Читать книгу Ordeal by Terror - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 10

CHAPTER 6

Dolan took out a massive pocket knife, opened the awl blade, and began gouging the gray paint on one of the alley’s metal walls. “You mentioned vandalism,” he said cheerfully. He carved the letters RC and the date, checked Adelle’s watch and added the time, and then fashioned an arrow that pointed toward the kitchen and bedrooms beyond the new section of wall.

“‘RC’ means ‘Rest Center,’” he said. “The arrow tells us which way to go. If it’s closed off, at least we’ll know we’re in the vicinity, and it’ll make them do some sanding and painting.”

When he finished, he said to Mondor, “Want to trade?” He shouldered the bed rails and marched off into the maze. At the first turn, he paused to repeat his carving.

While Dolan was enthusiastically mutilating the wall, Mondor stood scowling at the distant end of the alley. “I wonder how large this place is.”

“Having walked from one end of the building to the other several times a day—” Dolan began.

“That wouldn’t give you much of an idea,” Mondor said. “There are wings all over the place, and this sub-basement may be larger than the building. It might even extend out under the courtyards. In any case, it’s certain to be enormously complex. We’d better be prepared for anything. What do we know about Madam and her goons?”

Dolan finished off his arrow, added the date and time, and then turned. “Very little.”

“I know almost nothing,” Mondor said. “That should tell us something, because I’ve worked here for six weeks.”

“Madam had her peculiarities, such as spitefully peddling gossip, but she seemed amusing and harmless,” Adelle said. “As for the others, except for Goon 1, they ignored me completely.”

“Did they ever speak to you?” Mondor asked.

“Never. Not even Goon 1. I caught him watching me too frequently for it to be a coincidence, and I always spoke to him, but he never answered. It seemed odd, but so many things seemed odd about Z-R Publications.”

“Adelle,” Dolan remarked, “is accustomed to having men watching her.”

“Did any of them ever say good morning to you, or nice day, or commit any kind of a conversational platitude?” Mondor persisted.

“Never,” Adelle said. “I spoke to all of them—with conversational platitudes, of course. And I’d wave at them when I saw them at work. Sometimes they looked at me as though they were trying to smile but couldn’t remember how, and once in a while one of them did something that almost looked like a nod.”

“I never noticed anything like that, and I certainly never exchanged any words with them,” Dolan said. “Is this important?”

“It might help us understand the situation better if we knew why they didn’t talk,” Mondor said. “What were they looking for when they watched us, and why wouldn’t they respond to a harmless conversational platitude? A maze, no matter what animal it’s intended for, screams ‘experiment’. So I think we’re caught in some kind of experiment. Whether Madam is a mad scientist, or whether she just works for one, I have no idea, but I think there must be one. And I think every move we make is being observed and charted and studied.”

“Then the situation can be summed up something like this,” Dolan said. “We haven’t got a chance, but we’re going to do our damndest because the only alternative is to sit down and rot. We’re completely on our own. No one knows where we are, so no one is going to rescue us. And because kidnapping is a very bad crime, Madam and her goons will take pains to make certain we don’t get out of here. If the police sooner or later start looking for us, which we can’t count on, and if for some irrational reason they suspect Z-R Publications, which isn’t likely, it certainly won’t occur to them to search for a secret sub-basement. All we can do is go down fighting and hope for an unexpected piece of luck—but fighting is what makes unexpected pieces of luck happen. Madam may have absent-mindedly left us a loophole. At the very least, we can act as unpredictably as possible and try to screw up their experiment if that’s what this is. So that’s what I’m going to do. You two can decide for yourselves.”

“I thought we already did,” Adelle said.

“We can split up and go in different directions if either of you prefer that,” Dolan pointed out.

Mondor shook his head. “This isn’t going to be like a Sunday stroll in the park. For one thing, we’re without food and water. For another, the word ‘experiment’ has connotations I don’t like. Arranging this setup and suckering us into it was enormous trouble and expense. It wasn’t done to watch us wisecrack our way up and down alleys. There’ll be plenty of surprises for us, and the last one may be a trap door that drops us into a vat of acid. We’ll be better able to meet danger if we stick together, and surely all three of us would rather have company in our misery, even if we decide later to sit and rot.” He got to his feet.

“One moment,” Dolan said. He stooped and carefully gouged their names under the arrow he had just carved. “There. I’ll do that throughout the whole damned maze. Even repainting won’t obliterate it completely—they’ll have to sandblast the metal first. In the meantime, we’ll have left our names all over the place, and names are evidence. That’s one in the eye for your mad scientist. Okay—let’s go.”

* * * *

It was five o’clock in the evening and long hours later when Adelle slumped wearily to the floor and announced, “If a fairy godmother had given me the option of shortening my life by one day, this is the day I would have skipped.”

They had enlarged their knowledge of mazes enormously in the interim, but their newly acquired experience helped them not a jot. They continued to stumble into blind alleys, retrace their steps, march the length of long alleys that had no exit, and pass up apparent cul-de-sacs only to have to return to them later. An hour after they set out, their senses of direction were totally obliterated. Dolan stopped carving arrows because he had no notion of where to point them, but he stubbornly continued to vandalize the walls with their names and the date and time.

As he commenced his latest assault on the smooth gray paint, Dolan asked Mondor, “Is this scientist really mad, or is he merely stupid. Translation: What’s the point of our wandering around in a maze like this and not getting anywhere?”

“Some scientists believe rats have the ability to acquire a cognitive map of a maze,” Mondor said. “Once they’ve done so, they can think their way through it.”

“Good idea,” Dolan told him. “Go ahead and demonstrate.”

“The mazes they use for rats are designed for scientific tests. God knows what this one was designed for.”

Dolan got to his feet and shouldered the bed rails. “I can tell you what it wasn’t designed for. Aesthetic purposes. This battleship gray is getting on my nerves. ‘Water, water everything, and all the boards did shrink.’ Sorry, I shouldn’t have mentioned water. Gray, gray everywhere—” He kicked a wall viciously. “I wonder if they chose gray because it’s psychologically depressing.” He started off.

“Hold it!” Mondor snapped.

Dolan turned, scowling.

“Don’t forget—they can bring a wall out of the floor wherever a black strip crosses the alley. If one of us gets too far ahead or lags behind, they can separate us.”

“Right,” Dolan agreed. “We’ll stick together and make them work for whatever they think they’re trying to prove. Now if you don’t mind—we aren’t likely to acquire that cognitive map by transcendental meditation.”

Mondor and Adelle picked up the remainder of the bed and hurried after him.

Shortly before six o’clock, they turned into a new alley and suddenly came upon a test room that seemed identical to the room or rooms all of them had arrived in. They made no move to enter it. Dolan exclaimed, “Ah!” and began to assemble the bed.

This time they wedged the bed’s feet against the wall. Dolan, with Mondor’s clasped hands providing a step, hopped onto the bed, lifted a ceiling panel, and peered through. He jumped for a better look. Then he announced disgustedly, “Nothing.”

“I suppose there could be more than three test rooms, though I don’t know why they’d need so many,” Mondor mused. “One should be sufficient. Maybe there are doors on all four sides, and we entered the same room on chutes coming from different directions.”

“That’s possible, but I see no sign of a trap door from here,” Dolan said. He stood on tiptoe, and then he jumped again for a better look. “Nothing. Of course I can only see this one side. The test room’s walls go all the way up to the plywood.”

“Aren’t there any seams?” Mondor asked.

“Sure. The plywood panels are four by eight feet, and their edges make seams, but they’re very thoroughly nailed.”

“Can you reach the edge of a panel?”

“Yes. And I’ve broken two fingernails on it already.”

Mondor thought for a moment. “In that case, we might as well go through the test room and try again where we come out.”

“Just a moment,” Adelle said as Dolan swung down. “Those chutes were long. At least, mine was. It gave me quite a ride. Maybe we’re too close to the room.”

“Point,” Dolan agreed. “We’ll back up and try again.”

They moved the bed twice, but every panel Dolan tested seemed like a solidly nailed piece of plywood. “All right,” he said finally. “We’ll take their dratted test and see what’s on the other side.”

He paused to carve their names on the wall by the door.

“Don’t forget to wind that thing,” he said as he got the time from Adelle’s watch. “If you do, we easily could get confused about what day it is. We may anyway. Too bad you didn’t have the foresight to buy a watch with a calendar.”

“Too bad you were too cheap to even buy a sundial.”

Dolan grinned. “That’d really be useful down here. Mondor could use your watch to calculate where the sun ought to be, and then he could check your watch by the sundial.”

Carrying the disassembled bed, they marched into the test room. The opening closed after them with an almost inaudible hiss, leaving them in the dim glow of the recessed ceiling light. Numerals began flashing on the three walls where the inverted score boards were located.

The series was longer than before, and it flashed only once.

“The degenerate fiends!” Dolan exclaimed. “Now that we know how the thing works, they figure once is enough. Did either of you catch it?”

“I missed the beginning,” Mondor said.

“Six, seven, nine, one, zero, four, five,” Adelle recited. She punched the appropriate buttons as she spoke. With the same quiet hiss a door dropped open on the side opposite to the one they had entered.

Dolan gouged a “1” on a test room wall. He circled it. “Eventually we’ll find out how many there are. How’d you manage to remember that number so easily?”

“I’ve been typing numbers for three weeks,” Adelle said. “I couldn’t help it.”

They picked up the bed parts and marched out. The door swished shut behind them. Again they assembled the bed, and Dolan investigated the ceiling with the same futile result.

“They could have fastened the thing shut,” he called down to them when the third check failed to find anything. “It wouldn’t take much effort to bolt the trap’s frame to the joists when the trap isn’t in use. That’d keep us from climbing out and prevent the goons from falling through it accidentally. If they’ve done that, we couldn’t pry it down with a crowbar.”

He swung to the floor and began to carve their names on the wall.

Mondor watched him with a frown. “I should have drawn a map,” he said.

“You’d need a sheet of paper twelve feet square, and the end result would look like a warren dug by drunken rabbits,” Dolan told him.

“Even so—” Mondor got out a pocket notebook. “There’s no harm in trying. I might accumulate enough information to help us decide which turns to take when they’re generous enough to give us a choice.” He drew a small square, marked it T for Test Room, and represented the alley with a straight line.

Dolan finished gouging the wall and stepped back to inspect his lettering. “Let’s rest,” he said. “There’s no hurry to get where we’re going if we aren’t going anywhere.”

Not until Adelle sat down did she realize how utterly exhausted she was. She had been so preoccupied with her growing hunger and thirst that she failed to notice her fatigue. The long hours of aimless wandering had left the men just as tired. Dolan’s arrows became progressively less ornate as the day wore on, and now he was producing straight lines with carelessly drawn points at the ends.

He sat down beside Adelle; Mondor had seated himself on the opposite side of the alley. Adelle glanced at them before she closed her eyes. Dolan sat slumped back wearily, eyes closed, one hand cupping his hairy chin. Mondor, whose face showed faint signs of needing a shave, was bent forward, elbows on knees, and he seemed to be contemplating the toes of his shoes. This was what the bright optimism and determination of the morning had come to.

They rested in silence for a time, and Adelle tried unsuccessfully to sleep. Then Dolan asked suddenly, “Would it be a valid psychological test to observe the effects of hunger and thirst on humans?”

“I’m sure it’s already been done,” Mondor said.

“Then psychological tests on humans aren’t unusual?”

“They’re performed frequently, and they produce extremely valuable information. Reaction times, for example. How long does it take you to get your foot on the brake when you’re driving and see danger ahead? That’s a valid psychological test, and the data tell us things like how much distance we should maintain between us and the car ahead at different speeds. But no reputable scientist would experiment on humans without their consent.”

“What stupid people would let them do it at all?”

“Haven’t there been any ads for test volunteers since you hit Ann Arbor? Scientists frequently pay students to take part in experiments. If someone wanted to perform hunger tests, he wouldn’t have any trouble finding volunteers. What are a few days without food to an impoverished college student—especially if he’s paid well for it and fed afterward. The effect of hunger and thirst on the ability to think and remember would be a valid test subject.”

“As with the number in the test room?”

“Yes. Yes, I suppose that could be one of the ways they’re measuring us. They might check us again at this time tomorrow and see whether another twenty-four hours of thirst and hunger has had any effect on Adelle’s ability to remember that many numerals.”

“‘Sadistic ghouls’ is a better description of them than ‘putrid vermin,’ Dolan said. “What other experiments are they likely to inflict on us?”

“I have no idea. All I had was an introductory course in psychology.”

“Adelle?”

“I managed to skip psychology,” she said. “I thought I already knew all about it.”

“A college graduate,” Dolan said bitterly, “is someone who is overeducated in everything except what he needs to know.”

“And a writer,” Mondor returned, “is someone who doesn’t know enough about anything for it to be useful. Maybe we should ask Adelle to apply her English Literature degree.”

“No way,” Adelle said firmly. “Nothing about this place belongs to either literature or life. It lacks verisimilitude.”

“It also lacks drinking fountains, rest rooms, and burger joints,” Dolan said.

“Those things would go a long way toward giving it verisimilitude,” Adelle conceded.

A gong sounded. The unexpectedness of it, the totally unreal impact of a reverberating tone with the deep quality of Big Ben, startled all of them and brought Mondor halfway to his feet.

“Interesting,” Dolan remarked. “But for whom does it toll?”

With dual swishes, a wall raised out of the floor a short distance away, blocking off the alley, and a section of the wall nearby disappeared into the floor. Through the new opening, an intersecting alley was visible.

They exchanged glances. “Obviously they want us to go that way,” Dolan said. “Shall we?”

“Our alternative is to sit here and rot,” Mondor said gloomily. “We’ve already discussed that.”

“Right,” Dolan said. “Let’s go.”

The maze now seemed repentant of its former waywardness, and they encountered no more blind alleys. This made them suspicious rather than grateful. They plodded along slowly because they were tired, and they stopped twice for Dolan to repeat his carving act and once for Mondor, who was counting paces, to work on his map. It would extend from nowhere to nowhere, and every time their unseen captors pressed a button and opened or closed off an alley, a portion of it would become obsolete. The maze he was mapping today would have little or no similarity to the maze they would be walking around in tomorrow, but—as Mondor kept saying—he had nothing else to do. Adelle, watching him trying to sketch the gigantic maze in a small notebook, took his grim determination as one more quirk of the mathematical mentality and said nothing.

She was about to suggest resting again when Dolan uttered a yelp. “Look!” he shouted.

He had found one of his carvings with an RC and an arrow. He rushed in that direction with the others following on his heels. They turned, turned again—and found themselves staring into the kitchen they had left that morning. Dropping their bed parts, they queued up at the sink and gulped water.

After the first long drink, Dolan urged caution. “This can be dangerous stuff, especially when you’re not used to it. I wonder if they’ve left us an alternative.” He went to the refrigerator and opened it. “They’ve restocked the beer and pop. Not the food, though. And they took the three eggs that were left over from this morning. Good thing we ate well, eh? As long as there’s beer, why are we drinking water?”

A resonant “pop” sounded as he opened a can.

“Did they leave the milk?” Adelle asked.

Dolan nodded. “What was left from breakfast.”

Adelle began opening cupboards. “They took the breakfast cereal. And the chocolate and tea. They left us only a cup of coffee apiece.”

Dolan said philosophically, “Oh, well. As long as there’s beer—”

Carrying her glass of water, Adelle went to look at the bedrooms. “They’ve replaced the bed!” she exclaimed.

“Thoughtful of them,” Dolan said, wiping foam from his beard. “They’re saying, in effect, if we’re stupid enough to want to carry furniture around in a maze, we’re welcome to do so. If we’d taken the refrigerator, I suppose they would have replaced that.”

“They didn’t make the beds, though,” Adelle said. “And when they brought the new bed in, they put the mattress on it, but they left the sheets and blanket and pillow in the corner where you dumped them. Give the goons a demerit—their room service is inferior.” She moved over to the refrigerator and looked into the freezer compartment. “There are three small-sized TV dinners here,” she announced. “Salisbury steak, string beans, and mashed potatoes. All three of them.”

“Ambrosia couldn’t sound better,” Dolan said. “Now that we’re a day older and, hopefully, wiser, do we change our plans and sit here and rot where we at least have water and beds, or do we stupidly keep wandering about in the maze and taking psychological tests?”

“As long as there’s food here, we eat it,” Adelle said firmly. “And we get a good night’s sleep in a bed. I also want to improvise whatever kind of a bath is possible and maybe wash my socks and underwear. There’ll be plenty of time in the morning to debate the wisdom of rotting here or elsewhere.”

“I’ll second that program,” Dolan said. “I’m willing to stay here as long as the beer lasts. I’ll turn on the oven.”

“And I’ll start heating water for that bath,” Adelle said. “I don’t know how you two feel, but I intend to go to bed early.”