II
Drifting slowly on the thread of his spinneret, Rufus Sollenar came gliding down the wind above Cortwright Burr’s building.
The building, like a spider, touched the ground at only the points of its legs. It held its wide, low bulk spread like a parasol over several downtown blocks. Sollenar, manipulating the helium-filled plastic drifter far above him, steered himself with jets of compressed gas from plastic bottles in the drifter’s structure.
Only Sollenar himself, in all this system, was not effectively transparent to the municipal anti-plane radar. And he himself was wrapped in long, fluttering streamers of dull black, metallic sheeting. To the eye, he was amorphous and non-reflective. To electronic sensors, he was a drift of static much like a sheet of foil picked by the wind from some careless trash heap. To all of the senses of all interested parties he was hardly there at all—and, thus, in an excellent position for murder.
He fluttered against Burr’s window. There was the man, crouched over his desk. What was that in his hands—a pomander?
Sollenar clipped his harness to the edges of the cornice. Swayed out against it, his sponge-soled boots pressed to the glass, he touched his left hand to the window and described a circle. He pushed; there was a thud on the carpeting in Burr’s office, and now there was no barrier to Sollenar. Doubling his knees against his chest, he catapulted forward, the riot pistol in his right hand. He stumbled and fell to his knees, but the gun was up.
Burr jolted up behind his desk. The little sphere of orange-gold metal, streaked with darker bronze, its surface vermicular with encrustations, was still in his hands. “Him!” Burr cried out as Sollenar fired.
Gasping, Sollenar watched the charge strike Burr. It threw his torso backward faster than his limbs and head could follow without dangling. The choked-down pistol was nearly silent. Burr crashed backward to end, transfixed, against the wall.
Pale and sick, Sollenar moved to take the golden ball. He wondered where Shakespeare could have seen an example such as this, to know an old man could have so much blood in him.
Burr held the prize out to him. Staring with eyes distended by hydrostatic pressure, his clothing raddled and his torso grinding its broken bones, Burr stalked away from the wall and moved as if to embrace Sollenar. It was queer, but he was not dead.
Shuddering, Sollenar fired again.
Again Burr was thrown back. The ball spun from his splayed fingers as he once more marked the wall with his body.
Pomander, orange, whatever—it looked valuable.
Sollenar ran after the rolling ball. And Burr moved to intercept him, nearly faceless, hunched under a great invisible weight that slowly yielded as his back groaned.
Sollenar took a single backward step.
Burr took a step toward him. The golden ball lay in a far corner. Sollenar raised the pistol despairingly and fired again. Burr tripped backward on tiptoe, his arms like windmills, and fell atop the prize.
Tears ran down Sollenar’s cheeks. He pushed one foot forward … and Burr, in his corner, lifted his head and began to gather his body for the effort of rising.
Sollenar retreated to the window, the pistol sledging backward against his wrist and elbow as he fired the remaining shots in the magazine.
Panting, he climbed up into the window frame and clipped the harness to his body, craning to look over his shoulder … as Burr—shredded; leaking blood and worse than blood—advanced across the office.
He cast off his holds on the window frame and clumsily worked the drifter controls. Far above him, volatile ballast spilled out and dispersed in the air long before it touched ground. Sollenar rose, sobbing—
And Burr stood in the window, his shattered hands on the edges of the cut circle, raising his distended eyes steadily to watch Sollenar in flight across the enigmatic sky.
Where he landed, on the roof of a building in his possession, Sollenar had a disposal unit for his gun and his other trappings. He deferred for a time the question of why Burr had failed at once to die. Empty-handed, he returned uptown.
He entered his office, called and told his attorneys the exact times of departure and return and knew the question of dealing with municipal authorities was thereby resolved. That was simple enough, with no witnesses to complicate the matter. He began to wish he hadn’t been so irresolute as to leave Burr without the thing he was after. Surely, if the pistol hadn’t killed the man—an old man, with thin limbs and spotted skin—he could have wrestled that thin-limbed, bloody old man aside—that spotted old man—and dragged himself and his prize back to the window, for all that the old man would have clung to him, and clutched at his legs, and fumbled for a handhold on his somber disguise of wrappings—that broken, immortal old man.
Sollenar raised his hand. The great window to the city grew opaque.
Bess Allardyce knocked softly on the door from the terrace. He would have thought she’d returned to her own apartments many hours ago. Tortuously pleased, he opened the door and smiled at her, feeling the dried tears crack on the skin of his cheeks.
He took her proffered hands. “You waited for me,” he sighed. “A long time for anyone as beautiful as you to wait.”
She smiled back at him. “Let’s go out and look at the stars.”
“Isn’t it chilly?”
“I made spiced hot cider for us. We can sip it and think.”
He let her draw him out onto the terrace. He leaned on the parapet, his arm around her pulsing waist, his cape drawn around both their shoulders.
“Bess, I won’t ask if you’d stay with me no matter what the circumstances. But it might be a time will come when I couldn’t bear to live in this city. What about that?”
“I don’t know,” she answered honestly.
And Cortwright Burr put his hand up over the edge of the parapet, between them.
Sollenar stared down at the straining knuckles, holding the entire weight of the man dangling against the sheer face of the building. There was a sliding, rustling noise, and the other hand came up, searched blindly for a hold and found it, hooked over the stone. The fingers tensed and rose, their tips flattening at the pressure as Burr tried to pull his head and shoulders up to the level of the parapet.
Bess breathed: “Oh, look at them! He must have torn them terribly climbing up!” Then she pulled away from Sollenar and stood staring at him, her hand to her mouth. “But he couldn’t have climbed! We’re so high!”
Sollenar beat at the hands with the heels of his palms, using the direct, trained blows he had learned at his athletic club.
Bone splintered against the stone. When the knuckles were broken the hands instantaneously disappeared, leaving only streaks behind them. Sollenar looked over the parapet. A bundle shrank from sight, silhouetted against the lights of the pedestrian level and the Avenue. It contracted to a pinpoint. Then, when it reached the brook and water flew in all directions, it disappeared in a final sunburst, endowed with glory by the many lights which found momentary reflection down there.
“Bess, leave me! Leave me, please!” Rufus Sollenar cried out.