The Ambushers

VI

Tun RANCH IS IN SOUTHERN ARIZONA. To get to it, you drive first to Tucson and check with a certain telephone number, after which you proceed out of town by a specified route, seldom twice the same. Presently you pass a man changing the tire of a pickup truck or filling the radiator of a jeep or just standing beside an out-of-state sedan to snap a picture. If the door of the vehicle has been left open, you can go ahead. If it's closed, that means somebody's tailing you, and you have to go back to Tucson and await instructions.

The ranch is sanctuary-for some, a next-to-final sanctuary. It is the one place in the world an agent can relax without worrying who's behind him. Like most Nirvanas, it has its drawbacks, but it's safe; and every effort is made to keep it that way.

We got the all-clear signal on the first try and kept going. I had my fingers crossed. The car they'd wished off on me was a tremendous old Pontiac station wagon, built in the days when station wagons were still being made of wood. Now, sixty-odd non-stop hours out of Washington, D.C.-well, I'd occasionally napped on the front seat for an hour or so-it was banging along on only five cylinders and three wheels, or at least that was my impression. It didn't have to be correct. After wrestling the brute for twenty-four hundred miles, I wasn't as sensitive to impressions as I might have been. The only thing that could really impress me, at this point, was a bed. I hoped no last-minute breakdown would keep me from it.

The gate looked like any ranch gate in that country. It had a cattle guard and the usual friendly ranch-country sign: POSTED, NO TRESPASSING, NO HUNTING, NO WOOD HAULING. From there, the dirt road went back into the desert for five miles. Here was another gate, not a cattle guard this time, but a real, swinging-type gate with another sign reading: PRIVATE PROPERTY-NO TRESPASSING. I got the ancient mechanical monster stopped with some difficulty- the brakes weren't behaving right, either-and stumbled out, hoping the poor old beast wouldn't die while my back was turned. Idling, it sounded very sick indeed.

I got the gate open, remembering how it was supposed to be done, which wasn't the way you'd normally open a ranch gate. This told the gent watching through binoculars from somewhere up on the nearby hogback that it was okay not to shoot me. I drove through, limped back to shut the gate in a specified way, got back into the wagon, and drove on. After another two miles, the road dipped down into a green valley, and there was the ranch, a great, sprawling adobe structure in a grove of cottonwoods.

It had once been a guest ranch that went broke. Now it's supposed to be the property of a rich old crackpot with religious notions who's often visited by friends as looney as he is. Well, that's pretty close, except for the religious angle. Actually, the place belongs to rich old Uncle Sam, and I guess we qualify as his friends, and if we weren't crazy we wouldn't be in this business. I eased the old heap down the hill on what compression was left in the remaining cylinders, and let it roll to a stop in the yard.

We were expected. A man in a sports shirt was coming to meet us. The doctors don't wear white coats at the ranch, and the nurses don't wear uniforms, but they aren't hard to spot.

"You can wake up any time," I said over my shoulder. "We're in."

I heard my passenger stir in back. The guy in the bright shirt came up. He was young and earnest-looking, with metal-rimmed glasses, and he had all the qualifications of a good doctor except common sense and a sense of humor

– well, any kind of sense at all, to be perfectly honest. That's just one man's opinion, of course, based on previous visits.

He was one of the first-name boys. He was Dr. Thomas Stem, and he ran the place with all kinds of authority, but he'd think you were mad at him unless you called him Tom.

"Hello, Tom," I said. "She's in back. Give her a chance to put her shoes on."

"How's she feeling?"

"I'm just the chauffeur," I said. "I'm just the guy who gave her a lift because we happened to be going the same way. Telepathy is out of my line… No, I wouldn't go back there and get helpful."

He'd started toward the rear of the wagon. He stopped, frowning. "Why not, Eric?"

"Get a nurse, anything in skirts," I said. "She's gotten kind of used to me, to the point of silent toleration, but I don't know how she'd react to you." I limped around to the rear of the wagon and yanked open the transom and dropped the tailgate. "All right, Skinny," I said. "Out you come."

The thin little girl sitting on the blankets in the rear of the station wagon looked a lot more human than the one I'd helped bug out of the Costa Verde jungle, but she wasn't a jewel of glowing health and perfect adjustment. She just stared at me silently and crawled back to the opening, waiting for me to get well off to one side before she swung her legs over ad slid to the ground.

She was wearing a pair of slim, tapering cotton pants, light tan in color, and a boy's white short-sleeved shirt. They'd been clean and crisp enough in Washington, D~C., but now they looked kind of like a well-slept-in suit of pajamas. Well, I was in no position to criticize. My costume was no fresher. At least she didn't have a beard.

I'd been feeding her milkshakes and stuff clear across the country, whenever she was awake enough to absorb nourishment, but she still hardly cast a shadow. Her left hand was still wrapped in bandages. Her face was all bones and eyes, mostly eyes. Her hair had reverted to a light shade of brown, like the description in the files, and the machete haircut had been repaired as far as possible. Actually, it didn't look much worse than the short tousled messes some girls pay money to wear on their heads, even in this era of haystacks and beehives.

But it was the eyes that got you. They were big and gray and shiny, and sometimes they were big and yellow and shiny, and they never seemed to close at all. They were watching all the time, waiting for something dreadful to happen.

"She's all yours," I said to Dr. Stern. "So long, Skinny.

Thanks for the company, such as it was."

I saw the eyes change, just a little. I was getting to her.

If I'd had her for another sixty hours, I might even have made her blink. Dr. Stern was looking at me reproachfully. He obviously thought I lacked tact and feeling. A stout nurse in a print dress was glaring at me.

"Oh, you poor little thing" she said to the girl, putting her arm defensively around the narrow shoulders. "Come on, honey, this way. You're just going to love it here.

You'll see."

I could feel the eyes following me as I went to the front of the car to get my hat off the seat. Then the nurse was leading her away. I felt a little funny about it, almost as if I were going to miss her. I'd carried her feet twelve miles through the jungle; I'd driven all of her twenty-four hundred miles. She had still to say a word to me, but I guess you get used to having somebody around even if you mustn't touch them and they won't talk.

"The materials you're to study arrived yesterday by air. They're in your room," Tom Stern was saying. "But you'd better come into the office first. We're supposed to take a look at that leg."

"The hell with the leg," I said. "Just point me at a bed and stand back out of the way."

"Well, in the morning then," he said. "You're to call Washington when you've done your homework. What do you want done with the car?"

Sheila was just disappearing into the building, a wraith in pants beside the husky nurse in her print dress. I've never been able to work up a great deal of interest in trousered women, but then, she wasn't really a woman, just a pair of yellow-gray eyes. I looked at the Pontiac and shook my head regretfully.

"You'd better shoot it," I said. "It isn't humane to let it suffer so."

I followed one of the houseboys into the building. Two people were sitting in wheelchairs on the veranda or, as they call it in that country, portal, with the accent on the last syllable. The man had only half a face, acid had got the rest. The woman looked all right, but I knew, because I'd seen her on a previous trip when I came out for special training, that she'd sit there without moving until they brought her in and fed her and put her to bed. Her eyes didn't bother me much. They were just dead.

These were people who'd made the same mistake Sheila had: they'd got caught, somewhere, by somebody. And if you think mixing up the permanent invalids with the agents in for retraining or repairs, like me, was just an accident or an economy measure, think again. We were supposed to see them sitting there, the ones who hadn't quite made it. It was a gentle reminder of what happened when you goofed. As I say, the place is safe, but it has drawbacks.

I had a nice big room with a desk. There was a lot of stuff on the desk. I started opening the packages and said to hell with that. And to hell with the fact that there was still daylight at the window. I pulled down the blind, undressed, got into bed, and went to sleep.