A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  A board whimpers a little, and he gets off it with catlike litheness before it goes into a full-bodied creak. The gash of laboratory whiteness comes slowly nearer, outlining the angles of things even beyond its own radius. This house, he thinks, is as black physically as it is in spirit. Little tinkering, puttering sounds become audible from the still-distant laboratory, magnified in the stillness. Mania at its preparations.

  She signals with her fingertips, abreast of an open door. “In here?” he whispers. They turn aside and glide through. “Stand here right beside the door where I can find you again. I’ll see if I can locate his coat.”

  He does after a lot of cautious circling and navigation; it is hanging from a peg in the wall. He finds the key very quickly, though to her it must seem forever that he’s standing there fumbling with the coat. He slips back to her, jaunty with his own peculiar jauntiness even in this eerie situation. “Got it. Now here we go.”

  Outside again. Step by step through the silence and the blackness, the triangular wedge of white ahead the only visible thing. A board barks treacherously under him, this time before he can withdraw his foot. They stand rigid, while the echoes move into the night. The tinkering has stopped abruptly. Questioning silence from the laboratory now. O’Shaughnessy nudges her with his elbow, and they draw in against the wall.

  Not a sound from the laboratory. The bar of escaping light, narrow as a candlestick until now, slowly, insinuatingly, broadens out fan-shaped as the door behind it silently widens. A silhouette bisects it, Denholt’s outline thrown before him over the floor and up the wall, rigid, standing just within the opening, listening.

  The grin has come back to O’Shaughnessy’s face; he reaches behind him and squeezes her throbbing wrist reassuringly. It seems so long ago that he was last afraid of anything. Seventeen, was he then? Eighteen? Sometimes he thinks he’s missing a lot by being like this—fear gives life a fillip. He wonders how it is he lost it all, and what there is—if anything—ever to bring it back.

  One thing’s sure, she’s being afraid for the both of them, and plenty left over; her pulse is a whipcord under the thumb that is holding her wrist.

  The silhouette moves at last, begins to recede within the lighted room. The noise that conjured it up, like a genie out of a bottle, hasn’t been repeated. The tinkerings and drippings resume where they left off. Only the path of light remains wider than before, a ticklish gap to bridge undiscovered. When they are almost abreast of it and can hear Denholt’s breathing inside, O’Shaughnessy stops, gropes behind him, draws Nova around in front of him. He transfers the padlock key to her palm, closes her fingers over it. “I want to be sure you make that gate, no matter what. Take a deep breath and get across that lighted place. Don’t be afraid, I’m right here backing you up.”

  She edges forward, cranes her neck toward the open door. Apparently Denholt’s back is toward it. She takes a quick soundless sidestep, with instinctive feminine deftness, and is on the other side of the luminous barrier. He can see her there anxiously waiting for him to join her.

  A moment later he is beside her again, bringing with him a quick bird’s-eye glimpse of a white-coated form bent over, laboriously pouring something from a retort into a hypodermic-barrel. In the background a pair of operating tables, not just one. One an improvised one—planks bridging two chairs, with a rubber sheet draped over them. “Double-header coming up,” thinks O’Shaughnessy. “Rain—no game.”

  She is tugging insistently at his arm, but he is suddenly resistant, immobile. She turns her face up toward his. “O’Shaughnessy, come on! Any minute he’s—”

  “My rabbit’s foot. He’s got it in there with him, in my coat. I couldn’t go without it—”

  “O’Shaughnessy, he’ll kill you.”

  “Him and what sextet? Get over there to the door, kid, and start working on it. I want you in the clear in case that gun of his starts going boom. I’ve got to go in after my lucky paw, no two ways about it.” He has to jog her, push her slightly, to get her to tear herself away from him. Finally she slips off in the dark with a little whimper of protest. He waits there until a faint clicking comes from the main door. Then a bolt grates miserably as she clears it, and there is sudden, startled silence from within the gleaming laboratory.

  O’Shaughnessy, muscles taut as wires, rounds the angle of the doorframe, unhurried, casual. Digs a thumb at the man in the white jacket who has just whirled to face the door. “My coat, Doc. I’m leaving.”

  Denholt has just finished putting down the loaded needle he was preparing. The gun the girl mentioned is on the table, but under his hand already.

  “So you think you’re leaving? You’re very foolish, my friend. It would have been easier to sleep, the way I meant you to. No fright, no last-minute agony. You would not have seen your own death.”

  “No fright, no agony this way either.” O’Shaughnessy calmly reaches for his coat, extracts the charm, stuffs it into his trouser-pocket. “Don’t be so handy burning my identification papers next time,” he says, “or I’ll slap your head all the way around your neck—”

  The gun is up now, level with his chest.

  Behind them in the darkness the heavy outer door swings open with a grinding whirr. Denholt takes a quick step forward. O’Shaughnessy doesn’t move from before him, blocking his way. He’s flexing his wrists slightly, in and out.

  A patter of quick, light footsteps recedes outside in the open, flying over the clayey rain-wet ground.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who should it be? That’s the girl. I’m taking her with me.”

  Denholt’s face is a sudden mask of dismay. “You can’t!” he cries shrilly. “You don’t know what it means, you fool! You can’t take her out into the world with you! She’s got to stay here, she needs me!” He raises his voice to a frenzied shout. “Nova! Come back here!”

  “That’s your story and you’re stuck with it.” O’Shaughnessy raises his own voice, in a bull-rumble. He shifts dead-center in front of the leveled gun, to keep Denholt from snaking past around him.

  “Get out of my way, or I’ll shoot you dead. I didn’t want to puncture your skin, damage any vital organ, but if I have to, you’re the loser! Nothing can bring you back then, do you hear me, nothing can bring you back! You’ll stay dead!”

  O’Shaughnessy just stands, crouched a little, measuring him with his eyes. O’Shaughnessy is a gambler; he senses a reluctance on Denholt’s part to shoot him, and he plays on it for what it’s worth. Instead of giving ground before the weapon, he takes a sidling step in, and another.

  The alarm-bell begins ringing somewhere off in the dripping trees . . . She’s got the last barrier open, she’s made it.

  A sudden taut cord down the side of Denholt’s neck reveals to O’Shaughnessy the muscular signal sent down to his unseen trigger-finger. He swerves like a drunk. A foreshortened bar of orange, like a tube-light, seems to solder the two of them together for a second. Noise and smoke come later. O’Shaughnessy isn’t aware of pain, only knows that he’s been hit somewhere and mustn’t be hit any more. He has the gun-hand in his own now, ten fingers obeying two different brains, clutching a single weapon. It goes off again, and again, and again—four, five, six times.

  O’Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick- and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O’Shaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube-glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow.

  O’Shaughnessy can’t hit with his left arm, he notices; the shoulder blocks off the brain-message each
time. He just uses that arm to hold Denholt where his right-hand blows can find him. He has lost track of the other’s left hand for a moment, it comes back again around his body from somewhere, with a warning flash to it. Scalpel or something.

  O’Shaughnessy dives, breaks, puts space between them. A downward hiss misses his chest-barrel, he pounces, traps the arm before it can come up again, vises it between his own arm and upthrust thigh, starts forcing it out of joint. The thing drops with a musical ting! He scuffs it aside, takes a quick step back to get driving-force, sends a shattering haymaker in. Denholt topples, skids through broken tube-glass, lies there stunned, tilted on one elbow.

  O’Shaughnessy, his shoulder throbbing with pain like a bass drum, pants grimly: “Now—got it through your head I’m taking her?” He turns and shuffles unsteadily toward the door.

  Denholt is trying to struggle up, gabbling: “You’re taking her to her death!”

  The alarm-bell keeps pealing, waiting. O’Shaughnessy stumbles out of the laboratory, on through the darkness toward the front door. Cool, dank, before-dawn air swirls about him. He turns and sees Denholt outlined there behind him in the lighted doorway, where he has dragged himself, hanging weakly onto the frame, holding up one arm in imprecation—or in warning.

  “Remember what I’m saying. You’re dooming her. This is the thirtieth of June—remember this date, remember it well! You’ll know, you’ll know soon enough! You’ll come crawling back to me—with her—begging me to help you! You’ll get down on your bended knees to me, you’ll grovel at my feet—that’ll be my hour!”

  “Have another shot—on me,” O’Shaughnessy growls back from the darkness under the trees.

  “You’re not taking her out to life, you’re taking her out to her death—the most awful death a human being ever experienced!”

  The shrieking, maddened voice dwindles away behind him in the house, and he can make out Nova waiting tremblingly for him at the opened barbed-wire barrier. He stumbles to her through the mud of the storm-wrack, holding his bullet-seared shoulder. He grins and drawls in that quiet way of his above the slackening noise of the exhausted alarm-bell: “H’lo, Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. Shall we go now?”

  He takes her arm.

  VI

  O’Shaughnessy, dickering with a man named Tereshko at the bar of the Palmer House, Chicago, excuses himself, steps into a booth to call his North Side flat.

  “Why not have your wife join us for dinner?” Tereshko says. “Say, at the Chez Paree. We can talk business to music just as well as here.”

  “Great,” says O’Shaughnessy. Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don’t you’re a fool. You could call Nova O’Shaughnessy’s illuminating beauty that of a star-shell. If he uses it to help dazzle this wary gentleman he is trying to dent, it doesn’t mean he values it any the less himself.

  So he says into the phone: “Nova, I want you to meet me at Chez Paree. I’ve got a man with me. He’s looking for a pilot, and he’s talking big money, so be as beautiful as you can. Take a cab, honey.” Nova is still new to the city streets. “Just one thing. Any offer under seventy-five hundred and you give me a look, much as to say, ‘Isn’t he funny?’ Get it? And not a word about—that place on the mountain, of course.”

  At the Paree they order a table for three. They’ve been drinking a good deal, and Tereshko is beginning to show it. He isn’t drunk but he loses some of his caginess. Loosens up, so to speak.

  “You had much experience locating mining claims from the air?” he resumes.

  “No, just flying. But as I understand it, all you want is to be piloted up there, so you can look them over yourself. I can guarantee to do that for you. All I need’s the general direction and plenty of gas.”

  It’s obvious that money isn’t the hitch. This Tereshko has that written all over him, in a flashy uncouth sort of way. His hesitancy—and O’Shaughnessy is a good judge of men’s motives—seems to stem from caution, as though he wants to make sure whom he’s dealing with first before he puts all his cards on the table. He can’t doubt by now that O’Shaughnessy’s an experienced enough flier to get him anywhere he wants to go, after the clippings and documents he’s been showing him all afternoon long.

  “Of course,” Tereshko feels his way, offering the applicant a cigarette out of a platinum case with an emerald catch, “what I’m mainly interested in is to see that the whole undertaking is kept strictly between ourselves. I don’t want known to anyone what its object or destination is. No one at all, is that clear? Not even after it’s been wound up.”

  “I can give you a guarantee on that too. I’m no loudspeaker.”

  “No, you seem like the sort that minds his own business—that’s why I approached you in the first place.” He—very unwisely—signals for another drink.

  Tereshko relaxes still further. “I don’t mind telling you,” he admits, “that that whole mine-location business was just camouflage. What I’m looking for is already mined and minted, only it was put back in the ground. And it’s all the way around the compass from where I said. Not British Columbia at all, but in one of the Florida keys, we think. Maybe one of the Bahamas. I suppose that gives you the clue. Well, it looks like you’re our man, so there’s no harm in your knowing.”

  “Pirate stuff, eh?”

  “Yes and no,” says Tereshko. “Certainly was a pirate all right, but he dates from prohibition days and not Captain Kidd’s time. Guess you know who I mean now.”

  O’Shaughnessy doesn’t, but it doesn’t cost anything to let the other think so.

  “He won’t get out until, let’s see—” A pecan-sized diamond flames as he figures on his fingers. “1948, or is it ’50? Hell, he was a great guy and all that,” he goes on by way of self-excuse, “but you can’t blame the rest of us. After all, we’re getting older every day. He got his, why shouldn’t we get ours? He’s served two years of his sentence—why should we wait?”

  “Then you have no right to it?”

  “Any more than he had!” snaps the other. “It’s nobody’s money. It don’t even belong to the saps he got it from, because he gave ’em needle-beer for it at four bits a throw.”

  “One way of looking at it,” says O’Shaughnessy non-committally. “What other way of looking at it is there? Is it doing anybody any good lying where it is in the ground? We wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble only—you see banks were no good, nor safe-deposit boxes nor anything else, because his trouble was—Government trouble. He musta seen it coming up. We didn’t, but he musta, because we all remember how just before it happened he went off on a cruise down Florida waters in his motor yacht. Just him and a small crew to run the thing for him and, oh yes, some girl he was playing around with at the time. None of us, not one of us. We all thought that was funny, too, because he was a guy loved company. Until then he’da caught cold without the bunch of us being around him all the time. Well funnier still, just before turning back they touch at Havana. Him and this dame go ashore and nobody else’s allowed to leave the boat. Then, on very sudden orders from him, the yacht leaves Havana—without him and the girl coming back to it. It’s supposed to pick them up later at Bimini or something. It was never seen in one piece again. A piece of charred wood was picked up later with its name on it. Must have been destroyed at sea by an explosion, and not a soul aboard escaped alive. Funny, huh, to send it on ahead like that, when it could have waited right in the harbor for them? They were the only two it had to cater to.”

  “Tunny is right, but not for laughing,” O’Shaughnessy agrees.

  “Just when we were getting out our black neckties and armbands, a cable comes from him. ‘Hope you’re not worried, I’m okay, taking the next plane north, and wasn’t that a terrible accident?’ Thirty days later to the hour, Uncle Sam jumps on his neck and—” He pinches his fingers together, kisses them, flies them apart. “How much turned up, when the smoke had cleared away? Five grand. Why, he used to carry as much
as that around in his pocket for change! Does it look like I’m right, or does it look like I’m right? Every other lead we’ve had since then has petered out. It took us long enough to tumble, but now I think we’ve got it added up right. Now, d’you think you can help us swing it?”

  O’Shaughnessy shrugs. “What’s hard about it? I can taxi you around for a month, two months, as long as it takes you to locate it. An amphibian is the answer, of course. Now there’s this: you’ll have to stake me to the plane. I banged my own up week before last—that’s when I got this busted shoulder. Don’t get the idea I can’t fly—lightning butted in, that was all.”

  “We’ll provide you with the plane,” Tereshko assures him. “You shop around and pick up what you think you’ll need, and you can keep it, as an extra bonus, when we get back.”

  “Just how long will I last after that to enjoy the use of it?” wonders O’Shaughnessy knowingly. But that isn’t really a deterrent—people have thought they’d get rid of him, once he’s served his purpose, before now—and haven’t made a go of it. These fellows’ll find that out too.

  “The wren would come in handy for a guide—did you ever think of contacting her?” he says thoughtfully.

  “Did we think?” scoffs the other. “His cell door wasn’t closed behind him yet before we started to put on the pressure. Well we put it on too heavy. We had her figured all wrong. It just happens she was one of those innocent babes, hadn’t known what it was all about until the lid blew off—musta thought he made his dough in stocks and bonds or something.” O’Shaughnessy makes that derisive sound with his lips commonly known as the raspberry.

  “No, that’s what we thought too,” Tereshko assures him, “but it was on the level. He used to tell us everything was on the up-and-up between them—you know what I mean, and she wasn’t really his moll . . . He called her his madonna—”