Dragon's Island, page 10
The other voice murmured in the instrument.
“But we can’t just abandon him.” Cool resolution steadied her tone. “We need him too much with his mind undamaged. I’m afraid to move him yet, but I think I can delay that raid.”
He thought the other voice objected.
“I’m going out now, to make a diversion,” the girl said firmly. “If I get away with it, I’ll come back here in two hours for our new recruit. We ought to reach your place by five—if we get there at all.”
She hung up the telephone. He felt the thermometer in his mouth again, and the sting of a cold swab against a painful spot on his swollen arm. Then her quick footsteps receded. A door opened and closed, and she was gone. Wondering dimly whose that other voice had been, he went back to sleep.
What woke him was a shock of sheer alarm. It brought him to his feet, dazed and trembling. The movement hurt his head and left him giddy. He leaned weakly against the office desk, hands lifted to his throbbing temples, trying to remember anything.
He had been lying on the floor, with a blanket spread over him and a coat folded under his head. He thought he must have been somehow hurt, but he could find no injury except a small swollen discoloration on his right forearm. His shirt sleeve had been rolled above it, and the spot had been swabbed with some dark antiseptic.
He looked around him blankly, but he didn’t recognize the desk or filing cabinet or the doorway beyond. All he knew was the fact of deadly danger, which didn’t need remembering, because it was dusty bitterness hanging in the air, and a frosty bloom on the anonymous walls, and an urgent cold pressure at the back of his head.
Shivering, he put on the coat. Driven by those sensations of alarm, he tiptoed through the doorway into a small reception room, which looked equally strange and felt equally dangerous. He slipped out through another door, into a dark corridor.
Even in the darkness, that cold glow of something not light showed him the stair. He ran down flight after flight, as silently as possible, until at last he came to a closed door at the bottom. He reached to try it, and a shock of new alarm numbed his throbbing arm.
Drawing back confusedly, breathless and trembling, he could hear heavy feet beyond the door, and cautious low voices, and the muffled clicks of guns being loaded. Those sounds passed on, and the danger behind spurred him to try the door again.
It let him out, into a wider hallway. He ran silently along it toward the gray light from the street, until once more the feel of danger caught him. That cold force held him flattened back against a closed door while two men with short automatic rifles burst in from the street and ran crouching past him to enter the stair door from which he had just emerged.
That frosty clutch of warning let him go again, as the riflemen disappeared, and he hurried out the way they had come, into the street. It was a gloomy canyon, the distant lamps veiled in rain. Afraid to run, he started walking briskly past the cars parked at the entrance, toward the nearest corner.
No sound of alarm or pursuit came from behind, but he knew suddenly that those armed men had reached that room and found him gone. A warning reverberation echoed in his throbbing brain, and the bitter reek of hate exploded all around him, and the whole building shone with a dreadful dark luminosity.
He ran from it, then, frantically.
The sensations of danger faded slowly, as he ran. That warning bite went out of the air he gasped, and that dark reflection dimmed behind him, and that driving reverberation ceased. He was plodding along the empty sidewalk, three blocks away, shivering only from the thin rain, when the sudden headlamps of a car struck him from behind.
He almost ran again. That white glare was merely light, however, and he could feel nothing colder than the rain. He held himself from flight, even when the car pulled up to the curb beside him.
“Hello, there.” The girl from the office was at the wheel. She leaned quickly to open the car door for him. In the faint glow from the instrument panel, he could see the reddish color of her hair and the warm ivory tones of her lean face.
“I’m Nan Sanderson,” she whispered. “I’ve come to help you get away.”
Something made him hesitate. The glow against her face was only light, however, and he could feel no danger around her. Something made her car a sort of sanctuary. Gratefully, he got in beside her.
She drove rapidly at first through the rain, uneasily watching the dark streets behind in the rear view mirror and frowning sometimes at the panel clock, whose hands stood at five. She leaned to turn on the car heater when he sneezed, but seemed to give him no other attention.
Chilled and dripping, he relaxed in the blast of warm air, watching her sleepily. The pale, increasing light of dawn gave her a look of childish, troubled innocence. He liked her, and he felt safe with her. The danger he had fled was drowned in the dripping dark behind, and he could feel no pursuit.
Once, however, she pulled into a narrow alley, snapped off the lights, and waited there, uneasily watching the clock. After what seemed a long time, a police car came racing the way they had come, siren moaning and red light glaring.
She backed out of the alley when it was gone, and followed it more slowly. Rain-dimmed daylight had come by the time a toll gate stopped them, at the end of a long bridge. She paid from a small blue plastic bag, and she no longer watched the mirror as they went on, but smiled at him as if her fear had all been left beyond the river.
“We’ve made it!” He liked the friendly warmth of her voice. “Now you’d like to know where we’re going?”
“I—I suppose.” That was all he said, for words, like everything else, were curiously hard for him to recall. He didn’t care, really, where they went. He was with her, and that colorless glare of enmity was left somewhere far behind.
“We’re going to Mr. Messenger’s estate on Long Island,” she said. “Don’t you remember him?”
He shook his head drowsily.
“Don’t you even know your own name?”
But he didn’t remember anything. He didn’t even want to try, because the effort hurt his head. All that mattered was the moment, and the girl’s warm presence. He didn’t want this trip with her to end anywhere.
“Fallon.” Her tawny smile heightened his dreamy content. “You’re Dr. Donovan Fallon.”
“Fallon?” The syllables seemed somehow stiffly unfamiliar, but all words came awkwardly to him now. He repeated carefully, “Dr. Donovan Fallon.”
“Now, Don Fallon, would you like to have a job?”
“I don’t know.” The future was as blank as the past. “I don’t know—anything.”
“You need a job.” Her lean face was gravely concerned. “You’ve been sick, and you’re in serious trouble now. You’ve no family. No friends. No money. But Mr. Messenger can help you, if you’re willing to work for him.” “What kind of job?” He looked down at his hands, flexing them doubtfully. “I can’t remember—what I ever did.” “Don’t worry about that.” Her golden smile thawed his cold uncertainty. “Part of your memory was destroyed forever by this illness—it was a rare type of virus encephalitis. You’ll have to start all over again. But your manual skills weren’t harmed. And the damage to the memory is usually quite shallow, so that you can probably relearn most of what you used to know very quickly.”
lie answered her smile, trying hard to follow. “Anyhow,” she assured him, “Mr. Messenger will understand your difficulties. He makes a hobby, you see, of helping people stricken with that encephalitis, because he thinks the virus was accidentally imported by his own company.” Her smile widened confidently. “You’ll like Mr. Messenger.”
He nodded, gratefully, but a lingering unease made him inquire: “What’s this trouble I’m in?”
“You’re a geneticist.” Her long blue eyes looked up at him from the road, full of a troubled innocence. “You were working with this encephalitis virus, trying to identify it as a fresh mutation, when you had a laboratory accident. A young woman assistant was also infected, when you were. She died. You are accused of her murder.”
“Murder?” He stared at her blankly. “Can Mr. Messenger get me out of that?”
“He’ll take you to New Guinea,” she said. “We’re going there to undertake some very important laboratory work for the company. When you’ve recovered enough of your old knowledge and skill, Mr. Mesenger wants you to be his laboratory technician.”
“If it was all an accident, why must I run away?” “Because the girl was pregnant. The police believe she had been the unwilling subject of some illegal experiment in human genetics. They think you deliberately gave her a deadly injection of the virus, to cover it up, taking a safe dose yourself to divert suspicion.”
“But—I didn’t do that!” He watched her searchingly. “Did I?”
“You’re innocent.” Her calm smile reassured him. “But such charges stir up a great deal of feeling, and the authorities have circumstantial evidence enough to send you to the chair. We can’t help you in court, and obviously you can’t testify in your own defense.”
Groping in the blankness of his mind, he found no fact to help him.
“But you’ll be safe enough in New Guinea.” She was still smiling, yet her sidelong glance seemed oddly anxious. “If you want to come with us?”
“Then you’re going, too?”
“I am.” She nodded. “As Mr. Messenger’s secretary.” That decided him. This new life was not two hours old, and she was still the center of it. He relaxed.
“I want to come,” he told her. “If we can get away.”
Fourteen
She slowed the car at last, to turn from the highway into a broad drive which curved between massive masonry pillars toward a long mansion which loomed massive as a fortress in the rain.
“Mr. Messenger’s place,” she said. “We’re to pick him up. His private plane is waiting at the airport.” He heard the tremor of urgency in her voice. “We must get off the ground before the police broadcast your description. That gives us not quite an hour.”
He wondered how she knew, but a faint alarm whispered in his mind, warning him not to ask. He turned restlessly to study that dark building, dimly awed by its frowning bulk.
“Mr. Messenger must be sad about giving up the place,” she said. “But he had to sell it, to help save Cadmus.”
“Cadmus?”
“I’d forgotten.” She smiled apologetically. “That’s Mr. Messenger’s company. It operates plantations in New Guinea. It used to be enormously successful, but production has fallen to nothing. Your job now is to help us breed new plants, to get the company back on its feet.”
She parked at a side door of the mansion and slipped out of the car, nodding for him to follow. Unlocking the door, she hurried him up a wide stair tp a huge bedroom, where an enormous man sat waiting.
“Nan, I thought you’d never come!” The big man tried to rise from his chair, and sprawled back helplessly. “What made you so long?”
“I went to that detective agency, trying to help Dr. Fallon.” The girl moved quickly as she spoke to lift the fat man’s wrist, and paused to take his pulse. “I did destroy that Christmas tree and several other damaging exhibits, but I was almost trapped. Dr. Fallon’s place was already surrounded before I could get back there, but he had wandered outside. I found him on the street—and he wants to go with us.”
“Glad you’re going, Fallon!” A genial smile swept all the scarred ugliness and the mottled illness from the huge man’s sagging face, and he held out his hand.- “My name’s Messenger.”
Wondering how a Christmas tree could be a damaging exhibit, he took Messenger’s flabby yellow hand. The girl gave him no time to ask about anything.
“Your heart’s worse.” She bent over the swollen wrist, frowning in concern as she counted the pulse again. “I’m afraid you shouldn’t risk the flight.”
“I’m tough as a mule,” Messenger wheezed. “And I’ve already burned our bridges behind.” Grasping a silverwood cane, he leaned laboriously to stir ashes and charred papers in a metal wastebasket. A scuffed brief case lay open and empty on the floor beside it. “Our baggage is already on the plane.” His pale, small eyes lifted uneasily. “Can we still make it?”
The girl glanced at her watch. “We’ve forty minutes,” she said. “Before the airport authorities receive Dr. Fallon’s description.”
“Then help me get up.”
They both helped. He came ponderously upright, gasping alarmingly, yet moving with a surprising ease and dignity once his feet were under him. At the car, he heaved himself into the rear seat, and seemed to fall asleep.
The girl drove the treacherous wet streets with a silent concentration until the air terminal buildings emerged from the gray veil of rain ahead. She slowed the car then, to turn with a low-voiced warning:
“Be careful, here. You’re Dr. Donovan Fallon—that’s all you’ll need to say. Mr. Messenger has your passport, and we’ll take care of any questions.”
The time now was six. He could feel her mounting strain as they approached the customs and immigration men, but Messenger aroused himself with an appearance of lazy patience to display their papers, and the officials waved them on.
The pilot of the waiting plane waved cheerfully from the high cockpit as they started toward it, and a small brown crewman stood waiting to help them aboard, grinning an amiable welcome.
“Well, Dr. Fallon.” The girl touched his arm, whispering softly. “I think you’re safe.”
He followed her eagerly until he saw the insigne painted on the bright aluminum flank of the craft. Terror checked him then, with an icy suspicion that he wasn’t safe at all. He paused uneasily, looking up at the emblem.
A green dragon, outlined in gold, gaped and hissed as it died from the red wounds twisting across it like rivers on a map. A tall bronze giant towered above it, arms flung wide as if sowing seed. An ominous dark glow shone over those figures, out of his own lost past. He thought he could almost remember—
“Coming, Dr. Fallon?”
The girl’s warm voice shattered that moment of dread. Returning her smile, he hurried to overtake her. The dark steward was already helping Messenger up the ramp. They followed, and the brown man closed the cabin door, and the plane began to move at once.
He could see the girl’s elation as the great craft lifted them through the pounding turbulence of the clouds, but he was no longer sure he shared it. His glimpse of that green dragon had somehow thinned the veil across his memory, and now he was suddenly afraid of what lay just beyond.
“Just thirty hours aloft!” She was showing him the sleek luxury of the lounge and the staterooms, the gaunt strain on her bronze face relaxing into loveliness now. “Fuel stops at two or three Pacific islands—and we’ll be at Edentown.”
“Eden—What?”
“Our experimental plantation on the Fly River, deep inside New Guinea,” she explained. “Where all the wealth of the company was born—and where we must create it again.” She caught his arm. “Now let’s go meet the rest of the crew.”
He turned with her, and shivered when he saw the dying dragon and the giant again, this time on the bulkhead at .the end of the lounge. Glowing with pale danger, that emblem seemed the key to his forgotten past. He stood frowning at it, trying to remember.
“That dragon is the map of New Guinea.” She stepped to touch a jagged red wound across its belly. “The Fly. Eden-town’s right about here.” She smiled. “You’ll be quite safe, there.” *
Not sure of that, he turned quickly to keep her from seeing his uncertainty. They went forward, into the comfortable quarters of the crew. The pilot and the navigator on duty and the two men waiting to relieve them were all tanned and cheery. Somehow, with their smiling competence, they reminded him of that triumphant giant standing over the dragon.
“Another lotus-eater.” So the girl introduced him. “Dr. Donovan Fallon.”
He blinked at the phrase, but each man grinned and gripped his hand with a hearty warmth, as if the phrase had established a special bond between them. Mounting doubts were nibbling away his first deep liking for the girl, however, so that he was suddenly afraid to ask her what a lotus-eater was.
“Now I’m going to my room,” she told him. “Better get some rest, yourself, because we’ve a lot of work to do.”
She called the steward, Medina, to install him in his cabin. As soon as she was gone, he asked uneasily, “Just what is a lotus-eater?”
“Most of us are,” the little brown man said. “Nearly all the company people who ever see New Guinea. We get the jungle jobs, you see, because we’re immune.”
“Immune to what?”
“Virus encephalitis.” Medina looked at him curiously. “Not many people get it, here in the States. You must have picked it up from a fly we shipped in by accident.”
“I don’t know.” A thin panic crept into his voice. “I can’t remember anything.”
“You never will.” The steward shrugged unconcernedly. “But don’t fret about it. The company will take care of you, no matter how you caught the bug.”
“I can almost remember,” he muttered uncomfortably. “Something—not very pleasant.”
“We all feel that way at first.” Medina grinned. “You’ll get over it. All you’ve really lost is your troubles. Mr. Messenger always says he wishes he could pick up the bug himself, because he says we lotus-eaters are the happiest men on earth.”
Dane shook his head uncertainly.
“Look at my case,” Medina insisted cheerfully. “I used to be a Filipino.” He spoke as if the virus had obliterated his nationality as well as his past. “I am told that I came to New Guinea, hoping to rob the company. A man must be unhappy, to face such desperate risks for the sake of an unknown gain. All of us feel better now, as loyal servants of the company, than we could possibly have before. You’ll soon be happy as the rest of us.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re just tired.” Medina shrugged cheerily. “Call me if you want anything.”
