John Russell Fearn Omnibus

by John Russell Fearn

  “Great, isn’t it?” Ron breathed, as he drove slowly down at last through Earth’s atmosphere. “If those television scenes we’ve had are any guide we’re going to get the biggest ovation ever …”

  “Yes, I guess we are,” Nan admitted, gazing moodily down on the ever swelling, detailing landscape.

  “What’s wrong?” Ron demanded, clasping her dead right hand. “You’ve looked down in the mouth now for — ages. If it’s Calver Doone still biting you just forget it. We’ll take care of it. I suppose that is what’s worrying you?”

  Nan seized on the excuse to give a quick nod of assent. In the back of her mind she was wondering if she ought to confess how ill she felt, how curiously lifeless her whole body was fast becoming … Yet still the dim hope that she was only suffering from excessive space strain, which would soon pass away, held her back from utterance.

  “To hell with Calver Doone!” Clay Reynolds snorted, as he saw Nan’s nod of assent. “If he starts anything he’ll get an answer — and damn quick!”

  And at this precise moment Calver Doone was standing gazing through the window of his private office window on the 152nd floor of the Doone Building. In appearance he was rather different from the popular conception of a self-made financier and industrialist.

  He was small, with narrow stoop-shoulders and a face as thin as an ax. In the lean, acid features and thin-lipped mouth there was something startlingly in common with a snake. It was the kind of face from which one instinctively averts the gaze.

  “Look at it!” he breathed, in a voice white with anger. “Flags, bunting, ticker-tape, bands — Look well, gentlemen, for we’re not gazing so much on the birth of a new age as on the death of our own!”

  Four men were grouped about him, specially summoned to observe this gala occasion. There was Grant Meadows, the oil multi-millionaire — lanky, square jawed, habitually silent; Rolinac, the thick-necked, big-stomached steel king; Pascal, the immaculate, vinegary banker; and Dilson, Chief of United European Air Lines, a light eyed little man with knobbly knuckles which he incessantly massaged with his palm.

  It was queer how Doone, for all his smallness, seemed to dominate the group. An observer would have felt compelled to look mainly at this little figure with the narrow back standing with hunched shoulders before the window. Sunlight set his thin gray hair into a haloed mist on his small head.

  “He ought never to have succeeded!” he breathed, thumping his claw-like fist on the window frame. “According to the telecast a moment ago he’s arrived back safely with several Martian specimens. His wife, and that engineer Clay Reynolds; all seem to be in good spirits … The world has acclaimed space travel. That means that air-borne travel and commerce will be slowly superseded by the newer, faster medium.”

  “But there will still be a need for air traffic!” Dilson, the Air Chief, said.

  “Don’t be a damned fool!” Doone snarled at him. “A need, yes — but what sort of a need? This man Ron Dawlish has a super fuel, manufactured somehow from minerals. It puts gasoline right out of the picture. Hear that, Meadows?” Doone grinned malignantly at the oil man.

  “He uses a new metal for his firing cylinders, and platino bases for his ship’s plates. That wipes our steel out. Hear that, Rolinac? So, our three interlocked interests — airplanes, steel, and oil are wiped out by this scientist who is in truth a one-man industrial revolution. And you, Pascal, as our banker, will feel the pinch, too …”

  Doone clenched his hands behind his back. “Now you see why I called you here. We’re heading for being a second-rate power in world affairs: in fact I can even foresee total bankruptcy! The State itself is behind this Ron Dawlish, and so is the Science Institute. Interplanetary travel and super-fast fuels have come to stay. In a few months Dawlish’s Corporation will be established and it is going to be a miracle if the Air Line shares are going to be worth the paper they’re written on.”

  There was a grim, deadly silence for a moment as each man, ruthlessly ambitious, saw his security crumbling before the winds of advancing science.

  The silence was broken at last by the gradual crescendo of a band coming down Wall Street. Presently, the procession passed down the center of the street amidst the snow of ticker tape and the cheers of the packed people.

  “Look at ’em!” Doone growled, glaring down on the superb automobile in which sat Clay, Ron, and Nancy, and beside them again the President himself and the white-haired chief of the Science Institute.

  “Makes one wish for a bomb,” the oil man muttered, rubbing his square jaw speculatively.

  “Something violent, anyway,” agreed Rolinac, his stomach pressing against the window ledge as he leaned to look.

  Then Doone turned back irritably into the office and as a matter of course the other men turned with him. Seating himself at his desk he looked at them each in turn.

  “We have got to act,” he said, his venomous mouth setting. “And quickly! Violence is only to be our last resort because by its use we can get too easily involved with the law. To begin with it seems it is a job for you, Pascal.”

  The banker looked surprised. “Me?”

  “You will get agents on the job to cajole Ron Dawlish into parting with his formula. Never mind what you offer him, but get it. If that fails then try and work a partnership with our Corporation. Whatever happens we have got to know what that formula is, even if we only get a lease on it. Promise anything until we get it. When we have it the legal elimination of Dawlish can be arranged somehow.”

  The four heads nodded. After thinking for a moment or two Doone looked at the steel king.

  “You control most of the country’s steel output, Rolinac. Ron Dawlish will need it in big quantities to build his space ship factories. You will see to it that every hindrance short of getting at loggerheads with the State is put in the way of delivery. And when delivery has to take place I’m not particular if the steel isn’t of a high-class grade. Understand? You, Meadows, will slow up all oil transactions. Dawlish will need oil in big quantities. He can’t use anything except oil for trucks and Diesel engines.”

  The oil man nodded, but he looked troubled.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Doone asked harshly. “Afraid you may lose on the deal, or something?”

  “Not exactly that. I was just thinking that Dawlish has mighty powerful influences back of him — even the President himself. We’ve got to be damned careful.”

  “I expect you to be,” Doone retorted. “It’s as much in your interests as everybody else’s to see that Dawlish is smashed utterly — or if not that then to see that his formula is known to us as well as to himself … As for you, Dilson, you’ll launch the biggest publicity campaign ever, telling the masses that air travel is proven to be safe but that space travel is still experimental. Avoid the libel angle, but lay it on thick. Understand?”

  “I get it,” Dilson nodded.

  “And if these efforts fail?” the steel king asked.

  “Then there are other ways.” Doone smiled thinly. “Forceful ways, which one way or another, will give us back the security we have got to have …”

  Chapter III

  It was not long after the speechifying and feting was over before Ron Dawlish began to feel the commercial pressures instigated by Doone — nor did he require much imagination to know the financier was back of them. But, aided as he was by Presidential and scientific support, he gradually succeeded, with Clay’s help, in establishing the first of a series of spaceship factories. His actual headquarters were in New York itself. From here Ron controlled all the details, while Clay became the foreman of works.

  Altogether, a couple of months after the return from Mars, Ron was feeling pretty satisfied with himself and fairly sure — so far at least — that he had beaten Calver Doone at his own game. Not that he had any illusions about Doone, however.

  “Whatever he does, Nan, he’ll have to put a brake on his efforts,” he said one evening, as he and the girl sat at dinner in the gath
ering summer twilight. “We’ve got all people for us and precious few against us — so he’ll have to watch his step!”

  Nan nodded absently, but said nothing. Ron lowered his knife and fork for a moment and looked at her steadily.

  “You look sort of tired, dear. Is this new place we took getting too large to handle?”

  “With domestics and labor saving devices? Not a bit of it, Ron — Don’t mind me. I’m still trying to get over that space trip. I think it upset my nerves a good deal.”

  “And I’ve been — and shall be — too busy to console you,” Ron sighed. Then he shrugged. “So there it is! But there’s a fortune to be made, and one has to put a lot of things on one side for that, eh?”

  She smiled an assent, handled her knife and fork with hands that were totally dead. Instead of her queer condition improving, as she had once hoped, it had gone worse with the weeks, spreading further about her body every day. And still she had kept from worrying Ron, loaded up as he was with responsibilities. But she had made up her mind to make a move this very night if Ron went out again to catch up on work at headquarters …

  Which he did, fifteen minutes later. He kissed her white cheek gently.

  “Take care of yourself, sweet,” he said softly. “Get to bed early and catch up on some sleep. Maybe you’ll feel better then. ’By, Bouncer …”

  Bouncer stirred slumbrously for a moment, then went to sleep again. Ron looked at him with a frown.

  “Seems damned dopy these days … Well, I’ll be back somewhere around midnight.”

  Nan watched him go as she stood at the window — then the moment his roadster had vanished down the drive she had Clements drive her to Dr. Andrews, the family physician since her birth twenty-five years before. In the surgery he listened with a puzzled frown as she explained her symptoms.

  “And it is progressive? It gets worse?” And as she nodded his frown deepened.

  “I’m getting to the limit of endurance, Dr. Andrews,” she said hopelessly. “You see, I don’t know if it will end in death, or what. My arms and shoulders have been dead for weeks anyway, and now it is affecting my legs and feet. Yet the puzzling part is that I can use my limbs perfectly even though they have no sensation. I’m — I’m frightened; I really am!”

  Andrews led her to a chair and switched on a battery of arcs. For a long time he examined her, testing reflexes, pulse, eyesight, hearing. At the end of it he was looking more puzzled than ever.

  “I just don’t understand it, Mrs. Dawlish,” he confessed. “In all my medical experience you are unique! You are perfectly normal despite your lack of sensation. I can only assume something or other — maybe this Martian cactus you speak of — is affecting your sensory nerves and rendering them inoperative. Certainly it isn’t a circulatory trouble. Your heartbeats and blood pressure are both normal.”

  Nan got to her feet slowly. “I see,” she said quietly. “You can’t advise me, then?”

  “I might if you cared to stay in my sanitarium for a week or so.”

  “No, no, not that. I don’t want to upset my husband for one thing, and anyway I might get well again. Thanks just the same.”

  Andrews held her coat for her, grasped the cold hand she held out. Thoughtful, bitter indeed, she pondered her strange malady as she was driven home. Still pondering, she entered the lounge — and came to a stop. For an instant she was shocked out of her own personal worries.

  In the center of the rug, stirring in a kind of horrifying blind desperation, was Bouncer. Obviously he did not hear Nan’s approach, nor did he see her even though his blank, terrible eyes were fixed upon her. Fear streamed through her as she looked at him. It needed no more than a glance to see he was strangely, outrageously ill.

  “Bouncer!” Nan’s hands went to her lips in terror. “Oh, Bouncer, what is the matter?”

  Instinct perhaps advised him of her nearness. He whimpered pitifully, lifted one paw, then the other, in a stiff sort of effort to reach her. She hesitated, uncertain what to do — then whirling round she whipped open the French window and shooed him out into the garden.

  Blindly, he loped out into the moonlight. Nan watched him fixedly, stunned by the sight of strong summer grass wilting into sear dryness everywhere he wandered. In no time the lawn was streaked in a crazy patchwork of withered trails as though Death himself had walked there.

  For a long time Nan could not rouse herself to grasp the situation. Her own symptoms, she knew, were identical with those of poor Bouncer, except for the fact that she, being stung much later by the Martian cactus, would naturally receive the effects with corresponding latency. But surely to God it didn’t mean that she was to become a blind, desperate thing like Bouncer, stunned of all normal faculties and so diseased that everything living around instantly withered?

  Dry lipped, she turned away — and it was at that very moment that her own sensations reached a climax. The moonlit grounds seemed to swirl dizzily as she was struck by a hammer blow of pain in the head. All sense of remaining feeling left her and she crashed helplessly to the carpet …

  It was as though she were dead. All sight, hearing, movement, and sensation had ceased. And yet she was alive, fully aware of the fact that she had fallen and was in the grip of an iron paralysis. Then at last — she knew not how long after — there came a change. For the first time since the deadly malady had manifested itself she was conscious of returning sensation. It flowed like a steadily swelling tide through her veins. She knew once again that she had arms and legs and nerves …

  Hearing, sight, smell: they crept back upon her. She stirred a little, became aware of the fact that Bouncer was standing right alongside her, licking her face furiously.

  “Bouncer!” she whispered, clutching him. “Oh, Bouncer, isn’t it wonderful? We’re well again —!”

  She sat up, gradually got to her feet and stood thinking. Bouncer headed for the garden again and Nan’s eyes followed to where he had left those trails of destruction. She hesitated, reached out towards the bowl of full-blown roses on the table.

  She grasped one of them … It withered into brown petals!

  Suddenly there blazed across her mind the remembrance of a Martian inscription — ‘To Him to Whom Eternal Life is Given, He an Outcast Shall Become!’ It was as though the truth had been yelled at her.

  “Bouncer,” she said slowly, as he came back to her, “you and me are alike! We don’t hurt each other because we’ve each got the same complaint, whatever it is — We’ve got to go away quickly, and find out what’s wrong. Ron mustn’t see us — mustn’t touch us …”

  She turned away quickly, reached for notepaper in the bureau. She wrote a brief note, left it with the manservant before he, had the chance to contact her in any way, then she went up to her room and hastily packed some clothes. Only one other thing she included — the vacuum phial full of cactus needles which she had retained from her Martian adventure …

  Ron Dawlish had completed his job of going over the plans for the next day’s production schedule with Clay Reynolds, when the phone rang. Ron reached for it.

  “Yeah? Dawlish speaking.”

  The voice from the other end was not a familiar one. Not only did Ron hear it in the receiver but Clay also through the relay speaker. His big, powerful face darkened as he listened.

  “You won’t know me, Dawlish, but that’s beside the point. I’m just going to give you a little word of warning. You must be pretty well aware by now that certain factions are not going to allow you to exert absolute monopoly over that space fuel of yours.”

  “Why not call the ‘certain factions’ Calver Doone and done with it?” Ron snapped, looking significantly at Clay across the desk.

  “Names are dangerous, Dawlish — on both sides. Up to now you have been smart enough to dodge a commercial embargo on your oil and steel supplies, and you’ve turned down the highest money offers for your formula. That was foolish of you, for any further obstinacy on your part is going to cost you dear.”
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br />   “Listen, you —” Ron began savagely; but he was interrupted.

  “You listen to me! You’ve a lot of power on your side; that’s freely admitted, but most men start to squeal when their personal friends and relatives suffer.”

  “What in hell are you driving at?” Ron roared.

  “I’ll make it as plain as possible. Either you agree to enter into partnership with Strat-American Airways Corporation by midnight — that is in forty minutes — or things will start happening which will bring you such anguish of mind you’ll be begging to surrender within a week! Forty minutes, Dawlish. I’ll ring you back.”

  The line went dead. Ron stared bewilderedly at the receiver, then he slammed it back on its rest. Suddenly his fury exploded.

  “Of all the damned, infernal impudence! Who in hell does he think he is, anyway? He can’t get away with it, Clay! We’ll have the authorities put the finger on Doone and Strat-American Airways before they know where they are —”

  “How?” Clay demanded grimly. “We haven’t an atom of proof beyond that phone call. Not a single thing we can pin on Doone personally even though we know he’s back of it. But that warning was meant in earnest all right — and we’ve got to heed it.”

  “Like hell!”

  Clay’s big hand clutched Ron’s arm across the desk.

  “Listen, Ron, come to Earth! We’ve got to think of something whereby we can gain time. Doone has agents everywhere — possibly even amongst our own staff. We can’t tell —”

  “Oh, don’t talk like an idiot!” Ron said hotly. He sprang to his feet and paced around savagely. Presently he stopped at the window and gazed out on the lighted canyon below. “One would think you want me to comply with Doone’s wishes,” he muttered. “I’d never have thought it of you, Clay.”

  Clay got up and came over to him, swung him round.