His finger seemed to tremble on the trigger-switch of his weapon. Fielding gave another cry, wordless and desperate, and flung himself forward. He caught Stover’s wrist, deflecting the aim of the ray thrower.
“You can’t do that!” he chattered. “You don’t know—you can’t know!”
Stover threw him clear, with an effortless jerk of his arm.
“I didn’t know,” he agreed, “but I’m beginning to find out. Up to now it’s been guesswork. Fielding, you’ve given your show away. If I shot that image—as Malbrook shot the one that was painted to look like me, as poor Gerda slapped the unknown shape that jostled her in the dark closet— or if it received the slightest jar, as the trigger-devices gave to the image of Buckalew at my apartment, and to the dummy in your flying car—it would explode. The detonation would blow us all to bits, including you who figured to explode it if worst came to worst here—but who also figured to escape yourself.”
Fielding had recovered himself. He stood between Stover and the dummy.
“I protest at this farce!” he cried to Congreve. "Arrest Stover. If you can’t do it alone, deputize these others to overpower and disarm him. I accuse him of tampering with the recorded will of Mace Malbrook and of trying to saddle me with the blame for these dreadful crimes. Probably you’ll find, from this additional evidence, that he’s definitely the murderer.”
“Let me get a word in edgewise,” spoke up Reynardine Phogor. “All these recriminations are whizzing by mighty fast, but Fielding is right about one thing. Those last words that came from the television screen weren’t in the voice of Mace Malbrook. They were in the voice of Dillon Stover.”
“You’re right,” Stover admitted.
He put away his radium torch and produced another thing from his pocket, a small microphone. “I was near enough to the radio to reach out and switch off the sound track at what I thought was a good moment. And with this mike I substituted my own voice. But I spoiled no will. Fielding had done that already. Look at this.”
Reaching into his pocket again, he dug out the ragged coil of film he had found in Malbrook’s cupboard.
“Damaged, but partially salvageable. It’s Malbrook’s true spoken will, undoubtedly cut away from this transcription. Take it, Congreve.” And he passed it over.
PHOGOR was looking into the opened radio mechanism. “Stover has spoken truth. This film has been cut and spliced, a new track worked in.”
“Probably Fielding’s substituted piece of film is beautifully faked to sound like Malbrook’s voice.”
“That will,” said Fielding, “leaves everything to me.”
“It would. That’s why you faked it,” charged Stover. “Sound laboratories can diagnose and show the truth of all this.”
Congreve put away the coil of film. "Everybody’s been taking my job out of my hands lately,” he growled. “Now I ask, with all the courtesy in the world, to be allowed back into the police business. I pronounce you all under arrest until this is cleared up.” “Let me finish,” cried Stover.
“I demand a proper court hearing,” Fielding began.
“You’ll be heard—and condemned —right here!” Stover said tersely. “This explosive dummy you’ve brought in among us is the evidence that answers the riddle. A fabric of thin, strong elascoid, made into an airtight form that can be inflated into a very lifelike man. Without air in it, the tube is so slim that it can be inserted into a locked room through as narrow a hole as a ventilator pipe. But the inside’s coated with a nitroglycerin oil, enough to wreck a small area. When inflated from the other side of the hole by a small pump or a tank of compressed air, it becomes a shape that scares the victim, makes him strike or shoot— and brings about his own death.” “You’re crazy as well as criminal,” raged Fielding. “You can’t prove that fantastic theory.”
“But I can,” said Stover. “You seemed to be in the clear at Malbrook’s because I knocked you down before the explosion. But you’d just finished inflating the elascoid balloon that looked like me. Inside the room, Malbrook saw it and fired. It finished him and poor Prraal.”
From his pocket he drew out a shred of elascoid, the bit he had salvaged from the ventilator of the closet where Gerda had died. “Take charge of this, Congreve. It’s Exhibit A, a piece of such a figure. I’ll explain more fully in a moment.”
Again he turned on Fielding. “Most of the fabric of those dummies can be traced as stains—little smears left by the violence of the explosion. And we can examine this one which is still intact. Fielding, you long envied Malbrook his half of the great enterprises you ran together. You long planned this sort of murder—had elascoid dummies ready to finish him and any others you might need to kill.
“When Malbrook decided to fight a duel with me, you struck, figuring I would be found guilty. But you struck too late. For one thing, you found out what Malbrook’s will provided. That was why you wanted to marry Reynardine Phogor. When she refused you, you faked the will. Congreve brought us all in to hear it. And you prepared a specimen of your elascoid-and-nitroglycerin handiwork to kill us all if anything went wrong. Instead of which, it’s going to convict you!
“You have proved your point,” snarled Fielding without further subterfuge.
FIELDING was backing toward the far wall, and in front of him he held the elascoid dummy, divested of its robe. Buckalew, Stover and Congreve pointed their weapons, and Fielding only laughed.
“You daren’t shoot at my elascoid friend,” he warned. “That would dispose of all of us. But I’ll take the risk, if you force me.”
“By your actions you are confessing, Fielding,” said Congreve sharply.
“Yes, and I’m escaping,” snarled Fielding. “A few more deaths won’t make my punishment any tougher.”
“Not after the people you’ve already killed,” agreed Stover. “Better grab him, Congreve, before he cracks.”
“How far do you expect to get, Fielding?” demanded Congreve.
“You’ll never know. I know Pulambar—hidings, strongholds, disguises. Stand still, all of you. There’s a hidden panel, as Stover surmised. If you move before I get through I’ll explode my elascoid friend.”
Putting a hand behind him, he pressed a stud on the wall. A dark section slid away, revealing a rectangle of darkness.
“Good-by,” he taunted them. “Here, now you may have the evidence Mr. Stover so cunningly puzzled out.”
And he hurled the inflated figure across the room.
Strover realized later that what followed had been packed into a very brief interval. It was only that his mind was working at rocket-ship speed, outrunning his muscles and reactions, that made everything seem to transpire in slow-mation.
He sprang to catch the elascoid dummy. It was in his thoughts that if someone should die to save the others it might as well be himself who took the explosion against his big body. But somebody else moved more swiftly.
Buckalew!
From the side of the room, Buckalew leaped at an angle. He caught the thing in his arms, and rushed it into the secret passageway by which Fielding was trying to escape. At that instant, the blast came.
Reynardine Phogor screamed, her stepfather caught and steadied her. Stover and Congreve recovered from the blast of air and pushed their way through the gaping, smoke-filled panel.
The passageway was bulged as to walls and ceiling, but had not sprung apart anywhere. Stover stumbled over the prostrate form of Buckalew, and recovered in time to keep from stepping upon the manifestly dead body of Fielding. Of the dummy remained only another of the elascoid stains.
Stover felt heart-sick as he drew back from Fielding’s corpse. Then he heard Buckalew speak.
“I’m all right, Dillon.”
As he spoke, Buckalew struggled into a sitting posture. His clothes were in rags, but he smiled cheerfully.
“All right?” repeated Congreve, fumbling around in the passageway. “All right when that nitroglycerin blew a leg off of you?”
HE
POINTED to where it lay, foot, knee and part of the thigh, in a corner. Stover stared miserably. But Buckalew laughed. He drew up the knee he had left, and clasped his arms around it.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he told Congreve gently. “Pick it up and see.” The police investigator did so, gingerly. He uttered a startled exclamation as he dropped the leg in surprise. The limb fell with a metallic clank.
“Artificial!” he snorted, as though this were a prank played deliberately on him. “What next in this space- dizzy case? An artificial leg on a man.”
“In a manner of speaking,” agreed the victim of the accident. “Stover can help me, Congreve. My leg can be repaired. Don’t you think you had better call the coroner for Fielding— and then see about releasing Bee MacGowan right away so she can get in touch with my young friend here?” Congreve glanced from one to the other and then took a swift look at the body of Brome Fielding. “Yeah,” he said a bit sourly. And he stalked out, herding the incoming group back out ahead of him.
Dillon Stover knelt anxiously beside his injured friend. For a few moments the two were alone with only the dead Fielding for company.
“Robert,” said Stover, marveling, “you shouldn’t have taken such a chance with a—a game leg. I was going to try to capture that dummy and prevent an explosion. And your
—your agility amazes me. I’ve lived intimately with you, and I never dreamed you had an artificial leg.” “Listen, Dillon,” said Buckalew in the saddest accents Stover had ever heard him use, “I talked Congreve into going out so I could tell you something that only your grandfather and Malbrook and Fielding knew. I’ve tried to keep it from you, but you are the one person really entitled to know —and, besides, I need your help now.” “Of course, and you shall have it!” cried Stover vehemently. “I owe you a lot—including my life. Are you sure you aren’t injured elsewhere, Robert! Perhaps internally?”
“Only on the surface, Dillon,” said Buckalew, smiling faintly. “You don’t yet understand. How can a—a thing with an artificial body be injured?”
“But you—what?” exclaimed Stover, his blue eyes widening in a startled way as he gazed at the face of the speaker. “What did you say?” “I have more than one artificial leg, Dillon. I’m a fake through and through—legs, arms, body and head, I am made of metal covered with synthetic rubber flesh. I am the last robot your grandfather made. That’s why he gave me the name of Robert.”
CHAPTER XX Table for Three
AGAIN they sat at the Zaarr— Stover, Bee, and Buckalew. It was the same table from which Stover had once risen hotly to smash Malbrook’s sneering face.
“Somehow,” Stover was saying, “I'm not as shocked as I should be, Buckalew. I think I knew that you were a robot all along.”
He gestured at the food and drink served for only two. “This, subconsciously, was my first clue. Your’s isn’t a normal body, or you’d have to nourish it at times. And then your eternal youth; you knew my grandfather intimately, and you’re not a day older now than then. Again, when that explosion happened at our lodgings, you threw yourself in its way and saved me.”
“You gave credit for that rescue to the poor robot servitor,” reminded Buckalew.
“At first I did. But when you sighed over ‘A robot saved you/ you almost gave it away again. Your body, more solidly and strongly made than the metal servitor, kept my beef and bones from being de-atomized. And you didn’t pass out on me, but calmly changed clothes.”
“Not vanity on my part,” Buckalew assured him. “Without clothes I’m pretty evidently an artificial figure. And so I had to think of dressing before I dared awaken you. I dare say I acted very strangely, Dillon, but I was really telling the truth.”
“The truth?”
“Fielding magnetized the walls to hold both me and the servitor helpless until you came. Also to hold the inflated copy figure of me up, too, so that when it was released and sagged down the trigger device would set off the explosion. I actually went blank in my mind—it has metal connections, you see. They were frozen inactive until the magnetizing power was turned off. If I was rude or vague, I’m sorry.”
“There were more clues,” Stover continued. “You didn’t fear a shot from Gerda’s pistol. You had no sense of dizziness when you climbed down those girders after me; and your body, smaller than mine, was yet heavy enough to pull mine up by the counter-balance of its weight. And —well, won’t you tell us the whole story now?”
“Very briefly.” Buckalew toyed with the wine glass from which he never drank. “I was made, Dillon, by your grandfather when he was a young man like yourself, studying here. Malbrook’s grandfather had engaged him to experiment in robot engineering, and I was the finest example of his work. At first your grandfather was dissatisfied with the sub-mental, sub-personal servitors he evolved—but when he made me, he was heartsick.”
“Why?” asked Bee with breathless interest.
Buckalew smiled faintly. “I was a mind, a personality. To him, I was a friend, and a dear friend. But because I was an artificial construction I was property, the property of the man who engaged him.” Buckalew was somber. “He stopped making super robots at once, but I was already here. I descended at last to the Malbrook whose death has caused all these curious disclosures."
"So that was his hold over you,” summed up Bee.
Buckalew smiled bitterly.
"Yes. He could expose me at any time as an artificial form of life. He could, if he wished, have dismantled and destroyed me. He let me live as if I were a free man, well-supplied with money—but only to run various unpleasant errands for him.” Buckalew grew somber, but only for a moment. "I’m free of him now. Nobody knows my real status except the two of you and the heir to Malbrook’s property.”
"Reynardine Phogor,” finished Stover. "Yes, she knows about you.” "What a rotten shame!” put in Bee MacGowan warmly. "She may prove a worse owner than Malbrook.”
"I can only find out,” sighed Buckalew.
Stover smiled as he signaled a robot waiter, who replenished his glass and Bee’s. Then he said: "What were some of your jobs, Robert?”
"The principal one was being Mal- brook's financial figurehead. In my name he could speculate. His own operations would have caused too much publicity and set financial opponents on guard against him. With me as a front, he could operate safely. Even if I wanted to cheat or oppose him, I couldn’t. He could declare my true status at any time, destroy me, and take my technical holdings. Fielding used me that way, too.” "Could you operate as a financier and business man yourself?” inquired Stover.
Buckalew’s artificial eyebrows went up. "Yes. I’m well experienced and adapted. But I'll never get the chance, belonging to Miss Phogor.”
"She and I had a conversation while we waited to be interviewed in Congreve’s office,” said Stover. “First of all, she thought that she owed me everything. Without me, the true bequest to her of the bulk of Malbrook’s property would never have been learned. And I agreed very frankly. I asked certain favors.”
"About the water rights?”
"Yes, about the water rights,” agreed Stover. "They are going to be
administered for the good of the whole Martian population—a government project and relief activity, not a money-grubbing monopoly. They’ll tide Mars over while the condenser- ray work is being perfected. She agreed that I was right—such things should be. And then I made another stipulation. I asked her for something outright as a reward for my services.”
"Reward?” asked Buckalew. "What?”
"You,” said Stover succinctly.
For once Buckalew’s artificial face betrayed something like mute, human astonishment.
"She made a formal written transfer of her title to you over to me,” said Stover. "Technically, you’re now my property. That will protect you from any legal trouble as a piece of machinery. But, practically, you belong to yourself.”
"To myself,” muttered Buckalew. "To myself.” He picked up the wineg
lass. "For the first time since I was made, I wish I could take a drink.”
"Come to Earth with me,” Stover was urging. “There you’ll never be spotted as anything but a man. And you know that Bee and I will never tell on you.”
Robert buckalew looked at him with startled eyes.
“You think I could run my life my own way?”
"Why not? I’ll gamble on you. In all of Pulambar, in all of the Solar System, in all of the habitable universe, I could never ask for an animate friend with a braver, warmer, truer heart than you. And here’s to your robot health.”
Stover and Bee lifted glasses and drank. Buckalew gravely bowed his sleek head.
"Consider a return toast drunk,” he said in a voice that for once trembled with the emotion that robots are said never to feel. “We’re all safe, all happy, all triumphant. We don't have to fight or hate anyone. Not even Brome Fielding.”
"No,” agreed Stover. "We can see now that Fielding was beaten from the start.”
Both Bee and Buckalew turned sharp gazes upon him.
“How so?” asked Bee. “With Malbrook dead, he was so powerful.” “Exactly,” agreed Stover. “It happens that I was sure of his guilt only when I heard that he had possession of that transcribed will. It had been lost. I knew it had been tampered with. So Fielding must have hidden and changed it. The rest of the picture filled itself in. But his position of power was really his downfall. It became more and more evident that a man of supreme power was guilty.” “You started that train of thought when you first said that only one of the High-tower set could have done it,” remembered Buckalew.
“Yes. Police secrets, scientific knowledge, a dozen other difficult things, were wielded as weapons by the killer. Even without the evidence that turned up, we could have can
celed one suspect after another because of their weaknesses, until we came to the first citizen of Pulambar —Brome Fielding.”
Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 Page 12