Spaceman's Luck and Other Stories

by George O. Smith

  “He wasn’t there, I take it.”

  “He was not. I am a bit puzzled, though. He had been here. The bed had been used but was not made. Most of the men are neat, and Kingsley was one of the best. I’d try his home.”

  “Telephone?”

  “Of course.”

  Holmes led Murdoch to one of the offices and used the telephone. There was no answer.

  Murdoch then requested a taxicab, and waited with Holmes until the cab arrived. Hiring the cab for the day, Murdoch was driven to Kingsley’s apartment. He burgled his way in with a set of master keys and saw at once that the apartment had not been used for days.

  He went back to the laboratory and asked more questions, checking on Kingsley’s habits. Then, to check upon some of Kingsley’s habits in person, Murdoch took to his cab again.

  The feeling of frustration welled once more in Murdoch’s heart, and he felt glum about missing the scientist. He realized that he had not eaten breakfast, and asked the driver to drop him at a restaurant—and how about a cup of coffee?

  “Sure.”

  “Know Kingsley?”

  “Nope. Heard of him, though. Seemed a smart enough feller. Newspaper?”

  “I suppose. Any funnies? Nothing of real interest to an out-of-towner, you know. ”

  “We have a good one,” said the driver proudly.

  The newspaper was fair for a town of that size. It was filled with local items about people who were undoubtedly all well-known to the rest of the town, for the personal angle was high in every item. The comic strips were good; taken from a national syndicate and given prominence.

  The radio in the restaurant stopped playing music as Murdoch finished the paper, then there started a news broadcast. Indolently, Murdoch listened to the radio while finishing his coffee, and did not realize what he had heard until the account was almost over.

  Then he sat bolt upright and told the driver:

  “The police station and make it quick…"

  "I’M CAPTAIN HARRIS, Mr. Murdoch. What can I do for you?” The police captain handed Murdoch his credentials and looked expectantly at the Treasury agent.

  “I just heard a news broadcast and I want to know the particulars.”

  “Which one?”

  “Someone was found murdered in a garage.”

  “Oh. Tim Lake. Too bad about Tim. Tough lines for his wife and kids.”

  “Have any idea who did it?”

  “Some foreigner, no doubt.”

  Murdoch smiled. “How can you tell?”

  “The bullet was about the size of an American thirty-two, and the right weight. But the ballistics man tells me that it must have been one of the foreign guns, because the rifling was to the left instead of to the right. He told me that some foreign guns are rifled left-hand.”

  “That’s what I wanted to get straight,” said Murdoch. “What kind of a gun did he say it was?”

  “He didn’t know.”

  “Um. I wouldn’t know either. I doubt that any English gun is rifled to the left, and most of the French and German guns are millimeter sizes, neither of which popular sizes fall too well into the thirty-two caliber class. The seven millimeter is about two-seventy-five thousandths of an inch; and the nine millimeter is about three-fifty-four thousandths. I’d have to check the gun expert at the Bureau to state with any positiveness, but I believe that left-hand rifling is comparatively rare.”

  “Then what in heaven’s name—”

  Murdoch shrugged. He contemplated the situation for a moment and decided that there was far too much highly circumstantial evidence to start a hue and cry for Joseph Kingsley. After all, Murdoch knew too little. There was a reversed quarter that came from Holland with fingerprints on it which, when reversed again photographically, became the prints of Professor Kingsley. There was a reversed folder from a pack of cigarettes, also from Holland. There was the rather strange disappearance of Kingsley, though Murdoch had not checked too thoroughly as yet. And now this bullet,

  claimed to be a .32 but shot from a gun that was rifled to the left. A gun that there was little likelihood was an American weapon.

  Even so, the chain of circumstance did not lead too directly to Joseph Kingsley. Not enough to start a hunt for the scientist.

  The telegraph in the police station started to rattle, and the tape came spilling out at high speed.

  “Pardon me,” said Captain Harris.

  He went to the machine and began to read the tape, leaving Murdoch to think the situation over more thoroughly. Harris came back shaking his head.

  “Trouble?” asked Murdoch sympathetically.

  “Yeah. Jail break.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “You bet. A rather clever fellow, too.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “No one knows. Of course, the tape was quite sketchy, but it said something about a convict named Norman Blair being found missing this morning at check-up. The means of his escape were unknown since he was locked in his cell last night. His cellmate knows nothing about it.”

  “Who?” demanded Murdoch.

  “Norman Blair. Know him?”

  “Slightly,” said Murdoch, stunned by the sheer accumulation of coincidence.

  The trail here pointed more or less to Kingsley because of the fragment of fingerprint on the spurious coin. And now to have the further coincidence of the convict, Norman Blair, break jail was too much.

  Blair possessed at least one minute fragment of fingerprint that was a mirror image of some finger of Professor Kingsley. At least, similar enough so that there was plausible connection between the two fragments. Of course, one cannot state identification on the basis of a mere quarter-inch square of smudged print when it was sheer guesswork as to which finger it came from.

  YET the connection was solid enough.

  It pointed to Kingsley.

  Enough, thought Murdoch, to send out at least a “wanted-for-questioning” circular for Professor Kingsley. Too bad that fired bullets seldom have fingerprints on them.

  Murdoch went back to the laboratory and took Captain Harris’s fingerprint man with him. Dr. Holmes let them enter Kingsley’s laboratory with a master key, and stood dumbfounded when he looked at the empty room, shaking his head.

  “It begins to add up,” said Murdoch.

  It was an hour before the fingerprint expert was finished. It took another hour to send them to Washington by telephoto, and another hour later an answer came to Walter Murdoch:

  PRINTS DEFINITELY BLAIR, KINGSLEY, AND WOMAN SALLY RANSOME. PRINTS ON DIRTY DISHES MIRROR REPRODUCTIONS OF KINGSLEY AND RANSOME, NO BLAIR CAN YOU GET PRINTS FROM CIGARETTE FOLDER?

  TONY MONROE

  “No,” grumbled Murdoch. “That one was handled by too many people.”

  But Murdoch’s belief that there was some connection between Blair and Kingsley was confirmed, as strange as it was. And within the next couple of hours, a general alarm was out for Joseph Kingsley, Sally Ransome, and Norman Blair wanted for suspicion of murder.

  Meanwhile, the real criminals were rolling swiftly across the countryside in a stolen moving van with their loot. Another day of luck would see them at their hideout far from any city large enough to have more than the sketchiest of police departments…

  An instant after Joseph Kingsley saw the circle disappear, he began to look for a means of breaking his electrician’s tape manacles. His hands were taped behind him so he could not use his teeth, and they were taped too high to permit him to pass his feet between them.

  He inspected the room carefully. The walls and ceiling were of a satiny metal and the furniture seemed bulky and round cornered. Light came from tightly shuttered windows and was inadequate. Kingsley found that by wriggling like an eel, he could move about the room slowly and painfully, and after inspecting each piece of furniture and finding it useless for breaking his bonds, he located a radio receiver.

  He knew it could be used and his heart leaped. The front was smooth and clear of
anything likely to be of use to him, but Kingsley knew that somewhere in the back would be something that could be used. He levered the radio from the wall, hoping it was not a model with a closed-in back.

  It was not.

  And then Kingsley levered the radio forward on its face and eeled himself to a sitting position on the edge of the cabinet-rear, dangling his bound feet inside. He kicked against the largest of the several tubes and broke it with a loud pop.

  Then he sat upon the floor and dangled his hands over the back. He located the brutally splintered glass of the tube that clung to the base where it was inserted in the socket. He cut his wrist twice before he succeeded in getting the edge of the tape against the sharp glass.

  A minute later he was free.

  He unwrapped his ankles and stood up. He looked around the place, trying the doors and windows. They were locked with a complex lock that couldn’t be forced without tools of some sort. He did not know, but the place was a veritable fortress, built by Blair as a hideout and as a place for a final standoff if it came to a last ditch battle against Law and Order. And such a place, difficult to enter, was equally difficult to get out of when the owner desired to make it so.

  Kingsley hammered on the walls to let Sally know that he was free and that she must not lose hope. His one intent was to break free and to get to some place where he could let the authorities know what was going on.

  HE TOOK time to ponder the strangeness of reversal. He knew which was his right hand, and the mirror on the wall showed him to be right. He smoked with the correct hand and his coat was buttoned correctly. In his left hand pants pocket he found his keys just as they should be.

  But a book on an end table read as it might read when viewed in a mirror, and the mirror proved to him that this was so. When he approached something it came as it was expected to, and as he walked a curved course things moved as they should. He had no trouble in getting around.

  But he knew that the matter of position was a matter or relativity and that regardless of how he were reversed, a strange room would not seem stranger than normal. In his own apartment things would be reversed to him.

  Though it was really true that he was reversed with respect to it, it is human nature to interpret things in relation to yourself. The driver’s license and the papers in his wallet read properly to him, for they had been reversed along with him. Only those things that had not been reversed seemed backward.

  He could get along all right. But have someone ask him for his signature and he would be trapped, for he could not write backward—and other people would not accept a reversed signature. Besides, Kingsley was right-handed, and despite the fact that to his reversed senses he seemed normal, other people would see him as a southpaw.

  CHAPTER VII

  Hideout Fortress

  FORGETTING the strangeness of it all, Kingsley began to think of some way to get out of this trap. The shuttered windows, he discovered, were of tool steel and near to being impregnable even with the best of equipment, let alone his bare hands. The doors were steel-faced and sturdy. Yet he reasoned that a door between rooms might be less firm than those leading outside, and he determined to try.

  The cupboards that lined one end of the room were locked, and they resisted the battering of three wrecked floor lamps and one ruined chair before he gave up. The door at the end of the room seemed likely, since he could not open the cupboards to find something useful in breaking out, so he inspected the door and shrugged. He could do no more than try, and if he failed he would have tried, at least.

  Kingsley tried the sofa, and found it too heavy for him to lift. The heavier chair was bulky and he staggered under its weight, but it took a staggering mass to give him hope. He started from the far end of the room and began moving forward with the chair on his shoulders. He increased his walk to an uncertain run. He stumbled at about eight feet from the door and his groaning curse rang out through the room as he pitched forward under the chair’s weight.

  But the stumble proved fortunate. It gave him a headlong velocity he could not have achieved had he merely rammed at the door, and the hurling chair hit the door with force enough to shatter the bolt. The door opened slightly, and Kingsley, muttering about fortune coming in strange ways to the righteous, hurled the chair again but did not stumble this time. The weakened bolt gave way and Kingsley went into the next room on a headlong run.

  This room was furnished as a combined kitchen and dining room, and Kingsley lost no time in drinking from a glass he found on the sink. Then he looked around.

  There was something wrong with the setup, he knew, and he spent some time in trying to unravel the evidence presented, for there was some conflict that he could not, at first, determine. As in the case of the living room, cabinets and cupboards were locked. Dishes were neatly stowed in a glass doored cabinet which was not locked.

  There was a faint film of dust in the place.

  The refrigerator motor started with a faint purr, and Kingsley opened it to see what was inside. It was stocked; not filled to the brim with neatly-stacked packages and dishes, but in the normal fashion.

  Kingsley looked out of the kitchenette window upon a lake that glistened an unbroken blue through the trees. There was no sign of any other occupancy of the region from where Kingsley stood, but he knew that certain territories in the country were like that. A summer cabin could easily be located in such a manner as to be away and free of other people by mile after mile, or the next house might be only a couple of hundred feet through the woods.

  The shutter on the kitchenette window gave him too limited a view. Kingsley could not tell which kind of sheer loneliness it was.

  But as he tried to see more of the surface of the lake, he began to get the discrepancy. Here was a summer cabin on a lake, obviously miles from civilization. Locked and stowed as if abandoned for the season, but awaiting the arrival of its owners for the next season. But in contrast to this was the running water, the electricity, and the refrigerator stocked with food as though it had been used recently. The film of dust was that of a few days or at the most a week, but not that of month after month.

  In spite of the locked and abandoned look of the place, someone had lived here recently.

  The door in the kitchenette was open slightly and it showed stairs leading upwards into darkness. Kingsley opened the door the rest of the way and put his foot on the first step.

  “Sally!” he called. She must be up here somewhere, locked in some room.

  There was no answer.

  “Sally!”

  He paused in doubt. Had that gangster hurt her?

  “Sally!” he yelled.

  Or had the crook kept her in Holland, and what was her fate?

  KINGSLEY raced up the last few steps and burst into the room on the right. It was empty but a faint perfume filled the room. It was furnished as a boudoir and it had been occupied by a very feminine woman. Here the evidences of recent occupancy were greater than downstairs. A pair of sheer nylons were folded on the dresser and a full complement of cosmetics were on the dressing table. The bed was made neatly, and a chenille robe was folded and laid across the bed.

  On the lapel of the robe was an embroidered script-monogram, and Kingsley held it to the mirror to decipher it.

  “ ‘S. B. R.’,” he said, wondering.

  He found a book on the bedside table and opened it to the flyleaf. The scrawl would have been hard to read if properly presented, and Kingsley had trouble in reading it through the mirror. This was partly due to the fact that he did not want to believe his eyes. The signature was:

  Sally B. Ransome

  He slid open the boudoir table drawer and found a small pile of letters. The top letter was a long, lengthy letter from a man in jail which went on in a sentimental tone that sounded false, somehow. Certain words and phrases were misused, and below these was the same bad scrawl as on the flyleaf. Connected, these annotations added up to the fact that Sally should investigate some rather weird happenin
gs in Holland, Illinois, because they might prove interesting. “Sally,” he said in a dry voice.

  So that was how the girl had happened to be so conveniently interested in the Fortean Society. And Sally Ransome must have used the teleport to get her man out of jail!

  He found a chain of keys in the bottom drawer. The identification tag said “Norman Blair,” which meant nothing to Kingsley but made him believe that Blair must be the man in question. He pocketed the keys and looked around, thinking.

  There was no question as to his next move. He must get out of here quick and report to the authorities.

  The keys worked, and within a minute Kingsley was outside and walking briskly up the narrow roadway that wound in and out of the trees. It was several miles long and in poor shape, but Kingsley went along the trail until he came to the main road.

  Here he paused. Then because one way was as good as the other from his own standpoint, Kingsley turned left—knowing as he did that he was really turning right—and started up the main road.

  He began to whistle cheerfully. For the first time since Blair had shown up, Kingsley was confident that he could handle the situation.

  Kingsley had not gone far beyond the first curve when the moving van came up the road from the other direction and turned into the trail. It made heavy going through the narrow road, and it was almost an hour before Blair and Sally Ransome came to the house by the lake. Blair stopped the truck and turned to Sally.

  “You’ll have to be tied again, you know.”

  She nodded. “How long?”

  “Long enough for Kingsley to be convinced of the necessity of putting this gear together.”

  “Okay. Then what?”

  “Then it’s into the cellar with him!”

  Sally held her hands forward and Blair taped them loosely. Then he threw her over his shoulder and carried her to the door. From her handbag he took her keys and opened the door. He carried her in and dropped her on an easy chair, then he looked around.