darkened as I had figured it would be. I guessed the man with the key was probably in his office on the second floor, and so I kept going up the stairs. But I was in for a surprise as I came out the stairway door and into the auditorium.
The lecture hall was filled with people. The man I was seeking wasn't hard to find. He was put on the platform with two other speakers. I stuck my gun back inside my jacket and took a seat in the rear of the hall. Obviously I couldn't deal with him until whatever was going on was over.
It seemed to be some sort of a debate on art. My target was evidently the moderator. The audience was all- white, well-dressed, and definitely upper-crust Rhodesian. The first speaker went to some lengths, citing all sorts of arbitrary classical standards, to prove that primitive art isn't art at all. His point seemed to me to be more politically racist than artistically valid. Summed up, he was trying to prove that only Caucasians were capable of producing real art. The rhetorical convolutions he went through in attempting to place all African and Oriental art beyond the pale were worthy of a Governor Wallace. But the audience was obviously with him. It was the time for rationales from every area of white Rhodesian life to justify the steps being inaugurated by the government to insure that black Rhodesians were kept barred from all those lily-white provinces – the art world included – which the whites had earmarked for their own.
Loud applause greeted the end of this diatribe. Then the moderator introduced the second speaker. Right off the bat it was obvious that he was licked.
First of all, he had a decidedly English university accent which wasn't calculated to please a crowd which so obviously identified with the slurred Rhodesian speech pattern of the previous speaker. Second, his voice was unfortunately high-pitched, an easy target for laughter. And third of all, the audience was in no mood to listen to any point of view, no matter how moderately presented, which might suggest that the native art of the land was a cultural asset to be treasured. Still, they didn't resort to catcalls to shut him up.
They didn't have to. It only took two men and a trick that carried me back to my high school days to accomplish that. It's a trick that depends on the speaker using a p.a. system, which was the case here. Two people sitting in opposite corners of the room take ordinary, half-filled water glasses and make sure the inner parts of the rims are thoroughly wet. Then they each run the tip of one finger around this inner rim. The result is a crossfire of unheard high-frequency sound-waves which are picked up by the microphone. Then, when the speaker talks into the mike, his voice is transmitted as a garbled series of high beeps and his words are lost in a senseless caterwaul. As a kid, I'd been involved in pulling off this stunt once or twice when a high-school assembly speaker had been particularly dull. Now two grown men were doing it to drown out a speaker pleading for artistic appreciation and tolerance.
Watching the speaker turn red and start to stutter, I had a vague intuition about this business of using sound as a weapon. Somehow it seemed to tie in with all the gadgets which were activated by sound back in Highman's apartment in New York. I couldn't pin the connection down, but I sensed that the tactic somehow tied Highman in with what was happening in the lecture hall. Could it also have something to do, I wondered hazily, with the murders of Ilona Tabori and Prudence Highman?
The thought skipped away from the fringe of my mind as the speaker stopped trying to fight the interference. Angrily, but with dignity, he left the platform and strode down the center aisle toward the exit. The moderator hurried after him as if to apologize for what had happened.
I kept my eye on the moderator. He was the one I was after. He was the man with the key.
As he followed the speaker out the door, I got to my feet. But two men beat me to the exit. They were the same two men who'd pulled off the water-glass trick. I was right on their heels as they followed the speaker and the moderator down the stairs.
Talking in low, soothing tones which I couldn't overhear, the moderator led the speaker to a side door and opened it for him. He escorted him outside, to a narrow alley running alongside the building. Then he stood aside with a small smile on his face as the two men caught up with the speaker and stopped him.
The moderator was still standing there, a sort of disinterested observer, when I got outside. The two men were giving the speaker a silent, thorough going-over. I figured I'd get to them in a minute. First things first, and I wanted that key. So I shoved my gun against the moderator's belly and politely asked him to hand it over.
It happened so fast that he must have drawn at the same instant. The muzzle of his gun prodded me in the ribs even as I spoke. Only he didn't waste words as I had. He pulled the trigger.
The split-second realization that he'd do just that was all that saved me. Even as his finger tightened on the trigger, my hand was coming down with a karate chop to his wrist that sent the gun spinning from his grasp. The bullet grazed my hip, the pain searing but momentary. Still, it was just enough to give him the opportunity to make a grab for my gun.
We struggled for it. We sank to our knees, then rolled in the dust, neither of us able to make the other relinquish his grip on the revolver. Then one of the other men left off beating the speaker to come to my opponent's aid.
He stomped hard on my wrist, and the gun went flying. He started to dive after it, but I managed to stick out my foot and trip him up. The moderator was on top of me now, but I slammed my elbow into his throat and he fell back gasping.
The other bully-boy lunged to get into the act. But the gutsy speaker still had enough strength left to hinder him by sinking his teeth into the calf of his leg. I spotted the other gun lying on the ground where the moderator had dropped it. The first hoodlum saw it at the same moment. He dived for the gun and I dived for his groin. My head slammed into it, and I grabbed the gun. Now the moderator grabbed me from behind and we were again struggling for possession of a weapon. Only this time the gun went off.
The fight continued, but the sound of the shot drew footsteps both from inside the gallery and from the street beyond the alley. Before they reached us, one of the muscle-men clipped me from behind and the moderator wrenched the gun from my grasp. The speaker made a dive for him, and the moderator drilled a neat little hole right in the center of his forehead. Then he turned the gun on me and coolly drew a bead. From the sound of their footsteps, the crowd from both directions was almost on us now. Obviously he intended to finish me off before any more witnesses appeared on the scene.
Then, suddenly, his jaw dropped open in agonized surprise and he pitched forward on his face. In the moonlight I saw a small dart sticking out of the back of his neck. Immediately, there were people thronging around.
I wanted to elbow through them to his body. I wanted to get that key. But the two hoods had kept their heads in the sudden confusion, and now they were steadfastly flanking the corpse. They seemed to be known to many in the crowd, and they were explaining that I was a murderer and urging the others to grab me before I escaped.
Getting the key was out. I'd be lucky to get away with my skin. I could sense the building of a lynching fervor. I spotted one of the guns on the ground and swooped down to pick it up. Holding it on the crowd, I backed away from them. A sudden tug at my elbow almost gave me a heart attack, but then I looked down and saw that it was Lagula. He grinned up at me, and I grinned back my thanks for his once again having saved my life.
'This way,' he told me.
I followed him into the bushes and then paced him as he started to run. Once again I found myself fleeing through backyards, over fences, and through alleys. Our route took us finally across the color line and into the native section of the city. Lagula paused at the rear of a rundown house and led me inside through a cellar window. A tall Negro boy of about sixteen was waiting for us in a back bin of the cellar. There was a single candle on the table in front of him and he was bent over a book. As we entered, I made out the title. It was H. G. Wells'
'This is Manzu.' Lagula introduced the boy. 'And this is Mr. Steve Victor from America,' he told him.
We exchanged greetings.
'Manzu is the great-grandson of a famous Bantu emperor,' Lagula added. 'He is a leader in the fight against white oppression.'
'A fight which is as old as history,' the boy said, tapping the book.
'A fight which has to end,' I said, suddenly very conscious of being white.
'Or to be won,' the boy said meaningfully. Then he took off his glasses and his face relaxed into a smile. 'But please don't misunderstand, Mr. Victor. I don't want black supremacy any more than white. It's simply that we are being forced into a corner where the battle may have to be joined by just such absolutes. Only by the white man's voluntarily relinquishing his immoral hold over the black man can such harsh terms of battle be avoided. In Rhodesia, the Negro has nothing to relinquish, and so no position from which to compromise. Thus it is the white
