Collected Short Fiction, page 138
“Transportation is a necessity. Silence is a luxury. We’re just learning how expensive it can be. But if you can really quiet your conscience that easily, I’ve made a mistake.”
“What do you want to know?” she asked in a low voice as he started to turn away.
“Where these things come from,” he said urgently. “Who makes them. Where—”
“I can’t tell you those things,” she said, frowning.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“There’s such a thing as loyalty, you know.”
“These are uneasy times,” Kevin said softly. “More than ever, we must be careful where we give our loyalty.”
“That’s an odd thing to say.”
“I give up,” Kevin said in disgust. “You won’t believe me. Do one thing: read the paper. Watch the black box on the front page where the accidents and fatalities are totaled. See how the rate has climbed. Look at the business page and notice how retail sales have slumped. Then see if you can justify your loyalty. Maybe the people who are making these things are loyal, honest citizens. But they’re murdering their country just as certainly as if they were traitors. And it’s only been a week. What will it be like in a month?
“Maybe it will make you wonder if these things were invented behind the Iron Curtain.”
He clicked the Silencer as he dropped it into the open purse, stuck it in her hand, and walked briskly away.
He didn’t look back.
For the first time in more than a week, Kevin went to bed without a Silencer under his pillow. He felt like a heroin addict in the worst stages of withdrawal.
Cars turned the corner and splashed their headlights across the ceiling. Kevin stared at them, trying to blank his mind to the noise, but his body was taut, his arms rigid at his sides, his fists clenched, his mind a sea, stormy with speculation. . . .
His sleep, when he finally dropped off, was nervous. It was the new dream in which he tried to run away from something terrible and unknown. And he fought to run, but it was a nightmare slowness through the silence with faceless terror lurking at his shoulder, hand outstretched. . . .
He woke to silence—the complete tomb-silence of the slim, black cases. He breathed deeply for a moment, relaxing, thinking that he must have turned on the Silencer after all when the torment grew too great. And then he knew that he hadn’t surrendered.
He spun sideways in the double bed, rolling toward the wall. Something where he had lain made the bed vibrate.
From his knees he jackknifed to the floor at the foot of the bed. The room was too dark; someone had pulled the shades. He dashed for the light switch by the door. At the corner of the bed, his right elbow, raised protectively, sank into something yielding. It fell away.
All in silence and night. It was indescribably frightening.
Kevin lunged for the light switch, missed, and spun to protect himself. Something hit his head lightly. He swung a roundhouse right and felt the fist smash into something resilient, like cartilage. Fie threw a vicious left that missed and a short right that connected again and a sneak left, and then there was nothing to hit at.
His hand slid hastily along the wall, but before there was light, sound returned, deafening, violent.
The blue fixture on the ceiling sprang into life.
He was alone in the room.
Dazedly he brushed the back of his hand across his eyes and looked again. The bed was mussed, but that was all.
Hallucinations? Silent but solid? Solid enough. The knuckles on his right hand were split and bleeding.
There had been someone in the room with him. Someone with a Silencer. The shade on the west window flapped. The window was up as far as it would go.
Kevin looked out, but there was no one on the porch roof. He could be lurking underneath, but Kevin felt no impulse to go looking for him. One such encounter a night was sufficient.
More than likely, it was a sneak thief after valuables. He wouldn’t be coming back; he’d try easier places.
As Kevin put a piece of tape on his knuckles, he remembered how the bed had vibrated just after he had rolled toward the wall. He shivered.
He shut both windows and locked them and began stacking chairs into a precarious heap under them. He stopped suddenly. It was useless. Locks were no good against someone with a Silencer. He could break a dozen windows with impunity and stumble over all the chairs in the room without making a sound.
Kevin realized with a tight feeling of horror that the only protection against someone with a Silencer was a locked bank vault with a twenty-four hour guard.
He straightened an armchair and sank down into it weakly, staring out the useless window toward the night-dark sky. Five minutes later, he slipped into a tan sport shirt and a pair of brown, gabardine slacks, tossed some other clothing into a fiberglass suitcase, picked up his portable typewriter, and crept through the house and down the stairs to the kitchen.
It was after he had knocked over the teakettle that he thought of turning on his Silencer. While he was searching, he grew conscious that someone was standing in the doorway. He whirled apprehensively. It was Mrs. Waterman, her long, braided gray hair down her back, her face suspicious.
Kevin squeezed off the Silencer.
“. . . do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Moving downtown for a few days,” he said apologetically. “I wanted to borrow a couple of things before I left.”
“At three o’clock in the morning?”
Mrs. Waterman had always been certain there was something unnatural about a man who “worked” at home. “You know writers,” Kevin said easily. “Creatures of impulse. I intended to leave some money.”
“I should hope so,” she said dourly. “What was it you intended to borrow?”
Kevin had considered a knife, but there was too much risk of getting sliced about the leg or abdomen. Instead, he had picked out a sturdy steel—a long, ridged knife sharpener with a wooden handle. Beside it on the drainboard was a flash-light. Kevin extracted two twenties from his billfold and held them out. “That pays me up for two weeks. I’ll bring these things back when I’ve finished with them.”
Her hands closed tightly around the bills before she said, “What you want them for?”
In one hand Kevin gathered up his suitcase and typewriter. The other held the flashlight and steel. “You know writers,” he said brightly. “Notional.” He stopped at the front door and looked back. “Besides, Mrs. Waterman, there are prowlers about.”
He was out the door before her wail of anguish could reach him. He walked warily, inspecting the shadows, until he reached his car, parked at the curb as a target for birds and aphids. He flashed the light into front and back seats, tossed in his luggage, slipped under the wheel, and locked the doors.
He drove downtown by way of Sixth Street Trafficway, creeping across the infrequent intersections, watching the rearview mirror. There was little traffic, and no car seemed to stay behind him. He turned the car into the underground garage opposite Municipal Auditorium, stirred an attendant into awareness by walking into the glass booth and kicking his chair, and handed his luggage to a bellhop from the tunnel-connected hotel.
He kept the steel and flashlight in his hands. The boy glanced at them nervously. “Ask me no questions, boy,” Kevin said grimly.
The boy put down the suitcase and the typewriter, pressed his blouse pocket, and said, “Sir?”
“Never mind,” Kevin snarled. “Carry on!”
To the room clerk he said, “I want a room with no outside windows. Failing that, I want one on the tenth floor or above and at least twenty feet from the nearest fire escape.”
The clerk stared at him as if the thought Kevin were crazy.
Before he settled down in his claustrophic cubicle—unused, he had a suspicion, since the era of McKinley—he locked the door and pulled a solid bureau in front of it. As an added precaution, he worked out an ingenious arrangement of strings that would tug his leg out of bed if the door was opened.
It wasn’t that he was timid. He was scared.
The walls of the office were chiefly bookcases, and the books in them had the well-thumbed look of textbooks or reference works. Beyond that it was unpretentious and small and cluttered.
“Sure you weren’t followed?” Pryor asked anxiously.
“As sure as I am of anything,” Kevin said. “I played hide-and-seek in Jones’s until one of the elevator operators left to call the manager. Then I took a cab. If I was followed, they work in teams. I take it, then, that you believe me.”
“Why not?”
“I really might be crazy, you know.”
“So might we all. I’ll believe anything about the people who made that thing.” He glared at the slim, black case; his bandaged hands twitched. “Except this Iron Curtain business.”
“Who else?”
“Don’t know,” Pryor said thoughtfully. “Not a hint of a hunch. If it’s the Soviets, God help us all, because—well, a technology that could make this—”
“Accidental discovery?” Kevin suggested.
“Could be. Doesn’t feel right, though. Not the way their minds work. Ours either. Too damn’ subtle. Awry, somehow.”
“You pays your money and you takes your choice,” Kevin pointed out. “There’s only two—the Russians or some honest but mad scientist. Otherwise, why the secrecy?”
Pryor waved his hands helplessly. “You’re right, you’re right.” He brooded over the Silencer on his desk. “What made the bed vibrate?” he wondered.
Kevin shuddered. “I’m not sure I want to know.”
“Why you?” Pryor asked, looking up. “What do you know?”
“Nothing.”
“Maybe the girl—? You’ve given up on her?”
“No to both questions,” Kevin said quickly. “I’m letting her soften up.” He smiled reminiscently. “I’ve got a hunch—”
“Those hunches!” Pryor exclaimed. “Well, I don’t care how you get the information.”
“I think she’s real soft underneath,” Kevin went on, undisturbed. “That’s why she acts hard—to cover up. When I break through the shell, she’s going to tell all.”
“I can’t wait. Fifty thousand a day,” he mused. “Who delivers them?”
“Who? But how do you backtrack a truck? If I were doing it, I’d rent trucks, run the shipments at night, and take back the trucks to the agency until next time I needed them.”
“Tackle it both ways. I’ll get volunteers to watch a shop twenty-four hours a day. You tour the agencies.”
Kevin nodded. “The proceeds have to be picked up.”
“Salesgirls could deposit it. Or someone could enter as a customer. Fifteen thousand bucks in twenties, tens, and fives wouldn’t bulge too obviously if stowed strategically. But we can watch. Maybe you can learn that from the girl, too.”
“Don’t laugh!” Kevin warned. “You’re speaking of the woman I love. Before we’re through, she may be our greatest asset.”
“Or somebody’s,” Pryor agreed gloomily. He glared at the Silencer. “For all we know it’s a time bomb waiting to go off.”
“It couldn’t be much more deadly. At the present accident rate, the cities will be depopulated in a few years. That doesn’t even consider the economic effect. By the Times, retail sales are off another ten per cent. I never thought I’d weep for the hucksters.”
“You aren’t weeping for the hucksters. You’re weeping for your civilization.”
“Haven’t you discovered anything?” Kevin demanded.
“Sure,” Pryor said heavily. “A little black box, four inches by three by one-half, emits any frequency of sound between the aural limits of 15 to 23,000 cycles per second, any intensity, any wave form, any phase. Contained within it is an instantaneous sound analyzer which picks up outside noise from the perimeter of the silence zone by some kind of self-contained radar or what-have-you. The sibilance there—the Shhhh!—is an area of imperfect cancellation. All this, you understand, from a little black box we can’t peep into. My own personal theory,” he said bitterly, “is that they are only three-dimensional projections of four-dimensional laboratories occupying the equivalent of the Empire State Building.”
“You still can’t open it?”
“Oh, we can open them. They’re tough, but we can do it. We opened the thirty-third one an hour ago in a bath of liquid helium. The tank blew up and put two good men in the hospital.”
“Anyone who gets curious about them,” Kevin said, getting up with a baffled look. “They’re almost—consciously hostile. And I rushed wildly to buy one—”
“Greek gift,” said Pryor. “Be careful, now. Don’t rush blindly into anything.”
There was a sign framed on the wall behind Pryor’s desk. Kevin read it and grinned wryly. It was good advice:
BEFORE YOU LOUSE SOME-
THING UP—THIMK
Cincinnati, June 24. (AP)—
In a daring, daylight raid made possible by the newest electronic marvel and the oldest human brutality, five bandits shot down 29 persons and escaped with more than one million dollars from this city’s First National Bank this morning.
A small, black case known as a Silencer which appeared on the market only eleven days ago provided the most bizarre element in a scene of terror, confusion, and bloodshed unrivaled since Kansas City’s Union Station Massacre. Thirteen persons died without a sound and 16 persons were wounded, five of whom remain on the critically injured list.
The five bandits entered the bank half an hour after it opened this morning. One of them stopped at the door and lit a cigarette. The other four moved to different parts of the room. Only later did bank patrons remember seeing them drop something In wastebaskets or slip something into a desk.
But everyone saw what happened next. The five bandits drew automatics, and the four at the counters drew Silencers out of their pockets and tossed them among the bank employees. They motioned the tellers back from the windows. One teller hesitated. He died with a bullet hole in his forehead.
Near the door, a guard reached for his gun. He was dead before he touched it. Within the next minute, twenty-seven others were hit by bullets.
Working as if there were no reason to hurry, the bandits scooped bills out of cash drawers into linen sacks they removed from under their coats, looted the vault, and escaped without pursuit. Thirteen minutes after the bandits fled, the alarm was sounded. It took that long to clear an area of Silencers.
Mrs. Ivy Butler, who escaped with only flesh wounds from flying marble chips, said after help arrived: “It was the most terrible experience I have ever known. Not so much the people—that was bad enough—but the way they died, without a sound, like some new kind of animated dolls that have learned to bleed . . .
Chicago, June 25, (AP)—
Bandits’ stole $213,719 from the Midwestern Loan Office this afternoon, the eighth major daylight theft in the last two days, bringing the total loss to more than five million dollars.
Police, hard, pressed by the demands of the worsening traffic situation, are asking the sheriff’s office to deputize armed guards for the city’s principal financial institutions. . . .
San Francisco, June 26, (AP)
—Two banks, separated by a distance of three miles, were burglarized last night for almost two million dollars when safecrackers, under mantles of silence, wrecked the insides of the banks while blowing open the vaults.
No one heard a sound . . .
Washington, June 28, (AP)—The alarming rise in the nation’s crime rate was blamed this morning on illicit use of the new electronic miracle, the Silencer, by J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“The Silencer is the perfect criminal tool,” he told reporters in response to a rising public clamor over the wave of lawbreaking which has brought the nation’s financial existence closer to the brink than the Great Depression. “Robbery and burglary rates have increased twenty times over the last few days. Other crimes have been crowded off the front page, but their incidence is just as terrible: purse snatching, auto theft, assault, rape, murder. . . .”
No police force can handle a crime wave of this proportion, Mr. Hoover said. He called upon every citizen to forego the use of the Silencer.
“No honest man should be afraid of noise,” he said earnestly. “But it is the criminal’s greatest enemy . . .
Omaha, Neb., June 29. (AP)
—In spite of a signed confession in the hands of the police, Mrs. Elmo Pike pleaded not guilty this morning to the murder of her husband. All Omaha is waiting for the beginning of the trial which has already received headlines nationwide as “The Silencer Murder Case.”
It began 16 days ago, Mrs. Pike told police officers who booked her last Saturday evening. Elmo Pike had a different story. For him it began twenty years before.
According to neighbors and friends, Mrs. Pike had been talking to her husband for every waking hour of every one of those twenty years. Elmo, it is presumed, was tuning out as much as possible, with an occasional “Yeah” or “Uh-huh” to show he was listening.
Sixteen days ago Silencers went on sale in Omaha. The next day Elmo bought one. Then he made his fatal mistake: he took it home.
Elmo Pike had always enjoyed the sounds he heard in public; it was only the ones at home that annoyed him. He fell into a habit of turning on his Silencer as he crossed his threshold.
Elmo made his second mistake: he forgot to watch Mrs. Pike’s Ups.
Last Saturday night Elmo Pike looked into his wife’s right eye. It was sighting down the barrel of his automatic shotgun. Elmo Pike never heard the shot that killed him.
It is understood that Mrs. Pike will plead justifiable homicide.
(Feature story in the Kansas City Star, June 29, bylined: Kevin Gregg)
I talked last night with the czar of the Midwestern underworld. I thought he would be delighted with the increase in crime over the last two weeks.
He wasn’t. . . .
Rocco’s face was blunt and pockmarked and impassive. It didn’t change as Kevin said, “I imagine you know better than most of us what has happened in this city—”
