by Eando Binder
Then I let him go. He stumbled off, moaning. I had not harmed him permanently. I only wanted to give him a lesson. Some day a police force of robots like myself may patrol the streets, meeting criminal brutality with its own coin. Some day—when I have proved that the intelligent robot is less of a monster than men like that.
I went on to my destination. There was a dive called “Larkin’s Pleasure Palace”. Back of it, as Jack had said loomed a huge dark warehouse. In there, four men were meeting, part of the Big Boss’s crime ring. I could not find a way in from the street level. I saw the first level of a fire-escape, ladder pulled up. Flexing my legs, I leaped straight up ten feet, catching a metal bar and swinging myself onto the first landing. I made no noise. I weigh 300 pounds, but I have more timing and absolute control over motion than any circus acrobat. I say these things without false modesty. They are facts.
I clambered up the fire escape quietly, and found an open skylight on the roof. From there I took a running broad-jump of some thirty feet to a broad metal beam running across the warehouse’s interior. Here I perched silently, listening.
I heard the low murmur of voices a hundred feet away, from behind boxes stacked to the roof. I dropped to the floor into a pile of excelsior. It deadened my landing to a low thud. I crouched, listening, but they hadn’t heard. I made my way—tiptoed, you might say—to a position behind the rampart of boxes. From beyond I could distinguish their words clearly.
They seemed to be plotting some nefarious business, but in language whose criminal idiom escaped me. It was something about a kidnaping. I was not concerned with that. Only with something relating to the Big Boss—or Eve.
I began to wonder if my quest would be useless.
Then I tensed.
“OKAY, that’s settled,” one man’s voice said. He laughed. “The Boss says that way we’ll pin it on the robot again—on the other one, Adam Link. What a couple of tin monkeys he’s making out of them! Joe and Lefty are laying low till the metal skirt takes the rap for them. Boy, the Boss sure has brains!”
“Yeah,” agreed another. “And pretty soon he’ll be on the City Tax Council, cutting us in on easy graft and big money. That’ll be sweet—Councillor Harvey Brigg—”
“Shut your trap!” hissed the first man. “Hasn’t the Boss warned us never to mention his name?”
“Aw, who’s going to hear—”
Again he was interrupted. “Which one of you guys is sportin’ that loud ticker?”
There was silence for a moment.
I SHOULD have been warned. But I hardly heard. Only one thing drummed in my mind—Harvey Brigg! Harvey Brigg! I knew his name. The name of the man who had plotted three murders in the name of my innocent Eve.
Suddenly two ugly automatics were pointing at me, from both sides at once. The men had come around the boxes. I could have leaped away, easily, even then. But again something warned me not to risk exposure of my identity. Better to act the part of a human, caught like a rat in a trap.
They prodded me around the boxes to where they had sat. A flickering candle lighted the scene. They peered at me in its dim rays. The illusion of my human disguise held, fortunately.
“A dick, eh?” barked the leader of the four. “The Boss warned us to watch for dicks working for Adam Link. How much did you hear?”
I maintained a silence.
“We’ll make you talk, smart guy! Barney, find some rope.”
They tied me flat against a box, standing upright. Then, after ripping my chest free of the coat and shirt, they held burning matches to my “flesh.” I acted the part of a man in torment, with what histrionic ability I could summon. I squirmed against my bonds and made low moans. But I held my squirmings in check, lest the cords break.
I only hoped they wouldn’t penetrate my disguise. Luckily, the stench of the plastic under the flame was not much different from seared human flesh. I gathered that from their rather sickened expressions. I have no sense of smell.
“Guess he won’t talk!” said one of the men. They had burned welts all over my plastic chest. They could not hide a certain grudging admiration, thinking me a human with remarkable fortitude.
One of the men fidgeted. “Maybe he heard everything—even the Boss’s name!”
They looked at each other. The light that gleamed in their eyes made even me shudder. It is the look of human beings about to kill another.
“Okay, wise guy!” snapped the leader. “You won’t talk dead any more than alive. Let him have it, boys!” Their guns spoke in chorus. The heavy slugs thudded into my chest plastic, in a barrage. Carrying my part to the last, I slumped back against the box, head lolling. One of the men grabbed my wrist and felt for the pulse.
“No heart-beat,” he announced. “Went out like a light.”
Calmly the leader then flipped the lighted candle to the floor, kicking a pile of excelsior toward it.
“They won’t even find the body!” he exulted. “Come on, boys—”
They left my “dead” body. They had done the job too quickly to notice three things—that there was no blood on my chest, that my eyes hadn’t closed, and under the roar of guns they hadn’t heard the bullets making a muffled ring, as they struck against metal under the plastic.
I waited five minutes, just to be sure. They were gone. Then I straightened up, and walked away from the box, hardly aware of the heavy rope snapping like string around me. A ring of fire licked about me. I walked through it, not noticing the flame that burned half my clothes off before I beat it out with my hands. I climbed to the skylight, went down the fire-escape, and through an alley. At the corner I pulled the fire-alarm I found there. No need to let valuable property burn down.
I made my way down dark streets to Jack’s place. Within I was laughing, laughing! I wondered what those four gangsters would think if they could see the “man” they had “bumped off” walking along with his “riddled” body. But then I sobered. Adam Link, detective, faced his biggest assignment of all—tracking down the master criminal Harvey Brigg!
CHAPTER V
The Crime Ring
I CALLED Eve on the radio-telepathy. Poor Eve, sitting there in her cell 24 hours a day, unknowing of sleep’s blessing, waiting, hoping, perhaps despairing.
“Adam, I want to come to you!” she said almost immediately. “I cannot stand these horrible walls, and the chains binding me, and the cold stares of the prison people. Adam, let me come—”
Don’t forget Eve—mentally—was a young, sensitive girl. Not a cold, passionless being of steel nerves. Think of your sister or wife in jail.
“Eve, dear,” I said gently, firmly. “You must trust me. It is only a few days now. And then you will be free. I swear it.”
Kay, at Jack’s apartment, gave a little shriek as I walked in. Small wonder. My clothes were tatters, half burned away, exposing plastic that was seared and blackened. My “chest” was a ruin of what looked like torn dead flesh, with metal shining through in places. The metal was dented where the slugs had struck. My nose was gone. Somewhere, it had been knocked off. I remembered now the rather shocked glances of the few pedestrians I had passed, in the late hour. But they had shrugged and walked on, perhaps disbelieving most of what they saw so dimly.
Jack laughed too, when I told the story. “You took them for a ride!” Then he sobered, grinding his teeth. “Harvey Brigg, of all people! Unimpeachable character—in daily life. Lives in a swell home in a respectable neighborhood. But Adam, we’re stumped now. You couldn’t get anything on him in a year’s trying, much less a few days.”
“I’ll wring a confession out of him,” I returned harshly. “I’ll—” My hands were working.
“Adam!” It was Kay’s voice. She was peering at me in a shocked way.
I understood immediately. In her eyes—the disguise aside—I was a man, a human—a big, strong man, but gentle in nature. It was not like me to speak of brutal methods, no matter what the circumstances.
“Sorry, Kay. Don’t fear
that I’ve changed. It’s just that my blood boils, like that of any decent man’s, thinking of Harvey Brigg.” I spent a few seconds thinking. “A dictaphone! Jack, get me a dictaphone.”
“Wire it into the house?” Jack snorted. “My God, man, do you think you’re a wizard!”
“Wires? I won’t need wires. Get me the dictaphone and then drive me to my mountain laboratory.”
In the laboratory, I worked all the next day over the dictaphone Jack procured. It was simple, in a way, to eliminate the need of wires. In some basic mechanical principles, you human technicians are backward. Many things lie just before your nose. My creator Dr. Link—I mean no irreverence—spent years devising my body. In six months after I had come to life, I had improved my body four-fold.
Jack and Kay also patched up my torn chest with new plastic, remodeled a nose, and touched up my disguise in general. A new suit of clothes replaced the rags.
The next night I was behind the hedges of Harvey Brigg’s large home, with a black satchel. After some study, I climbed the roof of a back porch, careful so that I came up with barely a slither of my shoes. I forced the lock of an attic window. By leaning my weight slowly and steadily in the strategic spot, the latch clinked apart like nothing more than a snapping stick.
INSIDE, I wound my way past dust-covered old furniture and trunks. Wherever a board under my feet threatened to creak, I let my weight down with measured slowness, changing the sharp sound to a soft rubbing of wood. At certain places I kneeled, with my head touching the floor. Sounds from below, conducted through the walls, vibrated into my mechanical tympanums. The attic, to human ears, would have been as silent as a tomb, I suppose.
I will not detail the hours I snooped in this way, gradually learning, by sound alone, what rooms were below and who was in them. Three servants had retired. A fourth stood in a hall and later let in a late caller. He was led to a room that I knew to be Harvey Brigg’s private office or den.
The door closed, down below. The two men were alone.
“Well, Shane?” asked a cultured voice. “How did the job go?”
I hated the voice the moment I heard it. The voice of Harvey Brigg. Oily, smug, with hard overtones in it. The voice of a man whose heart was harder than the metal parts of my distributor “heart.”
Quickly, I rigged up my dictaphone system. I laid its pick-up device for sound on the floor. Like my ears, it was sensitive to the faint vibrations working through. If needed, I could have made it sensitive to the chirping of a cricket in the basement.
I had already connected the battery from my satchel. I tripped the on-stud. Five miles away, in Jack’s apartment, I knew the recording device was starting. A roll of wax was taking down the phonographic record of what the pickup device heard, and sent out as etheric impulses. At the same time, I leaned down on the floor, listening for myself.
“It went okay, Boss,” the visitor, Shane, said. “But a gumshoe dick was on the trail. Horned in on the boys at the warehouse. They couldn’t make him talk so they plugged him, and set fire to the joint. Morning paper told how the fire was put out after burning half the stuff in there. But nobody was mentioned, so it must have burned to ashes. Good work, eh, Boss?”
I could picture them grinning at one another triumphantly. But I was grinning—in my mind—more than they, and for better reason!
“Wonder if that Adam Link put him on the job?” mused Harvey Brigg’s voice. “Adam Link is supposed to be a mental wizard, robot or not—” There was just a shade of apprehension in his tone.
“But he don’t compare with you, Boss,” Shane responded. “You’ve got twice the brains he has!”
“I think you’re right, Shane,” Harvey Brigg agreed readily. “Four days from now his partner robot goes to trial. A little planning to pin it on the robot, and three men I had on the Black List were rubbed out. And who gets blamed? Who will take the rap? Not Joe and Lefty!”
There was loud laughter for a moment. Then Brigg’s voice came again. “Eve Link, the Frankenstein robot! Read that book sometime, Shane. You’ll know why then, at the trial, the jury will slap a guilty verdict on the robot faster than greased lightning. Evidence pro or con won’t matter. It’ll be just that they’ll be ready to believe the robot did it! I had that all figured out, you see.”
I HAD listened with riveted attention. Two things were clear. That Harvey Brigg was a megalomaniac. Secondly, that he was dead right about the trial—or had been. I don’t know which burned in me stronger at that moment. Anger at his cold, deadly plan in involving Eve. Or singing triumph that his own voice, on a wax record, would betray him.
The master mind who had twice the brains of Adam Link spoke again. “Shane, you’re a smart boy yourself! But now about the kidnaping. Give me all the details.”
Shane went into a recital of the kidnaping. It had been an efficient, coldblooded job, taking a young woman away from her well-to-do husband.
Then their discussion went into other channels—store robbery, protection fees, even the sale of drugs. Shane, I gathered as I listened, was the sole go-between for Brigg and his widespread “gang.” Brigg outlined certain methods of procedure, with a calm efficiency.
As the minutes slipped by, I was amazed at the ramifications of his ring. I began to doubt he could be a human being. He must be a frightful monster, human in name only.
The visitor left after two hours. I heard Brigg get into bed. I sat thinking. My mission was over. Eve was safe. But I thought of more than Eve. I thought of a city of humans preyed upon by this spider and his minions.
There were four days left before the trial. I stayed for three in the attic of Harvey Brigg’s home. I did not need food or water. I did not get cramped muscles, sitting for long hours. I signaled Eve once and told her to tell Kay of my decision to stay, so they wouldn’t worry about me.
No one disturbed me—except once. A servant was suddenly climbing the attic stairs. I had no chance to run for any item of furniture large enough to hide me. I was exposed to plain view, twenty feet from the stairwell. What could I do? I sat utterly still.
It was a woman. She came up and glanced around, looking for something. Her face turned my way. I froze into complete immobility. Her eyes flicked past me, safely!
I can offer an explanation. The light was dim. My absolute stillness must have deceived her into taking me for an inanimate object—perhaps a bundle of rags. No human being could have escaped. For no human can duplicate the rigidity of something non-living and non-breathing, as I can.
As for not hearing me—my internal hum and jingling seemed loud in the confined attic—I knew she was hard of hearing. Brigg had revealed once, in the course of his conversations, that he picked his servants for their poor hearing, thus safeguarding himself from any eavesdropping by them.
She went to a trunk, rummaged within, and left. I began to breathe again—no, sometimes I forget I am not human. I felt relieved, however.
CHAPTER VI
I Go to the Rescue
NO other disturbance came, and I went on with my recording. During the day, Brigg was out much of the time. But often he was in, and would closet himself with Shane, discussing their sinister activities in business-like tones. All of this poured into the superear of my instrument, and from there invisibly through the ether to Jack’s apartment. I had enough, in three days, to damn Brigg in the eyes of any court.
On the third night, something significant came from below. Shane was there again. It was near midnight. They were discussing the kidnaping.
“But he claims, Boss,” Shane was saying, “that he can’t raise more than $40,000 by midnight. He wants more time.”
Harvey Brigg’s voice was adamant. “Fifty thousand dollars by midnight was our stipulation. Since he can’t, or won’t pay, his wife dies at midnight! Go to the shack now, Shane. At midnight sharp—unless our contact man comes with the money—tell the boys to bash in her skull with the metal bar.”
I could sense that even Shane shuddered at Brigg�
�s utterly merciless tone. “But hell, Boss—”
“That’s an order, you fool! Don’t you understand? This kidnaping doesn’t count so much. The killing will be pinned on Adam Link, the robot! When we pull other kidnapings, they’ll pay up promptly, thinking it’s the cold-blooded, ruthless robot from whom they can expect no mercy!”
And not knowing—the thought drummed in my brain—that it was the cold-blooded, ruthless Harvey Brigg from whom they could expect no mercy!
“I get it, Boss! It’ll make the other kidnapings a cinch!”
“Get going,” snapped Brigg. “At midnight, remember!”
At midnight, a woman was to die. I was the only one who knew of it. I couldn’t let it happen. I left the attic, where I had been for three days and nights. I moved as swiftly and quietly as I could, leaped from the porch to soft grass, and scurried behind a hedge. Shane’s car backed out of the drive and roared away with a clash of gears.
I followed, with an equal clash of gears. For the first time in my two weeks of sleuthing, I let out my full running powers. I passed one late pedestrian. The man stopped stock-still, whirled to watch me, and then staggered to the curb and sat down, apparently sick. I saw that briefly over my shoulder. I might have been amused, except that my mission was so grim.
I pounded after Shane’s car as it left the outskirts of town where Brigg lived, out into the countryside. Traffic was sparse. Shane hit up a good speed. I ran along the concrete road’s shoulder, about a block behind Shane’s car, so that he wouldn’t glimpse me in his rear-vision mirror. Auto headlights momentarily lit me up—a human figure racing at better than 70 miles an hour. I don’t think the oncoming cars realized my speed. But the two or three I passed, going my way, must have. I can only surmise, as you can, what the drivers thought as what seemed a man overhauled and shot past them, though their motors were roaring.
