by Philip Wylie
Quail was panting. “This is terrible. He’ll never come out of it.”
“He’s got to,” Mrs. Quail answered.
Quail stood up. “You stay with him and do what you can to get him up. I’m going to police headquarters.”
“But——”
“My dear, don’t answer me. Listen. Daryl is being kept by Carpenter in a house at Mirror, Long Island—or near there. I’ll write it down. Give me a pencil. Yellow house with gables in the center of an open lawn a mile or so from Mirror on the sea shore.” He wrote. “What time is it?”
“About four thirty.”
“Get him up as soon as you can. Tell him I’ve gone—and send him after me.”
Quail left the house—without his hat, without a coat. He found a parked taxicab.
“Hey!” he shouted.
“Sorry, buddy—but I’m staying right here.”
The street was filled with people. The air was vibrant with excitement. Quail did not hesitate to pull from his pocket the revolver with which he had guarded Baxter.
“You’re going to go down town to police headquarters and you’re going, by God, in the best time you ever made.”
“The streets are all closed.”
“Get going—or I’ll drop you and take the cab myself.”
The driver started. He managed to get through the streetfuls of people to the lower end of Central Park before he was stopped. A police whistle blew.
“Pull up!”
Quail thrust his head through the door. “Come here, officer.”
The policeman walked over to the car.
“Officer. I’m on my way to headquarters. I’ve got the dope on the man who blew up Grand Central. You can get into this cab and help me go down town—or you can stop me. It’s up to you. If you help me through, you’re taking a chance of getting a promotion and honors you never would have had otherwise in your life. If you stall me here, well—this is so important that I had the President of the United States on the wire at my house a few hours ago.”
The policeman glared at the man inside. “That’s a hot one.”
“Will you come along with me?”
“Yeah. I’ll take you around to the hoosegow. Come on buddy—get moving.”
“Officer, this is a matter on which millions of lives are dependent.”
“Yeah? Well, you can talk it over at the desk.”
Quail did not hesitate. The street ahead was almost empty. The man who stopped him was one of a half dozen policemen who were holding up traffic at the northern end of bloody Fifth Avenue. There was one chance. Quail drew his revolver and deliberately shot the policeman high up in the right shoulder.
“Down Fifth,” he said to the driver, “and if you stop again before we reach headquarters—you get the next slug.”
The car shot forward. Behind them, whistles shrilled, revolvers barked. At Fiftieth Street they turned west. The closer they came to the River the better they found the conditions for speed. The whole city was congregating in the mid-town vicinity. Only the immense disorder existing at the time saved them from capture. On lower Broadway Quail abandoned the taxicab without a word or a payment to the demoralized driver and ran forward through the press of people.
At police headquarters he asked above the turmoil for the commissioner. He was compelled to interview three men and to wait eleven minutes before he could see the commissioner. The earnestness with which he spoke—a controlled earnestness beneath which lay a furious intensity—was responsible for his introduction to the hectic chamber where the commissioner was in a sort of conference following his return from the scene of devastation.
“Who’s this?” he asked.
“This man says,” a middle aged inspector replied, “that he has authority from the President.”
Quail interrupted. “I’m the man at whose house Baxter is staying.”
“Baxter. Oh, yes, Baxter. You have something from him?” The commissioner’s attention was immediate.
“I have. I know where your man is, or will be. But we’ve got to go fast and cautiously.”
“Where’s Baxter?”
Quail hesitated. “Working things from another angle.”
“Shoot.”
The Professor shot. Forty years of oratorical training were compressed in the brief address he made to the commissioner and his assistants. He outlined the situation and suggested his plan of attack—a plan based on the knowledge he had gained from Carpenter’s condition and habits.
The commissioner hesitated. “Is that what Baxter told the President?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why he got his credentials to me?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t he come?”
“Couldn’t.”
The commissioner stepped out from behind his desk. He was about to make history. His voice was quick, sharp, penetrating. “Duffy. A tug at the South Street dock. At once. Painter. A thousand men there immediately. A thousand more in half an hour, Gaines. Quail—with me. General equipment—rifles with bayonets. Ten men from the bomb squad, Shaughnassy.”
A fresh blast of sirens rose in the tumultuous streets.
Daryl hung up the receiver in the phone booth. She hurried out on the road and turned toward Chrome Gables. Her most desperate chance was that Carpenter had returned during her absence. She was quaking with fear. Her strength was as exhausted as it had been on the tempestuous night when she had similarly escaped from the Mortland farm. She realized that she had provided no means of getting back through the charred hole in the side of the house.
Twenty minutes later she walked slowly across the lawn. She had arranged her hair with her hands, brushed the carbon from her clothes, and she went slowly. At the cellar door which they had used for entrance and exit, she knocked loudly. There was no answer. No one had been attracted to the small fire at Chrome Gables.
The sun was getting low. She walked around to the hole in the wall of the second story and looked up at it. It was six or seven feet above the highest point she could touch with her fingertips. She tried all the doors and windows. Occasionally she stared out upon the overgrown lawn to see if it was moving under human feet. Carpenter always chose his houses in lawns; that gave him a citadel from which he could oversee his immediate environment. The grass did not sway or bend.
Daryl began to collect the rubbish in the lawn; parts of a fallen rose arch, a railing from a summer pergola, clothes props, the limb of a fallen tree. Eventually she had constructed a rickety mound from which she could gain access to the charred hole. She scrambled up to it and pulled herself painfully into the big sitting room.
Everything was just as it had been. She went over the stage set which she had left and decided that her story would hold water. She would tell him about the lamp, the fight with the resultant fire, the drop to the ground, the walk, the difficult but faithful return. She lay down on the divan to rest—but not to sleep. Drugs could not have made her sleep in those agonizing minutes of waiting.
They became a half hour and finally an hour. The room reeked with the reminiscence of smoke and fire—but it was habitable. The hole in the wall and the crack beneath the door had ventilated it.
After something more than an hour had passed and she began to believe that Carpenter had seen the damage done to his house and taken flight, she heard him on the stairs.
Step by step he ascended. The key clinked when he took it from the nail, rattled in the lock. The door opened. She stood.
“Hello, darling.”
The voice was hoarse. “What is this!”
“Didn’t you see it from the outside?”
“No.”
“Then it must be a shock. The lamp fell over and caught the room on fire. I was scared to death. I tried to put it out and then I began to get woozy from the smoke. I started over to the door and fell down. When I came to, the fire was almost to the ceiling.”
She prayed for the emotional gift required to convince him. “I began to b
eat it—getting down at the bottom of the door when I needed air. The heat and the smoke were awful. You see”—her voice broke—“if I’d been in here and hadn’t put it out finally—why—the whole house—and I couldn’t get out——”
He crossed the room to the gaping orifice and looked out. “What’s that down there?”
“That’s how I got back.”
“Got back from where!” Deep thunder.
“From out doors.”
“And why did you go out doors?”
Tears flowed down her cheeks. “Must you be so cruel to me?”
“I asked a question.”
“Don’t you realize that you nearly had me burned to death?”
“I asked!”
“Why—why—the room was so full of smoke that I couldn’t stay in it—and when I got the fire out—it was only a little way to the ground. So I made the hole bigger and dropped outside.”
“Yes?”
“For a long time I just lay on the ground.”
“Go ahead.”
She sobbed. “Oh—and then—then—I got up and walked around.”
“Where?”
She bowed her head. “To the road.”
“Well?” He shouted.
“I just walked along the road. I—I—I was glad to be alive. Surprised to be alive. I—I thought I was going to be—be burned to death. So I walked a little ways—just to be—there. And then I came back. And I couldn’t get in.”
“And so?”
She felt his hands suddenly take her arms. She felt the nearness of him, the mighty force of his emotions. She thought that he was going to kill her. She continued stubbornly. It was easier to act when she could not see him, easier to depict false emotions when the thin air was an audience. His hands were trembling, bruising her flesh.
“And so I pulled all the things I could rummage from around the house into a pile and I came back.”
“Daryl!”
“Don’t—hurt—me—so.”
“Daryl!”
She knew, then. His lips pressed against hers. He pulled her toward himself. Abruptly he released her.
“My little Daryl! To think that I nearly lost you! What a fool I am.”
She wept softly.
“You’ll be mine?”
Fiercely she bit back a shuddering indignation. She nodded. “Only—first——”
His voice was soft and sleek. “First what, my love?”
“First we must have something to eat,” she smiled.
“Good lord! You’ve had nothing since breakfast.”
“No.”
“I’ll get you something myself.”
“I’ll help.”
He went back to the hall door, swung it wide, and spoke again. “We’ll ventilate this place a little. I’m the happiest man in the world!”
She smiled at him.
“Sit down,” he said with mock vehemence. “I’ll get the supper. It’ll have to be from cans—because everything else is spoiled. And after supper——”
“After supper what?”
“We’ll go away.”
“Away?” she asked nervously.
“Certainly. There’s no one around here now—but you can’t tell how soon there may be some one. And if some one noticed that burned place—they’d investigate.”
“We ought to cover it up—before it gets dark—so they can’t see our lights from anywhere.”
Carpenter assented. “I’ll do that. Why—you’re even helping me think.”
“Not much.”
He crossed the room and, taking an oriental rug from the floor, speculatively fitted it over the aperture. He dropped the rug and left the room. When he returned—a hammer and some nails floated across the chamber a yard or more above the floor. He stood beside the heap made by the oriental rug, then, for some time without speaking. After that, he lifted up the rug and nailed it over the hole.
The sight was familiar to Daryl. The nails drove themselves, an animated hammer suspended above them. After he had finished he lifted the rug to one side and peered out over the darkening lawn for some time. Then, without speaking, he went back to the stove, lit a burner, opened a can of soup, poured it into a pan which he wiped clean of the smoke that stained it, and sat in a chair.
Daryl was nervous. She wanted him to talk.
“Where were you to-day?”
The reply was meditative. “Did you hear an explosion this afternoon?”
“I didn’t notice one. I might have been unconscious. Did you—carry on your plans?”
“I wrecked the Grand Central Station.”
“Wrecked the Grand Central Station?”
“I blew it to pieces.”
“Oh.” She spoke softly. “Were there many people in it?”
“A few thousand.”
“Oh.”
“To-night’s extras—were like the rest. Alarmed, but not sane enough to see that they must agree. To-morrow——”
“What happens to-morrow?”
“Down stairs,” he answered, in a voice that had strangely altered, that was weary and slow, “I have enough cholera to start a serious campaign. I suppose you know that I am a bacteriologist?”
“Of course, William.”
His slowness in responding increased her inward and inexplicable apprehension.
“Well—I have germs. A little tube of them dropped into this reservoir. Another in that. A third introduced in a main. It’s not ordinary cholera—the disease my little bacteria carry. They’re invisible. Like the fungus. Remember the fungus?”
“Of course.”
“Well—it seems a long time ago. Anyway—they shall go into the water supply. And no microscope will be able to detect them. The stains will not touch them—or—if they do—the stains will be absorbed through the thin cell walls and detection will be made impossible. I’ve tried.”
“I see,” she said flatly.
“No one will know what it is or where it comes from. Day before yesterday two cats I caught died of it. They turned a sort of blue black. It took about ten hours after they ate the milk I gave them. They will find thousands of people dead in the street—in a few days. Millions. They’ll find them lying in their beds putrefying. They’ll go walking down the street—alive and well. A minute later they’ll throw up their hands and fall down. In half an hour those bodies will be dark blue. When they have stopped kicking and—the cats screamed horribly. I was afraid you would hear them.
“The hospitals will run over. Word will be sent out to boil the water, cook the food—and the germs will crop up somewhere else. Day after day it will continue. I shall go to Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston. Trains will stop on the railroads, the engineers dead, the passengers falling from the platforms like flies stricken by an oil spray.
“Boats that have put to sea will be found wallowing in the waves, and the wind that blows from them will be fetid with the rottenness of their crews and passengers. The banker will drop in his office. The broker will fall over his ticker and blacken. The doctor will topple into the bed of his putrescent patient. The few whom some caprice of nature has made immune will flee in stark terror from the charnel houses into which their cities have been converted.
“Then I shall make my demand again—persistently, stubbornly, remorselessly.”
“That—should bring them to terms.”
“If it does not—there are still other and more terrible possibilities. But in a day or two—I’ll feed the immortal rats with a meal that will breed them big as dogs.”
“Couldn’t you wait?”
Carpenter answered almost gently.
“No. I cannot wait. I must go on alone, now, as swiftly as I am able. I have already divided my supply of bacteria and hidden it at numerous points of vantage. A kick of my toe will begin the march of pestilence.”
“Wouldn’t you wait—William—until our—our honeymoon was ended?” She swallowed the last dregs of this bitter effort to win time for the world with a warm smile.
“No,” he said. He walked to the rug and looked out. It was wholly dark. The distant treetops rustled in the wind. The grass bent before it sibilantly. “I cannot wait for that which will never be.”
“I—I don’t understand.”
She felt him looking at her. “The lamp, dear, that was supposed to have started the fire—is not even burnished.”
“Why—what——”
“It’s no need to pretend any longer. I can see. I should have known all the time.” The very softness of his tone was an indication of his revelry in this new martyrdom. “I loved you—and you have tried to betray me.”
“I——”
“Don’t speak. The lies would cut me to the quick—if I still have a quick.” He laughed. “I am a fool. A senile fool. I have so magnified you above other women that the process has cost me my senses. Having put myself above the rest of the world I should have remained above it. I should not have sought that which does not belong to me now—which never belonged to me even when I was like other men. Poor child! Poor, brave child. Perhaps in losing you I love you even more.”
“William!”
“Ah! I’ll suffer for it. You can never understand me—will never understand me. I am a brain. You are a woman—in your small scope a noble woman. But you cannot stand between the mind and the emotions. You lit the fire. You burned a hole through the house. The red blotches I see on your arms are not blotches won to save yourself for me—but the marks of courage that attempted to spell my destruction. You talked to him?”
“You are cruel, William.”
Anger flamed evanescently in his voice. “Am I? Are you less cruel? These last days have been paradise for me. Now they are ended. You have outplayed me. But not now. When you continue to pretend this monumental hypocrisy of yours, I suffer. A lesser man than myself would kill you. Me—I shall turn you back into the world to increase the agitation against me, to explain who I am, to describe the spidery villainy with which I plot man’s fate.
“I’ll even let you go back to Baxter and take the chances of survival with him and afterward I’ll let you live in the recreated state. I’ll even make him a member of my scientific parliament. That will be a supreme jest—for him. Is he coming?”