Chapter 12

"You really believe that _Bodger_ is involved in the anti-Hive movement?" Lennick said dubiously. "It doesn't make sense, Frank! Why should the Secondary--"

"All I know," Frank said determinedly, "is that Stanton was shaken by the news of young Bodger and Andra. It puts me right back on Andra's team, all at once. If Stanton was in the dark, then it's very doubtful that Andra's done anything to betray the movement; the greater likelihood is that she's pulled Junior _our_ way."

Lennick frowned doubtfully. "Andra's an attractive girl, Frank, but--"

"Everybody isn't pulled into the movement like you were, Bob. Sex appeal has its uses, but there's also a thing known as intelligence. Bodger and his son are no dopes. If she convinced them--"

"Why _should_ she!?" Lennick said angrily. "Have to convince _them_, I mean! Didn't they, of all people, _know_?"

Frank stood there with his mouth open, blinking. Then he sat down and stared at the producer, dazed. "I must be getting soft-headed," he murmured after a short hiatus. "Of course they must know.... Still--?" He looked helplessly to Lennick for assistance.

"I know; it doesn't make sense," Lennick nodded. "The only thing to be done is to _find_ Andra, I guess, and ask her the answers. Conjecture is only taking us in circles."

Frank spoke tautly, his pent-up frustration making his words strained and painful. "Excepting that, as long as Andra's in Grace Horton's sector, we can't go after her. That's not one of the permitted areas on my Voteplate. I'd hate to be caught loitering in that area when the Goons show up for Andra. When they make an arrest, they check on everybody. If only this had occurred later, today, near Ultrablack--"

"Why do you keep stressing Ultrablack?" Lennick asked. "I still haven't even figured out why I was to meet you here tonight just before it was turned on. We'd really be helpless then."

"Bob," Frank said gently, "this is nothing personal, but--Well, when the movement gets a new member, we don't just lay out all our schemes on a red carpet for him. There's a trial period for all new members. You've been on probation for a couple of months, now. The less you know of our plans, our memberships, the less you could spill if you were a plant."

Lennick grinned wryly and shook his head. "I know. That was a real bone of contention between Andra and myself when we'd been engaged nearly six weeks. A wife can't keep secret meetings from her husband very well; he may suspect her outings are something even worse. When I finally pressed her about broken dates, and times she couldn't be reached, and she told me about the movement, I was pretty miffed she didn't trust me with all she knew."

"She couldn't, Bob, you know that. The information wasn't hers to give out, without permission of the rest of us. We could not put our necks in a noose because Andra adores your big brown eyes."

"I'm surprised you're still speaking to me, after yesterday," Lennick said with chagrin.

"Bob, you did what any of us could have done: Nothing. One man can't fight off a Goon Squad. We would have lost _two_ members, instead of just Andra, if you'd put up a fuss."

"But about Ultrablack," Bob said, frowning. "I know you people have meetings after Light-of-Day goes off. _How_ you do it is beyond me, with the streets alive with Goons, and darkness everywhere, even indoors."

* * * * *

"If there were a chance of rescuing Andra when tonight's Ultrablack came on, I'd tell you, Bob," Frank said sincerely. "It'd give you the chance you didn't have yesterday to do something for her. I think you can be trusted. I trusted you enough, just now, to tell you about the tapped phone."

"You had to," Lennick said with a shrug. "Or else I'd be leery about believing you knew so much about Stanton's private call."

"We set that up ever since Stanton started appearing in our Hive-located scripts. He's always so busy, keeping in touch with his office between takes, that we've kept one jump ahead of the Goons, on occasion. It must drive him nuts, wondering about the raids that never came off."

* * * * *

Lennick got to his feet. "I wish we didn't have to just _sit_ here this way! At this very moment, Andra may be still uncaptured. If she could be warned--"

"She could, if top-level privilege didn't entitle young Bodger's fiancee to an unlisted number. You can go up there if you want, but--I know too much about the movement to risk it. If you're caught, it's unimportant--insofar as the sum of your knowledge, I mean. But I don't dare let myself be taken."

Frank paused, and cocked his head, listening. Lennick, seeing him, did the same. A keening wail penetrated into the depths of the office. "Sirens!" Frank said. "It means there'll be an emergency Ultrablack in fifteen minutes. Or even less, if we did not hear them from the very beginning...."

"You think it has to do with Andra?" asked Lennick.

"No telling," said Frank. "And no telling how long this Ultrablack is for. At normal Ultrablack, I can count on a definite number of hours, but--" He hesitated, then clapped Lennick on the shoulder and said, "Come on, Bob! This may be the chance we were looking for!"

The producer followed him, bewildered, out of the office and down the corridor toward the set. Just inside the set, where the siren-alerted crew members were grabbing their gear together in preparation for swift flight, Frank pulled Bob aside and led him to a door flanking the corridor entrance. "This way," he said, shoving the other man inside and following.

"To the prop room?" Lennick said wonderingly, his mind a pastiche of envisioned secret panels, inter-level tunnels and the like. Frank kept moving down the short hall without replying, so Lennick could only tag impatiently after him, his curiosity at its ultimate. Then they were in the high, barn-like gloom of the prop room, a fantastic collage of canvas backdrops, teeter-piled furniture, swords, pistols, fake-currency stacks, ropes, saddles, bows, arrows, and other oddments of the trade.

* * * * *

Lennick found his bewilderment growing as Frank pushed aside a stack of dusty chairs and then slid aside a tall desert-sky backdrop on oiled rollers. For a horrible instant, Lennick recoiled, his flesh going icy with unthinking fright. Then he relaxed and gave a shiver of relief. "Damn those things!" he grunted. "I forgot we had them stored back here...." Then he looked up and met Frank's gaze, and comprehension dawned on him. "You mean--_Them?!_"

"There's a panel in the back, where the operator can slide in to run the controls," Frank said. "It'll hold two, if you don't mind crowding."

"Good grief!" Lennick gasped. "I should have guessed!"

"Never mind the self-recriminations," Frank said. "Help me roll this thing out so we can get inside it."

Lennick nodded, and took hold of the jointed metal arm on one side, as Frank did the same on the other. Together, they wheeled the massive torso of the prop-Goon toward the center of the room. As Frank located and opened the neatly disguised panel, Lennick shook his head in doubt.

"There's no force-field, Frank," he said uneasily, "and once Ultrablack sets in--"

"Unlatch the door to the street," Frank said testily, "and stop asking so many questions." As Lennick hurried to comply, Frank added, with less irritation, "The absent force-field's the _reason_ we use Goons only after Ultrablack. A Goon won't notice the difference, since it only determines identities by shape, but a Kinsman would, instantly, as you just did. There are no Kinsmen out after Ultrablack, so that's the safe time for us. As for your other worry, about how we'll _see_ after Ultrablack, Ultrablack is only the jamming of the visible spectrum by the radiation of inverted light; the compression and rarefaction phases of the light waves are plugged, dovetailed into, by the opposing phases of inverted light. Goons," he said, depressing a switch beside a small cathode-screen inside the hollow body, "see by cutting off the sensitivity of their lenses to light or inverted light, it doesn't matter which. Then the Hive is bright as day-light to them."

Lennick clambered up beside him and helped Frank dog the metal panel shut. Side by side, hunched over the pale blue glow of the screen, they watched the interior of the prop room through the lens-eyes of their grotesque conveyance. When the sirens halted, Ultrablack swept the room from their ken like a velvet curtain. Then Frank turned a dial, and the room reappeared on the screen, like a negative image, with white for black, and vice-versa.

"Now we can go," Frank said, releasing a brake. The prop-Goon began to roll ponderously toward the door to the street, carrying its two perspiring conspirators. "I only wish," Frank said tensely, guiding their movement out into the Kinsmen-deserted street of the sector, "that this thing had Snapper-Beams, too. But I guess an underground movement can't have everything."