Assignment Moon Girl (17 page)

Durell spoke abruptly. “Then you are Har-Buri?”

“Yes. And now, good night, for a time.”

Durell swung about and tried the door by which he had
entered the file room. It was locked. His hands slid rapidly along the
edges of the doorway. No hold was available. The knob slipped round and around
in his hand. He tried to tear it off. Nothing gave way. It was all solid steel.
He crossed the room to the opposite door by which Ramsur Sepah—or Har-Buri—had
vanished. He met the same problem. There was no way out.

Then he heard the hissing of gas from the speaker vent in
the ceiling. And the light went out again.

He smelled nothing. Panic touched him for a moment. He stood
very still. He didn’t want to breathe. The hissing grew louder. He felt along
the top of the filing cabinet to his left, tested its strength and
weight. It seemed to be bolted solidly to the floor and wall. Using the
steel drawer handles, he lifted himself up until he could touch the invisible
ceiling above, and then stretched as far as he could toward the opening he had
spotted there. It was just beyond reach, but his fingertips felt a
sudden, moist coolness from the gas pouring into the chamber. He did not know
if it was lethal or not. He couldn’t reach it. He turned his head and drew a
breath, swinging out with one hand, and shrugged out of his coat. He lost his
grip and dropped to the floor, got out of the jacket altogether, and
climbed up again. Suddenly he felt nauseated and he swallowed hard. He bailed
up his coat and reached out in the darkness with the heavy cloth and tried to
stuff it over the opening. The hissing was momentarily muted. But he couldn’t
hold his stretched position for long. His arm began to tremble; his scars from
Madame Hung’s treatment suddenly screamed in protest. Again nausea racked him.
This time he fell harder to the floor, and a stomach cramp doubled him up. He
lay prone, face against the cool concrete. The room was literally a vault. He
couldn’t get out. It was airtight. He climbed up on the filing cabinet
once more. He felt cold, bathed in icy perspiration. He reached out awkwardly
for the ceiling vent one last time. He couldn’t make it. When he fell, he did
not feel the floor. He seemed to drop forever, into a bottomless black
pit.

Chapter Fourteen

HE AWOKE and heard voices, but they seemed to come through
an echo chamber and the words were garbled; he could not understand them. He
was sick, and he shouted into the darkness, but he made no sound. He gathered
his trembling muscles and tried to stand up, but there was a void around him
and he could not tell which direction was up or down or sidewise, and dizziness
took him and spun him around and around. He tried to extend his arms and seemed
to fly, with nothing under his feet, soaring and swooping and dipping and
diving. All at once he felt a lurching sensation and dropped gratefully into
nothing at all.

Time passed. He slept and awoke. He tried to read the
luminous dial of his wristwatch. The figures mocked him. He felt that at
least the night had passed, but it was still dark. He no sooner thought of this
than he was bathed in an agonizing light that seemed to prick every pore of his
body with intense pain. He writhed and tried to roll away from it, and now
instead of the soaring freedom he had felt before, he felt bound in iron,
unable to move at all.

More time went by.

He did not know if it was day or night. It was a long, long
time. He awoke to softness under him, a smell of antiseptic, the sting of a
needle in his arm. A form loomed over him and he swung feebly at the vague
face. He heard Ramsur Sepah-Har-Buri laugh. Or was it Ta-Po? He heard another
laugh. He knew that one, and it made his blood grow chill. Madame Hung, no
less. They had him properly, he thought. Where was Hannigan? And Lotus?
Everything he had arranged so carefully had blown up in his face. He wanted to
yell for Hannigan, but he bit oil the name before it came out. He felt cunning
and secretive, doing this. Never let your right hand know what the left is
doing.
Honi
soit
qui mal y
pense
.

“How do you feel, Mr. Durell?”

The voice came from a long distance. “I feel great,” he
whispered. “Out of this world.”

There was a chuckle, “Ah, yes. We are sorry for the delay.
Arrangements must be made. Transport must be laid on, you see. It will be
soon.”

“What will be ‘soon’?”

“Oh, it will be most remarkable.”

And there was no further voice to talk to.

He was aware of cold and heat, light and dark, and always
the flow of time going by, sometimes in quick spurts, other times in slow
torment, He was carried somewhere and put in a bed. He was walked somewhere
else and put in a car or a truck. He felt wind against his face and felt the
sting of another needle and felt nothing.

He knew that more than one day had already gone by. Perhaps
two or three. It was taking too long for them to make their “arrangements,”
whatever they were. In the moments when he was reasonably lucid, he tried to
pinpoint concrete evidence of what was happening to him. But everything was
distorted, as if in a nightmare. He wondered what they were pumping into him
with their syringes. He wondered at the callous depravity that would permit a
man like Ramsur Sepah to see his only son to his death.

He chewed sand between his teeth. The desert? A cold,
mocking sky reeled over him. He heard the hum of a truck motor. Yes, the
desert. He lay on his back, watching the moon sail in the heavens. Big, round,
luminous old moon, symbol for lovers, eternal mystery, sign of lunacy. He tried
to sit up, but he was tied hand and foot, and he couldn’t move. Two
figures loomed on benches built lengthwise along the body of the open
truck. Their rifles glinted like silver in the moonlight. Their faces
were black angles against the sky. They said nothing, did nothing, their bodies
swaying only to the movement of the truck.

He wondered why he was not more surprised to have learned
that Ramsur Sepah was the legendary Har-Buri. He could not have suspected this,
but somehow he felt as if he had made a mistake, a fatal one, and this was one
situation from which he could see no way out. No one was perfect. The
assignment had been complicated by national cross-currents and interests that
should have warned him, from the first. But he didn’t know what else he
could have done. He had counted on Hannigan, and he knew he should never depend
on anyone else in his business. Your survival was in your own hands.

Not that he blamed Hannigan. Maybe Hannigan was working on
it right now. Maybe Lotus had gotten to him, after all. But Hannigan didn’t
know about Ramsur Sepah and the plot for rebellion that came from high places
in Teheran. Hannigan didn’t know what Durell knew about Tanya and her father.
You play things too close to your chest sometimes, Samuel, he told himself.

The truck stopped. He heard voices, and smelled charcoal
smoke, and the debris and ordure of a desert village. Surprisingly, he was
hungry. And suddenly he was tortured by thirst.

“Hey,” he said to one of the faceless guards.

The man looked at him with glittering eyes and got up and
vanished from the truck. The other just sat and waited, faceless and anonymous.
Durell heard the clank of a camel bell, and presently he saw a woman’s
figure loom over him. It was Madame Hung. Her face was a witch’s face,
blotting out the full moon. He shuddered.

“How do you feel?” she asked in a whisper.

“Fine.”

“Oh, that’s very good.”

“I'm hungry.”

“Good.”

“Do you have any water, Madame Hung?”

“Oh, plenty of water. But you will not need any, American
spy, American killer. You are going on a long, long journey.” She laughed.

“Listen,” he said. “No more needles.”

“Just one more.”

“We can make a deal," he said.

“Ah. Now you crawl?”

”I’m a bourgeois, middle-class, capitalistic businessman. I
like to make deals, that’s all.”

“You have nothing to bargain with. Bon voyage, American.”

She plunged a syringe into his arm. He could not avoid it.
He tried, but his bonds were too tight, and she had no trouble handling him.
His last thought was that somehow, in some way, he would kill her.

If it was the last thing he ever did.

He was disoriented. His mind was detached from his body,
with a floating freedom that was delightful, making him happy and
carefree. There was nothing solid about him—no earth, no floor, no walls,
no ceiling or sky. He was alone in ecstasy, a revelation of utter detachment.
His body did not exist. He felt no pain, no hunger, no thirst, no lust. And no
heartbeat.

But he couldn’t be dead, he told himself. He could not be in
eternity, because he knew that time was passing, a lot of time, hours and days,
perhaps a week, maybe more. He wondered about this, and sometimes, when he was
permitted to return to his body, he was fed, although he was not hungry, and
given water, although he was not thirsty. He was always in darkness, except
that now and then he saw many colored lights that twinkled and often looked
like stars. Often, too, the moon sailed across his vision, enormous, pitted,
and hostile. More and more, it seemed to him that the moon was an enemy waiting
for him, an entity that was aware of him and even welcoming him to the
incredible emptiness of outer space. He thought a lot about the moon, and he
thought now and then of Tanya, who said she had been there. He had known
something about this once, and he tried to remember what it was; but he could
not remember. He tried. He

told himself it was important. His life depended on it. He
did not know how he knew this, but he knew.

Time went by. Too much time. He should not have been
floating in this emptiness so long. Somebody should have come for him by
now. Everything was wrong and out of focus. Yet he felt serene.

At last a voice came to him.

“You are going to the moon, Durell,” it said.

“Am I?”

“Oh, yes. It is all arranged, at last.”

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

“You shall see.”

He was called hack from wherever he had been. His euphoria
was gone. He was afraid, and did not want to come back. Little by little, he
knew his body again. His
heart beat
. He breathed. He
felt pain in his limbs. He was sorry it was happening. Who needed it? Shadows
talked to him. Light came and went. He sat in a chair. The chair enveloped him
from all directions, with straps that kept him secure. A helmet was put on his
head, and he wore an awkward bulkiness of clothing. The hiss of oxygen made him
dizzy for a moment. He could turn his head and he saw the night sky through a
tiny, oval port. The moon leered at him and then slowly slid aside, as in a
time-lapse motion picture film. Someone sat in a similar seat beside him.

“Hello, my friend.”

“Hello, Professor Ouspanaya,” Durell said.

“We go on a journey.”

“So I’ve been told.”

“It will be perfectly safe. Nothing to fear.”

“I’d rather not, though.”

“It is necessary. You are not surprised to see me? I shall
be beside you all the time. The trip may take two weeks. You are in fine
physical condition for it now. And I shall manage everything. You need only
accompany me and observe all there is to see.”

“Where are we?”

Ouspanaya smiled. His pale blue Siberian eyes regarded him
with scientific detachment. Durell wondered if this was part of the dream
he had enjoyed for so long. For days? Was it weeks‘! He was sure of nothing. He
looked through the porthole again. Things vibrated. Computers clicked. He
couldn’t believe it. Yet he had to. Everything was solid and tangible. It was
not part of the drugged hours he had spent, thanks to Madame Hung’s needles. He
was out of it. He was in full possession of his faculties. He was in a
spacesuit, he was in a space capsule sitting on top of a booster rocket. Voices
in Russian came eerily through the headphones built into his helmet. He drew a
deep breath. Oxygen. He felt good. He looked through the port. The stars
laughed at him. No, no. It couldn’t be. He looked at Ouspanaya.

The Russian nodded. “Here we go.”

He had read classified accounts of astronaut
launchings. Everything was according to schedule. He wanted to yell to
somebody, anybody, that he didn’t belong here, he didn’t know what to do, he
couldn’t save himself, and who wanted to go to the moon, anyway? Tanya had been
on the moon, and look what it had done to her. If this was fact and not fancy,
then everything he had worked on since his arrival in Teheran was based on a
false premise.

It couldn’t be real.

But it was.

He felt the trembling of enormous power under his back, a
vibration like a malevolent monster wakening and stretching, a pressure in his
chest and lungs that for long seconds seemed beyond endurance. The straps bit
into his
aims
and legs and held him flat. All
through the ordeal, the laconic voices of Russian technicians called out
numbers, coordinates, computerized sums, a space jargon that went beyond his
competent command of the language. Ouspanaya replied just as laconically. All
of his attention was on the computer flickering and
clickings
,
the maze of dials and needles, tubes and wires, that confronted him.

Suddenly they were free of the pressure and floating,
weightless. The sky swung as the booster tipped into the escape slot in space
that would let them leave the worlds gravity. He leaned forward as much as he
could and stared through the port. Yes, earth was down there, incredibly
beautiful, incredibly far down, beyond reach, torn from him forever, half daylight
and halt night. Then the sun swung into sight and Ouspanaya murmured an apology
and there was shade from its blinding menace. Durell felt as if there was
something wrong with him. He should have been screaming objections; but he felt
curiously complacent about it file spoke into the mike strapped to his
throat.