The Avenger 32 - The Death Machine (3 page)

“The young lady had some trouble with her car,” said Early.

“Oh, yeah? We got a report she was trying to do the Dutch, take a nosedive into the drink.”

The girl frowned. “Was I? I . . .”

“She’s afraid of heights,” continued Early. “She got out of her car to look under the hood and then realized where she was. It made her giddy.”

“Fishy,” said the patrolman. “Sounds very fishy to me, buddy.”

Early took his protective arm from around the girl. “Don’t worry about anything.” To the patrolman he said, “I’m Agent Don Early. Here is my identification.”

“Get ’em out slow, buddy.”

The cleancut young government agent smiled, taking his wallet slowly from the inside pocket of his coat. “Here you go.”

The patrolman took the ID packet between thumb and forefinger. “Everybody’s always trying to impress . . . Say! I heard of this outfit. It’s supposed to be even tougher than the FBI and—”

“I’d like to talk to this young lady.” Early leaned toward him, taking his wallet. “Can you see about having her car driven home for her?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Early.” The patrolman gave him a smart salute before ambling back to his car.

The girl was starting to shiver. “It’s very cold out here.”

“Let’s get into my car.” He guided her over and helped her in. “You live over in San Francisco?”

“No, back over in Mill Valley,” she said. “I don’t know why I was driving this way.”

“Take you home,” said Early. He got the car going, rolled down his window. Sticking out his arm, he made an abrupt U-turn.

“Hey, you crazy wife-beater!” shouted one of the motorists who’d stopped to watch everything.

Early said, “My name’s Don Early.”

“I’m Emmy Lou Dennim. Sort of a little-girl name for someone my size.”

“What’s wrong with your size?”

“I’m nearly five-eleven.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” he said. “What do you know about what’s just happened?”

Emmy Lou said, “I’m not even sure what did just happen. Was I really trying to jump?”

“Yeah. Any idea why?”

“No. I . . . no.”

“Where do you work?”

The girl hesitated, then asked him, “Could I see that identification of yours?”

“Sure, here.”

After studying it and returning it to the government agent, she said, “Supposedly I work for an outfit called Dameon Technics in San Rafael, small electronics company.”

“But you really work on the Vermillion Project.”

“You do know about it then?”

“More than you do even, since Vermillion is set up so that people in one segment of the operation don’t know who the people in the other segments are. But I know.”

“You say that as though . . . what’s wrong?”

“In the last three weeks several people who are engaged in working on some facet of the Vermillion Project have killed themselves.”

“I didn’t know that. That’s terrible,” said the girl. “How many have there been?”

“You’d have been the ninth.”

A raccoon, bandit-eyed, was looking through the screen door.

Emmy Lou noticed him, gave a start. “What do you . . . oh, it’s only one of them,” she said. “I made the dreadful mistake of feeding them when I first moved in. Now I have no less than a half-dozen raccoons dropping by for handouts every night.”

“Who’d you think you saw at the door?” asked Early.

“I don’t know . . . No, that’s not quite accurate. I do know, but I can’t seem to . . . no, I can’t get it.” She was sitting on a flowered sofa, knees tight together.

Agent Early said, “Miss Dennim, you happen to be the only person, far as I know, they haven’t succeeded with.”

She hugged herself, shivered. “Yes, I thought about that while you were driving me home.”

“Don’t like to pressure you, but it would be a great help if you could tell me anything.”

“Yes, I realize it would.” She glanced again toward the doorway. “I’ll get you your snack in a minute,” she said in the direction of the patient raccoon. “Somebody came here . . . tonight.”

“Someone you know?”

She closed her eyes, trying to see into the past. “I . . . don’t think so . . . lost . . .”

“Somebody claiming he was lost?”

“Can’t . . . this is really exasperating. It’s like what’s-his-name almost getting the rock to the top of the hill and then having it slip back.”

“Sisyphus,” supplied Early.

“How’d you . . . excuse me. I guess I expect government agents not to know anything but fingerprints and lie detectors.”

Early said, “I encountered you on the bridge a few minutes before midnight. Do—”

“Encountered? Is that the right synonym for saying my life.”

“Question I’m leading up to is . . . what do you remember about tonight? Say for several hours back from midnight.”

She watched the buff ceiling of her living room as she thought. “I remember listening to the news on the radio. It was the Richfield Reporter, so that means it was ten o’clock. Then . . . Funny, I don’t seem to be able to remember anything after that. Until I woke up with you holding me way up in the middle of the air on that frightening bridge.”

“Then we can tentatively say . . . let’s see. Takes about a half hour to get from here to the bridge. So if you had a visitor he arrived between ten thirty and eleven-thirty.”

Emmy Lou stood up. Walking into her cottage’s small yellow kitchen, she said, “can I make you some coffee, or what passes for coffee in these troubled times?”

“Yeah, fine.” Early crossed to a window, stared out at the night. “Not many neighbors.”

“No, that’s what I like about the place. I feel like I’m living out in the wilds, yet I’m only fifteen minutes from work. Oh, but you’re thinking in terms of witnesses.”

“Be nice if you had a little old widow living right next door,” said Early. “Little old ladies are a great source of information, especially about their young girl neighbors.”

“Closest neighbors are the DeBonnis family, quarter-mile up the road. And they usually . . .” She didn’t finish her sentence.

“What is it?”

No answer.

Early hurried in there. “Something wrong?”

Slowly the girl said, “A man wearing . . . a dark suit. I don’t know what he looked like. He stood out there on the porch . . . and for some reason the light didn’t work. He was carrying something . . . something that made . . . made a terrible sound.” She pressed fingers to her temple. “I just all at once remembered. Standing here waiting for the coffee to perk and there was a picture of him in my head.”

Early said, “Sooner or later you’re probably going to remember everything.” He went over to the wall phone. “I’m going to put a couple of my men to watching your place.”

“You think they’ll try again?”

“Good strong possibility they will.” He picked up the receiver. “Operator? Operator?” After a few more seconds he hung up.

“Aren’t you going to call?”

“Phone’s dead.”

“What’d you want to go and do something like that for?”

Uncle Algernon rested his smudged hands on the rumpled vest of his rumpled suit. “A man of genius must pursue the will-o-the-wisp of inspiration wherever it leads, my boy.” He was flat on his back on top of the bedspread.

Smitty roamed the room. “What the heck did you think the positive values of a machine like that would be?”

“The Heathcote Ultrasonic Brain Control Box,” explained his sprawled uncle, “has values too numerous to enumerate. In the field of mental health, for instance, it—”

“Okay, okay,” said the giant. “That’s what you were going to do with it. These bozos who glommed it, they got different ideas.”

“Which is why I am here to consult with you,” said his uncle “Do you think room service stocks Snickers bars?”

“No. Now get to the part where the box was swiped. Who done it?”

“Aye, there’s the rub. I have not the foggiest notion who made off with it.”

“Huh?”

“I was delivering a lecture on the peaceful uses of atomic energy over at Stanford Univ—”

“Peaceful uses? We ain’t even got any warful uses yet.”

“Exactly what the FBI agents who detained me after my talk pointed out. In the interest of my country, I’ve scratched the topic.”

“Who swiped the box?”

“I honestly do not know, Algy. When I returned to my rented home in the Berkeley hills, overlooking beautiful San Francisco Bay and nestled in—”

“Why have you got a joint in Berkeley?”

“It’s a modest abode, Algy. Procured originally so that I might have a place to work whilst I’m on my lecture tour of the West.”

“How many people know about your invention?”

His uncle turned his head away. “You may be aware that I was never one to hold my tongue.”

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“So that in addition to the various governmental circumlocution offices I trudged to in a futile effort to donate the Heathcote Ultrasonic Brain Control Box to the nation, I perhaps let slip a few details about the box to some of my attentive and enthusiastic lecture circuit audiences.”

“Anybody might know then?”

“I fear so, my boy.”

Smitty cracked his knuckles. “You really think the guys who swiped this box are using it to knock off people?”

“As much as I would like to believe otherwise,” said Dr. Heathcote, sitting up. “As I told you, I intended this hypnotizing machine to be used for good purposes. I envisioned our government utilizing it to gain control over enemy armies, perhaps. Imagine a battalion of our boys carrying Heathcote Ultrasonic Brain Control Boxes onto the battlefield and, without a single shot being fired, hypnotizing the opposition into complete and abject surrender.”

“What keeps them from hypnotizing themselves along with the other guys?”

“Specially designed Heathcote Earplugs.”

Smitty said, “From what I know about hypnonsis, Unc, you can’t make anybody do nothing to hurt himself.”

“Not with ordinary hypnosis, no. With the Heathcote Ultrasonic Brain Control Box, however, anything is possible. The fact that the box can make someone act against his own best interest was one of my strongest selling points. Although most of the bureaucrats I approached didn’t see the military possibilities of that.”

Smitty cracked his knuckles again. “How many guys you say have bumped themselves off?”

“There are always a great many suicides in the San Francisco Bay area,” said his uncle. “Possibly because, as several pundits have theorized, this is about as far West as one can go. Be that as it may, I’ve noted seven suicides in the period since the box was stolen . . . seven which give every evidence of being induced. Eight if we add the tragedy you witnessed earlier this evening.”

“What you got is a theory. You ain’t got proof.”

“Very difficult, my boy, to ask a dead man if he took his life willingly or was persuaded,” Uncle Algernon said, wiping perspiration off his chin with his tie. “I’ll make you a bet, however.”

“About what?”

“Tonight’s victim. I’ll wager he was a scientist of some sort, working either in physics or electronics.”

The giant said, “Hold on a minute. You’re trying to tell me all seven of these other stiffs were scientists?”

“That’s exactly what I am telling you.”

“I think maybe,” said Smitty, “I better call the Avenger.”

He heard them before he saw them.

Heard one of them at least. One of them stepping on a dry fallen branch and snapping it.

“What’s the quickest way to get all the lights in here off?” Agent Early asked the girl.

Without replying Emmy Lou dropped down on hands and knees. “I’m always complaining to the landlord I don’t have enough plugs.” She yanked one plug out under the kitchen table, scooted into the living room of her cottage and yanked out another cord. “All set.”

Every light was out.

“Don’t know what they’ll use.” Early slipped his revolver out of its shoulder holster. “Guns or . . . whatever it was they tried on you before.”

“Darn,” said the girl out in the darkness of the next room.

“What?”

“My refrigerator’s hooked up to one of those multi-plug extension cords I just pulled. Now my pint of ice cream is going to—”

“Quiet!” ordered Early in a whisper.

Only a leaf this time, but someone had stepped on it.

“You sure you aren’t just hearing one of my raccoons?”

“Nope, not unless you’ve got a 180-pound raccoon running around out there.”

As Early listened to all the night sounds he realized he wasn’t hearing something. The foghorns which had been mournfully calling . . . they’d stopped. He looked toward the window. Maybe the fog was going.

“Is it okay,” asked Emmy Lou, right beside him, “if I—”

“You move very quietly.”

“For such a big girl, yes, I do. Would it be all right if I helped out?”

“How?”

“I have a pistol of my own.”

Early nodded his head in the dark. “Okay, get it.”

“Got a couple other things, too. They might come in handy now the fog’s lifting,” she said. “Where do you figure our raiding party is?”

“One, possibly two of them, sneaking up from the east side of this place,” he answered. “Over near the garage.”