“A hundred and thirty-five, and some change.”
“And there was one-twenty in your wallet. You spent fifteen dollars, somehow. We’re going to find out what you did, if we have to take this town apart. And Major Lorne’s coming down tomorrow.”
He looked at me speculatively, coldly. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
I nodded, and he turned to go.
* * *
—
It got lighter outside, but inside my head it didn’t. My ideas, if you could call them that, went around and around and came out nowhere. If I were sane, then somebody was crazy. Because if I’d been the victim of a frame-up engineered by someone or something other than my own disordered imagination, nothing had been accomplished.
The briefcase hadn’t even been stolen. It would have been of no value, other than as a good ten-dollar briefcase, if it had.
But, damn it, there had been a wreck. I’d been there. I’d heard the screams and the ripping sound of metal, and I’d felt the train seat rise up under me and—
Breakfast came, but I wasn’t hungry. I drank all the coffee there was, but didn’t touch the rest of it.
Major Lorne came in at about nine o’clock. He sat down in the chair beside the bed and looked very austere and military. He asked first what hours I’d been working.
I told him, and he shook his head. “Too much, Remmers. A breakdown was bound to happen.”
“You think, then, that I went haywire—that I’m crazy?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, at all. I think you worked too hard and had a mental breakdown. I talked to Garland before I came up here, and it doesn’t make sense any other way. Does it?”
“Unless somebody thought I’d accomplished something with TNA, major. They might have—” I broke off, because it didn’t make sense that they’d have done it that way. They’d have killed me and taken the papers, and there was no reason for all the razzle-dazzle. And how would it have been done, anyway? Hypnotism? I didn’t believe that any hypnotist could have impressed on my mind the recollections of something that didn’t happen.
Lorne asked, “Did you give anyone cause to think that you might have discovered something important?”
I shook my head slowly. “I haven’t talked about what Carr and I have been doing to many people. And to none of them have I intimated that I had even an important lead. Matter of fact, I haven’t had.”
“You did all right on classifying that ammonium picric.”
“That’s a dead duck. I gave you what you wanted on that a month ago, and haven’t worked on it since. And last week I gave out the story to Andrews, as you told me to. Read his write-up on it?”
Lorne nodded. “Good job. He’s here now, by the way, to see you. I told him no publicity on this…er…misadventure. You’ve got another guest, too. Peter Carr.” He cleared his throat. “Remmers, you’ve got to take a rest cure. There’s a sanitarium near town run by Doc Wheeler. Ever heard of him?”
“No, but I’m not going to any—”
“You’ll be in good company. Several important officials are staying there right now. Worked too hard, like you. Doc Wheeler is sort of semiofficial psychiatrist to the—”
“Nuts,” I said. “I’m not crazy and I’m not going to a private loony bin. I’ll rest up a few days at home, but the work’s got to go on.”
Lorne stood up. He said, “Sorry, but you’re wrong. We can’t force you to go to Wheeler’s place, but you can choose between that and staying here. And Wheeler’s will help you the most, of the two.”
“But I don’t need a sanitarium, damn it.” But even as I said it, I wondered if I were wrong, and just being stubborn. So I said, “Well, all right, but just for a few days. What about work at the lab? Want Peter Carr to carry on?”
“I’ve talked it over with him,” said Lorne. “He wants to talk to you about it. Seems there are some loose odds and ends he can clean up. Take him about three days, and then he’ll rest up, too.”
When Lorne left, the doctor came in again. He checked me with the stethoscope as before, and asked how my head felt.
“There are two people still waiting to see you,” he said. “But you may see them for only a few minutes each. After that, you’d better rest up for your trip.”
Carr came in first. Good old Peter. But likeable as Carr always was, there was a quiet dignity about him that forbade intimacy. He’d worked for me for three years, and yet I knew little about him other than that he was an efficient laboratory technician. I’d had him investigated, of course, when I first hired him, and the report on him was probably filed away somewhere, but it was amazing how few of the details of his life I remembered from the report, or had learned since. It was as though he hid from life behind a pair of thick shell-rimmed glasses.
He smiled at me a bit uncertainly now and ran spatulate fingers through his thick shock of blond hair. He said, “I can’t tell you, Mr. Remmers, how sorry I am that you—” He paused as though embarrassed, not knowing how to continue the sentence.
“I’ll be all right, Peter,” I told him. “Couple weeks and I’ll be back. There isn’t much for you to do meanwhile, and I want you to rest up, too. Finish the check on that 14-series and get the decks cleared for action on something new.”
“Yes, Mr. Remmers. That’s only about two days’ work. Even if I rest, I’ll have time for more. Remember I told you I wanted to try ammonium nitrate and powdered aluminum in the tetranitroaniline 13-series? Mind if I go ahead and try that while I’m free?”
“How long will it take you?”
“Not over three days for rough tests. If anything likely develops and I go into detail on it, it’ll take longer.”
“Hm-m-m,” I said. “That’s what I’m afraid of. You might get interested and keep on working night and day, as we have been. Look, this is an order. You’re to take at least a week off out of the next two weeks. And to work only normal hours the rest of the time. Within that limitation, try anything you want. O. K.?”
“Fine, Mr. Remmers. Is there…uh…anything I can do? For you, I mean?”
“Not a thing, Peter. Thanks.”
He went out quickly, as though glad to escape.
* * *
—
Armin Andrews came in breezily. He pulled up the chair with its back toward the bed, and sat down astraddle of it, leaning his chin on his arms.
“What happened, Hank?” he demanded.
“What do you mean, what happened? I countered. “Didn’t you ever hear of a guy working too hard and having a—”
“Nuts,” he said. “This is off the record. I want a story, sure. But you know I wouldn’t turn it in without your O. K. And the War Department’s, too, for that matter. But don’t give me that breakdown routine. What really happened?”
I stared at him curiously, wondering whether I’d be able to make anything—except hallucinations—of my remembrance of what had happened. Armin Andrews was a brilliant reporter, all right. His name had been on one of the biggest stories of the years just past—the running down of the spy ring headed by Dr. Gerhard Wendell. He had been ahead of the FBI on several angles of the case according to what I’d heard from Major Lorne. He’d provided the lead that took them to Wendell himself, and he’d been in on the kill. He had a bullet hole in his thigh to show for it, too.
Andrews stood ace-high with Major Lorne. That was why, when a write-up of my lab, with pix, was picked for the army ordnance journal, he’d assigned Andrews to the job. He’d done an excellent piece of work on it, and we’d become well acquainted during the process.
“How’d you get in on this, Armin? Did the major tell you?”
He shook his head. “This is on my own. I was at the police station when they brought you into emergency, downstairs. The looie on duty down here knew I was talking to Cap Krasno. He decided from the papers and th
e money on you, you might be somebody, so he came up to ask me if I knew of a Henry Remmers. It was a lucky break.”
“Lucky for which of us?” I asked.
“For me. I smelled a story, and I still smell it. But it was a break for you, too, maybe. I told ’em to phone Major Lorne right away. That’s how the FBI got on it so quick. He notified them.”
I shrugged. “Well, the FBI’s off it now, I guess. They put it in the pink-elephant file, and I go to a sanitarium to rest up.”
“Was it pink elephants?”
I considered a moment before I answered. Lorne and Garland had both known that Andrews was waiting to see me, and certainly they knew he’d want to know the details of my experience. Neither had even suggested that I refrain from talking about it, so there was no reason why I shouldn’t tell him.
So I did. I gave him the whole story, starting with my phone call to Washington. And in the telling of it, I learned something.
I learned that I was a long way from being convinced that what had happened was a figment of my imagination. Damn it, I remembered taking the briefcase from the laboratory. I remembered buying a ticket. I even remembered buying cigarettes while I was waiting for the train.
I remembered riding on that train.
The wreck! It was one of the most vivid memories of my life.
After I’d finished, I lay back, worn out merely from telling about it. I shuddered and closed my eyes. In half a minute, I opened them.
Andrews was staring at me, his eyes narrowed in deep thought.
He said, “Damned if I know, Hank. Sounds impossible, but—Mind answering a few questions? Feel well enough, I mean?”
“Shoot,” I said.
“When did the train leave?”
“Seven-forty, or a minute or two after that.”
“Did you know there was a train leaving then? Before you went to the station, I mean? Does it prove anything, if there was?”
I thought it over, and shook my head. “No, I knew beforehand that was when the Washington Flyer left.”
“No reservation?”
“No. I went by coach. Ticket was eight eighty, round-trip.”
“Know that before you bought your ticket?”
“I…I might have remembered it. I’ve made the trip before.”
“Remember the number of your car, or anything about it?”
“Just that it was a coach and the seats were blue plush.” I saw clearly what Armin was driving at now, and tried to cooperate. I said, “Let me think,” and tried to remember details that could be checked on. But after a minute I shook my head.
“The conductor?”
“He was short and heavy-set. Maybe about fifty, with thin gray hair. I think I’d know him if I saw him again. In his uniform, anyway.”
“Would he remember you, do you think?”
“N-no. Hardly looked at me. I noticed him while he was trying to get a ticket from a drunk in the seat ahead.”
Andrews snapped his fingers. He said, “Now we’re getting somewhere, maybe. What was his argument with the drunk?”
“No argument, really. The drunk was asleep and the conductor shook him, but couldn’t wake him. The guy mumbled, but stayed asleep. He had two friends with him; they were possibly sober. One of them shook him several times and he finally woke up enough to hand over his ticket.”
Andrews looked disappointed. “What did they look like?”
“I didn’t see the drunk, except for a glimpse of his profile when he woke up for a minute. He was youngish and dark and—yes, he wore shell-rimmed dark glasses and a black felt hat. The men with him—guess I’d recognize them if I saw them again—they were both about forty, fairly well-dressed. One of them was short and chunky, but you can’t judge a man’s height when he’s sitting—Wait, he was stocky; I remember now he got up and went to the back of the car where the lavatory was.”
“Remember any other incident that might be checked on?”
“Hm-m-m. I’m afraid not. There were only about a dozen passengers in the car, and it was third or fourth car from the end of the train.”
Andrews nodded slowly. “Not much, but—hell, if you check on all those points, it would be past coincidence to think you imagined being on the train. I mean, if there were a coach with blue plush seats third or fourth from last, with only a dozen passengers, with the conductor you described, and a drunk who wouldn’t wake up—”
“But all you’ll do,” I pointed out, “is shove ahead the borderline between what happened and what didn’t. I remember all that, but, damn it, I remember the train being wrecked. And it wasn’t. I must have—”
The door opened, and the nurse came in with a thermometer. She said to Andrews, “Sorry, sir, but—”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Hank,” Armin said. “At the sanitarium.”
* * *
—
An intern from St. Vincent’s sat on one side of me, and Frank Garland on the other, in the back seat. The driver was a policeman in uniform. I wondered about that. I didn’t like it.
None of us talked much until we were almost out of town. Then Garland cleared his throat.
He said, “Aren’t those experiments with HE dangerous, Mr. Remmers?”
“Yes and no,” I told him. “We make them up in very small quantities, using every precaution possible in handling them. Of course, if something should go off while we were mixing it, it would be dangerous for the person handling it. But it wouldn’t wreck the lab, or anything like that.”
“Just how severe would be the explosion of the average quantity you work with?”
“About as…as severe as the explosion of a rifle cartridge. And about as loud, and as dangerous. Which means it could kill you or not harm you in the least, depending on the direction of the force of the explosion, what it was in at the time and—oh, a lot of details.”
“Like dropping a cartridge into a fire and standing around until the heat explodes it, huh? I mean, the shell will kick off one way and the bullet the other, and one of them might hit you, or might not.”
“Something like that, except the charge isn’t confined until we put it in the testing chamber. From then on, there’s no danger because we work from behind a shield in the testing.”
“Can’t you work from behind a shield in mixing it?”
I shook my head. “Too much trouble, and too little chance of an explosion, anyway. When I say an explosive is unstable, I mean relatively unstable. After all, we know what we’re doing and we don’t just toss things together blindly. We start with a basic known formula and then work gradual variations in it, and in general we test each one for possibilities before we try the next. Say we’re working with trinitrocresol, for instance. We add a minute percentage of sodium nitrate, and when we test it we find it’s a fraction less stable than the original. So we don’t add more sodium nitrate and try again. We know that won’t get us anywhere. We try other variations and don’t increase the dosage, as it were, unless it shows promise.”
Garland took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and handed me one. He said, “I’d like to see your lab some time. Personally, I mean. When you’re back at work in it.”
“Any time,” I told him. “The lab itself is no military secret; it’s been written up in the ordnance journal, and other places. I’ll show you around everything except the records. Not that it would matter if you saw them, too.”
“Why not?”
I grinned wryly. “They’re strictly in the no-dice class. We’ve got a big backlog of negative information thus far. I know four thousand-odd ways of varying the formula for TNA which do not help stabilize it. We did do a few minor things with propellants for special types of guns, but the records on them have been turned over. We don’t keep copies. It’d make me jittery to have anything valuable around.”
“Because it m
ight be stolen?”
“There’s always that possibility. Of course, we take plenty of precautions just the same, but—”
“Why, if there’s nothing valuable there?”
I laughed. “Somebody interested might not know that. And I have equipment there that set me back over fifty thousand. Precision stuff—it’s got to be precision to get accurate checks on such small quantities. You don’t measure out picrates in a beaker, not for the kind of work we do.”
“How does your head feel?”
“Tender, that’s all. The ache’s gone. But I’d just as soon not hit any bad bumps.”
“We’re almost there. Another mile.”
The last mile, I thought, and tried to laugh at myself for feeling uneasy at the comparison. A two-weeks’ rest, that’s all this trip was taking me to. And maybe I could cut down the time if I got plenty of sleep and kept my mind off—
“How do you test the stuff?” Garland asked.
“Any number of ways,” I said. “Deterioration—we can speed that up artificially in a Mersing chamber; rate of detonation—we can check that up to twenty thousand meters a second. Heat reaction test, which is nothing more than a heating chamber. But the main thing, for our purpose, is the stability test. We use a fulminate of mercury fuse for that.”
“And vary the quantity of…er…fulminate of mercury to see how big a charge is needed to set off whatever you’re trying out?”
“It’s easier than that. We use a standard fuse and vary the distance between the fuse and the charge we’re testing. If we find that the fuse, at X distance, does not detonate the charge, but at Y distance does detonate it, then we know it’s satisfactory for stability, and we go ahead with the other tests.”
“If you keep trying that all day, the lab must be a pretty noisy place, isn’t it?”
“No noisier than a shooting gallery. And you can’t hear the explosions outside the building, unless you’re listening for them, and there’s no traffic going by.”
The Big Book of Reel Murders Page 113
