Read Online The Fury Out of Time by Lloyd Biggle jr. - Free Book Online

back in was much more time-consuming.
    Ostrander caught up with them and helped Karvel into the car. “We’ll drop Mr. Haskins at the Officers’ Club,” Karvel told him. “Then I’d like to go back to the B.O.Q.”
    Ostrander folded the wheel chair, stowed it away in the trunk, and cheerfully took his place at the steering wheel. The ready and efficient way he’d assumed the role of personal nursemaid was irksome to Karvel. In some previous incarnation Ostrander had been a millionaire’s well-trained houseboy, and he had not lost the touch. When Haskins suggested that Karvel should have an assistant, he’d asked for Ostrander, thinking that the assistant was to help him on the U.O. project. It turned out that Haskins meant someone to assist him up and down stairs.
    Twenty minutes later Karvel was settled in his wheel chair in the small room he was occupying temporarily in the Bachelor Officers’ Quarters.
    “When do you want to eat?” Ostrander asked.
    “I don’t. Let’s skip it.”
    “Something to drink? Pinky Selton has some pretty good brandy.”
    “Nothing, thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.”
    Ostrander left obediently, and Karvel lapsed into a sullen, brooding silence. In a lifetime of frustrations, he had never felt as frustrated as he did now. He was weary of being hauled about in a wheel chair, and furious with Colonel Vukin for prohibiting crutches. He was mentally exhausted from formulating ideas that Haskins’s cavernous mind swallowed up unthinkingly, and more ideas to counter objections to ideas he’d already expressed. He was feeling intensely resentful of Haskins, and bewildered as to why the intelligence agent—which Haskins certainly was—had wanted his help in the first place. He had an overwhelming urge, active service or no, to hook his trailer onto his car and depart.
    Any destination would do, as long as it was satisfactorily remote from the damnably inert U.O. in Hangar Seven.
    Eventually he fell asleep.
    He awakened suddenly, surprised to find himself in the wheel chair. He moved it a few feet, pushed himself erect on his artificial leg, and pivoted to drop onto the bed. As he fumbled with his shirt buttons, his mind gyrated uneasily.
    Where was Haskins? The Anonymous Man had made a practice of dropping in each night for a quiet chat. Had he found Karvel asleep, and left without waking him?
    It was ten after midnight. The B.O.Q. reposed in a state of unnatural silence. Karvel maneuvered himself back into the wheel chair and rolled it toward the door, again cursing Colonel Vukin’s ban on crutches.
    As soon as he opened the door he heard reassuring noises—the faint vibration of snoring from a room across the corridor, hushed laughter floating down the stairway from the floor above. He rolled the chair along the corridor to the next room, Ostrander’s, and knocked softly. He waited, knocked again, opened the door.
    Ostrander was not there. The bed had not been touched.
    He swung the chair toward Haskins’s room. Haskins was not in, and the ash trays were empty of cigar stubs— incontrovertible proof that the Anonymous Man had not been in his room since morning.
    Karvel closed the door silently and rolled back to his own room. He took his blouse from the bed, wriggled into it, and propelled the chair around the corner to the building’s main entrance. He had halted at the door and was sourly contemplating the outside steps when a late-returning lieutenant hove into view and sprang to his assistance.
    “Going somewhere, Major? Want some help?”
    “Thanks,” Karvel said. “If you’d take the chair down, and then help me—it isn’t easy—” He winced as the lieutenant put an arm around him. Ostrander managed it much more adroitly, and without hurting him. “Thanks. I’ll be all right now.”
    “I doubt it, sir. Not if you’re going very far.”
    “I’m going to Hangar Seven.”
    “You can’t, sir. It’s been put off limits.”
    “It isn’t off limits to