Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 by Devil's Planet (v1.1)

want,” said Stover quite truthfully, and let her lead him along a
side-corridor. At the end was a metal door. “What’s your name?” he asked her,
to make conversation.
                 “Call
me Gerda,” she said. “Enter. And what shall I call you?”
                 “Parker,”
he improvised. They came into a small, messy-walled room with one barred window
and a telephone in a niche. “Here, Gerda, where’s the elevator? And don’t dig
your elbow into me like that.”
                 She
laughed. “There’s no elevator, and this isn’t my elbow. It’s a gun.” He sprang
away, and the weapon rose in her hand, a vicious electro- automatic. She
handled it with a forbidding ease. Her other hand slipped shut the catch on the
door.
                 “Don’t
try anything suicidal,” she bade him. “You’re my prisoner, Dillon Stover. That
fake dumb stare won’t help. I’ve seen several photos of you besides that one on
the televiso, and I had you spotted as soon as you walked into the game-dive.”
                 “You
were sent after me?” demanded Stover, giving up the farce.
                 “A
regiment of us were. We knew you hadn’t gone far. It was my luck to run across
you.”
                 “Congratulations,”
said Stover. “But the police will be more flattering than I.”
                 The
girl who called herself Gerda shook her red-dyed head. “Congratulations are
nice .. But I know someone who will pay for you with
something besides congratulations and twenty thousand value-units.”
                 “Who?”
snapped Stover, for he knew she meant the murderer.
                 “You’ll
see soon enough,” she told him with one of her bright smiles, and put her free
hand on the telephone.
                 “Wait,”
he begged. “You speak of cash. More than the twenty thousand value-units the
police offer. How much more?”
                 “Oh,”
said Gerda, her eyes wise above the leveled gun. “At least half as much again.”
                 “I’ll
double it,” said Stover, and she drew her hand back from the telephone. “May I
take the money from my belt-pouch?”
                SHE
nodded permission, and he produced his notes. With what he had won at
indemnity, he had a little more than the forty thousand he had offered.
Counting off the surplus, he folded it and began to return it to his pouch.
                 “Wait,”
said Gerda greedily. “I’ll take the whole thing.”
                 Stover
reluctantly surrendered all his money. She took it, thrust it into her own pouch. Then without lowering her gun, she caught his
outstretched left hand in hers. A quick movement and she had snapped something
on his wrist.
                 “Bracelet,”
she said. “Police bracelet. Isn’t it pretty?”
                 Stover
lifted his arm, staring at the thing. It was a plain circlet of nickeled steel,
with a hinge and a lock. It bore a spherical device with a dial. From that
sphere came a soft whirring sound.
                 “What’s
it for?” demanded Stover, angrily.
                 Gerda
chuckled above her gun.
                 “Police
bracelet,” she said again. “It has a radio apparatus tuned to the waves of
police headquarters. You don’t feel anything now, but if you go, say, ten miles
from here, your whole body will vibrate to the amplified waves, as though you
were being subjected to a heavy rush of current. The farther you go, the more
drastic and painful the effect. Fifty miles away, you’d be done for—your
nervous system tortured to death.”
                 She
picked up the telephone and called a number.
                 “This
is Gerda,” she said into the transmitter. “You know—police undercover detail. I
have somebody you’re