Part 8 (1/2)

Houston finished his coffee, dropped a coin on the counter, and headed for the other side of the street.

The big problem was getting into the building itself. It was ringed with alarms; La.s.ser & Sons didn't want just anybody wandering in and out of their building.

So Houston had arranged a roundabout way. The building next to the La.s.ser Building was a good deal smaller, only forty-five stories high. A week before, Houston had rented an office on the eighteenth floor of the building; on the door, he had already had a sign engraved: Ajax Enterprises.

It was a shame the office would never be used.

Houston walked straight to the next-door building and opened the front door with his key. Inside, a night watchman lounged behind a desk, smoking a blackened briar. He looked up, smiled, and nodded.

”Evening, Mr. Griswold; working late tonight?”

Houston forced a smile he did not feel. ”Just doing a little paper work,” he said.

He took the automatic elevator to the eighteenth floor. He didn't relish the idea of walking up to the roof, but taking the elevator would make the night.w.a.tchman suspicious.

He didn't bother going to the office; he headed directly for the stairway and began his long climb--twenty-seven floors to the roof.

All through it, he kept up a running comment through his throat mike. ”I wish I weighed about fifty pounds less; carrying two hundred and twenty pounds of blubber up these stairs isn't easy.”

”Blubber, hooey!” the earphone interrupted. ”Any man who's six-feet-three has a right to carry that much weight. Actually, you're a skinny-looking sort of goop.”

Both men were exaggerating; Houston wasn't fat, but his broad, powerful frame couldn't be called skinny, either.

When he finally reached the roof, he paused and surveyed the wall of the La.s.ser Building, which towered high above him, spearing an additional thirty stories in the air. Up there, the lights on the sixtieth floor gleamed in the night.

The air was growing cooler, and the beginnings of a mist were forming.

Houston hoped it wouldn't start to rain before he got inside.

The forty-sixth floor of the La.s.ser Building had no windows on this side, but there were plenty on the forty-seventh.

Leading up to them was an inviting looking fire escape, but Houston knew he didn't dare take that. By law, every fire escape was rigged with a fire alarm, in addition to the regular burglar alarm. He'd have to use another way.

The La.s.ser Building was a steel structure, sh.e.l.led over with a bright blue anodized aluminum sheath. Only the day before, Houston, wearing the gray coverall of a power-line workman, had checked the wall to find the big steel beams beneath the aluminum. He had also installed certain other equipment; now he was going to make use of it.

Concealed in the louvres of the air-conditioner intake of the lower building was a specially constructed suit and several hundred feet of power line which was connected to the main line of the building.

In the darkness, Houston slipped on the suit. It was constructed somewhat like a light diving suit or a s.p.a.cesuit, but without the helmet. In the toes, knees, and hands, were powerful electromagnets controlled by switches in the fingers of the gloves and powered by the current in the long line.

Houston stepped over to the blue aluminum wall, reached out a hand, and lowered one finger. Instantly, the powerful magnet anch.o.r.ed his hand to the wall, held by the dense magnetic field to the steel beam beneath the aluminum sheath. That one magnet alone could support his full body weight, and he had six magnets to work with.

Slowly, carefully, David Houston began to crawl up the wall.

Turn on a magnet in the right hand; lift up the left hand and anchor it higher; turn on the right hand and lift it even with the left, then anchor it again; do the same with both legs; then begin the process all over again, turning the magnets off and on in rotation.

Up and up he went. Past the forty-sixth floor, past the forty-seventh, the forty-eighth, and the forty-ninth. Not until he reached the fiftieth floor did he attempt to open one of the windows.