The Doomsday Affair, стр. 32

Illya pressed the last button on the panel. The elevator started a swift descent. DeVry’s voice rose, faded on the intercom, sank to a whisper, ceased…

The elevator doors parted on the huge white-lighted lab. The manually operated elevator was high above their level. The man operating it had donned one of the masks the scientists used inside the atomic cages. He had oxygen and protection from the anesthetic.

Otherwise the huge room was like a place of human statues. Men in almost every position, caught there in that final moment when the gas had felled them. Men with guns in their arms, men fallen to their knees or braced against walls. Colonel Baker, the renegade pilot, still clung to his can of beer, even in unconsciousness.

Sam Su Yan had been struck to his knees. Across the room at the intercom microphone, DeVry still clutched the instrument, on his knees before its lighted panel.

The lift operator jerked his head up, and saw Illya run out of the elevator ahead of Solo and Barbry.

The operator instinctively slapped at the braking ratchet on the smallest series of wheels. As his fingers struck the small metal piece, Illya shot him. He toppled away from the controls.

The tiny ratchet fell forward, slipping between the cogs of the oiled wheels. But total contact had not been made. The small wheel slipped past the ratchet. It struck the next cog, slowing it. But the second larger wheel then slipped backward, not braked, and so on in series until the cables lifting the hoist slipped and the elevator shuddered, slipping downward each time the ratchet missed its cog.

Illya stared at the small wheels a moment, then at the trembling cables under the flooring of the lift.

“Let’s get out of here! That hoist will fall faster and faster—by the time it strikes this sump—”

He did not even bother to finish the thought, herding Solo and Barbry ahead of him into the elevator. He stopped at the doors, holding them open. He lifted his machine pistol, aiming it at Sam Su Yan, meaning to kill him and DeVry before he cleared out.

“Forget it!” Solo said behind him. “When that lift falls out of control, their bomb is going to go. Let them go with it.”

The breath sighed out of him and Illya nodded. He stared one final time at Su Yan, at DeVry across the room, at that little ratchet slipping as it tried to brake that tiny wheel.

He let the gun sink to his side.

The elevator doors whispered shut. The warning whistle continued to wail in the eerie world of immobility. The elevator screamed upward, stopping at ground level.

“Nobody outside this building is going to be affected by that gas,” Solo warned. “Be ready to fight your way out.”

Illya nodded. “I need no coaxing. The way that ratchet is slipping is all the impetus I need for clearing out of here, fast, no matter who’s in my way.”

Solo led them along the corridor to the maintenance exit, out of which he had been permitted to run in his earlier escape attempt. Su Yan had enjoyed that cat-and-mouse game, letting him get almost within reach of escape, but that dry run had shown him where the institute cars were parked.

He shoved open the door, hearing the savage yelping of the dogs from the kennel. He and Barbry stepped out into the bright morning sunlight, followed by Illya with his gun held at ready.

The first car Solo saw on the ramp was a Rolls-Royce, black, gleaming, headed out on the drive. It was undoubtedly Osgood DeVry’s car, waiting for an instant getaway in case of any disruption in the plans of the doomsday bomb.

Beyond the garage and the cars on the ramp, the silver fan-jet rested in the sun, surrounded by armed men and technicians. The woup-wouping whistle shattered the morning silence.

“The Rolls,” Solo said. if any car has a chance to clear this place, it would be DeVry’s.”

They ran for it. Inside the garage, men shouted. Illya grabbed the door of the Rolls, threw it open. In the same motion, he knelt, the machine pistol bucking and rattling as he spray-fired into the garage.

Men turned, running from the plane. Illya sprang into the Rolls under the wheel, turning the key as he moved.

Solo thrust Barbry in between them, and Illya had the car rolling as he struck the seat and slammed the door. The men on the grass sank to their knees, firing at the racing car. Illya braced the machine pistol on the window, firing only for effect. His entire attention was on the drive and the iron gate in the fieldstone walls.

The gate attendant ran out as the car approached. Behind them, Solo saw the other cars being started, racing forward in pursuit.

Illya held the machine pistol out in plain sight, fixed on the guard. He shouted at him. The man nodded quickly pressing a button. The huge gates swung open.

Illya stepped hard on the gas. “I’ve always loved the way these things look,” he said. “But they handle awkwardly.”

Solo was watching the road behind them. “Do you suppose you could move it faster?”

“I don’t know,” Illya replied. “I’ve never actually driven one before.”

He held the car close to the inside of the winding mountain road, slowing as he went into the curves, but speeding as he navigated them.

They were some miles down the mountain when the explosion came. It shook the earth, battering it. From above them, earth crumpled and boulders larger than houses fell free. Other small explosions followed. Behind them there was silence as the pursuing cars stopped up above.

“That chalet up there,” Illya said, shivering slightly. “It must have crumbled into itself.”

“An underground atomic explosion that they’ll pick up all over the world,” Solo said. He drew the mask off his face. “Maybe they’ll write it off as an earthquake.

The battered mountain continued to quiver and shake as if torn loose from its foundations. The violence of that atomic underground blast loosened the earth from its shackles. Huge boulders, tom loose, hurtled downward like pebbles in a land-pounding avalanche. Brittle-rooted trees broke out of the rocky soil, sending up more thunder, more dust.

The big car rattled to its underpinnings. It lunged out of control and, with the convulsions torturing the earth, danced in jerky pirouettes from one side of the narrow road to the other. Shatterproof glass splintered, webbed and crumpled.

Illya fought the wheel, pulling his foot off the accelerator.

His hands gripped the wheel even harder when there was an electronically triggered click, and Su Yan’s voice rose eerily from a concealed recorder.

“Memo,” the voice droned. “‘From Samuel Su Yan to Osgood DeVry.” The car slowed. “Well, old friend of childhood days—whom I trusted no more then than now—you will be hearing this memo for one reason only. Something will have fouled our plan, and you will be running for safety, leaving me to face the debacle. This time you won’t make it—”

As if sharing the same thought, Solo and Illya simultaneously thrust open doors on both sides of the Rolls. The voice continued, “‘Race down the mountain. The heat bomb will be triggered by your speed. You can’t win. I always have the last word. It’s too late for you now—and my last word, my friend, is goodbye.” The recording was speaking to an empty car.

Solo grabbed Barbry’s head against his chest and hurtled them outward. When Illya leaped free the car went finally out of control. As it struck a mountain wall and rebounded, the heat bomb exploded, turning the mountain white. The fragmented car still moved, rolling, brightly orange with flames, to the brink of the cliff, and over it.