This time Watkins found the beam. The door glided aside. He dropped off
Summersby's shoulders, jumped into the next room. A quick look showed
him it was empty. As the door closed he heard Villa shouting hoarsely.
"Make bang noises for the guns. Fall dead, spring to life. We are
mountain fighters of great skill. Climb on machines, drop off with
bullets in your head, play you are--"
The door cut him off. Watkins chuckled. "What a ham," he said. He
started for the opposite door.
X
It was ten minutes to twelve. Summersby was panting like a spent hound.
He had not exercised in months, not since the doctors had told him his
heart was just about gone, and he was surprised that he hadn't keeled
over before now. Dashing around playing guerrilla like some
six-year-old! It had been a damn good idea, though. The giant
children--there were two of them today--were still enthralled, lying on
their bellies with their furry watermelon heads propped in fantastic
two-thumbed hands.
Leaning against a pink plastic maze wall, puffing, he thought, I've
almost grown to like them. Why?
Because for the first time since he was sixteen, John Summersby had to
bend his neck back to look up at someone. These grotesque humanoidal
beings were the only living things which did not make him feel
overgrown, uncouthly out of proportion, a hulking lout. If a chair was
too narrow for him, it would be like the head of a pin to one of these
kids: if a fork felt uncomfortably small in his own hand, it would be a
minikin indeed in one of those vast paws.
In their shadows, Summersby was a very small man. It was an unwonted
sensation, the most satisfying he had ever experienced.
He looked at them out there, as they lay watching Mrs. Full and Adam
mowing down Cal and Villa with imaginary Brownings. He grinned, felt his
lips curve in the unaccustomed grimace, and thought with no particular
bitterness that he was getting mellow in his last days. "Hello,
High-pockets," he said softly to the kid that owned him. "How's the
weather up there?"
At five to noon the door opened. Summersby, seeing its silent motion,
left off the mimic gunplay and started for the wall, where he could
intercept Watkins and find out whether he'd been successful. But the
safe-cracker came running down the middle of the room, yelling.
"Come on, everybody!"
"Come on?"
The two giant children were on their feet, uncertain of what was
happening. Obviously they didn't realize Watkins had been out of the
room at all.
"The adults spotted me!" roared the blond man, swinging his briefcase
wildly; where had he found that? "They're after me!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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