Sinister Barrier (21 page)

The gyrocar swung into the curb, stopped. Graham sat hunched in his seat, his eyes on the rear-view mirror. Opening the door he writhed out.

“What’s up? Can you see that mushroom from here?” Wohl fiddled with his wheel, glanced inquiringly at the other.

“The twenty-fourth floor. Yes, it was the twenty-fourth.” Graham’s eyes glittered. “Something blue and shining flashed out of an open window on that level just after we passed. I caught sight of it out one corner, of my eye. The six middle windows in that row belong to Sangster’s dump.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I’m pretty sure that it was a luminosity.” The investigator’s features showed ire: “Stick around, Art—I’m going to phone.”

Without waiting for Wohl’s reply, he entered the nearest building, found a telephone in a deserted and half-wrecked ground level office. In strange contrast with its surroundings, the instrument’s visor was intact and functioning perfectly, for a girl’s face blossomed in its tiny screen as his call got through.

“Hi, Hetty!” He gave her the usual cheer.

“Hi!” She smiled mechanically.

“Mr. Sangster there?”

“No. He’s been out all afternoon. I expect him back before five-thirty.” Her voice was peculiarly dull and lifeless, but her smile grew more insistent, more inviting. “Won’t you come along and wait for him, Mr. Graham?”

“Sorry, I can’t. I—”

“We haven’t seen you for such a long time,” she pleaded. “What with most of the buildings around us lying flat, and this one almost deserted, it’s like living on an island, I’m so lonely, so afraid. Can’t you come and chat with me until he arrives?”

“Hetty, I can hardly spare the time.” He felt moved by her cajolery even as he stared fascinatedly at the screen, noting the tiniest quirk of her lips, the slightest flicker of her eyelids.

“From where are you speaking?” Again that dull, lifeless, phonographic voice.

His temper started to rise, and there was sweat in the palms of his hands. Evading her question, he said slowly, “I’ll come around Hetty. Expect me about five o’clock.”

“That’s fine!” Her smile widened, but her eyes held no collaboratory expression. “Be sure to make it. Don’t disappoint me, will you?”

“You can depend on me, Hetty.”

Disconnecting, he glared a long time at the screen from which her familiar features had faded. His fury was tremendous. He worked his fingers as if itching to strangle someone. Giving vent to a hearty expletive, he hurried back to the waiting gyrocar.

“They’ve got Hetty,” he told Wohl. “She talked and acted as if animated by clockwork. The place is a trap.”

“Like the field office was,” remarked Wohl. He swallowed hard, tapped his fingers on the steering wheel while he kept watch on the sky.

“Ten to one my own home is also a trap—both Hetty and Sangster know it well.” His mounting fury colored his voice. His fists clenched into hard bunches. “They’re creeping nearer and nearer to me every minute. Art, I’m fed up. I can’t stand this hunt much longer. I’m going to step up and smack ’em right in the pan—and to hell with ’em!”

“Really?” said Wohl. He propped an elbow on the wheel, and his head on one hand. He studied Graham with academic interest. “Just like that, eh? You pull one down from the heavens and you kick into a pulp whatever it uses for a bottom, eh?” Taking his head off his hand, he shouted, “Don’t talk like a blithering idiot!”

“What’s eating you?”

“Nothing.” Wohl showed his iridium lined ring. “Nothing’s going to eat you either, not if I can help it.”

“I don’t intend to be eaten. That’s why I want to smack them with a fast one.”

“How’re you going to do that?”

“It depends.” Climbing into the machine, Graham sat and pondered, keeping wary watch through the transparent roof lest any wandering spheres might drift within telepathic range. “If that trap is toothed with Vitons, then I’m merely talking big, because there’s nothing I can do.”

“Ah,” said Wohl, speaking to the windscreen, “he admits it!”

Graham snorted, gave him a look, and added, “But if, as is likely, they’ve left the dirty work to a bunch of dupes, I’m going in. I’m going to go in and kick out their teeth and walk away with Hetty. Anything wrong with that?”

The other thought it over. “H’m, I guess it could be done if they’re relying on dupes. Yeah, you might do it and get away with it, though it’s a hell of a risk. I’ve one objection, though.”

“What’s that?”

“All this ‘I’ stuff you use. Who the heck d’you think you are?” He flashed the ring again.
“We
go in and take Hetty!”

“I didn’t contemplate trying it single-handed, nor even with you. I’m not all that daft!” Graham had a last look back at the Bank of Manhattan. “I found a fellow operative when I returned from Washington, and gave him the chore of finding the other nine who’re supposed to be functioning hereabouts. If he’s managed to trace them, they’ll be waiting for me at Center Station. We’ll pick them up and see what can be done about this trap. With luck, we may snitch the bait without grabbing the tribulation.” He lay back in his seat. “Bang her along Art—we’ve got less than one hour.”

He looked over the eight of them, noting their clean, square-jawed, confident features, and knowing that the remaining pair would never be found. There should have been ten all told. Every one of these young huskies was aware of that fact, and every one knew equally well that soon their number might be lessened still further. But no consciousness of this was evident in their expressions or bearing. These were men of the Intelligence Service, men trained to compensate for losses by doing the work of the missing—and more.

“You know what you’re to do?” he asked. They nodded. He jerked a thumb upward, reminding them of the observers twenty floors above, peering across two streets and a wrecked block, and into Sangster’s office.

“The boys say there are no luminosities in that office, so it’s evident that we have to deal only with dupes. I’m going in. You fellows have got to help me get out.”

Again they nodded. None could see any reason why Graham should be so keen to risk his life, but it was enough for them that he intended to do just that. They were prepared to play their part.

“All right, fellows—I’m on my way.”

“Me, too,” announced Wohl, stepping forward.

“For heaven’s sake, keep out of this, Art. We don’t know what sort of reactions these proxies have. Hetty was a pal of mine, but she doesn’t know you from Adam. If you barge in with me you may ball up the works.”

“Oh, damn!” said Wohl.

With a grin for his disappointed companion, Graham hastened out, crossed the intervening space under the watching glasses of his observers above, entered Bank of Manhattan. Five men were lounging around the dusty, neglected foyer. Disregarding them, he walked boldly to the pneumatic levitators, ascended to the twenty-fourth floor.

No more loungers were in sight on this level, but he felt that crazy and somewhat corpselike eyes were watching him as he thrust open the door of the department of special finance.

With a casual, “’Lo, Hetty!” he closed the door behind him. His keen eyes examined the room, noted the closed door of Sangster’s private sanctum, the closed doors of a large cupboard nearby. Sangster himself was not in evidence. Perhaps the girl had told the truth about him.

Outside, a war-worn clock struck twenty in cracked and off-tone chimes. It was precisely five.

Seating himself on a corner of her desk, he swung a nonchalant leg to and fro. “I’ve been busy, Hetty, as busy as the very devil, else I’d have been in to see you before now. Things are shaping for the showdown—I hope!”

“In what way?” She didn’t add, “Bill,” as was her habit.

“We’re about to produce an anti-Viton weapon at last.”

“In short waves?” she asked. Her eyes looked into his, and hair erected on the back of his neck when he saw the emptiness of her formerly lively pupils, a dreadful, soulless emptiness that made her no longer interested in masculine small-talk, feminine fripperies or any of her oldtime conversational subjects. Her interests now were different, appallingly different—anti-Viton weapons, and short waves, plus Graham himself as her masters’ fall guy.

“Sure!” He stared fascinatedly at her mechanical features. It was hellish to think that this was no longer the vivacious girl once he had known, that this familiar form had become a fleshly robot. “We’re searching way down in the centimeters. We’ve divided a broad band between many groups of experimenters. An army like that can’t fail to strike oil.”

“That is heartening,” she commented in a voice totally devoid of tone. Her pale, blue-veined hands fumbled in her lap, below the edge of her desk, out of his sight. “Do you know where these groups are, and which lines they’re trying?”

Triumph mounted within him as she put this childishly apparent question. It was as he’d expected—this poor, warped brain was working obediently along a single track, mechanically following the course on which it had been set. There was cunning here—but no cleverness. Even a moron would have seen through her query.

A twofold duty had been placed upon her: firstly, to bait the trap; secondly, to obtain essential information before giving the death signal. Obviously, the fearful operation to which her protesting mind had been subjected had not endowed her with telepathic powers—if luminosities could so endow their victims. At any rate, she was quite unaware of his shrewd perception.

Hard put to it to conceal his eagerness, he told her, “Although there are a lot of experimental groups, Hetty, I know the location of them all, every one of them.” It was a downright, thumping lie, and he told it with no compunction, making it in boastful tones. “You’ve only got to suggest a wavelength and I can tell you who’s about to try it, and where.”

The dummy responded by betraying her manipulators; her poor, distorted brain was too automatic for guile. “Point five centimeters,” she responded, speaking the words as if they had been engraved upon her tortured mind. Her hands slid forward, reached under her desk. She was making ready for the information—and his reward.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” Graham growled. He was on his feet and around her desk before she could move.

Putting out his hands to grab her, he saw the door to Sangster’s room whip open, and a menacing figure charge toward him. He flung himself forward and down; his automatic was in his hand as he hit the floor. The maniacal invader paused, took sloppy aim, and the sound of his shot was terrific in the confined space.

Things catapulted over Graham’s flat back. The cupboard door swung wide. Momentarily ignoring the first attacker, he blasted at the gap in the cupboard, saw splinters fly from the edges, knew that all four bullet sections had gone inside.

A whooping figure bowed low in the opening, bent farther, spewed a bloody froth. It toppled full length, its gory torso a sudden barrier in the path of his crazy fellow.

Profiting by his peril, Hetty lugged out a drawer, snatched something from it. She leaned over her desk toward Graham, her blank, unemotional eyes lined along the sights of a tiny, old-fashioned revolver. Her knuckles whitened. The desk erupted beneath her when with a desperate thrust Graham heaved it over from his side. The little gun spat upward as Hetty toppled in her chair, and its slug went into the ceiling.

Feet were hammering along the passage outside, and someone was bellowing oaths near the levitator shafts. Graham swayed upward with the lithe grace of a striking cobra, fired simultaneously with his first attacker. His left arm jumped involuntarily and went red-hot, but his assailant dropped like a slaughtered steer.

Behind him, the door burst inward, revealed two Intelligence operatives, weapons in hand. Hard, explosive noises twanged from the end of the passage. One missile struck metal, whined shrilly as it went on end over end. Two more thudded into the wooden frame of the door; a third clunked softly into flesh. The shorter of the two operatives choked, spat, choked again, leaned weakly against the wall, slid down. He finished in a sitting position, the gun sliding from his fingers, his head lolling forward.

“Full of them!” swore the other. “The place is crammed with them.” Peering leftward around the door, he sent two quick shots down the passage. A volley of shots from the right went in the same direction, and in the following few seconds of silence, four more operatives slipped into the room.

“Move fast!” urged Graham. “I want this girl out.”

Whirling around with the intention of grabbing Hetty and bearing her away bodily, he caught a glimpse of distant blue through the open window. “Vitons!” There were about twenty of the shining spheres, shooting along one behind the other like a string of immense beads, aiming directly for the room, and nearing swiftly. The shepherds were coming to the aid of their dogs.

More feet thundered recklessly along the passage. His companions opened fire as he sprang toward the door. The sitting operative pawed blindly for his gun, fell on his side, closed his eyes and dribbled blood.

Thumps, groans and mad, aphetic mouthings sounded in the corridor. The next instant, a swarm of staring dupes were in the room. They made their assault with complete disregard for personal safety and with the energetic lack of organization of automatons on the loose. They were robots conditioned only to kill, somehow, anyhow.

A colorless face in which blank eyes goggled ghoulishly came close to Graham’s own. Its lopsided mouth was oozing saliva. He hit it with every ounce he possessed. The face vanished as if snatched into the cosmos. Another replaced it and he promptly smacked it to the floor.

Somebody lifted a crazy, face-twitching body, hurled it halfway across the room. A stricken dupe writhed snakishly on the floor, snatched at Graham’s left leg. He used his right to kick the other’s schnozzle into something resembling a squashed strawberry. An operative’s gun roared close to his ear, deafening him, and filling his nostrils with the stink of cordite.

The mad melee swept him out of the uproarous office, along the passage to the levitator shafts. A weight descended crushingly on his shoulder, a thousand hands seemed to be reaching for him at once.