[Magazine 1966-­10] - The Moby Dick Affair - Davis Robert Hart - Страница 10

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He called Illya's name again. The answer came back, curiously fiat, nasal:

"Who is that?"

"Napoleon." Now Solo was near the inner door. "Did THRUSH fire the place? Where are you—" Just at the moment he reached the door the smoke thinned momentarily. He was on the verge of entering Dr. Shelley's inner laboratory when something in his unconscious checked him. Illya's voice sounded too strange.

Solo strained to see through the smoke billowing from the contents of a number of filing cabinets. The files smoldered on the tile floor between two long laboratory benches laden with glassware. A shape whirled the smoke.

Illya's head emerged from the smoke first. Then his torso, arms and hands. In his left hand Illya gripped a fat file folder with a gray cover. In his right was a gun, aimed directly at Solo in the doorway.

A relieved grin spread over Solo face. "You're alone. I thought for a minute—"

Solo stopped. Illya's face was immobile as marble. His eyes had a strange, empty look in them. Suddenly Illya's right hand twitched. It was all the warning Solo had.

He rolled like a tumbler, wildly, as Illya began pumping bullets at the door.

The shots crashed in the smoky tab. Solo somersaulted up and threw his whole weight at Illya, grappling for his gun hand. The moment Solo's hand closed on his wrist, Illya began to snarl and fight. He dropped the file folder accidentally and this seemed to panic him. He kicked at it, trying to shove it toward the smoldering pile of manuscripts.

Solo struggled to wrestle the gun away. Illya's face was ugly.

"You mustn't stop me. You musn't stop me." He repeated it in a kind of mechanical desperation. Whatever drug had been given him, Solo decided, had also given a tremendous boost to his strength. Despite the fact that Solo had hold of Illya's gun wrist with both hands, Illya was still managing to turn that gun so it pointed right at Solo's belt buckle.

Solo felt Illya's arm writhe.

That warning he felt through his fingers saved his life. The pistol whammed an instant after Solo released his grip and jackknifed back wards.

The bullet blasted lab glassware on the nearby bench. A shard hit Solo's cheek, slashed it open. Illya seemed to have forgotten the file folder. It lay on the floor, its upper right corner smoldering.

Illya lurched through the smoke, coughing. His gun muzzle quested for Solo, who was floundering in the middle of a mess of broken glass. Suddenly Illya gave a savage wince. He shuddered.

"You—shouldn't have come here." He whimpered it, almost as though he recognized his friend. "I don't want—to kill you. I haven't any choice, Na—" He stumbled over the name, pronounced it haltingly. "Napoleon."

Then, as though wracked by awful internal pressures, he threw his head back and howled, "I haven't any choice!"

Illya's face glazed over again. He wrapped both hands around the pistol to steady it. He took one step and pointed at his friend's forehead.

Through all this, Solo had been crouched against one of the lab bench fronts. Illya was three feet away, aiming. Solo whipped his hand over his head. He grabbed the first thing his fingers touched, yanked. A Bunsen burner and its tubing—Illya Kuryakin shuddered and fired once, twice. Solo was rolling again, his other cheek cut by broken glass as he skidded across the floor. He jumped up. Using the base ring of the burner as his weapon, he lunged in from the side.

Illya tried to turn. He seemed dazed, slow-moving. Solo crashed the burner ring down on his friend's skull with all his might.

Illya groaned. Solo gave him a hand-chop to the back of the neck. Illya dropped to his knees.

Napoleon Solo snatched his gun as it fell. Illya blinked, shook his head. Then he caught sight of the gray folder with the code letters CR-99-2 embossed on the cover. His hand twitched feebly toward it.

"Got to burn that," he said. Then louder, anguished: "Got to burn that, got to burn it—"

Part of the cover was alight, sending up sparks. Solo snatched the folder from the blazing pile of reference papers. Illya let out a moan of frustration. He covered his face and sobbed.

What was wrong with him? Solo wondered as he slapped the file cover against his trousers to douse the sparks. He caught his friend by the scruff of his coat collar and dragged him away from the flames. Illya continued to burble and moan, eyes closed, as though tortured by his failure. Solo hauled him all the way into the outer workroom.

Using the butt of Illya's gun, Solo smashed the glass in a wall fire alarm box. Immediately, sprinklers recessed in the ceiling began a hissing deluge. A siren warbled. Solo sheltered the charred file against his jacket and staggered through the smoke to find a telephone and call for an U.N.C.L.E. ambulance.

Illya Kuryakin had rolled over onto his face, totally motionless.

TWO

MR. ALEXANDER WAVERLY ticked the stem of his pipe against his teeth.

"Hypnosis, eh? Devilish."

Slouched deep in one of the leather chairs in the old Victorian headquarters room, his head muffled from the eyebrows up in a bandage, Illya looked disconsolate.

"Apparently it wasn't so deep that I didn't struggle to break out," he said. "I think I realized it was Napoleon I would be shooting. Otherwise I have no memory of what happened after Miss St. Cloud—that isn't her real name, by the way—began her tender ministrations in Commander Ahab's car.."

Napoleon Solo had been listening with half an ear. Now he put the telephone back on its cradle, crossed the rug to where an even more fatigued-looking Mr. Waverly leaned against the mantel.

"We can go up to the computer center any time, sir," Solo said. He grinned at Illya. "Are you up to it, Sleeping Beauty?"

Illya Kuryakin stood up, swaying a little. He managed a half-way grin. "I find your levity difficult to understand, Napoleon. After all, I very nearly removed any further opportunities for you to go over coat shopping."

Solo looked serious. "You wouldn't have gone through with it. I still owe you thirty-three dollars from our last gin rummy game."

The three men left the room. They moved down a stuffy corridor full of upholstered furniture and rubber plants and entered an elevator. It rose swiftly. Mr. Waverly bestirred himself from a rather cross-eyed mood of concentration, cleared his throat.

"Yes, it was a near thing all around," he said. "But at least it has netted us certain facts."

Solo nodded. "Commander Ahab is with us, and apparently masterminding a new major operation for THRUSH."

"And somehow or other, it centers around tidal waves and other oceanographic phenomenon," Waverly continued as the steel cage stopped.

They moved out into an upper-story corridor which was bare of the Victorian furnishings found on the lower levels. Here, squarely functional lighted panels winked on and off in the ceiling, teleprinters whirred beyond the open door ways of fluorescently bright rooms, and personnel moved briskly back and forth on various errands.

Mr. Waverly continued in a musing tone: "Since you, Mr. Solo, managed to overcome Mr. Kuryakin before he burned Dr. Shelley's CR-99-2 file, we really owe our opponents thanks. They led us to the key material which Dr. Shelley, due to his unconscious state, could not pinpoint for us. We may now make certain judgments about the current THRUSH activity."

Mr. Waverly's brow rose inquiringly. Illya Kuryakin picked up the cue.

"We must assume that the tidal wave which nearly killed us was not an accident," he said. "Newsom Nagelsmith may have summoned it from an unknown source when he realized he was finished." Illya didn't need to elaborate further on the grim threat posed by this kind of scientific manipulation of natural forces.

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