Kenneth Bulmer by The Wizard of Starship Poseiden Page B

creaked down to his floor. On the landing below him a
door opened and light shafted out strongly across the dim, dusty illuminations
of the lobby. A peeved voice threw echoes downwards.
    "What's
going on down there? Can't you keep quiet and let decent folk sleep?"
    Other
doors opened and other voices raised as the sounds of a door being smashed in
floated truitily up. The lift reached his floor. The old alloy gates squealed
back in neglected gooves. Up—or down?
    Hesitating,
Howland saw a door swing open opposite to him and frantically punched the
up-button. As the gates jerked to, a woman in a dressing gown, with muzzy hair
and sleepy eyes, peered around the, opened door. The metal gates thunked
together. Howland snapped the brim of his hat down over his eyes and cowered
back, into the shadows of the cage.
    Creaking,
the lift ascended. The woman glanced across and then yelled down the stairs:
"Shut up down there! You stinking, lazy, good-for-nothings . . ." And
then her voice was lost as the lift gathered speed.
    Sweat
lay thick and slimy on Howland's forehead. His hands trembled and the calves of
his legs shuddered. If Terry Mallow was at the bottom of this, he'd—he'd—He
remembered .the last time he'd said that, and the consequences. He had had no
time to ponder the strangeness of a respectable university doctor of science
being dragged into a sordid murder in a grimy apartment house, with police
dogging his tracks and everyone's hand turned against him.
    He left the elevator at the thirty-seventh
floor—indistinguishable from the fourth except that it lay wrapped in
silence—and again wondered what to do. The elevator indicator flashed and
began to sink. Were the police calling it? Would they take it up after him? He
suddenly cursed himself for riding up here. Hell and damnation! If he'd gone
down he might have been out in the street by now—might have been. They'd leave
a policeman guarding the door, that was for sure.
    The
thumping of his heart dizzied him. Been a long time since he'd run about like
this; he was out of condition. But never before had he run from the police
leaving the scene of a murder.
    Standing
for agonizing moments of indecision on that grimily lit landing, Howland was
gripped by the conviction that he could not afford to be questioned by the
police, that he was in danger, had been forcibly dragged into this frame up.
His only safety lay in shaking all this mystery off and letting himself be seen
in some familiar haunt—quickly.
    Flier
landing-stages had been built at ten story intervals on this old-fashioned
building, and at floor thirty-seven he was three below a landing stage.
    He
ran up the carpeted stairs, the artificial fibre worn .thin. Thirty
eight—thirty nine—he wavered a little in his dead run, panting for breath,
gloved hand grasping the banister. The elevator indicator stopped at the first
floor, flickered, then began its laborious climb up.
    Halted
there, one foot on the lowest tread of the next flight, hand pressed hard
against his side where a stitch had begun to drive skewers into his body, he
saw a dark bat shape flit past the streaky window, blotting out the stars as it
soared up towards the landing stage on the fortieth floor. Immediately he began
to run in a frenzy of pumping legs up the stairs, ignoring the pain clawing at
his side, his mouth open and rasping for breath.
    He burst out onto the fortieth story landing
with a first quick glance for the elevator indicator. Twenty-six. Then his eyes
flicked back to the landing stage doors. They slid open and a man and a girl
walked through—danced, rather, the man's arm around the girl's waist, her hair
disarranged and her eyes alight. Lipstick smudges tattooed the man's lips and
cheeks.
    Howland, one hand up to his face, brushed
past them without a word and ran out onto the stage.
    The autoflier's doors were
just sliding shut.
    He
flung himself forward, hands out like talons to grasp and cling at the closing
edges. His