The black car gained on them. No gymnastics. A bulletlike directness. But it was nearer all the time.
Dickson-Hawes gave a sort of whimper.
“No noise,” Freeman cautioned in a fierce whisper. “That’ll bring them down for sure. Now!”
He pressed the accelerator all the way down. The eggplant-colored car bounced and swayed. There was a tinkle of glass from the headlights of the car on the left as the sedan brushed it glancingly. Dickson-Hawes moaned, but realized they had gained the length of several cars. Momentarily, the black pursuer fell behind.
They went through two red lights in a row. So did the black bullet. It began to edge in on them. Closer and closer. Faster and faster.
Dickson-Hawes had slumped forward with his head on his chest. The black car cut toward them immediately.
Freeman snarled. Deliberately, he swung out into the path of the pursuer. For a second, it gave ground.
“Bastards,” Freeman said grimly.
The black car cut in on them like the lash of a whip. The sedan slithered. Hubcaps grated on concrete. The sedan swayed drunkenly. Brakes howled. Dickson-Hawes, opening his eyes involuntarily for the crash, saw that they were in a safety island. The same safety island, surely, from which they had started out?
The black car went streaking on by.
“I hate those things,” Freeman said bitterly. “Damned Voom. If I could—But never mind. We got away. We’re safe. We’re home.”
Dickson-Hawes did not move. “I said we’re safe,” Freeman repeated. He opened the car door and pushed the other man out through it. Half shoving, half carrying, he led him to the door from which they had entered the freeway. It was still the time of day at which nervous motorists turn on their parking lights.
Freeman maneuvered Dickson-Hawes through the door. He closed it behind them and fastened the padlocks in the hasps. They were out in the corridor again—the corridor on whose wall somebody had written horrer howce.
Freeman drew a deep breath. “Well. Worked better than I thought it would. I was afraid you’d yell. I thought you were the type that yells. But I guess the third time’s the charm.”
“What?”
“I mean I guess my goddamn luck has turned at last. Yeah. What did you think of it?”
Dickson-Hawes swallowed, unable to answer.
Freeman regarded him. “Come along to my office and have a drink. You look like you need one. And then you can tell me what you think of this setup.”
The office was in the front of the house, down a couple of steps. Dickson-Hawes sank into the chair Freeman pulled out for him. He gulped down Freeman’s dubious reddish bourbon gratefully.
After the second drink he was restored enough to ask, “Freeman, was it real?”
“Certainly not,” the other man said promptly.
“It looked awfully real,” Dickson-Hawes objected. “That arm…” He shuddered.
“A dummy,” Freeman answered promptly once more. “You didn’t see any blood, did you? Of course not. It was a dummy arm.”
“I hope so. I don’t see how you could have made all the stuff we saw. There’s a limit to what machinery can do. I’d like another drink.”
Freeman poured. “What did you think of it?”
Color was coming back to Dickson-Hawes’s cheeks. “It was the most horrible experience I ever had in my life.”
Freeman grinned. “Good. People like to be frightened. That’s why roller-coaster rides are so popular.”
“Not that much, people don’t. Nobody would enjoy a roller-coaster ride if he saw cars crashing all around him and people get ting killed. You’ll have to tone it down a lot. An awful lot.”
“But you liked it?”
“On the whole, yes. It’s a unique idea. But you’ll have to tone it down about 75 cercent.”
Freeman grimaced. “It can be done. But I’ll have to have a definite commitment from you before I undertake such extensive changes.”
“Um.”
“There are other places I could sell it, you know,” Freeman said pugnaciously. “Jenkins of Amalgamated might be interested. Or Silberstein.”
“Jenkins lit out with about six thousand of Amalgamated’s dollars a couple of months ago. Nobody’s seen him since. And they found Silberstein wandering on the streets last week in a sort of fit. Didn’t you know? He’s in a mental home. You won’t be selling either of them much of anything.”
Freeman sighed, but made no attempt to dispute these distressing facts. “I’ll have to have a definite commitment from you before I make that many major changes,” he repeated stubbornly.
“Well…” Fright and whiskey may have made Dickson-Hawes a little less cautious than usual. “We could pay you fifty a week for a couple of months while you worked on it, as advance against royalties. If we didn’t like the final results, you wouldn’t have to give back the advance.”
“It’s robbery. Apprentice mechanics earn more than that. Make it sixty-five.”
“I hate haggling. Tell you what. We’ll make it sixty.”
Freeman shrugged tiredly. “Let’s get it down in black and white. I’ll just draw up a brief statement of the terms and you can sign it.”
“Well, okay.”
Freeman stooped and began to rummage in a desk drawer. Once he halted and seemed to listen. He opened another drawer. “Thought I had some paper… Yeah, here it is.” He turned on the desk light and began to write.
Dickson-Hawes leaned back in his chair and sipped at Freeman’s whiskey. He crossed his legs and recrossed them. He was humming “Lili Marlene” loudly and off pitch. His head rested against the wall.
Freeman’s pen moved across the paper. “That’s about it,” he said at last. He was smiling. “Yeah. I—”
There was a splintering crash, the sound of lath and plaster breaking. Freeman looked up from the unsigned agreement to see the last of his entrepreneurs—the last, the indubitable last—being borne off in the long black arms of Voom.
It was the first time they had gone through the partitions in search of a victim, but the partitions were thin and the unsuccessful chase on the highway had excited them more than Freeman had realized. There has to be a first time for any entity, even for Voom.
Ten full minutes passed. Dickson-Hawes’s shrieks died away. The third episode had ended just as disastrously as the earlier two. There wasn’t another entrepreneur in the entire U.S.A. from whom Freeman could hope to realize a cent for the contents of his horror house. He was sunk, finished, washed up.
Freeman remained sitting at his desk, motionless. All his resentment at the bad luck life had saddled him with—loyalty oaths, big deals that fell through, chiselers like Dickson-Hawes, types that yelled when the Voom were after them—had coalesced into an immobilizing rage.
At last he drew a quavering sigh. He went over to the bookcase, took out a book, looked up something. He took out a second book, a third.
He nodded. A gleam of blind, intoxicated vindictiveness had come into his eyes. Just a few minor circuit changes, that was all. He knew the other, more powerful entities were there. It was only a question of changing his signaling devices to get in touch with them.
Freeman put the book back on the shelf. He hesitated. Then he started toward the door. He’d get busy on the circuit changes right away. And while he was making them, he’d be running over plans for the horror house he was going to use the new entities to help him build.
It would be dangerous. So what? Expensive… he’d get the money somewhere. But he’d fix them. He’d build a horror house for the beasts that would make them sorry they’d ever existed—A Horrer Howce for the Voom.