The Light-Kill Affair (7 page)

He drove the shears into the soft green texture of the constricting limb. Sap spurted out, sap that was pouring pinkly, almost like very anemic human blood.

ACT III—INCIDENT OF THE KILLER PLANTS

DR. IVEY NESBITT strode along the corridor and entered his office. Neither side of his face betrayed any emotion at seeing that Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo were gone.

He was immediately followed by his white-smocked assistant, a sullen, unsmiling man clearly of Indian ancestry.

At a short distance behind the assistant, two staring-eyed guards came, half-dragging Bikini Connors.

They led her into the office, deposited her in the chair in which Illya had sat. They stood at attention on each side of her then, gazing emptily ahead.

"Please, Dr. Nesbitt," Bikini begged. "Where is my father?"

At his desk, the tall scientist ignored her. He didn't look her way or appear to have heard her voice.

He glanced at the guards testily, as he might have gazed once at recalcitrant students in his class rooms. "What is the meaning of deserting your posts, letting our two prisoners run free?"

"Professor," the assistant said gently, "they don't hear you. Even if they do, they are unmoved by criticism or praise."

The doctor waved his arm. "Of course. One forgets one is dealing here with mindless animals, eh, Joe?"

"It's safest that way, Doctor," was all the Indian assistant said.

Nesbitt nodded, dismissing the subject.

Bikini spoke to him again, but it was as if he could not be reached by anyone from the outside world, from his past.

He turned his back, went to a bank of closed-circuit television screens. All glittered blackly, powered, waiting to be activated.

Nesbitt pressed buttons, opening the channel for each screen in turn, the walled yard, smaller labs, shipping areas, the hothouses, the corridors.

A hothouse camera swung across the long arena of tropical growth. Catching his breath, Nesbitt pressed a button, holding the camera in its position.

It was fixed on Solo, Kuryakin and a crushed body crumpled on the hothouse floor. The body the doctor ignored as if it did not exist for him, had never existed.

For a few moments, almost as if entranced by what he saw, Nesbitt watched Solo slashing at the huge arm of the writhing plant.

But as Napoleon Solo hacked the limb loose, the bloody sap spurting and oozing everywhere, Nesbitt's face darkened.

He pressed a button, spoke into a microphone at his side. Intercoms throughout the laboratory carried his voice. "There are two intruders in Hothouse One. Bring them to me."

Nesbitt's voice rattled through the humid greenhouse as Solo pulled Illya Kuryakin from the grasping tentacles of the plant.

For one moment Illya stared down in horror at Sam Connor's crushed body, and thought, "But for the grace of God and Solo using pruning shears, that could be me—"

All doors of the hothouse were thrust open and armed guards appeared in each of them.

Illya and Solo stepped in close to the doors as they were thrust open near them. With all their strength they slammed the doors shut behind the guards.

As the robot-men turned, both Illya and Solo lunged at them, thrusting them stumbling over Connor's body.

The men threw their arms up as they went sprawling into the tangled green plants.

Obviously following all this on his closed-circuit TV, Nesbitt shouted, his voice crackling over the intercom: "Door Six, Hot house One. Stop those men."

But Illya and Solo were already going out of the door. Solo glanced back, watching the two guards trying to fight free of the grasping limbs, the rustling growing to a keening pitch.

For that instant the incredibly long corridor was empty. It was brightly lighted with what seemed half a hundred doors along it.

Solo waved his arm in the direction of the distant white-doored exit.

They ran together.

Nesbitt's laughter sounded chilled and sardonic from the intercom speakers around them. It was nightmarish, as if laughter battered them from everywhere.

"He's watching us on TV," Illya gasped.

"Run," Solo said. He stayed close to the wall, sprinting toward that white-doored exit which seemed to recede the way it might in a bad dream.

"Run faster, gentlemen." Nesbitt's voice mocked them. "A little exercise, and then I shall stop you as I wish."

"Stay close to the wall," Solo warned Illya.

Illya nodded and sidestepped, but he was already too late.

They both heard the rising hiss. It was as if Illya had run into an invisible wall. The beam struck him and he stopped running, slowing, taking long steps and then halting as if paralyzed.

Solo leaped into the inset door nearest him as the hiss rose, approaching like an angry wasp.

The beam lashed at him and Solo put all his weight against the door, thrusting his way into it.

He toppled into a brightly lighted room and the door swung shut behind him.

He landed hard on his knees, and lifted his head slowly at the old chattering sound that over whelmed him.

His eyes widened at the sight of the set faces, the empty eyes, the meaningless chatter. The people sat at long tables suspended from the ceiling. They didn't look at each other, or at anything. They chattered, but it was less meaningful than squealing monkey noises in a tree.

Solo got to his feet, repelled and shaken by the sight of these mindless creatures.

He shook his head, retreated toward the door.

Faces turned his way, but not one pair of eyes actually focused on him. The eyes were like milky marbles and light reflected from them.

Solo wheeled around and grabbed at the door. Again there was no inside handle, and the door was locked securely.

Solo stared around helplessly. There was no other exit from this dormitory of the mindless. The only windows were set high in the walls.

Solo sagged against the door. The chattering went on, but he no longer listened.

From the intercom, Dr. Nesbitt's voice mocked him. "I expected you and Mr. Kuryakin to join our mindless ones eventually, Mr. Solo, but not so quickly. What's wrong, my dear fellow? You don't look overjoyed."

Exhaling heavily, Solo sagged against the barred door.

The voices rose chattering, excited, wildly agitated by the sound of the doctor's voice on the intercom.

Napoleon Solo did not look at them.

TWO

SOLO FELT the door shiver. He recognized the sound: an electric impulse had activated the lock. He stepped away and the padded door was shoved open.

Two expressionless guards stepped into the room. They were armed with a gun that had a base like a small cannon, but which was obviously aluminum light. The barrel of the gun tapered to the mouth, which suddenly lighted up.

Solo toppled back, thinking they had subdued him with a portable light gun.

The chattering raged, but none of the people at the tables moved. The guards lifted Napoleon Solo, half-carrying him through the corridor toward Nesbitt's office.

There was no sign of Illya Kuryakin in the corridor. Solo felt ill, searching for him.

Strength had returned to his legs and arms by the time the guards led him inside Nesbitt's white-walled office.

Bikini jumped up and ran to him.

She pressed herself against him. Solo gritted his teeth to keep from falling under the pressure of her weight.

"Oh, Solo. He won't look at me," Bikini said. "He won't listen to me. He acts as if I don't exist."

"I don't think any of us exist for him very much, Bikini," Solo said.

"But he's known me since I was a baby. He's my godfather. He was at my house all the time."

"I don't think he cares to re member that." Solo looked up at Nesbitt behind his desk. He spoke over the top of Bikini's dark hair, "Where is Illya, Doctor?"

Nesbitt smiled blandly. "You'll join him soon enough, Mr. Solo. Need I say any more than that?"

Bikini turned, but remained in side the circle of Solo's arms. She stared up at Nesbitt. "Please, where is my father?"

Solo stared up at Nesbitt, waiting for him to answer. But Nesbitt merely shrugged.

Solo knew he owed Bikini the truth about her father. But the truth was too brutal for her at this moment.

Just now he could not bring himself to say the words,
your father is dead, Bikini
.

He stood, watching Nesbitt.

The doctor's good eye gazed at him unblinkingly, the smile set. "I'm afraid my plans for you have been altered—by your own actions. I'd hoped to be able to allow the three of you to leave this place after undergoing a series of minor treatments for the removal of recent memory."

He shook his head. "I can't do that now. I'm sorry. The risk is too great."

Solo spoke coldly to Bikini. "What Dr. Nesbitt means is that Illya and I know your father is dead, and how he was killed—and that 'memory' removal is too risky because it doesn't work, but death does."

"My father," Bikini whispered. She pressed her face hard upon Napoleon's shoulder.

He touched her hair, gently, holding her. He felt her heated tears against his shoulder. Somehow it gave the world a sense of sanity that a girl could still cry for her father in this place.

It seemed less a nightmare.

Nesbitt's voice cut across Solo's thoughts. "Death. Yes, death works. Death is useful here, too, Solo. Professor Connor's death was useful—"

"You told us you didn't know about his death," Solo raged.

Dr. Nesbitt shrugged as if reminding him that nothing could matter less than what he said to them, or to anyone from the world of his past.

"He was sentenced to death by our highest court," Nesbitt said. "There was nothing I could do except see that he was executed in the way that would be most useful to us. Yes, even death must be useful."

Solo shook his head, hearing the doctor's words, but unable to believe a man could have so far receded from any human feelings of remorse, guilt, love or regret.

Dr. Nesbitt regretted nothing except time lost from his experiments.

"I'm sure our deaths will serve you in some useful purpose," Solo said bitterly.

"When the time comes. Meantime, you and Mr. Kuryakin will work for us as mindless slaves—made mindless by
light
, Mr. Solo. And as for Miss Connors, I can use her body in my experiments with my plants—"

"Dr. Nesbitt. Ivey!" Bikini cried out, tormented. "What's happened to you? Once you loved my father and me."

"It's no good, Bikini," Scio said. "He's gone crackers—"

"You think I'm insane, Solo?" Dr. Nesbitt raged.

Solo shrugged. "I suspected it all along. I'm convinced, now that you've decided to use a body like hers as plant food—"

"Mr. Solo, I assure you that only the plants are important here. They are mutations, grown from the most ordinary jungle carnivorous species, from those pitcher plants devouring flies and insects to what you saw in that hothouse—"

"Oh, Ivey," Bikini wailed. "Once you were the most beloved man in—"

"A fool girl like that, what does she know?" Dr. Nesbitt said to Solo, still refusing to speak directly to the daughter of his old associate. "Does she know of the horror of being stared at like a freak because of my disfigured face?"

"That's not true!" Bikini cried. "Nobody ever—"

"What does she know of the way I lived, dreading the way people cringed at the sight of my face? They wouldn't even let me work in peace until I came here.

"My plants don't cringe from me. My mindless slaves neither see nor react to my face. I don't have to watch people turn away."

"You're buried here," Solo said. "Worse than buried."

"That's where you're so wrong. Solo. Perhaps I shall yet control the world." Nesbitt looked around him now as though he wished to talk more fully about himself and his work.

"I shall set the world free by the use of light, Mr. Solo. I'm sure you've heard the theory that all light rays enter the eyes of animals and people, directly influencing the pituitary gland.

"In the same general way light radically affects the growth of plants. Scientists have exposed young rats to the rays of television rays and they die of severe brain damage within twelve days. By my own application of this theory I have made my slaves mindless.

"And I use the same X-ray light that comes from TV tubes, many times intensified. My jungle plants exposed to this X-ray light grow at phenomenal speed and to unheard of sizes.

"Light, Mr. Solo. Light to control. Light to kill. Light to grow. Everything subject to the intensity of my X-ray light. From a glow soft enough to be harmless to strength to register wildly on a Geiger counter. With light I shall control the world."

"Sure. And THRUSH lets you believe that you will. In exchange for what? For those plants which will grow and multiply and kill?"

Nesbitt smiled. "That is part of my experiment."

He shook his head and lowered his voice to that reasonable tone so characteristic of the deranged, "So you can see why I cannot permit you people to leave here—to spread the word of my work?"

THREE

ILLYA FELT himself being lifted up from the corridor floor where he'd crumpled like a bug when stunned by the light beam.

The men lifting him carried him loosely between them. They did not speak to each other, moving like robots.

Double doors swung open in the corridor walls ahead of them and Illya saw he was being carried into a room of dark chocolate walls with hundreds of small lights set under the ceiling, across it, and along the sills.

The guards placed him in an ordinary appearing chair which lighted up under his weight.

When he attempted to stand, Illya found he was helpless to move. The action of the light was like a terrible magnet holding him pinned to the chair.

There was no pain of any kind. It was simply impossible to break the pull of the light-magnets which secured him in the strange chair.

After a moment Kuryakin stopped fighting. He felt the strength return to his arms and legs. He still had a sense of being dizzy, but even this lessened after a few moments. He examined the chair as the guards backed out of the room.