“No, Billiken. Nor to the distance from the original.”
“And to all intents and purposes they’re exactly the same as living persons. The scenery too. We’d need to build only one set.” My mind was working at fever heat now. “We could have a single company acting in, say New York, and it would appear simultaneously in—”
“Any number of cities, towns and villages,” Parker caught fire from me, “wherever you had theaters with identical stages!”
“Precisely. So that the cost of the original production can be divided by any desired number of theaters into which your device can put it. The possibilities for profit are enormous.” I pulled in breath. “You see, Mal, what a practical man can do with one of your scientific toys.”
“Wonderful,” Murtry exclaimed, but Ad-lair simply looked confused, as did Sherry. Her father, however was for once properly impressed. “I never cease being amazed at the way your mind works, Billiken. You honestly think that you—I mean I suppose that by tomorrow morning you’ll have your bright young men selling stock in the—”
“Loring Multidram Corporation,” I named it in one of those flashes of inspiration Lorne Randall calls the mark of my peculiar genius. “No. Not quite as quickly as all that. We’ve got to put on a public demonstration first, in the ten key cities where my best suck—er—where the outstanding investors in my promotions reside.”
I was pacing the floor now as my mind raced, planning the operation. “Mal. Prepare blueprints and specifications for the patent lawyers and another set for the engineering department so that they can start producing the pilot sets. You’ll supervise that. Murtry,” I turned to the swarthy youth. “I want you to take charge of erecting the theaters and installing the apparatus as the sets come out of the workshop. I’ll have the office give you a list of the cities. Sherry, my dear. How would you like to select the first play we present, hire the director and performers and so on?”
Her eyes were topazes lit from within. “I’d love it.”
“The job’s yours, then.” She’d get a tremendous kick out of it and it didn’t make much difference how good the play was or how well acted, the novelty would put it over. “I’ll have my regular staff take care’ of the publicity.” That I couldn’t trust to amateurs. “I think that covers everything.”
“How about Robin?” Sherry asked. “You haven’t given him anything to do.”
“No, I haven’t.” I looked at the fellow, standing straddle-legged in the center of the room and thought of a way to wipe that lazy but somehow insolent grin from his face. “I’ll tell you what you can do, Adlair. You can assist your friend Murtry. Under his orders, of course.”
CHAPTER III
Death from a Shadow
Certain disturbing business developments engrossed all my attention and I completely forgot about the Multidram project until my secretary reminded me that the demonstration was only a week off. I learned then that one change had been made in the original plan. Sherry Parker had employed a number of players under contract to rival video networks with studios located at different points in the United States, two in England and one in Paris.
Since this made it impossible to assemble the cast at any one place, it had been decided to install transmitters as well as receivers in all ten theaters. In this way some performers could speak their lines in New York, others in Los Angeles, London and so on, but the net effect still would be the same as though all were playing on a single stage.
The scenery was erected in Los Angeles, would be reproduced in material image on the other stages. The originals of the smaller properties, books, maps, and the like, would be placed at the location of the characters who initially handled them.
It was Bart Murtry who’d worked out this solution to the difficulty. He’d further justified my estimate of his ability by building the ten theaters in exact replica, auditoriums as well as stages, thus effecting a considerable saving in architects’ fees and the cost of fabrication.
Instead of a sophisticated, modern piece written for video, Sherry had preserved the archaic flavor of the presentation by reviving a mid-twentieth century war play replete with the swashbuckling heroics, air raid alarms, gunfire and other bellicose trappings of that bygone era. All this gave me an idea. “See here, Foster,” I told my secretary, “We’ll reserve seats and issue tickets to the people we’re inviting to the premiere.”
“An excellent idea, sir.” He hesitated, tugged at the sandy mustache he was cultivating with sparse success. “Er—what are tickets, Mr. Loring?”
I laughed, for the first time in weeks. “Tickets, Foster, are—Oh, look here.” I riffled the sheets he’d laid on my desk, found the plan of the auditoriums. “Suppose we mark these rows of seats A, B, C and so on, starting at the front, and number the chairs in each row, like this.”
It wasn’t till I sketched an old-fashioned theatre ticket, with its coded stub, that the principle finally penetrated. “Now I understand, sir. It’s like place-cards at a formal banquet, a system of assigning the more desirable locations to guests you want particularly to honor.”
“Precisely.” There was no need to explain that it also was a way of establishing a price scale based more on the snob-value of location than the ease of hearing and seeing. “That’s why I shall myself decide who is to sit where. Let me have those lists of invites.”
“Here they are, sir.” He handed them to me. “But I’m afraid you won’t have time to do that just now, Mr. Loring. Mr. Hanscom’s waiting to see you.”
“Mr. who?”
“Maxwell Hanscom of the United Nations Securities Control Board. You gave him an eleven o’clock appointment.”
“Oh, yes. I remember now.” I didn’t have to remember. I’d been anticipating Hanscom’s visit all morning, and not with pleasure. “About this Multidram demonstration, Foster. Inform Murtry I’ll want to inspect the entire installation and attend a dress rehearsal.” My fingers drummed the arm of my chair. “All right. Send Mr. Hanscom in.”
The door to my office is thirty feet from my desk. By the time the gray little man had crossed that space, I knew that here was a government official I might be able to deceive for a little while but could not buy.
New Orleans, Manchester, Rio de Janeiro and the rest of the ten cities selected for the première Multridram performance of Escape from Destiny saw something that Spring day they’d not seen for a generation. Crowds. There was, it seemed, some strange, atavistic contagion in the notion of people actually gathering together to watch and listen to anything. The thousands who milled about the identical structures Murtry had erected could observe the proceedings sitting comfortably in their homes far better than being jostled and trampled here, but here they were.
As sweating police cleared a path for me to the entrance of the New York Bijou—so Malvin Parker had named the theaters in obeisance to our student rendezvous—I knew Billingsley Loring was on the brink of his greatest success, or at the end of his career.
Sherry was in Los Angeles, where the majority of the company were physically present, her father in Chicago supervising the master switchboard. Bart Murtry had taken off a couple of hours ago for London, to oversee the pick-up for the two British Isles stages and Paris and Moscow.
Just where Robin Adlair was I did not know. My last-minute decision anent the seating arrangements had necessitated a rush job of training ushers which Murtry had turned over to him. All the past week he’d been darting about the world in the Loring Skyfleet’s speediest stratojetter and we’d completely lost track of him.
From what I saw here in New York, I had to admit that he’d done a good job. Quaintly clad in long-trousered, button-studded blue uniforms such as I hadn’t seen for decades, the teen-age youngsters were well rehearsed. Not so the gathering audience. In spite of the careful letters of explanation that had accompanied each ticket, many were lamentably confused as to what was expected of them. One couple in their thirties, as a matter of fact, had to be forcibly removed from the f
ront row seats to which they insisted they were entitled by the rule of first come, first served.
I’d given strict instructions that every spectator was to occupy the location his ticket called for and the Loring organization is schooled to obey instructions to the letter.
The turmoil finally subsided. I went down the central aisle to the seat I had reserved for myself. A cherub-faced lad rushed up to me, checked my stub. “A-1. Thank you, sir.” He saluted and rushed busily off again. This first row of chairs was separated only by a brass rail from a six foot deep, empty trench that ran clear across the auditorium’s floor. Beyond this rose the curving face of the raised stage and from this in turn, high and graceful, the shimmering golden folds of a vast curtain emblazoned with huge, floral-wreathed L’s.
The sourceless illumination that filled the auditorium began to dim: A hush of tense expectancy gripped the audience. There was an instant of complete, velvety darkness, then a glitter and flash of chromium and polished wood exploded in front of and below me; musical instruments catching sudden light concentrated in the pit and splintering it into a myriad coruscations. In the blackness behind me, a thousand throats gasped. The dress-suited musicians swept bows across strings. A single handclap pattered as some oldster recalled the ways of his youth, then another, a third.
The sounds rippled, spread, merged into a torrent of applause.
The clapping died away. The orchestra’s triumphal strains waned till only a single violin sang softly. An aureate glow spread over the great curtain and it was rising, slowly at first, then more swiftly.
The stage it revealed was vacant! Bare floorboards stretched back to a blank wall of gray plasticrete. Something had gone wrong.
No. The stage was transformed into a room ugly with the flowered design of its papered walls, shut in by the black cloth awkwardly tacked over windows. Clumsy wooden furniture cluttered it, a table was covered by a white cloth and set as for a meal not yet served. In the left-hand sidewall—the stage’s left—was a closed door, a wooden door complete with ceramic doorknob. Another, similar door to the right rear was open a bare inch. Holding it so and peering through the crack was a woman’s taut, listening figure.
Slumped in a chair by the table, head propped in elbow-propped hands and every line eloquent of a fatigue that rendered him incapable of the fear that gripped the woman, was a young man in clothing torn, filthy with mud.
The applause rose again in a great, cresting wave that washed over me.
Underlying the surf of pounding palms was another, rhythmic sound the world has not heard for decades, the ominous thud of marching feet dulled by distance. Nearing it beat down the applause, seemed just out side the black-swathed windows.
A voice suddenly barked an unintelligible order. Silence. A sense of apprehension flowed from the woman at the door, a feeling of fear that could not possibly have been transmitted to that audience by a video image. The unseen voice spoke again, gutturally, and the feet thudded again, dispersing.
“They’ve tracked you to the village,” the woman whispered. “They’re searching the houses along the street.” She pushed the door shut. Soundlessly, she turned from it.
Hand to throat she moved across the floor toward the unmoving man at the table, eyes big with terror in a white and haggard face. In Neva’s face! Neva—No, not Neva of course but her daughter Sherry—whispered. “They’ll be here in a moment. Come. I’ll hide you.”
Why was Sherry playing the part for which Lilli Denton had rehearsed? I was out of my seat. Crouching low to avoid being silhouetted against the lighted stag I made for its left-hand corner.
“I’m not hiding.” The voice above me was hoarse with weariness and defeat. “I’m going out there to give myself up. You people have suffered enough—” It faded, as I went through the little door and found myself a place crowded with the glowing bulbs, of coils and condenser’s and serpentine leads of the Multidram apparatus.
The air was prickly with the tension of high potential, an incautious movement here might mean instant and terrible death. Explaining the setup last week, Bart Murtry had warned me not to brush against this lead, this switch. I was tight-strung, the palms sweating, by the time I reached the wings and looked through what to the audience seemed to be a papered wall, a closed door, out into the black dark of the auditorium.
I could make out clearly only the first row of rapt faces, the gap made by the aisle and the seat I’d left unoccupied. Directly in front of me the man was on his feet now, Sherry beside him, their backs to me as, frozen in consternation, they watched the other door thud shut behind a bull-necked individual who snatched an automatic from the belt-holster of his green uniform.
His lips stretched in a humorless, sinister smile. “As I thought.” Vindictive lights crawled in his skin-pouched eyes. “I knew only you and your blackguard husband would dare give this pig a refuge. That is why I sent my men to search the other houses and came here alone.”
The woman gathered herself, forced out words. “You mean that your silence can be purchased, Captain Markin. With what? We have nothing left with which to bribe you.”
“Except yourself, my dear Elsa—not forced but willing. You are a fever in my veins and—”
Markin cut off as the door here before me flew open and a gaunt man stepped through into the scene, a revolver clutched in his lifting hand.
“Franz!” Elsa exclaimed but the shots crashed in a single report. The captain turned. Franz folded, clutching his chest.
A scream shrilled from the audience, a shout husky with terror. Ushers were running down the aisle to where a man had jumped up and was pointing with shaking hand at the seat in which I should be sitting.
I stood on a stage abruptly bare again. The figures that had occupied it had vanished. Robin Adlair stepped out of the other wing, stared out into the auditorium at the front row seat the bright pleon of whose back was gashed by the bullet that had ploughed into it and, had I been sitting there, would have smashed into my chest instead.
CHAPTER IV
Nine-Fold Killing
Others were not as fortunate as I. In Chicago, in London, in Rio de Janeiro, in each of the theaters where a fascinated audience had watched the premiere performance of a Multidrama, a bullet had ploughed into the occupant of seat A-1. A single shot, fired from a single stage had slain nine men in nine separate cities scattered over half the world.
“One of the strange features of this case,” Rand Pardeen said later, “is that our examination of the guns used in the play disclosed that only blanks were fired from them.” Burly, rock-jawed and steel-eyed, the Chief Inspector of UN’s World Police had requested me to assemble in his office all of us who were primarily responsible for the Multidram; Malvin and Sherry Parker, Bart Murtry, Robin Adlair. “No molecules of lead were found in the barrel of the one fired in Los Angeles by the actor who played Franz, or of that which the character of Captain Markin shot off in London.”
“How about the bullets?” Sherry asked. None of us looked particularly chipper but she seemed especially worn, probably from the strain of stepping into the role of Elsa when Lilli Denton was taken suddenly ill the very morning of the performance. “I—” she smiled wanly. “I have a secret vice, inspector. I once found a collection of ancient detective books Dad made when he was a boy and I’ve read them all. According to them, the police always extract the murder bullet from the corpse and examine it to find out from what gun it came.”
Pardeen appeared grimly amused. “Quite right, Miss Parker. We should have done exactly that except for another odd circumstance. The surgeons who performed the autopsies on the bodies of the nine murdered men found no bullet in any of them.”
The stir this announcement evoked gave me a chance to glance again at the gray little man who sat inconspicuously in a corner, nursing a brief case. Why was Maxwell Hanscom here? Why should the UN Securities Control Board be represented at the investigation of a crime?
“Your people must have slipped up s
omehow, Mr. Pardeen,” Mal Parker was saying. “Nine of the slugs obviously were material images which were dissipated the instant I pulled the master switch in Chicago, shutting down the network, but there must have been a real prototype that continued to exist. You should have found it.”
“We did,” Pardeen replied. “We found it, not buried in the chest of any of the dead men, but in the upholstery of the seat Mr. Loring would have occupied had he not so opportunely decided to go backstage.”
My fingers closed on my chair’s arms so tightly the edges dug into flesh. “The actual shot was fired in New York, then. It was meant for me. I was the one the murderer was after.”
“So it would seem, Mr. Loring. The killer knew where you would be seated. He knew there was a moment in the play when the sound of his shot would be covered by shots on the stage. Apparently he did not know his missile would be reproduced so that it would kill nine others, and that seems to eliminate all of you who are familiar with the mechanics of this thing.”
“I disagree, Inspector.” Pardeen’s gray eyes moved to Murtry, who went on, “It eliminates none of us.”
Pardeen stared at Murtry with somber interest. “You suggest that the slayer didn’t care how many others died as long as his shot reached his intended victim?”
“I do not. I mean that as far as any of us knew, no one but Mr. Loring would be reached by a shot fired at him from the New York stage. The Multidram receiver and transmitter fields were supposed to end sharply at the outer edge of the orchestra pits. If that had been the case, only the actual bullet would have passed beyond the vertical plane of the brass rail that edged the pit.”
The Arthur Leo Zagat Science Fiction Megapack Page 47
