Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (106 page)

Police Chief Corbett eventually found one in the top ward of the overflowing Center Hospital. According to him, this fellow was the only employee of the National Camera Company among three thousand survivors rescued from what was left of Silver City.

The patient was bandaged from head to feet, his eyes being covered, only his mouth exposed. A strong odor of tannic acid exuded from him, bore mute witness to his extensive burns. Graham sat at one side of the bed, Corbett at the other.

Aweary nurse said, “Five minutes—no more! He’s very weak but stands a chance if you’ll give him one.”

Putting his lips close to a bandage-covered ear, Graham asked, “What exploded?”

"The tanks,” came a faint whisper.

“Silver nitrate?” inquired Graham, doing his best to convey incredulity in his tones.

“Yes.”

“Can you explain it?”

“No.” A dry, swollen and discolored tongue licked along cotton fringes over the burned lips.

“What was your job?” Graham put quietly. “Lab worker.”

“Research?”

“Yes.”

Graham wasted a meaning glance on the listening Corbett, then said to the man on the bed, “On what work were you engaged at the time of the disaster?” There was no reply. The mouth closed under its wrappings, the breathing became inaudible. Alarmed, Corbett signaled a nurse.

Hurrying up, the girl fussed over the patient. “He’s all right. You’ve got two more minutes.” She dashed away, her face pale, lined with long duty.

Graham put his question again, got no answer. With a frown, he signed to Corbett to take over.

“This is Police Chief Corbett, of Boise,” declared that official, severely. “Your questioner is a member of the United States Intelligence Service. More than thirty thousand people died in yesterday’s blast, and the few remaining are in no better shape than you. The discovery of the cause of this tragedy is more important than your loyalty to your employers. I advise you to speak.”

The mouth remained stubbornly closed.

“If you refuse to speak,” Corbett continued, “means may be found to—” Waving him into silence, Graham brought his own lips near the recumbent form, and murmured, “Doctor Beach authorizes you to tell all you know.”

“Beach!” exclaimed the man on the bed. “Why, he warned me to say nothing!”

“He warned you?” Graham was thoroughly startled. “He warned you when? Has he seen you
here?”

“An hour before you came,” admitted the other, in a low voice.

With a mighty effort, Graham suppressed a desire to shout, “Then he’s alive!” but kept his wits and said, coolly, confidently, “Much may happen in an hour. You can speak without fear.”

The other stirred feebly. “We found the new emulsion the day before yesterday,” he told them, reluctantly. “Under Beach’s supervision, we’d been looking for it for nearly three months. It was an intensive, three-shift, night-and-day job pushed through as if it were costing someone a thousand bucks a second. Beach never let up. It would have taken an individual worker ten years to develop the stuff, but there were sixty of us on the job with all the company’s resources at our disposal. Wyman eventually found it Wednesday morning, but we didn’t know for certain that he’d actually got it until we tested it a few minutes before the explosion.”

“What kind of an emulsion was it, and how did you test it?” Graham encouraged.

“It was a photographic emulsion susceptible to frequencies far into the infrared, farther than any commercial plates have been able to reach. It touched the ultra-radio band. According to Beach, such an emulsion ought to record things like suns—I don’t know why; none of us knew why. We made routine exposures with Wyman’s compound and, sure enough, we developed negatives recording things like little suns.”

“Go on! Go on!” Graham urged.

“We looked them over curiously and talked about them a lot. These suns were small spheres of invisible radiation, three or four of them, floating above the roof of Number Four Extraction Shed. Somehow—I can’t explain how or why—the sight of them made us greatly excited in a sort of horrible, heart-leaping way. Beach was home at the time the test proved positive, so Wyman phoned him, and was in the middle of telling him about it when—
wham!”

“But Beach definitely knew of the existence of these phenomena before you succeeded in photographing them?”

“Of course! I don’t know where he got the information, but he had it all right— from somewhere.”

“He never gave you any clue to the nature of these objects?”

“No. He told us only what they ought to look like on a negative. Nothing more. He was tight-mouthed on the subject.”

“Thanks!” said Graham. “I guess you’ve helped me plenty.”

Leaving his chair, he paced slowly out of the ward, followed by the deeply puzzled Corbett. Continuing along the curved drive leading to the road, they stopped by the police chief’s gyrocar.

In response to some weird impulse, some strange but urgent notion he could not identify or explain, Graham drove his thoughts away from the recent examination and compelled them to concentrate elsewhere. It was difficult to govern his own mind in such dictatorial fashion, and for several seconds he sweated in mental agony while he forced his stubborn thoughts into an innocuous path. He drew a woman from his memory, let his mind enjoy her picture, the curl of her crisp, black hair, the curve of her hips, the tranquil smile which occasionally lit her heart-shaped face. Doctor Curtis, of course. Being male, he had no trouble in considering her unprofessionally. She’d no right to expert status, anyway; not with a form like that!

His memory was still conjuring her calm, serene eyes for him to look into when Corbett got into his car and rumbled, heavily, “Pity that guy couldn’t tell us what those sun-things might be.”

“Yes,” agreed Graham, hardly hearing. He closed the car’s door upon the burly chief. “I’ll call at your office soon after dinner.” He walked hastily away, the vision still firmly held in the grasp of his own peculiarly vivid imagination.

Lowering his plastiglass window, Corbett called after him, “Those little suns need investigating, I reckon. They’ve got plenty to do with all this—I’ll gamble my life on that!” Receiving no comment, the chief cast a disgusted look at Graham’s broad back, and proceeded to gamble his life by prodding the starter-switch with a broad forefinger.

The gyrocar whined like an eager dog, slid easily forward, built up speed. Its velocity increased until the machine was screaming along and splitting wind in a way that flapped the sunblinds along the street. Bulleting through a narrow gap in cross traffic, it beat the automatic signals at the intersection, sent shocked pedestrians scuttling in all directions. Madly, it plunged past another block, made a slight curve when crossing the second intersection, plunged head-long into the concrete wall of a corner building. The car crushed itself down to half its normal length, and a two-ton concrete block cracked right through. The sound of the impact was a minor explosion that reverberated time and time again through surrounding streets.

The noise battered imperatively on the eardrums of the self-hypnotized Graham. He fought fearfully, desperately, half-insanely to hold a feminine face before his mental vision, to reject, keep out, beat off the knowledge that yet another had paid the terrible penalty for being curious about little suns.

While crowds—unconsciously protected by their own ignorance—milled and gaped around the distant wreck, Graham, made vulnerable by his own suspicions, threatened by the unseen, battled with himself as he walked steadily away—battled to view a mirage to the complete exclusion of everything else. He paced onward, grimly onward, fighting to camouflage his own betraying mind; and as he fought, he won.

The path was a crazy snake, mottled in the moonlight, twisting and turning as it crawled upward, ever upward. The few hours that had gone since Corbett became paste now seemed a year. Graham pushed the memory away, ducked into the shadow of a natural obelisk that poised at one side of the track. A bilious moon let its sickly beams fall over sullen corks and brooding pines, illuminating the rough landscape in the pale ghastliness.

The hidden man’s feverish eyes searched the pools of shadow that lined and pitted the route he had just traversed; his ears strained to catch sounds different from the sibilant rustling of branches, scrape of boughs, burble of distant waters—sounds he could attribute only to things that invariably were silent. Involuntarily, for no other purpose than to soothe his too-alert soul, he was looking for the unseeable, listening for the unbearable, waiting for that which lets no man wait when his time is due.

For a full five minutes he stood thus, his nerves strained, his muscles taut, his mind and body prepared to meet whatever menace might explode from the silence and the dark.

But there was nothing, nothing—only harsh rocks that thrust ragged outlines toward equally ragged clouds, only sentinel pines standing guard around the camp of night.

Several times had he stopped and stood thus, examining the trail behind, and each time the path remained empty, undisturbed.

Those stalkers in the ebon hours, slinking in his steps, skulking furtively through the gloom, were creatures of his overwrought mind. He had enough self-possession to know that they were fantastic products of his tired and regimented imagination, yet he could not forbear to seek occasional vantage posts and compel his sleep-hungry eyes to seek confirmation of the nightmares haunting his brain.

He stared until he had convinced himself of his own misapprehension, emerged from the black bar of shadow cast by the obelisk, continued up the trail. Stumbling over broad cracks, slipping in deep ruts, tripping over loose stones part-hidden in the inadequate light, he hastened along.

The path curved tortuously around the mountain, ended in a tiny, elevated valley surrounded by towering walls on all sides but one. A building squatted at the farther end of the valley, hugging low to the ground, architecturally cowering. It was no ramshackle erection, but a sturdy conglomeration of concrete and local rock, low-slung, drab, ominous in its complete seclusion.

At the valley’s mouth stood an ancient, decrepit finger-post, its faded board bearing in awkward scrawl the words:

MILLIGAN’S STRIKE. He looked at the board, eyes narrowed, peering closely, then glanced back along the trail. Nothing stirred.

Jet shadows cast by surrounding cliffs swallowed his own shadow as he stole through the valley, reached the silent building, surveyed its cold, impassive windows. No light blazed welcome from those glassy squares, no noise of human movement came from within those grim walls. There was no sound save that of a loosened stone rolling somewhere back along the trail. That tiny, distant clatter set him back against the wall, one hand in his pocket. He watched the moonlit mouth for fifteen minutes.

Giving it up, he rapped heavily upon the armorplate door, tried its handle, found it locked. He knocked again, using a large pebble to increase the noise. There was no response. Turning his back to the door, his bloodshot eyes staring through the gloom toward the distant, moonlit fingerpost, he swung a heavy, steel-shod boot at the armorplate, hammering it like a gong until the entire building echoed and re-echoed its urgent clamor.

Horror clawed at his heart while he battered frantically for entry. Perhaps others had gone in before him: others who had not knocked or opened, yet had passed silently and insidiously inside; others at whom it was futile to shoot, from whom it was useless to run.

Fighting off his panic, he gave the door a final, tremendous blow. If there was no response within one minute, he was going to bust a metal guard off a window, using a good, heavy rock for the purpose. At all costs he must get in, even if it were necessary to wreck the place. Putting his ear against the armorplate, he listened intently, heard a faint humming that grew into a low whine.

Frank relief brightened his features as the whine ceased. A short, metallic rattle followed; slow, deliberate feet approached the door. A chain clanged, a battery of bolts creaked aside, the lock snapped back, the door opened a bare six inches.

From the blackness a deep, rich voice demanded, “Well?”

Graham introduced himself in six swift words, then asked, “Are you Professor Beach?”

The door opened wide, and the man hidden in the interior gloom said quickly, “Come in, Graham. We’ve met before. I could not identify you in this infernal darkness.”

Entering, Graham heard the door slam and lock behind him. A hand grasped his arm, steered him across a completely obscured floor, stopped him at the other side. Metal grated and clanged before his face, the floor sank under his feet. An elevator, of all things, in such a place as this!

Light floated upward, the floor ceased its descent. Graham saw the other’s face in revealing rays. The scientist was still the same tall, thin-featured, dark-haired personage that he used to be. The burden of time rested lightly upon this man, for Graham could note little difference in the face he had not seen for several years. But there was one difference, a startling one
—the eyes.

Beach’s thin, curved, hawklike nose jutted between a pair of cold, hard optics unearthly in their brilliance. There was a hint of mesmerism in their deliberate, calculating and penetrating stare, something overpowering in their weird glow.

“Why the darkness upstairs?” queried Graham, still fascinated by those uncanny orbs.

“Light attracts nocturnal creatures,” replied Beach, evasively. “They can be a nuisance.” He studied his visitor. “How did you come to look for me here?”

“The editor of the local sheet in Boise knew that you’d been spending a lot of time in this place. He said he was sending a reporter here in the morning, to see whether you were alive or dead. I beat him to it.”

Beach sighed. “I suppose a horde of snoopers is inevitable after what has happened. Oh, well—” He ushered Graham into a small, book-lined room, gave him a chair. Carefully shutting the door, he took a seat opposite. His long, slender fingers built a church and steeple while his odd eyes bored steadily into the others. “I am indeed sorry that we should meet again in such terrible circumstances. I presume that your visit is connected with the Silver City disaster?”