Manly Wade Wellman - Chapbook 02 (12 page)

 
         
FORTY
feet below the girder, two cables forked from a common mooring, making a
narrow, spring- armed V. Into the angle of that V Dillon Stover had fallen.
Even on light-gravitied Mars it was a heavy tumble and the impact of Stover’s
body made the two cables snap apart, then back. He was caught at the waist like
a frog caught in the beak of a stork.

 
          
Lying
thus horizontally, feet kicking and head dangling, Stover wondered whether to
be thankful or not. He seized the cables and tried to push them apart, but they
were tough and tight-squeezing, and his right hand had sprained itself by
striking that veiled metal mask. He relaxed, saving strength. As he did so
there was the snarling
snick
of an
MS-ray cutting through the air close to him.

 
          
He
looked up. The draped figure knelt on the girder and levelled the ray thrower
at one of the cables. The metal sizzled. Stover's pinched abdomen felt the
cable vibrate
..
Still chary of marking Stover with a
telltale wound, the killer above was trying to cut the metal strand that held
him and set him falling again.

 
          
“I
wish you luck!” the young man called, and his swaddled destroyer made a
salute-gesture of irony with the ray thrower. Then
came
a new sound, a whistling, shrieking siren.

 
          
Stover
looked outward. A plane, a taxi flyer, was hovering and bobbing just beyond the
scaffolding. Somehow the drama on the girders had attracted attention. Another
plane came, another. The ray above him was shut off.

 
          
Stover,
cramped and half suffocated, gestured to the pilots of the machines. Pointing
to the scissorslike cables that imprisoned him, he spread his hands in appeal
for help. One of the planes made a wriggling motion in midair to indicate
understanding. But no one seemed to know how to reach and free him.

 
          
Stover
groaned despite himself.
Then, once more a voice from the
girder forty feet overhead.

 
          
'‘Dillon,
hold tight! I’m going to get you out of that.”

 
          
It
was Buckalew, running along the narrow footpath like a cat on a fence- top. One
of his hands flourished a velvet rope.

 
          
Stover
tried to call back but he had no breath to do more than wheeze and gasp.
Buckalew was lowering the rope. It dangled against Stover’s hand, and he seized
it.

 
          
Now
he would be pulled up.
All the way?
Or would Buckalew
let him fall, seemingly by accident? Had Buckalew clambered down out of the
tower, or had he merely thrown off the gray disguisings? No time to speculate
now. Stover caught the velvet strand. It tightened.

 
          
But
he was too closely crimped, and one of his hands was injured. The first tug
wrenched the rope from him, and Buckalew almost fell with the sudden slackening
of the cord.

 
          
More sirens.
The air around the scaffolding was thick with
planes. Drivers and passengers were sympathetic and most unhelpful.

 
          
“Chin
up, Dillon!” Buckalew yelled above the racket. “I’ll try something else.”

 
          
He
rove
a noose in the rope’s end. This he lowered and
snared one of Stover’s waving feet. Then he began to pull. Stover shifted in
the clutch of his trap, but could not be dragged free.

 
         
BUCKALEW
sprang backward into space.

 
          
He
kept hold of the rope, which tightened abruptly across the girder. The sudden
application of his hurled weight did the trick. With a final cruel pinch that
all but buckled Stover’s ribs, the cables released their hold. Then Stover was
being drawn up by one foot, his head downward. Buckalew came slowly down at the
other end of the rope. The smaller man was strangely the heavier. Drawing to a
point opposite Stover, Buckalew caught his friend by the arm.

 
          
“Steady
on,” he bade, twisting the two strands of the line together.

 
          
Then,
thankfully and triumphantly, Stover and Buckalew climbed hand over hand up the
doubled length of velvet. A few moments of rest on the girder, and they walked
back along it to where another length of cord gave them a passage back to their
own balcony.

 
          
To
the thronging plane-riders who now closed in, Buckalew had a brief word of
dismissal.

 
          
“Did
you like the show? We’re rehearsing an acrobatic turn for next year’s society
circus on Venus. Not very good yet, are we?”

 
          
Then
he closed the door behind him. He brought the exhausted Stover a drink, and
listened to all that had happened below the floor.

 
          
“You
say that the disguised one was as tall as you?” he asked at the end of the
story.

 
          
“Yes,
with those false magnetic soles,” replied Stover. “He’d have to be built up to
be that big. All my suspects are shorter than I am.” He measured Buckalew’s
middling height with his eye as he spoke.

 
          
“Why
say ‘he’?” asked Buckalew. “Couldn’t it be a woman, with that whisper, the
stilts and
draperies.
Reynardine Phogor?”

 
          
“She
might be a killer,” admitted Stover. “You seem to think so.”

 
          
“I
didn’t say that. I only want her to be remembered. Don’t drop any suspects from
the list without very good reasons.”

 
          
“But
where could that murderer have popped from?” elaborated Stover. “The whole
scaffolding’s open-work. Not place enough to hide even a small person. Yet I
turned around and there he—or she—was.” “You said the draperies were gray,”
reminded Buckalew.
“A good color to blend in with the metal.
Probably the murderer crouched motionless while you walked right past.”

 
          
Stover
shook his head and rubbed his bruised side gently. “I find that pretty hard to
accept, on a ten-inch girder.”

 
          
“You
weren’t looking for a human figure,”
persisted
Buckalew. “You were looking for clues—by the way, did you find any?”

 
          
Stover’s
hand crept into the pocket of his tunic. His finger touched the scrap of
elascoid. Perhaps Buckalew could help him decide exactly what it was. Perhaps,
again, Buckalew knew only too well what it was.

 
          
“No,”
he said.
“Nothing at all.”
Then his eyes had time to
quarter the room, and he jumped up quickly.

           
“Look! Gerda—her body! It’s gone!”

 
          
And
it was.

 
         
THE
high-tower set was holding carnival at the Zaarr. The place was packed, nearly
every seat and table taken. There
was
lots of music,
and Venusian dancers—frog-women who, grotesque as they were, had yet the grace
of snakes. To keep them supple and energetic, a misty spray of water played
over the glass stage, water that might cool the parched and dehydrated tissues
of many a Martian pauper out on the deserts far away.

 
          
Thus
in an atmosphere like that of their own foggy planet, the dancers outdid
themselves, their gliding gestures moving swiftly in faultless rhythms.
Suddenly, with an almost deafening shout, they sprang into the air—and
disappeared.

 
          
It
was a tremendous effect. The water-spray died at once, leaving nothing but
luminous air under the play of a pale light.
Thunderous
applause.

 
          
“I
know how that is done,” Phogor said to his step-daughter Reynardine.
‘‘The atom-shift ray.
It strikes any material into atomic
silence, so that they fade from view. See, the light is being wheeled away.
Those dancers, in the form of invisible atomic clouds, will go with it and
re-mate- rialize in the green room. Scientifically simple, and very
uncomfortable, I hear, to those involved. But the show must go on. Pulambar
demands new thrills.”

 
          
Brome
Fielding smiled, as if he, for one, found the new thrill acceptable. Only Amyas
Crofts, in a remote corner, glowered.

 
          
For he had been looking toward the main entrance, and had seen the
arrival of the two new guests who had just come to occupy the last reserved
table.

 
          
Dillon
Stover, towering and handsome in blue and scarlet, made a commanding figure
even in that richly decked crowd. Behind him came Buckalew, more somber but
quite as fashionable in black and silver. Where Stover’s expression was
strained and defiant, Buckalew was absolutely calm
 
and unruffled of feature.

 
          
Others
saw the pair, and stared as fiercely as Amyas Crofts. The Martian who had
replaced Prrala as proprietor fumbled over the admission card. Others,
including many guests, glowered at the recently jailed young man who returned
so nervily to the very heart of society. And one figure swaggered up, a man in
the uniform of a space-officer.

 
          
“Now
I can believe all I hear of you, Stover,” said this person in a thick,
disagreeable voice. “Only a man who is all brass and no heart would have the
crust to come over here.”

 
          
He
was almost as tall as Stover and heavier. His face might have been boldly
handsome before dissipation coarsened it. As he spoke, his right hand slid
inside the front of his tunic.

 
          
Stover
met his stare. “Who are you?”

 
          
“Sharp.
Captain Sharp.
Retired.
And,” the voice grew nastier still,
“since you must have come here just to show us your face—”

 
          
Turning
from Stover, he addressed the crowd that watched as expectantly as it had
watched the encounter with Malbrook three nights before. “This man’s crust
would blunt a rocket- kick!” he bawled. “Twice a
murderer,
and he coldly comes here.” He turned back to Stover. “What have you done to
Gerda?”

 
          
“Nothing,
if it’s any of your business,” said Stover, fighting to keep his temper.

 
          
The
coarse face darkened. “I love her—and she’s disappeared. You,” he leveled a
forefinger, “did away with her. Well, you were full of fight once before here.
How about fighting now?”

 
          
“Careful,
Dillon,” warned Buckalew. “He’s deliberately making trouble.”

 
          
“Maybe
you’ll fight for this!” raged Captain Sharp.

 
 
         
HE SLAPPED Stover, open- handed. Then,
as before with Malbrook, people were interfering. Among them was one who hadn’t
been here on the earlier occasion—Congreve. He caught Sharp by the shoulders
and thrust him back.

 
          
“Don’t
you High-tower sparks do anything but hit each other?” he asked dryly.

 
          
The
new Martian proprietor came towards Stover. “I feel, ssirr, that you had
betterr go elssewherre. We cannot have ssuch brrawling around here.”

 
          
“I’m
going,” growled Stover. “My enemies know I’m still in the running, for
lightning to challenge twice in the same place.”

 
          
They
went outdoors, and Buckalew signaled for an air-taxi.

 
          
“I’ve
got it!” Stover exclaimed suddenly.

 
          
“Got
what?”