Free The Light-Kill Affair by Robert Hart Davis Page A

the restaurants, the Village, the subways, the sun on the United Nations complex early in the morning.
    He gritted his teeth, swearing to hold these thoughts, to shut out what was happening to him.
    The hot water washed it away.
    He'd long since lost count of how many times he had been placed inside the drum. He never escaped the lights except for the briefest moments. The ice water no longer felt cold. Now there was no difference between hot and cold.
    He'd trap a thought of some distant place, but the first whirling of the lights fragmented the thoughts; he was unable to hold on to them.
    The light intensified, and so did the pain.
    As the drum parted and the chair slid forward his wrist watch scratched his cheek.
    Frantically, he grabbed the watch band, jerked the watch from his wrist.
    The motor hummed, the short slide was almost over, the immobilizing lights would flash on. Or maybe they no longer bothered to magnetize him to the chair. Illya didn't know.
    His mind could contain only the thought of the watch. He smashed it in his palm on the arm of the chair.
    Trembling, he shook the broken shards of glass into his mouth, and dropped the watch.
    At this instant the water struck him. He chewed sharp pieces of glass, feeling it cut his gums, his tongue, the roof of his mouth. He chewed again. Blood oozed from his lips.
    Kuryakin could feel the temperature of the water. It was cold.
     
    FOUR
     
    SOLO PROWLED the small room which adjoined one of the thickly grown hothouses.
    Bikini slumped against one of the three solid walls. She cried for a long time, her dark head pressed into her arms.
    Solo stood at the fourth wall. It was thick green glass and afforded a view of the lushly growing cannibal plants out there.
    He shook his head. He had no way to break this glass, yet it was almost as if Nesbitt wished he would. It was as though they dared him and Bikini to attempt to escape across that tangled growth.
    He drew his arm across his forehead, wiping away perspiration. The cell was as hot as the hothouse beyond the glass, and more breathless.
    The door was thrust open and Solo looked in that direction.
    A guard stood at the opened door with a light-gun in his arms. Another entered the small hot room. He walked slowly, like a spring-wound toy that has run down.
    His face was set, his eyes vacant. He faltered slightly.
    Solo caught his breath. The man's face was battered, his hands cut. This was the man who had fought him at the canyon ledge, the one he'd left dangling over the precipice. He had hit him in the face with his shoe until the pain somehow got through to his consciousness.
    The guard looked at Napoleon Solo, shook his head in an almost imperceptible movement, then he turned and walked, still faltering, toward Bikini.
    Solo set himself to jump the guard if he harmed Bikini. He closed the armed sentry at the door from his mind. It might be the last thing he ever did for Bikini.
    But the guard merely drew a folded sheet of paper from his tunic.
    He held it out toward Bikini in a quivering hand.
    Solo caught his breath. He recognized the form, it was a 'a summons to death' like the one delivered to Bikini's father at the hotel in Big Belt.
    Bikini took it. She didn't even glance at it. She recognized it, too.
    The guard turned and stalked toward the door.
    Bikini jumped up. She ran to Solo and pressed herself against him, tears in her eyes. Solo closed his arms about her, comforting the miserable, frightened girl.
    The guard was barely at the door when Joe, Nesbitt's Indian assistant, brushed past the door sentry.
    He caught the guard by the shirt front and pushed him against the wall, as if forgetting Solo and Bikini in a sudden savage fury.
    Joe switched on a wall light, marched the guard to it, forced him to stare into its brilliance. The man gazed at the bulb, unblinking. His dry eyes did not even water.
    Joe spoke urgently but quietly to the man with the light fixed in his eyes. The Indian's voice was low,