Free The World's End Affair by Robert Hart Davis

up and down the rear wall of the cage as the doors banged shut.
     
    Panting, Solo leaned against the side of the elevator. His heart thudded hard in his chest. The elevator rose steadily, humming. Solo worried that THRUSH would cut off the power and trap him inside. But evidently his break had thrown the base into confusion. Sirens still wailed tinnily through speakers in the elevator's ceiling. But the sensation of upward movement did not stop.
     
    Solo tried to organize his thoughts. He had no weapons left. He had to find one, so that he would be armed when he got aboard the plane - if he got aboard.
     
    The elevator stopped. The doors rolled back and sinister sundown light flooded in. Dead ahead Solo saw the turbo-jet on the concrete ready line.
     
    A controller stood on the tarmac near the black-painted nose, wigwagging with lighted batons. The main door of the fuselage was open. The elephantine General Weng was struggling up a baggage ramp with his suitcase and steamer trunk. The turbo-jet's engines screamed at full rev. Weng's suit flapped like laundry in the prop wash.
     
    All this registered on Solo in an instant. So did the two THRUSH soldiers turning to charge him, bayonets fixed.
     
    Solo sidestepped at the last second. He kicked the soldier nearest him in the backside. The man hit his head on the black concrete wall of the building. Solo seized the man's rifle, spun around and thought of Illya and rammed the bayonet to its hilt in the stomach of the THRUSH soldier still on his feet.
     
    The man wasn't on his feet for long. Solo wrenched the bayonet free. He knocked it off its mount and left it behind, checking the rifle mechanism as he ran toward the aircraft.
     
    The controller with the lighted batons threw them aside. He jerked out a pistol. He began firing as Solo's weird, flapping figure came charging out of the weird reddish gloom.
     
    Up the baggage ramp Solo went, two steps at a time. Just before he jumped inside he heard the controller shout something to the plane's pilot.
     
    The fuselage door closed and locked automatically. Solo blinked in the gloom of the lavishly appointed cabin. The cockpit door remained closed. There was an odd aroma in the air, coming through tiny ceiling ventilators as the plane began to roll.
     
    On the carpeted floor General Weng lay spread-eagled, unconscious. Solo took a step toward the obese man. The smell from the ceiling ventilators increased. Solo recognized it.
     
    He raised the rifle to try one shot at the steamer trunk. His hands were putty. He could not hold the rifle.
     
    He cursed the THRUSH pilot who had decided on his own authority to incapacitate General Weng in order to incapacitate Solo also. He cursed the THRUSH technologists who had dreamed up the idea of pumping ether through the air system into the plane's cabin. He cursed most of all his own miserable failure, as everything around him took on the blurred motion of a camera in the flash pan.
     
    Slowly Solo spiraled to the floor. With a scream of turbo-jets, the THRUSH aircraft lifted in the red sunset toward the high Himalayan peaks.
     
     
    Two
     
     
    You are a very brave girl," said Illya Kuryakin to the pale-cheeked Mei.
     
    "The worst shock has passed," she replied. "My honorable father was advanced in years. His ancestors will make him welcome. And the blow which the THRUSH soldier gave him with the butt of his rifle –"
     
    Mei's lovely face wrenched. "The blow was quick. I pray he felt little pain."
     
    Illya's wrists were already tingling. "How about you? Does it hurt?"
     
    "Not too much."
     
    "Good. Because I am afraid it will get worse."
     
    "You are a very brave person yourself, Mr. Kuryakin."
     
    Manacles had been placed around his wrists. These had been hooked to a chain which hung from the center of the ceiling of a large room. The room was shaped like the interior of a chicken's egg, point downward. Its walls were gray. The lighting was medicinally bright, but