At this instant whistles wailed throughout the laboratory. The guards leaped to attention.
A white-smocked man ran into the office from the corridor. "Dr. Nesbitt, there's a woman in the walled yard."
Swearing, Nesbitt ran from the room, following the white-smocked assistant.
A moment later an intercom blared, "All guards to the yard. At once."
The guards standing beside Solo and Kuryakin snapped to attention and ran like robots from the room.
"Mindless," Illya whispered. "They're mindless slaves."
Napoleon Solo jerked his head toward the doors opening off the office. "We've got less than two minutes. We've got to find out anything we can."
Illya nodded, agreeing. They ran toward the long hothouse beyond Nesbitt's rows of equipment.
Illya jerked open the door and they entered the room. They hesitated, staggered by the unnatural heat and humidity. It was almost impossible to breathe.
Quick scanning showed them the plants were all of one species, but there was every size from one inch to huge tubular plants with six foot leaves and twisting, snake-like branches.
The room was loud with a rustling, stirring of leaves and limbs.
"This is far enough," Solo said, gasping for breath and already sweating profusely. "Let's get out of here."
Illya nodded and heeled around. There was no handle on the inside of these doors. Illya thrust against them. They were securely locked and would not open from this side.
Solo wiped the sweat from his eyes. "Never mind. There's got to be more than one way out of here."
They saw another door far through narrowing aisles to their right. They ran toward it.
As they ran the large leaves brushed them, dripping water as hot as tears on them. The smell was sickeningly sweet, the smell of death. When they brushed one of the tentacle-like limbs, it adhered to their clothing and they had to break free.
The rustling was louder and the limbs stirred faster all through the hot-house, although there was not the slightest breeze.
"Out that door," Solo said, the horror mounting in him.
He pushed through overhanging leaves and limbs that seemed to fight back at him, almost like human arms.
He broke clear and lunged to ward the door. His feet brushed something and he stumbled to his knees.
"Solo!"
Illya's voice cried out behind him, but for the moment Solo stared at the dead man on the floor.
"Connors," he whispered, shaking his head. He'd seen the photograph Bikini carried of her father, but Sam had resembled his daughter in life, and he recognized him instantly.
Connors lay twisted on the floor, limp as a sawdust doll. He looked as if he had been crushed by a boa constrictor. All the bones in his body had been smashed.
"Solo!" Illya Kuryakin yelled again.
Solo jumped up, bringing his gaze from the shattered body on the floor.
Illya had tried to follow him through the growth of jungle plants, but had not made it. A green tentacle, larger than a fire hose had constricted about his throat and head.
Illya fought at it helplessly.
Solo looked around, feeling panic, sweated and almost drowned in the now wailing rustle of the plants all around them.
He caught up a pruning shears near the door and leaped toward the plant where Illya was trapped.
He drove the shears into the soft green texture of the constricting limb. Sap spurted out, sap that was pouring pinkly, almost like very anemic human blood.
ACT III—INCIDENT OF THE KILLER PLANTS
DR. IVEY NESBITT strode along the corridor and entered his office. Neither side of his face betrayed any emotion at seeing that Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo were gone.
He was immediately followed by his white-smocked assistant, a sullen, unsmiling man clearly of Indian ancestry.
At a short distance behind the assistant, two staring-eyed guards came, half-dragging Bikini Connors.
They led her into the office, deposited her in the chair in which Illya had sat. They stood at attention on each side of her then, gazing emptily ahead.
"Please, Dr. Nesbitt," Bikini begged. "Where is my father?"
At his desk, the tall scientist ignored her. He didn't look her way or appear to have heard her voice.
He glanced at the guards testily, as he might have gazed once at recalcitrant students in his class rooms. "What is the meaning of deserting your posts, letting our two prisoners run free?"
"Professor," the assistant said gently, "they don't hear you. Even if they do, they are unmoved by criticism or praise."
The doctor waved his arm. "Of course. One forgets one is dealing here with mindless animals, eh, Joe?"
"It's safest that way, Doctor," was all the Indian assistant said.
Nesbitt nodded, dismissing the subject.
Bikini spoke to him again, but it was as if he could not be reached by anyone from the outside world, from his past.
He turned his back, went to a bank of closed-circuit television screens. All glittered blackly, powered, waiting to be activated.
Nesbitt pressed buttons, opening the channel for each screen in turn, the walled yard, smaller labs, shipping areas, the hothouses, the corridors.
A hothouse camera swung across the long arena of tropical growth. Catching his breath, Nesbitt pressed a button, holding the camera in its position.
It was fixed on Solo, Kuryakin and a crushed body crumpled on the hothouse floor. The body the doctor ignored as if it did not exist for him, had never existed.
For a few moments, almost as if entranced by what he saw, Nesbitt watched Solo slashing at the huge arm of the writhing plant.
But as Napoleon Solo hacked the limb loose, the bloody sap spurting and oozing everywhere, Nesbitt's face darkened.
He pressed a button, spoke into a microphone at his side. Intercoms throughout the laboratory carried his voice. "There are two intruders in Hothouse One. Bring them to me."
Nesbitt's voice rattled through the humid greenhouse as Solo pulled Illya Kuryakin from the grasping tentacles of the plant.
For one moment Illya stared down in horror at Sam Connor's crushed body, and thought, "But for the grace of God and Solo using pruning shears, that could be me—"
All doors of the hothouse were thrust open and armed guards appeared in each of them.
Illya and Solo stepped in close to the doors as they were thrust open near them. With all their strength they slammed the doors shut behind the guards.
As the robot-men turned, both Illya and Solo lunged at them, thrusting them stumbling over Connor's body.
The men threw their arms up as they went sprawling into the tangled green plants.
Obviously following all this on his closed-circuit TV, Nesbitt shouted, his voice crackling over the intercom: "Door Six, Hot house One. Stop those men."
But Illya and Solo were already going out of the door. Solo glanced back, watching the two guards trying to fight free of the grasping limbs, the rustling growing to a keening pitch.
For that instant the incredibly long corridor was empty. It was brightly lighted with what seemed half a hundred doors along it.
Solo waved his arm in the direction of the distant white-doored exit.
They ran together.
Nesbitt's laughter sounded chilled and sardonic from the intercom speakers around them. It was nightmarish, as if laughter battered them from everywhere.