He released his hold and fell into the room, fell with a slack-muscled helplessness, his head thudding on the rug. He lay on his back and grasped his hard thighs with long-fingered hands, sensing the fibrous nerves, meaty tissues, churn of blood. He tasted his aliveness with his hands, content not to think for a little while. The drapery moved with the night wind. The wind cooled the sweat on his face. He heard the faraway city sound. Not like the roaring burly sounds of the old days. The cities had thinner sounds now. A lost and lonely scream was a part of each night.
Dake sat up slowly, feeling as though hallucination had drained his strength. He hitched closer to the window wanting to close it. The sash was out of his reach, yet he did not quite dare stand to reach it. He hitched over, stood up, leaning against the wall. He reached one hand over, blindly, slid the sash down with a shattering bang. He turned his heavy shoulders against the wall.
In front of him was an evanescence, the faintest silvery shimmer. It was much like that first warning flicker of migraine, dread shining blindness.
And Karen Voss stood there, brown hair tousled, thumb tucked pertly in the wide belt, luminous gray eyes full of pale concern and sassy arrogance. He drew his lips back flat against his teeth and made a small sick sound in his throat and tried to reassure himself by passing his hard arm through the vision. His wrist struck the warm roundness of her shoulder, staggering her.
“Don’t try to explain things to yourself,” she said quickly. Her voice was tense. “Got to get you out of here.” She stepped quickly to the desk, snatched up the typed confession, ripped it quickly. She looked over her shoulder at him. “I hate to think of how many credits I’m losing. Start drooling and babbling and prove I’m wrong.”
Dake straightened his shoulders. “Go straight to hell,” he said thickly.
She studied him for a moment, head tilted to one side. She took his wrist, warm fingers tightening, pulling him toward the door. “I remember how you must feel. I’ll break some more rules, now that I’ve started. You’re expected to go mad, my friend. Just keep remembering that. And don’t.”
At the door she paused. “Now do exactly as I say. Without question. I kept you from going out that window.”
“What do you want?”
“We’re going to try to get out of here. The competition is temporarily... kaput. If we get separated, go to Miguel. You understand? As quickly as you can.”
He felt her tenseness as they went down all the flights of stairs to the lobby, went out into the night. “Now walk fast,” she said.
Down the block, around the corner, over to Market. She pulled him into a dark shallow doorway.
“What are we...”
“Be still.” She stood very quietly. In the faint light of a distant street lamp he could see that her eyes were half shut.
Suddenly she sighed. “The competition is no longer kaput, Dake. They’ve got an idea of direction.”
An ancient car meandered down the potholed street, springs banging, engine making panting sounds. It swerved suddenly and came over to the curb and stopped. A gaunt, raw-looking man stepped out, moving like a puppet with an amateur handling the strings. He went off down the sidewalk, lifting his feet high with each step.
“Get in and drive it,” Karen said, pushing impatiently at him. He cramped his long legs under the wheel. She got in beside him. He drove down the street, hearing behind them the frantic yawp of the dispossessed driver.
She called the turns. They entered an area of power failure, as dark as one of the abandoned cities.
“Stop here and we’ll leave the car,” she said.
They walked down the dark street. She stepped into an almost invisible alley mouth. “Wait,” she said.
Once again she was still. He heard her long sigh. “Nothing in range, Dake. Come on. North Seventh is a couple of blocks over. Bright lights. Crowds. That’s the best place.”
“It’s a bad place to go. For a couple.”
“We’re safe, Dake.”
“What did you do to that man in the car?”
She didn’t answer. Her high heels clacked busily in double time to his long stride. They came to streetlights again. Brown hair bounced against the nape of her neck as she walked.
“What did you people do to Branson?”
Again she refused to answer.
“If you are people,” he said with surly emphasis. “I don’t care about your... motivations. I won’t forgive what was done to Patrice.”
“Please shut up. Stop grumbling.”
Two men appeared suddenly out of the shadows a dozen paces ahead. Dake stopped at once, turned and glanced quickly behind them, saw the others there, heard the odd whinnying giggle of a mind steeped in prono, anticipating the sadist fury. Karen had kept on walking. He caught her in two strides, hand yanking on her shoulder.
She spun out of his grasp. He gasped and stared at the two men. They had turned into absurd dolls, leaping stiff-legged in grotesque dance, bellowing in fright and pain. One rebounded off the front of a building, caught crazy balance and rebounded again. The other pitched headlong into the gutter and rolled onto his back and began banging his heels against the pavement, arching his back. Dake could think of nothing but insects which had blundered into a cone of light which had blinded them, bewildered them, driven them frantic with heat and pain. Behind them the other men bounded and bucked and sprawled. Karen did not change her pace. He caught up with her. She gave him a sidelong gamin grin, a squint of ribald humor in the glow of streetlights.
“Dance of the pronies,” she said.
“And there is no point, I suppose, in asking you... what did that?”
“Why not? A headache. A rather severe one. It gave them something to think about. Like this.”
He staggered and clapped his palm hard over the lance of pure flame that ran from temple to temple, a rivulet of fire. It stopped his breath for a moment. And it was gone as quickly as it had come. There was no lingering pain. But the memory of pain was almost as hurtful as the pain itself.
She took his hand. “You’d be much more difficult, Dake. Prono makes mush of them. Soft, sticky little brains. Like wet glue. We’ll go over there to that place. A breathing spell. I’ve got to think how I can get us back to New York.”
The fleng joint was a slow cauldron of mass desperation. Prone and fice, and fleng strip routines, and the gut-roil of the kimba music, and the rubbery walls like white wet flesh. During the Great Plague in London, man, obsessed by dissolution, had made an earnest attempt to rejoin the slime from which he had once come. Now the plague was of the spirit, and the effect was the same. They pushed their way through to a lounging table, and waved away the house clowns, refused a cubicle ticket, managed to order native whiskey. She put her lips, with their heavy makeup, close to his ear.
“We’re going to separate here, Dake. That will be the best way. I could try to help you get to Miguel, but they can find me easier than they can you. I’ll be more harm than help.”
“And if I don’t want to get to Miguel?”
“Don’t be such a fool. It isn’t a case of wanting. If you don’t get there, you’ll die. Maybe you want to do that. If you want to die, then I’m wrong about you.”
He turned toward her and saw the sudden panic change her face. Though her lips did not move, and he was certain she had not spoken, her words were clear in his mind, coming with a rapidity that speech could not have duplicated.
“I didn’t do as well as I thought: A Stage Three picked us up. Coming in the door over there. The man with the long red hair. I’m going to distract him. Leave as quickly as you can and don’t pay any attention to anything. Understand? Anything! No matter how crazy it looks to you. Go to Miguel as quickly as you can and... be careful when you get there. You’ll be safe once you’re in the lobby. But the street out in front will be dangerous. Be very careful. Go now. Hurry!”