Sinister Barrier (13 page)

There came a loud buzz of approval from listeners as Leamington sat down. For the first time since the Bjornsen-precipitated crisis, they felt that humanity was getting somewhere, doing something to rid itself once and for all of the burden of the centuries. As if to remind them that optimism should be modified by caution, the ground quivered, a muted rumble sounded outside, then followed the roar from the sky as lagging sound caught up with its cause.

Already Leamington had in mind a suitable site for the establishment of what he hoped would be the first anti-Viton arsenal. Ignoring outside noises, the Secret Service chief bestowed a fatherly smile on his protégé still standing on the platform. Instinctively, he knew that this plan would go through, and that Graham would play the part best calculated to enhance the reputation of the Service. Leamington had never demanded more of his boys than just their bodies and souls. He had never received less than that.

“It is of little avail,” Graham reminded, as outside sounds died away, “to battle the Asians without also attempting to subdue their crafty overlords. To wipe out the luminosities is to remove the source of our enemies’ delusions, and bring them back to their senses. They’re humans, like us, those Asians—take away their mad dreams and you’ll take away their fury. Let’s strike a blow by giving our solitary clew to the world.”

“Why not organise our native scientists and get them on the job?” inquired a voice.

“We shall do that, you may rest assured. But as we know to our cost, a thousand widely separated experimenters are safer than a thousand in a bunch. Let the entire western world set to work, and nothing—visible or invisible—can prevent our ultimate triumph!”

They roared their agreement as he stared absently at the cabinet still standing guard over the only door. The memory of Beach was a dull pain within his mind which held other and equally tragic memories—the rag-doll appearance of Professor Mayo’s broken body; the sheer abandon with which Dakin had plunged to his sickening end; the horrid concentration in the eyes of the sufferer with an imaginary dog in his belly; Corbett’s dying
crump
as he smacked into stone; the great black banner of tormented atoms which had been unfurled above Silver City.

Not much use damping their spirits in this rare moment of enthusiasm. All the same, it was as clear as daylight that short-wave research could move in only one of two directions—the right one, or the wrong one. Wrongness meant slavery forever; and the first indication of rightness would be the heartless slaughter of every experimenter within reasonable reach of success.

There was murder in prospect, murder of every valuable intellect in the front-line of this eerie campaign. It was a dreadful certainty that Graham had not the heart to mention. As the audience fell silent, he left the platform. The silence was broken by the now familiar feature of sudden death.

The floor jumped six inches northward, settled slowly back. While the occupants of the basement posed in strained attitudes, the tearing rumble of tottering masonry came to them through the thick walls. Then the vile bellow from the sky as if the Creator were enjoying the agonized writhings of his own creations. A pause, followed by the lower, lighter rumble of vehicles dashing along the street, heading for the new area of wreckage, blood and tears.

Sangster was worried and made no attempt to conceal the fact. He sat behind his desk in the office of the department of special finance, in Bank of Manhattan, watched Graham, Wohl and Leamington, but spoke to none of them in particular.

“It’s twelve days since that international broadcast giving a line to everybody from hams to radio manufacturers,” he argued. “Was there any interference with that general call? There was not! Did one radio station get picked up and tossed around? No, not one! I say that if short-wave research was a menace to the Vitons they’d have played merry hell to prevent it. They’d have listed the radio experts and had a program. There’d have been slaughter all the way from here to there. But the Vitons took no notice. So far as they were concerned, we might have been scheming to wipe them out by muttering a magic word. Ergo, we’re on the wrong track. Maybe they avoided therapy sets just to put us on the wrong track. Maybe they’re doing the laughs they can’t make up the sleeves they haven’t got.” He tapped his desk nervously. “I don’t like it, I don’t like it.”

“Or maybe they want us to think the same way,” Graham put in, easily.

“Eh?” Sangster’s jaw dropped with suddenness that brought grins to the others’ faces.

“Your views are proof that the Vitons’ disinterest ought to be our discouragement.” Strolling to the window, Graham regarded the battered vista of New York. “I said ‘ought,’ mark you! I’m suspicious of their seeming nonchalance. The damned things know more of human psychology than experts of Jurgens’ type are likely ever to learn.”

“All right, all right!” Mopping his brow, Sangster pawed at some papers on his desk, extracted a sheet, held it up. “Here’s a report from the Electra Radio Corporation. Their twenty experts might as well be shooting craps. They say short waves stink. They’ve thrown at passing luminosities every frequency their plant can concoct, and the spheres merely ducked out as if they’d encountered a bad smell. Bob Treleaven, their leading wiseacre, says he almost believes the cursed things really do sense certain frequencies as their equivalent to odors.” He tapped the paper with an accusatory finger. “So where do we go from here?”

“‘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.”

“We’re 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 we’re 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 joined 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 indistinct 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.

Chapter 10

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 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 thermo-static 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?”