by Keith Laumer
The sim was behind the trees now, shedding long, slanting rays across ordered fields, coloring the distant farmhouses a ruddy pink. Overhead, a helicopter whiffled on its way a few hundred feet above the ground. David drew a deep breath, pressed on the accelerator. It was a beautiful world, a good life. He was young―barely 28―with the best job in the world, health, no responsibilities except for himself . . . .
Somehow, the nagging sense of doubt, suspicion―it was hard to pin a name on it―sprang from that same sense of responsibility. It was as though some indefinable threat hung over . . . not merely himself, but this whole peaceful scene.
He shook his head impatiently. He was imagining things, building what was probably a perfectly innocent matter up into a dark conspiracy. He should put the whole matter out of his mind, call Marcia when he reached home, have a night on the town. Tomorrow, in the bright light of morning, it would all seem like what it no doubt was: a wild fancy brought on by overwork and too much of his own company.
But even as he relaxed, a vagrant thought struck him. He remembered Winthrop glancing at the sketch before Dorn had seized it. And he had said―what?”
Why―as a matter of fact . . .
David nodded to himself. The man had been about to say that he recognized the sketch. And if that were so―there might be more information in the company’s files―perhaps complete plans and specifications. If so, that would end the mystery. And he might as well see the thing through now as he awake tonight thinking about it. David braked, swung the small car in a U turn, and headed back toward the Utlimate Tool and Die Company.
3
There were cars clustered near the junction where State Road 27 joined U.S. 41. Two Maryland State Highway Patrolmen waved Vincent down. Ahead, smoke wafted upward from a burned-out wreck, lying smashed against the abutment. A blanket-covered body lay on the grassy bank beside it.
“What happened?” David called.
The police eyed him non-commitally, one coming up on either side of the car.
“Notice you have a DC plate,” one said. “What brings you here?”
“Business,” Vincent said. Across the road, the odor of burning tires was rank. There were a dozen cars halted, their drivers craning for a view.
“Kind of an out-of-the-way route for a businessman in a hurry.” the other cop suggested.
“What makes you think I’m in a hurry?” David asked, smiling slightly.
“Don’t get tough,” the first cop started―
“Lay off him, Chuck,” the other trooper said. “This can looks like it’s in a hurry when it’s sitting still.” He gave Vincent a severe look. “You see anything out of the ordinary around here in the last few minutes?”
David shook his head. “Why” He glanced at the wrecked car. It was a heavy black limousine, the paint still gleaming where it had not been burnt and blistered.
“Bypassers reported an explosion just before it hit,” the first cop said. “We―
“That’s enough,” his partner growled. “Probably just a blow-out You say nothing, eh?” he frowned at Vincent David shook his head again―then hesitated.
“There was a helicopter,” he said. “I thought it was probably a crop duster.”
The two policemen exchanged glances. One turned and walked to the squad car, began operating the radio, while the other quizzed Vincent as to the details of the machine he had seen.
“OK, you can go along,” he said when he finished. “Maybe well call you.”
David nodded. “Any idea who the driver was?”
“Sine,” the cop said, wagging his head. “Fine man plenty of money, too. Winthrop was his name. Manager of the plant just up the road.”
Chapter Three
Accident—or intention? David Vincent asked himself the question as he drove slowly toward the distant, looming shape of the factory he had left less than an hour earlier. It was hard to picture Winthrop, the well-fed, competent executive as the still figure under the blanket As for himself . . . he had changed his route, twice, unexpectedly. Was that the reason that he wasn’t dead himself now? He shook his head impatiently. He was developing a morbid imagination. There was nothing—nothing whatever that would stand up under close scrutiny as anything other than hunch, coincidence, suspicion. And of what? He didn’t know. And now Winthrop would never tell him. As for Dorn—maybe he should have mentioned him to the police. But what would he have said? That the man had torn up his sketch? It sounded flimsy, unconvincing, laughable. But regardless of how it sounded, the feeling was there, gnawing at him, growing, that all was not well . . . .
David drove past the plant gates. They were closed, locked, the big security lights already on in the early twilight. He wondered if the personnel knew of the death of the manager―if Dorn knew. Somehow, chillingly, he was convinced that he did. But again―what good was groundless suspicion .. ?
But if he had grounds; if there was something more concrete to work on, some evidence of―whatever was going on. And if there was such evidence―it would be there; in the files of the Ultimate Tool and Die Works. Dorn would never give him a glimpse inside the walls. But what if he didn’t bother with knocking at the gate?
There was a side road a quarter of a mile ahead, shadowy under dark trees. David pulled the car in, switched off, sat in the dark, studying the lights of the plant, listening―for what, he could not have said. He wanted a cigaret, but even that small glow would have been too conspicuous now. Suddenly he felt very much alone, vulnerable, like a secret agent deep behind the enemy lines.
I should get out of here, he told himself. Report what I’ve seen to General Moore. Let him take it from there. He still knew people in high places . . .
But there was still nothing to tell―nothing concrete. And there was just one way to change that. He’d have to go in―over, under, or around Dorn’s security system―and see for himself.
David Vincent stepped from the car, pushed through the dense hedge and started toward the dark walls of the factory.
2
It took David forty minutes to scout the ten-acre walled enclosure. At the southwest corner of the outer compound, a clump of poplar trees grew close to the ten-foot barrier. He scaled one, carefully lowered himself to the top of the wall. From here he could see the plant guard lounging at the main gate, a watchman with a leashed dog making the rounds on the far side of the enclosure. Neither was near enough to be an immediate danger. David dropped to the grassy strip below. Two minutes later, he was in a narrow passage between a warehouse and an open materials shed. Harsh mercury vapor lamps shed a cold blue radiance on the pavement ahead. A narrow band of shadow ran under an overhang protecting loading platforms. In its shelter he crossed to the side door of an outlying wing of the main building. The lock was a stout Yale model. Vincent smiled grimly. Locks had always been a hobby of his, along with anything else mechanical. He bent the piece of baling wire he had picked up behind the warehouse into a hook of peculiar shape, inserted it, tickled the tumblers. There was a soft click and the door swung in. Another minute’s work and he had shorted the inductance-type sensor guarding the entry, the details of which he had automatically noted while studying the plans of the building earlier in the day.
In the faint light reflecting through the windows, he crossed a wide office along an aisle between typist’s desks and filing cabinets. The papers he wanted would not be here, but in Winthrop’s office. He went through the double swinging doors into a tiled hall.
The building was utterly silent. The gold lettering on the managers office door gleamed dully at him―almost, the thought came to him, like a silent appeal.
Using the wire, he opened the locked door, locked it after him. The inner door stood half open. On Winthrop’s desk, a briefcase lay in the center of the blotter, open, empty. Somehow it gave the impression that its owner had left in haste . . . .
The filing cabinet in the corner was an expensive executive model, with individual drawer locks plus a locking bar secured
by a heavy combination padlock. This, David saw, would require more than a twist of wire to handle. He spun the dial once or twice to get the feel of it, then settled down, his ear to the metal door, delicately tinning the knob with sensitive fingers.
Twenty agonizingly slow minutes later, the final digit snicked in place and the lock dropped open. Another five minutes with a straightened paperclip, and the drawers slid out. Slowly, methodically, David went through the packed folders, searching for any reference to Technical Associates, Incorporated―the firm Winthrop had referred to before Dorn had intervened. Once feet sounded in the hall outside, the click of a dog’s claws; the outer door rattled as the watchman tried it. David held his breath until the slow tread moved on. His scent, familiar from his visit, had not betrayed him. Then the search continued.
It was almost a full hour before a familiar outline caught his eye, one of a sheaf of thumb-marked prints in a file marked: BID DOCUMENTS-PENDING. It was unmistakably the missing component. The design was remarkably like the reconstruction David had sketched. The leads to the ‘grip’ were housed in channels along the side of the unit, he saw, and there
> was an additional small protuberance at the top, and a number of metal fittings which might have been sights. But as for function―that was as big a mystery as ever.
He put the folder on the desktop in a narrow band of brighter light from the outside, leafed through page after page of complex wiring diagrams, special alloying and forming instructions, technical notation. He frowned as he noted the columns of cryptic indications: core gradient, 4.0967; boundary layer permeability, .0098; flux density, alpha range, 14,000-26,-500 . . . .
If these were engineering specifications, they were of a kind unknown to modern industry. The circuitry made no sense. The machine tolerances called for were of an incredible precision. No wonder the Ultimate Tool and Die Works was still holding the documents in their PENDING file. The job called for techniques and equipment more appropriate to a major research laboratory than to a commercial firm.
There was a copying machine in the corner of the room. David switched it on, in ten minutes had duplicated the mysterious papers. He returned the originals to the file, closed and locked the drawer, wiped away all fingerprints. With his copies safely tucked away in an inner pocket, he turned to the door―and froze as the outer office door clicked and swung in. David flattened himself against the wall, shielded by a filing cabinet beside the inner door. The light snapped on in the outer office. David held his breath as a man appeared in the doorway, outlined against the glare behind him. It was Dorn.
The security chief came into the room, brushed past not a yard from where David stood in the dense shadow of the cabinet. A second man followed him; a tall, lean man in a plant policeman’s uniform. Dorn half turned; the angular planes of his face caught the light from beyond the door. His mouth opened―and abruptly, shockingly, a harsh, metallic buzzing issued from it. David stood rigid, listening, as the guard buzzed a reply. Dorn went to the filing cabinet, opened it, took out a folder which David instantly recognized as the one he had just duplicated. Again the grotesque, incredible exchange of buzzes―like the hum of insects, grossly magnified. Then Dorn closed the drawer, replaced the lock. The two men left the room. The light switched off, the outer door banged shut behind them. David let out a long breath. It had been close―terribly close. And now he had to get clear with his trophy, or it was all wasted. And somehow, without putting it in words, he knew now that what was at stake was more than the career of a consulting engineer named David Vincent―or even his life. In the alien buzzings, the glint of light from the flat, remorseless eyes of the pair he had watched at close range, there was a nameless menace that closed about his heart like an icy hand, seeming to threaten the very world he lived in.
3
He left the building by the same door through which he had entered. A hundred yards distant, the watchman tried a shed door, his dog snuffling at his feet. David ducked out, reached the temporary safety of the alley running beside the warehouse. A moment later, he was at the wall, a sheer, ten-foot barrier, with no friendly tree now to help him. Here in the deep gloom, it was difficult to see the top. He jumped, his fingers brushed the coping, and he dropped back―and metal clattered as his foot struck piled angle iron. At once, the dog bayed, sounding dangerously close. David groped in the darkness at his feet; his fingers found a length of heavy I-beam, scaled with rust. He lifted one end; it was incredibly heavy. Muscles straining, he raised the six foot rail, leaned it against the wall. It was a poor ladder, but better than none. He gripped it; scrambled up, got a foothold, reached the top of the wall. As he pulled himself up, feet sounded in the alley mouth, the eager whine of the dog. A man burst into view, holding back the straining animal, a huge black and tan bloodhound. The beam of a powerful flashlight speared out, played across the weed-grown ground, the jumbled scrap iron―and found the end of the upraised I-beam. The man took a step forward, his hand darting for the holstered pistol at his hip. With a final lunge, David gained the top of the wall―and the massive steel section, unbalanced by the thrust, slid, grating along the rough brickwork. The man scrambled back, yanking the gun free; his foot caught, and he went down on his back―and the scream in his throat choked off as the ponderous steel beam thundered down across his chest. The dog snarled and leaped, fell back with a yelp as the leash brought him up short. Crouched atop the wall, David stared down horrified at the sight of the victim pinned under the rusted metal. And then the fallen guard moved, his hands groping over the surface of the metal. He gripped, pushed―and the thousand pound beam lifted, fell aside as if it were a cardboard mock-up. The man rose, staggered for a moment, then stooped, recovered his light. All this in a frozen, timeless moment.
Then, as the light flicked upward, David turned, jumped down into darkness, and ran for the distant line of trees. And behind him, the dog bayed, like a wolf howling at the moon.
Chapter Four
Eighteen hours had passed since the night raid on the Ultimate Tool and Die Works. In a shabby hotel room in South Chicago, David Vincent, for the hundredth time, pushed aside the tantalizing sheets of paper bearing the designs for the mysterious apparatus, baffled. All his training in engineering, his intuitive ability to fathom the workings of complex machines and systems, were helpless before the overwhelming strangeness, illogicality, the seemingly meaningless complexity of the device—just as the smooth plastic cases of the other assemblies in his suitcase were proof against his every effort to open them. He was at an impasse; this road led him nowhere. He must, he knew now, have help. And there was one man to whom his thoughts went: Dr. Albert Lieberman, research physicist on the staff of the University of Chicago, and his good friend and former classmate.
David almost smiled as the knowledge came clearly in focus at last; he must, subconsciously, have known all along that in the end he would turn to Al. All the while he had been driving hell-for-leather away from the factory, keeping to back roads, pausing to listen for sounds of pursuit, he had known. That was why he was here, less than fifteen miles from the Lieberman house, instead of at the other end of the country.
He packed away the drawing, sluiced down his face with cold water. His features stared back at him from the mirror, hollow-cheeked, drawn, after nearly forty hours without sleep. And when had he eaten last? A paper plate, a crumpled paper napkin on the bedside table reminded him of a greasy hamburger consumed twelve hours ago, when he had checked in, just after dawn. By now, back at MID-20th, General Moore would be pacing the floor, pounding desks, demanding to know what had happened to his overdue employee―and the half million dollars in design proposals he should have brought in, a day ago. David shook his head, ran his fingers through his rumpled hair. Perhaps the thing to do would have been to call Moore, tell him the story―but somehow, instinct had led him here―in secret. And now he was committed. To report in now, with nothing except a sheaf of stolen drawings and an incoherent tale-
No, he would
have to see Al. Between them, with Lieberman’s vast theoretical knowledge linked to David’s quick engineer’s grasp of the practical, they would deduce the nature and function of the machine that was being so ingeniously assembled―in the tens of thousands―by unsuspecting manufacturers all across the Eastern seaboard.
The room clerk bid him farewell with a grunt as he paid his bill; he tilted his bald head toward a side door in reply to David’s question. Beyond the greasy glass door, it was early evening; a grey, misty sky hung low over the grimed street. David’s car, parked at the curb, even coated as it was with greyish mud from the long run on unpaved roads, was incongruously elegant in the drab setting. David checked as he was about to step from the door. A man stood against a building front near the car; a tall, lean, angular-faced man, in a dark suit. For a heart-stopping instant, he thought it was Dorn. Then the man glanced his way. It wasn’t the security officer―but it might have been his brother. The cold, flat eyes flicked past David stepped back past the desk, around it into a narrow passage leading to the back. The clerk swivelled to follow him, spat out a toothpick.
“Hey!” he snarled. “Where you think you’re going?”
“Cops,” Vincent said tersely. “You want ‘em in here?”
The man narrowed his eyes. “Through the kitchen,” he grunted. “There’s a fence a guy could get over.” He spat on the floor. “Cops!” He turned away, dismissing the incident Half a minute later, David stepped out between overflowing garbage cans into a narrow, crooked alley, a dark canyon between blackened walls. Weak, yellow light leaked from behind a broken shade in a window above, showed him a sagging board fence. He went over it adding new stains and tears to those that had already reduced his once-sharp outfit to the semblance of a hobo’s rags. At that, it was as good a disguise as any―if he really needed concealment―if the whole thing wasn’t his imagination. But that was a question he could settle soon now. Al would be able to help him.