Sinister Barrier (5 page)

“I see.”

“Then you accept this commission?” pressed Colonel Leamington.

“Yes, yes, of course!” He studied the letter with concealed pride which was not lessened by Wohl’s open envy. To be one of the Government’s most tried and trusted band, one of Uncle Sam’s most privileged operators!

Taking his ring from Leamington, he put it on the right hand, third finger. It fitted perfectly, and he knew that it must have been prepared in anticipation of his acceptance. He also knew that upon its super-hard iridium inner surface were delicate inscriptions too small to be seen with the naked eye; microscopic data giving his name, height, weight, Bertillon measurements and fingerprint formulae, as well as his Service number and a faithful though infinitely small copy of his own signature.

This modest ornament was his only badge, his only warrant of authority, its meaning concealed from all but those equipped to read—but it was the open sesame to officialdom everywhere.

As these thoughts passed through his mind there came a faint and eerie sense of overhanging peril; the warning note again, vague, indefinite, but thoroughly disturbing. He looked once more at his ring, knew that it could be regarded from another and ghastlier angle: it might prove the sole means of identifying him in horrible, mangling death—as many others had been so identified.

What was it that Webb had talked about? “Mutilated trash cast aside by super-vivisectionists.”

Pushing the memory aside, he said, “One thing, colonel: I would like to have the continued co-operation of Lieutenant Wohl. He’s in this as deeply as me—and we need each other.”

He evaded Wohl’s look of gratification, listened while Leamington replied.

“Har-humph! Somewhat irregular, but I think it can be arranged. I have little doubt that the chief of police can be persuaded to grant Lieutenant Wohl a roving commission until such time as he’s seen this job through.”

“Thank you, sir,” Graham and Wohl chorused.

Sangster’s phone yelped for attention, he answered it, passed it to Graham, saying, “Harriman.”

“Hello, Harriman,” called Graham. “Yes, I got your list. Thanks a lot!” He paused as the second phone on Sangster’s desk clamored deafeningly, and Sangster reached to take it. “There’s a deuce of a row here. The other phone bawling. What was that you said?” He paused, listened, then, “Sorry, Harriman, I can’t tell you anything just yet. Yes, six times the average is something that calls for an explanation, and that’s what I’m out to get—if it can be got!”

He ceased speaking while Sangster put down the other phone and whispered, “Doctor Curtis, for you.”

“Listen, Harriman,” he continued hurriedly, “all these scientists are people of different nationalities, ages and types. The conclusion is that nothing is being aimed at any one country—unless someone is clever enough and ruthless enough to bump some of his own in order to avert suspicion. I doubt that.”

Harriman said, “There’s nothing political about this, any more than there is about a new disease.”

“Exactly! Different as they may be, these scientists
must
have shared one thing in common—the thing that directly or indirectly brought about their deaths. I want to find that common denominator. Rake me up every detail you can discover about the persons on your list and any earlier cases you may see fit to add. Phone them to”—he looked inquiringly at Leamington, was given a number, and finished—“to Colonel Leamington at Boro 8-19638.”

Ringing off, he took up the other phone, spoke rapidly. The others studied his changing expression as he talked.

Finishing, he told them, “Doctor Curtis has received a long-distance call from Professor Edward Beach. He said that he had just read the accounts of Webb’s and Mayo’s deaths. He expressed much sorrow, but Doctor Curtis thought him unusually curious about the details of the tragedies.”

“Well?” prompted Leamington.

“This Beach is an old friend of Webb’s, according to Doctor Curtis. I know him, too. He’s the man who designed the stereoscopic owl-eye camera which the police use in conjunction with Dakin’s vernier. He is employed by the National Camera Company, at their Silver City plant, in Idaho. Beach is precisely the sort of scientist likely to have valuable information concerning Mayo, Webb and Dakin.” He paused a moment, to lend impressiveness to what he was about to say, then added, “Especially since he made a point of asking Doctor Curtis whether she knew if Webb, like Mayo and Dakin, had been working on Bjornsen’s formula prior to his end.”

“Bjornsen!” ejaculated Sangster.

“You can see the implication,” Graham went on. “Beach is linked to these others exactly as
they
were linked to each other—by correspondence based on mutual interests. He’s got a place in this death-chain, but death hasn’t reached him yet! He’s a prospective victim still in condition to talk. I’ve got to see him and make him talk before he becomes body number twenty.” He consulted his watch. “With luck, I can catch the 10:30 strat-plane for Boise.”

Wohl said, “Do I come, or are you on your own?”

“I’ll take this by myself. While I’m on my way, phone Battery Park Stratosphere Station, Art, and book me a seat on the 10:30.”

Reaching for the phone, Wohl asked, “And after that, I do what? Give me something to follow—I hate wasting time.”

“You can make a cross-check on the data Harriman’s getting. See if you can make contact with the police authorities in all the places where these scientists died, ask them for full and complete details of the deaths. Get them to check thoroughly on every item no matter how minute or seemingly unimportant. Bully, cajole or do whatever else you can to persuade them to obtain exhumation orders and conduct autopsies.” He looked at Leamington. “Is all this okay with you, Colonel?”

“I’m satisfied to let you run this your own way,” Leamington approved. “I’m taking it for granted that the man who starts something is best fitted to finish it.”

“We’re worrying about quite a lot of people who started something that none of them finished,” Graham pointed out. “This thing—whatever it is—has a remarkable aptitude for finishing the starters before they get anywhere.” He grinned ruefully. “I’m not immortal, either—but I’ll do my best.”

Snatching his hat, he was gone, bound for Battery Park, the 10:30 strat-plane and the worst disaster in the history of the New World.

Chapter 5

THE NEW YORK-BOISE-SEATTLE STRATOSPHERE EXPRESS dived down from the atmosphere’s upper reaches, cut its oxygen from its pressurized cabin, levelled with a thunderous burst of rockets, swept beneath the undersides of fleecy clouds.

With the little town of Oakley nestling on its banks, Goose Creek rolled under the fleet vessel’s bow. Far to port and well to stern gleamed the northern fringes of Utah’s Great Salt Lake. About a hundred and fifty miles to go—a mere ten minutes’ run!

A cigarette that Graham had lit over Oakley was still only half consumed when the strat-plane banked away from the valley of the Snake and curved toward Boise. The turn brought Silver City on the port side where it was easily perceivable in the dry, dustless atmosphere of the locality. Its white and cream-colored buildings glowed in the sunlight. Bobbin-shaped chemical reservoirs of the National Camera plant, slung on huge towers, stood out clearly on the city skyline.

Thrusting his feet at the footrests to resist body-surge caused by the ship’s rapid deceleration, Graham took two more drags at his cigarette, cast another glance at the far vista of Silver City. For a moment, it was still there, sharp and clear in detail upon the horizon; the next moment it had gone in a mighty cloud of heaving vapor.

Crushing his cigarette between unnerved fingers, he rose partway in his seat, his eyes staring incredulously at the faraway spectacle. The cloud bloomed hugely, swelled with the primal vigor of an oncoming dust-storm, its bloated crests curling angrily as they gained altitude. Small black specks soared above this upper edge, hung momentarily in mid-air, dropped back into the swirling chaos.

“God in heaven!” breathed Graham. His eyes strained unbelievingly. He knew that for the strange specks to be visible from such a distance they must be big, very big—as large as buildings. In those tense seconds it was as if he were endowed with a front seat at the dropping of a bigger and better atom-bomb—with people in the back seats watching seismographs a thousand miles away.

The strat-plane’s tail swung round, concealed the distant drama. Unaware that anything abnormal was taking place, its pilot brought the vessel down in a long, dexterous curve that dropped Silver City behind intervening spurs of the Rockies. Making a perfect landing, the great machine rushed over the concrete, its rockets blasting spasmodically. With a final swerve, it stopped alongside a tower-topped building that bore in large white letters the word: BOISE.

Graham was first out. Descending the portable steps in a manner that startled its handlers, he hit the concrete, made to run around the ship’s tail, but stopped, appalled.

About a hundred civilians and officials were scattered over the stratosphere station’s areaway, but none advanced to greet the arrival. They stood stock still at various points around the space, their faces turned to the south, their eyes narrowed as they strove to bring a long range into focus.

In that direction, sixty miles away, yet thrusting high above minor sprawls of the Rockies, was the cloud. It was not mushroom-shaped as other ominous clouds had been. It was twisted and dark and still growing. It had become an awful pillar that reached to the very floors of heaven and sought to thrust through like a gaseous fungus rooted in hell; a great, ghastly erection of swirling, flowing, sullen clouds poised like a visible column of earthly woe and lamentations.

The noise! The noise of that far phenomenon was infinitely terrible even though muted by distance; a sound of tortured, disrupted air; a sound as if something insane and gargantuan were running amok through the cosmos, ripping, tearing, rending everything on which it could lay its mammoth hands. Titan on a bender!

All faces were pale, uncomprehending, while that far column poked its sable finger into the belly of the void, and from the void came an eldritch yammering like stentorian laughter booming through the caverns of beyond. Then, abruptly, the cloud collapsed.

Its gaseous crown continued to soar while its semi-solid base fell back. It dropped from sight with all the shocking suddenness of a condemned felon plunging through a trap. The thing was gone, but its swollen soul still rose and drifted westward, while its hellish rumbles and muffled roars persisted for several seconds before they faded and died away.

The hypnotized hundred stirred, slowly, uncertainly, as in a dream. Five officials moved stupidly toward the idling strat-plane, their minds confused by the vision in the south. To one side of the concrete area, a private flyer resumed his walk toward his sports machine. Graham beat him to it.

“Quick! Take me to Silver City—government business!”

“Eh?” The flyer regarded him with preoccupied air.

“Silver City,” repeated Graham, urgently. His powerful fingers gripped the other’s shoulder, shook it to emphasize his words. “Get me to Silver City as swiftly as you can.”

“Why should I?”

“Dammit!” Graham roared, looking dangerous, “d’you want to argue at a time like this? You can take me—or have your machine confiscated. Which is it to be?”

The note of authority in his voice had its effect. The flier came to life, said hastily, “Yes, sure! I’ll take you.” He did not ask who Graham was, nor demand his purpose. Clambering hurriedly into his highly streamlined, two-seater, ten-jet job, he waited for his passenger to get in, then blew fire from the tail. The sports model raced along the concrete, lifted, screamed at a sharp angle into the blue.

Their destination lay beneath an obscuring pall of dust that was settling sluggishly as they progressed. It was just as they roared immediately overhead that a vagrant blast of wind cleared away the desiccated murk and bared the site of what had been Silver City.

Looking down, the pilot yelled something which became lost in the bellow of the stern tubes, fought to regain the controls that momentarily had slipped from his grasp. With cherry-red Venturis vomiting fire and long streams of vapor, the ship zoomed close to the ground, brought into near view a scene that made Graham’s stomach contract sickeningly.

Silver City was gone; the area it once had occupied was now an enormous scar on the face of Idaho, a five-miles-wide wound dotted with wreckage through which crept, crawled and limped a pathetically small number of survivors.

Jittery with shock, the pilot made an impromptu landing. Choosing a smooth stretch of sand on the north fringe of the scar, he brought his machine down, touched, lifted, touched, tilted, dug the starboard wingtip into soft soil. The machine reeled in a semicircle, tore off its wing, fell on its starboard side with the port wing sticking grotesquely into the air. The pair scrambled out unhurt. They stood side by side and studied the scene in complete silence.

Only one hour ago this had been a neat, clean and busy city of some thirty-five thousand souls. Now it was a field torn from the domain of hell, a crater-pitted terrain relieved only by low mounds of shattered bricks, tangles of distorted girders. Pale cobras of smoke still waved and undulated to the tune of distant groans. Here and there, a stone parted raspingly from its neighbor, a girder contracted in iron agony.

There were other things; things from which eyes avert and minds recoil; things photographed, but not for publication. Gaudy gobs and crimson clots inextricably mixed with tatters of wool and shreds of cotton. A jello shape in shredded denims. A parboiled head still exuding steam. A hand stuck to a girder, fingers extended, reaching for what it never got—and giving God the high-sign.

“Worse than the Krakatoa explosion,” declared Graham, his voice soft, low. “Even worse than the Mont Pelée disaster.”

“What a blast! What a blast!” recited the pilot, gesturing in nervous excitement. “This is atomic. Nothing less than an atom-bomb could have done it. You know what that means?”

“You tell me.”

“It means that every inch of this ground is deadly. We’re being sprayed every second we stand here.”

“That’s too bad.” Graham nodded at the wrecked plane. “Maybe you’d better take the air, eh?” He made his voice more tolerant. “We don’t know that it’s atomic—and by the time we find out it’ll be too late, anyway.”

A figure emerged laboriously from behind a pyramid of twisted girders in the middle distance. It limped around craters, side-stepped shapeless but infinitely terrible obstructions, made a lopsided, lurching run toward the waiting pair.

It was a human being, a man whose rags flapped around his raw legs as he progressed. He came up to them, showing dirt and blood camouflaging an ashen face that framed a pair of glowing, half-mad optics.

“All gone,” announced the newcomer, waving a trembling hand toward the place whence he had come. “All gone.” He chuckled crazily. “All but me and the little flock who are worthy in the sight of the Lord.” Squatting at their feet, he rolled his red-rimmed eyes upward, mumbled in tones too faint to be understood. Blood seeped through rags dangling on his left hip. “Listen!” he ordered, suddenly. He cupped a quivering hand to his ear. “Gabriel sounded his horn and even the song of the birds was stilled.” He giggled again. “No birds. They came down in a dead rain. Out of the sky they fell, all dead.” He rocked to and fro on his heels, mumbled again.

The pilot went to his plane, returned with a pocket-flask. Taking the flask, the sitting man gulped potent brandy as if it were water. He gasped, gulped some more. Emptying it, he handed it back, resumed his rocking. Slowly the light of sanity returned to his eyes.

Struggling to his feet, he teetered while he gazed at the others and said, in tones a little more normal, “I had a wife and a couple of kids. I had a real good wife and two damn fine kids. Where are they now?” His eyes blazed anew as they shifted from one to the other, desperately seeking the answer that none could give.

“Don’t lose hope,” soothed Graham. “Don’t lose hope until you know for certain.”

“Tell us what happened,” suggested the pilot.

“I was fixing a patent no-draft cowl on a chimney in Borah Avenue, and I was just reaching for a piece of wire when the entire universe seemed to go bust. Something grabbed me, threw me all over the sky, then dropped me. When I got up, there wasn’t any Silver City any more.” He put his hands over his eyes, held them there a moment. “No streets, no houses. No home, no wife and kids. And dead birds falling all around me.”

“Have you any idea of what caused it?” Graham inquired.

“Yes,” declared the man, his voice pure venom. “It was the National Camera Company, fooling around with something they’d no right to touch. Looking for another ten percent, and damn the consequences. May everybody connected with it be blasted body and soul, now and for evermore!”

“You mean that the explosion was located in their plant?” put in Graham, stemming the tirade.

“Sure!” The speaker’s orbs mirrored his hate. “Their tanks blew up. They had a battery of cylinders holding a million gallons of silver nitrate solution, and every gallon of it went up at once, and sent everything straight to Hades. Why do they let ’em keep stuff like that in the middle of a city? Where’s their right—and who says so? Somebody ought to be swung for that! Somebody ought to be hoisted higher than the city went!” He spat fiercely, rubbed his swollen lips. Death was in the set of his jaw. “Wiped out peaceful homes, and happy families, and—”

“But silver nitrate in solution won’t disrupt like that.”

“Won’t it, mister?” retorted the victim, his tones sheer sarcasm. He gestured all-embracingly. “Look!”

His listeners looked. They found nothing to say.

Cars began to pour along the road from Boise, the vanguard of a veritable cavalcade that was to continue for a week. A plane swooped overhead, another and another. An auto-gyro bumped to earth half a mile away. Two helicopter ambulances floated inward, prepared to follow suit.

Temporarily disregarding causes, and reckless of consequences, a thousand pairs of feet trod through the graveyard of the West, a thousand pairs of hands pulled cautiously at wreckage, plucked maimed but living creatures from the soil. In his haste to rescue the living, no man thought of tormented atoms spitting invisibly, of hard radiations piercing his own body time and time again.

Ambulances, wheeled and winged, official or rush-converted, raced in, departed only to come again and again. Stretcher-bearers stamped a broad, firm path that later was to become the exact route of Mercy Street. Flying journalists hovered in hastily hired helicopters a few hundred feet above, their televisors recording the horror below, broadcasting agony and pathos in extravagant adjectives not one-tenth so moving as the photographic reality depicted on the screens of a hundred million telenews receivers.

Graham and his pilot slaved with the rest, slaved long after dusk had fallen and night had spread its sable shroud over the dead that yet remained. A gibbous moon crawled up, spewed its beams over the sights below. The hand on the girder maintained its gesture.

A gore-smeared gyrocar, with silent driver, carried Graham back to Boise. Finding a hotel, he washed, shaved, put a call through to Colonel Leamington.

The news of the disaster had shaken the world, said Leamington. Already the president had received messages of sympathy from fifteen foreign governments as well as from countless individuals.

“We’re taking every necessary action to determine as soon and as definitely as possible whether this is another Hiroshima, Black Tom, or Texas City,” he continued. “That is to say, whether its cause is attributable to assault, sabotage or accident.”

“It’s no Hiroshima,” Graham told him. “It wasn’t an atomic explosion—or not in any sense we understand. It was an ordinary, commonplace bang, a molecular disruption, but on a gigantic scale.”

“How d’you know that?”

“They’ve rushed in Geiger counters from all directions. I questioned a bunch of operators just before I left. They say radiation is not abnormal as far as they’ve searched. The area seems safe. If anything is radiating, it’s something not detectable by the means being employed.”

“Humph!” growled Leamington. “I guess we’ll get that report here shortly.” He was silent for a few seconds, then said, “If it so happens that you come across anything suggesting a connection between this awful disaster and your investigation, you must drop everything forthwith and get in touch with me. In such circumstances, the whole affair would be far too great for one man to handle.”