His jaw was too slack to enunciate an answer. He watched her go out, watched the door close, watched it open again, heard her say in a very hurt tone, "But I do think you could tell me why you won't say anything about this murder."
He scratched his head. "As long as you behave yourself, I guess I do owe you that." He thought for a moment. "It's not your kind of a story. That's about the best way to put it."
"Not my kind of a story? A double murder in Lover's Lane? The maudlin mystery of the mugger, or mayhem in Maytime? No kidding, Muley--you're not serious!"
"Budgie, this one isn't for fun. It's ugly. Very damn ugly. And it's serious. It's mysterious for a number of other reasons than the ones you want to siphon into your readers."
"What other reasons?"
"Medically. Biologically. Sociologically."
"My stories got biology. Sociology they got likewise; stodgy truisms about social trends is the way I dish up sex in the public prints, or didn't you know? So--that leaves medical. What's so strange medically about this case?"
"Good night, Budgie."
"Come on, Muley. You can't horrify me."
"That I know. You've trod more primrose pathology in your research than Krafft-Ebing plus eleven comic books. No, Budgie. No more."
"Dr. F.L. Muhlenberg, brilliant young biologist and special medical consultant to the City and State Police, intimated that these aspects of the case--the brutal murder and disfigurement of the embarrassed couple--were superficial compared with the unspeakable facts behind them. 'Medically mysterious,' he was quoted as saying." She twinkled at him. "How's that sound?" She looked at her watch. "And I can make the early editions, too, with a head. Something like DOC SHOCKED SPEECHLESS--and a subhead: Lab Sleuth Suppresses Medical Details of Double Park Killing. Yeah, and your picture."
"If you dare to print anything of the sort," he raged, "I'll--"
"All right, all right," she said conciliatingly. "I won't. I really won't."
"Promise me?"
"I promise, Muley...if--"
"Why should I bargain?" he demanded suddenly. "Get out of here."
He began to close the door. "And something for the editorial page," she said. "Is a doctor within his rights in suppressing information concerning a murderous maniac and his methods?" She closed the door.
Muhlenberg bit his lower lip so hard he all but yelped. He ran to the door and snatched it open. "Wait!"
Budgie was leaning against the doorpost lighting a cigarette. "I was waiting," she said reasonably.
"Come in here," he grated. He snatched her arm and whirled her inside, slamming the door.
"You're a brute," she said rubbing her arm and smiling dazzlingly.
"The only way to muzzle you is to tell the whole story. Right?"
"Right. If I get an exclusive when you're ready to break the story."
"There's probably a kicker in that, too," he said morosely. He glared at her. Then, "Sit down," he said.
She did. "I'm all yours."
"Don't change the subject," he said with a ghost of his natural humor. He lit a thoughtful cigarette. "What do you know about this case so far?"
"Too little," she said. "This couple were having a conversation without words in the park when some muggers jumped them and killed them, a little more gruesomely than usual. But instead of being delivered to the city morgue, they were brought straight to you on the orders of the ambulance intern after one quick look."
"How did you know about it?"
"Well, if you must know, I was in the park. There's a shortcut over by the museum, and I was about a hundred yards down the path when I..."
Muhlenberg waited as long as tact demanded, and a little longer. Her face was still, her gaze detached. "Go on."
"...when I heard a scream," she said in the precise tone of voice which she had been using. Then she began to cry.
"Hey," he said. He knelt beside her, put a hand on her shoulder. She shoved it away angrily, and covered her face with a damp towel. When she took it down again she seemed to be laughing. She was doing it so badly that he turned away in very real embarrassment.
"Sorry," she said in a very shaken whisper. "It...was that kind of a scream. I've never heard anything like it. It did something to me. It had more agony in it than a single sound should be able to have." She closed her eyes.
"Man or woman?"
She shook her head.
"So," he said matter-of-factly, "what did you do then?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all, for I don't know how long." She slammed a small fist down on the table. "I'm supposed to be a reporter!" she flared. "And there I stand like a dummy, like a wharf rat in concussion-shock!" She wet her lips. "When I came around I was standing by a rock wall with one hand on it." She showed him. "Broke two perfectly good fingernails, I was holding on so tight. I ran toward where I'd heard the sound. Just trampled brush, nothing else. I heard a crowd milling around on the avenue. I went up there. The meat-wagon was there, Al and that young sawbones Regal--Ruggles--"
"Regalio."
"Yeah, him. They'd just put those two bodies into the ambulance. They were covered with blankets. I asked what was up. Regalio waved a finger and said 'Not for schoolgirls' and gave me a real death-mask grin. He climbed aboard. I grabbed Al and asked him what was what. He said muggers had killed this couple, and it was pretty rugged. Said Regalio had told him to bring them here, even before he made a police report. They were both about as upset as they could get."
"I don't wonder," said Muhlenberg.
"Then I asked if I could ride and they said no and took off. I grabbed a cab when I found one to grab, which was all of fifteen minutes later, and here I am. Here I am," she repeated, "getting a story out of you in the damnedest way yet. You're asking, I'm answering." She got up. "You write the feature, Muley. I'll go on into your icebox and do your work."
He caught her arm. "Nah! No you don't! Like the man said--it's not for school-girls."
"Anything you have in there can't be worse than my imagination!" she snapped.
"Sorry. It's what you get for barging in on me before I've had a chance to think something through. You see, this wasn't exactly two people."
"I know!" she said sarcastically. "Siamese twins."
He looked at her distantly. "Yes. 'Taint funny, kiddo."
For once she had nothing to say. She put one hand slowly up to her mouth and apparently forgot it, for there it stayed. "That's what's so ugly about this. Those two were...torn apart." He closed his eyes. "I can just see it. I wish I couldn't. Those thugs drifting through the park at night, out for anything they could get. They hear something...fall right over them...I don't know. Then--"
"All right, all right," she whispered hoarsely. "I can hear you."
"But, damn it," he said angrily, "I've been kicking around this field long enough to know every documented case of such a creature. And I just can't believe that one like this could exist without having been written up in some medical journal somewhere. Even if they were born in Soviet Russia, some translation of a report would've appeared somewhere."
"I know Siamese twins are rare. But surely such a birth wouldn't make international headlines!"
"This one would," he said positively. "For one thing, Siamese twins usually bear more anomalies than just the fact that they are attached. They're frequently fraternal rather than identical twins. More often than not one's born more fully developed than the other. Usually when they're born at all they don't live. But these--"
"What's so special?"
Muhlenberg spread his hands. "They're perfect. They're costally joined by a surprisingly small tissue-organ complex--"
"Wait, professor, 'Costally'--you mean at the chest?"
"That's right. And the link is--was--not major. I can't understand why they were never surgically separated. There may be a reason, of course, but that'll have to wait on the autopsy."
"Why wait?"
"It's all I can do to wait." He grinned suddenly. "You see, you're m
ore of a help than you realize, Budge. I'm dying to get to work on them, but under the circumstances I have to wait until morning. Regalio reported to the police, and I know the coroner isn't going to come around this time of night, not if I could show him quintuplets in a chain like sausages. In addition, I don't have identities, I don't have relatives' releases--you know. So--a superficial examination, a lot of wild guesses, and a chance to sound off to you keep myself from going nuts."
"You're using me!"
"That's bad?"
"Yes--when I don't get any fun out of it."
He laughed. "I love those incendiary statements of yours. I'm just not flammable."
She looked at him, up and a little sidewise. "Not at all?"
"Not now."
She considered that. She looked down at her hands, as if they were the problems of Muhlenberg's susceptibility. She turned the hands over. "Sometimes," she said, "I really enjoy it when we share something else besides twitches and moans. Maybe we should be more inhibited."
"Do tell."
She said, "We have nothing in common. I mean, but nothing. We're different to the core, to the bone. You hunt out facts and so do I, but we could never share that because we don't use facts for the same thing. You use facts only to find more facts."
"What do you use them for?"
She smiled. "All sorts of things. A good reporter doesn't report just what happens. He reports what he sees--in many cases a very different thing. Any way..."
"Wonder how these biological pressures affected our friends here," he mused, thumbing over his shoulder at the morgue.
"About the same, I'd judge, with certain important difficulties. But wait--were they men or women, or one of each?"
"I didn't tell you, did I?" he said with real startlement.
"No," she said.
He opened his mouth to answer, but could not. The reason came.
It came from downstairs or outside, or perhaps from nowhere or everywhere, or from a place without a name. It was all around them, inside, behind them in time as well as space. It was the echo of their own first cry when they lost the first warmth and found loneliness, early, as everyone must. It was hurt: some the pain of impact, some of fever and delirium, and some the great pressure of beauty too beautiful to bear. And like pain, it could not be remembered. It lasted as long as it was a sound, and perhaps a little longer, and the frozen time after it died was immeasurable.
Muhlenberg became increasingly conscious of an ache in his calves and in the trapezoid muscles of his back. They sent him a gradual and completely intellectualized message of strain, and very consciously he relieved it and sat down. His movement carried Budgie's arm forward, and he looked down at her hand, which was clamped around his forearm. She moved it away, opening it slowly, and he saw the angry marks of her fingers, and knew they would be bruises in the morning.
She said, "That was the scream. The one I heard. Wasn't once enough?"
It was only then that he could look far enough out of himself to see her face. It was pasty with shock, and wet, and her lips were pale. He leapt to his feet. "Another one! Come on!"
He pulled her up and through the door. "Don't you understand?" he blazed. "Another one! It can't be, but somewhere out there it's happened again--"
She pulled back. "Are you sure it wasn't..." She nodded at the closed door of the morgue.
"Don't be ridiculous," he snorted. "They couldn't be alive." He hurried her to the stairs.
It was very dark. Muhlenberg's office was in an aging business building which boasted twenty-five-watt bulbs on every other floor. They hurtled through the murk, past the deepest doorways of the law firm, the doll factory, the import-export firm which imported and exported nothing but phone calls, and all the other dim mosaics of enterprise. The building seemed quite deserted, and but for the yellow-orange glow of the landings and the pathetic little bulbs, there were no lights anywhere. And it was as quiet as it was almost dark; quiet as late night; quiet as death.
They burst out onto the old brownstone steps and stopped, afraid to look, wanting to look. There was nothing. Nothing but the street, a lonesome light, a distant horn and, far up at the corner, the distinct clicking of the relays in a traffic-light standard as they changed an ignored string of emeralds to an unnoticed ruby rope.
"Go up to the corner," he said, pointing. "I'll go down the other way. That noise wasn't far away--"
"No," she said. "I'm coming with you."
"Good," he said, so glad he was amazed at himself. They ran north to the corner. There was no one on the street within two blocks in any direction. There were cars, mostly parked, one coming, but none leaving.
"Now what?" she asked.
For a moment he did not answer. She waited patiently while he listened to the small distant noises which made the night so quiet. Then, "Good night, Budge."
"Good--what?"
He waved a hand. "You can go home now."
"But what about the--"
"I'm tired," he said. "I'm bewildered. That scream wrung me like a floor-mop and pulled me down too many stairs too fast. There's too much I don't know about this and not enough I can do about it. So go home."
"Aw, Muley..."
He sighed. "I know. Your story. Budgie, I faithfully promise you I'll give you an exclusive as soon as I have facts I can trust."
She looked carefully at his face in the dim light and nodded at what she saw there. "All right, Muley. The pressure's off. Call me?"
"I'll call you."
He stood watching her walk away. Quite a gal, he thought. He wondered what had moved her to make that odd remark about inhibitions. They'd certainly never bothered her before. But--perhaps she had something there. Sometimes when you take what is loosely called "everything," you have an odd feeling that you haven't gotten much. He shrugged and ambled back toward the laboratory, pondering morphology, teratology, and a case where monstra per defectum could coexist with monstra per fabricam alienam.
Then he saw the light.
It flickered out over the street, soft and warm. He stopped and looked up. The light showed in a third-story window. It was orange and yellow, but with it was a flaring blue-white. It was pretty. It was also in his laboratory. No--not the laboratory. The morgue.
Muhlenberg groaned. After that he saved his breath. He needed it badly by the time he got back to the laboratory.
Muhlenberg dove for the heavy morgue door and snatched it open. A great pressure of heat punted a gout of smoke into the lab. He slammed the door, ran to a closet, snatched out a full-length lab smock, spun the faucets in the sink and soaked the smock. From another cabinet he snatched up two glass-globe fire extinguishers. He wrapped the wet cloth twice around his face and let the rest drop over his chest and back. Cradling the extinguishers in one bent forearm, he reached for the side of the door and grabbed the pump-type extinguisher racked there.
Now, suddenly not hurrying, he stepped up on the sill and stood on tiptoe, peering through a fold of the wet cloth. Then he crouched low and peered again. Satisfied, he stood up and carefully pegged the two glass extinguishers, one straight ahead, one to the right and down. Then he disappeared into the smoke, holding the third extinguisher at the ready.
There was a rising moan, and the smoke shook like a solid entity and rushed into the room and away. As it cleared, Muhlenberg, head and shoulders wrapped in sooty linen, found himself leaning against the wall, gasping, with one hand on a knife-switch on the wall. A three-foot exhaust fan in the top sash of one window was making quick work of the smoke.
Racks of chemicals, sterilizers, and glass cabinets full of glittering surgeon's tools lined the left wall. Out on the floor were four massive tables, on each of which was a heavy marble top. The rest of the room was taken up by a chemist's bench, sinks, a partitioned-off darkroom with lightproof curtains, and a massive centrifuge.
On one of the tables was a mass of what looked like burned meat and melted animal fat. It smelled bad--not rotten bad, but acrid and
--and wet, if a smell can be described that way. Through it was the sharp, stinging odor of corrosive chemicals.
He unwound the ruined smock from his face and threw it into a corner. He walked to the table with the mess on it and stood looking bleakly at it for a time. Suddenly he put out a hand, and with thumb and forefinger pulled out a length of bone.
"What a job," he breathed at length.
He walked around the table, poked at something slumped there and snatched his hand away. He went to the bench and got a pair of forceps, which he used to pick up the lump. It looked like a piece of lava or slag. He turned on a hooded lamp and studied it closely.
"Thermite, by God," he breathed.
He stood quite still for a moment, clenching and unclenching his square jaw. He took a long slow turn around the seared horror on the morgue slab, then carefully picked up the forceps and hurled them furiously into a corner. Then he went out to the lab and picked up the phone. He dialed.
"Emergency," he said. "Hello, Sue. Regalio there? Muhlenberg. Thanks... Hello, Doc. Are you sitting down? All right. Now get this. I'm fresh out of symmetrical teratomorphs. They're gone... Shut up and I'll tell you! I was out in the lab talking to a reporter when I heard the damnedest scream. We ran out and found nothing. I left the reporter outside and came back. I couldn't've been out more'n ten-twelve minutes. But somebody got in here, moved both stiffs onto one slab, incised them from the thorax to the pubis, crammed them full of iron oxide and granulated aluminum--I have lots of that sort of stuff around here--fused 'em with a couple of rolls of magnesium foil and touched 'em off. Made a great big messy thermite bomb out of them... No, dammit, of course there's nothing left of them! What would you think eight minutes at seven thousand degrees would do?...Oh, dry up, Regalio! I don't know who did it or why, and I'm too tired to think about it. I'll see you tomorrow morning. No--what would be the use of sending anyone down here? This wasn't done to fire the building; whoever did it just wanted to get rid of those bodies, and sure did a job... The coroner? I don't know what I'll tell him. I'm going to get a drink and then I'm going to bed. I just wanted you to know. Don't tell the press. I'll head off that reporter who was here before. We can do without this kind of story. 'Mystery arsonist cremated evidence of double killing in lab of medical consultant.' A block from headquarters, yet... Yeah, and get your driver to keep his trap shut, too. Okay, Regalio. Just wanted to let you know...Well, you're no sorrier'n I am. We'll just have to wait another couple hundred years while something like that gets born again, I guess."
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