by Keith Laumer
“The little man tried, Mister. Let’s give him that.”
He walked past my chair, stooped for Stenn’s gun. I heaved, slammed against him, and the light chair collapsed as we went over. Arena landed a kick, then I was on my feet, shaking a slat loose from the dangling wire. Arena stepped in, threw a whistling right. I ducked it, landed a hard punch to the midriff, another on the jaw. Arena backed, bent over but still strong. I couldn’t let him rest. I was after him, took two in the face, ducked a haymaker that left him wide open just long enough for me to put everything I had in an uppercut that sent him back across his fancy desk. He sprawled, then slid onto the floor.
I went to him, kicked him lightly in the ribs.
“Where’s Williams,” I said. I kept kicking and asking. After five tries, Arena shook his head and tried to sit up. I put a foot in his face and he relaxed. I asked him again.
“You didn’t learn this kind of tactics at the Academy,” Arena whined.
“It’s the times,” I said. “They have a coarsening effect.”
“Williams was a fancy-pants,” Arena said. “No guts. He pulled the stopper.”
“Talk plainer,” I said, and kicked him again, hard—but I knew what he meant.
“Blew his lousy head off,” Arena yelled. “I gassed him and tried scop on him. He blew. He was out cold, and he blew.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hypnotics will trigger it.”
“Fancy goddam wiring job,” Arena muttered, wiping blood from his face.
* * * *
I got the wire and trussed Arena up. I had to clip him twice before I finished. I went through his pockets, looked at things, recovered my souvenirs. I went over to Stenn. He was breathing.
Arena was watching. “He’s okay, for crissake,” he said. “What kind of punch you think I got?”
I hoisted Stenn onto my shoulder.
“So long, Arena,” I said. “I don’t know why I don’t blow your brains out. Maybe it’s that Navy Cross citation in your wallet.”
“Listen,” Arena said. “Take me with you.”
“A swell idea,” I said. “I’ll pick up a couple of tarantulas, too.”
“You’re trying for the hack, right?”
“Sure. What else?”
“The roof,” he said. “I got six, eight rotos on the roof. One high-speed job. You’ll never make the hack.”
“Why tell me?”
“I got eight hundred gun boys in this building alone. They know you’re here. The hack is watched, the whole route. You can’t get through.”
“What do you care?”
“If the boys bust in here after a while and find me like this…. They’ll bury me with the wires still on, Maclamore.”
“How do I get to the roof?”
He told me. I went to the right corner, pushed the right spot, and a panel slid aside. I looked back at Arena.
“I’ll make a good sailor, Maclamore,” he said.
“Don’t crawl, Arena,” I said. I went up the short stair, came out onto a block-square pad.
Arena was right about the rotos. Eight of them. I picked the four-place Cad, and got Stenn tied in. He was coming to, muttering. He was still fighting Arena, he thought.
“…I’ll hold…you…get out….”
“Take it easy, Stenn,” I said. “Nothing can touch this bus. Where’s the boat?” I shook him. “Where’s the boat, Stenn?”
He came around long enough to tell me. It wasn’t far—less than an hour’s run.
“Stand by, Admiral,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where…you….”
“We need every good man we can get,” I said. “And I think I know a guy that wants to join the Navy.”
EPILOGUE
Admiral Stenn turned away from the communicator screen.
“I think we’d be justified in announcing victory now, Commodore.” As usual, he sounded like a professor of diction, but he was wearing a big grin.
“Whatever you say, chief,” I said, with an even sappier smile.
I made the official announcement that a provisional Congress had accepted the resignations of all claims by former office holders, and that new elections would be underway in a week.
I switched over to Power Section. The NCO in charge threw me a snappy highball. Damned if he wasn’t grinning too.
“I guess we showed ’em who’s got the muscle, Commodore,” he said.
“Your firepower demonstration was potent, Max,” I said. “You must have stayed up nights studying the tapes.”
“We’ve hardly scratched the surface yet,” he said.
“I’ll be crossing back to Alaska now, Mac,” Stenn said.
I watched him move across the half-mile void to the flagship. Five minutes later the patrol detail broke away to take up surveillance orbits. They would be getting all the shore leave for the next few years, but I was glad my squadron had been detailed to go with the flagship on the Deep Space patrol. I wanted to be there when we followed those star surveys back to where their makers came from. Stenn wasn’t the man to waste time, either. He’d be getting under way any minute. It was time to give my orders. I flipped the communicator key to the squadron link-up.
“Escort Commander to Escort,” I said. “Now hear this….”
THE LONG REMEMBERED THUNDER
Originally published in Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963.
I
In his room at the Elsby Commercial Hotel, Tremaine opened his luggage and took out a small tool kit, used a screwdriver to remove the bottom cover plate from the telephone. He inserted a tiny aluminum cylinder, crimped wires and replaced the cover. Then he dialed a long-distance Washington number and waited half a minute for the connection.
“Fred, Tremaine here. Put the buzzer on.” A thin hum sounded on the wire as the scrambler went into operation.
“Okay, can you read me all right? I’m set up in Elsby. Grammond’s boys are supposed to keep me informed. Meantime, I’m not sitting in this damned room crouched over a dial. I’ll be out and around for the rest of the afternoon.”
“I want to see results,” the thin voice came back over the filtered hum of the jamming device. “You spent a week with Grammond—I can’t wait another. I don’t mind telling you certain quarters are pressing me.”
“Fred, when will you learn to sit on your news breaks until you’ve got some answers to go with the questions?”
“I’m an appointive official,” Fred said sharply. “But never mind that. This fellow Margrave—General Margrave. Project Officer for the hyperwave program—he’s been on my neck day and night. I can’t say I blame him. An unauthorized transmitter interfering with a Top Secret project, progress slowing to a halt, and this Bureau—”
“Look, Fred. I was happy in the lab. Headaches, nightmares and all. Hyperwave is my baby, remember? You elected me to be a leg-man: now let me do it my way.”
“I felt a technical man might succeed where a trained investigator could be misled. And since it seems to be pinpointed in your home area—”
“You don’t have to justify yourself. Just don’t hold out on me. I sometimes wonder if I’ve seen the complete files on this—”
“You’ve seen all the files! Now I want answers, not questions! I’m warning you, Tremaine. Get that transmitter. I need someone to hang!”
* * * *
Tremaine left the hotel, walked two blocks west along Commerce Street and turned in at a yellow brick building with the words ELSBY MUNICIPAL POLICE cut in the stone lintel above the door. Inside, a heavy man with a creased face and thick gray hair looked up from behind an ancient Underwood. He studied Tremaine, shifted a toothpick to the opposite corner of his mouth.
“Don’t I know you, mister?” he said. His soft voice carried a note of authority.
Tremaine took off his hat. “Sure you do, Jess. It’s been a while, though.”
The policeman got to his feet. “Jimmy,” he said, “Jimmy Tremaine.” He came to the counter and put out
his hand. “How are you, Jimmy? What brings you back to the boondocks?”
“Let’s go somewhere and sit down, Jess.”
In a back room Tremaine said, “To everybody but you this is just a visit to the old home town. Between us, there’s more.”
Jess nodded. “I heard you were with the guv’ment.”
“It won’t take long to tell; we don’t know much yet.” Tremaine covered the discovery of the powerful unidentified interference on the high-security hyperwave band, the discovery that each transmission produced not one but a pattern of “fixes” on the point of origin. He passed a sheet of paper across the table. It showed a set of concentric circles, overlapped by a similar group of rings.
“I think what we’re getting is an echo effect from each of these points of intersection. The rings themselves represent the diffraction pattern—”
“Hold it, Jimmy. To me it just looks like a beer ad. I’ll take your word for it.”
“The point is this, Jess: we think we’ve got it narrowed down to this section. I’m not sure of a damn thing, but I think that transmitter’s near here. Now, have you got any ideas?”
“That’s a tough one, Jimmy. This is where I should come up with the news that Old Man Whatchamacallit’s got an attic full of gear he says is a time machine. Trouble is, folks around here haven’t even taken to TV. They figure we should be content with radio, like the Lord intended.”
“I didn’t expect any easy answers, Jess. But I was hoping maybe you had something…”
“Course,” said Jess, “there’s always Mr. Bram…”
“Mr. Bram,” repeated Tremaine. “Is he still around? I remember him as a hundred years old when I was kid.”
“Still just the same, Jimmy. Comes in town maybe once a week, buys his groceries and hikes back out to his place by the river.”
“Well, what about him?”
“Nothing. But he’s the town’s mystery man. You know that. A little touched in the head.”
“There were a lot of funny stories about him, I remember,” Tremaine said. “I always liked him. One time he tried to teach me something I’ve forgotten. Wanted me to come out to his place and he’d teach me. I never did go. We kids used to play in the caves near his place, and sometimes he gave us apples.”
* * * *
“I’ve never seen any harm in Bram,” said Jess. “But you know how this town is about foreigners, especially when they’re a mite addled. Bram has blue eyes and blond hair—or did before it turned white—and he talks just like everybody else. From a distance he seems just like an ordinary American. But up close, you feel it. He’s foreign, all right. But we never did know where he came from.”
“How long’s he lived here in Elsby?”
“Beats me, Jimmy. You remember old Aunt Tress, used to know all about ancestors and such as that? She couldn’t remember about Mr. Bram. She was kind of senile, I guess. She used to say he’d lived in that same old place out on the Concord road when she was a girl. Well, she died five years ago…in her seventies. He still walks in town every Wednesday…or he did up till yesterday anyway.”
“Oh?” Tremaine stubbed out his cigarette, lit another. “What happened then?”
“You remember Soup Gaskin? He’s got a boy, name of Hull. He’s Soup all over again.”
“I remember Soup,” Tremaine said. “He and his bunch used to come in the drug store where I worked and perch on the stools and kid around with me, and Mr. Hempleman would watch them from over back of the prescription counter and look nervous. They used to raise cain in the other drug store….”
“Soup’s been in the pen since then. His boy Hull’s the same kind. Him and a bunch of his pals went out to Bram’s place one night and set it on fire.”
“What was the idea of that?”
“Dunno. Just meanness, I reckon. Not much damage done. A car was passing by and called it in. I had the whole caboodle locked up here for six hours. Then the sob sisters went to work: poor little tyke routine, high spirits, you know the line. All of ’em but Hull are back in the streets playin’ with matches by now. I’m waiting for the day they’ll make jail age.”
“Why Bram?” Tremaine persisted. “As far as I know, he never had any dealings to speak of with anybody here in town.”
“Oh hoh, you’re a little young, Jimmy,” Jess chuckled. “You never knew about Mr. Bram—the young Mr. Bram—and Linda Carroll.”
Tremaine shook his head.
“Old Miss Carroll. School teacher here for years; guess she was retired by the time you were playing hookey. But her dad had money, and in her day she was a beauty. Too good for the fellers in these parts. I remember her ridin by in a high-wheeled shay, when I was just a nipper. Sitting up proud and tall, with that red hair piled up high. I used to think she was some kind of princess….”
“What about her and Bram? A romance?”
Jess rocked his chair back on two legs, looked at the ceiling, frowning. “This would ha’ been about nineteen-oh-one. I was no more’n eight years old. Miss Linda was maybe in her twenties—and that made her an old maid, in those times. The word got out she was setting her cap for Bram. He was a good-looking young feller then, over six foot, of course, broad backed, curly yellow hair—and a stranger to boot. Like I said, Linda Carroll wanted nothin to do with the local bucks. There was a big shindy planned. Now, you know Bram was funny about any kind of socializing; never would go any place at night. But this was a Sunday afternoon and someways or other they got Bram down there; and Miss Linda made her play, right there in front of the town, practically. Just before sundown they went off together in that fancy shay. And the next day, she was home again—alone. That finished off her reputation, as far as the biddies in Elsby was concerned. It was ten years ’fore she even landed the teaching job. By that time, she was already old. And nobody was ever fool enough to mention the name Bram in front of her.”
Tremaine got to his feet. “I’d appreciate it if you’d keep your ears and eyes open for anything that might build into a lead on this, Jess. Meantime, I’m just a tourist, seeing the sights.”
“What about that gear of yours? Didn’t you say you had some kind of detector you were going to set up?”
“I’ve got an oversized suitcase,” Tremaine said. “I’ll be setting it up in my room over at the hotel.”
“When’s this bootleg station supposed to broadcast again?”
“After dark. I’m working on a few ideas. It might be an infinitely repeating logarithmic sequence, based on—”
“Hold it, Jimmy. You’re over my head.” Jess got to his feet. “Let me know if you want anything. And by the way—” he winked broadly—“I always did know who busted Soup Gaskin’s nose and took out his front teeth.”
II
Back in the street, Tremaine headed south toward the Elsby Town Hall, a squat structure of brownish-red brick, crouched under yellow autumn trees at the end of Sheridan Street. Tremaine went up the steps and past heavy double doors. Ten yards along the dim corridor, a hand-lettered cardboard sign over a black-varnished door said “MUNICIPAL OFFICE OF RECORD.” Tremaine opened the door and went in.
A thin man with garters above the elbow looked over his shoulder at Tremaine.
“We’re closed,” he said.
“I won’t be a minute,” Tremaine said. “Just want to check on when the Bram property changed hands last.”
The man turned to Tremaine, pushing a drawer shut with his hip. “Bram? He dead?”
“Nothing like that. I just want to know when he bought the place.”
The man came over to the counter, eyeing Tremaine. “He ain’t going to sell, mister, if that’s what you want to know.”
“I want to know when he bought.”
The man hesitated, closed his jaw hard. “Come back tomorrow,” he said.
Tremaine put a hand on the counter, looked thoughtful. “I was hoping to save a trip.” He lifted his hand and scratched the side of his jaw. A folded bill opened on the counter. T
he thin man’s eyes darted toward it. His hand eased out, covered the bill. He grinned quickly.
“See what I can do,” he said.
It was ten minutes before he beckoned Tremaine over to the table where a two-foot-square book lay open. An untrimmed fingernail indicated a line written in faded ink:
“May 19. Acreage sold, One Dollar and other G&V consid. NW Quarter Section 24, Township Elsby. Bram. (see Vol. 9 & cet.)”
“Translated, what does that mean?” said Tremaine.
“That’s the ledger for 1901; means Bram bought a quarter section on the nineteenth of May. You want me to look up the deed?”
“No, thanks,” Tremaine said. “That’s all I needed.” He turned back to the door.
“What’s up, mister?” the clerk called after him. “Bram in some kind of trouble?”
“No. No trouble.”
The man was looking at the book with pursed lips. “Nineteen-oh-one,” he said. “I never thought of it before, but you know, old Bram must be dern near to ninety years old. Spry for that age.”
“I guess you’re right.”
The clerk looked sideways at Tremaine. “Lots of funny stories about old Bram. Useta say his place was haunted. You know; funny noises and lights. And they used to say there was money buried out at his place.”
“I’ve heard those stories. Just superstition, wouldn’t you say?”
“Maybe so.” The clerk leaned on the counter, assumed a knowing look. “There’s one story that’s not superstition….”
Tremaine waited.
“You—uh—paying anything for information?”
“Now why would I do that?” Tremaine reached for the door knob.
The clerk shrugged. “Thought I’d ask. Anyway—I can swear to this. Nobody in this town’s ever seen Bram between sundown and sunup.”
* * * *
Untrimmed sumacs threw late-afternoon shadows on the discolored stucco facade of the Elsby Public Library. Inside, Tremaine followed a paper-dry woman of indeterminate age to a rack of yellowed newsprint.
“You’ll find back to nineteen-forty here,” the librarian said. “The older are there in the shelves.”
“I want nineteen-oh-one, if they go back that far.”