The Golden Age of Science Fiction Novels Vol 04

by Anthology

  As though his very statement had fathered the thought, two police cars swept into the intersection at Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue. The fleeing limousine was turning right to go down Fifth Avenue.

  The police cars were brought to a halt to effectively stop the further progress of the speeding limousine. Three other cars plunged in to make the box barrage of cars effective. The fleeing car was trapped. Barter must know that. If he did know, it proved that he could see everything that transpired. The next few seconds would show.

  - - -

  Bentley gasped as he put his hand on the driver's arm to have him slow down to prevent a wholesale pile-up in the busy intersection. He gasped with horror as he did so, for the fleeing car was now going crazy. It zigzagged from side to side. Now it rode the two right wheels, now the two left.

  And suddenly the driver swung nimbly out through the left window, his hands reaching up over the top, and in a moment he was on the roof of the careening car.

  "I've seen apes swing into trees like that," Bentley thought.

  While the car plunged on, the creature stood up on the doomed limousine, and in spite of the fact that the wind of the car's passing must have been terrific, the ghastly hybrid jumped up and down on the top like a delighted child viewing a new toy or riding a shoot-the-chutes.

  Suddenly the creature's right leg went through the top's fabric. It struggled to regain its footing as an ape might struggle to regain position on a limb in the jungles.

  At that moment the fleeing car crashed mercilessly into the two nearest police cars ahead. The men inside had expected the driver to slow down to avoid a collision. How could they know what sort of brain lurked within the driver's skull? They couldn't … and three policemen paid with their lives for their lack of knowledge as their bodies were hurled beneath a mass of twisted wreckage, crushed out of human semblance.

  - - -

  The hybrid atop the fatal car was hurled through the air like a thunderbolt. His body passed over the railing of the subway entrance before the Flatiron Building and Bentley knew he had crashed to his death on the steps.

  The police car had already come to a stop, and Bentley was running toward the subway entrance.

  The shapeless bleeding bundle on the steps no longer even resembled a man. Fortunately nobody had been struck by the hurtling body; and, miraculously enough, Barter's pawn was not yet quite dead.

  Moans of animal pain came through his bleeding lips. The eyes scarcely noticed Bentley, though there was a slight flicker of fear in them. Then, in the instant of death, even that slight expression passed from them. Bentley saw the scarline about the skull.

  And now Bentley knew that Barter was missing no slightest move, that he saw everything….

  For the ghastly hybrid on the steps raised his right hand in meticulous salute … and died. It was an ironic, grotesque gesture.

  Plain-clothes men gathered around.

  "Take his fingerprints," said Bentley quickly. "Then telegraph the fingerprint section, U. S. Army, at Washington, for this man's identity."

  An ambulance was taking aboard the three mangled policemen as Bentley stepped back into his car for the ride down to Washington Square to see what dread thing had happened to Ellen Estabrook.

  Chapter VI

  High Jeopardy

  Ellen Estabrook was almost in hysterics when Bentley reached her. She had been immediately picked up by plain-clothes men and had thought herself captured by minions of Barter. She had been panic-stricken for a moment, she told Bentley, and it had taken her some little time to be persuaded that she was in the hands of police.

  But Bentley's heart was filled to overflowing with gratitude that he had been able to safeguard Ellen against Barter. He never doubted it had been Barter who had telephoned her. And even now he fancied he could hear Barter's chuckle of amusement. Barter was watching, perhaps even listening. Bentley felt that the madman was just biding his time. Barter could have taken Ellen in this attempt, but hadn't tried greatly, knowing himself invincible, knowing that he could take her at any moment if it was necessary. And he might take her even if it were not necessary, since he had warned Bentley she must be removed.

  The police car raced back uptown so that Bentley could inform himself of any new developments in the Hervey case. Ellen snuggled against him gratefully. "You'll have to stick close to me," said Bentley, "until something happens, or until the exigencies of service draw me away from you. Then it will be up to Tom Tyler to look after you."

  "I can look after myself," she retorted spiritedly. "I'm over age and not without brains…."

  "Yet you went to Washington Square," said Bentley gently. "Didn't it even seem strange to you that I would have selected such a place as a rendezvous?"

  - - -

  Ellen turned away from him and her lips trembled. His gentle thrust had hurt her.

  "But I would have sworn it was your voice, Lee," she said. "And—I still think it was!"

  "I tell you I didn't phone you to meet me in Washington Square!"

  "But you told me you had talked with Barter for a long time on the headquarters phone, didn't you? Remember that you are dealing with the cleverest and maddest brain we know of to-day. What if he had merely talked with you to get a record of your voice? Suppose a voice were composed of certain ingredients, certain sounds. Suppose those ingredients could somehow be captured on a sensitized plate of some kind! Edison would have been burned as a sorcerer a few centuries before he invented the wax record. Twenty years ago who would have thought of talking pictures … voices permanently recorded on celluloid?"

  "But the talkie films merely parrot, over and over again, the words of actual people. When I talked with Barter this morning I certainly said nothing about meeting you at Washington Square."

  "But the tone, the timber, the frequency of your voice! Lee, suppose he had gone a step further than the talkies and had found a way to break the voice apart and put it back together to suit himself…?"

  "Good Lord, Ellen! It sounds crazy … but if you would have sworn that voice was mine, then mine it may have been, speaking words with my voice that I never spoke personally. But wait until we find out for sure. We're just guessing."

  But the idea stuck in his mind and he believed in it enough to tell Tyler, upon arriving at the Hervey residence, to warn every man named on the list of the Mind Master to make no appointments over the telephone, no matter how sure they were of the voices at the other end of the wire.

  It sounded wild, but was it?

  - - -

  That night Ellen and Bentley occupied rooms which faced each other across the hall in a midtown hotel, and plain-clothes men were on duty to right and left in the hall. There were men on the roof and in the lobby, in the garage, everywhere skulkers might be expected to look for coigns of vantage from which to proceed against Ellen Estabrook. Bentley knew quite well that Barter would not drop his intention against Ellen, especially since he had failed once already.

  Tyler and Bentley sat in Bentley's room drinking black coffee and discussing their plans for the next day. The latest paper had contained another manifesto of the Mind Master! the second man on his list was to be taken at ten o'clock the next day. The man was president of a great construction company. His name was Saret Balisle; he was under thirty, slim as a professional dancer, and dark as a gypsy.

  "But what does Barter want with all these big shots?" asked Thomas Tyler. "Just what is the point of his stealing their brains and putting them into the skull-pans of apes, if that's what you think he has in mind?"

  "The Barter touch," said Bentley grimly. "At first he probably intended to kill just any men and make the transfer, and then use his manapes to send against the men he wished to capture, and through whom he intended to gain control of Manhattan. Then he decided, since he had learned to control his manapes, by radio I suppose, that it would be an ironic touch to make virtual slaves of the "key" men he had chosen for his crusade."

  "But why the transplant
ation at all, even if the man is mad? He reasons logically. Only his premises are unthinkable … and he builds successful ghastly experiments on top of them…."

  - - -

  "He claims he wishes to build a race of supermen," Bentley answered. "His reason for the brain transference is therefore plain. An anthropoid ape has a body which is several times as hardy, durable and mighty as that of even the strongest man, but the ape has not the brain of a civilized man. A specialized man, one with a highly developed brain, generally has a very weak body. He's constantly put to the necessity of taking exercise to keep from growing sick. Therefore the ape's body and the man's brain would seem, to Barter, an ideal combination. That nature didn't plan it so troubles him not at all. He will make a fool of nature!"

  "I wonder if we'll get him. Nobody knows how many lives have been lost already."

  "We'll get him, Tyler. I'll bet anything you want to name that your men have walked back and forth across his hideout. I'll bet that decent, respectable people live within mere yards of him and do not know it. We'll get to him the second he makes a mistake of any kind. Maybe he'll make his first one when he tries to get Saret Balisle—Good Lord, I forgot something. Tyler, phone again and ask Headquarters if the coroner found anything strange about the head of the men I chased down Fifth Avenue."

  Tyler phoned.

  "Yes," he said, clicking up the receiver, "he had bits of metal which looked like aluminum in his scalp; but the autopsy shows that it came from outside somewhere."

  "It's part of Barter's radio control," muttered Bentley, "it must be! It has to be … and I didn't think of looking for it at the time."

  - - -

  Long before sunrise Bentley and Tyler repaired to the office of Saret Balisle, letting themselves in with keys which had been furnished them last night. It had been decided that Balisle would not try to run away from the threat of the Mind Master, but would be in his office as usual. If he ran, and got out of touch with the police, Barter would get him anyway and nobody would be the wiser.

  Balisle had grinned and shrugged his shoulders, but the wanness in his cheeks showed that he didn't take the threats lightly, considering what it was thought had happened to Harold Hervey.

  "I wonder," said Tyler as they walked through the cool of the morning to the Clinton Building on lower Fifth Avenue, where Balisle had his offices, "how Barter keeps his apes with men's brains from trying to break away from him when he has to divert his mental control to other channels?"

  Bentley hesitated, seeking a logical answer. It seemed simple enough when the answer came to his mind.

  "Suppose, Tyler," he said, "that you wakened from a nightmare and looked into a mirror to discover that you were an anthropoid ape? That you were incapable of speaking, of using your hands save in the clumsiest fashion? When it came home to you what had happened to you, would you rush right out into the street, hoping that the people on the sidewalks would understand that you were a man in ape's clothing?"

  "Good Lord! I never thought of that!"

  "You would if you'd ever been an ape. I know the feeling."

  "Then Barter's manapes are more surely prisoners than if they were sentenced to serve their entire lives in the deepest solitary cells in Sing Sing! How horrible—but still, they yet would have a way of escape."

  "Yes, simply break out and start running, knowing that the crowd would soon take and destroy them. Right enough—but even when one knows oneself an ape it isn't easy to destroy oneself."

  - - -

  They entered the offices of Saret Balisle and looked about them. It was just an ordinary office. They looked in clothes closets and in shadowy corners. They took every possible precaution in their survey of the situation. They looked for hidden instruments of destruction. They looked for hidden dictaphones. They were extremely thorough in their preliminary preparations for the defense of Saret Balisle.

  At five minutes of ten o'clock Balisle was at his desk, pale of face, but grinning confidently.

  There were men in uniform in the hallways, on the roof, in the windows of rooms across the avenue. Bentley and Tyler should have felt sure that not even a mouse could have broken through the cordon to reach Saret Balisle. But Bentley was doubtful.

  He went to the window nearest Balisle and looked out. Sixteen stories down was Fifth Avenue, patrolled in this block by a dozen blue-coats and as many more plain-clothes men. Saret Balisle seemed to be impregnable.

  But at ten o'clock exactly, a blood-curdling scream came from the room adjoining Balisle's, where some insurance company had offices. The scream was followed by other screams—all the screams of women….

  For just a moment Bentley and Tyler whirled to stare at the door giving onto the hall, their hands tightly gripping their automatics.

  "God Almighty!" It came in a choked scream from the lips of Saret Balisle, simultaneous with the falling of a shower of glass in the room.

  - - -

  Tyler and Bentley whirled back.

  A giant anthropoid ape stood on the window sill, and the brute's left hand held tightly clasped the ankle of Balisle, holding him as a child holds a rag doll.

  The ape swung Balisle out over the abyss.

  Tyler flung up his automatic.

  "Don't!" shouted Bentley. "If you shoot he'll drop Balisle!"

  Bentley felt sick and the bottom seemed to drop out of his stomach as the anthropoid, still holding Balisle as lightly as though he didn't know he held extra weight at all, dropped from sight.

  Tyler and Bentley leaped to the window, looked down. The ape had dropped safely to the ledge of the window just below. He held on easily with his right hand while Bentley and Tyler swayed dizzily. The anthropoid still held Balisle by the ankle.

  A head looked out of the window to the right. A frightened woman.

  "God!" she choked. "That beast came out of the clothes closet. We've been wondering why we couldn't open it. He must have been inside, holding it."

  A hundred men, all crack shots, stood helpless on roofs, in windows across the street, in the street below, while the anthropoid ape dropped slowly down the face of the Clinton Building toward the street.

  How would Barter lead his minion free of this tangle when, as was inevitable, the brute reached ground level?

  Chapter VII

  Strange Interview

  Bentley and Tyler were to learn in the next few minutes how great was the executive ability of Caleb Barter. He had created a mighty puzzle, each and every bit of which must fit together exactly. Time was important in making the puzzle complete—and the puzzle changed with each passing second. As the anthropoid went slowly down the face of the Clinton Building, Bentley was sure that Barter controlled every move and saw every slightest thing that transpired. He knew very well that of all the great organization which had been set to prevent the taking of Saret Balisle, not a man would now shoot at the ape for fear of jeopardizing the life of Balisle.

  And yet Balisle was being spirited away to pass through an experience which would be far worse than a merciful bullet through the brain or the heart. Bentley knew he would be justified in the eyes of humanity if he ordered his men to fire upon the anthropoid, even if he were sure that Balisle would die. But as long as there was life there was hope, too, and he couldn't bring himself to give the order.

  The ape dropped down the face of the building as easily as he would have dropped from limb to limb of a jungle tree. The sixteen stories under him did not disconcert him at all. Bentley had a suspicion about this particular ape, but he wouldn't know for a time yet whether his suspicion had a basis in fact. He couldn't think of a man—especially an old man like Harold Hervey—making that hair-raising descent. Yet … if he were controlled, mind and soul, by Caleb Barter the Mind Master…?

  "Tyler," said Bentley tersely. "The instant the ape reaches the street I'm going to order your men to fire. You will shout out to them now, designating which ones shall fire. Be sure they are crack marksmen who will drill the ape without hitting Bali
sle—and, by all means, have them wait so that the ape's fall won't send Balisle crashing to death."

  "Maybe I'd better tell them to rush him?"

  "Maybe that's better, but remember they're dealing with a giant anthropoid, in strength at least, and that somebody is likely to be fatally injured. In addition the ape may tear Balisle apart as soon as men start to close in on him. Barter will have thought of that, and all he'll have to do to make his puppet perform is to will him to do it. No, they'll have to shoot—and tell them to aim at his head and heart."

  - - -

  Tyler leaned out of the window and shouted to the men across the street.

  "Shoot as soon as the ape reaches the sidewalk!" he cried. "Be careful you don't hit Balisle."

  And from Balisle himself, muffled and frightened, came a sudden cry.

  "Shoot now! I'd rather fall and have it over with!"

  There was a moment of silence. Bentley almost gave the order to fire when the ape was at the twelfth story, but he held his tongue by a supreme effort of will.

  Balisle looked down. It must have been a terrifying experience to swing above such a horrible abyss by one leg, and for a moment Balisle lost his head. He screamed and started to grapple with his grim captor.

  "Don't, Balisle!" shouted Tyler. "You'll make him lose his balance. Hang on as you are and we'll get him when he reaches the street."

  "What good will it do?" screamed Balisle, his voice taking on a high keening note as the ape dropped again, this time from the twelfth to the eleventh floor. "He slipped it over a hundred men to get me this far. He'll find a way to beat you when he reaches the street, too."

  Bentley had a sinking feeling that Balisle spoke the truth; but even so, he could not see how anybody, even Barter, could walk through the trap which was being tightened around the descending anthropoid.

  It made Bentley dizzy to watch the slow methodical descent of the anthropoid. He could fancy himself in Balisle's position and it made him sick and faint. He understood the desperation which caused Balisle to make yet another attempt to battle with the ape.