When he woke he was relieved to find himself still on the bunk with his eyes closed. He sat up and peered through the bar-and-steel barriers until he spotted the keeper.
"Hey!" he called out. "When do I get breakfast?"
A man in a nearby cell chortled, "The curly-head pianner player wants his breakfast, fellers!" Kent ignored the remark and the resulting chuckles from the other prisoners.
"You get lunch in forty minutes," the keeper replied.
Kent stood up and began his morning workout as best he could within the confined space. This was his routine—a vigorous twenty minutes every morning to keep the rest of his body up to par with his hardworking hands, arms and shoulders. With an audience this time, he show-boated a bit with extended push-ups, one-leg knee-bends, double flutter-whoops and other acrobatic exercises. The prisoners and keeper watched with gratifying awe. His knuckles, which the police surgeon had treated, gave him no pain under their bandages, so they were probably all right.
He saw that Siskind had brought his hand satchel and toilet kit to the jail for him. They were on the floor just inside his cell door. When he finished exercising he tossed the satchel on the bunk and took the kit to the tiny sink. His blade razor was missing, but the battery-powered shaver, which he used when he was in a hurry, was there. He shaved with it, washed up, and brushed his teeth.
Returning to the bunk he put his kit aside, sat down, and opened the satchel. A bright green oval gleamed out at him. He stared back at this chilling reminder that not one but two attempts on his life had been made within twenty-four hours.
"Better give this to the cops," he lipped soundlessly.
No, his head twitched firmly. Give me control.
He did, and Pard sat farther back on the bunk and hooked his heels over the metal edge, elevating his knees to conceal what he was doing. He took out the Debussy volume to which the green disk had adhered, propped the book on his thighs, and picked the disk loose from it.
He examined the disk closely. It was about the thickness of two sheets of typewriter paper, with about the same flexibility, Kent noted. There was no visible material on its back, but that side had a strange dry stickiness to the touch. It was made of stout stuff that did not tear when Pard tugged hard at it. A definite line texture could be felt when he ran a finger across the green surface. Pard explored this texture until Kent was thoroughly bored. Finally he turned it over and began abrading one small area vigorously with a fingernail.
"Pard," urged Kent silently, "quit playing with that thing and give it to the cops. It could be just the evidence they need."
No.
"Do you know what you're doing?"
Yes.
Suddenly the disk felt different, though it looked the same. The stickiness was gone from its back. Pard had . . . had broken it in some way.
"Hey!" breathed Kent, with dawning comprehension. "It's electronic inside. Right?"
Yes.
"And as soon as something hits it hard enough to tear up its circuit . . ." He left the words unmouthed, his mind filled with a picture of a little projectile zipping up from the New Mexican waste to home in on the green disk and plow through it—and incidentally, through Kent Lindstrom—and of the no longer adhesive disk fluttering free to fall in the desert, where it would never be found to incriminate anybody.
There had to be something like the disk. Otherwise the projectile could never have come so close to a bull's-eye over such a distance. Pard had deflected the clopter with split-second timing, too late for the projectile to adjust its course.
Kent gazed at the disk in awe. "I've never heard of such a thing. Is it military or something?"
Yes.
"Secret stuff?"
Yes.
"How did you know about it?" Pard shrugged. An unanswerable question.
Worse and worse! thought Kent in sudden fear. Whoever's after me has access to secret weapons! No wonder Pard figures the cops can't help! But why am I in such a mess?
There was only one possible answer to that: his silent, night-walking skull companion, Pard.
"You've done something that's got us in this jam!" he accused.
Yes.
Pard was keeping his hands busy. He had curled the disk into a tight slender roll, and now was taking the plastic shell off his battery-powered shaver.
Only by an extended guessing game, Kent knew, could he ever get the full story out of Pard. That could take more weeks than somebody meant him to live. But he knew of one guess he could make as a starter.
"Is that 'mystery girl' in the photos mixed up in this?"
Yes. Pard wedged the rolled-up disk into the shaver so that it was pressed against, and perpendicular to, the windings of the tiny motor coil.
"You in love with her or something?"
Yes. Pard flicked the shaver's switch and the motor buzzed. Nothing else happened for about a second.
Then at least a dozen things happened at once.
Lights throughout the cell block flickered, and two of them exploded with dazzling flashes. Sirens whooped deafeningly. Bells clanged. Electronically-activated cell doors clicked loudly as their locks opened. The loud-speaker system blared out the first two bars of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and then went dead.
The prisoners, offered a golden opportunity, swarmed from their cells, flattened the startled keeper, and made for the nearest exits, shouting in gleeful excitement. Pard, his gadget in his hand, leaped to his feet and started to join them.
"No!" shouted Kent. "Don't be a fool, Pard!"
Pard hesitated.
"Running from the law and from secret killers at the same time is for TV heroes and other fictitious characters!" Kent mouthed urgently. "Now sit down and do something about that stupid gadget. Go on! You can't go far hopping on one leg, anyhow, and my leg isn't moving a muscle until you start showing some sense."
Pard shrugged and hopped back to the bunk. "That's more like it," said Kent, relaxing control of the right leg.
The gadget was still buzzing. Kent knew very little about electronics. When Pard read an electronics magazine after going to bed, Kent usually went to sleep immediately. But he had picked up enough general ideas to guess how the gadget worked.
The circuit in the green disk was a highly sensitive responser, meant to pick up signals from an oncoming missile, amplify and perhaps vary them in a certain manner, and send them back as instructions to the missile.
That's what the circuit did when it was spread out flat, when there was no interference between the tiny electromagnetic fields produced by its thousands of microscopic components. When rolled into a tight tube . . . well; it still did something similar, but not as a precise response to one particular signal. It was confused and undiscriminating. It responded to every blip of electromagnetic energy it picked up—from the sixty-cycle alternation in the building's electric wiring, from the fluorescent light switches, from the alarm network. And with what was, for it, an overpowering input of energy from the shaver coil to work with, it responded with roars.
"Turn it off!" mouthed Kent.
The left hand started, slowly and unwillingly, to obey, but just then the gadget quit by itself, having exhausted the battery in no more than a minute. Pard yanked out the rolled-up disk, wadded it and tossed it in the toilet bowl by the sink. He was putting the re-assembled shaver away when the lights came back on.
Seconds later a contingent of armed policemen rushed in to stare at the empty cells in angry frustration.
"Most of your guests have checked out," Kent offered.
A sergeant glowered at him and tried his cell door. It was still unlocked. "Why're you still here?" he demanded.
"Because I've done nothing to run from."
The keeper came up rubbing his bruised head. "That's Lindstrom," he told the sergeant. "The piano player."
"Oh, yeah." The sergeant watched as Kent strolled over to the toilet bowl, flushed it.
"What happened to the lights and things, Sergeant?" Kent asked.
"That's no concern of yours—or mine either," the sergeant grunted, walking away.
The escapees were brought in one and two at a time during the early afternoon, and returned disgruntled to their cells. Lunch was over an hour late.