Fear is the Key

"Like it, Royale?" I said hoarsely. "Can't you fed your throat, your lungs starting to hurt? I can feel mine — and I can see your face starting to turn blue. Not much, yet, just starting under the eyes. The eyes and the nose, they always show up first." I thrust my hand into my display pocket, brought out a little rectangle of polished chrome. "A mirror,, Royale. Don't you want to look in it? Don't you want to see-?"

"Damn you to hell, Talbot!" He knocked the mirror flying out of my hand, his voice was half-way between a sob and a scream. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

"But your victims did, didn't they, Royale?" I could no longer speak intelligibly, it took me four or five breaths to pant out that one sentence. "They all had their minds bent on suicide and you just helped them out of the depths of the kindness of your heart. Isn't that it, Royale?"

"You're going to die, Talbot." His voice was a frenzied croak, the shaking gun was lined up on my heart. "It's coming to you now."

"I'm laughing. I'm laughing out loud. I've got a cyanide tablet between my teeth." My chest was hurting, the inside of the observation chamber was beginning to swim before my eyes. I knew I couldn't last out much longer. "Go ahead," I gasped. "Go ahead and pull the trigger."

He looked at me with crazy unfocused eyes that had hardly any contact left with reality and fumbled the little black gun back into its holster. The beating he'd taken over his head was now beginning to take its toll, he was in even worse state than I was. He began to sway in his seat, and suddenly fell forward on to his hands and knees, shaking his head from side to side as if to clear away a fog. I leaned across him, barely conscious myself, closed my fingers over the control knob of the cartoon dioxide absorption unit and turned it from minimum all the way up to maximum. It would take two minutes, perhaps three, before there would be any noticeable improvement, maybe the best part of ten minutes before the atmosphere inside that chamber was anything like back to normal. Right then, it made no difference at all. I bent over Royale.

"You're dying, Royale," I gasped out. "How does it feel to die, Royale? Tell me, please, how does it fed? How does it feel to be buried in a tomb five hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea? How does it feel to know that you'll never breathe that wonderful, clean, fresh air of the world above again? How does it feel to know that you'll never see the sun again? How does it feel to die? Tell me, Royale, how does it feel?" I bent still closer to him. "Tell me, Royale, how would you like to live?"

He didn't get it, he was that far gone.

"How would you like to live, Royale?" I almost had to shout the words.

"I want to live." His voice was a harsh moan of pain, his clenched right fist was beating weakly on the deck of the chamber. "Oh, God, I want to live."

"Maybe I can give you life yet. Maybe. You're down on your hands and knees, aren't you, Royale? You're begging for your life, aren't you, Royale? I've sworn I'd see the day when you were on your hands and knees begging for your life and now you're doing just that, aren't you, Royale?"

"Damn you, Talbot!" His voice was a hoarse, despairing, agonised shout, he was swaying on his hands and knees now, his head turning from side to side, his eyes screwed shut. Down there on the floor the air must have been foul and contaminated to a degree, almost completely without oxygen, and his face was really beginning to show the first tinges of blue. He was breathing with the rapidity of a panting dog, each brief indrawn breath a whoop of agony. "Get me out of here! For God's sake get me out of here."

"You're not dead yet, Royale," I said in his ear. "Maybe you will see the sun again. But maybe you won't. I lied to Vyland, Royale. The master switch for the ballast release is still in position — I just altered a couple of wires, that's all. It would take you hours to find out which two. I could fix it in thirty seconds."

He stopped swaying his head, looked up at me with a blue-tinged sweat-sheened face, with bloodshot fear-darkened eyes that carried far back in them the faintest flicker of hope. "Get me out of here, Talbot," he whispered. He didn't know whether there was any hope or whether this was just a further refinement of torture.

"I could do it, Royale, couldn't I? See, I've got the screwdriver right here." I showed it to him, smiled down without any compassion. "But I've still got this cyanide tablet in my mouth, Royale." I showed him the button, gripped between my teeth.

"Don't!" A hoarse cry. "Don't bite on that! You're mad, Talbot, mad. God, you're not human." Coming from Royale, that was good.

"Who killed Jablonsky?" I asked quietly. It was becoming easier to breathe now, but not down where Royale was.

"I did. I killed him," Royale moaned.

"How?"

"I shot him. Through the head. He was asleep."

"And then?"