Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (119 page)

The knowledge that his anxious stare was accompanied by equally anxious thoughts, and that his broadcast psycho-vibrations might entice adjacent trappers, made him race for the door without further ado. Best to get clear while yet there was time! He hit the levitators, went down with a rush.

Two men were lounging just inside the front door. He spotted them through the transparent tube of his shaft even as his disk made a rubbery bounce and settled at street level.

Without leaving the shaft, he reasoned quickly, “If those guys were normal they’d show some curiosity about those two bodies lying within their sight. They aren’t interested, and therefore aren’t normal. They are dupes!”

Before his disk quite had ceased its cushioning motion he dropped it farther, his long, athletic form sinking from sight of the waiting pair. They stiffened in surprise, ran toward the shaft. Both had guns.

Five levels below the street, he stopped, was out of the perpendicular tube and across the basement ere hidden compressors ceased their sighing. Ducking beneath the main stairway, he heard feet stamping at the top. Hefting his automatic, he fled through a series of empty corridors, gained an exit at the building’s farther end. Coming out through a steel trapdoor, he sniffed fresh air appreciatively. It was a welcome change from that underground odor of fungus and rats. Wearers of the ring were familiar with six such exits, all unknown to and unsuspected by the general public.

The desk sergeant at the precinct station shoved the phone across the polished mahogany, amputated half a wiener, spoke around it. “That’s nothing, feller! Police Commissioner Lewthwaite got his around six o’clock. His own bodyguard done it.” Another bite. “What’s it coming to when big guys get bumped by their bodyguards?”

“Yes, what?” agreed Graham. He rattled the phone angrily. “Looks like they’ve wrecked the cityphone system as well.”

“All through the night,” mumbled the sergeant, forcing the words through his gag. He gulped, popped his eyes, yo-yoed his Adam’s apple. “Dozens of them, hundreds! We’ve bopped them, beat them, shot their pants off and burned them down—and still they come! Some of the nuts were our own boys, still in uniform!” His other hand came up, showing a huge police positive. “When Heggarty reports in, I’ll be ready for him—in case he ain’t Heggarty! You can’t ever tell who’s next until he starts something!”

“You can’t trust your own mother.” Suddenly getting his connection, Graham shouted, “Hi, Hetty!” He grinned sourly as he heard the answer, “Hi!” then snapped, “I want Mr. Sangster, pronto!”

A deep rich voice took over. Graham drew a long breath, recounted his experience of half an hour before, pouring out a rapid flow of words as he described the scene in the intelligence department’s office.

“I can’t get Washington,” he concluded. “They say all the lines are down and the beams out of action. For the time being, I’m reporting to you. There’s no one else within reach to whom I can report.”

“This is terrible news, Graham,” came Sangster’s grave tone. “From where are you speaking?”

“How the heck do I know?”

“Surely you know where you are at the present moment?” Sangster’s voice went two tones higher in surprise.

“Maybe. But you don't—and won’t!”

“Meaning that you refuse to tell me? You suspect
me?
You think I may be yet another of the mentally mutilated?” He was silent a while. His listener tried to discern his expression in the phone’s tiny television screen, but the thing was out of order, displaying only occasional glimpses between vague whorls of light and shadow. “I suppose I cannot blame you for that,” Sangster went on. “Some of their conscripts act like dumb gangsters, but others display extraordinary cunning.”

“All I’d like you to do—if you can find a way of doing it—is get my reports to Washington,” Graham said. “I’m too much on the hop to seek a way myself. You’ll have to help me there.”

“I’ll try,” Sangster promised. “Anything else?”

“Yes. I’d like to secure the name and address of any other Intelligence operatives who may be in or near this city. They won’t all have fallen into that trap. Sometimes some of them don’t report in for weeks. I reckon a few must still he roaming free. Leamington was the only one here who had the information I want, but Washington can supply it.”

“I’ll see what can be done.” Sangster paused, then came through a little louder. “A couple of Leamington’s recent queries were handled by this department.”

“Discover anything?” Graham asked, eagerly.

“A reply from Britain says that McAndrew’s laboratory and notes showed that he’d been conducting an interesting line of research in the variation of particle-velocities under heat treatment. Apparently he was hunting the secret of sub-atomic binding power. He’d had no success up to the time of his disappearance, and the British have given him up for dead.”

“That’s a safe bet!” Graham asserted. “He’s been analyzed—and the leftovers have been thrown away. He’s in some celestial ashcan—a dismembered rabbit!”

“My own imagination can draw all the pictures without you filling in the colors,” reproved Sangster. “Leave me alone with my dreams. It’s unnecessary to emphasize their horror.”

“Sorry!”

“We’ve found that no radio amateur eavesdropped on Padilla,” Sangster continued. “Whatever he told Treleaven is fated to remain a mystery. Data on Padilla’s life reveals nothing except that he was a financially successful radio experimenter. He made a big wad out of simplified frequency modulation. He made his own funeral out of something else—but left no record to indicate what it was.”

“I’d given up that lead a couple of days ago.”

“You say that as if you’ve found another and better one.” Sangster’s voice was pregnant with interest. “Have you?”

“I find one almost every morning,” declared Graham, glumly, “and it goes rotten on me by night. As a gallivanting gumshoe, I sure picked myself a heller right at the start!” He pursed his lips and sighed. “What are the governmental experts doing?”

“Nothing, as far as I know. There are two groups assembled in lonely places suggested by Leamington. They’ve discovered that the very loneliness which is their protection is also their handicap. They plan things, design them, make them— then find that there are no adjacent luminosities on which to test them.”

“Gosh, I overlooked that,” Graham admitted.

“It’s not your fault. None of us thought of it.” Sangster was now lugubrious. “If we transfer them to Viton-infested pastures, they’ll get wiped out. It’s an impasse.” He snapped his fingers with impatience.

“Probably you’re right, sir,” said Graham. “I’ll report again directly I’ve turned up something worth reporting.”

“Where are you going now?” The question came sharply.

“I’m deaf in this ear,” Graham told him. “Funny—I don’t seem able to hear you at all.”

“Oh, all right.” Disappointment trickled through the wires. “I guess you know best. Take care of yourself!” A loud click signaled that he had rung off.

“When in doubt,” offered the desk sergeant, darkly, “see who’s making money out of it.”

“Who’s making it now?” Graham asked.

“Morticians.” The sergeant frowned at his listener’s grin. “Well, ain’t they?”

The bronze plate said:
Freezer Fabricators of America, Inc.
Graham walked in, spent five minutes sparring a stubborn executive before that worthy agreed to conduct him to the golden name on the old oak door.

That name was Thurlow, and its owner was a living mummy. Thurlow looked as if he’d sweated himself dry in lifelong pursuit of percentages.

“We can’t do it,” complained Thurlow, after Graham had explained the purpose of his visit. His voice rustled like ages-old papyrus. “We couldn’t supply a refrigerator to the Sultan of Zanzibar even if he offered to balance its weight with jewels. Our plant has been engaged wholly on government work since the war began, and we haven’t turned out a solitary freezer.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Graham dismissed the point without argument. “I want one for the university to pick to pieces. Give me a list of your local customers.”

“Nothing doing!” Thurlow’s bony hand massaged his bald, yellow pate. “Things won’t always be like this. Someday, my prince will come. Fine fool I’ll look with my consumer list circulating among competitors.”

“Are you insinuating—?” began Graham, angrily.

“I’m insinuating nothing.” Thurlow waved him down. “How do I know you are what you represent yourself to be? That trick ring of yours doesn’t mean a goddam thing to me. I can’t read its inscriptions without a microscope. Why don’t the authorities provide you with a microscope?” His cackle was funereal.
“Heh-heh-heb!"

Keeping his temper, Graham said, “Will you give me a list if I bring you written authority?”

“Well,” Thurlow ceased his cackling, looked cunning, “if what you bring satisfies me, I’ll give you a list. What you bring had better be convincing. No slick competitor is going to gyp me out of a list just because trade’s gone haywire.”

“You need not fear that.” Graham stood up. “I’ll get something in clear writing, or else the police will make application on my behalf.” Stopping by the door, he asked one more question. “How long have you been using that bear as a trademark?”

“Ever since we started. More than thirty years.” Thurlow waxed pompous. “In the public’s mind, the standing bear is associated with a product unrivaled in its sphere, a product which—although I say it myself—is universally accepted as—”

“Thanks!” interrupted Graham, cutting short the eulogy. He went out.

The stubborn one with whom he’d first battled conducted him to the front doors, saying, “Did he oblige?”

“No.”

“I thought he wouldn’t.”

“Why not?”

The other looked troubled. “I shouldn’t say it but, frankly, Thurlow wouldn’t give milk to a blind kitten.”

Regarding him shrewdly, Graham punched his arm. “Why let that worry you? Time’s on your side. You’ll be in his chair when he’s stinking.”

“If any of us live long enough to see this through,” observed the other, gloomily.

“That’s
my
worry,” said Graham. “Bye!”

There was a phone booth in the corner drugstore. Graham sized up the four customers and three assistants before turning his back to them and entering the booth.

He was leery of everybody. That warning voice within his mind whispered that he was being sought with grim determination, that at long last it had dawned upon the eerie foe that the source of opposition was not so much the world of science as a small group of investigatory aces—in which he was the ace of trumps.

The Vitons had gained compensation for their inherent inability to distinguish one human being from another, humans who seemed as alike as so many sheep. Other humans had been forcibly enrolled and given the duty of segregating intransigent animals from the flock. The Vitons now were aided by a horde of surgically-created quislings, a hapless, helpless, hopeless but dangerous fifth column.

Short of a prowling luminosity picking on him at random, and reading his mind, he had been safe. Now he was threatened by proxies of his own kind. This brother-kill-brother technique was the newest and deadliest menace.

Dialing his number, he thanked heaven that Wohl’s dazed mind had not depicted himself and the locality of his home. Wohl’s smothered, disorganized brain helplessly had surrendered its knowledge of the field office, causing wolfish cap-tors contemptuously to leave him upon the bank in their haste to reach the scene of slaughter.

Graham would never tell the burly police lieutenant that he, and he alone, had put the finger on Leamington and the others.

“This is Graham,” he said, detecting the lift of a distant receiver.

“Listen, Graham,” Sangster’s voice came back urgently. “I connected with Washington shortly after you last phoned. We’re linked through amateur transmitters—the hams seem to have the only reliable communications system left. Washington wants you right away. You’d better get there fast!”

“D’you know what it’s for, sir?”

“I don’t. All I’ve got is that you must see Keithley without delay. There’s a captured Asian stratplane waiting for you down at Battery Park.”

“Fancy me roaming around in an Asian. Our fighters won’t give it five minutes in the air.”

“I’m afraid you don’t appreciate our true position, Graham. Except for occasional and very risky sorties, our fighters are grounded. If they had only the Asians to meet, they’d soon sweep the skies clear of them. But there are the Vitons, too. That makes a lot of difference. When a Viton can swoop on a pilot, compelling him to land his plane in enemy territory as a free gift from us . . . well . . . we just can’t afford to give away men and machines like that. The Asians have gained command of the air. It’s a fact that may lose us this war. You take that Asian job— you’ll be safer in that.”

“I’ll do it on the run.” Watching the shop through the booth’s plastiglass panels, he put his lips nearer the mouthpiece, and went on hurriedly, “I called to ask you to get me a list of local customers from Freezer Fabricators. You may have to get tough with a wizened dummy named Thurlow; the tougher you get the better I’ll like it. He’s long overdue to have his ears pinned back. I’d also like you to make contact with Harriman, at the Smithsonian, ask him to reach any astronomers who’re still active, and find out whether they can conceive any possible connection between the luminosities and the Great Bear.”

“The Great Bear?” echoed Sangster, surprisedly.

“Yes. There’s a bear hanging around that means something or other. God alone knows what it does mean, but somehow I’ve got to find out. I’ve a feeling it’s mighty important.”

“Important—a bear! It can’t be any other animal, eh? It has to be a bear?”

“Nothing but a small bruin,” Graham agreed. “I’m pretty sure that the astronomical slant is entirely wrong, but we can’t afford to overlook even the remotest chance.”

“Refrigerators, wizened dummies, stars and bears!” gabbled Sangster. “Jesus!” He was silent a moment, then moaned, “I think maybe they’ve got at you, too— but I’ll do as you request.” Then he said, “Jesus!” again and disconnected.