by Jerry
CHAPTER III
The Monster Takes Charge
MANSFIELD, his legs stiff with horror, followed the running professor. Arriving at the smashed test tube he halted, staring in mingled artist admiration and human dread and antipathy at the towering, dripping giant that confronted the scientist and himself.
The naked super-man was even taller than he had appeared to be while in the test tube. Wet black hair clung to his huge head, but he was beardless and his elephantine torso was smooth and hairless. A silver valve at his navel took the place of a button. His muscles, still bearing the imprint of suction cups, rippled beneath thick ivory skin, as he took a step toward them.
Instinctively, Mansfield drew back. He was not by nature a timid person, yet the sight of this giant chilled his spine. But Thorndile, far from being afraid, appeared delighted with the spawn of his weird brain. Without further hesitation, he approached his offspring in an affectionate manner, and they stood together, the wizened old scientist and the super-man, like pigmy and elephantine Goliath, regarding each other.
“Ha, you decided to come out!” said the scientist. “You should have waited. You have ruined a very expensive apparatus. I should not have forgotten. In my conversation with Mansfield, the time for your birth slipped by unnoticed. But you should have waited—you might have injured your knuckles on the glassite!”
The super-man writhed his face into a terrible scowl that seemed to frighten even the professor.
“I wait for no man!” he boomed, in a voice like thunder.
“But I am your master,” squeaked the scientist. “I created you. You must obey me!”
The giant stretched out one long arm and caught Thorndile by his skinny neck. With the ease with which a cat tosses a helpless mouse into the air, he lifted the professor above his head. The old man’s shriek was cut off by the big thumb on his throat; his legs kicked and dangled, and he tried weakly to tear the giant hand from his neck. Suddenly the super-man opened his hand, and the scientist dropped some ten feet to the floor.
“You, my master—you!” the superman sneered. Then he threw back his head and laughed so loud that Mansfield was almost deafened. The scientist recovered himself enough to get to his feet, where he stood swaying. Mansfield supported him.
“There is nothing you can teach me,” asserted the giant proudly. “I have been in communication with your brain for over two years. How do I know how to speak? I have learned it telepathically. You are only a mortal—I am a super-man. Of what possible use can you be to me? Your mental processes are childish in comparison with mine. I know the plans you have made for me. Your mind has taught me everything; you do not need to tell me. I have felt the impressions of your thoughts, of your emotions. Tell me, you weakling, what good can you do me?”
“I—I—” quavered the professor, and stopped. He couldn’t think a thing to suggest! “But you can’t kill me!” he protested. “Common decency—a man’s loyalty to his creator, his own father—”
“Are you trying to insult me.” thundered the monster, advancing threateningly.
Mansfield turned to flee, and the professor did likewise; but the super-man seemed only to find amusement in their terror.
“Mice!” he sneered, then chuckled. “I’m going to have a lot of fun with you while I let you live. I have one thing which you never gave me, Thorndile—a sense of humor. That’s a human trait I must have inherited from my human ancestors. But your talk of loyalty is nonsense, Thorndile! You have instilled only hate and malice in my impressionable mind; it’s too late to change now. I’m what I am. You made me this way—it’s only right for you to reap your reward.”
The scientist was speechless; he seemed paralyzed with fear.
“I am reading your minds right now,” the super-man asserted, his face expanding in a wolfish grin. “You, Thorndile, are trying feverishly to think of some way to control my actions—it has even flashed into your contemptible mind to try to destroy me. But—” He chuckled with satisfaction. “But you can’t think of anything that could kill me!” he laughed.
“And you, Mansfield, are wondering about that girl—what I’m going to do with her. Well, you’ll soon find out. Thorndile, I have absorbed most of your psychology, but there’s one point on which I do not agree with you. I want that girl, Thorndile, and I’m going to have her. And that reminds me, I’d better take a look at her; I’ve only received the false impressions of your warped, woman-hating brain to tell me what she’s like!”
HE advanced with great strides, and the two men flung themselves desperately out of his path. He ignored them and went straight to the test tube containing the sleeping golden-haired maiden.
Mansfield picked himself up from he floor and stared after the naked giant. Anger surged up in him, displacing fear and caution.
“He’s not going to touch her!” he gritted. “That girl is—human! He’s a monster, Thorndile—an inhuman monster, Thorndile—an inhuman monster! I’m going to kill him!
CHAPTER IV
Death of the Mad Scientist
SEIZING a stout surgeon’s scalpel of dura-steel, Mansfield crept along the floor toward the newborn monster.
“Come back!” hissed the professor. “You can’t harm him—he will kill you!”
But Mansfield went on, unheeding. He saw the super-man bending his huge back and peering in at the slumbering girl; and he knew only one thought—he must annihilate the inhuman freak!
Apparently the monster’s clairvoyant perceptions were momentarily suspended by his conscious mind. He was deeply engrossed in his study of the unborn beauty, and Mansfield crept up within seven or eight feet of him without attracting his attention. Mansfield realized then that despite his superhuman powers of mind the giant could scarcely receive impressions from all persons in the world at once; the result would be confusion and perplexity, chaos. There were limitations to the fellow’s perceptive powers, then; and that discovery gave Mansfield encouragement.
Slowly, cautiously, he rose to his feet, raised the knife to strike. The giant did not move. Mansfield brought the blade down with all the strength of his right arm.
The monster grunted, whirled around. Mansfield’s arm was numb. The knife lay on the floor. The impact with the super-man’s flesh had produced only a slight dent, as if his skin were the hide of a rhinoceros!
For one awful moment Mansfield had the feeling that he was facing certain death. The giant’s black eyes blazed with fury; then, surprisingly, his gaze took in the scalpel on the floor, and he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“You—you puny ant!” he bellowed. “You—tried to kill me!”
The creature’s perverted sense of humor kept him laughing for a full minute, big drops of tears rolling down his great cheeks. Finally he ceased, and the thunderous echoes died away.
“But,” he said, wiping his eyes with a huge forefinger, “even ants have courage. I like your courage, Mansfield. I shall show you a special favor.”
Mansfield held his breath; he could not speak.
“I’ll let you choose your own manner of dying,” said the giant. He turned back to his inspection of the girl, quite as if he had not been interrupted.
Finally he grunted, and began to fumble at an air-tight door of the test tube; a moment later he flung it open. Mansfield watched him remove the mechanical connections from the girl’s body, then pick her up in his huge arms, as if she were a tiny infant. Holding her by the ankles in one hand, he administered a sound slap, as a physician spanks a newly born babe to clear its lung passage and close the placental circulation artery.
The girl screamed—the cry of a woman, not an infant. Mansfield clenched his fists in helpless rage. Yet the giant seemed to know what he was about. He turned her right side up and set her on her feet. She swayed weakly, then got her balance, Her lovely blue eyes were wide with wonder. She looked all around, bewildered.
“Ha,” said the super-man, imitating the expression used by the scientist, from whose c
onsciousness he had learned his speech, “you are not so bad. Thorndile gave me a wrong impression of you. Too bad you are not a super-woman. But my mentality is not limited to that runt’s conceptions; I shall devise a way to improve you, make you a giant like me. Already I have a theory.”
She stared at him, wide-eyed, timorous, apprehensive.
MANSFIELD was so ravished by her appealing beauty that he almost forgot his dread of the monster.
“You lovely, lovely creature!” he breathed. “You are my golden goddess—only far more perfect than my conception of you! How did it happen? Why is there such a resemblance in you to my imaginative painting?”
She turned and regarded him silently. The look in her blue eyes melted his heart. Suddenly he cried out.
“I have it! I understand now! You are—”
The monster interrupted him.
“You are right,” he rumbled. “Your inferior mind has hit upon the truth. Thorndile visited you at your studio while your mind was intensely active with your inspiration of a super-woman, a goddess. He carried away an unconscious impression of maidenly perfection which has been conveyed to the sub-conscious mind of this girl, influencing her development. You, not Thorndile, are the author of her pulchritude. Mansfield, I find it possible to be grateful to you. I shall let you live for an indefinite period. I shall put you temporarily to work as my slave.”
The maiden spoke for the first time in her life, falteringly.
“Mansfield—Mansfield,” she repeated slowly, in a soft, musical voice. “Graeme—Graeme Mansfield?”
“Yes,” whispered the artist. “You can speak! And—and you know me already?”
“It—it seems to be in my mind—that name,” she said. “I can hear the name—it is associated with beauty—lovely things!”
The super-man frowned horribly at her, then he withered Mansfield with a glance of jealous rage.
“When I have performed an operation on certain of your glands,” he informed the girl, “you will not waste your thoughts on trivial ideas of art. You will be coldly intellectual, as I am, except for my sense of humor. While I appreciated your beauty, it is your mental possibilities and the attraction of the opposite sex that really matter to me. I will raise you above the normal limitations of ordinary mortals; you shall grow to be a giant, physically and mentally, for I need a super-woman companion.”
Mansfield shuddered. He tried to repress a thought; saw the monster turn upon him, grinning horribly.
“You are thinking of killing me—again!” he growled. The words were followed by another burst of roaring laughter. He broke off suddenly, gave a tremendous leap that carried him clear across the long laboratory.
Mansfield spun around, just in time to see him land beside the professor, who had opened the door and was trying to escape outside. The monster clutched him by the scruff of the neck and carried him back, arriving beside the wide-eyed girl and her amazed companion in two bounds.
“Now I will have some fun,” chuckled the giant.
He tossed the trembling scientist on the floor, where the old man cringed, whining piteously.
“Thorndile,” rumbled the super-man, “I am going to kill you with your own device. As I told you, I am familiar with all your plans. Your cosmo-wave is designed to end the life of every human being responding to a certain vibration. You intended to raise your own physical vibration, and Mansfield’s, to protect yourself, leaving the majority of humanity to die instantly from this ether-wave. Your idea is a good one. I shall employ the high-frequency vibrator to protect my mate and also Mansfield, for the time being. I shall not need that protection, having the vibration of certain bacteria. But you, Thorndile, shall perish by your own invention!”
“No, no!” quavered the scientist. “Let me live—you need me—to assist you! There are many things which you still need to learn, consciously. You have inherited only instincts, like a chick that comes from the shell and instinctively crouches in the grass at the shadow of a hawk!”
“You compare me with a low form of life, a chick!” sneered the monster. “Have I not demonstrated super-intelligence, super-physical prowress? A baby chick is not invulnerable. I am!”
Pride was in his rumbling, arrogant voice—the pride and self-esteem of his creator, Thorndile. The giant bent down and picked up the surgeon’s scalpel, snapped the dura-steel between his thumb and fore-finger, opened his huge mouth and swallowed the broken instrument with a single gulp!
“If you would wait for me to die,” he grinned at Mansfield, “I should have to prolong your life to equal my own span—two hundred years!”
HAVING delivered this proud statement, he seemed to mellow a trifle with self-satisfaction. A look akin to condescension and scornful pity came over his face. He stooped and picked up the scientist, who squealed in terror.
“Shut up!” growled the test tube monster. “I’ve decided not to torture you. I’ll subject you to a painless death at once.” Before either of them could move out of his reach, he swooped up Mansfield and the dripping-wet maiden in his other arm and walked in three-yard strides to a far corner of the laboratory.
“It will soon be. over,” he comforted the scientist. “You said I should have a son’s reverence toward you. I am therefore making this compromise. Thorndile, you may pull the lever that will bring about your own end!”
He set his victims down in front of a glass-metal machine. The old man’s eyes were popping out in terror as he was forced to look at his own diabolical invention.
Mansfield felt sick with horror. In his imagination he could see millions upon millions of men, women and children sinking lifeless to the streets and the floors of their homes. He felt himself on the verge of insanity.
“No, no! Thorndile! You can’t do this—it’s fiendish, ghastly! You can’t Thorndile, you can’t!”
Beside him the maiden stood looking from one to the other in innocent wonder.
“I don’t—don’t understand,” she complained, touching Mansfield’s arm with an instinctive feminine appeal for masculine protection. “Will people—like us—stop living?”
Mansfield’s arm went around her. He nodded silently.
“Will we—will you, Graeme, and I stop living?” she pursued.
“Some day, if not now,” he told her hoarsely. “But this—this is murder!” The super-man threw him a scornful glance. “What sentimental nonsense!” he scoffed. “Here—you two—inhere!” He caught them up and shoved them inside a glassite cabinet. Mansfield tried to struggle, but it was like a kitten pitting its strength against an elephant. Before the giant locked them in, however, he had time to hear the professor shrieking at him.
“Mansfield! He is not invulnerable! There is one weakness—all animal life is sustained by—”
The door slammed shut, cutting off the professor’s frantic voice. With the girl clinging to him in instinctive fear, he stared through the glassite at the scene before them.
Enraged at the scientist’s statement, evidently divining his thoughts, the monster jerked away from the door, which he had paused to lock. He reached the old man in a single bound, but not in time to prevent the downward blow of the fire-axe in the scientist’s desperate grasp.
No sound penetrated the cabinet, but Mansfield saw a pane of ordinary glass break, saw the axe cut into the heart of the delicate mechanism of the cosmo-wave machine.
The giant caught up the mad scientist and promptly tore his head from his shoulders. Mansfield turned away, feeling that he was about to swoon. With a violent effort of will, he kept his senses. He looked down at the girl, whose head was against his chest, thrustingly. He was thankful she had not seen the thing he had just witnessed. She was so young, so devoid of earthly understanding! He shuddered at the thought of what the test tube monster intended to do to her—transform her into a female monster like himself!
“Darling,” he whispered. “I love you, and I’ll save you—somehow!”
She looked up into his eyes.
; “Love!” she repeated softly. “I seem to know that beautiful word. It is connected with you in my mind. Do I love you, Graeme?”
HIS lips pressed hers, and her startled eyes looked into his with a new emotion shining in them.
“I feel—toward you, Graeme—something! Is it—love?”
“Yes, darling!” he whispered. “Nothing shall ever part us now! Wait—this machine!”
He began to examine the complicated mechanism in the corner of the cabinet, wishing desperately that he had more scientific knowledge.
“This changes the vibrations of protoplasm,” he muttered. “If it is adjustable, it could lower the vibrations of even ordinarily indestructible bacteria to the frequency of human vibrations. But to destroy him, I’d have to be able to repair the cosmo-wave generating machine, and—”
Suddenly he realized that he must not transmit his thoughts to the mind of his captor; so he began to think, over and over: “I do not know how to kill him—I do not know how to kill him!” Yet in his sub-consciousness a half-formed idea had impressed itself.
At that moment the door opened and a mighty hand dragged him out.
“You are trying to conceal your treacherous thoughts from me, you miserable man-animal!” snarled the monster. “Now I am going to kill you—just as you saw me kill Thorndile!”
Mansfield was hoisted above the giant’s head so quickly that his senses reeled. Obviously, he was being poised preparatory to being dashed into lifeless pulp against the opposite wall.
A faint cry came from the girl. The monster lowered his victim a trifle to turn and look at her. She was lying insensible in the doorway. He carelessly dropped the artist and hastened to pick up the maid.
Mansfield tried to break his fall by twisting in mid-air and throwing out his arms, but he only partially succeeded. His head came into violent contact with the hard floor . . .
CHAPTER V
The Monster Employs Hypnotism
MANSFIELD gained consciousness to find himself clasped in the arms of the woman he loved. Disregarding his throbbing head, he struggled into an upright sitting posture; she was too inexperienced to restrain him.