Mission: Earth "Fortune of Fear" (38 page)

Miss Simmons was having trouble locating the Countess to talk to her. The Countess must have seen that she was speaking to someone who was as blind as a bat.

"The police!" said the Countess. "Then you need head protection." She kicked the door shut behind her and right in front of Simmons took the hypnohelmet out of the square shopping bag.

I suddenly realized that I still had Simmons' glasses in my pocket. Unwittingly, I had made it very easy for Krak.

The Countess simply turned the helmet on and dropped it over Simmons' head! Just like that!

Krak looked around the rather large and well-furnished living room. Looking for a place to stamp, I thought. A radio seemed to be playing in the next apartment. The Countess Krak saw that a corridor led to a bedroom. She pushed Simmons toward it.

Like a sleepwalker, my favorite ally went down the hall toward her doom.

There was a wide bed, a boudoir table and an easy chair, all decorated in frilly white organdy. The Countess Krak closed the bedroom door. She lowered Simmons onto the bed. She arranged the pillow so it would support the helmet properly. She plugged in her microphone and then sat down in the easy chair.

Simmons had evidently been changing out of her street clothes when the door buzzer went, for they were lying on the floor. She had tossed on a dressing gown. It had opened now as she sprawled there. Not a bad-looking body.

Krak apparently didn't care for that. She moved out of the chair again and pulled the dressing gown together to make Simmons decent. Then she laid her sable cape aside and took off her own jacket, the equivalent of rolling up her sleeves to get to work.

The Countess spoke into her microphone. "Be calm, relax. You are quite safe." Oh, what a liar, I thought. "Sleep, sleep, pretty sleep. Can you hear me?"

Muffled, "Yes."

"What were those eight men going to do to you in Van Cortlandt Park?" said the Countess, leaning back in her chair.

Muffled, "Rape me. All eight of them. They were going to rape me hour after hour."

The Countess lowered her mike and pushed it into her shoulder. "I thought so," she muttered in Voltarian. "A real rape-crazy slut. The whole thing has been just a pose to steal Jettero!" She raised the mike and reverted to English. "When was the first time you saw Wister?"

Miss Simmons flung out her arms, throwing the robe wide open. Her hands extended down, straight out, so rigid they were quivering. Her feet jerked down. She looked like she'd been put on an electric rack. A faint scream came, muffled, from under the helmet.

"Answer me!" snapped the Countess Krak.

Simmons said, "Registration Hall last September." The quivers increased.

Krak said, "You are there at that moment. You see Wister. What do you
really
think?"

Simmons let out a faint scream. The vibrations of her body increased as the rigidity grew.

"Answer me!"

Simmons said, "He is too good-looking."

The Countess lowered the mike into her shoulder and muttered in Voltarian, "Just as I thought. Love at first sight." In English she said into the mike, "Anything else?"

The answer was a muffled scream, "That it was awful that he was a nuclear physicist major and had to be stopped."

"Why?" said the Countess.

Miss Simmons looked to be in torment. She shouted, "THERE MUST BE NO EXPLOSIONS!" Then in lower volume, muffled by the helmet, "My father held the chair of psychology at Brooklyn University. He said explosions were substitutions for sexual (bleepulations) and a girl must be frigid, frigid, frigid to protect herself." She was stiff, stretched out now like hard marble, totally rigid.

Krak spoke into the mike, "When did he say that?"

"When he caught me putting firecrackers in the dog's (bleep)."

The Countess dropped the mike. In Voltarian she muttered, "What a
weird
planet!" She sat there a bit and then picked it up and said in English, "The real incident was different. Your father made a mistake. You get NO pleasure out of hurting animals. You were feeding the dog milk and petting it. That is really what you were doing and what really happened. Your father was totally wrong. Accept it."

Simmons suddenly relaxed. She whispered, "I accept it. Oh, I am SO glad that was really what happened. Then my father must have been wrong about everything."

"Right," said the Countess Krak, villainously undoing in a breath what that poor, laboring psychologist-father had devoted his whole life to build up. What a destructive Manco Devil that Krak was!

The Countess took a firmer grip on the microphone. She was obviously through playing around. Now she was going to get down to business. She said, "Now we're back to the first time you saw Wister. What you really thought was that you were not good enough for him. Correct?"

Simmons said, under the helmet, "Correct."

Krak said, "Now it is the time of the first Nature Appreciation class last fall. You are alone, you are leaving the UN. You do not want Wister to follow you because you know you are not good enough for him. You feel very sad about it, right?"

Simmons said, "Right."

Aha, here it came. I knew that Krak was going to order her, now, to write a suicide note. For that is exactly what I would have done. Simmons was finished!

The doorbell rang.

I let out a wheeze of relief for Simmons. She had been saved by the bell. Grafferty! All was not lost. He was just a little early, for there was no corpse there yet. But he would see at once what this was all about: he would find Simmons in a hypnotic trance and know that murder was in the air.

Krak said into the mike, "You will lie there quietly for the moment and ignore anything you hear until I get back."

She put down the mike. She went out of the bedroom and closed its door behind her. She went into the living room. She peeled off her gloves, threw them aside and fluffed her hair. She opened the door.

DOCTOR KUTZBRAIN!

He was standing there in a bowler hat and black overcoat. He lifted up his inch-thick glasses and stared at Krak. "Well, well! Lizzie Borden!" Then he smiled like a hungry wolf and pushed his way in and banged the door shut behind him.

As soon as he was in, he said, "I just stopped by to tear off a little (bleep). I always visit my patients in times of stress, namely mine."

In a disgusted voice the Countess Krak said, "Really."

Kutzbrain was taking off his overcoat. He said, "Nothing like a little psychiatric therapy to cheer one up."

The Countess said, "Do you live with Miss Simmons?"

"Oh, no, no. I'm Doctor Kutzbrain, her psychiatrist at the University Hospital. But I'm impartial. I spread my professional skills around. I don't think you've been an inmate of my ward yet, Borden, but you're a real looker so I'll make sure you soon will be. So just lie down on that sofa and pull up your skirt and we'll get into the preliminary professional psychiatric examination. If it feels good enough, I can get you into the ward instantly. Those look like nice (bleeps) under your shirt. But they need a (bleep) erection test."

My hair rose. The Countess Krak had killed three men just for extending a hand toward her sexually. This dumb (bleepard) was about to be stamped to jelly! And then I really laughed with glee. Grafferty was going to find a real corpse!

The Countess Krak was reaching into the plastic shopping bag. I knew it was for some lethal weapon. It was a roll of something black. She tore one of the perforated bits from it.

The doctor's hand was still reaching. She put the small black square in it. "Hold this," she said icily.

He took it and stared at it.

She reached into the black plastic bag. There was a little dynamo in there. She touched a plunger which started it.

Doctor Kutzbrain stood straight up. He went utterly rigid. His face went blank. He was fixed in place like an awkward statue!

Oh, my Gods! One of the Eyes and Ears of Voltar devices she had filched from the Afyon hospital! I remembered it. It was a remote-control rig. When one had one of those black patches planted on him and the device was activated by the tiny dynamo, the person went rigid and blank and stayed that way as long as the dynamo ran, and when it was cut off the person returned to motion without being aware of the halt. According to the directions I had fleetingly seen, they used it to obtain evidence photographs in low-level light conditions. But she was simply using it to immobilize Doctor Kutzbrain.

Probably she would kill him later. Grafferty still had a chance to get his corpse, so necessary to headlines and to my plans for finally wrecking the Countess Krak.

Still, even if Grafferty came early, there was quite enough to cook her goose: a leading psychiatrist of the city standing like a catatonic statue in the middle of the living room and a very pathetic victim hypnotized in the back bedroom. Whichever way the cards fell, the Countess Krak was for it! New York City would give her Hells, to mention nothing of Voltar penalties for Code breaks.

She made sure that Doctor Kutzbrain was remaining statuized. Then she went back into the bedroom to finish off Simmons, all unaware that the police were howling on their way. I knew that she could never get out of there in time.

The Countess Krak closed the bedroom door behind her. Miss Simmons was sprawled on the bed-breasts, belly and thighs bare. The Countess reached over and pulled the bathrobe closed: I could not figure why she was doing that; I myself thought Simmons' nakedness pretty stimulating.

Krak sat down in the chair and again took up the microphone. "It is just after the first Nature Appreciation class last fall. You have left the UN and are now entering Van Cortlandt Park. Where are you?"

"Just entering Van Cortlandt Park," said Simmons, very muffled under the helmet. Her body started to stiffen.

"You see that Wister is following you. You know you are not good enough for him. You plead with him to go away."

From under the helmet, "Please go away, Wister."

"Good. Now he has gone away. You walk further into the park. You see eight men following you. Look back at them. What do you see?"

Miss Simmons' body went more rigid and began to twitch.

"I see eight men following me."

Krak said, "You are looking for a secluded place. You find one. What does it look like?"

Miss Simmons went more tense. She said, "A hollow with a high bank all around. The path comes down from the hill into it. The grass is green, there is a brook."

"Good," said the Countess Krak. "One of the men is closer than the rest. What would you really want him to do."

"Like it says in Krafft-Ebing."

"What is Krafft-Ebing?" asked Krak in a puzzled voice.

"The books like
Psychopathia Sexualis.
Like Have-lock Ellis' books or Sigmund Freud's. My father used to read them to me every night at bedtime. As a psychologist he said that all those nasty fairy tales were full of phallic symbols. Like putting thumbs in pies. And he said his daughter must read the same things they teach in kindergarten today because psychology is the best arousal-depressant for children as it pounds into them all the horrible things they must not do. He did it to help my natural frigidity so I could be normal like the other children in my class."

The Countess Krak lowered the microphone into her shoulder. "Good Heavens!" she muttered in Voltarian. Then she raised the mike and said in English,

"So what did you want the first man to do?"

"Like Krafft-Ebing. To knock me down in the mud and...
mumble... mumble... mumble...
just like it says in Kra... mmmmmmmm! Oh, yes. Oh, my, YES!" Her words had been more and more choked and her breathing was short and heavy. "Come on...
mumble, mumble...
Put...
mumble... mumble.
AH!"

The Countess Krak was staring at her. She covered the microphone. In Voltarian, she muttered, "Well, there's no stopping her now." In English she said into the mike, "That's exactly what is happening. You can see it, feel it, you are right there. Go ahead."

Miss Simmons got more rigid. Then she threw her arms and legs wide. She arched her back. Her hands impatiently ripped the robe even further away so she was totally uncovered. "Ah, ah... the mud... so beautiful... so dirty... ah... MORE!... MORE!" Her back was arched like a bow.

Some clothing on a hanger began to dance.
"Mumble... mumble,"
panted Miss Simmons.

"My word," said the startled Countess Krak.

The clothes blew off the hanger with the violence of Miss Simmons' scream.

The Countess Krak stared at her, stunned.

Miss Simmons was now lying there, spent, her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth.

The Countess Krak raised the microphone up. But she didn't get a chance to say anything. "Now YOU!" cried Miss Simmons.

Both Miss Simmons' feet rose into the air and began to kick jerkily.
"Mumble... mumble... mumble."

The items on the makeup bureau began to jump and quiver.

"Good Lords," said the Countess Krak.

"NOW!" screamed Miss Simmons. "NOW! NOW! NOW!"

The makeup bureau implements cascaded to the floor, battered by Miss Simmons' piercing screech.

Then Miss Simmons was lying there, tongue lolling out of the side of her mouth, panting.

The Countess Krak raised the microphone to speak. She didn't get a chance. "Two, two, two!" cried Miss Simmons. "Both...
mumble... mumble...
GOT TO!"

Miss Simmons was sitting up. She began to bounce up and down on the bed.

The Countess Krak was watching her, very puzzled.

A piece of plaster in the ceiling began to shake and splinter.

"Yowee!" cried Miss Simmons.

A piercing scream hit the plaster and it came crashing down.