Collected Fiction (1940-1963)

by William P. McGivern

  “Does it hurt?” the gaunt spectre asked solicitously.

  “I wish the guy would try it again,” I said, “from the front.”

  “Sometimes we are forced to take measures that are repugnant to us,” the tall figure bowed slightly.

  It sounded phony as hell to me. “What is it you want?” I asked bluntly.

  “Nothing but a little information, namely, the whereabouts of a certain, small leather-bound black book.”

  “You missed the boat,” I said. “The book is gone.”

  “I am Morea Khan,” the tall figure said with a curious smile. “I know that you had the book, but I don’t know where you have hidden it. I am giving you the opportunity to tell me. The cause for which I have labored decades will not be impeded by an obstinate tongue, I assure you. I have already gone to great lengths to secure that book, but I have met with disappointments. I warn you my patience is running short. The girl didn’t have it, so you must.”

  My hands gripped the arms of the chair. “What was that you said?” I asked thickly.

  “The girl didn’t have it,” Morea Khan repeated sharply. “What—”

  He never finished that sentence. I left my chair like I was shot from a catapult, driving straight for that scrawny throat. The man responsible for Joan’s condition, for Joan’s disappearance was within reach of my hands and that was all I asked.

  But I didn’t figure with that whop on the head I’d got. It must have taken a lot out of me because my knees buckled, almost throwing me forward on my face. But I caught myself in time and let a long looping right fly at Khan’s moon-like face. It landed and the tall, stringy figure toppled, backward, a strangely shrill cry of pain and rage escaping his teeth.

  I tried to follow up but something had happened to my arms. They seemed to weigh tons and before I could lift them my legs gave way and I felt myself sprawling on the floor, the pain rushing into my head again. I didn’t pass out because I could feel Morea Khan kicking me in the ribs, and then I felt his arms around me dragging me over the floor. The next thing I knew I was sprawled in the chair again, my head ready to explode.

  WHEN I opened my eyes I got a slight satisfaction from the dark swollen bruise on Morea Khan’s cheek and the thin trickle of blood that ran from his lip.

  “That was foolish,” he said, dabbing at his lip with a silk handkerchief, “and you will regret it. You might as well know that escape from here is impossible.”

  “Where is this joint?” I asked.

  “About thirty miles, from the city. It is ostensibly the home of a wealthy importer. The suspicions of your stupid police are completely lulled. It is as well armed as any fortress. The walls are electrically charged. Sentries patrol the grounds armed with sub machine guns. We could stand off an army here quite comfortably. It is maintained by the cause. No expense has been spared in making the entire estate impregnable.”

  “Kidnapping’s a pretty serious business,” I remarked. “You’ve got several of them to worry about.”

  “It is not I who worry,” Khan returned, “but you.”

  “You got something there,” I said. “Where is the black book?” Khan asked again and this time his voice sank to almost a whisper.

  “Is this a game?” I asked. “You know who got the book. Probably one of the guys working for you.”

  “You lie,” Khan hissed.

  I didn’t like that.

  “Now listen, you comic opera emperor,” I said. “A little guy with a silly smile took the book away from me. A little guy with striped trousers and a black Homburg.”

  I hadn’t been looking at Khan while I was speaking and when I raised my eyes and looked at him I received a shock. He was sagging against his desk, his saffron skin becoming a mottled shade of green.

  The breath was whistling in and out of his lungs as if they were made of wicker.

  “You are lying,” he said hoarsely. “He can’t—you are making this up.”

  “His name was Wu,” I said.

  Morea Khan stiffened and then jabbed a buzzer on his desk. He waited as if in a trance until two monkey-like little brown men bounced into the room. Then he turned to them and rattled off a string of words in some foreign tongue. The effect on the two men was startling. They backed away from Morea Khan, their brown skins lightening. Then they looked carefully around them and bowed low and backed from the room.

  Morea Khan seemed to have regained his composure. The mirthless, sadistic smile was playing around his lips again.

  “There are many things you could tell me,” he said, “inasmuch as you know of Mr. Wu. There are many colors in the tapestry I see that do not blend. Your cooperation will be greatly appreciated and will not be unrewarded.”

  “Go to hell,” I said.

  Morea Khan’s fathomless black eyes glowed strangely and an inscrutable, satanic smile twisted his features.

  “You will be more obliging in a short while,” he said smoothly. “You will talk. Ah yes, you will talk. And when you start you will never stop.”

  It wasn’t the most pleasant thing in the world to listen to.

  “What’s the gag?” I asked, trying hard to sound as if I didn’t care.

  “You will see,” Morea Khan said politely. “If you will accompany me into the next room I shall show you the little device that will spur you to loquacity.”

  He started to turn and then he paused, listening. In a second I heard it too. The wild, lonely baying of hounds.

  Khan was frowning.

  “My little pets,” he said, “are uneasy.” He strode to the wall and lifted a phone off a hook.

  “Inspect the grounds,” he ordered. “Check everything . . . listen and you will know why.” He hung up the phone a minute later and when he faced me again I could see that he was smiling slightly. “It is nothing,” he said, “so don’t allow your hopes to rise. Merely a passing tourist car that attracted the attention of the hounds.”

  A minute passed and I said nothing. A tourist car could go a long way in a couple of minutes. But the hounds were still baying. Khan did not notice but I kept listening and hoping as the weird, incredibly eerie baying of the hounds moaned through the air.

  CHAPTER IV

  The Mind-Draining Machine

  MOREA KHAN stepped to the door, still holding his automatic trained on the middle of my skull. He shouted something over his shoulder, and footsteps shuffled down the dark hallway. Then two of his Eurasian-men-friday were beside him. Khan said something else to them, his grin exposing that row of gold teeth, and they stepped toward me.

  The dark little Asiatics grabbed my arms before I could make a move. Not that I might have wanted to, however, for my head was splitting from that blow I’d received hours before. I went along docilely enough as the procession—with Khan’s tall, gaunt frame leading—wound down a series of darkened stairways and through several more halls.

  I was trying to make my brain function through the haze of pain that blurred my eyes with every step I took. Trying, in some fashion, to put the pieces of this damnable puzzle together. Some parts were fitting, but only the obvious ones. It was obvious, for example, that Joan was here in this vast mansion—somewhere. I could take Khan’s word for that, I was grimly certain. But the gaunt Asiatic thug hadn’t mentioned Professor Cartwright. However, unless the old man had been dispatched before now, he must also be somewhere around here, Khan’s prisoner.

  And the mysterious Mr. Wu—There didn’t seem to be any manner of fitting him into the puzzle, yet. There was the black book, of course. Mr. Wu must have been in possession of it at this moment. Even though Morea Khan wasn’t particularly pleased about it. I wasn’t certain that Khan believed my story about the black book, and as we turned down the last flight of stairs into a sort of dank cellar, I had the definite feeling that Khan suspected I knew what the contents of that book were—even though I didn’t have it on my person.

  Another thing that was sickeningly evident was that my lean and hungry wolfish chum, Kh
an, was probably going to do a little plain and fancy probing on me for information about the book.

  I didn’t know a thing about it. In fact, Khan really must have known more about it at that instant than I did. However, even if I’d known every last syllable, I felt certain that he wasn’t going to drag a word out of me.

  We had stopped in the darkness of the cellar passage, and were standing before a great iron door. Khan had some keys which he was fumbling with, and in a moment the door swung inward and one of the Asiatics flicked a switch that threw the subterranean chamber into a sudden brilliance. I gasped involuntarily. The place was a large, clean, elaborately equipped laboratory!

  I was inside and jammed down into another chair, the little Asiatics standing guard over me, when I heard other steps outside. And then a second procession filed through the door. A procession of three little thugs—looking identical to the Asiatics who stood guard over me—escorting a tall, gray, lean figure in badly wrinkled and slightly bloody tweeds. It took me less than three seconds to recognize that man. For I had seen more than a hundred pictures of him in the last twenty-four hours. It was Professor Engles—the Einstein of electricity!

  KHAN must have been watching my face closely, for he grinned again, those gold teeth gleaming. And drawing his breath in sharply, he said:

  “So, Mr. Burke, you recognize our prisoner, eh?”

  I couldn’t say a word. Even if there had been anything to say, anything worth saying. It was just as though a heavy boot had just kicked the breath out of me. Engles—so this explained his disappearance!

  Everything was wheeling around so wildly in my brain that I wasn’t able to do anything but stare glassily at Professor Engles. The old man seemed drugged. At any rate, he didn’t look right or left, didn’t even seem to notice Khan or myself. He just slumped down in the chair they shoved up behind him, staring dully ahead.

  And then the little Asiatics were rolling some equipment out from behind a screen in the far corner of the laboratory. A thing that looked at first glance like a cross between a dental chair and the Hot Seat itself. Wired, with a dome-like headpiece over the top of it.

  “We don’t need the black book to use this properly, as you might know, Mr. Burke,” Khan hissed softly. “However, if Professor Engles’ mind is ever to be restored, so that we may use it further, the book will be necessary. I’ll leave that up to you—for the moment.”

  It was still Alpha and Omega to me, so there wasn’t anything I could say in answer, even though Khan was evidently expecting me to say something. I just sat there, glaring at him, trying to figure it out. Then they were fooling with the machine. They rolled a cart-table up beside it. A table on which there was apparatus closely resembling one of those home-recording instruments they sell with radios these days. It was a sort of gigantic dictagraph, with records that were at least five times the normal size.

  The little Asiatics, under Khan’s direction, hooked up the cart-table dictagraph with the strange chair. At one point during the hooking-up process, Khan turned to me and gave me that golden grin.

  “Professor Cartwright is a clever man, eh, Burke?”

  At last the equipment seemed to be arranged to suit Khan, and he gave a clipped order, that resulted in Professor Engles’ guards pulling him up from his chair and dragging him over to the wired seat beside the dictagraph. They clamped him into this with remarkable ease, for he made no attempt to struggle. Then they slid the headpiece down over him.

  “Perhaps you have never seen Cartwright’s very remarkable invention in operation, Mr. Burke,” Khan said. “This should be an interesting demonstration, in that case.”

  More clipped, swift orders in that strange dialect, and the Asiatics jumped around like monkeys on a stick while Khan took his place beside Professor Engles who was now strapped helplessly in the chair. Khan’s clawlike hand touched a lever beside the dictagraph, and a record-wax began revolving swiftly on it. Then his hand slid to another lever.

  “We had to drug Professor Engles to keep him quiet. But it should work well, nevertheless,” he smirked. And at that, his hand threw down on the second lever.

  Instantly the room was filled with a peculiar buzzing, and for a split second the lights in the laboratory seemed to dim. Then, incredibly, Professor Engles was talking!

  It wasn’t the man’s voice that startled and shocked me. It was the tone of it—monotonous, and robot-like, droning!

  Professor Engles was rambling, almost incoherently, like a child reciting a very lengthy and terribly stupid verse!

  THE words he said were jumbled, and yet they weren’t, they were like the conglomeration of news broadcasts, conversations with friends, snatches of songs that a man might hum inwardly. It was weird, ghastly, somehow spine-chilling!

  And then figures began to tumble from his lips, figures that mingled with the other stuff, formulae, and more mumbo-jumbo of everyday expressions and sentences. And all the while, the big wax record on the cart beside him kept whirring around and around. And then I began to see. The machine was recording all this, everything Engles was uttering!

  I must have been sitting there open-mouthed in the astonishment I felt. For Khan, grinning mockingly at me, said over the muttered words of Professor Engles:

  “Your acting, if it is acting, is very commendable. As you undoubtedly realize, Mr. Burke, the Professor is being drained—syllable by syllable—of every last bit of conscious and subconscious information that has registered on his brain since infancy. The brain, as you undoubtedly realize, has a perfect record of every last fragment of knowledge possessed by its owner. Professor Engles has a very valuable brain, with especially valuable knowledge, for our Cause.”

  My disbelief must have been still stamped on my face, for Khan continued.

  “Every word uttered by the Professor is being impressed on the wax record you see beside him. Then, since the information from him is being drained from this present year backward, we will play our record in reverse, once we have our information, and thus have access to every last scrap of knowledge gained by the Professor—in logical succession—since the time of his childhood.”

  But for the last few words I hadn’t been listening closely to Morea Khan. My mind had been filling in the gaps in the puzzle as quickly as his words segmented them. The “Cause”—this was the third time that he had mentioned the word. And since the arrival of Professor Engles it was apparent that the old scientist now sitting in the chair and being drained of his knowledge had especially valuable information which Khan wanted, for the benefit of a mysterious “Cause!”

  I looked up and saw Khan’s cold eyes regarding me curiously. Obviously, he was still undecided as to how much I really knew about the whole thing. He had deliberately fed me scraps of information in an effort to draw some outburst from me that might show him where I stood.

  But I tore my eyes from Khan’s mocking gaze, and tried desperately to concentrate, tried to shut out Professor Engles’ monotonous muttered recitation. This machine was Cartwright’s, of course; that was apparent by now. I’d known, naturally, that Cartwright had been working on something or other for the past two years, but since it had been obviously none of my business, I’d never gotten nosey. But Khan, knowing of my closeness with the Cartwright family, and of my engagement to Joan, hadn’t been at all certain of what I knew especially after my having accidentally fallen upon that damnable little black book.

  Engles was now perfectly worked into my jigsaw. His work with the National Defense Commission on a new weapon was reason enough for Khan and his “Cause” to bring the old Professor here. They wanted knowledge about that weapon—and with Cartwright’s machine were getting it. All of which fitted Joan and her father, Professor Cartwright closer into the jigsaw. With a machine such as Cartwright’s, anyone using it to such a devilish advantage could tap the greatest brains in the world and gain access to an utterly incredible fund of knowledge. For any outfit labeling itself as a “Cause,” this power would be terribly imp
ortant!

  And suddenly, through all this, the thought that had been plucking insistently at my subconscious, hit me with a wallop. Joan—for the first time I realized what had happened to her, why she had been in the complete coma when I found her. It was crystal clear now, sickeningly so. Joan had been drained of knowledge in precisely the same fashion that Professor Engles was at this moment!

  And suddenly, I became conscious of the room again, and of Khan grinning like some ghastly devil. The noise that had jerked my mind back to my surroundings had been a sudden, queer, high-pitched whine.

  CHAPTER V

  I Go Into Action

  ENGLES’ face had grown deadly, sickeningly white, and his lips were moving at an utterly astonishing rate of speed. So fast that they were a blur of motion. And the whine was coming from his lips!

  Khan’s gold teeth were exposed in a grin once more.

  “I have adjusted the rheostat on this device to a much greater speed. At this rate, Professor Engles is imparting ten years knowledge in less than a minute’s actual time. Of course, in replaying the record, we can slow it down to whatever pace we desire. The blurred, whining sound you hear is nothing more than Engles’ words blurring into one another as he speaks faster than any man has ever spoken.”

  I had to say something, although it would have been mad to move. The Asiatics were still standing guard over me. Both had guns and were far enough out of reach to make the prospect of trying to disarm them an impossible one. But I had to say something.

  “Damn your stinking hide, Khan!” I shouted.

  But the yellow devil only grinned goldenly at me.

  “You will take Professor Engles’ place in this machine once he is finished, Mr. Burke. I have decided that I can obtain all the information I want from you in that manner.”

  I had expected something like that, and was about to snarl something in reply when there was a sudden rattling at the iron door that led to the cellar passage. Khan wheeled, then moved to the great grilled door, throwing a latch and opening it slightly. A voice, high and slightly hysterical, shrilled something in that strange dialect, and Khan answered sharply. He slammed the door, turning to me.