Read Ebook: Mary Anonymous by Walton Bryce Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 194 lines and 10359 words, and 4 pages

She slid along the wall. Her feet moved with a vague whispering silence, the silence of unconscious stealth. But then the guard turned to place his heel more comfortably on the inward-sloping bottom of the tube. And he saw her.

He grinned. "Mary!" he said. Everyone knew her. And everyone loved Mary. "What are you doing out here?"

He could never guess the truth, she thought. Even if someone told you, you would never believe it.

The good humor spontaneously beginning to bubble from the fat guard was changed into a kind of gasping cough of unbelieving fear. Desperate words filtered out through his teeth. A white line moved around his lips. His hands reached out and hung suspended.

"Mary--Oh God, Mary--the gun, that's--that's a real gun, Mary--"

The charge was light. It contacted the Guard's face just above the chin. It dissolved instantly all of his face and most of his brain. It left only a smeared shell of bone behind, like a bowl tipped up.

When this was done, she would be free. As free as the guard.

Once near the rocket, the long task would be ended. She would then theoretically be free from the complex thought which her body was incapable of handling without pain. Free from the pain of an imbalanced body and nervous system. And free of the coercion bands, the directive waves that could sometimes rip the cells apart.

She pressed the down button of the elevator. At that moment the high scream of the alarm sirens shrieked in her ears. She cowered a moment. It came from all around. It bathed her in painful sound. It became a pervading throb that seemed to come from the metal everywhere.

They had discovered the guard already. That was one of those unpredictable elements. Purely chance that anyone would have passed there just after the guard was killed. That could be the only reason for the alarm!

She had to get outside the buildings. She had to get over there near enough to the rocket to blast the firing tubes! She wasn't even off the tenth floor.

There was nothing to fear except failure. Death itself would be a welcome if not a preferred kind of freedom for her. But if she failed and lived, there would be torture. And the misty worlds of pain, not only in the labs but from the coercion directives. As far as she knew, perhaps the directive rocket buried somewhere high in the pines near the lake would contain even more duties for her, if this failed. Except that now she would be known and they would hunt her down and--but so far they did not know who had killed the guard.

No, if they caught her they wouldn't kill her. That was sure enough. There would be the labs again. They would probe, cut her open, try to find out why. She had long been a living instrument for finding out why.

As the elevator dropped, the walls pulsed with the screams of the alarms.

She had one advantage she realized that she had been doubtful of earlier. She was Mary, and everyone knew and loved her. Though it was definite now that a saboteur was loose inside the Foundation, there was nothing so far to connect Mary with such a fact.

She concealed the gun in the sling inside her cap, and tied the ribbon firmly under her chin. When the elevator reached the first floor, the panel slid back. She was tensed to run out, but a group of Foundation guards were running for the opening. Their faces were twisted into various expressions of tense terror. They were all inside a gigantic gas capsule, they knew that, one of terrible potential lethality. Evidently it was suspected that the G-Agent might be used.

Mary ran out, turned, leaped for the narrowing gap between the guards and the arched opening that led into the court. Most of the guards scarcely noticed her at all, and if they did they evidently figured it was hardly anything to cause diversion from the awful emergency.

But one of them, a man named Jonothan who had often caressed her and expressed his love for her, smiled. It was a kind of conditioned reaction that broke the frozen fear of his mouth and cheeks. He leaned toward her, his hand outstretched.

"Mary--this is no place for you, baby. You'd better come back up with us."

The invisible mouth of the intercom spoke. "The saboteur may be heading for the rocket which must blast on schedule. Already deadly gases may have been released inside the Foundation. Sections five and six will establish instant cordon around the rocket pits. Anyone not obeying security instructions will be shot instantly. Anyone entering or leaving the Foundation buildings or grounds without proper identification will be shot. All guards will immediately put on masks, and protective suiting, and will prepare antidote injections. Sections seven and eight will search the main wing. Sections nine and ten--"

"Come on, John!" someone yelled from the elevator. Kits were falling open. Masks were unfolding. Suit capsules were exploding under compressed air, and the special suits were breaking out in fluffs of green.

"Hey, for God's sake, Johnny, come on!" The voices were ragged with fear.

A warning would also, Mary knew, be going out to all civilians made susceptible immediately by inversion, movements of predictable winds. But Mary knew that many would die, many many would die, when the rocket crashed. If she could succeed.

Only for that inevitable percentage who would die in great pain did she have any recognizable sympathy. She had a duty, else she herself would experience greater and greater pain.

"You'd better come along with us, Mary baby," Jonothan said. He reached for her, while the others yelled at him. The intercom itself was toned with terror that was in the walls and in every man's eyes and his voice and the stance of his body.

Mary giggled. She started a kind of disarming dance. But this time it did not excite the laughter and general response it usually did.

Her stomach turned sickeningly as she felt the release, the ribbon fluttering and the cap falling. The thud and the bright shining spin of the gun over the mosaicked floor. The sling had broken.

She danced toward it.

Jonothan yelled, but the voices of the others snapped off into a pulsing silence. Then an incredulous murmur trickled over the floor.

"Mary--what are you doing with that? Mary--stop--wait, Mary--"

Desperately, Jonothan dived to the floor. He clawed. He kicked with his frantic feet for traction on the floor. He screamed at her as he pawed to reach the gun. But she leaped over him and turned with the gun ready.

Jonothan was slowly standing up. His face was white. His lips moved. His throat trembled. But no words came out.

Behind him, a voice shivered. "Give us the gun, Mary."

Pleading, cajoling, shaking, other voices joined.

"Mary--give us the gun now!"

"Please, Mary, you can kill people--"

"You just give Uncle Patrick the gun now, honey, and--"

She was backing away toward the arched opening. Beyond that were the gardens, the fountains the pretty landscape of the courts. Beyond that were the helio landings, and then the pits. It wasn't so far.

Jonothan was trying to smile at her as he reached again for the gun. Behind him, the others stood immobile and without any more words. The intercom had words, but no one was listening now.

She fired a much heavier charge than that against the guard on the tenth floor. Between Jonothan's outstretched arms which had held her with love, his torso and head disappeared. His arms fell and the legs toppled like parts of a mannequin. Beyond the vacancy that had been Jonothan, several others tried to draw their guns. All were abruptly reduced to jellied and smoking anonymity. Mary ran for the courts.

She heard herself giggling without recognizable meaning as she ran under the rainbowed fountains, leaped the flower hedges, and skimmed over the carefully designed green of lawn patches.

She still had that initial advantage. No one still could logically connect her with what was happening. So far there were no living witnesses. At least it was unlikely that there were.

She was a little behind her schedule and every second was now important. Where before there had been allowed some margin for error, now there was none.

She wanted to get a helio. She wanted to get as far up wind and as far into the air as possible when the G-Agent began drifting over the land. She wanted to live for the reasons she had thought about before, many times. She couldn't say that her life was important to her now any more than it ever had been. It had never been her life, not in her memory. Always she had been the instrument of others. She could blast the rocket back to earth from inside a helio, and keep on from there to some degree of personal safety.

That was the plan.

As she ran she wondered with a kind of dull throbbing hope if after this task was fulfilled, she would be free of the Martian directives. She didn't know. She could only hope.

Long after the high degree of intelligence she now possessed came to her, she had prayed to be free of pain and imprisonment. Even where there was not the capacity to formulate any awareness of her merely being used, or of being a prisoner of others, she had felt the primitive cellular discontent that had now become open and passionate desire for freedom.

Maybe after this was done, she would be free for the first time that she could really remember. What she could do with it, where she could go, where she could hide with it, whether she could even live to enjoy it, if in fact she could enjoy something she had never had, was really not of much consequence to her as she ran and thought about it. Even one brief flare of freedom would be its own exultant reward.

Figures made a scrambling chaos of unreality out of the area which usually displayed such a paradoxical atmosphere of quiet peacefulness. Sirens shrieked. Helios hummed and hovered nervously, then darted off in angled desperation through the slanting rays of dusk. Evidently there were a fortunate few whose emergency obligations were taking them elsewhere. And a few others, undoubtedly, who were escaping in guilt-ridden cowardice from an intolerable suspense.

She jumped, slid the cowl back, crawled into the plastoid bubble before the two-seated passenger helio. The controls were simple. She had watched Daddy Mike many times as he commuted to and from Lake House. Jokingly he had let her sit on his lap and play with the controls, not being able even to suspect what she was really learning, and what the end result would be.

As the helio whirred to lifting life, Mary did not bother with altitude. That would come later. She sent the helio skimming low over the courts and the landing plots, over the monuments and fountains, toward the pits.

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