Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  He strode out to the elevators....

  His first concern, after locking himself into the room where nine people had been stricken with something which, if it persisted, was worse than any death, was the thing the assistant manager had mentioned before death hit him. The roulette wheel.

  He bent over this, with a frown of concentration on his face. And his quick eyes caught at once a thing another person might have overlooked for quite a while.

  The wheel was dish-shaped, as all roulette wheels are. In its rounded bottom were numbered slots, where the little ivory ball was to end its journey and proclaim gambler's luck.

  But the little ball was not in one of the bottom slots!

  The tiny ivory sphere was half up the rounded side of the wheel, like a pea clinging alone high up on the slant of a dish!

  An exclamation came from Keane's lips. He stared at the ball. What in heaven's name kept it from rolling down the steep slant and into the rounded bottom? Why would a sphere stay on a slant? It was as if a bowl of water had been tilted—and the water's surface had taken and retained the tilt of the vessel it was in instead of remaining level!

  He lifted the ball from the sloping side of the wheel. It came away freely, but with an almost intangible resistance, as if an unseen rubber band held it. When he released it, it went back to the slope. He rolled it down to the bottom of the wheel. Released, it rolled back up to its former position, like water running up-hill.

  Keane felt a chill touch him. The laws of physics broken! A bail clinging to a slant instead of rolling down it! What dark secret of nature had Doctor Satan mastered now?

  But the query was not entirely unanswered in his mind. Already he was getting a vague hint of it. And a little later the hint was broadened.

  The phone rang. He answered it.

  "Mr. Keane? This is Doctor Grays. The autopsy on Wilson has been begun, and already a queer thing has been disclosed. It's about his heart."

  "Yes," said Keane, gripping the phone.

  "His heart is ruptured in a hundred places—as though a little bomb had exploded in it! Don't ask me why, because I can't even give a theory. It's unique in medical history."

  "I won't ask you why," Keane said slowly. "I think—in a little while—I'll tell you why."

  He hung up and strode toward the door. But at the roulette table he paused and stared at the wheel with his gray eyes icily blazing.

  It seemed to him the wheel had moved a little!

  He had unconsciously lined up the weirdly clinging ball with the knob on the outer door, as he examined it awhile ago. Now, as he stood in the same place, the ball was not quite in that line. As if the wheel had rotated a fraction of an inch!

  "Yes, I think that's it," he whispered, with his face a little paler than usual.

  And a little later the words changed in his brain to: "I know that's it. A fiend's genius.... This is the most dangerous thing Doctor Satan has yet mastered!"

  He was talking on the phone to the jeweler to whom Weems' watch had been sent.

  "What did you do to that watch?" the jeweler was saying irritably.

  "Why?" parried Keane.

  "There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with it. And yet it simply won't go. And I can't make it go."

  "There's nothing wrong with it at all?"

  "As far as I can find out — no."

  Keane hung up. He had been studying for the dozenth time the demand note Doctor Satan had written the officials:

  "Gentlemen of the Blue Bay Development: This is to request that you pay me the sum of one million, eight hundred and two thousand, five hundred and forty dollars and forty-eight cents at a time and place to be specified later. As a sample of what will happen if you disregard this note, I shall strike at one of your guests, Mathew Weems, within a few minutes after you read this. I guarantee that disaster and horror shall be the chief, though uninvited, guests at your opening unless you comply with my request. Mathew Weems shall be only the first if you do not signify by one a. m. whether or not you will meet my demand. Doctor Satan."

  Keane gave the note back to Blue Bay's police chief, who fumbled uncertainly with it for a moment and then stuck it in his pocket. Normally a competent man, he was completely out of his depth here.

  One man with a heart that seemed to have been exploded internally; ten people who were dead, yet lived, and who stood or sat like frozen statues....

  He looked pleadingly at Ascott Keane, whom he had never heard of but who wore authority and competence like a mantle. But Keane said nothing to him.

  "An odd extortion amount," he said to Gest. "One million, eight hundred and two thousand, five hundred and forty dollars and forty-eight cents! Why not an even figure?"

  He was talking more to himself than to the president of Blue Bay. But Gest answered readily.

  "That happens to be the precise sum of the cash reserve of Blue Bay Development."

  Keane glanced at him sharply. "Is your financial statement made public?"

  Gest shook his head. "It's strictly confidential. Only the bank, and ourselves, know that cash reserve figure. I can't imagine how this crook who signs himself Doctor Satan found it out."

  4. The Shell

  The house was serene and beautiful on the bay shore. The sun beat back from its white walls, and glanced in at the windows of the rear terrace. It shone on a grotesque figure there; a man with the torso of a giant, but with no legs—a figure that hitched itself along on the backs of calloused hands, using muscular arms as a means of locomotion.

  But this figure was not as bizarre as the one to be found within the house, behind shades drawn to keep out any prying eyes.

  Here, in a dim room identifiable as a library, a tall man stood beside a flat-topped desk. But all that could be told of the figure was that it was male. For it was cloaked from heels to head in a red mantle. The hands were covered by red rubber gloves. The face was concealed by a red mask, and over the head was drawn a red skull-cap with two small projections in mocking imitation of Lucifer's horns.

  Doctor Satan!

  In the red-gloved hands was a woman's gold-link purse. Doctor Satan opened it. From the purse he drew a thing that defied analysis and almost defied description.

  It was of metal. It seemed to be a model in gleaming steel of a problem in solid geometry: it was an angular small cage, an inch wide by perhaps three and a half inches square. That is, at first it seemed square. But a closer look revealed that no two corresponding sides of the little cage were quite parallel. Each angle, each line was subtly different.

  Doctor Satan pointed it at the library wall. The end he pointed was a trifle wider than the end heeled in the palm of his hand. On this wider end was one bar that was fastened only at one end. The red-covered fingers moved this bar experimentally, slowly, so that it formed a slightly altered angle with the sides....

  The library wall was mist, then nothingness. The street outside was not a street. A barren plain stood there, strewn with rocky shale, like a landscape on the moon.

  The little bar was moved back, and the library wall was once more in place. A chuckle came from the red-masked lips; a sound that would have made a hearer shiver a little. Then it changed to a snarl.

  "Perfect! But again Ascott Keane interferes. This time I've got to succeed in removing him. An exploded heart...."

  He put the mysterious small cage back in the gold-link purse, and opened the desk drawer. From it he took a business letterhead. It was a carbon copy, with figures on it.

  "Bostiff...."

  On the rear terrace the legless giant stirred at the call. He moved on huge arms to the door and into the library....

  In his tower suite, Keane paced back and forth with his hands clasped behind him. Beatrice Dale watched him with quiet, intelligent eyes. He was talking, not to her, but to himself; listing aloud the points uncovered since his arrival here.

  "A few seconds after talking with Madame Sin, Weems was stricken. Also, the lady with the odd name was seen coming
from the roulette room at about the time when a party entered and found the croupier and eight guests turned from people into statues. But she was nowhere around when Wilson died in the conference room."

  He frowned. "The watches were taken from all the sufferers from this strange paralysis, save Weems. By whom? Madame Sin? Weems' watch is absolutely in good order, but it won't run. The ball on the roulette wheels stays on a slant instead of rolling down into a slot as it should when the wheel is motionless. But the wheel doesn't seem to be quite motionless. It apparently moved a fraction of an inch in the forty-five minutes or so that I was in the room."

  "You're sure you didn't touch it, and set it moving?" said Beatrice. "Those wheels are delicately balanced."

  "Not that delicately! I barely brushed it with my fingers as I examined the ivory ball. No, I didn't move it. But I'm sure it did move...."

  There was a tap at the door. He went to it. Gest was in the corridor.

  "Here's the master key," he said, extending a key to Keane. "I" got it from the manager. But—you're sure it is necessary to enter Madame Sin's rooms?"

  "Very," said Keane.

  "She is in now," said the president. "Couid you—just to avoid possible scandal—inasmuch as you don't intend to knock before entering——"

  He glanced at Beatrice, Keane smiled. "I'll have Miss Dale go in first. If Madame Sin is undressed or—entertaining—Miss Dale can apologize and retreat. But I am sure Madame Sin will be unaware of intrusion. In spite of the conviction of your key clerk that she is in, I am quite sure that, at least figuratively, she is out."

  "Figuratively out?" echoed Gest. "I don't understand."

  "You will later—unless this is my fated time to lose in the fight I have made against the devil who calls himself Doctor Satan. Are Chichester and Kroner in the hotel?"

  Gest shook his head.

  "Kroner is in the Turkish bath two blocks down the street. Chichester went home ten minutes ago."

  "Madame Sin will be unaware of intrusion," Keane repeated enigmatically and with seeming irrelevance.

  He turned to Beatrice, and the two went to the woman's rooms.

  Keane softly closed Madame Sin's hall door behind him after Beatrice had entered first and reported that the woman was alone and in what seemed a deep sleep. At first, with a stifled scream, she had called out that Madame Sin was dead; then she had pronounced it sleep....

  Keane went at once to the central figure of the living-room: the body of Madame Sin, on a chaise-longue near the window. The woman was in blue negligee, with her shapely legs bare and her arms and throat pale ivory against the blue silk. Her eyes were not quite closed. Her breast rose and fell, very slowly, almost like the breathing of a chloroformed person.

  Keane touched her bare shoulder. She did not stir. There was no alteration of the deep, slow breathing. He lifted one of her eyelids. The eye beneath stared blindly at him, the lid went nearly closed again at the cessation of his touch.

  "Trance," Keane said. "And the most profound one I have ever seen. It's about what I had expected."

  "I've seen her somewhere before," said Beatrice suddenly.

  Keane nodded. "You have. She is a movie extra, working now and then for the Long Island Picture Company. But I'm not much interested in this beautiful shell. For that's all she is at the moment—a shell, now emptied and unhuman. We'll look around. You give me your impressions as they come to you, and we'll see if they match mine."

  They went to the bedroom of the apartment. Bedroom was like living-room in that it was impersonal, a standard chamber in a large hotel. But this seemed almost incredibly impersonal! There was not one picture, not one feminine touch. In the bath there were scarcely any toilet articles; and in the closet there was only an overnight bag and a suitcase by way of luggage, with neither of them entirety emptied of their contents.

  "One impression I get is that these rooms have not been lived in even for twenty-four hours!" said Beatrice.

  Keane nodded. "If Madame Sin retreated here only to fall into that deep trance, and did not wake again till it was time for her to venture out, the rooms would have just this look. And I think that is exactly what she has done!"

  Beatrice looked deftly through Madame Sin's meager wardrobe. Keane searched dresser and table and bureau drawers. He wasn't looking for anything definite, just something that might prove the final straw to point him definitely toward the incredible goal he was more and more convinced was near.

  He found it in the top of the woman's suitcase.

  His fingers were tense as he unfolded a business letterhead. It was a carbon copy, filled with figures. And a glance told him what it was.

  It was a duplicate of the financial statement of the Blue Bay Development Company—that statement which was held highly confidential, and which no one was supposed to have seen save the three Blue Bay officials, and a bank officer or two.

  Keane strode to Madame Sin's phone, and got Gest on the wire.

  "Gest, can you tell me if Kroner and Chichester are still out of the hotel?" Gest's voice came back promptly.

  "Kroner is here with me now. I guess Chichester is still at his home on Ocean Boulevard; at any rate he isn't in the hotel——"

  "Ascott!" Beatrice said tensely.

  Keane hung up and turned to her.

  "The woman—Madame Sin!" Beatrice said, pointing toward the still, lovely form on the chaise-longue. "I thought I saw her eyes open a little—thought I saw her look at you!"

  Keane's own eyes went down a bit to veil the sudden glitter in them from Beatrice.

  "Probably you were mistaken," he said easily. "Probably you only thought you saw her eyelids move.... I'm going to wind this up now, I think. You go back to your suite, and watch the time. If I'm not back here in two hours, go with the police to the home of Chichester, the treasurer of this unlucky resort development. And go fast," he added, in a tone that slowly drained the blood from Beatrice's anxious face.

  5. Death's Lovely Mask

  Chichester's home sat on a square of lawn between the new boulevard and the bay shore like a white jewel in the sun. It looked prosperous, prosaic, serene. But to Keane's eyes, at least, it seemed covered with the psychic pall that had come to be associated in his mind with the dreaded Doctor Satan. He walked toward the blandly peaceful-looking new home with the feeling of one who walks toward a tomb.

  "A feeling that might be well founded," he shrugged grimly, as he reached the porch.

  He could feel the short hair at the base of his skull stir a little as he reached the door of this place he believed to be the latest lair of the man who was amused to call himself Doctor Satan. And it stirred still more as he tried the knob.

  The door was unlocked.

  He looked at it for several minutes. A lock wouldn't have mattered to Keane, and Satan knew that as well as Keane himself. Nevertheless, to leave the door invitingly open like this was almost too obliging!

  He opened the door and stepped in, bracing himself for instant attack. But no attack of any kind was forthcoming. The front hall in which he found himself was deserted. Indeed, the whole house had that curiously breathless feeling encountered in homes for the moment untenanted.

  Down the hall was an open double doorway. Keane stared that way. He himself could not have told how he knew, but know he did, that beyond that doorway lay what he had come to find. He walked toward it.

  Behind him, the street door opened again, very slowly and cautiously. An eye was put close to the resultant crack. The eye was dark, exotically lovely. It fastened on Keane's back.

  Keane stared in through the doorway. He was gazing into a library, dimmed by drawn shades. He entered it, with every nerve-end in his body silently shrieking of danger.

  The street door softly closed after admitting a figure that moved on soundless feet. A woman, with a face like a pale flower on an exquisite throat. Madame Sin.

  Her face was as serenely lovely as ever. Not by a line had it changed. And yet, subtly, it had become
a mask of beautiful death. Her eyes were death's dark fires as she moved without a sound down the hall toward the library. In her tapering hands was the gold-link bag.

  In the library, Keane stood with beating heart over two stark, still bodies that lay on the thick carpet near a flat-topped desk. One was wizened, lank, a little undersized, with dry-looking skin. It was the body of Chichester. At first it seemed a corpse, but then Keane saw the chest move with slow, deep breaths, as the breast of the woman back at the hotel had moved.

  But it was not this figure that made Keane's heart thud and his hands clench. It was the other.

  This was a taller figure, lying on its back with hands folded. The hands were red-gloved. The face was concealed by a red mask. The body was draped by a red cloak. From the head sprang two little knobs, or projections, like Lucifer's homs. Doctor Satan himself!

  "It's my chance," whispered Keane. "Satan—sending his soul and mind and spirit from his own shell—into that of others—Madame Sin—Chichester. Now his body lies here empty! If I killed that——"

  Exotically beautiful dark eyes—with death in their loveliness—watched him from the library doorway as he bent over the red-robed figure. Sardonic death in lovely eyes!

  "No wonder Gest thought that Wilson was killed in the conference room, just before he could tell of the roulette wheel, as if Doctor Satan had been there himself! Satan was there! And he was on the roof garden earlier, and in the roulette room! A trance for the woman, the crowding of Satan's black spirit into her body—and she becomes Madame Sin, with Satan peering from her eyes and moving in her mantle of flesh! A trance for the unfortunate Chichester—and Satan talks with Gest and Kroner as the Blue Bay treasurer, and can strike down Wilson when he comes to report! Chichester and Madame Sin—both Doctor Satan—becoming lifeless, trance-held shells when Satan's soul has left them!"

  But here was Satan's physical shell, lying in a coma at his feet, to be killed at a stroke! His deadly enemy, the enemy of all mankind, delivered helpless to him!