“Your phrasing was rather unfriendly,” said Bancroft. “What you don’t appreciate is the revolting stagnation and cynicism of this age.”

  “Now you’re using the loaded words,” said Dalgetty. “Facts just are. There’s no use passing moral judgments on reality; the only thing you can do is try to change it.”

  “Yes,” said Bancroft. “All right then, we’re trying. Do you want to help us?”

  “You could beat the hell out of me,” said Dalgetty, “but it wouldn’t teach you a science that it takes years to learn.”

  “No, but we’d know just what you have and where to find it. We have some good brains on our side. Given your data and equations, they can figure it out.” The pale eyes grew wholly chill. “You don’t seem to appreciate your situation. You’re a prisoner, understand?”

  Dalgetty braced his muscles. He didn’t reply.

  Bancroft sighed. “Bring him in,” he said.

  One of the guards went out. Dalgetty’s heart stumbled. Dad, he thought. It was anguish in him. Casimir walked over to stand in front of him. Her eyes searched his.

  “Don’t be a fool,” she said. “It hurts worse than you know. Tell us.”

  He looked up at her. I’m afraid, he thought. God knows I’m afraid. His own sweat was acrid in his nostrils. “No,” he said.

  “I tell you they’ll do everything!” She had a nice voice, low and soft, but it roughened now. Her face was colorless with strain. “Go on, man, don’t condemn yourself to—mindlessness!”

  There was something strange here. Dalgetty’s senses began to reach out. She was leaning close, and he knew the signs of horror, even if she tried to hide them. She’s not so hard as she makes out—but then why is she with them?

  He threw a bluff. “I know who you are,” he said. “Shall I tell your friends?”

  “No, you don’t!” She stepped back, rigid, and his whetted senses caught the fear-smell. In a moment there was control, and she said, “All right then, have it your way.”

  And underneath, the thought, slowed by the gluiness of panic, Does he know I’m FBI?

  FBI! He jerked against the straps. Ye gods!

  Calmness returned to him as she walked to her chief, but his mind whirred. Yes, why not? Institute men had little connection with the Federal detectives, who, since the abolition of a discredited Security, had resumed a broad function. They might easily have become dubious about Bertrand Meade on their own, have planted operatives with him. They had women among them too, and a woman was always less conspicuous than a man.

  He felt a chill. The last thing he wanted was a Federal agent here.

  The door opened again. A quartet of guards brought in Michael Tighe. The Briton halted, staring before him. “Simon!” It was a harsh sound, full of pain.

  “Have they hurt you, Dad?” asked Dalgetty very gently.

  “No, no—not till now.” The gray head shook. “But you…”

  “Take it easy, Dad,” said Dalgetty.

  The guards hustled Tighe over to a front-row bench and sat him down. Old man and young locked eyes across the bare space.

  Tighe spoke to him in the hidden way. What are you going to do? I can’t sit and let them—

  Dalgetty could not reply unheard, but he shook his head. “I’ll be okay,” he answered aloud.

  Do you think you can make a break? I’ll try to help you.

  “No,” said Dalgetty. “Whatever happens, you lie low. That’s an order.”

  He blocked off sensitivity as Bancroft snapped, “Enough. One of you is going to yield. If Dr. Tighe won’t, then we’ll work on him and see if Mr. Dalgetty can hold out.”

  He waved his hand as he took out a cigar. Two of the goons stepped up to the chair. They had rubberite hoses in their hands.

  The first blow thudded against Dalgetty’s ribs. He didn’t feel it—he had thrown up a nerve bloc—but it rattled his teeth together. And while he was insensitive he’d be unable to listen in on…

  Another thud, and another. Dalgetty clenched his fists. What to do, what to do? He looked over to the desk. Bancroft was smoking and watching as dispassionately as if it were some mildly interesting experiment. Casimir had turned her back.

  “Something funny here, chief.” One of the goons straightened. “I don’t think he’s feeling nothing.”

  “Doped?” Bancroft frowned. “No, that’s hardly possible.” He rubbed his chin, regarding Dalgetty with wondering eyes. Casimir wheeled around to stare. Sweat filmed Michael Tighe’s face, glistening in the chill white light.

  “He can still be hurt,” said the guard.

  Bancroft winced. “I don’t like outright mutilation,” he said. “But still—I’ve warned you, Dalgetty.”

  “Get out, Simon,” whispered Tighe. “Get out of here.”

  Dalgetty’s red head lifted. Decision crystallized within him. He would be no use to anyone with broken arms, a crushed foot, an eye knocked out, seared lungs—and Casimir was FBI, she might be able to do something at this end in spite of all.

  He tested the straps. A quarter inch of leatherite—he could snap them, but would he break his bones doing it?

  Only one way to find out, he thought bleakly.

  “I’ll get a blowtorch,” said one of the guards in the rear of the room. His face was wholly impassive. Most of these goons must be moronic, thought Dalgetty. Most of the guards in the twentieth-century extermination camps had been. No inconvenient empathy with the human flesh they broke and flayed and burned.

  He gathered himself. This time it was rage, a cloud of fury rising in his mind, a ragged red haze across his vision. That they would dare!

  He snarled as the strength surged up in him. He didn’t even feel the straps as they popped across. The same movement hurtled him across the room toward the door.

  Someone yelled. A guard leaped in his path, a giant of a man. Dalgetty’s fist sprang before him, there was a cracking sound, and the goon’s head snapped back against his own spine. Dalgetty was already past him. The door was shut in his face. Wood crashed as he went through it.

  A bullet wailed after him. He dodged down the corridor, up the nearest steps, the walls blurred with his own speed. Another slug smacked into the paneling beside him. He rounded a corner, saw a window, and covered his eyes with an arm as he leaped.

  The plastic was tough, but a hundred and seventy pounds hit it at fifteen feet per second. Dalgetty went through!

  Sunlight flamed in his eyes as he hit the ground. Rolling over and bouncing to his feet, he set out across lawn and garden. As he ran his vision swept the landscape. In that state of fear and wrath, he could not command much thought, but his memory stored the data for reexamination.

  -5-

  The house was a rambling two-story affair, all curves and planes between palm trees, the island sloping swiftly from its front to a beach and dock. On one side was the airfield, on another the guard barracks. To the rear, in the direction of Dalgetty’s movement, the ground became rough and wild, stones and sand and saw grass and clumps of eucalyptus, climbing upward for a good two miles. On every side, he could see the infinite blue sparkle of ocean. Where could he hide?

  He didn’t notice the vicious cholla through which he raced, and the dry gulping of his lungs was something dreadfully remote. But when a bullet went past one ear, he heard that and drew more speed from some unknown depth. A glance behind revealed his pursuers boiling out of the house, men in gray with the hot sunlight blinking off their guns.

  He ducked around a thicket, flopped, and belly-crawled over a rise of land. On the farther side, he straightened again and ran up the long slope. Another slug and another. They were almost a mile behind now, but their guns had a long reach. He bent low, zigzagging as he ran. The bullets kicked up spurts of sand around him.

  A six-foot bluff loomed in his path, black volcanic rock shining like wet glass. He hit it at full speed. He almost walked up its face and in the instant when his momentum was gone, caught a root and yanked himself to the top. Again he was out of their sight. He sprang around another hulk of stone and skidded to a halt. At his feet, a sheer cliff dropped nearly a hundred feet to a white smother of surf.

  Dalgetty gulped air, working his lungs like a bellows. A long jump down, he thought dizzily. If he didn’t crack his skull open on a reef, he might well be clawed under by the sea. But there was no other place for him to go.

  He made a swift estimate. He had run the upward two miles in a little over nine minutes, surely a record for such terrain. It would take the pursuit another ten or fifteen to reach him. But he couldn’t double back without being seen, and this time they’d be close enough to fill him with lead.

  Okay, son, he told himself. You’re going to duck now, in more than one sense.

  His light waterproof clothes, tattered by the island growth, would be no hindrance down there, but he took off his sandals and stuck them in his belt pouch. Praise all gods, the physical side of his training had included water sports. He moved along the cliff edge, looking for a place to dive. The wind whined at his feet.

  There—down there. No visible rocks, though the surf boiled and smoked. He willed full energy back into himself, bent his knees, jackknifed into the sky.

  The sea was a hammer blow against his body. He came up threshing and tumbling, gasped a mouthful of air that was half salt spray, was pulled under again. A rock scraped his ribs. He took long strokes, always upward to the blind white shimmer of light. He got to the crest of one wave and rode it in, surfing over a razorback reef.

  Shallow water. Blinded by the steady rain of salt mist, deafened by the roar and crash of the sea, he groped toward shore. A narrow pebbly beach ran along the foot of the cliff. He moved along it, hunting a place to hide.

  There—a seaworn cave, some ten feet inward, with a yard or so of fairly quiet water covering its bottom.

  He splashed inside and lay down, exhaustion clamping a hand on him.

  It was noisy. The hollow resonance of sound filled the cave like the inside of a drum, but he didn’t notice. He lay on the rocks and sand, his mind spiraling toward unconsciousness, and let his body make its own recovery.

  Presently he regained awareness and looked about him. The cave was dim, with only a filtered greenish light to pick out black walls and slowly swirling water. Nobody could see much below the surface—good. He studied himself. Lacerated clothes, bruised flesh, and a long bleeding gash in one side. That was not good. A stain of blood on the water would give him away like a shout.

  Grimacing, he pressed the edges of the wound together and willed that the bleeding stop. By the time a good enough clot was formed for him to relax his concentration, the guards were scrambling down to find him. He didn’t have many minutes left. Now he had to do the opposite of energizing. He had to slow metabolism down, ease his heartbeat, lower his body temperature, dull his racing brain.

  He began to move his hands, swaying back and forth, muttering the autohypnotic formulas. His incantations, Tighe had called them. But they were only stylized gestures leading to conditioned reflexes deep in the medulla. Now I lay me down to sleep…

  Heavy, heavy—his eyelids were drooping, the wet walls receding into a great darkness, a hand cradling his head. The noise of surf dimmed, became a rustle, the skirts of the mother he had never known, come in to bid him good night. Coolness stole over him like veils dropping one by one inside his head. There was winter outside, and his bed was snug.

  When Dalgetty heard the nearing rattle of boots—just barely through the ocean and his own drowsiness—he almost forgot what he had to do. No, yes, now he knew. Take several long, deep breaths, oxygenate the bloodstream, then fill the lungs once and slide down under the surface.

  He lay there in darkness, hardly conscious of the voices, dimly perceived.

  “A cave here—a place for him to hide.”

  “Nah, I don’t see nothing.”

  Scrunch of feet on stone. “Ouch! Stubbed my damn toe. Nah, it’s a closed cave. He ain’t in here.”

  “Hm? Look at this, then. Bloodstains on this rock, right? He’s been here, at least.”

  “Under water?” Rifle butts probed but could not sound the inlet.

  The woman’s voice. “If he is hiding down below, he’ll have to come up for air.”

  “When? We gotta search this whole damn beach. Here, I’ll just give the water a burst.”

  Casimir, sharply— “Don’t be a fool. You won’t even know if you hit him. Nobody can hold his breath more than three minutes.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, Joe. How long we been in here?”

  “One minute, I guess. Give him a couple more. Cripes! D’ja see how he ran? He ain’t human!”

  “He’s killable, though. Me, I think he’s just rolling around in the surf out there. This could be fish blood. A shark chased another fish in here and bit it.”

  Casimir: “Or, if his body drifted in, it’s safely under. Got a cigarette?”

  “Here y’are, miss. But say, I never thought to ask. How come you came with us?”

  Casimir: “I’m as good a shot as you are, buster, and I want to be sure this job’s done right.”

  Pause.

  Casimir: “Almost five minutes. If he can come up now, he’s a seal. Especially with his body oxygen-starved after all that running.”

  In the slowness of Dalgetty’s brain, there was a chill wonder about the woman. He had read her thought, she was FBI, but she seemed strangely eager to hunt him down.

  “Okay, le’s get outta here.”

  Casimir: “You go on. I’ll wait here just in case and come up to the house pretty soon. I’m tired of following you around.”

  “Okay. Le’s go, Joe.”

  It was another four minutes or so before the pain and tension in his lungs became unendurable. Dalgetty knew he would be helpless as he rose, still in his semihibernating state, but his body was shrieking for air. Slowly he broke the surface.

  The woman gasped. Then the automatic jumped into her hand and leveled between his eyes. “All right, friend. Come on out.” Her voice was very low and shook a trifle, but there was grimness in it.

  Dalgetty climbed onto the ledge beside her and sat with his legs dangling, hunched in the misery of returning strength. When full wakefulness was achieved, he looked at her and found she had moved to the farther end of the cave.

  “Don’t try to jump,” she said. Her eyes caught the vague light in a wide glimmer, half frightened. “I don’t know what to make of you.”

  Dalgetty drew a long breath and sat upright, bracing himself on the cold slippery stone. “I know who you are,” he said.

  “Who, then?” she challenged.

  “You’re an FBI agent planted on Bancroft.”

  Her gaze narrowed, her lips compressed. “What makes you think so?”

  “Never mind—you are. That gives me a certain hold on you, whatever your purposes.”

  The blonde head nodded. “I wondered about that. That remark you made to me down in the cell suggested—well, I couldn’t take chances. Especially when you showed you were something extraordinary by snapping those straps and bursting the door open. I came along with the search party in hope of finding you.”

  He had to admire the quick mind behind the wide smooth brow. “You damn near did—for them,” he accused her.

  “I couldn’t do anything suspicious,” she answered. “But I figured you hadn’t leaped off the cliff in sheer desperation. You must have had some hiding place in mind, and under water seemed the most probable. In view of what you’d already done, I was pretty sure you could hold your breath abnormally long.” Her smile was a little shaky. “Though I didn’t think it would be inhumanly long.”

  “You’ve got brains,” he said, “but how much heart?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, are you going to throw Dr. Tighe and me to the wolves now? Or will you help us?”

  “That depends,” she answered slowly. “What are you here for?”

  His mouth twisted ruefully. “I’m not here on purpose at all,” Dalgetty confessed. “I was just trying to get a clue to Dr. Tighe’s whereabouts. They outsmarted me and brought me here. Now I have to rescue him.” His eyes held hers. “Kidnapping is a Federal offense. It’s your duty to help me.”

  “I may have higher duties,” she countered. Leaning forward, tautly, “But how do you expect to do this?”

  “I’m damned if I know,” Dalgetty looked moodily out at the beach and the waves and the smoking spindrift. “But that gun of yours would be a big help.”

  She stood for a moment, scowling with thought. “If I don’t come back soon, they’ll be out hunting for me.”

  “We’ve got to find another hiding place,” he agreed. “Then they will assume I survived after all and grabbed you. They’ll be scouring the whole island for us. If we haven’t been located before dark, they’ll be spread thin enough to give us a chance.”

  “It makes more sense for me to go back now,” she said. “Then I can be on the inside to help you.”

  He shook his head. “Uh-uh. Quit making like a stereo-show detective. If you leave me your gun, claiming you lost it, that’s sure to bring suspicion on you, the way they’re excited right now. If you don’t, I’ll still be on the outside and unarmed—and what could you do, one woman alone in that nest? Now we’re two with a shooting iron between us. I think that’s a better bet.”

  After a while, she nodded. “Okay, you win. Assuming”—the half-lowered gun was raised again with a jerking motion—“that I will aid you. Who are you? What are you, Dalgetty?”

  He shrugged. “Let’s say I’m Dr. Tighe’s assistant and have some unusual powers. You know the Institute well enough to realize this isn’t just a feud between two gangster groups.”

  “I wonder…” Suddenly she clasped the automatic back into its holster. “All right. For the time being only, though!”

  Relief was a wave rushing through him. “Thank you,” he whispered. Then, “Where can we go?”

  “I’ve been swimming around here in the quieter spots,” she said. “I know a place. Wait here.”