by Don Wilcox
She was turning into the elevator as he entered the building. The door closed and she was gone.
He put the handkerchief in his pocket and wondered what to do. He watched the dial above the elevator. The arrow showed that the car moved all the way up to the top floor. All right, he’d follow.
“Thirty-six, please.”
“That’s the roof, sir,” the operator said, giving him a strange look. “Is that what you want—the roof?”
“You took the girl there a minute ago, didn’t you?”
The elevator man nodded and the car went up. “It’s all right with me if you know where you’re, going. There don’t many go up. I know most of the faces.”
“What’s up there?”
“Some kind of a medical laboratory. The folks up there—you can tell them in the dark. They all smell like medicine.”
Melvin, stepped out into a glassed-in room on the ledge of the roof. It was a long glass corridor, air-cooled. The late afternoon sun blazed through, and the green palms cast big leafy shadows across the tile floor. Standing by a small grilled iron table, glancing through a handful of mail, stood the girl.
She looked up in surprise as he touched her arm.
“Pardon me,” he said. “But you dropped this.”
“Oh, I did?” Her eyes were wide, but he thought he saw amusement, not astonishment, in her expression. “Oh, well thank you.”
“Don’t mention it.” He started to turn away.
“That was awfully nice of you. I would have hated to lose this handkerchief. It was a gift—and is a favorite of mine. Say, aren’t you the one who beat off those Kozmack fellows after the speech? You don’t care very much for the Kozmack cause, do you?”
“I do not,” he said harshly.
“I could tell you something—something I think you’d like to hear.” She stood near him and touched his hand. “If you’re sure you have no use for Kozmack—”
“What do you want to tell me?”
“S-s-sh! I don’t trust these walls, especially near the elevator. Come down this way where we can talk.” She drew him by the hand. “If you’re sure—”
“I’m sure all right,” Melvin said with tight lips. “The Kozmack stuff is slow poison. The quicker America wakes up to that, the better.”
“And you mean to fight it?”
“How did you know?” He stared at her. She led him on down the glass-walled corridor. “You’re right, anyway. I’m rolling up my sleeves this very day. I’m just one citizen, but I can talk and I can act—”
“And so you’re going to fight it?” she repeated her question. She stopped and drew back a little, facing him, as if admiring his every word.
“Fight it with everything I’ve got! Fight it like it was a roomful of rattlesnakes. You’re damned right I’m going to—”
The floor gave way beneath his feet. The trap door he was standing on had suddenly opened. He went down like a bar of lead, plummeting into the blackness.
He struck limp on his side and shoulder. He was skidding downward. Spiraling. Slippery-sliding inside a hollow corkscrew.
It was over. It had lasted no time at all. He went scooting out as fast as he had slipped in. He slid out onto a glassy-smooth floor. A trap door snapped shut behind him.
He had dropped only the depth of two floors. He was unhurt. He would have gotten to his feet, but the dizziness threw him: A big medical laboratory was spinning around him; White uniformed men hovered. They made room for a weird-looking naked man—a pitiful ghost of a man—who came rushing up with a small bright needle-pointed instrument in his hand. The naked man’s hand lashed the air. He plunged the needle into Melvin’s side.
“John, you’re getting good,” one of the white uniformed men said, and patted the naked ghost-like figure on the back. Melvin tried to rouse up to see their faces. His wrists and ankles were being held down. A numbness spread through his body. He felt very sleepy.
Knowing he was about to pass out, he struggled to catch a few quick impressions. He would remember the bug-eyed young man in white. And John—that pitiful rag of a man whose almost complete nakedness revealed needle wounds over his arms and legs. They were complimenting John for his quick action.
“Even a slave can become efficient with the needle.”
John responded with a sickly grin. His lips and teeth were very white.
“All right, you naked wretch. Get back to your cell. The girl’s coming down.”
Melvin writhed inwardly. If only he could have stayed awake long enough to curse that girl! He tried to turn his eyes. Voices were fading. His. eyes were closing.
“No, John, don’t jab him again. Back to your cell. He’s already out cold.”
Far away, very far away, John’s cell door clinked. And then, dimly, came the voice of the bug-eyed man in white: “Dorothy, you certainly can pick them.” Then Melvin heard no more.
Within the next sixteen hours he was knocked but cold six times. Sometimes it was from the medicines, other, times from manhandling. Once he summoned his strength and went on a murderous spree, crashing equipment and trying to kill the attendants. Gun threats didn’t stop him. Someone finally felled him with a blunt instrument.
Sick and tortured and short of blood, he lay in his cell more asleep than awake. It was forenoon of the next day. Morning light streamed down the shafts of Lucite from the roof garden two floors above. Through the narrow vertical slits in his cell door he could see the big oval-shaped laboratory room that arched upward two floors to catch the daylight from the roof balcony.
The girl and the big bug-eyed man were up there on the promenade, the closed-in glass walk where Melvin had been led to the trap door in the floor.
That was Dean Stetcher, the big bug-eyed man. Melvin’s mind began to clear as he, watched Doctor Dean try to make love to the girl. She was Dorothy LaRue, and her official title was receptionist. Her little office was up there on the roof balcony where the elevator stopped.
Melvin wondered what they were saying up there. Doctor Dean was showing the girl a blue book and trying to put his arm around her. She was eluding him.
Melvin remembered, the blue book. It was full of loose-leaf notations about himself. They had put him through all the tests in the catalog.
From blood samples to. brain waves they had sampled and recorded his physical, mental, and emotional make-up.
What it was all about he could only guess. But this, fact had evidently impressed them above everything else. In spite of all the serums they had injected into his blood stream—in spite of foods and medicines, shock treatments, and suggestions under hypnosis—he still wanted to fight them.
The doctor and Dorothy had now disappeared from the balcony. Melvin could hear them coming down the stairs. Weakly he got to his feet. He couldn’t see the stairs from his cell window, but he could hear their voices as they came closer.
“I didn’t know it was this kind of job.” The girl was angry.
“All right, you know now,” the doctor said. “You follow my orders and keep your mouth shut.”
They stopped a few yards from Melvin’s cell. Dorothy spoke in a hushed voice. “How soon are you going to let him go?”
“Now, what was I just telling you, my dear girl?” Doctor Dean sounded as if he were straining to be patient with her. “The less you know about our inmates, the better off you are. Let us do the worrying.”
“All right. But somebody’s going to miss him. You’ve kept him, overnight. He’s in no shape to go home.”
“Well, what’s he going to say to his wife and family when he does go home?”
“He doesn’t happen to be married. He’s one of the unemployed rattling around in the big city.”
“That won’t keep him from telling someone—the police—or someone.”
“Miss LaRue, you’re being very dense. You want me to draw; pictures? This man is not going to be missed, see? He’s going to be right here a long, long time, and he’s not going to be missed.”
“You’re talking too loud.”
“I’ll talk as I please.”
Slap!
Melvin tried hard to catch a side-wise view from the vertical pencil-shaped windows. But, although unable” to see, he couldn’t fail to understand. The doctor had silenced the girl with a slap. Melvin’s teeth clamped tight: All right, what was a slap? Maybe she had it coming? He himself had wanted to smash her pretty face, hadn’t he? That innocent look she’d given him when he’d fallen through the trap door. Yes, that and all the cunning come-on play she’d made for him, leading him up there. He’d been hating her like the very devil every waking moment since.
But now he wasn’t so sure. Those questions she was asking the doctor put her in a new light. What had she been getting at?
“Now we understand each other,” the doctor muttered.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t hear things you’re not supposed to hear. Don’t know things you’re not supposed to know. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Now the two of them came in sight. Melvin could see the doctor’s round youngish face, his protruding pale-blue eyes, his round shoulders draped in the loose-fitting white coat. With puffy white hands he took his handkerchief and brushed the girl’s eyes.
“Sorry, I had to get rough with you.” He tried to look into her eyes.
“You’ve got to be tough in this job. You’ll catch on.”
They walked a few steps together. He slipped his arm around her.
“Actually, you’ve made a very good start. This catch you made yesterday is: exactly what we need.” He jerked a thumb, toward Melvin’s cell.
“Thank you.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me if you’d get a bonus on that deal.”
“Thank you.”
“Or if not a bonus, a nice dinner date. I can’t remember that I have anything planned for tonight.”
The doctor had caught her eye now, Melvin saw, and she answered his invitation with a faint smile. Oh, she was a cunning one, all right, looking so fresh and innocent. She could take a, slap and come back with a smile. Now the doctor was falling all over himself to be nice to her. He had His arm around her as they walked out of view.
When Melvin’s cell door opened a few minutes later he was still standing there, watching at the narrow window.
“Look at him, would you,” one of the four attendants said. “Up on his feet again. This is a case for Pibbering.”
Pibbering? Were they speaking of the once-famous criminal doctor? A case for Pibbering. Just an expression, Melvin thought.
“We’ll soon know,” one of the attendants said.
Melvin braced himself for another bad time, but he was pleasantly surprised. They hadn’t come to torture him or to inject serums into his blood stream. This time it was something mild by contrast. They set up a recording apparatus in his cell. They began to fire questions at him. Later the physicians would study his answers as synchronized with brain waves, pulse beat and other. physiological reactions.
Fifteen minutes of rapid-fire questions gave them the data they wanted.
“I know what the doctors will say,” said one of the attendants, garnering up the apparatus. “This guinea pig is right where he was when we started.”
“He hasn’t budged an inch. He hated the red and yellow when he came in. He still hates it.”
“It’s a perfect sample of a tough case. If they can. break him down, they can break anybody. I wonder how the girl picked him.”
“Yeah and I wonder what. Pibbering will do about, him.”
Pibbering! There it was again. Melvin’s brain was spinning. The attendants went out; the door closed. The echoing conversation about.
“Pibbering formula’s . . .” trailed off into silence.
“So I’m a case for Pibbering,” Melvin muttered to himself. The name of Dr. Pibbering had been well known by everyone a few years ago. Pibbering was the big medical criminal of two wars. He had hired out to the enemy nations, and all of decent mankind had been outraged by his evil works. Fortunately, he had died—or so everyone thought Melvin, remembered the pictures in the papers.
These scientists must have been, his pupils, Melvin thought. Perhaps one had taken the name—or maybe one was his son.
A few minutes later the cell door opened, and Melvin looked, upon the stoop-shouldered, yellow-eyed man with the scarred and twisted mouth. No one in the world could mistake that face Pibbering was alive!
“This is the case, Dr. Pibbering,” an attendant said.
The look of those yellow eyes was like an electric shock. Melvin recoiled. The graying, doctor shuffled into the cell slowly. He gave the impression of being slow and crippled, yet you instantly felt the fast play of his nerves as he took you in. All in a glance he saw the color of your eyes, the paleness of your cheek, the twitch of your fingers, the sharp intake of your breath.
You hardly noticed the younger doctor, Dean Stetcher, standing back of him, holding the blue book. You were only half aware of the young doctor’s respectful words.
“This is our prize case, Dr. Pibbering. Our regular treatments haven’t dented him. He has the same aversion to the red and yellow that he had when Miss LaRue spotted him in the park. I think she did very well. Doctor to—”
“Yes,” Pibbering’s low husky voice cut Dr. Dean short. He took the open book and glanced through the notations. “Very well!”
“When shall we expect you again, Doctor?”
“Soon. I shall, study this, record and your other data this afternoon. Our employer should be pleased to know that we have at last, come to grips with this type which is representative of the extreme resistance.” The scar-faced doctor allowed his yellow eyes to linger upon Melvin, for a moment. There was a mocking, smile in the corners of the twisted mouth. “Get some rest, young man. I shall see you first thing in the morning.”
Deep in the night. Melvin awakened. He arose painfully, trying to remember where he was and what had happened. Thin light filtered into his cell. The white bandages, that adorned his brown arms and his half-naked body showed bright, almost luminous. He was wearing tight-fitting white trunks. He moved about the cell restlessly. Needless to say, they hadn’t left him his clothing or any of his pocket things. He was possessed by a feverish desire to make notes on what had happened. If he ever got out of this madhouse.
But no, they would never let him out alive. They wouldn’t dare. All at once this realization came to him clearly. Whatever they meant to do with him, he could be sure he would never have a chance to reveal, what he had seen. To the outside world he would become a missing person. And here what?
Here he would become another ghost of a man, like John. Another living ghost with a glittering mad eye and needle wounds all over his rag-like body.
He paused at the narrow pencil-shaped windows in his cell door. He could hear the slow footsteps of one of the guards keeping night vigil in the laboratory. Moonlight was showering down from the roof garden into the big oval room, illuminating a patch of wall, one end of a laboratory table with test tubes of many colors, and a wide slice of the glass-smooth floor. The sight fascinated him. He listened, trying to interpret the slightest sounds.
A tiny tap sounded against his door. It might have been the touch of a fingernail. He listened.
Tap. Tap, tap, tap.
He answered the signal with the slight tap of his fingernail. Then came a whisper right at his ear.
“Melvin. Is that you?”
“Yes.”
He waited for a long moment. From somewhere in the distance the rhythmic footsteps of a guard could be heard, moving off into another part of the building.
Then the whisper came again: “Melvin, are you ready to go with me? It’s Dorothy LaRue. I’m going to open your door. You’ll keep quiet, won’t you?”
“Yes,” he whispered back.
The familiar clink of the door sounded. It glided open noise
lessly.
Melvin stepped out into the laboratory corridor. In the softness of the moonlight he could see the shining eyes of the girl. Her look was one of questioning.
“I wasn’t sure whether you would trust me,” she whispered.
“I’m not sure myself.”
“We can’t talk about it now. Trust me, please, and follow me.” The cell door closed with a slight clink.
“Where are we going?”
“I’m going to get you out of here.”
“Why?”
“Why? I got you in, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Believe me, I didn’t know what I was getting you into.” The emotions of remorse were unmistakable, even in her soft voice. “Believe me.” She was leading the way into the oval room.
“I can’t figure what a girl like you is doing in this racket in the first place.”
“I didn’t know. I came here following someone I loved. I took the job, agreeing to do whatever they asked—”
“Because you were in love with that skunk of a doctor Dean Stetcher.”
“No, please. You’re jumping at conclusions. It isn’t what you think—
“I haven’t time to explain now. But tell me this.” She stopped suddenly and turned to face him, and for a moment the moonlight from the high arch above the room was full in her face. She couldn’t have known, what a picture she was looking up at him, appealing to him. “Tell me—”
“Yes?”
Her fingers tightened on his arms. “Tell me, have you seen anyone here named John?”
“John! Yes, of course.”
“Oh!” She almost melted into his arms, and he could see the tears in her eyes. “Oh; then he’s here!”
“You” mean you were in love with him?”
“He’s my brother. I traced him here and had warned him not to get mixed up in this. I should have known better.”
“You should have known better than to warn him? Why?”
