Part 6 (2/2)

The general promptly shot twice more.

Then he paused to think.

One glance told him his instinctive action had been correct. The man in the center had been Pietro Musto, carrying a carving knife. The other two ... yes, they had been in the group that had arrived this afternoon.

But what was wrong? He had watched these men being conditioned....

A burst from a submachine gun echoed through the open door.

First thought: _They've got the armory!_

Second thought: _This is no place for me!_

He picked up his desk chair and smashed the picture window looking out over the moat on the west side. Then he smashed with the chair again to remove the fragments that stuck up like jagged knives.

A quick leap over the sill into the darkness, a twenty-foot sprint, and he was able to throw himself down on the steep slope that five feet farther on became the moat.

Just in time, he discovered. When he peered through the spa.r.s.e gra.s.s, he could see two men in his office. One had a shotgun, the other a rifle. The man with the rifle lifted it to his shoulder and fired into the ceiling.

Most of the staff, all but six of the guards up there, Bennington thought.

Resting his right hand against his left arm, he took careful aim and fired. The man with the rifle staggered and fell. The one with the shotgun dropped completely out of sight.

Bennington heard someone shouting hoa.r.s.ely about the lights.

The first floor blacked out.

He took a deep breath, held it, slowly released it. Then he was able to think.

How this had started was for the moment unimportant. First came the problem of regaining control.

To regain control, he needed help. To get help he had to reach the nearest visiphone.

Gla.s.s tinkled to his right. Almost too late Bennington remembered how his white hair could reflect the lights from the second-story windows.

He rolled rapidly to his left and a little more down the slope.

The dew-wet gra.s.s chilled his face and hands. His long legs felt the water of the moat creep up past his knees.

A semiautomatic rifle with carefully timed shots searched the area where he had been. ”Good man,” he noted professionally and replied with a pistol shot. He rolled again back to where he had been, but still further down the slope.

The rifle spoke copper-coated syllables once more, with a sequence of shots that started where he had fired from. But this time the sequence hunted further to both right and left.

This could go on all night.

He _had_ to get to a visiphone. Yet he couldn't leave here. The moment he did, the convicts has a wide-open road to freedom.

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