He got up and went into the living room. He pulled the chair out from his desk and sat down and stared at the typewriter sitting there, accusing him of an entire wasted day, pointing silently at the pile of manuscript that should have been a little thicker if he had stayed at home.
He picked up a few pages of the manuscript and tried to read, but he had no interest and he was gripped by the terrifying thought that he had gone cold.
He had said no, he wasn’t interested in writing Crawford’s book, and he had said it because he wasn’t interested. And yet that had not been the only factor; there had been something else. Hunch, he had told Ann, and she had scoffed at him. But there had been a hunch—that and a feeling of danger and of fear, as if a second self had been standing at his side, warning him away.
It was illogical, of course, for there was no reason why he should have had a sense of fear. He could have used the money. Ann could have used the fee. And yet, without an instant’s hesitation, he had refused the offer.
He put the sheets of manuscript back on top of the pile, rose from the chair and pushed it flush against the desk.
As if the whisper of the chair sliding on the carpeting might have been a signal, a scurrying sound came out of one darkened corner and traveled to the next and then was still with a deathly stillness that was unnatural, as if the whole house might be waiting for whatever happened next.
SLOWLY, Vickers turned around to face the room, pivoting his body with an exaggerated, almost ridiculous effort to be quiet, to get turned around so he could face the corner from which the sound had come without anything knowing he had turned.
There were no mice. Joe had come up, while he was in the city, and had killed the mice. There should be no scurrying from one corner to the next. Joe had left a note which even now still lay beneath the desk lamp saying that he would pay one hundred bucks a throw for every mouse that Vickers could produce.
The silence hung, not so much a silence as a quietness, as if everything was waiting without breathing.
Moving only his eyeballs, for it seemed that if he turned his head his neck would creak and betray him to whatever danger there might be, Vickers examined the room, the darkened areas in the comers and underneath the furniture and in the shadowed places that were farthest from the light. Cautiously he put his hands behind him, to grasp the desk edge, to get hold of something that was solid so that he did not stand so agonizingly alone, transfixed in the room.
The fingers of his right hand touched something that was metallic and he knew it was the metal paperweight that he had lifted off t-he pile of manuscript when he had sat down at the desk. His fingers reached out and grasped it and dragged it forward into the hollow of his hand and he closed his fingers on it and he had a weapon.
There was something in the corner by the yellow chair and although it seemed to have no eyes, he knew it was watching him. It didn’t know that he had spotted it, or it didn’t seem to know.
“Now!” said Vickers.
His right arm swung up and over and followed through and the paperweight, turning end for end, crashed into the corner.
There was a crunching sound and the noise of metallic parts rolling on the floor.
XII
THERE were many little tubes, smashed, and an intricate mass of wiring that was bent and broken, and crystal disks that were chipped and splintered, and the metallic outer shell that had held the tubes and wiring and the disks and the many other pieces of mechanical mystery that he did not recognize.
Vickers pulled the desk lamp closer to him, so that the light might shine down upon the handful of parts he had gathered from the floor and he put out a finger and stirred it among them, gingerly, listening to the tinkling sounds they made as they clinked together.
No mouse, but something else—something that scuttled in the night, knowing that he would think it was a mouse; a thing that had scared the cat which knew it was no mouse, and a thing that would not be attracted to traps.
An electronic spy, he speculated, a scuttling, scurrying, listening device that watched his every moment, that stored what it heard and saw for future reference or transmitted directly the knowledge that it gained. But direct to whom? And why? If it were a spying device, it would be made so well, so cleverly that it would be able not only to observe him, but to keep out of sight itself. To have any value, it must keep its presence undetected. There would have been no careless moment. It would not have been seen unless it wanted itself to be seen.
Unless it wanted itself to be seen!
He had been sitting at the desk and had gotten up and pushed the chair flush with the desk and it had been then that he had heard the scampering. If it had not run, he never would have seen it. And it need not have run, for the room was in shadow, with only the desk lamp burning, and his back had been toward the room.
The cold certainty came to him that it had wanted to be seen, that it had wanted to be trapped in a corner and crushed with a paperweight—that it had run deliberately to call his attention to it and that once he’d seen it, it had not tried to get away.
He sat at the desk and perspiration chilled his forehead.
It had wanted to be seen. It had wanted him to know.
Not it, of course, but whoever or whatever it was that had caused the contraption to be placed inside his house. For months it had scampered and scurried like a mouse, had listened and watched, and now the scampering and the watching had come to an end and it was time for something else; time to serve notice on him that he was being watched.
But why and who?
HE fought down the cold, screaming panic that rose inside of him, forced himself to stay sitting in the chair.
There was a clue somewhere in this very day, he thought, if he could recognize it. Something happened today that made the someone behind the watcher decide it was time to let him know.
He ticked off the day’s events, marshaling them in his mind as they might be written in a notebook:
The moppet who had come to breakfast.
The remembrance of a walk that he had taken twenty years before.
The story in the paper about more worlds than one.
The Forever car.
The women who had talked in the seat behind him on the bus, and Mrs. Leslie and the club she was organizing.
Crawford and his story of a world with its back against the wall.
The houses at five hundred a room.
Mr. Flanders sitting on the porch and saying that there was a new-found factor which kept the world from war.
The mouse that was not a mouse.
But that wasn’t all, of course; somewhere there was something else that he had forgotten. Without knowing how he knew it, he was aware that he had forgotten some other fact that should be inserted in the list of things that had happened in the day.
There was Flanders saying that he was interested in the setup of the gadget shops and that he was intrigued by the riddle of the carbohydrates and that he was convinced there was something going on.
And later in the day he had sat on the porch and talked of reservoirs of knowledge in the stars and of a factor which kept the world from war and of another factor which had whipped Man out of his rut almost a hundred years ago and had kept him at the gallop ever since.
He had speculated about these matters in an idle way, he had said.
But was his speculation idle?
Or did Flanders know more than he was telling?
And if he knew, what then?
Vickers shoved back the chair and got to his feet.
He looked at the time. It was almost two o’clock.
No matter, he thought. It’s time that I find out, even if I have to break into his house and jerk him out of bed, screaming in his nightshirt.
He was sure that Flanders would wear a nightshirt instead of pajamas.
LONG before he reached Flanders’ house, Vickers saw that there was something wrong. The place was lighted up from basement to garret. Men with lan
terns were walking about the yards and there were other knots of men who stood around and talked, while all along the street women and children stood off the porches in hastily snatched-up robes. As if, Vickers thought, they were waiting for a strange three A.M. parade that might at any moment come winding down the street.
A group of men were standing by the gate and as he turned in, he saw there were some he knew. There was Eb, the garage man, and Joe, the exterminator man, and Vic, who ran the drugstore.
“Hello, Jay,” said Eb, “we’re glad you are here.”
“Hello, Jay,” said Joe.
“What’s going on?” asked Vickers.
“Old Man Flanders,” said Vic, “has disappeared.”
“His housekeeper got up in the night to give him some medicine,” said Eb, “and found he wasn’t there. She looked around for him for a while and then she went to get some help.”
“You’ve searched for him?” asked Vickers.
“Around the place,” said Eb.
“But we’re going to start branching out now. We’ll have to organize and get some system in it.”
The drugstore owner said, “We thought at first maybe he’d been up during the night wandering around the house or out into the yard and might have had a seizure of one kind or another. So we looked near at hand at first.”
“We’ve gone over the house,” said Joe, “from top to bottom and we’ve combed the yard and there ain’t hide nor hair of him.”
“Maybe he went for a walk,” Vickers offered.
“No man in his right mind,” declared Joe, “goes walking after midnight.”
“He wasn’t in his right mind, if you ask me,” said Eb. “Not that I didn’t like him. I did. Never saw a more mannerly old codger in all my born days, but he had funny ways about him.”
Someone with a lantern came down the brick-paved walk.
“You men ready to get organized?” asked the man with the lantern.
“Sure, Sheriff,” said Eb. “Any time you are. We just been waiting for you to get it figured out.”
“Well,” said the sheriff, “there ain’t much that we can do until it gets light, but I thought we might take some quick scouts out around. Some of the other boys are going to cover the town, go up and down all the streets and alleys, and I figured maybe some of you might like to have a look along the river.”
“That’s all right with us,” said Eb. “You just tell us what you want us to do.”
THE sheriff lifted his lantern to shoulder height and looked at them. “Jay Vickers, ain’t it? Glad you joined us, Jay. We need all the men there are.”
Vickers lied, without knowing why he lied: “I heard some commotion going on.”
“Guess you knew the old gent pretty well,” said the sheriff. “Better than the most of us.”
“He used to come over and talk to me almost every day.”
“I know. We remarked about it. He never talked much to no one else.”
“We had some common interests,” Vickers said, “and I think that he was lonely.”
“The housekeeper said he went over to see you last night.”
“Yes, he did,” said Vickers. “He left shortly after midnight.”
“Notice anything unusual about him? Any difference in the way he talked?”
“Now, look here, Sheriff,” said Eb. “You think Jay had anything to do with this?”
“No, I guess I don’t.” He lowered the lantern and said, “If you fellows would go down to the river—split up when you get there—some of you go upstream and some of you go down. I don’t expect you to find anything, but we might as well look. Be back at daylight and we’ll really start combing for him.”
The sheriff turned away, walking back up the brick pavement with his lantern swinging.
“I guess,” said Eb, “we might as well get started. I’ll take one bunch down the river and Joe will take the others up. That all right with the rest of you?” There was no objection.
They walked out the gate and down the street until they hit the intersection, then went down to the bridge.
“We split up here,” said Eb. “Who wants to go with Joe?” Several men said they would. “All right,” said Eb. “The rest of you come with me.”
They separated and plunged down from the street to the river bank. Cold river mist lay close along the bank and in the darkness they could hear the swift, smooth rush of the river. A night bird cried across the water. Looking out to the other bank, one could see the splintered starlight that shattered itself against the running current.
Eb asked, “You think we’ll find him, Jay?”
Vickers spoke slowly. “No, I don’t. I can’t tell you why, but somehow I am pretty sure we won’t.”
XIV
IT was early evening before Vickers returned home. The phone was ringing when he stepped inside the door.
It was Ann Carter. “I’ve been trying to get you all day. I’m terribly upset. Where have you been?”
“Out looking for a man,” said Vickers.
“Please don’t be funny, Jay.”
“I’m not being funny. An old man, a neighbor of mine, disappeared. I’ve been out helping look for him.”
“Did you find him?”
“No, we didn’t.”
“That’s too bad,” she said. “Was he a nice old man?”
“The best.”
“Maybe you’ll find him later.”
“Maybe we will,” said Vickers. “Why are you upset?”
“You remember what Crawford said?”
“He said a lot of things.”
“But what he told us would come next. You remember that?”
“I can’t say that I do.”
“He said clothing would be next. A dress for fifty cents.”
“Now that you mention it,” said Vickers, “he did.”
“Well, it happened.”
“What happened?”
“A dress. Only it wasn’t fifty cents. It was fifteen!”
“You bought one?”
“No, I didn’t, Jay. I was too scared, I was walking down Fifth Avenue and there was a sign in the window, a little discreet sign that said the dress on the model could be had for fifteen cents. Can you imagine that, Jay—a dress for fifteen cents on Fifth Avenue!”
“No, I can’t,” Vickers confessed.
“It was such a pretty dress,” said Ann. “It shone. Not with stones or tinsel. The material shone. Like it was alive. And the color . . . Jay, it was the prettiest dress I have ever seen. And I could have bought it for fifteen cents, but I didn’t have the nerve. I remembered what Crawford had told us and I stood there looking at the dress and I got cold all over.”
“Buck up and go back in the morning. Maybe they’ll still have it.”
“THAT isn’t the point at all. Don’t you see? It proves what Crawford told us! It proves that he knew what he was talking about, that there really is a conspiracy, that the world does have its back against the wall.”
“And what do you want me to do about it?”
“Why, I—I don’t know, Jay.
I thought you would be interested.”
“I am,” said Vickers. “Very interested.”
“Jay, there’s something going on.”
“Keep your shirt on, Ann,” said Vickers. “Sure, there’s something going on.”
“What is it? I know it’s more than Crawford said. I don’t know how—”
“I don’t know, either. But it’s bigger than you and I can handle. I have to think it out.”
“Jay,” she said, and the sharp tenseness was gone from her voice. “Jay, I feel better now. It was nice to talk to you.”
“You go out in the morning,” Jay told her, “and buy up an armful of those fifteen-cent dresses. Get there ahead of the crowd.”
“The crowd? I don’t understand.”
“Look, Ann,” said Vickers. “Let us use our head. Fifth Avenue is going to have a crush of bargain hunters.”
“I guess you’re right at that,” she said. “Phone me tomorrow?”
“I’ll phone.”
They said good night and he hung up, stood for a moment, trying to remember the next thing that he should do. There was supper to get and the papers to bring in and he’d better see if there was any mail.
He went out the door and walked down the path to the mailbox on the gatepost. He took out a slim handful of letters and leafed through them swiftly, but there was so little light he could not make out what they were. Advertising mostly, he suspected. And a few bills, although it was a bit early in the month for them.
Back in the house he turned on the desk lamp and laid the pile of letters on the desk. Beneath the lamp lay the litter of tubes and disks that he had picked up from the floor the night before. He stood there staring at them, trying to bring them into correct perspective. It had only been the night before, but now it seemed as if it were many weeks ago that he had thrown the paperweight and there had been a crunching sound that had erupted with a shower of tiny parts rolling on the floor.
He had stood there then, as he stood now, and knew there was an answer, a clue, if he only knew where to find it.
AGAIN the phone rang and he went to answer it.
It was Eb, asking, “What do you think of it?”
“I don’t know what to think,” said Vickers.
“He’s in the river,” Eb maintained. “That is where he is. That’s what I told the sheriff. They’ll start dragging tomorrow morning as soon as the sun is up.”
“I don’t know,” said Vickers. “Maybe you’re right, but I don’t think he’s dead.”
“Why don’t you think so, Jay?”
“No reason in the world,” said Vickers. “No actual, solid reason. Just a hunch.”
“The reason I called,” Eb told him, “is that I got some of those Forever cars. Came in this afternoon. Thought maybe you might want one of them.”
“I hadn’t thought much about it, Eb. Too many other things on my mind, I suppose.”
“I’ll bring one up in the morning. Give you a chance to try it out. See what you think of it.”
“That’ll be fine,” said Vickers, and said good-by.
The Complete Serials Page 42