The Ambushers by Donald Hamilton Page B

thought she was crying, but the face she turned up to me was dry. The eyes were dry. They were perfectly enormous, and the odd yellow light was in them. She shrank away as I stepped forward to help her rise. I stopped.
    “Relax,” I said disgustedly. “I figure a hundred pounds for the legal raping size. You’re still safe by at least ten pounds. What the hell are you doing here, anyway?”
    She didn’t answer, of course. I went over to my suitcase, found the sandals and dressing gown I hadn’t bothered to unpack earlier, and put them on. When I turned again, she was standing up. They’d given her some kind of a crude, straight, sleeveless cotton gown that reached the floor. So much for my dream of drifting robes. It wasn’t the sexiest garment in the world, but it had a kind of convent simplicity that went well with the thin face and the big eyes and the chopped-off hair. She could have been a martyr on the way to the bonfire.
    She said, “Don’t leave me here.”
    I stared at her for a moment. It was a perfectly good human voice. Well, I should have known she had one somewhere.
    “Please don’t leave me here,” she said clearly.
    I drew a long breath. “I haven’t the slightest intention of leaving you here,” I said. “This happens to be my room and I’m still way behind in my sleep. I’m booting you out into the hall this minute, unless you come up with a very good reason to the contrary, fast.”
    “I mean this place. I don’t want to stay here.”
    “Why not?”
    The big eyes watched me, but they were no longer yellow. They only went yellow when she was scared or mad, I decided. These were gray eyes. If they’d only blinked occasionally, they would have been nice sensible eyes. When she spoke, her voice was quite sensible, too.
    “Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s a glorified funny farm, that’s why not! And I’m the newest, cutest inmate, and I’m just going to love it here if they have to kill me to make me. Well, I don’t love it! I think it’s perfectly horrible. Everybody feels so goddamn sorry for me, except you!”
    The blasphemous adjective went oddly with her saintly, ascetic appearance, barefooted in the rough white nightie.
    “What makes you think I’m not sorry for you?” I asked, startled.
    She said, “Because I know perfectly well you think I’m a clumsy little idiot who caused everybody a lot of trouble by botching up a perfectly simple job and getting caught so some people had to get shot rescuing her and others had to get blisters on their hands carting her to safety!” She got it all out in one rush of words while I stared at her. Then she said, “Of course, you’re perfectly right.”
    I didn’t know what to say to that. She watched me unblinkingly, waiting. It was funny—in a sense I’d known her for well over a week, but she hadn’t really been a person until this moment. She’d just been some damaged government property for which I’d been more or less responsible, off and on. And now that she’d become a person, she wasn’t at all the person I’d expected. Before either of us spoke, there were footsteps in the hall.
    “There’s a light,” said the voice of the big nurse I’d seen earlier.
    “Please!” Sheila hesitated and stepped forward quickly. It was obviously the bravest thing she’d done in her life, but she managed to force herself to touch me, to take my hand gingerly and turn it over so the half-healed blisters showed. She looked up at my face and whispered, “Please! Why did you bother to carry me out of the jungle, if you were just going to leave me in a dreadful place like this?”
    Then they were at the door, and she let go my hand and shrank back guiltily, as if caught committing a monstrous perversion.
    “Oh, there you are, honey,” said the big nurse. “Don’t you know you had us all worried, disappearing like that?”
    She was an imposing figure in a striped seersucker dressing gown, with her hair in curlers. She’d