permitted him by his chain; David had already scrambled away, and Phaedria was well out of his reach.
For a moment, while I shuddered and tried to sit up, the three of us simply stared at him. Then David quoted wryly:
Neither Phaedria nor I laughed, but Phaedria let out her breath in a long sigh and asked me, “How did they do that? Get him like that?”
I told her I supposed they had transplanted the extra pair after suppressing his body’s natural resistance to the implanted foreign tissue and that the operation had probably replaced some of his ribs with the donor’s shoulder structure. “I’ve been teaching myself to do the same sort of thing with mice—on a much less ambitious scale, of course—and the striking thing to me is that he seems to have full use of the grafted pair. Unless you’ve got identical twins to work with, the nerve endings almost never join properly, and whoever did this probably had a hundred failures before he got what he wanted. That slave must be worth a fortune.”
David said, “I thought you threw your mice out. Aren’t you working with monkeys now?”
I wasn’t, although I hoped to, but whether I was or not, it seemed clear that talking about it wasn’t going to accomplish anything. I told David that.
“I thought you were hot to leave.”
I had been, but now I wanted something else much more. I wanted to perform an exploratory operation on that creature much more than David or Phaedria had ever wanted money. David liked to think that he was bolder than I, and I knew when I said, “You may want to get away, but don’t use me as an excuse, Brother,” that that would settle it.
“All right, how are we going to kill him?” David gave me an angry look.
Phaedria said: “He can’t reach us. We could throw things at him.”
“And he could throw the ones that missed back.”
While we talked, the thing, the four-armed slave, was grinning at us. I was fairly sure he could understand at least a part of what we were saying, and I motioned to David and Phaedria to indicate that we should go back into the room where the desk was. When we were there I closed the door. “I didn’t want him to hear us. If we had weapons on poles, spears of some kind, we might be able to kill him without getting too close. What could we use for the sticks? Any ideas?”
David shook his head, but Phaedria said, “Wait a minute; I remember something.” We both looked at her and she knitted her brows, pretending to search her memory and enjoying the attention.
“Well?” David asked.
She snapped her fingers. “Window poles. You know, long things with a little hook on the end. Remember the windows out there where he talks to customers? They’re high up in the wall, and while he and Papa were talking one of the men who works for him brought one and opened a window. They ought to be around somewhere.”
We found two after a five-minute search. They looked satisfactory: about six feet long and an inch and a quarter in diameter, of hardwood. David flourished his and pretended to thrust at Phaedria, then asked me, “Now what do we use for points?”
The scalpel I always carried was in its case in my breast pocket, and I fastened it to the rod with electrical tape from a roll David had fortunately carried on his belt instead of in the tool kit, but we could find nothing to make a second spear-head for him until he himself suggested broken glass.
“You can’t break a window,” Phaedria said. “They’d hear you outside. Besides, won’t it just snap off when you try to get him with it?”
“Not if it’s thick glass. Look here, you two.”
I did, and saw—again—my own face. He was pointing toward the large mirror that had surprised me when I came down the steps. While I looked his shoe struck it, and it shattered with a crash that set the dogs barking again. He selected a long, almost straight, triangular piece and held it up to the light, where it flashed like a gem. “That’s about as good as they used to make them from agate and jasper on Sainte Anne, isn’t it?”
By prior agreement we approached from opposite sides. The slave leaped to the top of the chest and, from there, watched us quite calmly, his deep-set eyes turning from David to me until at last, when we were both quite close, David rushed him.
He spun around as the glass point grazed his ribs and caught David’s spear by the shaft and jerked him forward. I thrust at the slave but missed, and before I could recover he had dived from the chest and was grappling with David on the far side. I bent over it and jabbed down at the slave, and it was not until David screamed that I realized I had driven my scalpel into his thigh. I saw the blood, bright arterial blood, spurt up and drench the shaft, and let it go and threw myself over the chest on top of them.
The slave was ready for me, on his back and grinning, with his legs and all four arms raised like a dead spider’s. I am certain he would have strangled me in the next few seconds if it had not been that David, how consciously I do not know, threw one arm across the creature’s eyes so that he missed his grip and I fell between those outstretched hands.
There is not a great deal more to tell. He jerked free of David and, pulling me to him, tried to bite my throat, but I hooked a thumb in one of his eye sockets and held him off. Phaedria, with more courage than I would have credited her with, put David’s glass-tipped spear into my free hand and I stabbed the slave in the neck—I believe I severed both jugulars and the trachea before he died. We put a tourniquet on David’s leg and left without either the money or the knowledge of technique I had hoped to get from the body of the slave. Marydol helped us get David home, and we told Mr. Million he had fallen while we were exploring an empty building—though I doubt that he believed us.
There is one other thing to tell about that incident—I mean the killing of the slave—although I am tempted to
