They'd Rather Be Right (22 page)

“I will have to think it over,” he said again after a long pause.

He whirled around then, and his face became alight with the thing he knew best—the way to get things done. He punched a concealed button at the corner of his desk. Almost instantly, the door opened and Mrs. Williams came through. There was no curiosity in her expression, but her eyes could not conceal it.

“Mr. Carter has arranged for Bossy to come under our protection,” Kennedy said with a slight smile, knowing that she would interpret it correctly that he had been unable to buy Bossy outright. “Mr. Carter and his associates are to have every protection—from any source whatever, including myself. Mr. Carter is to have any or all of the resources of this entire organization at his disposal.”

Involuntarily, Mrs. Williams’ eyebrows lifted. This was a deal beyond all deals.

“This is to be put in contract form?” she asked, hardly able to make her voice sound.

“That won’t be necessary,” Joe said.

“Humph!” Kennedy snorted. “First stupid thing you’ve said, young man.”

“Is it?” Joe asked, with a twist of his lips.

“No, dammit,” Kennedy said grudgingly. “Contracts can be broken. My word can’t.”

“That, too,” Joe said softly, “might become a price.”

Kennedy flashed a warning look at him. There were some things, a few, that even his secretary didn’t know.

“First thing to do,” Kennedy said, “is get out a writ. Send down an armored car ... er ... whatever Joe says, to pick up Bossy. Better send along a big police escort—we don’t want trouble with the law trying to impound it or something.”

He turned away from her to Joe.

“I suppose you want to see Mabel right away?”

“Of course.”

“See that he’s got a car, a driver, bodyguards. Can-cel any appointments for the rest of the day. I want to think,” Kennedy instructed Mrs. Williams. Then to Joe, a little sarcastically: “I suppose I’ll be allowed to think?”

“Yes, sir,” Joe laughed. “That is, until you decide you want immortality.”

Carney had read the papers; the first issues, and the following extras. He did not believe what he had read. Mabel was old and fat and slov-enly; not that it mattered, you didn’t notice these things after you got to know Mabel the way she really was. But they had just got things screwed up over at the jail. There was hardly a man on the shortline who hadn’t served at least one rap he didn’t deserve just because they always got things screwed up over there and would rather see a man do time than admit they were wrong.

He didn’t understand why this firm of big lawyers had stepped in. Her own lawyer had always been good enough, and his father before him. Carney could understand why he hadn’t been in a hurry. Mabel knew the ropes. It was a simple matter to get bail for her. He’d take care of it when he got around to it.

And then when he did get to the jail, this other bunch of lawyers already had things sewed up. They just laughed at him down at the jail and told him to go fly a kite.

Everything was all screwed up. And yet, there were some things about it that Joe and the professors weren’t telling him.

The streets around Third and Howard were swarm-ing with people. Everybody had read the news.

Even guys who never showed their faces in the daylight were out on the street today. And Carney was a marked man. Everybody on the shortline knew he was Mabel’s best friend. They hovered around him like flies, they clung to his arm to show they were intimate with him. They were like Hollywood name-droppers in their eagerness to show their friendship with the great.

There was no chance for him to go to the professors to ask them for the real low-down on Mabel.

He had even been unable to speak to Joe, when Joe had come back from the bail hearing. He did not dare call attention to the area where Bossy was hidden by appearing interested in it.

The rumors got wilder and wilder. Mabel hadn’t been naked. The real truth was that Mabel had been seen in flowing robes of white. Mabel had huge shining white wings. Mabel had been seen flying around the jail, and then around Civic Center. Thousands of peo-ple had seen her flying around the City Hall, the Opera House, the War Memorial. There were a lot of photographs. The reason the newspapers didn’t print them was because they’d had orders from higher up.

The rumors were not hard to believe. Every man on the shortline could remember some good thing Mabel had done for him. A free handout here, a grubstake there, and that time she had sent her own lawyer to defend old Annie in the shoplifting rap. They had always known she was an angel in disguise.

They clung to Carney, they rushed to him with every new rumor. At first he, too, had basked in the warm glow; then as the rumors grew wilder and wilder he became more and more fearful. The urgency to see the professors, find out what really happened, was like a gnawing canker. But he could not shake off his arm clingers.

Nor was the crowd solely shortline people. All through the morning, sightseeing and curiosity mongering people had been coming from the other side of Market Street. They walked the same streets, rub-bernecking at buildings they had seen a hundred times before, buildings reputed to be owned by this terrible old harridan who had become young and beautiful. They walked the same streets, they brushed against the shortline crowd, a pillar-of-sin. But they did not mingle.

They, too, had their rumors. They say she was head of the biggest dope ring in the world. They say she had a tie-up with all the steamship companies and shipped out ocean liners filled with nothing but young, innocent girls for foreigners. She was a Russian spy. This whole thing was a plot to get more spies. No telling what goes on back of that Iron Curtain. Wasn’t there something about keeping a chicken alive for a hundred years?

A bright young man supplied a name.

“Pavlov,” he said. “And it was a chicken heart.”

The rumor spread up and down the street. The Russians had been able to keep all kinds of animals alive for hundreds of years. So why not humans? The young man was pressed for more details. In his sudden exalta-tion to the role of an Authority he dredged down in his mind for more.

“Spemann and Sholte,” he said, “succeeded in taking scar tissue from a salamander’s tail and growing a new head with it.”

What was a salamander? Well, it was a sort of lizard, a water lizard. Lizards had been on the earth for millions of years. For forty million years the reptiles had ruled the earth.

What these statements had to do with the case of Mabel he did not say. Like most learned young men, who enjoy only the briefest second of attention before the spotlight sweeps on, he spouted facts at random to impress everyone with the superiority of his mind.

The facts he spouted were handed from mouth to mouth, and minds, using the powers of reason and rationalization, wove them into a coherent pattern. The scientists had lizards who had been alive for forty million years. The secret of Mabel’s transformation was lizard blood. Spemanovitch and Sholtekoff had found the right recipe.

You take lizard blood and—

At first the recipes were given away freely. Then they began to sell. The prices mounted, higher and higher, as the bidding grew.

Rumors and people were progressing normally.

Never far away from the entrance to the hide-out, still hoping he might avoid all the eyes upon him, the rumors circulating around him, Carney saw Joe coming out again, after having spent an hour with Hoskins and Billings. Before he could catch Joe’s eye, the young man disappeared in the crowd. Now it was noon, and still Carney had heard nothing believable about Mabel.

For two hours nothing more happened, except the crowd got thicker and thicker. By process of mental osmosis, the word got around among the curiosity hounds that Carney was Mabel’s old lover.

The cameras focused on him. He was pressed for autographs. He was like a man trying to escape a nest of persistent hornets.

Relief came at last. For the first time in his life, Carney welcomed the sound of police sirens. The whole shortline, always tuned to the sound, heard them first and began to look about for innocent action patterns to occupy them and account for their presence on the street. The rest of the crowd, now outnumbering the regulars by five to one, became conscious of the sirens.

They couldn’t help noting them. No one on the shortline could remember when such a racket had been made in conducting a raid. It seemed to center about three blocks up the street from where Carney stood. From possible speculation to an absolute certainty in less than a half a minute, the rumor had it that another naked young woman was being picked up. Like a rush of flood waters, the crowd swept in the direction of the racket.

For the first time, Carney was left standing alone. The urgency for seeing the professors was greater than his curiosity. And again he was denied.

Even as the last of the crowd milled out of the area, an armored truck accompanied by four police cars and a private car, quietly crept down the street and down the alley. They stopped around the entrance to the hide-out. This was the real raid. The other was a false alarm to draw the crowds away.

Carney pressed himself tightly into a doorway and peered around its corner with tears of frustration streaming down his cheeks. Now they were going to take away the professors and Bossy, and then he couldn’t find out what had happened to Mabel. He was certain now that something had. Otherwise, she would have come back to the comfort of her old apartment long ago.

The police climbed out of their cars and stood in a semicircle around the entrance, with tommy-guns pointed outward. A chauffeur got out of the private car. He opened the rear door. A big young man sprang out and hit the sidewalk in an alert fighting pose. His hand was in his coat pocket, and his face very clearly stated his sentiments.

“If I must die, it will be for a noble cause.”

Joe came out of the car next. And behind him, another young man, ready to fight, appeared. Carney stared in disbelief.

Joe was not handcuffed!

Joe motioned to the entrance, the stairwell. Carney became suddenly sick. He fought down the urge to vomit. Plainer than words, Joe’s actions showed he had turned stoolie. He was conducting a police raid on his own hide-out!

But the police stayed where they were. The armored truck backed up to the entrance, opened its rear doors and projected a crane. Two men came out of the armored truck. They went with Joe and his two men down the stairs. They were all gone for five minutes.

Then the two professors appeared. They were dressed for the street, and they were not handcuffed.

At the head of the stairwell, they turned around and seemed to be directing activities below. The crane hook was lowered. Then it began to raise, and Bossy, plainly seen through her crate, appeared. The crate was swung into the maw of the truck. Hoskins, an apparently enthusiastic Hoskins, the way he was grinning, climbed in the truck behind her.

Carney could hold back no longer. He ran down the alley toward them, oblivious to the tommy-guns which swung in his direction. Joe said something to the policemen, and the tension seemed to ease.

“I’ve got to know! I’ve got to know!” Carney heard himself shouting.

Joe walked out past the tommy-guns and took Car-ney’s hand.

“Glad you came, Carney,” he said. “I was afraid you’d hide and we couldn’t find you. We need you, Carney. We still need you.”

For he suspected that Carney, like Mabel, would have lived enough and learned enough to know that he did not have all the right answers.

When Howard Kennedy’s office asked for a police escort, it was given without hesitation and without question. Both Billings and Joe were amused at Carney’s open delight in the situation. They were still hunted on a nationwide basis, the hunt centered in San Francisco where they were thought to be; and the police escort took them through the rigid Bay Bridge check points without pausing.

A quick sampling of their minds told Joe that none of the men knew it was Bossy and Hoskins in the armored truck, or Billings and Joe in the car behind. They had their orders, they were carrying them out.

At the city boundary, the alerted Berkeley police joined the caravan, and with a flourish escorted it through the city and up into the hills beyond, to the front gates of the Margaret Kennedy Clinic.

As the gates swung wide, Carney surveyed the lovely buildings and landscaped grounds inside the fourteen-foot walls with awe.

“This ain’t Howard Street,” he conceded.

The Margaret Kennedy Clinic had transformed the most wistful dreams of earlier clinics into a reality.

It covered a thirty-acre expanse with completely func-tional buildings. The shape and design of each had been dictated by the purpose it was to serve—forty separate units, covering every imagined phase of medical therapy, were blended into one harmonious whole. Completed five years ago, in memory of Kennedy’s wife, both its original cost and its upkeep were enormous.

It was one of Kennedy’s islands of rational research in a sea of chaos.

They were assigned one entire wing in the psychotherapy building. The armored truck pulled up to the service entrance and the institution superintendent, himself, was on hand to greet Hoskins as he clambered stiffly out of the body of the truck.

Superintendent Jones personally supervised the transfer of Bossy to a suitable room next to the amphitheater—where it was hoped by all the staff of the clinic that frequent demonstrations of Bossy would be given. Super Jones maintained an admirable attitude of this was all in the day’s work, but his eyes probed behind the slats of the crate for a preview. He seemed torn between a desire to keep Bossy no more than a cybernetic machine, and a hope that Bossy would suddenly begin spouting long and learned formulae to solve the enigmas of the world.