The Octagon loomed up like a mountain before me, the sky beginning to lighten behind it. We had cut this very close. There was an entrance ahead, the one I had been directed to, and two of the gray men were waiting. Both wore gausspistols which were still in the holsters. They were very sure of themselves. I walked up to them silently and one of them clamped a come-along cuff on my wrist and led me in through the doors and past the silent guards. I stumbled going up the stairs and after that looked down carefully to see where I put my feet. The injection was beginning to take effect. There was nothing I wanted to say and my captors, they in their usual fashion, had nothing to say to me. They prodded me in the direction they wanted me to go and pushed me through the doorway of the room they wanted me to enter. Once inside they covered me with their guns while the wrist-cuff was unlocked.

“Clothes off,” one of them ordered.

It was an effort not to smile. There was the fluoroscope off to one side and the other test equipment. These characters were running true to type, following the same routine they had used when I had first been captured. Didn’t they realize that routine was a trap and a losing game? No they did not. I fumbled off my clothes and let them work their will upon me.

They found nothing of course, since there was nothing there to find. Or rather there was one thing that I was sure they would not find. And they didn’t. They slowly plodded through their routine examinations and I began to wish they would finish and be done. My head was getting a little foggy from the drug and I felt as though I were wrapped in cotton wool. The injection must be reaching the peak of its effectiveness and would be tapering off soon. What I had to do must be done when the drug was at the height of its power—or close to it—or all the preparations would be useless.

“Put these on,” a wooden faced captor said and threw me the familiar transparent dungarees. I bent to pick them up and to cover the smile that I could no longer resist. Done it! They did not seem impatient when I fumbled with the closings on the clothes. I had to watch my fingers carefully to be sure they did their job. When the collar locked around my neck I almost heaved a sigh of relief. We were getting close, and the timing was just about perfect. As one of the guards took the torture box and led me out I lowered my head so I could see where I put my feet so I would not stumble. If this generated an illusion of defeat all the better. We went down a wide corridor and past a staircase, and I made a mental note of its location, even counting the paces after it to get some estimate of its distance from our destination.

Which was Kraj’s lair. He was waiting behind his desk, as patiently and as emotionlessly as a spider in its web. Angelina sat before him, her torture box hooked to the ceiling.

“Are you all right?” I asked as I came through the door.

“Of course. Nothing has happened. You shouldn’t have come.”

As soon as I had this reassurance I turned my attention to Kraj, aware at the same time of the guard closing the door behind us.

“You’ll release her now, won’t you?” I asked.

“Naturally not. There would be no advantage in that.” His expression never changed while he spoke.

“I didn’t think you would. Is there any reason why you shouldn’t tell me how you caught her?”

“Your memory contained an exact description of your wife. When we discovered that two women had aided your escape we naturally assumed that one might have been this Angelina. The computer identified her as soon as she entered the building.”

“We were foolish to take the risk,” I said, apparently turning to face her, but looking at the guard instead. He was about to hook my torture box to another hook in the ceiling—and if he did we were trapped.

All I could do was make a dive for him.

“Stop him!” Kraj shouted and the guard looked at me and pressed a quick pattern on the red keys on the box.

I can’t pretend that it felt nice. Enough pain leaked through to tear at my stomach with nausea and to knot my muscles. I stumbled and fell at the man’s feet, not quite reaching him. The drug I had taken blocked most of the pain, but not all of it. There still had to be nerve pathways open for motor control. My eyes filled with tears and I could not wipe them so my vision blurred and swam. There was a shoe before me and that was no good, and a uniform leg, bad as well.

And then the guard’s hand as he bent over to take hold of me. I lashed out with my extended middle finger and scratched the skin on the back of his hand.

He shivered just a bit and kept on bending, almost in slow motion, until he crumpled on the floor next to me, dropping the control box. It was just close enough to reach out and tap the off button.

The pain was over, instantly. And Kraj was behind my back. I scrambled and rolled, fighting my knotted muscles, climbing to my feet.

In the few moments since I had attacked the guard the situation had changed drastically. Angelina lay across Kraj’s desk, holding to her collar, writhing in pain. Kraj was on his knees behind the desk reaching for his gun. I dived for him just as he raised it. I was not going to make it, I was too late, he was going to fire and that was that.

But at precisely that moment the distant explosion went off and the floor heaved, dust and bits of plastic shook down from the ceiling and the lights flickered. Kraj had not been expecting this—and I had—and his attention wavered for that vital instant as I slithered across the desk towards him and my fingernail nicked his skin.

He fired, but the slug plowed into the far wall because he was falling, unconscious even as he pulled the trigger.

Angelina must have attacked him as soon as I had dived for the guard. By hanging from the cable she had brought her feet up high enough to get in the one good kick that had sent Kraj over. He had retaliated by going to the radio control before his gun—and this little bit of excess sadism had given me the chance to reach him. But Angelina was paying for this now.

I could not look at her twisting body as I climbed up on the desk beside her. There were a number of controls before Kraj’s chair but I was not going to take the time to try to figure them out. Instead I unhooked the box and turned it off. Angelina opened her eyes and lay still, just staring at me as I went through the drawers in the desk.

“Darling you are a genius,” she said weakly. I found a key and bent to unlock her collar. “How did you do it?”

“I out-thought them, that’s all. They couldn’t find any weapons in my clothing because the clothing itself was the weapon. The fabric was soaked in tanturaline which transformed it into a powerful explosive. I put the liquid catalyst on the cloth under my arms where my body heat would keep it from reacting. As long as I was in the uniform nothing happened, but as soon as they made me strip it off—as I was sure they would—the catalyst began to cool and when it reached the critical temperature…”

“Boom the whole thing exploded. My genius.” She reached up and pulled me to her as the collar clicked open, and bestowed a warm and passionate kiss that I returned for a bit until I remembered where we were and disentangled gently. She sat up shakily and tried the key in my collar.

“And I suppose you have some wonderfully ingenious explanation of how you killed these fiends?”

“Not dead yet, just unconscious. I filed one fingernail to a point sharp enough to scratch skin, then punted it with callanite.” “Of course! Invisible to the eye and it would take a spectrometric test to find the tiny trace. But more than enough to render the scratchee instantly unconscious. What next?”

“A phone call to get the rest of the operation going in case that explosion wasn’t heard outside the building. But they have listening devices…”