by Don Wilcox
“By innocently playing me for a sucker. He was conscientious enough, no doubt when he got in the habit of pinning the blame on me for everything that happened. He couldn’t forget that I was late for work once. He’s a bear on punctuality. But someone higher up—Harrington is my guess—worked on him. Jacobs soon thought is would settle all his grief if he could give me the rap. In the meantime the gang tried out their sabotage on my machine and got by with it.”
“First you accuse Harrington,” said Gleed skeptically. “Now you’re accusing a gang. Suppose there is a gang. What makes you think Harrington is in on it, and Jacobs out?”
“Because Jacobs doesn’t wear monkey wrenches on his neckties,” said Holland. Then noting a slight smile on Gleed’s lips he added. “It sounds silly, maybe. But there’s been lots of thick hobnobbing among a few men that wear monkey wrench designs on their neckties or their watch charms. Those ties aren’t made in Super City, by the way. I’ve taken the trouble to inquire.”
At this point Gleed rang for an attendant, had him put in a telephone call for night-boss Jacobs to come for a conference. At once.
“Now, Holland,” Gleed resumed after the attendant was gone, “I’m going to have to agree with you on one thing, at least. The monkey wrench is a symbol of a gang. I’ve been on the trail of that gang myself. I know where its support comes from. Oil Center. I tell you this because you have made your position clear. All my efforts to appeal to the respectable business and civic interests of Oil Center haven’t stemmed the tide of the racketeers. But this deal is the end. From now on it’s war. We won’t stop till we blow Oil Center’s reputation to atoms. When the people get the facts, they’ll never speak the name of Oil Center again without holding their nose. I’m telling you this, Holland—”
Ben Gleed grew white with surging indignation. He was weak from his injuries, and for a moment acted as if he were going to faint. Then a little pale color came back to his face.
“I’m telling you this, Holland, because I know you now. I know you’re going to fight with me. I need you.”
Dan Holland breathed a long deep draft of hospital air. He felt a little faint himself.
“But we’ve got a tough nut to crack before we can get anywhere,” Ben Gleed resumed. His eyes roved toward the ceiling. “Not one of my trusted experts has been able to find a single clue to explain the rampage of the Iron Men. I know Harrington’s explanation—a panic of fear on the part of the workers—is tommyrot. Harrington’s scheme is to hire workers from the outside as fast as I’ll let him, so that some fine day when everything is going full blast, he can suddenly throw monkey wrenches into every machine in the city. But how the devil did he work his black magic on the Iron Men?”
“I’ve got one more streak of daylight,” said Holland. He casually drew from his pocket some little transparent sheets that might have been bits of candy wrappers. “Snickson the clean-up man and I had a head-on collision the other night, and some sheets that looked like cellophane flew out of his pocket. Later I found that a bit of chewing gun on my shoe had picked up a few of them. I pocketed them—and then—”
“Yes?” Gleed’s eyes were bugging with curiosity.
“And then forgot about them.” Holland tried carefully to change positions, but his broken leg was too heavy with bandages and pain. “But while they were working on my leg a few minutes ago, I amused myself by touching these things to the electric light. The result was interesting. I’ll show you.”
He applied a comer of the transparent stuff to the glowing light bulb of the bed lamp. Gleed watched eagerly. In a few minutes the sheet responded to the warmth, gradually turned yellow. For several seconds it remained yellow, emitting a glow of color. Then it melted, seemingly into water, and evaporated, leaving no trace of a stain.
“Snickson, the clean-up man,” Gleed muttered to himself. “He dusts the electric eyes.”
“Naturally the action is slower within the electric eyes of the Iron Men, since the heat is far less. But obviously a color filter set for a blue beam will change its preference to green during the interval that the yellow mixes in.”
“No wonder,” Gleed commented, “that the Iron Men became so partial to men in green uniform.”
“Then there are other colors, as well,” said Holland, shuffling the transparent sheets.
An attendant came in bearing a note for Gleed. It was from one of his secretaries. It said:
“In answer to your request, I have sought out the hero who succeeded in turning off the power. He is Abel Snickson, an employee of the B-Hive. Do you wish me to confer a reward upon him?”
Gleed snorted and read the note aloud to Holland. Then he scribbled his answer at the bottom of the note:
“No. I’ll reward him myself. Have Jacobs bring him up.”
The attendant started out, then stopped at the door to look back.
“A young lady to see you, Mr. Holland.”
“Send her in.” It was Ben Gleed who gave the order.
Then while they waited, Ben Gleed picked up his bed phone.
“Chief of Police,” he said. It was a few seconds while connections were being made. Gleed shifted impatiently about in bed and groaned and eyed Holland calculatingly between groans. At last, connection made, he spoke swiftly, decisively.
“Send up a squad of police to make an arrest at my room, Super City Hospital. Then send out all your men and round up every man in the city wearing a monkey-wrench symbol on his tie. Arrest Harrington, chief of engineers, on a charge of conspiracy against Super City. Yes, I’ll sign the warrant myself. And I want a warrant for the arrest of Abel Snickson, the man you are going to arrest here, for murder. . . make it for Kerstubber . . . that’ll be enough to start. But we can pin every death in the B-Hive on him, on the evidence I’ve got.”
Gleed hung up as Doris entered.
Doris’ face was tense, frightened. She recognized Gleed at a glance and felt sure she was intruding upon something far more serious than an official reprimand. She knelt at Dan’s side, started to pour out her fears in a choked whisper.
“Dan, I couldn’t wait any longer to tell you. It’s all settled. I’ve made mother give her consent. Even if they fire you and deport you, I’m going with you, Dan. You’ll need me more than ever. You’ll let me, won’t you, Dan—you’ll forgive me for the way I acted?”
Dan Holland looked at her and smiled. “You might state your case to Mr. Gleed.”
Doris turned and started to speak, but the manager of Super City didn’t give her a chance.
“No unnecessary pleading, there, my girl. Your boy friend settled his fate when he turned his flashlight on my Oil Center visitors. That brilliant bit of headwork was what stopped the rampage.”
Doris’ eyes suddenly filled with tears of joy. She didn’t know what it was all about, but all at once the black clouds seemed to dissolve. She gave Ben Gleed a little kiss on the forehead that brought a little color to his cheeks. He wasn’t expecting a kiss. Dan Holland was—and he wasn’t disappointed.
In fact, Dan scarcely knew when Jacobs limped in to face Ben Gleed.
Immediately behind him was Snickson, and behind them both came two blue-coated Super City Policemen.
“Wait a minute, Snickson,” said one of them roughly. “We’ve got a warrant for your arrest.”
Snickson whirled, his pasty face going even whiter.
“W-what for?” he stammered.
“Murder,” said Ben Gleed from his bed. “The murder of Kerstubber, to start with.”
Snickson’s jaw dropped, and then suddenly he began to whimper.
“Take him out,” said Ben Gleed in disgust.
Gleed turned to Jacobs, who stood in ludicrous bewilderment.
“Jacobs, this man you wanted to fire has helped me with a little investigating which may develop into a full-fledged purge within a few hours. Holland and I have called you in to ask you a few questions.”
Doris discreetly excused herself from Dan’s side. She saw f
rom the movement of Ben Gleed’s eyes that he expected her boy friend to have a share in this conference.
“Holland,” said Ben Gleed, “I feel a little faint. You take over and give this man the works.”
“Sit down, Jacobs,” Dan Holland snapped. “I’ve got several things to say to you. . .”
And while her boy friend proceeded to give his night boss the works, Doris White sat inconspicuously in a visitor’s chair—just far enough away to catch Dan’s winks every time she snapped a tooth out of his pocket comb.
And when he wasn’t groaning, Ben Gleed was grinning.
EBBTIDE JONES ATOM CONTSTRICTOR
First published in Fantastic Adventures, August 1941
It was a marvelous invention. It turned an auto into a thin metal disc that could be filed away. But Trixie Jones had a very poor filing system!
CHAPTER I
Trixie green jones flung off her silver fox furs as she stormed into her husband’s office. Anger burned through her pretty rouged cheeks.
“Ebbtide! Your office boy’s a dope!”
“Which one?” Ebbtide grunted without looking up. He was stuffing papers in a brief case.
“Hercules—the big boy. What’s he walking out for this time of day?”
“Hercules?” Ebbtide blinked his small eyes and smeared his dusty fingers thoughtfully over his long, boney face. “You must mean Pokey, the big dumb one. He probably went out for a coke.”
“Dumb is right. Walked right by me and didn’t even speak. And me, the wife of the richest, most enterprising junk dealer in America—”
“Sit down, Trixie. You’re jumping round like a hooked fish. I got business to talk with you. You’ve got to run things while I’m gone. I’m taking off right away for Siberia and China.”
“The first thing I’ll do is fire Polecat, if he can’t learn some manners—”
“It’s Pokey, not Polecat—”
“He’s just Polecat to me,” Trixie snapped. Her sharp eyes caught on the dust marks on her husband’s cheeks. She leaned over the streamlined desk from her tiptoes and curried his face with a handkerchief. “Maybe he doesn’t know I’m the wife of the famous Ebbtide Jones that saved the day for the Zandonian King and got paid off with a trunkful of jewels. Maybe he thinks I’m just little Trixie Green, the waitress at the Chaw-Chaw Cafe—a nobody—”
“Shush! Snail soup!” Ebbtide muttered. “Pokey’s just dumb. He’s as good a wastebasket emptier as I ever had on the payrolls—”
“He could at least speak to me—”
“No! I’m telling you he’s dumb. He ain’t spoke a word in his life—”
“Oh, you mean dumb?” Trixie’s eyebrows lifted to see new light. “Well, why didn’t he say so?”
“You and Pokey oughta get along just fine together,” Ebbtide said, tickling her under the chin. “Listen, little funny face, I may be gone for three or four weeks this time, that’s why I want you to run a ground behind this desk and don’t let no high tides sweep you off till I get back.”
“Gee!” Trixie seated herself behind the big desk and looked admiringly at the compartments of an open drawer. The tabs were lettered in Ebb’s familiar scrawl: “BEACH COMBER GOODS, washed up.”
“City Junk Deals.”
“SECOND HAND DEALERS, Trixie’s Dad and Others.”
“Clippings on America’s JUNK KING.”
“Hauling and Misc.” Trixie drew a deep breath. “Gee!”
Ebbtide discreetly closed the drawer. “You won’t have to bother nothing. All you got to do is sit here and be a figurehead, like a king.”
“Like a queen,” Trixie corrected pressing her hands on the desk-top majestically and smiling to an assemblage of imaginary subjects.
“The clerks will handle the regular run of business, but if some big shot comes in and demands to see the manager, well, you’ll be here to stall him off.”
“Stall him off? Sure,” said Trixie confidently. “When I used to be a waitress at the Chaw-Chaw Cafe, I had all kinds of practice at stalling guys off—”
“Here’s the idea,” said Ebbtide. “If some sharper comes in from South America and says for a thousand dollars he’ll sell you the options on a chain of wrecking companies along the coast of Patagonia, all you gotta say is that you’re deferring action at present. Defer action. That’s all you gotta do. Get it?”
“Mr. So-and-So,” said Trixie, rising and speaking to an imaginary customer, “I prefer action at present!”
“Defer, not prefer!” Ebbtide shrieked, reaching as if to throttle her. But Trixie, the little monkey, was only teasing him. “All right, you,” he gruffed, as she kept laughing at him, “just tell them nothing doing today. Got that? Or shall I write it down?”
“The the bell rang and a moment later Stan Kendrick, the scientist, greeted the two of them like long lost cousins.
“Ebbtide and Mrs. Ebbtide! Fancy finding you two lovebirds still together after ten full weeks of married life!”
“I was just leaving her,” said Ebbtide with a grin. He creased his new twenty-dollar hat and dropped it on the back of his head. “I’m off on a round-the-world business trip. I’m busy as an upstream salmon these days.”
“You’re an important man, Ebbtide,” the scientist beamed. He couldn’t help contrasting the ungainly Ebbtide of earlier days with this well dressed, if still somewhat awkward, business man. Before he and Ebbtide had taken that daring spaceship journey and gotten mixed up with the rich Zandonian king and come back to the Earth with a bonanza of jewels, Ebbtide had been simply a long-legged beach comber.
Not that the vast wealth had displaced Ebbtide’s beach comber instincts. He was still beach comber to the core—shrewd, quick to drive a bargain, sensitive to the values hidden within goods that most people might call waste. He could smell a good wreck—an earthquake-shattered palace or a hurricane-ridden city—halfway around the world.
But the new Ebbtide, as his old friend Stan Kendrick saw at a glance, had clothes and capital. He had an airplane. And he had a brighter light in his eye that showed he was no longer gambling in thousand dollar ventures, but in millions. Three skyscrapers had been torn down to make room for the Junk King’s new headquarters just off Wall Street.
“I’m important, all right,” Ebbtide grinned. “At least the crooks think so. Every high-powered racketeer in the country has been casting bait my way. But all my money don’t make me smart enough to be a scientist, like you, and it was your dizzy figures and theories and things that got me all this.”
“I’ve got a new one for you today,” said Kendrick with a proud smile and a wink at Trixie. “It’s a little trinket that will save you millions. Take a look out the window.”
They looked down into the street at the huge odd-shaped vehicle. It occupied the parking space of two or three cars, and its sleek red body with silvery gadgets and crystal-roofed blazed in the sunshine.
“Trinket!” gasped Trixie.
“Jumpin’ catfish!” Ebbtide blinked. “Looks like a cross between a hungry whale and an army tank. Look at that big steel mouth in front. What does she eat? Truckloads of concrete?”
“Concrete, coal, books, automobiles, diamonds—anything.”
“No kiddin’ ?”
“No kidding. It’s an atom constrictor.”
“You don’t say.” Ebbtide gazed. He nudged Trixie and mumbled. “It’s an atom constrictor.”
“I heard him,” said Trixie, her nose pressed against the window pane. “I’ll take my chances with a plain old-fashioned boa.”
“I’m not so sure,” Kendrick laughed. “A boa-constrictor, they say, likes to coil around you and crush you to death. This little trinket simply knocks the third dimension out of you.”
“The hell you say,” said Ebbtide. “Before I catch my plane I’ve got to see this thing work. And dammit, quit callin’ it a trinket.”
CHAPTER II
Cream Puff Wanted
Pokey, the “dumb” office boy with the broad shou
lders and the dishwater blue eyes, had gone out ostensibly to get a coke. However, he ambled past three soda fountains without so much as looking in. He strode down the second alley he came to, descended a passage to a basement door. He entered, crossed through an apparently deserted storeroom, followed through two obscure doors, and presently was admitted into a hidden room.
The room was flooded with deep orange light. It contained several luxurious overstuffed chairs and one overstuffed man. The man puffed at his pipe, blew a complacent cloud of smoke at Pokey, and closed the door back of him.
Then the man chuckled. “I’ve been reading the papers. This criminal they call the Cream Puff is the biggest sensation in years.”
“They’ve got seventeen murders against him now,” said Pokey, dropping into a chair and lighting a cigaret.
“And twenty-five robberies.” The overstuffed man chuckled deep down in his throat. He was not a big man; on the contrary, he was less than average height. It was the general pudginess of his figure, the bags that surrounded his eyes, and the loppiness of his cheeks that gave him the overstuffed appearance.
“I think the Cream Puff is a damn fool,” said Pokey, “the way he’s playing for publicity. I read that his last three corpses were found with cream puffs lying on their chests.”
“His signature.”
“What if he gets caught—just once? Every cream puff job will fly back in his face. They say he’s wanted dead or alive.”
“He won’t get caught,” the overstuffed man rumbled in a low, satisfied voice. “He’s too smooth. That’s why the papers named him Cream Puff in the first place.”
“You sure of that?” said Pokey.
“What are you driving at?”
Pokey strolled over to the scales casually, stepped on, watched the arrow swing up to the two-hundred-thirty mark. He strolled back, flicked the ashes of his cigaret into a gold tray. “Maybe the newspapers named him Cream Puff because he’s over-inflated with his own conceit.”
“Don’t make me laugh.”
