The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur Leo Zagat

  Hoskins’ glance flicked past Thorkel. His gun leaped from its holder. His eyes were twin pinpoints of menace. “I’ll explain, Thorkel,” his voice rang out. “And if anyone so much as twitches a finger I’ll explain with Trinite spray. I am Ho-Lung! Vance escaped me when his heart gave way, but I’ll get the formula from you, and all hell won’t stop me!”

  Death vibrated in the room’s stunned silence. Hoskins—Ho-Lung—crouched, his lips retracted from white teeth. From the corner of his eye Thorkel saw Daniels leap to one side, hunting the shelter of a cupboard, dragging at his weapon. Blue flame darted from Hoskins’ gun—once—twice—there was the spatter of pellets striking their target—and the flesh-muffled roar of the Trinite blast. The room rocked beneath Thorkel, and a warm liquid splashed across his face to haze his vision with a red mist.

  As if of their own accord his hands jerked up the chair they grasped, hurled it at the momentarily distracted spy. Then he was off his feet, catapulting in its wake. Crack! The renegade’s face squashed under the news-man’s fist. Crack! Another hammer blow struck home. Hoskins was down, Thorkel swarming atop him.

  He heard a faint cry—“Stop, Dean, stop it!”—but his hands were clamped about a soft throat, and berserk fury made his fingers a tightening vise.

  Hands were pulling at Thorkel.

  “Let up! Let go! Killing’s too good for him,” someone was shouting. He surged to his feet.

  Daniels, white-faced, leaned against the wall. His left hand was gripped tightly about his right. He stared dazedly at a pool of blood on the floor, a pool fed by a diminishing stream from Haley’s shattered, legless torso.

  Suddenly the shambles disappeared from Dean Thorkel’s consciousness. He darted to the body, jerked at a bit of black fabric protruding from the rags that had been his assistant’s fur coat.

  From his nerveless hand a black robe hung sleazily, and a long black bandage through which two eye-holes had been cut! Thorkel stooped again. His fingers, searching, encountered wires, a Trinite gun. Then paper rustled. He started at cryptic symbols that danced before his eyes, symbols in Greg Vance’s familiar handwriting. It was the cipher—the cipher that held a nation’s safety! The proof was complete. It was Randall Haley who had stolen the formula, Randall Haley who was the torturer! Then—what about Cliff Hoskins?

  “God, Dean, you’ve got the kick of a mule,” the self-convicted traitor mumbled, painfully lifting himself to a sitting posture, his mauled features twisting into a battered grin.

  Thorkel held the disguise out toward Hoskins. “Then—then you are not Ho-Lung,” he stammered.

  Hoskins’ grin became more pronounced. He wiped blood from his mouth.

  “Oh yes, I am Ho-Lung,” he said calmly. “I didn’t lie.”

  “But—but—”

  Hoskins laughed. “It’s a bit complicated. I am Ho-Lung, one of Asiatica’s most famous spies, and yet I am not a renegade to the white race, nor a traitor to the American Intelligence Service.”

  Thorkel’s expression of dazed perplexity was pitiful. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t blame you. I was born in Asiatica, the son of American missionaries who were both killed in an accident soon afterward. I was adopted by Ho-Chien, an Asiatic high in the Secret Service of that country. He sent me to America to study, with the very brilliant idea that close acquaintance with our country’s ways and customs would make me a most efficient spy indeed.

  “What Ho-Chien did not count on was the call of my own people. At the University I realized that I was an American, a white. I realized that I could be of tremendous service to this country by pretending to continue to play the part of an Asiatic spy, while being in actuality a member of the American Intelligence Service. I told Ho-Chien that I was doing to America what I was actually doing to the Asiatics, that I was acting as a member of the American Service in order to further my work for the Easterners.”

  “But you—Ho-Lung—are notorious as a shrewd, cruel spy. The exploits with which Ho-Lung has been credited—”

  Hoskins chuckled.

  “Yes, I have built up quite a reputation for Ho-Lung, so much so that he has become a legend of terror. That, I imagine, is why Haley signed that name to his communications threatening Greg. And it was a sort of poetic justice. For the way Ho-Lung got his reputation was by stealing credit for the work of others.

  “You see, the Oriental Service is so managed that no one agent is known to another. Each works independently, getting what aid he can manage if he needs help. It was easy, then, for me to drop hints that this, that, or the other deed was mine, careful hints that spread in just the right quarters. Of course, every so often I did turn in real information, obsolete plans of fortifications, specifications of armaments carefully altered so that they were useless, names of American spies whom I knew had already been discovered, or were in a place of safety.

  “There was one operative, somewhere in America, who was particularly successful, and whose identity I could not ascertain. It was he who turned up what Greg Vance was doing, he who had charge of the operations in connection therewith.”

  “Randall Haley!”

  “Randall Haley. He got the wave-length combination of your private line by the old device of a waxed sheet hidden in the memo pad on which you jotted it for me.”

  “But why did you denounce yourself as Ho-Lung?”

  “Because if I hadn’t we’d all be shreds of pulped flesh now, blown to bits. I wondered why Haley shrank against the wall, why his foot was lifting, scraping against it. And then I saw a tiny bit of metal, there, that fine wire running out through the door-edge.” Hoskins pointed at it.

  “I guessed what he was up to. The current he used for the torture wire came from a small, but powerful battery concealed in his clothing, the circuit grounded through the sole-nails in his shoe. If Asiatica could not have the formula, he was determined no-one should. If the contact in his shoe ever reached that wire, a spark would have set off a Trinity bomb he had previously buried beneath the ice just outside.

  “My claim to be Ho-Lung confused him just long enough for me to get my gun out. The cop grabbed for his own gun. I had to shoot the gun out of his hands to save myself, and all of us. But I got Haley!”

  “Great work,” Thorkel exclaimed. “Yet Haley won anyway. We’re alive and we’ve got the formula. But Vance is dead, and it will never be completed now.”

  “I wonder. What’s on that other slip of paper? It fell out when you pulled the formula from the dead man’s clothing. You were too excited to notice it.”

  Thorkel looked where his friend pointed. Then he snatched the bloody slip of paper up. Words were scrawled on it, five words that changed the history of the world.

  “Increase third acid by 1.2%.”

  Dean Thorkel’s voice dripped into Ike cold.

  “Greg’s handwriting. He finished it. He finished the formula.” Thorkel pulled a sleeve across his forehead, clearing away a vision of blazing homes, of a yellow swarm pouring over a fair, happy land. “Let’s get going to Washington, Cliff. They’re waiting for the green ray.”

  Cliff Hoskins stuck out a big paw.

  “Go ahead, old man,” he rumbled. “I’ve got to get back to Manchukuo. There’s work waiting for me there.”

  THE TWO MOONS OF TRANQUILLIA, by Arthur Leo Zagat

  First published in Weird Tales, January 1943

  CHAPTER I

  George Carson—Lieutenant George Carson, U.S.N., now—came in through the door on which is lettered the meaningless title, “Editorial Consultant,” they gave me when they put me on the shelf.

  “What the devil are you doing here?” I growled as he closed it and strode toward me. “I thought you were somewhere in the Atlantic, chasing U-boats.”

  “I was, Pop.” He slung a long, blue-clothed leg over a corner of my desk, grinned down at me. “I’ll be shoving off again by midnight.” He looked ten years younger than when I’d last seen him. Wind and the sun had bronzed him, hooded his g
aze with an eagle’s drooped lids and the one or two threads of gray in his black hair served only to give him a certain solidity. “A bit of luck gave me the chance to wangle the first shore leave I’ve had in five months.”

  It might be luck, but with the word pain had come into his gray eyes and a slow smolder of anger.

  “Picked up a drifting ship’s boat,” he explained, “With some poor sons aboard more dead than alive.”

  “Jerry’s got another one, has he?” I grabbed for my phone. “What—City Desk, Jen—What was it? Where—? Oh, okay.” His face had gone blank. “Okay, George, I forgot. Quote. No information shall be published unless and until released by the Commandant, Third Naval District. Unquote. So the radio can spill it first,” I added bitterly, “And make our headlines look like the March of Time a year behind the band. Now in ’eighteen— You wouldn’t remember, you were in the Navy then too, but back in ’eighteen we—”

  “Had to fight your way into the building through the crowds waiting for extras. Or was that the fracas in ’ninety-eight?”

  “If you’re hinting, you young whippersnapper, that I’m old enough to—What in blazes are you wasting time here for, any way? Why aren’t you on your way up to Westchester to see your son?”

  “No train till one-seven, which gives me about forty-five minutes—Listen, Pop. Something’s come up that you—I wonder if you could help me out.”

  Fishing in a pocket of his uniform he looked and sounded exactly like the shy but earnest cub who when I was in the slot, in the twenties, used to come to me with a thousand eager questions.

  “I picked up a copy of the Globe this morning, the first I’ve seen since Christmas, and—You know I always read the Agony Column first, don’t you?”

  “I ought to, seeing it was I tipped you that the personal ads are a good spot to find hints for off-trail items.”

  “This hit me in the eye.” George put a torn-out clipping in front of me and added, an odd note of significance in his tone. “In today’s sheet.”

  It was four lines of six point type, the first line light-face caps and small caps:

  COUPLE WILL CARE FOR THE DURATION

  WITHOUT CHARGE CHILD OF WIDOWER WHO WISHES TO VOLUNTEER FOR MILITARY SERVICE.

  COUNTRY HOME.

  Phone Carseville-465.

  I looked up. “This would have struck you just right five months ago, but—”

  “It did. I answered that same ad five months ago, and parked Pete with the old couple who’d inserted it.” I’d been on vacation, I recalled. He’d been gone when I returned. “That’s how I was able to get back into uniform without worrying about the brat.”

  “So someone else got the idea, so what? It’s good, isn’t it?”

  “I said the same ad, Pop.” He spoke quietly, but obviously he was disturbed. “Exactly the same, even to the phone number. I checked in my address book. It’s the same people.”

  “Okay. Your Peter worked out well and they’ve decided to take in another kid.”

  “There isn’t room for another. The Barrets live in a small bungalow and the one guest-room is tiny—”

  “Two boys might share it, if they got one of these two-story beds you see advertised.”

  “Ye-e-es.” He tautened again. “They don’t specify a boy, Pop. Look here. See. They say child. Pete’s twelve and—All right. Maybe I’m nuts but I’ve got a nagging sort of hunch, What I came down here for was to find out if that ad’s appeared any other time since the lad’s been up there.”

  “What would that prove?”

  “Well…” I picked up the phone, told Jen to get me the Morgue, told Ed Brolles what I wanted. “Now suppose we get sensible, George,” I suggested. “Have you any sane reason to suspect anything’s wrong with the boy?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him since late January but he’s written me fairly regularly.” His breast pocket produced a packet of pencil-smudged half-sheets. “His letters are all pretty much alike.” He pulled one from under the elastic that held them together, unfolded it. “Like this; ‘Dear Dad. How are you? I’m fine. I hit a three bagger Saturday. We won, sixteen to twelve, and—’” George checked, brown fingers tightening on the paper. “I’ll be damned,” he said softly.

  “What’s hit you?”

  He didn’t answer. He put the letter down on the desk, selected another from the opposite side of the packet, glanced through it, grunted. “I thought I remembered… Listen, Pop. That letter’s six weeks old. This one came yesterday, but listen—‘I hit a three bagger Saturday. We won, sixteen to twelve.’ What do you make of that?”

  “Coincidence.”

  “Think so?” George had both papers on the desk, side by side, was looking back and forth between the two, lips compressed. Grim. “Take a look at this and see if you still think it’s coincidence.”

  I bent over, studied the sheets. “I see what you mean. The rest of the wording is different, but those two statements, just alike, are in exactly the same relative positions on the two pages.”

  “As if,” he half-whispered. “As if one was traced from the other.”

  “Mmm.” I couldn’t be positive without superimposing them, with a strong light behind, but it certainly looked as if every character of the endearing, childish scrawl on the one sheet were identical with its corresponding character on the other. “Yesterday’s letter might be a patchwork of tracings from several earlier—Wait!” I exclaimed, abruptly relieved. “We’ve forgotten that you had the earlier letters. You certainly didn’t give them to anyone to trace.”

  “No. No, I didn’t. But the whole batch of these might have been prepared all at once, then mailed at inter—.” The phone bell cut him off.

  My hand beat his by a fraction of a second. “The Globe ought to make a special rate for those people.” Ed has one of those telephone voices you can hear across the room. “That same ad’s appeared a dozen times the last—”

  “Thanks, fellow. That’s all I wanted to know.”

  CHAPTER II

  George’s eyes were gray steel, black-dotted by pinpoint pupils. “If they’ve done anything to Pete…” He slid off the desk and started stiff-kneed toward the door.

  “Wait,” I barked. “You’ve still got twenty minutes to make that train. I want to try something.”

  He swung around. “What?” but I was rattling the bar for Jen. She came in on the line and I told her, “Get me Carseville 465.”

  “I didn’t let them know I was coming,” George cautioned. “I—” His mouth twitched. “I wanted to surprise Pete.”

  In my ear a low, musical voice said, “Hello. Who is it, please?”

  “My name’s Harold Gatlin.” George tugged at the receiver and I moved it so he could get his ear to it too. “I’m calling with regard to your personal in this morning’s New York Globe.”

  “You are interested in placing a child?”

  “A little girl. Have you any preference?”

  The woman hesitated. Or perhaps I imagined it. At any rate, her reply was definite when it came.

  “Not at all.”

  I saw a brown hand tighten on the desk edge, its knuckles go white.

  “How old is your daughter, Mr. Gatlin?”

  “About ten,” I replied. “But she is not my daughter. I am her grandfather.”

  “Her grandfather!” I was sure, this time, that the voice at the other end of the wire had changed. “I am afraid you do not quite understand,” it said coldly. “What we have in mind is to release someone for military service—”

  “You’ll be doing exactly that in this case.” The rather nebulous impulse that had prompted me to say “Grandfather” was crystallizing into a definite plan. “My daughter is a trained nurse. Her hospital unit has been ordered overseas and she will have to resign unless Kay can find a home where she can be happy.”

  “Surely she could be happy with you.”

  “Surely. But, unfortunately, I too am leaving the country. I happen to be on the staff of a—a cert
ain magazine,” I’d almost said newspaper, realized just in time this would be too clear a tie-up with George, “And have been given an assignment that will keep me abroad indefinitely.”

  “I see.” Her tone was still tentative. “Are there no relatives, or close friends perhaps, who can take care of the little, girl?”

  It was evident now what she was after. “None. Helen was divorced shortly after Kay was born and—Well,” I ventured an embarrassed little laugh, “It would be about the worst possible thing for the child if she were to come under the influence of her father or his family. I’m sure you understand, Mrs.——”

  “Barret,” she filled in. “Mary Barret. Yes. I think I do.” She paused, began again. “Would you care to bring your granddaughter up here, Mr. Gatlin?”

  There it was, on a silver platter. “Precisely what I had in mind.”

  “And her mother too, please. Mr. Barret will be here and we can all get to know each other before we make any final decisions. Shall we say for lunch tomorrow?”

  George had only till midnight—“I’m afraid not. I shall have several important conferences and Helen will be on duty at the hospital. Would it be inconvenient if we were to skip the lunch and make it this afternoon?”

  Not at all. They would be happy to have us. I jotted down the directions she gave me and after a final exchange of inanities, hung up.

  George’s jaw was ridged, with knotted small muscles, his nostrils pinched.

  “Its being a girl didn’t faze her.”

  “No,” I agreed softly. “But did you get the rest of it? Your Mary Barret was plenty careful to make sure that no one would be dropping in unexpectedly—”

  “Someone’s going to drop on them, like a ton of coal, just as soon as that train—”

  “Hold, it, son. Hold everything, we’re not going up, there by train.”

  He stared. “We!”

  “What the blue exes do you think you’d accomplish, rushing in there like a red-eyed bull, except to make things tough for Peter if there’s really something wrong about that set-up? I’m keeping the appointment I just made, and if I don’t know the whole layout before I’ve been in that house half an hour, I’ve been in the wrong business for forty-three years.”