Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Robert Abernathy

  “What are you giving us?” demanded a deep voice, its owner a blur in the twilight. “We know all that. And who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “I know,” insisted Manning. “I was in Germany only this morning.”

  A little, wrinkled man scurried out of a doorway and laid a protesting hand on Manning’s arm. “You’d better shut up,” he said sharply. “That’s inflammatory talk, and it can get you in bad trouble.”

  “He’s crazy,” suggested another voice.

  “I’m crazy,” agreed Manning affably, and turned to go. Out of the tail of his eye he saw the little man go back inside, and he felt unreasonably optimistic.

  “Now we can see about that chow,” he told Dugan.

  IV

  THE INSIDE OF THE “EAT” WAS not attractive, nor was the food the slovenly waiter brought them. Dugan ate fervently. It didn’t matter to him that America was no longer America, or that American coffee was no longer coffee.

  But Manning dawdled. He had sat down with his back to the wall, so that his eyes could rove freely over the whole cramped interior; and he was all taut expectation. He was waiting for a sign.

  Within ten minutes after their entry, three men had come in and sat down, two of them together. They might have been ordinary customers, but to Manning’s covertly searching gaze they did not look sufficiently undernourished to be twenty-first century Americans. They looked like Germans.

  The next arrivals were a youthful couple, and then for a while no one came in. Manning ordered another cup of “coffee.” Then he got a shock.

  For when he looked down, reaching for his cup, it was gone. He blinked, and it was there, solid, chipped and stained. He, glanced briefly up at the unnoticing Dugan, then back to the cup—and there was no cup. And then there was, and he sat and squinted at it, struggling with a glimmer of understanding that this was what he had been waiting for.

  Their table was for four. Out of the corner of his eye Manning thought he saw somebody sitting in the chair at his right. He turned his head quickly, and there was no one. The chair was empty. Too empty. His brain tried to crystalize that intuitive conviction, but failed.

  He glanced sidelong at the suspiciously well-fed men. They sat morosely over glasses of what looked like beer, and paid no attention. But Manning knew that there was an invisible man in the room.

  He sat hesitating over his next move, when a voice screamed in his ear. It was a tiny thread of voice, not a whisper; it sounded like someone shouting frenetically over a bad telephone connection.

  “Don’t move,” it commanded urgently. “I see you know I’m here beside you, and that you’re being followed. Are you willing to follow instructions? If so, lay your right hand on the table.”

  Manning did so. The gnat-like voice shrilled, “All right. You leave here, turning left. Follow your nose and don’t look back. About five minutes’ walk will bring you to a bridge. Further instructions then. Act natural!”

  Despite the final injunction, Manning hardly knew how they got out onto the street. Out of possible earshot of their shadows, he explained hurriedly to Dugan. “I thought they’d try to contact us. We have the Gestapo itself to thank for that, I’ll bet. Even if it can’t put the finger on the underground, it must know enough about them so that we were dumped off here for bait, it could let the word go out so that the underground would hear about us and grab at the bait right away. They didn’t lose any agents on that raid in Germany, so they must have been pretty curious to learn that a couple of their men had been picked up on the scene and sent to New York! Now things are going to break.”

  The bridge loomed out of the darkness ahead. It was a wooden structure, crossing a narrow creek. Midway of the echoing span . . . they paused, and Manning pricked up his ears. He was not disappointed. The invisible presence said, “Good. I trust you can both swim? All right—drop over the railing, and swim straight back to the shore you just left, only come out under the bridge. I’ll meet you there. Good luck!”

  They looked at each other. “I heard him,” Dugan said, and without more words placed a hand on the rickety railing and vaulted out over the black water. Manning gave him a few seconds to get clear, and followed. He came up clinging to his orientation, and struck out; when he splashed ashore, Dugan was already shaking himself on the narrow strip of sand below the bank.

  AND a third man emerged abruptly from the shadow of the bridge piles. He was an ordinary-looking man in a worn leather jacket and patched trousers, but his face was masked by a dark hood, blank save for eye-slits, and on his back he carried something like a small pack with two small levers protruding. In his right hand was a pistol, and in his left a bundle; he dropped the latter on the ground and stepped back.

  “Put those on,” he hissed. “Quick, before they get here!”

  The bundle was two outfits such as the stranger wore. They donned them as instructed; the hoods were stiff with wire, and connected by a flexible cord to the packs. Manning eyed the gun speculatively; the masked man explained softly, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but those gadgets are too valuable to take any chances with. They’re invisibility units. Start them by pressing here.” He pulled down one of the levers on his pack; he seemed to blur slightly, but they could still see him. “The headgear insulates you pretty well from the effect. Go on, start those units!” Heavy feet were thundering overhead on the bridge planks.

  They obeyed; the packs made a faint hum. The stranger relaxed visibly. “Now we’re okay,” he said in a normal voice. “By the time they catch on, we’ll be a long way from here.”

  Directly above, an angry snarl: “Sie sind grade ins Wasser gesprungen! Wer hatte erwartet—”

  Somebody else answered, “Vielleicht wird ein Boot dort unten gelegen haben “Good guessing,” approved the masked man cheerfully. He motioned Manning and Dugan toward where a small skiff lay beached between the piles. “Help me launch this. First, though, turn your units up to full power—like this—so they’ll cover the boat.

  Manning was startled at the man’s bravado; as all three laid hold of the boat, he whispered anxiously, “Won’t they hear?”

  “Not if we shouted our heads off,” the other answered. “With these units going, we’re not only invisible, but inaudible and practically intangible. I’ve walked through a cordon that was closing in on me with linked arms.” He sprang nimbly into the bow of the boat. “Grab an oar, you two, and make yourselves useful. I’ve been through a lot of trouble on your account.” He seemed to decide that introductions were finally in order. “My name’s Jerry Kane. At any rate, it’s my favorite alias.” Manning and Dugan named themselves and fell to rowing. “Downstream,” said Kane, and he gazed back at the bridge with interest as they pulled away. Manning glanced back over his shoulder; there were dark figures swarming on the bridge, and lights, and a car had stopped there; even as he looked a searchlight beam swayed out across the water, moving systematically back and forth. For a moment it fell full upon the rowboat, and Manning ducked involuntarily; but the light passed on and there was no outcry, no shots came.

  Manning said hoarsely, “That light was on us! It didn’t go through us, or anything of the sort. A body that reflects light is visible. So how the devil——”

  “We’re not optically invisible,” answered Kane amusedly. “So far as I know, that’s a physical impossibility. Actually, those Germans saw us, but they didn’t notice us. Ever catch yourself looking right at something and not seeing it, because it was too familiar or because you were thinking about something else? That’s the effect the field has. Anything in the middle of it hides behind a psychic block in the mind of whoever looks at it. That’s why it works on hearing, too, and even on touch. It’s not perfect; if you set off a magnesium flare in front of somebody, or punched him in the nose, he’d notice something was up—but hardly before. When you get acquainted with the effect it makes you feel like a ghost. Back in that cafe, I had to shout in your ear till I deafened myself before I could make you hear.”<
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  THEY glided down the current, and the lights and voices around the bridge receded rapidly. As Manning bent to his oar, his imagination was busy with the first item of twenty-first century technology which went completely beyond his twentieth-century knowledge. In Germany he had seen the evidences of a mighty and advanced civilization, but everything had been the logical perfection of inventions already known . . .

  Kane seemed to read his thoughts. “Working like we do, we can’t compete with the Germans in things that call for a lot of resources and equipment. They have all the big weapons—the rockets and tanks and atomic bombs. For anything to be useful to us, it has to be something that can be invented and built in a cellar. So we’ve had to open up brand-new lines of development—and in fields like psychoelectronics we’re miles ahead of the Germans, because they didn’t have to . . . Better pull over. We don’t want to get rammed,” he interrupted himself.

  A blinding eye was bearing down on them across the water. In its stark glare Manning felt nakedly visible again. But they veered sharply toward the bank, and the launch went past in a swish of foam, still scanning river and shore ahead.

  “Where we going?” Dugan asked practically.

  “We’re about there,” answered Kane. “Easy now.” He pointed to where a jumble of ruins projected like a pier into the stream, the ripples lapping and gurgling in the spaces between the great piled fragments. “In there—the only space big enough for the boat. Better duck.” Their craft slid with scant clearance into an opening like the mouth of a cave. Kane produced a flashlight, and they saw that a timbered tunnel ran back into the bank at right angles to the entrance.

  “Up to the end,” ordered Kane. They poled with oar-thrusts against the tunnel sides for a score of yards, until the boat bumped against a wooden platform at the end of the shaft. Kane sprang ashore and made fast, and the others followed. The flashlight beam searched out a trapdoor; Jbelow it were stairs that led downward. At the bottom they trod on cement, and there was another door, on which Kane knocked in a deliberate pattern.

  Presently a bolt was shot back, and the door swung open. The man who opened it was hooded and it was a little hard to keep him in sight, even for those likewise protected. When he saw Kane, however, he switched off his invisibility unit. The new arrivals did likewise, and all of them slipped off their stifling hoods with relief.

  Jerry Kane had a surprisingly youthful and unlined face, topped with curly blond hair which women must have loved to run their fingers through. He didn’t look much like an underground plotter. The man who had opened the door fitted the role better; he was gaunt, blue-jawed and dour.

  The room they had entered had begun life as a basement; it was big, concrete-walled, ill-lit by an electric bulb dangling from the low ceiling, its furnishings a long table and a number of chairs which indicated its use as a gathering-place for a good many people. The only other person in it now was a massive man who sat at the table, an open book spread out before him, and stared unblinkingly at those who had come in.

  “Most of our regular agents are out—looking for you,” Kane remarked. He waved them to seats, and sat down himself on the table’s end. “However, we have here Harry Clark”—the blue-jawed man—“and Igor Vzryvov, one of the Russian members.”

  Clark nodded noncommittally. The big Russian rumbled in faintly accented English: “Pleased to meet you. I have never met any time travelers before.”

  They stared at him. Manning turned on Kane: “You know about us?”

  Kane grinned. “You told the Germans you came out of the past. At least, that’s what was reported in the camera session of the court which passed on your case this morning. One of our friends happened to be there—and at your trial, later on.”

  “Was there an invisible man there?”

  “No, he was visible and you saw him. Remember two elderly jurists who served as a sounding board for Gestapoleiter Schwinzog? One of them is a friend of ours. We have a good many, even inside Germany.”

  “He calls them friends,” growled Igor Vzryvov. “I say no German can be a friend.”

  “So——” Manning was numbed by surprise. “So you’ve had your eye on us from the start.”

  “Just about.”

  “And you believe our story?”

  “Since the Germans didn’t, I’m inclined to,” admitted Kane. “We know that more things are possible than German imagination can swallow; we’ve got several such things here. Of course, it’s always just possible that you’re German spies, using a crazy wheels-within-wheels stunt to get on the inside. I don’t think so, though, and fortunately I don’t have to guess.” He turned to Vzryvov. “Got the apparatus set up?”

  “Since an hour ago,” said the Russian.

  Kane slid off the table top. He became brusque. “If you’ll just step into the next room, we’ll read your minds and settle all doubts.”

  FIFTEEN MINUTES later, Igor Vzryvov switched off the psychoanalyzer. Manning glanced up under the spidery hemisphere of wire that gathered the faint broadcasts of the brain, and met Kane’s warm smile. The underground leader tossed aside the graphs he had been studying, and extended a welcoming hand.

  “You’re genuine, all right. No need to examine your friend—your mind says he came with you out of the past, and that’s enough and to spare.”

  “Swell!” said Dugan. “I didn’t much like the idea of having that thing poking around inside my head.”

  Kane caressed the machine affectionately. “This is one of the best achievements of cellar science. Thanks to it, we’ve got the only leak-proof organization this sinful world has ever seen. The Nazi party is one of the tightest setups ever created without benefit of the psychoanalyzer, and we’ve got men inside it—but we know that all our members are loyal and stable.” His expression darkened. “Of course, if this and our other psychoelectronic developments got into German hands, we’d be sunk. With their resources, they could exploit the field a lot more thoroughly than we can. For example, Igor here has invented a death ray that kills by just convincing a man he’s dead—but to make it an effective weapon would take a lot more power. We get a good deal of leakage here from the Long Island station, but we have to be careful about antennas.”

  The four of them sat around the table in the outer room. Harry Clark had disappeared—literally, and then gone out to pass the word to the agents scattered around New York that the men they sought had been found.

  “Now,” said Kane, “since you’re really time travelers, I’m on fire to hear how you did it. A time machine might be a useful addition to our arsenal, though it sounds like a tricky thing to use . . .”

  “I’m afraid we can’t help on that score,” said Manning, and related the whole story of their experience with Herr Doktor Kahl’s Zeitfahrer.

  Kane rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “So you’re stranded in our time. I feel for you! At least the Germans didn’t get the machine, either—though they have got the inventor. We may have to do something about that. And what about you? Have any plans?”

  Manning met his eyes squarely. “A hundred years ago, we were fighting a war. It seems we lost it—how or why, I don’t know. I don’t think we lost it in the fighting, but probably before it ever began, when we were complacent and let the Germans get a head start in preparation and invention. Anyway, for us that’s still unfinished business.”

  “And we’d like the chance to finish it!” stated Dugan bluntly.

  Kane smiled with a touch of sadness. Vzryvov said explosively, “The end may be soon!” and his eyes burned.

  In Manning’s memory flashed the vision of a mocking face. He asked abruptly: “What did Schwinzog mean: ‘A message for America—one week to live’ ?”

  The shadow on Kane’s face deepened, but he did not show surprise. “I guess he meant just that. That the Germans are about ready to do to America what they did to Russia fifty years ago . . . But of course you don’t know anything about the history of the last century. If you want to catch up o
n the missing chapters, I’ve got a fair-sized collection of books on the subject. All the ones dealing with events since the War of the Conquest are German, of course—English has just about stopped being a written language—and you’ll probaby find they don’t even agree on what you know. You said, didn’t you, that you were with an American army advancing into Germany?”

  “That’s right—and it was only one of several.”

  Kane grinned wrily. “The books don’t even whisper that Germany was ever invaded in that war. They must have been a lot closer to defeat than they’ve ever admitted since. But——” he shrugged, “they won in the end, so what’s the difference?”

  “How could they win?” scowled Dugan. “Hell, we had them on the run!”

  KANE gave him a pitying look. “You must have left some time before the Germans suddenly rose from the ashes and struck back at us. They attacked us with a new weapon—a radioactive dust, byproduct of several big piles—atomic power plants—they had secretly got going by 1949. The occupation forces were wiped out—along with a million or so of their own people. In no time Western Europe was overrun again. The whole of Soviet Russia seems to have collapsed about the same time.” He looked down at his hands, clasped on the table in front of him; his voice went on with the dispassionate recital of the dead past. “There was an attempt to defend England that folded up when London was dusted off the map. I haven’t been able to find much information on the war in Asia, but I think they had a long tough fight putting down guerrilla resistance in Siberia and later on in China.

  “Then came the attack on America, and for that they used the dust in combination with another ace in the hole—their own atomic bombs. The first one was dropped right here, on New York. It flattened five or six square miles and killed about half a million people. The defenses that we’d devised against the dust—inadequate as they must have been, because there isn’t any real defense—were neutralized by the bomb. America fought for just one month, and after that there wasn’t any United States—just a disorganized mob of survivors, dazed by the cities’ destruction and the sterilization of big stretches of countryside.