The Almost Complete Short Fiction

by Don Wilcox

  “Hold it!” Laubmann exploded with the breathless excitement of one who is on the verge of landing a million-dollar catch.

  Again the formula appeared—but only for an instant. It was like a blinding streak of lightning that illuminated vast wealth: a hidden treasure that might never be glimpsed again. Laubmann grabbed a pencil and made ready to scribble on an envelope.

  “That formula!” he rasped. “Where is it?”

  The formula reappeared on the screen, and in a clear solid image it suddenly moved back so far into the distance that the eye could not read it. Mentally, Taylor was putting it out of reach.

  In the picture, Bill Taylor’s hand held it, and he deftly folded the paper and sealed it within an envelope.

  Laubmann and Handy involuntarily crept closer to the big silvery bubble. They watched breathlessly. Their subject seemed to need no further encouragement. The images rolled along freely.

  So spellbound were the two men that they never guessed what was happening behind their backs. Maurine White had waited for just this very opportunity.

  For a split second the bubble seemed to whirl, the formula envelope disappeared, and a man’s two feet came into view—two feet bound with a rope. A small steely blade, perhaps a razor blade, slashed at the bonds. But at once the formula flashed back, and the two men remained frozen, intent. Laubmann started to write.

  The picture began to move swiftly.

  It showed Bill Taylor lighting a match to the valuable paper. It dropped to the floor in flames and Taylor stamped out the ashes. Then he dashed to a telephone and seemed to be in great agitation while he waited for his number.

  He drew another paper from his pocket. An official paper. Credentials. The paper enlarged on the screen. The words became legible.

  The date of the certificate was recent. The message was plain. William Taylor, pharmacist, was a member of the United States Secret Service!

  Bill Taylor was speaking briskly into the telephone. He quoted from another paper he held, and this paper also grew upon the screen into a close-up view. The hand-scrawled words were clearly legible. “Greenwood Village, Rural Route Two, Box Ten.”

  The young pharmacist’s lips formed the unmistakable order, “I’ll meet you there!” Then he hung up and dashed out—and the picture went into a whirl . . .”

  “The hell!” gasped Handy. “This guy’s a secret ser—”

  “Shut up!” Laubmann snarled. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “But they’ll be on our necks—”

  “Listen to me!” Laubmann growled hotly, trying to bring himself out of his turmoil. “I’m running this show, and no handful of cops is gonna upset the works.”

  Handy raised a bewildered eyebrow. “You mean you already knew this guy was a secret service—”

  “All the time,” Laubmann bluffed. “That’s why we’re playing against time. We’ve just got time to get out before the cops he called bounce in on us—I think.”

  “But the formula?”

  “We’ve got it all right!” On that question Laubmann was sure of his grounds. “It’s on the film! Grab everything! We’re on our way!”

  CHAPTER VI

  Portrait for Two

  The two men raced back and forth across the big room, snatching up film boxes, papers, blueprints. They smashed the bubble out of existence the first time it happened to be in their way. But bubbles and scientific mind-probing apparatus were things of the past now. Under the full blaze of the white lights, they swiftly filled two cardboard cartons.

  Splinters flew outward suddenly from the supply closet door. The corner of a wooden box crashed through a panel.

  “Tear the house down!” Laubmann yelled at his prisoner. “We don’t give a damn! All right, Handy, that’s everything. Come on. Wait—what’s this?”

  The big squint-eyed man seized his gun and marched back toward the seat of the image machine, his eyes glinting at the boy and the girl.

  “Not trying to pull a fast one, are you, baby?”

  “I’m dressing his wound,” Maurine White retorted.

  The big man glanced at the slow seepage of blood that streaked down the side of the young pharmacist’s face. The girl had evidently touched the lever, for the boy sat upright. But the straps that bound his arms, shoulders and head apparently had not been unbuckled. His eyes were closed.

  “Okay, you mop him up. See you on the homicide page of the Sunday supplement,” Laubmann sneered.

  He turned and stalked to the door where Handy, loaded down with cartons, fumbled with a key.

  But the supply closet door opened first. The human volcano charged out. His wild white hair flew like smoke, and his voice bellowed like a volcanic roar.

  “You dastardly, damnable whelps!” The mad Steinbock punctuated his profanity with a barrage of flying missiles. He stormed toward the two men, hurling every loose thing he could get his hands on. Within ten feet of them he stopped.

  “Radio speech! Science! Temperamental biographies! And you—nothing but a couple of murderous hoodlums! I’d like to fry you in a pan of fascinello and paint you all over the bathroom wall! You measly dirty damnable—”

  The volcanic roar choked off as if the crater had suddenly gone dry.

  Laubmann’s gun hand came up—up—steadily—accurately poised. His eye grew tighter and fiercer. His big jaw jutted outward brutally. This would simply be a murder of convenience.

  But Laubmann evidently did not see what Steinbock saw—the lithe figure of the pharmacist slipping along the right wall. The girl had succeeded in severing the straps that held him. Now Bill Taylor bounded for his lost weapon—the table leg, hidden in a pile of flimsy curtain.

  “The kid!” Handy shouted.

  Laubmann’s gun whirled. Handy’s boxes dropped. The girl screamed. And the club flew through the air with every ounce of Taylor’s strength back of it.

  A grunt of pain escaped Laubmann’s lips. A deep breathy grunt that was pain, shock and stung pride. His hand jerked up limply. But the gun that flew from it never fell to the floor. The bony fingers of the mad Steinbock swung in a sweeping gesture and caught the weapon out of mid-air.

  In a flash the gun looped to Steinbock’s other hand and was again poised for action. And the wild, crackling, triumphant peal of laughter from Steinbock’s wide-open mouth shot a chill through every spine in the room.

  “I’m a fakir, am I? So you’re going to tell the world! Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! We’l! see who’s shot through like a sieve!”

  The hysterical tone vanished and a low guttural growl sounded. The gun wavered nervously, swept the line of faces.

  All too obviously the demon in Steinbock was intoxicated by the fear he read in those faces, and for an instant he looked as though it would give him pleasure to shoot everyone down in cold blood. But his damaged ego cried to be restored. The pleasure of shooting could wait until he had spoken his piece.

  “You low-down ignorant fools! You think you’ve got a formula. You think you can cash in on it for a million. Who says it’s worth a million? I ask you! Who made it worth a million? I did!” He tilted his shaggy white head and pointed his goatee impertinently. He gestured boldly with the gun.

  “I sold that pigment! I made it worth a million! What if the girl did paint the pictures? I made people buy them. It was my lectures, my publicity, my insulting personality, if you please, that brought down this million-dollar avalanche. Do you have any stupid notion that you could do what I’ve done—you with the big ugly face and the frozen eye?

  “These art-mongers would take one look and run the other way. They go in for eccentrics—like me—not for thugs—like you! Fascinello in your hands wouldn’t be a color, it would be an animal—a white elephant—”

  A rap at a door on the lower floor echoed up the stairs.

  “Beat it!” Laubmann snapped. “They’re on us!”

  Handy dived to grab his boxes, but changed his mind, for Steinbock had had his words. He began to shoot.

  Crack!
Crack! Two shots went wild. Crack! Laubmann’s forearm flew to his face in time to catch the bullet.

  Crack! Handy’s revolver blazed out with one single deadly bullet. Steinbock fell, clutching his chest. His yellowish white hair swooped down like white rags on a falling mop-stick.

  Bill Taylor lunged at Handy. He shot a staggering blow to the pudgy man’s jaw. Handy tottered, writhed, tried to bring his revolver down to a bead. Taylor wrenched it from his hand. The weapon described a swift black arc through the air. Handy thudded to the floor senseless.

  The gun that fell from Steinbock’s bony fingers might have been recovered by its owner in that moment, had Maurine White not been alert. Laubmann, groaning with the pain of a bullet in his forearm, stumbled to a chair at the girl’s command.

  “Better not take any chances with me,” the girl said tersely. Laubmann eyed her sullenly. Footsteps were ascending the stairs. Maurine White added in a low voice, “I’m a murderess, you know.”

  The footsteps reached the top of the stairs. Taylor’s taxi driver looked in cautiously. The man had waited faithfully all that time.

  “Come in,” said Taylor, brandishing a gun. “We can use you. I knew it was you coming up those steps.”

  The hackman’s eyebrows jumped. “Looks like you’ve had some action.” His eyes roved from the dying form of the fake artist to the big man with the whitened face and the reddened arm; then back to the pudgy man who sat on the floor, trying to open his eyes.

  “Looks like you and the girl have cleaned house—”

  “The state police will be here soon,” Taylor interrupted. “That is—”

  He and the driver had a brief whispered conference. The fellow grinned. He was an accommodating person, even at one o’clock in the night. While Taylor and Maurine held their guns, he knotted some ankles and wrists together, and fixed a few bandages.

  “This artist is gonna die,” the taxi driver said. “He’s almost there.”

  Taylor bent over the eccentric old man. “Did you hear what he said?” Steinbock’s face remained expressionless, but weakly his head nodded.

  “You’re leaving Maurine in a devil of a jam,” said Taylor. “You know what the films caught—the murder of your twin brother. Was that all true, Steinbock?”

  Again the old man nodded. He whispered in weak, jerky gasps,

  “That . . . was the perfect murder. No one ever . . . knew . . . except the girl. The gun she used was planted in the drawer. It was loaded—with blanks. She thought . . . that she . . . did it. But—”

  “Yes—go on!”

  “I did it,” Steinbock gasped weakly. “I shot him from the door. She was so stunned, she never knew what really happened . . .”

  Taylor expelled his pent-up breath. “Thanks,” said the girl, pressing the old man’s hand. There were tears in her voice. “Thanks so much.”

  “And thanks for your help in this fight,” said Bill Taylor fervently. “Without you—”

  “Hell,” the dying man breathed. “I meant . . . to . . . kill them both . . .” The taxi driver started to leave, to make the telephone call that Taylor had instructed him to make.

  “Remember,” whispered Taylor, “get the call through to Chief Penniworth personally. I’ll show the Secret Service a thing or two!”

  “When Penniworth finds out what you’ve done, he’ll probably want to make you a Government man,” said the driver in an undertone.

  “That’s the very point,” said Taylor, grinning.

  The driver left to carry out his mission faithfully. But before the state police came to take the situation over, Maurine White and Bill Taylor had a quiet half hour to themselves, for their prisoners were secure, if bitter and sullen.

  “You never told me that you were a secret service man!” Maurine White exclaimed.

  “I’m not,” Taylor laughed, “but I made myself believe I was. Long enough to project some misleading images, anyway. You never told me that you’ve been dancing with someone who looks exactly like me,” he accused her.

  “But I haven’t! That is, I could see it all so plainly that I—”

  “I understand,” said Taylor, with a smile. “Would tomorrow night do just as well?”

  The girl gave one of her mysterious smiles.

  “I was supposed to do some pictures, but now—maybe no one will ever want my pictures again.”

  “They’ll want them more than ever when this story breaks,” Bill Taylor declared wisely. “And don’t you worry about your million-dollar yellow losing its value, in spite of what Steinbock said.”

  “Your million-dollar yellow,” the girl corrected.

  “Yours,” said Taylor staunchly. “I remember the day you first ordered it. You specified your want for the wildest color ever made.”

  “Yes, I was angry about my art lesson that day. I was furious and the only way I could express myself was to smear yellow over everything. But you invented it for me. It’s rightfully yours.”

  Bill Taylor folded the girl in his arms.

  “Who,” he said with a huge grin, “could say no?”

  CHAMPLIN FIGHTS THE PURPLE GOD

  First published in Amazing Stories, September 1940

  Wayne Champlin knew that he faced terrible danger coming back to his native island, but he had sworn to free his people from the Purple Slavery . . .

  CHAPTER I

  Wearing only his swimming trunks, Wayne Champlin waded into deep water and began to swim. Through the lavender mists of evening he could see his destination four miles ahead—a low cone-shaped island. The pinnacle of the cone was aglow with a faint purplish light.

  “The Shrine!” he muttered bitterly to himself. “Still burning.”

  Time was when that rim of purple fire had been the ruling power over his life. But ten years away from his native island had changed all of that.

  Champlin swam easily. A miniature raft of bamboo stalks slipped along after him, hitched from his shoulders and neck by a lithe cord. On the raft was strapped a battered traveling bag containing his personal effects. His people would be surprised to see him. No doubt they had thought him drowned . . .

  A splash of water disturbed his thoughts. He glanced back at his cargo, then stared in frank amazement.

  His raft held not one traveling bag but two. And clinging at the end of the towline was a girl.

  “Champ!” the girl called breathlessly. “Champ! How much farther are you going?”

  Wayne Champlin drew the end of the makeshift raft under his muscular arm as if groping for support. He gazed in speechless surprise.

  “Champ, don’t you know me? It’s Elsa!”

  Wayne Champlin paled. Here in the final plunge from the real world back to his old world of superstition, must he be haunted by figments of his imagination? This could not be real. The clear gray waters and the lavender mists of evening had conspired to fool him. And yet—

  The girl smiled at him expectantly. Water dripped from her smooth white forehead, her long brown eyelashes, her full red lips. The waves washed over her bare shoulders. Her scanty bath-attire of flimsy silk underthings clung closely to her slim shapely body.

  “Elsa! What are you doing here?” Wayne Champlin’s lips spread in dismay and his white teeth gleamed fiercely. “I told you ‘good-by’ back in the States—”

  “And I told you I’d follow you to the end of the world,” the girl breathed tremulously.

  So she had kept her word. She had fled the city’s slums to follow him, not knowing where the adventure would take her.

  “But Elsa, I told you not to—”

  “Oh, Wayne!” The girl’s eyes filled. “Aren’t you the least bit glad to see me?”

  Her white fingers locked around his neck appealingly and her face tilted toward his. She searched his eyes.

  “I’ve had such a time following you, Champ. I was on the same boat with you—the captain’s wife kept me—but I was afraid to tell you I’d come, for fear you’d send me back. I didn’t even know where
you would lead me—but I knew there was danger—and I loved you so—”

  Wayne Champlin caught the lithe form in his strong brown arms and kissed the lips and eyes and forehead feverishly. For a moment the two swimmers slipped beneath the water’s surface in forgetful ecstasy, then bounded up breathlessly and caught the tiny raft for support.

  “I’m terribly glad to see you.” Champlin assured her in his low rich voice. “Don’t ever doubt it . . . But it’s like I told you that night I left you, Elsa—”

  That vision had been a mystery to Elsa from the first. She had tried to understand. Her quick intuition had told her that Wayne Champlin was something more than the handsome, silent, dreamy lifeguard at the city beach. But though Elsa, a waif from the slums, had found her way into his heart, his people remained a mystery.

  “If my people are still under the yoke,” he had always said, “I’ve got to help them. My own happiness can wait.”

  Now Elsa gazed at the little isle, wondering more than ever what strange magnetism called him back. But he had spoken of a fight that awaited him. She had not followed him to this lost corner of the earth, only to let him throw himself away on some foolish danger.

  “I’ll go with you,” she said firmly. He protested, but she insisted that she could swim that distance alone, and would do it if he chose to shake her loose from his raft.

  “You win,” Champlin sighed. “Come on, I’ll take care of you.”

  Elsa would be about as safe on the island as a rabbit among hounds. But darkness was falling. She might see his people without being seen—perhaps there would be a ceremony at the Shrine. At any rate, tomorrow he would send her safely on her way back to America before he began his fireworks.

  Swiftly they swam through the mild semi-tropical waters. When they turned to swim on their backs, they gauged their directions from the first bright stars of the night. The little raft containing their worldly possessions glided along after them.

  When Wayne Champlin had last swum these waters he had been a boy of twelve. It had been good sport to swim out a mile or two to greet passing steamers. Of all the boys, Champlin had been the best swimmer, and the most daring.