by Pat Frank
I am inclined to agree with Mr. Pogey that the world is, and by rights ought to be, extinct. And so long as it is going to be extinct, why prolong the agony?
I am sorry to leave Mary Ellen and little Eleanor, but there is money enough to care for them. I think Mary Ellen will understand that my only chance for happiness is to resign and go away with Kathy. She is the only one who has the courage to help me. So, goodbye, Steve.
Homer.
P.S. Give my love to Marge, and tell Jane goodbye for me.
I picked up the telephone. “Who are you going to call?” Marge asked.
“I have had it!” I told her. I think I spoke without undue passion, and with determination. “I have had it, and I am going to call the airport, and we will get on a plane to New York right away. We’ll retire to Smith Field and pretend none of it happened.”
Marge took the telephone out of my hand and slammed it on its cradle. “Oh, no you’re not!” she told me. “You can’t! You’re responsible, Steve. If you run out, now, I’ll leave you. I swear it. I’ll leave you flat.”
Jane was reading Homer’s note. She finished it, it fluttered in her hand, and she quietly slid to the floor. “Do you see what you’ve done?” Marge said. “She’s fainted. Get a wet towel, you dope, and start thinking!”
CHAPTER 11
My every instinct warned me to get out of that hotel fast, and keep going, but since I could not do this, there were obvious steps to be taken. First I called the N.R.P., and asked for Abel Pumphrey. His secretary answered, and asked who was calling and I told her and she said, “Couldn’t you call back a little later, Mr. Smith. Mr. Pumphrey is very busy right now.”
I said it was urgent, and she said Mr. Pumphrey had said he did not want to be disturbed, because he was working on his radio script with Mr. Gableman. “You know he’s speaking tonight on a national hookup,” she said, “on the beginning of A.I.”
“This will concern his speech,” I said, “very vitally.”
“In that case,” she said, “I’d better put you through.”
“Who’s this?” Pumphrey’s voice said. “Oh, it’s you, Smith. I’m terribly busy right now, couldn’t you—”
“Homer Adam,” I said, “has run away.”
There was a choking sound at the other end of the line, and then, “I don’t think I understood you, Smith—Steve—did you say—”
“Homer Adam has run away. He has gone. He has vanished.”
There were loud, strange noises on the other end of the line, and disconnected words and phrases, but they were not coming from Abel Pumphrey.
“What’s happening,” Marge asked.
“I don’t know. Sounds like the place was suddenly invaded by furniture movers.”
I kept on saying hello, hello into the telephone, and after a number of minutes a voice on the other end said, “Hello, hello, is this Smith? Gableman. What did you do to Mr. Pumphrey?”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“He’s out cold. I think he’s had a heart attack. We’re sending him to the hospital.”
“I told him about Homer Adam. He just resigned. He ran away. He’s gone.”
“Oh! Oh, no!” Gableman groaned as if he had a stomach-ache, and then he said, “I’ll be right over. Don’t do anything until I get there.”
“I’m going to call the FBI,” I said. “I have to. Sorry about Pumphrey.”
“My gosh, when this gets out! Do you think we can find him in a hurry?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know whether we’ll ever find him.”
“Well, tell the FBI not to make it public until they have to, because if it’s made public we’ll all be ruined, and we might find him.” He hung up.
Marge said, “That was a peculiar conversation. What happened?”
“Oh, Pumphrey had a heart attack, and Gableman is coming over.”
“If he dies,” Marge said, “you’ll be a murderer!”
I asked the operator for the FBI, and then I told Marge that if she ever said another thing like that I would resign, like Homer, and go away, and if Pumphrey had a bad heart, and was fated to pass out on this lovely spring morning, then I couldn’t be blamed. Marge began to sniffle, and Jane, now recovered, put her arm around her shoulder, and I felt like a heel.
I got through to Inspector Root, at the FBI. Tex Root is a spare little man, quick and wiry as a blacksnake whip. Nothing ever surprises him, because usually he keeps about two thoughts ahead of everyone else. I had gone to Root when I needed a dossier on The Frame, and now when I told him about Homer vanishing he said, “Did that gal get him?”
“It looks that way,” I said.
“I thought she might,” he said. “Now don’t get yourself into an uproar. This may not be as bad as it looks. I guess you want to keep it quiet, heh?”
“It might prevent a number of lynchings and murders and I don’t know what else.”
“So it might,” Tex Root agreed. I knew he would be smiling. “All right, we won’t put out a public alarm—not yet. You’re positive he’s with the Riddell woman?”
“He left a note.”
“Okay, we’ll put special agents on the railroads, and air lines, and air charter ships, and bus lines—but I’m pretty sure she’s too smart to use them. And I’ll be up in five minutes.”
Gableman arrived first. He wasn’t alone. With him was Klutz, bubbling incoherently with excitement and apprehension. “How’s Pumphrey?” I greeted them, feeling guilty.
“His condition is undetermined,” said Klutz. “It’s awful, isn’t it? Why, if anything happens to Mr. Pumphrey, there’s no telling what the results might be. The whole organization might come to pieces. I don’t see how he could be replaced, I really don’t.”
“Looks bad, all right,” Gableman said. “There’s already been so much talk about putting N.R.P. under Interior, or Public Health, that if something happened to Mr. Pumphrey such a switch might be inevitable. Of course, it wouldn’t affect me personally. Interior has been after me to come over to them, and State wants me back, but we do have such a nice, tight little organization in N.R.P. that I’d hate to leave.”
“So would I,” said Klutz. “And the worst of it is I’d probably have to stay on until the last to supervise liquidation.”
Gableman shook his head and sat down. “I just don’t see how I can save this situation,” he said. “If we don’t find Adam immediately we won’t be able to keep it quiet. As a matter of fact I don’t know whether we’ll be able to keep it quiet in any case. Colonel Phelps-Smythe is sure to hear about it, and he’ll go running to the War Department, and there’s no telling what they’ll do.”
Tex Root arrived. I was glad to see him. Not only did he look sane, but you knew that he would remain that way. I gave him Homer’s note, and he read it aloud, twice, and then he said, “They can’t get away with it.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Why, they’re as conspicuous as, well, as if Joe Stalin and Winston Churchill were loose. More. Everywhere they go, they’ll be recognized. Particularly since this is A.I. Day. Suppose they turned up in Kansas City? Somebody would say, ‘Why, there’s Mr. Adam! And The Frame! Why, he’s supposed to be in Washington today, starting A.I.’ And the heat would be on.”
“That sounds logical,” I admitted.
“It is logical,” said Tex Root, “but only if we send out a general alarm. If we put out a general alarm the chances are we’d locate them in six hours.”
Gableman started to pace the floor. “Yes, but can you imagine what would happen if it was broadcast that Mr. Adam had vanished? Why—” The vision of the consequences seemed to render him speechless.
“I can imagine,” said Tex Root quietly. “It would be like Pearl Harbor, only worse. I think people would get killed. For instance, I think Kathy Riddell would probably get killed, and I think some of you people in N.R.P. would get killed, and those who didn’t would wish they were dead. People feel very strongly about Homer Adam, and A.I. I
know. I’m a married man. It was bad enough when people discovered that Adam was living with his wife. I don’t know what they’d do if they learned he’d eloped with an actress.”
“Exactly!” said Gableman. “There’d be chaos.”
Tex Root thought it over, his neat, lean fingers tapping the arm of his chair. “However,” he concluded, “it is the duty of the Bureau to find him, and as quickly as possible. I will treat it exactly as if it were a kidnaping. If Adam hasn’t turned up by midnight, and our Special Agents haven’t found any trace of him, we’ll have to make it public.”
“That’s reasonable,” I agreed. I sat down and gave him a fill-in on everything I knew about Homer Adam, and The Frame. Everything. When I got to the part about their mutual interest in Aztec archeology Root nodded. “It could be,” he said, “that they’re headed for Mexico. If they are, we’ll soon know about it.”
He called his office, and dictated additional instructions. “You see,” he said, “we’ll not only check up on every commercial service going to Mexico, but we’ll check all private planes that might be chartered for such a flight.”
I told him about The Frame’s phone calls to Homer, and together we went to the hotel switchboard. One of the girls remembered that Miss Riddell had called the previous evening. It wasn’t a long distance call. It was local. She didn’t know from where. Usually, Miss Riddell’s calls came from out of town. But they had been local for the past three days.
“That tells us something,” Root said when we returned to 5-F. “She was here last night. Where does she stay when she’s in Washington?” I told him and he called her hotel, but the hotel didn’t know anything about Miss Riddell’s being in the city. “She’s been keeping under cover,” he said. “Shows she planned this carefully. I don’t think we’ll find them by midnight. We may not find them for a long, long time. She’s a very clever girl. Very.”
The telephone rang and Jane Zitter answered it. “It’s the N.R.P. laboratory,” she said. “The doctors are ready for Mr. Adam. They’ve been waiting.”
I had forgotten. It was past noon. “Tell them,” I began, “tell them—what would you tell them, Gableman?”
“Oh,” said Gableman. “Oh, Lord, please let me think. Tell them that Mr. Adam can’t make it today.”
“That’s pretty lame,” I said. “We’ve got to do better than that. And we’ll certainly have to do better than that later in the day, or this evening, when Fay Sumner Knott calls and asks for her impregnation.”
“Oh,” Gableman groaned, “why did I ever leave the State Department? Nothing like this ever happened in the State Department.”
“Hold the wire a moment, please,” Jane said into the phone.
“Has anybody got any ideas?” I asked.
“Can’t you think up an international complication?” Marge suggested.
“That’s it!” said Gableman. “An international complication. Tell then that Mr. Adam cannot make it today, because of international complications. Tell them there are some things that have to be cleared before A.I. begins.”
Jane told the laboratories. “What things will have to be cleared?” I asked. “We’ll have to make this real.”
“That’s not hard,” said Gableman. “I can think of a hundred things that have to be cleared. Why, we’ve got whole stacks of protests in our files. We just got a beaut from the Russians last night. They charge that Fay Sumner Knott has been unfriendly to the Soviet Union, and as a matter of fact they cannot find anyone on the whole list who is friendly to the Soviet Union, and they protest the whole thing. And the French are indignant, and so are the Chinese. They all claim that unless some priority is given to other countries, there isn’t any guarantee that the United States isn’t pursuing a unilateral policy.”
“That ought to do it,” I said, “at least temporarily. That will hold us until midnight, anyway.”
“All right,” Gableman agreed, “I’ll go back to the office and fight a delaying action. But I want you to understand that if nothing has happened before midnight, I’m through. At midnight I’m going to leave the office and I will never return. Tomorrow you will find me with Interior.”
Klutz said, rising, “Mr. Smith, if you had only taken my advice in the first place, and allowed Mr. Adam to operate under the aegis of a committee, with the War Department sharing responsibility, we wouldn’t be in this mess. I’d like you to know that you have endangered my career, Mr. Smith.”
I started to speak, but I thought better of it because Marge and Jane were there. Gableman and Klutz left, and I went into the kitchenette and found Tex Root spreading cheese on crackers. “If you’re hungry,” I suggested, “we can have lunch sent up.”
“I’m not hungry,” Tex said. “I was just thinking, and when I eat crackers I think best.”
“And what are you thinking?” I asked.
“I was just thinking it’s just like my wife said. You get a shortage of anything, and people start to make a black market out of it.”
“You don’t mean that The Frame grabbed Homer for a black market in babies?”
“Well, that’s what my wife would say, right away. It would be practically instinctive. But I’m not sure of it. There may be other motives, besides selling stuff on the black market, but they’re hard to find.”
I could imagine The Frame as being a lot of things, but somehow she didn’t strike me as being avaricious for money. I said, “I think you’re being cynical.”
“Oh, you do? Well, turn on the radio.”
“What’s the radio got to do with it?”
Tex Root bit off half a cracker, munched it, and then stuffed the other half in his mouth. In a muffled voice he said, “Homer Adam affects the stock market, doesn’t he?”
“Sure,” I replied. “When Adam’s well, stocks are up. When they’re down, it’s a pretty good sign that either Adam is sick, or N.R.P. is in trouble.”
“And so far as the public knows, this is a big day—a boom day—isn’t it?”
“Certainly. This is A.I. Day.”
“And stocks should go up?”
“Oh, I suppose so. Moderately perhaps. After all, A.I. Day has been pretty well discounted by the professional traders.”
“What would you think if you turned on the radio and found stocks had collapsed?”
I thought this over. “If it was really a general collapse, it could only mean that war had started or the insiders thought Adam was ended.”
“All right,” said Tex Root, “I dare you to turn on the radio.”
I turned it on. It played music, and then a girl sang a little ditty about how to keep moths out of closets, and then the National Association of Industry announced it was presenting Mr. Henry Mullet, Jr., on the air, to give his version of the news, “completely uncensored and as he sees it.”
“Now watch,” said Tex Root. Sure enough, Mr. Henry Mullet, Jr., started off by stating that the stock market had collapsed, but on its face, with heavy selling inspired by rumors from Washington. He didn’t say what the rumors were.
“Now you see why I’m cynical,” said Tex Root. “You think you can keep it a secret about Homer Adam disappearing, but so long as more than one person knows about it, it’s no secret. And everybody who finds out about it, plays it smart. They sell humanity short.”
I didn’t like the phrase about selling humanity short, and said so. He said I ought to learn to be a realist. He reminded me that during the war everyone made money out of ships and airplanes except the fellows who died in them, and that after the war everyone made money out of houses except the people who needed them for living. I said I didn’t see what that had to do with black markets, and he said it illustrated the economics of shortages. He said it showed there were other reasons why The Frame might want to grab Homer Adam besides the ones we’d already considered.
The telephone kept ringing, and every time it rang I hoped it would be for Tex Root, but it never was.
Klutz called to tell me that Mr. Pumphre
y was better, and in fact out of danger. His high blood pressure had boiled over, and the doctors advised him to take a month off, but he would live.
Gableman called to say that he had put out a release announcing that A.I. Day was postponed twenty-four hours, but that it had not been well received, and the press wanted to know specifically why. “This business of international complications,” he explained, “is getting hard to work. The press associations always cable Moscow, and Moscow never knows what is up and issues a denial, and then the State Department gets huffy and denies having received the denial. One of these days that sort of thing will get me in bad. That is why I would rather work for Interior.”
Dinnertime went by. Tex Root and Marge and Jane devoured chicken sandwiches and drank milk, but I wasn’t feeling hungry. Midnight was getting no further away, and I was having visions. Very shortly I would be the most unpopular man in the world. I was the man on the spot. There wasn’t anything that could save me. There was no evading it. I kept telling myself that during a crisis like this a man’s viewpoint becomes distorted, and everything appears worse than it actually is. Then Danny Williams called from the White House and I discovered that things can actually be as bad as they seem.
“The President,” Danny said, “is having a conniption fit. I don’t blame him. Why weren’t we notified?”
“I thought somebody in the office would tell him,” I apologized. It didn’t sound right. I knew, and Danny knew, that no one in N.R.P. would want to be a bearer of black news.
“We didn’t know a damned thing about it until the War Department called.”
“Oh, do they know about it?”
“Certainly they know about it. Everyone in Washington knew about it, except the President. He wants your scalp, but I told him to wait. I hear the FBI has given you a midnight deadline.”