It must have been a wonderful feeling of power, Tanner thought. Adam Hart must have realized what he was then. That he was a superman.
It had probably been a lot of fun at first. Even John had probably gotten a kick out of it. He could play on the high-school teams and astound everybody with his ability. And Adam Hart must have enjoyed sitting on the sidelines, guiding John’s mind so he could make intricate plays on the floor and shots that would make the spectators gasp.
Bu then there must have been a day when there was a split. When John Olson realized that he wasn’t the master of his own soul, that he wasn’t living his own life. He must have grown tired of it, must have wanted out.
But Adam Hart hadn’t grown tired. John Olson was his creation, his puppet—the pet dog who had learned a hatful of tricks. And when his master wanted him to perform, John would perform, like it or not.
It must have been that which had crushed Olson. The knowledge that his life was not his own. That he had nothing to say about what he did. That Hart was master and he was something lower than a slave.
He felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Olson. It must have been killing knowledge … .
But Olson had finally gotten away. Eventually Hart had permitted him to flee away to college. And then, years later, Hart had shown up on the scene again. Olson had been terrified, knowing what might happen. That any moment Hart would pull the strings and once more he would be living the life of a marionette.
Tanner sat up in bed and took his pipe off the dresser. Olson had been added to the Project three months before his death. Had his nervousness actually dated from then? Probably. And if he had recognized Hart, why couldn’t he simply have left? But maybe Hart had decided that Olson knew too much and he couldn’t afford to have him leave.
Olson had tried to finger Hart, to point out that the Enemy existed and that something should be done. He hadn’t been able to talk outright so he had …
Filled out the questionnaire himself. Deliberately phonied it to arouse the suspicions of the committee. And when that had failed he had seen his one chance start sliding down the drain and had desperately tried to argue it out. He had dared Hart. And Hart had taken him up on it.
But it doesn’t fit, Tanner thought. It was a stupid thing to do. And Hart is not a stupid man.
Hart had known then that Olson would require constant watching and constant control. He had probably been standing outside the Van Zandt home, waiting in the dark, watching Olson move about his room, knowing that Olson had to die. John had come home at midnight and fought for three hours and finally broken the compulsion that had prevented him from talking or writing about Hart directly. He had sat down to write a letter and Hart had guessed what he was doing and killed him.
It couldn’t have been difficult. Hart had known Olson’s nervous system as well as his own. It would have been an easy thing to clamp down on it, to strangle the autonomic nervous system so that Olson’s heart had simply ceased to beat.
And Olson hadn’t been the only victim. Years before Hart had killed the people who had known him the best, who had probably guessed what he was.
His own family.
So one night he had come back. On the evening train. It had been a simple thing to let loose the trained bear and then stand behind a tree across the street and direct the animal towards the tanks of bottled gas outside the kitchen window.
Adam Hart, Tanner thought coldly.
The Enemy.
Adam Hart.
Monster!
It was a subtle awareness of other life in the room besides himself. An awareness of warmth, of movement …
Tanner jerked and rolled off one side of the bed. A moment later a figure was bending over the bed, pulling at something that it had jabbed through sheets and mattress to tangle in the springs. There was a brief moment of tense struggle and then the figure had the knife in his hands and was crouched, waiting for him.
He grabbed the pillow and used it as a shield when the figure lunged. The knife slashed through the pillow in a flurry of feathers and he felt a stinging in his cheek. Then he had the figure by the wrist and was bending it back to force the dropping of the knife.
The figure heeled him in the instep and he went down, still clutching grimly to the wrist that held the knife. They rolled against the bureau and he forced the wrist further back. A little more pressure and then a sudden crack and a thin, strangled scream of pain. They rolled once more, the figure trying to get its knees under his chest.
Then he had the knife and sent it skittering across the floor. When the figure started to scramble after it, he kicked it savagely in the groin. It doubled, moaning, and he yanked on the light chain.
A kid, he thought, a young kid . . . Maybe nineteen, maybe twenty. A farm youngster with clean-cut features and a hard, muscular frame and ingrained dirt under his nails and in the palms of his hands. Just a farm boy.
And a fanatic. Tanner felt clammy with sweat and sick with pain and excitement. “What were you after, boy? I haven’t any money!”
The boy was in too much pain even to be sullen.
“ … didn’t want your money.”
“Then what were you after?”
The boy’s lips started to tighten into a hard, thin line. He wasn’t going to talk, Tanner thought, he wasn’t going to say a word.
His own anger caught him by surprise. He grabbed the boy by the jacket collar and held him up so that his toes were almost off the floor.
“You going to tell me, son?”
The boy started to shake his head and Tanner exploded his other hand deep into the pit of the boy’s stomach. The youth jackknifed and was abruptly sick. Tanner waited until the spasms had stopped and then lifted him again.
“Why were you trying to kill me?”
The boy didn’t answer and Tanner slapped him, hard. Hard enough to make the boy stagger against the bedstead. It was making him sick as well, Tanner thought. But a moment longer and I would have been sliced like an apple.
“You going to tell me?” The boy shook his head and Tanner bit his lip and hit him once more. The boy doubled and dropped to the floor.
Tanner wiped his face with the back of his hand and swayed above the figure on the floor. He rolled the boy over with his foot and glared down at the blood-streaked face. His voice was low and flat. “I’ve been running for a week, son, and I’m tired. You either tell me why you were after me or I’ll kill you and plead self-defense. You understand that?”
The boy looked up at him, dazed. “You were asking too many questions,” he said in a choked voice. “You shouldn’t have been asking questions about Adam Hart!”
“Did Hart send you?”
The boy nodded.
Tanner looked at him contemptuously. “What do you take me for? Adam Hart hasn’t been in town for the last eight years!”
“He didn’t send me after you!” the boy whispered. “And he didn’t have to be in town—he told me eight years ago!”
Tanner stared at him, disbelieving, then got the picture. Adam Hart had been a cautious man. He had foreseen the possibility that some time in the future somebody might come back to his home town, looking for information.
So he had planted his booby traps, doing the delicate mental surgery that turned farm boys into deadly killers.
When they were triggered by somebody asking questions about Adam Hart.
8
THE doctor’s name was Schwartz. He had rushed down to the clapboarded town hall which also served as a police station, took one startled look at Tanner and the boy who had tried to kill him, then hustled Tanner into a sideroom. He made him sit on the table, busied with his kit for a moment, then daubed at the dried blood on Tanner’s cheek with cotton dampened in alcohol.
“Does that hurt?”
“What do you think?”
The doctor smiled faintly. “Doctors have a litany, just like priests; it’s all part of the ritual.” He went back to his kit and found a small hypodermic and a bo
ttle. “I better freeze it for you. You make a face and it will be hard to sew.”
A few moments later one side of Tanner’s face felt pleasantly dull and numb. “Thanks for being considerate.”
“Why not? You look like a cash customer.”
“I take it you don’t have many.”
“I could use more. Too many people out here pay off in ham hocks and home canning.” He was bending close to Tanner now, his fingers making expert passes with needle and surgical thread. “It was a knife, wasn’t it? I don’t think razors would be too popular in this town.”
Tanner jerked a thumb towards the door. “The kid out there did it, in case you were wondering.”
“So I gathered. He’s Jim Hendricks—most people in town think he’s a pretty good boy.”
“He’s very good. Particularly with a knife.”
The doctor took two more stitches and coated the cut with salve and lightly taped a strip of gauze across it.
“Be careful not to smile or frown—at least for a few days. I wish I could say it wouldn’t scar but it probably will. The cut went pretty deep.”
Tanner could already feel the pain thread back into his cheek. The doctor started to wash up at a basin in the corner. “Are you going to push charges?”
“Wouldn’t you?”
“Kids sometimes do funny things. I don’t think most people out here would want to see a boy punished for the rest of his life for something he had done on the spur of the moment.”
Tanner looked at him coldly. “Is that the way you look at it, Doctor?”
“No. But I’m afraid that’s the way a jury out here would look at it. The Hendricks boy is well liked in town, his father’s a respected member of the community—runs the feed store two blocks over.” He pulled some paper towels out of a wall rack. “You’ve got to realize that you’re a stranger. Country towns don’t care for strangers, especially those from the city. Before the trial was half over the town would have convinced itself that it was all your fault. They’d probably twist it around so they could rack you on a contributing charge.”
He crumpled up the paper towels and self-consciously potted them towards a wire wastebasket. “Why was Hendricks trying to kill you?”
Tanner’s cheek had started to throb and he felt weak. He wanted to go back to his hotel and sleep for twenty-four hours, then light out for a town that had never heard of Adam Hart or John Olson. But he realized he wouldn’t be permitted to do that. He was in the game all the way, and there was no getting out.
“Is it any business of yours?”
“No, but I can’t help being curious. Things like this don’t happen here very often.”
It might be an act, Tanner thought. Doctor Schwartz could be another booby trap that Adam Hart had left behind.
“When did you start practice in this town, Doctor?”
Schwartz looked at him intently. “Five years ago. But it would make a difference if I had been here—oh, say for more than eight years, wouldn’t it?”
Tanner said, “What do you know about him?”
Schwartz drummed his fingers on the table top. “I’m the only doctor in this town, I’m the only one they’ve had for the last five years. I know almost everything there is to know about everybody. I know all their virtues, I know all their sins. And believe me, both would fill a book.”
He brushed the sweat from a faint moustache. “I never met Adam Hart but I’m surprised how much I know about him. He must have been quite a guy. He borrowed money from everybody but so far as I can discover, he never paid it back and nobody ever pressed him to repay. They wrote it off the books and considered it an honor. For kicks, he used to start fights among the young toughs in town just to see what would happen. Nobody ever complained. If anybody else had done it, they would have been run in. When Adam Hart did it, it was just high spirits.
“That isn’t all. There were half a dozen bastard children in town at one time who could have claimed Adam Hart for a father.”
Tanner felt a little sick, thinking of a future twenty years away when there would be six Adam Harts running around. “You said ‘were’—what happened to them?”
“They were sickly kids—all of them. Nothing you could put your finger on, and nothing I could do for them. Maybe it was something in the genes, I don’t know, but they caught every childhood disease there was and they didn’t have any resistance. They died, all of them.”
Unsuccessful sports, Tanner thought. Mutations that hadn’t made the grade.
“The girls who had them didn’t care that it was out of wedlock,” Schwartz continued. “Neither did their parents. When Hart was younger he was precocious sexually and he experimented all over town—with everything and everybody. From the stories that went around, I can’t think of anything he left out. In a medical book he would have taken up a full page in Latin. Nobody ever thought it might be wrong. For him.”
Adam Hart had flagrantly and openly violated the taboos of human society, Tanner thought. And the members of that society had cheerfully forgiven him.
“As far as this town is concerned,” Schwartz said in a low voice, “the only citizen it ever produced worth talking about is Adam Hart. Ever since he left, Brockton’s been in an in-between state. It isn’t living and it isn’t dead. It’s just waiting. There’s a couple of other towns around here that are the same way, incidentally. Hart got around.”
“What are they waiting for?”
“For Hart to come back, of course. And some day he will.” Schwartz paused. “I sometimes wonder if Hart’s been traveling around the country.”
So a lot of other towns could get to know him, Tanner thought. It was something he hadn’t thought of before. The whole country, waiting for Adam Hart to come back …
“You’d have your man on horseback then, wouldn’t you?”
“That’s right, you would.”
Tanner slipped on his coat and started for the door.
Schwartz said, “What are you going to do when you find Hart, Professor?”
Tanner smiled faintly and the pain ticked back in his cheek. “Kill him.”
At the door, Schwartz said, “Dr. Pierce—I bought his practice just before he retired—was always going to tell me about the Hart family.”
“He never did, did he?”
“No. Six months after he retired, he had an accident. He fell down the cellar steps one night and broke his neck.”
“You so sure it was an accident?”
Schwartz hesitated. “I guess not. But if I found out for sure that it wasn’t, my life wouldn’t be worth much, would it?”
Tanner nodded. “You’re right, Doctor. It wouldn’t.”
9
HE caught the train out of Brockton early Sunday morning. There was no sense in staying to push his case. The boy was a home-grown product, and he was a stranger. And the local judge, a man who had held the office for the last twenty years, could hardly be expected to favor him.
Adam Hart took care of his own, he thought.
The endless prairies and the low blur on the horizon that had been Brockton gradually disappeared and he felt some of the tenseness drain out of him. In many ways it had been a smart idea going to Brockton. He had learned a lot about Hart.
And it had also been the sheerest luck that he had gotten away alive.
It was an uncomfortable thought. So far he had made no move that Hart hadn’t anticipated. It was still cat-and-mouse, with himself cast in the role of the mouse. Sooner or later Hart would tire of the play, the claws would flash out, and that would be that.
The train felt hot and uncomfortable and he made a half-unconscious gesture towards his collar. In the end it would be either the pier, or life as a living-dead man, like Olson had been. A marionette.
Now he wondered if Hart was after anybody else on the committee and if not, why not? What was so special about himself?
“Nice day today, isn’t it?”
He glanced at his seat companion. A middle-ag
ed woman, around forty-five or fifty, with graying hair and a face that wore its troubles like other women wore their lipstick. He grunted. She talked on in a sweet, determined voice.
“You get on at Brockton? That’s a real nice town. Jess does his banking there. We’ve got a little farm not too far away. Do right well, though since we’re country folks, we don’t need much.” She glanced sharply at him. “Were you in the service?”
“For a few years.”
She opened her purse and dug down among the wadded handkerchiefs and the keys and the compact that leaked powder. The photograph she came up with was just what he had expected—the boyish face beneath the overseas cap, a half smile, and a carefully retouched glint in the eyes.
“My Ralph. He was wounded in Vietnam.”
He didn’t know what to say and she stuffed the photograph away, her doughy face starching itself into a someone-will-pay expression.
“We fought that war all for nothing. Never had the right leaders …” She paused and he wondered how political she was going to get. God, he hated the type. She snapped the purse shut like she was operating a guillotine and the flesh drew tight over her cheekbones. “What we need is a leader, a strong, honest-to-goodness leader … .”
A leader, he thought.
Someone like Adam Hart?
It had been practically axiomatic that the human race would hate anybody or anything that was superior to it. That it would do its best to destroy it.
But would it really?
There was the very possible chance that people would welcome Adam Hart with open arms. And why not? For the last thirty years people had done nothing but play follow the leader. They were broken in, they were ripe. People were worshippers by nature. They worshipped movie stars, they worshipped athletes, they worshipped dictators.
People wouldn’t fight Adam Hart. They’d parade him down Broadway, they’d shower him with paper, they’d print his biography and buy millions of copies of it, every home would have his portrait.
Power, The Page 8