“You wrong me, Doctor.” He huffed a near-growl. “You slander me; I am an Israeli, you know that.”
“Yes” She nodded brusquely, her smile flown away. “So you and your records say … but men, like records, have been known to lie. Nicht wahr?”
“Have you had enough, Dr. Harel?” inquired Bedford, conversationally. “You throw your stick over the table and mine will follow it, but you throw yours first. I don’t trust you.”
“Yes, please, please stop, I beg of you both,” Dr. Stekowski pled, tears glittering in his eyes. “Remember, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
“You say so?” asked Bedford, then added in a scathing tone, “Then that eminent self-proclaimed Israeli scientist Dr. Harel, here, must own unquestioned some kind of all-time world-class record for incompetence. Wouldn’t you think so, Ruth?”
Too winded, still, to really growl, much less roar, the battered bully took a fresh, crushing grip on his nowscarred blackthorn stick; all could see his muscles tensing for another attack.
But suddenly the tip of the rattan swept forward, feinting at the bigger man’s eyes, and as both stick and free left hand rose to defend, the deceitful rattan dropped down, was drawn back just far enough to allow for a hard, short thrust to Harel’s bulging midriff. It struck between two of the straining shirt buttons, seeming to sink inches deep in the flabby flesh before striking denser tissue.
The afflicted man broke wind resoundingly, his eyes looked fit to burst from out of their sockets, and a gasping whine was the best that he could mouth. His left hand descended to grab the rattan cane, but its grip was so weak and fitful that Bedford had but a fleeting moment of resistance when he withdrew his weapon, which he then used to deliver a shrewd, powerful blow to the big man’s right wrist; when Harel still did not drop the blackthorn stick, Bedford grimaced, again raised his cane and slammed it down, this time across the back of Harel’s right hand. The big man screamed and his hand relaxed to let the blackthorn stick thump onto the floor at his feet.
Whining, taking his right hand gingerly into his left, he tried to move his fingers, half screamed again and looked up at Bedford, tears cascading down his chubby cheeks, a near-sob in his voice. “Damn you, you brutal bastard! My hand, my hand, you have broken it! Broken at least one of my metacarpals, you have, all four of them, perhaps.”
“And what did you intend to do to me, Harel?” asked Bedford. blandly. “It seems to me that I recall threats to the effect of seeing blood and tears, of hearing whimpers, screams and sobs. Well, you should now feel happy, fulfilled, for you’ve now seen blood and if you looked in a minor just now you’d see tears, too … but both of these substances your own, of course, not mine. As for sound effects, you’ve screamed and sobbed, so far. So tell me, please, just what would I have to do further to you to draw one good, audible whimper out of you? Would another blow on the back of your right hand do it? Hold it out here and we’ll see—we don’t want you disappointed, after all.”
When Bedford made as if to raise his cane, Harel hugged his swelling, reddening hand to his body and stumbled back, shaking his head so forcefully that tears from his cheeks and blood from his two split ears flew out in all directions. “No, no, please! No, of you I beg, Mr. Bedford, sir. Please to not hurt me any more, please. To leave I will, I promise. I promise, never again to hear of me will any of you. If to the Van Natta project you wish me to go, then there I will go, tomorrow, tonight, I swear it. But do not to hit my hand again, please … please?”
Surrendering his consciousness momentarily to an atavistic urge to sadistically toy with, mercilessly taunt an injured and helpless prey, Bedford brought his rattan cane up to guard in sixth and smoothly, with obvious deliberation, slid his right foot forward, toward Harel bringing his left foot back up in place against the right.
“Come, come, Dr. Harel,” he said coldly, “you’ve given us pleas, now, but still no whimpers. Can we not all hear just one little whimper?”
He started when he felt a hand on his left shoulder, started and almost struck out again at the cowering, injured man.
“Jimmy,” said Ruth Marbert’s low, controlled voice, “this you now are doing is like him, not like the Jimmy I know and care for. This is just as a … a something like Dr. Harel would behave, not as would a man, a man like you. Stop torturing him. He is now hurt and hurting and without spirit to fight. You and your cane broke more of him than just his bones. So let him be, I beg you, just let him be. I’ll attend to his injuries now.”
Slowly, Bedford relaxed, allowed the cane to sink from the guard position. He suddenly felt utterly exhausted almost limp. Harel’s tear-swimming eyes watched the terrible cane’s slow descent with bated breath. When Singh and Zepur, having come from behind him, around the far end of the table, pushed a chair to the backs of his knees and helped him to settle in it, the big, battered man sank his head upon his chest and began to sob, raggedly, whimpering like a whipped child.
“Jim,” said Dr. Marberg, “you and Dr. Singh will have to help him down the hall to my lab. I need to find out just how badly he’s hurt, If those bones in his hand are indeed broken, then we’ll have to call a copter to fly him down to a clinic or a hospital. I’m a fair general sawbones as well as being a medical researcher, but orthopedics was never my speciality.”
Having with great surprise and by supporting most of his weight with the cane and the table edge made it up to his chair, Bedford shook his head. “No, Ruth? not quite yet. There’re still some things we have to get straight, here and now. Get Harel some aspirin and a cup of coffee. Hell, I could use a cup, too.”
When all again were in their usual places, Jim Bedford took a folder from his case and unloosed its tiestring, then took out some typewritten sheets.
“Dr. Stekowski,” he began, “I want both you and Dr. Baronian to tell us all just how Dr. Harel was threatening you to ensure your cooperation with his dictates and will on this project. After you have done so, I’ll tell you all some things that you likely do not know about Dr. Harel. Well. Dr. Stekowski?”
Stekowski sighed. “Mr. Bedford, when my wife and I defected, many years ago, it made for a hard choice for me, at least. She had been orphaned during the Great Patriotic War against Germany, but I had to leave behind an elder brother and his wife. My sister-in-law died within a few years, of breast cancer. But when Dr. Harel first came to me, my brother still lived, a very old man, but still alive.
“Dr. Harel told me that he was going to join our staff, that I might retain the ostensible leadership and the title, but that I would do exactly as he ordered in all things. He showed me very recent three-dimensional stills of my brother at his home in Wroclaw, then told me all the terrible things that could befall the feeble old man were I to not become his man, were I not to redirect our project to bovid rather than felid animals.
“I loved my late brother, Mr. Bedford. He and his wife cared for me, virtually reared me, when our parents died. They saw to my education, licked boots and paid bribes to see to my higher studies. They in no way tried to discourage the defections of me and my wife, though they must surely have known that they would be made to suffer for those defections. Suffer they did, too. So I felt that I could not risk the possibility that a brutal and barbaric government would heap further sufferings upon my old, frail, ill brother; despite everything. I just could not risk it. Therefore, I became Dr. Harel’s creature. I betrayed you all to him and to his nefarious schemes.
“However, within the last week, I have been in receipt of a letter from an old family friend. It told of the natural demise of my brother. He now is with God and beyond any sufferings that anyone could inflict upon him. He never had any children, for some reason, and I have no other relatives there of any degree of real closeness, so this monster here has lost his bestial hold upon me.