Darker Than You Think (25 page)

But
that was many years ago, before old Mondrick turned against him.
Wistfully, for a moment, he wondered why—but the problems of
the present were large enough without brooding over old slights. He
parked around the corner, and strode firmly up the walk to the tall
new Foundation building.

That
lingering, nameless malodor of the night had fled, and the sounds of
nighttime carpentry had ceased. The austere hush of the dim corridors
seemed almost ominous. Instead of the girl he expected to see at the
information desk, he found a thick-set man who looked many years too
mature for his university sweater.

"Sorry,
mister." The man scowled. "Library and museum not open
today."

"That's
all right," Barbee said pleasantly. "I only want to see Mr.
Quain."

"Mr.
Quain's busy."

"Then
I'd like to speak to Mr. Spivak or Mr. Chittum."

"Busy."
The man scowled harder. "No visitors today."

Barbee
was reviewing his gate-crashing technique when he saw the two men
idling in the automatic elevator. They also seemed too old to be
wearing sweaters splashed with the yellow-and-black of the Clarendon
tiger, and they looked back at him too sharply. He saw the bulges at
their hips and remembered that Sam Quain had been hiring guards for
the Foundation.

He
scrawled on a card:
"Sam,
it will save us both trouble
if
you will talk to me now"
and
pushed the card and a dollar bill across the information desk. He
smiled at the cold-eyed watchman.

"Please
send that to Mr. Quain."

Silently,
the bleak-faced man pushed back the dollar and carried the card to
the elevator. He limped like a tired policeman, and Barbee found the
bulge his gun made. Sam Quain evidently intended to protect that box.

Barbee
waited ten uncomfortable minutes under the guard's cold stare before
Sam Quain stepped abruptly out of the elevator. Barbee was appalled
to see the stark intensity of his contained desperation—no
wonder Nora had been upset. He was coatless; his shirt sleeves were
rolled up and his big hands had a vague chemical odor, as if he had
been interrupted in some laboratory task. His unshaven face was gray
and harsh with strain. "This way, Will."

His
haggard eyes recognized Barbee without friendship, and he led the way
brusquely across the corridor to a long room which briefly puzzled
Barbee. The walls were hung with huge maps of all the continents and
others which bewildered him until he recognized them as restorations
of the different coastlines and vanished land masses of the geologic
past. A battery of card-punching and card-sorting machines occupied
the end of the room, with long rows of gray steel filing cabinets
beyond.

Barbee
wondered for a moment what sort of data old Mondrick and his
associates had assembled and analyzed here. The rivers and mountains
of those lost continents older than legendary Atlantis and Lemuria
were shown in convincing detail; colored boundaries across them
puzzled him again. The work of the room had been either completed or
suspended, because the sleek machines were silent today, the dim-lit
aisles deserted.

Sam
Quain shut the door behind them and turned beside a desk to face
Barbee. There were chairs, but he didn't ask Barbee to sit. He
knotted one gaunt fist in an unconscious gesture of restrained
emotion.

"Better
lay off, Will!" His quiet voice was vibrant with a controlled
vehemence. "For your own sake."

"Tell
me why," Barbee challenged.

A
spasm as if of anguish twisted Quain's stiff face. His dark, tortured
eyes looked up for a moment at those maps of the far past. He
coughed, and his voice seemed to choke.

"Please,
Will—don't ask me that!"

Barbee
sat down on the corner of the desk.

"We're
friends, Sam—or we used to be. That's why I came out here. You
can tell me some things I've got to know—for very urgent
reasons."

Quain's
face set.

"I
can't tell you anything."

"Listen,
Sam!" A quivering urgency turned Barbee's voice imperative.
"What was old Mondrick trying to say when he died? What did you
find in the Ala-shan—and what have you got in that wooden box?"
He studied Quain's bleak, gray face. "And who is the Child of
Night?"

He
paused, but Quain stood woodenly silent.

"You
might as well answer, Sam," he rasped bitterly. "I'm in the
newspaper game, remember. I know how to deal with unwilling sources.
I'm going to find out what you're hiding—whether you like it or
not."

Quain's
blue eyes narrowed and his Adam's apple jerked to an uneasy gulp.

"You
don't know what you're meddling into." His abrupt, low voice was
harsh with pain. "Won't you just leave us alone with this—while
there's something left of our old friendship? Can't you forget you're
a snooping newshawk?"

"This
isn't for the
Star,"
Barbee
protested huskily. "The paper isn't interested. But things are
happening that I can't understand. I've got to solve some riddles,
Sam, before they drive me nuts!"

His
voice shuddered.

"I
know you're afraid of something, Sam. Why else did you take all those
useless precautions to guard old Mondrick at the airport? And why
have you turned this building into a fortress?" He swallowed.
"What's the danger, Sam?"

Stubbornly,
Sam Quain shook his head.

"Better
forget it, Will," he said. "The answers wouldn't make you
any happier."

Barbee
rose trembling from the edge of the desk.

"I
know a little already," he said hoarsely. "Enough to drive
me nearly out of my mind. I feel that you are
putting up
a
terrific fight against—something. I'm involved in it—I
don't know how. But I want to be on your side, Sam."

Sam
Quain sat down heavily in the chair behind the desk. He fumbled
nervously with a paperweight—it was that little Roman lamp of
Mondrick's, Barbee saw, the one whose blackglazed design showed
Romulus and Remus, twin sons of dark Mars and a human vestal, sucking
at the dugs of a wolf bitch.

"Anything
you know may be very unfortunate, Will —for both of us."
He pushed the terra-cotta lamp away from him abruptly, and sat a long
time motionless beyond the desk, searching Barbee with hollowed,
pain-shadowed eyes.

"I
think you're imaging things," he said softly at last. "Nora
was telling me you've been working too hard, and drinking too much.
She was worried about you, Will, and I'm afraid she's right. I think
you need a rest."

He
put his hand on the desk telephone.

"I
think you ought to get out of town for a few days, Will—before
you drive yourself into a complete breakdown. I'll arrange it for
you—so nothing will cost you a cent—if you'll promise to
catch the afternoon plane today for
Albuquerque."

Barbee
stood frowning and silent.

"You
see," he explained, "the Foundation has a little party
working in New Mexico—excavating a cave dwelling for remains
that may tell us why Homo sapiens was extinct in the western
hemisphere when the Amerinds arrived. But you needn't bother with
their work."

A
hopeful smile warmed his harsh face.

"Won't
you take a week off, Will?" he urged. "I'll call Troy and
fix it with the paper—you might even do a feature story on the
trip. Get plenty of sunshine and a little exercise—and forget
about Dr. Mondrick."

He
started to lift the phone.

"Will
you go—today—if we arrange the reservations?"

Barbee
shook his head.

"I
don't bribe, Sam." He saw Quain's angry flush. "I still
don't know what you're trying to cover up, but you can't ship me out
of town that way. No, I'm going to stick around and see the fun."

Quain
stood up stiffly.

"Dr.
Mondrick decided not to trust you, Will—a long time ago."
His voice was flat and cold. "He never told us why. Maybe you're
all right. Maybe you aren't. We simply can't afford to take chances."

His
stubborn face was bleak and dangerous.

"I'm
sorry you choose to be so unreasonable, Will. I wasn't trying to
bribe you—but I have to warn you now. Lay off, Will. If you
don't stop this presumptuous investigation of affairs that don't
concern you—we'll have to stop you. I'm sorry, Will. But that's
the way it is." He shook his raw-boned, sun-bronzed head
regretfully. "Think it over, Will. Now I've got to go."

He
strode to open the door.

"Wait,
Sam!" Barbee protested sharply. "If you can only give me
one sane reason—"

But
Sam Quain shut the door of that enigmatic room behind them and turned
abruptly away. Barbee attempted to follow, but the elevator doors
shut in his face. Uneasily conscious of the cold-eyed guard at the
reception desk, he retreated from that stern tower that had become a
citadel of the inexplicable.

Beside
his shabby car at the curb, he turned to look up at those high
windows behind, where he had seen the blue glare of welding torches
in that nightmare, as Quain's men prepared a strongroom for the box.
He couldn't help shivering, or sniffing again for that peculiar
fetor. His nostrils caught nothing now. Yet the perfect fit between
dream and reality frightened him— and his very sanity, he felt,
was locked inside that guarded wooden box.

A
sudden, illogical panic swept him into the car. He raced the motor
and clashed the gears and lurched around the turns getting back to
the highway. Foolish, he told himself. But Sam Quain, with that
curious mixture of desperate intensity and solemn regret and sheer
terror, had somehow shaken him.

He
drove around the campus until that irrational spasm of dread had
passed, and then started back to town. He glanced hopefully at his
watch, but it wasn't time to call April Bell. He was still supposed
to be working for the
Star,
he
recalled, and the Walraven file was waiting in his desk in the city
room. His troubled brain, however, revolted at the unpleasant chore
of renovating Walraven for the voters, and suddenly he knew that he
had to see Rowena Mondrick.

Why
did she wear those quaint old silver heirlooms —in reality and
in his dream? What, precisely, had she and Dr. Mondrick been digging
for in Nigeria—and what had been the exact circumstances of
that black leopard's attack? What did she know of Mondrick's later
work? Did she know of any enemies who might have conspired to murder
him at the airport? Did she know the name of the Child of Night?