Clean Break, Page 3

rush.

  "Pearl!" yelled Oliver, petrified with horror.

  The bear stood swaying upright over her, threshing its tufted forepawsfor balance and showing yellow tusks in a grimace that stemmed fromdrugged weakness but which passed quite creditably for a snarl ofdemoniac fury.

  Obviously something had to be done. Oliver, galvanized by therealization, came to the rescue with a promptness that amounted toreflex action.

  "Down, boy!" he said, and dealt the bear a sharp blow across themuzzle with his board.

  The bear dealt Oliver a roundhouse clout in return that stretched himhalf-conscious beside Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above. Then, atprecisely that moment of greatest dramatic impact, it shook its headdizzily and passed out cold.

  The girl scrambled up and knelt beside Oliver to listen to hisheartbeat, found that he was alive and raised her voice in an urgentarpeggio that held in spite of its operatic timbre a distinct note ofcommand.

  In answer to her call the great beast in the corner--built somethingon the order of a hippopotamus but with unorthodox variations in thatit boasted six legs to either side and was covered with close-curling,bright blue wool--trotted out of the shadows and scooped up theunconscious bear in its four powerful anterior arms.

  A word from Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above sent it into the mainmenagerie quarters, where it stuffed the limp bear into its old cageand trotted back to its mistress with a look of adoring deference onits round face.

  The girl gave the creature a random trill of commendation and,displaying surprising strength for one so slight, herself dragged thereviving Oliver back to the scene of his unfinished diagnosis. Theorder given her earlier by Mr. Furnay was not forgotten, however, forshe did not linger.

  "Not handsome, no," she murmured, locking the partition door behindher this time. "But O Personal Deity of Unmarried Maidens, suchheadlong bravery!"

  * * * * *

  Oliver roused ten minutes later to find himself alone with a memory ofnightmare and a sleeping bear that offered no resistance whatever whenhe funneled a quantity of tetrachlorethylene down its throat.

  He was still alone an hour later--and still trying dizzily to separatefact from fancy, having tried the partition door and found itlocked--when the bear returned to semi-consciousness and submittedgroggily to a follow-up dosage of purgative.

  Oliver would have liked to stay long enough to learn the results ofhis diagnosis and to see Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above if she shouldreappear, but a glance at his watch electrified him with therealization that he had been away from his clinic for more than twohours and that his Aunt Katisha and Glenna might by now have the statepolice beating the palmetto flats for his body. Accordingly he leftthe Furnay estate in a great hurry, pausing at the gate only longenough to leave word for Mr. Furnay that he would ring later in theevening to check his patient's progress.

  It was not until he had returned home and found his Aunt Katisha stillout that his overworked nerves, punished outrageously by shock,violence and confusion, composed themselves enough to permit him areasonable guess as to what actually had happened--and by that timehis conclusions had taken a turn so fantastically improbable that hewas lost again in a hopeless muddle of surmise.

  He poured himself a glass of milk in the kitchen (he preferred coffee,but his Aunt Katisha frowned on the habit) and took his grislysuspicions down to the clinic, where he felt more at ease than in theantimacassared austerity of the house. There he mulled them overagain, and time was able to weave into the pattern the disjointedimpressions carried over from his period of semi-consciousness anddismissed until now as nightmare figments from the delirium of shock.Their alignment with other evidence increased his conviction:

  Mr. Furnay and Menage, Oliver concluded with a cold thrill of horror,were not human beings at all but monsters.

  * * * * *

  The pattern became even more disturbing when he considered variousstories of local saucer-sightings and fireballs, which linkedthemselves with chilling germanity to the events of the day.

  First there had been Champ's instant distrust of Mr. Furnay andBivins, and his attempt to rout them for the aliens they were. Therehad been Bivins' anomalous scream when bitten--a raucous soundcertainly not human--and Mr. Furnay's grittily inconsonant order,spoken in no identifiable earthly tongue. The isolation of the Furnayestate took on a sinister and significant logic, as did itsunderstaffed condition; there was the evident but baffling reluctanceof Mr. Furnay and his myrmidons (with the notable exception of thegolden-voiced Pearl) to approach even safely caged beasts, and thegreater mystery of why a man so terrified of wild animals should havebought a menagerie in the first place.

  Considering the part played by Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above in ascheme of things so fantastic left Oliver more disturbed than ever,but for a different reason. That she was unarguably as alien as theothers made her equally mysterious, but connoted no share in whateverdevious plot occupied the Furnay faction; a reexamination of Mr.Furnay's harshly dictatorial attitude toward her, coupled withOliver's own uncertain memory of the moment when the girl had come tohis rescue, convinced him that she was not ipso facto a member of theextraterrestrial cabal but was its prisoner instead.

  Visualizing the probable fate of a beautiful girl held captive byaliens--and forced by them to train outlandish, half-remembered bruteslike the one behind the partition--rather strained Oliver's talent forsurmise, but at the same time moved him to the uneasy conviction thatit was his duty to rescue her in turn.

  The thought that he might already be too late appalled him. Theslender blonde beauty of Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above wasdistractingly fresh in his mind, the eager arpeggiation of her voicean indelible memory. Recalling the smile she had given him in partingstirred an internal warmth unguessed at before, an emotional ignitioncertainly never kindled by his fiancee or family.

  * * * * *

  Orella Simms, Glenna, his Aunt Katisha!

  Thought of his obligations brought him back to reality with a jar; theappalling gulf between fact and fancy made clear to him with suddenand shocking clarity the nonentity's role that had been played, andmust be played, all his life by Oliver Watts.

  He was the perennial romantic introvert, dreaming impossible dreamscompounded of escape reading and frustration, grasping timorously atany thread of adventure that might lead him to forget for the momentthe drab monotone of his existence. His mouth twisted wryly. Therewas, of course, no fantastic alien plot incubating on the Furnayestate, no sunsuited damsel in distress awaiting rescue at his inepthands. He'd imagined the romantic aspects of the episode--the"unearthly" tongue, the improbable beast. No one required, or everwould require, anything of Oliver Watts except his Aunt Katisha andGlenna, who demanded obedience, and Orella Simms, who expectedconformity.

  As if on cue, the Watts family car swung off the highway and rolleddown the crushed shell driveway past the clinic. Oliver's Aunt Katishagot out, leaving Glenna and Orella Simms to wait, and strode into theclinic office.

  "I see you've managed to spoil another one," she said acidly, pausinglong enough to retrieve the handkerchief Mr. Furnay's chauffeur hadlost earlier. "Moreover, I called twice this afternoon and found yougone. Where?"

  Oliver, as usual, weathered the storm in silence. Somewhere near theend he managed to squeeze in the information that he had treated asick animal at the Furnay place--a saddle horse, he said, lyingautomatically as the lesser of two evils.

  His aunt Katisha, her inquisitorial duty discharged, dropped thediscolored handkerchief pointedly on Oliver's desk and rejoined Glennaand Orella Simms. The car drove away. Oliver, left alone in thegrowing dusk of evening to his miserable introspection, found hiswandering attention returning unaccountably to the crumpledhandkerchief, and drew it closer for a better look.

  It was only a harmless square of linen, smudged with dust and spottedwith blood from Bivins' chow-bitten leg--but with his closer lookOliver's world spr
ang up and exploded with a shattering bang in hisstartled face.

  The dust was quite ordinary, but Bivins' blood was not.

  It was green.

  He was never quite sure, later, just what happened next. He retained avague memory of roaring away in his Aunt Katisha's car through areckless showering of crushed shell; sometimes he could recall thecool onrush of wind whipping his face and the frantic dodging ofapproaching headlamps on the highway. But in the main, his descentupon the Furnay estate was a blank.

  Only one fact stood out with freezing clarity, excluding any thoughtof his Aunt Katisha's certain wrath or of Orella's maidenlyreproaches: Perrl-high-C-trill-and-A-above was in Deadly Danger, andthere was none but Oliver Watts to rescue her.

  There was a brief instant of lucidity as he approached the Furnaygates through the cabbage palms and was forced to choose a course ofaction.

  The attendant certainly would not admit him without orders from