The John Russell Fearn Science Fiction Megapack

by John Russell Fearn

  The other man snorted. “If you’re thinking of a Venusian being back of this you can discount it,” Burns grunted. “None of them are birdlike, anyway. And none of them have webbed feet.”

  Hart Crozier smiled amiably; “Nevertheless, I may as well read up on olipus plants.” He tossed the volume over to his assistant and then turned to Joan Benson. “I think, Miss Benson,” he said gravely, “that you should hold no animosity toward Constable Archer for coming upon you in time to frighten your stork away. He possibly saved your life.”

  “What do you mean?” the girl gasped, paling.

  “That’s what I want to know,” added Burns impatiently. “First, you find tracks which aren’t there. Then you holler for one of the victim’s dirty shirts, and now you go nuts over a Venusian plant and want to read up on the flora and fauna—”

  Crozier imperturbably waved him into silence as Rawlins came back into the library with a white shirtsleeve. The scientific investigator put it into his pocket and then cut out a small square from the dead man’s right jacket-sleeve with a tiny pair of scissors and placed this carefully in his wallet. He beckoned to Mary Douglas and then took down the olipus plant from its pedestal and started for the door.

  “Carry on your routine work, Burns,” he called over his shoulder. “I’ll be back as soon as I do a little checking up.”

  At full speed Crozier returned to his laboratory home on the Palisades. While Mary Douglas ordered a special dinner of steak and onions for them, he proceeded to scan through the book he had brought, study the olipus plant carefully, and then read through a file of information on the dead explorer.

  After a sumptuous meal, Crozier struggled into a frock and hurried to his laboratory. His charming assistant followed him with the Turkish coffee pot.

  “Madam Butterfly, please,” he flung over his shoulder as he began adjusting a weird-looking electro-microscope—one of his own inventions to study light.

  Mary obediently started the electrical amplivox, and the music of the first disk recording of the opera filled the great room. Crozier contentedly bent to his work.

  “We’ll try the Prober first, Mary,” he said.

  This instrument was really a light trap. Light, science had long ago proved, expands outward at the rate of 186,600 miles per second. But it also moves inward at a mathematically slower speed into the microcosm. So Crozier had perfected the Prober, which could follow inmoving light rays into the microcosm, overtake, and pick them up, even though they be a thousand years distant from their original source.

  The girl helped him place the square of cloth from Sutton Wills’ jacket in the finder and adjust the field.

  “It’s almost a certainty,” the investigator said, “that among the countless atoms making up this piece of cloth there will be one series which will show us exactly what happened in that library tonight.”

  He bent before the controls and operated the hair-thin line of blinding cold light vibration that focused itself on the cloth under the complicated lenses. The screen of the instrument came into life through prismatic devices. It showed all manner of things—the library, parts of New York, a boat, an ocean. That coat had been places.

  Crozier gave a grunt and adjusted again with even more delicacy. For nearly thirty-five minutes he fished about. Then suddenly the girl gripped his arm. A vision of the library was there. From the position, Wills’ arm was obviously raised in the air. Part of him, seen from the position of his arm, was huge and overpowering in the right foreground. Behind him were the library shelves, the olipus plant in its alcove, the shuttered window.

  “Looks like he was either stretching himself or holding up something to the light,” Mary breathed tensely, blue eyes on the screen.

  They waited in motionless silence, but nothing unusual happened. All of a sudden the view whirled round as Wills dropped sideward into his desk chair. The scene became stationary on a pile of ash on the desk.

  “Lousy!” Crozier said glumly. “He was killed all right, but by something that was never inside his library. Guess we’re no nearer, except for proving that he did have his arm in the air when that vibration struck him.”

  He lapsed into thought, then presently he caught sight of the white shirtsleeve on the table.

  “Obviously,” he said slowly, “Wills used an invisible dye—if he had any marks on his arm—something invisible in ordinary light. But the dye that can’t be seen by ultra-violet has yet to be created.”

  “Hence the shirtsleeve?” Mary asked.

  “How delightfully Madam Colbi sings—oh, yes, hence the shirtsleeve. Invisible dye is bound, if constantly pressed in almost the same place, to imprint itself into white fabric. Being unreflective to light waves it remains as invisible as on the arm, but the very warmth of the skin must impress it, particularly when a man rests his left arm down a lot as in writing, such as Wills did.”

  “You’re taking it for granted Wills had something on his forearm?”

  “Only logical conclusion. Stretch that shirtsleeve before the ultra-violet camera.”

  Methodically Mary obeyed. When at last the linen was taut she snapped on the camera’s mechanism, waited a moment. Crozier still sat in silence, head thrown back, drinking in the trilling from the recorder. Then he looked forward again as the girl took the automatically printed and developed plate from the machine and handed it to him.

  “So,” he murmured slowly, getting up, “I was right!”

  The girl looked over his shoulder at a blurred but none-the-less distinguishable map, small but concise, with tiny lettering at various points.

  “Neat idea of yours, Hart,” she murmured admiringly, taking the plate from him and placing it under the high-power magnifier.

  “Dye did come out all right,” Crozier muttered, as he stared through the twin eyepieces.

  Part of the map was blurred, but in the main the faint lines and writing were quite distinguishable, mainly due to the shirtsleeve having taken the same position on the forearm each time Wills had rested upon his desk.

  “Looks like an island,” Mary said at length. “A Venusian island. See that arrow with ‘To Hotlands’ written after it?”

  “I see it, but look below. Shaded portion indicating ziterbuk surface ores, fringed around with jungle and Wetlands.”

  Hart Crozier straightened suddenly and pulled the book on Venusian life towards him, ran his finger down the index.

  “Ziterbuk, page forty-two.” He flipped the pages, read for a moment, then looked up sharply. “Zíterbuk, my dear young lady, is a rich Venusian surface ore, difficult to find, but present in entire shingles in some parts of Venus. Worth thousands for a single ounce! Now we’re getting some place! Wills was indecently wealthy, he’d traveled a lot on Venus, he happened on ziterbuk ores. So careful was he to make sure nobody else knew the location, while remembering himself, he mapped out the position on his own arm in invisible dye, studying it by ultra violet light when necessary.”

  “Check!” Mary nodded thoughtfully. “But somebody else knew he’d got this map, wanted to stop him, and so killed him and destroyed the arm with the map on it?”

  “Um—maybe. Else Wills stole the location of ziterbuk ores and finally met up with his enemy.”

  “Which doesn’t explain a web-footed stork.”

  Crozier relaxed into the big chair by the bench and mused for a while, pulling at his hair. Record two of the opera started off in a burst of melody.

  “Whoever killed Wills was a scientist of no mean measure,” Crozier muttered. “He used vibratory power to shatter that arm. Where is there a scientist on Earth with a power like that? Nowhere, or I’d know about it. On Venus? Possibly. But all Venusians are bipeds like us no matter what land they come from. Explorers have shown that by what they’ve written in that book.”

  “Wills knew somebody was after him, otherwise he wouldn’t have taken such precautions to protect himself.”

  Crozier frowned. “A bird. Why the hell a bird?”

&n
bsp; “Did it ever occur to you,” Mary said, “that no explorer has mentioned ziterbuk ores in any quantity, certainly not in the Wetlands—unexplored territory which Wills penetrated. He must have done so, to have brought back an olipus plant!”

  “Lord!” Crozier exploded, leaping up. “What a girl! I brought that plant just to look it over, but now I believe it has another use. There is still another type of life on Venus as yet unseen—the Wetlander. He’d have webbed feet, surely? Only Wills knew about it.” He stopped and stared at the black, loamy soil of the olipus plant.

  “Straight from the Wetlands,” he breathed. “What cannot the atoms of that soil show us of the Wetlands? Quick, the Prober again! Maybe we can intersect a group of atoms and reproduce the light waves that must have been prevalent on Venus. We shall see the Wetlands, which only Wills had ever seen.”

  He stooped to the controls again, brought forth a jigsaw of weird designs, crazy Venusian jungle, blurred trees, phantomic shapes. Again he adjusted, and again, until at last he and the girl were staring steadily at a typical Venusian Wetland scene with its vast sickly green trees and expanses of misty marshes. Evidently the atoms under observation had been in banked-up soil, for they gave a horizontal view.

  But through the mist shapes were visible, moving through the air with terrific speed. Half-human, half-bird, they looked like something out of Dante’s Inferno. This in itself was interesting, but even more engrossing was the fact that as the mist cleared very slightly for a moment there was the transient vision of a pale yellow city, strangely designed, the embodiment of scientific achievement. There was a glimpse of titanic machines, ceaseless industry—and all around the city the dull gleam that pronounced ziterbuk ores.

  “That city is on the self-same island as the ziterbuk ores,” Crozier breathed. “Those flying people live on it. There is where Wills got his rumor of war. War by them, the unknowns in the mist, on the rest of Venus. Now I get it!”

  He fell silent, watching the reflected image of the nearest flying bird-man. When the creature came close enough for a decent study, the girl almost recoiled from her eyepiece in horror. The thing, two-thirds the size of a normal human being of Earth, glided to the ground and stood erect. It had a face like a gargoyle with the eyes of Satan.

  “Notice its eyes through the mist,” cried Crozier. “Infra-red rays. It can see through the murk. It has webbed feet and rudimentary wings, but it propels itself by the ejection of force from that ray gun it carries. It probably slays by the same force, altering the wavelength by adjustment. Good grief, Mary, we’ve got to hurry! Maybe it’s too late already.”

  They rushed madly from the laboratory. Instead of using his rocket car, Crozier led the way to the little private hangar where was housed his atomic-rocketed spaceship. The pair of them bundled in and took off in a silent flare of orange light—a tail like that of a young comet streaming out to die away behind them.

  As they headed into the stratosphere above New York Crozier flipped on his electro-magnetic space-eye. Almost at once the vibrator picked up a foreign substance in the amplifier. Swiftly the girl adjusted dials, fishing, searching for the source of that noise. Suddenly, almost like magic, the image of a dully-gleaming yellow globe sprang into being on the visi-screen.

  “That metal!” snapped the investigator. “The same as that used in the construction of the city on the island in the Venusian marsh.”

  “That’s a Venusian spacecraft of strange design then,” Mary Douglas agreed. “Our murderer must be on board—escaping from Earth.”

  “Right,” grated Crozier, all his laziness burned away in one of his terrific bursts of energy that few people ever saw. “But he won’t escape. Switch on the Prober attachment to view the interior of the globe.”

  Wordlessly the girl did so, and the figure of a web-footed bird-man flashed on the screen, bent over a queer looking control board. It was almost as if he were conscious of being under observation, for his beaklike mouth parted in a snarling expression and his beady eyes glittered. He reached over and touched a stud in a row before him. A flash of blinding light obscured the screen, and Crozier’s little ship rocked mightily.

  “Hart!” cried the girl desperately. “He’s firing at us with something.”

  “Right,” said Crozier tersely. “I had hoped to take him alive, but I guess he’s too tough a customer.”

  The dull globe came back into view on the screen. Rapidly Croziér computed distances and ratio of speeds. He suddenly swerved his vessel to one side and then back again. He threw his atomic power on full and flipped a switch. There was a crackling roar, a flash of bluish-white light which lit up all space outside, and the globe on the visi-screen seemed to explode in a glare of orange hell.

  “My new electronic space canon,” Crozier explained to Mary’s strained face. “You helped me work on it. Well, that’s that. We must make sure and see that a warning is sent to the rest of the Venusians about the menace of the Wetlanders. Let’s go back and report to Superintendent Burns.”

  The agent from the Institute was impatiently awaiting them when they reached the Wills house. Everything and everybody was the same as when Crozier had left a couple of hours previous, save that the corpse had been removed.

  “Well?” snapped Burns. “Just what have you turned up? Whom am I to arrest?”

  “Nobody,” said the special investigator, yawning. “Here’s your solution. In the first place, Sutton Wills discovered ziterbuk surface ores on Venus, easily carried in a haversack. No mining necessary. Probably he found them by accident; we shall never know about that. To remember the position he engraved a map on his forearm with invisible dye, drying insensitive to light.

  “But he also knew that that island contained a city of scientific power, beyond anything ever imagined in other Venusian countries. He had no designs on that city, but he did want ziterbuk. For a long time he got the stuff easily enough, then one day one of the city’s inhabitants must have seen him.

  “It is clear what happened. Wills knew his presence on the island would be misunderstood. To an Inhabitant of that island the ziterbuk ores were valueless. Wills’ presence there could only mean he was a spy, searching out the secrets to warn Venusian officials of war to come. Further, the Wetlanders have eyes able by nature to see through mists. This one must also have seen that map on Wills’ arm, invisible to our eyes. Wills knew that much.

  “So he fled back to Earth and took what he thought were precautions. But suddenly things caught up on him. A Venusian Wetlander was sent to track him down. The queer creature succeeded.

  “It saw him, I imagine, either clean through the walls or else through the chink in the window shutters. It fired its own deadly form of force through the only possible place—that quartz window behind the olipus plant. Quartz would permit the force to pass through without cracking. Wills couldn’t save himself. He probably died before he knew what was upon him, and so his plan and his life were destroyed.”

  Burns remained silent, scratching his head. The Benson girl and her father were smiling in relief.

  “My own line of research showed that the burn in the carpet could also have been made by a force fired through the quartz window,” Crozier resumed. “In fact, I knew that was the case from the beginning because the olipus plant’s top leaves were charred from the passage of such a force over the top of them. Outside, the quartz window was convenient to the veranda. Obviously, Miss Benton saw the Venusian, not a real bird. Unfortunately, I couldn’t capture the murderer alive. When you want the official evidence, Burns, they’re in my laboratory. You can find me either there, at the Black hat Restaurant, or at the Metrocast.”

  “Yeah—thanks,” Burns said weakly.

  He stood watching in sad admiration as Crozier turned to the door and caught Mary’s arm. She looked back once and winked a blue eye solemnly.

  Back from the hall came a few badly sung bars of La Boheme.

  SECRET OF THE MOON TREASURE

  Why were these pallid moo
nweeds so important that cruel murder was necessary to recover them?

  CHAPTER I

  Death strikes twice

  “Well, you don’t believe me, do you?”

  Dr. Coratti was off on another of his tantrums. In fact, ever since he’d gotten back from man’s first trip, to the moon, the gray-haired, nervous inventor had been anything but a prize package.

  “Now father, you mustn’t say such things. Of course we believe you,” said Beryl, his tall, dark, amazingly calm and collected daughter.

  “Yes, father, we don’t doubt for a minute that you discovered a great secret on the moon.”

  That was Lucy, his younger daughter. Lucy is blonde and pert, and besides she’s my wife, and I ought to know.

  Dr. Coratti, however, was not mollified. He threw his napkin on the dinner table.

  “And you, Curt Fowley,” he demanded, “what do you, as an attorney, think?”

  I tried to be diplomatic. “Dad,” I said, “as long as it is a discovery on which you haven’t filed claim, there’s a possibility that the criminals you’re worrying about may steal it from you.”

  “Steal, fiddlesticks!” Coratti snorted. “Nobody’s going to steal anything from me!” And he got up in a huff and strode from the room. Headed for his laboratory outside, we knew. The laboratory where none of us was welcome.

  Well, Coratti didn’t show up the rest of the evening, so we three just sat around the lounge and watched a tele-play from New York; that is, when we were not wondering what the hell had got into the cantankerous inventor. The estate was not the sort of place to make one cheerful, either: old-fashioned, rambling, true enough, but there was too much gray paint on the buildings, too somber an overtone that hung over everything.

  The laboratory was a large barn-like building, a kind of hangar for experimental and constructional purposes—there Coratti had built his rocket ship.