He rested his eyes on me unblinkingly for at least thirty seconds. Finally he said slowly, two faint spots of red burning in his hollow cheeks, “Listen, wise guy, if you think you’re pulling my leg and getting away with it — they said the other night that that was just a gag for their convention.”
I shrugged hugely. “They’ve evidently changed their minds now. Give them a ring if you don’t believe me.”
He snorted, and considered that for a while. Finally he looked up at me again. “Get out of here,” he rasped.
• • •
So they had a tail on me. It wasn’t bad enough that I had to take on jobs like searching out invaders from Jupiter, or wherever they were supposedly from, I had to have the homicide squad keeping track of my every move while I did it.
Mike Quinn hadn’t offered to take me back to my office, so I retraced on foot the route our jitterbug driver had taken us over fifteen minutes earlier. I walked down East First to Marion, crossed the street and turned right. I made no effort to check on whether or not I had a tail.
On the way, I picked up an afternoon paper from a newsboy, and gave it a quick once-over as I walked. There wasn’t anything new on the Shulman case. For some reason or other, it hadn’t hit the headlines the way an off-trail murder usually will. Evidently there was too much public interest in the rapidly warming cold war.
I went to the Marion Street entrance, the main one, of the Kroll Building, as though heading for my office. But instead, I continued on back through the building to the small delivery door opening on the alley. I went down the alley to West First and turned right.
Half a block down I hailed a cab, piled in, and told the cabby to drive through traffic for a few minutes. I checked over my shoulder from time to time, but couldn’t spot anything. I gave him Zimmer’s address.
I kept my mind blank on the way over. On the phone, Les Zimmer had sounded as though he’d just got the word on where the Martians had landed and where they’d hid the spaceship. But there wasn’t anything I could do about it until I talked to him. Something had changed his mind since yesterday; what it was I couldn’t imagine and there was no use worrying about it.
I paid the driver off at the door and made my way up the walk and up the three wooden steps. The door was closed, in spite of the heat of the day. I rang the bell and waited.
Les Zimmer held aside the lace curtain and peered out fearfully. I looked over my shoulder just to be sure. There wasn’t anything there.
He opened up a slit, just enough for my one hundred and eighty pounds of bulk, and I slipped in.
“What’s the idea?” I asked. “Process server, or something?”
He didn’t appreciate the try. His nose was still too big and his eyes too sincere, and his ears still stuck out from the side of his head like Bing Crosby’s. But this time, on top of it all, he was scared spitless.
“I’m glad you finally got here,” he said shrilly. His voice had been somewhat high the day before; now it was womanlike. It brought home to me how alike he and Harry Shulman were — or rather had been.
I pushed my hat to the back of my head and waited for him to go on.
He said, “Follow me, Mr. Knight,” and turned and headed up the stairs to the second floor of the house. So it was Mr. Knight now. Evidently my standing had risen since our last tête-à-tête.
We went down the hallway half a dozen steps and he opened a door. I followed him inside. “This is my room,” he said. “I slept here last night.” His mouth twitched.
I started to say something like, “Congratulations,” but broke it off halfway through. I pointed with my finger and said instead, “What the devil is that?”
The room was a small one with one window. His bed, a hard-looking, three quarter affair, sat opposite the window and about a foot from the wall. Under the window was a desk with an old Number 5 Underwood on it. There were two chairs, a five drawer bureau, a faded carpet on the floor. The walls were comparatively barren — a Varga calendar, a high school pennant, one magazine illustration original of the type he had in his den in the cellar.
My finger was pointing to a large, still slightly smoldering spot on the wall behind the bed. It was about three and a half or four feet in diameter and made a rough circle. The wall was a mess, he’d evidently thrown water on it to put out the fire.
“What happened?” I repeated.
He was actually trembling. “I’m not sure I know,” he shrilled.
I turned and gave him a quick searching glance, then went over to the wall and scrutinized the spot carefully. “It looks like somebody went to work on your wall with a blow torch. When did it happen?”
“Last night.”
I looked at him, curiously this time. “Well, where were you?”
“In bed, sleeping.”
I didn’t get it. It was clear to him, evidently, but I didn’t get it at all. “What happened?” I asked him again.
His tongue darted out and licked his dry lips. “I went to bed a little early. When I woke up this morning, it was there, still smoking. It just missed me.”
I still didn’t get it. I looked back at the wall again. “What just missed you?”
“The heat ray. Don’t you see?” he said shrilly. “They fired a heat ray at me.”
CHAPTER NINE
I let my eyes go from Les Zimmer back to the wall and then to Zimmer again. “Never heard of it,” I said. “Try to straighten up, man. What’s a heat ray?”
He laughed, a high-pitched laugh. I grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. “All right, snap out of it,” I rapped. “You’re acting like some dizzy blister. Now tell me what happened; give me more details.”
He took a deep breath and then shook his head sharply. “Just a minute,” he said. “I’ll be all right. I’m sorry.”
The apology was fine, but I preferred some sense. He crossed over to his desk and sat down at the low-back chair there. He took another deep breath or two and then looked up at me; his eyes were still as earnest as ever, but there was something wild in them, too.
“After you were here yesterday, I got to thinking about Arthur and James Maddigan hiring you. In fact, I became rather upset about it. Fandom is a serious matter to a good many of us, and we don’t like to see it run into the ground. Time and again, the newspapers will ridicule us or outsiders will sneer, ‘Buck Rogers stuff.’ Actually, as Tony Boucher, one of the staff editors, put it once, Buck Rogers has about the same relationship to science fiction as Dick Tracy has to the detective novel.”
“All right, aren’t you drifting away from the point?” I asked him impatiently. “I know some of you fans bleed about this stuff.”
He took another deep breath. “Well, I thought that some of the members of Scylla — and Scylla is probably the most advanced club in the country — hiring a private detective to look for aliens would just give outsiders another opportunity to ridicule the science fiction field. I decided to go to Maddigan and protest. So early that evening I took my car and drove over to the Maddigan home. Arthur Roget was already there and they’d already been arguing. Not that they were making any sense; first one would argue on one side, and then he’d switch over to the other.”
“What were they arguing about?”
“About whether or not it was sensible to hire you. Well, I got into it and we had it hot and heavy for a while. Maddigan is only a half-baked fan anyway, as far as I can see. Arthur is more of a student, although even Arthur leans more to fantasy.” Les Zimmer sneered. “He thinks the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is superior to Astounding.”
“Listen,” I sighed, “let’s get to the point.”
“Well, we argued a while and finally they decided I was right and that they’d call you off.”
“My pal,” I muttered.
“It’s not that I have anything against you, Mr. Knight,” Zimmer said earnestly, his big ears going slightly red.
I didn’t say anything, so he went on. “Afterwards, I drove home, plann
ing on doing some more work on the programs for the Anniversary Convention. I’m spending my vacation, you know, working for the AnnCon.” He added irrelevantly, “Mother and Father have gone to the Adirondacks.”
Then, when I still remained patiently silent, “I was too upset, however, I suppose; at any rate I went right to bed. When I awoke in the morning, there it was!”
He stopped, as though that were the end of the story.
“What’s a heat ray?” I asked. “You’ve told me everything but something to the point.” I indicated the wall with a motion of my head. “What’s that?”
He led me over to the window and pointed to one side of the window frame. There was a seared spot.
I scowled at it and bent nearer. “That looks like it’s been worked on with a blow torch, too.” I looked out. Beyond was a city park. Beneath, was a fifteen foot drop to a cement pavement below. Out in the park a boy and girl — sixteen or seventeen, maybe — were walking along, their arms around each other’s waists. Further beyond, hardly discernible, was a cop talking to a baby-carriage-pushing nurse. In a playground to the right, a dozen youngsters played, yelled, and fought.
I turned back to Les Zimmer, who was shaking his head vigorously. “They — something hovered over the park, about twenty feet in the air, last night and fired into my room with a heat ray. It came in this window and missed me by inches.”
I took that quietly. I went to the wall and pushed the bed out of the way and knelt behind it in front of the burnt area and sighted out the window along the seared place there. It involved sighting slightly upward and over the park. There were no trees right in that vicinity.
I said tonelessly, “You mean from a helicopter or something?”
He laughed in an inane way. “Or something,” he repeated.
I stared at the burnt spot on his wall. “You’re lucky the house didn’t go up.”
“Father is a fanatic about fireproofing,” he explained. “Almost everything is fireproof; he went to considerable expense to make it that way. The blast must have carried tremendous heat to have made even that much impression on the wall. They must have thought that even if the blast didn’t get me, I’d roast in the fire.”
I turned back to him again. “All right, here’s the sixty-four dollar question. Who are they?”
His voice was almost matter of fact. “Why, the aliens.”
It had been building up to that, so I wasn’t particularly surprised. I looked out the window again at the kids in the playground, the sixteen-year-olds, the cop and the nurse. None of it looked as though there were a Martian stirring. “Let’s go down and get some coffee,” I told him, and started for the door.
He let me lead the way down the stairs and back through the hall to the kitchen, wordlessly. I tossed my hat to one of the four red chairs that sat around the porcelain-topped table and opened the cupboard to look for the makings. There was both powdered coffee and drip grind.
I said to him, “Can you make coffee?”
“Not very well, but I’ll try.”
I shook my head emphatically, got out a saucepan and filled it half full of water and put it on the stove. Les got two cups from the cupboard, some spoons and the sugar, and then a can of milk from the refrigerator. His hands were trembling; not that I blamed him.
“Got any liquor?” I asked.
That took a few seconds to sink in, but then he said, “Oh, yes,” and went into the dining room through a swinging door at the far end of the kitchen from the hall entrance. I heard a door open and shut in the other room and he returned with a bottle of brandy that looked as though the cork had been drawn out of it months before, but liquid level showed only one or two drinks had been taken. I muttered an inner prayer that the air hadn’t got to it.
He set the bottle on the table and I went for the now boiling water. I put a heaping teaspoon of the coffee extract in each of our cups and poured the water on top of it. Then I took the brandy and poured a heavy slug into the first cup.
Zimmer said primly, “I never take stimulants myself, but you are — ”
“Today you take stimulants,” I snapped back at him. “If I ever saw a guy that needed a drink, it’s you.”
He didn’t say anything more. I gave his cup a good jolt, then sat down. “Now let’s get to the point. Suppose you start telling me what you refused to yesterday.”
He lifted a spoonful of coffee and blew on it before putting it in his mouth. The spoon made sounds rattling against his teeth. “You mean about — ”
“Yeah, exactly. A week ago I’d never even considered the possibility of there being little green men from Mars on — ”
He stirred on his chair opposite me. “They wouldn’t necessarily be green,” he began to protest.
“This is where I came in,” I snorted. “All right, I know; for all we know they’re purple.” I reached into my coat pocket for pipe and tobacco.
He said doggedly, “We haven’t the slightest idea what they might look like. Actually, they might be insects, intelligent insects from another world. On the other hand, they might look humanoid like us; or perhaps there is some slight difference in size, or shape, or color.” He smiled wanly. “They just might be green.
“There are other possibilities, Mr. Knight. They might be microscopic in size, or invisible to our narrow range of vision. Or they — ”
“You’ve made that point,” I said, loading the pipe carefully and tamping the tobacco with my right forefinger. “I’ll accept that if there were visitors from space they might look like just about anything. Go on. What evidence is there — if any? Maddigan, Roget and Shulman already gave me that book, Life on Other Worlds.”
He nodded seriously. “Don’t forget that the author was the Astronomer Royal of England.”
“So they told me; half a dozen times, in fact. All right, so this Astronomer Royal thinks that life probably exists on other worlds.”
“His opinion isn’t lightly to be brushed aside.”
“I’ll take that, but it’s still just an opinion.”
“Nor are the so-called flying saucers and kindred phenomena to be ignored.”
“Come again?” I said, bringing forth my kitchen matches and lighting up. “What’s this about kindred phenomena?”
He finished half his cup of coffee and turned those big serious eyes back to me again. “The things that have been sighted recently weren’t all of one type, you know. Most of them were reported to be disc-like in shape, but there were others. Some were cigar-shaped, our usual conception of what a space craft would look like.
“Another point that should be made clear is that the so-called flying saucers aren’t anything new.”
I interrupted him there. “Wait a minute, now; I thought they were first sighted just a few years ago by some businessmen flying over Washington, or Idaho, or some place in the Northwest.”
He nodded. “You’re thinking of Kenneth Arnold. But he wasn’t the first to sight the flying saucers; he only set off this recent flurry of sightings. Just a minute.” Les Zimmer got up from his chair and left the room.
While he was gone, I got up from my own chair and made two more cups of coffee, spiking them both. I could use it, and so could he.
He came back with a heavy book and handed it to me. I looked at the title, The Books of Charles Fort. “What’s this?” I asked him. “Isn’t Fort the screwball that tells all about the rains of frogs and that sort of crap?”
Les Zimmer settled down in his chair again and took another swallow of his coffee. He didn’t seem to notice that I’d renewed it, or if he did he wasn’t protesting.
“That’s hardly a proper description of Charles Fort,” he said stiffly, looking down his overgrown nose at me in hauteur — that brandy was doing him a world of good. “Fort has gathered material for decades in an attempt to show that modern science is too smug, too hypocritical — and too ignorant. He made a hobby, a lifetime work, of gathering evidence of phenomena that modern science has as yet been unab
le to explain.”
“Such as what?” I asked skeptically.
“Well, at random, the electrical phenomenon, fireballs — science has no explanation of what they are. Or take these rains of frogs you mentioned. Fort gathered hundreds, if not thousands, of eye witness accounts, sometimes involving absolutely impeccable witnesses, on not only rains of frogs, but of fish, stones, red rain. Science has been unable to explain satisfactorily these happenings, so it usually ignores them.”
“Let’s forget Fort and his frogs,” I protested. “We seem to continually get away from the point.”
“My point was that Charles Fort, in gathering his various other material, also gathered accounts of flying saucers that go back over a hundred and fifty years.” Les Zimmer shook his head seriously. “The flying saucers aren’t a recent development. Kenneth Arnold, the businessman you mentioned, contends that upon research he found records of them that go back to before Christ.”
That surprised me. I said, “Kind of knocks out the theory that they’re either U.S. or Soviet military craft.”
“That’s right; they were reported long before the Wright brothers got off the ground,” Zimmer said smugly. Most of the shrillness had gone from his voice now. That boy needed to do more good honest drinking.
I digested what he’d said, puffing gently on the brier and sipping at the coffee. “All right, let’s go on,” I said at last. “How about some other evidence?”
He considered momentarily. “It isn’t something that admits of absolute proof, of course. If it did, then we’d all know about it. It’s just a matter of adding together a lot of little things.”
“Such as?”
With his right hand he made a perplexed motion to the back of his head. “For instance, I read a story not so long ago in which the author developed the idea that snakes and spiders are possibly life forms originally from some other planet.”
I set my coffee down at that one.
“You mean that snakes or spiders are capable of building space ships and flying here from, say, Mars?”
The Case of the Little Green Men Page 8