Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 by Devil's Planet (v1.1) Read Free Book Online

disguise, and the police
guard who looked in was deceived for the moment.
                 “What
happened, did you say?”
                “Can’t you see?” Stover yelled in
feigned impatience. “He knocked me out and took my uniform. There’s his rig.”
He pointed with one stained hand at his own crumpled garments in a corner.
“While you stand there, he’s probably clear away.”
                 “Well,
come out of there,” the guard told him. “Wrap a blanket from the cot around
you. We’ve got to ,make a report, quick!”
                 Stover
wrapped himself up as directed, taking care to slump and so approximate the
lesser height of the jailor Dellis. Under the blanket he brought along his felt
and pouch. But he did not intend to appear before Congreve or other
too-observant officers. Reeling, he supported himself against the door-jamb.
                 “I
still feel shaky.”
                 “Here,
then.” Another guard had come up, and the first guard beckoned him. “Take
Dellis to the locker room while I report to the front office. That big society
lad, Stover, got away.” Leaning heavily on the newcomer’s arm, and half-swaddling his stained head and body in the blanket, Stover allowed
himself to be helped down another corridor and into a long room lined with
lockers. Against one wall was a cot, where he dropped with a moan.
                 “Hurt bad , Dellis?” asked the guard who had brought him.
                 “I
hope not,” sighed Stover. “Let me lie here for a
while.”
                 The
other left. As the door closed, Stover sprang up and to a lavatory. Scrubbing
violently, he cleansed hair and body of his messy disguise. Then he opened
locker after locker. Most of the clothes inside were too small, but he found a
drab civilian tunic in one, breeches in another, and boots in a third, all of
them fair fits. Thus properly clad, he donned his own pouch and girdle and went
to a window.
                 The
level of the cells was still high above the noise and glow of the canal levels.
A man less desperate might feel giddy, but Stover had no time for phobias. He
must be free to find and convict the true murderer of Malbrook. Only thus could
he hope to survive.
                 Quickly
he ripped the blanket into half a dozen strips. Knotting these into a rope, he
tied one end to a bracketlike fixture on the outer sill. A moment later he was
sliding down into the night.
                 The gravity of Mars being barely four-tenths that of Earth,
Stover’s huge body weighed no more than eighty pounds as it swung to the cord
of knotted blankets. Even so, he needed all of his nerve, strength and
agility for what he planned to do.
                 A
few seconds brought him to the end of his line, thirty feet below the
window-sill. There were no windows or other openings at that point, and no
projections on the smooth concrete wall, only a metal tube, barely an inch in diameter, that housed some slender power lines and ran
vertically beside him. Every fifty feet or so it was clamped
to the wall by a big staple. One such staple held it at the point where
Stover dangled.
                 He
looked in the other direction. Ten or twelve yards opposite was another building, with many lighted windows. Given a solid footing, he might
have tried to leap. As it was, he must bridge the gap otherwise. He hung to his
blanket-cord with one hand while he tugged and tore at the metal tubing. It was
none too tough, and broke just at the staple. A jerk parted the wires inside.
He tested the broken'tube. It was springy and gave some resistance, but would
it be enough? He could only try, with a prayer to all the gods of all the
planets.
                 GRASPING
the tube with both hands, he quitted his cord. There he hung for a moment, like
a beetle on a grass-stalk. Then the tube