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The blond man leaped up, grabbed the cardboard box, and ran away.
Kickaha ran after him. Anana screamed. The winos shouted, and many people came running.
At another time, he would have laughed. He had originally planned to take his box and the
pseudo-bell into some such place as this, a park where winos and derelicts hung out, and create some
kind of commotion, which would make the newspapers. That would have brought Red Orc out of his
hole, Kickaha had hoped.
Ironically, he had stumbled across the real Beller.
If the Beller had been intelligent enough to cache his bell some place, he would have been safe.
Kickaha and Anana would have passed him and never known.
Suddenly, he stopped running. Why chase the Beller, even if he could catch up with him? A
chase would draw too much attention.
He took out the beamer disguised as a pen and set the little slide on its barrel for a very narrow
flesh-piercing beam. He aimed it at the back of the Beller and, at that moment, as if the Beller realized
what must happen, he dropped to the ground. His box went tumbling, he rolled away and then
disappeared behind a slight ridge. Kickaha's beam passed over him, struck a tree, drilled a hole into it.
Smoke poured out of the bark. Kickaha shut the beamer off. If it was kept on for more than a few
seconds, it needed another powerpack.
The Beller's head popped up, and his hand came out with a slender dark object in it. He pointed it at
Kickaha, who leaped into the air side-ways and at the same time threw the hatbox away. There was a
flash of something white along the box, and the box and its contents, both split in half, fell to the ground.
The hatbox burst into flames just before it struck.
Kickaha threw himself onto the ground and shot once. The grass on the ridge became brown. The
next instant, the Beller was shooting again. Kickaha rolled away and then was up and away, zigzagging.
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Anana was running toward him, her hand held up with the huge ring pointed forward. Kickaha
whirled to aid her and saw that the Beller, who had retrieved the cardboard box, was running away
again. Across the grass toward them, from all sides, people were running. Among them were two
policemen.
Kickaha thought that his antics and those of the Beller must have seemed very peculiar to the
witnesses. Here were these two youths, each with a box, pointing ballpoint pens at each other, dodging,
ducking, playing cowboy and Indian. And the woman who had been screaming as if she had suddenly
seen Frankenstein's monster was now in the game.
One of the policemen shouted at them.
Kickaha said, "Don't let them catch us! We'll be done for! Get the Beller!"
They began running at top speed. The cops shouted some more. He looked behind him. Neither had
his gun out but it would not be long before they did.
They were overtaking the Beller, and the policemen were dropping behind. He was breathing too
hard, though.
Whatever his condition, the Beller's was worse. He was slowing down fast. This meant that very
shortly he would turn again, and Kickaha had better be nimble. In a few seconds, he would have the
Beller within range of the beamer, and he would take both legs off. And that would be the end of
possibly the greatest peril to man, other than man himself, of course.
The Beller ran up concrete steps in a spurt of frantic energy and onto the street above. Kickaha
slowed down and stopped before ascending the last few steps. He expected the Beller to be waiting for
his head to appear. Anana came up behind him then. Between deep gasps, she said, "Where is he?"
"If I knew, I wouldn't be standing here," he said.
He turned and left the steps to run crouching across the steep slope of the hill. When he was about
forty feet away from the steps, he got down on his belly and crawled up to the top of the slope. The
Beller would be wondering what he was doing. If he were intelligent, he would know that Kickaha wasn't
going to charge up and over the steps. He'd be looking on both sides of the steps for his enemy to pop
up. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]