by Otto Penzler
“I can see I came to the right place. You have just been appointed Chief Investigator for the Flying Saucer Division of the Ross Harte Research Laboratories, Inc.”
Merlini placed the pie plate on thin air, gave it a quick spin, and left it there, whirling mysteriously on nothing. “And how,” he asked, “did you get into that business?”
“Articles on the Great Flying Saucer Mystery sell magazines. I’m ghost-writing one. Visitors From Space by Albert North.”
“He’s solved the mystery?”
“That’s what I want to know. He’s set himself up as an unofficial clearing house for saucer information. Whenever someone reports mysterious lights in the sky, North looks into it. He’s had to hire a fulltime secretary to handle the mail and he has filled four large filing cabinets with reports. Did you know that since flying saucers first hit the headlines in 1947 there have been several thousand reported sightings?”
“A celestial traffic jam,” the Great Merlini observed. “But I thought the Air Force issued a report which said that people had been seeing weather balloons, temperature inversion mirages, and spots before their eyes.”
“Then you didn’t read all of it,” I replied. “They explained eighty percent that way, but they had to label the remaining twenty percent as ‘Unknown.’ That could add up to quite a lot of saucers. And just one bona-fide vehicle from outer space would be the biggest story since the invention of the wheel.”
Merlini nodded. “I’ll agree to that. And North thinks he has good solid evidence that will stand up in court?”
“He’s convinced that where there’s so much smoke there has to be a fire. He doesn’t swallow everything he’s told either. When some elderly lady in Bad Axe, Minnesota, reports that a doughnut-shaped object landed in her back yard and a horde of small green men with purple spots trampled her zinnia bed, he files it under H for Hysteria. It’s the sober detailed reports of sightings by university professors, airplane pilots, and such people that have North convinced—and me confused.”
“Has North figured out why saucer pilots have been content for so many years to flit about among the clouds, mostly at night, merely viewing the scenery? Are they shy? Or not very curious? Or what?”
“If you mean why haven’t they landed, North’s reply is: ‘How do we know they haven’t?’ What’s more, he believes that someone, or something, is watching him. He says that twice within the last week he has been followed.”
“From flying saucers,” Merlini murmured, “to persecution complex. That figures.”
“It would,” I said, “except for one thing. I just came from North’s apartment—and I was followed, too.”
Merlini, who had started to light a cigarette, stopped, the match still burning in his fingers.
“Aliens from another world? Little green men with eyes on stalks, and tentacles coming out of them?”
“No, but it makes just about as much sense. There were two of them and I think I’ve seen one before. Down at Centre Street. Why would a couple of city dicks be tailing North and anyone who happens to be visiting him?”
That did it. Merlini’s interest in flying saucer pilots was lukewarm, but an unexplained interest on the part of the Police Department aroused his curiosity. We had dinner together and he accompanied me uptown to continue my interview with North. No one, as far as we could see, tailed us.
A young man with broad shoulders, a crew cut, and an intense, somewhat worried look in his dark eyes let us in and introduced himself as Charles Kane, North’s son-in-law.
“The old man’s in the study with that well-stacked secretary of his. Dictating another batch of letters to his crackpot correspondents. At least, that was the official bulletin she released when she let me in a few minutes ago. All secretaries should be homely and flat-chested. It’s much more efficient.” He lifted the highball he held. “What can I get you to drink?”
As he filled our orders, Merlini said, “Apparently you and North disagree as to flying saucers.”
Kane squirted soda water into our glasses. “That’s putting it politely. We disagree about other things, too. Like the Chairman of the Board of Northair Corporation signing his name to magazine articles about flying saucers. This is not the kind of publicity that helps get new business.”
“North,” I said, “believes it will get him more saucer reports.”
“Sure it will. An article in a national magazine about pixies would get him reports from people who’d swear they had gone to school with them.”
“I’m told,” Merlini said, “that North sifts his evidence pretty carefully.”
Kane didn’t actually snort, but he came close. “If he’d let me sift it for him I can assure you there wouldn’t be enough left to write articles about. He’s an enthusiast. Which is all right if you can control it. But every now and then he goes overboard. A few years ago he sank a couple of hundred thousand in an experimental aerofoil design that was to revolutionize aerodynamics. He thought it would prove that the Wright brothers started the whole science off on the wrong foot. Only it was a complete bust. Now he wants to find out what makes flying saucers fly. If he starts building saucer motors and if you own any Northair stock, you’d better sell quick.”
Behind us a voice with a sharp cutting edge said, “My son-in-law is not a bad plant manager, but he lacks vision.”
Albert North walked toward us from the study door—a short, stocky man with a pirate’s face, a quarterdeck manner, and fire in his eye.
“Charles,” he growled, “when you phoned this afternoon I told you I had an engagement with Mr. Harte this evening. Why are you here?”
Charles may have lacked vision, but he didn’t seem to be afraid of talking back to the boss. He turned to the bar and added whiskey to his drink. “If you hadn’t hung up in the middle of the call—as you do about half the time—you’d know why.” Kane lifted a brief case that lay on the bar. “I need your signature on these government contract bids. They have to be in Washington tomorrow morning. If you’d give me the authority to sign …”
“And why,” North growled, “weren’t they ready yesterday? No, don’t tell me now. Bring them into the study.” He looked at me. “I’m sorry. This won’t take long.”
He turned abruptly and marched toward the study as a young lady who answered Kane’s description quite accurately came through the door. As secretary in charge of flying saucers, she was quite a dish. I could see how her effect on the efficiency of a business office might not be all that a dedicated personnel manager could wish. And I suspect she knew it. In contrast to her face and figure, her voice was cool and impersonal, her manner brisk and businesslike. The tailored suit she wore tried hard to leave a similar impression but it definitely fought a losing battle.
“Will you need me for this?” she asked.
“No, Anne,” North replied. “You may go now.”
“Unless,” Charles added, “you want to wait for me.”
She gave him a smile and a fast no. “I’ve got a date with a man from Mars. He has two heads.”
Albert North stopped and turned. “Are you making flying saucer jokes now, too?”
Anne shook her head. “No. But Charles is married to your daughter. I just wanted him to know that a two-headed date would be preferable.”
North moved on. Kane followed, turning as he closed the door to eye Anne. “All that,” he said, grinning, “and brains, too.”
Miss O’Hara picked up a purse and gloves from a chair by the outer door. Then she saw our drinks. “Would there be any more of that?” she asked. “After today I could use a quick one.”
She didn’t have to ask twice; I was already at the bar.
“Tell me,” Merlini asked, “do saucer pilots usually have two heads?”
She sat on the edge of an armchair. “They come in assorted sizes and shapes. So far, one head apiece seems to be standard equipment, but I wouldn’t predict what might turn up in tomorrow’s mail.”
“You’ve seen al
l of North’s evidence. Does any of it convince you that we are actually being visited by ships from space?”
Miss O’Hara sipped her drink first. “I wish I knew. Ninety-five percent of the reports are from people who could use a good psychiatrist. But every now and then there’s a witness who is awfully hard to doubt—a professor like Dr. Price, for instance. And lately I’ve been waking up at three a.m. in a cold sweat after a nightmare about nine-foot Martians. I’m beginning to think that typing business letters about shipments of coffee and tea might be a welcome change.”
“Nine-footers?” I asked.
“That’s the record catch—a report from Arizona last week. Four people swear they saw a green disk in the sky traveling at the usual eighteen thousand miles per hour, and shortly after, a woman claims she found a nine-foot-high man—or something similar—in her bedroom. When she screamed he walked out—right through the wall.”
“And who,” Merlini asked, “is Dr. Price?”
“Professor of Archeology at U.C.L.A. He’ll be here tonight.”
“What is his evidence?”
Anne frowned. “You’d better ask him. He doesn’t want publicity.”
“North briefed me on Price,” I said, “but I have to get the doctor’s okay before using it. One of his graduate students was doing field work in the Navajo country last summer. A few days after a saucer sighting in the area, the boy found and photographed some very queer markings on the side of a cliff face. They seemed to have been burned into the rock. They look to me like something a beginning shorthand student might write after five martinis. But they gave Doctor Price a jolt. He’d seen the same sort of script once before—in a Yucatan jungle.”
“Don’t tell me,” Merlini said, “that the Martians are going to turn out to be Mayans.”
“It’s worse than that. Price thinks this may be the clue to a major archeological mystery. Two years ago he was excavating a Mayan pyramid dating about a.d. 600 and found an inscription that had absolutely nothing in common with the Mayan hieroglyphs. When his student brought in another sample of the same thing—several symbols are identical—and when this new sample had a possible connection with saucers, Price remembered one phrase in the Mayan inscriptions found at the same site which he had thought was merely allegorical. Now he thinks the Mayans meant it literally. It was a reference to ‘ships from the sky.’ ”
“And not long after,” Anne added, “the Mayans, for some mysterious reason, completely abandoned all the cities of the Old Empire.”
“Hmm,” Merlini said. “That’s certainly a Stop Press bulletin for the archeological journals. So Price brought his alien inscriptions to North?”
Anne nodded. “He’d read that North was collecting saucer information and he hoped more of the script might have turned up. He thinks that with enough of it he may be able to break it down and get a translation.”
“Translation?” Merlini blinked. “The men who finally solved the Mayan writing succeeded only because they knew something of the Mayan culture. But Price is tackling a script of what he thinks is an extra-terrestrial culture. What he needs is a new Rosetta stone.”
“Which,” I said, “is what he hopes to find if he can get funds to finish excavating that Mayan pyramid. He—”
I stopped short. Merlini got slowly to his feet. We all stared at the closed study door.
Anne said, “What was that?”
“It sounded,” Merlini and I replied almost together, “like a shot.”
I was nearest the door and reached it first. I turned the knob and pushed.
The door was locked.
I rapped on the door—hard. “North!” I called. “Kane!”
There was no answer.
Merlini asked, “Is there another way in?”
Anne’s voice was a whisper. “No.”
I knocked again and got the same result—nothing.
Magicians who can’t open doors for friends without keys have to take a lot of ribbing and on this account Merlini always carries an assortment of lockpicks. He had the leather case that held them in his hands now.
“I’ll go to work on the lock,” he said, kneeling before the door. “You phone. We want a squad car and an ambulance.”
I agreed completely. The silence beyond that door was much too ominous. I found the phone on a writing desk and dialed.
And at that moment the buzzer of the door to the hall buzzed.
I snapped the address to Headquarters, and added, “Get a squad car and a doctor up here—fast.”
A quiet voice said, “You’re calling the police?” Anne had opened the door and a thin, dapper little man stood just inside, his rimless glasses glinting in the light. “Why the police?”
Anne, not nearly as cool and collected now, told him, her voice trembling a bit. “It’s Mr. North and Charles, Dr. Price. In the study. We heard a shot—and they don’t answer.”
In the hall outside I heard an elevator door open and the sound of voices.
Merlini said, “Come in and close that door. We don’t want sight-seers at this time.”
But Price turned toward the hall. “There’s a physician’s office on the first floor. I think, under the circumstances …”
Merlini’s voice suddenly took on an official tone. “We’ve ordered a doctor. And I may need you here. Come in and close that door!”
Price obviously wasn’t used to taking orders. He took a step toward the hall. “It’ll be quicker if I—”
Merlini cut in, “Ross, yank him in here. Hurry!”
I started for the professor on the double. Price scowled, hesitated, then decided not to argue the matter. He stepped inside again and closed the door. Then, stuffily, he asked, “Miss O’Hara, who are these men?”
Anne told him as I joined Merlini. He was probing the lock’s interior with a slender blade of steel whose careful tentative movements were tantalizing in their slow deliberation.
There was still no sound from beyond the study door.
Then, at last, I heard a metallic click. Merlini stood up, turned the knob, and the door moved open.
Several framed enlargements of flying saucer photographs hung on the opposite wall. Below them, in a circle of light that dropped from the ceiling, was North’s desk. He sat in the chair behind it, his body slumped forward, his head resting on the green blotter.
On the floor in front of the desk lay a man’s coat.
The door opened wider. Against the left-hand wall was a secretary’s desk and four filing cabinets. Close by the cabinets Kane’s body lay face down on the floor, and near it, his overturned highball glass, a wet stain spreading out from it across the beige carpet.
“The rest of you stay put,” Merlini commanded. He stepped inside, strode swiftly to the open workshop door on the right, and looked inside. Then he turned and eyed Kane, scowling. I was still trying to believe what I saw.
Kane’s trousers and shoes were on the floor near his coat.
And Kane’s body was completely nude.
Merlini moved to the desk and bent above North. As he did so, Kane moaned and his body moved. His eyes opened and he began, in slow motion, to push himself up off the floor.
Merlini moved toward him. “What,” he demanded, “happened to you?”
Kane regarded him blankly, lowered his head, and rubbed the back of it with one hand. Then slowly, as if it hurt him to speak, he said, “Where the hell … are my … clothes?”
His eyes lifted as he spoke and he saw North at the desk. “Is he … all right? What the—”
Merlini said, “North is dead. What happened in here?”
Kane stared a moment, then his eyes closed and his hand again massaged the back of his skull. “I gave North the papers. He sat at the desk, started to read them. I … I heard something move—behind me. I started to turn and something hit me on the back of the head … Will someone, for Pete’s sake, get me some clothes?”
Anne, behind me, said, “Here.” I took the bathrobe she had found in a
bedroom, stepped forward and held it out as Kane got unsteadily to his feet and put it on. He lurched to an armchair beside the desk and sank heavily into it. “I’ve got one beaut of a headache.”
He wasn’t the only one. My head was beginning to spin. I took a quick glance into the workshop. It looked just as it had when I had seen it earlier—a workbench along one wall, tools neatly arranged above it on a pegboard, a stool, a small supply cabinet. The vise held a saucer-shaped disk of wood modeled after one of the photographs in the other room.
There was no place in either room where anyone could hide. Kane seemed to be having the same thought.
He asked Merlini, “You were in the living room all the time?”
Merlini nodded. “We were.”
“Then you saw whoever it was that knocked me out. He’d have had to leave that way.”
Dr. Price spoke suddenly, his voice not at all steady. “Anne, how long has that been there?”
He was pointing at the wall near the workshop door. About two feet from the floor several dark marks defaced the green-painted plaster—cursive, meaningless scrawls that a child might have made.
Anne’s eyes were round—and frightened. “It wasn’t there when I left the room.”
I knew what it was; I had seen Price’s photographs. He had wanted to find more of the alien script, but now he didn’t seem happy about his unexpected success.
I crossed to the wall, stooped, and ran a finger across the marks. They had been burned into the plaster.
Kane pulled himself from his chair and faced Merlini. “Who came out of this room? Who did you—”
It was Anne who answered. “Nobody, Charles. No one came out—no one at all.”
Kane stared at her. “But someone must have—”
“Only nobody did,” Merlini said. “And it’s high time we had some brass around here. Ross, there’s a phone on the desk. See if you can get Gavigan before the squad car boys arrive.”
Outside the door buzzer sounded.
“There they are now,” I said.
“Start dialing!” Merlini ordered and moved swiftly to the doorway in which Anne and Dr. Price still stood. “Anne, are the living room and study phones separate, or is one an extension?”