying soundless plane in the skies, a pair of voices reach him. “Did you hear where they were headed for?”

“Yeah, and it sounds like a swell idea—”

High up over him the chattering motor swells into a roar, the air he is trying to breathe is sucked away from him along the ground, grit and road-dust swirl over him. God, they’re flying low! What’re they trying to do—? Looking down his own body he can see a red light poised momentarily on the toe of his shoe. Then it dips below it, and it’s gone. And he’s alone there, with the unconscious pilot lying a little way off for company, and some other guy he’s never even seen, only spoken to over the radio.

He wants to sleep so badly — dying they call it — and he can’t. Something’s bothering him to keep him awake. Something that won’t let him alone. Not about Nova, not about the still pilot either. Something about this other, strange guy.

And then he remembers. The guy has a car, that’s what it is. The guy brought a car here. The guy is dead now, but the car is still standing there, back a little ways under some trees. He saw it himself.

He’s got to get into that car. He may be half-dead, but cars don’t die; it’ll get him wherever he wants to go, good as ever. And where he wants to go is just where Nova is, no matter where.

He rolls over on his face first. And a lot of hot wet stuff comes out on his shoulder and his chest and hip. That makes everything come alive again and hurt like blazes. He starts pulling himself around the other way, with his good arm and shoulder for a propeller, like something maimed that ought to be put out of its misery with a big stick.

Then when he gets all the way around in a half circle, there’s the car, with the pilot and the other guy for milestones leading to it. He starts dragging himself toward it. He can tell it’s no use trying to get up on his feet.

He comes up to the pilot first, rests full length beside him a minute, reaches out, shakes him a little.

Frazier moans a little — almost a bleat — stirs a little.

O’Shaughnessy inches on toward the car. Like a caterpillar goes, contracting in the middle, expanding again, contracting, expanding. Like a caterpillar someone’s stepped on, though. He leaves a moist trail behind him along the asphalt roadbed.

It’s easy to rear up as high as the running-board, but above that there’s a long unbroken stretch of glossy tonneau up to the door-handle. He makes it, on the heels of his hands and the points of his elbows, using them for grips, like vacuumcups. The window’s down, luckily, and a hand on the sill of the frame keeps him up. He falls, sprawling, into the seat.

Light funnels out of the dead headlights again, across the two men on the ground. He jockeys slowly around, then straightens out.

The rush of air through the open windows clears some of the cobwebs from his bullet-stunned mind. He knows where they went, and where to follow. “Did you hear where they were heading for?” the first voice had said. And the second answered, “Sounds like a swell idea.”

The dirt-packed mountain-detour branches off at last, and the new-made treads of the car ahead are plainly visible along it. It’s a hard trail to tackle, with just one good arm to steady the wheel by, and a grade like a loose plank tilted before your face, and obscuring branches and foliage whistling in at you through the windows.

The barbed-wire fence starts up beside him after awhile. He wonders if Denholt still lives behind it. The scooped-out hollows of their ruts are still before him, plain as day, and broken branches hanging down at right-angles. The fence suddenly crumples into the ground, and a big gap torn in it where the gate used to be, where he remembers it, shows him how they got in.

He turns in after them, brakes only when their own car, broad side to him, blocks further progress. Beyond, the house shows palely against his partly-deflected headlights. He gets out, bangs the car door after him out of habit, lurches over to their car, steadies himself against it for a moment. Caution is for the healthy. He laughs sort of crazily and stamps onto the wooden porch. He hangs onto the door-frame for a minute, then goes on through the unguarded opening.

They haven’t even closed the door after them, they’re so sure they’ve left all opposition dead behind them where the highway crosses Route 19. That white light from the laboratory is streaming out to guide him. They’re in there, all of them; he can hear their voices as he comes draggingly nearer. One voice, raised above the others, strident, threatening.

“Don’t tell us you don’t know what we mean! Why the barbed-wire fence and all the trimmings, if it ain’t around here somewhere? Why was the Brown girl, here, heading this way so fast with that guy she calls her husband? And a nifty place, if there ever was one! Here we was thinking it was somewhere down in the Florida keys all the time! That’s just like the Boss, goes off on a cruise in one direction to cover up, sends the do-re-mi in another. He was always smart that way, always doing things like that. Now you be smart.”

“There’s no money here. I don’t know who you are, what brings you here, but there’s no money here. Only the — the results of a lifetime of— For God’s sake, be careful!”

That’s Denholt’s voice. Already O’Shaughnessy has reached the threshold by now and stands there looking in at them like an apparition, unnoticed. Their backs are all to him, even Nova’s, gripped cruelly between two of them, held upright. Only Denholt is facing his way, at bay against the far wall.

Even from behind, O’Shaughnessy can spot one of those backs, Tereshko.

X

He is standing near a retort filled with colorless fluid; as Denholt’s frantic warning singles it out, his elbow has just grazed it, caused it to teeter. The plea has exactly the opposite effect it was intended to; it is something precious to that old crank standing there before him, so his impulse is to destroy it forthwith. He deliberately completes the shove, sweeps it off the trestle it rests on. “Nuts with all this junk y’got here! This is a phony front. Who y’think y’kidding?”

The retort shivers into pieces on the floor. Its contents flood out, spread, dissipate beyond recovery.

Denholt lets out a hoarse, anguished cry. And leaps at the wanton destroyer of his whole life’s work. Tereshko’s gun raps out almost perfunctorily; smoke blooms between them; Denholt staggers, turns around the other way, then goes down to his knees slowly like a penitent in prayer.

They hear him say, in the brief silence: “Yes, it’s better this way — now.” Then he falls forward on his face.

O’Shaughnessy’s leap for Tereshko crashes through the rear-guard, sends the four behind Tereshko lurching off-balance. Nova released, totters aside, keeps herself from falling against the edge of the operating table. They whirl, see who faces them and forget, in their utter disbelief, to use their guns. Tereshko goes down backward, his neck caught in the grip of O’Shaughnessy’s arm, while the Irishman’s other fist is pounding, flailing, slashing, into the side of Tereshko’s head and ribs.

The struggle doesn’t last long; it’s too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it’s easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeer’s collar.

Tereshko is trembling with his anger. “Now him again!” he protests, as though at an injustice. “All they do is die and then get up and walk around again! What’sa matter, you guys using spitballs for slugs? No, don’t kick at him, that’ll never do it — I think the guy has nine lives!”

“Wait!” The mask has spoken, and they turn in awe at the impassive face looking at them. Face that lies now if it never did before — so calm, so untroubled, so serene, at the scene before it. “What is it you want of us — of me? Why do you hound us like this? What have we ever done to you?”

Tereshko sneers, “You’re Benedetto’s girl, ain’t you? You’re Jane Brown, ain’t you? You oughta know what we want of you. We did his dirty work for seven long years, you just come in on the pay-off at the end. Where’s the profits of those seven years, when two bits out of every fifty-cent glass of beer drunk east of the Mississippi went into his pockets? Where’s the million and a quarter dollars in gold and Federal Reserve notes that dropped from sight when he was arrested?”

“I never saw or knew Benedetto,” says the mask slowly.

“You lying tomato! I’m looking right at the face he used to kiss in front of all of us. I’m looking right at the face that stood in a diamond frame on his bureau, every time I went in there to make a report. I’m hearing the voice that used to call him Benny-boy, I’m seeing the eyes that cried when he got sent away— Oh no! You’re Jane Brown, all right.”

Gloved hands rise from the enfolding cloak, undo tiny straps behind the ears, below the golden hair on top of the head. “Look closer still — and tell me if I’m Benedetto’s girl — if I’m Jane Brown!” The face drops off — a shell — and yet repeats itself, identical, still unravaged, only paler, beneath.

They gasp in surprise. And then in the midst of a deep silence, Tereshko says: “All right, that’s a mask — so what?” but his voice trembles a little.

Her hands flutter up and down the cloak-fastenings, seize it to throw it open. “Look closer,” she says, “and tell me if you know me!”

“No, Nova — don’t!” O’Shaughnessy cries from the floor.

She says softly: “Close your eyes, O’Shaughnessy, and keep them closed, if you love me. For no love could survive this — no love in all the world.” Dumbly obedient, he holds his hands there in front of his eyes. A rustle of Nova’s cloak, a swirl of air as it flies back. A choking sound from someone near him. A gun thudding to the floor. Then a wild, terrible scream — a sudden rush of feet, five pairs of them, around and past him and toward the door. A stampede of mortal terror.

“Get away from me! What — are you?”

Above it all, her voice, serene, sepulchral. “Now — am I Benedetto’s girl — am I anyone’s girl any more?”

Across the wooden floor of the front of the house rushes the retreat of scuffling shoe-leather. A door bangs. The motor of their car comes to life — gears clash and scream. The car sound dies away — then suddenly comes a far-off crash carried thinly on the still night. One dim, final cry of pain and death — and dead silence drops at last like a curtain on a play. Within the room, for long minutes, there is no movement.

“They must have gone off the road,” O’Shaughnessy says tautly. His hands fall from before his eyes, and Nova’s cloak is closed again. How close to death she must be, he thinks, to drive the living to their own deaths in wild flight just from the look of her.

A gun, dropped there on the laboratory floor, is all that’s left of them.

O’Shaughnessy toes it aside and it skitters across the room. Painfully, inch by inch, he hauls himself over beside Denholt, lifts the scientist’s head and shoulders in his arms. Denholt’s eyes, still alive, turn toward him.

O’Shaughnessy’s voice rasps like a file. “You’ve got to save her. Got to! Kill me if I’ve wronged you — but I’ve brought her back to you — you’re the only one who can do anything... Denholt, can you hear me?”

The dying man nods, points helplessly to the shattered retort, the evaporating stain on the floor.

“Was that it—?” O’Shaughnessy shakes him wildly in his fright. “There must be more. That can’t be all! Can’t you tell me how to make more?” A sigh filters through the parted lips. “No time.”

“Haven’t you got it written down?”

A feeble shake of the head. “Afraid to— Jealous someone else would steal it from me—”

O’Shaughnessy’s bony hands claw at Denholt’s shoulders. “But you can’t mean — that she’s got to die. That there isn’t anything you with your knowledge or I with my love can do for her — anything at all—?” Something, like a cold hand, closes his throat. Something else, like little needles, pricks his eyes until the lashes are moistened. Nova, standing there motionless, slowly droops her head.

A thin tensile hand grips O’Shaughnessy’s arm to arrest his attention. A hand that must have been very strong once. “Wait. Lean down closer, so you can hear me — I was filling a hypo — for one of the rabbits — when they broke in. I don’t remember what became— Look around, see if you can find it— Enough for one injection, if it’s intact — hurry, it’s getting dark, I’m going fast.”

But before he does look for it, before he makes a move, he remembers to touch that mascot in his pocket, the rabbit’s foot. “Help me,” he says to her then, “you know what it looks like, you used to see enough of them—” She raises her head, steps aside — and there it is behind her, lying on the operating table. A precious liquid glinting within its transparent barrel.

Then he’s down again beside the dying man, holding it before his dimming eyes.

“Yes, that’s it. All there is left now. It’ll be lost forever in a few more minutes when I go. I’m taking it with me — after what I’ve seen tonight of human nature, too much power for evil in it — it’s better, for our own sakes, the way Nature ordered it—”

“Shall I lift you up, do you think you can stand long enough to—”

“No time.” He motions to Nova, weakly. She draws near. “Recline on the floor here, where I can reach you—” Then to O’Shaughnessy, “Sweep the hair from the base of her head. Hold my arm at the elbow, steady it—”

The needle falls, emptied.

O’Shaughnessy murmurs, staring dully at the floor: “A month more — this’ll give her. Maybe I’m a fool to have done it. What torture that month is going to be — knowing now our only chance is gone. Well, maybe that French doctor was right...

Again that hand on his arm. “Listen— She will be ill, very ill, for twenty-four hours. The reaction. Keep ice packed around her until the temperature goes down. Then — after that — the injection will arrest it for a while. It can’t mend what’s already happened — but it will give you that one month. Maybe a little — longer. I am sorry that I can’t give you more — or any real hope at all.”

Then whatever was human and compassionate in Denholt dies out, and the scientist replaces the man. “I want you to know why I failed. I must tell someone. I brought everything in her to life — but the blood. That was dead, stayed dead. As it circulated in her veins it carried death through her body. The injections I gave her held that flowing decay at bay — no more.

“I didn’t realize that — I do now. The chemical composition of the blood changed in death — nothing I have done restored it. It would always defeat the serum — eventually. She was not really alive in her own right; she was being kept alive by a sort of artificial combustion introduced into her system at periodic intervals.”

O’Shaughnessy’s eyes glare dully. “You had no right,” he says. “You had no right to do it. It wasn’t fair to her or to me — or” — and he smiles ruefully — “even to those fear-crazy gunmen who are smeared all over your mountainside right now. You tried to bring life, Denholt — and you’ve got nothing but death on your hands.”

The pale, almost lifeless lips flicker in a ghastly smile. “My death, too,” he whispers. He struggles to rise in O’Shaughnessy’s arms. And there is a pitiful attempt at self-justification. “If you hadn’t come along, O’Shaughnessy — who can say? None of this — would have been. And yet, you rep resented the human element — the thing I didn’t reckon on. Yes. It was the blood that defeated me — the passionate warm blood of men and women, hungry and greedy and alive — the blood I couldn’t put into Jane Brown’s body...

O’Shaughnessy’s shoulder still throbs with pain and there is blood trickling down the arm inside the sleeve, coming out below the cuff, oozing over his wrist and his hands. O’Shaughnessy stares at it dully and remembers Denholt’s last words; and then suddenly strength comes to him to do the thing he must do. There is a car outside and down below a plane waiting. And there is Nova, her pale face flushed and hectic with the fever, her eyes flickering closed, her breathing labored. And here — here, you crazy gods of Fate, is O’Shaughnessy, the man who hasn’t been afraid, not for himself anyway, since he was eighteen. Yes, all the pieces of the mosaic are here to hand, and the pattern has just fallen into place in O’Shaughnessy’s mind.

He is a little light-headed, and giddy, but there is a hard core of will in his brain. He can stand now, where before he could only crawl like a snake with its spine crushed. He scoops Nova up in his arms, totters for one step with her, before his walk is firm and steady.

Nova’s head stirs against his shoulder. Her eyes are open. “What are we to do now?” she murmurs, with the fever-heat thickening her tones.

“What does it matter?” O’Shaughnessy says. He doesn’t want to tell her, doesn’t want her to know. “I’m with you, Jane.”

He says that to show her that he can call her by her right name without feeling, that he doesn’t hold Jane Brown against her. But she won’t let him. That name isn’t hers.

“My name,” she says, childlike, “is Nova. Nova — O’Shaughnessy.”

She doesn’t speak again all the time he is putting her into the car, where she slumps against the cushions like a rag doll, no more than half conscious, or while they are driving down the mountainside, or even while he carries her to the plane that is still standing there.

He goes, a little more unsteadily now, to kneel beside the wounded pilot.

“How you feeling?” O’Shaughnessy’s words are jerky.

The pilot nods. “I’m okay, I guess. Feels like just a nick.”

“That’s all right, then,” O’Shaughnessy say s. He pushes a wad of bills into Frazier’s hand, helps the man to sit up. “I’m going to take your plane. I’m glad you’re feeling okay, because I’d have to take the plane anyway — only it’s nice that I don’t have to leave you here dying. You can use the car there.”

Wrinkles of worry blossom at the corners of the relief pilot’s eyes. “You sound kinda crazy to me — what happened up there? What’s this money for?”

“That’s to square you for the plane — in case... Well, just in case.”

Then he is gone, weaving across the uneven ground. Frazier gets up and wobbles after him. “Hi, wait a minute. The propeller—”

In a few minutes, his hands are on the blades and from inside the plane-cabin O’Shaughnessy’s voice is calling, “Contact,” and Frazier yanks, the propeller spins. Frazier falls back and the plane taxis jerkily with a sputtering roar of the engine.

O’Shaughnessy somehow negotiates a take-off from an impossibly tip-tilted angle, and Frazier stands there watching, jaw dropped, until the black of the sky and the distance have inked out the tiny plane-lights. “Screwball,” he mutters and paws the sweat from his face. O’Shaughnessy’s hard-knuckled hands grasp the stick hard. Thunder rumbles above the roar of the motor; lightning stabs the darkness. Rain begins to slash down around the plane.

O’Shaughnessy remembers another storm, another plane, another night; and he glances at the girl beside him. She seems to sense his gaze upon her, her eyes open; her lips would speak but the fever that is burning through her won’t let the words come. They are in her eyes, though, as plain as any words could be, and her whole heart is with them. No question there at all, just courage and confidence.

“I brought you into this,” he says — to those eyes. “Now I’m taking you out of it. There’s no place in it for us any longer.”

Her fingers inside the glove tighten on his hand convulsively as if to say: “Alone, O’Shaughnessy? Must I go alone?”

At least that’s the way he figures it, for he says quickly: “With me, honey. Together.”

The pressure of the fingers relaxes, then tightens, but more steadily this time, reassured and reassuring. That’s her way of saying:

“All right, O’Shaughnessy. It’s all right with me.”

Her face blurs in O’Shaughnessy’s eyes; he begins to whistle a silly tune that even he can’t hear, and somehow it is comforting. Lightning again and a louder crash of thunder. A gust of wind rocks the plane. The black bulk of a granite ridge that looks like a giant comber whipped up by a typhoon and frozen by the hands of God shows up ahead and a little below.

O’Shaughnessy’s hand blunders out to take Nova’s gloved one in his own. She whimpers a little, and stirs. O’Shaughnessy slides the stick forward, the plane tilts sharply down; the mountainside, rocky and desolate, seems to be reaching up for them, but in these seconds they are alone, the two of them, with the sky and the storm.

It takes will power and nerve to hold the stick that way, to keep his eyes open and watch the rocky face of the cliff, pine-bearded, rush up at them. O’Shaughnessy’s mouth flattens, his face goes white. And then in that final fraction of a moment, he laughs, a little crazily — a laugh of defiance, of mocking farewell, and, somehow, of conquest.

“Here we go, baby!” he shouts, teeth bared. “Now I’m going to find out what it really feels like to fly into the side of a mountain!...”

There is only the storm to hear the smash of the plane as it splinters itself against the rock — and the storm drowns the sound out with thunder, just as the lightning turns pale the flame that rises, like a hungry tongue, from the wreckage.