Something in her tone told Barnes she had known of the hole he had made in the wall of Free’s house—that she had known and had posed for him, dressing again or turning out her light when she did not want him to see more. He stared at her.
“If we were alone, it might be otherwise. Now go up.”
He shook his head and mounted the little stair, finding it more difficult in the oxygen-poor air than he would have thought possible and hearing the witch’s laughter in the click of her heels behind him.
A narrow landing held the door through which Stubb had gone and another, larger, door that had been hidden by the ceiling when they had stood on the level below.
Beyond it was a wide room with a score or more of chairs and sofas, a dry fountain, and basins and boxes filled with dead, dry earth. Overhead spread a dome of tinted panes that dyed the moonlight.
“Here they took their ease,” the witch said, “surrounded by precious things. They were very clever, these men, very cunning, though not wise.”
Barnes was examining one of the chairs. Its fabric had torn under the pressure of its stuffing. When he touched it, it tore again, rotten with age. “This place is in a lot worse shape than the other one,” he said. “I don’t see anything precious here.”
“They are gone,” the witch told him. “And the suns of many years have done the damage you see. But water played in that fountain once, streaming from the horn held by the undine. I shall not trouble to explain the symbolism of horns or undines to you now, but here, so far above the seas and lakes of Earth, water was a precious thing. Fools would have said, ‘We must drink it, use it to make breathable the air, and so we will hide it in tanks.’ These men said, ‘We will put it in a fountain for our pleasure. Then it will make breathable our air, and we may drink it when we choose.’ There were flowers here as well, and flowers too are precious things.” She laughed. “The visitors saw the gracious room, the little offices, and thought those here lived spartan lives. They knew that when the structure is so large, mere space costs very little. It is the load, not the emptiness, that brings down the airplane. Is it not so?”
Candy came panting up behind them. “I didn’t think they’d hold me,” she said. “You should have heard them crack! I waited … minute … each step.”
“Here is the living illustration,” said the witch.
They went forward through the sere, ruined garden, with the witch leading the way, a witch of yellow, rose, and purple as she stepped from one shaft of moonlight to the next.
“It’s like that
Beyond the garden were half a dozen shadowy rooms filled with instruments and winking glass. A few of the yellow lights still burned in them; where their illumination was insufficient, the witch held her cigarette lighter aloft like a torch.
Beyond these laboratories was another hallway, and beyond that, Stubb’s back. They saw him open a door at the end of it, and through the door glimpsed the familiar, bearded face of Ben Free as he turned in the pilot’s chair to see who had entered.
Stubb’s voice came to them faintly, carried on the thin whistling of the wind. “Good morning, General Whitten,” Stubb said. “Or was Whitten a lie too?” The door closed.
General Buck Whitten
The witch burst into the cockpit like a panther. “What thing is this! You have betrayed me, betrayed us all!” She whirled on Free and dropped to her knees. “And you, Master, you live! This traitor told me you were dead.” Barnes followed her in, Candy lumbering after him.
Free said, “Sit down. Some of you, anyway.”
Stubb had taken the copilot’s seat. There were two more at the rear of the cockpit, apparently intended for a navigator and an engineer. The witch and Candy sat there.
The witch hissed, “Inside the wing, you said, and I see you here. You would speak with the Master behind me!”
“I’ve never crossed a client yet,” Stubb told her. “When we were looking for Mr. Free here, you never said you didn’t want me to talk to him unless you were there. If you had, I wouldn’t have agreed to it.”
“You told me you were going in the wing!”
“Sure, and I did. It was dark as hell in there, but I got far enough to see there were steps inside those things that held the engines so the mechanics could go down and work on them in flight. By then the matches I’d gotten from Ozzie were running out, so I went back.”
“And we were gone,” Barnes said. He was standing behind the witch’s seat.
“Right. So I figured you had probably headed toward the front of the plane, and I went that way too. I’ve got most of this worked out, I think.”
Free said, “You recognized me when you saw me here, but you had not recognized me on the ground. I suppose that was only a few hours ago.”
Stubb nodded. “Yeah, I should have, but you were younger and you had a clean shave, and it was too crazy. Of course that girl, Kip, had blown smoke in my eyes with the story about the twins. Is she really your daughter? She looks a little like you.”
“Yes, my only child. Eventually she will kill me, I suppose.”
Stubb stared at him.
“She reported to me; you must have realized that. Even then I had begun to suspect that Benjamin Free had been myself.”
Barnes said, “Wait a minute. You were the man in the duffel coat?”
