with a sort of tender thoroughness, shorting this item, shorting that, giving this frantic emergency call, stating that baseless lie. When he went out of the kiosk he walked briskly toward an appointment he had made.
And presently the murmur of the city at night had new sounds added to it. They began as a faint, confused clamor at the edges of the city. The uproar moved central-ward and grew louder. There were clanging bells and sirens and beeper-horns warning all non-official vehicles to keep out of the way. On the raised-up expressway snorting metal monsters rushed with squealing excitement. On the fragrant lesser streets, smaller vehicles rushed with proportionately louder howlings. Police trucks poured out of their cubbyholes and plunged valiantly through the dark. Broadcast units signaled emergency and cut off the air to make the placid ether waves available to authority.
All these noises and all this tumult moved toward a single point. The outer parts of the city regained their former quiet. But in the mid-city area the noise of racing vehicles clamoring for right-of-way grew louder and louder. The sound was deafening as the vehicles converged on the large open square in front of the Interstellar Embassy. From every street and avenue fire-fighting equipment poured into that square. In between and behind, hooting loudly for precedence, were the police trucks. Emergency vehicles of all the civic bureaus appeared, all of them with immense conviction of their importance.
It was a very large, open square, that space before the embassy. From its edge, the monument to the first settlers in the center looked small. But even that vast plaza filled up with trucks of every imaginable variety, from the hose towers which could throw streams of water four hundred feet straight up, to the miniature trouble-wagons of Electricity Supply. Staff cars of fire and police and sanitary services crowded each other and bumped fenders with tree-surgeon trucks prepared to move fallen trees, and with public-address trucks ready to lend stentorian tones to any voice of authority.
But there was no situation except that there was no situation. There was no fire. There was no riot. There were not even stray dogs for the pound-wagons to pursue, nor broken water mains for the water department technicians to shut off and repair. There was nothing for anybody to do but ask everybody else what the hell they were doing there, and presently to swear at each other for cluttering up the way.
The din of arriving horns and sirens had stopped, and a mutter of profanity was developing, when a last vehicle arrived. It was an ambulance, an it came purposefully out of a side avenue and swung toward a particular place as if it knew exactly what it was about. When its way was blocked, it hooted impatiently for passage. Its lights blinked violently red, demanding clearance. A giant fire-fighting unit pulled aside. The ambulance ran past and hooted at a cluster of police trucks. They made way for it. It blared at a gathering of dismounted, irritated truck personnel. It made its way through them. It moved in a straight line for the gate of the Interstellar Embassy.
A hundred yards from that gate, its horn blatted irritably at the car of the acting head of municipal police. That car obediently made way for it.
The ambulance rolled briskly up to the very gate of the embassy. There it stopped. A figure got down from the driver’s seat and walked purposefully in the gate.
Thereafter nothing happened at all until a second figure rolled and toppled itself out on the ground from the seat beside the ambulance driver’s. That figure kicked and writhed on the ground. A policeman went to find out what was the matter.
It was the ambulance driver. Not the one who’d driven the ambulance to the embassy gate, but the one who should have. He was bound hand and foot and not too tightly gagged.
When released he swore vividly while panting that he had been captured and bound by somebody who said he was Bron Hoddan and was in a hurry to get back to the Interstellar Embassy.
There was no uproar. Those to whom Hoddan’s name had meaning were struck speechless with rage. The fury of the police was even too deep for tears.
But Bron Hoddan, back in the quarters assigned him in the embassy, unloaded a dozen cooled-off stun-pistols from his pockets and sent word to the Ambassador that he was back, and that the note ostensibly from Nedda had actually been a police trap.
Getting ready to retire, he reviewed his situation. In some respects it was not too bad. All but Nedda’s share in trying to trap him, and having a party the same night. He stared morosely at the wall. Then he saw, very simply, that she mightn’t have known even of his arrest. She lived a highly sheltered life. Her father could have had her kept in complete ignorance.
He cheered immediately. This would be his last night on Walden, if he were lucky. Already vague plans revolved in his mind. Yes…he’d achieve splendid things; he’d grow rich; he’d come back and marry that delightful girl, Nedda; and then end as a great man. Already, today, he’d done a number of things worth doing, and on the whole he’d done them well.
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