Collected Short Fiction, page 572
Including—murder?
“As such a specialist,” Messenger continued blandly, “you will work directly under me. You will receive your assignments from me personally, and report their accomplishment to me alone—there must be no failures.”
“But I haven’t taken the job.”
“You will take it, when you hear about your first assignment.”
DANE listened uncomfortably, certain Messenger would never tell him so much, except as a warning to forget what he already knew.
“A tricky affair.” Worry erased the financier’s ponderous confidence. “There’s a newspaper reporter—a filthy little rat—prying into our private business with a stupid persistence and no legitimate reason. He has even been to New Guinea, trespassing on our concessions. Now he’s back in New York City, ready to expose us—as he puts it. Your first job will be to gag him.”
“If a man is writing the truth,” Dane said flatly, “how can you gag him—honestly?”
“Your problem,” Messenger murmured. “Although we can assist you with unlimited funds and a staff of clever specialists who have solved many such problems with never an incident to stain the good name of Cadmus!” The faded eyes peered sharply through gray cigar smoke. “Is that perfectly clear?”
“Perfectly,” Dane said. “Even though I can’t take the job.”
“Better think it over.” The fat man was blinking at him sleepily, and suddenly Dane felt danger like a cold liquid dripping down the back of his neck. “Come back in the morning, if you change your mind. I’ll hold it open until ten.”
“I’ll think it over,” Dane agreed. “But I’ve had another offer that’s even harder to refuse.”
“Better watch your step,” Messenger warned, with an air of lazily friendly concern. “These people trying to steal our secrets don’t stop at anything. Bits of accidental information about our business have cost a number of men their lives.”
“Thanks.” Nodding ironically, Dane turned to the door. “I’ll try to be on guard.”
VI
THAT snarl of unseen danger met him again when he came out into the windy street. The taste of hostility was once more a dry bitterness in his mouth, and the feel of it a cold weight at the back of his skull. He had to squint against a driving glare of black malignance.
That awareness couldn’t be real—but it was. For a panicky instant, in spite of Nan Sanderson’s tests, he wondered if it could be some actual perception of Messenger’s specialists or Gellian’s executioners or even Kendrew’s inhuman creations; and he turned back suddenly, trying to catch some murderous stalker by surprise.
The people he saw were harmless to the eye: a few clerks and office girls, shrinking timidly from the raw east wind and ignoring him entirely. Yet that colorless cast of danger made all their pale faces equally gray and wary and implacably intent.
Give it up and get away, common sense was urging. But it had been too late for that, he knew, ever since Gellian spoke to him in the lobby. Perhaps ever since Nan Sanderson called. There was nowhere to go, beyond the reach of Gellian’s men, or Messenger’s. If the mutants were causing this danger-sense, they might be anywhere.
Anyway, even now, he didn’t want to run away. The amazing art which had shaped that metallic plant was worth any possible risk. The wealth of Cadmus was merely a hint of what it could do. Here was the goal of all his life, too near and real to be abandoned now.
He was still plodding north, too aimless even to signal at the taxis passing in the rain, when his harried thoughts turned to that nameless reporter. He wanted to know what the man had discovered in New Guinea, but he could see no way to find out. He shook his head wearily . . . and then noticed a change in that pall of overhanging danger. . . .
Before, that colorless glow of something not light had seemed to bum uniformly over all the inhospitable city; but now it seemed to fade and flow, condensing into an ominous column east of him.
At the next corner, he turned uncertainly toward it. For that sudden shift was at least another hint that it came from something outside his troubled mind. If he could find its actual source, here and now, he thought he might find the key to all his riddles.
The change in that strange radiation had come as he wondered how to find that hiding man—almost as if it had been a searchlight, focused to guide him. Now he noticed that it seemed to fade and spread whenever he wondered what it was, and to gather again when his mind came back to that nameless newsman.
Dimming and returning with every shift of his thoughts, that inexplicable beacon hung over the same dilapidated block until he reached it, and then the ominous reflection of it seemed to pick out the gloomy doorway of a cheap transient hotel. Trying not to breathe the strong reek of menace seeping out of the narrow lobby, he pushed eargerly inside.
“Sorry, mister.” The sad-faced red-haired youth at the desk looked up mistrustfully at his empty-handed dampness. “No vacancy here.”
“I just want to see one of your guests. A newspaperman, just back from New Guinea.” Anxiety caught his breath. “I don’t know his name, but don’t you know the one I mean?”
The clerk’s sad eyes brightened at Dane’s five-dollar bill.
“We do have a funny little guy up in five-eleven,” he admitted. “Name of—” He paused to peer at the dogeared register. “Name of Nicholas Venn. Sunburned, from some hot country. Typing, up in his room. Would he be your party?”
“Let me talk to him.”
The clerk picked up the five, and nodded at the ancient automatic elevator.
A TYPEWRITER stopped when Dane knocked at the locked door of 511, but he had to wait a long half minute before the door opened on a chain to a cautious slit. A tired nasal voice asked harshly who he was.
“Nobody you know,” Dane said. “But who I’m not might interest you. I’m not a Cadmus expert. I think that gives us something in common. May I come in?”
After another uncertain pause, Nicholas Venn unchained the door. A nervous, shabby, hungry-faced little man, he secured the door again before he turned to face Belfast, with a glitter of puzzled mistrust in his narrow eyes.
“All right,” he rasped uneasily. “Tell me what we have in common.”
“Danger,” Belfast said. “From Messenger’s specialists.”
And he turned to look around that musty cell of a room, which opened on a dark air shaft. Stronger than the light of the naked bulb at the ceiling, that hueless glare of peril washed the stained walls and the ramshackle dresser and the battered suitcase half under the unmade bed.
Catching an apprehensive movement behind him, he swung back to see the worn bolo on the dresser, now in easy reach of Venn’s poised hand.
“Well?” Venn stood peering at him fearfully. “How do I know you really aren’t a Cadmus man?”
“I’m a geneticist. I want to talk about those mutant plants in New Guinea. I’ve some papers—” Dane had stooped to open the brief case, but he stopped as Venn’s thin, dirty-nailed hand darted, for the bolo. “Just papers.”
“Guess I’m jittery.” Venn’s bloodshot eyes narrowed again. “But how did you get here, unless Messenger put you on my trail?”
“He did, in a way.” Dane decided to say nothing of that guiding column of dork fire just yet, though he still hoped to find the source of it in something here. “When he was trying to hire me.”
“If you aren’t working for him—why not?”
“Because I think he’s exploiting a discovery stolen from a friend of my father’s. A way to mutate new species. If you’ve really been to New Guinea, I think we can help each other.”
“I’ve been there, all right.” Venn nodded wearily. “I do need help. From a geneticist, especially.” He nodded at the only chair. “Sit down, and let’s talk things over.”
Removing an empty milk carton and a full ash tray, Dane sat down in the chair. “What can a geneticist do?”
“Examine something I brought back.” The haggard little man came limping to sit on the edge of the untidy bed.
“Something from New Guinea?” Dane had to catch his breath. “A specimen?”
“I think we ought to get acquainted, first.” A weary watchfulness came back to Venn’s sleepless eyes. “Let me see your papers, now.”
BELFAST showed the contents of the brief case and his wallet, and spent the next half hour answering shrewdly searching queries about his scientific training and Kendrew’s old dream of rebuilding the genes of life at will and his own recent meeting with Messenger.
“Okay, Belfast.” He gave Dane a thin smile of approval. “You’ll see why I had to be safe, when you know what I’ve been through.”
“That specimen—may I see it now?”
“Later.” Venn grinned wearily at his restless anxiety. “The thing isn’t even whole. And it won’t mean much until you know how I got it.”
“Then let’s hear about it.” Sitting impatiently back to listen, Dane lighted a cigarette, hoping the tobacco might help cover that bitter scent of hostility still hanging in the room. He saw the sudden glitter of hunger in Venn’s red eyes, and offered the package.
“Thanks!” Venn’s soiled, broken-nailed fingers quivered with the match. “I’m all out of tobacco.”
Glancing sharply at the door, he dropped his voice again. “Couple of years ago, I began to pick up rumors about Cadmus. All their competitors had gone under. Messenger had run Cadmus up from a shoestring to the top in twenty years. He had enormous enterprises in New Guinea, but no labor problem. The few people who knew anything were getting rich by keeping quiet. It all had a funny smell, so I began digging.”
“So you went to New Guinea?”
“In the end.” Venn inhaled again, avidly. “You can’t buy a ticket to New Guinea. Company policy. But Cadmus has made a lot of people curious. I found men ready to risk their lives to find out more. A few were after diamonds or uranium. Took months to get started, but we finally got to Manila and hired a fishing boat to smuggle us ashore on the north coast of New Guinea.
“We managed to avoid the company launches on the rivers, and the patrols that fly along the coast, but New Guinea beat us. Tried to hire native guides, but the company property is taboo. And they’re scared to death of the little-fella green-fella devil-fella.”
Dane stared.
“Potter’s lizards,” Venn explained. “Cadmus doesn’t use Kanaka labor. They use a sort of tame iguana that a man named Potter found in an unknown valley on the upper Fly. The climate doesn’t hurt them, and they’ll work until they drop—I guess that’s why they’re called ‘mules’. Never saw one myself—but the Kanakas told me about them.”
“I wonder if Potter really found them,” Dane said slowly. “I wonder if he didn’t make them?”
Venn peered at him oddly.
Dane asked, “Is that what you brought back? One of those mules?”
“I don’t know what it is.” The worn man shrugged. “I’d started upriver alone, in a little inflated plastic boat. Some of the men were too sick to travel, and the rest lost interest when they found a few flakes of gold.” Sitting hunched on the bed, Venn shivered. “Stinking swamps alive with leeches. Flooded tributary streams full of crocodiles, and hills that are rain forests tipped on edge, and more nipa swamps beyond. I ran out of food and atabrine. Malaria hit me again. Finally I gave it up.
“I was three-quarters dead, the day I came paddling back down that tributary into the Mamberamo—too weak and groggy to know where I was or to care who saw me—and then I found the dead thing floating.”
“A mutant iguana?” Belfast whispered.
“Maybe you can tell what it is.” Smiling haggardly, Venn got down on his knees to pull the travel-scarred suitcase from under the bed. He unlocked it, and dug beneath soiled shirts and underwear to come up with a heavy, strongsmelling package.
He began unrolling layers of tough, transparent plastic from around something shaped unpleasantly like the body of a child. “I cut it up for wrapping.”
THE THING he unwrapped was neither human nor lizard nor anything else Dane could name. The color of it was a shiny, greenish black, and the heavy, penetrating odor of it became part of that reek of danger in the room.
“It doesn’t decay.” An awed puzzlement slowed Venn’s voice. “I was too sick the night I dragged it out of the water to use the preservatives I had brought, and next day I could see they weren’t needed.” He looked up sharply. “Do you know what it is?”
Kneeling beside him on the floor, carefully turning and prodding that queer, crumpled thing, Dane shook his head dazedly. The creature had been a biped, he could see, with slender three-fingered hands and a long, egg-shaped head. Its sleek, dark armor was somewhat like the chitinous exterior skeletons of insects and crustaceans, and the small masses of dried, brittle tissue on the back resembled vestigial wings. The rest of it was incomprehensible.
“Well?” Venn whispered anxiously. “What is it?”
“Something new.” Dane frowned blankly at the curiously smooth oval of its head. “Something I don’t understand. No mouth, you see. No jaws. Eyes, but no external ears. No nostrils—though it must have had some respiratory arrangement to live at all. No evidence of any sort of alimentary tract, or even of reproductive organs.”
He bent to peer and prod again, and finally shrugged with bafflement. “It’s no iguana, certainly. No more a lizard than it is a man. The fact that it doesn’t decay—and its odor—suggests an entirely different chemistry of life.”
He rose at last, turning slowly back to Venn.
“The thing’s exciting,” he said. “It proves that somebody is creating entirely new kinds of life in New Guinea. It’s enough to prove that Cadmus is using some process for directing mutation!”
“Will you help me do that?” Venn’s shadowed eyes searched him anxiously. “Prove to the public what Messenger and his gang are up to?”
“I’ll do anything I can.” Dane nodded quickly. “Because I’m pretty well convinced they murdered my father’s old friend, to get that process. I want to recover it. Kendrew intended to enrich the whole world with it, not just a few bankers!”
“Then let’s decide what to do.”
“You might be better off without me,” Dane warned him. “I’m afraid I’d be a dangerous asset.”
“Don’t worry too much about Messenger’s specialists.” A feverish purpose glittered in Venn’s weary eyes, and quivered in his rasping voice. “Because we can run those vermin to cover now. I’ve smashed other rackets with press campaigns—I know how to use publicity.”
“So does Messenger,” Dane said grimly. “And I’m going to be in trouble with another group, besides. A private detective agency, hunting mutant men supposed to have been made by this same process. I’ve refused to join them—and they’re going to be looking for me, after eight in the morning.”
“Mutant men, huh?” Venn seemed to listen again for footsteps in the hallway. “Is there no limit to what that process can make?”
“It can unlock all the latent powers of life,” Dane said soberly.
VENN shrugged abruptly, as if trying to shake off his fears. “You can examine the mule again, and describe it for the scientists. I’ll fix up a press release. We’ll have a press conference—at seven in the morning!”
Nodding in agreement, Dane felt hope come back.
“I know how to manage that.” Venn’s weary voice was confident again. “I’ll invite reporters and photographers enough so Messenger can’t intimidate them all.” He got up impatiently from his seat on the bed. “The first thing—” His haggard face turned anxious. “I hope you have some money?”
“Around a hundred dollars.”
“That should do it.” Venn frowned thoughtfully. “We’ll need to rent a duplicating machine to run off our press release. Paper and supplies. A few dollars for tips, to get word around. Money to hire a larger room, somewhere, for our press reception.”
“At my hotel,” Dane suggested. “I’ll call about it.”
“Good. My welcome here’s about worn out.” The shabby man grinned wryly. “Even the room service doesn’t seem to trust me for a pack of cigarettes.”
“Oh.” Dane saw then that he must be hungry. “Let’s go somewhere to eat.”
“I do need food.” Venn nodded at the empty milk carton. “That was yesterday. But I’m afraid to go outside. Just bring me something when you come back—and be careful yourself, in case anybody’s already watching.”
And Dane went down again to the street, which seemed more friendly now than Venn’s beleagured room. The rain had stopped, and that gray glare was paler in the twilight. Facing the raw east wind, he inhaled gratefully, glad to escape that bitter reek of something more than the dead green monstrosity.
He walked three blocks, watching shop windows, without finding either business machines for rent or the laboratory equipment he needed for his own examination of the mule. Deciding to shop by telephone, he turned back, stopping at a delicatessen to buy cold meats and a loaf of bread and containers of hot coffee.
The red-haired clerk watched him suspiciously over a tattered comic magazine, as Dane carried his packages into the automatic elevator. The fifth floor seemed too silent, and its hush set that soundless alarm to throbbing again in his mind. He hurried to knock, and the door swung open from his hand.
The odor of death came out to meet him—stale and overwhelming. Holding his breath against it, he stumbled inside. The light was out, but that harsh glare of something else revealed Nicholas Venn, sprawled across the unmade bed—beheaded.
Fighting panic, Dane set his packages on the dresser and shut the door and snapped on the light. Merciless as that other dark illumination, the light showed him Venn’s head, more than ever pinched and pale, staring from its own black pool on the sheets.
He turned quickly from it, feeling ill, to look for the brief case, which he had left on the dresser. It wasn’t there. He started across the room to look for it, and stumbled against the suitcase. It lay open on the floor, Venn’s dirty shirts dumped out and one of them newly soiled with wiped red smears.
