A Saucer of Loneliness

by Theodore Sturgeon

  “All right,” said Killilea.

  Hartog came up on the couch as if it had contained a spark coil. Killilea circled the couch and pushed his chest. Hartog sat down again.

  “Wh-what is this? The old badger game?”

  “A much better game than that, Croy,” said KilliIea.

  “Croy?”

  “You’re not going to deny it,” said Killilea flatly. “Can you use a jeweler’s loupe?”

  “Use a what? What are you talking about? What is all this?”

  “Here,” said Killilea. Hartog took the loupe hesitatingly.

  “I want to show you something.” Killilea scooped the silver lighter off the end table and sat down close to Hartog. He raised the snuffer-lid of the lighter and held it close to Hartog’s face. “Look through the loupe. Look right there, at the spark wheel.”

  Hartog stared at him then screwed the loupe into his eye Killilea took out a mechanical pencil and pointed with it. “Watch right there.” With the tip of his finger on the side—not the rim—of the spark wheel, he turned it. “See it, Croy?”

  “No. Yes I do. A little hair.”

  “Not a hair. A needle.”

  “It worked fine, Killy,” said Prue from the bedroom doorway. She had not changed. “He barely felt it.”

  “A little more refined than cutting someone with a finger ring,” said Killilea.

  “What have you done to me? Let me out of here!”

  “What did you do to him?” Prue asked coldly of Hartog, pointing at Killilea.

  “Is this some sort of a joke? I told you I was sorry about cutting you. What sort of childish—”

  “Shut up, Croy,” said Killilea tiredly. “I know who you are and what you’re up to.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. Why are you calling me Croy? What do you want from me?”

  “Not a thing. Not a thing in the world.” Killilea crossed to the door and locked it. “Just sit there and take it easy.”

  “You know your biochemistry,” said Prue. “You’re going to have heart failure, poor man.”

  Hartog looked at his thumb. “You mean you … that this is going to—why, you idiot, that won’t work unless I—” he stopped.

  Killilea grinned coldly. “Unless you what?” When Hartog didn’t answer, Killilea said, “Hospitality has its limits, after all. Much as we enjoy company …” The bantering dropped out of his voice. “You have the wrong idea. You’re going to die, Croy. In a half hour or so. I didn’t have the time or the apparatus to make up the factor you used on me. You’ve got a dose of nice, simple, undetectable hormone poison.”

  “No!” gasped Hartog. “You can’t! You mustn’t! You’ve got this all wrong, Killilea. I swear it! I’m not what you think I am.…”

  “Yes you are,” said Killilea blackly. “I think you’re a megalomaniac name of Jules Croy. I think you got on to my research in hormone-complex analogies. I think you used it to make some of the deadliest, most hellish extract that ever appeared on this Earth. I’m sure that besides myself no one but you knows about it, and inside the hour no one but I will have it. It will be safe with me.”

  “What are you going to do with it?” Hartog asked faintly.

  “Forget it. Pretend it never existed.… I see you’re not denying anything any more.”

  “I’m Croy,” said the man, with his eyes closed. “You’re doing the right thing with the factor. But you’re wrong about me. Believe me, you are. And you’re wrong about no one else knowing.”

  Killilea caught his breath “Who else knows?” he demanded.

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “He’s lying,” said KilliIea. “Croy, we have thirty minutes or so to kill, and there’s nothing that can save you now. Why go out full of lies? Why not tell the truth?”

  “There’s nothing you could do if I did … it’s too late now. I’m the only one who could help.” He looked up at them piteously. “Am I going to die? Am I really going to die?”

  Killilea nodded.

  “It’s a hard idea to get used to,” Croy said, as if to himself.

  “Tough,” said Killilea. He wiped his forehead. “If you think we’re enjoying this, we’re not.”

  “I know that,” said Croy surprisingly.

  “You’re taking this better than I thought you would.”

  “Am I? I hate the idea of dying—no, I don’t. It’s the idea of being dead I hate.”

  “Still the barroom philosopher,” Killilea sneered.

  “Don’t,” said Prue. “We don’t have to hurt him, Killy. We just want him dead.”

  “Thanks,” said Croy. He looked at Killilea. “I’m going to tell you everything. I don’t expect you to believe it. You will, though. That won’t help me, of course; I’ll be dead several weeks by that time. But as you say, I have a few minutes to kill …”

  He lay back. Sweat glistened on his upper lip. “You give me too much credit. I’m no scientist. I wouldn’t know a ketosteroid from castor oil. I’m just a little man with a big bank account. I s’pose everyone has his poses. My analyst once told me I had a Haroun-al-Raschid pattern. Dressing up in cheap clothes and pretending to be something less than I was … giving sums of money secretly to this one and that one, not to help, just to affect people. Intrigues, secrets … the breath of life to me. Breath of life … I feel awful. Is that symptomatic or psychosomatic?”

  “Symptomatic,” said Killilea. “Go on. If you want to.”

  “It was Pretorio who got on to what you were doing. One of the few real all-around scientists in this century. Immense ability to extrapolate. He saw the directions your researches were taking you, and he got alarmed when you quit reporting progress but kept on working.”

  “But how did he know?”

  “Through me. I own Zwing & Rockwood.”

  Killilea clapped a hand to his head. “I never thought of that!”

  “What, Killy? Who’s Zwing and Rockwood?”

  “Glassblowers! Work like mine calls for very special custom apparatus. And step by step, as I ordered apparatus—”

  “That’s it,” nodded Croy. “For Pretorio it wasn’t too tough. He was working right along with you the whole time. Sometimes he was ahead. Sometimes he would call and tell me exactly what piece of glass you’d order next.”

  “I thought I was getting fantastically good service.”

  “You were.”

  “What on earth was Pretorio after? Why didn’t he come to me? How did you happen to be working with him?”

  “What was he after? What he told me was that he was afraid you didn’t know the possibilities of what you were doing. He was so afraid of it that he didn’t want to tip you off by asking you. After all, he was the great extrapolator, you know. As for me, I was flattered. He had me completely spellbound. You just don’t know what a tremendous man he was, what an—an aura he had.”

  “I do,” said Prue.

  “I did absolutely everything he told me to do. Some of it I couldn’t understand, but I trusted him completely.”

  “And then he died.”

  “I went sort of crazy after that, I guess. Didn’t know what to do with myself. It was pretty bad. Then one day I got a call from a man with a husky voice. He said Pretorio had left him instructions. I didn’t believe him at first, but when he started giving me details that no one but Pretorio could have told him, I had to believe.”

  “Who was he?”

  “He never told me. I never met him. He said it had to be that way because he hadn’t Pretorio’s great reputation. But Pretorio’s work had to go on. Well, I followed orders. You know about Landey, and then Monck. I was blind, stupid, I guess. You’ll have to take my word for it that I injected both of them and introduced them to her—” he indicated Prue with his chin—“without knowing why they were dying. I thought it was heart failure, just like everyone else. I didn’t even know she was with them when they died.”

  “What about Pretorio? You infected him, didn’t you?”

&nbs
p; “No, damn it, I didn’t!” shouted Croy, his voice angry for the first time since he had started his narrative. “That must have been an accident—the one crazy accident that fell in line with the things I arranged. Or maybe he injected himself by accident. It doesn’t take much, you know.”

  “I know,” said Killilea grimly.

  “Well, the day came when I got orders to do the same for you. I didn’t know until then who she was. When I found that out I got some thinking done. It was like coming up out of a dream. I’d never doubted this man’s word any more than I had Pretorio’s, but now I did. I saw then what these deaths meant; I connected them with the Ethical Science Board that I was supposed to take over and run for this man; I saw suddenly how you four—Pretorio, Landey, Monck and yourself—would have stood in his way. I called him back and refused to go on with him.

  “He told me then what he was after. He told me what the factor was, what it could do, how the world had to be protected from it. He told me that you developed it, that unless you were stopped it would slip out of your hands and plunge the world into ruin. And about the Board, he said the world wasn’t ready for a group that would efficiently cross-fertilize scientific specialties. We haven’t caught up, as a culture, with the science we already have.

  “I agreed with him and promised to go on.”

  “Why—the man is crazy! And so are you, for swallowing that drivel!”

  “Who swallowed it? I knew then he was crazy, that he was responsible for the death of one of the finest men since Leonardo, that he’d made a murderer out of me and put you two through hell … so I made up my mind to play along with him until I could find out who he was. I was ready to kill him, but how do you kill a man unless you can find him, and how do you find him when you don’t know his name or what he looks like?” He spread his hands, dropped them. “And that’s all. I know it looks bad for me, and I guess I’ve earned what I’m getting. But—like I said … no one but me can find him, and by the time you get proof of that I’ll be dead. He’s going to kill you, you know. He’s got to. He can’t afford to have anyone else know about the factor.” Killilea strode across to the sofa and lifted a heavy fist.

  “Killy!” cried Prue.

  With difficulty Killilea lowered the fist. “You’re a liar,” he said thickly. “If that ingenious story is true, why did you cut my hand with the ring?”

  “I told you. I had to play it his way. But I didn’t inject the factor! It was something else—something that may have saved your life. Progesterone.”

  “Why on earth progesterone?”

  “Orders were to tell you where she was, see to it you went to her. You were looking for her; you wanted her back. It was a wonderful setup for his plan. I didn’t know too much about hormones, but I did what I could. I had the stuff compounded; progesterone and a large charge of SF—hyaluronidase, I think it was—to make it spread.”

  “What on earth is that?” asked Prue.

  “An enzyme. SF means ‘spreading factor,’ ” said Killilea. “Lectures later, Prue. Go on, Croy.”

  “You had enough progesterone in you to bank your fire for a week,” said Croy. “By that time I hoped to have the whole thing cracked.”

  “You sure were upset when you found me alive the next day.”

  “I was upset when I found you were there. I wanted to get you out of my sight. I didn’t know when my—my would-be boss might see you.”

  “Then why all the talk about finding me another chick?”

  “I wanted to see if the hormone was working. I wanted to find out where you stood with her. But when she came in, there was nothing I could do. It was all right, anyway. As long as you were together, he could assume only that you were taking your time in making peace.”

  “An answer for everything,” said Killilea. “How much of this do you believe, Prue?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, troubled. To Croy she said, “Why didn’t you tell us this before? Why didn’t you tell me tonight at dinner? Or even after you found Killy here?”

  “Do you know of a scientist worth his salt that would even speak to me?” Croy said wistfully. “The first chance I ever had to do something really fine for science—I wasn’t going to jeopardize that by getting slapped down when you found out who I was. Don’t you see that’s why I was so pleased to be able to work with Pretorio?”

  “I remember what Egmont said about him,” mused Killilea.

  “Egmont,” said Croy. “The crystallographer? Yes; a good case in point. He can’t stand the sight of me. When he found out I was behind the scenes in the Board membership, I thought he would explode.”

  “He did explode,” said Killilea. “Prue, we’ve got quite a story to tell the Egg.”

  “There’ll be time for that later. Killy, suppose he’s right? Suppose there really is someone else who knows about your factor—someone as dangerous as Croy says?”

  “We’ll hear from him,” said Killilea.

  “He won’t be as clumsy as I was,” said Croy. “I tell you you’ll be dead before you know who killed you.”

  “I guess I’ll have to chance it,” said Killilea. “You said if you lived you could find him for us. At least you can tell us how, so we can try.”

  “There would be only one way—to trace him when he calls me. He won’t call me after I’m dead.”

  Killilea watched Croy narrowly. “If you had a chance to catch him now, would you do it?”

  “Would I! If I only could!”

  “We’ve killed you,” Prue pointed out.

  “You did what you could; you were right as far as you knew. And I suppose I have to pay for what I’ve done … I’m not angry at you two.”

  “All right then. Either you’re the cleverest liar or one of the bravest men I’ve ever met,” said Killilea. “Now I’m going to remind you of something. You said that when he ordered you to inject me with the factor, you balked. You called him back. Give us that phone number and you’ve proved your point.”

  “The phone number,” Croy breathed. “It hadn’t occurred to me, because he always said it was useless to call except in the afternoon; he wouldn’t be there at any other time.”

  “Ever try it?”

  “No.”

  Killilea pointed to the phone. “Try it.”

  “What shall I say?”

  There was a heavy silence. “Get him here.”

  “He wouldn’t come here.”

  “He would if his whole plan depended on it,” said Killilea. “Come on, Croy. You’re the boy for intrigue.”

  Croy put his head in his hands.

  “I knew he’d balk,” snarled Killilea.

  “Shut up,” said Croy, startlingly. “Let me think.”

  He crouched there. He covered his eyes, then suddenly raised his head. “Give me the phone.”

  “Better tell us first what you’re going to say.”

  “Oh, Killy,” said Prue, “stop acting like a big bad private detective! Let him do it his way!”

  “No,” said Killilea. “He’s dying, Prue. And if he isn’t half-cracked just now, we know he has been. How do we know he isn’t going to pull us in the hole after him?”

  “Phone him,” said Prue evenly.

  Croy looked from one to the other, then took the phone from the end table. From his wallet he took a piece of paper and dialed. “You better be right,” Killilea whispered to Prue. He went to Croy and took the paper out of his hand and put it in his own pocket. Through the silent room the sound of the ringing signal rasped at them. At the sixth unanswered ring Killilea said, “Even if he’s there now, Prue, it might be just a trick.…”

  Croy covered the transmitter. “I haven’t time for tricks,” he said. And just then the receiver clicked, and a hoarse voice said, “Well?”

  Prue gripped Killilea’s biceps so hard that he all but grunted. Croy, pale but steady, said, “I’m in trouble.”

  “It better be bad trouble,” said the voice. “I told you not to call me this late.”
r />   “It’s bad, right enough,” said Croy. The reversion to an English accent under strain was quite noticeable. “She took me to her apartment. Killilea was here.”

  “Alive?”

  “I should say so. Alive and very much aware of what’s happening. I hit him with the poker.”

  “Go hit him again.”

  “I can’t—I can’t do that. Besides, he told her everything. She knows, now, too.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Tied up. What shall I do?”

  A long pause. No one breathed. “I’ll come over. Where is it?”

  Croy gave the address and apartment number. “And hurry. I don’t know how long he’ll stay under. Take you long?”

  “Fifteen minutes.” Click. Croy looked up at them. “Have I got fifteen minutes?” he asked. His face was wet.

  Killilea looked at his watch. “How do you feel?”

  “Not good.”

  Killilea went into the bedroom and came out a moment later with a hypodermic in his hand. “Lie down,” he said.

  “Relax. Relax,” he said again, touching the side of Croy’s neck, “completely. Better.” He slid the left sleeve up, squirted a drop of fluid upward from the needle, and buried the gleaming point in the large vein inside the elbow. “Just take it easy until he gets here. You’ll last.”

  “What is it?”

  “Adrenalin.”

  Croy closed his eyes. His lips were slightly cyanotic and his breathing was shallow.

  “Are you sure he’ll last?” asked Prue.

  “Sure.” Killilea smiled tightly. “Believe him?”

  “Mostly, I think.”

  “Me too. Mostly. We could be making an awful mistake, Prue.”

  “Mmm. Either way.”

  He took a turn up and down the room. “Morals and ethics,” he said. “You never really know, do you?”

  “You do the best you can,” she said. “Killy, you do very well indeed.”

  “Do I?”

  “You react ethically much oftener than morally. You react ethically as much as other people do morally.”

  “What are you thinking about?”