In the morning he got painfully to his feet, frightened by the sound of his own breathing, and drank some more warm water. He looked at his watch. Less than three hours to go. Supporting himself against the wall and then on the banister, Hutchman went upstairs and sat on the pale-green chair. He leaned sideways and threw the switches which put the machine in a state of readiness, then he made sure his hand would fall easily and naturally onto the black button.
He was ready.
He closed his eyes and waited, smiling at his vision of Vicky’s face when she finally understood.
The sound of a metallic crash in the street outside shocked him into wakefulness. He sat absolutely motionless, finger on the button, and listened. In a few seconds there came the familiar ringing of high heels on pavement — a woman’s footsteps, running — following by a pounding on the door of the house. Still Hutchman refused to move, to be tricked into taking his finger away from the button.
“Lucas,” a voice called faintly. “Lucas!”
It was Vicky.
Transported to new levels of fear, Hutchman ran drunkenly down the narrow stairs, and wrenched open the front door. Vicky was standing there. Her face flowed like molten wax when she saw him.
“Get away,” he shouted. “Get away from here!” He looked past her and saw that two cars had collided at the corner of the street. Men in dark suits and overcoats were running.
“Oh God, Lucas. What’s happened to you?” The colour had left Vicky’s face.
Hutchman snatched her into the hall and slammed the door shut. Dragging her with him, he ran up the stairs, into the back bedroom, and dropped into his chair.
“Why did you come here?” He spoke between the harsh roars of his breathing. “Why did you have to come here?”
“But you’re alone.” Vicky spoke faintly as her uncomprehending eyes took in the bare room. “And you’re ill!”
“I’m all right,” he said inanely.
“Have you seen yourself?” Vicky covered her face and began to cry. “Oh, Lucas, what have you done to us?”
Hutchman gathered up the old sofa cover and pulled it tighter around his shoulders. “All right, I’ll tell you. But you must listen carefully and you must believe — because there isn’t much time.”
Vicky nodded, her face still hidden in gloved hands.
“What I’ve done is build this machine.” He spoke sadly, with the rich compassion he could afford now that Vicky was about to come to her moment of truth. “And when I turn it on — as I’m going to do at noon today — every nuclear bomb in the world will explode. That’s what I was doing when you thought…” His voice faded as Vicky opened her hands and he saw her face.
“You’re mad,” she whispered strickenly. “You really have gone mad!”
Hutchman pushed the matted hair away from his forehead. “Don’t you understand yet? Why do you think they’re hunting me? Why do you think the whole world is hunting me?” He pointed toward the street with a dirt-streaked hand.
“You’re ill,” Vicky announced with the crisp determination he knew so well. “And you need help.”
“No, Vicky, no!”
She turned and ran for the stairs. Hutchman lunged for her, tripped on his improvised shawl, and went down on his side. He got to the top of the stairs just as Vicky was reaching the front door.
She pulled it open and ran straight into two of the dark-suited men.
One was carrying a heavy pistol. He pushed Vicky aside, and Hutchman watched the foreshortening of his arm without realizing it meant the pistol was being aimed at him. Vicky clawed the man’s face. The other dark figure spun her round and drove a karate blow into her neck. Even from the top of the stairs Hutchman heard the crushing of bone. He put his foot on the top step as the pistol unleashed its thunder, and his arm went dead. The floor of the landing ballooned up and hit him. He scuttled, whimpering, into the rear bedroom and got his finger on to the black button.
Keeping it there, he twisted himself upward until he was sitting on the chair and facing the door.
And when the two men entered the room he was smiling.
CHAPTER 17
“Move away from the machine,” said the man with the pistol. His long face was gray, priestly with implicit purpose.
“Gladly.” Vicky was dead, Hutchman knew, but he was strangely unmoved. Sensation was returning to his numbed arm, and now he could feel blood streaming over his fingers. “But are you sure you want me to move away from it?”
“Don’t play games. Stand clear!”
Hutchman smiled again, feeling his lips crack. “All right, but have you noticed where my finger is?”
“I can put a bullet through your solar plexus before you can move your finger,” the big man assured him earnestly. “Then you won’t be able to press that button.”
“Perhaps you can.” Hutchman shrugged. The only effect Vicky’s death had had so far was to make his mind feel cold. His thought processes had a cryogenic rapidity. “But you are missing my point. Look really closely at my finger, and you’ll see…”
“He’s already pressed it!” The man who had broken Vicky’s neck spoke for the first time. “Let’s get out of here. They’ll be here any second.”
“Hold on.” The bigger man appeared suspicious of Hutchman’s calmness, and personally affronted by it. He aimed the pistol squarely at Hutchman’s stomach. “What happens if I call your bluff — with a bullet?”
“You’ll be doing your masters a disservice.” Hutchman almost laughed — the man was trying to scare him with a gun, not knowing that with Vicky dead there was no longer any meaning to words like fear, hatred, or love.
“You see, I’m a weak man, and when I was building this machine I had to make allowances for my own character defects. I anticipated that a scene like this one might occur — so I designed the trigger circuits so that they will function when I take my finger off this button.”
The big man stared in bafflement, a muscle twitching at the corner of his mouth. “I could wreck the machine.”
Hutchman coughed so painfully that he half-expected to feel blood in his throat. “In three seconds? That’s all it will take for the output radiation to get to the moon and back — besides to do that you’d have to force me to hold the button down. And I assure you I’ll release it if you take one step into this room.”
“Give it up,” the other man said anxiously to his companion. “Come on, for God’s sake! I think I hear somebody…”
There was the sound of the front door of the house being thrown open and shuddering against the wall. The bigger man turned away from Hutchman, raising his pistol. Hutchman’s flow of sense impressions was blasted and disrupted for an indeterminate time by the sound of machine guns being fired in a confined space. The two men disappeared from his view in a cloud of smoke, dust, and whirling flakes of plaster — then there was silence. A few seconds later he glimpsed khaki uniforms on the landing, and two soldiers in battle kit came into the room. Without speaking they took up positions on each side of the doorway and covered Hutchman with weapons which were still belching acrid smoke.
He sat without moving as the room gradually filled with other men, most of them in civilian clothes. They stared reverently at Hutchman, their eyes taking in every detail of his appearance and of the machine he was touching, but nobody spoke. Out in the street a siren wailed briefly and died away in a disappointed moan. Hutchman watched the strangers, dreamily aware that the situation had its ludicrous aspects, but his arm was throbbing hotly now and he had to concentrate hard to keep from fainting. He looked down at his watch. The time was three minutes before noon.
Close enough, he thought. Three minutes won’t make any difference. But… The trouble was that he could not let go and take his rest just yet. He had specified a noon deadline, and at least one invariant point had to remain — otherwise nothing he had done could retain its meaning.