"When I count three, you will wake up, refreshed. One, two, three."
I sat up. I felt great. Naturally, it hadn't done them any good, I'd just told the story again as I had before ...
Son of a bitch.
"You did it," I said, awed. "You put me under."
I was talking to one of the two other people in the room, Docto Leggio who Arnold had called after I agreed to try hypnotism. He was a medical doctor.
"I remember everything," I said, still a little stunned "I was just going along with the joke ... "
Leggio laughed.
"That's the only way to make it work, Mister Smith. You were a good subject. Your memory is excellent."
I looked at Mayer.
"And I told it just the same way, didn't I?"
He nodded, grudgingly.
"We obtained more detail ... but, yes, you never wavered."
The doorbell rang its little five-note theme again. Leggio was shaking hands with me as he got ready to leave, and so was the, other new arrival, who I hadn't talked to at all because she'd arrived while I under and Leggio hadn't asked me to talk to her. She was Frances Schrader, and she had a doctorate in biochemistry and a talent for pencil sketching. Damn, the doctors were getting so thick around that place I could hardly walk.
Leggio and Schrader left, and in came a new fellow lugging some heavy equipment.
While he was opening it and setting it up, Arnold introduced us. The man was Phil Karakov, and he was a polygraph expert.
I sighed, sat down, and let them hook me up.
"I can't shake anything in his story," Karakov said, at last.
Mayer didn't seem to be listening closely. I was feeling relief that I'd passed the lie detector as well as the hypnotic examination, and here was Mayer, gazing out the window at the sun setting over the orchard.
"Thank you, Phil," he said. "I'll let you know what becomes of this."
Karakov packed up his equipment and left. Mayer continued to stare out the window.
Then he picked up the sketch Frances Schrader had made, looked at it, and tossed it to me.
It was very good. Leggio had made me recall things about the stunner that I hadn't been able to get at before. Schrader had worked with me looking over her shoulder, erasing and filling in details as Leggio pressed me to look deeper into my mind. There were two views, one much better than the other. The first showed what I'd seen on the outside. The second showed the inner workings, which I'd only seen for a second before I got zapped. , Mayer seemed finally about to say something, when his trick doorbell rang again. He frowned, got up, and went to the front door. He was back soon.
"No one there," he said. "That's never happened -- "
It rang again. He looked like he'd bit into something sour, but once more he went to the door. He was gone longer this time. While he was gone, the damn thing chimed three more times.
"I looked all around. It must be malfunctioning. I disconnected it, so it shouldn't give us any more It rang again. He was about to say something nasty, when his Edison phonograph started to play. It was some Scottish ditty, scratchy as hell. While we were still staring at that, his hifi came on at full volume with something that must have been Wagner. As he hurried to shut it off, the Xerox machine started to run. It was .spewing paper all over the place. I could see his computer terminal had lit up. All the lights in the house dimmed, then came on very bright.
I was on my feet by then. I wouldn't have been surprised if a fleet of toy cars had come through the kitchen door, followed by a vacuum cleaner. Steve Spielberg, where are you now that we need you? Then every pane in Mayer's glass wall blew out into the vegetable garden.
19 Lest Darkness Fall
We were looking down an infinite tunnel.
There was a sound. I'd heard it before: the low rumble as I stood in the hallway outside my hotel room. This time it was much louder. The floor started to shake, and two points of very bright light appeared somewhere along the length of that impossible tunnel.
The tunnel wasn't even there, really. I could see the trees of the orchard right through it.
There were odd shapes that I didn't like to look at, so I focused on the bright lights.
The lights started to take on the shape of humans. Then the perspective went all crazy and a high wind began to blow. Papers were swirling around us, and everything in the room got shiny, like it had been in my hotel room when I opened the door. I looked at my hand; it was shiny, but not cold. I looked back at the tunnel. One moment the lights were a hundred miles away, and the next they were in our laps, only to flicker into the distance again.
Then it was over. Louise was standing in the ruins of Arnold's windows. She was wearing the black commando outfit she'd had on that night in the hangar. Standing beside her was something else. I didn't know what to make of it at first. It was humanoid, it had a face and two arms and two legs. Parts of it looked like the robot from Star Wars, and parts looked more like Gumby, that little clay cartoon figure. It moved fluidly and didn't seem to have any seams. But it was big, and built like a weightlifter.
There was no doubt in my mind. This wasn't a human being in a funny suit. This was an alien creature, or a robot, or something I'd never seen before.
Arnold Mayer got his voice back first.
"I presume you are Louise Ball," he said.
"Baltimore, actually," she said, coming into the room. "From a long line of Marylander-
Columbians." She reached a chair a few feet from the one I'd been sitting in, tilted it to dump the pile of books and papers onto the floor, and sat.. "My companion is Sherman."
"Pleased to meet you, Doctor Mayer, Mister Smith," Sherman said. He continued to stand near the ruined glass wall.
"He's a mechanical man," Louise went on. "A robot, if you wish. He's at least as smart as either of you, and he's a hundred times as strong and a thousand times as fast. I named him after a tank used in the First Atomic War."
"Is that a threat?" Mayer asked.
"Take it however you want. You've got something I want-"
"Are you really from Maryland?" I asked.
She looked at me, and I thought I saw some sympathy there. At least I hoped I did. She'd come into my life and left it in ruins. It would have been nice if she'd felt some remorse for it.
"My forebears are. You're probably one of my great-granduncles or something, fifteen thousand times removed. But at this point the race hasn't started to differentiate into distinct ... " She looked away, and rubbed her forehead.
"This isn't relevant," she went on, and turned back to Mayer. "You have something I want. Something I have to have. I intend to get it."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Mayer said.
"You're lying. Sherman, where is it?"
"I don't know, Louise," the robot said, in a voice deeper and more threatening than it had used in its earlier friendly greeting. "I'm not getting a reading."
"Well, probe the room."
If he did "probe the room," he did it quickly. Without a pause, he pointed to the mantelpiece covered with picture frames.
"There is a safe hidden behind the central picture," he said.
Louise stood, pointed her finger at the picture. It swung away on hinges. She made some complicated motions, and I saw the dial spin back and forth, then the door swung open.
"How did you do that?" I asked.
"Magic," she said. She went to the safe and started throwing its contents onto the floor.
Mayer took a step in her direction; Sherman made a throat-clearing noise and wagged a warning finger. It was enough for Mayer; it probably would have been enough for me, too.
That bastard was huge.
Gold coins and stock certificates were soon scattered around Louise's feet. She came up with an old army Colt .45 and tossed it to Sherman, who shredded it. What I mean is, he threw the ammo clip about a mile into the dark, and rubbed the gun between his hands until it fell in a shower of metal chips. I felt a drop of sweat trickle down my back.