Free If I Were You by L. Ron Hubbard Page B

O’Brien scuttled out with his thermos bottle. He scurried through the darkness. The first cop did not even see him. The other persons who saw him did not have a chance to investigate, and assumed that they had suffered a brief illusion. In a few minutes he had dodged around the crowd to the front doors of the building. A fireman saw him coming, but watched him, popeyed, without trying to stop him as he raced through the front door. He kept on through the green-walled corridors until he found a stairway, and started up.
    After one flight, he regretted this attempt. The treads were waist-high, and he was getting too tired to leap them, especially with his arms full of thermos bottle. He bounced around to the elevators. The night elevators were working, but the button was far above his reach.
    He sat down, panting, for a while. Then he got up and wearily climbed down the whole flight of steps again. He found the night elevator on the ground floor, with the door open.
    There was nothing to do but walk in, for all the risks of delay and exposure to Guanella’s friends that such a course involved. The operator did not notice his entrance, and when he spoke the man jumped a foot.
    “Say,” he said, “could you take me up to the floor where the giant’s head is?”
    The operator looked wildly around the cab. When he saw O’Brien he recoiled as from an angry rattlesnake.
    “Well, now,” said O’Brien, “you don’t have to be scared of me. I just want to go up to give the big guy his medicine.”
    “You can go up, or you can go back to hell where you came from,” said the operator. “I’m off the stuff for life, I swear!” and then he bolted.
    O’Brien wondered what to do now. Then he looked over the controls. He swarmed up onto the operator’s stool, and found that he could just reach the button marked “18” with his thermos bottle. He thumped the button and pulled down on the starter handle. The elevator started up with a rush.
    When it stopped, he went out and wandered around the half-lit corridors looking for the side to which McLeod clung. He was completely turned around by now. But his attention was drawn by a rushing, roaring, pulsating sound coming from one corridor. He trotted down that way.
    It was all very well to be able to move more actively than you could ordinarily, but O’Brien was beginning to get tired of the enormous distances he had to cover. And the thermos bottle was beginning to weigh tons.
    Euclid O’Brien soon found what was causing the racket. It was the tornado of breath going in and out of McLeod’s nose, a part of which could be seen directly in front of the window at the end of the corridor. The nose was a really alarming spectacle. It was lit up with a crisscross of lights from the street lamps and searchlights outside, and by the corridor lights inside. The pores were big enough for O’Brien to stick his thumb into. Sweat ran down it in rippling sheets.
    He took a deep breath and jumped from the floor to the windowsill. He could not possibly open the window. But he took a tight grip on the thermos bottle and banged it against the glass. The glass broke.
    O’Brien set the thermos bottle down on the sill, put his hands to his mouth, and yelled, “Hey, Mac!”
    Nothing happened. Then O’Brien thought about his voice. He remembered that Guanella’s had gone up in pitch when Guanella had drunk the shrinko. No doubt his, O’Brien’s, voice had done likewise. But his voice sounded normal to him, whereas those of ordinary-sized men sounded much deeper. So it followed that something had happened to his hearing as well. Which, for O’Brien, was pretty good thinking.
    It was reasonable to infer that both McLeod’s voice and McLeod’s hearing had gone down in pitch when McLeod had gone up in stature. So that to McLeod, O’Brien’s voice would be a batlike squeak, if indeed he could hear it at all.
    O’Brien lowered his voice as much as he could and bellowed, in his equivalent of