Astounding Science Fiction Stories Vol 1

by Anthology

  "Cut out the kidding! Where is she?"

  "What's the difference, Lou? She's not here, is she?"

  "That doesn't mean she can't be somewhere else, dead."

  "She's not dead. You don't have to believe me about anything else, just that."

  He hauled me out of the chair and stared hard at my face. "You aren't lying," he said. "I know you well enough to know you're not."

  "All right, then."

  "But you're a damned fool to think a dish like that would have any part of you. I don't mean you're nothing a woman would go for, but she's more fang than female. You'd have to be richer and better-looking than her, for one thing--"

  "Not after my friends get through with her. She'll know a good man when she sees one and I'd be what she wants." I slid my hand over my naked scalp. "With a head of hair, I'd look my real age, which happens to be a year younger than you, if you remember. She'd go for me--they checked our emotional quotients and we'd be a natural together. The only thing was that I was bald. They could have grown hair on my head, which would have taken care of that, and then we'd have gotten together like gin and tonic."

  * * * * *

  Lou arched his black eyebrows at me. "They really could grow hair on you?"

  "Sure. Now you want to know why I didn't let them." I glanced out the window at the smoky city. "That's why. They couldn't tell me if I'd ever get back to the future. I wasn't taking any chances. As long as there was a possibility that I'd be stranded in my own time, I wasn't going to lose my livelihood. Which reminds me, you have anything else to do here?"

  "There'll be a guard stationed around the house and all her holdings and art will be taken over until she comes back--"

  "She won't."

  "--or is declared legally dead."

  "And me?" I broke in.

  "We can't hold you without proof of murder."

  "Good enough. Then let's get out of here."

  "I have to go back on duty," he objected.

  "Not any more. I've got over $15,000 in cash and deposits--enough to finance you and me."

  "Enough to kill her for."

  "Enough to finance you and me," I repeated doggedly. "I told you I had the money before she sent me into the future--"

  "All right, all right," he interrupted. "Let's not go into that again. We couldn't find a body, so you're free. Now what's this about financing the two of us?"

  I put my fingers around his arm and steered him out to the street.

  "This city has never had a worse cop than you," I said. "Why? Because you're an actor, not a cop. You're going back to acting, Lou. This money will keep us both going until we get a break."

  He gave me the slit-eyed look he'd picked up in line of duty. "That wouldn't be a bribe, would it?"

  "Call it a kind of memorial to a lot of poor, innocent old people and a sick, tormented woman."

  We walked along in silence out in the clean sunshine. It was our silence; the sleek cars and burly trucks made their noise and the pedestrians added their gabble, but a good Stanislavsky actor like Lou wouldn't notice that. Neither would I, ordinarily, but I was giving him a chance to work his way through this situation.

  "I won't hand you a lie, Mark," he said finally. "I never stopped wanting to act. I'll take your deal on two considerations."

  "All right, what are they?"

  "That whatever I take off you is strictly a loan."

  "No argument. What's the other?"

  He had an unlit cigarette almost to his lips. He held it there while he said: "That any time you come across a case of an old person who died of starvation with $30,000 stashed away somewhere, you turn fast to the theatrical page and not tell me or even think about it."

  "I don't have to agree to that."

  * * * * *

  He lowered the cigarette, stopped and turned to me. "You mean it's no deal?"

  "Not that," I said. "I mean there won't be any more of those cases. Between knowing that and both of us back acting again, I'm satisfied. You don't have to believe me. Nobody does."

  He lit up and blew out a pretty plume, fine and slow and straight, which would have televised like a million in the bank. Then he grinned. "You wouldn't want to bet on that, would you?"

  "Not with a friend. I do all my sure-thing betting with bookies."

  "Then make it a token bet," he said. "One buck that somebody dies of starvation with a big poke within a year."

  I took the bet.

  I took the dollar a year later.

  * * *

  Contents

  BOOMERANG BULLETS

  by James A. Goldthwaite

  IT wasn't death itself that Drill Morgan feared. No one had a better reputation of being able to take care of himself in a jam where automatics cracked spitefully in the dark and streaks of flame leaped swiftly from unexpected places. In the open, hand-to-hand or gun-to-gun, Drill had the savage, icy-nerved scorn of danger of a fighting rat.

  It was another sort of death that Drill Morgan feared. A death in a small gray room with its one furnishing a heavy wooden-chair--hung with straps and wires.

  And it was this fear that had gripped him and fastened and grown on him till he told the district attorney that he would testify, testify to anything, against anybody, even his own mother, to save his life. So they gave him a nominal sentence of five years and turned him loose on a pardon at the end of the first year. At midnight, on the very day of Morgan's release, Jim Morrison, after twelve months of fruitless appeals and delays, was to go to the chair for the murder of McCracken's butler.

  Slumped down in his seat in the train, Drill let his mind run back to the scene in the courtroom when he had given his testimony against Jim.

  It was he, Drill, who should have gone to the chair by rights. He had shot the butler, himself, while Jim was outside on the lookout.

  But Jim would be the one to pay for the job; there wasn't any doubt about that Drill's evidence had clinched that. He would be led into that room, and when he came out, they would put him into a cart and carry him away like a piece of meat.

  Drill Morgan jumped in his chair, and his hands gripped the wooden rail till the knuckles cracked. A voice from over his shoulder had broken into his thoughts. But all it said was:

  "Dinner is now served in the dining car. Dining car is in the rear."

  Drill straightened himself up in his chair. He laughed and cursed himself for a fool. That was all over now, all over and past, he told himself for the hundredth time. The fear of the chair was out of his life, out of it forever. Only, he had stood sweating and trembling under its shadow for so long, it was a habit almost.

  In the washroom, Drill brushed his natty gray suit of clothes that he had ordered in prison at his own expense, sleeked back his black hair, polished his neat oxfords with a brush, and came out whistling, his chin up.

  He made his way back through the train to the dining car and selected a seat at a vacant table. After consulting the menu and giving his order to a waiter, he leaned back in his chair and let his gaze drift negligently and comfortably around the car.

  His ease of mind lasted only a few seconds. Almost the first thing his eyes rested on was a newspaper in the hands of a man at the next table in front. In four-inch headlines slapped clear across the page, the screamer announced that all appeals in behalf of Jim Morrison had failed, and that he must die at midnight. Prominently displayed in the middle of the page was a photograph of the electric chair, bordered in black, with an imaginary drawing of Morrison strapped into it.

  Drill Morgan shuddered. Furtively he mopped beads of sweat from his forehead. With the jolting of the train, it seemed to him that the picture of the man on the hot spot looked more like him than it did like Morrison....

  He muttered another oath and jerked his eyes off the tabloid. He wasn't afraid. There wasn't a thing in the world to fear now.

  All at once, he realized that somebody was standing in the aisle, looking down at him.

  This newcomer was an undersized
, stoop-shouldered little man, with a thin, wrinkled face, pasty-white from indoor life, and brown eyes, sly and shifty as a pair of glass beads. He was dressed in a suit of sleazy prison clothes and he wore a derby hat at least two sizes too large for him.

  Drill recognized the man, now that he came to look at him. Off and on, for months back in stir, he remembered he had been catching glimpses of the comical little figure in the baggy uniform shuffling around in the long, gray queues of prisoners. Moreover, the little fellow had been waiting in the warden's office only a couple of hours before when he, Drill, had passed through on his way to the outside. Waiting for his discharge at the end of his term--

  SEEING that Morgan was looking at him, the little man sidled over to the table and slid into the chair opposite Drill. Seated, his head and shoulders hardly came above the table top. But his beady brown eyes gripped Morgan's like a ferret's over the white cloth and silverware.

  "Hello. You're Drill Morgan, ain't you?" wheezed the little man.

  Morgan stiffened. His big, cruelly handsome lips curled in disdain. He looked around for the waiter to tell him to have the shabby little intruder kicked out, and then thought better of it. He was in no position, even though legally clear of the bulls, to stir up a scene.

  "Well, suppose I am. What of it?" he replied curtly. The little man did not answer for a second.

  He sat leaning forward toward Drill, mouth half open, and an expression of awed wonder on his face that reminded Drill of a dog watching its master.

  "I thought so. I'm Ollie Meekers--Rabbit Meekers, you know," the little man finally wheezed back. "I've seen you around, up--up there--lots of times. I used to watch you. But I don't suppose a big shot like you would even bother to notice a runt like me."

  Meekers pulled one hand up from under the tablecloth and pushed it timidly over the cloth toward Drill.

  "Maybe I'm all wet to think of it, but I'd like to--do you suppose--would you shake hands, Mr. Morgan?" he blurted out.

  Drill Morgan scowled with surprise. He hesitated, started to growl out a refusal, and then stuck out his hand. The people across the aisle, he saw out of the corner of his eyes, were getting interested.

  The hand that Rabbit Meekers slid into Drill's big white digits was just what Morgan had expected it would be. Long and slender and thin-fingered, wonderfully flexible and soft. The kind of a hand that can move in and out of a pocket, or back and forth over a deck of cards, faster than the eye can follow it.

  The waiter came with the soup, and Morgan started to eat it.

  "Now suppose you spill me something," he growled to Meekers after a moment. "What's the big idea? Why all the stuff about who I am and shaking hands. Rabbit? Ain't runnin' for Congress or something, are you, cull?"

  Meekers hugged himself with both his skinny, pipestem little arms. He sucked in his flabby blue lips in a chuckling grin.

  "You're the man that pulled the McCracken job and got away with it," he breathed. "We knew all about that, up at college. Even the ones that was up there before it happened. I just finished two this time--"

  "What's your line, Rabbit?" Morgan interrupted.

  Meekers flushed sheepishly and dropped his eyes.

  "Me? Oh, I ain't nothing compared to you. Drill," he muttered. "I'm just a pocket-dipper--a gold watch here, a piece of coin somewhere else. I tried to do a couple of box jobs, but I fell down. Someway, I can't seem to get the hang of it. The last time they nabbed me on the way in--that's how good I am." He laughed cacklingly.

  "Guess I'm too dumb to be anything but honest. And I don't even know how to be that."

  There was a moment of silence, broken only by the rhythmical click of the car wheels "That was why I wanted to speak to you. Drill," the little man went on wistfully, at last. "Me, I ain't never done nothin' all my life but bum around and get pinched. I always wanted to meet up with one reg'lar guy. If I couldn't never pull off a decent job myself, anyhow I wanted to shake hands with a high-toned worker, and see how it felt. Gee, yuh couldn't never guess what a kick I'm gettin' outa this!" Drill Morgan sat staring at the comically earnest, wrinkled little face in front of him for a moment, then burst out laughing. "Say, you're handin' me the first good laugh I've had in a year, no kidding," he guffawed. "I didn't know they let 'em loose with as few brains as what you've got. Have something to eat on me, dumb-bell."

  RELAXING from the tension of the last weeks, Morgan amused himself during the next half hour by relating to the little man some of the less serious exploits of his career, and listening with a certain contemptuous amusement to the pickpocket's awed exclamations of wonder. Finishing their meal, the pair left the dining car together and went into the smoker, which happened to be empty except for themselves. There, Morgan went on with his anecdotes.

  "Gee, you're wonderful!" Meekers sighed admiringly at last. "What you goin' to do when you get back to the big town, Drill? Got anything lined up to turn over?"

  Drill's cigar halted halfway to his lips. He froze motionless as a statue, his blue-ice eyes drilling the Rabbit like a butterfly under a pin.

  "You're askin' me?" he said slowly. "I been away more than a year, don't forget. And exactly what difference does it make to you, anyway, punk?"

  Rabbit glanced up, flushed and fidgeted in his chair.

  "Not a thing in the world, Drill," he stammered hastily. "Only, I was just thinkin'. I suppose you're figgerin' to go up to Rosy the fence's some night pretty soon and pick up the twenty grand that mug owes you on the McCracken emeralds, ain't you? You could live on that dough quite a while without doin' any work. If you could get it--"

  Drill Morgan did nothing to attract the attention of the two men who had just paused in the doorway of the smoking car. His big white hand fell on Rabbit's skinny forearm as it rested between them and vised over it with a clutch that brought tears to the little man's eyes.

  "What do you know about Rosy and the junk--supposing there ever was any?" he snarled. "What do you mean, 'if I can get it'? What are you trying to do, muscle in on me, you shrimp? Come clean and come fast."

  "Cripes, Drill, don't go gettin' me wrong," Rabbit whined. "Leggo my arm. You're killin' me. Me muscle in on you? Say, do I look that goofy--honest, do I, now?"

  "I'll find out how goofy you are after you talk," Morgan grunted, a little mollified in spite of himself. "Go ahead, cull. Shoot the works."

  "There ain't no use you tryin' to stall me that you didn't knock off old man McCracken's emeralds that night that y-o-u--I mean Jim Morrison--smoked the butler," Meekers said. "And you went and soaked the junk with Rosy--didn't you, Drill?"

  Drill Morgan laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh to hear, so smooth, yet withal so rasping. Like the unsheathing of a jagged-edged knife from a satin scabbard.

  "Who says so? If you know something, let's hear it. But don't go shoving no cross-examination at me, Rabbit," he purred.

  "Who says so?" Meekers leaned closer to Drill, laughing knowingly under his breath. "Spike Haggerty said so. And Spike's in the know, what I mean. He got up here--up there at the house, I mean--about six months after you did. I guess maybe you never happened to pipe off who he was. Somebody must have spilled the works to him--I don't know who. Spike said that you left the stuff with Rosy for safe keeping. He swore to keep dark that he had it. If you got a long stretch up river, he promised to keep it in his safe till you came and got it, if it was ten years. Didn't he?"

  Drill Morgan's breath had started to come thickly and fast. His face grew white, hard and cruel as chiseled stone.

  "What are you driving at, you boob?" he gritted between his teeth. "Are you trying to tell me that Rosy--"

  Rabbit Meekers shrank back from the killing fury in Morgan's face.

  "He sold you out, Drill," he muttered. "Old McCracken put up twenty grand reward for the return of the stuff and no questions asked. Rosy packed it up and some wise mouthpiece of his took it back to McCracken and collected the dough. So--"

  His face white and twitching. Drill plun
ged out of his seat and started to pace the floor. "The double-crossing skunk!" he raged, hoarsely. "I'll cut his heart out for this--" He whirled and stood glaring down at the Rabbit. "Curse you, if you're lying to me--if this yarn of yours is some plant--" He stooped and gripped the little man by the shoulder. His fingers burned through the thin cloth of the coat like steel hooks.

  "What's your racket, anyhow, you rat?" he hissed. "What's the idea, musclin' into the know with me, and then unloadin' all this? What business is it of yours, anyhow?"

  "For the lovamike, Drill, what d'yuh keep gettin' me wrong for?" Meekers whimpered. "Listen, will yuh? Yuh had the rocks once, and when yuh gave 'em to Rosy, yuh was goin' to have the dough instead of 'em. Wasn't yuh? Now you're sore because yuh think you've lost 'em--rocks and kale, both." Meekers dropped his voice. "Well, how'd yuh like it if yuh could get 'em back again? Not just the dough. The dough and the rocks, both?"

  Inch by inch it seemed, so slowly did he move, Drill sank back into his chair again.

  "What d'yuh mean, cull? What are yuh drivin' at?" he growled.

  For reply, the Rabbit reached into his pocket and drew out a newspaper. He folded it to the headlines of an article in the society section and passed it wordlessly to Morgan.

  PROMINENT SOCIETY PEOPLE TO ATTEND HOUSEWARMING

  Members of several of New York's most prominent families have accepted invitations to assist at the housewarming festivities to be held tonight by Mr. and Mrs. John Henry McCracken on the occasion of the opening of their new hunting lodge in the Adirondacks. Mr. and Mrs. McCracken left the city yesterday forenoon with a staff of domestics from their New York residence, arriving at Cedarcrest in the late afternoon for the purpose of completing last minute preparations for the reception of several autoloads of friends who followed them early this morning. Mr. and Mrs.

  McCracken will remain at their palatial "camp" only two days on this occasion, returning to the city tomorrow for the purpose of attending the international polo matches, in which their son, Mr. Jerrold McCracken, will participate as a member of the American team.