Voice, querulous: "This is a failure. No point in going on with it. I am not interested in his fantasy life - I want hard facts. We may as well stop now. How long before he comes out of it?"
"Several hours. Four or five at least. And I wouldn't call it a complete failure. You have some interesting notes."
"Hah! That's because you aren't in my shoes. You don't have to face them with a dozen pages of insane raving. No - I shall just have to do it the hard way. It's all laid on. I only have to make a phone call."
A thick blanket of purple fleece settled over Richard Blade. He smiled and slept. The voices were gone, he was alone in the universe. Peace. Sleep.
Blade came awake feeling weak and sick. Still on the table, still bound to it, still naked though the blanket had been tossed over him. He stared at the oriel window. Dark outside.
A man cleared his throat. Blade swiveled his eyes. It was the same guard, the silent man with the pistol, sitting on a camp chair and nodding a bit, fighting sleep, the pistol drooping into his lap.
Blade felt a surge in his bowels. This would be it, then. The time was as good as any. Night. Sleepy guards and himself coming weak and dazed out of a powerful drug. They would not expect him to give trouble. That might give him just the slight edge he needed.
He strained up against the straps and chains. "I have to go to the bathroom again. Hurry up. And I feel sick - like I'm going to vomit any second. You want me to do it here?"
The man stood up. He had been expecting this. He waved the pistol at Blade. "Hold it, mate. Just hold on to it for a \bullet few bleeding seconds."
He went to the door and tapped on it, then came back to cover Blade with the pistol. A minute or so later the other two men came in, one with a pistol and the other with the familiar Sten gun. Blade noted that the Sten was on safety, the cocking handle in the lock slot. He grinned at the Sten gunner. "That thing hasn't blown up in your face yet?" His answer was a grunt.
They herded him along the same passage and over the cobbled area to the toilet cubby. A fine rain greased the cobbles and it was so dark that Blade could not see the brick fence to his left. Coming back it would be to his right. He didn't care about the gate. He would have no time for gates.
As they approached the toilet he began to pray silently that the single rusty razor blade would be on the washbowl. He needed it. He was planning on it. He had spotted it on his previous trip and now all his hopes of success hung on it still being there.
It was there. As he squatted and let himself spew he cast an eye at it. Ancient, eaten with rust, staining the already dirty porcelain, it might have lain there for years. Awaiting this moment.
Blade strained and groaned. He put his head in his hands. "I'm sick at both ends," he complained. "What did those bastards shoot into me, anyway?"
One man grinned. Another spat. All regarded him like a clinical specimen. Nothing to do with them. They did their job, got paid, and asked no questions. And yet the rhetorical question had value. Patter. Patter to distract the audience.
Blade put his head in his hands again, groaned louder, and" peered down between his legs at the toilet bowl. Nothing. Panic flared in him. Suppose he didn't pass it? Suppose it was tucked away somewhere in his guts and refused to come out? Then he must find another way.
There it was. A shiny aluminum capsule that shielded yet another inner capsule. Between the two capsules was a thin buffer of acid. Acid that would be activated by air.
Now the tricky part. His three guards were becoming impatient.
Blade got partially up, groaned hideously, then sank to the seat again. He tried to smile at the men. They stared blankly back at him.
"Be just half a mo," Blade said. "Ohhhhhh - now my guts are cramping. Ohhhhhh - "
He raised, turned, put his hands on the sides of the bowl and began to retch miserably. It was a convincing performance. One of the men said, "He is a sick bloke, all right. Glad it ain't me."
Blade reached down into his own excreta and palmed the capsule. Done. He retched for another minute, acting out his part, then staggered weakly to the washbowl. The razor blade lay waiting. This was also tricky. The capsule was the size of three aspirins - he had swallowed it with oil - and he held it between his left thumb and first finger as he washed his hands. His guards watched.
Blade retched again, bent over the bowl, groaned. He brushed the razor blade into the bowl and waited. Had they seen it?
"Get a jump on," one of them said. "You think we want to fool with you all the bleeding night?"
Blade washed his hands. He gashed the thin shell of the capsule with the razor and dropped the capsule and blade into the bowl. He ran a thin stream of water, saw the capsule vanish down the drain. The acid was at work. Two minutes.
Blade dried his hands on toilet paper as he began to count to himself. Nothing could stop the explosion now. The RXD 1, cyclonite hexogen, T 9, was a liquid plastic that was the latest thing. Only atomic fission exceeded it in fury. In the tight space of the drains it was going to tear everything to hell.
A minute and a half now. The acid was eating away at the inner capsule. It was precise. Two minutes and the acid would eat through and activate the explosive. The explosion, Blade thought, would be mainly upward. But there would be a fringe effect and he would just have to take his chances. He kept counting.
He slowed his steps. Not too fast. He set the training post in the courtyard as his marker. Beyond that he could not go. The rain had thickened. That might help.
Blade listened for the Sten gunner taking the cocking lock off. That he didn't want. That would mean that he took a burst in the back as he ran for the wall. He did not hear the snick he dreaded. They were approaching the training post now. The rain wept and the cobbles were like dirty glass under his bare feet. He began to pull the blanket around him with one hand, bunching it.
They were at the post. For the first time he thought of it as an executioner's post. Stop thinking. Time to go.
Blade stopped and pointed. He screamed, "Rat! Look at that big rat!"
The man behind him bumped into him. Blade whirled and flung his blanket at the Sten gunner. It fluttered and folded over the man's head. Blade butted hard into the man behind him and hurled him back into the third man, who had just raised his pistol. Blade ran.
For the wall on his right. He ducked and he ran, not trying to zig-zag - too slippery for that - and he put on a burst of speed that he had not known he was capable of. Behind him a pistol snapped and the bullet whirred past, smacked the wall and disintegrated. Fragments stung his bare legs. Another shot.
Blade lunged at the wall. It was six feet high and he caught the top with one mighty bound, getting his elbows over and pulling himself up. His spine was an icy rod. Where was the Sten?
A nasty chatter told him. Part of the brick wall exploded at his left elbow. Then Blade was over and falling into the soft earth of a flower bed and running into darkness. Roots and weeds and branches caught at him and clawed and dragged and slashed his flesh. He fell. He got up and kept running into nothing. He held his hands outstretched to keep from braining himself on a tree or another wall. He slipped down an incline and rolled through gravel and rock, punctured himself a few more times and ended up against a thick hedge. Dark. He was as good as blind.
The sky lit up behind him. A huge red flower blossomed in the wet night sky. It turned yellow at the edges and before the blast knocked him into the hedge he saw that a lane ran just beyond it. He was flung painfully into the hedge and half through it, wedged into it, while a great G force slammed at his belly and he watched dark objects rise and Soar over what had been the stable. Strange shrapnel pattered down about him as the first sharp flame began to die.