Page:Amazing Stories Volume 21 Number 06.djvu/82

82 Suppose I did tell him? Oh My!

The ward was on the ground floor. Outside the window I could see some grass, a shrub, the sidewalk.

That night, when the nurses were all off the ward but one nodding sleepily at her table in the end of the ward, I heard a soft tapping at the window.

The face was Kyra's, eerily beautiful as in my dreams she had always been. I pinched myself to make sure this wasn't a dream, too. Then I slid softly out of bed, and, crouching in the dimness between the beds, slid the window open. Kyra hissed:

"Come on. Tanil doesn't want any police attention. We are skipping out to avoid all the rigamarole while they try to understand what happened. Have you seen the papers?"

"What papers?"

"Don't you realize that your attack on Tanil was the opening move of Nueces; that he has the doll mech and the whole caverns in his hands? He used your doll to make you try to kill Tanil. When she got around that with a gas capsule from her bag he turned his attention to terrorizing the city. Dozens of banks have been robbed by people in his control; the city is in an uproar. He has murdered dozens of men—guards in banks; cops; tellers There's Hell to pay! Come on. Tanil says, 'you are very strong, but she has more gas capsules,' so come along!"

"Lucky for her I wasn't wearing my harness. She would be a dead woman."

"We have no time for talk now. We will explain later. Nueces is raising hell! We have to stop him. Tanil is very depressed. She thinks the powerful 'hidden ones' have turned away from her, have lied to her. We must save our own lives as well as the lives of the people of the city. Come on, we will get clothes for you later." LAD only in the hospital pajamas and feeling silly, I slid out of the window. The screen made a hell of a racket. It was one of those tricky, hinged gadgets they have in such places. I never could figure them out, could you?

I dropped to the grass and Kyra led the way on a run. Half a block down the street a cab was waiting. Kyra and I plunged into the dark interior. I sat down on Tanil's lap, inadvertently, in the dark. She squeezed me, laughed. That terrific effect she had on me, an effect like no other woman, throbbed through my veins. Could a man love two women? It has been done, I guess. Certainly I wanted Kyra with all the fervor of young love. But Tanil! Tanil had all the lure of the mystery of wisdom, that lure that had placed the image of Kyra in my dreams ahead of all other faces in a greater degree—that wisdom that is the witch's alone. I often wondered what Kyra would have done with her own knowledge and arts without the eclipsing Tanil as her superior.

The cab took off in a rising crescendo of motor. In a second we were on the parkway.

Nueces hadn't been killing time. As the cab pulled off the parkway onto Grand Ave.—a street containing many of the biggest stores and banks of the city—we heard tumult far ahead, saw people running, heard shots, screams, and the dull rumble of dynamite. Traffic was a snarl of cursing drivers in front—everyone trying to leave—while the curious, thinking it a fire, were trying to get nearer.

We got out of the cab, ran toward the scene of the uproar on foot. A line of trucks hogged the center of the street. They were big trucks, and out of the stores, jewelry shops, and out of the bank, men were hurrying, their arms loaded with loot, tossing their burdens into the trucks, and hurrying back for more. The trucks inched ahead against the jammed traffic, horns tooting steadily. The shop fronts had been blasted open with dynamite. Clouds of dust hung in the air.

"What the H is going on?" I yelled at Tanil.

"It's Nueces! He's operating all the doll control men to loot the city; the trucks are driven by his own men."

"Just how does he expect to keep the coppers from breaking up his party? They'll have to call out the militia for this!"

"He's probably set a few apartment houses or hotels ablaze in some other part of the city. It wouldn't matter—he could drop them with the ray."

"If he could, why doesn't he? Why doesn't he kill us if he's so anxious?"

"Oh, shut up! I'm trying to think what to do. He'll wreck the city if I don't stop him."

I subsided. It was too much for me. I turned to watch the commotion. The operation was going forward with the organized stolidity of an automobile assembly