Jevne lurched to his feet. His oxygen-excited brain, already half delirious with incipient pneumonia, was insane with terror. Teague said, “Remember Malley, the bank president? He went crazy with fear. The toxin found his secret weakness—”
“Fear!” Jevne shrilled. “It’s true—Kedrick shot that poison into me!” He stumbled forward, brandishing the gun. His eyes were glaring and mad. Fear ruled Jevne’s mind as surely as though the virus had actually been administered.
“Kedrick!” the man mouthed. “God, I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!”
He lurched to the door, flung it open. Teague heard his footsteps moving unsteadily away. The reporter pushed himself up, managed to turn off the oxygen with his teeth.
He hopped laboriously toward a table, pushed a beaker to the floor. It shattered. Teague let himself down again and fumbled for a sharp-edged bit of glass.
“To the left a few inches,” Norma said breathlessly. “There!”
Grunting with satisfaction, Teague rolled toward the girl. He propped himself up against the chair, and, guided by Norma’s instructions, managed to slice through some of the cords that bound her. After that it was easier. The girl freed herself, and then released Teague.
Bullets crashed nearby. Teague said, “Wait here, Normal” He raced out into the hall, hurried along it. From an open doorway pale lamplight streamed.
Within the room Stephen Morgan was bound to a chair, his haggard face grimly set. Two men were struggling on the floor—Jevne and Kedrick. Blood was pumping from Jevne’s breast. On the floor beside him lay a filled hypodermic syringe.
Kedrick had a gun in his hand. He lifted it, smashed it down viciously on Jevne’s head. The little man’s clawing hand touched the hypodermic. He gripped it, swung it up, drove it into Kedrick’s face. Blood sprang out from dozens of tiny cuts.
Kedrick put all his strength into a blow that crushed Jevne’s skull like cardboard.
Teague realized that he had waited too long. He sprang forward—and Kedrick leaped up, lifting his gun. The man’s once-handsome face was a crimson ruin.
He snarled, “Get back! Hear me?”
Teague hesitated, heard a soft cry behind him. Norma!
“Don’t move, or I’ll kill the girl.”
Teague stood motionless, his muscles tensed. By a miracle the splinters of glass had missed Kedrick’s eyes. The man’s face was drawn in a grin of agony.
“I think—I think I’ll kill you anyway,” he said, and for the first time Teague heard
Kedrick’s incisive voice thick and hoarse. “Both of you. And Morgan . . .”
The gun’s muzzle steadied, pointing at Teague’s heart. Kedrick’s finger tightened on the trigger.
The reporter looked intently into Kedrick’s eyes. Just before the man fired there would be a signal there.
But—why didn’t Kedrick shoot? He was standing quite still, and in his eyes there was growing a look of stark, frightful fear. He screamed.
And his flesh—changed!
IT seethed and bubbled and dropped from his bones in dreadful disintegration. The virus in the hypodermic syringe had entered Kedrick’s bloodstream through the cuts in his face. And the plasmosin, the “glue of life,” was being destroyed by the poison.
The cells of Kedrick’s body degenerated, no longer held together. Once more Kedrick screamed, his voice knife-edged with agony—and then he sank down, writhing and struggling, as the framework of his flesh failed.
The reporter stood watching grimly until the last semblance of life and movement had departed from the horror on the floor.
Then Teague freed Morgan. As the last rope fell from him, he sprang up, hurried to a table and caught up a bottle.
“The antitoxin, Teague,” he said. “We’ve got to put this in the reservoir. It’ll stop the plague, destroy the virus.”
He paused at the door. “But we’d better hurry down to Pineville afterward. I’ll save some of this antitoxin, in case it’s needed—and I can make more in an hour.” Without waiting for a reply, Morgan went out. Norma and the reporter followed him. Glancing at the girl’s bright curls, Teague felt a pleasant exhilaration.
“You know,” he observed, “things have been happening so fast we haven’t really had time to get acquainted.”
“That’s right,” Norma agreed, “but there’ll be plenty of time from now on, Bill!”
[1] Many of the disease-producing viruses, once thought to be ultra-small bacteria, actually are giant protein molecules, according to Dr. Calvin B. Bridges of Caltech and other biologists.
[2] In 1938 Dr. R.B. Bensley of the University of Chicago announced that he had identified the “glue of life,” a binding material which holds together the cells of the human body. This substance, plasmosin, can be compared to the attraction which holds the particles of objects together. The action is reversible. When plasmosin lets go, the cells affected degenerate like toy balloons bursting. It is now known that this was the explanation of the young man’s death.
[3] The famous case of Captain Charles Martell, “the man who shrank,” was caused by a parathyroid tumor. Because of the overactivity of the parathyroid gland, new bone tissue being formed lacked the necessary lime salts to harden it, and the bones became thinner because more calcium was being lost than was being taken in. See The Advance of Science by Watson Davis, Page 225 et seq.
[4] If both genes and viruses are invisible specks of special protein, it is obvious that these specks are tiny powers which not only determine what we are, but also, while ‘on the loose,’ serve as mighty captains of the hosts of death. It is a mighty power these molecules possess. Besides reproducing themselves they have the magical ability to control and organize the development and activity of every form of life!”—Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1938.
[5] “Already it has been shown that both genes and viruses are subject to evolutionary change. They have been observed to change in their natural environment and also have been changed artifically in the laboratory. A virus, for example, may thus gain the ability to produce a disease its ancestor could not cause.”—Los Angeles Times, May 15, 1938.
TIME TO KILL
Harmon’s Mind Received the Thundering Torrent of Wave-Impulses that Flowed from the Brain of a Killer!
THE city waited, in anxiety and terror, for the next bombardment. Already air-fleets and giant guns had brought flaming ruin; streets were littered with broken masonry and glass, though all corpses had been speedily removed. Perfect organization took no risk of plague. Day after day we looked up and saw planes hovering against the blue, watching, watching. Far away the cannon thundered and men with fixed bayonets battled by the light of star-shells and were shot and stabbed and caught on the wire.
For us, behind the lines, in the waiting city, it was far worse. Our nerves jolted, our minds cried out silently in rebellion against the madness of war. Insanity was in the tense air that brought to us the sound of bellowing repercussions and the crash of toppling buildings.
Each night we had a blackout. In the day we crept through the streets fearfully, visiting our razed homes and once-familiar landmarks, wondering when the war would end. Those of us who remembered 1918 felt it might not end till mankind had been destroyed.
But it is not of the war I am writing—that still goes on, very dreadfully—it is of Rudolph Harmon that I wish to speak. Of Harmon, and his strange telepathic power.
I met him first in the partly destroyed office building which some of the homeless had made their headquarters. The first floor was nearly undamaged, and part of the second; the rest was ruin. Families lived in some of the offices, amid salvaged bedclothing, and, for the lucky ones, army cots. There were pitiful attempts to make the ratholes homelike—a mirror, a carpet, a picture or two on the walls. For the most part, however, we used the building only as a place to sleep and hide. One looks for little more when at any moment the devastating shells may rush down cut of the skies.
I was alone, my wife and child dead in the fi
rst air-raid. And the office in which I had bestowed my blankets was already occupied by Harmon, a lean, gaunt, nervous fellow of thirty or so with rather bulging eyes and a scrubby mustache. We made an odd pair, for I was short-set, stocky and clean shaven, built more like a wrestler than the physician I had been before our world ended with the undeclared war.
Crises exclude formalities. I entered with my blankets, there was a question, a grunt, and a nod, and after that the two of us lived together amicably enough, though with some disinterest. Now the office had belonged, I think, to an importer, and what happened to him I cannot say. He was probably dead. His desk was still there, and his stenographer’s, with a useless lamp on each and a typewriter broken on the floor.
A dictaphone and a transcriber were in the corner, and Harmon, who was a mechanic of sorts, amused himself by trying to repair these. Very luckily, the building had its own power plant in the cellar, and so we could cook and use electric lights whenever we found an unbroken bulb, which was not often. No illumination could be displayed at night, of course. The soldiers were strict about that, at least at first before they were all called to the front. But by that time we had learned the theory of the blackout.
I had little to do with Harmon for a time. Conversation is difficult when nervous strain is so intense and unremitting. We smoked a good deal, drank surprisingly little, and thought entirely too much. Meanwhile the war went on unceasingly.
And day or night we could hear the far, faint rumbling of the guns, and after dark their flashes beating like heat lightning over the horizon.
It is difficult to describe the atmosphere of the city during those days, which have not yet ended. One’s skin becomes unendurably sensitive, as though all the nerve-endings were exposed. One’s brain winces from sudden discordant sounds, and there is always the feeling of expectancy, the momentary dread of hearing the shrill scream of displaced air that precedes the explosion. Though we certainly, at last, would have welcomed a shell to end the unendurable eternity of waiting, not knowing what to do, seeing no solution and no hope. The mind, balked of the outlet of action, turns inward and devours itself. Spleen, jaundice, ennui—none of us was quite normal.
In fact, such an atmosphere might be calculated to upset or suspend normal laws, not only of habit and thought, hut those rooted in unchanging stability. The very earth seemed unfamiliar beneath our feet; it assumed an aspect of alienage, and seemed as though at any time it might change and shudder and disintegrate into chaos. Faces seemed different, and eyes. One had time to analyze them, to realize the mystery in the simplest things, the articulation of a muscle, the ability of the optic nerve, and of all the other senses. I must stress this point, for it is significant in view of what followed.
Harmon repaired his dictaphone and amused himself by dictating into the machine, keeping an audible diary of the days as they went by. There was little enough to record. By day a skeleton army cleared away the corpses and patrolled the city. At night the army was scarcely a squadron, without lights, for the beam even of an electric torch was dangerous. The stratosphere planes and balloons had powerful telescopes, and one by one our own protecting air-force was ordered to the front.
So we waited, doing trivial and foolish things because we needed an outlet for our emotions and thoughts and energies. The nervous strain poured unceasingly into our brains and men and women found various methods of relieving it.
Liquor, sensuality, sudden outbreaks of violence—all these outlets, and others, were undammed.
WEEK after week went by; still Harmon and I occupied the same room. We grew to hate it. But we never became really friendly; it was not dislike, but indifference. The food supply began to fail, and we shared whatever we could forage. This, too, was merely a matter of convenience and foresight. One day I came in with a few cans of soup, meat, and one of tuna—I remember the latter especially, for it turned out to be bad’—and found Harmon seated before the dictaphone transcriber staring at it intently, the earphones clamped over his head. He started when he saw me and hastily turned off the machine.
“Well,” I said, throwing down my booty, “we’ll eat for a time, anyway. I’m worried about water, though. A guardsman told me the reservoir was bombed.”
The news did not affect Harmon perceptibly. He scratched his mustache nervously, and his bulging eyes watched me with an unreadable expression. I went to the window and looked out.
“Two planes,” I said. “At the front they’re being shot down in droves. There’s a new kind of incendiary magnetized bullet—”
“Stanley,” Harmon said abruptly, “I wish you’d listen to this record.”
“Eh? What—”
“I’m—afraid, a bit,” he told me. “It’s a dream, a hallucination, or madness. I don’t know which. Last night, you see, I dictated something while I was in a trance. At least I wasn’t fully conscious, though I wasn’t asleep either. You’ve heard of automatic writing. It was rather like that—automatic speech. Except that I seemed to be dreaming too. I was”—he coughed and looked away—“committing a murder. It wasn’t me, though. My mind, my perception, seemed to be in someone else’s body. And my voice was giving my thoughts as they went through my brain. It was, well, horrible enough.”
“Nerves, perhaps,” I said. “Let’s hear it.”
Harmon gave me the headpiece. I adjusted the phones over my ears, and moved the needle to the beginning of the record. The wax cylinder rotated. I slowed it down a trifle and listened.
At first I heard only an indistinguishable muttering. This changed to disconnected words, and then to a coherent monologue. Harmon watched me closely. His face was rather pale. And, after a time, I understood why.
For on the record were the thoughts of a killer, confused, chaotic, in the beginning:
“Shadows . . . building shadows . . . jagged . . . thrown by the moon. Stay in shadow. They protect. One can hide from the sky . . . the sky presses down, a pall, smothering, crouching. Death ready to leap out of it. But death doesn’t leap. If it would, God, if it would . . . no, just waiting. Unendurable. Bombs, shells, bloody rain. Something to tear away the blanket on my brain . . . hot, oppressive. I’m calm outwardly. In my brain is seething, raging turmoil. The thoughts beat, beat, in uneven tides . . . this away below the threshold. To break the broken silence. I dare not scream. Don’t. Don’t. That would rip off the blanket and leave the brain exposed, palpitating . . . stay in the shadows. Slink along the street, dodging the moonlit patches.”
For a space, silence, and the scratching of the record. Then the voice resumed:
“My brain moves, turns sickeningly in my skull. Too full of thoughts and fear. Hate. Sorrow. Emotions. What can I do? The front . . . is certain death. Why do I cling to life? The war may end tomorrow. But we can never leave the city. It isn’t on earth any more. The air even is changed. It pulses with vibrations of dehumanized emotion. Like electricity beating at the brain. Supercharged brains. Some outlet, some escape.
“Ah, God, something is moving near me, something spawned here where normal laws are transcended, materializing . . . a dog. Small. Leg broken. Its fur is soft. Fur about its throat. . . . My hands are white in the moonlight against black, silken hair. My hands . . . tighten . . . softly, tenderly . . . my fingers are strong; see the tendons stand out. My brain . . . tides of thought are bursting through the blanket that smothers it. There’s cold air blowing on my brain. The shadows are jumping toward me. Swooping. Shutting out the horrible sky. I’m in a cave. The shadows guard me. A cold brain, and my fingers filled with ecstatic aching. My hands are releasing the energy that was bottled up in my brain. The dog’s dead.”
Again the needle scratched softly, rhythmically.
I glanced at Harmon. He made a peremptory gesture. I heard the voice once more:
“Not enough. Not enough energy released. Brain turning, rocking . . . this is the right way, though. But not a dog. Not enough energy released. Not enough. . . . Light on brass buttons. Khaki uniforms. Asleep.
A soldier, leaning against a wall, his gun nearly out of reach. He doesn’t hear me. His collar is unbuttoned; it’s a warm night. The pulse beats under the skin; a blue vein throbs. Can I approach silently? Yes, he doesn’t hear. I move the rifle a few feet further away. Now I stand directly in front of the man. My arms lift. The energy is draining out of my brain into my arms. The throbbing in my skull isn’t as sickening . . . perhaps this is enough. No. The energy will rush back unless I. . . .
“The shadows poise to leap. Softly, tenderly, my hands tighten about the soldier’s throat. Now, now, leap, shadows, guard me, swiftly, volcanically. A thundering torrent floods from my brain, through my arms, into my hands, down to the fingers that release the power. . . . He is dead. His spine cracked almost inaudibly. Let him lie there. Calm, quiet. The sky isn’t pressing down any more. A wind blows cool and refreshing on my bare brain. . . .”
I had reached the end of the record. I turned off the dictaphone, removed the earphones, and swung to face Harmon. He tugged at his mustache, his lips quivering.
“Well?” he asked.
“Subjective,” I said. “You’re not mad. Nervous hysteria may cause somnambulism. You walked in your sleep, that’s all.”
“Yes,” he said. “But a soldier was found this morning strangled on the street down by the river.”
I fingered the stubble on my chin. “So? There have been coincidences before.”
“I went down to see the body,” Harmon said, “but it had been taken away. Then I walked around a bit till I saw a dead dog. A black spaniel with a broken leg, I—I—” His eyes protruded even more than usual; he wet his dry lips. “Could I have—”
I grinned and touched Harmon’s thin arm. “Could you have strangled a husky soldier? Broken his neck? What do you think?”
Collected Fiction Page 160