Sinister Barrier (16 page)

“Oh, darn!” He thought a moment, then said, “You might as well be told, I guess. You’ll learn it sooner or later, anyway.”

“What is it?”

“They don’t seem to be killing them any more. They’re snatching them bodily now, and taking them God knows where.” He spun his hat round in his hand. “We don’t know why they’re snatching them, or what for. But we can have our dreams… bad dreams!”

She paled.

“It’s the latest version of the oldest gag,” he added, brutally, “a fate worse than death!” He put the hat on his head. “So for pity’s sake, look after yourself and keep out of their way to what extent you can. No ducking out of your dates, even by going skyward, see?”

“I’ve not made a date.”

“Not yet. But someday you will. When all this mess is cleaned up, you’re going to be pestered plenty.” He grinned. “I’ll have nothing else to do, then—and I’m going to spend all my time doing it!”

He closed the door on her faint wisp of a smile. Sneaking through the gates and into the murky road that crawled beneath a sky of jet, he knew that that smile still lingered with the memory of his words. But he couldn’t think for long about her smile.

In the distance the hidden clouds dripped great blobs of shining blue; rain from the overhead hell. There was a mutual soaring of ghastly globules a little later. They were too far off for him to see clearly, but he sensed that the phenomena were ascending burdened.

With his mind’s eye, he saw stiff, unmoving human figures rising in the tentacled grasp of repulsive captors, while below their helpless bodies ten thousand guns gaped at the lowering sky, a thousand listening trumpets awaited the advent of another enemy which, at least, was flesh. The pond was being scoured for frogs even while the frogs were battling each other, cannibalistically.

“We shall measure our existence by its frogs.”

He wondered how this epidemic of kidnapings would appear to an observer not yet treated with Bjornsen’s sight-widening formula. Undoubtedly, this awful demonstration of superior powers justified the fearful superstitions of the past. Such things had happened before. History and the oldest legends were full of sudden frenzies, levitations, vanishings, and ascensions into the blue mystery of the everlasting sky.

His thoughts jerked away from the subject, switched to the old scientist who had hurried home with a strange idea, and he said to himself, “Bill Graham, I’ll lay you a dollar to a cent that Farmiloe either is demented, departed or dead.”

Satisfied with this sportingly morbid offer, he turned down Drexler, sneaked cautiously through the deepest shadows, his rubber-soled shoes padding along with minimum of sound, his agate-like, glistening eyes wary of ambush in the night-time clouds. Down, down below his slinking feet the beryllium-steel jaws gnawed and gnawed and gnawed at the hidden ores and secret rocks.

Chapter 11

PROFESSOR FARMILOE WAS DEAD BEYOND all possible doubt, and Graham knew it the moment he opened the door. Swiftly, he crossed the gloom-filled room, ran his pencil torch over its windows, made certain that its light-bottling drapes permitted no vagrant gleam to pass outside. Satisfied, he found the wall-switch, flicked current through the center bulb. A two-hundred watts blaze beat down on the still figure of the scientist, making mocking sparkles in his white hair which was framed by arms bent limply on the desk. Sitting in his chair, Farmiloe looked as if he had fallen asleep, couching his weary head within his arms. But his was not the sleep that is broken by the dawn—it was slumber of another kind, dreamless and never-ending.

Gently, Graham lifted the bowed shoulders, shoved a hand through the shirt-front, felt the cold chest. He studied the aged and kindly face, noted that it was quite devoid of that terrorized expression which had distorted the features of other dead.

He had reached a pretty good age, Farmiloe. Maybe his end was natural. Maybe his clock inevitably had readied its fateful time and tick—and the luminosities had not been involved in the tragedy. At first glance, it didn’t look as if they’d been involved; that peaceful expression, plus the fact that he’d died and not been snatched. The hell of it was that if an autopsy showed death to be caused by heart failure it would mean nothing, absolutely nothing.

Weirdly vibrant filaments could absorb quasi-electrical nervous currents with sufficient swiftness and greed to paralyse the heart’s muscles. People—old people especially—could die of similar trouble having no connection with supernormal manifestations. Had Farmiloe suffered no more than the natural ending of his allotted span? Or had he died because his wise old brain had harbored a thought capable of being developed into a threat?

Looking lugubriously at the body, Graham cursed himself. “‘Or would you rather arrive too late, as usual?’ She was damn prophetic there! Johnny-come-too-late, that’s me, every time! Why the heck didn’t I take after the old geezer the moment she mentioned him?” Ruefully, he rubbed his head. “Sometimes I think I’ll never learn to get a move on.” He looked around the room. “All right, Fathead, let’s see you make a start!”

In mad haste, he searched the room. It wasn’t a laboratory, but rather a combined office and personal library. He treated the place with scant respect, well-nigh tearing it apart in his determination to discover whatever it might hold worth finding. He found nothing, not one solitary item to which he could tie a potent line. The mass of books, documents and papers seemed as devoid of meaning as a politician’s speech. There was a touch of despair in his lean features when finally he gave up the search, made to go.

Its balance disturbed by his maneuverings, the body slid gradually in its seat, flopped forward, its arms spreading across the glossy surface of the desk. Putting his hands beneath cold armpits, Graham took the pathetic weight, bore it toward a couch. Something fell to the floor, rolling metallically. Laying the body full length, Graham covered its face, composed its worn, veined hands. Then he sought for the thing that had fallen.

It was an automatic pencil—he spotted its silvery sheen close by one leg of the desk. He picked it up. Obviously, it must have dropped from Farmiloe’s cold fingers, or from his lap.

The find stimulated him afresh. Memory of others’ dying ramblings made the pencil seem highly suggestive. Of course, Farmiloe might well have been struck out of this life and into the next—if he had been thus smitten—at the very moment his mind broadcasted the thought that his pencil was about to record. It was a thoroughly un-Vitonic principle to give the sucker an even break: their killings came without warning or hesitation, and they killed for keeps.

At that stage, he amazed himself by perceiving an angle he’d overlooked before, namely, that the Vitons could not read. A point so obvious had not occurred to him until that moment. The Vitons had no optical organs, they employed extra-sensory perception in lieu of same. That meant that they passed sentence of death on whoever nursed dangerous ideas, or conceived the notion of recording such ideas in manner not plain to them. Possibly printed patterns on paper, or written ones, meant nothing to their alien senses; they dealt in thoughts, not in pen, pencil or typeface; they were the masters of intangibles rather than the concrete and substantial.

That meant that if Farmiloe has used this pencil it was likely that his record remained, had not been destroyed, exactly as the other messages had not been destroyed. For the second time Graham went through the drawers of the desk, looking for scratch-pads, notes, any kind of hurried scribble that might convey something significant to an understanding mind. Transferring his attention to the top, he satisfied himself that its writing-block and blotter were quite unmarked, looked through two scientific books, examining them leaf by leaf.

No luck. That left only the
Sun.
The late night final lay spread but unopened in the middle of the desk, positioned as if Farmiloe had been about to peruse it when abruptly he lost interest in the world’s news. With his photographic eyes poring over the sheet, the Intelligence man breathed deeply when he found a pencilled mark.

It was a thick, swiftly-scrawled ring; a slashing circle such as a man might make in a moment of frenzy—or in the very last moment of life.

“If they got him,” mused Graham, “evidently he did this after they got him. Death isn’t coincident with stoppage of the heart; the brain does not lose consciousness until several seconds later. I once saw a dead guy run ten steps before he admitted he was dead.”

His tongue licked along dry lips while he tried to decipher this message from the grave. That frantically drawn ring represented Farmiloe’s last stand: the fading brain’s stubborn effort to leave a clew no matter how crude, hurried or far-fetched. In a way it was pathetic, for it was the professor’s dying tribute to the intelligence and deductive qualities of his own kind. It was also wacky, it could not well have been wackier—for the ring encircled the printed drawing of a bear!

In the advertising columns, depicted against an iceberg background, the animal was standing upright, its right forepaw extended in a persuasive gesture, an irritating smirk of commercial pride upon its face. The subject of its appeal was a large and ornate refrigerator beneath which appeared a few cajoling words:

“I stand for the world’s best refrigerator—you’ll find me on its door.”

“That ad-writer doesn’t suffer from excess of modesty,” grunted Graham. He pored over it defeatedly. “Sleep,” he decided. “I’ll have to get some sleep, else this’ll put me among the knitters of invisible wool!”

Neatly tearing the advertisement from the page, he folded it, placed it in his wallet. Then he switched out the light and departed.

Entering a phone booth in the subway on his route home, he called police headquarters, told them about Farmiloe, gave rapid instructions between repeated yawns. Next, he tried Boro 8-19638, obtained no response, felt sleepily surprised that the intelligence department’s office did not answer. He was too far gone in fatigue to query the matter or to develop suspicions and apprehensions. They didn’t answer—so to hell with ’em.

Later, he fell into bed, thankfully closed eyes red-rimmed with weariness. One mile away, a high-altitude battery, Sperry predictor, radar early-warning outfit and listening-post stood unattended in the dark, their former operators involuntarily removed from their posts. Knowing nothing of this, he tossed uneasily in fantastic dreams that featured a deserted office surrounded by a sea of living, scintillating blue through which strode the gigantic figure of a bear.

The unease he ought to have felt the night before made up for its absence with the morning. He tried to reach the intelligence department’s office on the phone, still got no reply, and this time reacted sharply. Something fishy there, bawled his refreshed and active brain—better watch your step.

He watched his step carefully a little later as he approached the building. The place looked innocent enough; it sat there with all the studied indifference of a recently set mouse-trap. The nearest Vitons were well to the west, dangling from the undersides of fat clouds and apparently contemplating their navels.

He hung around for a quarter of an hour, sharing his attention between the ominous building and the menacing sky. There seemed no way of discovering what was wrong with Leamington’s phone except that of going in and finding out. Boldly, he entered the building, made toward a levitator shaft. A man emerged from the attendant’s niche at the side of the levitator bank, made toward him.

This fellow had black eyes and blacker hair stuck on a chalk-white face. He had black clothes, shoes, hat. He was a sartorial dirge.

Sliding across the parquet in easy, pantherish strides, he harshed, “You—!” and fired directly at Graham.

If the Intelligence man had been one degree more assured or a fraction less edgy, it would have cost him half his noggin. As it was, he felt the bullet-sections whip wickedly above his scalp as he dived to the floor. Going prone, he rolled madly, hoping to cannon against the other’s splayed legs before he could fire again, but knowing that he could not make it in time.

His back muscles quirked in agonized anticipation of a split bullet’s quadruple impact. There came the expected last, sharp and hard. Nervous conditioning forced open his mouth in readiness for the yelp his throat did not utter. In that astounding moment of realization that again he had not been hit, he heard a weird gurgling followed by a thud.

A crimson-streaked face fell into the arc of his floor-level vision, a face in which eyes retained an insane glare even as their luster died away. Graham leaped to his feet with the quick suppleness of an acrobat. He gazed down dumbly at his stricken attacker.

A low groan drew his attention to one side. Jumping the body of the man in black, he sprinted to the stairs winding around the bank of pneumatic levitators, bent over the figure sprawling awkwardly at the bottom of them.

Still clinging to a warm automatic, the figure stirred weakly, moved with little, pitiful motions that exposed four blood-soaked holes in the front of its jacket. The other hand dragged itself up, showed Graham a plain, gold ring.

“Don’t worry about me, pal.” The figure’s speech came in forced, bubbling gasps. “I got down this far… couldn’t make it any farther.” Legs twitched spasmodically. The dying man let go his weapon, dropping it with a clatter. “I got the swine, anyway. I got him… saved you!”

Holding the ring in his fingers, Graham’s glance flashed between the man at his feet and the somberly dressed shape of his assailant. Outside, hell blew off its top and roared its fury, the building swayed, and nearby masonry poured down, but he ignored these sounds. What was a fatally wounded operative doing at the very entrance to the intelligence department? Why hadn’t the office answered his calls of last night and this morning.

“Leave me. I’m done!” Feebly, the operative tried to push away Graham’s hands as they tore open the gory jacket. “Take a look upstairs then get out fast!” He choked up a bloody froth. “Town’s… full of nuts! They’ve opened the asylums and the crazy are… on the loose! Get out, brother!”