She saw Dr. Lowry appear in the vault door with another pile of papers.
He tossed them in carelessly, turned back into the office without
glancing in her direction. Arlene found herself walking out after him,
her legs carrying her along in dreamlike independence of her will.
Lowry was now upending the contents of a drawer to the top of his desk.
She tried to scream his name. There was no sound. She saw his face
for an instant. He looked thoughtful, absorbed in what he was doing,
nothing else....
Then she was walking through the living room, carrying something--the
next instant, it seemed, she'd reentered Lowry's office. Nightmarishly,
it continued. Blank lapses of awareness followed moments in which her
mind swayed in wild terrors while her body moved about, machinelike
and competent, piling material from workshop and file cabinets
helter-skelter into the records vault. It might have been going on for
only three or four minutes or for an hour; her memory was enclosed in
splinters of time and reality. But there were moments, too, when her
thoughts became lucid and memory returned ... Colonel Weldon's broad
back as he disappeared through the narrow door in the living room wall
into the private conduit entry, the strap of the diex projector case in
his right hand; then the door closing behind him. Before that had been
an instant when something blazed red in the projector's viewplate on
the table, and she'd wondered why neither of the two men sitting before
it made any comment--
Then suddenly, in one of the lucid moments, there was time for the
stunned thought to form: _So the rogue caught us all!_ Weldon's
self-confidence and courage, Dr. Lowry's dedicated skill, her own
reluctance to be committed to this matter ... nothing had made the
slightest difference. In his own time, the rogue had come quietly
through every defense and seized their minds. Weldon was on his way to
him now, carrying the diex projector.
And she and Dr. Lowry? They'd been ordered by the rogue to dispose of
every scrap of information dealing with the projector's construction,
of course! They were doing it. And after they had finished--then what?
Arlene thought she knew when she saw Dr. Lowry close the vault, and
unlock and plunge the destruct button beside the door. Everything in
there would be annihilated now in ravening white fire. But the two
minds which knew the secrets of the projector--
* * * * *
She must have made a violent effort to escape, almost over-riding the
rogue's compulsions. For she found herself in the living room, not ten
feet from the door that opened into the outer halls where help might
still have been found. But it was as far as she could go; she was
already turning away from the door, starting back across the room with
the quick, graceful automaton stride over which she had no control. And
terror surged up in her again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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