Complete Short Fiction, page 183
It was half past eight before he folded the paper.
He sat, frowning. He thought irritably: If Virginia had been sleeping since that morning, then she ought to be roused. And besides it was time she satisfied his curiosity as to the results of her vigil before the Futurian Science Laboratories the night before.
He knocked at the bedroom door, and, when there was no answer, opened it, and went inside.
The room was empty.
Professor Mention was not nonplussed. He stared ruefully at the unmade bed, and then shook his head, and smiled. After twelve years of being married to Virginia, he was well aware of the intricate maneuverings of women newspaper reporters.
It was not like Virginia to leave her room untidy, but it had happened at least twice before, and each time he had done what he did now: He made the bed, ran the carpet sweeper over the rug and mopped the floor.
When he was making the bed, he noticed a bloodstain on the sheet.
“Darn it,” Professor Mention muttered irritably, “Virginia oughtn’t to go out when her nose is bleeding, and without her coat, too.”
He went finally back to the living room, and tuned in a comedy team, whose popular appeal he had for some weeks vainly tried to analyze.
The failure was repeated this night. He laughed hollowly once. When the ordeal was over, he clicked off the radio, and began to whistle softly under his breath.
After a while his watch said that it was eleven. Perhaps, if he phoned the Herald office—No, that wouldn’t do. She was supposed to be sick.
He picked up a detective novel he had been intending to read. for a month. At twelve o’clock he finished it, and looked at his watch.
He had felt the worry creeping up on him for some time. It tingled in the back of his mind all the while that he was reading the story. The ending, the act of closing the book, was like a cue.
Professor Mention stood up. He swore aloud. He told himself he was very angry with Virginia. She oughtn’t to go off like that, and then not phone him.
Pie decided to go to bed. He woke up with a start. The dials of his watch showed eight o’clock, and the sun was peering through the window. Unnerved, he climbed from under the cosy quilts, and went into Virginia’s room.
It was unchanged.
The important thing, Professor Mention told himself precisely, was to be logical. Suppose he did go to the police—after, of course, duly verifying that she was not at the office or at a few other places he could think of.
The police would ask questions. Description? Well, she was strikingly good-looking, five feet six inches tall, a sort of a redhead, though not exactly. There was an odd glint fin her hair that—
Mention stopped that thought with a conscious effort. This was no time for romantic touches. “Redhead,” he said aloud, firmly, “and she was wearing—”
He paused grimly. At this point at least, scientific accuracy was possible.
Resolutely he headed for her clothes closet. For ten minutes he fumbled with increasing gloom among some four dozen dresses, striving to picture which one was missing. The amazing thing was the number of dresses that he couldn’t remember ever having seen before.
At the end of ten minutes, he knew himself defeated. He turned back into the bedroom—just as the hazy figure of a man stepped through the wall of the room.
He stood there for a moment, like a motion picture image focused on a cloud. The insubstantial form of him began to thicken. It became a man in evening clothes, a man with arrogant, sardonic eyes, who bowed coolly, and said:
“Don’t go to the police. Don’t do anything foolish. Perform your normal duties, and make reasonable excuses for your wife’s absence. After that, wait. Just wait.”
He turned. His body changed, became transparent. He stepped into the wall. And was gone.
There seemed nothing else to do. There seemed nothing TO do. Yet during the war he had learned the habit of decision.
Mention hesitated. Then slowly he went into his room, and removed the Luger automatic from the back of the drawer where he had kept it for years. It was a war trophy; and because he had won the medal it required no license.
He stood fingering it with a gathering skepticism. But finally, conscious of its symbolic importance to his morale, he put it into his coat pocket, and started out into the morning.
He was halfway to the university before it struck him that it was Saturday. Mention stopped short in the street, laughed harshly. To think that he had imagined he was taking it calmly.
He stood undecided, grim, thinking with a sudden, new dismay: a man who could walk through solid walls! What had Virginia run across?
His brain sagged before the implications. He felt strangely boneless, and dry inside, as if his body was all shriveled up by an intense inner heat. His fingers, when he raised them to his burning forehead, were moistless, almost abrasive.
He looked at them, startled. Then hurried into a corner drugstore.
“Give me an injection of blood plasma,” he said. “I’ve just narrowly escaped being run over, and I feel dizzy.”
It was only partly a lie. There was no question but that he was suffering from shock, and in no mild form either.
“That’ll be one dollar,” said the druggist a minute later.
Mention paid it gratefully, and strode out. His brain was working again: and his body had lost the drab sense of approaching unconsciousness. What he needed now above everything else was to appraise his situation.
He thought drably: The facts were: Futurian Science Laboratories—Edgar Gray—Dr. Dorial Cranston—a strange cold-faced man who walked through walls.
He stopped there. Once more he felt himself change color. He whispered huskily:
“It’s impossible. I must have dreamed it. The human body is a structure evolved from a more primitive type. Therefore, unless—”
Higden’s thesis! Only if man had once been innately capable of passing through substance, could outside energy help him do it now. Higden’s thesis that present day man was a degenerate from a higher form must be correct.
Mention laughed curtly. He lashed at himself. “Am I having an academic argument with myself when Virginia is—”
His mind faltered. He felt the strain coming back. He saw another drugstore sign ahead. He went in and bought his second and last plasma injection.
Afterwards, physically buoyed but mentally depressed, he seated himself in one of the booths. An hour later, the reality was still the same:
He was a badly frightened man. And since the fear was not for himself, there was nothing he could do about it but what the stranger had suggested:
Wait!
SUNDAY: At 11 a.m., he went down town and peered through the plate glass window of the Futurian Science Laboratories. Edgar was there, a long skinny monstrosity, absorbed in a magazine.
After ten minutes, Edgar hadn’t moved except to turn over pages. Mention went back to the apartment.
MONDAY: He had one period without a class. There were three other professors in the recreation room. Mention turned the subject to the Futurian Science Laboratories.
Troubridge, physics’ professor, jumped at the use of the name, then laughed with the others.
Cassidy, assistant professor of English, said: “It sounds straight out of Tommy Rocket, the new comic sensation.”
The third man changed the subject.
TUESDAY: He had no free periods. During the noon hour he went into the library, and asked for books by and about Dr. Dorial Cranston.
There were two by the doctor, and one about him by a Dr. Thomas Torrance. The first published of Cranston’s two volumes was entitled “Physical Affinity Of The Human Race.” Astonishingly, it was a tract on pacifism, a ringing condemnation of international slaughter, an hysterical document against war, in which the worthy doctor enlarged emotionally upon the theme that men were brothers under the skin. He advocated the extension of the handshake as a symbol of friendship, urged the adoption of promiscuous kissing among men and women alike, and spoke highly of the Eskimo custom of rubbing noses.
“Alien peoples,” he wrote, “are electrically charged against each other, and only sustained physical contact will resolve the difference in their potential, A white co-ed, for instance, who allows herself to be kissed by a Chinese student will find that the hundredth kiss is far from repulsive. In the interval the man has become for her a human being, in some fashion which she cannot analyze. The next step, marriage, comes into her thoughts; and what began as a desire for exotic thrills has, through contact, attained a more honorable status. We see these marriages taking place all around us, and, unless we have ourselves established similar contacts, we cannot begin to comprehend how they ever happened.”
Basically, stripped of its pacifists ranting, that was the book. The lunch hour was over when Mention finished his perusal. He took the other two out, resolved to read them that night at home.
The second Cranston book was a repetition, in even more violent and dogmatic language, of the first. The man was obviously a bug on his subject; and it required a real effort for Mention to read the second volume to the end.
He picked up the Torrance biography of Cranston, flipped it open at chapter one, and read:
Dr. Dorial Cranston, pacifist, neurologist extraordinary, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in—
Mention closed the book wearily. He was willing to concede that physical contact would do wonders for human relations. But it was already clear that the reading of old books about Cranston had no connection with the present reality.
WEDNESDAY. He had no new thoughts.
THURSDAY: Professor Troubridge fell into step beside Mention, as the latter started home.
“Norman,” he said, “about your reference the other day to Futurian Science Laboratories: If they’ve approached you, don’t hesitate. They can do what they claim.”
For a moment, the words sounded as if they had been created at random by a mechanical word machine. But there was meaning finally. Meaning so important that Mention fought doggedly to prevent himself from blathering questions that would reveal his ignorance. He gulped, paused disastrously, and then was saved, as Troubridge went on:
“Three years ago, my physician, Dr. Hoxwell, told me that my heart wouldn’t last six months. I went to the Mayo Clinic. They confirmed the diagnosis. It was a month after that, when I was already despairing, that I was approached by the Futurian people, and informed that I could be furnished with a new heart for ten thousand dollars. They showed me a heart in a glass case, beating. It was a living heart, Norman, and they said it made no difference what organ I needed at any time, they could supply it, provided I had the money.”
Mention said: “I thought organic transplantations were impossible because—”
He stopped. Realization came that that wasn’t really the thought in his mind. There was something else, a picture, a question that roared through his brain with the clamor of a tidal wave. As from a great distance, he heard Troubridge say:
“They can do it because they’ve discovered a new principle in organic electricity.”
The thought that had come to Mention dominated the whole universe of his mind now. In a dead voice, he uttered the terrible words:
“Where do they get their live replacement organs?”
“Eh!” said Troubridge. His eyes widened. A stunned expression crept over his face as he whispered: “I never thought of that.”
By the time Mention reached the empty apartment, he didn’t want to think of it either.
There came purpose.
He paced the living room of the apartment that night in a fury at himself for having waited so long. And yet the problem was still: what should he do, what could he do that would be effective?
Go to the police?
He felt immensely reluctant. Because there was still a chance. They wouldn’t have told him NOT to go to the authorities merely to keep him quiet for a week—if at the end of that time he went anyway.
He could mail a letter to his bank lo put into his safety deposit box, which would be opened if something happened to him . . . Yes, he would do that.
He wrote the letter, then sat at his desk striving to think. After a long period during which nothing would come, he began heavily to write down a list of possibilities, item by item:
Virginia accidentally runs across Futurian Labs. She disappears.
I am warned by a man who walks through walls. I discover that:
(1) Dr. Dorial Cranston, founder of Futurian, is a fanatic Pacifist as well as a neurologist.
(2) That Futurian sells human organs on a mass scale to rich men. (This is probably their purely commercial enterprise, their source of income.)
(3) The ability to walk through walls is obviously a means of power, and they are not sharing that with anyone. Yet they seem unworried by the fact that I know about it.
(4) Cridley, science editor of the Herald, told Virginia that several attempts to investigate Futurian were stifled in embryo stage, proof that they have influence in high places.
(5) There is absolutely no reason why they should treat Virginia any differently than they do the other—sources—of their live organs.
Mention wrote the last sentence grimly, then stared down at the list, dissatisfied. It seemed to offer no lead that he could follow with even the vaguest possibility that he would find Virginia.
After a moment, he wrote slowly:
If I went to the police, and they arrested Dr. Cranston and Edgar Gray, Cranston would walk out through the walls of the prison, and Edgar would—
Mention lifted his pen, and stared with a sudden heady surmise at what he had written: Edgar! If it was true that there were Futurian shops in all the large cities, then there were hundreds of Edgars all over the world acting as receptionists. But—Edgar!
Virginia had disappeared after a night of investigating Edgar.
What had she discovered?
Excitement touched his mind, then flared through his body. He looked at the mantel clock. It showed one minute to ten. If he hurried, he could get downtown just about the time that Virginia had phoned the night she followed Edgar.
He might be trailed of course, as she must have been.
Edgar was still there. Mention parked his car a little way along the street, but at a point from which he could see Edgar plainly, where he sat under his spotlight.
Edgar was reading a magazine. At 11:30, Edgar rose, put on his hat, switched out the light, and came out of the door. He locked the door behind him.
He did not look around him, but headed straight for the restaurant where Mention had often eaten with Virginia. Mention climbed out of the car, and walked over to the restaurant window.
Edgar was at the counter, wolfing a piece of pie and a cup of coffee. He put some money on the counter; and Mention had time only to turn his back, as Edgar emerged from the door.
Edgar hurried off down the street. After five minutes he turned into the dimly lighted foyer of an all-night theater. Mention debouched from his car again, bought his ticket a little breathlessly—and a minute after that watched Edgar sink into a seat well down in the front of the theater. He edged into the third row behind Edgar.
At three o’clock Edgar was still in the show, goggling bright-eyed at the screen. It was shortly after that that Mention fell asleep.
He wakened with a start. His watch said 6:45. Edgar was hunched down in his seat, his legs over the back of the seat ahead. But he wasn’t sleeping.
At 7:40, he got up abruptly, and hurried out of the theater. Straight for the restaurant he headed, with Mention following a hundred feet behind. It took four minutes for Edgar’s meal to be served, three for him to eat it. At the counter the girl handed him two of their made-up box lunches; and then he was outside.
He paused in a drugstore to purchase four magazines.
At one minute to eight he unlocked the door of the Futurian Science Laboratories, and settled himself in the chair behind the counter, tie picked up one of the magazines and began to read.
Apparently, his long day was about to repeat itself.
Now what?
Back in the apartment, Mention wakened himself with a cold shower, hurried through a breakfast of toast and coffee, and then set out for the university. His first class was not until twenty to ten; and so he had a reasonable amount of time to ponder his findings.
Actually, what had he discovered? Nothing except another facet of the neurological research of Dr. Cranston. The man was undoubtedly a genius. Perhaps he had passed over the books by and about Cranston too hastily.
There was nothing to do about that until night. Then he took down from the shelf, where he had put it unread, the biography of Dr. Dorial Cranston by Thomas Torrance, Ph.D.
As he opened the volume, he saw that there was a picture in the frontispiece, a photograph of a man standing on the terrace of a swanky house.
Mention jumped as he saw the picture, then stared and stared at the cold, sardonic face and powerful body. The caption underneath read:
The author, Dr. Thomas Torrance at his palatial home in New Dellafield, Massachusetts.
There was no mistaking the identity. Torrance was the man who had stepped through a solid wall, and warned him not to call the authorities.
He couldn’t think. The sleep he had missed the night before, the sheer nervous exhaustion of the past week, took their toll of his brain now, when he needed strength to examine the potentialities of his great discovery.
His last thought before he finally allowed the sleep to engulf him was: Whatever had happened to Virginia had happened during her sleep that day. Perhaps he too—
He woke up annoyed that he was safe, and then, slowly, he grew aware of a purpose. His watch said 11:15. He stood up and headed straight for the phone.
Considering that his call was from California, it went through swiftly. After fifteen minutes the phone rang.
“Your party, sir,” said the operator.
Mention drew a deep breath; then tensely: “Hello!” he said.
There was the sound of the operator hanging up, a pause, and then a familiar voice said quietly:
