"Steve, you poor fool, don't you understand? If our child came as predicted, the first thing I'd do would be to have the child inoculate the father? Then we'd be--"

"Um," I grunted. "I hadn't thought of that." This was a flat lie. I'd considered it a-plenty since my jailing here. Present the Medical Center with a child, a Mekstrom, and a Carrier, and good old pappy would be no longer needed.

"Well, after I found out all about you, Steve, that's what I had in mind. But now--"

"Now what?" I urged her gently. I had a hunch that she was leading up to something, but ducking shy about it until she managed to find out how I thought. It would have been all zero if we'd been in a clear area, but as it was I led her gently on.

"But now I've failed," she said with a slight wail.

"What do they do with failures?" I asked harshly. "Siberia? Or a gunny sack weighted down with an anvil? Or do they drum you out of the corps?"

"I don't know."

I eyed her closely. I was forced to admit that no matter how Catherine thought, she was a mighty attractive dish from the physical standpoint.

And regardless of the trouble she'd put me through, I could not overlook the fact that I had been deep enough in love to plan elopement and marriage. I'd held her slender body close, and either her response had been honestly warm or Catherine was an actress of very rare physical ability. Scholar Phelps could hardly have picked a warmer temptress in the first place; putting her onto me now was a stroke of near-genius.

I got up from the edge of my bunk and faced her through my bars. She came close, too, and we looked into each other's faces over a cross-rail of the heavy fence.

I managed a wistful grin at her. "You're not really a failure yet, are you, kid?"

"I don't quite know how to--to--" she replied.

I looked around my little cell with a gruesome gesture. "This isn't my idea of a pleasant home. And yet it will be my home until someone decides that I'm too expensive to keep."

"I know," she breathed.

Taking the bit in my teeth, I said, "Catherine even though--well, heck.

I'd like to help you."

"You mean that?" she asked in almost an eager voice.

"It's not impossible to forget that we were eloping when all this started."

"It all seems so long ago," she said with a thick voice. "And I wish we were back there--no, Steve, I wish Mekstrom's Disease had never happened--I wish--"

"Stop wishing and think," I told her half-humorously. "If there were no Mekstrom's Disease, the chances are that we'd never have met in the first place."

"That's the cruel part of it all," she cried. And I mean _cried_.

I rapped on the metal bars with a fist. "So here we are," I said unhappily. "I can't help you now, Catherine."

She put her hands through the bars and held my face between them. She looked searching into my eyes, as if straining to force her blocked telepath sense through the deadness of the area. She leaned against the steel but the barrier was very effective; our lips met through the cold metal. It was a very unsatisfactory kiss because we had to purse our lips like a pair of piccolo players to make them meet. It was like making love through a keyhole.

This unsatisfactory lovemaking did not last long. Unsteadily, Catherine said, "I want you, Steve."

Inwardly I grinned, and then with the same feeling as if I'd laughed out loud at a funeral, I said, "Through these steel bars?"

She brought out a little cylindrical key. Then went to a bra.s.s wall plate beside the outer door, inserted the key, and turned. The sliding door to my cell opened on noiseless machined slides.

Then with a careful look at me, Catherine slipped a little shutter over the gla.s.s bull's eye in the door. Her hand reached up to a hidden toggle above the door and as she snapped it, a thick cover surged out above the speaker, television lens, and microphone grille, curved down and shut off the tell-tales with a cushioned sound. Apparently the top management of the joint used these cells for other things than mere containment of unruly prisoners. I almost grinned; the society that Scholar Phelps proposed was not the kind that flourished in an atmosphere of trust, or privacy--except for the top bra.s.s.

Catherine turned from her switch plate and came across the floor with her face lifted and her lips parted.

"Hold me, Steve."

My hand came forward in a short jab that caught her dead center in the plexus below the ribs. Her breath caught in one strangled gasp and her eyes went gla.s.sy. She swayed stiffly in half-paralysis. My other hand came up, closing as it rose, until it became a fist that connected in a shoulder-jarring wallop on the side of her jaw. Her head snapped up and her knees caved in. She folded from the hips and went down bonelessly.

From her throat came the bubbly sound of air being forced painfully through a flaccid wet tube.

I jumped outside of the cell barrier because I was certain that they had some means of closing the cell from a master control center. I don't know much about penology, but that's the way I'd do it. I was half-surprised that I'd been able to get away with this much.

Catherine stirred and moaned, and I stopped long enough to take the key out of the wall plate. The cell door closed on its silent slides.

I had hardly been able to more than run the zipper up my shirt when the door opened and I had to dance like a fool to get behind it. The door admitted a flood of bright light from the corridor, and Dr. James Thornd.y.k.e. The cell door must have been bugged.

Thornd.y.k.e came in behind a large automatic clutched in one nervous fist.

He strained his eyes at the gloom that was not cut by the ribbon of light.

And then I cut him down with a solid slice of my right hand to the base of his neck. I remembered to jump off the ground as the blow went home; there was a sickening crunch of bone and muscle as Thornd.y.k.e caved forward to the floor. He dropped the gun, luckily, as his body began to twitch and kick spasmodically as the life drained out of him.

I re-swallowed a mouthful of bitter bile as I reached down to pick up his gun. Then the room got hot and unbearably small and I felt a frantic urge to leave, to close the door upon that sight.

XXV

I was yards away from my door before my panic left me. Then I remembered where and who I was and took a fast look around. There was no one else in the corridor, of course, or I would not have been able to cut and run as I had. But I looked around anyway until my reasoning power told me that I had done little to help my position.

Like the canary, my plans for escape ended once I was outside of my cage. I literally did not know what to do with my new-found freedom. One thing was becoming painfully obvious: I'd be pinned down tight once I put a foot outside of the dead area in which this building was constructed. What I needed was friends, arms, ammunition, and a good, solid plan of escape. I had neither; unless you call my jailed friends such help. And there I could not go; the tell-tales would give me away to the master control center before I could raise my small--and unarmed--army.

So I stood there in the brightly lighted corridor and tried to think. I got nowhere, but I was driven to action again by the unmistakable sound of the elevator at the end of the corridor.

I eyed the various cell doors with suspicion; opening any but an empty room would cause some comment from the occupant, which again would give me away. Nor did I have time to canva.s.s the joint by peeking into the one-way bull's eyes, peering into a semi-gloom to see which room was empty.

So instead of hiding in the corridor, I sloped towards the elevator and the stairwell that surrounded it, hoping that I could make it before the elevator rose to my floor.

I know that my pa.s.sage must have sounded like a turbojet in full flight, but I made the stairway and took a headlong leap down the first short flight of stairs just as the elevator door rolled open. I hit the wall with a b.u.mping crash that jarred my senses, but I kept my feet and looked back up the stairs.

I caught a flash of motion; a guard sauntering past the top of the well, a cigarette in one hand and a lazy-looking air about him. He was expecting no trouble, and so I gave him none.

I crept up the stairs and poked my head out just at the floor level.

The guard, obviously confident that nothing, but nothing, could ever happen in this welded metal crib, jauntily peered into a couple of the rooms at random, took a long squint at the room I'd recently vacated, and then went on to the end of the hall where he stuck a key in a signal-box. On his way back he paused again to peer into my room, straining to see if he could peer past the little shutter over the bull's eye. Then he shrugged unhappily, and started to return.

I loped down the stairs to the second floor and waited. The elevator came down, stopped, and the guard repeated his desultory search, not stopping to pry into any darkened rooms.

Just above the final, first-floor flight, I stopped and sprawled on the floor with only my head and the nose of my gun over the top step. Below was the guard's desk and standing beside the desk with anger in every line of his ugly face was Scholar Phelps!