The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 29
"Use your imagination," Graham chided.
"Don't tell me you've picked up a line!" Wohl's honest eyes popped in surprise.
"I haven't." Bill Graham grabbed his hat. "In this crazy business we have to spin our own lines. Come on—let's get back."
It was as they flashed through Stamford that Wohl shifted his steady gaze from the road, glanced at his passenger, and said, "Spin me a line or two."
"We haven't enough data about Padilla," replied Graham. "We'll have to get more. Added to which, it seems that Treleaven had five undisturbed minutes at the phone before he was put out of the running. He was on to Sangster for less than half a minute, so unless it took him four and a half minutes to get his connection, I reckon that maybe he phoned somebody else first. We'll find out whether he did, and, if so, whom he called."
"Bill, you're a marvel!" declared Wohl with open envy.
Grinning sheepishly, Graham went on, "Lastly, there's an unknown number of ham stations operating between Buenos Aires, Barranquilla and Bridgeport. If any one of them was listening in and caught Padilla's talk, we want him as badly as do the Vitons. We've got to find him before it's too late.
"Hope," recited Wohl "springs eternal in the human breast." His eyes found the rear mirror, rising casually then becoming fixed in fearful fascination. "But not in mine!" he added in choked tones.
Slewing around in his seat, Graham peered through the car's rear window: "Vitons—after us!"
His sharp eyes turned to the front, the sides, taking in the terrain with photographic accuracy. "Step on it!" His thumb found and jabbed the emergency button just as Wohl shoved the accelerator to the limit. With the dynamo singing on its top note; the gyrocar leaped forward.
"They've got us!" gasped Wohl. He manhandled his machine around an acute bend, corrected three successive sideslips, straightened up. The road was a streaming ribbon beneath their madly whirling wheels. "We couldn't escape at twice the pace."
"The bridge!" Graham warned. He nodded toward the bridge flashing nearer at tremendous rate. "Mount the bank, dive into the river. It's a chance."
"A lousy chance!" breathed Wohl.
Offering no comment, Bill Graham looked again through the rear window, saw his ominously glowing pursuers a mere two hundred yards behind and gaining rapidly. There were ten of the things speeding through the air in single file, moving with that apparently effortless but bulletlike pace characteristic of their kind.
The bridge widened, shot still nearer; the ghostly horde picked up another fifty yards. Anxiously, Graham divided his attention between the scenes in front and rear.
"We'll barely do it," he murmured. "When we splash, fight out, swim downstream for as long as you can hold breath."
"But—" commenced Wohl, his eyes wide, his face strained as the oncoming bridge leaped at their front wheel.
"Now!" roared Graham. He didn't wait for Wohl to make up his mind; his powerful fingers clamped upon the wheel, twisted it with irresistible power.
With a scream of protest from the maltreated gyroscope, the slender car went up the bank like a shell from a gun. It vaulted the top a bare foot from the bridge's concrete coping, described a spectacular parabola through the air, and struck water with force that sent shocked drops flying road-high.
The machine went down, down amid a fountain of bubbles. It vanished, leaving on the troubled surface a thin film of oil over which ten baffled luminosities skimmed in temporary defeat.
IT WAS fortunate that he had flung open his door the instant before they struck, thought Graham. Inward pressure of water might have kept him prisoner for valuable seconds. With a sinuous motion of his hard, wiry body, and a mighty kick of his feet, he was out of the car even as it settled lopsidedly upon the bed.
Making fast, powerful strokes, he sped downstream, his chest full of wind, his eyes straining to find a way through liquid murk. Wohl, he knew, was out—he had felt the thrust upon the car as the police lieutenant got clear. But he couldn't see Wohl, the muddiness of the river prevented that.
Bubbles trickled from his mouth as his lungs reached point of rebellion. He tried to increase the speed of his strokes, felt his heart palpitating wildly, knew that his eyes were starting from their sockets. A lithe swerve shot him upward, his mouth and nostrils broke surface, he drew in a great gasp of air. He went down again, swimming strongly.
Four times he came up like a trout snatching at a floating fly, took in a deep, lung-expanding gulp, then slid back into the depths. Finally, he stroked to the shallows, his boots scraped pebbly bottom, his eyes arose cautiously above the surface.
The coruscant ten were soaring upward from a point on the bank concealed by the bridge. The hidden watcher followed their ascent with calculating eyes; followed until the luminosities were ten shining dots below the clouds. As the blue specters changed direction, drifting rapidly to the east, Graham scrambled from the water, stood dripping on the bank.
Silently and, undisturbed the river flowed along. The lone man regarded its placid surface with perplexity that quickly changed to open anxiety. He turned, ran upstream, his mind eager yet fearing to see the other side of the bridge.
Wohl was there, his body visible through the concrete arch as the running man came nearer. Water squelched dismally in Graham's boots as he pounded along the shred of bank beneath the arch, and reached his companion's quiet form.
Pale transparency had replaced the healthy color of Wohl's face. There was ghastly abandon in the attitude of his body that sprawled with heels in rippling water.
Splayed fingers hastily combed back wet hair from Graham's forehead. He bent over a pair of limp legs, embraced them at the back of cold thighs, heaved himself upright, his muscles cracking as they raised the other's bulk,
Water poured from Wohl's gaping mouth, dribbled over Graham's boots. Graham shook with a jerky upward motion, watching resultant drops. He laid Wohl face downward, squatted astride him, placed wide, muscular hands over breathless ribs, began to press and relax with determined rhythm.
He was still working with an utterly weary but desperately regular rocking motion when the body twitched, and a watery rattle came from its throat. Half an hour later, he sat in the back of a hastily stopped gyrocar, his arms supporting Wohl's racked form.
"Got a hell of a crack on the head, Bill," wheezed Wohl. He coughed, gasped, let his head loll weakly on the other's shoulder. "Stunned me. Maybe it was the door. I sank, went up, sank again. I was breathing water."
"You'll be all right;" Graham comforted.
"Goner ... I was a goner. Thought to myself this was the end. Up and down, up and down, forever and ever and ever. I was up ... fighting like a maniac ... lungs full. Broke top ... and a Viton grabbed me."
"What?" shouted Graham.
"Viton got me," repeated Wohl with complete lack of interest. "Felt his ghoulish fingers ... inside my brain ... feeling, searching, probing." He coughed again, hackingly. "All I remember."
"They must have lugged you to the bank," declared Graham excitedly. "If they've read your mind, they'll anticipate our next moves."
"Feeling around ... in my brain!" murmured Wohl. He closed his eyes, breathed with harsh, bronchial sounds.
LEAMINGTON pursed his lips, said, "Why didn't they kill Wohl?"
"I don't know. Perhaps it was because he didn't know anything really dangerous to them." Bill Graham returned his superior's steady stare. "Neither do I, for that matter—so don't take it for granted that I'm liable to die on you every time I go out."
"You don't fool me," scoffed Leamington. "It's a marvel how your luck's held out so far."
Graham let it pass, said, "I'll sure miss Art for the next few days." He sighed gently. "Did you get me that data on Padilla?"
"We tried." Leamington emitted a grunt of disgust. "Our man in Buenos Aires can discover nothing. The authorities have their hands full, and no time to bother with him."
"Why?"
"Buenos Aires was blown to tatters by a Yellow air fleet shortly after we cabled."
"Damn!" swore Graham, "There goes a possible lead." He chewed his bottom lip in vexation.
"That leaves us the ham stations to look up," remarked Leamington dismally. "We're on that job right now." Sliding open a drawer, he extracted a sheet of paper, handed it across. "This came in just before you arrived. It may mean something, or it may not. Does it convey anything to you?"
"United Press report," read Graham, rapidly scanning the lines of type. "Professor Fergus McAndrew, internationally known atom-splitter, mysteriously disappeared this morning from his home in Kirkintilloch, Scotland." He threw a sharp, surprised glance at the other, returned his attention to the sheet. "Vanished while in the middle of enjoying his breakfast, leaving his meal half eaten, his coffee warm. Mrs. Martha Leslie, his elderly housekeeper, swears that he has been kidnaped by luminosities."
"Well?" asked Leamington.
"Kidnaped—not killed! That is queer!" The investigator frowned as his mind concentrated on the problem. "It looks as if he couldn't have known too much, else he'd have been left dead over his meal rather than snatched."
"That's what gets me down," admitted Leamington irritably. For once in his disciplined life he permitted his feelings to get the better of him. He slammed a heavy hand on his desk, said loudly: "From the very beginning of this wacky affair we've been tangled in strings that all lead to people who are corpses, or people who aren't anything any longer. Every time we grab, we grab a vacuum. Every time we run, we trip over some cadaver. Where is it going to end; when is it going to end—if it ever does end?"
"It'll end when the last Viton ceases to be, or the last white man goes under," asserted Graham boldly. He flourished the United Press report. "This McAndrew, I reckon, must have a mind fairly representative of the world's best talent."
"So what?"
"They'll not merely probe his mind—they'll take his entire intellect to pieces and find how the wheels go round! My bet is that the Vitons have become uneasy, maybe scared, and have snatched him as a suitable subject for their super-surgery." Graham's eyes flamed with intensity that startled his listener. "They'll estimate his brain power, and from that they'll deduce just how likely we are to find whatever it is that they're frightened of us discovering."
"And then?" The question came in a sharp hiss.
"We suspect that Padilla found something, but we must allow for the possibility that he was only a guesser who got wiped out deliberately to mislead us." Graham stood up, his tall form towering above his chief's desk. He wagged an emphatic finger. "This kidnaping means two things."
"Those are what?"
"Firstly, that there definitely is a lethal weapon waiting to be discovered by us." He paused, then said carefully: "And secondly, if examination of McAndrew's mind satisfies the Vitons that we shall soon make this discovery, they're going to do something to meet the threat—and damn quick! Hell is going to pop!"
"As if it isn't popping already!" remarked Leamington.
Graham made no reply. He was buried in thought, deep, anxious thought. One, now dead, had credited him with extra-sensory perception. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was second sight—for hell was already on the way.
DARKNESS; deep, dismal darkness such as can swathe only a city once lurid with light. Apart from firefly flashes of gyrocars hurtling with dimmed lamps through New York's ebon canyons, there was nothing but that heavy, ominous, all-pervading gloom.
Graham got out of his shapely speedster, and said, "What's the idea?"
"Sorry, mister," replied the young officer. "Your machine's wanted." He remained stubbornly silent while Graham revealed his identity, then he declared: "I can't help it, Mr. Graham. My orders are to commandeer every machine attempting to pass this point."
"All right." Reaching inside the speedster, Graham hauled out his heavy coat, writhed into it. "I'll walk."
"I'm really sorry," the officer assured. "There's serious trouble out west. We need machines." He turned to two of his olive-drab command. "Rush this one to the depot." Then, as the pair clambered in, he pressed the button of his red-lensed torch, signaled another approaching gyrocar to stop.
Graham paced rapidly along the road. There were tottering walls at his side; while on the other gaunt skeletons of what once had been business blocks stood in awful solitude.
An antiaircraft battery filled the square at the end. He passed it in silence, noting the aura of tension emanating from quiet, steel-helmeted figures, surrounding the sleek, uplifted muzzles.
Beyond the square, precariously poised on a shattered roof, was a listening post, its quadruple trumpets angled toward the westward horizon. Although he could not see them in the blackness, Graham knew that somewhere between the post and the guns were more tensed, silent figures waiting by the Sperry computator—waiting for that faraway wail that meant the coming of high-flying death.
From the depths below the road came a strange sound: the sound of a mighty gnawing. That subterranean scrunch, scrunch, scrunch was audible all the way along the road, and accompanied the stealthy walker for a mile.
There, far down in the earth, great jaws of beryllium steel were eating, eating. Mechanical moles were chewing through the substrata, forming the arteries of a newer and safer city, beyond reach of bombs.
"When all this is finished," mused Graham, "the subway will be the el!"
He turned left, saw a blotch of solid darkness in the more elusive dark. The dim form was on the other side of the road; hurrying nearer with swiftly clopping heels.
They were almost level, and about to pass, when from a swollen cloud there plunged a ball of cold, blue light. Its sudden, ferocious onslaught was irresistible. The vague figure sensed imminent peril, whirled around, gave vent to a blood-freezing shriek that ended in a gasp.
While Graham stood perspiring in the deeper shadows, his hard eyes registering the incredibly swift attack, the luminosity shot upward, carrying with it the quiet, unmoving body of its victim.
Another was snatched on the vacant lot two hundred yards farther along the road. Graham, passed a deserted rooming house, saw hunter and hunted crossing the open area.
The prey had all the frantic motion of one fleeing from a product of fundamental hell. His feet hit earth in great, clumping strides, while queer, distorted words jerked from his fear-smitten larynx.
Iridescent blue-formed a satanic nimbus behind his head. The blue swelled, engulfed both the runner and his final, despairing scream. They soared skyward.
A third and a fourth were picked from Drexler Avenue. They saw the downward swoop of blue. One ran. The other fell on his knees, bent in dreadful obeisance, covered the nape of his neck with his hands. The runner bellowed hoarsely as he ran, his terror filled tones a veritable pæan of the damned. The kneeler remained kneeling. They were taken simultaneously, sobbed together, went up together.
Moisture was lavish on Graham's forehead while he stole up the driveway, passed through the doors of the Samaritan Hospital. He wiped it off before seeing Harmony, decided he would say nothing of these tragedies.
SHE WAS as tranquil as ever, even her slight blush suggesting pleasure rather than confusion. Graham thought her black eyes as glorious as her blacker hair, but that neither compared with that atmosphere of supreme serenity with which she was always surrounded. Calmness was her outstanding characteristic, and it appealed to him more than anything ever had done.
"I had Professor Farmiloe around to tea," she announced.
"Bill," insisted Graham.
"Around to tea, Bill." She made the correction with a smile that soothed her hearer's troubled mind. "He's an old dear! Know him?"
"Not very well. Aged gent, with a white goatee, isn't he? Believe he's Fordham's expert on something or other, but I know him only by sight."
"He was my godfather." She mentioned the fact as if it explained everything. "He's some kind of a physicist." Her long, shapely fingers reposed across the back of Graham's hairy fist. "Bill, I think he's got an idea of some sort. It bothers me. Every time somebody gets an idea, he dies."
Pleasure filled Bill Graham's soul as the girl's eyes showed that her anxiety was not for the professor alone. She feared for him, too! For the first time, he felt that the menace to himself was worth it.
"What makes you think he's afflicted with a notion?"
"I was questioning him about the luminosities. I wanted to know why it is so difficult to find a weapon against them."
"And what did he say?"
"He said that we couldn't handle forces as familiarly as substances." Her fine eyes were unwavering as they appraised her listener. "He said we could throw energy in all sorts of forms at a Viton, and if nothing happened we couldn't discover just why nothing had happened. We can't even hold a Viton to find out whether it repels energy or absorbs it and re-radiates it. We can't even grab one to discover what it's made of."
"True," admitted Graham. "That's the hell of it!"
"Professor Farmiloe says it's his personal opinion that luminosities bend most forms of energy around them, absorbing only those that are their natural food." Revulsion suffused her features. "Such as emotional currents."
"And we can't reproduce those with any known apparatus," Graham commented. "If we could, we might stuff them until they burst."
HER SMILE returned, and she went on, "I happened to remark that I'd like to have a magic spoon, and stir them up like so many puddings." Her slender hand grasped an imaginary spoon, stirred in vigorous ellipses. "He seemed fascinated when I made this foolish demonstration. He waved his finger round and round, as if it was a new kind of game."
"Doesn't make sense to me," said Graham.
"Nor me, either. He looked slightly dazed, said he'd better be going. Then he wandered out in that preoccupied manner of his. As he went, he remarked that he'd try to find me that spoon." She finished on an expectant note, her smoothly curved brows rising in query.
"Nutty," decided Graham. He made a stirring motion with his hand. "It's nutty—like everything else since this crazy affair started."
