The Golden Globe

My best bet seemed to be to drop down through another grate into an empty room, then simply walk out. I passed over such a grate, looked down at five people of at least four sexes naked on a big bed. I had to look again; I hadn't known you could do that with an umbrella. Best not to join the party, though. It looked painful.

And because the perversity of the universe tends always toward the maximum, that was the last grating I crossed. I made a left ninety-degree turn: nada. Another turn back to the right: zip. Another right and a left. Nothing.

I risked getting my Swiss Army knife from the pocket on the side of my suitcase. If knives in the Swiss Army had ranks, this would not be the Colonel or the general of knives. This was the Oberfeldmarschall, the very Fuhrer of pocketknives. This knife would not only clean fish and pick your teeth and uncork your wine bottles, it was equipped with a tiny light, among many other things. It's the best all-purpose tool I've ever come across in seventy years. Most people, looking at it, would never know what an effective weapon it could be. And I'm not talking about the fish-scaler, either.

I shined the light behind me. The coast was clear, back to the last turn I'd taken.

Perhaps I could have retraced my steps to the last grate, dropped through, joined the orgy, and everybody would have been saved a lot of trouble. Except maybe the orgiasts. But there really was no question of that. If there was even a one percent chance I'd encounter Comfort before I got to the grating, it wasn't worth the risk. And I was sure there was a bigger chance than that. No, when next I encountered Mr. Comfort, it was going to have to be in a situation where I had a lot more than just a slight edge, which was what I figured I had just then, with him injured and probably weaponless, and me with a short-bladed knife. What I had in mind was more like him with his arms and legs cut off, blinded, with his back to me, and me with a nuclear-tipped missile. That seemed to me more acceptable odds. Even then, I wouldn't count Izzy out.

I couldn't hear the sound of his progress. Was he resting, or could he hear me that well, to stop when I stopped? Or could he, please God, have fallen through a grate and been cluster-fucked to a fare-thee-well?

I was feeling so heebie-jeebery (a word from my Sparky days) that I just had to know. The silence was worse than the sound.

"Izzy?" I said, in a normal voice. No sense rousing the whole hotel. "Is that you?"

"Who else would it be, Sparky?" I banged my head on the duct. I wish I could have recorded the sound I made. It would have been useful the next time I had to play a man almost dying of fright. The thing was, it sounded like he was two feet behind me. I knew he wasn't but I had to look or I'd choke on my own vomit. I looked. He wasn't there. It was an acoustical trick of some sort, the effect of being in a long pipe.

"Did I hurt you some?" I hope it sounded brave.

"I'm afraid you did," came the disembodied voice again. "My balance is shot. Keep listing to the right. I can't feel one arm and one leg."

"Right or left?" I asked.

"That would be telling, wouldn't it?" Indeed. And how much of what he had said was true? Hell, it could all be true. I think he was still so contemptuous of me that he didn't care if he threw away a tactical advantage like that.

"You've got to stop this business of assault with a deadly musical instrument," he went on. "What's next? Cymbals? A bassoon?"

"How about a grand piano, dropped from a great height?" I had turned back around and was crawling forward again. Shove the suitcase, crawl two steps, shove the suitcase, crawl again, flick the light on and off quickly to see what was ahead. Nothing encouraging but another turn to the right.

Wait. Left, right, right, left. For a moment I thought I'd turned completely around and might be paralleling the duct he was in; he might be only inches away, off to my right. Or was it left, right, right, right? And now a right again. I was hopelessly confused. And where were all the grates?

I crawled through another right angle, turning left, and after twenty feet I came to something new. I found it by almost dropping my suitcase into a down duct, the same size as the one I was in.

There were four different ways to go here. Pipes branched off to the right and the left, and also straight ahead. The fourth way was down, not a direction I was prepared to take, but which I thought would be an excellent choice for Comfort. If there were only a way to persuade him.

"Is that what you shoved through the window back there?" he asked.

"What's that?"

"A piano. It looked like something big went through it."

"You didn't look down."

"Too dizzy. Afraid I'd fall out. I didn't think you had left that way."

I had put my suitcase on the far side of the down duct, and now I eased myself carefully over it. I moved down about five feet, and snapped on the penlight.

"And you knew I hadn't gone out the front door," I said. Somehow, keeping him talking made me feel better. When he talked, he was just another human being. When he was silent he was Death.

"You left a little strip of toilet paper sticking out of the grate."

"I was in a hurry."

"I saw some puzzling things. Holes in the door. The missing window."

"Your friend is what went out the window," I said.

"I thought so. Sparky, you're full of surprises."

"But you keep coming back to life," I said. "Cats get nine lives. How many do rats get?"

"At least one more. The first time I underestimated you. The second time you were lucky. And now Isobel is gone. The third time, I will get you."

"Is this still the second time, or are we talking third time right now?"

He didn't say anything. I flashed the light around frantically, left, right, down, behind me. If he stopped talking I was afraid he was setting some trap, or sneaking up from an unexpected direction. As long as he talked, I knew he was still in the pipe with me.

"This Isobel," I ventured. "A friend of yours?"

"She was my sister."

Oh, terrific. But he said it like I might have said, "You want some fries with that?" I tried to think of a reply, but what do you say to a man whose sister you just defenestrated? Sorry didn't quite cover it, and it wasn't true, anyway. I was not sorry, even a little bit. So I had my reply.

"She didn't die quickly," I said. "She seemed to be in a great deal of pain. I'm pretty sure she was alive when I pushed her out."

"Good," he said. Well, what did I expect?

"You didn't like her?"

"I worshiped her."

"Could you explain that to me?"

"Not now. Later, if you're still alive."

I figured he figured he was almost on me. Okay, I was almost ready for him.

During our talk I'd pulled out the one implement among fifty or sixty I'd bought the pocketknife for. This was a little item known as a chain knife. You've probably heard of them but it's unlikely you've seen one, as most planets ba

This one was a five-inch snub-nosed blade. If you looked at it closely, you'd see all around the edge almost a thousand tiny razors set in a stainless-steel chain. The razors were shaped like shark's teeth. When you pressed the power button, that chain began moving so fast it looked to be part of the blade. It made a high-pitched whine, not unlike a dental drill in old movies. Believe me, you'd rather face a thousand dental drills with no ether than go up against a chain knife. It was based on something called a chain saw, which was used on Old Earth to cut down towering redwoods. I could just sort of wave it at your throat; you'd feel nothing until the blood started to spurt as your severed head fell from your shoulders. Bone, gristle, sinew, muscle. It was all the same to the chain knife. Like butter.