Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (115 page)

“‘They also serve who only stand and wait,”’ quoted Graham, philosophically.

“Very well. We’ll wait.” Tilting back in his chair, the bothered Sangster put his feet on the desk and assumed the expression of one whose patience is everlasting.

“I’ve tremendous faith in you, Bill, but it’s my department’s money that is being poured into all this research. It would relieve my mind to know what we’re waiting for.”

“Were waiting for some experimenter to come near frizzling a Viton.” Graham’s leathery face grew grim. “And although I hate like hell to say it, I think were waiting for the first of another series of corpses.

“That’s what has got me uneasy.” Leamington’s voice chipped in, his tone low, serious. “These infernal orbs frequently are prying into minds. Some day, Bill, they’ll examine yours. They’ll realize they’ve found the ace—and you’ll be deader than a slab of granite when
we
find
you. ”

“We’ve all got to take chances,” said Graham. “Heck of a one I took when I chose to be born!” He gazed through the window once more. “Look!”

The others jolted him, gazed out. A fat, gray cloud was blooming from the base of the Liberty Building. Sound caught up with sight even as they looked, and there came an awful crash that shook the neighborhood. Then the skyward sound arrived, a terrific yelp that changed pitch with Doppler effect as it descended.

Four seconds later, with the cloud at its fattest, the immense bulk of the pitted and glassless Liberty Building leaned over, slowly, ever so slowly, lowering itself with the mighty reluctance of a stricken mammoth. It reached a crazy angle, hesitated in seeming defiance of the law of gravity, its millions of tons a terrible menace to the area it was about to devastate.

Then, as if an unseen hand had reached forth from the void and administered the final, fateful push, the enormous pile fell faster, its once beautiful column splitting in three places from which girders stuck like rotten teeth. The noise of its landing resembled a bellow from the maw of original chaos.

Ground rumbled and rolled in long, trembling waves of plasmic agitation. A vast, swirling cloud of pulverized silicate crept sluggishly upward.

A veritable horde of spheres, blue, tense, eager, hungry, dropped from immense heights, streaked inward from all directions, their paths direct lines concentrated on this latest fount of agony.

Over the Hudson, another string of spheres ghoulishly were following a flying bomb, clinging to it like a tail of great blue beads. The bomb hammered steadily for Jersey City. Shortly, it would tilt downward and start to scream, and the women beneath it would try to outscream it . . . and the Vitons would enjoy them with the silence of dumb vultures.

“One rocket!” breathed Leamington, still staring at the smoke-obscured wreck of the Liberty Building. “I thought at first they’d started with atom bombs. God, what a size that one must have been.”

“Another Viton improvement,” opined Graham, bitterly. “Another technical advantage they’ve given to their Asian dupes.”

On Sangster’s desk a telephone whirred with suddenness that plucked at their already taut nerves. Sangster answered it, pressed the amplifier button.

“Sangster,” rattled the phone, in sharp, metallic accents, “I’ve just been called by Padilla on the radio-beam from Buenos Aires. He’s got something! He says ... he says . . . Sangster . . .
oh!”

Alarmed by Sangster’s wildly protruding eyes and ghastly complexion, Graham leaped to his side and looked into the hesitant instrument’s visor. He was just in time to see a face slide away from the tiny screen. It was a vague face, made indistinctly by a weird, glowing haze, but its shadowy features conveyed a message of ineffable terror before it shrank completely from sight.

“Bob Treleaven,” whispered Sangster. “It was Bob.” He stood like one stunned. “They got him—and I saw them get him!”

Taking no notice, Graham rattled the telephone, raised the operator. He danced with impatience while the exchange tried to get an answer from the other end. No response could be obtained, not on that line, nor on alternative lines.

“Give me Radiobeam Service,” he snapped. “Government business—hurry!” He turned to the white-faced Sangster. “Where’s Electra’s place?”

“Bridgeport, Connecticut.”

“Radiobeam Service?” Graham held his lips close to the mouthpiece. “A recent call has been made from Buenos Aires to Bridgeport, Connecticut, probably relayed through Barranquilla. Trace it and connect me with the caller.” Still clinging to the phone, he beckoned Wohl.

“Take that other phone, Art. Call Bridgeport’s police headquarters, tell them to get out to the Electra plant, and keep for us whatever they may find. Then beat it down and have the car ready. I’ll be one jump behind you.”

“Right!” With a grunt of eagerness, Wohl snatched up the other instrument, jabbered into it hurriedly. Then he was gone.

Graham’s call got through, he talked for some time, his jaw muscles lumping while he listened to the faraway speaker. Finishing, he made a second and shorter call. He looked moodily disappointed as he shoved the phone aside and spoke to the others.

“Padilla is stiffer than an Egyptian mummy. The relay operator at Barranquilla is also dead. He must have listened in and heard something we’re forbidden to know. The knowledge he gained has cost him his life. This is a time when I could do with being in four places at once.” He massaged his chin, added, “A million to one Treleaven is as dead as the rest.”

“Well, you’ve got your corpses,” commented Leamington, with complete lack of emotion.

His remark came too late. Already Graham was outside the door and dashing down the passage toward the levitator shafts. There was something retributory in his fast lope, and a harder gleam lay behind that other gleam filling his wide-sighted eyes. The rods and cones of his pupils had undergone more than spectroscopic readjustment—they now vibrated with hate.

Air sighed in the bowels of the building as Graham’s disk dropped at reckless pace, bearing him toward street level and the waiting gyrocar. Reaching bottom, he sprang out, his nostrils distended like those of a wolf which has found the scent and is racing to the kill.

The Electra Radio Corporation’s small but well equipped laboratory was meticulous in its orderliness, nothing being out of place, nothing to mar its prim tidiness save the body flopped beneath the dangling telephone receiver.

A burly police sergeant said, “It’s exactly as we found it. All we’ve done is make a stereoscopic record of the cadaver.”

Bill Graham nodded his approval, bent, turned the body over. He was not repelled by the look of horror which vicious, glowing death had stamped upon the corpse's features. At deft speed he frisked the victim, placed the contents of the pockets on an adjacent table, examined them with shrewd attention.

“Useless,” he commented, disgustedly. “They don’t tell me a thing worth knowing.” He shifted his gaze to a small, dapper man fidgeting miserably beside the police sergeant. “So you were Treleaven’s assistant? What can
you
tell me?”

“Bob got a call from Padilla,” babbled the small man, his frightened eyes flickering from the questioner to the object on the floor. Nervously, his manicured fingers tugged at his neatly trimmed mustache.

“We know that. Who’s Padilla?”

“A valuable business connection and a personal friend of Bob’s.” He buttoned his jacket, unbuttoned it, then returned to the mustache. He seemed to be afflicted with too many hands. “Padilla is the patentee of the thermostatic amplifier, a self-cooling radio tube which we manufacture under his license.”

“Go ahead,” Graham encouraged.

“Bob got this call and became very excited, said he’d spread the news around so it couldn’t be stopped. He didn’t mention the nature of this news, but evidently he thought it red-hot.”

“And then?”

“He went straight into the lab to ring up somebody. Five minutes later a gang of luminosities whizzed into the plant. They’ve been hanging around for days, sort of keeping an eye on us. Everybody ran for dear life excepting three clerks on the top floor.”

“Why didn’t they run?”

“They’ve not yet had eye-treatment. They couldn’t see and didn’t know what was happening.”

“I understand.”

“We came back after the luminosities had left, and we found Bob dead beneath the phone.” Another jittery fumble at the mustache, and another frightened shift of gaze from questioner to corpse.

“You say that the Vitons have been hanging around for days,” put in Wohl. “During that time have they snatched any employee and pried into his mind?”

“Four.” The small man became more nervous than ever. “They have had a poke at four within the last few days. That made it pretty awful for us. There was no way of telling who they’d pick on next. We couldn’t work so well daytimes and we couldn’t sleep nights.” He gave Wohl a pathetic look, and went on, “They got the last one yesterday afternoon, and he went insane. They dropped him outside the gates and left him a gibbering idiot.”

“Well, there weren’t any about when we arrived,” remarked Wohl.

“Probably they’re satisfied that this counterstroke has prevented the plant from becoming a possible source of danger to them for the time being.” Graham could not restrain a smile as he noted how the jumpiness of the little man contrasted with the elephantine indifference of the police sergeant. “They’ll come back!”

He dismissed the witness and other waiting employees of the radio plant. With Wohl’s help, he searched the laboratory for notes, memo-pads or any seemingly insignificant piece of paper that might record a clue, his mind recalling the cryptic messages left behind by other and earlier martyrs.

Their efforts were in vain. One fact and one only was at their disposal—the fact that Bob Treleaven was decidedly dead.

“This is hell!” groaned Wohl, despairingly. “Not a lead. Not one miserable little lead. We’re sunk!”

“Use your imagination,” Graham chided.

“Don’t tell me you’ve picked up a line?” Wohl’s honest eyes popped in surprise. He scanned the laboratory, trying to find something he’d overlooked.

“I haven’t.” Bill Graham grabbed up his hat. “In this crazy business nobody lives long enough to hand us a useful line, and we’ve no choice but to spin our own. Come on—let’s get back.”

It was as they flashed through Stamford that Wohl shifted his thoughtful gaze from the road, glanced at his passenger, and said, “All right, all right—is it a family secret or something?”

“What d’you mean?”

“This line you’re spinning.”

“There are several. To start with, we’ve not got enough data concerning Pa
dill
a We’ll have to get more, and some of it may prove well worth having. Then again, it seems that Treleaven had about five undisturbed minutes at that phone before he was put out of the running. He was on to Sangster for less than a half a minute, and that was his last call in this sinful world. So unless it took him four and a half minutes to reach Sangster—which is not likely—I reckon maybe he phoned somebody else first. We’ll find out whether he did and, if so, whom he called.”

“You’re a marvel—and I’m dumber than I thought,” said Wohl.

Grinning sheepishly, Graham continued, “Lastly, there’s an unknown number of radio ham stations operating between Buenos Aires, Barranquilla and Bridgeport. One or two may have snooped the commercial beams while raking the ether. If any one of them happened to be listening in, and caught Padilla’s talk, we want him as badly as do the Vitons. We’ve got to find that guy before it’s too late!”

“Hope,” recited Wohl, “springs eternal in the human breast.” His eyes roamed up to the rear-view mirror, rising casually, then becoming fixed in fearful fascination. “But not in mine!” he added, in choked tones.

Slewing around in his seat, Graham peered through the car’s rear window. “Vitons—after us!”

His sharp eyes switched to the front, the sides, taking in the terrain with photographic accuracy. “Step on it!” His thumb found and jabbed the emergency button just as Wohl shoved the accelerator to the limit. The crisis-bank of extra batteries added their power, and with the dynamo screaming its top note, the gyrocar leaped forward.

“No use—they’ve as good as got us!” gasped Wohl. He manhandled the machine around an acute bend, corrected three successive side-slips, straightened up. The road was a broad ribbon streaming past their wildly whirling wheels. “We couldn’t escape at twice this pace.”

“The bridge!” Graham warned. Feeling surprised by his own coolness, he nodded toward the bridge rushing nearer at tremendous pace. “Hop the bank and dive into the river. It's a chance.”

“A . . . lousy . . . chance!” breathed Wohl.

Offering no comment, Bill Graham again glanced backward, saw their ominously glowing pursuers about two hundred yards behind and gaining rapidly. There were ten of the things speeding through the atmosphere in single file, moving with that apparently effortless but bulletlike pace characteristic of their kind.

The bridge widened in perspective as it shot nearer; the ghostly horde picked up fifty yards. Anxiously, Graham divided his attention between the scenes in front and at rear. This, he could see, was going to prove touch and go. A split second would be the difference between one chance in a million and no chance at all.

“We’ll barely do it,” he shouted above the dynamo’s howl. “When we hit the water, fight out and swim downstream for as long as you can hold breath. Don’t come up for more than a quick gulp. Stay down for as long as they’re around even if you have to soak for a week. Better that than—” He left the sentence unfinished.

“But—” commenced Wohl, his face registering strain as the oncoming bridge leaped at their front wheel.

“Now!” roared Graham. He didn’t wait for Wohl to make up his mind; his powerful fingers clamped upon the wheel, twisted it with irresistible power.

With a protesting screech from the sorely maltreated gyroscope, the slender car went hell-for-leather up the bank. It vaulted the top a bare foot from the bridge’s concrete coping, described a spectacular parabola through the air. Like a monster, twenty-foot missile, it struck the water with force that sent shocked drops flying high above roadlevel. A tiny rainbow shimmered momentarily in the shower.