Collected Short Fiction, page 573
The plastic-wrapped package was also gone.
He bent to search for it under the bed, but his groping fingers failed to reach the mule. What he found felt cold as death itself, and what he saw when he drew it out was Venn’s long jungle-knife, red-spattered and blazing with that dark fire in his hand.
VII
SWAYING from his shock, Dane stood for dragging seconds in that gloomy room. Pity made a painful tightness in his throat; and then he began trembling with cold anger at the killers of this shabby little man, whose only offense had been his stubborn effort to learn and tell the truth about Cadmus, Inc.
A shaken impulse swung him to the telephone, to notify the hotel management and the police. His hasty fingers caught the receiver—and the touch of it rocked him with an almost physical impact of alarm. He let go the instrument, staggering back from it dazedly.
The harsh consequences of that act were suddenly as clear as if he had already endured them. For the fingerprints stamped in Venn’s blood on the bolo hilt and the telephone were now his own. He shivered to a sudden icy certainty that Messenger’s efficient experts had followed him here from the Cadmus building, and deliberately arranged this final disposition of the Venn case so that it would also dispose of his own.
A sense of trapped futility held him helpless for a moment. But he hadn’t completed the call. Warned by that puzzling awareness, he still had time and freedom to fight. The green mule would make a powerful weapon in court, if he could somehow recover it.
Calmer now, he nerved himself to examine the body and the head. At first he saw no mark of anything except the jungle knife, but the twisted oddness of the heads’ grisly grin drew him back to find a faint swollen discoloration of the upper lip, from some slight injury which must have been inflicted while Venn was still alive. It appeared to be no ordinary bruise, because tiny beads of blood had oozed from the punctured skin. Yet he could discover no other cause for it.
Too much haste could destroy him now, as surely as the Cadmus killers could. Deliberately, he took time to wipe the telephone and the bolo hilt and the inside door knob with another of Venn’s soiled shirts. He opened the door with his handkerchief, and paused again to wipe the outer knob. The automatic elevator was an endless time coming. It took him down alone.
He knew the sullen youth at the desk would soon be recalling everything about him for the police, but he decided to take the risk of leaving a stronger impression.
“I came here to buy some valuable plant specimens that Mr. Venn brought back from New Guinea,” he began carefully. “He told me to come back later, because he was expecting another bid. Now he doesn’t answer my knock. Has anybody left with baggage since I was here before?”
“Couple of salesmen checking in. Nobody checking out. Unless—” The clerk looked back at the twenty, hopefully. “Unless your party could be a girl?”
Belfast began to shake his head, and changed his mind. “Might be.” He tried not to seem too desperately concerned. “If she left in the last hour, with baggage or a large package.”
“She did.”
The clerk was holding out his pale hand, but Dane hesitated. No ordinary woman would have strength and skill to decapitate a man with one slash of a knife. But the not-men, he recalled that warning of Gellian’s, were quicker and stronger than men. He released the bill.
“Did she have blue eyes and reddish-brown hair?” Dane’s voice was dry with strain. “Skin just faintly olive—as if she had a little Indian blood?”
“That’s right,” the clerk agreed.
Dane must have swayed, for he felt cold and sick inside. He found himself clutching at the desk with a sweaty hand, and drew back apprehensively, hoping the police wouldn’t check for fingerprints there.
“Thanks,” he whispered bleakly. Nodding with a veiled hostility, anxious to be rid of him now, the clerk watched sharply as he plodded out to meet the leer of the streets. The sullen youth would recall him very clearly, when the police came.
WHATEVER the truth, Nan Sanderson’s office seemed a logical place to look for the missing mule. Trying not to leave too plain a trail, he took one taxi back to Times Square, and another east on Forty-second Street, and walked the last two blocks south to Fortieth.
The building looked dark, but a sleepy-eyed elevator operator took him to the nineteenth floor and waited while he rapped at the door of the Sanderson Service. To his surprise, it opened instantly.
“Why, Dane!” The tall girl looked past him to meet the questioning glance of the man in the elevator. “It’s all right, Kaptina,” she called. “Dr. Belfast is one of our clients.”
She let him in, and locked the door. He stared at her uneasily. She looked lovely, and strangely afraid.
“Why did you come back, Dane?” Her hands had risen apprehensively when she saw him, and her breathless voice held reproof. “Didn’t I warn you?”
“I came back for a biological specimen.” Watching her, he saw terror crawl up to drain the blood from her lips and the light from her eyes. “The body of a small greenish creature, called a mule. I think you have it here.”
“Please—won’t you leave me alone?” Her pale hands made a violent protesting gesture. “And get out of town, while you can!”
“Sorry.” He grinned at her stiffly. “But it’s much too late for that. I’ve talked to Messenger, you see, as well as John Gellian, And I’ve just seen poor little Venn with his head off.”
She nodded, shrinking from him, her eyes narrow and greenish-seeming now. She seemed to wait for his accusation, and he made it hoarsely:
“You killed him—didn’t you?”
She flinched, and seemed to catch her breath. The line of her pale lips drew harder, expressing neither admission nor denial.
“Anyhow,” he added harshly, “I want that mule.”
She stood for a long time motionless, her body taut.
“I have it,” she admitted at last. “Back in the lab.”
He moved forward quickly. “Let me see it.”
Still blocking the door, she studied him with a tortured indecision dark in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered at last. “I really wanted to help you get away.” She moved regretfully out of his way. “Come on in, if you must see the mule.”
He followed her back to the little laboratory where he had failed to qualify for the benefits of the Sanderson Service. Choking fumes brought him gasping to the sink. There he found the creature from the Mamberamo, reduced to a few dark shapeless scraps dissolving in a greenish acid froth.
“I’m sorry, Dane.” Her low voice swung him back. “I didn’t plan it this way—”
That was all he heard. He caught one glimpse of the weapon she had found in the moment while his back was turned: a thin metal tube. Though it looked too tiny to be dangerous, he snatched at it desperately. It clicked very softly in her golden fingers before he could reach it, stabbing out a fine jet that stung his forearm like a hot blade. That was all he knew.
VIII
SOMEBODY was shaking him. “Wake up!” It was a girl, bending over him anxiously. “Can’t you wake up, now?”
She was beautiful in shimmering blue, reddish-haired and tawny-limbed, but he didn’t recognize her. He didn’t know this dim-lit office room. His head ached intolerably when he tried to lift it, and his right arm throbbed, and he couldn’t wake up.
Later, a telephone rang near his head. Still too drowsy to move, he heard the girl’s quick footsteps, and her low voice speaking.
“No, I’m still waiting,” she said. “I’ve packed what we can take, and destroyed what might harm us. I’m ready to go, as soon as our visitor is able.”
The answering voice was too faint for him to hear.
“The usual satisfactory reaction to the jet injection.” The girl spoke briskly again. “He crumpled up, before he knew what hit him. Pulse still accelerated and temperature high. He’s a clean page, by this time.”
Dimly, he wondered what her words could mean, but he couldn’t remember anything. Feeling too heavy to move, too blank even to ask who he was or what had happened to him, he kept on listening.
“Leave him behind?” Her voice lifted protestingly. “He’s worth all the danger to us. And he wouldn’t have a chance, if they ever found him here.”
He wondered vaguely who “they” were, and why he wouldn’t have a chance.
“A raid?” Her voice turned faint with fear. “At four? No, I didn’t know. I’m too tired tonight to see that far ahead.”
The other voice murmured in the instrument.
“But we can’t just abandon him.” Cool resolution steadied her tone. “We need him too much with his mind undamaged. I’m afraid to move him yet, but I think I can delay that raid.”
He thought the other voice objected.
“I’m going out now, to make a diversion,” the girl said firmly. “If I get away with it, I’ll come back here in two hours for our new recruit. We ought to reach your place by five—if we get there at all.”
She hung up the telephone. Her quick footsteps receded. A door opened and closed, and she was gone. Wondering dimly whose that other voice had been, he went back to sleep. . . .
What woke him was a shock of sheer alarm. It brought him to his feet, dazed and trembling.
He looked around him blankly, but he didn’t recognize the desk, or the filing cabinet, or the doorway beyond. All he knew was the fact of deadly danger.
He slipped out into a dark corridor. Even in the darkness, a cold glow of something not light showed him the stair. He ran silently down flight after flight, until at last he came to a closed door at the bottom.
It let him out, into a wider hallway. He ran along it toward the gray light from the street, until once more the cold force of danger caught him. It held him flattened back against a closed door while two men with short automatic rifles burst in from the street and ran past him to enter the stair door.
As they disappeared, he tip-toed out the way they had come, into the street. He held himself from flight, even when the car pulled up to the curb beside him.
“Hello, there.” The girl from the office was at the wheel. She leaned quickly to open the car for him. In the faint glow from the instrument panel, he could see the reddish color of her hair and the warm ivory tones of her face.
“I’m Nan Sanderson,” she whispered. “I’ve come to help you get away.
Something made him hesitate. The glow against her face was only light, however, and he could feel no danger around her. Something made her car a sort of sanctuary. Gratefully, he got in beside her.
SHE drove rapidly at first through the rain, uneasily watching the dark streets behind in the rear view mirror and frowning sometimes at the panel clock, whose hands stood at five.
Once however, she pulled into a narrow alley, snapped off the lights, and waited there, uneasily watching the clock. After what seemed a long time, a police car came racing the way they had come, siren moaning and red light glaring.
She backed out of the alley when it was gone, and followed it more slowly. Rain-dimmed daylight had come by the time a toll gate stopped them, at the end of a long bridge. She paid from a small plastic bag, and she no longer watched the mirror as they went on, but smiled at him as if her fear had all been left beyond the river.
“We’ve made it!” He liked the friendly warmth of her voice. “Now I suppose you’d like to know where we’re going?”
“I—I suppose.” That was all he said, for words, like everything else, were curiously hard for him to recall. He didn’t care, really, where they went. He was with her, and that colorless glare of enmity was left far behind.
“We’re going to Mr. Messenger’s airport on Long Island,” she said. “Don’t you remember him?”
He shook his head drowsily.
“Don’t you even know your own name?”
But he didn’t remember anything. He didn’t even want to try, because the effort hurt his head. All that mattered was the moment, and the girl’s warm presence. He didn’t want this trip with her to end anywhere.
“Fallon.” Her smile heightened his dreamy content. “You’re Dr. Donovan Fallon.”
“Fallon?” The syllables seemed somehow stiffly familiar, but all words came awkwardly to him now. He repeated carefully, “Dr. Donovan Fallon.”
“Now, Don Fallon, would you like to have a job?”
“I don’t know.” The future was as blank as the past. “I don’t know—anything.”
“You need a job.” Her face was gravely concerned. “You’ve been sick, and you’re in serious trouble now. You’ve no family. No friends. No money. But Mr. Messenger can help you, if you’re willing to work for him.”
“What kind of job?” He looked down at his hands, flexing them doubtfully. “I can’t remember—what I ever did.”
“Don’t worry about that. Part of your memory was destroyed forever by this illness—it was a rare type of virus encephalitis. You’ll have to start all over again. But your manual skills weren’t harmed. And the damage to the memory is usually quite shallow, so that you can probably relearn most of what you used to know very quickly.”
He nodded, gratefully, but a lingering unease made him inquire: “What’s this trouble I’m in?”
“You’re a geneticist.” Her long blue eyes looked up at him from the road, full of troubled innocence. “You were working with this encephalitis virus, trying to identify it as a fresh mutation, when you had a laboratory accident. A young woman assistant was also infected, when you were. She died. You are accused of her murder.”
“Murder?” He stared at her. “Can Mr. Messenger get me out of that?”
“He’ll take you to New Guinea,” she said. “We’re going there to undertake some very important laboratory work for the Cadmus company. When you’ve recovered enough of your old knowledge and skill, Mr. Messenger wants you to be his laboratory technician.”
“If it was all an accident, why must I run away?”
“You’re innocent.” Her calm smile reassured him. “But the authorities have circumstantial evidence enough to send you to the chair. We can’t help you in court, and obviously you can’t testify in your own defense.”
Groping in the blankness of his mind, he found no fact to help him.
“But you’ll be safe enough in New Guinea.” She was still smiling, yet her sidelong glance seemed oddly anxious. “If you want to come with us?”
“Then you’re going, too?”
“I am.” She nodded. “As Mr. Messenger’s secretary.”
That decided him. This new life was not two hours old, and she was still the center of it. He relaxed, content to be anywhere with her.
“I want to come,” he told her. “If we can get away.”
SHE turned from the highway at last, into a broad drive which curved past a long mansion as massive as a fortress.
“Mr. Messenger’s place,” she said. “His private plane is waiting for us.” She slowed the car and stopped, as the plane emerged from the gray veil of rain ahead.
The pilot of the waiting plane waved cheerfully from the high cockpit as they started toward it, and a small brown crewman stood waiting to help them aboard, grinning an amiable welcome.
“Well, Dr. Fallon.” The girl touched his arm, whispering softly. “I think you’re safe.”
A few moments later the great craft lifted them through the pounding turbulence of the clouds. Nan Sanderson caught his arm. “Now, let’s go meet Mr. Messenger.”
In the sleek luxury of the lounge an enormous man sat waiting.
“Nan, I thought you’d never come!” The big man tried to rise from his chair, and sprawled helplessly. “Glad you’re going, Fallon!” A genial smile swept all the scarred ugliness from his sagging face. “I know you’re going to be valuable to us!”
The girl gave Dane no time to ask questions. “Medina—” she nodded at the dark steward—“will show you to your room. Better get some rest, because we’ve a lot of work to do!”
Awkwardly he acknowledged Messenger’s greeting, and a moment later was alone in his tiny cabin. Too tired to wonder at his peculiar predicament, or speculate upon the work he was expected to do, he dropped to his berth, fully clothed, and slept. . . .
He woke suddenly, sweating and shivering in his berth. For a moment he thought some shocking memory had come back as he slept, but each detail vanished as he groped for it, until only a haunting recollection of terror was left. He sat up at last, flinching from a thin needle of pain at the back of his head.
The plane was steady now, droning through stable air and the bright morning sunlight soon swept away the lingering dread of the dream. Even the tiny ache was gone from his head, by the time he had washed his face and left his room to look for breakfast.
“Good morning, Dr. Fallon.” Startled by that genial hail, he found Nan. Sanderson and the financier sitting over coffee cups in the lounge. Beaming at him, Messenger’s fat, splotched face seemed to have a better color, and the girl was radiant.
“Feeling better, Don?” She nodded at the ports. “Now you can see you’re really safe.”
Turning uneasily to look out, he saw an endless rolling plain of white stratus clouds below, bright as new snow beneath the morning sun but fissured here and there with chasms floored with dark, wind-wrinkled water.
“The Pacific,” she said. “We’re not three hours from Hawaii. Your old troubles won’t overtake you now.” She rang for the steward. “Eat your breakfast, and let’s get started with your reeducation.”
THE grinning Filipino brought a tray that made a little table beside his chair, and Dane emptied the plastic dishes with a relish that surprised him. Before he had finished, Nan Sanderson came back with an armful of heavy books. He frowned at the titles.
Microbiology. Mechanisms of Mitosis. Proteins, Viruses and Genes. Evolution of Mankind. And another, that somehow recalled the haunting unease of his dream: Biochemistry of Mutation.
