Sinister Barrier (3 page)

“There he goes!” exclaimed Graham, urgently. “Quick, Wohl—that was Dakin!”

Frantically spinning his wheel, and turning the gyrocar in its own length, Wohl fed current to the powerful dynamo. The machine leaped forward, hogged a narrow gap between two descending cars and charged madly up the ramp.

“He’ll be about six turns above us and near the top,” Graham hazarded.

Grunting assent, Wohl muscled his controls while the police speedster spiralled rapidly upward. The fifth twist brought them behind an ancient, four-wheeled automobile holding the center of the shute and laboriously struggling along at a mere thirty.

They gave an impromptu demonstration of the greater mechanical advantage of two wheels with power on both. Cursing violently, Wohl swerved, fed juice, shot around the antiquated obstruction at fifty, leaving its driver jittering in his seat.

Like a monster silver bullet, their vehicle burst from the corkscrew onto the skyway, scattered a flock of private machines, dropped them behind. The speedometer said ninety.

Half a mile ahead, their aluminum-bronze quarry hummed full tilt along the elevated artery and maintained its lead.

Moving his emergency power lever, Wohl grumbled, “This is going to make junk of the batteries.”

The gyrocar surged until its speedometer needle trembled over the hundred mark. The gyroscope’s casing broadcast the angry sound of a million imprisoned bees. A hundred and ten. The tubular steel supports of the skyway railing zipped past like a solid fence, with no intervals apparent between them. One-twenty.

“The Grand Intersection humpback!” Graham shouted, warningly.

“If he hits it at this crazy pace he’ll jump more than a hundred feet,” growled Wohl. He narrowed his eyes as he squinted anxiously forward. “His ’scope will give him a square landing, but it won’t save his tires. One of them will burst for sure. He’s driving like a blithering maniac!”

“That’s what makes it so obvious that something is damnably wrong.” Centrifugal force held Graham’s breath for him as they cut around another decrepit four-wheeler whose driver managed to gesticulate within the split-second available.

“Every jalopy ought to be banned from the skyways,” Wohl snarled. He stared ahead. The shining shape of their quarry was whirling headlong around the shallow bend leading to Grand Intersection. “We’ve gained a bare hundred yards. He’s driving all out, and he’s got a special sports model at that. You’d think someone was chasing him.”

“We
are,” remarked Graham dryly. His eyes sought the rear-view mirror while his mind considered the likelihood of Dakin being pursued by someone other than themselves. What was Dakin running from, anyway? What did Mayo take a death-dive to escape? What did Webb shoot at as his dying act of defiance? What wiped out Bjornsen and made Luther expire with a gabble on his lips?

He gave up the fruitless speculation, noted that the road behind was clear of other chasers, raised his eyes as something threw a dark shadow over the gyrocar’s transparent roof. It was a police helicopter hanging from spinning vanes, its landing wheels a yard above the hurtling car.

The two machines raced level for a few seconds. Wohl jabbed an authoritative finger at the police star across his vehicle’s bonnet, then waved urgently toward the crazy car ahead.

Making a swift gesture of comprehension, the helicopter’s pilot gained height and speed. Hopping great roofs, his machine roared through the air in desperate attempt to cut the skyway bend and beat Dakin to the intersection.

Without slackening pace in the slightest, Wohl hit the bend at full one twenty. Tires shrieked piercingly as they felt the sidewise drag. Graham leaned heavily on the nearside door; Wohl’s bulk pressed crushingly on him.

While centrifugal force held them in that attitude, and the tortured gyroscope strove to keep the machine upright, the tires gave up the battle and the car executed a sickening double-eight. It swooped crabwise across the concrete, missed a dawdling phaeton by a hairbreadth, flashed between two other gyrocars, wiped the fender off a dancing four-wheeler and slammed into the side. Miraculously, the rails held.

Wohl gaped like a goldfish while he dragged in some air. He nodded toward the hump where the skyway curved over another elevated route which swept past it at right angles.

“Holy smoke!” he gasped. “Look at that!”

From their vantage point four hundred yards away the crest of the hump appeared to bisect the midget windows of a more distant pile of masonry. Dakin’s machine was precisely in the center of the crest with the police helicopter hovering impotently over it.

The fleeing car did not sink in perspective below the crest as it should have done in normal circumstances. It seemed to float slowly into the air until it reached the tops of the bisected windows and exposed a line of panes between its wheels and the crest. There, for one long second, it poised below the helicopter, apparently suspended in defiance of the law of gravity. Then, with still the same uncanny slowness, it sank from sight.

“Mad!” breathed Graham. He dabbed perspiration from his forehead. “Utterly and completely mad!”

He rolled his window downward until a deep dent in its plastiglass prevented it from descending farther. Both men listened intently, apprehensively. From over the crest came a short, sharp sound of rending metal, a few seconds of silence, then a muffled crash.

Without a word they struggled out of their battered gyrocar, sprinted along the skyway, over the long, smooth hump. They found a dozen machines, mostly modern gyro-cars, drawn up beside a thirty-foot gap in the rails. White-faced drivers were grasping twisted railposts while they bent over and peered into the chasm beneath.

Shouldering through, Graham and Wohl looked down. Far below, on the side of the street opposite the lower and transverse skyway, a mass of shapeless metal made a tragic heap on the sidewalk. The face of the building that reared itself ten floors from the spot bore deep marks scored by the wreckage on its way down. The ruts of the road to oblivion.

A rubbernecking driver jabbered to nobody in particular, “Terrible! Terrible! He must have been clean out of his mind! He came over like a shell from a monster, gun, smacked the side-rails, went right through and into that building. I heard him land down there.” He licked dry lips. “Like a bug in a can. What a wallop! Terrible!”

The speaker’s emotions were voiced for the rest. Graham could sense their awe, their horror. He could sense the excitement, the sadistic thirst, the corporate soul-stirring of the inevitable mob now gathering three hundred feet below. Mob hysteria is contagious, he thought, as he felt it rising like an invisible and hellish incense. One could get drunk on it. Men who were cold sober individually could be drunk collectively; drunk on mass-emotions. Emotions—the unseen intoxicant!

Another feeling drove away these morbid thoughts as fascinatedly he continued to stare downward: a feeling of guilty fear, like that of a man holding dangerous and punishable opinions in some far country where men are hanged for harboring the wrong thoughts. The sensation was so strong and emphatic that he made a mighty effort to discipline his mind. Dragging his gaze from the scene beneath, he nudged Wohl into attention.

“There’s nothing we can do. You’ve reached the end of Dakin’s trail and that’s that! Let’s get going.”

Reluctantly, Wohl backed away from the gap. Noticing the defeated helicopter landing on the skyway, he hastened toward it.

“Wohl, homicide squad,” he said, briefly. “Call Center Station on your short-wave, will you, and ask them to have my machine towed in for repairs. Tell them I’ll phone a report through shortly.”

Returning to the still gaping group of drivers, he questioned them, found one who was bound for William Street. The fellow had an ancient four-wheeler capable of a noisy fifty. Wohl accepted a lift with becoming condescension, climbed in crinkling his nose in disgust.

“Some move with the times, some jump ahead of the moment, and some just stay put.” He picked disdainfully at the worn leatherette on which he was sitting. “This hell-buster has stayed put since Tut built the pyramids.”

“Tut didn’t,” Graham contradicted.

“Tut’s brother, then. Or his uncle. Or his sub-contractor. Who cares?” His head jerked backward as the driver let in a jumpy clutch and the car creaked forward. He uttered a potent name, looked aggrieved, said to Graham, “I’m letting you tote me around because, being just another wage-slave, I’ve got to do as I’m told. But I’ve still no notion of what you’re seeking, if anything. Does your department know something special that isn’t for publication?”

“We know nothing more than you do. It all started with me having some vague suspicions, and my superiors backing them up.” He gazed speculatively at the cracked and yellowish windshield. “I first smelled the skunk. For my pains, I’ve now got to dig out the stinker—or sing small.”

“Well, I’ve got to hand it to you for getting hunches and having the nerve to play them.” He bounced around on his seat, said complainingly, “Look, homicide on the job, in a jalopy! That’s where it gets us. Everybody dies, and even we’re in a corpse-wagon.” He bounced again, hard. “I can see by the way things are shaping that I’ll finish up playing with feathers and treacle. But I’m with you as long as I stay sane.”

“Thanks,” Graham responded, smiling. He studied his companion. “By the way, what’s your other name?”

“Art.”

“Thanks, Art,” he corrected.

Chapter 3

THEIR CAREFUL SEARCH OF DAKIN’S place revealed nothing worthy of note; no last, dramatic message, no hidden jottings, no feature that could be considered in any way abnormal. As a route to the solution of their indefinable puzzle, it was somewhat of a dead-end.

Discovering the late scientist’s original and crude model of his vernier, Wohl amused himself by projecting its standard stereoscopic cube upon a small screen. Twiddling the micrometer focusing screw that controlled the cube’s perspective, he made the geometrical skeleton flat enough to appear almost two-dimensional, then deep enough to resemble an apparently endless tunnel. “Cute!” he murmured.

Graham came out of a back room holding a small, nearly empty vial of iodine in his fingers.

“I looked for this on another hunch. It was in his medicine chest along with enough patent cure-alls to stock a drugstore. Dakin always was something of a hypochondriac.” He put the vial on the table, surveyed it morosely. “So that means exactly nothing.” His dissatisfied glance went round the room. “We’re only losing time in this place. I want to see Doctor Fawcett, at the State Asylum. Can you run me there?”

“I’ll phone first.” Using Dakin’s instrument, he talked to his station, cut off, said to Graham, “There will be no autopsy on Dakin. They can’t dissect pulp!” He put away the vernier, pocketed the vial, opened the door. “Come on. Let’s have a look at your asylum—some day it may be home, sweet home!”

Darkness was a shroud over the Hudson. A sullen moon scowled down through ragged clouds. Incongruously, a distant neon repeatedly flashed its message in blood-red letters fifty feet high: BEER HERE. Observing it, Wohl subconsciously licked his lips. Fidgeting on the sidewalk, they waited for the gyrocar which Wohl had ordered over the phone.

The machine hummed down the street, its long floodlight blazing. Wohl met it, said to the uniformed driver, “I’ll take her myself. We’re going to Albany.”

Climbing into the seat, he waited until Graham had plumped beside him, eased the machine forward.

Graham said to him, warningly, “We’re in a hurry—but not that much.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Please, I’d like to get there in one lump. I don’t function so well in several parts.”

“Nobody functions so well when you get after them. Are you a stockholder in the local graveyard?” Wohl’s beefy face quirked. “There’s one comfort about hanging around with you.”

“What’s that?”

“I’ll die with my boots on.”

Graham smiled, said nothing. The car picked up speed. Twenty minutes later he was hugging the rail as they cornered. Still he said nothing. They pelted northward, reached Albany in two hours—good going even for Wohl.

“This is well outside my official stamping-ground,” Wohl commented, as they pulled up outside their destination. “So far as I’m concerned, I’m off duty. You’ve merely brought a friend along.”

The new State Asylum sprawled its severe, ultra-modern architecture over a square mile of former parkland. It was very evident that Doctor Fawcett was the leading light in its administration.

He was a skinny little runt, all dome and duck’s feet, his top-heavy features triangular as they sloped in toward a pointed goatee beard, his damn-you eyes snapping behind rimless pince-nez.

His small form even smaller behind a desk that looked the size of a field, he sat stiffly upright, wagged Graham’s copy of Webb’s jottings. When he spoke it was with the assertive air of one whose every wish is a command, whose every opinion is the essence of pure reason.

“A most interesting revelation of my poor friend Webb’s mental condition. Very sad, very sad!” Unhooking his pince-nez, he used them to tap the paper and emphasize his pontifications. “I suspected him of having an obsession, but must confess that I did not realize he’d become so completely unbalanced.”

“What made you suspicious?” Graham asked.

“I am a chess enthusiast. So was Webb. Our friendship rested solely upon our mutual fondness for the game. We had little else in common. Webb was entirely a physicist whose work had not the slightest relation to mental diseases; nevertheless, he showed a sudden and avid interest in the subject. At his own request, I permitted him to visit this asylum and observe some of our patients.”

“Ah!” Graham leaned forward. “Did he give any reason for his sudden interest?”

“He did not offer one, nor did I ask for one,” replied Doctor Fawcett, dryly. “The patients who interested him most were those with consistent delusions coupled to a persecution complex. He concentrated particularly upon the schizophrenics.”

“And what may those be?” put in Wohl, innocently.

Doctor Fawcett raised his brows. “Persons suffering from schizophrenia, of course.”

“I’m still no wiser,” Wohl persisted.

With an expression of ineffable patience, Doctor Fawcett said, “They are schizoid egocentrics.”

Making a gesture of defeat, Wohl growled, “A nut’s a nut whether in fancy dress or otherwise.”

Fawcett eyed him with distaste. “I perceive you are a creature of dogmatic preconceptions.”

“I’m a cop,” Wohl informed, blinking. “And I know when I’m being given the runaround.”

“You must pardon our ignorance, doctor,” Graham chipped in smoothly. “Could you explain in less technical terms?”

“Schizophrenics,” answered Fawcett, speaking as one speaks to a child, “are persons suffering from an especial type of mental disease which, a century ago, was known as dementia praecox. They have a split personality the dominant one of which lives in a world of fantasy that seems infinitely more real than the world of reality. While many forms of dementia are characterized by hallucinations which vary both in strength and detail, the fantastic world of the schizophrenic is vivid and unvarying. To put it in as elementary a manner as possible, he always has the same nightmare.”

“I see,” commented Graham, doubtfully.

Putting on his glasses with meticulous care, Fawcett stood up. “I will let you see one of the inmates in whom Webb was interested.”

Showing them through the door, he conducted them along a series of passages to the asylum’s east wing. Here, he reached a group of cells, stopped outside one, gestured.

They peered cautiously through a small, barred opening, saw a naked man. He was standing by his bed, his thin legs braced apart, his unnaturally distended abdomen thrust out. The sufferer’s ghastly eyes were fixed upon his own stomach with unwavering and hellish concentration.

Fawcett whispered rapidly, “It is a peculiarity of schizophrenia that the victim often strikes a pose, sometimes obscene, which he can maintain without stirring for a period of time impossible to the normal human being. They have phases when they become living statues, often repulsively. This particular case is a typical poseur. His stricken mind has convinced itself that he has a live dog inside his abdomen, and he spends hours watching for a sign of movement.”

“Good heavens!” exclaimed Graham, shocked.

“A characteristic delusion, I assure you,” said Fawcett, professionally unmoved. He looked through the bars as if academically considering a pinned moth. “It was Webb’s irrational comments about this case that made me think him a little eccentric.”

“What was Webb’s reaction?” Graham glanced again into the cell, turned his eyes thankfully away. The thought in his mind was the same as that in Wohl’s—but for the grace of fate, there go I!

“He was fascinated by this patient, and he said to me, Fawcett, that poor devil has been prodded around by unseen medical students. He is mutilated trash tossed aside by super-vivisectionists.’” Fawcett stroked his beard, registered tolerant amusement. “Melodramatic but completely illogical.”

A shudder ran through Graham’s muscular frame. Despite iron nerves, he felt sick. Wohl’s face, too, was pale, and both sensed the same inward relief when Fawcett led the way back to the office.

“I asked Webb what the deuce he meant,” Doctor Fawcett continued, quite unperturbed, “but he only laughed a little unpleasantly and quoted that adage about when ignorance is bliss it is folly to be wise. A week later he phoned me in a state of considerable excitement and asked if I could get him data concerning the incidence of goitre in imbeciles.”

“Did you get it?”

“Yes.” Fawcett dived down behind his huge desk, slid open a drawer, came up with a paper. “I had it here ready for him. Since he’s dead, the information comes too late.” He flipped the paper across to Graham.

“Why,” Graham exclaimed, looking it over, “this states that there is not one case of goitre among the two thousand inmates of this asylum. Reports from other asylums give it as unknown or exceedingly rare.”

“Which doesn’t mean anything. It’s evidence only of the negative fact that imbeciles are not very susceptible to a disease which isn’t common.” He glanced at Wohl, his tones slightly acid. “When a disease isn’t common, it’s because not many people are susceptible to it. Probably the same data applies to any two thousand bus drivers, or paint salesmen—or cops.”

“When I catch goitre, I’ll tell you,” promised Wohl, surlily.

“What causes goitre?” Graham put in.

Fawcett said, promptly, “A deficiency of iodine.”

Iodine! Graham and Wohl exchanged startled glances before the former asked, “Has a superfluity of iodine anything to do with imbecility?”

His goatee wagging, Fawcett laughed openly. “If it did, there would be a great proportion of idiots among seafaring folk who eat foods rich in iodine.”

A message burned into Graham’s mind, red-hot. Wohl’s face betrayed the fact that he’d got it also. A message from the illogical dead;

Sailors are notoriously susceptible.

Susceptible to what? To illusions and to maritime superstitions based upon illusions?—the sea serpent, the sirens, the Flying Dutchman, mermaids, and the bleached, bloated, soul-clutching things whose clammy faces bob and wail in the moonlit wake?

Must extend the notion, and get data showing how seaboard dwellers compare with country folk.

Displaying a forced casualness, Graham retrieved Webb’s notes from the desk. “Thanks, doctor. You’ve been a great help.”

“Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me if I can be of further assistance,” Fawcett advised. “If you do eventually arrive at the root cause of poor Webb’s condition, I’d appreciate the details.” His short laugh was more chilling than apologetic. “Every competent analysis of a delusion is a valuable contribution to knowledge of the whole.”

They returned to New York as fast as they had left, their cogitating silence being broken only once when Wohl remarked, “The entire affair suggests an epidemic of temporary insanity among scientists whose brains have been overworked.”

Graham grunted, offered no comment.

“Genius is akin to madness,” persisted Wohl, determined to bolster his theory. “Besides, knowledge can’t go on increasing forever without some of the best minds giving way when they strain to encompass the lot.”

“No scientist tries to learn the lot. Knowledge already is far too much for any one mind, and that is why every scientist is a specialist in his own field though he may be an ignoramus about things totally outside the scope of his own work.”

It was Wohl’s turn to grunt. Concentrating on his driving with no better results at the sharpest corners, he voiced not another word until he arrived at Graham’s address. Then he dropped his passenger with a brief, “See you in the morning, Bill,” and hummed away.

The morning was bright, symbolic of a new day that brought early developments. Graham was standing before his mirror, his electric shaver whirring busily, when the telephone shrilled. The youth in the visor eyed him and said, “Mr. Graham?”

“Yes, I’m Graham.”

“This is the Smithsonian,” responded the other. “Mr. Harriman had a message for you late last night but was not able to get in touch with you.”

“I was in Albany. What’s the message?”

“Mr. Harriman said to tell you he has been to all the news agencies, and finds they’ve reported the deaths of eighteen scientists within the last five weeks. Seven of them were foreigners, and eleven American. The number is about six times the average, as the news agencies rarely report more than three per month.”

“Eighteen!” ejaculated Graham. He studied the face picked up by the faraway scanner. “Have you got their names?”

“Yes.” The youth dictated them while Graham copied them down. He gave their respective nationalities. “Anything more, sir?”

“Please convey my thanks to Mr. Harriman and ask him to phone me at the office when convenient.”

“Very well, Mr. Graham.” The youth disconnected, left him pondering deeply.

“Eighteen!”

On the other side of the room the telenews receiver’s gong chimed softly. Crossing to it, he raised the lid, exposed the press-replica screen which, in his apparatus, was licensed for the
New York Sun’s
transmissions.

The
Sun’s
early morning edition began to roll at sedate reading-pace across the screen while he watched it with part of his mind elsewhere. Presently, his eyes sharpened and his concentration returned as another headline appeared.

SCIENTIST’S DEATH DIVE

Professor Samuel C. Dakin, fifty-two years old William Street physicist, took the Grand Intersection humpback in his sports gyrocar last evening, and plunged to death at more than a hundred miles an hour.

The report continued to half-column length, included a photograph of the wreck, several references to “this departed genius,” and stated that the police were looking into the cause of the tragedy. It concluded with a comment to the effect that this was the third successive death of a New York scientist since the previous morning, “those of Professor Walter Mayo and Doctor Irwin Webb having been detailed in our yesterday evening edition.”

From the automatic-record locker beneath the screen, Graham extracted his photographic copy of the
Sun’s
evening issue. Mayo’s and Webb’s cases were in juxtaposition; the former headed: MAYO FALLS FROM MARTIN; and the latter: ANOTHER SCIENTIST DIES. Both reports were superficial, revealing nothing more except that “the police are investigating.”