A Gift From Earth

He'd known it from the begi

The guard turned their eyes back to the ceiling. The lab man disappeared through the doorway and closed the door after him. Only Castro himself continued to behave peculiarly; his eyes kept darting around the room as if searching for something that wasn't there. Matt began to breathe more easily.

The man with the coffee had appeared at just the right time. Matt had been about to leave, to see if he could find a fusion control room before he got back to Castro. He had, in fact, discovered that the frosted glass in the hall light would take ink; and he was marking it to show which door led to Castro, when someone had rounded the corner, carrying coffee.

Castro was still behaving oddly. During the interview in Castro's office, Matt had never ceased to be afraid of him. Yet now he seemed only a nervous man with a bandaged arm.

Dangerous thinking, thought Matt. Be scared!

Suddenly Castro started up the ladder.

Matt nibbled his lower lip. Some comic chase this was becoming! Where was the Head going now? And how could Matt hold six eyes, two above and four below, while climbing a ladder? He started for the ladder anyway.

"But, sir! What about the prisoner?"

"I'll be right back." Matt backed into the corner again. Prisoner? Coffin. The word was nearly obsolete on Mount Lookitthat, where crew and colonist alike cremated their dead. But that box against the wall was easily big enough to hold a prisoner. He'd have to look inside. But first, the guards...

"It's the Head calling, Major."

"Thank you, Miss Lauessen."

"Jansen, is that you?"

"Yes, sir."

"I've found another bleeding heart."

"In the Planck?"

"Yes. Right above the coffin room, on a light. Now here's what I want done. I want you to close the Planck's airlocks, flood the ship with gas, then come in with a squad. Anyone you can't identify immediately, play a sonic over him to keep him quiet. Got it?"

"Yes, sir. Suppose the traitor is someone we know?"

"Use your own judgment there. I have good reason to assume he's not a policeman, though he may be in uniform. How long will you need?"

"About twenty minutes. I could use cars instead of elevators, but it would take just as long."

"Good. Use the cars. Seal off the elevators first. I want as much surprise effect as possible."

"Yes, sir.'

"Execute."

The guards were no trouble at all. Matt stepped up behind one of the men, pulled the gun from his holster, and shot them both.

He kept the gun in his hand. It felt good. He was sick of having to be afraid. It was a situation to rive a man right out of his skull. If he stopped being afraid, even for an instant, he could be killed! But now, at least for the moment, he could stop listening for footsteps, stop trying to look in all directions at once. A sonic stu

The "coffin" was bigger than it had seemed from the doorway. He found clamps, big and easy to operate. The lid was heavy. Foam plastic covered the inside, with a sound-deadening surface of small interlocking conical indentations.

Inside was something packed very carefully in soft, thick white cloth. Its shape was only vaguely human, and its head was not human at all. Matt felt the back hairs stir on his neck. Coffin. And the thing inside didn't move. If he had found Polly, then Polly was dead.'

He began unwrapping it anyway, starting with what passed for the figure's head. He found ear cups, and underneath, human ears. They were blood-warm to the touch. Matt began to hope.

He unwrapped cloth from a pair of brown eyes. They looked up at him, and then they blinked.

Hoping was over. He had found Polly, and she was alive.

She was more cocoon than girl. Toward the end she was helping to get the wrappings and paddings and sensory wires off her legs. She wasn't much help. Her fingers wouldn't work. Muscles jerked rhythmically in her jaw, her arms, her legs. When she tried to step out of the coffin Matt had to catch the full weight of her failing body, and they went down in a heap.

"Thanks," she said unsteadily. "Thanks for getting me out of there."

"That's why I'm here."

"I remember you." She got up, clinging to his arm for support. She had not yet smiled. When Matt had uncovered her mouth and removed the clamps and padding, she had looked like a child expecting to be slapped. She still did. "You're Matt something. Aren't you?"

"Matt Keller. Can you stand by yourself now?"

"Where are we?" She did not let go of his arm.

"In the middle of the Hospital. But we have a fair chance to get out, if you do just as I say."

"How did you get in?"

"Jay Hood tells me I have a kind of psychic invisibility. As long as I can stay scared, I can keep people from seeing me. That's what we have to count on. Hey, are you all right?"

"Since you ask, no." She smiled for the first time, a ghost grin, a rictus that vanished in a split second. She was better off without it.

"You don't look it. Come here, sit down." She was clinging to his upper arm with both hands, as if afraid of falling. He led her to one of the chairs. She's still in shock, he thought. "Better yet, lie down. On the floor. Easy... Now put your feet up on the chair. What the Mist Demons were they doing to you?"

"It's a long story." Her brows puckered, leaving a sudden deep V between her eyes. "I can tell it fast, though. They were doing nothing to me. Nothing and nothing and nothing." She lay on her back with her feet in the air, the way Matt had placed her, and her eyes looked up past the ceiling, looked up at Nothing.

Matt wanted to look away. Polly was no longer pretty. Her hair was a housecleaners' nest, and her makeup had gone every which way; but that wasn't it. Something had gone out of her, and something else had replaced it. Her pale face mirrored the ultimate horror of what she saw, looking up at Nothing.

Presently she said, "How did you get here, Matt?"

"Came to rescue you."

"You're not a Son of Earth."

'No.

"You could be a ringer. Harry's house was raided the night you came."

"That's highly ungrateful for a maiden in distress."

"I'm sorry." But her eyes were watchful and suspicious. She took her feet off the chair and rolled to sitting position on the floor. She was wearing an unfamiliar garment, like a playsuit, but made of soft, flimsy fabric. Her fingers had found a corner of the cloth and were playing with it, kneading it, pulling at it, rolling it, crumpling it. "I can't trust anything. I'm not even sure I'm not dreaming. Maybe I'm still in the box."

"Easy," he said, and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. "You'll get over-"

She snatched at his hand to hold it there, so quickly that he almost jerked away. Every move she made was exaggerated. "You don't know what it was like! They wrapped me up and put me away, and from then on, it was like being dead!" She was squeezing his hand, feeling the fingers and the nails and the knuckles, as if she'd never touched a human hand before. "I kept trying to remember things, and they were always just out of reach. It was--" She stuck, her larynx bobbing and her lips twitching without sound. Then she jumped at him.

She knocked him flat on his back and wrapped herself around him. It was nothing like affectionate. She clung to him as if she were drowning and he a floating log. "Hey," said Matt. "The gun. You knocked the gun away."