Five Great Novels Part 4

"Welsh," Fred said curtly. He could barely hear; his ears had blurred out, and one by one his other senses as well.

"Are those the people who sing about the men of Harlech? What is 'Harlech'? A town somewhere?"

"Harlech is where the heroic defense against the Yorkists in 1468--" Fred broke off. s.h.i.+t, he thought. This is terrible.

"Wait, I want to get this down," Hank was saying, writing away with his pen. Fred said, "Does this mean you'll be bugging Arctor's house and car?"

"Yes, with the new holographic system; it's better, and we currently have a number of them unrequisitioned. You'll want storage and printout on everything, I would a.s.sume." Hank noted that too.

"I'll take what I can get," Fred said. He felt totally s.p.a.ced from all this; he wished the debriefing session would end and he thought: If only I could drop a couple tabs-- Across from him the other formless blur wrote and wrote, filling in all the inventory ident numbers for all the technological gadgetry that would, if approval came through, soon be available to him, by which to set up a constant monitoring system of the latest design, on his own house, on himself.

For over an hour Barris had been attempting to perfect a silencer made from ordinary household materials costing no more than eleven cents. He had almost done so, with aluminum foil and a piece of foam rubber. In the night darkness of Bob Arctor's back yard, among the heaps of weeds and rubbish, he was preparing to fire his pistol with the homemade silencer on it.

"The neighbors will hear," Charles Freck said uneasily. He could see lit windows all over, many people probably watching TV or rolling joints. Luckman, lounging out of sight but able to watch, said, "They only call in murders in this neighborhood."

"Why do you need a silencer?" Charles Freck asked Barris. "I mean, they're illegal."

Barris said moodily, "In this day and age, with the kind of degenerate society we live in and the depravity of the individual, every person of worth needs a gun at all times. To protect himself." He half shut his eyes, and fired his pistol with its homemade silencer. An enormous report sounded, temporarily deafening the three of them. Dogs in far-off yards barked. Smiling, Barris began unwrapping the aluminum foil from the foam rubber. He appeared to be amused.

"That's sure some silencer," Charles Freck said, wondering when the police would appear. A whole bunch of cars.

"What it did," Barris explained, showing him and Luckman black-seared pa.s.sages burned through the foam rubber, "is augment the sound rather than dampen it. But I almost have it right. I have it in principle, anyhow."

"How much is that gun worth?" Charles Freck asked. He had never owned a gun. Several times he had owned a knife, but somebody always stole it from him. One time a chick had done that, while he was in the bathroom.

"Not much," Barris said. "About thirty dollars used, which this is." He held it out to Freck, who backed away apprehensively. "I'll sell it to you," Barris said. "You really ought to have one, to guard yourself against those who would harm you."

"There's a lot of those," Luckman said in his ironic way, with a grin. "I saw in the L.A. _Times_ the other day, they're giving away a free transistor radio to those who would harm Freck most successfully."

"I'll trade you a Borg-Warner tach for it," Freck said.

"That you stole from the guy's garage across the street," Luckman said.

"Well, probably the gun's stolen, too," Charles Freck said. Most everything that was worth something was originally ripped off anyhow; it indicated the piece had value. "As a matter of fact," he said, "the guy across the street ripped the tach off in the first place. It's probably changed hands like fifteen times. I mean, it's a really cool tach."

"How do you know he ripped it off?" Luckman asked him.

"h.e.l.l, man he's got eight tachs there in his garage, all dangling cut wires. What else would he be doing with them, that many, I mean? Who goes out and buys eight tachs?"

To Barris, Luckman said, "I thought you were busy working on the cephscope. You finished already?"

"I cannot continually work on that night and day, because it is so extensive," Barris said. "I've got to knock off." He cut, with a complicated pocketknife, another section of foam rubber. "This one will be totally soundless."

"Bob thinks you're at work on the cephscope," Luckman said. "He's lying there in his bed in his room imagining that, while you're out here firing off your pistol. Didn't you agree with Bob that the back rent you owe would be compensated by your--"

"Like good beer," Barris said, "an intricate, painstaking reconstruction of a damaged electronic a.s.sembly--"

"Just fire off the great eleven-cent silencer of our times," Luckman said, and belched.

I've had it, Robert Arctor thought. He lay alone in the dim light of his bedroom, on his back, staring grimly at nothing. Under his pillow he had his .32 police-special revolver; at the sound of Barris's .22 being fired in the back yard he had reflexively gotten his own gun from beneath the bed and placed it within easier reach. A safety move, against any and all danger; he hadn't even thought it out consciously. But his .32 under his pillow wouldn't be much good against anything so indirect as sabotage of his most precious and expensive possession. As soon as he had gotten home from the debriefing with Hank he had checked out all the other appliances, and found them okay--especially the car--always the can first, in a situation like this. Whatever was going on, whoever it was by, it was going to be chickens.h.i.+t and devious: some freak without integrity or guts lurking on the periphery of his life, taking indirect potshots at him from a position of concealed safety. Not a person but more a sort of walking, hiding symptom of their way of life. There had been a time, once, when he had not lived like this, a .32 under his pillow, a lunatic in the back yard fining off a pistol for G.o.d knew what purpose, some other nut or perhaps the same one imposing a brain-print of his own shorted-out upstairs on an incredibly expensive and valued cephscope that everyone in the house, plus all their friends, loved and enjoyed. In former days Bob Arctor had run his affairs differently: there had been a wife much like other wives, two small daughters, a stable household that got swept and cleaned and emptied out daily, the dead newspapers not even opened carried from the front walk to the garbage pail, on even, sometimes, read. But then one day, while lifting out an electric corn popper from under the sink, Arctor had hit his head on the corner of a kitchen cabinet directly above him. The pain, the cut in his scalp, so unexpected and undeserved, had for some reason cleared away the cobwebs. It flashed on him instantly that he didn't hate the kitchen cabinet: he hated his wife, his two daughters, his whole house, the back yard with its power mower, the garage, the radiant heating system, the front yard, the fence, the whole f.u.c.king place and everyone in it. He wanted a divorce; he wanted to split. And so he had, very soon. And entered, by degrees, a new and somber life, lacking all of that. Probably he should have regretted his decision. He had not. That life had been one without excitement, with no adventure. It had been too safe. All the elements that made it up were right there before his eyes, and nothing new could ever be expected. It was like, he had once thought, a little plastic boat that would sail on forever, without incident, until it finally sank, which would be a secret relief to all. But in this dark world where he now dwelt, ugly things and surprising things and once in a long while a tiny wondrous thing spilled out at him constantly; he could count on nothing. Like the deliberate, evil damage to his Altec cephalochnomoscope, around which he had built the pleasure part of his schedule, the segment of the day in which they all relaxed and got mellow. For someone to damage that made no sense, viewed rationally. But not much among these long dark evefling shadows here was truly rational, at least in the strict sense. The enigmatic act could have been done by anyone for almost any reason. By any person he knew or had ever encountered. Any one of eight dozen weird heads, a.s.sorted freaks, burned-out dopers, psychotic paranoids with hallucinatory grudges acted out in reality, not fantasy. Somebody, in fact, he'd _never_ met, who'd picked him at random from the phonebook. Or his closest friend. Maybe Jerry Fabin, he thought, before they carted him off. There was a burned-out, poisoned husk. Him and his billions of aphids. Blaming Donna--blaming all chicks, in fact--for "contaminating" him. The queer. But, he thought, if Jerry had gone out to get anybody it'd have been Donna, not me. He thought, And I doubt if Jerry could figure out how to remove the bottom plate from the unit; he might try, but he'd still be there now, s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g and uns.c.r.e.w.i.n.g the same screw. Or he'd try to get the plate off with a hammer. Anyhow, if Jerry Fabin had done it, the unit would be full of bug eggs that dropped off him. Inside his head Bob Arctor grinned wryly. Poor f.u.c.ker, he thought, and his inner grin departed. Poor nowhere mother: once the trace amounts of complex heavy metals got carried to his brain--well, that was it. One more in a long line, a dreary ent.i.ty among many others like him, an almost endless number of brain-damaged r.e.t.a.r.ds. Biological life goes on, he thought. But the soul, the mind-- everything else is dead. A reflex machine. Like some insect. Repeating doomed patterns, a single pattern, over and over now. Appropriate on not. Wonder what he used to be like, he mused. He had not known Jerry that long. Charles Freck claimed that once Jerry had functioned fairly well. I'd have to see that, Arctor thought, to believe it. Maybe I should tell Hank about the sabotage of my cephscope, he thought. They'd know immediately what it implies. But what can they do for me anyhow? This is the risk you run when you do this kind of work. It isn't worth it, this work, he thought. There isn't that much money on the f.u.c.king planet. But it wasn't the money anyhow. "How come you do this stuff?" Hank had asked him. What did any man, doing any kind of work, know about his actual motives? Boredom, maybe; the desire for a little action. Secret hostility toward every person around him, all his friends, even toward chicks. On a horrible positive reason: to have watched a human being you loved deeply, that you had gotten real close to, held and slept with and kissed and worried about and befriended and most of all _admired_--to see that warm living person burn out from the inside, burn from the heart outward. Until it clicked and clacked like an insect, repeating one sentence again and again. A _recording_. A closed loop of tape.

". . . I know if I just had another hit . . ."

I'd be okay, he thought. And still saying that, like Jerry Fabin, when three quarters of the brain was mush.

". . . I know, if I just had another hit, that my brain would repair itself."

He had a flash then: Jerry Fabin's brain as the f.u.c.ked-over wiring of the cephalochnomoscope: wires cut, shorts, wires twisted, parts overloaded and no good, line surges, smoke, and a bad smell. And somebody sitting there with a voltmeter, tracing the circuit and muttering, "My, my, a lot of resistors and condensers need to be replaced," and so forth. And then finally from Jerry Fabin would come only a sixtycycle hum. And they'd give up. And in Bob Arctor's living room his thousand-dollar custom-quality cephscope crafted by Altec would, after sup- posedly being repaired, cast onto the wall in dull gray on one small spot: I KNOW IF I JUST HAD ANOTHER HIT . . .

After that they'd throw the cephscope, damaged beyond repair, and Jerry Fabin, damaged beyond repair, into the same ash can. Oh well, he thought. Who needs Jenny Fabin? Except maybe Jenny Fabin, who had once envisioned designing and building a nine-foot-long quad-and-TV console system as a present for a friend, and when asked how he would get it from his garage to the friend's house, it being so huge when built and weighing so much, had replied, "No problem, man, I'll just fold it up--I've got the hinges bought already--fold it up, see, fold the whole thing up and put it in an envelope and mail it to him."

Anyhow, Bob Arctor thought, we won't have to keep sweeping aphids out of the house after Jenny's been by to visit. He felt like laughing, thinking about it; they had, once, invented a routine--mostly Luckman had, because he was good at that, funny and clever--about a psychiatric explanation for Jerry's aphid trip. It had to do, naturally, with Jerry Fabin as a small child. Jerry Fabin, see, comes home from first grade one day, with his little books under his arm, whistling merrily, and there, sitting in the dining room beside his mother, is this great aphid, about four feet high. His mother is gazing at it fondly.

"What's happening?" little Jerry Fabin inquires.

"This here is your older brother," his mother says, "who you've never met before. He's come to live with us. I like him better than you. He can do a lot of things you can't."

And from then on, Jenny Fabin's mother and father continually compare him unfavorably with his older brother, who is an aphid. As the two of them grow up, Jerry progressively gets more and more of an inferiority complex--naturally. After high school his brother receives a scholars.h.i.+p to college, while Jerry goes to work in a gas station. After that this brother the aphid becomes a famous doctor or scientist; he wins the n.o.bel Prize; Jerry's still notating tires at the gas station, earning a dollar-fifty an hour. His mother and father never cease reminding him of this. They keep saying, "If only you could have turned out like your brother."

Finally Jerry runs away from home. But he still subconsciously believes aphids to be superior to him. At first he imagines he is safe, but then he starts seeing aphids everywhere in his hair and around the house, because his inferiority complex has turned into some kind of s.e.xual guilt, and the aphids are a punishment he inflicts on himself, etc. It did not seem funny now. Now that Jerry had been lugged off in the middle of the night at the request of his own friends. They themselves, all of them present with Jerry that night, had decided to do it; it couldn't be either postponed or avoided. Jerry, that night, had piled every G.o.dd.a.m.n object in his house against the front door, like maybe nine hundred pounds of a.s.sorted c.r.a.p, including couches and chairs and the refrigerator and TV set, and then told everybody that a giant superintelligent aphid from another planet was out there preparing to break in and git him. And more would be landing later on, even if he got this one. These extraterrestrial aphids were smarter by fan than any humans, and would come directly through the walls if necessary, revealing their actual secret powers in such ways. To save himself as long as possible, he had to flood the house with cyanide gas, which he was prepared to do. How was he prepared to do this? He had already taped all the windows and doors airtight. He then proposed to turn on the water faucets in the kitchen and bathroom, flooding the house, saying that the hot-water tank in the garage was filled with cyanide, not water. He had known this for a long time and was saving it for last, as a final defense. They would all die themselves, but at least it would keep the super-intelligent aphids out. His friends phoned the police, and the police broke down the front door and dragged Jerry off to the N.A. Clinic. The last thing Jerry said to them all was "Bring my things later on--bring my new jacket with the beads on the back." He had just bought it. He liked it a lot. It was about all he liked any more; he considered everything else he owned contaminated. No, Bob Arctor thought, it doesn't seem funny now, and he wondered why it ever had. Maybe it had stemmed from fear, the dreadful fear they had all felt during the last weeks being around Jerry. Sometimes in the night, Jerry had told them, he prowled his house with a shotgun, sensing the presence of an enemy. Preparing to shoot first, before being shot. That is, both of them. And now, Bob Arctor thought, I've got an enemy. Or anyhow I've come onto his trail: signs of him. Another slushed creep in his final stages, like Jerry. And when the final stages of that s.h.i.+t hits, he thought, it really does. .h.i.t. Better than any special Ford or GM ever sponsored on primetime TV. A knock at his bedroom door. Touching the gun beneath his pillow, he said, "Yeah?"

_Mubble-mubble_. Barris's voice.

"Come in," Arctor said. He reached to snap on a bedside lamp. Barris entered, eyes twinkling. "Still awake?"

"A dream woke me," Arctor said. "A religious dream. In it there was this huge clap of thunder, and all of a sudden the heavens rolled aside and G.o.d appeared and His voice rumbled at me--what the h.e.l.l did He say?--oh yeah. 'I am vexed with you, my son,' He said. He was scowling. I was shaking, in the dream, and looking up, and I said, 'What'd I do now, Lord?' And He said, 'You left the cap off the toothpaste tube again.' And then I realized it was my exwife."

Seating himself, Barris placed a hand on each of his leather-covered knees, smoothed himself, shook his head, and confronted Arctor. He seemed in an extremely good mood. "Well," he said briskly, "I've got an initial theoretical view as to who might have systematically damaged with malice your cephscope and may do it again."

"If you're going to say it was Luckman--"

"Listen," Barris said, rocking back and forth in agitation. "W-w-what if I told you I've antic.i.p.ated for weeks a serious malfunction in one of the household appliances, especially an expensive one difficult to repair? My theory _called_ for this to happen! This is a confirmation of my over-all theory!"

Arctor eyed him. Slowly sinking back down, Barris resumed his calm and bright smiling. "You," he said, pointing.

"You think I did it," Arctor said. "Screwed up my own cephscope, with no insurance." Disgust and rage swelled through him. And it was late at night; he needed his sleep.

"No, no," Barris said rapidly, looking distressed. "You are _looking_ at the person who did it. b.u.g.g.e.red your cephscope. That was my complete intended statement, which I was not allowed to utter."

"You did it?" Mystified, he stared at Barris, whose eyes were murky with a sort of dim tniumph. "Why?"

"I mean, it's my theory that I did it," Barris said. "Under posthypnotic suggestion, evidently. With an amnesia block so I wouldn't remember." He began to laugh.

"Later," Arctor said, and snapped off his bedside lamp. "Much later."

Barris rose, dithering. "Hey, but don't you see--I've got the advanced specialized electronic technical skills, and I have access to it--I live here. What I can't figure out, though, is my motive."

"You did it because you're nuts," Arctor said.

"Maybe I was hired by secret forces," Barris muttered in perplexity. "But what would their motives be? Possibly to start suspicion and trouble among us, to cause dissension to break out, causing us to be pitted against one another, all of us, uncertain of whom we can trust, who is our enemy and like that."

"Then they've succeeded," Arctor said.

"But why would they want to do that?" Barris was saying as he moved toward the door; his hands flapped urgently. "So much trouble--removing that plate on the bottom, getting a pa.s.skey to the front door--"

I'll be glad, Bob Arctor thought, when we get in the holoscanners and have them set up all over this house. He touched his gun, felt rea.s.sured, then wondered if he should make certain it was still full of sh.e.l.ls. But then, he realized, I'll wonder if the firing pin is gone or if the powder has been removed from the sh.e.l.ls and so forth, on and on, obsessively, like a little boy counting cracks in the sidewalk to reduce his fear. Little Bobby Arctor, coming home from the first grade with his little schoolbooks, frightened at the unknown lying ahead. Reaching down, he fumbled at the bed frame, along and along until his fingers touched Scotch tape. Pulling it loose, he tore from it, with Barris still in the room and watching, two tabs of Substance D mixed with quaak. Lifting them to his mouth, he tossed them down his throat, without water, and then lay back, sighing.

"Get lost," he said to Barris. And slept.

5.

It was necessary for Bob Arctor to be out of his house for a period of time in order that it be properly (which meant unerringly) bugged, phone included, even though the phone line was tapped elsewhere. Usually the practice consisted of observing the house involved until everyone was seen to leave it in such a fas.h.i.+on as to suggest they were not going to return soon. The authorities sometimes had to wait for days or even several weeks. Finally, if nothing else worked, a pretext was arranged: the residents were informed that a fumigator or some such shuck personality was going to be coming in for a whole afternoon and everybody had to get lost until, say, six P.M. But in this case the suspect Robert Arctor obligingly left his house, taking his two roommates with him, to go check out a cephalochromoscope they could use on loan until Barris had his working again. The three of them were seen to drive off in Arctor's car, looking serious and determined. Then later on, at a convenient point, which was a pay phone at a gas station, using the audio grid of his scramble suit, Fred called in to report that definitely n.o.body would be home the rest of that day. He'd overheard the three men deciding to cruise down all the way to San Diego in search of a cheap, ripped-off cephscope that some dude had for sale for around fifty bucks. A smack-freak price. At that price it was worth the long drive and all the time. Also, this gave the authorities the opportunity to do a little illegal searching above and beyond what their undercover people did when no one was looking. They got to pull out bureau drawers to see what was taped to the backs. They got to pull apart pole lamps to see if hundreds of tabs sprang out. They got to look down inside toilet bowls to see what sort of little packets in toilet paper were lodged out of sight where the running water would automatically flush them. They got to look in the freezer compartment of the refrigerator to see if any of the packages of frozen peas and beans actually contained frozen dope, slyly mismanked. Meanwhile, the complicated holo-scanners were mounted, with officers seating themselves in various places to test the scanners out. The same with the audio ones. But the video part was more important and took more time. And of course the scanners should never be visible. It took skill to so mount them. A number of locations had to be tried. The technicians who did this got paid well, because if they screwed up and a holo-scanner got detected later on by an occupant of the premises, then the occupants, all of them, would know they had been penetrated and were under scrutiny, and cool their activities. And in addition they would sometimes tear off the whole scanning system and sell it. It had proven difficult in the courts, Bob Arctor reflected as he drove along the San Diego Freeway south, to get convictions on theft and sale of electronic detection devices illegally installed in someone's residence. The police could only tack the bust on somewhere else, under another statute violation. However, the pushers, in an a.n.a.logous situation, reacted directly. He recalled a case in which a heroin dealer, out to burn a chick, had planted two packets of heroin in the handle of her iron, then phoned in an anonymous tip on her to _WE TIP_. Before the tip could be acted on, the chick found the heroin, but instead of flus.h.i.+ng it she had sold it. The police came, found nothing, then made a voiceprint on the phone tip, and arrested the pusher for giving false information to the authorities. While out on bail, the pusher visited the chick late one night and beat her almost to death. When caught and asked why he'd put out one of her eyes and broken both her arms and several ribs, he explained that the chick had come across two packets of high-grade heroin belonging to him, sold them for a good profit, and not cut him in. Such, Arctor reflected, went the pusher mentality. He dumped off Luckman and Barris to do a scrounging number for the cephscope; this not only stranded both men and kept them from getting back to the house while the bugging installation was going on, but permitted him to check up on an individual he hadn't seen for over a month. He seldom got down this way, and the chick seemed to be doing nothing more than shooting meth two or three times a day and turning tricks to pay for it. She lived with her dealer, who was therefore also her old man. Usually Dan Mancher was gone during the day, which was good. The dealer was an addict, too, but Arctor had not been able to figure out to what. Evidently a variety of drugs. Anyhow, whatever it was, Dan had become weird and vicious, unpredictable and violent. It was a wonder the local police hadn't picked him up long ago on local disturbance-of-the-peace infractions. Maybe they were paid off. Or, most likely, they just didn't care; these people lived in a slum-housing area among senior citizens and the other poor. Only for major crimes did the police enter the Cromwell Village series of buildings and related garbage dump, parking lots, and nubbled roads. There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor. He parked, found the right urinesmelling stairs, ascended into darkness, found the door of Building 4 marked _G_. A full can of Drano lay before the door, and he picked it up automatically, wondering how many kids played here and remembering, for a moment, his own kids and the protective moves he had made on their behalf over the years. This was one now, picking up this can. He rapped against the door with it. Presently the door lock rattled and the door opened, chained inside; the girl, Kimberly Hawkins, peered out. "Yes?"

"Hey, man," he said. "It's me, Bob."

"What do you have there?"

"Can of Drano," he said.

"No kidding." She unchained the door in a listless way; her voice, too, was listless. Kimberly was down, he could see: very down. Also, the girl had a black eye and a split lip. And as he looked around he saw that the windows of the small, untidy apartment were broken. Shards of gla.s.s lay on the floor, along with overturned ashtrays and c.o.ke bottles.

"Are you alone?" he asked.

"Yeah. Dan and I had a fight and he split." The girl, half Chicano, small and not too pretty, with the sallow complexion of a crystal freak, gazed down sightlessly, and he realized that her voice rasped when she spoke. Some drugs did that. Also, so did strep throat. The apartment probably couldn't be heated, not with the broken windows.

"He beat you up." Arctor set the can of Drano down on a high shelf, over some paperback p.o.r.n novels, most of them out of date.

"Well, he didn't have his knife, thank G.o.d. His Case knife that he carries on his belt in a sheath now." Kimberly seated herself in an overstuffed chain out of which springs stuck. "What do you want, Bob? I'm b.u.mmed, I really am."

"You want him back?"

"Well--" She shrugged a little. "Who knows?"

Arctor walked to the window and looked out. Dan Manchen would no doubt be showing up sooner or later: the girl was a source of money, and Dan knew she'd need her regular hits once her supply had run out. "How long can you go?" he asked.

"Another day."

"Can you get it anywhere else?"

"Yeah, but not so cheap."

"What's wrong with your throat?"

"A cold," she said. "From the wind coming in."

"You should--"

"If I go to a doctor," she said, "then he'll see I'm on crystal. I can't go."

"A doctor wouldn't care."

"Sure he would." She listened then: the sound of car pipes, irregular and loud. "Is that Dan's car? Red Ford 'seventy-nine Torino?"

At the window Arctor looked out onto the rubbishy lot, saw a battened red Torino stopping, its twin exhausts exhaling dark smoke, the driven's door opening. "Yes."

Kimberly locked the door: two extra locks. "He probably has his knife."

"You have a phone."

"No," she said.

"You should get a phone."

The girl shrugged.

"He'll kill you," Arctor said.

"Not now. You're here."

"But later, after I'm gone."

Kimberly neseated herself and shrugged again. After a few moments they could hear steps outside, and then a knock on the door. Then Dan yelling for her to open the door. She yelled back no and that someone was with her. "Okay," Dan yelled, in a high-pitched voice, "I'll slash your tires." He ran downstairs, and Arctor and the girl watched through the broken window together as Dan Mancher, a skinny, short-haired, h.o.m.os.e.xual-looking dude waving a knife, approached her car, still yelling up to her, his words audible to everyone else in the housing area. "I'll slash your tires, your f.u.c.king tines! And then I'll f.u.c.king kill you!" He bent down and slashed first one tire and then another on the girl's old Dodge. Kimberly suddenly aroused, sprang to the door of the apartment and frantically began unlocking the various locks. "I got to stop him! He's slas.h.i.+ng all my tires! I don't have insurance!"

Arctor stopped her. "My car's there too." He did not have his gun with him, of course, and Dan had the Case knife and was out of control, "Tires aren't--"

"My _tires!_" Shrieking, the girl struggled to open the door.

"That's what he wants you to do," Arctor said.

"Downstairs," Kimberly panted. "We can phone the police--they have a phone. Let me _go!_" She fought him off with tremendous strength and managed to get the door open. "I'm going to call the police. My tires! One of them is new!"

"I'll go with you." He grabbed her by the shoulder; she tumbled ahead of him down the steps, and he barely managed to catch up. Already she had reached the next apartment and was pounding on its door. "Open, please?" she called. "Please, I want to call the police! Please let me call the police!"

Arctor got up beside her and knocked. "We need to use your phone," he said. "It's an emergency."

An elderly man, wearing a gray sweater and creased formal slacks and a tie, opened the door.

"Thanks," Arctor said. Kimberly pushed inside, ran to the phone, and dialed the operator. Arctor stood facing the door, waiting for Dan to show up. There was no sound now, except for Kimberly babbling at the operator: a garbled acccount, something about a quarrel about a pair of boots worth seven dollars. "He said they were his because I got them for him for Christmas," she was babbling, "but they were mine because I paid for them, and then he started to take them and I ripped the backs of them with a can opener, so he--" She paused; then, nodding: "All right, thank you. Yes, I'll hold on."

The elderly man gazed at Arctor, who gazed back. In the next room an elderly lady in a print dress watched silently, her face stiff with fear.

"This must be bad on you," Arctor said to the two elderly people.